Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.
If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Ten years ago, I'd have said that the most likely way that I'd die would be of heart disease at 78 years old or the like.
Today? My "normal" death is forty years away! With the speed these models are advancing, and how we are still picking low hanging fruit in several different areas, it seems increasingly unlikely we won't have AGI by then – barring some disaster like a global nuclear apocalypse. Today, I'd say my most likely death is either getting paperclipped, or surviving for thousands of years until I die of some scifi crap I can't even currently imagine.
How should one act in the face of this? I'm not Yudkowsky; what little he can do to affect the course of humanity, I certainly can't do much better. Still, are there not steps one could take to improve one's own lot in case it works out for the better? I'd like to see some sort of "retirement plan for the AI-pilled", common sense stuff you can do to at least hedge for the eventuality. Post-singulary I'll get hopelessly outcompeted in alpha, but maybe there's some beta to be had if you act now? Buying physical items with historical significance, perhaps? I imagine the rich people of the year 3000 would pay a lot for an authentic medieval manuscript, for example.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How concerned would you be if your home address was visible online if somebody googled your name? What about your age, SSN, tax return (naturally including your exact income), company involvement, real estate ownership, and every court case transcript and and police report you appear in?
In Sweden, that's all public information. If you looked up my name you'd find my address pretty much immediately, which you could drop into google maps to get a view directly into my kitchen. Police reports is slightly more difficult; you'll find websites stating things like "Foo Bar is present in 2 court cases! Pay $10 to see them!", and you'd have to send an email yourself to the court/police if you don't want to pay for that.
In addition, if you happen to work for the government, then all your work letters, emails, and instant messages become public information as soon as the case it concerns is closed. Tangentially this means that it's very easy for a Swedish person to be a major pain in the ass for government agencies, as you can anonymously keep bulk-requesting random emails and and the employees have to do time-consuming archive digging.
I find it interesting how people here really don't care about it. Hell, I don't really care, mostly because it's been like this my entire life and nothing bad has come out of it (yet? Knock on wood).
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
A little project I want to do this year is try cooking an "Acherburger", that is, a meal that breaks the most kosher laws possible. There's some discussion about doing that online, but it's mostly low-effort stuff like "bacon-wrapped shrimp" etc. Lame! One can do so much more.
Here's the initial plan:
For the meat patty, combine as many treyf animals as I can. The supermarket in my city has a whole bunch, e.g. rabbit, kangaroo, alligator, even bear. I'd put a little of a bunch of them in, with the bulk being pork just so It doesn't taste too weird. Animal blood is forbidden as well; so I add a little bit of that too.
Onto this we'll add cheese, of course.
For frying, one can use suet instead of oil/butter, as that's forbidden.
Produce must be tithed before consumption, and you can't eat fruit during the first three years after planting. Outside of Israel, this isn't necessary unless you know for certain that it is the case; luckily I have a relative with a lime tree I know isn't that old, so I can add lime to the sauce and break that commandment.
Produce that may contain insects must be checked, or it is not kosher. Thus we don't do that for the lettuce, deliberately closing our eyes before putting some on the burger.
We'll eat it during the passover sabbath, so the fresh bread we'll buy is Chametz, Pat Akum, and Chadash (and of course the entire preparation of the meal is forbidden due to the sabbath). Naturally none of our utensils will be kashered either.
For the drink, we'll have wine. I have a bottle of Château Musar 2015. In addition to it being not kosher, 2015 was a Sabbath year in Israel, and since the wine is from Lebanon which counts as "Eretz Yisrael", it's not allowed. We'll also make it yayin nesech by pouring a little bit of it out in dedication to Baal. Before drinking it, I'll take a Nazirite vow to abstain from alcohol just to deliberately violate it.
The one rule I have some problem with breaking is Kil'ayim, that is "the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards [...]". This applies to Israeli produce only, and buying anything like that to make sure the seed were mixed during planting seems difficult. Sure, I can get spice mixes grown in Palestine in my local spice shop, but how can I be sure it actually broke any rule when it was grown?
Anything else I've forgotten about?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
I see Americans complaining online about how many spam telephone calls they are getting, to the point they don't even pick up the phone when the caller is unknown.
This is pretty alien to me; I live in Sweden and have literally never gotten a spam call in my life. (Maybe the reason for this is that the scammers naturally won't bother learning Swedish?)
So, potential silly lifehack: why not get a foreign telephone number from e.g. Denmark or something, and then never get spammed again? Presumably your calls will be more expensive as you'd be paying the international rate constantly, but this can be ameliorated by getting a plan where that's cheaper.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
In Sweden to pay our bills you can have a thing called "autogiro". This means you grant a company the right to pull a certain sum from your account each month, so you never have to bother with any administration for your bills. Pretty convenient, except I've been using it for all my monthly expenses so I've never had to log in to my bank at all.
Early this year was the first time I've logged in to my bank for years. I've had constant anxiety to see how much money I actually had, and finally I had to bite the bullet and actually look.
Turns out, I had MUCH more money than I expected. The relief I felt from that was pretty much indescribable; I've now proceeded to buy a condo much closer to the city centre, and have been going out to eat more or less every weekend.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Is anyone else interested in poetry here?
A thing I've noticed in poetry analysis that annoys me is what I've come to think of as "schizo" interpretations.
On the one hand, you have symbolism that was likely put into the text intentionally; e.g. in "Ozymandias" (which I assume you are familiar with) the famous "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" can be very reasonably interpreted as the onlooker ironically despairing that even the greatest ruler will eventually decline and be forgotten.
On the other hand you have stuff like "Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout". How reasonable is this interpretation? I think not very; if the poem had instead referred to the statue's arms or something, would there have been another possible tenuous interpretation to some other person or concept? Probably. You would need some sort of Bayesian intuition for this, as there is a "base rate" of possible random associations you could make – and for any connection less credible than that you're basically finding patterns in random noise.
It reminds me of how the famous schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis would "speak to God"; he had a random number generator that spat out words, and he'd do free associations between them. Textual criticism is rife with this. I suspect it's because there is really no incentive to find out the "truth" of a text, just finding cool associations that makes the reader look smart, and since there's no ground truth to verify anything it easily gets disassociated from reality.
To "fix" this, I propose a calibration game of sorts. One would write a text with actual symbolism and poetic devices, then publishing both the text and a canonical explanation for everything in it. Readers could then interpret it, and afterwards find out how much their interpretation missed the mark. If anyone wants to try this, I have done so with one of my old poems here.
(For the unfamiliar with meter, it's written in straightforward iambic tetrameter, i.e. each line consists of four pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables; with an ABAB rhyme scheme.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I tried various American foods when I was over there, generally things I've seen online & in movies and such, but never tried. The most memorably bad one was pop-tarts. Insanely dry, with a synthetic cloyingly sweet flavour. I get that it's for kids, but god damn it's bad.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
My article really only covers generative models, like the recent Stable Diffusion. Controversial models like classifiers that try to evaluate how likely somebody is to commit a crime has entirely different considerations. Maybe I should have made that more clear.
Also I disagree that a "de-biased" crime model would discriminate against white men! Men commit a highly disproportionate amount of crime compared to women; any sort of adjustment you make has to adjust for that, adding a whole bunch of likelihood on women especially, probably more than the racial difference even.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.
In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:
-
Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.
-
Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.
-
Not counting transfer payments.
-
Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.
-
Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
retaliate by just blocking access completely
Personally I don't think it would be that bad, and if only considering purely selfish reasons I'd even welcome it. People generally underestimate just how much of the bottom-tier dross of the internet originate in India and Southeast Asia, like a global Eternal September, and having that blocked would substantially improve the net in general (for westerners, naturally; not so much for the Indians themselves!).
The reason for this is simple: India is huge, rich enough for most people to be online, not rich enough to not need to bother with small amounts of money, and they speak English decently enough. More importantly, there is a pervasive cultural trait where "looting the commons" is seen as basically acceptable; and by not doing it you're seen more as a schmuck than virtuous. This causes people to rapidly consume every bit of easily-exploitable goodness in a community, externalities be damned.
As an example, I am a software developer with a bit of open-source contributions. Each year, DigitalOcean has an event they call Hacktoberfest, where if you submit code to any open source project they send you a T-shirt. Perhaps predictably this causes a massive flood of inane garbage from Indian users wanting their shirt, forcing everybody else to spend all month dealing with spam.
Who do you think is making those click-farm spam sites that rehost e.g. StackOverflow content that has made Google so bad in recent years? Indians, grinding out a few bucks of ad revenue at a time. A lot of the trash on YouTube/Facebook is from there too, like those awful videos for kids. For the same reason, they're also responsible for the bulk of the scam calls plaguing the rest of the English-speaking world. It's no coincidence that the second-worst country for that, Nigeria, shares relevant traits (large population, middling poverty, English proficiency). Brazil would possibly be number two, but "luckily" their non-elite population don't speak much English at all.
A straightforward objection to "block it all" would be that some genuinely good users would be caught in the middle. Sure, but the quality of a community does not hinge much on the absolute amount of good users, but the average. We would hardly be on themotte if that wasn't the case! Having India ban you presents an excellent opportunity to improve your service without being accused of e.g. racism, and you get free-speech goodwill to boot.
(Even more tangentially I am awaiting the moment when some internet hustler guru discovers how you can exploit some modest opportunity for deploying LLMs and spamming people, unleashing a flood of garbage on some unlucky website. I imagine it will be something like a zillion LLaMA-powered Indians commenting on every post with a text containing random Amazon affiliate links fluidly shoehorned into it, or a hundred add-filled spam sites for every legitimate one when you search for anything. By then we'll have to actually do something.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Tangentially I find those youtube thumbnails ghoulishly inhuman. Creators have access to pretty complex A/B testing for what drives clicks with instant feedback, so over time they have slowly "gradient descended" into plastering those open-mouthed staring faces everywhere – not as a conscious decision by anybody, but simply because that's the local minima when you do large scale tests of the minds of children. It's almost Lovecraftian, like a human puppeted by a deeply alien mind that you have no goals in common with.
A simple example might be the Lacey Act of 1900. It prohibits import, export, transport, purchase, or sale of species of wildlife, fish, timber, and plants, if that would violate any state, federal, tribal, or foreign law. Since it's so extremely broad it makes it basically impossible to predict what will be legal or not, and could plausibly result in you theoretically committing a very large amount of crimes every day.
If the state really, really wanted to ruin your day and had no qualms about the poor optics they could totally find some obscure law about oak wood in Botswana and nab you for it.
I wrote a quick and shitty script to bruteforce English Sator squares from a big wordlist. The only one that makes any sort of limited sense is this:
t i m i d
i r a n i
m a d a m
i n a r i
d i m i t
I.e. "[the] timid Iranian madam that Inari dimit(=had dismissed)".
Edit: Of course somebody else had done the exact same thing and found the exact same square before. Oh well.
bias the algorithms ahead of time
While anti-bias efforts are easy to abuse, I don't think they are inherently bad. There really is a bunch of detritus in the datasets that causes poorer results, e.g:
-
Generate anything related to Norse mythology, and the models are bound to start spitting out Marvel-related content due to the large amounts of data concerning e.g. their Thor character.
-
Anything related to the "80s" will be infected by the faux cultural memory of glowing neon colours everywhere, popular from e.g. synthwave.
-
Generating a "medieval knight" will likely spit out somebody wearing renaissance-era armour or the like, since artists don't always care very much about historical accuracy.
This can be pretty annoying, and I wouldn't really mind somebody poking around in the model to enforce a more clear distinction between concepts and improving actual accuracy.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Comparing it to Alpha Centauri seems almost unfair; considering it's probably the game with the most philosophical depth of all games, ever. It's not a coincidence that Scott frequently inserts references to it in his posts (click the colon characters in his review of Albion's Seed, or read Unsong, where I noticed at least one chapter deal with and directly reference concepts introduced in SMAC e.g. the quote from a "wise woman" here, a reference to this).
The chief difference I think is that the writers clearly had a whole bunch of genuinely interesting ideas stewing in their heads that they wanted to express, and chose the computer game medium to do so. Other games have a plot and then attempt to come up with "deep" ideas after the fact, something which almost always fail.
(Tangentially, If you've played it and enjoyed it as much as I did, I can recommend this blog containing in-depth analysis of basically every quote in the game.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
You are missing the point.
I don't think I am. I agree that a naïvely de-biased crime model will favour blacks over whites compared to a model that just went for simple accuracy and nothing else, but men will also necessarily similarly have to be favoured. If not, people are immediately going to notice the model convicting men and freeing women even when the facts are identical. There is absolutely no way people are going to accept that; radical anti-racist ideology isn't that powerful. Adding even more weight in favour of women would just be silly.
(What is slightly more realistic is if the model somehow gets access to a variable that correlates with gender but also crime itself, like your level of testosterone. With that, apologists may explain that the model convicted a man for e.g. murder based on his hormone levels which made it likely that he'd been aggressive; when in reality the model considered that to be rather unimportant compared to it being able to figure out that it's analysing a male.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
I have a little blog post milling around in my head about one of my favourite lyrical/poetical "tricks" – using e.g. the refrain as a framing device, but having the meaning of the refrain changed by the context of the verses so that it implies something else in the end. I'm probably never going to get around to writing it, so I'll give you the abridged version of some examples I've had in mind that may be of interest. It's pretty common for European folk songs to use it:
"Son Ar Chistr/The song of the cider", a traditional song from Brittany (YT: Alan Stivell, 1970).
It begins as a drinking song – "Drink cider, Laou, for cider is good! A penny, a penny a glass!" – but the verses quickly descend into telling how the singer is an alcoholic womanizer and was kicked out of his house by his wife, so when the same refrain comes back it's clearly about him drowning his sorrows in cheap alcohol instead.
"Hej Sokoły", a Polish/Ukrainian folk song (YT).
It begins with an uhlan cavalryman sent out to fight in a foreign land, saying goodbye to his girl. The refrain is then about falcons flying past the mountains and forests, seemingly symbolizing his untetheredness from his home. However, in the last verse he gets killed, so now the falcons in the same refrain are instead his last thread back to home. (I also like the turn in the "Wine, wine, give me wine!" line, as the first obvious interpretation is quickly turned around to mean that he wants alcohol as an anesthetic).
"Jag hade en gång en båt" Swedish/Dutch singer-songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk is also a rather good but more advanced example. (YT, and Lyrics), set to the same (originally Bahamian folk) melody as Sloop John B by the Beach Boys.
The first verse is about the narrator reminiscing about an old boat he once owned and then lost. In the second, he sings about an old dream he had and lost also, and so on. In the final verse it's a city park, gone due to a nuclear bomb. The song then quickly unwraps back, so you can have a new interpretation to each verse – from the figurative (the hopes and dreams of the narrator dying in the blast) to the concrete (the boat was lost due to everything being obliterated). Reexamining the first verse where the narrator states that he had a boat "so, so long ago", one can interpret that not as a nuclear war survivor or anything but rather humanity as a whole, implying the second verse means that all the hopes and dreams of humanity is gone.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Yeah, there's a lot of text on the internet. With a pretty cursory Bayesian analysis, even with a 99.9% accuracy you're looking at a thousand false positives if you are combing through a million posts. Without some other thing to narrow it down, it seems reasonable that it'll not be possible from writing patterns alone.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.
The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.
I wrote a post about de-biasing efforts in machine learning, which got a bit long, so I decided to turn it into an article instead. It's about how corporate anti-bias solutions are mostly only designed to cover their asses, and does nothing to solve the larger (actually important) issue.
(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)
More options
Context Copy link