GBRK
4hr ago
He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.
"Love thine enemy."
I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.
Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!
GBRK
4hr ago
My school teachers are not trusted to make good judgments.
"X" are not trusted to make good judgments is why any variant of corporal punishment/extra bullying/more police brutality doesn't work in person. We intuitively want to do this because through the vast majority of our evolutionary past we lived in small bands with a smaller population than dunbar's number where the discretion of a few enfranchised elders and warriors was a fair, just, and effective way to police our behavior because they could know everyone under their authority as a fully realized person. But while that remains an effective approach even now, in many small agricultural communities, it's indisputably a bad model for policing a city.
GBRK
4hr ago
We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war.
Maybe.
Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip
Definitely not.
In a counterfactual world with full american support for israel, I actually seriously doubt they would genocide the palestinians. It's just bad geopolitics-- they're surrounded by arabs on an sides, and several of those arab nations can very credibly threaten to nuclearize.
I recognize that this was probably hyperbole-to-demonstrate-a-point rather than an actual assement of what israel would do, but it's worth remembering that "kill them all and salt the ashes" is historically not what most empires do with their enemies. that's especially true with succesful empires. A more realistic strategy looks like either "collaborate with local elites to suppress popular sentiment in response for tribute" or "raise up a local minority group to serve as a precarious class of administrators beholden to your own political order." Plus some sort of long-term incentives against childbirth and in favor of out-migration... were I genuinely trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group as a local political force, I would be encouraging late marriage age, spending a long time in foreign countries in guest workers, gating employment behind credentialing, enforcing wealth transfers from the young to the old, increasing the employment rate of women, and so on and so forth.
GBRK
2d ago
ast Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets.
TBH I'm kind of inclined to dout that the reddit board as an organism is "smart" enough to do that, except in the broadest sense. Like, with as much data and control as a social media site has, I'm pretty sure I could be way more effective at pushing my own ideosyncratic policies than any existing social media site actually does. Reddit at it's most ruthless just sort of vaguely boosts leftism in the exact same way that tumblr and pre-elon twitter did. Probably because if anyone in particular starts trying to press a view hard, there's too much disagreement on the specifics to get very far. Just imagine a world where, for example, the entire board of higher-ups at facebook were monarchists, including Zuck. They definitely have the power to make monarchism a credible political subcurrent in america... but I think they would sincerely fail to advance the cause of a particular monarch. Zuck would want himself, of course, but members of his board might be crypto-orleanists, or avowed bonapartists. In the process of promoting monarchism more generally, they'd have plenty of latitude to advance their own causes, in the end causing self-interference and averaging out.
GBRK
2d ago
So a between-sibling GWAS of persons born in WEIRD society and one or both parents are mixed-races would find answer.
It would find a very limited version of the answer. Again, even if you find that the measured relative average IQ difference between groups A and B is caused by genetics, it doesn't necessarily prove that the measured relative average IQ difference between group C versus A and B is due to genetics. Even if you find a result that applies to "nigerian immigrants in america" the selection effects of immigration would invalidate extending the result to "nigerians in nigeria."
Why? Selection eliminates deleterious alleles from population. What constitutes deleterious depends on current environment. So you may find some population where selection for IQ-lowering alleles intensified but selection for bad running (or immune systems) relaxed.
If there's still a single target "golden brain" it doesn't matter how weak or strong IQ selection effects are for it-- every group will aproach it asymptotically over time, though some groups will take longer than other. For IQ to be traded off versus, say, faster running, you need to start thinking in terms of the actual tradeoffs for having big brains-- mainly metabolic, but also head size, injury likelyhood, pregnancy difficulty, etcetera. And when you start thinking about the biological tradeoffs, it becomes obvious that,
- The very recent past has had extremely different selection pressures than the agricultural and hunter-gatherer past
- There is massive intra-race variation between subpopulation lifestyles and when they entered, as a cohort, the agricultural and modern eras
Therefore, at least naively, any aggregate difference between races due to a hypothesized selective effect should be present itself even more sharply within a race. If you want to explain IQ differences between whites and blacks as being caused by earlier or later starts to settled agriculture, feudal societies, democracy, modern medicine, etcenera-- then those same differences should be that much more visible between, say, Italians and Poles, or Madagascarans and Kenyans.
I can't wholly rule out places where this dynamic actually seems to appear-- as in the sharp difference between Azkenazi jews and everyone elser. But at least so far, we've explained only a tiny part of sub-racial and inter-racial IQ differences this way.
Why? I'd agree that non-equal allocation of IQ points can be better, but the premise was to test different IQs.
If we want to test whether IQ is a good measure of individual intelligence, we want to hold as much as possible as a control versus either modern society or some primitive state of man so we can be sure that it's IQ specifically that's making the difference. Putting people with similar test-taking performance may or may not be a confounder. Probably random group allocation (and group sizes) would be ideal for eventually extracting the most interesting observations. Of course doing that on large enough scale to get good data for every possible combination of IQs is combinatorially impossible, but this whole thought experiment is impossible anyway.
Oh, I know for a fact that it was an AI. What's interesting to me is the exact nature of the AI. I can trivially imagine designing an AI moderator to actually promote community health; using strictly existing techniques, for example, you could prompt the moderator to consider previous user posts, and also to make public verdicts that can be upvoted/downvoted to influence future behavior on that user. (Like, if the moderator comments are broadly disagreed with, it self-deletes, but if the moderator "notices" it has a history of commenting specific types of well-regarded warnings to a specific user it's more likely to take action.)
But as I explained, reddit clearly isn't trying to improve community health.
GBRK
3d ago
If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.
If that happens, it's because those hobbies are dominated in real life by those kind of politics too. Like if I wanted to get into guns, unless I make a specific effort to find liberal gun owners, any hobby group I join would more likely than not be catered to right-wingers.
The format of voice conversations vs format text posts is very different, but I think that's probably for the best. My local in-person rational group is dominated by progressive ideologies and that makes me hesitate to use particular phrasings. But by the same token, thanks to the social capital I have in the group, if I stick to the right frames I find that people actually give me fairly significant latitude on content because that's the social norm and I end up doing the same in return. I suspect discord will be the same way: you need a greater investment in social capital and respect for the particular social conventions of a given server, but in turn can have much greater relative disagreements than your average text forum without devolving into a flamewar.
GBRK
3d ago
You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization.
"White" is not the same thing as "European Descended". And as stated, your argument used the latter and not the former. And that's because White is a non-existent categorization, or at least, it's a fuzzy one, like "red" or "blue" or "heap". If european descent was what mattered, you'd think people would care about either defining an exact threshold at which it becomes meaningful or disambiguating between the relative amount of time ethnic groups have spent in europe. But no one cares about the relative admixture of neolithic DNA or about creating a specific hierarchy of european descent based on how late or recent one's ancestors migration into europe is. The main determinant is literally aesthetic. Whiteness itself was the intentional lie-- a deception against the anglo-french-dutch settlers of north america intended to convince them to expand their circle of concern to include first each other and then traditionally dissimilar groups like the italians, polish, and germans. It's a lie I have some sympathy for, of course. Creating new national identities that concentrically include the old ones is the only way for an expanding empire to survive. But there's nothing special about "whiteness" relative to "americanness" or "being-from-a-particular-part-of-Britain."
GBRK
3d ago
Basically no one thinks, "the thing I want most is to make lots of money." But making money ultimately ends up being a very consistent vector along which behavior is reinforced. And while it's not going to be the most important vector for any given individual, it's one of the vectors nearly every individual has in common, which makes it a useful simplification for how organizations like corporations work.
GBRK
5d ago
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
I wasn't, but by my estimation the built in software features accurately figure out the state of my body. Maybe the software has just been updated since you tried your experiment.
Hereditary landowners love love LOVE bringing in exploitable labor from foreign ethnic groups. I can understand why right wing parties are opposed to immigrants. I can't understand why right wing parties aren't opposed to the farming and industrial interests responsible for encouraging their entrance in the first place. If they actually want to stop immigration, they need to eliminate the pull factors. Criminalise paying illegal immigrants. Criminalize accepting non-money payments from illegal immigrants. Lock up the suburbanites using maid services, and the factory and agrobusiness owners, and pretty soon illegal immigrants don't have a reason to stay in america. Even if they're feloniously on welfare... Healthcare, food, education, and housing is still cheaper back home.
Oh well. I like immigration so I guess this works out in my favor.
GBRK
5d ago
This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended
That's a retrospective categorization that people living in those historical eras might have accepted as descriptive, but wouldn't have felt was particularly accurate. Imagine if someone from 2060 zapped in and started talking about the importance of being a microsoft windows culture and how the decline of america was due to ios and android destroying traditional microsoft-linux values. Even if their argument convinced you, you still probably wouldn't see your OS affiliation as being central to your identity, and you still wouldn't be convinced to create systems of mutual support and intermarriage within your OS denomination.
But what do I know. Maybe you're an Arch Linux user.
GBRK
5d ago
He believes society has prevented him from being a warlord, it more likely prevented him from being a slave
TBF if you're a healthy male child early in the line of succession you could likely expect a decent enough life. The probability of being a warlord or prince is miniscule, but relative to the rest of the serfs in your hamlet you'd probably be fairly high status. And, you can't miss video games and flush toilets if they don't exist yet. Probably the hedonic treadmill makes you about as happy singing work songs in the field as it does listening to bohemian rhapsody on your ipod.
The main benefits of modern life are better health and less susceptibility to violence-- both those things objectively influence your hedonic baseline. But if your aversion to violence is outweighed by your urge to commit it, and your relative status is so low you're willing yo sacrifice your health to improve it, the past starts looking a lot more appealing (To young men early in the line of succession.) I personally wouldn't make the trade, but I can see why other people would.
GBRK
5d ago
It was surprisingly difficult for multiple reasons: your heart doesn’t differentiate between ‘low stress’ and ‘depressed heart rate because you’re recovering from a massive exertion’, or ‘high stress’ vs ‘happy drinking with friends’.
Does your smart watch track heart rate variability and blood oxygenation? I think my garmin watch is pretty decent at knowing when I'm stressed emotionally vs when I'm stressed metabolically. Of course, the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them.) But I think the problem doesn't lie with either the sensors or suggestions, but with a lack of an effective punishment/reward scheme.
...okay, I'll admit it. I just want a robot mommy that pats my head when I'm a good boy and spanks my ass when I'm a REALLY good boy.
GBRK
5d ago
Have you heard of the types of fun? If not, See: https://essentialwilderness.com/type-1-2-and-3-fun/
As a descriptive generalization, all complex activities are composed of all three types of fun. The exact ratio of each type of fun changes activity by activity and person by person. Typically speaking, everyone wants to maximize type 1 fun and minimize type 3 fun. In the meantime, they will tolerate type 2 fun in proportion to they ability to delay gratification as an investment to produce more type 1 fun in the future.
Now, gamification, in this context, is best understood as a means to transmute type 3 fun into type 2 fun. The mechanism by which this happens is through providing consistent feedback and rewards so that the gamer later associated a particular misery with a positive outcome. In games, for example, killing the first 3 orcs in a questline might be type one fun, but killing the next 197 would be type 3 fun if it weren't for the xp and gold you get at the end. Similarly, in martial arts you might enjoy the first minute of getting punched in the stomach while being in horse stance, but you're not going to enjoy the next five unless you come to associate it with improving your capabilities and social status.
Gamification isn't always-- or even usually-- helpful. If an activity has a super high proportion of type 1 fun, you just do it to do it. And generally people don't have many issues doing activities they feel are predominantly type 2 fun, though they might have to get motivated first. I'll procrastinate doing my laundry, but I don't need to gamify it before I do it-- I know exactly how much I like clean clothes. Meanwhile, people should and do avoid activities that are mostly type 3 fun. I think I'd briefly enjoy falling out of a building, but I would definitely hate hitting the ground.
Where gamification helps most is at the margins, when an activity is favorably disposed toward types 1 and 2 intellectually, but at any given moment can feel emotionally tilted toward type 3. Think of this as the cold lake effect (you know you'll have fun if you just take the plunge, but you can't help but tiptoe in miserably). So if you're looking for it in mountan biking, don't expect to find it everywhere. As a hobby, mountain biking is probably dominated by the kind of people who find it type 1 fun. But if you find someone that's always a little reluctant to get on the trails. And seems mostly motivated by buying new gear, obsessively tracking their health statistics, and posting images of themselves completing on difficult trails... That's what gamification looks like for mountain biking.
GBRK
5d ago
So I just ate an automated 3-day reddit ban for saying we should bomb the tigrayan militants responsible for their genocidal strategy of raping and genitally mutilating women. I can't really complain about that: I was knowingly in violation of reddit's "no advocating violence" policy. I have been before, and I will be again, probably until I get permabanned, because sometimes violence is the solution. Thomas Aquinas will back me up there.
But what's interesting to me is the "automated" part. Now, I've faced my fair share of human disciplinary action before. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes its not. But either way, the humans involved are trying to advance some particular ideological goal. Maybe they blew up because Ii contradicted their policies. Maybe they developed a nearly autoimmune response to any kind of NSFW post becauseof prior calamities. (Looking at you, spacebattles mods.) Maybe they genuinely wanted to keep the local standard of discussion high. But reddit's automated system is clearly not designed for any of that. Rather, its most fundamental goal seems to be the impartial and universal enforcement of reddit's site-wide rules to the best of its capability.
I agree with yudkowsky on the point that an "aligned" AI should do what we tell it to do, not what is in some arbitrary sense "right." So I'm also not going to complain about how "cold and unfeeling AI can't understand justice." That would be missing the the forest for the trees. It's not that AI aren't capable of justice, it's that the reddit admins didn't want a just AI. They wanted, and made, a rule-following AI. And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.
Well, really it's "make as much money as possible." But while AI are increasingly good at tactics-- at short tasks-- they're still very lacking at strategy. So reddit admins had to come up with the strategy of making anodyne discussions, which AI's could then implement tactically.
The obvious question is: "why?" To which the obvious response is, "advertisers." And that would be a pretty good guess, historically. Much of reddit's (and tumblr's, and facebook's, and pre-musk twitter's) policy changes have been as a result of advertisers. But for once, I think it's wrong. Reddit drama is at a low enough ebb that avoiding controversy doesn't seem like it should be much of a factor, and this simultaneously comes as a time where sites like X, bluesky, and TikTok are trying to energize audiences by tacitly encouraging more controversy and fighting.
Which brings me to my hypothesis: that reddit is trying to enhance its appeal for training AI.
Everyone knows that google (and bing, and duckduckgo, and yahoo) have turned to shit. But reddit has retained a reputation for being a place to find a wide variety of useful, helpful, text-based content. That makes it a very appealing corpus on which to train AI-- and they realized that ages ago, which lead to them doing stuff like creating a paid API. This automated moderation style isn't necessarily the best for user retention, or getting money through advertisement, but it serves to pre-clean the data companies can feed to AI. It's sort of an inverse RLHF. RLHF is humans trying to change what response strategies LLMs take by making tactical choices to encourage specific behaviors. Reddit moderation, meanwhile is encouraging humans to come up with strategic adaptations to the tactical enforcement of inoffensive, helpful content. And remember what I said about humans still being better at strategy? This should pay out massive dividends in how useful reddit is as training data.
Coda:
As my bans escalate, I'm probably going to be pushed off reddit. That's probably for the best; my addiction to that site has wasted way too much of my life. But given the stuff I enjoy about reddit specifically-- the discussions on wide-ranging topics-- I don't see replacing reddit with X, or TikTok, or even (exclusively) the motte. Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats. And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
That I am obligated to owe? 10. Always 10. God is pretty explicit about this.
That I am physically capable of owing without supernatural intervention?
... admittedly less than ten in all respects.
But I don't think ranking people by how much you "owe" them makes sense. If you're going to rank people, rank them by your ability to help them. If you have a glass of water and a man is about to die of heat stroke, you should give it to him regardless of which of these men he is. You should also take the chance to restrain him, if he is likely to harm innocents, but in any case should help him survive. If you have a glass of water and ten thirsty man, give it to the man for whom it maximizes the chance of survival (plus survival chance multiplied by net good the man will do over his life, to the best of your ability to estimate second-and-third-order effects.) You should help your wife, or a member of your community, over a total stranger, not because the stranger is a distinct, worse class of human, but because you are more capable of helping your wife or community member. Your help goes further, and does more good in the world. But again, that's a matter of maximizing good, not about people being entitled to different levels of brotherhood.
...and that's why I give some, but not all of the money I allocate for charity to the GiveWell foundation. It's a very cost-effective way to do lots of good, but I'm also uniquely capable of targeting "good" when it's aimed toward buying gifts for my family, or drinks for my friends, or donating to my own local parish.
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