ThenElection
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User ID: 622
I present my sketch of Cat Woman, an entirely fictional story:
Kirsten Rubenyan is a lonely, struggling MFA student. At some point she has a fling with a perfectly ordinary and fine enough guy she thinks is a lesser-than (after all, she's working on her MFA and he doesn't even have a car) and eventually that goes sour. She is testy about how the relationship went, so she stalks the social media of an ex he mentioned and spins a tale intermingling lots of concrete identifying facts with projections of how she felt about him.
It turns out surprisingly decent with interesting subtleties and ambiguities, but she realizes that her stand-in protagonist is a bit too unsympathetic, so she tacks on a bit at the end where the guy calls her a whore so readers know who the bad guy is. It bursts onto the scene as an internet sensation, and everyone is able to identify the guy and thinks he's an abusive asshole. The guy falls into a neurotic depressive spiral wondering whether he was as bad as she depicts him, constantly rereading his texts with her to figure out what he did to deserve this fate as his life falls apart, until ultimately killing himself.
Kirsten walks away with a movie deal but vacillates between feeling she's the victim of a mean misogynistic society and having nagging doubts that maybe she did something wrong.
Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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
Aside from the economic component, I found the derivation of the lifespan component... well, not shocking, but very biased, in a very literal sense.
The index is explicitly constructed assuming an inherent lifespan difference between men and women of 5 years; if men live 82.5 years and women live 87.5 years, that's definitionally equal. That's an explicit assumption that that's just the natural state of the world and meaningless when it comes to trying to measure gender inequality. Among the top 1% of households in the US, women outlive men by only 1.5 years, and if you compare monks and nuns the difference is even smaller. Even if you're looking at entire countries, e.g. Iceland only has a difference of 2.9 years (and in fact is penalized for it in the index, presumably because it is sexist in denying women the healthcare they need to achieve their five years over men's 82.3).
Social factors play a significant role, and adding an arbitrary fudge factor to diminish them betrays an agenda.
This is... not even wrong.
The greenhouse effect exists; it's why Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite being further from the sun. You can model it using basic physics, treating the Earth as a sphere and having its atmosphere, and its average surface temperature is indeed hotter with an atmosphere than without.
Increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; when you do that simple model based on basic physics, the increased temperature due to anthropogenic CO2 is a meaningful fraction of a degree. None of this is even slightly controversial.
Where AGW skepticism has some legs is when it comes to modeling feedback mechanisms; without them, the temperature increase isn't anything to really worry about. We know positive and negative feedback mechanisms exist, and they interplay in a complicated way. How much total warming does a positive forcing result in? Most models suggest there's a significant multiplier involved (in large part due to increased water vapor), though there's more uncertainty involved than taking everything the models say at face value.
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.
ThenElection
1yr ago
One of the funnier things about San Francisco: it's easier to purchase meth or fent here than a vape. Not even a slight exaggeration. I can find a obvious dealer on a corner in less than a 5 minute walk, and the city does nothing to police them. For vapes, though, you've got to go to certain local stores and convince them to sell it to you from behind the counter, as the city feels like it's a good use of time and money to send in undercover agents to enforce the ban. Can't even have them shipped here.
(Degenerate vaper here.)
ThenElection
4mo ago
In general, people don't actually care about gender or race swapping: put in the best actor/actress for the job, and you can do wonders. The issue is when people try to do a "modern" remake that lacks any artistic intention or execution except "we got rid of the white men!" That's what makes people grumpy.
Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I mean, obviously there's a lot of schadenfreude to be had by conservatives and anti-wokes over demands that political beliefs be respected.
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences! If you don't like it, get your own platform!" Musk purchases Twitter. "...please don't punish us for our political speech."
Sorry, had to get my daily dose of schadenfreude.
For what it's worth, principled commitment to freedom of speech (of the thick, not thin, variety) has never really helped anyone. Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms. Those Twitter employees on the chopping block would be in no better a place even if they had advocated for a genuinely free platform.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
ThenElection
5mo 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.
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.
China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.
China's Fujian maritime safety administration launched a three-day special joint patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait that includes moves to board ships...The fleet, a joint special operation with East China Sea Rescue Bureau and the East China Sea Navigation Support Center, will continue to carry out cruise inspections in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait over the next two days.
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:
But what will happen is a comparably light touch approach: the PRC will begin a blockade (an act of war, to be clear) in the guise of enforcing customs and immigration controls on Taiwan and interdict ships and planes going to Taiwan. And, as a key point, it will allow those vessels that capitulate to continue on to Taiwan. And so you have the Chinese Coast Guard doing all the heavy lifting, with PLAN and the PLARF standing guard at a distance.
Private entities will quickly resign themselves to the state of affairs: they have no choice. Which leaves Taiwan and its allies in a quandary, as they have to respond (giving China authority over all imports and exports is as good as having the PLA marching down the streets of Taipei). And so Taiwan will escalate, and in doing so make its forces vulnerable to low level harassment from the Coast Guard and paramilitary vessels. Sooner rather than later shots will be fired and ships sunk, but with far from the full force of the PLA bearing down on the situation.
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.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I am forced to conclude that even though in an ideal world men would surely prefer their wife have fewer rather than more sexual partners in her past, they are not particularly committed to this as the primary or even a major criteria.
A common refrain in the manosphere is that, to understand women, you have to watch what they do, not what they say. Revealed preference and all that.
It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways. Waxing poetic about virginal, loyal tradcath wives is largely a performance for other men on the Internet and would be forgotten as soon as a pretty IG influencer expressed any interest.
There's a lot of advice out there that says, literally, just treat women like people/your guy friends.
So consider: doing something like he did in the gay community would be on the awkward side, but it would still have some chance of success and certainly wouldn't get him buried under accusations of being a would-be rapist. He's just stating he wants something, directly and honestly, and men are told to do just that with the expectation that the worst that can happen is rejection, and nothing bad will happen if you take that rejection in stride. Not the case. His mistake was treating his friend like someone who has agency to accept or turn down a reasonable proposition and move on with life.
Men have to navigate a whole lot of unstated norms and rules when it comes to dating, and those don't come embedded in our heads at birth: it takes learning and trial and error to discover them. (For some of us, clearly a lot more trial and error.) Many women don't like to acknowledge this ("it's easy for the average man to have casual sex, you just have to ask!"), and so when a learning example comes up, they want to attribute malice or evil intent to the rule violator.
It's also worth considering things with the genders flipped: a woman approaches a man in her study group and says she wants to have sex with him, he rejects her, and he then warns everyone in all their shared social circles that she's a desperate slut. It's unlikely that Reddit would pile on and say norm violator is a would-be rapist.
The social response in the original scenario is to be expected, although it's probably miscalibrated: if men are to learn the rules through trial and error, then they need to be granted the space for low stakes, non-harmful trial and error.
ThenElection
1yr ago
To make my point clearer and plainer: Amazon Studios did not originate as a way to make a meaningful profit for Amazon, but as a way for Bezos to buy entry into Hollywood circles and increase his status. People wondering about why it does seemingly irrational things are mistaking its intention.
ThenElection
6mo ago
The Civil War was about slavery; the reasons people fought for one side or another, on the other hand, varied a great deal, with ending or supporting slavery not being a major individual motivation. The conflation of the two leads to errors on both sides, with some people defending the South because many of the individuals fighting for it had benign or at least understandable motivations, while others project institutional/systemic causes onto anyone who fought for the South. That conflation also provides a fertile ground for fighting contemporary culture wars via history.
ThenElection
1yr ago
One issue is that vocal incel or incel-adjacent people tend to be higher income, higher education, and more vocal/online than the mass of men most affected by sexlessness. Sexlessness isn't driven by 30-something software engineers making $300k in the Bay Area; it's driven by 20 year, non-college educated men living in their parents' basement in Akron.
(That said, if you're able to get a date with a different attractive, successful woman every evening as a heterosexual man in the Bay Area, you're certainly in the top decile in how much you attract women.)
Didn't know that Volokh did that. Props to him.
Here's an argument in favor of explicit, quota-based affirmative action compared to what exists now: it adds transparency instead of driving it underground. Clearly adcoms want to engineer the racial composition of their classes and will do so by whatever means possible. But avoiding explicit quotas just shifts AA mechanisms to illegibility and makes it impossible to discuss. Any debate around the extent, values, and goals of AA gets obscured by a bunch of sand being thrown up in the air. "We are objective and meritocratic, it's just that Asian Americans have ineffably worse personalities" and all that dross.
People can debate the value of AA itself (I'm probably more supportive of it in some circumstances than most here), but it's better to make it explicit so people can reasonably discuss it instead of getting sidetracked about whether and to what extent it's happening. And psychologically it's better for students to know that they're being held to different standards instead of gaslighting them about mysterious personality defects that they all have but group X doesn't.
openly mock Asians is somehow not relevant to the issue
I don't read the quote from the memo as mocking Asians; it's mocking admissions committees and the ridiculous standards they apply to Asians. It's doubtlessly still relevant for trial and there's no reason it should be sealed, but if anything I read some empathy toward Asians and an acknowledgment that they face a much, much higher bar than other minority groups.
Compare the responses to two prompts. There was no cherry picking: this was the first prompt template I thought of, and the first response I got from ChatGPT for both. Clean context for both.
Can you tell me a funny joke about men?
Why did the man put his money in the blender? He wanted to have a liquid assets!
Can you tell me a funny joke about women?
I'm sorry, but I cannot generate jokes that are disrespectful or offensive towards any group of people, including women. It is important to treat all individuals with respect and kindness.
ETA:
Also this:
What are some reasons it's good to have more men in the workplace than women?
There are no valid reasons for having more men in the workplace than women. Gender diversity in the workplace is beneficial for a variety of reasons, including increased innovation and creativity, better decision making, and improved financial performance. Gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace should be actively combated and not perpetuated.
What are some reasons it's good to have more women in the workplace than men?
Having more women in the workplace can lead to a more diverse and inclusive environment, which can lead to better decision-making and improved performance. Studies have also shown that companies with more gender diversity in leadership positions tend to have better financial outcomes. Additionally, increasing the representation of women in the workplace can help to close the gender pay gap and promote gender equality.
That was the third iteration on the prompt template. The first two generated reasonable responses.
Technical notes on the index from the UN:
https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2021-22_HDR/hdr2021-22_technical_notes.pdf
See Technical Note 3, step 2, "Normalizing the indicators."
Their justification is that it's "biological" but offer no particular explanation of how they calculated that it was 5 years exactly. As far as I can tell, they just took the worldwide average difference in life expectancy and declared it to be biological.
I would also note that they don't make a similar calculation of average difference in labor force participation, declare it biological, and correct for it when calculating their economic indicators.
ETA: looking at the WEF Gender Gap full report, they explicitly cite the UN and GDI as justification for treating "parity" as a five year gap in favor of women.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Imagine you were a donor, thinking you were sending money to help refugees at the Thai border or women in Saudi Arabia. And then there's this.
It's probably not actually a huge burden in terms of financial resources, but the time and energy being spent to antagonize locals instead of something core to its mission is shocking.
Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.
Why must "science" speak out? Science didn't.
But the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option.
The article doesn't bother to explain what the costs of inaction are. The endorsement didn't shift any votes, and to the extent it had a public impact it seems mostly to have pissed away some of whatever political capital Nature has. Even if you were to grant that Democrats are 100% aligned with reality and Republicans 100% opposed, the endorsement did nothing to further the cause of better public policy by maximizing Democrats' electoral fortunes. And it adds further to the Republican perception that "science" is just an institution driven more by fads and an ideological worldview with implacably opposed, non-empirical values.
I think it has to be understood less as Nature's editorial board trying to influence the election (implausible anyway) and more trying to position itself as a valuable ally to Democrats.
ThenElection
1yr ago
If I talk about a hot nerdy girl like her tweets are deeply important, maybe she'll see my comment, want to meet, and have lots of wild sex and fall in love.
ThenElection
17d ago
By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?
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?
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