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.).
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.
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?
nand
1yr ago
But if there is no reprisal, then Poland, at least, has to be asking, what's the point of belonging to NATO? NATO, the alliance that was specifically created to deter Russian military incursions?
But... Russia has not taken hostile military action against Poland. The missile, if it even was theirs, was clearly aimed at the Ukraine. Two farmers died. Nobody gives a shit.
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
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)
nand
1yr ago
It's not altruism if I'm getting something in return (or have already gotten something in return and am therefore indebted).
nand
1yr ago
We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right.
Major nit: There's a difference between saying something "bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory" and saying something that can, without much interpretative effort, be understood as literally meaning "I want to systematically kill Jewish people".
Using Kanye West's outbursts as an example to prove a point about how you can't criticize Jews without being deplatformed is at least as misrepresentative of reality as claiming you're being victimized by somebody's (unwitting) use of the 'OK Sign' hand gesture.
nand
1yr ago
Note: the guy who kicked the other developers out was rather inactive as far as actual development of the project goes, so that does make this a bit of a pointless move. In open source, power is awarded to those who do. Merely holding the keys does not make you the supreme ruler. If you kick out the majority developers of a project, they will fork the project and leave you holding an empty bag. What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Not because of his political opinions.
(*) But, please, call a duck a duck. A hostile take-over is bad enough, why does the media have to distort and lie and frame this as "malware"??
Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.
I feel like I satisfy these criteria and I'm willing to discuss this with you in further detail, if you'd like. I can quantify improvements on the following metrics post-therapy:
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Self-assessment of life satisfaction and mood (measured daily).
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Number of friends, number of minutes spent engaging in meaningful social connection (by daily self-assessment).
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Sleep schedule consistency (measured by, for example, number of appointments missed due to sleep issues).
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Income and work schedule consistency (measured by my working hours, which I log).
As well as a similar number of harder-to-quantify but very personally noticeable improvements to my quality of life, such as my excitement and eagerness to try out new things, my decrease in aversion to social risk, and the fact that I can now stand in front of a mirror and admire my appearance instead of hating it. I attribute my decision to go to a therapeutic rehab for 3-4 months, as well as the ~2 years of follow-up talk therapy, as the major causal factors in arriving at these results. And while "cure" is a strong word, I previously satisfied the diagnostic criteria of three major mental illnesses (major depression, personality disorder, and social anxiety), and post-therapy I no longer satisfy the diagnostic criteria of any of them.
Specific factors that helped me:
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Being thrown into an unfamiliar social environment and having no other option but to learn to engage with the people around me and engage in unfamiliar hobbies (since I had no PC during all of this).
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Receiving encouragement (and social pressure) to leave my comfort zone and overcome fears.
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Better understanding my own emotions, wants and needs, through talk therapy and critical analysis of my behavior.
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Providing exposure to, practice on and familiarization with alternative behavioral strategies to deal with negative emotions.
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Literally just having a parental surrogate figure that cares about your well-being and is not themselves mentally disordered in the same genetically inherited ways you are.
But I will go out and say that therapy is not an abstract thing - the most effective interventions are also the most visceral and concrete. I would broadly speaking characterize it as the process of reprogramming my emotional reactions to certain stimuli. No amount of thinking will do that, you have to experience the world in a different way, to arrive at a different result.
I will also, quite frankly, propose that the success rate of therapy depends more on the individual receiving it than the practitioner, and that a better outcome is generally correlated with other good stabilizing factors - so ironically, those most in need of therapy are those least equipped to benefit from it.
nand
10mo ago
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.
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
I disagree with your assessment of the situation because to me there is a significant distinction between "weak, injured or malformed" and "psychopathic, murderous, criminal". In a crude analogy with another important system of life, the immune system, the former represent damaged cells that need to be repaired, and the latter represents cancerous cells that need to be excised.
Side note, I don't think dwarf fortress is a representative simulation of the social dynamics at play, because it doesn't model what it's like to have, say, an asshole boss whose coworkers actively suffer because of his ongoing existence.
nand
1yr ago
I mean, I was formally diagnosed with a psychosomatic pain disorder because I kept claiming I had stomach cramps to get out of going to school. This whole thing strikes me as a bunch of adults becoming genuinely confused that somebody could legitimately fake illness to get out of unwelcome chores, and lie about it with a straight face.
Teenagers are monsters whose moral compass has not yet developed. There is no "mass sociogenic illness" being "spread" via social media. Infohazard? Seriously? Just don't pretend to be sick to get out of work and you're immune.
I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.
To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.
A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.
Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.
How many and what variety of women have you dated?
I used to be skeptical of the ideas presented in GP's post until I started dating a lot and experiencing all of these dynamics for myself - from the "losing interest quickly in women that are too open to having sex" to the mad, head-over-heels attraction to excessively coy women that nonetheless give off ever so slight hints of their sexuality. I can wholeheartedly agree with this characterization of gender roles and human sexuality.
Hell, even the women I speak to about these topics basically confirm the picture: their dream man, overwhelmingly, seems to be a high-status, independent and adventurous psychopath who turns into a sophisticated poet and lover in their arms. But you have to sell that image to maintain their interest. The moment you actually give them too much affection, they genuinely lose interest - a prize easily obtained is a prize worth little. (This goes for both sides, of course)
The net result is that the only relationships which end up lasting for a long time is one in which neither party is too interested in the other person, only just enough to be worth the effort. (And also why I think the best on-ramp to a relationship is a friendship with somebody you didn't particularly plan on fucking)
nand
1yr ago
Women being more susceptible to cults is an obvious example that comes to mind.
Even "softcore" urination is banned there, for example. Also public nudity is a very gray area and, from my understanding, de-facto prohibited.
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