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georgioz


				

				

				
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georgioz


				
				
				

				
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User ID: 493

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Of course I do understand that what follows is a lot more complicated, but I think that in general medicine should always be driven by primum non nocere - first do no harm principle and I would be much more strict in enforcing this. So for instance transhumanist things like most forms of esthetic medicine such as breast implants, trans surgeries, contraception pills, sterilizations, euthanasia, abortion and other similar or procedures or drugs would be considered outside of core publicly funded medicine. It could still be provided but under different scope let's say akin to getting tattoo or going to nail saloon and thus it should be automatically clear to the customer that the primary goal is unrelated to certain standard of this no-harm principle and that he or she should accept the risks as well as costs associated with it.

As for the part where people do not follow the medical plan or even actively sabotage it, which then requires even more resources from the system, I think having a system of deductibles like let's say in Singapore can partially resolve the problem. So the principle is that state pays for your medical bills because it is a prosocial thing to do in order to have healthy population but only up to the point. A level up from that is to involve immediate family so for instance part of the costs will be coming from their savings so that the immediate family (children, spouse, parents) has incentive to pressure that person to do something about themselves or they will be at least partially held accountable.

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?

The "analysis" does not really depend on that single "sentence" - although I also think calling it just as a sentence is uncharitable. It is not some random sentence from Sequences, The OP called is as a credo, it is oneliner that is tied to rationalism and Yudkowsky especially.

What I was getting at was the overall tone of some of the rationalist writing that I think "the credo" shows very well: it is edgy sounding guru oneliners that are sometimes literally used in normal conversation - the credo in particular I think was for instance said by Aella in her interview with Lex Fridman unironically.

I also admit that I am maybe too harsh, maybe I am taking it all too uncharitably. It is just internet infotainment, there is not that much going on and rationalists do have also oneliners like "it all adds up to normalcy". And then one reminds himself that normalcy includes saving ants, or AI apocalyptic doomerism and then I am not as sure what charitable take on rationalist utilitarianism should look like when taken as an actual moral philosophy that is adopted up by the unwashed masses.

Also as a closing point, I thought in this manner due to the fact that the OP described how normal people including Marxists do not adhere to the credo. I found it paradoxical as I do not find rationalists strictly adhering to the credo either, in that sense they do have much more in common with Marxists: they do have materialist utilitarian moral philosophical system (or one can almost dare say theology) build up ground up from first principles with some transhumanist transformative project. It is a philosophy created outside of mainstream, a system created by outsider "basement dwelling" philosopher with prolific writing and slight ties to rich donors. I wanted to point out this myopia to OP.

"Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things

The credo is much stronger than that, it puts the Truth as ultimate value, not as just something aspiring or something one "tries" to adhere to but abandons for something else in presence of "dangerous" information. The credo is not "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be unless it is dangerous to do so". Of course you can argue what you do, but then there is no need for edgy sounding guru lines like the credo. You would then just have ordinary thing like "try to tell the truth whenever you can" - it almost sounds something people like Peterson could say actually.

Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right!

Of course it does. I can say that I believe New York Times or Eliezer Yudkowsky or The Pope or I can trust the Science. If you pick up bundle of beliefs some of them are for sure going to be untrue. This is a common way how people get to believe untrue things. And this is also the way rationalists pick up their beliefs, unlike some scientific sounding first principles reasoning. So again, there is not that much of a difference between rationalists and just regular informed people, in fact from what I noticed rationalists are putting too much faith into their own thought leaders.

That's just common sense!

Slow down, we are talking about rationalists, I am not that sure how far the appeal to common sense can carry you here. Again, I am maybe too harsh as most rationalists are just normal people who actually have some common sense, except that the whole rationalist ethos is about overcoming commonsensical reasoning on many things and there really are some people over there that can take these things maybe too literally. That's my whole point.

Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie!

Except if it is dangerous to tell the truth, we already covered that, right?

I think that all this language about how one is rationalist but one should also put numerical credences (ideally down to decimals) to one's beliefs and how one should be careful about context of information and source of my views and how in the end it should all kind of feel "normal" - it all is the usual way of how rationalists say a simple thing everybody knows in a complicated way. Man, practice some source hygiene, work on your thinking and trust your intuition a bit. On most beliefs one would be in line with majority of informed people.

Paradoxically it is always the weird shit where rationalists are touting their supposed first principle revolutionary approach, where they are espousing mantras like that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. I am talking about things like saving ants or taking drugs or defending some sexual deviancy or other defense of some weird shit that nerds really want to rationalize. Guess what, my intuition screams "red alert".

I do not have interest going into technicalities. Leveraging my position and asking my employer to hire somebody I fuck is nepotism, period end of story. Arguments involving softening the language by euphemisms like "spousal hiring", defending it on the grounds of values of family formation like somebody above or digging up these other examples like remote work are unnecessary sophistry.

If he tries to secure larger paycheck, then I see nothing wrong. If he tries to secure hot assistant that will give him a blowjob whenever he feels like it or he requires that university signs contract with his brother's firm for security services or that the university hires his nephew for new research vacancy - then yes, I think those concessions are wrong. I hope I will not have to go into the weeds of why I see it as wrong.

What is stopping me is overall morality and being judged by peers, sometimes even written ethical rules. But what amazes me is that simple renaming of a thing gets so far: it is not bad nepotism what we are doing, we are only doing "spousal hiring". Renaming things seems like a really powerful social technology of how to render written rules moot, and judging by reactions here it also works on people. Awesome.

It seems like a noble sentiment on the surface, but it does not seem that great when you are hiding in the bushes while the enemies behead your brothers and rape your sisters and aunts. This high-minded morality to me is just a sign of privilege, it is easy to pretend to be "moral" if one is not present with tough choices

Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.

I agree, however another point is how proud these people are for openly standing on one side of the conflict. It is seen as a moral and just thing to lie and decieve in order to "win". Or to be more precise and trying to walk in their shoes- in their minds it is not lying and decieving, nato really. They are doing the good work. In the past I had a thought experiment of insane Christian who decided to kill babies right after they were baptized. In mind of this Christian he is on a mission to fill the heaven with innocent souls and he is the only willing to pay the price of eternal damnation. He was the only "true" Christian who has the guts and moral chutzpah to pay the price unlike those other weakling wannabe Christians. He was willing to pay the ultimate price of his immortal soul to "do good". Of course the question is if he really is in the right or hopelessly in the wrong. For me it takes huge heaps of arrogance, narcissism and and of course also psychopathy to pull something like that off. Additionally it is a strategy that brings huge cost to oneself which makes it very hard to correct due to sunk cost fallacy coupled with consistency fallacy.

Only we now live in a society where instead of condemnation of similar despicable practices and as you say, willingness to throw away the whole game by failing to process ones behaviour through categorical imperative - we now have some new morality praising such destructive behavior. There are definitely some psychological, social and moral angles to process here and as I say I am not quite there yet to have some stable opinion on it.

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.

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.

If you want to understand Identity Politics, then it is best to go to the source of Black feminist group named The Combahee River Collective and how they defined it in their 1977 manifesto

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.

This is the true birthplace of the concept of intersectionality, The Combahee River Collective was a group of black women many of them were lesbians. They connected their identity to oppression, and posited that until the least privileged are free (black, queer women), nobody is free. Of course the identity politics in this sense is abhorrent as it automatically assigns value judgement to immutable characteristics such as sex, race etc. The way to get around this is to introduce systemic thinking. You are a man and even if you do not directly and consciously engage in oppression, you nevertheless have access to male privilege and you implicitly and unwittingly perpetuate the system of power - The Patriarchy (or White Supremacy or Capitalism etc.) - that oppresses people. You will never be able to tap into the lived experience of oppressed people, you will always lack this way of knowing, but you can be an ally and center these marginalized identities whenever possible. To center here it means literally, they imagine identities being on the margin of the circle while privileged people are in the center. Marginalized people have better view of the situation having the outside view, you have to shrink the circle and introduce margins into the conversation. You will see these concept in DEI training explaining it all to you. As Di Angelo says:

This work [anti-racism in this case] requires courage and commitment to a lifelong process.

It is lifelong work until patriarchy/capitalism/white supremacy/whatever is dismantled completely. But before then you have to give power to the marginalized so that the society can reorient itself in right direction under their expert guidance to dismantle oppression. Once that goal is achieved, the marginalized will abolish themselves as they will no longer need the power and we all end up in utopia.

That is the one minute summary of generalized dialectical conspiracy theory, their weltanschaung and ideas behind that worldview. It really is quite simple if you look at it. For sure at least in the way to identify who is the victim and who is to blame for everything as with many other conspiracy theories. Similarly to those there is also a huge rabbit hole to lose yourself for a lifetime, but the general gist stays the same despite complicated sounding jargon and the rest of it.

I have my own peeve with said comment, this supposed "rationalist Cross-Examination" makes people even more stupid and in the end everybody retreats into their own aesthetics of the situation. It is more stupid discussion the more basic the moral intuition is - like for instance "why murder is bad". I can put you on the spot here and it will be up to you to come to defense of your view that murder is bad ranging from defining murder to exceptions like war and whatnot. It almost always degenerates into sophistry (AKA dark arts) as the situation is of course nuanced and complex and you can spend lifetime cross-examining, unless of course you have certain end in mind. So in the end, it all comes down to normalcy, murder is murder and nepotism is nepotism.

So I guess intuition is very powerful and it is not always easily accessible to rational discussion which quite often leads to wrong conclusions depending on what path you take. Which is kind of a point even here in this discussion - you already see how people invent all kinds of defense to this, including this call of yours. To me, if I see a person pushing to hire somebody he fucks, this is nepotism. I do not understand what does temote work do with any of this, laid out your argument.

You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:

Manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire.

Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.

I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.

It is almost exactly the same scenario. There are three people: hiring manager, then there is the superstar fucker and then there is candidate that is being fucked. Superstar is pressuring hiring manager to hire his mistress "or else"- he leaves along with grants on his research or whatever. I can even construct it a such: superstar researcher with millions in grants comes to the hiring office that he fucks this student and she may be leaving for a job in other city. If they do not hire his mistress as an adjunct then he is going with her along with grants because he loves her. Now the same happens with my example of corporate manager: he fucks this young intern and she tells him that she has a good job lined up in another city. Manager sees this as a threat so he pressures his colleague in other department to hire his mistress, he even gets tacit approval from his own superiors because he is now responsible for crucial project and nobody wants to rock the boat for such a silly thing. How exactly is this different: except the fact that university has this as a written policy?

A good state of affairs can be that "everyone kinda knows, nobody makes a big fuss about it, it isn't officially condoned or supported or acknowledged, but people slightly judge the people involved in the deal and don't see it exactly aligned with the principles of a university." Plausible deniability is maintained, disbelief is suspended and a "quantum tunneling" has taken place. It's not necessarily good to separate everything into the black-and-white categories of legal (and therefore supported, and documented, and regulated and defined and socially accepted and considered moral) vs illegal (and beyond the pale and morally corrupt and unacceptable and you're an unperson for it).

Yes, this is called good old fashioned nepotism. When this manager in the team fucked his subordinate and then promoted her, everybody knew about it and many thought it was kind of piece of shit move. It also did not endear the newly promoted person in eyes of many of her colleagues. It was tolerated as lesser evil for many reasons by his superiors unfortunately. Little did I know that what he should have done was telling it transparently by saying that he was not promoting somebody for fucking his brains out, it was just normal HR benefit of "sex partner hiring" he was awarded during standard salary increase negotiations, no big deal. You see, he is really working hard and he works harder with hard-on that he needs to be motivated, his situation is special because he has no time to look for partners as he is working so much. Reading apologetics here in this thread I'd guess he would probably have much more defenders, silly him.

The fact that it hurts people's feelings to tell them that they squandered their opportunities to make something of themselves doesn't mean that they didn't squander said opportunities.

Sure, but this begs the original question. You didn't make it, so you had to squander your opportunities because we removed all the obstacles such as religion, race and so forth. This is basically restating my original position - if the outcome are not equalized it is hard to argue that opportunities were equalized.

But even if we abolish all of those barriers, you're still left with the uncomfortable fact (qua deBoer) that some people are naturally smarter, taller, faster, stronger, more charismatic etc. than others and will inevitably have better outcomes as a result, and there's precious little that social engineering alone can do about that.

Sure, however the messaging is different. You are genetically one of the useless lumpenproletariat and equality of opportunity will do nothing for you or your kids. The best you can get is to equalize the outcomes, meaning you have to basically extract rent from those more successful somehow. Be it political action for more welfare - maybe using low level violence to extort them to cough up the money, up to actual crimes. Those are avenues available to you.

Which BTW kind of questions the whole idea of merit as well, if somebody is successful it has to be somehow related to some merit, he may be the best programmer or best hustler or best drug dealer or whatever. To me it really is not that clear that a programmer developing one of the addictive gacha games shows more merit than literal criminal or that some unemployed person who uses his money to do graffiti has less merit than somebody who has ability to worm herself into liberal arts academia financed by government dole.

The LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. It just understands them as probabilistic sequences of tokens and its job is to predict the tokens that should come next.

This to me seems like a pretty shallow explanation of understanding and the same criticism can be applied also to humans. According to some people like Scott Alexander, human brain is "just" a multi-layer prediction machine. It seems that the feeling of understanding itself is nothing extra special, some people on drugs like LSD feel as if they cracked the code and now understand the whole universe and their place in it. In practice understanding can be viewed as ability to give correct output given an input. We do not have access to many other methods, that is why we use tests to see if students understand things they learned.

Additionally I do not think that saying that the LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. is that much reassuring. Quite to the contrary - LLMs give correct answer to very large set of problems and yet obviously they came to that place using completely different approach compared to humans. This makes them more alien, more inscrutable and thus more dangerous in my eyes.

Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?

One way they may explain it is that saying "transgender woman" is a similar to let's say saying "tall woman". Of course it does not remove the problem of definition of the word woman. Which as far as I understand is then defined metaphysically, woman is somebody who "feels like a woman born in wrong body". So womanhood is metaphysical term, it is something like a soul.

12/20, as a note I was really overthinking at the beginning. In the second half I just went by my guts and had a little better results. But it really seems like a random chance.

I am using it exactly as economists want it to. The only difference is that economists love to use examples of "good" nudging. Even in your examples the 401k and organ donations are supposed to be universally accepted as a good things and as long as the nudges are used in this good direction they get quality of the nudge. Except when some religious family finds out that they cannot bury their loved one whole because she was used as a source of organs automatically creating feeling of being tricked and used. Yeah, she should have opted out from the scheme, and fuck her religion anyway - we utilitiarian nudgers know what is best for humanity and it still counts as a nudge as opposed to trick, she and her family should have known better.

Also nudging is not only about opt-in/opt-out schemes, this is just the default type of the nudge. There are other nudges like creating a psychological anchor or changing the salience of certain options and many other tricks. I purposefully used examples of what community here would probably see as a "bad" nudge but that is to show the point. I could have used your organ donation example: to make it as a default option reflects certain ethos of technocratic "nudgning" class and they impose it on the rest of the population. My argument is that they are tricks and that "nudging" is just euphemism, paradoxically by anchoring the very existence of nudges as organ donation or 401k is in and of itself dishonest description that is supposed to psychologically predispose you to agree with the premise. They do not show negative examples of nudges, they make only the positive ones as salient. Go figure.

No, my main thesis is the nudging is just euphemism for tricking. I do not have any axe to grind against anybody. I used an analogy, it could have been anything else like for instance EULA "agreements" or something like that.

Additionally, the ecosystem of nudging also creates perverse incentives that diminishes the role of education. I could have used an example of End User License Agreements that are purposefully written in order for the public to not understand their choice by relying on impulse choice of the consumer to get to the thing they want just one click away. There is no TL;DR at the beginning of EULA in red and exclamation marks that describes what things are they giving up in exchange for the trinket. They just see one green "I agree" button and the reward behind it. And this is seen as some enlightened cutting of the proverbial Gordian Knot - no need to educate the public or explain anything. We just decide what they need.

So yes, for me the nudge really is just another synonym for deception.

We're looking at increase in M2 from ~$15.5 trillion to $18 trillion in one quarter, then continuing up over $21 trillion in the next few quarters. The United States has never spiked monetary policy to that extent

For some reason any analysis of M2 or money supply I see completely ignores the FED policy of paying interest on reserves that was introduced in 2008 with specific purpose of sterilizing effect of quantitative easing on inflation - which is a stupid policy if you ask me, but it is what it is. Interest on reserves basically turns money supply into substitute for treasury bills and thus renders analysis of most amateur economists who like to show "exponential growth of money printing" moot.

I think Putin did it. Goal? To force Germany out of support for war. Russia tried some tricks with Germany by pretending that they need some new equipment to start the gas flowing so Germans were supposed to break the embargo and cooperate on reopening of the pipeline. Blowing the pipeline up is a stronger signal, it is not just about turning the flow on, it is about forced cooperation with Russia.

People underestimate to what extent Germans depend on cheap Russian gas. Just BASF chemical plant in Ludwigshafen employs over 30,000 employees and consumes 4% of total German gas consumption. Cheap gas is necessary for renewable energy mix of German electricity production. No access to Russian gas has potential to knock down the very base of the whole complex German supply chain - no basic chemicals and expensive electricity will make export oriented German industry not competitive worldwide an it can lead to deep recession. Any alternatives look grim, for instance Qatar would be able to sign contract for LNG, but they require 20 year contract fixing in high price. Germany is between a rock and the hard place: negotiate with Russians and immediately become pariahs in diplomatic scene not only with US but also with rest of the EU. Do not negotiate with Russians and sacrifice your economy.

So Putin is rising the stakes, it may no longer be possible for Germany to play the double game of supporting Ukraine while holding their nose when buying Russian gas. Putin will ask more commitment from them if they ever want to access cheap gas again. This is a show of strength of sorts, Germany is on the crossroads independent of the outcome of Ukraine war. This is about strategic pivot and ability of Germany to truly turn away from Russia even for upcoming years with huge impact on the structure of their economy but also on their climate strategy and basically everything Germans touted last few decades - it all now hangs on a thread.