felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
Perhaps I'm guilty of skipping steps in my argument. I agree that "people are not really independent actors and social norms need to be shaped to lead people to make good decisions."
The idea that social norms need to be shaped to lead people to make good decisions is worrying. Could social norms be misshapen? The worries branches off in three different directions.
First, the leaders might be lazy. Social norms don't get shaped. People make bad decisions.
Second, greed. People might seek leadership intending to sell out. Social norms get shaped at the behest of business. People make decision that are profitable for the businesses buying norm-shaping, but not so good for the people
Third, structural. Social norms get shaped by advertising and product placement. Who has the money for this? Governments spend some money on Public Service Announcements. Charities promote awareness, and sometime get government grants. But the lions share of money comes from profitable businesses aiming to become even richer. The purest example of this is that you haven't heard of the society for barefoot living. Since they wear nothing on their feet, they have nothing to sell and make no money and buy no publicity. But you have heard of barefoot shoes. Where there is a product there is a revenue stream, and some of that money gets diverted to buy publicity.
I'm using the phrase "late Capitalism" because others use it and I'm trying to communicate. I would much rather say ConFinCap, as in Fragpowmop versus Confincap. Whatever. I mean the economic system we currently live under. My core claim is that late Capitalism is much the largest force shaping social norms, and shapes them according to its own internal logic, with no human malevolence require to bring about bad outcomes.
I may be claiming too much. What are the other forces hammering social norms in and out of shape? In the UK, Christianity used to be a big deal, but has pretty much gone. In the UK in 1900, intellectuals were socialist, but that was a labour-centric creed and has also pretty much gone. Tony Blair was a Labour Prime minister, but he was about management and procedure. His mantra was "Education, education, eduction" but with no vision of what to teach.
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
You cannot talk about Shane Gillis and women's gym attire without a link to "Scrunch Short" on a gym wear retail site https://thegymking.com/products/gym-king-365-scrunch-short-bubblegum-pink claiming "V-scrunch shaping to the back waistband to enhance and define the glutes"
The culture war aspect is that the this helps you understand moralists who want to ban things. When you operate in the paradigm that they are asking for bans on organic human stupidity, bans seems authoritarian, and (since human stupidity is infinite) rather futile. But many of them are operating within the paradigm that late capitalism turbo-charges human stupidity. The concern with cannabis is not that 1% of teenagers will drop out of college to become stoners; the concern is that big business will advertise cannabis into mainstream coolness, and money-politics will lead to cannabis smoking being expressly permitted by law, and your teenager will dorp out of college to become a stoner. The concern with prostitution is not what is available to sailors down at the docks. The concern is that Big Brothel will mainstream sex work. Your daughter will apply for Unemployment Benefit and be told that there are jobs available at McFuck and General Sex. She will be ineligible for welfare because she turned down sex work.
One notices an instance of this on the Gym King website. Women dress for attention in the gymnasium. And capitalism steps up to provide the tools with bubblegum pink enhancement of the glutes with "Squat proof" performance properties.
I tried writing a sentence to sum this up: "Law makers need to be aware that whatever is permitted will be turbo-charged by late capitalism.", but that isn't quite right. We live in an era of intrusive law making. If a gymnasium owner tries to open a "men only" gym, he may fall foul of sex discrimination law. If a teacher tries to run a school with strict discipline, expelling unruly pupils, he may fall foul of disparate impact jurisprudence. Any law has loopholes and unintended consequences. Late capitalism will turbo-charge the exploitation of loopholes and amplify the unintended consequences.
felis-parenthesis
18d ago
My perspective on the ICC comes from being Scottish. I'm not personally affected by Drug deaths rise sharply in Scotland as figures remain worst in Europe but it seems pretty clear that Scotland needs its own Duerte to save its young people from fentanyl and death. The ICC are the bad guys, on the side of drugs gangs and death. The ICC insist that government must be ineffective, with success being punished by prosecution for "crimes against humanity". Has the ICC been captured by organised crime?
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
There are many more plausible forms of government than those that have been tried. Consider the various forms of Monarchy. How do they handle the problem of the stupid eldest son? Basically they don't. Historical monarchies were small and had problems with communications. Clarity about succession is vital and often lacking. So a simple rule, that invariably chooses the eldest son might be the best that was possible in the past. But modern conditions allow a country like France to have a more elaborate approach to succession, such as The Rotating Triple Crown.
One might look at the options for a country like the UK with around 60000000 people. One king gives a ratio of rulers to ruled of 60000000 to 1. An aristocracy of two dozen Earls makes it 2500000 to 1. A broader aristocracy with a thousand Barons has 2500000 ruled to each ruler. Then we leap to democracy with 48 million electors; the ration of ruled to rulers is five to four. There is a big gap in the ruled to rulers ratio. The expansion of the franchise took around a hundred years, so there is a sense that the missing, intermediate ratios did get tried. But only in a transitory sense. We haven't really tried having one hundred ruled to each ruler, in the sense of having a broad ruling class 600000 strong combined with a lasting commitment to elitism.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
That is a fascinating find. The transcript cuts off too soon. Continuing
the mums who live across the street in the housing project can go to that school and complain day in and day out and every-one writes them off and no-one cares and then we say "they just don't care about their kids' education, they just don't advocate for their kids --- its not true; we don't listen to them" This is about us sharing the advantage that we have with those that don't have it, so maybe my kid doesn't get every single advantage but she already has so many
NHJ is almost there - she just has to realize what the "advantage" is. But she fumbles it, following up with a non-sequitur.
I think what I'm asking people to do is if you can give your kid everything else do you have to take the public resources and an education as well from the poor black or brown child maybe a good public education is the only thing that their parent could give them, that's the argument I'm making
I can trace discussion of the "advantage" back to Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty published in 1970. The political impact of the book came from the idea of coerced loyalty. If the rich are unable to "exit", they will speak up, that is use "voice" and this will improve things for the poor as well as the rich.
This idea was applied to education in the United Kingdom. Here is an article from twenty years ago https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/02/election2005.publicservices
During the 70s and 80s, looked at through the prism of Hirschman, the left and the right in Britain were polarised. The left wanted to reduce the possibilities for exit and promote voice by, for instance, abolishing private schools. The right wanted to increase the possibilities for exit through privatisation and school vouchers. The centre brooded away, and has now come up with its own solution: choice.
My old analysis was that "voice" depends on both "talk" and on "listen". Failing to speak up (talk=0) results in voice=0. Complainers may also be ignored (listen=0) which also leads to voice=0. A minimal model is multiplicative voice = talk × listen. Reducing "exit" affects "voice" both by increasing "talk" (if you cannot walk away, you can always try complaining louder) and also by reducing "listen" (why bother listening to people who a trapped? They just have to take it.) And my guess at the effect sizes was that halving "exit" doubled "voice", and reduced "listen" to one quarter. 2×1/4=1/2. "talk" may have increased, but "voice" halves.
NHJ confirms my guess with her emphatic claim that "mums who live across the street in the housing project" exercise "talk" and this fails to constitute "voice" due to the absence of "listen". Then she stops short of noticing that her advantage is "exit". When she finds out that the school doesn't listen she can move her child to a school that does.
There is an ambiguity about "exit". What is the end game of strong exit rights? Does every-body move their children, the school shuts down, and the teachers lose their jobs? Do enough parents move their children to get the attention of the head master, who sacks teachers that don't listen, or who listen but fail to act, resulting in the school improving? Or does the system win? The rules that create a dysfunctional system are state level rules and nothing improves.
I'm unhappy about using fake numbers in my exposition. We may say that voice is a function of exit, writing v(e) and that voice depends on exit via both talk and listen, writing v(t(e),l(e)) before using the chain rule to obtain dv/de = ∂v/∂t dt/de + ∂v/∂l dl/de. Then I'm making claims about signs.
- ∂v/∂t > 0 talking contributes to voice
- ∂v/∂l > 0 listening contributes to voice
- dt/de < 0 if you can leave, leave; if you cannot leave, complain.
- dl/de > 0 people listen when their customers can walk out of the door taking their money with them
and finally
- dv/de > 0 because dl/de is the big one, not dt/de
which says that removing peoples exit rights reduces their voice.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
For this evening's dinner I fried a venison burger (local Scottish venison) boiled peas, sweet corn (maize), and broccoli. Added some butter to my vegetables. Does that count as cooking? I get the impression that "cooking" is supposed to be more complicated, and produce a tastier meal. On the other hand I've avoided the added sugar in a ready-meal, and I'm happy enough with meat and vegetables, so I'm going to call it cooking :-)
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
A traditional approach to symbolic artificial intelligence frames problem solving as a search of a tree. Do you go depth first, dodging infinite branches? Or breadth first (do you have enough memory?). What about iterative deepening? Sometimes the solution is in the tree, but it is too deep, and one runs out of time before it is found.
Statistical based learning acts as a branch predictor. Sometimes guiding the search to go very deep in the right place and find the hidden solution. Sometimes guiding the search to go very deep in the wrong place; one runs out of time as usual.
Notice the strength of a hybrid approach. One isn't accepting the probably correct answer of the statistical part. It is only a guide, and if the answer is found, and the symbolic part of the software is correct, the answer will be reliable. This hybrid approach is being spectacularly successful in pure mathematics. Notice the deep historical roots, going back to Hilbert and Ackermann's 1928 book Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic). The formalization behind the symbolic AI software was a major human achievement. This strikes me as an extension of the successful creation of AI to play the game of Go. Underneath Alpha Go lies a hand coded rule engine implementing the rules of Go.
Then we ask about practical applications. For example, I've been receiving my neighbors gas and electric bill due to errors in the gas meter database. If Ovo energy starts using an LLM to do customer service, will this fix the problem? The humans haven't fixed it. The front line staff have a script to go through that assumes that the gas meters are in a common area and the confusion is that meters are swapped. Having the database place two meters in a single flat isn't part of the script. There is a lot of slop in the database. "34 Top Flat Left" could be 34/7 or 34(4F1). It strikes me that there is little training data. What little there is, applies to a different problem. An LLM, deployed as customer service agent, will just hallucinate (I prefer to call such things Runge Spikes. The spectacular successes in pure mathematics depend on an intellectually rigorous formalization of the domain. But no Hilbert or Ackermann class intellect is coming to formalize gas meter databases and how that works in blocks of flats and conversions of big houses to flats, and the like.
One of the frustrations of dealing with Ovo energies customer service is describing the layout of the property by email. There are meter readers who visit to read meters, but the UK gas supply companies subcontract that to service companies. Ovo energy's staff know nothing. But at least they live in houses and have gas meters of their own. The LLM lives in the realm of language, and doesn't know that the real world exists. It cannot accompany a meter reader and see for itself. It only has second hand knowledge, allowing it to talk-the-talk, based on the discussion of the real world in its training data.
Getting LLM's to do banal customer service jobs without adding new and Kafkaesque confusion will wait on the Zermelo–Fraenkel of gas meters. Who will create it? Perhaps the newly unemployed pure mathematicians will be hired to create rigorous formalizations of daily life. Probably not. I'm expecting five or ten bad years when LLM are deployed in customer service roles and make things worse. After that, my crystal ball gets cloudy.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Searching the article that you link to, the text has eleven instances of "work" and zero instances of "tourist". Also zero instances of "holiday". I've checked all sixteen instances of "visa" and none are "tourist visa" and none of them reveal a synonym for "tourist".
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
J D Vance's new book is a second data point and specifically Catholic. As the reviewer says
What draws Vance towards a specifically Catholic identity is the need to see grace as being absorbed and assimilated over and over again in a long history of learning and growing – in contrast to the quick spiritual fixes he sees in the evangelical world of his childhood.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I've just asked Google's search engine LLM about Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal and got a terrifying response
Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is an informal internet maxim that states: "Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny."
It essentially highlights the tension between accuracy and comedy. The more nuanced and detailed an explanation is, the easier it is for someone to mock or dismiss it with a clever, sarcastic punchline.
The Core Concepts
Subtlety vs. Simplicity: True explanations for complex phenomena (like human behavior, physics, or philosophy) often require heavy nuance and caveats. The Sarcastic Edge: Because these explanations are complex, they can come across as confusing (turbid) to a casual observer. This makes them ripe targets for a quick, witty, and dismissive joke that ignores the nuance for a cheap laugh.
LessWrong
The LessWrong Origins: This law was coined in community forums like LessWrong to describe why rigorous intellectual debates can easily be derailed by people utilizing humor to dismiss legitimate, well-thought-out positions.
Would you like to explore how this applies to modern online debates, or perhaps share a specific complex explanation you've been working on to see if we can "stress-test" it against this law?
I was an LLM sceptic, but now I see that even a basic, free LLM gets it, in a way that leaves highly intelligent mottizens trailing behind in the dust. I'm shocked because Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is my own lame coinage. It got no traction. There is no exposition in the training data for the LLM to plagiarize. The LLM has managed to understand it, all by itself. Terrifying!
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous?
You are misunderstanding.
Since life is about seventy years long, and science grinds slowly, taking hundreds of years, we all end up in forced choice situations, forced to guess. We guess wrong and believe something false. "Believe"? Maybe we knew at the time that we were guessing, but we still acted upon the false "belief"; that is the main part of believing. Shrug. Believing something false is built-in to the human condition. It is part of the solid-normal. It is not part of the cozy-weird.
I've an essay to write, provisional title: "Life is more complicated than language, nothing that needs saying can be said briefly." Since life is more complicated than language, ambiguity is inevitable. We can push back a little, by writing at greater length, using the extra words to disambiguate. But watch out for two dangers. First, wittering on at great length usually muddies the waters; more words, more ambiguity. Second, the seventy year thing; we don't have the time. So again, ambiguity is built-in to the human condition and part of the solid-normal, not the cozy-weird.
I'm hoping that we share a common understanding of the out-there-weird. One kind of out-there-weird is when you fry your brains with LSD. But humans are flaky. There are a lot of beliefs that are crazy, and the people who hold them just latched on to them with no chemical assistance. "flat earth in 2026 AD" is out-there-weird. "flat earth in 700 BC" is solid-normal. Why is "flat earth in 700 BC" solid normal? Wikipedia has Eratosthenes of Cyrene measuring the size of the Earth in around 200 BC, and tells the tale
The distance between Alexandria and Syene was reported to be about 5,000 stadia, as measured by professional bematists.
The Earth is big enough to be locally flat, and few people in 700 BC were travelling far enough to notice that something was off. (Wait! I'm forgetting the long distances involved in the Bronze Age tin trade. Shit!)
Back to the cozy-weird. How does inter-generational transmission of culture work? As a child I wanted to grow up and become an adult and that meant copying the adults around me. My father would tell me "You will understand when you grow up." and I would accept what I was told, trusting that I would indeed understand when I grew up. It is worse than that. My father was a Yorkshire man and proud of his deadpan irony. I was a socially incompetent child and did not get the joke. Looking back I think that some of my world view was formed by the following route. My father would attempt to tell me that X was false, by stating X ironically. I would miss the irony and learn that X was true. I think that inter-generation transmission of culture works badly in two different ways.
First, culture is transmitted faithfully, but the "You will understand when you grow up" bit doesn't happen. Father passes belief to Son. Son never does understand, but Son passes belief to Grandson with the words "You will understand when you grow up". There is no error correction.
Second, beliefs are flipped due to too much irony. Young people are not in on the joke. Old people do not notice that young people are not in on the joke and are getting the opposite of the intended message. The message gets corrupted.
The idea of the cozy-weird is that there are many beliefs that an outsider (to our culture) would consider out-there-weird (not false, not ambiguous, but crazy and weird) that we are brought up to believe and which pass for normal inside our culture. I'm claiming a disastrous failure of culture transmission with crazy rubbish being passed down the generations so well that the craziness is invisible to those inside that culture. Hence my subdivision of normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird.
Do we all live in a single global culture? Not yet, but things are heading that way, and it is hard to find an outsider. Or maybe talking to an outsider doesn't help. The details of the cozy-weird are culture bound, but the phenomenon of the cozy-weird is universal. You could go to Tehran and talk to a Mullah. He would point out the craziness of Western Culture. But he cannot show you the cozy-weird that both cultures share. Worse, he is embedded in his own culture. He may be quite convincing that the important thing is to submit to Islam, because he sincerely believes it, but that is his own culture's cozy-weird. His sincerity and conviction are warning signs of the invisibility of the cozy-weird details specific to a particular culture, to those within that culture.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Abstractly the difference between the solid-normal and the cozy-weird is that the cozy-weird is indeed weird.
Artistically, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mdiZ9rwoSQ is a scifi story about hi tech perceptual filters leading people astray. Err, it is over long and clunky, but it does have an interesting, oblique take on the dangers of consensus reality.
Concretely one wants examples. But this is where it gets self-defeating. If X is genuinely cozy-weird in our shared culture, you will not accept X as an example of the cozy-weird, because it appears normal to you. Worse, I will not suggest X as an example of the cozy-weird because it appears normal to me. One only catches glimpses of the cozy-weird out of the corner of ones eye.
I've encountered this kind of tangle, where it is impossible to give good examples, before when thinking about subduction phrases
Why think that the cozy-weird exists at all? I started down this path by reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ with discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406 It struck me that people hoped that psychedelics would tear away the veil of illusion, and let people see reality as it really was. It was a hope that I had been warned against, but still shared. However, psychedelics tear away too much, one just ends up out-there-weird. Meanwhile I read some economics and noticed that people believe strongly in folk economics. Some folk economics is both weird and not out-there-weird. Early psychedelicists could believe in folk economics and no-one would include that as evidence that they believed weird things, because the weird things appear normal.
One example is that people talk confidently about raising and lowering taxes. If raising, do they mean raising taxes rates? Or raising taxes revenues? Taxes rates are directly within the power of governments, so it is tempting to assume that the discussion is about raising raising rates. But following the discussion one notices that it is about what the money gets spent on. There is an assumption that raising rates brings in more money. That is not in itself a problem. But people are also comfortable with the idea of punitive taxes. Protect people from lung cancer by taxing cigarettes so heavily that they smoke a lot less. Shame about the tax revenue, which falls due to people quitting. So the cozy weird bit is a belief. We can infer that people believe that government ministers have psychic powers. When they intend an increase in tax rates to raise additional revenue they hypnotize the general public to keep paying. When they intend an increase in tax rates to change behavior at the cost of lost revenue, that works too. No discussion needed. Nor even permitted. People don't actually believe that government ministers have psychic powers, but people do have psychological defense mechanisms. They will push back angrily against the idea that tax rates and tax revenues are two different things. There is a tangled mess of weirdness here, but it is cozy, people like it and will defend their cozy fuzziness.
People also talk about raising and lowering the minimum wage. That is bizarre. The minimum wage is a prohibition. It is parameterized. One might prefer to call it a restriction. Whatever. It is the kind of thing that you make tighter or looser. If you like brutal and disturbing satire, the Manifesto of the Nasty Fascist Party might help you get the point.
I realize that the previous paragraph is a flawed example of the cozy-weird. Arguments are soldiers, and words are the uniforms they wear. "Raise and lower" are the dark blue words worn by the good guys, and "Tighten and loosen" are the gray words worn by the bad guys. It is natural to dress your arguments in the uniform words of ones own side.
And yet dressing your arguments-soldiers in the appropriate color uniform-words is perhaps a good example of the cozy weird. We are supposed to be helping the poor. Instead we play elaborate word games. As the Nasty Fascist Party would put it " The booze and TV addled brains of the comfortably off are actually too feeble to distinguish between these two opposites."
I've tried addressing the distinction between solid-normal and cozy-weird abstractly, artistically, and concretely. Concretely is the important one, but articulating good examples is too hard for me. Fourth option: Praxis. What can one do to improve the chances of catching sight of the cozy-weird?
I think that psychedelics hinder, by leading you towards the out-there-weird and away from the cozy weird. The invisibility of the cozy-weird is policed by emotional reactions and defense mechanisms. Perhaps Buddhist meditation practices can help. One learns to notice the flickering play of emotions. Notice and let go rather than getting sucked in by the illusion. Maybe cached thoughts are important. Re-reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "cached thoughts" essay, to check the relevance of linking to it, I notice that his examples have a vibe of "cozy-weird thoughts sitting in the cache". There are strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache, because you must Never Question Conventional Wisdom. Noticing the unreasonable strength of the strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache leads you towards noticing the cozy-weird. Getting stale answers straight from the cache leads you away.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Whoops! I didn't bookmark where I got that version of Romulus and Remus from, and cannot now find it. I've probably got that wrong.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
... it is the lamestream that is weird.
It is not really normal versus weird. normal covers both solid-normal and cozy-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category really is weird, you just cannot see it.
For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Disapproving of horading they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop it. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.
Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place. So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.
Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.
I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there!" In 300 AD virgin births are cozy-weird not out-there-weird.
Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%. This weird belief is so cozy that some readers will not know what is wrong with it. Which brings up a deep problem: I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal.
Having renamed weird to be out-there-weird and divided normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird I can now state my thesis succinctly: the lamestream is mostly cozy-weird.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Fixed the link: radical leftism and Cuba.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.
First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.
That rethink may include a father deciding
It is OK if my fine young son turns out gay and builds a nest with the man he loves. It is not OK if he gets sucked into the bath house scene, gets trains run on him, and dies young when antibiotic resistant syphilis turns up. Let us have common sense gay control.The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Thank you for the links. I've gone for the first link link, document no 1 (main) and clicked Text rather than PDF.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71664415/1/united-states-v-arnold/
Search quickly finds me
19, Atthe same time, around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department (“APD”) officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DHS correctional officers, In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters. That caliber is typically used with AR-15-style rifles.This is so much worse than what I was expecting from the discussion that I'm having to re-calibrate my opinion of following online discussion
It is already happening. Here is Farage. And also Jacob Rees-Mogg
Edited to give two examples, not just one.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The interface between intelligence and instinct is the reward system; pleasure and pain. I think that the intensities of pleasure and pain are about right for the ancestral environment, especially if intelligence is directed outwards to solving the problems of daily living. Directing it inwards to game the reward system is a problem.
For example, in the ancestral environment hunting and gathering is tough. Want meat? You are not leading a lamb to slaughter, you are hunting a wild animal that can fight back and may kill you. Want vegetables? There are no crop varieties, you are gathering wild plants, with chemical defenses and few calories. You could stay home and fail to fatten up in autumn. That risks dying in a hard winter. The future belongs to those who really enjoy their food and take their chances and enjoy their wild fruit and berries.
Fast forward 100000 years and humans game the reward system with calorie dense, hyper-palatable snacks and Chili Heatwave Doritos. It is supposed to make people happy, and it kind of does. But it also leads to morbid obesity. Using intelligence to game the reward system is an auto-monkey-paw.
My example illustrates the idea of having a reward system of about the right intensity, and how it can get subverted by modernity. But the example isn't about sex. Maybe sex is different.
Sex is about reproductive success. Success against nature, success against other species, but also success in competition with other humans. If Alfred has a higher sex drive than Boris, he has more descendants. Natural selection increases the strength of the sex drive until it is so intense that the problems it causes balance the boost to reproductive success. That might mean that Carol blows up her happy marriage to Boris with an affair with Alfred (he is so sexy) and Boris stabs Carol and Alfred to death (natural selection has imbued Boris with maximum jealousy and lust). More commonly it gives humans lives that are driven by lust, obsessively so. And people are psychologically defenseless because it feels so good. My thesis is that natural selection naturally leads to sex drives that are too strong for humans to have happy lives. At the very least, unbridled lust leads to lying and deception, which leaks out into other areas of life, creating a low trust society.
In modernity, we game the reward system because not only is sex pleasurable, but more is better. Vibrators and pornography, obviously. Contraception allows a more fleshly contact per child conceived. We deploy our intellect and game the reward system with "a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent". Does turning it up to eleven make us deliriously happy or jaded, coarse, and insensitive. That is a tricky question; humans have weak psychological defenses again the pleasures of the moment. (Whoops! I'm back again from scrolling YouTube shorts, I nearly gave up on writing this comment, seduced by the pleasures of the moment. That damn algorithm is good at gaming the reward system!) We are unlikely to choose wisely between more is better and the counter intuitive more is worse.
My intuition is that a happy society is one with taboos around sex, and a general reticence that promotes childhood innocence, and late sexual awakenings. The basic instincts are already too strong. Directing our intellects inward to game the reward system is making them stronger still, and we are naturally inclined to fail to notice the auto-monkey-paw.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
My flatmate injured his rotator cuff. Since I'm also getting old and frail, I made an effort to learn from some-else's experience. I bought some dumb-bells intending to do a variety of arm exercises to strengthen the stupid little muscles that hold the ball in the socket before anything bad happened. I took it steady, starting with just the two kilogram bar, only adding a one kilogram plate when I could do twelve repetitions with just the bar.
I followed the instructions in the booklet that came with the dumb-bell. Start at seven reps. Work up to twelve. Return to seven but with a slightly heavier weight. As I increased the weights, I noticed that I needed to brace my core; I was exercising a lot of muscles, not just my arms.
My back grew stronger and stopped aching. I found that to be a memorably excellent result, worth passing on in a comment in theMotte :-)
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
The mention of "water purification control chips" reminded me of Poland using clams for this: https://www.johnfhuntwater.co.uk/resources/news/how-clams-keep-water-clean-in-poland/
The question of minimum population sizes for different levels of technology is tricky. One has the whole of Earth researching and developing clever hacks to help keep things simple on Mars. I expect a lot of clever dodges making it possible to obtain adequate outcomes on Mars without needing a deep technology stack and a large population.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The autopsy report found 11 ng/mL of Fentanyl and 5.6 ng/mL of Norfentanyl. The story I've read online (which I'm not qualified to judge) goes like this:
DUI blood test sometimes show that drivers have 11 ng/mL of Fentanyl in their blood. Habitual users build up protective tolerance and can remain functional despite a level of Fentanyl in their blood that would be rapidly fatal to a naive user. The level of Norfentanyl adds nuance. The typical overdose death of a naive user occurs before their body can metabolise Fentanyl to Norfentanyl. The presence of Norfentanyl proves that George Floyd had a protective tolerance and had had a high level of Fentanyl in his blood for a while, giving his body time to metabolize it.
This is a load bearing part of the criminal prosecution of Derek Chauvin. Without Floyd's habit and tolerance, 11 ng/mL is a lethal dose, explaining away Floyd's death and handing Chauvin a get out of jail free card. It is important context for understanding policing in America. The police have to deal with junkies who are high on pain killing drugs at the time of their arrest, putting the police at risk of wild, random violence.
Had the Fentanyl story been pure invention, intended to muddy the waters, then keeping it alive by calling him "Fentanyl Floyd" would indeed be just obnoxious boo-lighting. But it is a vital part of the story. Without it, a nerdy, timid forger is attempting to quietly pass his $20 bill, gets caught and surrenders without resistance. Then he is knelt on and killed for being Black. That is a very different story. Trying to airbrush Fentanyl from the story is waging culture war.
"Moving the goalposts" is a bad metaphor.
Putting literal goal posts in approximately the right place is easy. Just put them on the end line, at the middle. But sports are competitive. Players will not be happy with the goal posts being in approximately the right place. They have to be in exactly the right place. This too is easy. Goal posts are self defining; the right place for the goal post is where the goal post is!
Belabouring the point, I invite you to consider a soccer match. In the first half, team A score with a shot just inside the right post. In the second half, team B fail to score with a shot just outside the left post. In the post-game adjudication, it is discovered that the goal posts were two feet right of they ought to be. Team A's goal gets disallowed. Team B's miss becomes a goal. Moving the goal posts flips a win for Team A into a win for Team B. The absurdity here is not so much the motion as the neglect. We are neglecting that the goal posts define the goal.
Turning now to Artificial Intelligence, we notice that humans are intelligent [citation needed :-)]. Which raises the question: why are we bothering to create an artificial version of what we already have? Mostly because the devil in in the details; humans are intelligent, but ...
If Alice copies Bob, and Bob copies Charles, and Charles copies Alice, then who should David copy? Human intelligence has a circle jerk problem. Perhaps David should copy Edward, who has reasoned things out from first principles. Perhaps David should copy Fiona who has done experiments. But brilliant, charismatic intectuals lead societies over cliffs. I wrote a paragraph on the difficulties of empirical science, but I deleted it because I couldn't get it to replicate.
We want something from Artificial Intelligence. We want it to cover the gaps in human intelligence. If we could crisply and accurately characterise those gaps we would be well on our way to fixing them ourselves. We have (had?) exactly one example of intelligence to look at, and we are not happy with it. We certainly notice that it has a weak meta-game: human intelligence is bad at seeing its own flaws. We are not able to install self-defining goal posts.
Old people bring baggage from the 1960's to discussion of AI. The word Computer invokes images of banks of tape drives reading databases. Human written legal briefs have a sloppiness problem. Need a precedent? A quick skim and this one looks close enough. It is job of the opposing lawyers to read it carefully and notice that it is not relevant. (The legal system is not supposed to work like this!) One images that an Artificial Intelligence actually reads the entire legal database and finds precedents that humans would miss. When an LLM invents a plausible, fictional precedent that just doesn't exist, one is taken by surprise. One wants to mark the AI down a lot for that non-human error. Doing so involves both moving the goal posts and admitting to not anticipating that failure mode at all.
There is a more subtle issue with LLMs writing computer programs. We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data. We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
Notice the clash with old-school expectations. A lot of GOFAI focussed on formal verification of mathematics. Some early theorem provers were ad hoc (and performed poorly). The attention shifted to algorithms growing out of Gödel's completeness theorem and Robinson's work on resolution theorem provers. Algorithms that were provably correct. The old school expectation involves a language such as SML, with a formal semantics, a methodology such as Dijkstra's "A Discipline of Programming", and code accompanied by a formally verified proof of correctness.
A tool for writing code with bugs that humans cannot find sounds like the kind of thing that Mossad would use to sabotage Iranian IT infrastructure. It may be super‐humanly intelligent, but we still want to move the goal posts to exclude it as the bad kind of intelligence.
One old school of AI imagined that the language of thought would be importantly different from natural language. The architecture of AI would involve translating natural language into a more rigorous and expressive internal language, thinking in this internal language and then translating back to natural language for output. LLMs do perhaps partially realise this dream. The tokens are placed in a multidimensional space and training involves discovering the latent structure, effectively inventing that training run's own, custom language of thought. If so, that is a win for the bitter lesson.
On the other hand, LLMs learn the world through human language. I believe that humans suffer from linguistic poverty. Many of our disputes bog down for lack of words. When we have one word for two concepts our discussions are reduced to hopping instead of walking.(My missing words web page is neglected, my post https://www.themotte.org/post/1043/splitting-defensive-alliance-into-chaining-alliance was not well liked, I'm not managing to explain the concept of linguistic poverty.) I hope that AI will "... cover the gaps in human intelligence." but LLMs seemed doomed to inherit our linguistic poverty and reproduce our existing confusions. The dream was that AI would cure human intellectual weakness not copy it.
I think that it is legitimate to notice that LLMs are indeed intelligent, and to then move the goal posts, declaring that, now we have seen it, we realise our error and this is not what we had in mind.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".
Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead
I've four guesses
- That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
- Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
- Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
- The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(
I'm a semi-demi-Luddite.
Five days a week: soul destroying grind :-(
Five days a month: meaning and purpose :-)
Not sure that I believe me, because Tucker Carlson: Easy Money Is Destroying American Society is the inspiration. Even if people are in broad agreement, there is much to discuss about the actual amount of work, and what kind of work, and how the system would function.
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