DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
My opinion on hard-core rationalists has stayed fairly stable over the years : "Listen to their opinions, never give them power."
Their utilitarian framework malfunctions if an apocalyptic outcome presents itself, no matter how miniscule its probability. After all, the apocalypse has negative infinity utility, and infinity x anything = infinity. At that point, you can stop listening to anything that comes out of a rationalist's mouth.
Once they have decided that alarm is the right course of action, the second problem arises. Rationalists will do everything except actually go work in the discipline they are so sure is important to the future of humanity. Entire AI ethics departments spring up, with not a single person having passed undergrad level calculus. If you care about AI alignment, then go join Anthropic and run actual experiments, instead of creating (horrific) castles in the sky. Go do a masters and learn enough math to avoid making a fool of yourself on twitter.
Scott excellently calibrates the strength of his opinions to his confidence in the subject matter. Gwern and Dynomight are excellent in his regard too. Aaronson & Yud on the other hand frequently suggest extreme actions in domains they have little visibility into.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The highest value research is always going to happen in the US because US pay for top academics is 3-5x what it is in Western Europe
I see this perception changing among my peers. The H1b, Green card and general immigration annoyances are finally getting to people. The increased anxiety every time you leave the country and the stamping process has being to wear on them.
I know quite a few top researchers who decided to move to Europe because of the better laid out immigration process. It's funny. Technically it is faster to get a green card in the US (except Indians, Chinese and Mexicans), yet the process is the most painful. Your visa can rejected for any reason, and you are left with no recourse. Anecdotally, every single one of my peers who moved to Europe (Taking a more than 50% pay-cut, around 70% pay-cut post tax) is happier for having moved than staying in the US.
Money doesn't help much when you're living in NYC / SF / Seattle / Boston. Not like you can afford to buy a house anyway.
Note: I am not talking about academics here. My experience is that the most exciting work in any field worth talking about is happening in industry labs. Pharmacy, Genomics, CS, AI ..... all in the industry.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Your own post contradicts your claims.
150 pounds
RDA for athletes is up to double this amount: 1.6 g/ kg body weight, or 110 G protein for me. I can hit this if I try, but my daily consumption is usually around 100g protein, at least during the times I’ve tracked intake..............
algae DHA supplement daily, chia, flax ..................
fortified in soy milk and nutritional yeast ...................
For your fairly low body weight, you need to be laser focused about your nutrition to avoid being deficient. Even then, you struggle to meet protein needs for anyone who prefers a bulkier-aesthetic. You eat foods that do not fit into any culinary tradition. Require a ton of time to plan around and are expensive. ( though I'll grant you that invisible subsidies makes it hard to calculate what part of it is an illusion).
Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
I have a life ?
Let me flip that around for you. What is your excuse for adopting a lifestyle as limiting as veganism when there are other options that achieve the same goals with far less compromise?
IMO, Veganism doesn't work because it is absolutist. Veganism doesn't work because vegans are more interested in being vegan than helping animals of any kind. The need for complete eradication of animal products makes it a culture war issue, rather an a productive discussion about reducing animal exploitation.
A lot of Asian cooking can be done with minimal of use of animal products. Indian, Chinese, Thai.... the list goes on. Vegans could have used their massive marketing machine to push a change in that direction, reduced animal suffering by 99% (the last 1% being use of ghee, cream, oyster sauce, fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc), and gotten closer to their goal instantly. But they didn't. Hell, I suspect the vegans didn't go vegetarian because a bunch not-cool Indians were already vegetarian and there was no cultural cachet to be gained from vegetarian grandstanding.
Veganism is fairly arbitrary too. If pesticides are necessary for plant food, then what's wrong with eating cousins of those pests ? If vegans are alright with genociding cockroaches & slugs, then what are their ethical issues with eating shrimp & snails? If vegans are alright with genociding rats, then why can't we eat rabbits ? Why is honey not vegan ? Vegans support modern medicine and pesticides. So clearly, rats are the globally accepted intelligence bar for genocide. Based on that, Climate change is not a good enough excuse for veganism, because chicken + fish are dumber and quite sustainable.
I know a lot of vegans and I don't judge them. Afterall, people avoid food for arbitrary reasons all the time. (Hindu-beef, Muslims-pork, etc). But some will claim to have moral superiority for it, and can't stop talking about it. I scoffed at the Jains in school who used to chastise me for killing mosquitoes and I scoff at any vegan who has issues with me eating meat.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Not sure I agree. You assume that those who cant do simple chores cant do difficult ones either.
I personally have been pretty good about most things, and especially the hard stuff. But I do struggle to consistently drink water or fold laundry.
If anything, is exactly because I have so many important tasks at hand that the trivial ones fall to the wayside.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
you need to think of ways around it, reevaluate your willpower.
I am sick of people who somehow choose to be confused about how "some things are easier for some people." It is annoying how the same (not you) person who cackles at my inability to do simple chores , also comes to me for tips on simple google-page-1 social tasks.
Just because the steps are trivial, doesn't mean they are easy for someone to execute. That's not to say that 'just suck it up and do it.' is not valuable advice. But it is never productive to bring it up as the first solution to someone's genuine question.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Unsweetened seltzer water is my favorite. But, I don't have a seltzer machine and I can never stock up enough seltzers from the grocery store. ($$ add up)
Highly-highly diluted cold coffee is also great. I have a huge 1+ liter glass that put a bunch of ice and cold black coffee into. And drink that. My brain thinks it is a steady supply of caffeine because there is still some color to it.
Why not get one of the 1 gallon water bottles. Add a bunch of ice, lemon and mint to it in the morning, and now you have a clear marker for 3.7 liters to finish every day.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Consultants make that much about 7-8 years into training
You aren't doing yourself any favors by comparing yourself to the 1 well-compensated profession that even practitioners themselves will admit is a scam.
I don't really see why you'd think doctors are evil really
I do it because it is provocative. The main point alludes to the eternal tradeoff between protecting your paycheck and doing good in the world. Doctors are ideal bait, because it is the one profession which has an air of selflessness, and sets implicit expectations of reverence from the common man.
US doctors are far more professionally organized and cartel-like
Agreed. My fellow Indians doctors do not seem to enjoying the same luxuries as American doctors. If anything, being a doctor in India sounds like the worst of both worlds.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Sorry, I meant the BAR exam
Note - GPT4 is handicapped when it comes to performing on 'exam recall' style questions. It still performs admirably, but 2 changes will immediately make it perform better with no extra "innovation" required.
1. Using medical reports in the pre-training dataset.
Presently, most medical reports are privately held, and not available on the open internet. Unlike law, where a majority of cases have at least semi-redacted public documents, medical documents are not available to GPT-4 for training. GPT-4 went from 40th percentile to 88th percentile on the LSAT BAR, by simply adding legal data to the pre-training set. This would be equally easy to do with medicine if HIPAA didn't exist.
2. Retrieval + generate instead of next-word-prediction
GPT models have no sense of truth. This means, that they will confidently blabber about anything you throw at them, even if it is complete lies. Second, even if the model has read everything on the internet, it does not mean it can recall which bits it should be reading with ease. Retrieval style work workflows allow the model to first go search for the right answer or correct reference document on the internet. It looks for the page with the answer on it. Then, it uses its 1600 SAT verbal IQ to interpret it in a manner that GPT-4 is famous for.
Both are relatively easy (as in doesn't need any major innovation to do) changes, and should immediately make the lives of every doctor a LOT LOT better. Y'all are doing 80 hr weeks anyway. Maybe this will help secure so WLB. Ofc, it won't actually happen because Doctors are Evil.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Fair. Isekai is as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" gets.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Another good reason to learn Sanskrit, is that a great many manuscripts remain untranslated. Even when they are translated, they are done by woke moralists who interpret the works through a 2023-western-woke lens.
The hard part of learning Sanskrit, is like Latin, no one actually speaks it. So you would only ever be fluent in it as a written language.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
That's really interesting. I am not sure if that supports my anecdotes or balances it out ahaha. Either way, useful nuance.
I bet it makes for more creative love making. Porn is creatively bankrupt.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
I would expect their contribution to be high, because jews are wealthy, disproportionately represented in the media industry and live in places where voices are heard (LA, NYC).
Antler estimates that two-thirds to three-quarters of the women in these collectives were Jewish.
It could be as high as 40% (while being 7% of the population) and I wouldn't bat an eye. But, at 66% there certainly was something about being Jewish that led to the numbers being so high.
If Jewish conspiracy theorists would quiet down for a bit, it would be really interesting to do good faith studies into why urban WASPs and secular Jews behave so differently. But I don't think there is any world in which such a modest proposal gets interpreted as anything but anti-semitic.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Women also fantasize to fiction.
I know 1 guy who actively prefers reading + fantasizing over porn. I know a ton of women who never saw the appeal of porn, and purely go off scenarios in their own head.
It's an entire industry the size all porn on the internet, that is contained purely within fiction novels for women.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
I am tempted to bring up one of those unsubstantiated claims : "Men are producers (do-ers?), women are consumers (experiencers?)."
Games force you to act. Books can be passively consumed. Even within books, the ones that force a lot of intellectual friction onto people, seem to be more popular among men. Modern literary fiction often reads like wish-fulfillment and escapism, rather using fiction as a tool for putting the reader in the midst of difficult hypothetical choices.
I am not convinced that there is something here, but interesting coincidence either way.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Have you tried an OpenAI model setup with Azure. Those have different hosting mechanisms and can be more stable than OpenAI directly.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
read fiction this boring
The LOTR books are boring stories set in an amazing world.
Lord of the Rings is great because so much great fantasy fiction was written after LOTR, and all those worlds owe Tolkien for doing the heavy lifting.
Tolkien drops the façade of writing a novel all together with the The Silmarillion, finally doing what he loves best : writing encyclopedias.
German
German is an amazing language. The closest thing to a simplied-Sanskrit using the English-alphabet.
I grew up fluent in English, Marathi and Hindi. Learned a decent bit of Sanskrit grammar, but was never able to sustain a conversation in it.
German was the one language I learned in adulthood, and my 2 distinct experiences with learning German have helped crystallize certain opinions on language learning.
There is no such thing as leisurely language learning. You need to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now, this might seem like surface level advocacy for immersion based learning, but there is more to it. I am going to squeeze every little bit of metaphor from that analogy. Similar to drowning, you need to feel that sense of hopelessness for it to work.
I studied Sanskrit for 3 years and never got close to stringing more than 2 sentences together. I got a 99/100 in my exams for it, but leisurely learning with zero desperation meant that learning it was more like storing facts / gotchas in my head, rather than any from-fundamentals understanding of the language.
I studied A2 German for 3 months after a shitty A1 class, and the new class had 1 rule. You could not speak any other language in the class. Not with the instructor or your fellow classmates. Any mistake meant an actual monetary fine. It sounded ridiculous.
How am I supposed to ask what I don't know in a language that I don't know. How am I supposed to understand explanations for simple German I don't understand in more simple German I don't understand. It was also humiliating, because everyone else had done the good A1 class and were far ahead of me on day 1. It was desperate and the first few days were brutal.
But the human brain is a miracle machine. A few weeks in, I could almost feel my brain rewiring. It stopped reaching for English as an intermediate crutch and started grounding my understanding of less-simple German in the simplest German words. I have never since learned anything as fast in my life. In 3 months I was more fluent in German, than my friends who had spent a year or two in Germany. They had greater immersion, but they weren't desperate. They were in the shallow end of the pool. Most importantly, in 3 months, my German was better than my Sanskrit had gotten over 3 years, and both are practically the same language !
It's been 10 years since, and I have completely forgotten all my German. But, I feel confident that just like swimming, it will come back to me with a little bit of desperation.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Always set your max tokens. Make small requests, large requests time out. Use a smaller few-shot warm-started curie model for any non-major tasks.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The Motte is inherently about rigor. To defend an outrageous claim, you need outrageous evidence. So, people try to cover all their bases, and that inherently leads to longer posts.
While true understanding leads to more concise / distilled thoughts. I've found that brevity is often-times an excuse by novices to skim-over very real logic holes in someone's understanding. There is a relevant quote that perfectly captures this idea, but I can't find it right now. :\
better safe than concise.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
It's funny how Trump is worse for the Republicans than he is for the Democrats.
A geriatric Biden can only beat 1 candidate, and that candidate is Trump. Trump sucks the air out of any room he is in. An election with Trump is an election about getting a democratic candidate who can blend into the background, and allow the hate train to build on its own. An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues. Biden would have to actually speak during the debates to beat DeSantis. Would allow Biden to speak, and Biden would absolutely dig hos own grave faster than Desantis.
With Trump, Biden could piss his pants in a debate, and people wouldn't even notice it. Democrats and Republicans alike will only be looking at Trump, with their minds warped to imagine dreams/nightmares that no reality could match.
Showing a young executive like RD next to a frail Biden will be quite the contrast and I doubt Biden will be Reagan like with quips about not taking advantage of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.
Agreed. I see a rock paper scissors scenario opening up.
Biden > Trump > DeSantis > Biden
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
We wouldn't have the same terms. but the base-9 equivalent of '10' (the aesthetically satisfyingly number) would occur every 9 numbers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
16 to 18 year-old girls would crush 26 to 28 year-old women, much less 36 to 38 year-old women when it comes to desirability. The classic Dataclysm chart and Bruch & Newman, 2018.
Hah. If we had a base-9 number system, the whole chart would say 18.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The base rates also make the mirror image scenario far likelier than you'd think.
Let's assume that about 0.5% of the population would benefit from medical transition and about 20% of gen-Z are drawn to being LGBT / gender-questioning at same point in their lives. Then a 10% false positive rate for gender-affirming care, would mean 4 detransitioners for every real trans person. Those are terrible destructive odds and I was rather generous to the current state of trans care with my the numbers I assumed. My personal intuition is that far more of gen-Z is drawn to gender-questioning ideas, that the base rate of trans-ness is less than 0.5% and that the rates of desistance/de-transitioning are significantly higher than 10%. But, I'll stick to these numbers for now.
This is exactly why doctors do not mass refer people for invasive surgeries early into a rare diagnosis. The odds of you not having the disease and reducing your lifespan due to surgery, are much much higher than the odds of saving a life due to early surgical intervention for said rare disease.
Stepping out from the moral argument, these kinds of statistical and logistical issues with transitioning are a bigger and dangerously ignored problem.
There is no end to the expensive surgeries needed by trans people to feel fully integrated into their new gender. If trans-ness is accepted as a human right, how do we plan to handle this massive new healthcare burden. If it is not covered by insurance, then does this mean that only the top 10% of trans people can actually transition ? If it treats body-dysphoria, then should all superficial surgeries be covered by insurance ?
I sympathize with trans people. They seem to be dealing with the 'big man in a hoodie walking down a dimly lit street' problem. Irrespective of a young woman's moral judgement, she is better off crossing the empty street. It sucks that those who tick more of those boxes are treated unfairly, but rather an accidental bigot than dead.
I do comment quite often, but I rarely make a top level post.
I have a few I'd like to make, but haven't had the time to realize fully.
The essence of comedy - language is a crutch. Inspiration: 2, 3, 1
Self-defeating cycles of resentment. eg: The exact things that make you an Incel, make it harder to stop being an Incel, and lead to standard advice making you even more of an Incel.
Your diet lacks in Macros - why Biden is a bad president and plotting the fall of the American empire
Micros = low impact local issues with immediate impact
Macros = strategic issues that define the fate of a country over generations
Western media and political leadership have polarized populations on micros. Trans bathrooms and police accountability are QOL changes with local impact that merely address symptoms prompted by Macro changes.
You don't get it, words dilute
The criminal justice system needs purgatory
Life is reinforcement learning
Why gamergate is the most underrated moment in the formation of the alt-right and new internet culture.
Modi. No one gets India. Least of all, people who claim to get India.
Man in a matriarchal world.
Why is everyone in leftist video-essay-youtube suddenly trans ?
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