EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Is your gender the social expectation from you or is it your inner feeling?
Does someone who doesn't conform to "current gender norms" have a different gender then?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In machine learning the aim is to distinguish signal from noise, to extract things that will generalize to future data, as opposed to merely coincidental, contingent things that appear in the training data. This however leads to deeply philosophical issues that some engineer types tend to ignore out of a feeling of superiority over humanities types. It's not clear for example how to distinguish real, fundamental correlations from mere happenstance. For example one may say that a female US president is perfectly possible, it's not a logical contradiction. The fact that we haven't had one is just a contingent fact about our timeline so far. Or perhaps that the fact that black people currently commit more crimes is not an inherent property to them but a happenstance based on external conditions and so on.
By the way, Saul Kripke just died a few days ago. He had a lot to say about necessity. I'm not convinced that the necessary vs contingent stuff (which goes back all the way to theological arguments) is actually all that meaningful but it's good to recognize that people have already discussed these sorts of things.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Sure, but my point is that saying "It's just a number! That's ridiculous to ban!" gets around the meat of the argument (any digital information can be encoded in binary and therefore as a number). It's lazy. Argue the substance.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
There are all kinds of models that are in-between the two: do the triceratops thing but you can manipulate the scene, swap out objects etc. And in some sense SD also "interpolates" between its source images, just in a very complex way.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
This is just so over the top in your face that it's either Photoshop (ie this exchange didn't actually happen with a real woman), or the woman is really really stupid to not realize that it's a picture taken from the web, but even so she is more likely to have thought that the bio was a sort of black humor to go along with.
I feel like people who take this image as proof of anything regarding women is just very out of touch with reality.
people with black skin seem to feel some sort of absurdist kinsmanship with other people of their skin color
Is it so? I heard that recent African immigrant communities in the US often don't feel much kinsmanship with African Americans (descendants of slaves).
Also by white/whitey they don't tend to mean Poles, but people descended from colonizer nations and empires, who are mostly Western Europeans (by ancestry).
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I'm not from Britain, but to me the intended meaning was clearly "it is now all too common that they go out armed with knives with the intent of using them on humans." Maybe in your world everything is about constant conflict and you obviously need weapons with you but for people who have lived their lives in general stability where you could mostly trust the people you meet in your town in your evening stroll, for them the idea that people are out there at night with knives intended against humans is a definite step backwards, further from ideal society. If your philosophy is "every man must fight for his foothold in this universe", I can see how the desire for knifelessness is repulsive.
Also, there's no clear boundary between knives and swords. And I for sure don't want people walking about carrying samurai swords, machetes or katanas in the streets. Some kind of blade length restriction seems good.
I wonder if they would be okay with it if it (the rapper AI) was operated by black people. If yes, then it's not merely about the AI as an object or the math. You have to argue (and I don't think it's hard) that blacks don't have a monopoly on rap, it's not enough to say "hurr durr it's just math".
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I'm referring to dismissals along the lines that "it's increasing the accuracy therefore it can't be unfair", which is often a very narrow minded view. Note by the way that I am certainly closer to the techie nerd type than the humanities type. My point is though that it's not so simple. And also that fairness, justice, ethics etc. are important values and they should not be conceded to be claimed by the woke as their own conceptual turf.
Maybe you train a model based on inputs age, sex and race, and you can predict some important social outcome with 76% accuracy. The conclusion shouldn't be "Great, now deploy it because it clearly captured something about reality", but to think more "why did we choose the aspects that we did? Could we use inputs that are more in control of each person and has clearer causal connection to the outcome? What happens to those that are wrongly classified? Are there substantially different subgroups who we should handle separately instead of lazily lumping them together? What is the right granularity?" etc. I'm not saying that this isn't done, but many techies like to short circuit all this and almost seem to say that if the model is more often correct than it would be by chance then its good and should be used.
All I'm saying is that this stuff is not trivial and not all of this can be easily dismissed. If you already think about these things, that's great. But I see many tech people go too much to the other end (what the woke call tech solutionism - though they overuse the term to wrangle any credence or authority or stake out of the hands of the engineer types to boss them around from their DEI offices).
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Seven years ago there were a few months when it was indeed an important topic that hundreds of thousands of migrants wanted to pass through Hungary.
I can understand that it's an important topic in Western Europe, but in Hungary it's imported and larped.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
You are setting up a circular argument. Good programmers need intelligence. By intelligence we mean whatever makes people good at programming.
This has no explanatory power.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Is the art in the arm movements or the idea, the composition, the choice of colors etc? If I memorize how to paint a Mona Lisa replica, am I as impressive as Leonardo?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.
The difference is that a 15 year old will be 25 in 10 years, but a woman doesn't become a man (in general...). And they'd say the reason that people don't watch women's football is sexism.
It's also interesting how the popularity gap is different in different sports. At least in Hungary, women's handball and water polo are not much less popular than men's. Same with swimming. But for football/soccer the gap is enormous, approx zero care about women's football and men's is hugely popular.
Regarding not the same sport: I wonder if someone would argue that all athletes should earn the same, regardless of sport. So a volleyball player should earn the same as a football player, because they both train equally hard, and the only cause of difference in earnings is some form of bias.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Circumcision in the religious context is an initiation ritual, it's a mark of belonging to community. Initiations often contain an element of sacrifice. This can be derided as mere exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy or a way to trap people, (eg when the mafia requires that you commit a crime to enter the org, so they can be sure you won't go to the police as you'd also implicate yourself), but it can also be seen more charitably as a test of commitment, a filter for serious loyalty etc.
Circumcision can be seen as a symbolicized, minimized form of child sacrifice. Now you don't sacrifice your firstborn (who would be your main inheritor), you simply ritualistically chop a bit off of your kids most valuable part, the one that will continue your genetic lineage. It's symbolic but sort of indicates your willingness to sacrifice for the community and that you have skin in the game.
Why secular and Christian Americans do it is more complicated and circumcised people come up with a jumble of nonsense post hoc reasons. It's almost as worthless to ask them as asking single women how to be successful in dating as a man. Tons of mental stopsigns involved.
I would assume it's probably some sort of judaizing Protestant Christian influence originally.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
No, not causation. I mean correlations that will hold at test time and aren't just coincidences. Causation is a different thing.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I thought they just want to cancel the use case of training an AI to rap about tough black life in the hood while throwing about the word nigga. I believed they would be fine with I don't know an AI that explains things to blind people or summarizes news articles or generates sport news from the match records or whatever.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
The next obvious culture war front has been opened by the Hungarian government. After importing the immigration, race, gender topics, they have to keep up with American CW discourse on abortion too. It's the hip new thing to discuss since the overturning of Roe. The state-of-the-art polarizing issue, proven to work in America.
Hungary enshrines 'fetal heartbeat' abortion law
Under the new law, doctors must also issue a report that records that the pregnant woman was presented "with the factor indicating the functioning of fetal vital functions in a clearly identifiable manner."
This has been a long time request by the far right Our Homeland Movement, but apparently such laws exist also in the US.
I don't care about abortion. I don't think Orban cares about it either. It's purely about sowing division and polarization. Orban is happy to push the exact buttons that will trigger the left, in a predictable way. But what's the point? I can see two things: an attempt at distraction from the exploding inflation and utility price hikes, in violation of their election promises, or it's about pandering to Republicans (see CPAC, Tucker Carlson) in hopes of not-sure-what, by doing things that are legible to Americans. It's not like Americans would understand the significance of the local CW stuff, so it has to be photogenic sexy up to date topics of the day for the American right to care.
I hope gun control/freedom won't be the next thing coming up. Because now almost all other American CW fronts have been imported.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Resume padding doesn't exist in Europe, you get admitted based on cold hard criteria like tests and grades, not cozy fluffy stuff like extracurriculars, quality of personality and "well-roundedness". Still it seems that standards have to be lowered steadily. This is understandable for universities that are growing in student count. For already very selective schools like NYU, it's probably due to a change in selection criteria.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds time: It's maybe too easy to say that today's generation is coddled and soft. But there does seem to be a difference. Youths always used to be entitled/lazy/whatever, but that was in defiance of the messaging towards them. Now a generation has grown up who were told all along that they are a special little unique snowflake whose greatest value lies in "being who they are". (It's tempting but probably futile to summarize entire generations like this but whatever.) At the same time though, it seems that zoomers are more neurotic, anxious, self-conscious etc., drink less alcohol, have less sex, drive slower, generally are more aware of their constant public image (online, and also in person due to the constant presence of Internet-connected cameras in people's pockets). The stakes are high all the time, and reality smacks people in the face compared to what they were told.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It's probably easier to tack on additional oppression points than to get the first one and move from full blown oppressor to a little bit also victim. Women already have one layer of protective shield making it rude to question their motives.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
What are you testing for? It's natural to be more protective of women. Call it "women are wonderful", "white knight" or whatever, we subconsciously know that the well-being and safety of the (young) women of our tribe/community is crucial for its continued existence, via childbirth and raising families.
This doesn't mean that young men checking out isn't a tragedy. But it's different.
Clearly they didn't. They "canceled" actions of people for (to them) socially relevant reasons.
This kind of "they canceled math" reminds me when pirates said that "a number was banned", meaning that the sharing of an encryption key was banned (my point is independent of agreeing with that ban), or "I just used words" or "I just moved a mouse and clicked on things". Or saying "it's just pixels" if you were caught with CP.
(Another somewhat similar trick is "no person is illegal", making it seem as if someone who uses the phrase "illegal immigrant" meant that the person themselves is illegal besides being an immigrant, when clearly it means a person who immigrates illegally. The person isn't illegal, but their actions are. Similarly here, it's not the math that is canceled but an action performed through math.)
It's an annoying rhetorical tool. It's not "just" that, and the fuss isn't about that "just" part but the consequences, the context, the intent, the usage, etc. Everything is, at the end of the day, "just" something. A bomb is just some chemicals, just some molecules. Everything is just a bunch of quarks and electrons and so you can make any action sound absurd.
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