ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
"Is Morning Glory Milking Farm closer to Henry Miller or Murakami?"
ThenElection
1d ago
I was more late 90s and 2000s, and the closest I got to feeling hated was around the Iraq War, when I was vocally anti-war in a time when everyone supported it, in what we would now call a red state (back then, the blue-vs-red framing barely existed).
I would say I feel more hated now than I did then; my politics are the same, but my visible identities create negative reactions (and my invisible ones--like being bi--I don't advertise).
ThenElection
2d ago
The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.
There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.
ThenElection
2d ago
Morning Glory Milking Farm
How is this? I've been looking for a contemporary "spicy" book to read to get a better sense of the genre, and I've seen it mentioned a couple times.
ThenElection
2d ago
Abortion opinion has stabilized, and pro-life views are better represented legally now than they've been in decades. Socially, although the book is definitely something that reeks of the 2020s, abortion opponents aren't in the worst place they've been.
There's a narrower critique to be had about why this particular book was published and marketed, and here vibe-wise I agree there's been a shift in the culture war aspect. But it's more about the class that written works now originate from: not to put too fine a point on it, well-educated, materially comfortable women, who have cohered into a distinct block that takes a maximalist pro-abortion position. This was relatively uncommon in the safe, legal, and rare era, but it now dominates elite institutions, including publishing. Men mostly don't care about abortion except insofar as opposing it cuts off social opportunities, so pro-abortion wins by default.
What I would like to know is sales numbers on the book, and how much purchased copies of it are read. Does it have an actual audience that reads it?
Yes; or, at least, a situation that's to be remedied with other means than government action. It's within the rights of a private organization to want to outsource a blacklist to a third party, and the motivation is sympathetic in many cases. If I run a company, I don't want to be on the news for matching an employee donation to NAMBLA (nor do I want to fund it), but I don't want to spend time or resources collecting a comprehensive list of objectionable organizations.
There's something of a wrinkle here: the kind of progressive blob that the SPLC inhabits and thrives in is itself a creation of the state, and in a world with spherical cows, we wouldn't have that. But that's not going away anytime soon, so its outsized (and overall pernicious) influence is a bullet I'm willing to bite.
ThenElection
2d ago
He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government.
The root issue here seems to be too much government power; give me six lines written by an honest man etc. It always starts out unobjectionable: of course we want to be able to battle terrorists/drug cartels/child pornography rings. But once the tool is established, its scope of use expands to things that I find unobjectionable (in this case, I have no deep objection to private organizations investigating other private organizations).
And ultimately it ends in endless lawfare, with whoever is in power deploying those tools against their enemies: and everyone is guilty of something, so any complaints can be met with "the law is the law," and defendants can only respond with weak arguments and accusations of hypocrisy. It is, of course, rich for Democrats to complain about this, but it's nevertheless an unfortunate situation.
ThenElection
2d ago
Is your complaint that the model is training on tokenized language data? I.e. hypothetically, if you had a model that instead learned human language by being trained purely on tokenized audiovisual data taken from some embodied robot with motor controls, would you see that model as an intelligent being? I don't see why that should matter and we're nowhere close to that, but I want to understand your objection better.
Or is it the very idea of using prediction as a self supervised learning objective that's objectionable?
ThenElection
3d ago
Does Othello count?
ThenElection
3d ago
You can "pretrain" with RL:
ThenElection
3d ago
The model it builds--what types of people do certain things, how it relates to their perspective on the world--is in the weights, not in the preamble. The memory bank is only for identifying which type of person is prompting the LLM; the actual model of P(vote|person likes horror fiction, fine press, math) doesn't reside in the bank.
ThenElection
3d ago
There's some kind of model building going on. E.g. I never discuss politics with Claude. Yesterday I was filling out a ballot and tested it by asking it to predict my votes (based purely on its memory bank of our previous interactions; I confirmed there are no political memories in it). Out of what was over a dozen real choices, it only got one incorrect. That's a pretty effective model of my political preferences (which wouldn't be accurately modeled by aggregate polling of the normie voter).
ThenElection
3d ago
Maybe the issue is that "interpolation and limited extrapolation paired with a reward signal" is really what intelligence is, and although it's all LLMs are doing, it's also all that humans do too.
ThenElection
3d ago
Gary Marcus is a hack who has been saying deep learning can’t possibly work for years
Gary Marcus has plenty of issues, but fundamentally he doesn't reject DL, or even that DL will one day enable AGI. When pressed he thinks we will get to AGI in 8-15 years. Which is an entirely reasonable timeline, if a touch conservative.
He's a smart guy who's discovered a niche playing up current limitations to midwits in a way that seems he's making much stronger claims than he actually is.
ThenElection
5d ago
I like this variation: same exact framing, but if you press blue, a random person dies, unless 50% or more press blue.
Morally, it seems like it has most of the same forces involved: there will be idiots or psychopaths who press blue, but if society can coordinate to get to 50%, no one dies. It adds some skin in the game for red: voting red doesn't give you safety, though it increases your chances of survival infinitesimally.
But I think this would drive more people to choose red, because it makes the sacrifice of voting blue not yourself but instead another person (extremely likely).
This is weird too me: if all lives are equally valuable, then which of the two scenarios shouldn't change whether you choose red or blue.
ThenElection
5d ago
Her good poll numbers among Democrats is just name recognition: Trump bad, she anti-Trump, therefore Harris good. But, in practice, she has been an incredibly weak candidate in every election she's run in, for two decades. Whatever advantages she does have are matched and exceeded by Newsom in particular.
ThenElection
5d ago
Unfalsifiable seems a bit strong, here: we just don't have the data collected to falsify the hypothesis. But that data isn't in principle uncollectible.
Though, it's an interesting question from a philosophy of science point of view: if data that no one will collect anytime soon is necessary to falsify a hypothesis, is that hypothesis unscientific?
ThenElection
5d ago
Why should I pay attention to something that I have literally zero power over, as opposed to focusing on building a rich, fulfilling personal life? Does that make me stupid?
Men are expected to construct romance. It's a labor of love, but labor nonetheless. And part of that construction is hiding the labor, making it seem effortless and even magical.
To share that breaks the illusion. This reveals character traits about the man: either he is socially incompetent enough to not understand his role, or he understands it but resents it enough that he's nevertheless going to throw it in women's face. Both of those possibilities are unattractive, for different but very good reasons.
A third possibility is that he's just a deep systemizer and is looking for another deep systemizer and wants to fly his freaky systemizer flag wildly to filter out nonsystemizers. This is more sympathetic, but women who reject him for it are doing him a favor: they're incompatible, and he doesn't want to date a nonsystemizer anyway, so everyone wins.
And it's easy not to discuss it: it's a shared understanding of reality similar to "the sky is blue." If I'm dating a woman, obviously she already knows that e.g. women in general strongly prefer height. Bringing it up isn't going to lead to enlightenment on anyone's part, and that makes it come off as more begging for sympathy or validation than an interesting topic of conversation, which is obviously unattractive in a man.
ThenElection
5d ago
I know some couples that qualify, but it tends to be an above average in attractiveness Indian guy who is reasonably professionally successful. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
ThenElection
5d ago
I don't think the Motte is excluded. People here have done truesight tests with recent frontier models, and they're able to identify their handles.
ThenElection
5d ago
The people who need to hear women are attracted to dominance aren't the ones beating their girlfriends. Typically, they are very passive and milquetoast in their interactions with women, leading to their failures in dating.
Hypothetically, you might imagine one of them wildly overshooting, but in practice that's not an issue: "dominance" isn't close to their default state, and even minimal movements in that direction are very uncomfortable.
ThenElection
8d ago
Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.
ThenElection
9d ago
I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up
Denisovans. IIRC the Denisovans were never actually in Australia, but Aboriginal Australians (along with Melanesians) picked up their genes in transit.
Mostly neutral, although all other factors being equal I'd prefer no painting of nails. Garish colors are a turn off.
This is mostly because it seems fairly ubiquitous. I'd guess 90%+ of women get their nails done at least once a year.
More options
Context Copy link