MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
6mo ago
For people unfamiliar with Dutch politics, it might be interesting to compare these polls with the political compass (the horizontal axis denotes economic left/right policy, vertical axis socially progressive/conservative policy).
(For the logos: the butterfly represents the Animal Rights Party (PvdD), the seagul Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), and the Greek building Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD)).
The current elections are interesting because a large number of party leaders stepped down before the elections and have been replaced with “fresh” faces. Meanwhile, the political landscape has not shifted all that much.
As you mentioned, the historically important Christian Democrat party, which was in decline for a while, has now been almost completely replaced by two new parties: New Social Contract (NSC) lead by Pieter Omtzigt (himself a former Christian Democrat) and the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) lead by political outsider Caroline van der Plas (whose party was at one time leading in the polls, but has gradually declined almost to insignificance for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
Meanwhile, the Labour party (PvdA) and Green party (GL) have merged into a single moderately progressive/leftwing party (uninspiringly named PvdA/GL) lead by former Labour-party Foreign Affairs Minister and European Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
The key to understanding current Dutch politics lies with the VVD, the quintessential (neo)liberal party that supports globalism, open borders, low taxes, minimal environmental protections and less regulations for businesses. Their voters consist mainly of the “haves“ in society: wealthy people, high earners, business owners, home owners, pensioners; people who are happy with their lives, do not favor income or wealth distribution, and do not feel especially threatened by globalization or immigration.
The VVD has been part of the government for the past 13 years. The main reason for this is that despite being economically right-wing, they are quite flexible when it comes to social issues, which has allowed the party to form coalitions both with conservative Christians and with progressive liberal parties.
In terms of coalition building, based on the current polls, there is an obvious three-party coalition of PvdA/GL + NSC + VVD. While these parties cover a broad part of the spectrum, the combination isn't as far-fetched as it might seem: PvdA and VVD have governed together in the not-too-distant past (two cabinets between 1994 and 2002). Adding a third party would seem to complicate things, but on paper, Omtzigt's NSC is ideologically somewhere in between the two, so it feels like it should be possible to include them as well, though much depends on how flexible Omtzigt turns out to be: if Omtzigt insists on social conservatism, and the VVD insists on economic rightwing policy, then together they have nothing to offer PvdA/GL: the VVD's past success has hinged on yielding progressive topics to their left-wing coalition partner to secure the economic right-wing policy they really care about.
It's worth noting that historically, a coalition between PvdA and VVD has hurt PvdA much more than VVD. So it's unclear if they will dare to go for it again this time.
No other coalition seems immediately viable. It's probably best to wait for the election to see where the chips fall.
MartianNight
9mo ago
The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.
MartianNight
11mo ago
If she's intersex, she is definitely not a woman.
In reality, Caster Semenya is a male with 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (I had to google this), which very woke and pro-trans Wikipedia defines as (emphasis mine):
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D) is an autosomal recessive condition caused by a mutation in SRD5A2, a gene encoding the enzyme 5α-reductase type 2 (5αR2). The condition is rare, affects only genetic males, and has a broad spectrum.
5αR2 is expressed in specific tissues and catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT plays a key role in the process of sexual differentiation in the external genitalia and prostate during development of the male fetus. 5αR2D is a result of impaired 5αR2 activity resulting in decreased DHT levels. This defect results in a spectrum of phenotypes including overt genital ambiguity, hypospadias, and micropenis. Affected males still develop typical masculine features at puberty (deep voice, facial hair, muscle bulk) since most aspects of pubertal virilization are driven by testosterone, not DHT.
So in every way that matters for the purpose of participating in sports, Semenya is male. I don't think it's reasonable to say that a male with a disorder of sexual development becomes eligible to compete with women. It might be different for people with disorders like CAIS, but obviously Semenya is a genetic male with a male-typical body and male-typical levels of testosterone. She has never acknowledged any of those facts, and neither have you.
Semenya identifies as a woman despite being genetically and phenotypically male. That makes her transgender, by definition.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Okay, I see what you mean here, and I agree that you can become a member of a group by virtue of being recognized as such by your peers. After all, words have meaning only by virtue of people using them to refer to things; if everyone agrees you are a woman you pretty much by definition are one.
But from the fact that there doesn't need to be a rigorous definition of “woman” to be recognized as such, it doesn't follow that any definition will work, and that self-identification is enough. There is practically no noun where you can become that noun simply by self-identification. Am I an artist if I say I am? Am I a genius if I say I am? Am I a greengrocer if I say I am? Am I a nice guy just because I say I am? Am I a black person just because I say I am? Am I an American just because I say I am? All of these things come with some expectations, and although you can quibble about the details, pure self-identification doesn't work (I can't be a Chinese person born in China to Chinese parents that hasn't been in America in my life and meaningfully claim to be American).
In short, even if you cannot define what a woman is, exactly, it's clear that “anyone who identifies as a woman” isn't it.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Before I respond to the content of this comment, have you found a place where Caster Semenya admits to being male, or do you take back your earlier claim that all transwomen recognize that they are male and therefore different from ciswomen?
MartianNight
11mo ago
I guess my overall point here is that “woman” isn’t some mysterious reified category. Like many words for humans, it includes three facets: biological, behavioral, and relational.
I don't think I follow you. Yes, there is a biological definition for both "woman" and "mother", that is clear. Genderists reject biological definitions of women, though.
Then it comes to behavior: it's clear there is some behavioral definition of "mother", or rather "parent", where "mother" refers to a parent that's also a woman. What's the behavioral definition of "woman", though?
Finally, relational: I have no clue what you mean by that, neither in reference to mothers nor to women.
So please, define these terms.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Fair enough, but those aren't really appropriate dress in a lot of situations, for example if you work in any kind of office environment.
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's likely that I misunderstood something; I'm not very familiar with the various offerings. I was going by OP's own admission that they didn't pay for the top model and their version was only able to solve 7 (sub)problems vs 13(ish) for “Chat GPT Plus” which seemed to imply that the latter is a stronger problem solver.
MartianNight
5mo ago
I will likely continue to provide updates here until the chips have fallen.
Keep in mind that the previous formation period lasted over nine months. There probably won't be exciting news every week.
MartianNight
11mo ago
But that is not how I defined a woman. I said, "Suppose I had a rule that says that men must open doors for women." That rule requires men to open doors for all women, regardless of whether they want the door opened for them or not.
If being a dorble is defined only as identifying as such, and the only consequence of that identification is that non-dorbles must open doors for you, then yes, I think people would identify as dorbles only based on whether they want doors to be held open (or whether they don't want to open doors for others, of course). After all, what else could feeling like a dorble mean? If identifying as a dorble comes with no duties or privileges, it's meaningless.
What is your dorble identity anyway? How did you determine it if not by thinking about doors being held open?
So no matter how you squirm, you have defined dorble as "someone who prefers to have doors held open for them, rather than hold doors open for others", because someone of the opposite preference wouldn't identify as a dorble!
It's the same with genderism. Transwomen want to be seen as women because women are viewed and treated differently in society. What's the point of identifying as a woman if nobody treats you like one?
I am extremely skeptical that that is the reason that a dedication to logical consistency is the reason that they don't like genderism.
It's not "logical consistency", it's the erasure of biological sex as a real thing and the root cause of women's oppression.
"I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman." No transgernder person makes that claim, because it is impossible by definition
Oh sweet summer child! I agree it's a logical contradiction, but the whole trans movement is illogical. Go read/watch some interviews with Caster Semenya and find me a single instance where she will admit to being male. It's all "everyone is different, I just happen to have high testosterone", which makes me want to scream: you have high testosterone because you are male, or rather: you don't have high testosterone levels, they are perfectly normal for a male. But again, go find me one interview where this biologically male transwoman admits to being male and/or trans. I'll wait.
Then when you can't find it, please retract your statement and admit that I was right that some transwomen refuse to admit they are not ciswomen. (It's not only Semenya, by the way, but it's a high-profile example.) This is the erasure of biological sex I was talking about.
It would be perfectly fine with me if we used "dorble", but that is not really germane to the underlying issue. because we already have a different term for people who feel that they are women, yet are not born as a member the sex able to bear children: It is "transwoman"!
Except that we also already have a word that means "adult human female" and it's "woman". So instead of relabeling "woman" to "ciswoman" why don't we keep "woman" (sex based) and "dorble" (identity based) and invent a new term for the superset, let's say "worbles"? That seems much less confusing: Caster Semenya is a dorble and a worble but not a woman.
Of course, the conflation of terms is very much intentional. By saying "transwomen are women" trans-activists intend to claim privileges are conferred to ciswomen on the basis of biological sex.
Or if you really want to use the term "woman" to include both males and females, how would you feel if, as a one-time concession, we replaced the words "woman" and "man" with "female" and "male" in all laws and rules written before 2010 we would replace man and woman with male and female? Men's bathrooms would be male bathrooms, women's sports would be female sports, women's prison wards would be female wards, your passport would contain your biological sex again (maybe next to your chosen gender identity), and so on. In this framework I would recognize that I'm male but I wouldn't identify as a man or a woman since the term is meaningless to me.
Then we can discuss whether female bathrooms should be changed to women's bathrooms, and so on. Do you think that would be acceptable to trans activists? Or do you agree it's likely they would fight tooth and nail to get male women recognized as "females" so they can claim all the female privileges by default?
I hire an alien to be the head of Women's Services at my university. [..]
To summarize, what you're arguing for here is to use different definitions of "woman" in different contexts. This is similar to my proposal of separating male/female from man/woman except you make the meaning of the word variable instead of using separate words.
I'm not philosophically opposed to this (many words have different meanings depending on context) but I would start from the assumption that "woman" means "female" and any case to include males would have to be made separately. So no males in women's sports or women's spa's just because those males self-identify as women.
Finally, we provide a safe space for "women" to contemplate the oppressions of the patriarchy. Because of the nature of that patriarchy, for the purposes of admission to that space, we define "woman" thusly: "a 'woman' is anyone who identifies as a woman."
This safe space of course already exists: it's every single college campus in America.
In this model, will there also be a safe space for females who want to contemplate their oppression at the hands of males, which is actually much more common than gender-based oppression? Or do they get banned, harassed and assaulted everywhere they go, as is the case for TERFs today?
Are females allowed to have female only spaces such as spas?
Are lesbian females allowed to have female-only dating apps?
Unless the answer is yes, you are just advocating for more oppression of the female sex.
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do.
On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.
(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)
The claim “I didn’t realize a fire alarm would set off an alarm” is pretty weak.
That's not what he said. He said: “I was trying to get to a door. I thought the alarm would open the door, and I pulled the fire alarm to open the door by accident.”
That's also questionable (if you pulled the alarm because you thought that would open the door then you didn't do it by accident) but the point is: he doesn't deny intentionally triggering the fire alarm, but he claims his intent was to open the door, not to prevent the vote. And that seems at least possible. On twitter I saw this image of the location with a sign that reads:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
PUSH UNTIL ALARM SOUNDS (3 seconds)
DOOR WILL UNLOCK IN 30 SECONDS
(But note that in the still of Bowman pulling the alarm that sign seems to be missing! Which maybe explains why he pulled the fire alarm lever on the wall instead of pushing the exit bars as the instructions by the door suggest.)
This does make it sound like you can open the door by setting of the fire alarm (which also makes logical sense), though it's pretty clear you're only supposed to do that in case of an emergency. Maybe Bowman thought that the alarm would be local and he could just shut it off after opening the door, or maybe he knew the building would be evacuated but thought nobody would know he was the one that triggered the alarm. Either way, it doesn't show that he pulled the alarm in order to delay the vote happening at the Capitol.
The evidence against an intentional action is this:
- The building that was evacuated was the Canon Hill building across the street, not the Capitol building where the vote occurred. If he wanted to prevent a vote wouldn't it make more sense to pull the alarm in the Capitol building itself?
- The bill was passed with near-unanimous Democrat support, including from Bowman. Not to mention that Democrats have absolutely no interest in a government shutdown with a Democratic president in charge. Why would a Democratic congressman want to obstruct the voting on a bill he is in favor of?
MartianNight
10mo ago
Your use of the word "luddite" suggests that you have a negative emotional valence towards the Actors' Guild strike.
It's unfortunate that Luddite has a negative connotation, but it seems useful to have a term to refer to people who are concerned about AI taking their jobs, to the point that they're willing to go on strike to enact a ban on AI. Can you suggest a more neutral term you would prefer?
MartianNight
14d ago
Nit pick: /r/the_donald was the banned subreddit.
MartianNight
4mo ago
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women
Let me stop you right there. It was never about male-looking people. It was always about males. It just so happens that being male-looking is a pretty good proxy for being male in the real world (despite what the trans lobby wants you to think).
The rationale is that many more males abuse women and girls than females do. Therefore, women and girls are safer in the presence of other females then they are in the presence of males. If you disagree with this fairly obvious statistic, what do you think women-only spaces are for?
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
Moving away from anecdotes, I think it's important to realize that for every masculine-looking trans-identified female, there are probably three trans-identified males that are absolutely deranged, like Karen White, Darren Merager, or Michael Pentillä. Would I rather have women share a bathroom with a female porn star, or with a male serial killer and unrepentant rapist of women and young girls, you ask? Wow, what a dilemma you put in front of me! I just don't know how to choose!
No seriously, obviously it's the female porn star. If it were up to me, I'd put a hundred Buck Angels in women's bathrooms before I'd let a single Michael Pentillä in. It seems the obvious choice, if you want to optimize for women's safety rather than maximizing the euphoria of rapist serial killers. Was that really supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
MartianNight
4mo ago
Day 8 is a bit of a bad example, the general solution is the chinese remainder problem which isn't much harder anyway.
Have you tried to solve the general problem yourself? It's absolutely much harder than the version contestants had to solve.
First, the Chinese remainder theorem is genuinely a lot harder than simply calculating the least common multiple. Second, the problem statement allows much more complicated input than that. For example, the problem statement allows loops with multiple end states; I don't even know how you'd deal with that efficiently, I doubt you know on the top off your head, and I certainly wouldn't fault ChatGPT for not knowing it either.
If you post your code I can probably come up with a test case that breaks it.
How could other humans learn how to construct those solutions? They read the same textbooks that are in the training set of ChatGPT (a miniscule fraction of them) and they understand their contents.
No, that's absolutely not how humans learn to code. Or at least it's not how I learned or anyone I know that's good at solving AoC style problems learned to solve them. Reading textbooks is the absolute minimum time investment. The majority of time is spent thinking about the problem, writing code, noticing it doesn't work, trying to find a flaw by reading through it, stepping through the execution with a debugger, or maybe adding printf() statements to get insight in the internal state, and so on.
It's a very interactive process. But the intermediate code, with all the printf() statements for debugging, isn't something that usually gets committed. That's why ChatGPT doesn't know to debug code that way. It has never even seen someone do this. It might have heard about printf() debugging from Wikipedia but it has never done it itself, or if it did (because of user requests), it keeps no memory of it.
You can also look at this as a question of whether ChatGPT Plus is worth it in general: it did better than straight API calls but I spent 2$ of API calls vs 20$ for plus, it isn't 10 times better.
I don't think this comparison makes sense. You're treating it as a comparison of efficiency: as if Model A is solving problems at a rate of X/day and Model B at a rate of 2X/day, so Model B is only twice as valuable as Model A. But that's not what's happening: Model B is solving problems that apparently Model A cannot solve at all. If Einstein can prove only 1% more theorems than the average physics major, does that mean he should be paid only 1% more?
Can you break that statistic down into stepfathers and stepmothers?
(Ideally without including males in the category of “stepmother” but I realize that in our society that might be too much to ask.)
MartianNight
11mo ago
Mulan was also the released at the height of the COVID pandemic, which probably had a larger impact on its revenue than the contents.
MartianNight
21d ago
I agree that Ukraine is fairly conservative at the moment, but the question is: for how long? Euromaidan was essentially Ukraine pledging allegiance to Western values. That was the cue for Russia to invade!
This can conservatively be interpreted as “Ukrainians turned away from Russia because they wanted economic growth similar to Poland after joining the EU” but it can also easily be interpreted to mean “Ukraine is now lost to the globo-homo neo-liberal monoculture of which liberal feminism is a fundamental part”. The fact that Ukraine receives the majority of its support from America, and within America from the pro-feminist Democratic party, rather than the Republican party that has the Christians and conservatives, doesn't bode well. I can easily imagine that the Ukrainian women that fled the country end up decrying the toxic masculinity of the men who chose to fight and die for their country (like American liberals would), rather than praising them for their service to their homeland (like American conservatives might).
MartianNight
4mo ago
Nice writeup. Unfortunately not a lot of discussion yet so let me add some random comments:
And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Depends on what you call “novel”. A lot of the problems are based on well-known algorithms like path finding, Josephus problems, etc. And there is quite a bit of repetition of concepts between years as well. So I think LLMs and humans alike benefit from being having the previous problems in their data set.
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
It's probably the same reason why ChatGPT does so poorly at writing longform fiction. It has no idea how to construct an overarching narrative because the planning, rewriting and editing necessary is invisible to ChatGPT; it only sees the finished output.
I think coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) will be able to fill this gap by observing how humans actually develop code.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
True, and I agree with your subjective assessment that the problems aren't any harder this year, but I'd add also that the leaderboard is not really representative of the overall participant base. People on the leaderboard are the top 1% of all solvers (let alone participants), and they have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, a problem that requires dynamic programming is easy for them (but hard for most casual programmers), while the top 1% still need more time on problems that require lots of of careful reading, convoluted input parsing, tricky edge cases, etc.
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
MartianNight
4mo ago
(not really because... well you know)
Speak plainly please.
only Christianity is targeted. Would Atheists ever put up depictions of Muhammad (peace be upon him)?
That's just not true. Maybe in America, where Muslims make up a tiny minority of the population, but in Europe Islam is often criticized and even ridiculed, mostly by atheists. What did you think caused the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan, the attack on the Swedish embassy in Iraq, the 2023 terrorist attacks in Belgium, Türkiye soft-blocking Sweden's ascension to NATO, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.?
MartianNight
9mo ago
I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.
The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!
MartianNight
10mo ago
It's not that crazy, considering that the US already had a full blown Twitter addict as a President.
MartianNight
11mo ago
This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped
Huh? You're saying if a white man murdered two black men that raped and tortured a white girl, an all-black jury would let the murderer off the hook entirely?
Palestinians don't just want peace, they also want independence. We both know that if Palestinians turned Jew-loving overnight, released their hostages and laid down their arms, what happens next is not that Israel withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather that Israel will conquer the entire country (as Netanyahu has already said he intends to), and Palestinians will live under Jewish rule forever.
All armed conflicts can be resolved peacefully if one side is willing to give up all of their claims. But would you suggest this in any other conflict? Should the Ukrainians hand their country to Putin for the sake of peace, at the cost of their freedom? Should Taiwan give their country to the CCP? Should America have accepted British rule instead of establishing their independence?
And let's be clear: the source of the conflict has nothing to do with whether Palestinians love or hate Jews. The inhabitants of all surrounding countries hate the Jews just as much as the Palestinians do, but Israel is not occupying them, because Israel does not want their land.
The reason Israel is occupying territories like Jerusalem and the West Bank is that the Jews consider those part of their God-given holy land. It doesn't matter whether the citizens living in that land love or hate the Jews; the Jews want to conquer that land either way.
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