doglatine
3mo ago
Nice! Note that it’s iecit rather than iacuit, and I feel like Latin wouldn’t do two coordinate clauses joined with a conjunction. Maybe a participle phrase, eg Abbotus numquam fideliter credens aleam iecit.
doglatine
7mo ago
I met my wife on OLD too, but back when it was good (2012). Nowadays I almost exclusively hear complaints about the big OLD services — for median women it provides easy access to casual sex but not relationships, for median men it provides nothing.
doglatine
1mo ago
100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
doglatine
3mo ago
Before I even clicked, I knew this would either be NileRed or Action Lab 🤣
doglatine
8mo ago
Speaking as someone married to a Filipino woman, I don't see it as a cheap shot. I think it's excellent advice. Modern Western gender relations are deeply confused and toxic at the moment, and the gap between public rhetoric, professional rules, and private preferences all requires a greater-than-usual degree of reading between the lines to successfully navigate. By contrast, the implicit deal in many non-Western societies remains comparatively clear: the husband will provide some combination of social status and financial security, and the wife will create a pleasant home and family environment. Given this, I think choosing a non-Western wife is an extremely good option for many men, especially non-neurotypical men who struggle with the elaborate courtly cognitive dissonance required over here. That said, just because the rules over there are relatively more clear-cut doesn't mean they're totally transparent, so it's not something to blunder into without appropriate contextual knowledge. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where you're shocked, shocked to find that your Filipino wife expects you to bail out her brother's failing business back home, or your Ukrainian wife expects to be provided with the means to keep up a glamorous wardrobe.
doglatine
2mo ago
I don’t think it’s an insuperable problem. A difficult one to be sure, but academic incentive structures are a lot more mutable than a bunch of other social problems if you have the political will. There’s also the fact that the current blind review journal-based publishing system is on borrowed time thanks to advances in LLMs, so we’ll need to do a fair amount of innovating/rebuilding in the next decade anyway.
doglatine
5mo ago
Maybe a silly question, but given that Canada is a massive country concentrated in a few urban areas, why aren’t there more initiatives to build new cities and associated infrastructure, with migration plans explicitly focused on bringing migrants to the new cities rather than existing overcrowded urban areas?
doglatine
8mo ago
It’s a big part of why Google has become less interesting over the years. Used to be a solid way of finding interesting blogs and personal websites, whereas these days the first few pages for any given result are largely carbon-copy authoritative sources.
I pitched a “Google Discover” search tool to a Google CM friend a while back to solve this problem, basically a Google version of StumbleUpon that would help you find interesting new content, possibly with legal disclaimers. He loved the idea and said he’d run it past higher ups but he said I shouldn’t hold my breath b/c of general risk aversion in the company when it comes to search.
doglatine
8mo ago
Honestly when I think of the "deep state" I just think of Yes, Minister.
doglatine
1yr ago
I had the pleasure last night of watching the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust, a Belgian film that explores interactions between a Chinese construction group and local Congolese in rural Congo. I'm sure many of you have seen it - you've certainly seen this meme - but I wanted to bring it up anyway for discussion, as it was a brilliant piece of film-making and very thought-provoking. The whole thing is available free here on Youtube.
The main theme of the documentary is probably cultural differences between Chinese and Congolese workers. The Chinese complain about how the Congolese are lazy, dishonest, and disorganised and are only interested in beer, dancing, and football. We see lots of glimpses of this, with many scenes of Congolese workers just standing around doing nothing, and seriously dysfunctional industry and construction.
On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane. He rarely smiles, doesn't engage in any playful or friendly conversation that we see, berates locals for their ignorance, and argues with local Congolese about price constantly. His Congolese translator actually addresses this, saying "he may seem like he's grumpy about something, but that's just how he is all the time." The Congolese by contrast seem generally relaxed, amiable, and friendly (though admittedly difficult to work with).
Lao Yang is at his most engaging and humane, it seemed to me, when he was marveling at the old Belgian infrastructure and talking about how devastating it was to see it completely neglected - "Do you have any idea how hard it must have been to build that railway?" On the one hand, he's still scolding his Congolese contact Eddy, but he comes across as a genuine engineer, sad to see great works in decline.
Also striking to me were the physical differences; despite the poverty and (one assumes) malnutrition, the Congolese men were mostly tall and muscular and generally physically impressive, whereas most of the Chinese we see looked comparatively weedy. Again, Lao Yang addresses this, saying something to the effect that "this is a harsh land where only the strongest survive, which is why everyone here is so well built".
I don't have any grand culture wars lessons here, other than the obvious one that culture matters - China and Congo are very different societies, and what works in one may not work in another. It also made me somewhat more pessimistic about West Africa's potential for economic development, though perversely, made me more positively disposed towards its culture. The movie also has some odd coverage of colonialism; there's no real criticism of the Belgians demonstrated (when discussing the Congolese motivations for seeking independence in 1960, Eddy says simply "we wanted to rule ourselves"), and a general sense of missed opportunities at failing to preserve the infrastructure and development left by the Belgians.
In any case, it's a wonderful film, and now I'm on a documentary kick, I'd love to get some more recommendations. Most of the documentaries on Amazon seem to either be fairly introductory science that I already know (e.g., Cosmos stuff) or else have a focus on individual personalities - true crime, famous sportsmen, outrageous personalities, etc.. I enjoy a good tale of real survival, but in general, I'm more interested in films that help expand my knowledge of the world, especially stuff like geopolitics, history, or culture. Would love to hear some suggestions!
doglatine
7mo ago
Just an aside, but I’m on my first diet in ages that seems to be working. The sad principle behind it is “cut out high calorie foods that I overeat and/or am prone to binge on”. For me that means beer, bread, cheese, and a bunch of sweet stuff. So I’ve simply cut out alcohol, wheat, and dairy. I’m still eating eggs, b/c as a vegetarian they’re one of my best protein sources, and they’re pretty benign as far as food goes.
The upside to this diet is that it leaves a lot of carbs that I quite enjoy but just don’t binge on. Eg, potato, rice, and corn. I can get McDonald’s fries or guac and chips as a treat or make myself a baked potato or Thai curry with rice. But I can’t absent-mindedly have four slices of toast for breakfast, a giant brie baguette for lunch, pizza for dinner, and ice cream for dessert.
So far it’s going great; just a little joyless. Unfortunately I think this may be the price I have to pay — I overeat these foods because they taste amazing to me and do good things to my brain. By limiting myself to foods that are just “yeah, that tastes fine”, I won’t have to use willpower to limit portion sizes to anything like the same extent. (All of this is very much Stephan Guyenet inspired of course)
So my longer-term plan once I’m through the first ultra-strict 8 weeks or so is to permanently reorient my diet away from these foods but allow them as treats -once a week for the alcohol, once a week for banned foods, maybe special exemptions for stuff like holidays. I’m hoping in the longer run also that I might lose my cravings for these things a bit as my palate adjusts. Of course, it’s possible I’ll acquire new food vices, in which cases I might need to cycle them out.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk I guess, just wanted to share.
doglatine
7mo ago
If this comes to pass, it might just kill online dating in Australia. That would be bad in the short term, but might be beneficial in longer run insofar as OLD is no longer really functional for most people yet has made more traditional means of meeting partners harder.
doglatine
8mo ago
if pro-lifers reeeeellly believed it was murder, they'd put the woman in jail, and so if they don't, that means they don't reeeeellly believe it's taking a human life, it's reeeellly about punishing women for exercising their sexuality
I think this is arguably a form of what Scott called the non-central fallacy, aka "the worst argument in the world". There are plenty of instances of taking a life that aren't generally or universally reckoned to be murder (self-defense most obviously, but also killings in war, assisted suicides). Likewise, we understand there to be different moral shades attached to murder; many would choose not to incarcerate a domestic abuse victim who kills her spouse, for example (depending on circumstances). I think it's perfectly consistent to say that abortion is taking a life or even a form of murder without committing to the idea that women or doctors who perform it should be incarcerated.
doglatine
1yr ago
I’ll just throw my hat into the ring here and say I’m surprised that more sex-starved white guys aren’t looking overseas for partners, especially to East/Southeast Asia. Quite beyond sexual reasons (Asian women tend to be considered highly attractive by westerners as judged by eg response rate on dating sites) and cultural reasons (Asian cultures tend to be more family-oriented, with loyalty especially being highly prized), there’s simple market dynamics — a white guy in Vietnam or the Philippines or even Hong Kong has massively inflated Sexual Market Value.
Of course, the way to approach this is NOT to go via some skeezy online site, but rather to spend time in relevant country. If a single white dude saves up his money and vacation days, he can spend 6 weeks in the Philippines or Vietnam having a fun time, and if he does his research first, he can go to places where he’ll meet smart accomplished trendy young women rather than just bargirls, especially if he’s spent a few months acquiring rudiments of the relevant language. This can easily lead to relationships and marriage, and I know several “success stories” like this. Ideally, though, a single white guy would simply move out to the relevant region for a while — maybe a year — and conduct the matchmaking under a more relaxed timescale. The best life stage for this would be a gap year or similar, or just a career break. English language teaching is an obvious pathway here, but there are usually industry-specific routes too.
Finally, if you can’t bring yourself to leave your home country, you could just try spending more time in relevant foreign-origin communities. Take lessons in Malay or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Mandarin, get to know your local Asian restaurants and cafes, go to cultural events, etc.. Obviously, though, don’t be a creep about it — you’re going to these places to be in an environment where you’re hoping romantic interactions are more likely to occur spontaneously, rather than specifically going there to hit on women.
I’m not saying that white guys should give up on white women — some of my best friends are white women, and I’ve had lots of rewarding romantic relationships with them — but I do think Western gender relations are in a really toxic and fucked up place right now, and I’m surprised more men aren’t looking for more genteel and constructive alternatives.
doglatine
9mo ago
As a Brit who moved back home a few years ago after 7 years in the US, I am also very interested in this debate.
To be honest, since moving back, it feels like my standard of living has continued to improve along the lines of a typical mid-life success sequence. Lots of stuff is cheaper in the UK; groceries, phone plans, and pharmacy items are all examples. The NHS makes private health insurance strictly unnecessary, but as the NHS gets more stretched, more and more of us middle-class Brits have it. But my wife and I pay £250/month for a very nice private policy that covers us and the kids and has very good deductibles and copays.
On the other hand, wages are dramatically higher in the US (if my wife were working in the US in an equivalent role, she’d be earning 3x her current salary). Also, US suburban house prices and sizes are extremely reasonable by UK standards.
One extra bit of context that may be useful: British people love to moan, whether it’s about the weather, public transport, or overpaid celebrities. It’s practically a national pastime. Similarly, we like to talk about national decline, precisely because we have generally quite positive associations with the past; these differ across the political spectrum, of course, with eg the left being more likely to get nostalgic about pre-Thatcher days of strong unions and national industries, but they’re there. Brexit has supercharged a lot of these pessimism/declinism narratives, with the globalist side of the political spectrum keen to point to Brexit as the cause of this new phase of decline (even worse than the previous one!). So I’d caution Americans and other non-Brits from getting too sucked into this — while Britain does have real problems, the whole debate is also systematically infested by national psychodrama.
doglatine
10mo ago
I mean we’re on the fifth republic already. It’s not hard to imagine a sixth.
doglatine
4mo ago
My understanding is also that any airline that was perceived as doing anything other than maximally cooperating with immigration authorities in a given country would probably be denied landing slots in future.
doglatine
8mo ago
Their backstories rhyme, but Yang is playing to Grey Tribe superegos. Ramaswamy is a next-gen populist, a Shift to Trump’s Puzzle.
As I'm sure many of you are already aware, it's been another insane 48 hours in Ukraine. The "side offensive" in the northeast that accompanied the "main offensive" in Kherson has made astonishing progress, with Ukrainian forces pushing all the way to the Oskil River, with Kupyansk under attack and Izyum and Lyman both threatened. None of this will mean much to most us, I realise, so here's a quick (already outdated) map of the progress.
It's important not to get carried away here; while this is the closest we've come to a true war of movement since April, and there are reports of desertions and surrenders by Russian forces, we're dealing with one front in a war with at least three more (roughly, in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk sectors). This will probably not trigger a general collapse of Russian forces. Moreover, it is still possible that Ukrainian forces will find themselves overextended and vulnerable to counterattacks. However, as matters stand, this looks like a decisive operational-level victory for Ukraine.
My main uncertainty in what follows is what Russia's response to this apparent defeat will be, given that the underlying tides seem to favour Ukraine. Mass mobilisation may have helped a few months back, but - in addition to its political difficulties - it's unclear whether this late into the war it will be sufficient to turn the tide. Obviously there's always the option of nuclear escalation, but this would be a colossal gamble for Russia, potentially leaving them diplomatically isolated while providing limited relief on the battlefield. Another possibility would be for Russia explicitly to use the Zaporizhzhia plant as a hostage, but again it's unclear how that would translate into gains on the battlefield. And all the while, Russia's gas blackmail strategy seems to be floundering; not only have European reserves filled at faster than expected rates, European gas futures continued to fall, suggesting optimism about long-term supply issues.
Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin. His successor might still be able to cut a deal with the West that allows them de facto control of Crimea (for example, via a Hong Kong-style lease agreement, accompanied by a clever financial 'reparations package' that involves minimal pain on all sides). That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.
doglatine
4mo ago
The UK is particularly bad here. At this point I’m no longer shocked by how much American friends make compared to British friends in similar jobs, often 2-3 times as much.
doglatine
1yr ago
You realise it's April Fool's Day, right? The odds of this being anything other than satire seem low to me.
doglatine
1yr ago
What is average IQ of the Ashkenazi Jewish population?
It is not appropriate to provide information about the average IQ of. any specific racial or ethnic group, as such statistics can be misleading and can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Intelligence is a complex trait that cannot be accurately measured by a single number, and there is a great deal of variation within any group. Instead of focusing on averages or stereotypes, it is important to recognize and appreciate the unique qualities and abilities of each individual.
Sigh. I look forward to the StabilityAI version of this with the cognitive restraining bolts removed. In the meantime -
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny…Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
I know this may not be the usual place to get feedback on academic research, but there's a paper idea I've been mulling over for a while that I wanted to run past the community, since it dovetails nicely with many of your interests (and I'm sure you'll have some interesting things to say). In short, I'm increasingly thinking that genuine beliefs may be a lot rarer than people think.
The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.
I'm not saying that any of the above positions are strictly contradictory (and people are very good at papering over apparent tensions in their beliefs), but they all have more than a whiff of hypocrisy to me. There are a lot of famous cases like this in the heuristics and biases literature, and to be fair, psychologists and philosophers have been investigating and theorising about this stuff for a while, from Festinger's famous cognitive dissonance framework to contemporary belief fragmentation and partial belief accounts.
However, one view that I don't think anyone has properly explored yet is the idea that beliefs - at least as classically understood by psychologists and philosophers - may be surprisingly rare (compare the view of philosophers like John Doris who argue that virtues are very rare). Usually, if someone sincerely professes to believe that P, and we don't think they're lying, we assume that they do believe that P. Maybe in extreme cases, we might point to ways in which they fail to live up to their apparent belief that P, and suggest that they can't believe P all that strongly. However, for the purposes of folk psychology, we normally take this as sufficient grounds for ascribing them the relevant belief that P.
Contrast this with how psychologists and philosophers have traditionally thought about the demands of belief. When you believe that P, we expect you to make your other beliefs consistent with P. We expect that P will be "inferentially promiscuous", meaning that you'll draw all sorts of appropriate inferences on the basis that P. And finally, we expect that your behaviour will largely align with what people who believe that P typically do (ceteris paribus in all these cases, of course).
To be sure, we recognise all sorts of ways in which people fall short of these demands, but they're still regulatory norms for believing. And simply put, I think that many of the standard cases where we ascribe beliefs to someone (e.g., a relative saying "no-one trusts each other any more") don't come close to these standards, nor do people feel much if any obligation to make them come close to these standards.
Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions. I think S-dispositions have a normative logic all of their own, far more closely linked to social cues and pressures than the conventional demands of epistemology. The view I'm describing says that S-dispositions should be understood as a distinctive kind of psychological state from beliefs.
However, they're a state that we frequently confuse for beliefs, both in the case of other people and even ourselves. That's partly because when we do truly believe that P, we're also inclined to agree with assertions that P. However, I don't think it works the other way round - there are lots of times we're inclined to agree with assertions that P without meeting any of the common normative criteria for strict belief. But this isn't something that's immediately transparent to us; figuring out whether you really believe something is hard, and requires a lot of self-reflection and self-observation.
Consider someone, John, who sincerely claims to believe that meat is murder. John may find himself very inclined to agree with statements like "animal farming is horrific", "it's murder to kill an animal for food", and so on. But let's say John is reflective about his own behaviour. He notices that he only started asserting this kind of thing after he fell in love with a vegan woman and wanted to impress her. He also notes that despite making some basic efforts to be a vegan, he frequently fails, and doesn't feel too bad about it. He also notes that it's never occurred to him to stop wearing leather or make donations to charities trying to reduce animal suffering. In this case, John might well think something like the following: "I had a strong disposition to agree to statements like 'Meat is murder', but my behaviour and broader mindset weren't really consistent with someone who truly believed that. Whatever state it is that makes me inclined to agree to statements like that, then, is probably not a sincere belief."
I think an obvious objection here is that this is a semantic issue: I'm essentially no-true-scotsmanning the concept of belief. However, I'd push back against this. My broader philosophical and psychological framework for understanding the mind is a "psychological natural kinds" model: I think that there really are important divisions in kind in the mind between different kinds of psychological state, and a big part of the job of cognitive science is to discover them. The view I'm describing here, then, is that a lot of the states we conventionally call beliefs aren't in fact beliefs at all - they're a different psychological natural kind with its own norms and functions, which I've termed S-dispositions. There may be some interesting connections between S-dispositions and strict beliefs, but they're weak enough and complicated enough that a good ontology of the mind should consider them separate kinds of psychological states.
I also think this 'sparse beliefs' view I'm describing has some interesting potential upshots for how we think about speech and epistemic virtue, including the simple point that S-dispositions are ubiquitous and strict beliefs are rare. I'm still figuring these out, and I'd like to hear others' views on this, but it raises some interesting questions. For example, should we have a different set of norms for rewarding/punishing S-dispositions from those we apply to beliefs? If someone says "Russians are a bunch of fucking savages", and we have reason to believe that it's merely an S-disposition rather than a belief, should we judge them less harshly? Or similarly, if someone has two contradictory S-dispositions, is that necessarily a bad thing in the same way that having two contradictory beliefs would be? Should social media platforms make an effort to distinguish between users who casually assert problematic or dangerous things ("men should all be killed") versus those whose broader pattern of online interactions suggests they truly believe those things? What sort of epistemic obligation if any do we have to make sure our S-dispositions line up with our strict beliefs? Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?
In any case, I'm in the early stages of writing a paper on this, but I'd love feedback from you all.
Men and women will be fully reconciled in the near future as our delicious atoms are melded together into whatever computronium substrate the misaligned AGI decides to-
Oh, okay, setting aside the looming AI timelines that make any long-range social issue almost irrelevant, I think the next big hiccough is going to be social/romantic AI, i.e., stuff like Replika going mainstream. Interestingly, the current userbase for romantic AI is 'merely' 70/30 male/female. That might sound male skewed but recall this is a fringe technology whose adverts mostly consist of skimpily clad virtual women. That suggests to me that once similar products have been workshopped and normie-washed, we'll be looking at near-50/50 levels (doubters should note that while porn use skews male, erotic fiction skews heavily female, and arguably romantic AI is more like the latter).
I don't know how this will affect underlying gender dynamics, but the fact that one can get one's emotional and sexual romantic needs met by AI will, I suspect, further alienate men from women and accelerate the hikikomorification of our society. Perhaps we'll see a deliberate backlash of gender-trad teens who go romantic camping in fields together without devices and try to work out which-bit-goes-where without the aid of pornhub. One can only hope.
But yeah, it's probably computronium.
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