octopus_eats_platypus
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User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
9mo ago
Aggravated burglary specifically was something like 40 times in 2017, though this admittedly had a lot to do with a small population and a gang going hard on organised crime, meaning it's very easy to get outsized figures in a way that doesn't represent a necessarily 'real' base rate. The ~7 times figure below is more accurate overall, though making allowances for a much younger population I'd say the real base rate is intuitively somewhere in the 4-5 times more likely zone.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.
I am absolutely keen to hear more about this, because everything I know tells me this is a close-to-impossible problem. The notion of 'pretty easy' seems intuitively wrong to me, but if you have any reading to offer on the subject I'd love to go through it.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?
Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.
I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.
Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.
Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.
The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Please take five minutes out of your day and google "Duane Gish".
I wrote one paragraph, I genuinely didn't think reading the entire thing was that big an ask, especially in this community.
To be more succinct: Gish gallop bad, should be unconvincing. Central question powerful and important - but not answered! Why mottizens fall for gallop but ignore important central question in argument between two people? Not good!
Alternatively: Meta-argument commentary on argument is in fact a valid part of the community, as evidenced by what you are literally doing right now. This tiresome sort of hypocrisy really deserves 'no one cares about your opinion, bring arguments' as a snide response but instead I think I made my point fairly succinctly and reasonably to begin with in the context of the original argument.
Unless your argument is 'community norms are not worth consideration to begin with', talking about them has as much value as our recent debate on the Holocaust.
Moreover, I'm not just talking about skepticism or opinions, I'm talking about voting habits. The 'this is a big wall of text, reflective upvote' culture doesn't necessarily cause all the cream to reach the top to be skimmed off. It makes me wonder to what degree mottizens see argument as won by walls of text over actual correctness, for instance.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I think you're being somewhat deceitful, I'm sorry. It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument. The line in question was asked several times and notably never answered, and yes, the other side eventually acted offended and signalled disbelief - this is the point of a Gish Gallop, to induce a failure state on the other side. The goal is never to prove anything, merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts (or simply introducing doubt into facts somewhat removed from the central point) that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.
If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?
The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1
Notably, this is not true for the Australian Imperial Force, which was entirely volunteer - the split over conscription (a referendum which narrowly failed) ended up splitting the Australian Labor Party and ultimately shaped the modern Liberal and Labor Parties.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Entertainingly I did the opposite. Got 10/20, 7 out of the first 10 correct and then 3 out of the last 10.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
14/20 the first time and 10/20 the second
It really does look like random chance.
Also because I'm Australian, anyone wearing green immediately strikes me as, well, a Green.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
14/20. Mildly better than chance, went solely off intuition and zero thought. Literally 'left or right? click!'.
I think I would've done worse if I'd thought about it.
Your assertion that Ligma Johnson was a genius 5D chess maneuver designed to undermine the authority of modern journalism as opposed to, y'know, a joke isn't compelling so much as it stretches the principle of charity to believe you believe it.
Your patterns aren't just non-obvious, they're non-existent and clearly contrived - badly contrived to support a single political side. You have a pattern of posting half-developed essays that meander for a long time and take a sharp left turn at the end into a conclusion completely unsupported by the argument.
Your thesis is "rationalists are too easily duped". Your supporting points are a hypothetical thought experiment from Nassim Taleb, a tweet including the eggplant emoji from Elon Musk and Krugman taking a Scott Adams tweet seriously to make his own point (this isn't duping and I have no idea why you think it is).
Notably, none of these events even involve scams, let alone rationalists. They involve 'deception' in the sense that Krugman doesn't really care if Adams votes for Trump or not, he was using Adams' tweet to make his own point. If you say 'I am a communist and I want higher taxes' in a discussion and I use that as a springboard to argue against higher taxes, you haven't fooled me if you're really a fascist and are just pretending to be a communist. I've said the piece I wanted to say, why do I care that you lied?
As for the end of your essay if you're genuinely in possession of a secret 'black pill' of deception and persuasion, why are you personally not convincing?
The answer lies in some fairly traditional elements. Pathos, ethos, and logos.
There's not much pathos to speak of here, so I won't.
Ethos matters. If your essay is 'wow, look at all these points from people who also hate the woke like I do', you lose a substantial amount of ethos from the get go. You've clearly picked a side and have an investment in it winning, or at least looking good. You seem untrustworthy - why would I believe you're genuine and honest about arguing this? This doesn't sink your essay, but it intrinsically loses you the trust you might need to stretch an argument further than it might ordinarily go.
Logos.
I maintain than in our modern era rationalists are not nearly as skeptical as they should be. Even people who call themselves skeptics lack skepticism.
Why are none of your examples about real skeptics or rationalists failing to be skeptical? This is a complete failure of logos. You should bring a series of logical reasons I would believe in your stated argument, but you don't. You bring weirdly irrelevant culture-war bits - which ties back into ethos again. If your supporting evidence is both irrelevant and biased, your failure in logos simply increases the failure in ethos.
Hopefully that clarifies things.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This feels all over the place. Your title doesn't seem to be related with most of what you wrote, and your conclusion comes out of left field 'here's a bunch of examples about some jokes, this is why rationalists get scammed' seems more like nonsense than a coherent argument.
You also pattern-match badly here - Trump, Adams, Taleb and Musk are the kind of examples that intimate you aren't seriously thinking about this but simply want to dunk on the opposition.
Maybe take this one back to the writing board, and look for more salient examples that support the point you're trying to make.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
You wrote all of this on an election thread to say someone else is wrong?
This is a discussion forum. Writing something large and detailed to disagree with someone else is our bread and butter.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Out of curiosity, do you mean sparse urbanization in that our cities are low-density, or sparse urbanization in that we have a large rural population? The former is true, but the latter definitely isn't
I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.
So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.
But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.
Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This is a really excellent post. One of my favorite things is 'someone articulating something you've long felt but haven't had the correct words to communicate that insight', and this is exactly that. Reported as a quality contribution as well, thank you.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Possibly. I grew up as poor white trash and my high school friends largely reflect that, worked in a factory and my blue-collar friends (the two I keep in touch with) reflect that as well, and then uni to a bog-standard office career - so plenty of white-collar colleagues and a couple of friends as well. All that means I think my bubble is hopefully a little more diverse in opinion than that of most people. It could be in part that I'm Australian - the response was largely bipartisan because for quite a long time lockdowns meant 'no Covid' instead of 'we still have Covid but you also can't go out to eat'.
There are plenty of people I know who are still mad about the pandemic response, but it all seems to be vaccine-centered. Though the 'Australian' bubble is very difficult to pop, it's not as if I can go out and meet new Americans in real life on a regular basis.
It's also why I'm asking, though! Maybe my friends weren't representative and most everyone was fine and had moved on. Maybe everyone was mad about lockdowns and didn't care about vaccines. I certainly didn't know, so I thought it was worth raising.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
That was part of what triggered it. It wasn't just my personal life, but a bunch of people here (largely around lockdowns, though, which I haven't really heard concerns about in my personal circles) as well! But I figured the 'what broke your brain personally' question was worth following up with 'have you noticed this in your friend circles', especially because this is not exactly a normal place. Mottizens being angry about an issue doesn't necessary translate to much salience in the public at large.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I've had to restrict my diet for health reasons over the last six months.
I eat soaked oats with fruit, brown rice with vegetables and eggs, and vegetable soup with occasionally a little meat. This isn't a particularly amazing diet, but it serves to keep the symptoms under control.
Over this time, I've also lost 5 kilos. It's not a huge amount of weight, but my diet isn't particularly varied. I think simply restricting yourself from eating a large variety of foods is enough to get weight loss going.
On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I had pretty mainstream thought on Covid all the way through, so I can give you an example of my thought processes.
From what I remember, the logic (over here) went like so:
1 - We're going to get a vaccine soon, so we're going to do lockdowns and hold out until then. They suck, but we can contain the virus with lockdowns because it's virtually not in Australia.
2 - Once we get the vaccine and everyone takes it, Covid will be over and we'll return to normal life. This sucks, but it is a temporary suck that we will swiftly overcome. During this terrible time everyone needs to band together and accept the shittiness.
I'm not sure I would've supported lockdowns knowing what we know now about the virus. People were talking about a 2% fatality rate (so, what, seven million people dead in the US, 500k or so here) which is much, much larger than what we ended up with. I weighed half a million dead in my mind against a temporary restriction on my civil liberties and thought 'okay, this is the sort of situation where I can accept restricted civil liberties'.
I'm not so sure I would've accepted it in almost any other country in the world. The United States didn't have a choice to not have Covid in its borders, Australia did.
We moved on to getting the vaccine. I think at the time the claim was that vaccines stopped Covid spreading. If the option was 'zero Covid, but you have to get vaccinated' or 'Covid kills ~100,000 people (Australia, so I'm reducing the US numbers tenfold) but we don't enforce vaccines' I am in fact okay with a vaccine mandate. Mostly I'm not okay with mandating stuff like that, and as soon as it turned out that no, we weren't vaccinating ourselves back to a no-Covid world, I changed course pretty rapidly.
Vaccine mandates lagged popular opinion here - they were popular because we thought vaccine mandates would make this all go away. Lockdowns were popular because we thought they were the precursor to getting the vaccine, and, again, making Covid disappear like a bad dream. Your average person doesn't support lockdowns or vaccine mandates now, but that's because they've been proven ineffectual. China is still locking down over Covid and can't seem to accept the reality of the situation.
I think '2% of the population will die if we don't do this thing' is a good reason to consider the temporary suspension of civil liberties, and I think I'm very much a normie in that sense.
This is a category where the conventional wisdom fits really well in that opposite spending styles cause a lot of marriage woes.
My experience with this across quite a few friends and their partners is that with this sort of coupling is that it invariably ends in one of roughly three (I'll outline four but two are variations on a theme) stable ways.
The first is the end of the relationship - there's not too much to be said here. I don't think this is a huge risk for you personally, as this is a more lower-income sort of end. If she's not outspending your actual income then the chances are much-reduced.
The second is that she gets what she wants, which is license to spend what she wants. For some spenders this has an inherent limit and will be satisfied, at which point this largely resolves itself. If her spending is more social - lunch with the girls, keeping with fashions with her friends, etc, etc, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of people feel the urge to spend more to keep up with the Joneses, but many simply want to keep up and don't feel the need to spend incessantly. Lunch, dinners, hairdos, makeup - a lot of women just need these things covered for social reasons which to me is very fair. If she has a compulsion to spend her money no matter how much she has... well, GOTO 1 or 4.
The next two are very similar and differ mainly by degrees but because they play out so differently psychologically I've listed them separately.
The third is when you have auto-payments deducted out of your accounts into non-spending accounts that are hard to access. Savings accounts with no cards attached, 401ks, etc. These automatic debits come out on payday. Once that's done, what remains is spending money. Usually this means the two of you separate out, say, grocery money (a buddy of mine used store gift cards to manage his grocery budget with his girlfriend which meant any further spending had to happen from her spending money) and such, and potentially have a third account for other automated spending like bills and such. In short, making as much of the process as automatic as possible so any spending blowouts are constrained.
The fourth is very similar - money goes into a central bank account under the control of the 'saver' spouse and the 'spender' is given their allowance automatically once a month/fortnight/week. They can still log into it and transfer money, but there's an understanding nobody is going to do that. This is more extreme than 3 and is more when someone has a spending problem, can't control it and needs just to have a card with limits. I have seen this work well with my grandparents - my grandfather always spent money like it was going out of style so my grandmother would always give him a cash allowance for the week to spend and managed the household herself with the rest.
The theoretical fifth is that she just starts budgeting well by herself, falls in line with your spending philosophy and all is well. I have never seen this happen but have included for completeness' sake.
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