iprayiam3
1mo ago
No I think I was unclear, yes this is in line with what I'm seeing. When I said sr. mgmt doesn't realize the impact, I mean the follow through logic of the macro effects of every other company also freezing spending and hiring.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
No I know. Of course that’s the biggest part of it. My overall point is I’m seeing uncertainty expressed in AI uncertainty, whether that’s just a rebundling of tariff etc uncertainty or not, my fear is that it is contributing to increased general uncertainty, which will be additive economic results trending from that uncertainty
iprayiam3
1mo ago
but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.
But this uncertainty is what I’m interested in. How much is effect but how much could snowball into cause? Buyers get skidding, forecasts go down, and so forth. I’m not saying it’s the leading cause of uncertainty to anywhere near it. But I am noticing it becoming a contributing factor
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
He dated a chick for eight years before meeting her sister? That’s less believable than the no sex thing, unless the ‘dating’ was on the internet or something
Ah, I wish it were actually "fine tuned". Most of our instruments are blunt, our approaches to most diseases barbaric, the only saving grace being that they're the best we have and are better than nothing.
Well this is kind of my point with a disagreement about 'better than nothing'. I am not a pure naturalist, and don't want to imply a false dichotomy, but nor do I want overly broad equivalencies. I don't think all medical interventions are equally good, equally bad, or equally neutral.
But my metapoint here is kind of a a Russell's conjugation of sorts; Your better than nothing is my worse than default. Your fix is my treating the wrong problem; etc. Show me a transhumanist doctor, and I'll show you someone overmedicated.
It's easy to shun the notion of an extended, healthy and happy lifespan until it's you or a loved one dying in front of your eyes. Since I'd prefer nobody had to die unless by choice, I try my best to make it so.
This is the other half of my point, in that this is a motte to the bailey. None of the treatments we're talking about are about life extension; We can debate that separately, but my disagreement is more that the transhumanist axioms might have life extension as a, or even the goal, but these side-routes are not that.
Is that not a form of heaven as you believe in?
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but no? This is pretty orthogonal to any Christian concept of heaven.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I'd like to riff off this comment and muse on just how far apart our worldviews are. I assume you're positing it here for general interesting discussion; but if any of this feels too personal or prying let me know and I'll retract.
- You are on ADD medication
- You are on an antidepressants
- You are on semiglutine to counteract (partly) the weight gain from the anti-depressants
- You are looking at plastic surgery
I am sure from your perspective, this is exactly what the transhumanist plan looks like - medtech improvements and fine tune control over your inner chemistry and outer appearance. To me this looks like a medical doom spiral, and one that won't end in a post-humanist nervana.
I am not critiquing your decisions, as they flow out of your own circumstances I can't know intimately, and are in line wiht your axioms. I have always been a critic of your axioms however, and this seems (dispassionately amusingly) to be two movies on one screen -> a confirmation of each of our philosophies.
Anyway, best of luck on the weight loss and fitness goals, and again, apologies if this is too spicy.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I mean this is fine and all, but the angle that frames this as aw-shucksy, give yourself permission to spend on hired-help advice for the masses
e.g.
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!
He is calling 'being wealthy enough to outsource parenting' a vibe
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Yes, it's generally better not to broadcast complaints, especially as a man (like being cold on a second date). The exception is when you are seeking advice or building empathy credibility to provide advice or comfort.
Obviously Scott thinks he's doing just this, but the problem is common where the empathetic credibility attempt comes off as tone deaf and out of touch.
Generally if your audience is poorer than you, attempted 'down with the struggle' will have the opposite effect. Poorer in money, time, romantic success, whatever.
Dave Ramsay is at his worst when he tries to analogize some speaker problem to something in his own life (post-success) or parenting experience. His daughter, who's mostly taken over the show is basically a meme of this, constantly thinking her gilded life experiences are relatable.
Due to human variation and hedonic treadmill effects, everyone's feelings of hardship are generally real, but are not objectively comparable.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
it'd be such a pleasant surprise for a girl to take the initiative to increase my comfort level instead of penalizing me for the gaffe of bringing it up
I mean sure in theory, yes. People don’t need to stick exactingly to red pill gender roles, but this anecdotes is so on the nose as a gender bent reversal of the cliche of all cliche examples of the ‘female comfort test’ with an outcome that digs into the gender reversal (he ends up with not just a scarf, but the “nicest” scarf), it has to be made up.
Before getting to the stealing, I'm more stuck on my aesthetic distaste to the vignette of a man on an early date telling the woman he's cold, and her giving him an article of clothing to comfort him (among the more feminine articles to boot). It's too perfectly set up as a subverted cliche, that I am 50-50 (edit on reflection, 70:30) that it's made up. I suspect many if not most of the people defending it are doing so on those very aesthetic grounds, and it's not remotely about agency, morals, or consequentialism. This is basically a manic pixie dream girl scene that crossed with light 'gender swapped' tittilation.
There's a very real trope about a certain kind of proclivity toward strong female to femdom fantasies, that is disproportionately represented in ratty kind of spaces, and people who like this stuff are likely to make up, hyperbolize, or latch onto real anecdotes online as a substitute for the actual paucity of it in the real world. The high agency stuff is just a laundering of a titilating fantasy about a strong female, playing provider to a meek guy with 'low agency', aka the sub.
OK
Regarding the lying and stealing, yeah morals aside, there's a russell's congugation here: My: high agency, your: unscrupulousness , their: low impulse control
To the extent that this is a real story, yeah run buddy. A girl who casually lies and steals for immediate time preference satisfaction (even (maybe espectally) if charitably done by proxy to near empathetic aquaintances) is bad news.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Re: the not allowed to give out a cup of water, it’s likely related to some general ups and downs in their loitering policy drama over the past several years.
I don’t recall the ins and outs and may be getting timing wrong but basically around George Floyd, there was a lot of bad optics around not letting people loiter or use the bathroom without being paying customers. This was seen as racism and bad. But meanwhile there were a lot of people taking advantage of such open doors policies, and basically loitering junkies we’re driving away customers.
Not giving out free water is perfectly reasonable way to discourage freeloading loiterers who might disrupt the appeal of the space for paying customers.
If you let that policy happen via discretion you risk the cancel mob highlighting perceived inequity, and wage workers don’t want to get plastered on the internet for that shit.
Blanket ban is much safer for the establishment as well as the workers to have blanket policies like this.
15 years ago I worked at a fast food restaurant right next to a college bar and we had similar policy because otherwise drink college kids who spent no money filled up the place and interfered with the business
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating)
I don't think you even need to go this far in summative evaluation. You can still have graded, proctored tests, as well as essays written in class during a timed window.
You don't have to jump from aysynchronous homework -> graduation exam. You can go from current state to in-class, real-time testing. No reason for it to be oral or 1:1.
The short story is that his life since writing the Benedict Option has turned out exactly the way the BO is meant to avoid. I don't mean that he's turned away from his positions or been hypocritical or anything. (I'm not trying to calumny his character). Just that literally the trajectory of his circumstances, undermines the credibility of the book as an efficacious endeavor, rather than an intellectual LARP.
Rod is currently an expat divorcee, rootlessly gliding around Europe without any 'home' left in America, somewhat disconnected from his family. Whether begrudgingly or not, he's living an almost cartoonishly rootless cosmopolitan lifestyle, pretty much only possible in the world of liquid modernity, the BO has rejected.
Even if you want to argue that Rod didn't Ben-Op hard enough or something, it just strengthes the LARP point, when if the trope-namer himself couldn't implement it effectively.
And again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how Rod got here, or whatever, this is not a character-attack in the slightest. It is just an observation about the BO and the topic of whether it's serious or a LARP for a certain class of people.
Relatedly, I have general issue with Rod's 'research' approach, and question the kind of 'study' made up of carefully curated vignettes of the point you're pushing, rather than a more rigorous approach to forwarding such a social theory.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.
Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.
To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.
I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.
This is dumb bait. But I think the Bill Maher discussion of his dinner with Trump soundly puts to bed any arguments here. Bill Maher, is about a raving of a TDS as almost anyone, coming away and praising his sharpness and conversability is not something that can be shrugged off with gestures toward nothing like this.
Trump's quoted point at the end is completely coherent, just ideosyncratic and favoring his point over debating the minutia. I'm not defending either the content or point of view, but it's entirely coherent, and the demential complaint is dumb as hell. Here's a summary of the not even subtext of that clip:
Interviewer starts to try a tu quoue about some Biden tactic analogy to Trump. Trump doesn't want to take the bait, so pre-empts with an reverse objection about a double-standard of critique. He uses that to launch that into an attack on Biden's competence. This single sentence has tons of intent:
- The media's critiques of Trump are invalid double standards
- As evidence by the media's protection of Biden
- Biden was not just bad, but incompetent, and the media / deep state covered for him/ controlled him.
All this could be disagreed with, but rather than being incoherent, its a very tight conveying of meaning.
The interviewer then tries to dodge the question of Biden's competence by arguing whether Biden actually did an interview with them or not in some given timeframe.
Trump first starts to engage, but then decides he's not going to lead the interviewer to any Socratic point, so just throws out the idea that he didn't do an interview into being a well informed that he 'barely' did an interview and it was terrible.
Is Trump lying that he's familiar with that particular interview? Yeah probably. (or else he was lying that Biden didn't do an interview and lying or mixed up about the length). But that's not really evidence of mental acuity. The lie makes complete sense in context of the picture he's trying to paint.
The interviewer then gives a sarcastic praise. Trump takes it straight-faced, and uses it to restate his thesis: Biden was incompetent, and any appearance of power-grabbing from him is just hostile coverage from the media
Again, without any bias here (tbh I deeply dislike Trump), Trump's entire bit in that last exchange is tightly governed by a specific frame and defense against a percieved hostile frame. He just favors rhetorical point over detail consistency.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
it's ok to generalize when giving general advice. generalization isn't a synonym for absolutes.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
As soon as you feel comfortable going out of the house with the baby, take full advantage of it. While the baby is young enough to be content sitting/napping in their stroller, you can savor the last bit of dinkiness allowable. By 8 months, your baby will be restless and the pleasure of going out to eat or do other adult oriented activities with them will take a deep dive for the next several years.
Spend months 2-7 going out and socializing with a baby in tow.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
A lot of me thinks this is just reverse 'population bomb'-ism. I'd like to compare the certainty of those worried about underpopulation today with the opposite in the 70s. AI and robots are going to overturn so much, I don't think these negative bombs are particularly predictable for much.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Basically my thinking exactly. While I'm not myself MAGA, I was very disappointed that what was good about it was going to sell itself out to slightly less woke technocratic liberalism, and that this was going to work on the masses.
I still don't think we're out of the woods, but am happy about the direction here.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.
Giving a takehome essay should be given up on for sure at this point. Graded essay writing should be something that happens entirely under supervision at this point, if the goal is to measure learning in the area of creating coherent, written point of view.
Were I a teacher, I'd do this:
- Give a generalized form of the prompt or subject. Students can then use AI to help them create notes, do primary research etc.
- Students can bring some limited selection of reference material to class to turn in. On the day they turn it in they have to write an ad-hoc explainer of what they've coallated and why.
- The coalation is reviewed before the day of the essay. On the day of the essay, each student is given back their packet (less unjustified material), and the true prompt is given (Therefore preventing what's turned in to be a straight draft).
- The student writes their essay during the test period, ala blue books.
- Bonus: Another assignment could be letting the student use AI to refine and turn in a final, more comprehensive draft of the essay at a later date
iprayiam3
3mo ago
You are being nonsensical in your handwaving of complexity. Chess has 32 total pieces each with an extremely contrained potential action across only 64 positions. You can't just handwave knowability there into the real world. There's no reason to believe enough computational power exists to be able to have 'omniscient level' understanding of the world. You are just speaking pure, unfounded fiction.
70% sure, maybe. But what happens if it's 'just' 2008 levels of sudden disruption? And then a small stagnant window before another dive. I am more worried about falling into a series of local minima, where the immediate 'solutions' get us into a worse scenario.
In some respects 70%+ emplyment disruption, or a skynet scenario could be better, in creating a clear, wide consensus on the problem and necessary reaction. I am more worried about a series of wiley cyote getting over a cliff before he realizes it, falling, then repeating as he tried to get ahead of the next immediate shift.
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