We can of course also already anticipate the classic: "Regret actually is a big deal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing". Hint: it can move forward our political cause.
You smuggled in the argument that "sex is sacred" and therefore not at all like tennis. But then tennis people should just say it: sex absolutely is like tennis and it should be okay for children to have sex with adults was it not for all those pesky people who wrongly think that sex is sacred. But don't worry, as soon as we work a little bit on that opposition we will gladly accept child sex as new normal and embrace groomer as proud moniker.
Maybe the argument is that they will obviously not do that for political and strategic reasons. Something the NYT article gloats about: haha, we lied about gays being born that way to fool conservatives into accepting new laws. Now when we have majority and conservatives are eating dust, we can finally say what we wanted all along. And by the way trust us, the sexual liberation will definitely stop before full acceptance of Minor Attracted Persons (wink, wink hahaha).
Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?
I agree with the OP that this is question of conceptual core beliefs and morality. I think that what we are going through a phase where we will see what are the real consequences of of shredding the old moral principles and replacing them with what we have now. What I find interesting is that between people like Rationalists, Sam Harris and even New Left the common theme seems to be pedestalization of maximizing utils, which means something like "minimizing suffering" as the new ultimate value. The methods may be different - rationalists prefer to think about themselves as professional surgeons who know how to not get emotions in their way. They know what is moral and they will do what is necessary to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. The new left on the woke side pedestalizes compassion above everything else. They also want to maximize minimize suffering by means of compassionate justice.
I think this morality and aesthetics will bring us ruin, I do not think it is workable as a society-wide system. I agree with the OP that the whole theology is absolutely wrong, the focus on utils and compassion as the highest aim is not only wrong, but I think it is unstable as it was the result of the previous moral system.
A large chunk of the decrease in my p(doom) from a peak of 70% in 2021 to 30% now is, as I've said before, because it seems like we're not in the "least convenient possible world" where it comes to AI alignment. LLMs, as moderated by RLHF and other techniques, almost want to be aligned, and are negligibly agentic unless you set them up to be that way.
You are probably one of the few people who decreasd p(doom) from 2021 and after ChatGPT revolution in 2022. I updated the probability upwards due to:
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The increase in capability just by adding compute and scaling the old 2017 transformer architecture was surprising to many. A moderate breakthrough in hardware can move capabilities so much? We are closer than we thought in our race to AGI. It no longer seemed to be feasible to think beyond 2100, we maybe have decades and possibly even years to do what is needed to be done. Definitely bad news for alignment timewise.
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The nature of LLMs is terrible as candidate for AGI. The technology is inscrutable, explainability of these models is terrible. Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody could predict what compute is needed for qualitative jumps such as that between Chat GPT and GPT-4. This makes the models notoriously tough to align even for basic things, like hardening them against exfiltration of training data. If AI can provide answer of when was president of France born, maybe it knows what was in the email CEO of some company sent on January 1st 2019 - if such data was used to train the model. The fact that the most likely candidate for AGI is as Yudkowsky said some just some "giant matrices of trillions inscrutable floating-point numbers" is terrifying - there may be googleplex combinations of viable matrices like that and we do not know what subset of those can be considered aligned and we do not know how to get there. We are just adding compute and are amazed that the thing that is growing in our petri dish is getting more and more capable, we do not manage the growth in any meaningful sense. In the past we had different approaches to Machine Learning specific to domains, people reasonably thought that maybe we will have to work on specific algorithm designed to integrate these separate subdomains. But no, we found out that just throwing compute on very simple game of "predict next word in text" is enough to gain multimodality and make the output more general expanding to domains like computer generated graphics, speech recognition and other areas that were previously separate fields. Also not to just talk broadly, we now know that LLM can discern self-reported race of people from images of their bones beyond current limited capabilities of medical doctors, who can do that from few things like skull etc. Nobody knows why or how the model does it, it just can and we move on.
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One last thing to the above point is the old news of top-notch AI model playing GO getting beaten by one simple trick. For years people thought that the model "knew" how to play go in normal sense, the whole community thought that they "aligned" it with the task of at least beating humans in this game with very simple ruleset. Except it was proven that the model achieved results by learning some different concepts, it probably learned a completely different "game" and winning at go for years was just a sidefect. It did not learn very primitive concept that even amateurs at the game can grasp. The "alignment" of the model with basic rules of Go was a lie. I cannot imagine how can we align many orders of magnitude more complicated LLM model who has to grasp all the rules of reality, and imagine that we get exactly what we want, that there will not be any security hole and that some random teenager does not start apocalypse by some primitive prompt or strategy even after the whole scientific community will celebrate the safety of this particular "giant matrix of trillions inscrutable floating-point numbers".
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We now have the new Q-Star breakthrough in Open AI. And at least according to some speculation it seems that what it achieved is that one can use compute not to train the model, but to automate evaluation of answers to questions. Imagine it as on the fly training of the model that selects most promising answers generated by larger static model in LLM powered chain-of-thought automation. It seems that this approach can temporarily boost capabilities of the model by orders of magnitude at the expense of more compute focused on specific question/prompt. If true, this means that there is another lever where you can literally throw money on some potentially productive questions like "how to make LLM more effective" and let LLM provide answers. We may be closer to intelligence explosion than we thought last year.
All in all, I do not see p(doom) decreasing in any meaningful way, quite to the contrary.
georgioz
1yr ago
Of course it is well documented, it even has a name of toxic masculinity. You have it right there in the article:
Men who adhere to traditionally masculine cultural norms, such as risk-taking, violence, dominance, the primacy of work, need for emotional control, desire to win, and pursuit of social status, tend to be more likely to experience psychological problems such as depression, stress, body image problems, substance use, and poor social functioning.
georgioz
1yr ago
Sexism isn't a general thing that people can do to others by discriminating on the basis of sex, it a specifically BAD thing that only MEN can do to only WOMEN (and other non-MEN).
Sure, I understand that concept. Bellow I even used similar example of Christian with strong beliefs. You can observe him praying, visiting church services and praising god and all that. But by understanding his beliefs you also can infer that he also believes in Satan as a force of evil. It would probably not be very far fetched to say that maybe such a person can accept that somebody got ahead in his life - getting rich etc. - by having nefarious help from demonic forces. Heck, with very strong belief you can see demonic forces in most innocent aspects of your own life.
That is the gist of what I wanted to say - that having strong beliefs has consequences. And I do not think that feminists are against using sexism to advance cause of women in the same way Christians would be against using demon worship to get ahead - like achieving pregnancy or destroying their enemies. The bar would be much lower for feminists in this case as the belief system is identity based as opposed to outcome based. "Sexism" against men is not real sexism, a boardroom full of women is the most feminist thing ever and opposed to being sexist.
georgioz
1yr ago
If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.
Sure, I can agree also with that characterization. The main point being that relationship and marriage are of secondary importance. It is all about her, and the job of the man is to support the woman in her life path.
It is no armchair psychology to understand people on their own terms. A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power? Why is it psychologizing to just state what some people literally believe? If somebody believes that cabal of twelve Jews and Free Masons rules the world, is it far fetched to say that maybe they also can believe that another group of 12 "good" patriotic people can possibly also rule the world utilizing the same level of control and make it a better place? It has to be in realms of possibility that such a mind can contemplate, desirable even at least as some sort of second worst alternative to Free Mason Jews being on top, right?
My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs.
I think the point was something else. Imagine another test where people threw a dice and then they estimated what their dice throw was. Of course people who threw 6 could only underestimate or be correct and people who threw 1 could only be correct or overestimate.
So even if both the result and estimation was random, then you would reproduce Duning-Kruger effect due to autocorrelation. Result of “over/underestimation” is dependent and correlated to the measure you over/underestimate against which is also a variable. The correct answer is just that this is stupid statistical artefact.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
I think that the New Atheist are "anti-west" in a sense that they have parasitic relationship toward western values that they nominally hate. It is very similar to some other anti-west or anti-Christian ideologies: they heavily rely on subversion of existing values to move forward with their goals. What I mean by that is to take some value that is part of the culture - e.g. "we were all created equal by god" and then just use it to ram through their own redefined version, e.g. that equity is just an upgraded version of whatever you believed before. But these values lack anchoring, as soon as the host you have parasitic relationship with dies, there is no longer any basis whatsoever to move these values forward.
If I don't believe in god or soul or equality as some god-ordained transcendental Truth, then why should I care about this or that disadvantaged group? Indians did develop literal caste system that prevailed for thousands of years, it is not as if equality is the only way we can conduct in this world. Maybe people are created unequal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing to keep it that way [hint - they are outgroup].
It is the same whenever somebody tries to poke a little bit into value system Sam Harris has. He uses some big words familiar to people in rationalist spheres such as "promote human flourishing" or "decreasing suffering" in a sense that he wants to move from the "worst possible misery for everyone", a thing very evocative of the image of hell. In the end similarly to rationalists he lacks grounding of his morality. If one takes this supposed "new" morality at face value, one quickly finds himself in realm of maximizing some hypothetical utils of unborn people by bombing datacenters or something, maybe alternatively one sees utils expressed as tons of biomass thus maximizing number of ants in existence or some utter nonsense - at least nonsense as intuitively viewed from somebody still at least partially partaking in western/Christian ethos.
It goes haywire real fast, so I agree that it is insanity to expect anything resembling western values by deconstructing and sawing off not only the branch you are sitting on but basically creating nuke and bombing the whole forest just to see what beautiful things will emerge out of the rubble. It is inherently self-defeating game, Sam Harris will not produce mini Sam Harrises as they will have no desire to study Christianity or religion as Harris did, they will bot be raised by people adhering to same values that formed Harris. And it is not as if it is impossible, but I find it interesting how many people use adding up to normality as some kind of stopgap for obviously intuitively wrong conclusions - like eating babies. Except apparently eating babies was literally seen as normal in some societies, I am not that sure if we are not building one such at this point.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
I actually don't think I understand your point overall but it feels like your point is we can't rationally prove that pain and suffering are bad, so checkmate rationalists, we're no better than anyone else. Which... okay.
No, this was not the point. Go and analyze pain and suffering of animals abused for bestiality compared to animals slaughtered for meat all you like in fine rationalist tradition. What I object is going to meta level of what are your personal feelings about this or that response to such thought experiments, in that sense a rationalist is not obliged to privilege your anecdotal emotional outburst. I may as well imagine somebody who is hurt by what you are saying - and believe me there would be no shortage of agitated people if I said that we are going to normalize bestiality.
And now voilà, you have some basis of understanding of what is going on, just by analyzing your own emotions. And we do not have to model other people as if they do not understand that pain and suffering is bad and they need you to explain it to them. They do understand it very, very well - only from their standpoint it is people promoting bestiality who are source of that pain and suffering for them. And it is you who opened this door for them by harping on your own personal feelings about the whole discussion, you made this meta discussion about how this original discussion makes people feel part of the game.
For the n+1-th time, emotions are not incompatible with rationality.
Write that to the OP.
Further, presumably @zataomm takes umbrage to arguments that rely entirely or mostly on emotion, not a claim that emotion is entirely out of place in an argument.
So do I. I do not understand why anybody should give a shit what reading some arguments made OP feel: if he is disheartened or if he hates humanity or if his hand hurts today as he slammed it against the table reading these arguments. It is tangential to the discussion and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is his incredulity with why people are emotional if somebody defends bestiality.
Which is BTW the hidden point that may have gotten over your head: the other people maybe also feel disheartened and lost faith in humanity and hate the society after reading arguments supporting bestiality. This would be equally emotionally "rational" response. So by rationally examining his own elevated emotions, the OP answered his question at least as it pertains to certain part of the outraged mob. Now I hope his curiosity is at least partially sated.
georgioz
1yr ago
This pattern of reaction is disconcerting. We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts. It's really hard for me not to feel disheartened or even adopt a misanthropic view when I see things like this.
I just really want to know if you are aware of what you did here. You are against "emotional outbursts" because they make you "feel disheartened" and move you towards misanthropy AKA hatred of humans? Does it not "feel" a little bit too melodramatic and emotional to you, the supposed rationalist?
I am by no means an expert, but I think this relates to the idea of Greater Israel. There even was an attempt to do that by Ariel Sharon in 1980ies at least according to Darryl Cooper of Martyrmade fame. The plan was to ethnically clense Palestinians from Gaza, West Bank as well as from Lebanon. Make Lebanon a Christian ally state and drive all the refugee Palestinian population to Jordan, where they can have their revolution creating a new Palestinian state by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy, which was imported by Brits in 1920ies anyway.
It is not without precedent - something similar happened to Germans after WW2. Not many people know about it, but Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers "to the left" and anexed/incorporated some lands into Russia//Ukraine at the expense of ethnically cleansed Germans from historically German cities like Breslau/Wrocław or Königsberg/Kaliningrad etc. The same happened in Czechoslovakia where millions of Germans were ethnically cleansed and relocated to Germany, Germans who lived there for literally centuries. Poland and Czech Republic became ethnically homogenous countries.
The analogy would be treating Gaza/West Bank as something akin to East Prussia or Sudetenland while Jordan - or any other Arab state for that matter - plays the role of post-war East or West Germany or Austria. So you will have two state solution in the end. And ideally nobody will bat an eye, the ethnic cleansing of Germans is nothingburger today. Nobody gives a shit, there is no whining on some supposed wound on the soul of Czech or Polish or Russian nation or anything like that. Most people don't even know this and life goes on, there is enough to do in the respective countries and the mutual relationships are cordial enough, event outright friendly.
georgioz
1yr ago
I don't think there is any confusion to be had. Polling is exactly about whether somebody would win in two weeks. Betting is if somebody is going to win in 2024.
I am not sure why this simple fact is somehow mysterious. There is a difference betting if some sports team wins head-to-head next Sunday or late 2024. There will be some underlying similarities, but a lot of things can change between now and then.
Reading closely it seems Macron and his former teacher consider Male-Form-As-Neutral a sensible rule for French; the governing body of language of Laplace, Liouville, and love agreeing with them.
In Slovak, the language where there is grammatical in a sense that really changes the structure, the "gender sensitive language" morphed into using both genders in a speech. It is very similar to English's actor and actress except for every occasion - so we now have "colleague and colleaguess" or "policemen and policewomen" and so forth.
This of course is a terrible solution, it sounds incredibly alien. First, nobody speaks like that in real life. Nobody says - "Hmm, I wonder how many doctors and doctresses work in that hospital" or "If you have a problem call waiter or waitress" etc. Second, as you mention it is already thing of a past. I have already seen "dear colleagues and colleaguesses and nonbinary persons" in an email. It becomes real dumb real fast - instead of focusing on aspect that binds us (we work in the same company) now you have to make it about sex and sexual orientation of everybody. You literally take something unifying (we are all colleagues) and make it a divisive category where everybody falls into a different box. It is absolute fail.
But in a sense I see this all as a huge win, it shows how foreign this wokeness is to many cultures. There are people profusely trying to import these concepts without any rhyme or reason. Genders are no problem in Slovak language, they are somewhat arbitrary and divorced from sex. As somebody said, girl in Slovak is dievča and it is neuter. Knife is nôž and it is masculine as is flower or kvet. And rifle or puška is feminine as is let's say crow or vrana. Generic masculinum for professions is just another of those arbitrary things and up until five seconds ago nobody cared. And in fact bringing actual sex of people into the language also brings weirdness and creepiness. If you ask for a waiter, you used to get a man or a women - waiter is a word for profession and it was not about sex or whatnot. Now if you ask for waiter do you specifically want a man or what? It is just weird and feels like mindfuck. Which I think may be a purpose of the whole excercise.
georgioz
1yr ago
It is not only loading. On average Abrams tank requires 8 manhours of maintenance for 1 hour of operation. That is one of the reasons why Abrams is so big with crew of 4 instead of 3 and autoloader for Russian tanks: the fourth crew member is indispensable when it comes to making sure the tank is operational, as crew of four working on a tank will decrease the ratio of 8:1 to 2:1 with some redundancy there.
The rules of Westphalian diplomacy aren't particularly concerned with proportionality, as it applies to wars. Instead, the rule is that, when one nation attacks another, the second nation can go to war. So, if Israel is attacked by the newly-formed nation of Gaza, is should go back to the siege listed previously.
I am not sure if it works that way anymore. I am no expert but to me it seems that more and more nations use paramilitaries/PMCs/terrorist groups to conduct asymmetrical warfare with the whole purpose of keeping plausible deniability. What prevents new government of Gaza to claim that they regret terrorist attack conducted from their territory by underground terrorist group? Or even better, they can finance terrorist cells inside Israel or Syria or Lebanon or West Bank and do similar things. Now this is nothing new, for instance Pakistan does this all the time vis-à-vis India, Iran itself has parallel government structure tied to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with their own network of companies and terrorist cells and unique capability of wreaking havoc without necessarily being tied to the Government. The same goes for Russia and Wagner's adventures in Africa for instance.
georgioz
1yr ago
There's been speculation that a ground invasion may not happen at all but rhetoric coming from Israel's defence minister would make it very hard to climb back from:
I actually think that it can be very easy to climb back from it, all you need to do is to claim that it was all just disinformation campaign and feint to force Hamas to concentrate their troops so they can be bombed from afar or some such. Given that many people do not want Israel to attack Gaza by ground forces, such a narrative would be picked up and defended by media as well as many world leaders as shrewd and prudent, even if they just have to pretend it to be that way so Israel can save face.
georgioz
1yr ago
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
Agreed, it is the same with some people performing Roman salute while shouting Sieg Heil!, it is just saying Hail victory! in German. Some people surely use it with genocidal intent, while other people use this ancient salute in its original intent - "to give their hearts" by figuratively grabbing it by in their right hand and offering it on display. They may just want to express their strong support for your victory in your struggle. And as for why should they speak in German? It may have nothing to do with any hypothetical alignment of their views with weltanschauung espoused by national socialists in 1930s Germany. They maybe just like to use words like schadenfreude, it makes them look more educated. Context matters!
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