meduka
20d ago
I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist. Where did I go wrong? What the fuck do people see in this shit?
You used a "4B" model which is about an order of magnitude below the level where I find AI starts to be useful for more than just single line autocomplete. But most of the evangelists aren't using 30-40B class local models, either, they're using frontier models which are scaled another order of magnitude, and usually closer to two. Capabilities obviously aren't linear with model size and one can get surprising results from small models at times, but "small" here usually doesn't mean "fits on your phone".
I have no idea what the market is for shitty, small models. Well, in Gemma's case I think it might be for on-device inference to save Google compute costs, and "fits on your phone" is a core constraint and market demand never really factored into it.
And I don’t know if enough people will choose blue (for this or another reason), but if red ends up winning, final society may be so apocalyptic that death isn’t. For example, maybe the person I would’ve saved (by pressing red) would’ve died quickly anyways in the aftermath.
Not to pick on you, but I think this is a pretty weak line of argument, as unlike in the original problem, under this one the blue sacrifices are a random selection from all of humanity. So it's not a case of all the altruists killing themselves leaving behind a world full of psychopaths, it's a random cull of (at most) 50% of humanity, saints and sinners alike. Which is bad, but there are historical parallels, like the Black Death which killed 30-60% of the population in some places. Was life after the Black Death so bad as to not be worth living? Maybe for a modern human; we have grown pretty soft. But the recovery was reasonably swift.
I quite like this twist as it inverts the moral valence of the original problem. You can press blue out of pure self-interest (you might be one of the people who would've been killed if blue fails to clear 50%) or if you think risking innocents is justified for the greater good (on, e.g., utilitarian grounds). Otherwise, if you value someone's personal autonomy it's quite hard to justify pressing blue.
meduka
1mo ago
I disagree that simply persuading people to choose blue is unethical. Ultimately it’s their decision, and it’s not obviously wrong.
An example to demonstrate my point: there is a cult leader who has spiked the Kool-Aid with lethal poison. He genuinely, 100% earnestly believes that everyone who he convinces to partake of this drink will go to heaven; after he's tended to his flock he intends to follow them. Is it unethical to convince people to join him? He is genuinely acting in what he believes is their best interest. I think this figure is tragic, delusional, and dangerous, but, if he's a true believer, one could argue that he isn't unethical, though he is, at the bare minimum, projecting his utility function onto others.
Now, let's change the parameters: the cult leader is no longer certain that everyone who drinks the poisoned Kool-Aid will go to heaven. He's actually only about 50% sure. Maybe drinkers will go to heaven or maybe they'll just die. Nevertheless, he continues trying to convince everyone to take this gamble -- and he knows it's a gamble. Can he ethically advocate for Kool-Aid drinking? I think this is a decision that everyone should make for themselves after being informed of the risks, and that persuading people to drink the Kool-Aid (by asserting that their family and friends are going to drink it, for instance) is dubious and paternalistic. The strongest argument I think he is ethically permitted to make is something like, "I personally believe there is a 50% chance that drinking the Kool-Aid will get you into heaven; I believe the reward outweighs the risk and encourage anyone who agrees to follow me voluntarily."
This is not quite isomorphic to the button problem as posed but there are strong parallels. It is pretty close to the button problem where the results are already determined -- that is, no matter how many people you convince, the outcome won't change, and it's worth noting that this is the most common case: your advocacy is unlikely to change enough votes & minds to swing the results one way or the other. "The votes have already been tallied and one side has won by a significant margin: you and your family are the last ones left. How do you vote, and how do you instruct your family members to vote?"
meduka
1mo ago
My position, which seems to annoy both blues and reds, is that blue is the "altruistic" choice, but advocating or recruiting for blue is evil. If you want to press the probable-suicide button because there's a chance it might save some lives even though it certainly risks your own, OK, that's your business, and I can at least respect the courage that takes even if I think it's dumb and almost certainly doomed given the parameters of the hypothetical (it is asking literally everyone in the world, not just a Twitter bubble), but where it crosses the line is when you try to pressure others into pressing the suicide button alongside you through either manipulation or coercion: I have seen quite a few tweets about blues fantasizing about hunting down and purging all the reds once blue "obviously" win, which, to be frank, is not great optics.
Blues who threaten and coerce others into voting blue don't seem to seriously grapple with the possibility that blue won't win. They claim that reds have "blood on their hands", but convincing someone to vote blue and then losing is more fraught, morally, then opting to not partake. And the act of advocacy and coalition building is so obviously self-interested it diminishes the "altruism" in pressing blue.
Blues generally want to see themselves as saviors or martyrs, then fantasize about killing reds (or positing hypotheticals where the buttons are secretly switched and all the "anti-social reds" exterminate themselves, or where your choice of red or blue is actually made public); this is actually more cynical than the red perspective in many ways.
So there are broadly four categories of voters. You have people who advocate red and press red: their priors are that blue won't clear the threshold and pressing blue is suicidal. They argue for their family and friends to press red to save themselves. The presence of "randomizers" (toddlers, confused people, the colorblind or whatever) is unfortunate and it means that "everyone presses red" is not a possible outcome, but one can at least reduce the death toll by converting blues to reds.
Then you have the people who advocate blue and secretly press red. These are the "free riders" who benefit from the virtue signaling of claiming blue allegiance but don't actually bear any risk. I think this group is unambiguously the most evil, and, crucially, it's impossible to distinguish from a self-proclaimed blue-presser.
Then you have people who advocate blue and press blue. They want to build a large enough coalition to "win" and save everyone. This is noble in intent, but if the blue cause is actually doomed then they're just recruiting people into their suicide cult. Given that blue doesn't win in a landslide in an internet poll where the incentives are strongly oriented toward signaling cooperation and altruism, I'm not optimistic about blue's odds when the stakes are real. Plausibly these blues actually do believe that they can pressure and guilt enough reds to secure a victory. In any case, they're gambling with other people's lives and I think they're worse than "honest" reds.
The final group, which may not even exist, is the population that advocates red and then presses blue. This seems inherently self-defeating (as they're actively reducing the chance they survive) and suicidal, but if you're unsure whether blue will win and uncomfortable asking or coercing others to risk their lives, then this is at least a coherent position. This manifests as imploring your wife and children and anyone of sane mind to press red then solemnly entering the voting booth and pressing blue, expecting to die but unwilling to risk the possibility that your red vote could kill half of humanity. They would believe that pressing blue is a choice you have to make of your own volition: pressing blue because you're worried that the blue death squads will hunt you down in a post-button world isn't altruism, it's just a red who read the room.
Blues generally seem to believe that a blue victory is possible because humans are fundamentally good, or because we live in a high-trust society, but I'd argue that the highest trust society looks more like everyone independently choosing that last group -- advocating red then pressing blue because their conscience won't allow them any other option. A "fun" thing to consider is how many people might choose this path: how many of the filthy reds the blues fantasize about exterminating will waver in the moment and press blue? The discourse surfaces what people claim and the nature of the secret ballot means that just as the advocate-blue-press-reds are indistinguishable from blue's strongest soldiers, the reverse is also true.
meduka
2mo ago
Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?
Alice, Alice. Bob & Carol can be reasoned with, persuaded, or manipulated: only Alice believes that X is an unambiguous good; this is, as you assert, "absolutely evil and abhorrent": it's irreconcilable. You simply need to kill enough Alices to trigger a preference cascade. To prevent the Evil Empire from ever reconstituting itself you'll need to be thorough and completely erase every "true believer" in X, but you can save cleaning up the incompetent and ineffectual ones until after your rebels have consolidated power. The true believers like Alice are the biggest threat -- as they're smart, once they start to lose they'll cloak their belief in X and make it hard to differentiate them from Bob and Carol, then secretly advocate for X in the shadows. Hopefully the "X" in question is something like Christianity in Edo Japan and you can just demand the Alices to step on or desecrate some sacred icon and kill them if they refuse.
meduka
3mo ago
Emil Kirkegaard has a new test, a "Multifactor General Knowledge Test". Link here: https://taketest.xyz/mfgkt
It's short and takes maybe 5 minutes. The percentile rankings are fun. Surely The Motte can drag the distribution rightward.
My results. (Foiled again by my working class upbringing.)
meduka
9mo ago
Should public parks belong to whoever is most successful at scaring everyone who's not their friends away from them?
My response to this doesn't quite rise to the level of a gigachad, but it's close. I am very much not pro "CHOP/CHAZ"-adjacent behavior, and if it ever reaches that point, with youth gangs permanently occupying large public spaces and accosting anyone who passes near, that is obviously bad. But I think groups of youths having a place they feel is "their spot" and yelling at anyone who comes too close to "fuck off" is just teens doing dumb teen shit, and that's what this tends to look like in practice. My experience is they're also likely to try to bum some smokes or get you to buy them some booze. Antisocial, sure, but I wouldn't say it's turning the neighborhood into a ghetto. I think this kind of low-level dysfunction is pretty close to unavoidable in urban areas without extreme measures.
meduka
9mo ago
the base prior has to be that the 'woman wielding the unwieldy weapon was wrong'
I am, personally, never going to be upset about a woman (especially a girl!) carrying a knife around, no matter what the letter of the law says. It would be great if we lived in a world where the average adult man couldn't trivially overpower any woman they see due to inherent physical asymmetries, but that is not our reality. A knife makes it possible for a girl to defend against a predator.
Upthread there's a link about a gypsy grooming gang that was active in the city where this took place, the guy in this case may well be a gypsy, ergo I side with the 12 year old girl against the weird brown creep who was filming her.
I will concede that my support of the girl in this case is not unconditional. If there was evidence that she was trying to rob the "Bulgarian" man by brandishing her weapons, I would (begrudgingly) side with him. Merely scaring creepy men away from the place where you and your friends like to hang out is, actually, based.
This is a pretty interesting debate as it demonstrates a real fracture point between the "alt-right" NRx folk (such that still exist) and the "trads" who might otherwise be allies of convenience. We can joke about 13/52 and find common ground on e.g., the execution of rapists, murderers, and child molesters; plausibly agree on the utility of racial profiling, nativism and remigration, and broadly reject blank slatism in all its forms -- but god forbid (and, I suppose, God forbids) we proactively prune a few fetuses with extra chromosomes.
The religious right will, of course, construct their Jenga tower of cope re: why their ideology doesn't immediately collapse back down into leftist slave morality, but ultimately, they protect them because they are pitiful, and that is indistinguishable from progressivism. I have no faith that these "allies" would be willing to bar the gates and sink the ships in a Camp of the Saints-style dystopia; it's all just LARP.
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