nand
1yr ago
Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.
nand
1yr ago
Isn't it on aggregate better for the world for the children of mentally unstable murderers to die before they can continue the cycle of harm?
As for the fathers, it really doesn't requite a lot of effort not to impregnate a crazy person.
nand
1yr ago
I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.
In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?
"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"
vs
"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."
tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.
Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.
Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?
nand
1yr ago
Do the relationships between crime and economic equality get any more interesting when you break crime down into subtypes? Somehow, my naive imagination is that poverty would primarily motivate material theft, while wealth primarily enables psychopathic crimes (murder, rape, etc.).
nand
1yr ago
I suspect (and nodding to the other post downthread) there's probably a gender angle to this; under the lens of rational self-interest it makes more sense for women to be progressive-conservative (PC for short), because reinforcing power structures is their evolutionary specialization (being the supply-side gender, they want their prices as high as possible), and more sense for men to be liberal, since they prosper when power structures flatten (more available and accessible ways to pay said price). Which is probably why that's what we see borne out in opinion polls, voting splits, and chosen professions.
This is an intriguing framing and something I'd like to learn more about. Do you have any references to recommended reading?
I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.
It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.
Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?
nand
1yr ago
Even "softcore" urination is banned there, for example. Also public nudity is a very gray area and, from my understanding, de-facto prohibited.
Am I right in coming away with the conclusion that your post seems to be arguing about two very different and almost opposite things?
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An AI's general willingness to combine things in unrealistic ways. This is the ability required to produce images of things not heavily represented in the training set, such as female presidents.
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An AI's ability to understand and ignore "spam" in its training data (e.g. popular depictions that mislead from "reality"), such as Marvel depictions of Norse mythological figures or faux 80s illustrations.
In a sense, these are directly opposite goals because 1 requires painting something unrealistic, and 2 requires ignoring/penalizing unrealistic outputs. I suppose the common ground is that an AI should default to painting logical/coherent/realistic things unless prompted otherwise. But even this desire is loaded - first of all, the way these AIs are trained, I think, sets them up to hopelessly fail at any measure of how "realistic" their outputs are - we humans have the advantage of our perception of reality being a distinguished input, and also by access to vastly more information crucial to understanding concepts such as causality and physical intuition. It's also clear to us whether we're seeing something real or seeing something fictional, by virtue of that fictional thing always being a subset of the reality we perceive (e.g. a still image on a display, rather than something we're seeing with our naked eyes directly).
nand
1yr ago
Shower thought: I live in an area that has 100% green electric power generation. If I use more power than necessary, does this increase or decrease my net carbon footprint? Say I pay out of my pocket to run 1 MJ of green power through a resistor. What effect does this have on my carbon footprint, as defined by the difference in overall emissions compared to the counterfactual world in which I didn't do this?
I have conflicting thoughts:
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Power is power. If I didn't use that power, it could have been used instead of coal-derived power by somebody else. And obviously, most people would prefer to use greener power rather than less green power, if given a choice - and this argument holds all the way down the chain to the person using the least green power available. So the net addition to my carbon footprint when wasting 1 MJ of energy is determined by whatever it takes to produce 1 MJ of power at the tail end (i.e. coal). Or a slightly refined version: By supply and demand, increasing demand on green power just drives up the price of green power, causing more people to use non-green power because of the price differential, thus leading to the same 1 MJ to be burned in coal plants to cover the waste.
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As a consumer of green power, I am essentially paying for the construction of green power plants. So all I'm doing is subsidizing the production of more green power, so my net carbon footprint is the sum of what it takes to build that infrastructure, minus whatever benefit will be derived from it after I'm done using it - so probably effectively neutral (or slightly negative).
nand
1yr ago
When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.
nand
1yr ago
I guess the part I'm confused about is how it isn't an obvious foregone conclusion that it was an accident, just based off the complete absence of plausible motive. Why would they deliberately attack two random farmers in the middle of nowhere?
A Ukrainian false flag would make more sense than a deliberate Russian attack, but even so, why would you false flag with something that looks like an obvious accident.
But on the other hand, I've often wished that girls I ghosted would reach out to me. Often I stopped replying for a petty or momentary reason, and a week or a month later I'm feeling silly about it and I want to see her again but I'm too embarrassed to reach out because I have no good explanation for the initial ghosting.
This sounds like a trivial problem to fix and absolutely not at all a reason to project such (IMO neurotic) expectations onto other people.
nand
11mo ago
For small countries which do well, this leads to a different sort of jadedness where the national broadcaster is trying to ensure that their country loses deliberately for financial reasons (but is generally not able to say this to its viewers, who like winning). Ireland is the most famous example where eventually the cynicism got through to the viewers.
Can you elaborate on this point?
nand
1yr ago
This post seems confused by its own argument. You setup an equivalence between a negative externality of X and a positive externality of not-X, which is logically sound. You then ask why we're treating X as a negative externality instead of treating not-X as negative externality. This does not follow from your reasoning.
Indeed, the logical equivalence of "X is a negative externality with respect to not-X baseline" and "not-X is a positive externality with respect to the X baseline", means that which framing you choose to do the calculation in, cannot possibly alter the result. Minimizing f(x) and maximizing -f(x) gives you the same value of x.
nand
9mo ago
Can you elaborate on this point? What is the key difference in their immigration policy and why does it work so well?
if he lied, or even was misinformed, Ukrainian credibility will take a hit.
The one thing I have found consistently weird about the entire Western perception of this conflict is the universal mass-amnesia of the fact that Ukranian and Russian are birds of a feather. I personally tune out everything that comes from the mouth of a slavic leader as an obvious fabrication, and wait for the independent corroboration of events.
nand
1yr ago
Am I the only one genuinely baffled by why it matters whether the missile was Russian or Ukrainian?
Cause and effect. If the Ukrainian missile was fired as a defense mechanism against a Russian attack, then I think it's fair to attribute collateral damage to the initial attack. (Indeed, the whole invasion)
If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
nand
1yr ago
Presumably the rest is coming from rare variants (the cutoff in this study is a minor allele frequency (MAF) of < 1% which is quite high), structural variants, or some genetic dark matter implying that our heritability estimates are too high or not being driven by DNA (?).
Or environmental factors (e.g. prevalent nutritional deficiencies)?
Incidentally, how do heritability estimates discriminate between genes that "causally" influence height (e.g. a gene that, when expressed, somehow biostructurally increases bone growth), and genes that dictate "unrelated" behavioral patterns which, in turn, affect the desired trait (e.g. craving/distaste for junk food)? Am I right in thinking that this is another major weakness of GWAS - even if you identify candidate genes, those genes might completely fail to transfer to, say, another population in which junk food doesn't exist?
So if you run a GWAS identifying N promising genes for affecting height on US citizens, you couldn't use that to reliably increase the height of European babies?
nand
1yr ago
The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.
Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)
Personally, as an Apple user, I always felt that Apple is better at designing hardware than software. Designing software is more of a necessary factor in being able to design the hardware with the freedom they want. (Bespoke chips everywhere, complete control over the entire trust chain, etc.)
iOS is pretty much a pile of trash and the major downside to being able to use an Apple device.
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