fmaa
18d ago
Does it not give you any pause that you've now likened these real and existing Canadian doctors to five fictional characters and zero real people? In fact contrasting this fictional archetype with two actual people.
fmaa
9mo ago
Why a non-sequitur? Earlier parts of section IV show a higher steady state for asians than for whites, then they get dropped from the comparison. If they were included in this graph, it would either show that their advantage is also mostly male and asian women match white women, in which case maybe this graph says a lot more about gender than about race. Or the asian over white advantage is maintained for both genders, which would make for a much stronger anti-HBD argument. Because one of the more appealing HBD talking points imo is that by Occam's razor the black/white gap and the white/asian gap have the same basis.
fmaa
9mo ago
That's not "the same for Black girls as for the White population", it's the same for black women and white women, the white male curve is noticeably higher. And on a meta level, it's always suspicious when a paper drops categories midway through. Whatever conclusions you want to infer from this graph, they would be much firmer if it also had asians.
fmaa
1yr ago
Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.
I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,
I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.
But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.
fmaa
1yr ago
With community servers, there were plenty of cheating horror stories of a different kind - people excusing/turning a blind eye to the cheating of a popular member of the community, or people turning to cheats to keep up when they care more about the community than the game.
Though I guess they were still rare enough to be stories, instead of business of usual.
fmaa
1yr ago
I'd like to be able to say, for instance "computer, match me with someone who is a about equal to my my baseline skill level," or "computer, match me with someone who will push me to my limits" or "computer, I don't really care who I match with today."
This can achieved by having multiple accounts and switching based on your level of intensity. It is often frowned upon because it can be easily abused, of course. The computer can't really tell whether you're honest or just asking for the first one but actually planning to go all out and stomp people worse than you.
fmaa
1yr ago
Even with the assistant models, you can probably do a lot of obfuscation by bothering to add instructions to write your screeds "as written by an X" or "in the style of author Y" etc.
fmaa
1yr ago
While I sympathize with this making the game worse, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the platonic ideal of competitiveness is the natural one, and the one that actual humans consistently gravitate to without verbal communication is the unnatural one.
fmaa
5mo ago
Basic information theory would suffice, unless you want me to demonstrate the concepts of meaning or the validity of induction. In which case you've retreated from your original point to the standard 'treating solipsism as a gotcha against materialists' position. This has come up so often on this board, I should come up with a catchy enough formulation to make it my flair: either any communication happens between real minds existing in an inductive external reality (including thoughts as communication across time) or the concept of communication is nonsense. So prepend any communication ever with "Conditional on solipsism being false,".
fmaa
5mo ago
Memory and response to inputs both mean the actual number of outputs would be infinite if not for mortality. As is, it's probably only one of those meaninglessly large journalist numbers like the number of atoms in the solar system or something. Not that you could in any way generate such a list of outputs without fully understanding and simulating my brain in the first place, even discounting the impossible time/space requirements of such a task.
More importantly, the computation is the entire fucking point. That this post could technically just be a meaningless random string of characters doesn't mean it is one, and you will not perceive it as one. It is very clearly chosen in a nonrandom process. Getting from your post to this reply required processing in my brain, something you can in no way skip by randomly picking one out of a list of all the possible outputs of my brain.
fmaa
7mo ago
To expand on the second paragraph point because it's relevant to the original discussion, there's no reason to believe that the first person to come up with an idea would also come up with the best way to structure and explain it.
And indeed, students in any hard science don't learn from the original writings of the pioneers in their field, because that would be a very inefficient way to learn. The original writings serve mostly as a historical curiosity. And as the contrapositive, I feel that any field where people overly focus on the original texts immediately shows itself to be more about status signaling games than any actual content.
fmaa
9mo ago
Familiarity with the topic doesn't make it more relevant to your thesis. Dvorak is exactly as arbitrary and hard to learn as Qwerty. The relative efficiency of touch-typing english text matters when you're already doing 100+ wpm and type regularly as part of your job or something. Most people don't touch type, a different layout wouldn't help them any.
Of course, I don't think your thesis has any basis in reality anyway. The average person these days is quite proficient with phone onscreen keyboards, which are vastly worse interfaces than physical keyboards.
And, as with dictation, if you want to do your text input with eyetracking, you've been able to do that on existing computers for years. People keep using keyboards because they are in fact quite good at what they do.
fmaa
11mo ago
Not who you asked, but the sails are good as a skyline piece while the bottom layers of the SOH are a boring block of concrete, so the whole thing looks better from a distance than up close. And looking at the works of Hadid, she reasonably exemplifies the trend of inhuman boxes and blobs of weird shapes which look interesting for 5 seconds but seem in no way to be awe-inspiring, pleasant to be around or part of a beautiful skyline.
Really, this is the essence of the issue for me - a lot of Architecture from the previous century feels designed to impress people looking at it for 5s-5min. Wow, what an unusual design. But buildings are going to be the home or workplace of many people, and part of many more people's daily commute or view. I'd pick any place from the front page of that subreddit over any of Hadid's buildings for this.
fmaa
1yr ago
My point is, if you prefer that level of challenge, but will pull out all the stops if challenged more, you're explicitly saying that you'd prefer to not be matched against yourself, but someone worse. The way to get that level of challenge more consistently then is to not tryhard when challenged more, but take the loss and drop in ranking.
The beauty of going off pure Elo is that it doesn't care why you're performing at your level. Whether you're talented but goofing around, or terrible but trying your best, all it does is match you against someone performing at the level you've recently been performing at.
Yeah. But we can surely design algorithms that consider ELO but also consider, I guess, the fact that ELO doesn't capture all the factors that might go into the outcome. In some games, weird random factors can impact who wins, or certain particularly cheesy strategies work really well unless you specifically counter them.
Elo is that algorithm. Trueskill if you want to add in the factor of uncertainty. As a metric, it doesn't matter if your rank jumps around +-100 due to random factors, they'll even out in the long run and are not a precise enough measure that these jumps matter that much. Any consistent change will still only come with an actual change in player skill. It is only as a target where these random jumps leading to losing 200 from where people feel the 'deserve' to be (which is nearly always their peak, though of course the peak is also a random jump ahead) are a problem.
Cheesy strategies are a separate design issue, a match can be perfectly balanced 50/50 but be a boring blowout either way depending on random rock-paper-scissors.
fmaa
1yr ago
I'm replying to a post that's wondering why people don't just surrender to save their lives. And the very point of those discussions on LW was that any model of rationality that easily destroyed can't be all that rational. Which is why the last paragraph of my post gives a game-theoretic reason to fight.
But humans very much do not live forever. You are not your genes, your consciousness is their byproduct and will die with your physical body. And your desires are only indirectly linked with genetic success (adaptation executors vs fitness maximizers and all that). Plus, for genetic success it's much better to get other people to die for you instead.
fmaa
1yr ago
I didn't say "lots of people", I said "basically everyone actually living in the countries involved". (including security analysts, politicians, pro-Russia people etc.)
Motteposting does have a point, though. Putin's literal words don't actually convey worry, but are also clear bullshit. Therefore more significance should be given to their negative valence, which does indicate worry.
fmaa
1yr ago
Yes, the 4-1-5 horseshoe was exactly my point. 2 feels like a failure of test taking ability in the context of an anti-woke test, phasing out AA is more naturally a "talk less about race than currently" option. 3 is possible, though it is a fairly noncommittal stance and the original test was on a 4-point scale.
fmaa
1yr ago
You could offload a significant portion of the price-setting burden to professionals by inverting the system. Have purchase offers go through the government land registry, and base the land tax on the highest offer rejected in the past year or something.
Offers unanswered in some time are rejected by default, and you have a somewhat fair system to assess land value for tax purposes where the owner isn't forced into regular active price setting or having to sell for a previously committed price.
In such a system purchase offers would presumably need collateral or preapproved mortgages to ensure against frivolous purchase offers.
This part is confusing two entirely separate things:
The last I checked, the distance between the equator and the north pole doesn't have any reasonable relationship to my everyday life, why should I expect units of time to?
One is the need for an independently verifiable definition of your measures, these days generally based on fundamental physical constants. Instead of building your system on a prototypical example and then accumulating measurement errors outward from it. Every system needs this, and in fact your current imperial units are defined as fractions of SI units, piggybacking on the definitions work of metric.
The other is the scale of the default unit, which is completely independent from your method of definition. After deciding to base the meter on the earth's circumference the actual fraction can still be freely chosen. The meter was picked specifically as a length useful in everyday life, it's pretty much the same scale as a yard.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
fmaa
5mo ago
I'd say that the usual theodicy formulation is extremely overstated, and in fact the observed universe is incompatible with a god that's just kinda potent, benevolent and scient. It is very easy to imagine limited supernatural powers falling well short of omni-anything which could vastly improve the world.
Unsurprisingly, just about the only sensible theodicy I've seen is Scott's Answer to Job, and that's a creative writing exercise, not an attempt to explain the world. Though he does now have a link to actual apologetics using this line of reasoning.
fmaa
8mo ago
That, and because there's a bank of railguns running along the underside of the fuselage, and the rear area is taken up by life support and capacitors. Also, because I thought it looked cool! Thinking about it, though, there's no reason not to go glassless and just bury the pilot down in the guts of the craft. They'd be safer there as well...
The "hard(er) sci-fi writer explaining away rule-of-cool art" answer is that this is already the case and the dome at the front is a sensor array.
fmaa
1yr ago
https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.
Literally the single actual point anywhere in this article is that the very vague and informal metric that is Moore's law is slowing down. It doesn't even attempt arguing for the past's importance, letting alone doing a great job at it. It just lists off a series of applause lights and hopes you don't notice it never puts forth any actual arguments.
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