FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I genuinely don't think there are all that many places that allow both white nationalism and criticism of white nationalism, especially within a liberal conversational framework. DSL maybe, as another rat fork.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
No because Trump is an outlier. Trump-style populism relies on his charisma; it's not replicable at scale. Not even Trump could build a machine that produces Trumps; and his party is not interested in doing so at any rate.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
There was never a need for a "casus belli", Trump can just do things. He can just ignore the supreme court. What's supposed to keep the country working is not "presidents don't assume dictatorial powers" but "the other organs stop him". This will simply be an opportunity to discover if it works.
It's so weird to me, because it's like a minimum coup. Not even a minimum viable coup, because it clearly isn't. It's not doing your enemy a small injury, it's like slapping your enemy in the face with the broad of your sword, then running away. Are you trying to start shit or not? It's like they themselves didn't know if they wanted to start shit or not. Like a child's drawing of a coup: all the parts are there, the march, the violence, the fraudulent scheme, but they're just executed with zero skill or coherence, basically at random. I think that's why it causes so much division. It's like your neighboring country rolls a tank over the border, but it's made of cardboard, plops out one sad shell and falls apart. Now you don't even know if you're supposed to be at war.
It's a coup done by a person who just doesn't know how to do one. So do you let it count?
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Conversely, if Kamala wins, does that mean you underestimated the power of Orange Man Bad?
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Yeah but messing with the dominant search index of the country to censor certain topics is pretty much as close to "he who controls the present controls the past" as a company can get. So does the Dalle diversity scandal for that matter.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
I mean, I'm not proposing a model but an empirical observation. If the Republican machine could replicate trump to replace him they would have, considering how much they dislike him.
I don't think that "charisma matters in politics" is news. Plenty of American presidents have had mass appeal, just for instance Obama. But the Dems cannot produce Obamas anymore than the Reps can produce Trumps. If that's solved -- sure, but there's no reason to me to think that Trump moves us closer to solving it. American politics has had centuries to codify charisma and hasn't managed to do more than come across it in the wild.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
"Sniper peaking on the roof" like damn, he really enjoys his work
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
The normal way you beat a network effect is by providing an alternative that is sufficiently compelling to a subset of high-value users that they jump first and bring the rest of the network with them later.
You know what? Make a good fandom wiki! The current sites are a confused, ad-riddled mess, getting worse all the time, and Wikipedia has explicitly kicked them off. They're up for picking.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Personally, I mostly read forum quests and fanfic on my phone. I don't think there's anything special about books in particular.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.
Personally, I believe the court should just carve a distinction between curated and carried speech. There is a speech interest in, say, a supermarket curating the newspapers that they carry; there is not a speech interest in a supermarket excluding topics of discussion between shoppers, even though they take part inside their venue. Nobody interprets, say, their Facebook feed as being a communication from Facebook. IMO this should cover both "direct" and "group" messages. There may still be other grounds to block it, such as a stated or implied disinterest on the part of the recipient, or curation by instruction of the recipient, but not venue 1A grounds, because nobody reasonably interprets them to be the voice of the venue to start with.
I think Covid is and always was significantly more infectious. Per-case deadliness doesn't matter if a virus can only get a small fraction of humanity to start with. And of course, the deadliness estimate for swine flu depend on the actual number of infections, which may be underreported. So either it's deadly but not very virulent, or it's virulent (but still less virulent than Covid!) but not very deadly. The original Covid had both virulence and deadliness, which justified the extreme response.
The highest estimates for H1N1 I can find are 10% of the population being infected. Do you know anybody who's never had Covid? Google puts the US at 77% with antibodies as measured in 2022. That's not comparable.
It's like... some people experience dysphoria, right? They are in a body that matches their gender, and if they were in a body that didn't match their gender, they'd feel something was wrong. That's what'd make them trans in that situation. We may model that as two facts: they have a body, and they have a body model, and when the body model tries to match to the body and fails, it generates error signals that are experienced as dysphoria. That is, they are cis - body-aligned - if they have a body that matches their model, and trans - body-unaligned - when their body does not.
Cis-by-default people have a body, and they have a body model, but the body model is a model of whatever their body happens to be. If they put themselves into situations where they experience a body with a different sex, ie. mirror experiments, VR, really good imagination, then their body map just updates to the new schema. They're cis - body aligned - not because their body map matches their body, but because their body map tracks their body. If you gave a cbd man a female body, or a cbd woman a male body, they'd go "huh, neat" and move on with their lives - sex-changed but still cis. They might even swap pronouns, purely on the basis of "well, it's female now, innit. Just look at it." Or if not, it'll be on the basis of something like thinking that gender shouldn't be about sex at all.
As an AGP transhumanist, I identify (in the literal sense of "looking at myself, I think I am described") as CBD and I think this hangs together really well with AGP. Because you know you'll be fine regardless of sex, you can start having preferences, even kinks, about sex - but they're just that, not needs.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Prediction market links:
- Trump disqualified after being elected (5%)
- Elon arrested, some very schizo results on this one. Apparently half his expected probability of arrest is between 2026 and 2030? This market looks to be trading on a "well it has to happen SOME time" theory. Honestly, I think these are bizarrely high - it kind of makes me want to open an account.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I think it's misleading to call it "old grievances dating back a decade" when it's ongoing behavior that began a decade ago.
FeepingCreature
1d ago
I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."
Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.
The question to me hinges on this: did the people who say that AGI seems fundamentally impossible then consider that the sub-AGI systems that we today possess were possible? Right now I can go on Twitter and pick up a two-page detailed instruction booklet written in plain English that, if I feed it into a commercially available chatbot, will empower this chatbot to, through a deductive process that at least reads surprisingly similar to human research, form a remarkably accurate answer as to where a photo was taken, where the originators of this chatbot had never at all considered this possibility and did not build the chatbot for this purpose. In the course of doing so, the chatbot will autonomously search the internet, weigh evidence, and execute optical comparisons of photos evincing high-level understanding of visual features. Would anybody who currently says that AGI is sci-fi have admitted this technology could exist? Or would they have said it was, as it were, "at least 100 years off"?
Sure, we don't understand how the models do it so it's easy to say "I thought we didn't have a research path to that skill, and actually we still don't." But empirically, it seems to me that enough skills have been "flaking off general intelligence" - turned out to not be "general intelligence" bound after all - that to me the whole concept of general intelligence is now in doubt, and it seems at least plausible that more and more "AGI-complete skills" will continue to flake off and become practically solved until there's nothing left to the concept. Certainly at least the confident claim that this won't happen is looking very shaky on its feet right now.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
As I understand it, there may be genuine self-induced brain damage in play, so probably no.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Yeah I gave him a lot of credit, but the evidence he got online right brainfried is rapidly mounting.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Sure. But every time an exploit comes out that chains together like seven distinct vulnerabilities, people ask "how was this possible? they seem to pull out a new security hole at every single layer of security." And the answer is normalization of deviance, ie. "that's bad but we still have more layers of defense".
"At this rate of growth, the entire lake will be this algae in a few days". "Ludicrous silliness!"
The point is we don't have a clue where the sigmoid will level, and there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to think it'll level at the human norm considering how different AI as a technology is to brains. To be clear, I can see reasons why it'll level below the human norm; lithography is a very different technology from brains and it does sure look like the easily Moore-reachable performance for a desktop or even datacenter deployment will sigmoid out well below the human brain scale. But note how that explanation has nothing to do with human brains for reference, and if things go a bit different and Moore keeps grinding for a few more turns, or we find some way to sidestep the limits of lithography like a much cheaper fabrication process leading to very different kinds of deployment, or OpenAI decide to go all in on a dedicated megatraining run with a new continuous-learning approach that happens to work on first, second or third try (their deployed capacity is already around a human brain), then there's nothing stopping it from capping out well above human level.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
I think the real answer here is "do not under any circumstances allow a party to win all three organs of government."
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Rationalist here. Timeless decision theory was never explicitly designed for humans to use; it was always about "if we want to have AIs work properly, we'll need to somehow make them understand how to make decisions - which means we need to understand what's the mathematically correct way to make decisions. Hm, all the existing theories have rather glaring flaws and counterexamples that nobody seems to talk about."
That's why all the associated research stuff is about things like tiling, where AIs create successor AIs.
Of course, nowadays we teach AIs how to make decisions by plain reinforcement learning and prosaic reasoning, so this has all become rather pointless.
Huh. I also cannot get any Google autocomplete for "trump shot", "trump assassina...", "trump secret s...", "trump inju..."... Google clearly knows of these topics, but they somehow haven't made their way into their search history model.
This is at least very fishy.
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