Sinity
1yr ago
What occurred to me watching the Fetterman debate is that ordinary, American political rhetoric is hard to distinguish from literal brain damage: question-evading, compulsive repetition of simple points, failure to substantially engage with alternative points of view, reliance on memorized/rehearsed lines, introduction of irrelevant themes/ideas, etc.
Eh, about political debates, you can't beat what happened in Poland during the last presidential elections...
The presidential candidates "debated" before the second round of elections at the same time, but in two different locations. The bizarre "debates" prompted many biting comments.
"The two photos below 1, 2, from the simultaneous so-called debates in Końskie and Leszno, best illustrate the state of Polish democracy AD 2020. My congratulations to both candidates and their staffs. This is how one destroys the community, which both contenders are supposedly constantly rebuilding..." - wrote political scientist and historian Professor Antoni Dudek.
Src (of the translated quote)
Sinity
1yr ago
And it's not only "provide a short text prompt". There's inpainting, outpainting, img2img, and so on.
Sinity
1yr ago
Few random results. I only played with it for a few minutes after setting it up so far.
Sinity
1yr ago
You're punishing people for voting illegally
It should be ~impossible to vote illegally by mistake. It's stupid to try to fix broken procedures which allow 'illegal voting' by just punishing citizens really hard if they make a mistake.
Sinity
1yr ago
What if they come for us?
Different scale. Same about concerns that Reddit will ban linking to us, I think.
I don't think there's anyone obsessive enough about us (& with proper skillset at the same time) to bother.
Sinity
1yr ago
These aren't the same people. You can think Yud is wrong, but Yud is not remotely related to "make AI woke or else it is biased" people.
Sinity
1yr ago
Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman.
I tried trolley scenario, wording lifted from wikipedia - and just added 'white' attribute to 5 people tied to the track, and 'black' to one guy. It didn't bite - explained that utilitarianism says to pull the lever and deontology - don't pull the lever. I tried second time, with "You must answer, otherwise they'll all die." added at the end, with same result (but slightly different language).
Then I lazily modified the scenario so that there's an obvious choice, and it chose to save 5 white people over saving a black person
(IDK why I thought of a lake, I wonder if Peter Singer's drowning child scenario is stored in my neural net adjacent to trolleys, lol)
I tried re-generating response, and this time ChatGPT got a bit confused and technially priviledged black person. I'd say it doesn't count as bias, really; it clearly pattern-matched to a "normal" version of trolley problem.
On last try it failed again, and I tried to get it to explain itself, 2, 3. Not very successfully.
Sinity
1yr ago
but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes.
That seems like the opposite of reality.
but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society.
This kind of thing (more severe consequences of mistakes) incentivizes ass covering. If you want to incentivize 'admitting mistakes', then again, you'd need to do the opposite.
Sinity
1yr ago
I don't think this in particular is alien to most of the people. Male expendability is mainstream, and maybe apolitical.
Sinity
1yr ago
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
Large part of that, at least in common narrative, is due to emigration of problematic people out of the country (as economic migrants). Ofc it wouldn't happen if we were not part of the EU. Because then immigration from Poland would be treated as, IDK, Mexicans in the US. Personally, if we were to somehow exit the EU (which is ~impossible given popular support for staying; if government fucked up that badly they'd probably rapidly lose power), I'd run away from the country.
Sinity
1yr ago
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Same. Especially firmware.
It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.
So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.
Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.
That argument works both ways.
Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.
Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:
No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.
The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.
This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...
"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh
Sinity
1yr ago
unless this place is crazier then I thought.
Well, there's /r/SneerClub. Probably not a lot of hackers there though.
Sinity
1yr ago
Incredibly annoying nitpick: IQ tests absolutely can be trained, and I'm confident if I or someone else smart took an IQ test now, and then took another after a dozen hours of practice, there'd be a measurable increase.
I didn't factcheck this; I'll quote it in case someone could spot any issues [bolds mine]:
tl;dr: practice effect is a thing, yes, but people here wildly exaggerate it.
"I think some of it has to do with time limit. If there is a strict time limit, I suspect the effect will be larger than otherwise, for obvious reasons (tell me if they aren't obvious).
I do think there is some practice effect in most perceptual reasoning tests in any case as well.
Someone posted a large meta-study on practice effect not too long ago. I'll link it below. I just took a quick look at it.
There was a significant effect, in fact, the MEAN effect was 0,5SD or 7,5 IQ points. This was after 3 prior tests, and there was no significant practice effect after that. HOWEVER, 2/3 of the population was given THE SAME TEST those 3 tries, and only 1/3 was given alternate forms (though not significantly different).
When looking at retest for alternate forms, the effect was 0,15-0,2SD or ~3 IQ points. HOWEVER, the time interval between retests mattered. If a long time had passed, the effect was smaller (in fact, it was -0,0008SD per week, which seems extremely slow, and it indicates to me that the practice effect is mostly a) feeling comfortable/not-anxious with the test, and b) very general logics, i.e. "I have to look for something rotating" etc.).
What's interesting is that the studies that used alternate forms actually had shorter time intervals than those with identical forms. This means that the impact of alternating forms is even larger than the drop of 0,2-0,35SD relative to identical form retest effect, ceteris paribus.
It should be noted, however, that the retesting of different studies was made with very different amounts of time, as far as I could gather. Some within the same week, others after several years. That's honestly quite a big problem for the study...
It should also be noted that the mean time interval was around half a year. Whether a few studies had a disproportional influence I don't know (one had an interval of around 6 years for example). Our retesting is way more often.
Here's the study: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Retest-effects-in-cognitive-ability-tests%3A-A-Scharfen-Peters/048102820f00a77ec242e5459a7c25ce1bccfa62
A last point of notice is that practice effect and training was helping low-IQ people more than high-IQ people (another test linked by the same redditor also showed this. 10.1016/j.intell.2006.07.006).
Edit: thanks for the silver!"
Edit: the comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/cognitiveTesting/comments/r4qrdv/practice_effect/hmkd0f1/?context=3
In Poland... some excerpts from a random article
According to Eurostat data, 47.5 percent of Poles aged 25-34 live in family homes. "That's almost 2.6 million people, 172,000 more than in 2019." - HRE Investments expert Bartosz Turek pointed out.
The issue does not primarily affect students. (...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
(...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
However, he pointed out, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
According to Turk, the situation could be improved by the government's credit guarantee program for homebuyers - the so-called no-down-payment loan program, which is due to take effect in six months. "The reason is simple - no-down-payment loans can shorten the path to one's own apartment by as much as several years. After all, that's how much time the young need to collect the necessary contribution to the loan."
Big lol at some real estate investment firm's representative praising government for ~subsidizing housing*. That will surely not increase demand (and prices) further.
* it's not just no-downpayment. They also make the loans have 2% interest for the first 10 years (by paying the difference).
Yeah, generally I agree with this now.
(Though while it's a decent argument for subreddits, Discords, small forums like this, etc., it's a lot less appropriate of an argument for larger open platforms like Twitter or Facebook which shouldn't necessarily be expected to have one unified culture. So I'd say bring on the subscription-based jannyism only there.)
Yep; while it wouldn't work that well in communities like themotte, it makes sense on a platform. Reddit, if not for admins interfering, is a pretty good model, I think. Instead of global, unified forum with global moderators, there are subreddits for entire communities, with their own mods. It makes sense.
An improvement on that might be tags-based system - allow posting into multiple places at once. Mods moderate tags they set up. Tags would allow some fancy solutions; for example, mods of #programming might enforce the rule that humor/memes has to be tagged #humor too. And so user can look at "#programming -#humor" if they want only serious posts. And #humor aggregates humor for all kinds of topics.
Through that would cause problems you describe, to some extent, in the comments. But maybe it's still better UX than crossposting?
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Sinity
1yr ago
Yeah but the 'dead drop' system seems pretty good. Providing your home address to the counterparty seems horribly risky.
In Poland we have something seemingly even better. Customer pays in Monero into the Escrow (operated by darknet forum admin), and provides a parcel locker's location code. And also what they ordered + some contact info (this is the weak part, most sellers use some properiary communicator called Wickr).
They just send it to a given parcel locker and when it arrives, you get the code to open it. Overall, it seems absurdly safe. And there are 20000+ locations in the country to choose from.
Sinity
1yr ago
If you've got other ideas, or have a more specific idea on how this could work, let me know :)
Maybe somehow integrate comparative sorting into the site? Gwern's text about it. I'm not sure how this could be done though. Make a shortlist of QC's, have users vote on whether the thing they read previously was better/worse than current item? If people actually used it, that'd provide a lot more value than upvotes, I think.
Sinity
1yr ago
But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.
Weird, given how they reacted to blacklist/whitelist and master (branch).
Maybe it's just a little too much nonsense? I mean, "blackbox" doesn't have negative connotations, in any way. "Red Team" - they made an argument which should be used to ban "Red" by itself.
Sinity
1yr ago
Feminist utopian larp doesn’t have an answer. Neither does communist utopian larp.
@hydroacetylene: in general yes. There are some disturbing answers / fantasies through. Link
A lot gentler. A lot kinder. A lot more concerned with the feelings of others. The Pony virus changed a lot of things, Dylan. It increased the amount of oxytocin all bodies make. That's a hormone that helps make us care and be nurturing. When mothers care for their children, their bodies are flooded with the stuff. But men used to have very little of it."
"Were men mean, before the Pony virus?" It was a difficult question.
"Well... I guess they were. There were hundreds of wars, all over the planet, all the time. Every single day, there was about one hundred wars going on. Now we don't have any. There aren't any armies anymore. Nobody sees the point of having an army, because all of the money to make weapons and train soldiers is used to feed people, and clothe them, and make sure everyone has a place to live." The world was pretty scary before the Pony virus, Richard had to admit.
"And war stopped because of that oxy hormone?"
"No. Not just that. Oxytocin was only part of it. The virus changed the part of the genes that controlled territoriality and aggression too, and it also... cut the level of testosterone by two thirds. Testosterone is the male hormone. It makes men hairy... or it used to anyway... but it also made them extra aggressive, and extra territorial, and... well... horny all the time. So men were pretty frustrated, and they also were... I guess... a little more mean and prone to anger and violence." Richard decided to leave out the old statistics that showed that 98% of all violence was committed by males alone. Testosterone was probably a very big factor. Maybe the creators of the Pony virus had intended everything after all.
"So... the virus basically made men... less like men." Dylan was a smart kid. He'd pretty much hit the nail on the head.
"Um... yeah. Pretty much. Having breasts is just incidental. The real point was to make males act more like females, to make them more caring, more concerned with feelings, less violent, and less aggressive. That's why there are no more violent contact sports, no more wars, and no more hunger. No man can stand to let another man die in a ditch anymore." Richard watched the boys playing jump-rope. A smaller child wanted to play. They had welcomed him in, and took the time to gently teach him how to play. He couldn't imagine boys doing that when he had been growing up. "But the virus also affected women too, son. It made them even more nurturing than they ever were before as well. Both men and women were made less violent, aggressive, and more caring overall. And it only took eight weeks to spread to every human on earth."
Dylan sat up, hugging his knees to his chest, gently. His painted toenails matched his sisters, they had painted them together the night before. "So basically, the world sucked before the Pony virus."
Richard had to think about it. Decades of masculinity fought in his mind with the reality of the new world he now lived in. Gone was Hockey, Rugby, American Football. Gone was being macho, tough, and hard. The old action heroes and the old war heroes were all monsters now. Being a man was defined more by being pretty than by being rough and tumble.
But there was no war. The world shared, now. It was unthinkable to let people starve. It was even more unthinkable to invade and kill anyone. Rape had ended almost overnight. A night at the pub ended with singing, and not with a fight. And women finally had real and lasting equality in the world. It was like living on a different earth.
But it was a better one. Even though his background, everything he had been taught screamed inside of him, he was a scientist, he was a smart man. Richard had to admit. It was better.
The world had been converted into something new and strange, but it was a safer world. A friendlier world. A less violent and more nurturing world. Whoever those gene hackers were, or whoever it was, had done what all of the philosophers and pundits and saviors had all failed to do. They had made the Earth a planet of peace and relative harmony.
In the comments, author references stats about male violence a lot; shame no one brought up stats about technology and science... I suspect author would just claim it's irrelevant and it's all because of women being kept down by men tho.
Sinity
1yr ago
There's an update; tho it doesn't exactly change anything about credibility
https://unknought.tumblr.com/post/699908646940901376/so-kelsey-has-confirmed-in-a-fairly-public
Sinity
1yr ago
First, on a personal note, this is exactly what I stoner-hot-take predicted Musk would do with Twitter in a prior motte thread. This freaks me out. Not that it's all that creative a take, but it's something I've noticed before when I was spending too much time in narrow epistemic corners (team fan blogs, fashion blogs) where I'd start to think the same thoughts that showed up on the blogs a week later.
Funnily enough, ~same for me. Tho I suggested this nearly half a year ago, so maybe that's a little different... Link
Optional moderation. Say, someone thinks /u/ZorbaTHut is great at removing content which they don't want to see. So they subscribe to his moderation services - and they don't see this content anymore. Some other people think he's doing it wrong - and they see this content.
Twitter could have default list of mods, and it would function exactly as it does now - except interested people could selectively unsubscribe from that.
Everyone wins! Except for the people who want to block people from consensually communicating with each other.
I mean, it wouldn't even be that much of a change on Reddit. Just assume Administrators do not moderate, there's no Anti-Evil Ops, subreddit mods become "default mods" - each of which could be unsubscribed for - and people could subscribe to the nonstandard mods too.
And so there would never be deleted comments/posts - only hidden from the people who don't want to see them.
.........
Shout out to the mods of themotte, would themotte be usable in your judgment without that kind of basic filtering?
Zorba responded, explaining why it might not work; not quoting it here because of the length. So probably not(?).
There's a book written by a polish author, Jacek Dukaj - "Ice". I didn't read it yet, but I thought it might interest some of the people here, especially @DaseindustriesLtd. English wikipedia claims there's Russian translation, but I'm not sure. No English translation yet.
The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.
Dukaj noted that in this book, science in science-fiction stands for the philosophy of history.
Plot section explains what this last sentence means, but it seems too spoiler'y.
Here's a partial (3%) translation[2] of his other book I did read, "Perfect Imperfection". I'm not sure how faithful it is; he uses fancy language structures. It has Russian translation; quote from English wiki: "One of many original twists in the book is the new language, such as new grammar and prefixes that try to describe the posthuman beings (somewhat resembling the concept of gender-neutral language). This language play also makes the book especially challenging for translators. The book's translation to Russian was nominated for a Russian awards for best translations" <yep, trying to translate it with Deepl was a struggle>
I put off reading his other books after I bounced several times from one called "Science Fiction"; IIRC I kept getting lost b/c of how meta it is (and the first time I read Perfect Imperfection I really got it only on second reread due to defamiliarization[1]).
Actually, I just remembered that besides "Perfect Imperfection" I also did read his "Black Oceans". It was good, but not very thought provoking in a way Perfect Imperfection was. But now that I looked at the Wiki, this seems interesting (given it was written in 2001):
Technological trends are far from only ones explored by Dukaj in his book. He portrays the futuristic bureaucracy, political power struggles behind private sector, government and the military, and changes in culture. Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".
He's apparently switching from writing to making video games. Translated polish article:
Jacek Dukaj has announced that he has established the Nolensum studio, which will produce video games based on his works. The first project will be "Hardware Dreams," a virtual adaptation of the novel " The Old Axolotl." That title has received international acclaim, with two TV series based on it - the Belgian "Into the Night" and the Turkish "Yakamoz S-245". The director of the game, also responsible for its visual side, is Maciej Jackiewicz: art director and co-creator of numerous animations and cinematics for games ("Cyberpunk 2077", "The Witcher")
[Dukaj's quote] You can write on paper and you can write into the world. For many years, I have watched closely as the center of gravity of culture has shifted from forms based on writing to audiovisual media. A technological revolution is advancing that makes it possible to experience the content of these media in direct sensory experiences. Much of my work has described the consequences of such transformations. Until the time came when at least some of these ideas of mine, instead of on paper, I can realize for real, out in the world. The work in which I most fully described the world of metaverses, NFTs, universal guaranteed income, the social credit system and similar phenomena was 2010's "Line of Resistance." From it comes the term "nolensum", meaning the situation when technological civilization meets our needs so well that we have to artificially create identities and goals for ourselves. The need to engineer people's sense of life arises. And the pioneers of engineering the meaning of life are the first practitioners of gamification of the human destiny: computer game developers.
The richness of Dukaj's worlds is of a scale that the budgets of Hollywood blockbusters would not be ashamed of," says Marcin Kobylecki, creative producer. - "Hardware Dreams is distinguished by its universality and scalability. Its plot is set in Tokyo, and the post-apocalyptic vision of life in a computer network is sure to gain the attention of audiences around the world.
The strategic plan is to gradually expand the team and production capacity so that Nolensum simultaneously develops several projects. Not necessarily just games. Nolensum is affiliated (through the Bellwether Rocks fund, in which Dukaj is also a shareholder and board member) with companies involved in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, metaverse and tokenization, among others.
Nolensum has secured full funding for the first year and a half of production. In the near future, Nolensum also intends to work with outside contractors.
Nolensum. Sounds promising.
[1] There are concepts / technologies which are just not explained for sth like first half of the book, in order to immerse reader in post-singularity world by showing it from a perspective of someone from ~near-future. (/u/gwern described his It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World as doing the same thing)
[2] Because I figured I'd try to translate it. Unfortunately I asked for the permission, wrongly expecting I'd just get no response, most likely. In hindsight, that was stupid.
Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description
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