RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well, without making doxing too easy, I can assure you it's not such an establishment. We have bad universities in Australia like Charles Sturt University or Federation University. My point is that even Group of Eight universities are getting to be like this too, they're debasing their increasingly undeserved reputations to transfer vast amounts of Chinese, student and government money to administrators.
Same thing has been happening in Canada and America. Huge grade inflation at high-end universities, while teachers bemoan the stupidity, laziness and ignorance of their students. Just the other day there was another top level post about students who struggled with fractions and quite basic maths somehow getting university admissions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Humanities (at a fairly prestigious university in Australia). The most mathematics I did was cubic polynomials at one point (that course was also the most challenging). I can't speak for the STEM side of things but I'd estimate that the majority of students were in limp-wristed and unrigorous degrees.
There were people going through via plagiarism alone, foreign students who couldn't really speak English that well and domestic students who were quite stupid.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iphones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.
I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment. You'd never see them rob some 2 metre tall bodybuilder, even those 'schizophrenics' who push people onto subway lines or whatever, they'll go for someone weaker than themselves. Maybe the payoff for killing is hatred or jealousy rather than pure monetary gain...
I agree that swift discipline is the cure but I think that they all have some ability to judge, even if it's some reptile-brain 'this guy looks alpha better not attack him' level. More specifically I think some middle-class coddled brat is going to be really whiny and irritating when running into some obstacle but won't rob a store because he/she assesses 'I can just get my parents to pay for it'. Whereas the hardened thief calculates more along the line of 'who cares if I go to prison, my mate Bronco is there, I know lots of people who went to prison, and I don't want to look like a pussy and I need this cash fast'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.
This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.
Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.
If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.
The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
They can and do change over time. But it took centuries and very specific conditions to change one specific English culture to another English culture, an enormously complex process with unpredictable results. Trying to do something similar with Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan in a few decades is a much bigger ask.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
freely and willingly choose religious warfare
I was reading a history book talking about Episcopalian death squads running around killing Presbyterians in Britain, in the 17th century. About half the book is a game of musical chairs where various sects are persecuting eachother, none of them even that distinctive besides the Puritans who just hated fun... totally different mindset to today.
Likewise, just the other day, I was reading on twitter about how Sunnis were bullying Shia and Sikhs in British 'multi-faith prayer rooms', hiding their prayer books and similar. How they'd treat others were they in charge is pretty clear, they're pretty pushy even as a minority. You don't want to be Shia in Saudi Arabia. There are some actual differences in nationality for this, so it's more explicable.
I think it'd be funny to tell social liberals sanctimoniously 'read more and educate yourselves about history!' but it wouldn't work.
it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.
The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.
Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Instead the oil rights got bought largely by China IIRC. The US military has essentially been securing China's energy imports.
(And the '''grand strategists''' in the Pentagon/State Department blob never got purged or anything, they're still around)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man
Maybe in an arena with rules and social judgement for men who beat up women. Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic, good chance they start with a sucker punch or are in some cluttered space where technique is less relevant and both sides are improvising.
80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.
I agree 100% regarding weapons and avoiding fights. My point is that the sex that gets men to carry heavy things has no place in a fight fundamentally and should avoid it wherever possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Trying to wage war against computing is like waging war against guns, you are sure to lose. Personally I don't see any way out of this mess besides a miracle. Our civilization really struggled with baby's first game theory of 'avoid mutually assured destruction.' We still haven't cracked down on gain of function viruses. What chance is there that we can manage superintelligence properly? Maybe actions right now will turn out to be vaguely helpful by some unknown method but my expectations are very low.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Even if things go well and the plebs do get scraps off the plate, how do we subdivide that amongst ourselves? X was an armed burglar, Y kicked puppies, Z posted mean things on the internet, ZA was a really nice guy, ZB is from a historically marginalized group... I think we're being too rosy-eyed about resource distribution. If we're carving up the lightcone, we can also reproduce fast, clone ourselves, use up superhuman amounts of resources. We might drop down to subsistence quickly (by immortal standards). What if the people born in simulation demand fleshbags share the wealth they're hogging with inefficient resource use?
We might have extremely toxic discourse like 'Alice worked 10 hours a day as a nurse and is poor as fuck, Bob bought bitcoin in the hopes of buying some child pornography and is a millionaire' except it's NVIDIA shares and scaled up immeasurably, such that Alice's whole bloodline is born into poverty for the rest of time because she took on student debt and never accumulated capital?
There are all kinds of resource-distribution problems that deserve consideration. I think that this is something we need to be thinking about beforehand. Most important of course is not letting psychopathic men/machines exterminate the rest of us but even the lesser problems of wealth distribution have already seen tens of millions butchered!
I think we need a strong consensus on distribution of power, to prevent a singleton.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Has AI actually done any of those things?
The Nvidia AI chips in Russian missiles, performing autonomous targeting to bypass jamming, per my links.
Also, per the chip article, some do work and that's the key part? It's easier to simulate a chip design and check if it works than to design a chip with superior performance.
I think the trend is pretty clear. Right now AI is causing some unemployment, producing some economic gains (mostly concentrated in big tech), adding some military gains. I expect this trend to continue and accelerate as the tech gets better and adoption improves.
Where is the evidence that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? Reminds me of the Yes Minister quote about thousands of new staff being hired to deal with the chaos caused by the labour-saving computers... but we don't seem to see increases in employment amongst AI adopters.
People are willing to pay vast amounts of money for obviously worthless things on a regular basis - NFTs are one infamous example.
NFTs aren't useful but people certainly did value them, it's just a novel subgenre of art/signalling good. I personally don't want to buy a bored ape or ugly abstract paintings, a CS GO knife skin or an extremely expensive watch that's functionally inferior to my Casio but I accept they have some kind of value. Anyway, people aren't buying AI because it's classy to have (indeed, its gotten pretty low-status), they buy it because of its utility, convenience, cost-efficiency.
I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.
Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.
Same with the guy who bought bitcoin early, I think this is why crypto is so widely hated online, people got rich in an 'unorthodox' way compared to hard work and high skill. Plus, crypto bros come off as low-status. Same with landlords, there's considerable bitterness towards boomers who bought a house that then 10xed while they were also getting decent yields off it. People see a boomer and think 'I am much more deserving but much poorer, the economy is terrible.' Same with 'billionaires' or 'tech-bros' in aspects of the popular imagination.
Of course it's always been this way. In the time of the Stuarts kings would give huge payments to their friends, the navy might be starved for shot while some sexy duchess was dripping with gems and titles. Good old fashioned sinecures and fraud is as old as civilization. But with social media this is rubbed in people's noses by algorithms deliberately trying to rage-bait them. There are people whose whole lifestyle is funded by rage-baiting and attention-grabbing for being obnoxious lowlifes. They are pushing everyone else down in social-economic hierarchy.
The economy feels fake and gay, in other words. To a large extent it is more fake and gay than before (SF venture capital especially) but even more so, it feels that way. Imagine being socially-bamboozled into taking on huge amounts of debt, studying and jumping through hoops to get a degree only to find it's mostly worthless. Now have fun interviewing with dozens of companies and jumping through endless hoops to get a meaningless job. HR makes a complete mess of things while you work, tiktok shows you the luxurious lifestyle of your unworthy betters... Very depressing.
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