PokerPirate
3d ago
In my reply to @clo above I mention having just read an easy-greek reader of The Illiad... but since you mention Sherlock Holmes... I feel obligated now to mention that I just received an attic greek translation of Sherlock Holmes from amazon this week. I've been really enjoying reading these "modern ancient greek" stories recently.
PokerPirate
3d ago
I just read Ho epi Troian Polemos. It's an easy-greek reader that tells the story of the Illiad using only ~400 greek words. It's designed for someone who has had about 1 semester of greek studies.
If you're actually interested enough in the books to re-read a translation, then I recommend starting to just go to the original language!
PokerPirate
4d ago
I teach computer science and so I look at a lot of people's hands as I watch them type on the keyboard. I'd guess that about 1/3 of female students have nails long enough that they cannot type comfortably on a keyboard, and this meaningfully impacts their performance in my classes. (Foreign-born women do not have this problem; only American-born women.) I don't see any painted nails though, just grotesquely large nails.
The median parental income at this school is $500k/year, so these are pretty upper class women.
PokerPirate
10d ago
It's time for the daily Two Minutes Hate against translators/localizers/paraphrasers who take unjustified liberties with the source material. "Said" rather than "had said"? "Old gentleman" rather than "gentleman"? Commas rather than em dashes? No repetition of "my son"?
This week I was reading my bible in greek and noticed that in Matt 15:17 uses the word ἀφεδρῶνα (toilet). Sadly, none of the popular translations like NIV/ESV actually include this word in their translation :(
PokerPirate
10d ago
Dell-Mann Amnesia is related. But the effect I'm thinking about / worried about is different.
PokerPirate
11d ago
This is the sort of high-quality motte post about random topics I've never thought about that I love to see. Thank you.
I have a meta-comment, however, about themotte: I wonder how dangerous high quality posts like this are that are outside my area of expertise?
What I mean by that is that I don't have enough background knowledge to fully judge the accuracy of this post. I will probably make future decisions based on this information though. And I suspect that there are enough well written posts like this that contain enough not-quite-perfectly-accurate statements that I will make suboptimal decisions in the future based on motte comments that I thought were correct but turned out not to be. And I wonder what the cumulative negative effects of this will be on my life.
PokerPirate
13d ago
"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."
According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...
PokerPirate
16d ago
Foreign governments have long been trying to monetize this, as well, paying handsomely for information provided by insiders.
Actually, American spies are famously recruited for very cheap prices. For example Ronald Pelton sold the secrets of the multi-billion dollar Operation Ivy Bells to the Soviet KGB for only $35k.
PokerPirate
16d ago
My vomit-inducing custom house is approximately three-fourths complete.
This is the first I've noticed your roof is so shallow and you have no eves. I live in perfect-weather-california, and even here I know of lots of homeowners who complain about weather-induced problems from this type of roof.
I am jealous that you actually know where all your pipes/wires are and what they do...
PokerPirate
17d ago
My impression is that morale is sky-high. Military folk love to play with their toys and they're getting to play with essentially zero risk right now. The US Navy is doing all sorts of things it hasn't had the change to do since WWII, like sinking ships with submarines and launching broadside attacks with cannons. As much as I disapprove morally, these are legitimately fun things to do.
PokerPirate
19d ago
Maybe in San Francisco. But here in my bubble in LA nursing is higher status. The only status conveyed by SWE is the status of money.
PokerPirate
20d ago
right to giant congress
Wow. I never knew there were originally 12 amendments in the bill of rights. I feel ashamed of my civics education.
Also, I'm fully convinced. Let's complete the Bill of Rights.
PokerPirate
23d ago
You would have needed a decent full rack of machines in a data center to do a moderately large scale search task back then. No GPUs though. These days, that same task can be done on a single machine that cost <<$5k. Hardware efficiency gains have been massive.
PokerPirate
23d ago
I understand. Modern LLMs have not meaningfully impacted search at all. Our ability to semantically search documents in a particular technical domain has not advanced tremendously in the last decade. word2vec (2012) and BERT (2017) were both meaningful step changes (but only a small step). Nothing in the generative/LLM era has meaningfully impacted search.
PokerPirate
23d ago
I said this in a comment last week, but the utility would be more like "search all the depositions we have on file and pull all the ones where a witness testified about X". Well, we have tens of thousands of depositions on file, most in PDF but some in a special format used for court transcriptions. Conservatively assuming 100 pages per depo and 140 words per page, that comes out to something like half a billion tokens of context required, before we even consider that PDFs take more tokens than plain text, and a lot more if they haven't been OCR'd (which most of these haven't).
This is well-within the technological capability of 2010 AI systems (using techniques that look nothing like chatgpt and where concepts like "context windows" don't apply). So the lack of a tool that does this for you has nothing to do with technical limits on AI, but only on someone's desire to build it/market it to you.
PokerPirate
26d ago
Yes, every moderately educated person knows all of this. I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.
PokerPirate
26d ago
Like I said in my post:
I have a decent sense of what happened for each of these topics individually
I'm not looking for individualized explanations of these events. I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society mind changes that can simultaneously explain all of them.
PokerPirate
27d ago
I would be very interested in reading some effort posts that explore how people actually change their core moral principles. Off the top of my head, some of the historical examples that I don't fully understand are:
- how exactly did gay marriage and pro-choice become the default?
- how do religious groups reliably attract converts (or prevent deconversion)?
- how did America become anti-alcohol and then pro-alcohol so quickly in the Prohibition era? (These required Constitutional Amendments! I can't fathom 2/3rds of the population agreeing on something like this.)
- how did America change it's mind on eugenics / slavery / the Indian question / so many other political topics so abruptly?
- why did American fail to win the "hearts and minds" in Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam?
I have a decent sense of what happened for each of these topics individually, but I feel like there's a lot of commonalities / general principles that good be extracted here. I feel like this could provide a good sense of "epistemic hygiene" to help me from changing my mind when I don't intend to, help me better predict what future society will look like, and help me better convince people of my own moral intuitions. Maybe something like this already exists buried in the lesswrong archives?
PokerPirate
27d ago
I'm just a puny protestant, but I see my own spiritual journey reflected in everything you wrote :)
I always thought mission was equally required for both men and women, and only adult converts "get out" of mission.
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