Crowstep
7hr ago
A lot of these kind of grouchy iconoclastic guys do a ton of work to carve out their own path but then lack any kind of community and their kids just leave because there's not community for them to become an adult in
I suspect that's what will happen with the Collins' children. I can't see them adopting their dad's techno-puritanism.
Crowstep
7hr ago
Huh, TIL. I wonder why there hasn't been such a backlash in the Rugby-playing countries as there has been against American Football.
Crowstep
1d ago
It's possible they are able to introduce enough new equipment and rule tweaks to solve the CTE issue, but the clock is running out
RETVRN to Rugby!
Crowstep
1d ago
you cannot tell me Aphrodite of II is not a man's face stapled onto a woman's figure
I feel like I must be missing something, because I'm looking at (what I think) is the two figures compared and I genuinely couldn't tell you which one is the uglified version. They both have angrogynous faces. Did they change up the version for II after the backlash or something?
Crowstep
1d ago
Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did
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!
Crowstep
1d 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
1d ago
Crowstep
1d ago
I guess we'll see. So far there is a noticeable spike in her favour.
Crowstep
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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.
I wonder if it's due to young people being raised on social media. The only kind of dropping out they can idolise is the vanlife/digital nomad/world traveller kind that is broadcast on Instagram.
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