octopus_eats_platypus
No bio...
User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr 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.
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
2yr 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
2yr 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.
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
2yr 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
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr 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
2yr ago
I think it's fair to say there's no anti-left mod bias, but it's certainly a very right-coded space in terms of the culture war.
I think part of what makes it seem more leftist in polls than it actually is is the fact that there are quite a few older former leftists who believe in things like socialised healthcare, a cradle-to-grave welfare state, etc, etc, but have cultural views formed in the 90s or 00s and consequently oppose modern identitarianism very, very strongly.
That's roughly where I identify, but the thing about the Motte is that it's a cultural war space, not a policy discussion space. I suspect on policy issues the membership skews a fair bit more left. We definitely have some very strong libertarians who are all for as few taxes and as few government services as possible, but I think there's a reasonably large population of 'I like my healthcare free, just like my speech' Mottizens who would argue for single-payer healthcare, higher welfare payments, etc, etc. Of course, the reality I might be fired from my job for refusing to call someone 'ze' (thankfully not in our office as of yet, but we've had a helpful instructional email from corporate HQ over in the US about neopronouns from a middle-aged white HR lady) is also something I'm very much against, so if we only ever talk about the latter I find myself in the same place as reactionaries in opposing it.
If this was a forum about how to deal with monopolies or on the virtues of re-zoning low-density areas in the inner city I think I'd find myself very strongly on the other side of the debate much more often. It's just that we don't really talk about those things here.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Given that the entire world seemed blindsided by this, why should have it been obvious to Zelensky that it was true? It's one thing to assume someone will notice the very obvious, but if almost everyone misses it (and congratulations on being a lone voice of truth in the wilderness, I'd love to see what you said about this prior to the war), perhaps it wasn't as obvious as all that?
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think the question needs to be backed up. Dating platforms are like nightclubs - getting women to sign on is the hard part. Once you get women to your club, the men come and they spend money on the women. Likewise if you could guarantee that every single woman in the world would get on and look at your iteration of Tinder, it would be a multi-billion dollar app even if you require men verify themselves by writing their username on their dicks and sending photos in before getting online.
The network effects here are huge and real, getting people onto your dating app is hard. It's the Facebook problem all over again, except this time you need to convince women to come get hit on by men. You might be able to do that with BillionaireDating.com or your new trendy SixFootAndOver app, but absent that sort of filtering that's a tough call to begin with. Starting a new dating app isn't just like opening a nightclub where you can trend some loss leaders, spend more on live music, etc, and try and burn some cash to get people coming to where you are.
Still, just like any fine drinking establishment you either need a niche or a hook (Bumble - guys can't message you weirdo shit initially, Grindr - should be obvious) that's strong enough to get people off the default option. Once you've done that you can be a local institution and coast, but initially you need to wow people and move them to your nightclub for more than one rare step in the bar crawl.
Men are already predominant on dating apps. There's no dancing on Tinder, no girls out for a night of fun that doesn't plan on meeting men but still might if they're a good-looking good dancer. Roughly 2/3s-3/4s of everyone on a dating app is a man. Fantastic if you're gay or a woman, but for single straight guys this is a difficult environment. So if you're a guy you might have a Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, etc, etc, account because why not? Why not try Conservadate? Why not hit up O'Malleys? Yeah, I know it's an Irish pub, but there is that one cute girl there who plays in the band there occasionally. This place sucks anyway, let's go somewhere else. We can always come back.
Why would single conservative women move to the new nightclub? They already have plenty of conservative men around them as men are more conservative than women in every age bracket. They're already in a good spot. The drinks are already free, the DJ is pumping out some great beats. And you want them to go and move over to Thiel's new weird club? Why? What do they have to gain? Men are buying them drinks, they're dancing, having fun, and your query is 'why not go to the new empty club that nobody but a bunch of weird dudes are in?
Sure, two-thirds of single women who voted didn't vote Trump. That's got to be a factor, in the sense that you've lost two-thirds of your market already. Polarization and the like are real, and anyone who demands to date solely on political factors is much more likely to end up alone, but... I think the answer isn't 'women hate conservative men', it's 'Thiel couldn't even move the conservative women over'.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Hollywood hates Slavery, not slavery. The latter, 'slavery' is the institution that probably precedes writing and came into existence with agriculture. The 'Slavery' Hollywood cares about is specifically the portion of the transatlantic slave trade that ended up enslaved in America.
There's no big movies about slavery in Brazil from Hollywood, and that's because Americans care about American slavery, not Roman or Brazilian or even Australian blackbirding overmuch. They don't openly support it or anything, but there's one big key thing that's cared about, and the others have only have salience insofar as they're linked to American slavery.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.
I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.
Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.
The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.
Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.
It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?
I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.
The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
To a degree, yes. People who have a high-level understanding of their field, however, are those best placed to use new AI tools. Likewise, statisticians didn't disappear because we built better tools for statistical analysis, rather the demand for statistical education has never been higher. The tools are still used by someone and we tend to see the lowest rung automated away and smaller numbers of usually better educated employees getting productivity increases. Usually what this looks like is a lot of the lowest-skill (or those with a very narrow skillset) employees lose their jobs - the invention of the mechanical (and later electronic) calculator removed the need for human calculators, but engineers and mathematicians are still a thing.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever,
Is there any reason you shouldn't generally expect this to keep happening with each election as the population grows? Naively I would expect the winner from every election to have received the largest number of votes of any candidate ever for the most part.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Reddit is a good site with awful moderation policies.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
If you enjoyed Reverend Insanity, I think you might enjoy 40 Milleniums of Cultivation. Similar sort of guile and cunning-driven plot, but with a more altruistic main character concerned about the wellbeing and freedom of human beings - a definition he eventually expands to things that share human values, not just human DNA and bodies.
octopus_eats_platypus
8mo ago
Absurd. Insane. Spectacular.
I didn't expect them to catch the booster at all on this attempt, but I'm so glad to be wrong.
octopus_eats_platypus
8mo ago
I appreciate you writing this. My grandfather is rotting away due to Alzheimers - the last time I saw him was three years ago, after which his health rarely allowed visitors and flying down to see him was nearly impossible plan due to personal health issues. When I was a little boy, he was the strongest man I knew. I love my grandmother as well, but going down to see him was a special joy.
I never knew my father, but my grandfather would toss me up in his arms and get me to feel his sweat 'any sweat?' and then whiskers 'any whiskers?'. He'd always be in from a hard day's work (after retiring he renovated houses and repaired cars until his health no longer allowed it, after which he went from a joyful strong man to perpetually grouchy and frustrated) and there'd always be sweat on his brow. Whiskers sometimes. He'd laugh and he'd put me down and make me lemon cordial with milk, a combination I've never seen anyone else like. You had to drink it quick to stop it curdling, and I'd always have my own milk whiskers afterwards.
All throughout my life he was taciturn and showed his love physically or by building or fixing something. He fixed cars of mine a few times when I couldn't afford a mechanic, and loaned me his ute when my car broke down and I couldn't afford a new one for some months. But he had a biting sense of wit as well, and loved to tease. I once found a giant novelty wooden spoon at a car boot sale, and painstakingly carved the words 'biggest shit-stirrer' into it for a Christmas present. He laughed at the time - but later I found out he hated it and felt put on the spot, only keeping it because he appreciated a gift from his grandson more than his own pride.
Now the only thing he can remember about me is that I owe him fifty dollars. It makes him apoplectic with rage that I haven't paid him back for the money, and if I were to go visit him in hospice all I could bring what remains of him is grief and rage. I'm his favorite grandson (I was given his name which I think gave me an unfair head start) and now all I do is ring my grandmother once a week and hear about how he's degrading, how another little piece of him is being taken away. How his legs and fingers are rotting and he only recognises my grandmother sometimes.
Nobody in my family has ever died since I was four years old and too young to remember it, but every time I think of him I hope it comes soon.
I tried to sit down with him and record something when I last saw him, but he hated the notion of his life being recorded, as his own father was an undisputed monster and I think he wants the man to go unlamented and unremembered. I thought foolishly I had time to convince him, time to sit down and talk and record and write so I'd get some record of his life and the man he was.
I didn't, and there's not enough of him left to piece it together.
Thank you for writing this. I'm going to find a time later this year, take a week off work, sit down with my grandmother and record whatever she'll give me.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Autism is ~4x more prevalent in boys than in girls. This is true for a lot of genetic diseases due to the relative size of the X chromosome meaning girls can have one copy of a allele that causes issues and have it 'error-checked' so to speak by the other.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
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.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr 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
2yr ago
Please take five minutes out of your day and google "Duane Gish".
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr 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.
Being taller is one of those things I'd basically take 100% of the time up to probably 6'4-5 or so. It's not a cure-all, but it's like being richer in the sense that it's virtually all upside. That's not to say you can't or don't have other downsides that vastly outweigh it; I wouldn't take being incredibly rich if I were also a paraplegic. Nor would I be made incredibly handsome if I gained agoraphobia as a result.
But if I could get a height boost, a handsomeness boost, or a big pile of money for free I'd take it without reservation.
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