OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I work in aged care.
The only significant use I have seen for it at work thus far is listening to and transcribing conversations in meetings, like an automated secretary.
Management also set up a policy bot, so you can ask the bot about the existing policies on such-and-such procedure, and it will search through the intranet and tell you, but thus far it does not seem to be widely used.
For the most part I think nobody knows what it is. All the doctors and RNs I talk to make their own judgements, and find the idea of outsourcing patient welfare decisions to a computer terrifying. Personal care workers and lifestyle workers have no use for it. Residents mostly have no idea what it is. I appear to have been identified by a few co-workers as relatively tech-savvy (you help people log in or troubleshoot a computer problem a few times and suddenly you have a reputation...), so there have been a few cases where I have reluctantly explained to people what ChatGPT is and how you use it. In practice I try not to encourage its use, though.
The most visible use of LLMs or bot-generated content I see at work, as I've commented before, is via YouTube slop. We have large televisions that can access YouTube and sometimes use them to play music, classic movies, church services, the news, or anything else residents might be interested in. Search results are increasingly polluted by AI-gen content, and sometimes YouTube automatically rolls over to them. This is a regular if minor frustration for care and lifestyle workers looking for good shows or playlists.
I probably can't generalise from my field, but if I had to guess, I'd say that for most jobs 'on the ground', which require either interacting with people or interacting with real, physical things, AI/LLMs/bots remain a solution looking for a problem. I know my case that the site manager is quite technophilic and is intrigued by the potential for AI, but thus far the use cases just don't exist.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated.
I don't think this is true. I think people dislike the auto-generation itself. The simple test of this would be that you can show somebody a text, ask if they enjoy it, get a result, and then reveal to them that it was bot-written and watch them get angry.
I'm willing to bet that if you ran a study where you gave the same text to three groups, where you tell the first group nothing, tell the second group that the text is written by a bot, and tell the third group that the text is written by a human, and then ask them all to rate the text, the second group would rate it the lowest.
Maybe that's irrational, in the same way that people will prefer hand-made or artisanal objects to machined objects, but if so it's still a highly predictable irrationality.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I do like some (but not all) of Scott's writing, which tends to be very long, but I can easily understand how someone who learned by reading Scott would come to conflate length with wisdom.
For what it's worth, this isn't meant to call out self_made_human, whom I have nothing against, and at any rate certainly isn't the worst example of this trend.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Since when was AI ever fun? Or at least LLMs? I've seen fun things with pre-GPT chatbots, I guess, but LLMs have always been mediocrity machines.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
If you've ever signed out of YouTube and erased all your device history, and looked for anything fresh, it's amazing how much bot slop there is everywhere. Try 'revenge stories' or something for a particularly egregious look at the genre.
I've been a cynic/pessimist/skeptic about 'AI' here before, but one thing I think it will do a lot of is spam, and unless filter technology keeps up and matches it, I think there is a very real chance that platforms like YouTube become genuinely unuseable within the next few years.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
There's a lot I don't like on the Motte, but when it comes down to it, I would rather hate a post written by an actual human than I would engage with anything written or polished by a bot.
I was not particularly a fan of the This Is Going To Hurt review, which I thought was a bit meandering and over-long. The best book reviews are punchier than that. Still, judging from the past book review winners, ACT readers have very different taste to me, so maybe it's in it with a shot. But again, I'd prefer a meandering ramble from a human than something by a bot.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
I think if you had asked even the most ardent American patriot on 9/12/01, “Do you think we should invade and occupy Afghanistan for the next 20 years?” he would have looked at you like you were crazy before answering “No. We’ll just bomb the shit out of them.” We could have gone in, bombed whatever we felt like bombing, taken out the Taliban leadership, hunted down al-Qaeda without letting Pakistan know, and left.
No, I don't think you could have. I think that's the same kind of 'hard man' fantasy that gets you Trump saying they should just tale Iraq's oil or whatever other nonsense.
Pragmatically, the question is whether just bombing Afghanistan and leaving would meaningfully contribute to fighting al Qaeda or global terrorism, and the answer there is "no". Sure, you could try to take out the Taliban leadership and then leave, and what do you think happens in Afghanistan after that? Just blowing everything up was not a solution.
Politically, is that something that the US could viably have done, considering domestic pressures, the ideological and cultural mood in the country, and the international situation? I do not think it could have.
As for wounded pride, I suppose I just agree with the old adage, “war is politics by other means.” If the offense is great enough, war seems like a pretty reasonable response.
I think that killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people over twenty years is neither a reasonable nor a moral response to September 11, all the more so because the the majority of those casualties had nothing to do with September 11.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
I also do not consider 'mended our wounded pride' to be a valid objective for a military operation.
I was thirteen years old. I remember being at home, and my parents came up to me, with very serious expressions, and told me there had been a terrorist attack in America.
I was confused. I was not confused by the attack - I was confused by why they were telling me. A terrorist attack in another country? Aren't those very common? World Trade Centre? Never heard of it. Is three thousand a lot, relatively speaking?
After some more time had passed I did figure out why it was a big deal, but I remember that in the first moments, my reaction was to be surprised that people were acting as if it were a big deal. Mum and dad never told me about random news events in other countries before. My first reaction, therefore, was to get on with what I was interested in, without having any emotional reaction. It was the same kind of story, to me, as "many dead in earthquake in India", or "Russian separatists bomb city in the Caucasus", or "civil war breaks out in Latin America". I heard it, went "oh, okay", and that was it.
Over the coming weeks I did realise its importance. I remember thinking that the real crime of the hijackers wasn't killing such-and-such number of Americans, but rather making America afraid, and now America was going to make the entire rest of the world afraid in revenge.
Though I am a bit ashamed of teenage-me's initial response, I am proud that my teenage self then immediately opposed both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11, or to make the world safer from terrorism.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
You know that your problem is still that every time you are asked for specific examples, all you have is a cherry-picked list of incidents across centuries or millennia, most of which on examination are innocuous.
If you repeat it often enough, it will not thereby become true.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Then why are you so shocked that antisemitism is growing among Whites as they become aware of the cultural mechanisms that have vilified White identity and engaged in strong activism against it?
In America, aren't whites the least anti-semitic racial group, at least if you don't count Jews themselves?
There isn't actually a great awakening here. Statistically, as I understand it, blacks and Middle Easterners are the most anti-semitic racial groups in the US, and Asians mostly just don't care.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Do Christians also have to reject their god? Are you a "Christianity is a Jew-cucked slave morality cult" white nationalist? Or are you a "Judeo-Christianity is a Jew lie" white nationalist?
The short answer is yes. I have beaten my head into the SS wall before, and he does hate Christianity as well.
You may notice that his criticisms of Judaism all apply to Christianity as well. He accuses Judaism of being 'slave morality', which is a far more traditional critique of Christianity. He's moved on to repeatedly attempting to use the Divine Name in a mocking way - that's as offensive to Christians as it is to Jews. Now, as you can see down-thread, I think his real objection to Christianity is that Christianity is 1) uncomfortably Jewish, and 2) an obstacle to some sort of white identitarian politics. If you could produce a Christianity that is purged of either any link to the history of Israel, and its resolutely non-racial orientation, I think he would drop his objection to it, but, well, that has been tried in the past.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
'Serving himself' is not a clear category. Cain was obviously self-motivated in committing the murder, but he was not benefitting himself in committing the murder. The phrase 'serving himself' could cover either.
To recap a little, my position is:
Firstly, it does not make sense to describe the murder of Abel as an act of 'redistribution', or as 'socialism' in any meaningful sense. No material goods nor the distribution thereof were involved. Cain did not believe that Abel was 'stealing' anything, or that Abel's possessions were obtained unjustly. The motive for Cain's murder was envy. He acted out of hatred. Abel did well, Cain did poorly, and out of resentment Cain murdered his brother and then sought to pretend otherwise.
Secondly, Cain's motive had nothing to do with 'self-preservation'. No defense of Cain's actions along those lines is viable. Cain was not defending himself or his interests, or protecting his posterity, or making the evolutionarily optimal decision. Abel's life in no way threatened any of those things.
The fact someone else [generic: "your brother"][2] does something better than you does something to you. You invested for no reward. You feel robbed and you feel angry[3].
Congratulations - this is correct. Abel did better than Cain, and Cain felt envious, angry, and wrathful. But of course the point is that Cain was wrong to feel that way. Feelings are not self-justifying. See Jonah chapter 4. God's repeated question to Jonah is, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
So what is the point of this sophistry about redistribution, socialism, self-preservation, or evolution? The first murder was not about any of those things. Okay, I understand that now you are retreating to a more subtle point - that the psychological tendencies that underlie and motivate Cain's murder are also present in the motivations for socialist politics today. But 1) I think you should have made that point more clearly above, 2) that argument that socialism is based on envy is commonplace in conservative politics and you do not need to drag in Cain and Abel to make that point, and 3) any political position, socialism included, is held by an immense number of people for an immense number of reasons, it's impossible to fully peer into any individual's heart, and human motives are always irreducibly mixed. Envy, pride, resentment, etc., are ubiquitous and present among the adherents of pretty much every political creed imaginable.
Bringing up Cain is just a combination of bad biblical exegesis and bad political analysis. You were responding to Pongalh's correct point that socialists believe that natural resources are a kind of common heritage that should not be privately owned with a non sequitur about Cain and Abel. I think you should try to speak more clearly.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
Objectively in what way? In terms of objective self-interest, it's hard to see any benefit for Cain here - even if we take God's wrath out of the picture entirely, what benefit is there for Cain in murdering someone who seems like a valuable ally? If you want to bring up evolution here, Cain and Abel are brothers - kin selection seems like it would recommend Cain and Abel working together to help each other. I don't think there's either a biblical or an evolutionary justification for the idea that somebody else being talented is inherently a risk to you, or for the idea that destroying a similarly- or more-talented person to yourself is necessarily beneficial.
Incidentally, it is not clear whether Abel was in fact superior to Cain. Abel was a herdsman and Cain was a farmer, and implicitly they both seem to have been capable in their roles. Normally I would have thought that herdsmen and farmers can mutually benefit from working with each other. Per Hebrews 11:3, Abel's advantage was his righteousness, but righteousness is not zero-sum. I do not see how Cain can become more righteous by murdering Abel, nor how Abel's righteousness in any way disadvantages Cain. In purely material terms, would they not both have benefitted more through cooperation?
Cain obtained neither relative nor absolute advantage through murdering his brother.
The idea that it's 'objectively' right to kill a friendly, cooperative person merely because they are not yourself is ludicrous.
But here, the message is essentially saying that these natural impulses- you have "envy, hatred, and pride" to keep you alive and reproducing- are in conflict with God's will?
There is no sense whatsoever in which murdering Abel improved Cain's ability to reproduce, or provide for his offspring. Likewise there is no sense whatsoever in which Abel's life, or his righteousness and favour with God, disadvantaged Cain, such that he would have had to kill him to secure his ability to have a family. That is simply not in the text, and neither can it be reasonably extrapolated from the text.
(It may also be worth noting that all of Cain's line died out in the Flood. You might say that counting God's intervention is cheating, but I think that trying to read the early chapters of Genesis while removing God from the narrative is absurd. The whole story is about God. We aren't talking about a historical coincidence where it just randomly happened that Cain's descendants all died. The story of Genesis deliberately interweaves historical events with human righteousness or unrighteousness and corresponding divine action.)
As Cain points out to God, what the fuck? How could self-preservation be the wrong answer here
This story is not about self-preservation.
Why, yes, if you interpret Cain's actions to be something that they were clearly not, and in service of a cause that they were clearly not in service of, you may come up with some different conclusions. But I don't see what weight or meaning that would have for anybody else. Cain's murder of Abel had nothing to do with survival or self-preservation - not even through an evolutionary lens. Evolution is not a war of all against all, where the most psychotically murderous being wins. Evolution and natural selection include cooperation and family.
The first sentence here made me think it was some sort of Latin rite Catholic lesbian bar.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that 'Western Mass' means 'Massachusetts', and I am still disappointed, because this story could only be improved by the inexplicable involvement of the Catholic Church.
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