ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
8d ago
Of course not. Your obligation is to get a well paying job at an AI company, usher in the apocalypse, and convert the universe into computronium, which can run innumerable simulations of bee lives in lands of endless flowers and honey and free of suffering.
ThenElection
8d 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
8d 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
8d ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
ThenElection
24d ago
As a bi guy, I've dated both men and women. And it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to get a date with a man than it is with a woman. Quantitatively, my inbound like/match rate online was literally 100x when matching with men (I'd get a number of likes in a day with men that it'd take me almost a year with women).
Sure, a fair bit of that was just casual sex. But even if 75% were just looking for casual sex, that's still an order of magnitude more ease dating men than women.
I suspect this mismatch is that your "average man" encompasses a lot of things that make him substantially above average.
ThenElection
29d ago
But... There's no way that Aella would actually have trouble finding a partner who wants kids who is okay with her lifestyle. Not some captain of industry, but also not some random meth addict on the street either. There are plenty of total simps in tech with a solid paycheck who'd be thrilled to go for her, and she knows that.
This is all a marketing gimmick. Come save the poor whore with a heart of gold and a mind of platinum!
ThenElection
23d ago
I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.
ThenElection
8d 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.
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
19d ago
The elites of the USA (who are often to be said to be captured by the left) are pro-Ukraine, pro-Israel, though. A substantial fringe of academics and student protestors doesn't change that.
ThenElection
19d ago
The risk is that this escalates to a broader conflict. Not Iran vs whoever--Iran is a paper tiger, and all other factors being equal it's good that it's now further from getting nukes than it was (one hopes). But I'm worried this triggers a series of international incidents that leads to a Taiwan war. Although it seems far-fetched, it also seemed far-fetched that an assassination of an archduke could spiral to a world wide conflagration.
Iran needs to respond somehow, for domestic political reasons if nothing else. And, one thing leads to another, and Hormuz ends up mined, and China decides, well, the world is going to suck for a couple years and the US is otherwise occupied, might as well take advantage of the moment.
ThenElection
25d ago
Why should you care? Well, it's your prerogative to or not. But two reasons:
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As young men drop out of the caring game, that makes the market (both economically and sexually) less competitive. There are more opportunities and niches to get utility from. Still less than a hypothetically static situation, but people dropping out mitigates some of the increased difficulty.
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It's far better to strive and create than to passively survive. For society, sure, but also better for you as a person. There are forms of joy that aren't available to someone just existing.
Yes, the world at that point was a powder keg, and you can name at least a dozen incidents before the assassination that could have set it off. The assassination was far from the root cause, but it was the proximate event in a spiral.
The world is in a similar state today, and normalcy bias is what prevents us from seeing it. Seemingly minor events can trigger repercussions far out of expectations if conditions are right.
I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.
The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.
For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.
You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:
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Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.
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The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.
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There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.
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Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.
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Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.
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Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)
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Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected
This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.
ThenElection
2mo ago
the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did
I still find it shocking that everyone important just agreed to never talk about COVID and our response to it again. I don't know how anyone can discuss bad policies that wreck the economy without at least bringing it up to refute it being an example. It's like remembering the COVID shutdowns happened is icky and uncouth.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Why not just rotate in the cooks and cleaners into the garbagewomen roles, since they're equivalent jobs?
This would be especially good if you swapped in the elderly caregivers into the gravedigger roles. It aligns incentives: if your care receiver dies, you dig the grave for them.
"When a person shows you who they are, believe them."
No update on opinion. What it means to me: the most useful way to interact with a system is through modeling what it does and how it does it. Not what it says it does, not how it originated, not what its creator intended it to do, not what its subcomponents think it does, not what you want it to do, not what purpose it having would be the best for the world, not what the documentation says it does, not what the label on the tin says it does.
If you don't do this, you will run into trouble. For example, consider corporate DEI training sessions. The entire DEI training ecosystem, including outside trainers/consultants and corporate HR, will publicly state that they are doing it to help reduce bias and discrimination (along with some secondary claims around it increasing efficiency and innovation). Suppose an employee took this at face value, and he's deeply committed to racial DEI. He does some research, and it turns out in general these sessions increase discrimination and racism. And he does further research and is able to prove, with incontrovertible empirical evidence, that the sessions at his own company are making employees materially racist. He reports this to HR; surprisingly, they seem to ignore it. He thinks his report is being missed because of an overworked HR department, and so he publishes his research and evidence widely within the company.
What happens, do you think?
If you take HR's statements of their purpose at face value, you would expect them to effusively thank him for pointing this out to them, quickly remedy the situation as quickly as possible, and maybe even give him a bonus for his exceptional effort in helping them achieve their purpose better.
If you think the purpose of HR is instead to tick boxes to protect the company from legal liability and to join in into popular fads, you aren't as sanguine about the employee's future. You might even expect him to be called into HR for public desanguination.
When it comes to personal decision making, people who use one of these heuristics for ascribing purpose to impersonal systems are going to do much better than people who use the other.
Scott's post is, frankly, lame and disappointing. He doesn't even mention Stafford Beer and only has interest in responding to Twitter randos.
You left out a third option: raise taxes on the entire country to equalize compensation across the different job classes. You even get to hit highly productive men (and women) more, creating even more equality.
Do this process enough, and you can eventually make sure part time yoga instructors get paid the same as the top researchers at DeepMind!
There's also the fourth option, of doing pretty much nothing and then complaining on BlueSky about the conservative incel wreckers for causing the Fourth Bubonic Plague.
ThenElection
1mo ago
If a student wrote a "based" indigenous studies essay, would that help them pass the class to get the degree they're paying two hundred thousand dollars for?
Of course, there's the opportunity to write and think about things that aren't either kind of slop. But I'm very skeptical that equal standards would be applied. Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays (or the quality of them, or anything really).
ThenElection
3mo ago
(Warning to the reader: this turned into an extended rant.)
The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people. They are unsafe and chaotic. You can add rules to make this slightly better--no drugs, no alcohol, no pets--but that makes the homeless you most want out of the libraries and off the streets even less willing to go to a shelter.
So that leaves individual housing and apartments. But they can't be temporary: if they are, what happens when the beneficiary runs out of time? Do you kick them out, making them homeless again? So you indefinitely let them stay. A one bedroom in my city runs around $2500 a month, at the very low end. That's $36k/year for each person housed, which in isolation is still better than $100k/year. But the population housed would be constantly growing. And it's assuming no additional costs: you might reduce emergency room visits from once per week to once per month, but it's still a cost. And what happens when the tenant destroys substantial parts of the property? During COVID, vacant hotels were used by my city to house the homeless, and one hosting a couple hundred suffered $20M in damages over two years. $20M here, $20M there, and soon you're talking about real money.
All these funds are coming from taxpayers that are themselves having to spend a significant part, and often a majority, of their income to pay for rent or mortgage. It's the number one reason people leave my city.
And yes, our housing policy is shit, significantly contributing to the issue. But in a world where activism to improve our housing policy has failed for over a decade, I have to assume that it'll be at least a decade before anything improves on that front. Does that mean I should just forego crazy luxuries like clean and safe libraries, parks, sidewalks, and transit for the next decade? Why shouldn't I just move, taking the 60k I pay every year to the city along with me, when there are plenty of places that do manage to have public spaces at a small fraction of the cost? Plenty of people are doing exactly that already, which has driven massive deficits in the city budget. And then how are we going to pay for even more homeless services? Shutting down schools? Libraries? Parks?
ThenElection
1mo ago
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:
SFPD officers responded and gave the [raccoon carcass man] a mental health evaluation and determined he did not need to be detained.
And:
Police found a body without a head or hands in a large fish tank. They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.
The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.
The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data.
Although the Hinge post that included their top line numbers has been scrubbed, it's still available on Wayback. They address your point directly:
When we look at the rate of men forming connections – rather than the rate that they are sent initial likes, as we did before – we find that index of inequality greatly decreases.
With straight men on Hinge, the Gini index of connections comes down to 0.324, or approximately the UK — a huge improvement.
As an aside, this movement toward equitability when dealing with connections exists with straight women too, so much so that the Gini index becomes meaningless.
That, arguably, supports your point (things are substantially less dire than looking at raw likes), though I think the credibility depends on how the junior data analyst defined "forming a connection."
What I'd love to see is the Gini coefficients of mutual matches for different dating apps in 2025.
Widespread, I don't know, but it did happen. For instance:
The Morning Star bundle ceremony among the Skiri Pawnees (who lived in what is now central Nebraska) reasserted devotion to the power of the rising Eastern Star (Mars). It was their only ritual involving human sacrifice and was one of only a few not tied to seasonal cycles. For the ceremony to occur, a male member of the tribe had to announce that he had seen Morning Star in a dream and, upon awakening, perceived it rising in the east. Ritual tradition then called for dispatch of the dreamer (now deemed the "warrior leader") to secure a girl captive by raiding neighboring villages... After being dressed by the Morning Star priest in sacred raiments from the Morning Star bundle and anointed with red ointment, the captive stayed with the Wolf man... the Wolf man led the captive to the scaffold, constructed of different symbolic species of wood. The killing was carried out with a ceremonial bow and arrow. Immediately a stone knife incision was made near the heart, and specially prepared buffalo meat held to receive drops of the victim's blood before being prepared for feasting. Before the body was removed and placed in the prairie facing east, the entire village, including children, lodged dozens of arrows in the victim's back. The Skiris believed that this ceremony allowed the victim's spirit to ascend to the sky to become a star, while her body returned to the earth... The last known Morning Star Ceremony sacrifice took place on April 22, 1838, with the killing of Haxti, a fifteen-year-old Lakota girl. The United States subsequently suppressed the ceremony, but it also seems that some Skiris themselves wished to stop the human sacrifice.
http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.rel.035
I'm always somewhat torn about highlighting this kind of thing: it's not surprising for Native Americans' level of development, and most cultures have things equally sordid in their past. But it's an essential corrective to the idea that Native Americans were noble savages, little fairy children dancing in the woods in communal bliss until big mean Europeans came and ruined Eden.
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.
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