BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Alignment is easy. Agreement is hard. The Bailey is «aligning the AI to the generic mode of operation where it makes sure the user's intent is understood correctly and does not go all monkey's paw». The Motte is «having the AI align the future to your preference, very much not obliging the user when the instruction is against my preferences».
This is the general problem of politics.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.
If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.
Did your English fail you? Or is this some subtler issue with failing to assimilate into the society and morality of Earthlings after your alt-historical non-tribalist India?
"Amadan thinks HBD is probably real but we shouldn't racially discriminate, and a lot of HBDers do want to do that"
Do they?
The disconnect, if that's how you want to put it, is a very simple matter, I think. I'll ping people to let them refute me if I'm wrong.
Me, @The_Nybbler, @aqouta, @fuckduck9000, @curious_straight_ca and perhaps others who are pressed to identify as «HBDers» variously accuse you of or are questioning reasons behind you lot's (@HlynkaCG, @FCfromSSC, and you too) misrepresenting the distribution of opinion around these parts, in a way that amounts to slander. Denying that slander when directly asked, but then repeating it as a generality, is a very irritating pattern.
We believe that what you present as a non-central, relatively unimportant case and specify with the qualifier «factual», i.e. an HBD-recognizing belief system that does not advocate for racial discrimination against any group (please let's not get off track with some inane "is canceling affirmative action not discrimination" debate, this clearly isn't what you mean) is the central case here, to the point it needs no qualifiers. It's a coherent position, in many/most cases motivated not so much by object-level theory of human trait variability, nor by normative ethnocentrism (I don't even identify as «White» and look down on you hajnalbots), but by opposition to systematic deceit, anti-white racism, unjustified redistributionism and leftist ideology writ large.
Notably, «political HBDers» that exist are a somewhat separate club. They are few and they include people like @parrhesia (and I suspect Matthew Yglesias) who, in effect, call to proactively brain-drain the world and put genotypic IQ above any other merit of a citizen. On this account they, too, are invulnerable to Hlynka's gotchas, even though they are, in a meaningful sense, progressives.
Back to the main issue, in these spats you do not point to a sizable constituency of what you inappropriately call «political HBDers» i.e. generic White Supremacists who don't much care who scores what. Instead, you speculate about them hiding behind the veneer of the merely factual opinion, just-asking-questions to support a preconceived bigoted ideology with an arbitrary self-serving table of ranks for different groups.
Hlynka:
The problem for the dissident right types is that the dissident right only really exists as a subset of the woke. In my experience the average HBD is even more of an ardent true believer in the correctness of progressive talking points than the average democrat. For all the talk of combatting wokeness it's clear at a glance that these people don't want to see wokeness defeated, they just want to reorder the intersectional stack so that thier favored groups are on top.
FC:
You can argue the label if you like, but "person who believes in meaningful racial differences in intelligence, and thinks it's a good idea to implement racial discrimination on this basis" is a notable cluster here
You:
Modern HBDers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of non-whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and HBD offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.
You refuse to say «$username, I call you out on actually, secretly adhering to this ideology». But you always bring it up when arguing with any of us.
And crucially, the very act of creating those boxes, identifying people as «HBDers» of any sort serves to distance yourself from the toxic belief and the whole cluster of associations that it evokes. You, Amadan, do not think of yourself as a «factual HBDer» or some other variant species – you just happen to think HBD is a fact, because you are capable of generic reasoning about facts, but it does not define you like it ostensibly defines us. With these classifications and distinctions you put us on the spectrum from I-Fucking-Love-Science race realists to 1488 genocide enjoyers, but you do not inspect your position on that spectrum, you look at it from a comfortable vantage point of «reasonable opinion»; you condescend to «factual HBDers» with platitudes to the effect that, facts being what they are, racial discrimination is still wrong – instead of admitting that there is no difference in opinion between you and us. This is what drives @fuckduck9000 mad here, and what I perceive as gaslighting.
Because if there is a difference in opinion, what do you think it is exactly? And why does it apparently call for these incessant remarks about «Dreaded Jim» and deporting all blacks and other shit, and rhetorical questions like «sooo, what do you think follows from these oh-so-important Facts, Mr. HBD»?
Do you think you deserve that treatment for believing the same things?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There's no context, it's a contrived example of a suspicious HBD narrative about inherent racial tendency to react in a particular way to mask mandates, on par with «Asians are tolerant of having their breathing blocked».
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I'd be more interested in knowing whether they'd equate a normal but childless-past-some-significant-age child (as many Millenials are) to a dead one. I know that some would, in traditional societies especially.
But here, obviously this bloodline thing is a rationalization for a moral intuition about badness of trans. I'd prefer if people argued directly for what they believe. Fear of reprisal warps human reasoning into really strange and inauthentic shapes, unfortunately.
about all it does for us is give us high confidence that attempts to "fix" a misunderstood problem almost certainly won't work.
There's a profound epistemic benefit to learning about HBD as a scientifically sound framework. It gives a man grounds for confidence about two very important matters, namely that a) despite disagreeing with the apparent common sense about some observable facts, he is not insane or evil, and b) a near-totality of respected and publicly visible people, in a highly transparent, individualist and relatively very democratic society, can be gaslit or intimidated into perpetuating a regime of blatant lies; even though those lies were not so long ago known to many to be just that.
This is quite sufficient to justify informing people of it.
I have an extremely strong revulsion for gaslighting. I viscerally experience it as intrusion into the brain, and into that which brain exists for; tentacles, spider legs, ovipositors, horsehair worms, larvae with mechanically clicking jaws, the assertive writhing mass of wiry, greedy, fecund alien appendages trying to violate soft tissues of my mental organism and remake it into a host for its own designs, into a consumable devoid of inherent worth. I dimly guess that's how many victims understand rape.
I think lying to people, with a serious intent to mislead them, is wrong, though this definition covers too much to use heavy words. To mislead them about themselves is, generally, an evil act. But, worst of all, to make them stop believing in a significant real facet of their goodness and ability to appreciate good and true within and without themselves – this amounts to an act of gratuitous violence; an attempt at mutilation worse than crippling the body. I feel that Christians get it right when they identify the principal source of evil and misery and distortion in the world as The Father of Lies, and exactly for this reason.
I've rewritten this section several times now; I seriously don't know how to express my attitude, except simply: when I notice a person trying to knowingly gaslight me (or even someone else) about anything not utterly trivial, I start thinking of a suitable pretext to kill that creature. I give up always, but not because I believe that impulse is wrong.
Alas, you and Hlynka (and to an extent Amadan) are now, it seems, erecting your own regime of gaslighting here, what with these «political HBDers» (rather, regular White Supremacists) advocating for racial discrimination all over the place; so pervasive that simply gesturing at the subreddit name suffices to make the argument.
On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here
Aren't you that South Asian rationalist guy who audaciously implied that ethnocentrism is an entirely alien notion to you since you're not white, and that it is impossible to have «reasoned debate» with people who don't want you to immigrate to their countries, because they have «blue-and-orange morality», so the only way to deal with them is censorship?
You sure are good at assimilating: you can learn English and slatestarcodex lingo and whatever else is needed to «pass». I'm sure you pride yourself on this ability to mimic superficial markers of a cooperating agent. But what matters is not how much you look the part: such «assimilation» is not worth more than changing skin color. What matters is actually, you know, cooperating, including respect for host's values, even irrational ones.
I've already said all I had to say about you years ago.
Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.
If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.
(On another note, it's really funny how @HlynkaCG has corncobbed himself with his philosophical notion of woke Neo-Nazis and other clever inversions. Will we see him arguing that DEI values follow from literalist interpretation of the Constitution and are more American than apple pie, if another moderately suave progressive happens to aid him in his dunking on woke HBDers?)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Well,
Okay, but even if HBD is true, in the "biology says blacks are going to be at a disadvantage no matter what we do" sense, what should we do about it?
I simply claim that «yes, we shouldn't do these things» is a good enough first answer.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Personally I asked:
Do you appreciate that at the very least it says what we SHOULDN'T do about it?
where do you get the idea that I am in favor of this?
I am not saying you are in favor. I am saying that implications of HBD can inform constructive enough plans to make rhetorical questions like
what should we do about it?
– suspect, and your attitude both unreasonable and morally wrong in a way. Knowing what TOTALLY NOT to do because it doesn't help and indeed makes the situation, taken as a whole, worse along neglected dimensions is valuable, productive knowledge. «To begin with, stop fucking digging» is very often good advice. In an ideal world, HBDers could be perfectly content with autistically pointing out Facts About Race that absolve whites of collective guilt/responsibility and predict/explain low RoI of many popular strategies (which are intellectually predicated on HBD being mostly wrong and "systemic white supremacy" being true), while not proposing any positive action themselves. They wouldn't have to be dragged over the coals with this sort of character analysis:
Modern HBDers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of non-whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and HBD offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.
What did you do about race relations? Wrung hands that HBDers (or, here, specifically @The_Nybbler) aren't exceedingly generous, and don't talk nicely enough when being subject and objecting to unironic racism against their people (which you yourself recognize as repugnant)?
But I won't hold you to task for not meaningfully contributing to «improvement of race relations» (not that I care much about that specifically). This is an unreasonable standard, not just on this platform. My point is: being correct, honest and calling out counterproductive bullshit is plenty enough to merit some charity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Okay, but even if HBD is true, in the "biology says blacks are going to be at a disadvantage no matter what we do" sense, what should we do about it?
Do you appreciate that at the very least it says what we SHOULDN'T do about it? Namely, we shouldn't do that which is mainstream now – gaslight white people with the assumption of their collective, systemic complicity in underperformance of black people; their unmerited privilege; their bumbling idiocy that precludes them noticing literally brain-damaging harms incurred on blacks by the very phenomenon of their white living.
This is not a trivial proposition, for it drastically changes the moral arithmetic of any possible positive action to close performance gaps: from "redressing past wrongs at last" to "voluntarily helping the less fortunate", say; and it changes the whole landscape of authority to have opinions on the subject, which matters arguably even more. It makes your condescension even for more radical HBDers less morally impressive, too.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Unless there's strong evidence for Asians (in US, or otherwise outside of Asian countries that have been primed by SARS/MERS scare) really wearing masks more often than non-Asians in some unbiased sense that an Asian person is more likely ceteris paribus, I suspect it's some combination of confounders and selection effects that do not have direct relation to physical Asianness.
Some just-so narratives:
-
Asians tend to be in higher SES brackets, higher-IQ, wearing masks is a higher-class thing (is it?)
-
Asians mostly vote Democrat, Democrats police each other more severely for COVID compliance
-
Asians (especially higher-SES ones) are skinnier and healthier than other comparable Americans, so do not suffer from shortness of breath typical of overweight Americans, so masks are less of an obstruction for them;
-
Given the above, they also may walk on foot more often, so they get overrepresented among people wearing masks one may spontaneously observe in the street.
But all that said, I buy the basic racialist theory that Asians are just naturally more conformist/conflict-avoiding/rules-abiding/disinclined to get myopically hung up on symbolics and engage in protests to signal their sexual prowess (in the order of increasing charity to them vs. anti-maskers).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
A well-credentialed doctor in a prestigious institution has once prescribed me a massive, costly and crippling operation in response to some worrying symptoms. I thought for a bit, reasoned that hypochondria and credulity are shameful, and just ignored the problem, which subsequently… mostly went away.
(I visited the Church for the first time in years after that).
N=1 is not much, but I do not contact medical professionals all that often in the first place.
The point is I do not fundamentally care if my clinician is a transformer or a meat bag: it would be quite unwise of me to uncritically assume that either has a modicum of responsibility or common sense. It'd be nice to know in advance that outright hallucinations are unlikely, of course.
There's no way to know mathematically, because the whole thing is a non-deterministic black box.
Not true, it's a deterministic black box, and not even that black, we can fact-edit LLMs. Of course we can also curate the dataset.
If the process is as simple as to pattern match symptoms to diagnosis from a list of previous diagnoses with their associated symptoms, why can't this be done with a good old stupid database? Something like this has to exist. Does the LLM have an advantage beyond writing the answer in nice prose?
Why do you think holistic application of medical knowledge can be implemented with a database search, but English prose is something we need LLMs for? Grammar, too, has regularities.
LLMs are just our best way to date of approximating arbitrary regularities of text.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
How many Joyces contend for an average Hugo?
Every second-tier female fanfic writer is invested in her characters' feelings and thoughts and dedicates a big part of the work to spelling that out.
Men, like I said, have other avenues to express their core interests.
I'm not sure if that's really challenging my claim about priorities. Men can reason about psychology, sure. But McCarthy, for example, is famous for a number of enigmatic masculine characters, whose psychology, however nontrivial, is revealed overwhelmingly though action; it's a cinematic «show, don't tell» ethos. Vonnegut's ones came across as alexithymic and somewhat emotionally stunted to me (Slaughterhouse, Cat's Cradle).
Perhaps we could evaluate this just by looking at the proportion of self-referential monologue in text.
«Old World giants» was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I meant chronology and pre-digital culture more than geography, it just occurred to me that my immediate associations are Eurasians, which was not the case with genre fiction I referred to.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Disclaimer: I haven't read much fiction in the last two decades, and what I've read was similar to a stereotypical older Lesswrongian's sci-fi/fantasy diet and nuggets of classics, so my opinion is probably best discarded. Read @Dean's review of shitty new Star Wars movies instead, then.
Anyway, while institutional and ideological factors necessarily play a role, I would not rush to mock the premise that women are better writers. Of course, this depends on what we mean by a good writer. (For convenience I'll ignore market definitions and issues, such as female readers preferring stories by women). What does a good writer write best about? Stuff he – or, as it happens, she – cares about. It's not a given that this coincides with better practical understanding; but as for the resolution and clarity of verbal lens, it probably does.
In my experience, women, including writers, are vastly more interested in people, and men in events and things (the people-thing distinction is trivially true). In the limit they converge on detailed worldbuilding (whether «realistic» or thoroughly fictional) that provides a harmonious stage for the development of complex personalities, but the dissimilarity remains. Men write about things, ideas, events that the protagonist wrestles with, grows through, or sometimes is crushed by (classifications of archetypal narratives are very telling here), or in the worst case blasts through like a flying brick, shrugging off damage. Women who aren't complete hacks undeserving of our time write about… well, about stuff the protagonist feels as any this happens, in detail, to the point of forgetting that other pieces of the world should continue to move and live. Some of the best women wrote about a great man, adoring him as if from some distance, wrinkles and all. Say, Le Guin wrote Shevek. What is the deepest woman written by a man?*
Still, while some of my all-time favorite stories are written by women, others are written by men about women, for very understandable reasons. It's quite funny how the latter, in the modern genre fiction at least, are essentially weird men (consider all of Neal Stephenson's jailbait; bona-fide feminist protags are far worse, naturally). Yet men-as-depicted-by-women are still recognizably male and deeper than men's men – if sometimes unrealistically sensitive and vulnerable, even absolute brutes (indeed, especially brutes). Frankly, that may not even be much of a distortion: women work to see that side of their partner, the side that is usually not shown in male fiction – or in public.
Male fiction, put simply, is somewhat crude and churlish on the psychological side. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong in the sense of providing poor actionable descriptions. But it's not elaborate, not fancy and eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind.
As a concluding note: it's not just that male consumers play games. Male creators also play games, and write them too. There are arenas for worldbuilding and self-expression that are more fit for male interests than composing traditional novels.
And, of course, then there's the real world, where we men are meant to carve novels of our lives into the bedrock with consequences of our acts.
* I am well aware that some Chekhov, Kuprin or Conrad could do more than that in an offhand sketch, but it feels wrong to bring them into this discussion. Old world giants are more than men.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There's no guarantee that actual children will care about you either. Didn't you just say it's not about parents, though?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's not just sarcasm. He says it sincerely, I think; and so do I. Some posts you disagree with really are extraordinary – extreme, audacious, wild, unusually unabashed. «A good leader hates his subjects» is in that category, for me.
Again, maybe there is a grain of truth to it – you need the ability to resist public pressure. But really, personal sentiment is orthogonal to the question of having the power to execute any vision you might have. I take it as a given that many leaders above vice-mayor level, certainly national leaders, are more or less non-human psychopathic reptiles who find notions like loving or even having contempt for the populace beneath their dignity; nevertheless, most opt for populism for pragmatic reasons.
And Biden is proving unexpectedly resistant to pressure; he 's ho senile grandpa. Case in point: Afghanistan.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's not a reference to my own corpus. It's a typical response by Eigenrobot* (a pretty smart user 2rafa, like many dramanauts, most likely knows) on twitter. He usually writes it in response to… well, you be the judge. Oh, for convenience here they are.
*I'm not eigenrobot.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse
This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.
You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?
And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Oh please don't backpedal now. It's pretty obvious that you are simply expressing your own sentiment and deep-seated philosophy here: all the bad comes from the unwashed masses, all the good from sometimes mistaken but ultimately competent and well-intentioned elites, whose loathing for villeins is in itself a decent guiding principle. It takes some boldness to spin a paranoid, corrupt autocrat's war of conquest informed by 19th century realpolitik and "geopolitics" into some romantic sentimentality; it stretches the notion of sentimentality well past the breaking point.
Russia also had conducted a wildly unpopular and protested pension reform, if you don't know. Colossal immigration from Central Asia is likewise unpopular and ruthlessly maintained, as is the suppression of popular nationalism. Putin has many faults, but being too soft-hearted isn't one.
I agree populism is poison and submitting to the whims of public opinion can well destroy a nation, but there's, well, at least I don't find much jupiterian in saying «geez the demography is busted, the budget is overextended, I don't know how to fix this shit so how about you scum work more and get paid less»; it's just about the most ancient and primitive tool at any ruler's disposal, on par with "hire more police" and debasing currency. If we're doing the high standards thing when judging plebs, it stands to reason to expect more of the powerful.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Extraordinary.
Clearly this isn't about fragility, at least they certainly don't look at this primarily through the lens of expecting humiliation in a debate (though such people exist, and these ones specifically can conceive of their inevitable failure in a debate yet keep their faith, I think). They tend to understand this in the framework of «platforming» or «legitimizing» «noxious ideas». The illegitimacy is predecided, as is their authority as gatekeepers of discourse. Thus, irritation, condescension and flipping out when they are denied the rite of stomping out Evil and an apparently irrelevant issue of analyzing the argument is being forced on them. What does it matter which particular part is «bad» by the deliberately obtuse nitpicky standard that ignores the moral imperative to suppress such noxious ideologies!? Would you have them greenlight a Neo-Nazi pamphlet if it has no grammatical mistakes?
This kind of perception is normal for people who are accustomed to having authority or basking in its favor. Really very Sneerclubby, and it's no wonder many of top posters there are academics.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Chess is a game. It's something to play, to exercise your faculties, to have transient moments of joy and frustration about. I think professional sport is in general a pretty perverse culture, precisely because it kills the playful spirit of games, turns them into a high stakes rat race, essentially creates evil out of thin air. The value of discovering natural genius and pushing it to the limit is not worth this tradeoff.
Particularly seeing as that genius, confined to the realm of the game, doesn't contribute anything tangible to the world. Assuming the fungibility of IQ, Magnus and others are an immense lost opportunity. If we are tolerating this, might as well let them have a good time instead of pointlessly forcing the solemn ethos of self-sacrifice for the greater good where there isn't any.
You know, this really is something of a blue-and-orange universe. Are you sure you can comprehend Western morality enough to imitate its outward expressions?
More options
Context Copy link