ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.
Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.
All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.
ThenElection
3d ago
Can even get a nice bidding war going between the UK/US and China. Basically free money.
ThenElection
3d ago
So, similarly, I've also had plenty of people express interest in me. Enthusiastic, plentiful, sometimes even stalkery. Been asked out multiple times on the street in broad daylight, in fact; three months ago someone cold approached me on my way to work and told me I was really attractive. The thing is, they were all men. Which is fine: I'm bisexual.
But that same kind of ease is something I have never once in my life experienced from women. It was always a complicated process to get even the slightest time of day. And I think that's the difference: for some people, they've got to approach the process strategically and analytically, or they will never have any success.
trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work
Which is exactly the issue: many men do want relationships to form through the same process as friendship. Something organic where both people naturally recognize the value of the other person. And, for dating other men, it can and does happen exactly that way (though there are even simpler ways...), simply because baseline attraction is more evenly distributed. But, for dating women, getting over the attraction hurdle is a huge, difficult step, and TRP (at least in its lighter, non-neurodivergent varieties) is useful for understanding how to actually do that, even though the initial dating process remains entirely devoid of pleasure.
(A critical piece of context: I'm also 5'3", which explains why I have such a different experience between the two audiences. In my online dating days, when I as a test listed myself as 5'10", I got all the same enthusiasm from women as I did from men, and so I doubt it'd be necessary to rely on eldritch rituals to find success).
Amen. The core of RP ideology is that there are strong, gender-specific trends in what women like that you can change about yourself in order to be more successful dating: all women are like that is an overstatement, but its cousin "most women are like that" is spot-on.
Growing up, I took all of the mainstream advice to heart, which aligned with my natural instincts anyway: just treat women like people, as if they were a friend you liked a lot and that you'd like to become a best friend you have sex with. This, surprise surprise, led to complete failure before picking up lite red pill tactics (much too late in my 20s, alas).
So long as men like relationships and sex, they will work to understand what factors lead to relationships and sex. And so long as all women are like that, men will notice that and deploy strategies to navigate that.
Not my ideal world, but short of a commitment to lifelong celibacy, there's not much I could do about it. The ball's in women's court.
ThenElection
7d ago
In principle, you can let doctors, Catholic hospitals, etc opt out of any obligation to provide assisted suicide, even if it's "medically necessary" under some rubric. Even if you're extending the concept of coercion to taxpayers being forced to fund assisted suicide, you can block government funds from being used for it.
In practice, I recognize the slippery slope here.
ThenElection
10d ago
That's all true, but the best argument against Freddie deBoer isn't a bunch of words but just to point out that he suffers from severe mental illness and is desperately trying to shed that reputation he's gained by attacking overly enthusiastic nerds.
ThenElection
11d ago
She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.
What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.
The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.
At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
ThenElection
17d ago
Offering a data point of myself:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
I would reject it, though I'm not sure I represent the typical Mottezan's viewpoint. Then again, I question whether the typical Mottezan is even a meaningful category.
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Yes.
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
Word games, but "meritocracy" and "individualism" are just pointers to confused concepts that are themselves products of a long series of word games.
ThenElection
21d ago
For tattoos in particular: it entirely depends on context. On a ski trip back during Covid, we had a mixed gender group, and all the girls had tattoos of various sorts, and none of the men did. That led to some teasing: all the men are squares etc. But the idea that they indicate some latent violent criminality in the women is laughable: all of us were well-educated and had highly paid corporate jobs, and I would be surprised if any of us had gotten into a violent altercation in our lives. It functions more as a piece of jewelry or clothing to show off how cool and stylish you are, which women care about and men don't.
It's a silly fad (and I'm sure some will regret getting one when the fad dies), but whatever tattoos might have once indicated about a person (besides wanting to be perceived as cool) is gone since they've been normalized. At least for most tattoos: face tattoos still provide a useful signal.
ThenElection
21d ago
Note to self: the best way to get @DaseindustriesLtd to write a lengthy comment on an ML topic is to write a post confidently and aggressively wrong about the topic.
Going to take a bit of a different angle than most people: yes, agriculture is a highly intelligent system, one that outperforms all of humans, sophisticated numerical models, LLMs, and chimps in its niche.
It has its actuators (trucks, etc), and it has its neurons (individual humans and collections of humans). And a learning signal: prices (or, as a TD signal, profit). As a system, it manages to do things nothing else is capable of: no human or computer is smart enough to process all the information needed for it to succeed in its niche, and the individual humans are not organizing production and consumption so much as synapsing to other neurons based on the signals the system provides.
Asking if a combine is intelligent is like asking if a voltage differential across a membrane is intelligent. No, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
(I don't know, do the modern models even have them today?)
They do; operating directly on one-hot tokens would be prohibitively expensive.
But they're not central to the power of modern LLMs. You can even run an ablation where you use unlearned, static, entirely random embeddings (so, nearly every embedding is approximately orthogonal to every other embedding; semantic similarity would have zero relation to cosine similarity). The later layers are still able to learn syntax and semantics on their own, albeit with significantly increased loss.
Which speaks to the power of transformers: you'll get far more coherent text out of transformers with even random embeddings than some novel architecture made of simple linear combinations of word2vec.
ThenElection
22d ago
There's an important kind of intelligence that apes lack but LLMs possess.
There are even kinds of intelligence apes possess that humans lack. Particularly, short term spatial memory: sequentially flash the numbers 1 through 9 on a touchscreen monitor at random positions, and have the subject then press the monitor at those positions in order. Chimpanzees, even young chimpanzees, consistently and substantially outperform adult undergraduate humans, even when you try to incentivize the human. Does that mean chimps are smarter than humans?
Intelligence is very spiky. It's weird, but different substrates of intelligence lend themselves best to different tasks.
ThenElection
24d ago
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
ThenElection
27d ago
for the crime of lasting success in her field
This misplaces the crime. Mamet's primary crime isn't success, but being a very visible Trump supporter. For him to then have the gall to have made a play about Weinstein and #metoo is violating the principle that sexual impropriety in the arts is something the Left has the right to frame and self police.
ThenElection
28d ago
It's too early to tell, IMO. You had e.g. Newsom saying that MTF trans kids shouldn't play in sports for a bit, so Democratic politicians definitely were seeing the need for a course correction.
Unfortunately, it is (correctly) perceived that Trump has made a series of unnecessary self-owns, so now the "keep the same playbook and hope the ebb and flow of politics brings us back to power" segment has renewed leverage in the intra-party dispute. Mid-terms will determine which view gets to compete in 2028.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I think Tony Hsieh of Zappos (barely) broke into the billionaires club, and he had a tattoo and threw tattoo parties for employees.
Not sure if that's a strong recommendation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Just want to echo your experiences.
It has other knock on effects, as well. I used to smoke... Well, too much. I had tried to quit multiple times and failed. A few months ago, I realized I hadn't smoked in over a week. This was despite putting zero conscious effort into it.
It's an insanely powerful drug, and it makes me worry about other things it's doing to my nervous system. At the least, the fact that effects apparently disappear when you go off it is reassuring. Regardless, the positive health effects absolutely must outweigh any negatives.
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.
ThenElection
1mo ago
But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.
I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.
How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.
I get joy at the idea that some small part of me will help someone down the line. I don't claim any deep philosophical justification for it; it's the same part of my brain that picks up a piece of litter to throw it away in a place I'll never revisit. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it still makes me happy.
Do you pick up litter? If so, why?
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