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MathWizard

Good things are good

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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)


Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.


How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sort of. But if you're constantly tangling people up in the courts over technicalities the way this would you've already failed. If people are breaking the letter of the law and only getting by by the good graces of juries then that's just further incentives for corporations to virtue signal and get entangled in the culture war to make people side with them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:


-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.


The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am absolutely loving the memes coming out of it. Probably my favorite is a fake anime trailer:


https://youtube.com/watch?v=_UXmgkAzFDY


Which, although the actual art is AI generated, has clearly been carefully curated and edited with loving care and attention to how anime trailers work.


Also relevantly, people dug into the game files and found alternate endings that aren't in the final game release:


https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgUfNn1CClE


where originally the game tracked what choices you made and then if you picked wrong too much you get the "bad" ending where you and Amelia go out protesting together and get stopped by the police. But apparently they decided that wasn't the message they wanted to send and rediverted you to the "you feel bad about letting your friends down and go to the teacher who pats you on the back and sends you to get re-educated voluntarily" ending.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It should be obvious from basic efficient market processes that every measurable category of people the credit card companies can subdivide people into is internally profitable without needing subsidization, otherwise they wouldn't serve those people at those interest rates. The only subsidization occurring is


    

  1. 

    People that don't use credit cards subsidize rewards for people with credit cards since stores are charging higher average prices than they would if credit cards weren't so prolific.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    People who have different actual repayment within the same legibility category. Ie, someone with a bad score who ends up in debt, paying a lot of interest, and working their way out of bad credit ends up subsidizing the people with bad scores who end up defaulting on their loans. If the credit card company doesn't know ahead of time which is which, they have to offer interest rates that will enable them to recoup their costs on average across the group. The former ends up paying a lot of interest because the credit card company gave them the same risk profile as the latter.
    

    3. 



Now, you could make a claim that XYZ piece of information should be priced in but isn't and thus the market isn't truly efficient. But it's not going to be something as obvious as "rich people" vs "poor people".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Projects that require a layered approach of various theories and techniques seem like they're fundamentally beyond AI.




Why would you think this? Every year it gets better at this sort of thing. Clearly, it is beyond the level of current AI, but I don't see how you make the leap to "fundamentally beyond" when this seems like exactly the sort of thing that you could do by explicitly layering various theories and techniques together. Maybe you have 20 different sub-AI each of which is an expert in one theory and technique and then you amalgamate them together into one mega AI that can use all of those techniques (with some central core that synthesizes all of the ideas together). I don't know that that's definitely possible, but I can't see any evidence that it's "fundamentally" beyond AI just because they can't do it now. A couple years ago AI couldn't figure out prepositions like putting a cat on top of a horse vs putting a tattoo of a cat on a horse and people said that was "fundamentally beyond AI" because they've never encountered the real world and don't understand how things interact, but now they can usually do that. Because they got better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"Life is one long series of problems to solve. The more you solve, the better a man you become."
-Sir Radzig Kobyla, March of 1403




I have been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance and, while it was already clear that this was not a woke game from pretty early on, this line really drove that nail home for me. You would never here a line like this in a modern American video game. It's not even anti-woke: as a game from the Czech Republic, it's so far removed from the modern American culture war that it just doesn't even care. This is in response to being asked why does God allow so much evil in the world, and the man responds that it's probably a test so we can become better by overcoming it. Everyone is a medieval Catholic (except the evil foreign Cumans who are barbaric and evil, but also way way stronger than your local bandits which makes it terrifying when you stumble on one early game and you probably need to run away instead of fighting), and it's just kind of in the background morality of the individual characters. There's a quest where you go back into the ruins of a town that was just destroyed and still roving with bandits and scavengers in order to bury your murdered parents, putting yourself in danger for no reason other than respect for them and wanting them not to get stuck in purgatory. And yet it's not as if the story is glazing Christianity either, it's got plenty of evil and corrupt people abusing the system, and even a drunk and lecherous priest who is preaching protestant reformation against the Catholic church and their money grubbing ways. Characters believe things because it makes sense for their character to believe that in this culture and the narrative isn't using them as a cudgel to propagandize you that they're obviously right or wrong.


What I think I like about it most of all is that it's an open world Western RPG where your character is... actually a character. You play as Henry, a blacksmith's son from a town, with parents and friends and a personality. He speaks, he has opinions, he makes decisions that you cannot control that drive the plot forward. He is not a blank faceless self insert who gets swept along in some chosen one plot so that you can pretend he is actually you in this world. Henry is Henry in this world, and that gives the writers so much more room to actually write a real story that involves him in it because they can make him do and say things that the story needs a protagonist to do and say. They do a clever job of giving him a bit of moral gray at the beginning with a good and honest father who tells him to do what's right, and a bunch of mischievous friends trying to get him to misbehave, so that whether you decide to run around stealing and murdering or decide to be good and helpful both are still kind of "in character". But there is a character, and I really like that and think that most Western RPGs are missing this.


I haven't finished it yet, so I can't speak for an overall review of how good it stays or how the narrative wraps up in the end, but I am very much liking it so far.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We need Lord StrAInge's Men, a troupe of AIs that can read, review and dismiss AI slop just as quickly as it's written instead of relying on avid human readers.




An AI that can accurately identify and dismiss slop is 90% of the way towards producing quality content, since you could just build the generative AI with that skill built in (and train them on it).


Which is to say, maybe in 10 years this will be a mostly non-issue. If they reach the point where they can generate thousands of genuinely high quality and entertaining stories, I'll happily consume the content. I think "human authorship" as a background principle is overrated. It has some value, but that value is overrated in comparison to the actual inherent value of the work. The problem with slop is that it's not very good, regardless of whether it's generated by humans or AI. Once it's good then we're good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Survivorship and selection bias works on the population level as well as the individual work level. How many hundreds or thousands of playwrights existed in Shakespeare's time? And yet most are forgotten, while the best of the best (Shakespeare's works) are what are remembered and enjoyed and studied.


Also, there definitely is variation within an individual author's works. How much time and effort do people spend studying "Two Gentlemen of Verona"? Is it actually a good work? Personally I haven't read it, but given how little it's talked about or ranked on people's lists, my guess is that it's mid and the only reason anyone ever talks about it at all is because Shakespeare is famous for his other plays. That is, Shakespeare wrote 38 plays and, while his skill was well above average, and therefore his average work is higher than the average play, they're not all Hamlet. But one of them was. He didn't write a hundred plays and then only publish the best, he wrote 38 and then published them all and then got famous for the best few (which in turn drove interest in the rest above what they actually deserve on their own merits).


In-so-far as AI is likely to vary less in "author" talent since whatever the most cutting edge models are will be widely copied, we should expect less variance in the quality of individual works. But there will still be plenty of variation, especially as people get better at finding the right prompts and fine-tuning to create different deliberate artistic styles (and drop that stupid em-dash reliance).


I tentatively agree that there are limits to this. If you took AI from 5 years ago there is no way it would ever produce anything publishably good. If you take AI from today I don't think it could ever reach the upper tier of literature like Shakespeare or Terry Pratchett. However this statistical shotgun approach still allows one to reach above their station. But the top 1% of AI work today might be able reach Twilight levels, and if each of those has a 1 in million chance of going viral and being the next Twilight, then you only need to publish a hundred million of them and hope you get lucky. Clearly we've observed that you don't need to be Shakespeare in order to get rich, its as much about catching the public interest and catering to (and being noticed by) the right audience as it is about objective quality, and that's much more a numbers game.


I do think that AI lacks the proper level of coherence and long-term vision to properly appeal to a targeted audience the way something like Twilight or Harry Potter does. But a human curator (or possibly additional specialized AI storyboard support) could probably pick up the slack there (although at that point it's not quite the shotgun approach, more of a compromise between AI slopping and human authorship, and mixes the costs and benefits of both)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It also amplifies the effect through the amplified productivity. That is, you can achieve greater success with a lower mean quality, because instead of having a thousand humans write a thousand works and then pick the best one, you can write ten million AI works and then pick the best one, allowing you to select more standard deviations up. Which means that there will be literal millions of AI slop work of very low average quality just in the hope that one will rise to the top.


This makes discovery a lot harder and waste more time from pioneers reading slop in order to find the good stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Kind of. I guess it's Berkson's paradox applied to a specific class of cases where the the output is easy to observe (and often just "this is a big enough deal for me to have noticed it"), and the variable you care about is harder to directly observe than other variables.