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
11mo ago
There are orders of orders of magnitude difference in probability between a 10-ton fighter jet arising from pure chance, and a microscopic DNA (or RNA-based) protocell with a few dozen to a few hundred nucleotide bonds.
If the latter took all of the universe to create, the former would be outrageously impossible.
In dating, if you're ghosted, do you a) always move on stoically, b) always give it one more shot, or c) go with a mix of the two depending on circumstances?
Always a) without second thought. If she ghosts you, she's not worth your time. Either because she's the type of immature bitch who gets a kick out of emotional manipulation, or because she's just plain not interested.
Overwhelmingly likely, the latter. You have to remember that women feel attraction in a way fundamentally different from men. They are fickle, extremely selective, exponentially more hypergamous, and basically all-or-nothing. A woman can't be half-interested in somebody, she is either head over heels or wholly uninterested. If you get ghosted you are already in category two, and trying to flip her back into the other state at that point is fighting a losing uphill battle.
So what do you do? Do you have a system for deciding if and when to follow up after not hearing back?
Play the numbers game. If landing a relationship is one in thousand, you have to churn through a thousand mediocre semi-interested women before one will work out.
If you're even at a position where you have the free time and mental capacity to spare thought for somebody that ghosted you, I'd say you're not yet seeking out enough opportunities. I sometimes have days where I chat with 5-10 new people in a single day, something that takes a lot of time and effort. Effort I no longer have left over to worry about some girl who hasn't responded in 3 days.
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
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?
It should come as little surprise that the methods are different when the outcomes are, too - consistently, capitalism rewards IQ, while IQ is a trait selected against by natural selection - in every generation.
Edit: Incidentally, the first time I've heard it verbalized that way was by a woman. I literally quote her: "A girl cannot be only half interested, in her head it is always either yes or no."
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
The characterization of the New Right as being liberals but with added elite skepticism makes me wonder to what extent this demographic actually overlaps strongly with the supposedly far-left pro-communist anti-institutional "all cops are bastards" camp. Or, to put it more bluntly, I'm wondering what exactly about this 'New Right' demographic is even still right.
If the belief is essentially that free trade cannot work because 'checks and balances' don't exist, resulting only in centralization of power, corruption and impression - haven't you just made the case for the anti-capitalist / anti-market left?
nand
1yr ago
I'm with you. I've been locked into the technophagus practically since birth, and everything in that piece has resonated strongly with my own waning interest in the Internet. The past year-or-two for me has been demarcated by an increasing desire to withdraw from online interactions and disillusion with big platforms inevitably turning to shit. Hell, even Google Search these days feels like a cheap advertising gimmick - nowadays, if I have a question I need answered, I use the Reddit site search instead of google.. because that way I find responses written by humans instead of soulless, mindless auto-generated "blog posts".
In a way, it is my understanding of technology that precisely is what makes it so awful for me. Because I know what technology is capable of. And instead, I see it used for.... this. Another skinner box designed to make humans miserable. I'm sick of it and want it to die, for the real life to be revived.
nand
1yr ago
I can be accepting of other people's preferences while not sharing that preference myself. I publicly accept the existence of pistachio flavored ice cream, even if I do not like it myself. Maybe only a few people do, I do not know. But I have no reason to disapprove of it, because I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with pistachio flavored ice cream. I just don't like the taste.
If I find myself unattracted to people of substantially difference race, that doesn't mean I find anything wrong with the concept. As long as two people are attracted to each other, I don't see the issue. I'm just not personally attracted to certain people, for reasons that include physical appearance.
I think this is a very valuable change. There are certain users I would personally auto-minimize, not because I find their posts bad, but just because I find their choice of submissions personally uninteresting. But I definitely wouldn't block them, and if somebody I have "blocked" responds to one of my own comments I'd definitely like to know.
I don't see a reason for a block functionality to exist on this site, except as a short-term spam mitigation feature (e.g. for PMs).
Despite being generally very pro biodeterminism, I actually feel like this is a product of western culture moreso than innate biology. Have you ever talked to women from a non-western nation? They often have a completely different mindset. I'm currently dating a Russian woman and I can talk quite freely with her about political matters, even sensitive topics like HBD or feminism. It's not just her, many Russian women I've found are far more open to criticisms of the values that Western women hold sacred.
Of course, you can make the argument that Russian culture is still designed to suppress the opinions women would otherwise naturally tend to have, and that it takes a liberal nation to reveal their true colors. But for once, I think the blank slatists actually have a point. What you believe is largely a product of the society you were born in, and the west has simply gone off the deep end with feminist/SJW/woke theory. If anything, you can argue that women are merely more naturally susceptible to whatever the prevailing dogma is in the nation they grew up in.
nand
1yr ago
Out of context my first instinct would have been to assume this is a smear campaign designed to make feminism look daft. But I doubt such a smear campaign would have been authored by @UNWomen, unless there is some serious levels of internal fuckery going on.
nand
1yr ago
Something I thought about extensively at the date of the last iPhone launch was that this entire situation comes down to archaic pricing practices and a dearth of seemingly obvious technological solutions.
For example, instead of selling phones at a "first come first serve" basis and forcing people to suffer through stressful virtual queues and server overloads, why not just introduce a sort of "dynamic auction"? Give people an X-day grace period with which to register their blind bids. For each 'batch' of products that come from the factory, take the top N bidders at that point in time, and have them all pay the price needed to outbid the N+1th person in the queue. Break ties by number of 'batches' the person has been in the queue for, and break sub-ties by random chance.
Easy to understand (the more you're willing to pay, the faster you get your phone), simple, stress/DDoS-free, and all of the profit goes to the company making the product - not middlemen scalpers.
nand
1yr ago
I would actually double down and assert that 2+2=4 is a fact deeper than arithmetic. If 2+2=4 are elements in a modular ring, it holds true. If they are vectors, it still holds true. If they are abstract discrete topological spaces, it holds true. I have not encountered a situation in (non-joke) mathematics where the symbols '2', '+' and '4' are overloaded so as to not make this equation true.
There is an underlying concept of "twoness", "addition" and "fourness" that holds this property even as you generalize it to systems beyond integer arithmetic, almost like a fundamental structure of mathematics. This is not even about notational trickery. Even if you decide to use different symbols, it does not change the underlying mathematical relationships. You would just be expressing the same undeniable fact differently.
nand
1yr ago
In my own experience, there is a vast disconnect between perceived consensus on the "public internet" and perceived consensus in real life and private correspondence with people. (*) I think that what has happened, at least in part, is an internal schism caused by big tech's stranglehold on public spaces drowning out all dissenting opinions from the public face of the internet.
What you're left with is an illusion of progressive consensus, but the reality, to me, seems more like people are just moving on from publicly blogging their political opinions.
(*) Heavy disclaimer: I live in Germany, but primarily engage with the English-speaking Internet. So this rift is amplified by cultural differences between the US and Germany.
nand
1yr ago
Just like introversion-extroversion or sex drive, gender is a spectral trait which follows a Gaussian distribution: occupying the extremes is rare, most people fall somewhere in the middle.
I could not disagree with this more. Gender absolutely does not follow a Gaussian distribution. By this claim, you would have a hard time determining what gender most people are. And yet I can assure you, that barring cherry-picked exceptional cases, the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female". What gender is, is a bimodal distribution.
Incidentally, the same criticism applies to your forced normalization of all of the other labels you are criticizing - for people's usages of terms like 'ambivert' to to make sense, it is sufficient that they believe its a bimodal distribution, not a discrete one. (And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category)
Finally, knowing that somebody is average in a trait is useful information, because it collapses your uncertainty about that person. It's not the same thing as describing an elephant as gray.
Do we really? Then why is every generation having less of it, and people taking longer to lose their virginities? Why are the most developed countries the most sexless?
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