aqouta
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aqouta
3d ago
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?
aqouta
3d ago
I like this model for some things but I actually think bimbofication is a different pathway. The appeal is silencing neuroticism. It's ignorance is bliss and fetishizing not just a lack but a total incapacity for responsibility. Same reason a lot of this stuff is involuntary. Lots of people feel responsibility as an unbearable burden. But maybe you're wrapping all that into the sub role.
aqouta
3d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
There's two sides to this tango, they've not been proven right, but neither have they been proven wrong. The pathway between genes and outcomes is very complicated. It would have been nice if there ended up being some really simple way to map everything out but we can't even do that for height, let alone something as difficult to nail down as intelligence. The question is nurture vs nature and the twin studies convincingly argue that nature is a very large share. Scott convincingly points out that educational attainment may itself have some problems as a proxy for intelligence.
aqouta
10d ago
You can say you dislike territoriality as a national interest but it's not without reason. I think you're confusing arbitrary with contingent. Borders could have been different if circumstances had gone differently but they were reasoned and fought for with blood and statecraft for various very real purposes.
They're neither arbitrary in that they were set up for no reason nor arbitrary in that they make no difference. It's like if you insulted some guy and he punched you in the gut, you wouldn't call his actions arbitrary even if the response could have been a wide variety of actions. He had reason enough and it certainly matters to your gut that he decided on punching rather than harsh words.
aqouta
12d ago
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
If the offer is the same offer that empirically failed to hold 40 years ago offered by the party that has been continuously failing to uphold it this whole time then offering it unamended is bad faith or the people offering it are either stupid or think the people they're offering it to are stupid. I actually do think that an amnesty with safeguards to ensure enforcement is our only real option. But the deal is effectively the amnesty side gets amnesty and the immigration hawks get nothing they weren't already entitled to from the previous agreement. You need to pass like an amendment level of tying future governments to the mast to credibly offer this solution.
aqouta
12d ago
The boomers didn't just shaft the whole next generations coming up, they implemented tons of policies meant to rebalance the racial makeup of the party. Because they weren't going to give up their positions the only way for this to work out is to aggressively discriminate against white up and comers. So they mercilessly culled them and made it clear that they wanted the next generation of the democratic party to be anything but straight white men.
aqouta
13d ago
I think the major difference is people who have monosexual friend groups vs mixed friend groups. If all your friends are nerdy guys you're probably not going to the kinds of parties where there are lots of single ladies to hook up with and you're relegated mostly to cold opens. People have been making less friends now than ever before so it's pretty common to not have one member of the opposite sex that you see regularly and platonically, and if you meet your friends through mostly male hobbies then, lets just say monosexual friend groups aren't rare.
aqouta
14d ago
I'd never fault someone for behaving rationally in the imperfect system. I just found it funny that you cheered on rent control then listed like the most central downsides. I see the cheering was sarcastic.
aqouta
14d ago
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control)
It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
aqouta
14d ago
Just asking questions is when someone is pretending to just be interested in a topic asks pointed questions designed to poke holes in some narrative, central example being a holocaust denier trying to make the holocaust seem implausible by "just asking questions" about how many train cars could plausibly carry how many ect ect.
I'd say there are two major distinctions.
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I just don't really think aella is a pedophile. She's not pretending to be interested in how people answer these questions. These are classic examples of "what's worse and why" questions. If someone really wanted to JAQ pedophilia I don't think they'd start with "is one instance of it better or worse than torture murdering grandma?"
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Hypotheticals aren't really the same structure as JAQing off. JAQ offs don't really give you open ended questions. They have a narrative that they want to drive down without variance. They aren't interested in your moral reasoning, they want to use pointed questions to force your to answer one way or the other. They're doing a kind of dishonest persuasion rather than trying to find understanding.
aqouta
14d ago
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless? The person asking you is just going to come back with some added contrivance to make this "actually I start a rebellion" dodge impossible because whether you're clever or heroic enough to overcome the scenario isn't what anyone cares about in this sort of conversation.
They're trying to see how other people think about certain value trade offs, would you do something horrible and disgusting to save a life? Does it matter if it's an elderly life you're saving? If your answer is no then that's a fine answer and you can justify it. Whether you'd then go and try to overthrow the society that put you in that situation is just not very interesting. Yes, very good, everyone agrees it'd be horrible to be put in that situation. Because we all agree with that you elaborating on just how angry you are at this imaginary entity forcing the least bad option is just kind of boring, especially if you're doing it to dodge that actual question.
aqouta
16d ago
I don't really get what the problem here is. The effort required is basically just to actually put together the currently publicly available information and describe why people would be interested in discussing it. It's the kind of thing a college bound high schooler should be expected to be able to do in 20 minutes. And for this effort bar we filter out a lot of fluff. The cost is that we will have to wait 20 minutes for someone to do this before we have a discussion about breaking news, but we're not aiming to be a breaking news platform so this is a very low cost.
It aids discussion a lot to have a rough draft of the facts that can then be directly disputed, it channels discussion in a less free form way.
aqouta
16d ago
If you and someone else believe different things then this is the process of finding out where the underlying disagreement is. Seems pretty reasonable, if you're confident in your beliefs you should be able to object to the part of the hypothetical that is wrong. This is a perfectly fair way to investigate someone's beliefs.
aqouta
17d ago
A lot of words are abused in modern discourse but "arbitrary" is certainly one of the most abused words. Citizenship and borders are not arbitrary. They could be otherwise of course, but that isn't what arbitrary means. The modern world order would fall apart if we did away with borders and citizenships, one can imagine a different world order but we don't live under that world order.
aqouta
17d ago
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
You should do it as a habit but not doing so when no one is looking isn't a major infraction. Not doing so when there are other people around that could benefit from the knowledge is shitty behavior.
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
Stop every time, if there's literally no one around you can maybe not come to a total complete stop.
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
Depends heavily on the location. It's fine to speed like 5-10+ on highways. In neighborhoods much less.
The left lane is for passing only, and also, if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off or rides your bumper, that is fine.
Left lane is for passing but tailgating is also stupid and dangerous.
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
Depends heavily on circumstance, if it's a zipper merge and you're in the right place then you should be going over. If you're trying to skip the line then no.
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
You should go when it's your turn at a stop light and not hesitate to cross as a pedestrian at a crosswalk. The half starts are dumb. If everyone just consistently took their right of way everyone would get where they're going faster.
aqouta
17d ago
Maybe you do but I consistently find that the sorts of people who resist thought experiments tend to have deeply conflicted world views that they never examine. As I said, if you're being accosted by some rude stranger feel free to dodge out and stick to small talk. But With people you know well who are curious about how you think? On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas? What's the point? You could just go do something else with your time.
aqouta
17d ago
The level of skill where LLMs are immediately useful, not the literature background. Obviously 95% of programmers don't have a literature background.
aqouta
18d ago
I understand the catharsis in cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru challenge but it really is the cop out answer. Oh, so you're guarded and cynical and don't want to discuss sacred values? That's fine, you can use this maneuver to get out of it when it's an inappropriate time to have the discussion but are you genuinely just committed to never exploring which of your values plays master to the others? Too afraid of judgement for making a call?
Fighting the hypothetical is small talk, it's a dodge. It exchanges a kind of low grade cleverness to avoid substance.
aqouta
18d ago
In your effort to declare LLMs as incapable programmers you're excluding 95%+ of the profession, not literature majors. not high school students. Professional programers with CS and SE degrees. All I've been asking is for you to acknowledge that. If your standard is quant on a hft desk then great for you. I'm sure you're an excellent programmer. You'll probably have a job for six months longer than me.
aqouta
19d ago
What do you imagine is the ratio just at banks between people writing performant net code and people writing crud apps? If you want to be an elitist about it then be my guest, but it's a completely insane standard. Honestly the people rolling out the internal llm tooling almost certainly outnumber the people doing the work you're describing.
aqouta
19d ago
I'll chime in to note that all of my china visit posts went through an ai spelling check pass because as a dyslexic with only a phone for composing them it was that or a lot of typos.
aqouta
19d ago
Prompting is a skill like any other. Sending it off without context is like telling an underling to fix your config file without explaining or letting them look at the system they're writing it for. It's often a mistake to assume the prompt needs to be something a human would understand. You can and should just dump unformatted logs, barely related examples of working config files, anything you can imagine an underline with infinite time in a locked room might find useful in solving your problem.
If you're a high-school student or literature major with zero background in computer science looking to build a website or develop baby's first mobile app LLM generated code is a complete game changer. Literally the best thing since sliced bread.
You have to contend with the fact that like 95+% of employed programmers are at this level for this whole thing to click into place. It can write full stack CRUD code easily and consistently. five years ago you could have walked into any bank in any of the top 20 major cities in the united states with the coding ability of o3 and some basic soft skills and be earning six figures within 5 years. I know this to be the case, I've trained and hired these people.
If you are decently competent programmer working in an industry where things like accuracy, precision, and security are core concerns, LLMs start to look anti-productive as in the time you spent messing around with prompts, checking the LLM's work, and correcting it's errors, you could've easily done the work yourself.
I did allude that there might be a level of programming where one needs to see through the matrix to do but in SF's post and in most situations I've heard the critique in it's not really the case. They're just using it for writing config files that are annoying because they pull together a bunch of confusing contexts and interface with proprietary systems that you need to basically learn from institutional knowledge. The thing LLMs are worst at. Infrastructure and configuration are the two things most programmers hate the most because it's not really the more fulfilling code parts. But AI is good at the fulfilling code parts for the same reason people like doing them.
In time LLMs will be baked into the infrastructure parts too because it really is just a matter of context and standardization. It's not a capabilities problem, just a situation where context is splined between different systems.
Finally if you're one of those dark wizards working in FORTRAN or some proprietary machine language because this is Sparta IBM/Nvidia/TMSC and the compute must flow, you're skeptical of the claim that an LLM can write code that would compile at all.
If anything this is reversed, it can write FORTRAN fine, it probably can't do it in the proprietary hacked together nonsense installations put together in the 80s by people working in a time where patterns came on printed paper and might collaborate on standards once a year at a conference if they were all stars. but that's not the bot's fault. This is the kind of thinking that is impressed by calculators because it doesn't properly understand what's hard about some things.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. No one's examples about how it can't write code are about it writing code. It's all config files and vague evals. No one is talking about it's ability to write code. It's all devops stuff.
My wife is a psychiatrist at a public hospital that deals with some of Chicago's sickest and poorest mental cases. I get a pretty good cross section of the stories. It's just not really the case that the kind of politics she's dealing with from her patients are mondain red vs blue tribe stuff. The craziest red tribe anti-vax position you can imagine would not phase her and would sound strange in its groundedness compared to the actual involuntary cases she deals with, which are almost always about refusal to take medication that stops them from like painting the walls with their feces. Psychiatrists are certainly like 400% more lgbt than the general population but they just aren't taking the politics of their patients seriously enough for discrimination to really be a thing, they're fighting tooth and nail just to get the feces smeerers to take their meds.
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