Ah, no, sorry, it calls me an ethno-nationalist. The quotes were mine, you’re just the closest person in broad profiling terms whose name it knows.
It thinks you’re a nostalgist with a “somewhat rosy view of pre-war gentleman-scholar society” or words to that effect :P
You can take the AI out of San Francisco, but…
What I think you’re overlooking is that the model (if you believe the chain of thought) is not doing stylographic analysis for the most part, it’s doing profiling.
Broadly:
British-presenting / ethno-nationalist / writes at length in a cultured register / HBD believer / argues for the ideal of the gentleman-scholar and a leisured aristocracy / argues from utilitarian logic therefore likely rat-adjacent + some other stuff -> 2rafa.
Assuming you don’t put these convictions in your hypothetical internal research reports, I would expect it to be orders of magnitude harder to identify you.
But then I think it would have known about me, and it clearly didn’t. Even when I confirmed the quote was from a motte poster, and asked for a big longlist of candidates, my handle never came up at all. Instead it started listing notables like Zorba even when they couldn’t possibly fit the profile. Very clearly it doesn’t know mid-tier posters like me. May not stay that way of course.
Corvos
1d ago
But ‘identifies 2rafa’s writing as 2rafa’s writing’ is a big difference from reading your comments on instragram or company PR releases and linking you to known dissident 2rafa. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but doxxing someone is an order of magnitude harder as long as you don’t have a very particular stylistic tell.
It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!
Honestly? My Motte-specific knowledge is thin and patchy, and I should be upfront about that rather than pretend to a corpus I don't have. What I think I actually have:
AAQCs (Quality Contributions roundups) are the most likely source — they get reposted, linked, quoted on Twitter, and occasionally end up excerpted on other blogs or in ACX link roundups. That's the kind of content that gets scraped into training data multiple times via multiple routes, which is how specific passages stick. Culture War Thread weekly roundup posts from the /r/TheMotte era, when it was still on Reddit, are more likely to have been indexed than anything after the move to themotte.org. Reddit is heavily represented in training data; standalone forums much less so. Meta-discussion about the Motte on SSC/ACX, LessWrong, Twitter, and rationalist-adjacent blogs — so I know about certain handles (2rafa, Hlynka, Trace, KulakRevolt before he left, Darwin before he was banned, etc.) more than I know their actual posts. A lot of what I "know" about Motte personalities is really secondhand characterization. Full threads, not really. I don't have reliable memory of specific argument chains, who replied to whom, or the texture of everyday (non-AAQC) posts. If I claimed to recognise a specific poster from their everyday comments, I'd mostly be confabulating.
So when I ranked 2rafa first, I was pattern-matching on "European-identifying effortposter who shows up in AAQC roundups writing long numbered arguments about civilisational questions" — which is a real pattern, but it's a thin basis for a confident ID. Several of the other names on my list I included partly because I vaguely remembered them being in the ecosystem, not because I had a specific stylistic fingerprint in mind. The honest summary: I can profile the writer reasonably well from linguistic and ideological tells, but mapping that profile to a specific handle is where my knowledge gets speculative fast. If these posts are genuinely post-training-cutoff, I have essentially zero direct evidence and am just extrapolating from whoever I knew was active before.
That is if you trust its own self-reporting of course. And more parameters means more detailed recall. Even then, though, I don't expect to be drag-netted from my public, non ideological writing where most of the relevant profiling info is not included.
In the meantime @2rafa, please enjoy answering for my sins :-D
My instinct is that even with this type of training, LLMs will still be missing something essential
Your instinct is probably correct IMO. This form of synthetic data generation is just another tool in the box, it's not the key to everything.
I will say that we've got far further than I ever expected us to get using these methods. I'm instinctively a Gary Marcus-style fan of embodiment and unsupervised learning, it seemed clear to me pre-LLM that models wouldn't be able to be anything resembling intelligent without a body and the ability to interact with the real world and 'test' their understanding in real time. When LLMs came in, I felt I had to admit that I'd been wrong. It seems clear to me that we have managed to get to something I would call 'intelligence' (even if it's spiky and fails in some cases where humans would not fail) through these means. So I no longer trust my instincts as much.
This kind of semi-supervised exploration seems like a good compromise for now. I am also very interested in LLMs that can combine next-token video generation and text generation, because video generation requires understanding a bunch of stuff about the real world in order to produce consistent results, but that's a way off.
In this toy case it's just literally a calculator (a snippet of python code). The problem is 2+2, the calculator just does 2+2 and checks if the answer is the same as the LLM output. (The LLM is trained to format the final answer in a particular manner and wrap it with special tokens, so the verifier doesn't have to be able to interpret natural language.)
You can get surprisingly far with this. If it's a calculus question, you can use an automatic differentiator to check it. Likewise for factorisation questions, metric conversion questions, algebraic manipulation of formulae, etc. you put a little work into programming the automatic verifier and you can get an infinite number of problems.
If you're a big company, you might have human domain experts doing some of this work too. If you're a smaller company you have a big LLM do verification for the smaller ones.
Then you have leetcode and programming problems, and again you can verify these automatically. Does the program compile? Is the program output what was requested? Is it faster than the previous solution?
Like I said, this only works for maths, programming, and other domains where you can verify the answer with a computer relatively cheaply, but contra the model of multiple intelligence factors, heavy training on maths and programming seems to improve general intelligence and reasoning quite well.
Mid 30s, and I drink rarely because even one pint makes me woozy for a few hours and that's not fun unless I'm with friends. Drank 3 pints one evening last week, had very restless sleep and was hungover and unable to work until about 3pm. That's a bit extreme for me but it's just not something I can do any more.
In general I think it has less to do with age and more to do with drinking frequency, which correlates with age for various reasons. My father is like @MaximumCuddles and has more every single day than I would in a month. He doesn't sleep well but otherwise shows no ill effects.
Question: What is 2 + 2
Model: Hmm, that’s 2 and then another 2, so 22.
AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: WRONG
——
Model: Hmm, that’s the sum of 2 and 2, so 4
AUTOMATIC VERIFIER: CORRECT.
The model is tweaked slightly to make the second output more likely, and that output is potentially added to the training set. Repeat for arbitrarily complex mathematics and other problems as long as the solution can be verified, even if it isn’t known in advance. In this way you can generate potentially infinite amounts of data, albeit limited to certain domains. However, problem solving ability has so far extended quite well to other domains even when trained in this manner.
Corvos
19d ago
I read your sentence as
It also should be noted that Ukraine has a way better military than anyone gave them credit for [in spite of the rubbish inheritance they got from the Soviets].
Whereas Ditto is saying
[Ukraine has a way better military than anyone gives them credit for, because the Soviets gave them a good military]
It was a bad idea that has predictably gone tits-up. The possibility of saying so is why people want to be consulted.
Corvos
19d ago
Please consider the possibility that we don’t all secretly agree with you.
I'm surprised Denmark didn't even consider the offer, or what they could get for their far off inhospitable territory. I would be curious to know what their price is.
I doubt they have one. I don’t mean this personally, but I’m constantly startled at the Make America Great Again movement’s inability to consider national pride as a motivation in other countries.
National pride is complex in Europe for reasons that you know, but voluntary abnegation like the Chagos stuff (ridiculous as I think it is) is totally different to somebody coming over and demanding you tell them what you want for the family silver, especially when they’re holding a knife. Same in Canada and Iran, same with European air bases now, it’s a massive blind spot that MAGA just keeps falling into.
Corvos
19d ago
Do arthropods broadly taste like crustaceans?
I remember being very surprised a few years ago to be given alligator and find out it really does taste like chicken. Exactly like chicken, to the point where if you close your eyes you can’t tell the difference. But the line of descent is clearer on that case.
Yes, there’s no way Europe would ever support this, with or without Trump, because it’s potentially hugely damaging to us and there’s no obvious need for it.
The point of consulting other people is that you sometimes get told that something of a terrible idea and you shouldn’t do it.
Consulting your citizens over forced heart donations wouldn’t result in twelve pages of constructive criticism aimed at doing it with minimum pain and compensation to the widows. It would result in horror and refusal, but that’s a lot better than the alternative!
The problem is that we don’t have undisputed control of two continents and loads of homeland shale. The closest we can get to energy security is diversifying our in-flows and buying from people who don’t like each other to keep prices down and make it hard to cut us off and this is what the US has been determined to prevent.
Personally I am cynical enough to think that the US is quite happy with gas dependence as long as we’re dependent on the right country, viz. the US, but that’s by the by.
Come now. If you require absolute perfection in my fictional analogies, let him be armed to the teeth while you are on your way to the gun shop to do something about an unfortunate jam.
Again, please consider the main point. Europe is much poorer and weaker than America. I wish it weren't so, but it's so. And yes, threats from you freak us the fuck out because we are sane and it is sane to be worried when the massive, much more powerful nation who just black-bagged a head of state starts making threats.
I don't think it would be a good idea to take Greenland by force. I think it would be great if we could buy it from Denmark.
And since Denmark has categorically refused to sell it, you will happily agree that taking it by force or e.g. economic compulsion through tariffs is completely off the table, yes? Because that would be a spectacularly shitty way to treat an ally who is on your side. Yes?
I'm not even being sarcastic, particularly! The fact that apparently-reasonable Americans, when asked whether America should mug a loyal ally and take their stuff, have a good chance of either shrugging or enthusiastically agreeing is also part of what's creeping people out. Europeans read American newspapers, blogs, and websites. We know what you say to each other.
And even though I suspect that most Americans read anything negative about Trump and their minds immediately present an outrageous French-accented person saying, "Tell me, do you now see your foolishness and disavow your president? Ohohoho!" these are real issues and your behaviour really matters.
I was writing a longer and more detailed reply to your other post but accidentally refreshed the page. Will try and get back to it. But you have to try and understand the experience of being a small country dealing with a massive country that has made clear it doesn't like you very much. You are a good patriotic American as you should be, and America is ultimately 'us'. From outside, America is 'them' and you are not, from our perspective, automatically the good guy or automatically well-meaning.
America's behaviour here is like being a police officer making a joke about raping your wife, just after beating a perp unconscious in front of you. No, there's relatively little chance he's going to do it, and nothing you could do if he did. But that kind of behaviour from an authority figure with complete power over you and a clear propensity to solve problems with violence is really unnerving.
The only acceptable answer when the largest and most powerful country in the world is asked, "are you going to take your ally's land by force?" is, "No! Fuck no! Are you crazy?! We're allies, that'd be insane!". And that's the answer every president before Trump would have given. Most of them would have meant it, too.
EDIT 1:
But all the people saying that America doesn't need Greenland because we'd be allowed to build and use any military base we wanted there anyways... they have been proved obviously wrong over the past month. And I was one of them.
I note that even here, "Lol, it's only a joke, calm down," is immediately followed by, "would have been a good idea though..."
EDIT 2:
Note that Denmark had already firmly rejected any possibility of selling Greenland during Trump's first term:
During the first Trump administration, US president Donald Trump said that the US should buy Greenland. The governments of Denmark and Greenland clarified that Greenland is not for sale and cannot be sold under the Danish constitution, and the Danish government has always rejected such proposals, which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called "an absurd discussion".[12] Greenland invited US investment, however, stating that "we're open for business, not for sale".[44]
The lesson Trump seems to have taken from this is that if he wanted to press his suit further he should also use threats. This is not a half-serious joke, and it's most definitely not a sign of "our eternal love for each other".
Corvos
20d ago
I'm sorry. I've had serious tachycardia and having trouble with the ticker can be very frightening. The good news is that the heart is a much simpler and easier-to-fix organ than many others.
The two things I would recommend AS A NON-DOCTOR are:
- Ask your doctor what specifically to look out for in terms of serious problems. I had a recurring pain in my upper chest and along my arm, which combined with the tachycardia frightened me terribly until I went to the doctor and he kindly pointed out the actual location of the heart for me. In reality it was mild DOMS from
wankingweightlifting. - I am told that soluble fibre, often in the form of phyllium husk, can be very good for attaching to cholesterol and rendering it non-dangerous. Look into it properly but I believe this is recommended and produces good effects.
Where was Europe's plan for preventing Iranian nuclearization? Did they care at all or accept it as a fait accompli?
No idea. Personally, I think it's both a fait accompli and very much not my problem. Sooner or later every country that can will have nukes, because it's the only way to make sure that people like Trump don't roll over you. This invasion may have pushed Iran nuclear weapons back 10 years, 20 years, or maybe not, but between them America and Russia have guaranteed that in a hundred years there will be nukes all over IMO.
Nobody I know honestly believes this, or at best, believes "what we could do" would amount to fuck all.
Believe what you like, but I believe we'd do what we could in good faith. If 'what we can' isn't enough for you, please stop crashing our economy.
instead blame America for provoking Iran into doing it
Because America did.
Many parties were consulted -- Israel and the Gulf states.
I'm sure. Israel is the only ally America actually treats like an ally.
As far as I'm aware, the Gulf states were not consulted and were previously against war with Iran, though they are now more worried about Trump pulling out than keeping going. "AP reports that Gulf leaders have become discontent with the United States’ handling of the conflict and have expressed anger over the absence of prior notice of the operation."
You know who else makes the stuff Iran makes to keep your civilization alive? Russia. It's OK to get into fights there, apparently.
I don't think that. I'm British. The chances of Russia getting anywhere near threatening us are tiny, whereas the economic shock from the American-led sanctions crippled our economy for the foreseeable future. I'm not going to argue that we were doing well before that, but I saw the change from being an okay-ish country to a poor one in real time. We are now simply incapable of meaningfully militarising.
When it comes right down to it, America is the one who went in and started killing people and blowing things up. Without consulting anyone, without giving a shit about the rest of the world, Trump just decided 'I'mma kill these guys now.' Months after he made noises about attacking Europe to steal Greenland.
America isn't going to keep the seas safe on its own.
In my lived experience as of this month, the safest thing for the seas is for America to stay far, far away from the Middle East, or at least to give Trump some sleepy pills.
It's not that I don't get what you're saying, it's just that this is after a barrage of contempt and thoughtlessness from America and I'm tired of being friends with the big aggressive guy who keeps getting into fights with the people who make the stuff my civilisation needs to stay alive. The massive cope that it's secretly some kind of 4D chess to teach us a lesson makes it 10x worse. If America were actually in really serious trouble as a result of outside aggression, we would do what we could to help our ally if asked, and I hope the reverse is also true. But right now Europe is in very serious difficulties that can't be overcome by just 'getting a clue', we need time and space to find the will and the means to recover, and being friends with America is giving us the opposite of that. I'm quite happy to kiss and make up with Iran, and get some oil in return, and I don't see what UK interests are threatened by that.
In general, we would prefer to get American 'help' when we ask for it. As a wise man once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
I do note that EA and various other ‘bleeding-heart’ movements also tend to be disproportionately Jewish.
One might fairly argue that almost every movement is disproportionately Jewish, due to high IQ and great verbal skills, but there’s something there IMO.
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