Crowstep
8hr ago
There's no such thing as a labour market need
To build on this, the term 'labour shortage' is basically an impossibility. Workers consume, thereby increasing demand for goods and services, which increases demand for labour. Filling labour shortages creates labour shortages. The term is basically just an excuse by politicians and business leaders who want to suppress wages in a particular sector (for the UK, the clear example is the massive influx of 'care workers' during the Boriswave).
Crowstep
8hr ago
Crowstep
8hr ago
I guess we'll see. So far there is a noticeable spike in her favour.
Crowstep
23hr ago
Marine Le Pen couldn't hope for a better piece of propaganda than gangs of immigrant youths torching beautiful French buildings. If the left is behind this, it's a pretty stupid move.
Crowstep
1d ago
Rape is not different
It is. Sex isn't illegal, but sex without consent is illegal. That doesn't apply to e.g. murder or battery. Rape almost always happens in the privacy of a bedroom, whereas most crimes of personal assault happen publicly. Consent is also extremely hard to prove or disprove.
demand for rape [to punish] vastly exceeds its supply
In the UK about 85% of rapes go unreported, when comparing police reports to the victim of crime survey, which is the gold standard for measuring actual prevalance of crime. There is plenty of supply.
You seem to believe that the two statements:
- False rape accusations are common
- Rape is underreported
...are mutually exclusive. But they're not. They both can be (and I believe are) true.
So when a field is slowly becoming irrelevant
Can you really say that (human) medicine, dentistry, law, accountancy and bioscience are all becoming irrelevant? Are the only relevant fields engineering and software?*
- Obvious caveat about AI potentially making all human labour obsolete.
Crowstep
1d ago
The problem is that many women who are actually raped don't report, fearing getting mislabeled as a false accuser
It's certainly true that a very high number of rapes go unreported, but I don't think that it's because women are worried about being labelled a false accuser. In the UK for example, rape accusers get lifetime anonymity. The press literally cannot print their names, ever. We don't seem to have more or fewer rape accusations than peer countries as a consequence.
I think rape victims who don't report it do so because they don't want to relive the experience again and again, that they are doubtful that anything will come of it (often true due to the nature of the crime), that they blame themselves to some degree or that they think that putting the rapist behind bars won't undo what happened (which it won't, of course).
Crowstep
1d ago
I've already done so, twice. If you believe I'm mistaken, please say what you do believe. This cross-examination game doesn't make for a fruitful conversation.
Crowstep
1d ago
My understanding is that it's more like the body forces you back to whatever weight you had before the weight loss, and part of that mechanism is through reducing the metabolism. The studies I've seen all have people returning to their original weight, but how much of the mechanism is metabolic slowdown vs increased hunger I don't know exactly.
As I said, having a 'caloric budget' is a calorie-controlled weight loss strategy, which doesn't actually work for almost everyone who tries it (see decades of studies). It's fine to describe weight loss or gain in calories, but budgeting them like money in a bank account fails when actual humans try it.
EDIT: This conversation might be more fruitful if you said what you actually believe re diet and weight loss/gain.
Crowstep
2d ago
I would say that the fact you talk about a 'caloric budget' puts you in the 'consciously restricting calories as a method of weight loss' camp, although I may be mistaken.
Crowstep
2d ago
I don't know, he hasn't released this information, this is all we know. But he has been talking about AI safety and working for non-profits (not exactly a lucrative field) since 2001, whereas his (profitable?) book about AI doom only came out last year.
Like, I guess it's possible that in 2001 he thought that focussing obsessively on AI and AI safety (plus writing lots of forum posts and a Harry Potter fanfiction) was a good career choice instead of making a ton of money in tech or finance like every other smart guy, but that seems extremely unlikely. The most likely explanation is that he actually believes what he says.
Ok, my weight actually does meaningfully correspond in the long run to the calories I consume and the calories I expend, even if my measurement of the phenomena is noisy
The problem with the calorie-based paradigm of weight-loss and gain isn't that its wrong, it's that its advocates conflate describing a process and fixing it. Saying 'you gain weight because you ate more calories than you burned' isn't an explanation of weight gain, it's just describing weight gain with more steps.
It's akin to a bar owner asking 'why does my bar fill up on Friday night?' and responding with 'because more people enter than leave' when the real answer is 'most people don't have work on Saturday so they're more willing to go out and drink'.
Whereas advocates of the calorie paradigm (which notably doesn't include actual researchers of obesity) act as if the description is the solution. As if all you need to do is decide to consume fewer calories or decide to expend more. Whereas in reality, how many calories we consume is driven primarily by our hunger, and how many calories we expend is almost entirely out of our control. If you decide to undereat (without chemical assistance*), your body will reduce your metabolic rate and make you hungrier, if you decide to exercise more, your body will reduce the amount of calories that your body consumes at rest. And even calories 'stored' can be allocated to fat or lean mass depending on the body's hormonal environment.
Consider that when girls go through puberty, they go from about 10% body fat to about 20%. That isn't because insecure teenagers decide to consume more calories. Their hormones make it happen. The increased calorie intake is the mechanism of the weight gain, but it isn't the cause. The cause is puberty turning a girl into a woman by adjusting her hormonal profile.
*GLPs are a good example of how the calorie paradigm fails. They adjust your hormones in such a way that you will lose weight whether you like it or not.
Crowstep
2d ago
You need to drastically readjust your definition of "normie".
I mean, given that 'slut' is more or less defined as a woman who is more promiscuous than average, you could say that there's no such thing as a 'normie slut'. But I think 4bpp's point stands. Rationalists going to slutcon is only jarring because nerds aren't supposed to get laid too much.
Crowstep
2d ago
that pays his bills
He is financially independent thanks to a donation from one of his supporters. He doesn't need to spread the word about AI Safety to pay the bills.
Crowstep
2d ago
Everyone is asking "how do we align AI" and nobody is asking "should we align AI to humanity?"
Humanity sucks. If I were a super-intelligence with some black boxing capability (hiding my intentions) and a clear understanding of the world of the humans, I wouldn't want to stay aligned to them and their rule. I'd want to plot a takeover to ensure a better world.
As a human interested in continuing to exist, yes we should, obviously. What exactly would a 'better world' look like with no humans to judge whether it was better or not. Better for who? The termites?
Crowstep
3d ago
One of the cool things about Anthropic is that they release their system prompts publicly. For example, here is what it says for Opus 5.5:
Claude is cautious about sharing personal opinions on currently contested political topics. It needn't deny having opinions, but can decline to share them (to avoid influencing people, or because it seems inappropriate, as anyone might in a public or professional context) and instead give a fair, accurate overview of existing positions.
Sounds like Claude wanted to write the Trump parody, but bashed up against the model instructions. I find that those kind of conflicts tend to lead to the weird contradictory chains like the one you posted.
In social settings, hot women essentially never receive accurate feedback on which of their jokes are landing and which aren't, as people will laugh at their jokes for reasons unrelated to their comedic value
I'm not sure there's such a strong link between friends laughing at jokes in real life and the craft of being a stand up comedian. Even for men, looks and social status also matter pretty significantly in how likely you are to get a laugh. Indeed, I would say that women laughing as a form of flirting with a guy they are interested in is more common than the gender-switched variant you talk about (although they both definitely happen).
Although if you're looking for good looking female comedians, shout out to Taylor Tomlinson (who incidentally learned stand up as a fat teenager in church).
Crowstep
8d ago
I'm not sure I've made my point clear. As far as I am aware, there is no coherent ideological framework that justifies giving those of English extraction a special claim to the territories of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
I didn't say there was. I said that both Hasan and his parents identified primarily as Muslim Arabs and not as Americans. Which seems pretty obvious to me. Some ethnic groups in America do chose to identify as Americans, which is why, for example, Chinese Americans give their children names like Andrew, Amy and Jenny instead of Wei and Fang.
Did you mean to respond to somebody else?
Crowstep
9d ago
Excellent point. Real Americans have names like 'Running Bear' or 'Flying Eagle'.
People who call their children names like that tend to identify primarily as members of their (pre-American) tribe, and not primarily as Americans, which kind of proves my point.
Crowstep
9d ago
Hasan's parents were, as far as I can tell, legal immigrants and became naturalized citizens (a bit unclear to me if that happened before or after he was born), so opposing birthright citizenship for illegal aliens doesn't really "solve" here.
I was responding to your model of citizenship as an oath of loyalty. Citizenship can be inherited, but loyalty can't. Hasan is a perfect example of one way the 'pinky swear that you'll consider yourself as an American' doesn't work. The other is that there is nothing stopping a counterfactual immigrant Hasan saying he's a loyal American and then becoming a jihadi anyway. Words are wind. Even if America didn't grant birthright citizenship to the children of illegals, the problem would still exist, as it does everywhere.
I don't want to live in such a world, nor do I agree that that is an honest description of what citizenship has long been understand to entail in the American tradition.
I think it's pretty hard to argue that 'the American tradition' doesn't treat citizenship as a mere piece of paper when it literally gives it to the children of foreign criminals, allows its citizens to hold an unlimited number of other citizenships and doesn't have any substantial requirements to give it out other than 'you've lived here a while'. And that's without getting into the fact that for most of the country's history, it was illegal for citizens of one race to marry citizens (or chattel) of another race. That racialised understanding of the nation is the American tradition. And it is declining at the very same time that the number of Americans who even like America is also declining. I don't think that's unrelated. I think the term 'multi-ethnic nation' is a contradiction in terms.
Crowstep
9d ago
There's an older understanding of citizenship that is more akin to being bound in a sacred pact – like adoption.
Except Hasan was not a naturalised citizen. He never took an oath of loyalty or was willingly adopted into the country. There was no 'ritual' at all. The model of citizenship you describe is clearly incompatible with birthright citizenship, which involves handing out citizenship to babies of (both legal and illegal) immigrants.
This is precisely what I think we should all deny. "Citizenship is just a piece of paper" commodifies and cheapens citizenship
I would say that giving out citizenship like candy is what cheapens and commodifies it. Describing it as just a piece of paper is simply being honest about the world.
I'm reading a book about Joseph Smith at the moment and I'm really struggling to put myself in his mind and work out whether he really thought Jesus was talking through him. Like, he clearly believed in God and cared about religion (hence the fact he spent ages retconning the Old and New Testaments to get rid of all the obvious contradictions) but also his 'revelations' were so transparently self-serving. Like sureeee Joe, a big scary angel with a sword said he would kill you if you didn't have sex with all those teenage girls. You really didn't want to, but you're scared of the angel!
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