Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
23d ago
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them
We can identify neurons, which are not quite as predictable as transistors but pretty good. I think we can also grow and arrange them controlledly to some extent, though not at the scale of a human brain. We can in fact gears-model simple organisms on an individual neuron basis. So it seems to me that if we are uncertain whether brains are "mechanical but intractably complex", we should be similarly uncertain about LLMs.
I indeed dont understand the difference you make between axioms and inference. Even if we could build brains, couldnt you equally claim that "its axiomatic" whether the non-manufactured ones are also mechanical? If I could predictable control people in a gears-model way, are they still mechanical while Im not looking? Is it actually an illusion and I can actually only "control" them into doing things they would do anyway, even though I feel like I could have chosen anything? Whos to say that I have a 1/6 chance of dying when I spin the revolver and put it to my head, just because everyone else does?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
23d ago
I/O is not Read/Write
You dont really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope. The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable. Its not the least bit difficult to write a programm or OS that doesnt have meaningful interactable gears for you, and transistor-level analysis is not the best, most efficient way to interact with computers. I mean, we talk a lot about LLMs here, and I dont think they are the same thing as humans, but it seems like they pass an non-mechanical by your criteria.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
23d ago
The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction.
Im sceptical of this because for me this differs a lot between different kinds of sensations. E.g. I can never "forget that youre wearing it", whatever "it" is, but it takes effort to not tune out music in under a minute, even if Im not doing anything else.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
24d ago
Have you ever actually gone in, and lost the whole budget quickly? I can understand that the experience of winning might override the knowledge of -EV, but thats definitionally not something that can happen most of the time.
Im especially wondering about the olde times when there was no house and its all peer-to-peer betting, where presumably the others want to stop betting as you want to keep going.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
The alternative is you giving swords to their kid secretly, me telling my nieces and nephews that God doesn't exist and is made up, and so on and so forth.
I think some level of stating your opinion is a normal part of social relationships. I dont know if /u/Iconochasm's situation is like that, but handing the kid a foam sword there when youre talking with them, or saying you dont believe in god when it comes up, seems pretty reasonable. Dont do it in secret, dont make a plan for converting them, but expecting your kid to have zero exposure to the beliefs of a dinner guest seems pretty crazy to me. Yes, it will be a point of friction, of course it will be, but some level of friction is also a normal part of social relationships - interpreting any amount as a sign youre doing something wrong is a symptom of nerddom.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
Do you mean that "normal" tomboys are autoandrophiles?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
At least where I live, the alcohol thing is stable without any real legislation (beyond the age limit). You can buy it at the supermarket and almost all restaurants, I would guess you can order it over delivery services too. But alcohol consumption around 30% higher than the US, and statistic on alcoholism... vary wildly in absolute levels but generally the US seems to be higher in most comparisons.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.
Can you elaborate? I dont understand this at all. Some games of chance are fun games, but they are so also without staking money.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
Why is it even illegal to drink while driving? If you can drive after having a beer, it should be fine to have it during, no? (I have also never heard of anyone doing this, but Im far away.)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
26d ago
I am guessing (but this is only a guess ) that your actual preferred solution would be something like disenfranchising Jews, denying them the right to vote or own property in non-Jewish lands, and shipping them all off to Madagascar
That seems unlikely to me. SS presumably doesnt believe in magic soil, and so would have no reason to think that it makes a difference long term whether theyre shipped to Israel or Madagascar.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
Hm, did not expect to end up sympathetic about the murder part. Can you link the essay?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
If you or OP were to look at the X account, the pinned tweet makes the analogy to Ignatiev directly.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
Your link is dead. Not sure how it happened in an hour, but try to link to images directly rather than their google images display.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
My guess was USSR + SSRI, but that didnt and doesnt make sense.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
Whats the "ussri" name about btw?
He stuck to a regime and has a beard, which, if not quite Dwarkesh Patel standards, is eminently respectable.
As far as I know, beard minoxidil doesnt need to be kept up. Androgenic hair is easy to get and usually sticks around.
But this only holds if all the numbers are accurate and independent
I dont think Bayes theorem requires its numbers to be independent (whatever it would mean for a conditional to be independent of its condition).
It's no surprise I didn't think of this, since my anecdotal evidence is that there's no shortage of ungracefully balding Indian uncles both at home and abroad. But the numbers don't lie here.
It might be quite heterogenous within India, too.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
29d ago
For instance, generals can just order the President of the United States to be placed under house arrest. A hundred thousand nude bodybuilders are converging on Washington...
Not really clear what that scenario looks like, but either way theres a significant chance Hanania faces the wall, dont you think?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
29d ago
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
30d ago
as that you believe the latter but realise that touting that principle is a bad look/likely to decrease support for you
This is the part I disagree with, because I dont think they run this calculation, following the rule literally is not even on their radar. The way I think of it, their understanding of what following a rule means just is what will make other people say they followed it. Like thats what meaning is. The "other people" are a little abstract, for example they can see what you do even if noones around (not that thats relevant in this case) but its all based on social cognition. They do this even if it would be to their advantage to really understand, because its all they can do.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
I would guess they also genuinely believe that its different when we do it. Most people are unable to take anything as literally as they would need to to see the symmerty there. (This is in part why I was surprised. I have strongly internalised that people are crazy, much crazier than being against abortion, and I would have thought you have too) I suppose you could say that they are therefore unable to really believe anything, but that doesnt seem productive.
Its not about the inconvienence. Its about Officially declaring that this is not the thing Good People are supposed to do. Its not a trivial inconvenience countering milgram-power, its taking away milgram power by defrocking. Who a conservative government can actually do that for remains to be seen of course.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely difficult (sic) for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered
Im surprised by this. There are lots of pro-life people. How many of them would have to be just rationalising before the number of genuine believers reaches lizardman levels? It seems pretty clear that theres a line of thought there thats compelling to a significant number of people (though I sometimes feel it should be the left that its compelling to)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either.
This can in fact be true, though I would recommend a slower pace of escalation than him even then. How would you know when it is true?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
I have a bit of a different perspective than the other two here, but perhaps it will help you understand them.
The evidence for human free will appears to me to be overwhelmingly strong
If I ask you why you did xyz, you can probably give me an answer. In what sense is that answer true, if the reasons you give me didnt cause you to take the action? If you agree that they caused the action, congratulations, thats all the determination materialism requires. This is an unconventional perspective to take on actions, but a common one on beliefs. It is in this sense that people say they dont choose what they believe; my reasons are as they are, and they cause me to believe as I do. And for me, "I would really like believing it" is not one of the reasons that convince me (at least, not a very convincing one) - so it may be that I want to believe something but dont believe it. I dont know what "observation of free will" you think contradicts this, but IME people are unable to describe it in non-circular terms.
You can't compare their Kolmogorov complexity, or Minimum Message Length, or employ any other test to determine which of them is more likely than the other
Those are some very heavy guns for what in this case amounts to a very simple argument: What reason is there for thinking the uncaused cause is embodied in a human born around 0 AD? Not a cosmological reason; because it is quite different from the phenomena which are visible cosmology, and would be complex to nail down based on them (try if you dont believe me!). By contrast, there could be cosmological evidence for a seamless loop; a big crunch for example may just imply it as a straighforward application of ordinary physcial laws. There are other things which could be proven by cosmology, even if none of them are currently - but christianity is not one of them. If there are reasons to think the first cause is the christian god specifically, they are not about cosmology, and would likely be just as convincing without making the first cause argument to begin with, so dont.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
The technical issue of holding territory if you manage to capture it is still hard to solve.
I dont think either of them want to hold enemy territory. Iran maybe as a long-term goal, but theyre on the defensive here so its probably not in play. Israel is fine with distance-policing their capabilities.
I think its fairly clear that there is a general intelligence, even if there are subfactors. There is some correlation between different abilities even across animal species, where it makes no sense for a whole species to be adversely effected wrt intelligence. You might say this is just parallel selection, but then you have to explain why needing those abilities correlates so broadly.
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