RedRegard
3mo ago
When comparing AI drawing abilities to writing abilities, I think a key difference is that for us as humans drawing slop is harder than writing slop. What I mean by this is that an AI can generate something like a 4K image of aliens with energy swords rendered in a hyper detailed yet ultra generic fashion, and the output is something that only 0.01% of humans have the technical skill to create. But when you ask an AI to write pages and pages of Shakespeare and the results are cliché ridden gibberish, you can only look at it and say that other than in terms of scale, I could’ve easily made this crap, if through some dada-style cut-and-paste technique if nothing else. Essentially putting letters in sequence to form words is easier than drawing entire images, and so when AI generates images, even though they’re just reconstituted from data sets on the basis of predictive software and so involve no actual drawing, they still seem impressive.
RedRegard
7mo ago
In the Iraq War documents, incident reports of the US army detail the deaths of 100k Iraqis at the hands of their own forces, of which about two thirds are civilian. These deaths, further, go above what other attempts at documenting war deaths reported, and they provide the most conservative estimate as they only include deaths drawn up in incident reports (i.e. if a helicopter launched a missile at a building and killed a bunch of people, this wouldn't find its way into incident reports, which are based on individual soldier reports of their interactions with the Iraqi public, nor would deaths caused by the chaos and privations of occupation), which are also likely to be biased by the soldiers reporting them.
The lessons learned from this I would say apply to the Israeli military operations. There is likely to be a far greater actual number of deaths than what's reported, as well as a huge number of civilian deaths relative to combatant, perhaps in the area of 2:1 at best, in all likelihood far worse.
RedRegard
7mo ago
The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
RedRegard
7mo ago
He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.
RedRegard
7mo ago
Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.
RedRegard
8mo ago
The difference between traditional forms of processing and the modern is that the modern kind is hyper optimized by capitalism, through vast amounts of capital and chemical engineering, for addictiveness and thence profitability. Healthiness could also be optimized for, but unfortunately it’s opaque to most consumers and doesn’t function as a schelling point in any case.
RedRegard
8mo ago
the vast majority of obesity is caused by neglecting fork-put-downs and overeating. You, unless you have a severe medical condition, are capable of simply not eating at every opportunity
This seems more interested in figuring out where to allocate blame, or castigating people for not being virtuous enough, than concrete results. If you’re a government charged with increasing citizen health then you will get results by doing things like limiting the amount of hunger-inducing additives, sugar, empty carbs in mass market food products, removing junk food vending machines from school hallways and other public spaces, etc. Also, culture and behaviour doesn’t generate spontaneously. Policy choices in the past shaped human behaviours of today. There’s a conspiracy run by corporations focused on manipulating people into being degenerate hedonists.
RedRegard
8mo ago
Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this -
The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.
RedRegard
8mo ago
You're assuming that CEO competence is unlimited in its range and potential. It could be that decisions CEOs make are fairly obvious and simple ones, that their skillsets are only somewhat more demanding than those of any other top tier professional, and that a lot of the variance of outcomes between companies comes down to more structural matters than whose at the helm. If business churn is more about structuralism than great man theory, then there are diminishing returns for attempting to poach talent.
RedRegard
9mo ago
Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.
RedRegard
9mo ago
What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?
It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.
Even government propaganda is capitalism now?
Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.
RedRegard
9mo ago
As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.
RedRegard
9mo ago
No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates
RedRegard
9mo ago
If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.
RedRegard
9mo ago
I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.
RedRegard
9mo ago
It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.
RedRegard
9mo ago
Yeah, i suppose if you're living somewhere with high inefficiency and waste the numbers will be extremely negative for all but the upper echelons of society. My model of modern society is that much of its value is produced by machines (capital) which only require skeleton crews of mechanics and engineers to maintain, and that asides from those specialists and the capitalists who own the machines, most other people are superfluous. On the other hand, democracy provides a brutish sort of power to those superfluous people, and thus they are able to extract value beyond what their economic potential would otherwise command. So the attempt to internally partition countries along these class lines could be seen as a class warfare attempt to undermine democracy.
RedRegard
9mo ago
Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical. I don't know if all things equal out in favor of them producing positive value, but I do know that it's tricky calculating such things and that your own calculations have so far neglected crucial points.
Also I don't think your numbers for the cost of schooling are correct. I thought there was an article on the original SSC saying the annual cost per student is 10k or something.
The original is at least readable. It suggests personality and context, the nature of which makes it funny. I can’t say that the ChatGPT examples in this thread have anything at all to make them worth reading. Like the best of what the bot produces, there’s sometimes this sense of airbrushed elegance, but never any sort of underlying texture.
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