At the age of eight?
Yes? Young girls talk to older girls, older girls tease them for being ignorant and drip-feed knowledge of the adult world. That’s why lots of women recall being terrified of menarche, because older girls think it’s funny to torment them. The boys in my all-boys school were making pussy jokes at 10, not because they understood them but because that’s what the older boys did.
I am, however, very invested in protecting the purity of girls, especially young girls. That's kind of the whole point of this discussion.
Okay, with what end? Are we, in fact, talking about icky brainwaves after all? Are we positing that making young girls aware that people do/will soon care about their looks harms them? Are you saying that competition for looksmaxxing is harmful because stressful, and the earlier it begins the worse it is? Is it a spiritual commitment to defend the innocence of childhood, and is that for both boys and girls or just girls? If you made your metaphysical commitments a bit clearer then it would be easier to discuss them.
What "pressure" are you referring to? And why do we observe a major discontinuity in teen suicide and depression in 2014?
How major? And are we talking about a generalised effect over the whole cohort specifically in that time, or specifically worsening of the most anxious 1% from quite suicidal to very suicidal, or what? Like I say, I welcome serious attempts to get to grips with this and characterise it and disentangle different factors. I would prefer solutions to be more focused than ‘let’s ban smartphones and prevent children uploading home videos to the internet’. Thus my proposal to restrict displaying like-based feedback to the underage.
FWIW that was a genuine 'if'. I didn't know where you were coming from, and there are certainly many people who do think like that. That's why I put two 'if's: if you are concerned about A which I think is sensible, here is my proposal, if you are concerned primarily about A as it pertains to B which I think is less sensible, I think you should let it go. I apologise if you found my reply obnoxious.
Before TikTok, did you ever hear of an eight-year-old being asked what she wanted for Christmas and her replying "skincare"? No eight-year-old should want skincare products for Christmas, and it's obscene that social media has made her think she needs them.
Honestly, it's my strong impression that young girls have always been obsessed over the things that women do, including cosmetics. My mother went to an all-girl's school and they discussed this kind of thing constantly. The difference was that it was hidden from adults to protect their idea of childhood (and feminine) innocence.
I do not believe that our world, in which most teenagers in the West own smartphones and use social media, is healthier overall than the counterfactual world in which most teenagers do not own smartphones and use social media.
That wasn't my counterfactual. My counterfactual was (in response to a potential position you don't in fact possess) that I don't think it's healthy for society to obsess over protecting the purity of women or the spread of images of women.
To go to your point, though, I am very skeptical of movements that take away something people like and do because they ought not to like and do it*. I'm all for giving people tools to control smartphone usage, and for attempting to cut down on network effects that drive people to smartphones whether they wish so or nay. But the fact is that text can be a lighter, easier way of communicating with people more like oneself (viz, this forum) and I'm reluctant to say "no! only in-person communications!". The real world can be harsh in many ways, and some of those ways are needful, but 'go and suffer' isn't necessarily always the right response. I can't say I remember my pre-smartphone childhood to be much happier or less anxious making - playground cliques are just as isolating as social media ones, and playground bullying is worse than cyberbullying. People treat smartphones as a refuge for a reason.
* Yes, I know there are surveys showing that lots of teens don’t like social media and smartphones. I look forward to more work on this being done, and would prefer to address those teens and their needs specifically rather than reach first for the ban hammer.
With regards to anxiety and depression, I don't think it's the phones, although the phones don't help. I think it's the pressure and the constantly raised standards, which is mostly downstream of globalisation.
do they know that pederasts are watching these videos and masturbating to them?
If you are concerned about young people unwittingly being lured into (willingly) making increasingly sexual videos for likes, that seems a reasonable concern that can be addressed by hiding the likes on social media for kids. This has the handy benefit of removing lots of other incentives to present a false face to the world.
If you are concerned about the existence of people who might watch these videos and think unsavoury thoughts, thus defiling innocents with their nasty brain-waves, then that sounds like a classic moral panic. The haunting fear that somewhere a nonce is happy. If there is a depiction of a pretty girl in the world, someone has masturbated to it, that’s simply a fact of life, and getting upset about it is the kind of impulse that ends up leading to the removal of all images of the female form and hiding girls in burkas. Look at the vast online collections of images that happen to show women’s feet. There is no point troubling yourself (or everyone else) over such things, it’s almost certainly healthier overall than the alternative.
Corvos
4hr ago
Partly since said adversity is required to make those brains develop properly!
Corvos
4hr ago
Talking to my founder about it, one big reason is that people simply don’t want to be constantly at the mercy of twitchy stockholders who see your company purely as a Number Go Up machine and don’t understand that a ‘bad quarter’ can just mean people don’t buy ice cream in midwinter.
Plus the compliance costs are absurd, which ties into regulation.
Corvos
15hr ago
But on the other hand Harry Potter fanfiction is godawful: nothing but Master of Death power fantasies and Hot (Gay) Slytherins as far as the eye can see. The crowd is not always better.
Corvos
19hr ago
While pivoting to abortion is clearly reaching, I agree with him that it's interesting and noteworthy that the Annunciation is not a rape, or even a seduction, as one sees in the vast majority of e.g. Greek tales.
To be honest, I don't think he's wrong on this. Lowly American citizens are as apt to demand their government Do Things about the objects of their consternation as citizens are anywhere else. In the spirit of goodwill between nations, I'll concede maybe they're a bit less likely than some, but it's such a high bar it makes no odds.
Even here, where many are supposedly libertarians, @Amadan and other mods complain that lots of users hammer the Report button in response to posts they disagree with. I also note that many American citizens seem to quite like their government getting its way by muscular means, so long as it works and they aren't inconvenienced.
I don't write this to dunk on Americans specifically, only to say that having the citizens of a foreign power in charge of the internet is very likely to cause issues no matter which power that is, because people are people. It's certainly true that much of what the American government does is pretty unpopular with American citizens, much more so when it affects those citizens, but even if the American government suddenly turned into a direct democracy I still wouldn't particularly want to be beholden to the American public.
Corvos
1d ago
Like tattoos. I’m not implacably opposed to them on principle but there are very few stickers that look better than no stickers.
Corvos
2d ago
Honestly, I do think that's basically cultural prejudice. Coupled with perhaps an unusual amount of time spent with other ESL speakers.
I've known Russian professors etc. who were basically incomprehensible, the Indians have no monopoly on that. Rather that than chavvy London accents.
Corvos
2d ago
I knew a very nice Japanese girl with impeccable middle-class credentials. She spoke Japanese with a pleasant Tokyo accent (which the Japanese equivalent to RP these days) and she spoke English impeccably... except that she'd been to university in Plymouth and had picked up an incredibly gutter accent and speech patterns that she seemed to be completely unaware of. It was incredibly disorienting.
I think that's a broadly artificial separation. In my opinion the vast majority of new tools / technologies / methods / routines / research come from some combination of:
- Observation of something interesting during a routine process.
- Application of something routinely used in one context to another context.
- Common-sense extension that has only now become available because of advancements in another area.
I have observed AI doing (2) and it makes (1) and (3) considerably easier.
If my project works it will be an entirely new way of doing desktops, and I guess it was my idea not the AI's, which is maybe what you mean? But I got a lot of the techniques from another area and 90% of the design is the AI's suggestion and uses techniques I'd never heard of, so it's still more complicated. I'm quite happy for the top-level what to stay my job and leave the how to the machine, of course.
As Napoleon once said, quantity has a quality all its own.
My private project is a graphics thing for ricing. To get what I wanted, I would have had to become proficient in desktop compositing, OpenGL, wayland, and several disciplines around graphics and rendering. Then I would have had to write several thousand lines of fairly finicky boilerplate, including several false starts and bad assumptions.
If I were retired and had the time and the energy, I could do that. In practice, though, switching from 5% ideas 95% grind to 60% ideas 30% reading 10% grind means that it’s fun and I’m a good chunk of the way there after maybe three good evenings of work. Without AI that just wouldn’t have happened and it would go into the bin of ‘someday’.
For my startup, again, AI is not a superintelligence but it sirfaces good papers, explains the maths when I get stuck, implements diagnostics in minutes that would take me hours. It’s not like having a Nobel winner in my pocket, it’s like having a textbook that can talk to me and a bunch of PhD students on Speed. Very senior people in very serious organisations are using it for proof of concepts and your projects.
TLDR: no individual thing it does is truly revolutionary except maybe the maths from my perspective, but I find the ease and quality and speed with which it does it is revolutionary in aggregate.
Corvos
2d ago
I think he means it in the sense that "a nice man on the phone told me he was from BitPanda and asked me to read my password to him so he could check if it was secure" or "SBF stole all my money" can't be detected by enforcing code correctness. All of the badness has happened outside the code, everything inside the code is a perfectly valid transaction.
Corvos
2d ago
I think crypto isn't such a good analogy. I never saw anyone get value out of crypto qua crypto. As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.
Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research. I think the hype is still kind of overdone, but only because the hype is so strong that only the immanent eschaton could live up to it and because it's not clear how much of a directly-related ecosystem there will be for third parties.
With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.
The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.
Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.
I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).
Corvos
2d ago
There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.
DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?
ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?
DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.
ROSE: What's it look like?
DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.
(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)
DOCTOR: What? What?
(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)
DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?
(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)
DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!
Corvos
2d ago
Now, as a gentleman enthusiast of the literary arts, how to find these people...
Corvos
2d ago
Isn't a huge chunk of increased prices for premium grocery products (meat, cocoa) competition with huge new markets in China? As you say, the market is global.
Corvos
3d ago
Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.
You know, I never thought about heroin/cocaine/fentanyl saving alcohol’s reputation but when you say it I can see what you mean. That’s a very interesting perspective.
Corvos
4d ago
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
I don't see why not. I think you're blowing it massively out of proportion. Eight year old girls, just like my mother's generation, are aware that people treat pretty girls better, that cosmetics are products meant to make you prettier, and that they're exciting and adult. They don't need social media to know that, (though yes I'm sure social media hammers it home) just eyes and ears. The reason my mother's generation weren't asking for skincare products for Christmas was nothing to do with the purity of youth and everything to do with the fact that their parents would have blown a gasket at them 'painting themselves' too soon (or in the case of my grandmother, at all). Given the reality that people do care about looks, even at that age, a quiet conversation and a provision of age-appropriate cosmetic products seems potentially a far kinder thing to do than lying about how real beauty is on the inside. My mother's school like most girls' schools had deliberately drab uniforms and all the girls hated being forcibly uglified.
You've been bouncing around between quite a lot of things. And you can care about any and all of them, it's a free country, but when you're throwing out bans all over the place (no broadcast media starring children, no social media, no smartphones, no uploaded home videos (does that extend to no uploaded photos?)) then it kind of helps if you're specific. If you're really worried about the mental health of child actors, okay, there's maybe stuff the industry could do, and indeed they already do it. The Potter actors turned out basically fine. If you're worried about children being sexually groomed, then there's also things you can do (whilst bearing in mind that AFAIK that kind of stuff mostly happens in the home or at school, in the in-person community). If you're worried about depression and body anxiety, then let's see if we can isolate slightly more where that's coming from (and personally I do think it has a lot to do with academic pressure) and how large the effect size is. Those graphs are interesting but they are relative measures - the first covers only standard deviations, the second is about percentages of people who already report depression. To take a deliberately absurd example, I would not be willing to make sweeping changes to society because the average number of self-poisonings have moved from 2 to 4.
I am totally open to large RCTs with banning/controlling use of smartphones to see the effect on these metrics, and I support banning or heavily restricting smartphones in schools, at least for now.
With regards to spiritual commitments, then we are much closer to 'moral panic' territory and I get increasingly wary. I'm as keen as anyone not to foist sexual topics on children too soon, that's not quite the same as 'protecting their purity' and I can tell you from experience that endeavors to impose purity in an impure world can be both stressful and harmful. Even to the extent that I care about this, I care about lots of things and there is only a certain level to which I am happy to trade them off against the sanctity of childhood. "Think of the children!" became a punchline precisely because it allowed so many busybodies to make nuisances of themselves, which was because childhood can be plausibly made to touch so many things. I do not want to live in a world primarily optimised for the health and purity of children.
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