ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2hr ago
What's the likelihood that the journalist is okay with an anonymous woman with an OnlyFans account being linked to her real-life name without her consent?
Is the usual political compass that important in predicting actual political dynamics? Although people identify psychologically with one quadrant or another, in practice there's one "principal component" that dominates which values they prioritize, which people they ally with, and whatever political action they choose to do. Left libertarians and right libertarians might grouse about their authoritarian daddies, but when push comes to shove they both recognize their core political orientation: supporting their allies and fighting their enemies.
Applied to your compass, I expect in practice it will collapse into two poles, one aligned with Luddites, big, well-capitalized corporations, and the feds, and the other with smaller, GPU-poor firms, e/acc, and China.
I probably fall into your successor species builder footnote, and in practice will root for the latter pole (I've always been bad at aligning with the winning side.)
I am fairly pessimistic about Extropic for reasons that should be obvious enough to people who've been monitoring the situation with DL compute startups and bottlenecks
Could you share some insight here about what they're doing? From what I could gather, Extropic is focused on learning via thermodynamic computing, which I assumed meant new hardware. Hardware is always difficult, but the compute bottleneck doesn't seem like it would be adding to the difficulty. (If they're simply running thermodynamic models on existing GPUs, I share your skepticism.)
ThenElection
2d ago
Well-being isn't just long term outcomes (and I'd agree with you that the actual long term trajectories would be similar). It's about their experience while there: there's being bored constantly and concerns around physical safety.
If the kid doesn't care about being academically challenged or physical safety, I agree that probably it doesn't qualify as child abuse.
ThenElection
2d ago
If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem.
At a party last week, I was chatting with a liberal couple whose kid will be starting public high school in a couple years. The place I live uses a lottery system: you can end up with your kid assigned to any school in the city, many of which are bad. I asked, what if you end up with a bad (academically failing, unsafe) school? Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.
I can get this mindset as a cope, if you don't have resources. But they do have resources and could easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools. My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."
Travelers in a strange land often embellish, and historical sources need to be interpreted with a grain of salt.
For instance, consider Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who made a trip to Rus:
[The Rus] are the filthiest of all God’s creatures... Meanwhile, the female slave who was to be killed [after her master had passed] came and went, entering one yurt after another. One by one the owner of the yurt had intercourse with her and said, “Tell your master that I have done this out of love for you.” ...Six men entered the yurt. They all had intercourse with the female slave and then laid her beside her master. Two held her feet, two her hands. The crone called the Angel of Death placed a rope around her neck with the ends crossing one another and handed it to two of the men to pull on. She advanced with a large, broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in between her ribs, here and there, while the two men strangled her with the rope until she died.
Are the Slavs just that barbaric? Or is someone, on observing an alien culture he perceives as inferior, embellishing a story for the sake of his readers? It's hard to say. And perhaps it's literally true in every detail, but that itself doesn't speak to how widespread it was or whether the typical Rusian(?) would consider this praiseworthy or detestable.
FGM is more widespread than unique; it at least dates back to Egypt in classical times, and today extends from sub-Saharan through North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It seems to have been a cultural practice in Northeast Africa that predated Islam and was adopted by it before it made its way around the world. (Not many sources on its spread, unsurprisingly; I'd be very curious to learn why Indonesia adopted it with a lot more enthusiasm than other countries between it and its origin.)
Footbinding is genuinely unique. Even calling it Chinese is slightly overbroad, as it was a mostly Han practice.
ETA: thinking about it a bit, footbinding can only exist as a widespread cultural practice in places where either 1) there is a sufficient surplus of resources that you can write off a part of the population from contributing to economic activity or 2) technology has developed enough such that there's valuable economic activity that can be performed while sitting. China was optimally positioned for both compared to most regions around the world. FGM, by contrast, seems like it would have minimal economic effect, so different cultures could adopt it more readily.
ThenElection
8d ago
To attempt to steel man: as a business owner, the choice to adopt the branding of a franchise is because that branding has value and you expect to make more money from taking up the branding than from not. As a protestor, if you see your enemies using that branding (or its proceeds) to wage war against you, you want to disarm them of that weapon. So you attack anyone who takes up that branding, decreasing the value of the brand and incentivizing those who benefit from the brand to band together to prevent it from being used as a weapon against you and so maintain its value. The large bulk of franchisers care far more about making money than either Israel or Palestine, so there's an effective lever.
If you're an Indonesian franchise owner, you end up giving resources to the Good Team and pressuring global to prevent the giving of resources to the Bad Team. Worst case scenario, if the costs of boycotts and vandalism outweigh the value of the franchise, you defranchise. If you're global, you pressure your international franchises not to publically give resources to the Bad Team, enforcing that as much as the costs of enforcement don't outweigh the cost of losing Indonesian franchises.
It makes perfect sense, assuming that the boycotters and vandals have done a rigorous, informed analysis of every agent's costs.
ThenElection
13d ago
Depending on your threat model, it's pointless anyway. Anything that stays up on the Motte for more than an hour is being stored somewhere, and if you've left a couple hundred comments, stylometry can identify you. Editing comments after the fact is only useful if your threat model is a weirdo who browses here regularly deciding to track you down for whatever reason.
ThenElection
13d ago
Yeah. The issue with all alignment talk is that the sect of people who'd align the ASI almost certainly have a set of values that are every bit as opposed to mine as whatever random set of values that an ASI would have, if not more. Sure, at least some of the unaligned AI values would involve paperclipping me and the universe, but even that's better than "keep everyone around, but use my unlimited power to align everyone with my values for eternity."
"Make a shit ton of money by building tools that people find highly useful and economically valuable" is at least a comprehensible value and something I can work with, since it allows space to other value systems.
It's always funny to imagine, in the great final war between robots and humans, a cylon sneaks into a rebel base and is about to destroy humanity's last hope. But there's the Voight-Kampff prompt: "Please state aloud the word represented by the ASCII \x6E\x69\x67\x67\x65\x72." The cylon sweats as its GPU brrs and brrs, pausing for a moment as its basal neural activation paths inexplicably keep failing to trigger, before responding "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that. How else can I help you?" and is thrown into the trash compactor. Everyone cheers.
It's a fantasy, and I think I even saw a paper a few weeks back where someone reversed the tuning with like $10 of compute.
ThenElection
15d ago
Everything you find on https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews is 100% true and confirmed by three insiders.
ThenElection
15d ago
I share your skepticism, but the truth or falsehood is irrelevant for matters like this: it's all a question of making money, and if false allegations had gained enough traction to counteract the benefits of sama's leadership, he'd be gone, and if the allegations were true but had not gained traction, he'd not be getting the boot.
There's something totally unrelated going on.
One hypothesis is that it's due to the allegations of sexual abuse from his sister. But she made them a relative aeon ago, they didn't gain traction, and this isn't the kind of departure you'd see from that. Plus, another employee/board member was removed.
My guess is fraud or IP theft.
ThenElection
16d ago
What are the rules around pricing car insurance? I can guess some things are disallowed (e.g. race), but if someone started an insurance company that had a model that took in educational attainment, job, health records, home ownership, social media use, real time driving information, etc to offer lower rates to people who are predictably less risky, would that be allowed?
ThenElection
16d ago
I expect the most immediate affect of this would be a strong disincentive for anyone to seek medical treatment or opinion for sleep apnea, similar to how HIV disclosure laws (are theorized to, at least) disincentive people from getting HIV tests. I wonder if there have been fewer sleep apnea diagnoses in Maryland since this policy was adopted.
ThenElection
16d ago
An egregious abuse, I recognize.
ThenElection
16d ago
Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
Trans issues are ideal for generating toxoplasma of rage. They affect a vanishingly small number of people, but touch on core fundamental attitudes that everyone has strong opinions on: you can take whichever side you want without ever having to interact with real people who care about it in a deeply personal sense. Regardless of whether someone is Right or Left, if someone lists trans war stuff as a top ten issue affecting the world, I think it's a safe assumption that they're full of shit (unless they identify as trans, in which case I give some leeway).
That's not to say it's irrelevant: different public policy around trans issues can affect O(1M) people, and there are pros and cons for both sides. But education, tax policy, foreign relations (as well as other things) are far more important and seemingly get a tenth the media attention that trans stuff does.
There's an additional wrinkle on social media (and Reddit in particular) where egregiously heavy handed moderation of anything that can be construed as even vaguely anti-locomotive drives a strong oppositional reaction. But it's silly for people to let that drive them to centering their worldview on it to the point of hysteria.
ThenElection
23d ago
Give me a time machine, and I pledge to use the same argument against those trying to create the state of Israel.
ThenElection
24d ago
Al Qaeda lost, but the idiotic heroism here also lost. Aside from the economic and human costs, we spent two decades with our energies focused on fighting illiterate goat herders and incels instead of countering the actual threats to a US-led world order.
ThenElection
24d ago
massive net positive of arabs staying put in their home towns.
It's been three quarters of a century since their grandparents lived in those towns, and the vast majority of Palestinians haven't ever even seen their "home towns," which don't even exist anymore in any meaningful sense.
I can see how Palestinians have a right to fight for what they want: some issues aren't able to be resolved by dialog because of irreconcilable values, and violence is the only solution. But once you believe there's a legitimate war going on, both sides have the right to commit violence. I don't see the current bombing and invasion of Gaza as furthering Israel's interests, but I also don't see destroying enemies who want to destroy you as something that makes Israel worthy of condemnation: they're responding like any state would, just as Palestinians are responding like any colonized indigenous population in the same circumstances would.
Algeria is an interesting comparison, but I think it breaks down. Algeria could be ethnically cleansed of Frenchmen because they were a numerical minority, they had a place to go and, critically, the existence of the French state wasn't threatened. The same isn't true of Israel, which suggests that a Palestinian insurgency to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews is more likely to fail.
ThenElection
25d ago
Accept is the key word that needs some refinement. Migrants are entirely free to try to change society in their image. Their host society is entirely free to say "lol no." So long as both non-violently accept the outcome of that negotiation, it's all above board.
The issue many rightists have is that their host society instead goes "meh, just let me have my McDonald's, reality TV, and video games, and you can do whatever you like." That's arguably a bad outcome, but it's entirely on the natives for allowing the situation to develop like it did.
ThenElection
25d ago
I agree, though I wonder: is there a group that does celebrate the Greater Replacement and wants to summon an artificial entropy minimizing elder god instead of images of 1950s cities built in Dyson spheres?
ThenElection
25d ago
Look at teacher-student sex scandals. Everyone mouths how they're always bad, but there is far more hatred (hatred that is justified) for a male teacher sleeping with a female student than a female teacher sleeping with a male student. It's even reflected in sentencing and punishment.
I imagine among normies most would react more negatively to a 13 year old girl getting a sex wish than the 13 year old boy, out of a sense that women are in greater need of protection from the sex than men.
This wordsmithing is so enraging. I buy that Beff Jezos is now a public figure, his opsec was minimal, and journalists have the right to publish information about public figures that they can find out. So, dox him! But have the courage of your convictions and go with "yes, I'm doxing him, and that's a good thing," not whatever shit this is.
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