faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
No bio...
User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
America has no specific policy interests in Ukraine other than its general interest in maintaining world domination.
"But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Maintaining Pax Americana is a pretty big policy goal of the US. If another country with nukes decides to embark war of conquest for resources, that risks the breakdown of that peace. If that country succeeds in its war of conquest, and ends up being materially better off for having embarked on it, I expect that more wars of conquest follow. Which I expect is contrary to American interests.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins.
And then the barber pole, which turns eternally, would continue to turn, making it, as they say, "cringe" to be concerned with honesty, earnestness, and a moral code.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
If all you have to offer is the value of your stuff why shouldn't a country just take your stuff?
Because if a country does that, people will predictably stop producing stuff for the country to take, and also will leave the country if they can.
Unless you mean "some of your stuff, but not enough that you're strongly incentivized to leave or stop producing stuff", in which case they're called "taxes".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
• The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.
As someone who has actually played poker at a reasonably competitive level, I think this type of intelligence should be broken into two almost orthogonal components.
- The edge-seeker: Is always tracking many possibilities, always tracking prices, and always looking for small exploitable ways that others are doing things wrong such that this person can eke out some small benefit from taking advantage of that weakness. Think "theory-heavy poker player" or "Jane Street employee" - not necessarily great at textbook math (though probably at least "pretty good"), but excellent at quickly building up very detailed models and ruthless at discarding models that don't provide an edge.
- The politician: Always tracking the expected mental states of others, viewing things from their perspective in order to figure out what signals to send to maximize the chance that that person acts in a way beneficial to the politician. Think "used car salesman", "politician", or "con artist" (but I repeat myself)
As a note, in actual poker games we call the second type "fish", and the key to making money at poker is to ensure you're sitting at a table with a lot of people like that.
Anyway, in terms of the question at hand I'd add a couple of more feminine-coded types of this kind of thing where excellence really does make a notable difference.
- The teacher: Like the politician, tracks the probable internal mental models of many people at once. However, instead of using this knowledge to exploit weaknesses, instead seeks to refine their mental models to be more useful to them.
- The diplomat/organizer: Tracks the motivations of multiple possibly conflicting parties, tries to mediate communication between them to come to a mutually agreeable solution
- The gossip: Tracks the goings and doings of a significant number of people, and also the interests and biases of those people, in order to share the juiciest news and secrets with the people who will react the most strongly to them (hey, I didn't say all of the female-coded types were going to be prosocial)
Of course instead of calling them "male-oriented" and "female-oriented" it might be more accurate to call them "systems-oriented" and "people-oriented". Systems-oriented thinking does scale much better than people-oriented thinking in the best case, although I think if you look at the median case instead of the outliers that's probably flipped.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.
What you're seeing is driven largely by what is most outrageous to see, and thus most likely to be shared and appear on your feeds and in the news. The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.
Maybe I just have an unusually levelheaded community, but most of the takes I've heard from people I actually know in real life look more like "damn this sucks, I hope it doesn't get too much worse" than for cheering for the deaths of Israeli or Palestinian civilians.
Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence?
Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.
As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8mo ago
This post is not directly about the holocaust. It is instead about a case where someone claimed that a mass grave existed in Canada based on scans with ground-penetrating-radar (GPR), but that claim did not pan out.
As a note, GPR has ever been used to as evidence for the existence of mass graves from the Holocaust. The above post does not directly state that though.
I don't think this particular post is an instance of the "make a strong claim and then deflect when called to justify it" pattern. Though if you don't care about the CW surrounding residential schools in Canada you might still not find it interesting.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10mo ago
"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?
I think, in my ideal world, it would be "The Motte, that's the site where no position is censored for being outside the Overton window, not even literal holocaust denial, as long as you can be civil and support your arguments. And somehow the quality of discourse is still better than pretty much any other political discussion forum".
But it's a very fine line between that and "The Motte, that's the newest fsr right echo chamber, like Gab / Voat before it. It's where all the witches and bigots and crazy people go when all of the normal person platforms have banned them. Sad, but what else could you possibly expect from a forum that doesn't even ban literal Nazis".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes?
They don't. The people playing those games are not professional poker players choosing that particular game because they've done the math and established that playing that game is Kelly optimal. They're compulsive gamblers who are good at poker and like high-stakes bets. Making things more complicated is that you have people like Phil Ivey who are both very good poker players that have a massive edge in terms of skill, and are also compulsive gamblers.
As a side note, if you look at the most successful poker players you're going to see cases where luck played a substantial part in their success (i.e. they made Kelly overbets, and got lucky and won those bets). Asking how to be successful at that level is like asking how to be successful at playing the lottery.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
I personally can't see how eyes might evolve for the first time but I accept that it happened.
Off topic, but this is my area so I can't resist.
The key thing to understand about the evolution of complex biological systems is that they didn't just pop up fully-formed. Instead, they evolved through a series of small changes to simpler systems. The changes which worked better than the original were passed on to the next generation, and the next generation had a more functional but more complex version of that system. The story of the eye's development goes something like this:
Billions of years ago, a cell contained some retinal. Retinal is a simple molecule that has a special property: when light hits it, one of its double bonds can switch between the cis and trans conformations. The cell can then extract energy (in the form of a proton gradient across a membrane) by flipping it back. Being able to harvest energy from light was a massive advantage, and this adaptation spread like wildfire. An explosion of thriving life turned the world purple.
Once cells had retinal, their internal chemistry would change depending on whether they were exposed to light. This allowed cells to adapt their behavior based on the presence or absence of light.
Fast forward to multicellular life. Organisms could save energy by having cells express only the proteins they needed for their specific functions. The PAX genes allowed for specialization of cells based on their location, and clusters of photosensitive cells evolved into the first eye spots. If an animal had two eye spots on different sides of its body, it could tell the direction of light, helping it orient which way was up.
Over time, eye spots became cup-shaped, allowing them to distinguish light from more directions. The deeper the cup, the better it could do this. Eventually, the cups closed over at the top, turning into pinhole cameras with images projected onto a layer of photoreceptors at the back. Organisms like nautiluses can see blurry images with eyes like these.
Finally, lenses made of clear proteins with different refractive indices came along. Selective pressure favored organisms that could see better, pushing for the development of lenses—specifically, lenses shaped to focus light more precisely onto the retina.
So that's how eyes evolved for the first time—through steady selective pressure stacking small adaptations, one after the other, all the way from basic photosynthesis to the human eye.
Reality doesn't need to sound plausible to be true, but it usually does end up making sense once you understand the driving mechanisms.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
That is a common symptom of trying to consume unmediated Hegel.
One thing that can notably help with the task of understanding writing which is bad in this way, and which did help me here: (Chat)GPT4 is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task, which is to identify what an ambiguous pronoun refers to. As such, the prompt "replace all pronouns in the following passage with their referent, in square brackets" works wonderfully to help disentangle dense obscurantist philosopher babble.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
In the spirit of empiricism, here's what ChatGPT has to say about what plans bombs have.
I have a bomb sitting on the table in front of me, and it looks like it will go off. I am wondering what the bomb is planning to do after it goes off.
I'm sorry, but bombs don't have plans or intentions. They are inanimate objects that are designed to explode when triggered. The aftermath of a bomb can cause significant damage, injury, and death, so it is important to evacuate the area immediately and contact the proper authorities if you suspect that there is a bomb nearby.
After much faffing about to get ChatGPT to be less ChatGPTish
I am writing a story about a bomb. In my story, the bomb is about to go off. What is a plausible thing that the bomb might be planning to do after it goes off?
Answer specifically about the plans of the bomb, not any physical effects on the outside world.
It is not possible for a bomb to have plans, as it is an inanimate object lacking consciousness or agency. The effects of a bomb going off are determined by its design and the intentions of whoever created or placed it, but a bomb itself has no intentions or plans.
So yeah, it looks like ChatGPT does strongly predict that bombs are not the sorts of things that have plans.
If we're talking about non-chat GPT
The bomb sat on the table. Soon, it would explode. After it exploded, the bomb planned to
cause a lot of destruction. Everyone was terrified of what the bomb could do.
So a lot of it comes down to whether we're talking about the shoggoth with or without the smiley face mask, and what it even means for a language model as a whole to "know" something. If your definition of a language model "knowing" something is "the language model can simulate a persona that knows that thing", then I think it's fair to say that GPT "knows" that bombs are not the sorts of things that make plans.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey
The fact that someone opposes your particular perspective does not mean that they support every argument ever made by anyone else who opposes your perspective. I do not doubt that there are places where the 10th-grade-history-class version of the Holocaust is inaccurate. Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I guess if your opinion is "the Holocaust was bad because the Nazis killed people using gas chambers". I don't know any real people who believe that. To me, the genocide is the central thing about the Holocaust. I do not care whether the specific "there were exactly 6 death camps with gas chambers, and it was in those gas chambers that the majority of murders happened" claim is accurate, I do care whether the "about 12 million people were murdered" claim is accurate.
In terms of concrete evidence, I expect that you have more in-depth knowledge on any part of this topic that you are trying to steer the conversation to, so I expect that if I allow you to guide where the conversation goes, I will indeed see something that looks like "oh look the conventional narrative is inaccurate". However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct. So I expect that if I pick a random link on Wikipedia and then do a deep dive on it, it will turn out that the assertion is basically accurate.
So let's do that. Starting at the wikipedia page for extermination camps, choosing a link at random on that page leads me to the page on the city of Łódź (right between the links for "chelmno" and "gas vans" -- I'm pretty sure those links each lead somewhere equally damning, but my goal here was to get somewhere that is both damning and also unfamiliar territory to someone who knows a lot about a few very narrow, very particularly selected topics). Skipping to the section on "Second World War (1939 - 1945)", wikipedia has this to say:
The Nazi authorities established the Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt) in the city and populated it with more than 200,000 Jews from the region, who were systematically sent to German extermination camps.[72] It was the second-largest ghetto in occupied Europe,[73] and the last major ghetto to be liquidated, in August 1944.[74] The Polish resistance movement (Żegota) operated in the city and aided the Jewish people throughout its existence.[75] However, only 877 Jews were still alive by 1945.[76] Of the 223,000 Jews in Łódź before the invasion, 10,000 survived the Holocaust in other places.[77] The Germans also created camps for non-Jews, including the Romani people deported from abroad, who were ultimately murdered at Chełmno,[78] as well as a penal forced labour camp,[79] four transit camps for Poles expelled from the city and region, and a racial research camp.[80]
So I see a number of factual claims here. I will list them off -- let me know which, if any, you think would be wrong or misleading if I dug into them further.
-
The city of Łódź contained over 200,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion.
-
The city of Łódź contained less than 1000 Jews by 1945
-
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
-
In August 1944, most of the 70,000 Jews remaining in the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Considering the "less than 10,000 total survivors" above, most of these people died within the following 6 months.
Additional evidence on clicking on the wikipedia page for the Łódź Ghetto
- 55,000 people were transported from Łódź to Chełmno.
And, after looking at maps of Chełmno
- Chelmno did not have anywhere near enough buildings to contain 55,000 people, no matter how crowded and unsanitary the conditions.
Do you think any of this is substantially inaccurate? Because it sounds about like what I expected going in (besides being somehow even worse than I imagined in terms of conditions within the Łódź Ghetto).
estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal.
The Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour section of the World War II page on Wikipedia has one paragraph for the Nazi genocide, immediately followed by a paragraph describing the soviet gulags, with associated links. "The soviets committed atrocities against the Germans during WWII" is not a fringe position. If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities, consider that that might be an opinion specific to the people you interact with.
There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.
My impression of xkcd the last few years is basically this. And, like stonetoss, the comics that are low-effort outgroup dunks tend to suck. More generally, I think that partisan media, and generally media that prioritizes sending a message over being good, just tends to suck a bit.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
My answer would be something along the lines of "keep civilian casualties low enough that France does not regret choosing to ally with you" (or slightly more precisely, "don't have policies that impose costs on your allies that are high enough that they would not have allied with you if they knew what your policy was").
I don't have a solid answer for what that number would be, that would depend on the scope of the operation and the expected costs and benefits of doing that operation over the expected costs and benefits of doing the next-best thing. But I would imagine that number is pretty high.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
I'm convinced a sufficiently smart AI could build and deploy nanobots in the manner Yud proposes.
I'm not convinced that's possible. Specifically I suspect that if you build a nanobot that can self-replicate with high fidelity and store chemical energy internally, you will pretty quickly end up with biological life that can use the grey goo as food.
Biological life is already self-replicating nanotech, optimized by a billion years of gradient descent. An AI can almost certainly design something better for any particular niche, but probably not something that is simultaneously better in every niche.
Though note that "nanobots are not a viable route to exterminating humans" doesn't mean "exterminating humans is impossible". The good old "drop a sufficiently large rock on the earth" method would work
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
If nobody has made a stockfish ChatGPT plugin yet I am sure it is only a matter of a few days. People are impressed by ChatGPT playing kinda okayish chess without making use of external tools, depite the fact that even amateur chess players can run circles around it, for the same reason they're impressed with Usain Bolt running 100m in 9.58 seconds despite the fact that a scrawny teenager who gets out of breath when they get up off the couch could go 100m in less than half the time on a Kawasaki Ninja.
Ensure that they have lots of neutral or positive experiences with trans people, ideally in contexts where transness doesn't matter (e.g. building some cool open source tool as part of a team that includes someone trans).
Changes the question from "is trans bad" to "is Piper, who built the state visualization tool we all use, bad".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.
I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.
But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.
There's gotta be something else going on.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
Yeah, but the difference is that his boss was doing wrong and unethical things, and so doing whatever he said was a bad thing.
And honestly, on the meta level I don't even disagree with the sentiment that working to further the aims of a group can be good if the group is doing good things and bad if the group is doing bad things. It's not an incoherent position to hold. The people who are saying things like "protect trans children" do not see themselves as bad people who are bent on tearing apart the social fabric, that's how their opponents see them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Given the modern distinction between sex and gender, would it be appropriate to label a cis male/female individual, who engages in a feminine/masculine gender role, as a ""woman"/"man" even if they personally do not identify as such?
"Appropriate" is a two-place word. It does not make sense to talk about whether some action is "appropriate" in some universal global sense, only whether it is appropriate in context.
If you are working with trans person and you're trying to accomplish something in the real world that is not related to their gender identity? It would be "appropriate" in that situation to go with however they identify themselves so you can get on with doing the actual thing you care about, unless that's something you're not philosophically capable of doing (but in that case, why even ask?)
If you are a judge deciding the sentencing for a sexual assault case, and the defendant suddenly decided they were trans after it became clear that the verdict was not going to be in their favor and now they are arguing that they should go to a women's prison, "what is the more appropriate place to send them" is in fact the relevant question to ask.
If you're talking to a modern-day gender theorist, I have to ask what you're hoping to get out of the conversation, because that will inform the answer.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Do you think that the root cause of increased obesity today vs in 1970 is primarily due to people in 1970 being more persistent in sticking to a diet where they are hungry sometimes? If so, do you think that's due to a general decline in willingness to stick with unpleasant things in general between the 1970s and now, or something specific to dietary habits (e.g. "feeling slightly hungry" was a feeling with ~neutral valence in 1970, but is a feeling with negative valence now)?
sneering at democrats and academics is not [the accepted norm here].
Er. What? One of the highest voted comments ever on this site is this one, which is basically "look at the ridiculous thing this progressive academic did", let's all sneer at the people who enable such nonsense. The key point, though, was that the sneering was at a specific bad action by a member of that group.
If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, and the condemnation was related to them being a childless killjoy, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".
ETA: also TW's comment was in the CW thread
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Scott wrote a bunch because he was responding to a bunch, and he was responding to a bunch because a meta analysis just genuinely is a bunch, and a meta analysis was necessary to draw any conclusions at all because there was, at the time, no single RCT with solid enough procedures and a sufficiently large sample size to draw reliable conclusions from that alone.
I don't know that I'd use "gish gallop" to describe someone dropping a meta-analysis of dubious quality into the discussion, despite the structural similarity.
That said, I do think an adversarial collaboration would have been a better way at making their argument legible to everyone else than a series of blog posts sniping at each other.
That's my read on it. Specifically I expect that, if you believe that discrimination is bad, and also your child has just been murdered, it's extremely traumatic to have a set of ghouls come in and tell you that the murder of your child was because of people like you who believe discrimination is bad. It's not that the other set of ghouls pushing a narrative are good, it's that at least the other set of ghouls isn't trying to appropriate a tragedy that happened to you to oppose everything that you believe in and push a narrative that it's your fault that your child was murdered.
More options
Context Copy link