MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think honestly you should have the ability to do a National injunction but it should be a situation where you have to get all the plaintiffs on one case, and it should be automatically taken up by SCOTUS. The first part, to me, is reasonable because it removes the “I’ll keep going before judges until I get my way” tactic. The loss would be the end of the matter. But I think it’s necessary for such a system to exist because there are some decisions that it’s extremely hard to undo, and the courts especially, if there are multiple appeals, can move far too slowly to bring Justice. If I decide to force prisoners to work in a factory on pain of not feeding them unless they do, that’s potentially a serious breach of justice. If it takes 5-6 years for the case to wind through the courts, you have people potentially starved to death before you get a definitive answer on the matter. You can’t undo dead. But because there’s a threat of “okay, but because of the nature of the injunction, it’s only binding until SCOTUS rules on it,” people are going to be appropriately reticent to bring out that big weapon, and only use it in cases where the law is clear on the matter.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think to be honest most Americans are, to borrow a phrase from the Chinese, unserious as a people. Their need for an easy life and for getting exactly what they want exactly how and when they want it. It’s the mentality of a child. And I think this harms dating and marriage because being in a relationship with another living person requires work and compromise and commitment that more often than not people are less willing to accept.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
It’s a weaponized system. The ADA is designed so anyone claiming a disability can make hostage threats. You won’t give me the exact testing situation I want — you’ll hear from my attorney. And as such it’s almost impossible to hold to any real standards of rigor. Timed tests are too much for ADHD students. In class tests are too much for autistic students. Brain damage? Open book and notes. But no in class essays as that’s too much for dyslexic students. Accommodate all of that and you’re basically down to making tests a formality.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I tend to agree. Curves tend to have the purpose of hiding failure. You can objectively fail the material and still pass. I find a lot of monkeying about with the grading end of college and almost all of it does the same. Grading scales in the 1989s had A= 100 to 92, Cs were 85 to 72. Anything under 72 was pretty much failure. Now it’s 70 to pass, and 90 it an A. Curves are much more common. And I’m finding a lot of schools now allow extra credit, class participation and other “free points” to goose grades. Until upper division courses, Theres a good bit of handholding as well, as major tests and papers are mentioned in class and in some cases the students must produce drafts of papers and outlines at intervals to make sure they’re working on them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Skill tests exists. CLEP (https://clep.collegeboard.org/register-for-an-exam) runs all kinds of exams to give college credits. There’s stuff like GRE and GRE subject tests. We have versions of this stuff already and putting them under one roof with national testing would not be that difficult. An advantage is that if this takes off nationally, it’s plausible that you could replace college with such testing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
This is starting to happen on the student side. I see more and more kids choosing other paths because they see the costs, watch parents and older siblings struggle to pay back the loans, and want nothing to do with it.
I think once the firehose of graduates slows, businesses will catch on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
To me the answer is the way we structured the payment for college more than anything. There were two things that set student loans up to be a giant mess. First, because the government guarantees the loans, everyone gets one. There’s no reason not to admit anyone who applies because they can always pay the bills. The second was that students cannot discharge tge loans in bankruptcy. Which now removes any concern that the student needs any sort of real job afterwards, so the quality of the program doesn’t matter. Add this up, and essentially the school doesn’t lose money if they don’t demand students learn anything. In fact, since more students enter behind where they should be, it’s actually a negative to expect too much. If the students are washing out, you lose money.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean sure, but I don’t think most people wou be materially hampered because they didn’t get exposed to philosophy or history or art history. There might be the odd tool (personally, I think formal logic is a very powerful tool for understanding the world, and the same is true of probability and statistics and so on) but unless such things are related to daily work in some way, it’s mostly a vestige of the leisure class view of college as finishing school and at that point, you can make a case for teaching manners and dance as part of making a person suitable to the upper class. But this, again is silly, and really doesn’t lead to gains for anyone. It’s a waste of time, and to be fair, most of this is something that could be done for nearly free using resources available cheaply online.
But it’s mostly about the grift. You have to pretend that you’re now a better person because you know some history of Asia, or read a bit of Kant, or wrote an essay on indigenous peoples.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean I think the rub is that the alignment problem is actually two problems.
First, can an AI that is an agent in its own right be corralled in such a way that it’s not a threat to humans. I think it’s plausible. If you put in things that force it to respect human rights and dignity and safety, and you could prevent the AI from getting rid of those restrictions, sure, it makes sense.
Yet the second problem is the specific goals that the AI itself is designed for. If I have a machine to plan my wars, it has to be smart, it has to be a true AGI with goals. It does not, however have to care about human lives. In fact, such an AI works better without it. And that’s assuming an ethical group of people. Give Pinochet an AGI 500 times smarter than a human and it will absolutely harm humans in service of tge directive of keeping Pinochet in power.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I’ve always found it amazing just how out of touch the intellectuals in university are about what their institution actually means for students. To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.
In the 1990s kids were caught cheating, and many before computers outsourced those slop essays to grad students or upperclassman. Every kids knows how to find old exams and cajole the exam topics out of the TA. Which is to say, except for this being done with LLM bots, it’s not even unusual. And civilization has not fallen because students cheat on tests. Mostly because the things tge students are cheating on — slop writing assignments in non major classes and generally covering topics that most people would only use on Jeopardy— it doesn’t matter if they know it or master it. History, sociology, psychology, X studies, and philosophy can certainly be interesting classes. But I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people, so again, the cheating not only isn’t harming them, but it’s beneficial, both because they’re saving time so they can focus on the courses that matter, but because they’re getting hands on experience using a technology that will be more important to their future than whatever essay they’re not writing on their own.
Of course the professors of these courses tend to have exaggerated notions of their importance and the importance of the subject matter they are teaching, not just for the current crop of twenty year olds who are forced into their classrooms by the college itself, but to the world at large. I enjoy philosophy and history. I like reading about it, thinking about it, and so on. But I also understand that unless you’re going to work in a university teaching the subject to students and writing research papers about it, it’s not going to be valuable for the students. They love to bemoan the decline of students, that they don’t read the material, or they use chatbots or they scroll during class time. But they don’t ever ask why it’s happening to them and not in engineering classes or CS classes.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think a plateau is inevitable, simply because there’s a limit to how efficient you can make the computers they run on. Chips can only be made so dense before the laws of physics force a halt. This means that beyond a certain point, more intelligence means a bigger computer. Then you have the energy required to run the computers that house the AI.
A typical human has a 2lb brain and it uses about 1/4 of TDEE for the whole human, which can be estimated at 500 kcal or 2092 kilojoules or about 0.6 KWh. If we’re scaling linearly, if you have a billion human intelligences the energy requirement is about 600 million KWh. An industrial city of a million people per Quora uses 11.45 billion KWH a year. So if you have something like this you’re going to need a significant investment in building the data center, powering it, cooling it, etc. this isn’t easy, probably doable if you’re convinced it’s a sure thing and the answers are worth it.
As to the second question, im not sure that all problems can be solved, there are some things in mathematics that are considered extremely difficult if not impossible. And a lot of social problems are a matter of balancing priorities more the than really a question of intellectual ability.
As to the third question, I think it’s highly unlikely that the most likely people to successfully build a human or above level AI are people who would be least concerned with alignment. The military exists in short to make enemies dead. They don’t want an AI that is going to get morally superior when told to bomb someone. I’m suspecting the same is true of business in some cases. Health insurance companies are already using AI to evaluate claims. They don’t want one that will approve expensive treatments. And so there’s a hidden second question of whether early adopters have the same ideas about alignment that we assume they do. They probably don’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Therapy in general has done a lot of damage as it’s become more “normalized”. A big problem is that as the mental health industry has pushed itself forward, it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way. This is a huge problem as it creates glass brains that simply cannot handle normal life. When you raise several successive generations in this way: teach them that life is traumatic and that they need to ruminate on their feeling, you end up creating an entire culture that simply cannot handle normal life. I believe honestly that Gen Z and Gen α are the first generations raised completely by a culture that’s bought into therapeutic models of living. They’re also a complete wreck, needing support at every turn, unable to handle negative emotions or thoughts.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
The problem for writers is that outside of really amazing talents, 99% of it is some flavor of bubble gum. You don’t need to create award winning stuff.
Take science fiction. A lot of it is some form of retooled space opera. If I took the basics of such a story — a story set in space, space battles, robots, and so on — I’d probably be able to prompt a LLM into producing a decent first draft of a space opera. Taking story elements and recombining them is how the shelves of barns and noble get filled. Yes, most of it, from a literary standpoint, is crap. I don’t think most people who appreciate good literary fiction are going to dispute that 99% of the stuff available is even decent as literature. It’s only better than trash TV in the sense that it requires you read the story yourself rather than having actors read the story to you. But then again that’s what the public generally wants in entertainment. They don’t want to have to think about what they’re reading, they don’t even really want to notice any particular literary quirks of the author. They want to mostly escape the world and for the most part be able to congratulate themselves for reading instead of watching a video or playing spider solitaire on their phones.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think for a lot of genre fiction, an AI book edited by a human would probably be just fine for the median reader. Most of the published books in genre fiction are written to be read quickly and forgotten just as quickly, written more for people who want to read in transit between places (say on a bus, train, or plane) or as a pastime on vacation. It’s not nor was it ever intended to be serious reading. And while I don’t think AI at present can write well enough to be read as a beach read, it can produce something that would be publishable with a reasonable amount of developmental and line editing.
The advice for producing such novels is actually pretty cookie cutter. There are known plot development tools (save the cat is the most common), character development sheets, and style advice. Training an AI to use the beat sheets and other advice would produce a reasonable rough draft of a novel. Editing those novels might still require a human touch, but it’s probably not prohibitively expensive.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean, yes. But he also doesn’t really separate out the single event that modern discourse around WW2 the holocaust is the tragedy of the war. Here, it’s surrounded by other atrocities— battle casualties, burned capitols, European cities in ruins. It has not yet developed the mythical power that it will hold much later on. A modern writer talking about the events listed in this passage would never dare to put the holocaust in the same paragraph as other casualties of the war. Modern telling puts the holocaust front and center, alone, with no other atrocities allowed to detract from it. That’s not how Churchill sees WW2. To him, the holocaust is one tragedy among several others, not something uniquely evil or even more evil than the other events of the war.
To post mythic generations, this would be pretty ambivalent, and if the person were Jewish, he’d probably consider such a retelling pretty antisemitic as it downplayed the holocaust compared to how modern history talks about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
That fits the ambivalence theory. I don’t see anything in that statement that suggests he sees “the stockyards slaughter house pens” as worse than the ruin of Europe or the destruction of Eastern European capitals.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I’m going to disagree here. Yes, we knew about the Indian removals of the 1800s and the slave trade and colonialism. But they weren’t things that people were supposed to feel deep guilt about. Indian removal was seen as perhaps unfortunate, but necessary to build a civilization in America. Hitler changed that because he moved at an industrial pace and we won in time to film the aftermath. He was also a gift to the Military-Industrial complex, as the specter of Hitler somewhere in the world was useful to convince tge populace that they should send their sons to some military adventure out in the world, and for that, we needed a huge military. Anti-racism is also politically useful globally because it gives those nonwhite nations a reason to choose our side — we fought genocidal racism.
Without Hitler I don’t think it happens. Without Hitler racism goes from being the evil to being on par with any number of other political evils that we knew about and don’t celebrate, but don’t punish ourselves over. And there are plenty of other evils to bring up.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean yes, but after the fact. If you’d lived in the era of antipopes, that doesn’t resolve the issue of whose rulings are the infallible ones or which hierarchy actually has succession.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
He also had universalist views on salvation from what I’ve read of him. His belief, AFAIK was that sincere Jews and Muslims didn’t need to become believers in Christianity to be saved. That’s pretty darn progressive/liberal thinking from a Christian perspective.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think the antipopes in the 12 century should have been a clue. There’s no way that you could have tge head of the church be a single person with a direct line back to Peter, then have entire centuries in which there are two and sometimes three claimants to that title.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think there are good aspects to Asian schools that we could bring in, though perhaps not to the extreme that those schools go to.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project. And the result is that almost half of all American adults cannot read on an eighth grade level. Mathematics and science fair no better. Because of this, we’re generally stuck when it comes to innovative ideas and deep thinking in philosophy or the arts. If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
But the other thing that makes it work is the tracking. Not every kid who graduates goes to tge same “university to office job” track. If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs. This not only reduces the competition for entry level positions for college graduates, but ensures that every group ends up with a skil they can use to support themselves.
Most of the actual problems come from taking the system to extremes. Over competing in sports leads to 13 year old kids needing Tommy John’s surgery. To much competition in academics makes people miserable. Neither is an indictment of those activities or those who take them seriously. If rules are put in place to keep the competition sane, competition is generally good for people and drives them to do better. The alternative is underachieving with all the problems that come from that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I think the dollars make crowdfunding less prone to cheap virtue signals as it requires more from the giver than a simple post. You have to put up cash to the cause. If I believe in something, that’s not a problem. If I believe in DEI, then giving $25 to support such causes or to someone wronged by the lack thereof is at least skin into the game. Simple posts are not the same and therefore people are probably signaling things that the person isn’t committed to but says because it’s “the right thing to say.” But would you be willing to actually donate to that cause?
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
And it’s a revealed preference. If people didn’t agree with the woman’s cause, nobody would give money to it. In that sense it’s like an opinion version of a prediction market — unlike polling or social media posts, you can’t just opine without putting some actual money down behind it. What meaning you take from this particular case, im not sure. Is it because this woman was threatened, because it’s expanded to her family? Because the thing was filmed? Because people want to say “nigger”? That’s a bit harder to gage. But there’s a signal there that doesn’t exist with mere posts. Every person who donated has has done so at cost to themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality. "Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one. Referring to DeSantis's takeover of the New College of Florida, Jonathan Haidt wrote that, "I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country."[2] Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste. There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
I’m not convinced that “academic freedom” failed. We had university-like institutions across the globe for millennia. The philosophy schools of Greece, the Confucian schools, medieval universities. Even in modern times, it’s possible to have universities without them becoming captured. How many woke professors are there in Korean universities? Or Mexican universities? It doesn’t appear that this is universally true of universities with academic freedom. In fact, for most of history, colleges were not especially woke.
On the other hand, in America, universities have two direct lines to power. First, their research directly affects public policy as government cites research and the professors who do it. This means that any ideology injected into universities will eventually be reflected in government policy. Second is that the press will cite these things often without criticism, thus injecting the ideas directly into the veins of culture. Both of these things make American universities ideal for ideological purposes. It’s an easy way to get your ideas to be accepted as received wisdom by the masses whether or not they happen to be true.
What would be the ideal solution is to not use colleges as the source of knowledge and government policy. If you no longer have direct access to the ear of the king, the position no longer is useful for pushing ideology. If journalists investigated beyond just quoting the first professor they come across, again, it’s not useful to push ideology. At that point, the academy goes back to being a place where you do dispassionate research and teach students how to think for themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.
I don’t get this. You know going into service adjacent industries that at least part of what you do is offer a service. It’s not a mystery, it’s not hidden in the fine print. There is no “surprise, we actually want you to make this experience as pleasant as possible.” And as such, as either the owner/manager of a place like that or a customer, I expect that you will perform a service and do so without being rude or acting like the job you were hired to do is a burden. If not acting like a spoiled child made to clean their bedroom is too hard for you, then don’t work in the service industry.
And furthermore I don’t think that the current year thing where employees are allowed to bring political and social issues, personal problems or anything else into the workplace is good. It’s a business. It is not your personal billboard for whatever pet cause you have. It’s not a place where personal problems should get in the way of getting the job done. Such things just get in the way. Leave it at home or talk to a therapist as needed, but the primary purpose of a job is to get the work done. It’s not your home, it’s not your friends, and it’s not your therapist’s office.
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