Corvos
15d ago
Avoiding the tendency of the hobby to suck you in and make you more and more devoted to the game at the expense of work or social life.
Corvos
16d ago
I was thinking of the SNP (Scottish National Party) myself. They got rid of male Salmond in favour of hip female Nicola sturgeon.
Corvos
17d ago
the Southport murders (committed by a born British citizen)
Committed by Axel Rudakubana, child of two Rwandan immigrants, picture here.
I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but frankly Mr. Rudakabana is a very non-standard 'British citizen' and that is clearly and directly relevant to both the country being on edge and the Southport riots. The brackets here strike me as deliberately burying the lede.
Corvos
18d ago
1 can chilli con carne: £3
1 can black beans: £2
Rice
Easily 2 meals for £5/2=£2.50 and you can be more strict if you want to save more money. Got me through postgrad.
Corvos
18d ago
I’ve read all five. Don’t worry about it. The quality is a bit uneven IMO but that’s not going to be a big part of things going forward.
Corvos
19d ago
Broadly, the Hanania perspective is:
- Woke identity politics and the takeover of important positions by unqualified tokenism has been a disaster. Running the world’s premier empire and scientific machine requires strong competition to acquire and promote very intelligent, very knowledgeable people.
- Therefore we need a correction.
- Trump and his voters are not that correction. They don’t like woke identity politics and minority tokenism, but they want to replace it with rural white identity politics and affirmative action for the deluded. This is even worse than wokeness.
- Woke correction will not come from the left. Therefore attempt to destroy the MAGA right so that a smarter right can rise in its place. This right should encourage coloyrblindness, high immigration, low taxes, eugenics and globalism, and discourage white identity politics, conspiracy theories, religion and nationalism.
Corvos
19d ago
Oh, I agree. I spent a big part of last year trying to create a personal assistant and the biggest reason for its failure was that I had no real way to judge its output.
What annoys me is that they seem to have ignored all of the ways you might optimise for this, let alone produced different products that you could trade off against each other. I would love to have one AI optimised for being lauded by literary critics, one for maximum mid-wit upvotes, etc. And you could always mix and match weights afterwards.
I am skeptical that optimising for maths and engineering ability will produce intuitive social machines because, well…
Corvos
19d ago
I find meditation really cool and its promises really interesting, and then every time I look further into it I’m reminded that the end goal is, essentially, voluntary ego death.
You talk about meditation a lot, so please forgive me for asking directly: does it not creep you out that this practice is supposed to end in you realising that you don’t really exist? Am I mistaken about the end result? Not the rhetoric, but the actual purpose of realising that theee isn’t a real you.
Corvos
19d ago
True, but what I mean is that LLMs have been moving AWAY from fluid verbal intelligence and back towards the comfort zone of code and maths IMO.
I value the kind of writing ability and ‘everyday intelligence’ that the models indicated and Claude 3.7 had but I don’t think that’s the direction they’re moving in.
Corvos
19d ago
True intelligence is about ambiguity, creativity, and language.
To be fair, LLMs have been moving away from this towards coding, engineering and maths because their success is easier to judge and rewards for RL-produced reasoning are easier to define.
Corvos
20d ago
Yeah, I was getting him confused with Tree, who has mentioned a couple of times that his family comes from that background and didn’t get much joy out of it.
Corvos
20d ago
This is basically what happened with anime, right? Loads of people have switched from American stuff to Japanese stuff. But for various reasons that hasn't been interpreted as competition or a cultural signal.
Corvos
20d ago
It's not so easy. You can't actually gamify boring things to make them fun. You can make kind-of-fun things funner, fun things very fun, etc. That's why most games are themed around things humans already find enjoyable and biologically rewarding: exploring, destroying stuff, killing people, operating machinery. And gamification works best on things like running or weightlifting.
This is the kingmaker scenario, right? Gwern talks about it a bit - if you have three friends, and one friend refuses point-blank to eat non-Halal food, then you will find yourself always looking for halal restaurants even though he’s only 25% of the group. In a very real sense that’s on the other three for not kicking him to the curb, but in a practical sense he’s the one controlling where you go.
There’s also just the straight issue of schelling points. The left in the UK has such kingmaker scenarios a lot with local Muslim populations. If they can’t all agree to ignore them at vaguely the same time, the white liberals who do will be steamrollered by the ones who don’t.
From the essay:
A scrub would not throw their opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize your chances of winning? It's "cheap," though, throwing is cheap. And it's not just throwing, it's also a long list of somewhat arbitrary maneuvers. If you keep a scrub away from you by zoning them with projectile attacks, you'll probably be called cheap. If you do one move over and over, that's cheap. If you get a lead, then do nothing for 30 seconds so that you can win by time-out, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Let's specifically consider the case where you do one move over and over. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Are they such a poor player that they can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't you be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.
... to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
The scrubs' games might be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.
And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it's not degenerate.
The thing is, this works okay if you can keep the low-level players and the high-level players apart. But a) that doesn't work for real-life friend groups and b) it means you're either stuck in the little leagues forever or you have a long, long, hard grind before you can play with the experts. Thus rafa's original point, which is that if you open everything up to maximum competition with everyone all the time, only the monomaniacal grinders will have any fun.
Corvos
20d ago
Let's get pointers - if you know what is pointer you can design a class from first principles - it doesn't take huge jump to create a memory blob, put some header information - congratulations that is struct. but let's put another blob attached to it with pointers to executable code - now we have a class. But i want to modify already existing class - well just play with the blobs values a bit - you have inheritance.
Nicely put, I've been programming for years (though no CS background) and never actually saw it that way. Are there any books you'd recommend that explain things that way round?
Corvos
21d ago
To the degree that gender is a useful concept separate from sex, it is exactly a belief.
This I think is exactly the bone of contention behind the relabelling. To the trans, 'gender identity' is an innate characteristic that is often incorrectly assigned at birth and rediscovered later in life. That is very different from the conception that sees 'gender' as being a propaganda concept that is actually the exact same as sex and 'gender-identifying' as a category mistake at best and a mental illness at worth. That is what I mean by 'reifying' - the manner in which such things are recorded implicitly gestures towards an official attitude on them and is at least in part an attempt to take hold of the 'neutral' ground.
To take a more extreme example for illustration, if Sarah is an otherkin we do not say
Name: Sarah. Species: unicorn.
If we note their weird beliefs at all, it would be as a note in the misc section.
Finally, let's take your atheist example. Let's imagine a very, very atheist society in which 2% of people at most have a religion and it's regarded as a ridiculous peculiarity and evidence of schizophrenic delusion. Such a society would certainly not have a Soul column in their datasheets! Nor would they have a religion column because almost nobody has a religion and nobody cares about the people who do. They would, where appropriate, note the person's peculiarities in the misc section.
I was amused to see 'Lord' and 'Lady' as potential titles on a questionnaire I was sent recently from Harley Street. You wouldn't get that in America, but you might get 'Mx' or various other formulations. The questions that are asked, and the way the answers are recorded, show society's implicit viewpoint and define common sense, so they are absolutely going to be a battleground in cases like this.
Corvos
21d ago
I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?
But you see the difference between:
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Gender: F.
and
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Auxiliary Note: Transexual / Female-identifying
right? Regardless of whether you agree with the latter.
In short, there is a difference between 'female' and 'female-identifying'. One is a reified claim about what someone is, one is a note about their beliefs.
"Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc
That's basically easy, if you're seeing her every few days at communal social events and you've known each other all your lives and everyone of both genders agree that men are supposed to be persistent. Embarrassing, yes, but not that embarrassing.
Today, lots of men know few or no women, and are taught from birth that anything more than a very indirect one-time-only approach is sexual harassment. I am a perfectly well-adjusted adult and yet I haven't spoken to a women who wasn't a friend's wife for months. When the bar is so very much higher, it's no surprise that people seek easy alternatives.
This happened to a friend of mine. He had a very good case, and the lawyer said, "Look, you've got a 95% chance of winning this. But the other side is going to hire the very best, most expensive guys in town. There's a 5% chance you'll pay millions in damages - can you handle that?" And of course they didn't have that kind of money.
More options
Context Copy link