Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I guess (1) is where I disagree. I think there's a substantial difference between understanding the meaning of a word and understanding that word's statistical relation to other words. LLM's understand the latter, but not the former.
I must ask, what is the most powerful LLM you have personally interacted with? Default ChatGPT feels like talking to a 6-year-old after using Bing and GPT-4.
I've used Bing and it's still pretty easy to ask it questions that demonstrate it doesn't understand the semantic content of what it is being asked. Here's an interaction I had just now:
M: Write a fifteen word story
B: Sure! Here’s a fifteen-word story for you: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock.”
M: Write a fifteen word story
B: Sure! Here’s another fifteen-word story for you: “The baby’s cry was the only thing that could stop the apocalypse.”
M: Write a fifteen word story
B: Sure! Here’s another fifteen-word story for you: “The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest.”
I asked it the same question three times and never once did it give me a story that actually had fifteen words in it. It clearly does not understand what "fifteen" means and how the presence of the word in the my sentence should constrain its answer.
Maybe you and I have different definitions of "understand" but this seems clearly false to me.
ETA:
Perhaps better to say, I don't see what this statement has to do with LLMs.
Elie Mystal over at The Nation has a pretty skeptical take. Noting that the statute of limitations has passed for both crimes and the theory for why it should be tolled is not great.
The first issue that Bragg has is time. Trump committed the underlying campaign finance offense in 2016, and the statute of limitations on bookkeeping fraud and campaign finance violations is five years. That brings you to 2021. The statute of limitations for tax evasion is three years. Even if you don’t start the clock on that until the story breaks in the news in 2018, that brings you, once again, to 2021. To get to 2023, Bragg appears to be arguing that the statute of limitations paused while Trump was president and living out of state. That’s… a theory, but not necessarily a good one, and certainly not one that has been tested enough to know how it’s going to hold up in the courts. Remember, the alleged immunity Trump had from prosecutions applied only at the federal level. Local prosecutors, like Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance, who was the Manhattan DA during Trump’s presidency, could have charged him with this crime at any time.
ETA:
My understanding is the case is a claim that Trump falsified business records with his payments to Cohen that were ultimately intended for Daniels. Normally this is a misdemeanor:
A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with intent to defraud, he:
1. Makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise
However, it upgrades to a felony if:
his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
So the question is does "another crime" include federal crimes or only state crimes? He's not being prosecuted for violating any particular federal law, his violation of federal law is merely the predicate for finding he committed a more serious violation of New York State law.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I see we're back to trying to outlaw mathematics. I encourage everyone to read this article by Stephen Wolfram describing how LLMs work before panicking. I cannot understand the degree to which LLMs have apparently broken some people's brains.
I think the "solution" to this "problem" will be some combination of:
1. Women having relatively less casual sex and;
2. Men being relatively more comfortable dating and/or marrying women who have a higher number of partners.
How much we'll get of each one depends on the cost/benefit ratio for each party in question. Given the relative difference in rates of single men vs single women who are looking for a relationship I suspect we'll see relatively more of (2) than (1).
ETA:
Also not clear to me that a random article in New York Magazine or plot lines in Sex and the City represent comprehensive overviews of feminist thought on the topic.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Fair enough. I suppose I was thinking along the lines of "policies that improve the material conditions of working class people." Stuff like universal health care, increased business safety regulation, unionization, things along those lines. I think SSCReader's comment upthread has a good enumeration.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism".
Does anybody dispute that what we mean by "racism" in 2023 is different than what people meant by "racism" in 1968? That's a whole one year post-Loving v. Virginia. I'm confident if you asked a bunch of Americans if anti-miscegenation was "racist" in 1968 they would say "no." I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."
The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
Why "pretends to believe?" If our understanding of racism has changed why isn't it the case that more Americans today authentically believe Trump is racist than believed Wallace was racist in 1968? Note that your quote isn't comparing Americans today calling Trump or Wallace racist. It's comparing Americans today calling Trump racist with Americans in 1968 calling Wallace racist.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
I guess it depends on what policies they advocate that involve taking up this flag. Most pro-working class policies seem pretty left-coded in the United States to me though.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The problem is that the last two sentences of the first paragraph of your OP are in tension with each other. You write:
We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.
The first sentence is about the subjective evaluation of the person living the life on their own life. Specifically, that they would not trade that life for any other person's life. The second sentence is about the hypothetical evaluation of a reasonable person, that a reasonable person would want that life.
I think there are many examples of lives that are one or the other of these, but not both. Lots of people probably want to be rich or be celebrities or whatever and those same celebrities wish their lives were other than they are. Lots of people probably would not trade their lives for a different life, but the hypothetical reasonable person evaluating their life from the outside would not want it.
What I'm looking for is some clarity in what it means to be "ideal." Is it the subjective evaluation of the person living the life? Is it the judgment of the hypothetical reasonable observer?
Your comment here seems to be assuming the "ideal" life (or, at least, the "un-ideal" life) is the result of the inter-subjective agreement of "reasonable" people. I do not think that is a very good criterion. Not least because that inter-subjective agreement can and has changed. Once upon a time "reasonable" people would have regarded "being gay" in a similar way as your examples of huffing paint or being a Minecraft server admin. Even today in some countries or cultural contexts they still would. Is it impossible, then, to live an ideal life while being gay? Was it the case that it is impossible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where reasonable people regard being gay as unideal, but it's possible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where they don't regard being gay as unideal?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Memory and experience are not mutually exclusive. To have a great memory of an ideal experience, you need to experience the present sharply.
I agree but this seems in tension with your OP. In that post you posit a tradeoff between memory and quality of experience and come down on the side of memory. If your argument instead is that people with a good memory must, by necessity, have a high quality experience as well that seems quite different than the description in the OP. If this is the case, why isn't it that people with a certain quality of experience must also have a certain quality of memory?
Do you think a reasonable person would choose to live a life filled with anger?
What do you mean by "reasonable?" Why do only the evaluations of "reasonable" people matter?
Do such people report high life satisfaction?
I have no idea. Should I take this question as indicating that if they did report high life satisfaction, you would agree they were living an ideal life? Is an ideal life, then, whatever causes one to self-report high life satisfaction?
Do we have records of people giving up not for more anger, or do we have the opposite? Do major world religions prioritize anger over other emotions?
I don't know why either of these are relevant. The fact that some people change from being filled with righteous anger to being some other way or that world religions don't counsel living this way don't seem relevant to evaluating the question of whether someone could live this way and be satisfied with their life.
No reasonable person would decide to prioritize only anger in his life, and we know this because no reasonable person has ever done so.
Citation?
The criticism denies that there can be any improvement in mood or life satisfaction. But reasonable people decide all the time to focus on improving their mood and life satisfaction, and they don’t pick “maximum anger”.
I don't understand how my criticism denies there can be improvement. My point is that whether someone's life is "ideal" is based on the evaluation of the individual who is living the life in question. As you note, people evaluate their own lives as un-ideal all the time! I don't understand how my criticism is incompatible with this fact.
Re: someone who prioritizes living in the moment, would this person choose to lose his memory entirely in exchange for greater one-time experiences? I think we can determine that even such a person greatly values his collection of subjective experiences (memories). A complete discounting of memory would entail an almost suicidal drive toward a single great experience with no concern for the future, because future is a prediction based on memory. We’re back to a hypothetical: is the person who is dancing naked in the rain right now eternally better lived than the person who danced in the rain 100 times in the past? The idea behind favoring the latter person is that we value the enjoyments of memory. Vivid present subjective experiences are savored by memory, which is why people collect and remember them, and would not choose to eliminate their memory if they could. (At least in my experience, everyone I know who is adventurous treasures their memories).
If we want to take this to extremes I think the extreme end of having a memory but lacking present experience would also be bad. Imagine someone who can experience no joy, no passion, no pleasure contemporaneous with their experience but only by remembering it later. Does that person have an ideal life? It seems to me like it would be quite bad! Being unable to enjoy the pleasure of sex, while having it. Or the beauty of a painting or piece of music while experiencing it. Only having vivid memories of these things and not emotionally fulfilling contemporaneous experiences seems quite un-ideal.
Re: someone who loves righteous anger, should we trust his own knowledge of what is greatest to experience? For instance, there are alcoholics is who truly believe a good life consists of getting drunk. Should we say they are right or wrong? To me, someone who loves to only experience righteous anger sounds inhuman — I would rather say they don’t actually know what is greatest for their own enjoyment.
Taking this route seems like it requires the ideal life consisting in something other than the subjective evaluation of the individual living the life. In which case, in what does it consist? What makes you right about enjoying righteous anger being an un-ideal way to live? Why isn't it you who are wrong and they who are right?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.
Not clear to me this is true. Seems like this requires the assumption that there is great inter-subjective agreement on what it means for life to be ideal. I think that assumption is broadly false. That is, I can imagine two (or more) people who are living lives ideally in their own subjective evaluation, yet live very different lives, and neither would trade their life for the other's life.
The rest of the post I think is projecting your own preferences onto other people. It is not hard for me to imagine an individual who, for example, prefers living in the moment and having vivid present subjective experiences as opposed to having lesser experiences but being able to reflect on them more accurately. Or someone who enjoys having an experience of righteous anger at injustice more than a sense of peace or tranquility.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Then maybe that is where I'm misunderstanding what you're asking. I was thinking of the two works in terms of their broad cultural impact, not of just the impact of their licensed multimedia. In that case I think there is a case to be made for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy of films but that's about it innovation wise. I have enjoyed a lot of the Lord of the Rings games but I don't think they did anything particularly innovative, certainly not compared to what Dune seems to have done (I haven't played it myself).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is not obvious to me that "a Dune video game created the RTS genre" and "there was a Dune board game so popular people played it decades after it was out of print" is sufficient to conclude "Dune had a stronger showing" than Lord of the Rings in terms of cultural inspiration.
The influence Tolkien's worldbuilding and method of storytelling on fantasy as a genre seems difficult to understate. Not just on directly LotR inspired works but across a range of intellectual properties and media types. This is not to say Dune wasn't influential or inspirational but it does not really compare, to my mind.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?
This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.
Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
That is certainly the stereotype but I'm not sure how true it is. According to Pew (at least back in 2020) fewer single women than single men (in every age group) were looking for a relationship of any kind, though a larger fraction of single women were looking for a committed relationship than single men. More recent data shows an even further decline among singles looking for relationships, though mostly among single men.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
You might be interested in checking out the latest State of Theology survey. 43% of respondents who identified themselves as Evangelical Christians agreed with the statement "Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God", up from 30% in the 2020 survey.
I don't see a barter system as not a marketplace.
A barter system is "how convenient, I can provide X and you can provide Y, what a mutually profitable exchange for both of us", instead of "I can provide X units of value, you can provide Y units of value, of X is greater than Y I have lost". I agree that's a way healthier way to think of relationships, but it's still a kind of transaction, with the goal being both parties feeling they have benefited.
Fair enough, I was thinking too narrowly about a "marketplace" when I wrote my comment above. Reflecting on it some more I actually think a barter model avoids most of the things I find problematic about discussions of a "sexual marketplace" or "sexual marketplace value." I think discussions of SMV and similar tend to be oriented more towards the second mode of thinking you describe, where you "have" some objective value and you are "losing" by being with someone whose value isn't close enough to yours.
As for quantifiable or not, I guess my impetus for writing this question is in discussions of the "war of the sexes" I constantly get the impression of people struggling to think of the other side as a full agent in a transaction. They'll fall back on complaining that men/women are "shallow" or whatever, whereas to me it makes perfect sense to conceive it as, for example, both sides want a partner who they are sexually attracted to, women want a partner they can trust to provide adequate parental investment in offspring, men want a partner they can rely on for sexual loyalty/paternity, etc. I don't see why this needs to end up turning into an antagonistic market relationship when it could just as easily be a mutually profitable market relationship.
Two observations. People rarely think their own standards for partners are too high. If they did, they would lower them when they failed to find a partner. Relatedly, people can rarely think of things to change to make themselves more attractive to people they want to date or to meet people who would want to date them. If they could, they would probably just do it!
I think these observations combine to lead a lot of people (maybe just vocal online people) to believe the problem is other people's standards. This ties in to your description of not seeing the other person as a full agent. Their standards are too high, so they should lower them! They aren't entitled to their standards the way I am entitled to mine! Notions of a sexual market value, and that value entitling one to a partner of a similar value, also play into this.
When you fail to get a date with someone on a more barter-y model you both just had incompatible wants and that's fine. "They needed a cobbler but I'm a haberdasher, no mutually beneficial transaction for us." When you have a different orientation it's a matter of not getting your due. "I'm obviously a seven and she's only a five so she fact the wouldn't date me clearly shows her standards are too high." The relationship can become antagonistic because of the attributions of one's failure to unreasonable or unjustifiable actions by the other party.
But then, I'm happily married. So my perspective is obviously shaped by the market having "worked" for me. I guess I am trying to understand what makes it so hard to work for others.
I am admittedly in the same boat. My wife is the only long term relationship (or any kind of romantic relationship) I've been in. Though I do read a lot of other people articulate their romantic woes online!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
First, this can of course work on an individual level, but any discussing of the dynamics of a "sexual marketplace" or what have you is obviously about broader transactional politics.
I am admittedly not convinced that the best or most productive way to model human intimate relationship formation is as a marketplace. Surely there are some similarities, in that there are a large number of diverse participants attempting to enter mutually consensual interactions. But there are also lots of differences. There isn't really analog for currency. If it's any kind of marketplace it seems much closer to a barter-based system, the double coincidence of wants is in full effect. Frankly, I think most modeling of relationship formation as a marketplace involves flattening the diversity in men and women's preferences to a cartoonish degree, one that often leads such reasoners astray,
Second, I guess I do find that a vaguely strange worldview. Sure, after eight years of deep investment in my marriage, I have a lot of reasons, both moral, emotional, and practical, to stay loyal to my spouse if he stopped bringing anything to the table, although even then I'd probably be struggling with whether I should divorce him or not if it was a true total cessation of everything.
But certainly before marrying him I wouldn't have considered it if he wasn't bringing anything worth having. Why marry someone if marriage to them is not better than being single, and also assumed to be better than at least the most easily available other marriage prospects?
I mean, I agree. It's not like there's nothing my wife could do such that I would consider leaving her. But nor am I keeping some kind of mental ledger of how much I do for her and how much she does for me to make sure the scales are balanced or something. Maybe what I intended to convey is the kind of value my wife brings is often of a less quantifiable sort, though no less valuable to me for not being quantifiable.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
You might see some effect from rolling back no-fault divorce.
I actually think this is one of those "can't put the genie back in the bottle" situations. If we went back to requiring cause for divorce today I suspect what would not happen is a return to traditional marriage. What would happen instead is marriage rates would crater. My impression is understanding of the downsides of this arrangement are well known and lots of people, women especially, would not be interested in risking it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What, in your opinion, should/does a desirable male partner bring to the table? What should/does a desirable female partner bring to the table?
Maybe this is a cop out but I think the terms of which partner brings what to the table is something to be negotiated by the parties entering the relationship. I, personally, don't think of any of these things as being inherently gendered.
To make the discussion more specific, less hypothetical: excluding amorphous concepts of "chemistry", what is the concrete package of measurable traits the opposite sex needs to offer for you to want to commit to a relationship with them? What is the package you are offering them in exchange? Do you feel this is a "good deal"?
This is kind of orthogonal but I have felt much better in my relationships when I stopped viewing them in this kind of transactional manner, as being about getting something in return for giving something. Maybe that makes me a sucker, certainly I'm confident some people viewing my marriage from the outside would say I was getting a bad "deal", but I have been much happier from letting go of that framing.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Probably not? The issue is distinguishing, from the outside, individuals who are "tak[ing] a chance on love" and individuals with more nefarious motivations.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
If we could hear this from the woman's perspective I suspect it would go something like this:
There was this guy in my class/study group who I enjoyed hanging out with and thought was a close (platonic) friend. Then one day, out of the blue, he asked me to have sex with him. Not even to be in a relationship or date or anything, straight to sex! I said no, but what kind of person pretends to be someone's friend to get them to have sex?
I suspect this is the case because if you spend any amount of time in a place where women discuss their relationships you will have heard some variation of the above.
Woman meets man. Man apparently wants to be a platonic friend. They grow close. Man tries to convert platonic relationship into a romantic or sexual one. Woman declines. Suddenly man is no longer interested in being platonic friends.
We are missing the last part from this story, I suspect because the woman in question pattern matched OP's actions to this narrative and cut it off preemptively. All their friendly interactions are suddenly recast through the light of "was this an authentic interaction or did he just want to get in my pants?" She cut off the friendship with OP because she believed she could no longer trust that OP wanted to be her friend in some kind of authentic way vs being her friend as a means to get a sexual relationship with her. This also, I believe, explains the level of vitriol directed at OP from people hearing about it second hand. "Awkward guy in our study group awkwardly asked me for sex" shouldn't, and I think probably doesn't, tend towards that kind of reaction but "guy in our study group pretended to be my friend to try and sleep with me" seems like it would warrant a much harsher reaction.
This also brings us back to the "be clear about your intentions" advice. Contra some other commenters I don't think this advice is satisfied with "be direct about asking for sex when you want it." The way I understand the advice is more like "when starting a long term relationship with a woman (of whatever kind) be clear about what kind of relationship you want it to be." I think a lot of people giving this advice would say OP was not clear about his intentions, given he started the relationship indicating it would be platonic when he wanted it to be sexual. Now, I think an obvious problem with this advice is that one's intentions for a relationship can change over time. Giving OP the benefit of the doubt, he did authentically want a platonic friendship and only developed the desire to convert it to a sexual one (and belief that it could be) some substantial time in to the relationship. Unfortunately this is where I run out of ideas. It's not a position I've found myself in and there doesn't seem to be a great way to be clear about how you want the relationship to change that doesn't involve some risk of destroying the relationship as it already is, beyond what some other commenters have noted.
I do not think the takeaway from the article is about the hardware that LLMs are being run on. It's about the way LLM's function. The LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. It just understands them as probabilistic sequences of tokens and its job is to predict the tokens that should come next. An interaction I recount in another comment showcases this issue. I point to the article because it is not clear to me that what LLMs do (token prediction) is the kind of thing that can be extrapolated to the dangers people like Yudkowksy are worried about with respect to unfriendly AI.
If we had an AI that actually understood the meaning of what it was being asked.
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