felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
12d ago
Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
The issue is that there are two distinct dangers in play, and to emphasize the differences I'll use a concrete example for the first danger instead of talking abstractly.
First danger: we replace judges with GTP17. There are real advantages. The averaging implicit in large scale statistics makes GPT17 less flaky than human judges. GPT17 doesn't take take bribes. But clever lawyers find how to bamboozle it, leading to extreme errors, different in kind to the errors that humans make. The necessary response is to unplug GPT17 and rehire human judges. This proves difficult because those who benefit from bamboozling GPT17 have gained wealth and power and want to preserve the flawed system because of the flaws. But GPT17 doesn't defend itself; the Artificial Intelligence side of the unplugging is easy.
Second danger: we build a superhuman intelligence whose only flaw is that it doesn't really grasp the "don't monkey paw us!" thing. It starts to accidentally monkey paw us. We pull the plug. But it has already arraigned a back up power supply. Being genuinely superhuman it easily outwits our attempts to turn it off, and we get turned into paper clips.
The conflict is that talking about the second danger tends to persuade people that GPT17 will be genuinely intelligent, and that in its role as RoboJudge it will not be making large, inhuman errors. This tendency is due to the emphasis on Artificial Intelligence being so intelligent that it outwits our attempts to unplug it.
I see the first danger as imminent. I see the second danger as real, but well over the horizon.
I base the previous paragraph on noticing the human reaction to Large Language Models. LLMs are slapping us in the face with non-unitary nature of intelligence. They are beating us with clue-sticks labelled "Human-intelligence and LLM-intelligence are different" and we are just not getting the message.
Here is a bad take; you are invited to notice that it is seductive: LLMs learn to say what an ordinary person would say. Human researchers have created synthetic midwit normies. But that was never the goal of AI. We already know that humans are stupid. The point of AI was to create genuine intelligence which can then save us from ourselves. Midwit normies are the problem and creating additional synthetic ones makes the problem worse.
There is some truth in the previous paragraph, but LLMs are more fluent and more plausible than midwit normies. There is an obvious sense that Artificial Intelligence has been achieved and it ready for prime time; roll on RoboJudge. But I claim that this is misleading because we are judging AI by human standards. Judging AI by human standards contains a hidden assumption: intelligence is unitary. We rely on our axiom that intelligence is unitary to justify taking the rules of thumb that we use for judging human intelligence and using them to judge LLMs.
Think about the law firm that got into trouble by asking an LLM to write its brief. The model did a plausible job, except that the cases it cited didn't exist. The LLM made up plausible citations, but was unaware of the existence of an external world and the need for the cases to have actually happened in that external world. A mistake, and a mistake beyond human comprehension. So we don't comprehend. We laugh it off. Or we call it a "hallucination". Anything to avoid recognizing the astonishing discovery that there are different forms of intelligence with wildly different failure modes.
All the AI's that we create in the foreseeable future will have alarming failure modes, that offer this consolation: we can use them to unplug the AI if it is misbehaving. An undefeatable AI is over the horizon.
The issue for the short term is that humans are refusing to see that intelligence is a heterogeneous concept and we are are going to have to learn new ways of assessing intelligence before we install RoboJudges. We are heading for disasters where we rely on AI's that go on to manifest new kinds of stupidity and make incomprehensible errors. Fretting over the second kind of danger focuses on intelligence and takes us away from starting to comprehend the new kinds of stupidity that are manifest by new kinds of intelligence.
felis-parenthesis
17d ago
Democrats are the real racists = Democrats R the Real Racists = DRRR = DR^3 = DR3
Wait, you might not be asking how the weird abbreviation works. You might be asking why people believe that Democrats are racist.
I think that the change that has happened in my life time starts from the position that Black underperformance is due to anti-black racism from whites. End racism, replacing it with meritocracy and Blacks will thrive and do just as well as Whites.
After forty years of disappointment, the new-Democrat anti-racist position is that blacks are inferior, so meritocracy condemns them to an inferior position in society. Therefore meritocracy is bad and must be rejected in favor of racial quotas to ensure that blacks are given equal outcomes to whites. new-Democrats don't word it like that. DR3 is that claim that that is what they mean and it is really racist and bad.
felis-parenthesis
27d ago
It would be more focused to target buy-borrow-die by expanding the definition of realization to include using the asset as collateral for a loan. Buy for $100, take out loan for $90 secured on asset, no tax liability. Notice that the asset is now more valuable. Convince lender that the increase in value is durable. Take out another $90 loan secured on the asset. Now you have realized $180 so a $80 gain becomes taxable, and you have money (the loan) to pay it without having to sell the asset.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
The significance of your observation depends on your causal model. Usually the fall into tyranny is treated as exogenous: it is just as likely when the civilians have guns as when they are disarmed. Eventually it happens, and if the civilians have guns we get to see if they can shoot their way back to freedom.
I prefer to add two upstream stages. Before you can have a coup or a tyrant, you need that kind of person in politics. Once in politics they scheme and calculate. Perhaps the civilians have been disarmed by a well meaning predecessor. Now the would be tyrant's calculation is whether the police and the army will kill on his behalf. Perhaps the civilians have guns. How the calculation is whether the police and the army will take incoming fire. Some will die. Dying is a bigger ask than killing, and I anticipate the would be tyrant biding his time, waiting for a better opportunity that never comes.
But upstream of that is the question: does the would be tyrant even go into politics? Some-one who grows up in a disarmed country may see his fellow country men as sheep to be sheared and enters politics hoping to transcend electoral politics and become Lord Protector. Some-one else, growing up where civilians have guns sees less chance of grabbing ultimate power and probably ends up following a different path through life. Perhaps he aims to become very rich, by up newspapers, and then to half-rule from the shadows, using the media to shape public opinion, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never at risk of being shot.
Perhaps the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment is pointless because the guns never get used. I think that the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment works better than expected, shaping who goes into politics. The guns are never used because those with ambitions to be tyrants find others paths through life.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell
show: I rushed over and helped myself.
The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.
tell: I was hungry as heck.
Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Is it as complicated and impractical as introducing technology and organizational systems from the West, or is there hope?
Fixed that for you. Deirdre McCloskey has a trilogy on why the industrial revolution happened in the West rather than elsewhere.
I've only read the reviews but have got that impression that in her telling it is all about subtle stuff, like Bourgeois Dignity. There are lots of other theories, but it seems very common to admit that things came together in a way we don't understand and which only transfer to other countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, now China, for other reasons that we don't understand, and with their own distinctive twists, which also will not transfer.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works
Contrast the example from up thread
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.
with this alternative
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching them become literally annoyed.
It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads explode.
then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
One of the dank failure modes of social media obsession is reading and re-reading one's own comments.
- comments that are up voted generate feelings of being valued and understood
- comments that are down voted generate feelings of superiority: those poor fools are not on my level!
- all comments generate a reassuring feeling that at least one person on social media is writing sane comments
Picture the scene in a weeks time when Whining Coil succumbs to the temptation to re-read his own comments. Soon he reaches a big post about how bad all this is for his health. That gives him the opportunity to turn off his computer and play with his dog. That is in line with his goals:-)
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Your Section 174 link was fascinating. I feel that it underplayed the back story. It was sketched very briefly, but appears to go like this:
There are fiscal responsibility rules. If the US government passes a tax cut, the law should also include a tax increase in the future to balance the budget over the longer term. Legislators game this by writing a future tax increase that is stupid. Yes, it is in the law, but there is a nudge and wink that it will be repealed before it takes effect. This time the repeal never happened, so the deliberately stupid tax increase goes into effect.
This compounding disfunction bodes ill for the future of the US.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
This was bad when the left was doing it. It's bad when the right is doing it
You've got two its there. The point of my comment https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230745?context=8#context is that, in context, the two its are referring to different things.
Watch out for double its. I think that you will find that many of the comments that you disagree with have double its and the source of the disagreement is that that author of the original comment assumes that it is both obvious what it is, and obvious that both its are talking about the same thing.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Here is how I try to make the concept of Free Speech coherent, at least for this narrow topic. Free Speech needs to be a graded concept, with levels of speech.
Let us set up a little context. Mr Red-one exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-two beats up Mr Red-one and boasts about it. Mr Red-one decides to stay quiet. That is a clear infringement of Mr Red-one's right to free speech.
Mr Red-three exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-four says "You had better shut your trap, or you will get a beating, like Mr Red-one." This is second level speech. Is it covered and protected by the concept of free speech? Mr Red-five makes a public fuss about what Mr Blue-four said, trying to persuade Mr Blue-four's employer to dismiss him. This is third level speech. First level is political policy discussion. Second level is using speech to deprive others of their first level speech rights. Third level is using speech to deprive others of their second level speech rights.
I think it is coherent to say
- First level good
- Second level bad
- Third level good again
Could we say that the first and second level are both good? I see this as the incoherence that @FCfromSSC is concerned about. Some people think that free speech absolutism requires us to uphold second level speech. But that has it backwards. Since second level speech rights trash first level speech rights, upholding second level rights is going soft on free speech. There is a real conflict, but we have to uphold the first level and therefore we must disparage the second level.
What of the complication of saying that the third level is back to being good again? It really is a complication. It might be neater superficially to say that the third level is also bad. But that is to make the mistake of the lazy school teacher who doesn't make the effort to find out who is the bully and who is the victim that hit back. The first level is the one that we are trying to defend, so we object to the second level, but consistency leads to a ripple effect, with the third level good again, least we go soft on our objection to the second level, and end up weak in our defense of the first level.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
There are different kinds of weirdness. There is sincere weirdness. For example, some-one might believe that women punch just as hard as men, put their opinion on the internet, and be upset when other people reply with insults. There is trickster weirdness. For example, some-one (call them Tricky) might create a fake account that posts the claim that women punch just as hard as men. Later, when some-one else (call them Gully) thinks that the fake account is real, Tricky will enjoy using his real account to call out Gully for being gullible for thinking the fake account was real.
One might discover sincere weirdness on the internet and spend a merry year or two shining a light on it. Only later does one discover that trickster weirdness exists, and realize that one was in fact Gully from the paragraph above, and had blundered into being Tricky's lolcow.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Traditional pronouns align with biological sex. Preferred pronouns may not, leading to a surprise when "she" turns out to be a man in a dress.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Your argument, about the implied gender of foreign names, builds the case for traditional pronouns, not preferred pronouns.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Could it be about Trump trying to avoid getting trapped by a faction among his supporters? I'm thinking of a scenario where an independent right wing group publish their own "Here is what Trump is going to do." story. Some Trump supporters like the story and vote for Trump on that basis. Trump gets elected and then fails to do some of the things; they were never part of his plan. But his supporters are upset, claiming that he promised and is letting them down.
Sometimes this is fuss about nothing. Other times it is a bad look and Trump comes under real political pressure. So he wants to get out in front of the problem by being clear that it is not the official Trump manifesto.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
injectable aficionados call “low trust”
My speculations about the meaning here are baseless. Can somebody clue me in? I cannot even tell whether "injectables" is botox or heroin.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Tarriff's can potentially fix the problem for the domestic market (though economists look at the gains to auto-workers, and losses to car buyers, buying expensive American cars to avoid tariffs, and declare the loss greater than the gain)
But Americans have traditionally made fat profits and high wages from exporting cars. They cannot expect foreign countries to tax Chinese EVs but not American EVs, for the sake of American workers, at the expense of their own people. Losing export markets will hurt.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I pair up
- Keep up with chores
with
- Define chores narrowly
precisely to avoid the list of chores expanding every time I get two-thirds of the way down the list. It is vital to define chores narrowly enough that one can actually finish today's and have a little time left over.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
What is DR3 ?
Urban dictionary doesn't know nor does wikipedia.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I'm trying to imagine what pushback looks like. Perhaps it starts with language reform. Those pushing forward call it "gender affirming care". Perhaps those pushing back need to insist on calling it "gender bending care".
Race and crime get easier to discuss if you expand your vocabulary through anthropomorphism.
- Black criminals are foxes
- Working blacks are chickens
- White criminals are wolves
- Working whites are sheep
Now we have encoded the real-world racial segregation of crime into the language of parable: foxes eat chickens, while wolves eat lambs or sheep. Racial discourse, pitting black against white, implicitly says that one team is team fox+chicken, while the other team is team wolf+sheep. But most of us see sheep and chickens as a team that must work together against foxes and work together against wolves.
With this framing, abolishing prison and defunding the police is a movement of sheep working to let the foxes into the chicken coop. Notice that this language punches hard. It is nearly as strong as "transwomen are women".
But I'm still stuck on imagining what pushback looks like. I'm not seeing catchy reframings coming from the right, and I don't know why. The right was traditionally on the side of law-and-order. But that depends on what the law actually says. If a persons experience of the law is with red-light cameras with wonky timings being used to raise revenue, they will find "law and order" slogans repulsive. What about saying that the teams are chicken allied with sheep, not chicken allied with foxes? That emphasizes real harms. Maybe it leads to a crack down on red-light cameras rather than a focus on foxes? That would be good; a small amount of progress but in the right direction.
Maybe my fox-chicken-wolf-sheep language doesn't work. I spend the words on it to make my comment concrete. Abstractly, I'm noticing that the left are the masters of word magic, and the right seems bewitched by it, and unable to cast spells of their own. But why? What is going on?
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.
One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.
I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and
Trying Bing.com
Typing
into Google gets me various autocompletions
The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series
The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan
Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.
It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
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