MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think it’s more that Europe has the right formula as they don’t have elections that begin the moment the current government is sworn in. The campaign seasons are fairly short and unless there’s some vote of no confidence or something, the government can run things and people don’t feel the need to consume political news to follow it all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think politics is now eating celebrity. It’s just inescapable at this point that no matter what it is, it will be political and those involved will be political. There’s not much that’s made in America or done in America that doesn’t somehow touch politics. And so if you want to get Noticed, it’s probably going to be going after a political target is going to be the kind of thing you do. In 1980, we had a pretty strong celebrity culture and everybody had their favorite movie star in poster form on their bedroom wall. There were magazines devoted to hot male singers that would be roughly analogous to the stuff you’d see around K-Stan’s. Most normies would maybe read a single newspaper or watch a half hour of national News nightly. The rest of life was just about normal human activities— listening to music, watching TV, hanging out with friends, watch the ball game. And so people who wanted to “go out with a bang” tended to go after famous entertainment figures.
Whether or not anyone doing these things cares about politics as actually caring about a policy, I tend to doubt it. I’ve yet to see anyone who commits an act of violence like this who had ever worked for a local political organization or canvassed a neighborhood or even donated to a campaign. They don’t hold specific political ideas, they don’t know policy or anything. At best, they tend to vibe. Believing in universal healthcare is a policy position. There are various models, but it’s a policy on how one should fund and deliver healthcare in the country. Shooting a health insurance CEO has nothing to do with it. And to my knowledge, Luigi never really seemed to have a firm view of healthcare delivery before he shot the UHC CEO.
Honestly I don’t think our current situation is healthy simply because is not normal or desirable for government to be the singular touchstone of a culture. Politicians cannot work that way, and probably shouldn’t be running through a million polls asking stupid people how to solve the problems of the world. It doesn’t work because people mistake the theatrics for the substance or a smooth delivery for thought. And once you take away the smoke filled room in which the real business was done, the result is shitty and subject to rediculous purity games that preclude dealing to get things done. Furthermore, it breeds the perfect storm of division. If the most important thing the thing you spend the most time talking about is politics, you’ll naturally divide the country. And there are few if any neutral places. You can’t turn it off and just enjoy a brew and some baseball or hockey with someone who doesn’t share your political beliefs. Fandoms are almost all coded either liberal or conservative. Beers seem to be as well. Shopping and the brands you buy. Politics as identity is how you get dark things, as it makes those who disagree enemies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean what exact intent is implied by invading a Capitol and attempting to breech the doors of the legislature and ignoring multiple commands to stop? I would undertake the sympathy if she’d gone wandering around the roduntra with a sign or upside down flag, or if she’d been going into offices or something because those things do not represent the same sort of threat as attempting to invade the house floor as member of congress are fleeing. She clearly intended to do something by those actions and so did those with her.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It wasn’t much of a secret. They wrote it all down. You can read all kinds of writings about various divisions of labor and social roles. We no longer read the stuff but it’s not hard to find. Confucius is pretty specific about the five relationships, and what the role is supposed to be doing. So is the Bible.
I still hold that decontextualizing relationships creates a lot of the problems. It’s weird to think of actual human relationships as though there’s an underlying contract and someone is getting a bad deal. A relationship is between people, and if both do as they are supposed to do, it works even if it looks unequal on paper.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
What people value is culture specific in many cases. Jobs didn’t really become aspirational until the median white male was working an office job. Women didn’t clamor to work in factories, they were quite content with minor teaching and nursing roles and being the occasional secretary. At this point they chose to work. Having a wife who didn’t work up to that point was a status symbol as it meant you earned enough to not need a second income.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
My point is that it like a lot of things are often the result of sloppy thinking. Yes in today’s culture it’s boorish to bring up the unequal division of labor, however humans have lived for thousands of years with numerous such relationships and duties often explicitly defined for each role. They tended to be at least theoretically reciprocal I owe my husband a clean house and a hot meal, he owes me money for the house, protection, and so on. The same would be true of lord and peasant. You work, I will protect the realm and see to the stability of the fiefdom. Or teacher to student, boss to worker. This worked up until we decided that individuals could assert rights without any context of place in wider society. I think it’s a wrong framework because it ignores all the ways we are not atomized individuals without context in wider society.
Your wife isn’t just any old woman, she’s your particular wife with whom you have a long relationship and possibly children. Those children are not random children, they are your children. So when she doesn’t want to do laundry, it’s in the context of your personal relationship, not any other relationship. Naked assertions of rights don’t make sense in that context and it’s really only thought of this way in the modern era.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think he is sort of viewing everything from 500 feet as though every person acts a as a perfect automaton blindly acting exactly like every other person as a perfectly rational being. TBH I find the same flaws in most theoretical constructions— they ignore that humans are not little Spock’s running about perfectly enacting logical self interest. It also tends to elide the degree to which relationships between people and groups of people tends to totally change how people perceive their self interest and make choices.
The entire conversation about feminism and anti-feminism falls apart if you introduced a single wrinkle— humans tend to form these crazy things called families. And thus a lot of “rights” type arguments don’t work because every right asserted on one member of a family without imposing either a constriction or duty on someone else in that family. So if you say “well, women shouldn’t have to do all the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care, because she is equal to the man,” you immediately have a problem because somebody has to do that stuff. So now you’re putting this on the other adult in the relationship— the man. But then he claps back with his own rights claims “why should I have to do all this? Why is it my job to do the laundry?” She wants to have a career, but someone else has to support her to make that happen. If one person could get a huge promotion by uprooting and moving to New York, you either move everyone or you don’t.
These simple mistakes always floor me because they’re pretty obvious. It’s not possible to ignore the individual choices, nor possible to ignore the relationships between people that inform those choices. The entire edifice is built on two lies — first the notion of an individual without tastes and preferences that don’t lead directly to maximizing utility on every axis, and second the idea that every man exists by himself with no relation to others around him. They’re both absurd. Humans have cultures that shape their preferences, and they have relationships with other people, not just families, but communities, cultures, political systems, and so on.
Even with regard to education, I think he’s right — in America especially, because the expense of college has made it that way. We have a fairly unique relationship with college. I’d argue we’ve basically turned it into a very expensive career casino in which you bet 4-5 years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars (over the course of the loan) on the chance that a given combination of the right school, major, activities, internships, and GPA will grant you a middle class career. And really a lot of his (correct) understanding of education works best in the American system where the entire point of our college system is to get a credential, get a job, and never think about that stuff again. In that context, attending Yale courses, but not getting the credentials is a waste of time and money. But if we’re talking about aristocratic students who for various reasons don’t need college specifically to get a job after college, they aren’t looking at college in the same way. They’d see the education part as more important as a way to impress people, as a sign of prestige, or a way to find a spouse. They would read the readings they are interested in, and maybe wouldn’t care as much about the diploma. Attending a lecture at Yale is much more intrinsically valuable when the diploma doesn’t matter.
Again, the context matters in how this stuff happens in the real world. If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I would say if the judge is repeatedly doing something like this and they’re constantly issuing injunctions that get overturned, then yes. Would not think that a single overturned injunction would reveal partisan hacking unless the injunction is so bad on the merits of the case that he clearly shouhave known better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think that does make a lot of sense. But my main concern is to limit the ability to issue a national injunction to “break-glass” levels of emergency. The idea being that the principle in question is so important to the public good, Justice, or good government that allowing it to continue before SCOTUS takes it on would result in grave harm. I don’t want it completely ended, but at the same time I don’t want it to be used casually as a “we don’t like this” measure.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
And I understand the people who feel it's duplicitous to pretend to be nice to someone you loathe or pretend to be happy when you feel like shit, but a) that's society and b) that's what they're being paid for, most people don't care if they grind the beans a particular way, they just want a cute girl or guy to smile when they get their coffee. And yes, maybe it's selfish to not want to worry about tailoring your behaviour to not upset some barista you'll never see again, but I think it is eminently more selfish - and entitled - to expect strangers to treat you like you belong in their Dunbar's group. Especially when you are being paid to be there and the stranger is paying you.
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
Off the top of my head:
Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.
Quantum Physics: I firmly believe we’ll have a pretty good idea how it all works, probably by 2050.
I’ll agree with the idea of dietary guidelines being much better than now, but I don’t think it’s that we have absolutely no idea how it works so much is that nobody actually likes the results. Food manufacturers do not want to hear and the public doesn’t like. Basically the solution is to eat mostly vegetables with meat and starches being about a quarter of the meal each. Eat as minimally processed as you can, and avoid refined carbs. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we don’t like that kind of food, and billions are made catering to what people want even though we know it’s bad.
More options
Context Copy link