VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.
The escalator (June 2015) was less than a year after the first Ferguson riots (which spanned several dates, the last of which was after the escalator). I would agree that race relations probably reached their best point during the early years of the Obama administration, but there was a demonstrable slope toward weaponizing it from as early as the White House Beer Summit (6 months into office). I think many people expected better improvements under Obama's leadership (I'm not going to say those expectations were, in hindsight, realistic), and more than a few voters soured on the idea in both directions.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15hr ago
Before mass migration we could functionally ignore HBD and be nice and get along because the country was 87% white
I'm not going to say you're fully wrong here, but history suggests that the 87% of what is currently considered "white" did not self-identify at the time as homogeneous. The largest single lynching in US history was of Italians (and why we celebrate Columbus Day). And they're hardly the only such group.
The perceived unity of the mid-twentieth century seems IMO more a product of the trauma-bonding of the wars, the looming Cold War threat to unite against, and mass-market broadcast culture. TV, radio, and print media all existed, but were restricted to scales that gate kept access and enforced some degree of "same screen".
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Epstein seems an interesting comparison, because he also killed himself [citation needed], doubtlessly because of, at least in part, a bunch of negative press coverage. Surely if we need these sorts of protections for plagiarizing, fabulist sociology professors, we also need them for pedophile financier socialites: think of how much blood is on those journalist's hands, too!
As an example, does anyone even remember that Stanford's (white) president was forced to resign in 2023 over research misconduct brought forward by the student newspaper? Fabricating (literal data manipulation!) Alzheimer's research in Nature you'd think would be a bigger deal. He's still a professor there, even.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I have observed in the past that warfare has gotten, for lack of a better term, more abstract in the last century or two. Time was, you fight because the enemy would sack your cities, take your lands, put you and yours to the sword, or similar. But those things are unseemly by modern Western standards (not saying they don't happen, though). Modern states fight for principles or alliances or things like that, and we'd likely prefer to force surrender (or at least negotiations) rather than aim for maximum destruction. See the current Iran conflict: we certainly could strike bridges and power plants, but that's not abstract like we'd like it (not judging, merely observing).
It seems the logical conclusion is that we'll move to warfare between entirely-robotic forces, with any human casualties seen as "gross, icky, war-crime material". On the other hand, the abstraction only works when all parties accept the implication: the Taliban didn't have the good sense to give up in the face of overwhelming force that wasn't accompanied by wanton destruction. Neither does Iran, it seems.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Symbolic AI which was a thing in the 70s-80s, ie almost 3 decades before the transformer.
I have a few AI books from that era that I've been meaning to flip through again just to get a kick out of the huge vibe shift in the field. When I remember acquiring them 15-20 years ago, it seemed it was all attempts to create bespoke approaches to each aspect of the human experience. Hand-coded language models ("verb", "subject", "object"), visual edge detection, spectrograms for speech recognition, physical world models, and so forth. Nowadays, "lolz, just throw data and compute at it" seems the preferred approach.
To be fair, the limitations of the bespoke methods were known at the time: different words can serve different roles in different contexts. Sometimes we noun verbs and verb nouns. And so on for the other spaces.
I would love to get Epsteins ability to get random super successful people to email me back.
In the academic/philanthropic space here I think it might be sufficient to just have money. Full professors at research institutions are, from having talked with several, largely focused on raising money to pay for grad students and postdocs to do the real work (and a large fraction for university overhead). Other university leadership is looking to put names on new buildings or departments. The startup/VC ecosystem seems largely similar, where I've seen founders stoop to surprising levels in the interest of closing a funding round, and only later go on to great success. These people aren't fools, but having it known that there are nine or more digits in your bank account makes them take you seriously, laugh at your dumb jokes, and tell you how great your ideas are. The comparisons to, uh, escorts (which Epstein also seemed to like hanging out with) write themselves.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
From knowing a bit about the topic (very peripherally related to some research interests), I doubt it'll do as much as they propose. Existing algorithms might well work, but can't allow for an open "is this watermarked?" oracle, or it becomes fairly straightforward to start stripping watermarks, or even deriving the ways to generate them.
And if every attempt to check the watermarks requires going through Anthropic, it doesn't seem to be that much better than "is this in our set of generated artifacts?".
And that's in addition to the inherent fragility of such watermarks against edits and the amount of background data needed to hide one (I don't have a quantity in mind).
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I'm legitimately curious about how attorney-client privilege here interacts with therapist-client privilege.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
As tempting as it is to socialize with the people you know at a conference (fellow attendees from your organization, most likely), I'd recommend you at least make an effort to talk to someone new (daily?). It'll vary based on field, but "what is your research interest?" or "are you presenting? Tell me about your topic" are pretty evergreen. Some conferences provide meals, which I've found to be a good time for this. I'd expect many/most of these attempts to go nowhere (maybe they're a vendor of something you don't need), but the practice of talking about it and making connections is useful, and sometimes you learn something or meet someone interesting. If you want to be particularly savvy, find a paper/presentation that sounds interesting to you and try to chat with the specific author/speaker.
Are you sure skepticism of stimulants to treat ADHD is completely unwarranted? Sure, the ranks of skeptics include Scientology and RFK, but even The New York Times has published such opinions relatively recently [1] [2]. I'm not going to call myself a complete skeptic here --- I know people for whom the medications seem to work well --- but the diagnosis criteria are really a spectrum, and the rates at which we're prescribing these drugs (23 percent of 17-year-old American boys!) is concerning with respect to how we've pathologized cases that really can't be that far from the median, and the drugs have very real side effects. To the extent that they're performance-enhancing for most people, there is a real question of fairness and applicability, but I won't claim to know enough to have a strong opinion about that here. See also the fraction of high-achieving "mentally disabled" students at top-tier universities demanding special accommodations.
Medication might well work for you. I'm not a doctor, and I'm definitely not your doctor, but I would recommend a little sympathy for differing views here. There might well be other reasons to cut off contact, but IMO "ADHD skepticism" seems, alone, well below that bar.
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