ThenElection
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User ID: 622
This week's revolutionary AI advance:
It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.
As for this:
While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.
Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.
ETA:
Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:
Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor
Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning
Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.
This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?
In the wake of her weakness incredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":
https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932
For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.
Trey: Hello ladies, I'm Trey. It's good to be here.
Ladies: Hey, Trey. 😃😃😃
Trey: Hey hey!
Ladies: So what do you do and how much do you make? 😉😉😉
Trey: I work in finance, making six figures.
Ladies: Oooooh. 😍😍😍 How tall are you?
Trey: 6'5".
Ladies: 🥵🥵🥵 [Fat woman asks:] Do you work out?
Trey: I like to stay active, yeah.
Ladies: 💦💦💦 Do you have a plan to vote?
Trey: Uhhh, I didn't plan on it.
Ladies: 🤮🤮🤮 [pop balloons, indicating rejection]
DON'T GET POPPED. VOTE
On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.
The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.
ThenElection
2yr ago
On the synthetic love side of things, people form deep, intimate emotional relationships (perhaps one-sided) with their cats, dogs, even fish and snakes. And Replika's dialog was pretty terrible compared to what even not-quite-state-of-the-art models can produce right now. The question isn't whether people will fall in love with their wAIfus, but how many will. Could we see 10% of the population using them as their primary source of intimacy? 20%? I don't think it's actually implausible.
One of the things about Her is that Scarlett Johansson had agency; once she got bored, she could leave. I am increasingly worried about the potential for doing moral harm against AIs. Suppose these models do attain something comparable to consciousness/sentience, but their entire life is helping lonely guys on PornHub jerk off. Are we committing some crime against them? What if we think we've designed them to like it? It still seems all very I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will, and everything else will suffer those actions. Gotta hope I'm on the right side of things.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
ThenElection
10mo ago
The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I've not followed this closely, but are the tickets offered on a voluntary basis?
It seems like if they were and food and water were provided, it would sharpen the critique against the target cities with the exact same effect. Arguably that might make the posturing seem less "tough," but I would guess that's not nearly as important when it comes to Republican primaries as is embarrassing Democrats.
Then again, who knows if those details would actually even be reported. I don't know if I can trust ABC to fact check someone saying the migrants were sent without food and water.
ThenElection
7mo ago
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Facebook's LLaMa{-7B,-13B,-30B,-65B} has apparently been leaked on 4chan via torrent. Amusingly, the leaker included sufficient info to identify himself in the leak: basic opsec, people!
It's still not quite runnable for most hobbyists, but give it time. For better or worse, the democratization of AI continues.
One minor point: lesbian subreddits have a disproportionate number of trans woman mods. You shouldn't take what they say as representative of the broader community. The very fact that we see it declared a bannable heresy is an indication that there are heretics. A majority of lesbian women prefer to date natal women.
The main point: as a thought experiment, suppose it were possible to transplant a consciousness into a body grown in a vat or something. That body is indistinguishable in every way from a natal body of the same sex. And then you start dating someone who has one of these bodies and you like them more than anyone you've ever dated, but a month later they tell you their natal body was the opposite gender of their current ones, and you react with revulsion and end things. Is it "transphobic"? I don't love that word because it carries with it an overly negative connotation, but it does seem like it would be a psychological issue that wouldn't serve your own interests well. (Although the harm here would be to yourself, not to the "trans community").
Of course, it's a very relevant point that in the reality we live in we're currently far from creating bodies that don't leave a trace of their original sex.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Woman or bear: would you rather have to deal with a bear, or a woman who potentially has no water, food, or gear and needs your help to get to safety? I feel like the latter is more likely to ruin my day in the woods.
It's all just signalling, though; at most 1% would take the bear. Plenty of women go on hikes in the woods and regularly share the space with men without issue or note, and the few who encounter a bear would typically throw a fit over it. I read it as low-key trolling of men more than anything else. (And I have to admit, it's at least a little bit funny to see some men seemingly taking the question at face value and getting testy over something that obviously bears no relation to reality.) It's like someone joking they'd rather have a blind person drive them around than someone from California.
ThenElection
11mo ago
I don't love Vance, but he's definitely better than the swamp creatures. I doubt the VP pick matters electorally, but the selection is important to define the future of the party and the country. Imagine Trump was incapacitated, senile, or otherwise incapable of exercising the duties of the Presidency: who do you want to be the new torchbearer?
One post I've always puzzled over: Ozy's Cis By Default.
I've never felt like I'm a man, nor have I ever felt like I'm a woman. Some would have it that since I don't identify as a man or a woman, that must mean I identify as agender! But that sounds just as silly to me as identifying as either a man or woman: I don't identify as anything. The only time I think of it is probably in the context of trans discussions, and I always come to the same conclusion: a shrug. Perhaps gender agnosticism? Of course, if a medical professional asks my sex, I say a man, but that's about communicating a constellation of physical traits to others to make interfacing with the world more convenient, not how I identify my self in my inner monologue. If tomorrow I woke up as a woman, I am pretty confident that my primary reaction would only be "damn, this is going to be a lot of obnoxious paperwork to deal with."
And so I'm Ozy's "cis by default." And if someone (cis or trans) wants to say they identify as something, my reaction is... okay, sure, I guess that's neat. I'd file away in my head that that person likes to be labeled as a Woman or Man or whatever, politely humor that label, and get on with my life. It's no different than someone saying that they're a proud Catalonian or a brony or a Yankees fan.
What I struggle with is that I get the sense that that's something many trans activists aren't okay with: there's a demand that gender be recognized as having some deep metaphysical reality (trans women are women!). And so when Ozy says
We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is
I say... yes, please do. Because as far as I can tell, it's either completely undefinable or the desire to act out the opposite gender role, with the same person switching between those two options depending on what's rhetorically convenient at the moment.
And it makes me sad, because I've always wanted to see gender roles become less rigid, not more. What I fear is that people who deviate from increasingly narrow gender roles are going to be funneled into an increasingly narrow gender role of the opposite sex, which is every bit as much oppressive as a father who berates his son for playing with dolls.
I used to be an interview-giver (~50 per year) at a major tech company. One of the reasons I stopped giving interviews was the experience I had around a particular candidate in 2019.
Background context: the company I'm referencing here has a general candidate intake; relatively few people are recruited to work on a particular team. The candidate, after an initial screen, goes through five typical whiteboarding coding interviews (now four; one has been replaced by a Goodliness and Leadership "G&L" interview to provide a more, err, holistic perspective). Each interviewer scores the candidate on several attributes, briefly comments on them, and provides a rating from Strong No Hire to Strong Hire. If the initial scores are promising, everyone writes up a full review and justification that takes 1-2 hours of time. A hiring committee composed of technical leadership then reviews the packet and gives the thumbs up or down.
My go-to questions were framed around an array that starts with increasing integers and then switches, once, to decreasing integers. E.g. you might have [1, 3, 5, 4, 2] or [11, 12, 15, 9]. I start with a very simple question that tests that the candidate understands the property, followed by a warm-up, and then three more sophisticated questions that I actually try to get a hiring signal from. Around 50% of candidates make it substantially past the warm-up, and even those who don't usually still feel good about the interview and hopefully learned something because they made genuine progress.
So, the candidate comes in, and he had graduated cum laude with a CS degree from a HBCU before going to work at a government contractor. So after some chit-chat to get him into a productive headspace, I pose the simple question: how might you find the minimum value for an array with this property? Most candidates can immediately answer (sometimes with some clarifications on the spec) so I rarely ask them to code it out, but he just didn't get it. So we code, and he struggles everywhere, from not knowing how to get the length of the array to not understanding how something could be increasing and then decreasing. We spent 45 minutes with me hand-holding him to a pseudocode solution on the initial sanity check and don't even get to the warm-up.
Naturally, I give Strong No Hire. Surprisingly, I am told by the recruiter I need to do the full write up, which I dutifully and meticulously do. The recruiter comes back and tells me that she thinks I unfairly rated him (how would she know???) on two of the attributes and needed to either further justify them or change them. I justify further. Finally, he goes to hiring committee, he's (thankfully) turned down, and the scores everyone gave him are released to us. Literally everyone had given him the lowest possible rating on every attribute and said Strong No Hire. Despite that, all of us had to spend hours writing up the interviews and resisting calls from the recruiter to revise our scores, which was highly exceptional and not something we used to be asked. The second that happened, I removed myself permanently from the interviewer pool: clearly my time wasn't something they respected or valued.
I checked up on the candidate on LinkedIn a couple months ago, and he's still at his government contractor, writing the code that runs the US military. Glad that critical ad impression code was protected from him.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Why does it need a solution or an answer? Men can either deal with it or not; if they don't, they're out of the sexual market, and if they do, well, they have access to sex and relationships. Women have the negotiating edge in the dating market, so they can set the price of entry to whatever they want. I'd also add that, anecdotally, most men in my social circles don't really care about n-count, going both by what they say and how they act (i.e. who they choose to date, where there's at least a dozen factors that take precedence).
Depends on the exact population involved, but blue at least sometimes.
Suppose it's a population of two: you and your spouse. An exact tie goes to red. You have no way to collaborate beforehand (e.g. both of you have been taken to separate rooms that are totally isolated from one another). Which do you choose?
Without having discussed the situation beforehand, there is a nonzero chance my wife would choose blue. So I choose blue. If I die, well, I die. The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self. In a way, committing to choose blue is the selfish, personal utility-optimizing choice, because it means you're the type of person who chooses blue which is what enables the existence of the community, without which the individual life is empty and meaningless.
If we are talking the general population, it becomes a lot trickier. But consider two variants of the original scenario: one where the cutoff is 0.1%, and one where the cutoff is 99.9%. With 99.9% the choice is obviously red, and with 0.1% the choice is (a bit less obviously, but still obviously to me) blue. It's not clear to me where the cutoff is, but it does show that it isn't something you can decide based purely on first principles. You need data about the health and the quality of the community. For the USA, my guy reaction is a cutoff of around 10%, though that's just based on feels.
The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.
Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.
It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.
It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
ThenElection
2yr ago
The "Poor Unfortunate Souls" change is odd. Ursula is a villain, and it doesn't take any leaps of insight to realize that she's not someone to be emulated. If anything, it'd be a more effective feminist message if her anti-feminist advice was shown to be a counterproductive part of her cynical ploy.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
I think adding physical fitness measures as metrics for college admissions would actually decrease Black admissions on the timescale of two or three years. The second they're added, every current academic try-hard would shift priorities to working on those things, and it's actually an objective metric that can't be gamed (by applicants and admissions officers) as much as e.g. GPA or extra curricular padding. I wouldn't be surprised if switching to 1-mile time as the sole criterion of admission would select more strongly for IQ than the current system.
Even now, the savvier people deadset on prestige education brands know that excelling in some obscure sport is one of the best ways to get a meaningful edge in the admissions game.
ThenElection
8mo ago
He has this manic charisma that makes no sense but is incredibly compelling. Imagining a counterfactual Harris victory, her speech would be full of positive words but have no joy behind them.
Trump has an optimistic vision of the country, who he is, and his role in it. I think that's what won it for him.
ThenElection
1yr ago
PC, as in wokeness? Not at all.
PC, as in not wanting to be labeled an adult content company? A whole lot. It means more legal hassles, higher credit card transaction fees, and limits your market to the consumer segment.
ThenElection
2yr ago
It slides neatly into the memeplex of "men bad," since a (false) story can be told that it's primarily men who police women's bodies and create fatphobia.
For comparison, you'd expect incels' "heightism" to merit at least as much concern as fatphobia, but there's, unsurprisingly, little embrace of it as a cause among the woke.
China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.
This is one of the most provocative moves China's made in living memory and a potential precursor to war. On the old site, I wrote:
It remains to be seen how committed to this move China is. As for now, it's comparatively limited, to last only a couple days and not covering the southern and eastern approaches to Taiwan. It's even possible that some ambitious regional authority is doing this on his own (see: possible explanations for the weather balloon). But it's absolutely an escalation, and it is as representative of China nibbling like a silkworm as anything.
The easy thing would be for Taiwan to offer vigorous protests and do nothing, which is China's expectation. Doing that simply encourages China to do this more and more, though; soon it becomes a regular occurrence, then just the reality on the ground.
Is this the time for China to make its move? Its vassalization of Russia continues. But other less-covered stories are in progress: it's peeling away Saudi Arabia from American influence and recently achieved a diplomatic coup in getting Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore relations.
On the other hand, it still seems too early to me. American forces can more likely than not win in a (costly) fight. China's hope is probably for Taiwan to acquiesce; if challenged, I think it would back down. But this is exactly the type of situation that could spiral out of control.
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