doglatine
5mo ago
Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”
Just some quick thoughts on the future of the internet. In short, I expect the way we use the web and social media to change quite dramatically over the next 3-5 years as a result of the growing sophistication of AI assistants combined with a new deluge of AI spam, agitprop, and clickbait content hitting the big socials. Specifically, I’d guess most people will have an AI assistant fielding user queries via API calls to Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and creating a personalised stream of content that filters out ads, spam, phishing, and (depending on users’ tastes) clickbait and AI generated lust-provoking images. The result will be a little bit like an old RSS feed but mostly selected on their behalf rather than by them directly, and obviously packed with multimedia and social content. As the big social networks start to make progressively more of their money from API charges from AI assistant apps and have fewer high-value native users, they’ll have less incentive to control for spambots locally, which will create a feedback loop that makes the sites basically uninhabitable without AI curation.
One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed, because these days people use it mainly for navigation rather than exploratory search (eg you use it to search Reddit, Twitter, or Wikipedia, or find your way to previously-visited articles or websites when you can’t remember the exact URL). But AI assistants will handle navigation and site-specific queries, and even exploratory search will be behind the scenes, meaning Google Ads will get progressively less and less exposure to human eyeballs. This is why they urgently need to make Gemini a success, because their current business model won’t exist in the medium-term.
All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.
doglatine
11mo ago
I’m surprised no-one mentioned the way this incident has been covered on the /r/NYC subreddit. Given that it’s a deep blue city and Reddit is a deep blue site, you’d think everyone would be up in arms about Neely’s death. But the dominant mood is dramatically more pro-Penny than here, for heaven’s sake. Multiple posters saying that he did what needed to be done, people have a right not to be hassled by psychopaths on their commute, even some highly upvoted comments calling out progressivism by name as the ideology that created this problem. I’m utterly bemused and perplexed. Am I missing something?
On a related note, if Trump is canny, he’ll make his candidacy about law and order this time. The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue. And while I don’t have good polling on the issue, my sense from reading the city subs on Reddit is that crime is creeping up voters’ list of priorities. Oh, and as an issue it’s less alienating than immigration for many Latino voters, while being able to be plausibly connected to immigration with Trump’s base (“I’ve been gone four years and we have chaos in the streets of our cities, chaos on the border”).
Reposting my original advicepost from the Motte —
Since dating came up in last week's Culture Wars thread and seemed to trigger a bit of brief discussion, I thought some people in this sub might be interested in hearing a bit of dating advice geared towards contrarians. Back in Radicalizing the Romanceless, Scott says -
Male attractiveness seems to depend on things like a kind of social skills which is not necessarily the same kind of social skills people who want to teach you social skills will teach
I think I can give some useful pointers in this regard. Note that as sex and dating are fundamentally gendered experiences, most of my advice is geared towards straight men, and won't be applicable to straight women (though some surely will). I'd be interested to hear female perspectives as a result. I also imagine that a lot of people won't be interested in hearing advice on this topic, or will find some of what follows obvious and patronising. This is probably unavoidable, but apologies in advance.
As to why I feel arrogant enough to give any advice: I've had a fairly long, rich, and interesting dating life, with quite a few painful lessons learned along the way. I discovered the existence of sex and romance relatively late by some measures - in my late teens - when I lost a lot of weight and suddenly found women responding to me differently, so I think I have a bit more insight than someone for whom this stuff came wholly naturally. Additionally, I'm fascinated by sex and dating norms, both on a philosophical and practical level (in fact, I've taught undergraduate classics on the applied ethics of sex and romance), and despite now being happily married I still read a lot of dating and love advice out of raw curiosity. Still, as always, YMMV, and I'm happy to debate any of the below points.
(1) Don't be unattractive. Sorry to start out with this one, but it can't be overstated. This particular bit of advice is usually placed second to "be attractive", but I think being attractive is a lot harder than not being unattractive, so I'd recommend focusing on the latter. Worse still, I think trying to be attractive can lead people to try to be extravagant or unconventional in their personal style or behaviour (see 'peacocking') and this can backfire horribly. Instead, focus on minimising unattractiveness. This means obvious stuff like good personal grooming - don't underestimate the difference wearing cologne, having good dental hygiene, having a good haircut, and trimming your beard regularly can make.
It also means having a good solid wardrobe and sense of style. I'd suggest that for most men conservatism is the right strategy, at least to begin with - stuff like OCBDs, slim or straight leg jeans, smart sneakers or brogues, and fairly slim fitting cashmere or merino wool sweaters. As a rule of thumb, if you're interested in looks, buy clothes that are slightly tighter than is optimal for comfort (surprisingly, this also applies if you're overweight). Malefashionadvice has some good tips, but bear in mind it's a bit of a circle jerk. One of the key purposes of all of these efforts (in addition to looking and smelling better) is to show that you are sensitive to and aware of presentation norms in your peer group.
Of course, it can also help a lot if you have chiseled abs and arms like Henry Cavill, and everyone should figure out a good diet and exercise routine for their long-term health and mental well-being. But that's a huge topic I won't address here. I'd also flag that I think being 'ripped' or 'shredded' or even just in good physical shape are factors that can be overstated in dating - there are plenty of stylish, well-dressed, funny, confident but slightly pudgy men who are also real casanovas, and plenty of desperate depressed singletons over at /fit/. Above all, don't put off dating until the day you have a body like a Greek god: it will probably never come.
(2) Don't assume dates will come to you. Most men can go years without ever once being approached by a woman with explicit romantic interest. You will need to be proactive to find a romantic partner. In the modern age, this sadly means getting on dating sites and apps. The upside to this is that the costs of failure are typically pretty small: the people you meet are people you will never see again, and with whom you probably have no friends in common, so even if it's all horribly awkward it will have few negative consequences downstream. While I've been out of the dating pool long enough that I can't recommend the best current apps, a good rule of thumb is to be proactive about setting up as many dates as possible and to triple your rate of failure (though always remember the human... and for god's sake never, ever send dick pics to anyone you've known for less than six months).
Most dates will inevitably be crash-and-burn ventures, but as long as you learn from the experience and gain confidence, you'll still be benefiting. I would strongly suggest that you don't pay for your date's food and drinks on the first few dates. It increases the costs of a bad date and can lead to bitterness and unreasonable expectations. Besides, it's current year, as the meme goes. Note that each dating site and app has its own norms and strategies. Each has its own target demographics, and while some will skew towards detailed profiles and lengthy intro messages, others will be more of a numbers game (though they all are to some extent). When you join a new dating site, try to learn 'the meta', whether from reading blogs or asking the advice of friends. One big point worth emphasising: the pictures you put up really matter. That may seem shallow, but it's just how it is. Get the advice of friends, and maybe even get a professional photoshoot done. The difference between a bad set of profile photos and good ones is colossal.
(3) Don't treat dating like a purely cooperative venture. While dating is ultimately a non-zero sum game that should lead to happy relationships, early on, there's a definite element to it that requires a more strategic mindset. This is a delicate point, and I certainly wouldn't recommend being adversarial about it, but you should certainly be trying to manage your date's first impressions of you (see point 4 below). While you shouldn't think of a date like a job interview, it's not totally crazy to think of it as resembling a pitch to an investor: you want to accentuate your positives and avoid dwelling on the negatives. You need to be confident and genuinely believe that you have something valuable to offer the other party. Hopefully most of you believe you do have value to offer, whether it's your intellect, your common sense, your good finances, or your in-depth knowledge of the Punic Wars. If you don't think you have anything to offer, you're not ready to date. See a therapist or work on yourself until you've nurtured a bit of confidence. But otherwise, you should really reflect on your best qualities and ground your behaviour in the date on a strong sense of your own value. "I have a lot to offer as a romantic partner, and any woman who chooses to date me will be making a great choice," is a useful mantra, even if sometimes it takes a bit of effort to internalise it.
(4) Don't just be yourself. A huge amount of what we look for in a partner is good judgment, especially in social matters. There are a lot of people out there who are weird, awkward, and generally indifferent to the social cues of others, and a lot of early dating is about weeding these people out. If you're too up front, you can easily come across as someone who simply doesn't get it. There's nothing wrong, for example, with having wargaming, Magic The Gathering, and videogames as your main hobbies, but these are not high status activities, and if you lead with these you look like someone who simply doesn't notice what's high status and what's not. If you want to talk about hobbies, try to cultivate some that are high status: physical activities like climbing, running, and team sports are good, as are outdoor activities like scuba, skiing and even hiking. Travel, languages, and literature are solid, and food and cooking are easy and safe, if a bit pedestrian. Being able to talk about what's trendy in culture and your city is also helpful, e.g., "have you been watching Tiger King?" and "have you seen the fancy new restaurant that opened on main street?".
You don't need to invest too much time and effort into these interests and hobbies - just enough that you have something to say about them and can honestly report that they're something you're interested in. I'd also flag that talking about sex, kinks, and exes on a first date is generally a bad idea (unless you're meeting someone from Fetlife, of course). Again, it's about displaying good judgment and showing that you're not one of the creepy weirdos with no filter. A good general rule for most straight men is to follow women's lead on these issues, and to reveal personal information carefully and gradually. I imagine some people think this all sounds dismal: "I want a partner who accepts me for who I am, warts and all!" I think that's absolutely a realistic thing to aim for, but the process of opening up should be done gradually and in a way that's responsive to the growing intimacy between you and your partner.
(continued below)
/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.
In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.
This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.
But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).
I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.
So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.
First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.
Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..
That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.
doglatine
9mo ago
There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.
doglatine
11mo ago
I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.
I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.
doglatine
3mo ago
When writing formal letters in Japanese, there are a variety of extra steps you have to do above and beyond fancy salutations and signoffs, including - my favourite - the seasonal observations beginning the letter (e.g., in August you could say "The oppressive heat continues to linger") and closing it ("please give my regards to everyone"). These are so stereotyped that I think most recipients of letters regard them more as a structural element of the composition than a semantic one, just as in English we don't really think of the virtue of sincerity when reading "Yours Sincerely".
I think this is basically what LLMs will do to writing, at least on the 5-10 year time scale. Everything will be written by LLMs and interpreted and summarised by LLMs, and there will be a whole SEO-style set of best practices to ensure your messages get interpreted in the right way. This might even mean that sometimes when we inspect the actual first-order content of compositions created by LLMs that there are elements we find bizarre or nonsensical, that are there for the AI readers rather than the human ones.
To get back to your point, I absolutely think this is going to happen to bureaucracy in academia and beyond, and I think it's a wonderful thing, a process to be cherished. Right now, the bureaucratic class in education, government, and elsewhere exert a strongly negative influence on productivity, and they have absolutely no incentives to trim down red tape to put themselves out of jobs or reduce the amount of power they hold. This bureaucratic class is at the heart of cost disease, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that their continued unchecked growth is a civilisation-level threat to us.
In this regard, LLMs are absolutely wonderful. They allow anyone with limited training to meet bureaucratic standards with minimal effort. Better still, they can bloviate at such length that the bureaucracy will be forced to rely on LLMs to decode them, as noted above, so they lose most of the advantage that comes with being able to speak bureaucratese better than honest productive citizens. "God created men, ChatGPT made them equal."
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these. If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse. Similarly, academia is decreasingly valuable for delivering basic research; the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and almost no-one produces content with actual value.
I'm actually quite excited about what LLMs mean in this regard. As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive the epistemic anarchy of receiving vast numbers of such submissions, with no way to tell the AI-generated ones from the human ones. And in the softer social sciences, LLMs will make the harder bits - i.e., the statistics - much easier and more accessible. I imagine the vast majority of PhD theses that get completed in these fields in 2024 will make extensive use of ChatGPT.
All of these changes will force creative destruction on academia in ways that will be beautiful and painful to watch but will ultimately be constructive. This will force us to think afresh about what on earth Philosophy and History and Sociology departments are all for, and how we measure their success. We'll have to build new institutions that are designed to be ecologically compatible with LLMs and an endless sea of mediocre but passable content. Meanwhile I expect harder fields like biomed and material sciences to (continue to) be supercharged by the capabilities of ML, with the comparative ineffectiveness of institutional research being shown up by insights from DeepMind et al.. We have so, so much to look forward to.
doglatine
7mo ago
Excellent summary. I’d only add that I think a lot of these nonsensical foreign policies come from a “strategy-game understanding” of geopolitics. You can’t just offer Russia a big pot of gold to get +100 relations. Russia and China currently have deeply aligned interests. Both are non-status quo powers. Russia has already paid a significant cost in involuntary decoupling from the West and is now rebuilding those value chains with China. The Russian public is as anti-American as they’ve been for decades. Given the above, even if you could extract a promise from Putin to play nice, there’s no reason to expect it to hold.
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
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.
doglatine
4mo 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
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
11mo ago
My first take on the flowchart is that "consciousness" is horribly abused as a concept here. Not to abuse authority here, but: I've spent most of my academic career writing about consciousness, with the last 5 years focused on AI consciousness, I'm on the boards of multiple journals in the field, and have numerous publications in top cogsci and philosophy and even AI journals on the topic. I would say that almost without exception, anyone who knows anything about AI risk and consciousness realises there's very little connecting the two.
The interesting part of consciousness is the hard problem (aka qualia, subjectivity, zombies), and that is explicitly divorced from the kind of cognitive capabilities that could be scary; it's the mystery layer on reality, and fwiw I do think it's genuinely mysterious. I have no idea whether future superintelligent AIs are likely to be conscious -- or rather, my thoughts on the subject are complex, meandering, and dense. By contrast, it's pretty straightforward to see how an agential AI that outmatches us in capacities like strategic planning, social cognition, and behaviour anticipation is scary as fuck.
I don't care if it's conscious. I care whether it's able to outthink me.
doglatine
11mo ago
One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.
Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.
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
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
11mo ago
Yes. I fully agree with these criticism of the modern movie industry. That said, I think TV is getting interesting again; after the Golden Age of the 2000s (The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under) and the Silver Age of the early 2010s (Breaking Bad. Mad Men, early Game of Thrones), we’ve had a rocky few years, with far too many streaming services chasing too few eyeballs. But The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, and Severance are both excellent and are new IPs, if I’m not mistaken.
doglatine
2mo ago
Another problem is that there are more scientists than plausible paths of scientific enquiry.
Philip Kitcher has some useful insights here on the division of epistemic labour in science. In short, it's not always ideal to have scientists pursuing just the most plausible hypotheses. Instead, we should allocate epistemic labour in proportion to something like expected utility, such that low-probability high-impact hypotheses get their due. Unfortunately, this can be a hard sell to many researchers given the current incentive structures. Do you want to spend 10 years researching a hypothesis that is almost certainly false and is going to give you null results, just for the 1% chance that it's true? In practice this means that science in practice probably skews too much towards epistemic conservatism, with outlier hypotheses often being explored only by well-funded and established eccentric researchers (example: Avi Loeb is one of the very few mainstream academics exploring extraterrestrial intelligence hypotheses, and he gets a ton of crap for it).
There are also of course some fields (maybe social psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology as examples) where the incentives stack up differently, often because it's easy to massage data or methodology to guarantee positive results. This means that researchers go for whatever looks bold and exciting and shiny because they know they'll be able to manufacture some eye-catching results, whereas a better division of epistemic labour would have them doing more prosaic but valuable work testing and pruning existing paradigms and identifying plausible mechanisms where it exists (cue "it ain't much but it's honest work" meme).
All of which is to say, I think there's plenty of work to go around in the sciences, enough to absorb all the researchers we have and more, but right now that labour is allocated highly inefficiently/suboptimally.
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
7mo ago
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.
doglatine
10d ago
The idea that Ukrainians are only fighting out because mean old NATO made them do it is absurd. In the months leading up to the February invasion, it was widely assumed in Western capitals that Ukraine would fold like a house of cards, and that would be that. The only reason the West got sucked into the conflict in its current capacity is because Ukraine put up an impressive resistance, stopping the Russian offensive in its tracks and pushing them back rapidly. Relatively recent polling data from Ukraine (a few months old, but after the failed summer offensive) shows continued strong support for the war and confidence in the UAF. Now, I'll happily grant that Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive was a disaster, not so much because of casualties but because it significantly depleted Ukrainian munitions and led to the current "shell hunger" being experienced across the line, and all for very little return. But despite this setback, Russia has not been to shift the lines significantly either, suffering lopsided casualties for minimal territorial gains at Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and the largest successful advances of the war after the initial invasion still remains the Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive of Q3 2022.
The bitter lesson of the last year, I would suggest, is that the operational environment in Ukraine now strongly favours defensive operations, and large breakthroughs are unlikely. On the one hand, this is bad news for Ukraine: any dreams of sweeping advances into Crimea or liberation of Donetsk City have been thoroughly quashed. However, it's also bad news for Russia, insofar as it makes an outright military resolution of the conflict unlikely. Instead, it will be a battle of stamina and will between Ukraine (and its backers) and Russia (and its backers). It may be that the Ukrainian people decide it's not worth fighting on, and will sue for peace, and that's ultimately up to them, but we're a long way from that point. Moreover, it's not clear that the fundamentals of the battle of stamina really do favour Russia: we're witnessing dramatic scaling-up of munitions production in Europe and the US, the continuing depletion of Russian armoured vehicle stocks, and increasingly bold attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure hundreds of miles behind the border. It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
doglatine
4mo ago
I’ve heard this expressed pithily as “one of the worst things about being poor is having to live alongside other poor people.” It sounds cruel and god knows there are plenty of rich arseholes but my friends from genuinely deprived backgrounds seem to have to endure a huge amount of interpersonal drama with family, from people needing to be bailed out (literally) to female relatives or friends needing help after getting beaten up by abusive boyfriends or spouses or friends stealing from them. Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.
doglatine
7mo ago
If Rubiales is guilty of anything here (besides plausibly being coked off his face), it’s of a failure to “read the room” and adapt to the etiquette of high status individuals in his communities. In some cultures, he’d be quite appropriately excoriated simply for shaking hands with any of the female players. In others, an affectionate mouth-to-mouth kiss would be appropriate between him and all the male players.
As it is, social forces have been rapidly moving towards a new set of norms that emphasise female bodily autonomy to the exclusion of unsolicited signs of warmth and affection. Rubiales was going slow in the fast lane of cultural change, and got rear-ended for his slowness, stupidity, or arrogance.
I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
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