astrolabia
11mo ago
I don't get it - I agree that a more serious accusation would be unrecoverable, but she just said "I'm unhappy that you made out with me".
I'm also not sure what you're talking about in the second paragraph - this guy has already demonstrated all of the 'decent human being' virtues in spades.
And then maybe she’d deign to give him another shot again, but if she didn’t it just means he wasn’t able to do the bare minimum of manning up and passing the shit-test with a high enough grade.
Yes, that's what I'm claiming. I think it's actually not-totally-crazy behavior, either. It's similar to guys teasing each other partly to show that they can handle a bit of pressure / aggression.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Dude, she accused me of molesting her.
This is consistent with what I was saying - my point is that she's being obviously unreasonable!
She's also a fucking sperg
I also might be wrong about this, but my understanding from being a bit of a sperg myself is that things like the rules of attraction + most emotions are similar to everyone else, but with a layer of neuroticism and poor social skills on top.
Even if that's a thing women do, she wouldn't.
I personally spent way too long thinking that sufficiently smart women wouldn't require, or play, these kinds of games - thinking something like "If they are so un-self-aware as to play the normal BS social games, I'm not sure I want them anyways". I've also known a few amazing women that were self-aware enough to understand their own reactions, but even they still had the same requirements for attraction as the others. I think your dating experiences would make way more sense if consider that even sperg women have similar romantic responses and impulses as normal women.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Her message was a good sign! It sounds like a classic shit test. It's just a final check to see if you can stand up for yourself before she decides to date you. If she wasn't into you anymore, she would have just ignored you or waited for you to press the issue. She was provoking you to see if you'd show backbone.
A better answer would have been: "You're an adult, and you weren't that drunk. Don't play games.". I know this would feel like a 180 from your normal personality, but that's the point!
I once was on a relaxed second date with a very hot girl who was a little out of my league, hanging out in my room. I had had experiences like yours in the past and was expecting something similar. Almost on cue, the next time I tried to get her attention to talk, she ignored me to type on her laptop for 5-10 seconds. When she finally answered, I did something very unlike my normal personality: I warmly but firmly said something like, "You're being disrespectful, you need to leave for tonight." I said that I want to see her again but not any more tonight. She didn't even seem all that upset, and was a little shocked, but also almost pleasantly surprised. She came over again the next day and we had an intense affair until I moved away for school.
I know I must sound like an incredible ass, and you shouldn't take my word for it, but I'm normally an easygoing guy to the point of being overly passive. But I (finally) realized that you only have to show a backbone once or twice to make a girl feel comfortable around you indefinitely - but they usually won't feel comfortable until they've seen you do it - hence the need for shit tests.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Did you mean Russel conjugation?
astrolabia
11mo ago
Wow, I never heard about the 1977 flu this whole time. And I thought I had built an information diet that would expose me to this kind of forbidden knowledge.
astrolabia
11mo ago
less offensive to call a woman a chestfeeder than to remind a man that he doesn't have breasts, and cannot breastfeed
Oh, I thought it was to avoid reminding women who are breastfeeding but identify as male that they do have breasts. Which always seemed like it must be a rare request. Like how many women feeding their baby using their breasts, who certainly can feel what's happening, still get psychic psychic relief from not acknowledging that it's a breast?
astrolabia
1yr ago
My favorite example of this is complaints about the "cotton ceiling"[https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/6a3e3a/who_else_here_is_put_off_by_the_idea_of_the/]("cotton ceiling"), which to me paints a hilarious and sad picture of aspergers guys becoming trans as a gambit of rules-lawyering lesbians into sleeping with them.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it.
The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs
It sounds like you think this definitional battle is, in fact, worth it?
I'm encouraged that you acknowledged that there are costs - can you elaborate? I think Zac would claim that one serious downstream cost is autogynophiles being encouraged to castrate themselves. To me that is the main problem - confused and unhappy people being encouraged to mess up their bodies unrecoverably. I think that frank acknowledgement of the senses in which, due to the limitations of medical technology, trans people aren't actually their desired gender, would lessen this problem. So I do think that this is a definitional battle worth fighting (as do pro-trans advocates).
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree, but I was trying to be maximally charitable in case all that Folamh3 knew about Hanson was that he was arguing against rape being worse than something else. That's why I was asking if he read the post.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Okay, but the framing as "sus" makes it sound like a hidden, rare opinion. What do you think of his claims?
astrolabia
1yr ago
I was thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
but that's fair, it might just have been motivated cognition. But given that Scott has independently reached unpopular contrarian opinions on his own so many times, and doesn't address the downsides of gender-defined-by-fiat head on, it's almost the same phenomenon as dishonesty imo.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.
I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.
Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Did you read the linked post? He's making the claim that it's a bigger harm in terms of genetic interests.
Can you expand on what you mean by "majorly sus"? Is the idea that the fact that he'd raise a hypothesis that could also be used to argue for taking crimes against women relatively less seriously, that's evidence that he's misoginystic?
I suppose that's a reasonable inference, but I also think he does raise a good question and point to a genuine mystery. More generally, if academics can't raise wrong-sounding ideas without being cancelled, then there's not much point in having them or listening to them. So I guess I implore you to ask if there is any venue or method by which someone could discuss disgusting-sounding ideas that would lead you to actually try evaluating their claims.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree the benchmark is a real contribution. My claim is that there are similarly novel-reasoning-heavy benchmarks that also look more like useful tasks. such as https://klu.ai/glossary/gpqa-eval
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree with this take. One interesting open question is: what fraction of the wealth created will the big labs be able to capture? Right now the differences between the big LLMs are relatively small, so it seems plausible to me that the LLM provider becomes a low-margin coke vs pepsi kind of market. However there could easily be some winner-takes-all dynamics or services bundling dynamics that might favor e.g. Google since they might be able to integrate across services better. Am curious for your thoughts.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Francois Chollet is a disingenuous midwit who makes himself sound smart by arguing against strawmen. He reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould. In general his claims are a mix of: things that everyone already agrees with (like that LLMs are currently missing some sorts of long-chain reasoning abilities) or things that are a mix of simply wrong and meaningless word games (like that LLMs are merely memorizing).
To his credit, he released a new benchmark, but imo it's more poorly-motivated than lots of other benchmarks measuring performance on similarly reasoning-y but real tasks.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree, but I'm saying that it also managed to not even help ADOS. And that a future "Human Lives Matter" movement would be similarly ineffectual at its ostensible aims. And that our future votes would similarly buy us a wretched welfare bureaucracy at best.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Good point. I agree they have de jure privileged status, and that this leads to some substantial concrete benefits. But I'd counter that, to the extent that competition operates, it naturally disenfranchises them from almost all angles and makes their own self-advocacy ineffective. E.g. affirmative action spots mostly go to non-ADOS, BLM was a corrupt waste of political energy (compared to e.g. the at least-somewhat effective ADL), high-income people move away leaving places like Detroit.
I'm saying that a human worker advocacy org, in a world of more sophisticated machine actors, would similarly end up being a useless skinsuit pretending to advocate on behalf of humans, but wouldn't be able to avoid the important sources of influence all naturally routing around human agency. E.g. if you were a rich human, would you use an inferior (by supposition) human-run investment firm to manage your assets, or a machine-based one?
So my ultimate claim is that we have to choose between freedom and competition versus the continued relevance of humans. I really don't want to have to choose between these things, but I think we do.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree, I think "a useless mouth and his clout are soon parted". To the extent that competition still operates at any scale, I worry that anti-automators will be eventually marginalized, no matter how many kids we have.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I know what you're talking about, but I'm confused about Norman vs Nordic phenotypes. Aren't the Normans also Nordic? I'm also not clear what it means when I see very thin faces with fine features, which showed up a lot in old royal portraits.
astrolabia
1yr ago
One of the scariest things from my point of view is watching some Jewish progressives I know choosing, after a period of internal struggle, to take the side of Hamas. I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side. And I would have been surprised to see them abandon pretty much their whole progressive social networks and worldview under any circumstances, even to defend themselves. But it seems like many of them chose to thread the needle by simply becoming "one of the good ones".
astrolabia
1yr ago
looking for self-actualization that will never arrive
Seems like it does arrive for them, in the sense that they get to be a part of a change in zeitgeist. I imagine it feels pretty fulfilling to get in early on the next big political thing.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I don't think it's that they're stupid, it's that talking concretely about reforms invites infighting. Everyone in those orgs can agree racism is bad / the problem, but they've learned that talking about specific mitigations is a recipe for drama.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree it was a spineless, worst-of-both-worlds kind of apology. It was clearly disingenuous for a polymath like him to claim that he's not qualified to even evaluate the evidence about HBD. It was worse than normal straight-shooting autism.
That said, he's a great thinker when he's in his element.
Did Meloni actually do much about immigration to Italy, though?
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