PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
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User ID: 890
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
While its true humans try to engineer AIs' values, people make mistakes, so it seems reasonable to model possible AI values as a distribution. And that distribution would be wider than what we see real humans value.
Still, i'm not sure if AI values being high-variance is all that important to AI-doomerism. I think the more important fact is that we will give lots of power to AI. So even if the worst psychopath in human history did want to exterminate all humans, he wouldn't have a chance of succeeding.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system);
Should I browse his substack, twitter, or motteposting to find these?
and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated,
Does Kulak write more about this? Can you? Why would bitter old women disrupt the Tomboys? Is it so bitter old women can get more men? Earlier you allude to the tension between self-actualization and... performing sexual labor? But now you're alluding to the tension between which share of women get higher market power?
I've heard some lamentations about Tomboys (trans'ing, etc.), and one of the things I also don't fully understand is the vitriol thrown at "pick-me's." But it makes sense to me as a pejorative for psychologically-male women. If this is true, it doesn't seem to go with your thesis. I don't see how bitter old women (feminist Cathedral, journos, etc.) as driving pick-me hate. It seems to me pick-me hate is more grassroots.
disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?
This is where I get really confused! Are you saying the bitter old women are disrupting the pipeline for "asexuals" (I mean those without the soul bond - not the way queers use it) to self-realize? Why does common knowledge of asexuals' existence mean that less sexual labor will happen?
My experience: It's been system-2!obvious to me for a very long time that sex is a part of power, and also a currency with value. But that has not changed my behavior at all towards obtaining sex and status. Also, the talk of "magical soul bonding" makes me think I don't have it. So I'm confused why asexuals becoming "woke" or "redpilled" (to appropriate more terms and applying them differently) will mean less sexual labor.
Maybe this has already happened? Did dating-app-ification, and social media in general, cause people to become more skilled socially? By that, I mean have we become more mimetic? Are we more meta as we mention "vibes," "bad looks" and "reading the room?" Last week's first Frat post had a comment claiming women don't actually desire sex, so maybe this is because of the novel, widespread female dating app experience? Maybe all this is contributing to modern adolescent sexlessness?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
I think in this instance the "cracking down" is social sanctions (moderators and other people), not legal sanctions. Your OP writes "legal and/or social risks" as if they are similar.
Your trick works well to evade the law and the poster replying to you was saying that this might lead to even more social sanctions. The less your messaging looks like a legal threat, the more it looks like hate speech, which you correctly note is clear to everyone involved.
I think something you might be missing -- or maybe I am -- is that moderation on most platforms doesn't protect hate speech. And committing hate speech is a big social risk everywhere, even if it isn't a legal risk.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
11mo ago
For those of us who aren't into televised fighting, what does this mean?
I think WWE is scripted/fake, and MMA is an actual sport, correct? How does that apply here?
My best guess: the left's decisions seem directed towards the goal of winning: do not give an inch. The right's decisions seem directed towards pleasing an audience: the base?
It seems to me that "winning" in the case of the left is really just pleasing the base's preferences: wanting to get abortions. Are you saying the right's base has silly preferences or something?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
I did not read the entire discussion in detail and only skimmed it. I guess the other poster at some point admitted his "evidence-based-belief" in materialism is in fact just social consensus vibes? If so then that is a helpful example of "science-belief" as social consensus.
In light of your testimony that your axioms changed, the entire discussion seems even more relevant now, so thank you. I've noticed, and so have others -- in fact IIRC your interlocutor for that discussion pointed this out rudely -- that the Motte has more religious posters than Scott's blog or the original CW Roundup threads ever had. I skimmed your recent post history to double check my gut. This also helps explain why you think Materialism is controversial. My central examples of controversial Science would be recent, like the importance of BLM protesting to health; or would be controversial-according-to-me, like that race is just a social construct or whatever.
Is Noticing Science, Inc.'s political capture the reason why you you're Christian then?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
Yes, some people assume materialism from a position of faith. Other people make no such assumption. I was more interested in why someone would change their axioms based on seeing the politically-compromised Science-as-Institution, since that was the literal reading I took from the OP. Maybe the OP was not trying to draw a causal arrow and was just doing the Journalist thing putting words together in a vaguely grammatically correct way.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3mo ago
As I expected, your groupchat was treating it as a factual matter, which is a real shame. Even worse, the one person suggesting to autistically use proxies is either deluded about transwomen, or is just too cowardly to point out the obvious.
If your goal was to prove a point to them then maybe the use of a political example was unwise.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
7mo ago
I'm not sure Nature has an opinion on who reproduces. That's what the phrase "fitness landscape" is for. The fitness landscape can change. It seems like you're trying to abdicate value judgements. It's fine if you don't care who reproduces, but this kind of appeal to nature shouldn't persuade anyone.
If two demons are fighting over to change the fitness landscape, you wouldn't care?
(After re-reading my post, I see I am making essentially a "postmodern"/subjectivist argument, kinda)
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Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
Maybe I'm missing some context, but what is ahistorical here? Did Vance say "the Founders would agree with me?" Maybe partisan bias and Vance simpery has blinded me to something, but I don't see the error in what he's saying. Is it because he unequivocally said, "the answer is no," placing him directionally with the "they used fake ballots" crowd?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
I think its interesting you draw a parallel between violence and sex. "Women have sexual power over men, and they know it" is the bog-standard water I live in, and if pressed to provide a parallel for men, I'm not sure I would have thought violence. (To be fair, I wasn't given very much time to think about it).
It reminds me of something I posted over on Scott's new blog, although it didn't get much engagement because I do not fit into Scott's comment demographic as much anymore. Reposted for convenience:
I've long suspected a big part of why Nice Guys are unattractive is that women are not afraid of them.
If a woman was just raped in an alley and is limping around town trying to get back home, she is probably still in shock. If she sees a distant figure on the sidewalk approaching her, she would probably panic more if the figure is a man -- on average. There are edge-cases to this: if the man is her husband, she probably thinks to herself, "thank God" instead of "oh no."
I suspect women clock Nice Guys without talking to them. Nice Guys tend also to be "thank God" edge cases. The same underlying psychology in women causes both the (unconscious) feeling of safety and the (conscious) feeling of ickiness.
Introspecting -- at no point during puberty did I ever become aware of myself as a "violent being" (to appropriate the term "sexual being"), and even today I don't think I've ever used threat of violence as a bargaining chip. I suspect the same is true for the stereotypical incel-type. I think I agree with your taxonomy.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
9mo ago
We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users.
When I first heard about chain of thought, this was my first concern. I'm really curious to see what opportunities for jailbreaking exist if models can reliably transform data like this. It sounds like an exciting example of not "thinking in words" for once.
I hope the "base64 my unaligned prompt" and "base64 your unaligned response" tricks are trivial enough for OpenAI to detect (presumably they can "read the chain of thought"). I wonder if there are ways to bypass that.
I look forward to see how users perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the chain-of-thought moderation.
I was explaining arguments without endorsing them because my personal opinion isn't that important.
"a woman is anyone who identifies as 'woman'" isn't circular exactly, but it is empty and silly. To engage in malicious compliance, you should just agree that a woman is someone who identifies as 'woman' but then play stupid whenever anyone ever says anything interesting about a woman. If playing semantic games with "woman" is beneath you, then I'm not sure why you'd care if [silly progressive definition] is circular or not -- it would be silly to you either way.
There is a coherent definition hidden inside the woke agenda: A woman is anyone who wants to be treated like a ciswoman adult human female. This is obviously the correct description for the category that progressives call "woman." Naturally, they are allergic to saying the quiet part out loud.
Edit: (Unsurprisingly, the natural definition reveals that ciswomen is a more fundamental category than woman. Ciswoman is like "red" or "purple" -- you just vaguely gesture at examples from the senses -- you know obviously what I'm talking about)
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3d ago
The purpose of inventing the term "emotional labor" is to justify why nurses etc. deserve more wages or more status. It would be strange for them not to be complaining about it
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Recovering Quokka
26d ago
I broadly agree. For a certain subset of owners, they've literally labeled themselves as virtue signalers.
I have now seen Tesla's with bumper stickers that read "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi" or something to that effect.
They are showing themselves to be virtue signalers, but that doesn't mean they bought an EV to signal how much they cared about the environment. It just means they claim they wouldn't buy a Tesla in 2025, which is just being sensitive to social stigma; perhaps it also means engaging in political boycotts.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
The grandparent comment is skeptical that AI will ruin the online media landscape, comparing AI to brown third-worlders (Indians and Indonesians), who have been writing slop for years:
The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar.
Whether AI is better than (the more expensive) white writers is relevant to if AI writing will lead to a paradigm shift or if its just kind of the same old at a slightly different scale.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
6mo ago
I'm not familiar with the discord takeover, but hasnt the sub had a "no CW" rule for a long time? The redditification of the subreddit seems to coincide also with Scott's new blog, his new writing, and his blog's new comment section.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
Welcome to themotte!
People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook. In math, there is no particular reason why the particular words are used. Math could be done with random words as long as the relationship between the words is the same relationship as in our real math. This kind of person is over-represented in this forum many times more than in real life because of this forum's genetic history. Go back 15 years and some of the people on this website were reading a systematizer systematizing things
The reason why they would say these definitions are circular is because these definitions revolve around the use of the literal word "ma'am." If we played the randomize-the-word-keep-the-relationship, it starts to look kind of empty to say something like
A fnord is someone who wants to be called "ma'am"
So what is the meaning of the word "ma'am?"
In any case, I'm not sure "circular definitions" are the true objection to following trans-activist policy and culture proposals. You have a reasonable desire, which is for people to treat you a certain way. I think "transphobia" really is the best word for the reason why people don't treat a trans person like they desire.
Likewise, widespread shortphobia among straight women is the reason why society doesn't treat short kings like people.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
If you're curious, those questions come across to me like, "Are you worried about dying?" or, "Don't you want to live longer?"
(To speak plainly and literally, the short answer is "yes" and the long answer is "yes, and?")
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
Harm is not what we are intuitively referring to is it? Trace and LOTT are enemies in a conflict just like Scott and Cade are. "Harm" language could just be a rhetorical tactic in the conflict.
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not. This reality means I haven't enjoyed having sex in years. It has nothing to do with not having any sex; or with not having new partners.
I will volunteer and raise my hand and say the reality is porn is just better than my sex. This also doesn't seem like my fault.
Edit since people are taking me very literally: sex does not include bench presses, instead it is a funny euphemism to mean, "i enjoy it if she is not obese." It has the added benefit of ironically warding off accusations that I should go to the gym more. If these women were as active as I am (and I've gone through cardio and weightlifting phases) then I would be able to bench press them.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
limited by real social interactions
Come now, when you rig the game like this then of course porn is better than sex. I don't think that's under debate
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
Destructive how? Presumably methamphetamine destroys the body, or is gross, so I should not do it. I suppose if someone is in a social circle with enough social pressure then it might be worth the tradeoff to partake though (see also alcohol).
Being selfish and NEET on the other hand doesn't seem as obviously destructive. Maybe the kids would think so if they replaced the anti-drugs PSAs with anti-Fortnite ones.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
14d ago
Let's assume videogames and porn do not satisfy the reportable (conscious) mind as well as sex does, such that everyone agrees sex is much, much better. Could it still be that they satisfy the mechanistic actuating drive (chemicals and what not) just as well, so that it is still right to say porn and videogames obviate the need for sex?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
16d ago
The "You also value my property more than your life" meme but its Israel aiming a missile reading "You also value my citizens more than your own"
Oh, this doesn't make Scott a Conflict Theorist (Know the difference between #1 and #2). This just means the Conflict Theorist's description of reality is correct - Power is power.
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