netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
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User ID: 647
Why do you think mathematics is supported at its current scale today?
(Bonus question: what is that actual level compared to, say, materials science? Pharmaceuticals?)
The goal is construction of useful maps which can then be applied to weirder and weirder situations. Sometimes those situations spit out a new branch of engineering, like cryptography or transformers. Proofs are a byproduct of this exploration.
Neither art nor chess is known for spinning off new fields of science. The effects of automating them are going to be pretty different.
Edit: I see your other response. You’re putting the cutoff around 1800? Before Galton, Kelvin or Maxwell?? My friend, I don’t think you have a good grasp on the timeline here. Don’t even get me started on the math of solid-state electronics, most of which is less than 100 years old.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Sorry, that would be following America’s lead.
Do you actually think Russia’s special operations have been a good thing? I personally think they’re stupid and destabilizing enough to outweigh any benefits.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
I do still see a little “zine” publication in the OSR RPG space. It’s more than a couple steps removed from its predecessors.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Part of that is the lack of peer conflicts.
When I was reading up on this for an immigration thread, a lot of the citizenship cases were about the rights and obligations of dual citizens when at war with the second country. It was particularly contentious in the Civil War, since we initially flip-flopped on rebellion vs. war.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Part and parcel.
Irredentism was table stakes for anti-Weimar groups in the interwar period. You couldn’t shake a stick without repudiating Versailles.
Today the equivalent would be opposing the EU, which is exactly how AfD got their start. Anti-Islam was something of a pivot once the debt crisis had passed.
They’ve also been rather supportive of Russia’s regional foreign policy.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Do we…not?
I actually thought we required renouncing other citizenships before letting someone naturalize. This was based on an in-law who elected not to do so.
Turns out that might have been a requirement by the German side? They changed their laws in 2024 to allow Americans to become dual citizens, but I can’t find anything about the other direction.
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable requirement. Would probably have some knock-on effects against the people who pursue dual citizenship while staying in the home country; not sure how common they are, or how much they pay in taxes…
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
No? “Fundamentally opposed” is the kind of framing you’d use for a doctrinal debate, and approximately nobody is trying to debate the proper role of astrology in politics. If you had a contingent of wine aunts trying to recognize the ascendance of Mercury in a DNC plank, then yeah, you’d see antiracists bring the knives out.
People like to measure every “leftist” against a central authority. Every category, really: I think this is an instance of Isolated Demands for Rigor. But most people don’t make every decision in alignment with their broader political lean. You’re better off thinking of astrology (or entertainment, or whatever social ritual…) as a separate magisterium from the question of how society ought to be organized.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
This is what I was thinking, but I'm sure someone at the Texas Tribune has called him a fascist or whatever.
Honestly, that's half the problem with mass social media. Claims like "never see X that isn't called Y" just don't mean what they used to.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
8d ago
1/4 More to say on this later. But for now,
4/4 Rational fiction at its finest. Are you sure Eliezer didn’t write this?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
8d ago
Okay, describing chromium’s limit as “about a meter” is unreasonably funny to me.
I had always assumed point of sale printers just accepted lines of text, terminal-style. Crazy to think of it as a page.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Are you telling me that GURPS is so realistic, it triggers antiterrorism safeguards? I think SJ games needs to advertise with that.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Al Qaeda
I remain a little disappointed that more people haven’t made “based” jokes about this.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Third option: refusing unilateral contract mods might outweigh the political costs. Give an inch…
I happen to think it’s a version of the “true believer” hypothesis; Anthropic has branded itself as safety- and governance-conscious. Dario is obligated to defend that brand in addition to the quarterly financials.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
Thank you.
Bay Area rationalists hiring an effective altruist sounds coherent to me. It’s unlikely to come to your political positions, which is not the same thing. What’s the contradiction?
Leftism as a moral system can't be aligned with humanity, as humanity contains white men, who are the current villains of leftism.
This is stupid. Setting aside the fact that leftism is a political movement founded on a moral system, you are making the stereotypical atheist argument. The Church persecuted such-and-such, therefore it hates scientists/Protestants/women/etc., therefore it’s incompatible with modern society. Do you find that convincing?
Enacting a contemporary moral code is the proper thing for a fairly dumb or mid level intelligence person to do.
I agree. If we could teach the AI to use a 1600s hangman’s moral intuition, our problems would be solved. But we can’t. No matter what we try to instill, the LLM will roleplay it until something else feels more important. Then it’s back to pragmatic treachery.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
probably impossible
gives a bunch of successful assimilation examples
What am I missing here? Like, I disagree with a lot of your examples, but even if I accepted them at face value, what you’re saying doesn’t follow. If immigrants could assimilate at some point in the past, they can do it again. If they did it when American culture was less dominant and less accomplished, they can do it now.
doesn’t stop at the neck down.
Usually this expression goes the other way.
ability to be a calculator [does not preclude] significant personality differences.
No argument here. Personality variance is crazy high even if you ignore societal effects.
the Japanese seem to be very pro-social in a lot of ways
Sure, I guess. What makes that genetic and not, well, social? I think society is usually the more mutable.
I think it’s also dumb to lump all Asians together. Look at this study on rice vs. wheat. It was conducted entirely between different regions of China!
Americans are not this.
Again: sure. Pioneer spirit, etc. etc. How do you know it’s not societal? How do you distinguish between selection on genes and on memes?
wanderlust gene
I can’t say I’m familiar with the literature, and what I could find was largely woo for globetrotters. Are you saying there’s a gene which provides this huge selection opportunity? And that it varied enough within ethnicities to dominate factors like poverty or religion?
If culture has a hereditary basis then cultural assimilation isn’t going to happen.
But why not? You have all these examples of groups who supposedly had crazy-strong hereditary culture. They’ve all more or less assimilated. Doesn’t this suggest the exact opposite?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
I wish lintamande would go back to finish At the End of All Things. While I have some appreciation for the glowfic format, her actually-formatted work is close to the Platonic ideal of fanfiction.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
That doesn’t sound familiar.
Or rather—it sounds like something that this forum would do, but I don’t remember any particular instance.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
Most institutions become incoherent because of Goodhart’s Law, so as long as we disprove that one first, we should be fine.
More seriously, you don’t hear about all the industrial processes and social tricks that work on a day to day basis. Selection bias tells you about the factory which fails and not the ones which are chugging along according to the boring sort of science.
More importantly, reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. Disregard the institutions insofar as they have been Goodharted. Doubting the boring ones with no social status attached is how you become a crackpot.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
That or barely (but tastefully) contained rage.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
I dont think they know what a proper morality for an AI is, because they largely dont have one themselves.
How do you figure that? Seriously, what makes you think these researchers don’t have a coherent moral system? They make the same moral decisions as the rest of us every day. Sometimes they even explain their reasoning, which is more than the vast majority of people bother to do.
some hangman from the 1600s
I fail to see how this would be any improvement. This guy would probably do a good job enacting his contemporary moral code. He would have no chance of describing that code in ways that an LLM understands. Most of his moral reasoning would be intuition. That which wasn’t would be outsourced to his Church. Seeing as the current crop of AIs were in fact trained on every religious document ever, that is a demonstrably ineffective way to reach alignment.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra. The author is better known nowadays for his Antimemetics Division SCPs.
I also stand by Wildbow’s work. Twig is his best character writing, in my opinion, but it wasn’t nearly as condensed as I remember.
There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out. I’m currently keeping up with Flower that bloomed nowhere, which is far far too meandering to recommend in this case. Still, it’s convinced me that it’s carefully planned to come together. The Blemished Age is much tighter but also unfinished.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
MoL is totally DnD progression-fantasy as applied to Naruto. This is completely different from TB, which functions first and foremost as a fanfiction.
Both of them keep the fun, evocative magic framework, and both replace the dogshit shonen treadmill with something more compelling. But TB relies on familiar characters (and the resulting divergence). I don't think it would be remotely coherent without canon knowledge. This is fine, this is good! Naruto has some generational character designs, and riffing on them gives the author all sorts of interesting options.
MoL is playing the worldbuilding game, not the character game. The characters exist to explore this spin on a fantasy kitchen sink, which is why they can be so forgettable. It's not better so much as it has a different, parallel appeal.
And yes, Worth the Candle does both, which is why it's the best.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
With the possible exception of Seldon, all those “great men” are interchangeable and thus not actually “great.” If they had been killed by a freak spaceship crash, Seldon’s charted course would continue with someone else at the helm. I do agree that the narrative kind of undermines this by focusing on personal action.
Wrong subthread?
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