Shrike
12hr ago
I don't think that this is logical, because something can be not taught for a period of time and still remain true.
I think the real sticking point for lots of Protestants is that that is considered a dealbreaker. The issue is less that it might be true and more that they would be forbidden from arguing that it is.
I say this while being aware that Protestants also often have weird dealbreakers, but the Catholic church has periodically forbidden viewpoints that were held throughout church history. For instance, my understanding is that Nicaea 2 anathematizes iconoclasts, which would excommunicate Catholic saints like Justin Martyr (who wrote that Christians did not crown their images, which is one form of icon veneration.)
This is compounded by the fact that while Protestants can be picky about who they let into their congregation, most Protestants* do not claim that their denomination is the only path to salvation and explicitly would say the opposite.
This doesn't mean Protestants are correct, but the intellectual world for Protestants is much more open and doesn't bind you to as many positions that were historically, at best, points of contention within the church. (For instance being Catholic might not be very appealing if you have doubts about the current understanding of the Papacy, which the Catholic church itself agrees was one that developed over centuries and was never held by large portions of the church.) Although obviously in practice plenty of Catholics believe in all sorts of non-Catholic doctrines and disbelieve all sorts of Catholic ones, it's much easier for a scrupulous Protestant to, say, believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary than it is for a scrupulous Catholic to question it.
*to include those who would profess to be Special Non-Protestants Actually, such as Baptists and Anglicans
Shrike
14hr ago
Agreed, and I while I don't think waving one's hand and saying "jobs programs" is particularly likely to suddenly solve marriage rates, I do think jobs program education is more likely to have a positive effect than art sensitivity programs.
Shrike
14hr ago
I'd like for them to realize that you can be more than just a thug.
When presented with the alternative of "ballet performer (non-remunerative)" it would hardly be surprising if guys (regardless of race) chose "thug."
I'm also skeptical of your case (though I haven't heard it yet). I think creativity and softness can help with women, but I can't help but think you're barking up the wrong tree: as far as I can tell women are, generally, into pretty masculine men. Relevant both to my suggestion and to the question of "what do chicks dig?" military service members are more likely to be married, not less, than civilians.
Shrike
15hr ago
Have them do ballet, painting, and heavily emphasize soft and social skills. This should be done in combination with rugged stereotypically masculine activities such as wrestling or football. Good men have strong elements of masculinity, with some healthy doses of feminine attributes on the side!
This seems like it could backfire considerably. Why not just take whatever resources we would use to fund this and instead promote manly-man masculinity, by which we mean a stint in the armed services followed by a wholesome career as a firefighter or police officer?
This is also considerably more useful to society than teaching people ballet.
Shrike
15hr ago
how do you build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth if it is filled with pit bulls?
Isn't there some research suggesting that, specifically, Christian influence on
- execution
- cracking down on incest/cousin marriages
is part of what led to European civilization operating at such a highly functional level?
Backing up just a bit:
From a theological perspective what’s a good argument that human races have much different rates of grave sin? You can deal with sin at the individual level thru a need for free-will, but to say God created some humans that like to sin more feels very bad.
The biggest disparity in grave sins when dividing by immutable characteristics, it seems to me, is in gender, not race, so the question of the moral impact of immutable traits is not some new problem for Christianity, I don't think. Ditto for really pretty much any other religion or ethics system. It just seems particularly vexing because of contemporary social mores.
Shrike
7d ago
Disclaimer: I am a poor pleb with Sonnet 4.6, which might explain 100% of the divergence. I tested your second link with an identical prompt and Claude struck out. In fact, it first told me it wouldn't be able to guess, and I had to lean on it for a bit and tell it to spit out a top 5 list.
In case you are curious, here are its guesses (the second 5 with the adaptive setting turned on). I don't know who any of these people are so, uh...congrats, maybe, I guess?
Vathara — The multi-fandom range, the interest in broken/rehabilitated characters (especially Sample 1's Tai Lung angle), the dense sensory worldbuilding, and the flat acceptance of strangeness all feel consistent with her style.
Magistrate — The deadpan humor, the clipped dialogue, and the ethical weight placed on unglamorous details feel like a possibility here.
Ruskbyte — Prolific, multi-fandom, with a tendency toward darker characterization and unconventional takes on canon.
Luan Mao — The Pratchett influence and the dry, economical prose feel like a match for writers in that orbit.
Sueric — A long shot, but the interest in physical damage and personhood threads through some of their work.
Vathara — Still my strongest guess. The rehabilitation arc, multi-fandom confidence, and flat acceptance of strangeness are consistent with her body of work.
GoblinCat — Known for serious KFP work specifically, with real philosophical weight. Could the range extend to Pokemon and original fiction?
YsabetWordsmith — The disability specificity, ethical framework around personhood, and multi-fandom range feel plausible here.
Copperbadge — Craft-conscious, literary, genuinely multi-fandom, and the dry humor fits.
Lisse — A longer shot, but the tonal control and interest in damaged characters feels familiar.
Shrike
7d ago
This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint of an American elite (and I don't have a good read on Karp so this might not be his perspective) intolerance towards religious belief is basically pure self-ownage. (Keep in mind that in the US, religious behavior is correlated with higher education levels.) There are a lot of smart, motivated religious people who will happily serve in the military and then work in your munitions plant afterwards and if you are intolerant of them you're running the risk of losing their talent or, worse, making yourself their enemy.
Shrike
7d ago
The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying.
Can I suggest in a relatively nice way that perhaps the world model of lot of the doomsayers could use some refinement?
Shrike
8d ago
I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I think .45 ACP wasn't more popular because there weren't really smaller handguns made for it. You can carry a .38 revolver in a coat pocket in a way that you can't a 1911.
Additionally, the .38 was specifically in widespread use by police and military, so the 'cool' factor associated with the military/police was absolutely there, and if I am not mistaken plenty of law enforcement agencies were still packing .38s in the 1970s.
Shrike
8d ago
Toy model to illustrate:
Let's say that I need to make 100 PowerPoints per year, and I use AI for this. And let's say that when I use 4.6, it costs me $1 in token costs to make a PowerPoint presentation based on a prompt. I now have to spend 10 minutes correcting the errors.
Now supposing we bump up to 4.7, and suddenly the PowerPoint a bit better, I only need to spend 5 minutes correcting the errors. But it costs $2 because the token cost is less efficient.
If Anthropic is making margin on the token costs, then the demand for tokens has increased even though the demand for work has not (I still need to make 100 slide decks annually). And while we've saved me some time, we've increased my cost to $200 instead of $100. If Anthropic is making 10% margin, they've now made $20 instead of $10. And since suddenly the token demand has doubled (in this toy world with static demand for PowerPoints which now cost more tokens) Anthropic can likely use the increased demand to raise costs on compute further.
Some disclaimers:
- this is a toy model
- I am not sure to what degree and in what way "benchmark improvements at the cost of more token use" translates over into real world applications. Does 4.7 now use more tokens to do the same work (e.g. answering "what is 2+2") or does the allegedly less efficient token cost only kick in with more involved prompting? I can imagine a world where "benchmark improvements at the cost of more token use" in the real world means you can 1-shot an app instead of 3-shotting it, so even if it uses twice as many tokens, it's actually saving compute.
- from what I understand the financials of compute are all over the place: some people or services have something closer to a cost-per-token, many do not
- Furthermore as I understand it companies like Anthropic own some of their compute, but not all of it, meaning that if costs of compute increase due to this it might be bad for their bottom line if they are renting a lot of their compute and their providers decide to jack prices up on them
Possibly there's something (else) I am missing here, would be very happy for feedback. I don't use LLMs to code so my lack of experience with the most-common use-case means I have little personal insight into the trade-offs between increased demand for tokens versus higher performance. If people are complaining, though, I assume it's because they feel like they are able to get less done (IOW, the model is less token-efficient). If anyone has a better model for how this works in the real world, particularly in more common use-cases, I would love to be filled in.
Shrike
9d ago
My mind went to military stuff, with the context of Ranger's post.
But when it comes to innovation, obviously when it comes to rocketry the running joke is that ultimately the American Germans beat the Russian Germans...
(Although on the subject of Russian copying, it's worth noting that Buran, despite looking like the space shuttle, had notably different design features.)
Shrike
9d ago
It seems to me this also has financial implications. If you are paying per token, and the model's benchmark performance increases slightly, but its token cost to reach those higher benchmarks increases tremendously, suddenly you're paying a lot more to do, at best, slightly more.
If Anthropic is making margin on the token cost, then this is an improvement from their financial point of view, right?
Shrike
9d ago
As a model of Iran, consider Gaza. Both the IRGC and Hamas are militant Shiite extremists.
Epistemic status: Twitter, so buyer beware, but it seems that at least one IRGC radio broadcast has been referred to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as an "idiot" and defying his announcement that the strait is opened. I've seen reports that Iranian television (which I do not watch) has criticized him as well.
Aha, well, surely Abbas Araghchi is a moderate? Within the ranks of "Iranian regime officials," maybe, but he was a member of the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War and participated in the revolution against the Shah. As far as I can tell he's not exactly a secular squish.
Obviously I am very open to the idea that there's some sort of good cop-bad cop routine being enacted here (to say nothing of Twitter just being wrong) but so far there seems to be some directional evidence that the economic sanctions are causing rifts within the ranks of the regime.
Again, I don't blame anyone for a "wait-and-see" approach, I think this is a relatively low-quality information environment so far. But if the Iranians are already fighting over whether or not the "close the strait, make the US feel the pain" strategy is worth keeping up, what does it say about the economic situation of Iran?
Shrike
9d ago
I definitely think the algo has something to do with it (perhaps even a lot to do with it) but I also think the influence of social media would be tempered by much better economic conditions. The ideological terrorism in the 1970s happened without the algorithm, but I would hazard a guess that the mediocre economy helped fan the flames more than a little.
On the gripping hand, though, the worse economic conditions would be tempered by a better algorithm (or none at all). In particular, it seems like gender relations are really poisoned now in a way that they weren't in, say, the 1970s. And I think that's insanely radicalizing, people can handle being relatively poor if there is still a viable path to marriage and family formation, and it seems to me that right now the algorithm and the socio-cultural trends it amplifies are harming that more than the economy.
Shrike
9d ago
The blockade is cutting off an extremely important source of revenue and may be causing cracks within the Iranian government, with the foreign minister saying Iran's blockade is lifted and the IRGC issuing a contradictory statement a few hours later.
Whenever the Trump administration pulls stunts like this, it's often claimed to be incompetence of the worst sort, but in keeping with my general tendency to try to analyze actors as rational, let me steelman their actions: it seems possible to me that Iran is doing a good-cop bad-cop routine and/or decided to close the strait again once they realized the US intended to maintain the blockade.
Nevertheless the possibility that Iran's different factions are making different calls could indicate that the government is fracturing internally, which on balance is likely good news for the US (if that is what is happening). Either the IRGC purges the moderates, which would generate a more hardline Iran (bad news for the US) but would likely also weaken the IRGC's legitimacy and narrow the power base of the Iranian government (good news for the US) or the IRGC gets purged by moderates (great news for basically everyone) or Iran continues to issue contradictory statements and shoot at friendly (or at least neutral) shipping, which will begin to turn previously neutral third parties against Iran and make them look like the mad dogs the US government is portraying them as.
Obviously there are certain downsides to the blockade, and it's not over until it's over. But on balance I am much happier with the blockade than I am the proposed "bridge and power plant day," for humanitarian reasons if for nothing else.
Shrike
9d ago
Fortunately the Soviets could mostly only copy and not innovate like China can.
This is a minor pet peeve of mine, so please forgive the digression (your post as a general rule I agree with).
The Soviets actually, from what I can tell, were quite innovative, and beat US and Western countries to technological "firsts" repeatedly, even though they were often behind in important, even critical, areas (particularly in electronics and computing). Part of their innovation had to do with engineering around their inferior tech base.
A few examples of Soviet innovation and "firsts":
- The world's first operational Active Protection System for tanks (Drozd, created in the 1970s and used in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)
- Supercavitating torpedoes (to my knowledge, again, the first operational system.)
- Networked antiship missiles with swarm attack logic (the P-500 went into service in 1975, before the Harpoon, which to my knowledge did not have this capability, although the US can hold its cards very close to the chest.)
- First electronically scanned array in a fighter aircraft (the Zaslon in the MiG-31.)
- Titanium-hulled submarines.
- Crew automation: the Alfa-class submarine, in service 1971, reduced the number of crew down to 31, compared to the Los Angeles class with a crew of more than one hundred and thirty). To be fair, the Los Angeles ships are much larger than the Alfas, but even larger submarines like the Akula class have fewer than 100 crew members, while the newer Virginia class still has roughly the same crew as the Los Angeles class.
Some of these are due to philosophical and/or doctrinal differences - for instance, the Soviet emphasis on antiship missiles was developed as a counter to the carrier battle group; the US saw submarines and aircraft as their ship-killers. Or, to use another examples, tank autoloaders have serious drawbacks compared to hand-loading (particularly, as I understand it, in earlier iterations of the tech). My point here isn't about Soviet technological superiority (there were some areas where they were ahead, of course) but rather about the fact that their difference in circumstance led them to develop doctrines and weapons systems that were often vastly different and divergent from Western designs, instead of being copies.
Shrike
10d ago
To throw off suspicion, you could even get things wrong from time to time.
"It's not like Europe is going to be holding military exercises in Greenland out of fear of the United States, or something."
Shrike
10d ago
I would go forward in time to learn about the ultimate outcomes of ongoing geopolitical events and then use that knowledge to continually be 100% correct about everything during geopolitical debates on this niche forum I post on anonymously.
Shrike
10d ago
Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian...No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.
If my relatively unconsidered perception that women are more susceptible to peer pressure (on average) whereas men are more likely to go full on dril "it only makes my opinions Worse" in response, then this is both ironic and counterproductive, or at least an inefficient use of cultural resources.
Shrike
13d ago
This story is from 2019 - if it was so easy to defeat the Shaheds, why isn't the Strait full of US navy ships easily taking those drones out of the sky and securing freedom of navigation?
Iran has other threats, including mines and antiship missiles, that can threaten US ships in the strait. It's also true that a sufficient mass of anything could cause a ship to run out of ammunition! It doesn't surprise me that the Navy is keeping its ships further back where they have more flexibility.
I can also turn this question on its head: if Shaheds are so good, why haven't the Iranians sunk any destroyers yet? The long-range ones are supposed to go over 1,000 miles, and the Iranians are believed to have satellite imagery from Russia to help with targeting. We have reason to believe that the carrier strike groups were close enough to launch missiles at them because Trump specifically said that the carrier battle group was targeted with and shot down 101 missiles ("missiles" which suggests not Shahed, but Shaheds are really just cruise missiles and apparently Iran said their drone units were involved, so it could have been Shaheds). Either way, why didn't the Iranians use Shaheds to sink a carrier or a destroyer?
Yes, you can shoot down a bunch of shaheds - but if there are enough of them they will get through
Correct.
the cost of making enough of them is lower than the cost of the defensive weapon system.
You are shifting your goalposts here. What I was contesting specifically was the idea of
drones that cost significantly less to manufacture than the interceptor missiles used to shoot them down
It's true that a Shahed costs less than a CIWS, the same as an anti-tank missile costs less than a tank, or an anti-ship missile costs less than a ship. But it looks like a CIWS burst is going to be cheaper than a Shahed.
If the US has robust and cost-effective anti-Shahed defence systems, why are their troops working from home in hotels?
It's quite likely that the US does not have enough robust and cost-effective anti-Shahed systems! Simply because there are cheaper ways to shoot down drones does not mean they have been procured at the necessary scale. A plausible end result of US counter-drone technology is giving aim-assist technology to riflemen or machine-gunners, which obviously has not happened yet.
Why isn't the US navy proudly sailing through the strait, drones defeated?
It certainly appears that the US Navy did do this, including the "drones defeated" part.
I've always been thinking about them in the context of a broader military package which includes the things you've just mentioned.
Yes – in which case I think they can be a powerful tool. But I think as a cheap weapon they are at their best against fixed targets. If you have assured satellite coverage, then using them as an anti-ship weapon makes more sense, because you can put a man-in-the-loop. (But ironically this arguably makes them better suited in the role for the US than for Iran.)
They're advertised as ideal for spraying pesticides or taking photos for land surveying (not sure if they actively advertise them as suicide attack drones).
This was an interesting claim. On a quick look, it looks like most of these drones are copters, and Alibaba apparently doesn't consider the range worth specifying (at least for the ones I viewed), which makes evaluating their utility as a weapon troublesome. I'd be very interested if you could provide the specific product you had in mind?
Shrike
14d ago
I recently read Player of Games and while to some degree I echo the "boring Utopia" criticism, a lot of what makes the Culture utopia is a literally incredible amount of technological wizardly.
I can buy warp drives and the like, but if you have robots with little force fields and humans that can take a retrovirus to change gender and do drugs by thinking about it, you arguably have moved past the point of being able to offer social commentary simply because your society is inhuman. Banks, it seems to me, does social commentary anyway and I wouldn't say it's entirely a miss - some of it is thought-provoking. But I sort of choke when I am expected to believe that humans were doing stuff like going to dinner parties instead of wireheading or something even thought the technology in the books is more than just "really really smart AI," it is the ability to manipulate the spacetime continuum to a degree that arguably surpassed Star Trek (while having just enough limitations to serve the purposes of this specific plot, much like, well, an old-fashioned Star Trek episode).
Not sure if I explained that well. But basically Banks is, from what I can tell, asking me to believe that the entire Culture has insane gigatech and lives in the way that it does (that way happening to be, basically, what a liberal arts student would hope a socialist utopia would be like) Just Because. I've been vastly preferring the Stephenson I've read recently; Stephenson really is interested in the intersection of technology and ideology and tries to show his work whereas the Culture, to be honest, seems if anything more naive than Star Trek about the ideology of the future (while sharing perhaps certain assumptions of Roddenberry about how The Future would eliminate certain barriers between older men and young and desirable women.) Obviously you can justify anything you want in the Culture by waving your hands and saying "aligned AI" but that doesn't necessarily make it satisfying.
Shrike
14d ago
Going in as an officer is great for aspiring right-wing leaders. If you commit to it and don't screw up, you build a resume and a rolodex and give yourself future credibility as a political leader. It only negatively impacts your status among a small sliver of the population and opens up future employment avenues as well.
If a son of mine was interested in the military, I would likely discourage them from going in as enlisted, but not necessarily if they were interested in going in as an officer.
Shrike
14d ago
I agree that this might be a problem - and sincerely hope and pray that it is not.
However from a humanitarian perspective it seems to me the blockade is almost infinitely preferable to a concentrated power generation destruction campaign. When a blockade is lifted, it takes days or weeks for trade to resume; when power generation capacity is wholesale destroyed, it takes months or years to rebuild, and the economic damage from a blockade would be overshadowed by the economic damage from destroying Iran's power generation capacity.
(The US does have specialized munitions to temporarily degrade power supply but given that their effects are, I believe, relatively easily reversible I am not sure we would use them for "Bridge and Power Day.")
Hilariously, while drumming up my earlier reply to Nerd, I had done a quick Google and BAM!
There are some really funny ways to reconcile what you're saying and the first page Google result (people forget that married couples have more and often better sex than single individuals) but none of them sound particularly worth the hassle.
Not that I am trying to dunk on male ballet dancers, but I wouldn't go into the profession purely for the sexual opportunity.
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