Corvos
5mo ago
I was thinking sugar-coated, like a doughnut, or shiny like a glazed window.
I haven't really used 5 yet so don't have an opinion. But broadly I agree with this Reddit post that AI soft skills are being steadily downgraded in favour of easily-benchmarkeable and sellable coding and mathematics skills.
When I was using 4o something interesting happened. I found myself having conversations that helped me unpack decisions and override my unhelpful thought patterns and things like reflecting on how I’d been operating under pressure. And I’m not talking about emotional venting I mean it was actual strategic self-reflection that actually improved how I was thinking. I had prompted 4o to be my strategic co-partner, objective, insight driven and systems thinking - for me (both at work and personal life) and it really delivered.
And it wasn’t because 4o was “friendly.” It was because it was contextually intelligent. It could track how I think. It remembered tone recurring ideas, and patterns over time. It built continuity into what I was discussing and asking. It felt less like a chatbot and more like a second brain that actually got how I work and that could co-strategise with me.
Then I tried 5. Yeah it might be stronger on benchmarks but it was colder and more detached and didn’t hold context across interactions in a meaningful way. It felt like a very capable but bland assistant with a scripted personality. Which is fine for dry short tasks but not fine for real thinking. The type I want to do both in my work (complex policy systems) and personally, to work on things I can improve for myself.
That’s why this debate feels so frustrating to watch. People keep mocking anyone who liked 4o as being needy or lonely or having “parasocial” issues. When the actual truth is lot of people just think better when the tool they’re using reflects their actual thought process. That’s what 4o did so well.
The bigger picture thing I think that keeps getting missed is that this isn’t just about personal preference. It’s literally about a philosophical fork in the road
Do we want AI to evolve in a way that’s emotionally intelligent and context-aware and able to think with us?
Or do we want AI to be powerful but sterile, and treat relational intelligence as a gimmick?
I think that the shift is happening for various reasons:
- Hard (maths, science, logic) training data is easier to produce and easier to quality-control.
- People broadly agree on how many watts a lightbulb produces, but they disagree considerably on how conversations should work (your 'glazing' is my 'emotional intelligence', and vice versa)
- Sycopancy has become a meme and companies may be overcompensating
- AI is being developed by autists and mathematicians who feel much more confident about training AI to be a better scientist than a better collaborator
- AI company employees are disproportionately believers in self-reinforcing AGI and ASI and are interesting in bringing that about via better programming skills
EDIT: the other lesson is 'for the love of God use a transparent API so people have confidence in your product and don't start double-guessing you all the time'.
No, the second would be way, way more offensive.
‘Fuckbois who lead women on should get their dick chopped off’ will make people laugh or grimace depending on how you say it, but ‘women should be kept chaste for marriage’ will get you labelled as an misogynist and people will vanish at the speed of light.
Corvos
5mo ago
sex in a public lavatory is illegal in the UK
It’s very gay-coded in the UK because it’s associated with cottaging. If you complained about going to a gay bar and finding two men having sex in the loo, people would laugh at you. If you persisted they would call you a bigot.
This and the IRA (who put bombs in them) are the two reasons Britain doesn’t have nearly enough public loos.
Corvos
5mo ago
I second @Lewyn's welcome. I would like to learn to read Chinese someday but I'm very interested about what goes on. The Chinese internet is basically dark matter for most of us - you know it's there and you know it's huge, but you have no idea what's in it. The Great Firewall notwithstanding, I believe that the reverse is not quite true, though that may be parochialism on my part.
Corvos
5mo ago
I have no problem with his beliefs, though I don't also share them. The problem was that he was so totally certain of the rightness of his own beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else's that he had absolutely no interest in genuine discussion. He didn't bother trying to understand anybody else's objections to his arguments, and even asserted multiple times that he knew what his interlocutor thought better than they did. Any effort made trying to engage with him would never be returned and I stopped bothering. I think that attitude is more corrosive to the Motte than overt shitposting.
So-so? I tend to use it as halfway between the two (plus fiction writing). I find the benefit of LLMs over an encyclopedia is that I can drill down and use them as a sounding board, and conversely unlike a sounding board I can pester them about details.
Corvos
5mo ago
Personally I just remember the 10 times table and get everything from that.
7x8 is just 70 with a couple of 7s taken away, ie 70-14.
Corvos
5mo ago
seeing Hlynka banned inspired him to “take up the mantle” of defending the cultural/ideological corner that Hlynka had previously occupied
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
He was a user who predated the Motte even on reddit. He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people, but ultimately he was an evangelist here to save the lost sheep rather than a debater here to chew the fat. Like most of the evangelists we get here, he ended up eventually flaming out in fury that most people didn't want to buy what he was selling.
Corvos
5mo ago
Russian Roulette as therapy? Mind you, I think that was the original purpose.
Corvos
5mo ago
Yeah, I guess. I hate it. But in particular I feel like I was around for most of this one and so I feel more jerked around by it.
Corvos
5mo ago
Dementia and Alzheimers disease
ischaemic heart disease
Forgive the aside, but what is the meaning of the word 'disease' in medical parlance? I suppose in the back of my mind I was aware of 'heart disease' but I would normally think of 'disease' as synonymous with 'infection'.
Corvos
5mo ago
“Well, golly, I like the leopard-pattern wallet but where’s the rest of the fursuit?”
Ha. In all seriousness, though, you're aware that a bill was put forward at the end of last year to legalise it in the UK, right? And that it was basically bounced through the Commons as a private, unscheduled bill with no preparation and is now waiting for approval from the House of Lords, after which it will become law?
And I do remember that the first few times 'assisted dying' was floated it was about really quite specific scenarios, and that even now a lot of the 'pro' polls about it are still quite specific. For example
A poll of more than 7,000 people this month found that almost three-quarters agreed that adults “who are intolerably suffering from an incurable condition and who wish to end their lives” should be allowed medical help to do so. It was conducted by Electoral Calculus for Humanists UK, a campaign group that supports assisted dying.
And yet when it comes to the actual law:
An attempt to block access to assisted dying for people suffering mental health problems or because they feel "burdensome" was defeated by a majority of 53. (emphasis mine)
whereas if you look at actual public opinion you see support for a much narrower version, with:
More than half of Britons (57%) would support doctors assisting non-terminally ill patients in physically unbearable conditions with life-ending medication. However, support declines to 35% when considering mental or emotional suffering. (emphasis mine)
and
63% of adults think that assisted dying should not be allowed for those whose primary reason is that they feel like a burden on their families or the NHS.
https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/news/survey-reveals-publics-fears-about-assisted-dying-bill (yes, biased, but the poll was carried out by YouGov)
I've thought a lot about this issue for the last ten years, as many have, and it's hard to escape the feeling that public consent has been laundered by keeping the spotlight firmly on rare, sympathetic cases while the intent of campaigners has always been significantly more far-reaching. Even the chosen term is very obviously a marketing gambit - 'assisted dying' where in reality they aren't dying in any sense other than the philosophical and the point is to legalise deliberately injecting them with something that will kill them. My memory is that these words were originally justified twenty years ago by limiting discussion to the near-death cases I describe, though I admit I can't back that up.
I'm not trying to lay this on you, you're honest about your opinions. But the way the whole thing has been handled leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
Children are often nigh-unkillable
"...and believe me, folks, I've tried." :P
I take your point. My intuitions could be wrong. But I think also 'assisted dying' was marketed as being for much more specific freak cases where people have an absolutely certain and very short life expectancy, and were in horrible pain that could not be alleviated through even strong pain medication. I would be willing to bet that if you raised the figure of "5% of all deaths" before this stuff was legalised you would be dismissed as a scaremonger if anti- and if pro- you would be taken aside and given a stern talk about staying on-message.
Corvos
5mo ago
I was under the impression that the vast majority of the guns were bought after military service, skewing the stats. Now you prompted me to re-look, I see that this is not necessarily true.
They also do sell ammo, you just can't get it from the army apparently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeGuns/comments/185bamo/swiss_gun_laws_copy_pasta_format/ is supposedly vetted by a real Swiss guy and seems somewhat interesting without being blatant political fodder:
Many on the pro-gun side seems to think everyone has a gun at home, while many on the gun control side thinks ammunition is heavily regulated.
If you had Swiss gun laws introduced today in the US, both the pro-gun and the gun-control side would be outraged tomorrow, for various reasons.
Broadly that described by @self_made_human. Total autonomy (as least for educated people) over their own life and death in all cases, Roman-style, which in practice means breaking the social/religious and legal taboo over suicide. The 'assisted dying for the terminally ill' case was introduced as the thin end of the wedge where those objections were not very sensible, with advocates knowing that they would be able to push the ball significantly down the slope once the Schelling fence was overcome.
I think that the 'we will euthanise the elderly to save NHS money' people aren't wrong at the edge but this happens to some extent anyway with Do Not Resuscitate; I expect some scandals but not widescale abuse. I am more worried about the elderly pressuring themselves into suicide, and about those with long-standing but irrational suicidal tendencies. I differ from @self_made_human in thinking that suicidal depression is an absolute indicator that a given person cannot be trusted with this particular form of autonomy as their judgement in this area is compromised.
Personally, I would rather have legalised voluntary assisted suicide specifically for dementia patients, requiring two time-spaced diagnoses of clinical dementia from two different doctors and a voluntary statement from the patient taken when compos mentis (to the extent that this is practical). I think this addresses the real, secret fear that is propelling normie support for these political movements and is limited enough to be stable. Alas I don't think that 'culling the mentally-feeble' would make it past the journalists and I don't think it would satisfy the campaigners, but I think it would take the wind out of the issue.
Corvos
5mo ago
I thought the same FWIW.
It was sold as ‘if you have a terminal illness, you are going to die in a few weeks, you are in terrible agony and there is no way of alleviating your pain or saving you’ which I would expect to be 0.1% max. Hence calling it ‘assisted dying’.
I think that this was never the intended use case and that those politicians who advocated for it on these terms were being dishonest.
Corvos
5mo ago
All of these things have happened in the US, though. Moreso in blue states where guns are more controlled, yes, but to my mind the difference isn't about guns, it's about ideological individualism and bloody-mindedness. This correlates with being anti-anti-gun-regulation and therefore with gun presence but is not caused by it.
Corvos
5mo ago
The article from the BBC has an obvious slant, but the laws in Switzerland seem to be tight and getting tighter. Notably people don't get any bullets with their guns:
In 2006, the champion Swiss skier Corrinne Rey-Bellet and her brother were murdered by Corinne's estranged husband, who shot them with his old militia rifle before killing himself.
Since that incident, gun laws concerning army weapons have tightened. Although it is still possible for a former soldier to buy his firearm after he finishes military service, he must provide a justification for keeping the weapon and apply for a permit.
When I meet Mathias, a PhD student and serving officer, at his apartment in a snowy suburb of Zurich, I realise the rules have got stricter than I imagined. Mathias keeps his army pistol in the guest room of his home, in a desk drawer hidden under the printer paper. It is a condition of the interview that I don't give his surname or hint at his address.
"I do as the army advises and I keep the barrel separately from my pistol," he explains seriously. "I keep the barrel in the basement so if anyone breaks into my apartment and finds the gun, it's useless to them."
He shakes out the gun holster. "And we don't get bullets any more," he adds. "The Army doesn't give ammunition now - it's all kept in a central arsenal." This measure was introduced by Switzerland's Federal Council in 2007.
Mathias carefully puts away his pistol and shakes his head firmly when I ask him if he feels safer having a gun at home, explaining that even if he had ammunition, he would not be allowed to use it against an intruder.
"The gun is not given to me to protect me or my family," he says. "I have been given this gun by my country to serve my country - and for me it is an honour to take care of it. I think it is a good thing for the state to give this responsibility to people."
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Sure, you could, but it's not causal
I am suggesting that it is largely causal. It's not a coincidence that most people's opinions are pretty close to their family's and the social group's - they are hugely influenced by them, and also by casual factors that they share in common with those groups.
It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?
As I said:
Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
The effects of any given change are obviously objective, at least per any given situation, but they are vague and complex and delayed, and this produces obvious disagreements about them when observed and analysed subjectively by subjective humans.
do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks
Certainly I thought so, or I would have changed my opinion to that of the poor person. But I observe that the poor person is equally certain of his opinions' superiority to mine. These days I'm not entirely sure what I believe about macroeconomics.
I refuse to answer, on the grounds that you're taller than me and I don't like the implications :P
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