aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1yr ago
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
aqouta
1yr ago
Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
aqouta
2yr ago
Saying MtF trans people don’t exist is a bizarre viewpoint - what do you call the obviously real number of people who are born male, have gender dysphoria, and are transitioning to have the characteristics of females by taking hormones and going through surgery? Those people clearly exist, and MtF is an apt descriptor, as they are going from male to female - in some cases successfully enough to pass, in some cases not. The “MtF” term is useful to distinguish between MtFs and FtMs - I don’t see any commonly used alternative words that avoid confusion (many times I’ve had to explain to people the direction of transitioning of people I know - e.g. X used to be a girl and now is a boy).
There is no epistemicly coherent method to differentiate between the experience of being a man who actually has the internal experience of a woman and being a man who mistakenly believes they have the internal experience of a woman but in fact has typical male internal experiences. The difference between the two interpretations of experience is purely memetic, as one of these interpretations leads to pathology it is a harmful meme. Taking hormones and mimicking the opposite sex is a behavior and esthetic decision and has no bearing on the person's sex. Just their presentation.
Also trans people have existed since recorded history, there’s ancient Sumerians trans priestesses called Gala, the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and kathoeys (aka Thai ladyboys) are not a recent western phenomenon.
These are other memes and are nothing like actually transitioning from one sex to the other. In every one of these cultures this is a third state, usually of weaker men who could not provide being used by the other men rather than being simply killed.
aqouta
2yr ago
The more I digest the shower thing the stranger it is to me. Does she never exercise to a sweat? The people quiting shampoo at least makes sense as it's a relatively new invention but humans have been bathing forever.
aqouta
2yr ago
How someone can look at the abuses possible with a central authority and immediately dump on the decentralized alternatives is incredible. No argumentation, just blind ignorant assertions.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
Who do you think owns your life? Who gets to decide what you do with it?
aqouta
1yr ago
No reason to burn this bridge. I enjoy the new freer X as well, but the ground has not even settled yet. That is a land ruled by a mad an capricious man that any day may change his stance and wipe us from existence. That and, while I understand why the current obsessives might sour your experience, there is still magic here. I think before this election is done we'll need to rely on it again.
aqouta
2yr ago
Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
aqouta
2yr ago
You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.
aqouta
2yr ago
Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:
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Is very predictive of success in things people care about
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Cannot be trained
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Is a very well studied and consistent measure
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Varies a lot person to person and has at least a large genetic component
To the degree that some tests meant to measure IQ can be studied for is a flaw in those tests but the ones we have are pretty good at not being gamed.
HBD stands for "Human Bio Diversity" and is the recognition that populations of people vary genetically. Uncontroversially in situations like the Dutch being taller on average than the Spanish. Incredibly controversially in situations like American Jews having a higher IQ on average to American Natives. People here disagree wildly on whether it is true and what it would imply if it were. But we do allow its discussion which brings quite a bit of heat from the sort of people who find the idea dangerous. We originally started out as a weekly thread on slatestarcodex.com run by Scott who now blogs on astralcodexten.substack.com, but he was harassed by people who didn't like the discussion so he asked us to got to his subreddit, then our own subreddit and finally this shiny new offsite. Although it's not just HBD that got us targeted, it's the willingness to entertain dangerous ideas with HBD being the most usually cited example.
aqouta
2yr ago
It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.
aqouta
2yr ago
I don't even really understand the question. People, at least in wester democratic countries, believe that the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the governed. This isn't a perfectly consistent belief as few beliefs are shown in a kind of status quo bias that has them opposing forcible annexation but also opposing many secessions. But the underlying belief is quite simple. It is axiomatically evil to use force to make people join compacts that they do not want to join, Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.
You seem to think they should be operating on some crude non-iterative maximization of total utility in the near term like unthinking animals. But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.
aqouta
2yr ago
How much money should someone need to spend online to have full access to creator content?
In Freddie daBoer's recent interesting post contrasting the intrusive ad model with paid content model I find myself nodding along mostly but I didn't come away completely convinced. This post is mostly my unorganized thoughts after reading this piece. I understand and am sympathetic to the need of professional writers to earn an actually living if we want them to be able to write full time, and a good one at that given their importance as sense makers. And I do think the ad model is quite toxic.
What I mainly have problems with is the extremeness of each option. If this cnbc report is to be believed online advertisers spend around $140 billion dollars a year, divided naively and entirely among the 250 million American adults gives us the very rough estimate of $560 per year. The number feels intuitively close but I think the point stands even if it is off by quite a bit. So if I decide to pay the rate the advertisers were paying for my access to various sites how far does $560/year get me. We can start at a premium daBoer substack subscription at a seemingly reasonable $50/year, Scott Alexander is asking for $100/year and we're already at nearly a fourth of our budget!
The difference is conversion rate. DaBoer, Scott and the NYT are all aware that the vast majority of their ad based readers are not going to fork over for the premium model, the ones that do seem able to easily make up the difference for many writers and content creators but I'm less convinced than daBoer that this is a sustainable solution. I do subscribe to some writers and content creators that I like but I like far too many such that if each put up a $5/month paywall, even with a generous software engineer salary I'd have to start picking and choosing very quickly.
It's more than reasonable for writers to optimize for the total amount of dollars flowing into their wallet each month but we should be aware that this is actually quite bad for readers and the open internet in general. Some of the magic of the internet is that we're able to plug into a global conversation and as more and more paywalls go up that conversation becomes more fragment and trying to follow a thread can become increasingly frustrating. This probably doesn't matter much for pure entertainment content but for sense makers and political writers who at least purport to trying to educate and persuade the general population this could exacerbate the process of creating echo chambers and keeping good arguments away from who most needs to read them.
Think of the children! I still remember a time when I was young on the internet with no credit card. It's all good and well to expect adults to pay their way but much like the poor kids don't have income at all, disposable or otherwise. The internet kids are going to come up in under Freddies paradigm is very unlike the open and free internet I grew up with. I think in many ways for the worse.
Freddie only really touches on the phenomenon from the perspective of someone who is also writing a blog,
a complication that some would point to: Compact has a paywall. People couldn’t read the whole argument because they haven’t subscribed to Compact. It should go without saying that this is not really a defense - if you can’t read it, just don’t comment on it!
Makes some sense from the perspective of someone who floats around and comments on things but works less well for communities like this one where we come together and discuss articles. It's one thing to as a writer choose not to comment on something paywalled to save the money but being locked out of these secondary discussions is a larger cost.
And, look, I get it - I get annoyed too sometimes when I want to read a specific piece from a site that I don’t want to pay for in general.
This is perhaps the thing that most frustrates me. I'm the type of person who would rather buy a piece of media I'm only going to consume once than rent it just in case I ever want to return to it. I actually quite dislike the model where I pay someone for temporary access to something.
A potential solution is ads plus a paid membership to remove them, something like how the basic attention token works where you can decide how intrusive to make ads and get paid in the token from the advertiser to be used to forward on to some content creator. You can either endure enough ads to afford access or turn off ads and load your BAT wallet occasionally with real $. Perhaps another option is bundling in the direction the TV networks go. Maybe I should be able to subscribe to the rationalist diaspora a la cart or get them all for $40/month distributed according to how much some central entity thinks they draw new subscribers.
What does the motte think about paywalls and potential alternatives.
aqouta
2d ago
I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.
I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.
If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.
aqouta
2mo ago
Thanks for your thorough reply!
Yes and no. Clearly, things are better than even three years ago with the original release of ChatGPT. But, the economic and practical impact is unimpressive. If you subtract out the speculative investment parts, it's almost certainly negative economically.
And look - I love all things tech. I have been a raving enthusiastic nutjob about self-driving cars and VR and - yes - AI for a long time. But, for that very reason, I try to see soberly what actual impact it has. How am I living differently? Am I outsourcing much code or personal email or technical design work to AI? No. Are some friends writing nontrivial code with AI? They say so, and I bet it's somewhat true, but they're not earning more, or having more free time off, or learning more, or getting promoted.
I think you're a little blinkered here. It takes more than a couple years to retool the whole economy with new tech. It was arguably a decade or more after arpanet before the internet started transforming life as we know it. LLMs are actually moving at a break neck pace in comparison. I work at a mega bank and just attended a town hall where every topic of discussion was about how important it is to implement LLM in every process. I'm personally working to integrate it into our department's workflow and every single person I work with now uses it every day. Even at this level of engagement it's going to be months to years cutting through the red tape and setting up pipelines before our analyst workflows can use the tech directly. There is definitely value in it and it's going to be integrated into everything people do going forward even if you can't have it all rolled out instantly. We have dozens of people whose whole job is to go through huge documents and extract information related to risk/taxes/legal/ect, key it in and then do analysis on whether these factors are in line with our other investments. LLMs, even if they don't progress one tiny bit further, will be transformative for this role and there are millions of roles like this throughout the economy.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement: I hear you saying "AI does amazing things people thought it would not be able to do," which I agree with. This is not orthogonal from, but also not super related to my point: claims that AI progress will continue to drastically greater heights (AGI, ASI) are largely (but not entirely) baseless optimism.
Along with these amazing things it comes with a ripple of it getting steadily better at everything else. There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything. It started out decent at some areas of code, maybe it could write sql scripts ok but you'd need to double check it. Now it can handle any code snippet you throw at it and reliably solve bugs one shot on files with fewer than a thousand lines. The trajectory is quick and the tooling around it is improving at a rate that soon I expect to be able to just write a jira ticket and reasonably expect the code agent to solve the problem.
Nothing has ever surpassed human level abilities. That gives me a strong prior against anything surpassing human level abilities. Granted, AI is better at SAT problems than many people, but that's not super shocking (Moravec's Paradox).
Certainly this is untrue. Calculators trivially surpass human capabilities in some ways. Nothing has surpassed humans in every single aspect. There is a box of things that AI can currently do better than most humans and a smaller box within that of things it can do better than all humans. These boxes are both steadily growing. Once something is inside that box it's inside it forever, humans will never retake the ground of best pdf scraper per unit of energy. Soon, if it's not already the case, humanity will never retake the ground of best sql script writer. If the scaffolding can be built and the problems made legible this box will expand and expand and expand. And as it expands you get further agglomeration effects. If it can just write sql scripts then it can just write sql scripts. If it's able to manage a server and can write sql scripts now it can create a sql server instance and actually build something. If it gains other capabilities these all compliment each other and bring out other emergent capabilities.
The number of people, in my techphillic and affluent social circle, willing to pay even $1 to use AI remains very low.
If people around you aren't paying for it then they're not getting the really cutting edge impressive features. The free models are way behind the paid versions.
It has been at a level I describe as "cool and impressive, but useless" forever.
AGI maybe not, but useless? You're absolutely wrong here. With zero advancement at all in capabilities or inference cost reductions what we have now, today, is going to change the world as much as the internet and smart phones. Unquestionably.
No, and that's exactly point! AI 2027 says well surely it will plateau many doublings past where it is today. I say that's baseless speculation. Not impossible, just not a sober, well-founded prediction. I'll freely admit p > 0.1% that within a decade I'm saying "wow I sure was super wrong about the big picture. All hail our AI overlords." But at even odds, I'd love to take some bets.
Come up with something testable and I am game.
Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
aqouta
2yr ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
aqouta
2yr ago
My gym was closed for 2 weeks during the winter and I thought I was going to lose my mind, how can people live like that?
aqouta
1yr ago
Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler?
I mean there is a smuggled premise that animals have something like moral equivalence to humans. It's a kind of hack of empathy and personification that we don't like admitting that animals just don't have moral equivalence. It's the same instinct that makes you cringe when a doll's head is ripped off. Hitler was killing people who have moral equivalence to humans, the argument is much simpler.
I definitely agree, and I am also baffled sometimes that more of the smart types with those opinions don't just start hitting the gym. Healthy body, healthy mind and being muscular has all sorts of advantages with practically no drawback besides a couple hours a week during which you can get your motte posting in.
aqouta
2yr ago
The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.
Did this have any actual impact on the total suicide numbers or did some people just get a less scenic last few moments? This is why root cause analysis is important, because you very much may have just ended with uglier bridges and uglier suicides for all your effort and expenditures.
aqouta
2yr ago
I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.
Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.
And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
Could you put even a little effort into not straw manning the opposing viewpoint?
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