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octopus_eats_platypus


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 05 01:16:53 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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octopus_eats_platypus


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:16:53 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 334


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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	 Hot Bump Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for December 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Rationalists are too easily duped
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is that expensive where you are? I pay 16 US cents per kWh and I stay on top of good bargains over here in Australia.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For my part, I'd given up on using Reddit, so the Motte moving offsite gained a user, rather than losing one. I don't think the problem was banning as such, it was an ever-constricting line around what you can say which was so unpleasant. Living under a censor where the rules are deliberately made opaque is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a community that so highly populated by autistic people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.


Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Reddit is a good site with awful moderation policies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				No. Medieval Armies didn't Look like Highschool Theatre Productions
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 9, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Has anyone else noticed how, well, schlubby other men in their 30s are?


I'm not particularly fit, nor was I exceptionally handsome in my 20s. But the amount of guys who are halfway to bald, wear a ratty t-shirt everywhere and have a beer belly you could sit an actual beer on is astounding. All of these things are controllable (there are those will who go bald completely even with the total minoxidil/rollers/finasteride, but those are smaller numbers than those who just don't bother), and yet the number of fat, underdressed, balding middle-class white-collar professional guys in their 30s - compared to the same for women - seems absurdly high.


I was attractive in my 20s because I hit the gym a lot. A nice face and a ripped body made it easy to meet women.  Post a motorcycle accident big weights are risky for me, so I swim or use an exercise bike instead, keeping myself reasonably trim and fit. I use hair loss products which have slowed my hair loss to a crawl and restored some of what I initially lost, returning me to a 'slightly high widow's peak' situation. I spend a few hundred bucks a year to ensure my wardrobe is updated and I look okay when I leave the house.


I'm not looking for accolades, as I don't feel like I do much beyond the absolute bare minimum, but I'm curious if my experiences are more 'my corner of Australia' or whether they're more universal. It definitely feels like beyond the whole 'wall' meme for women, men are the ones hitting unattractiveness faster. Not intrinsically, but because they're doing nothing to slow or mitigate the signs of aging. I definitely feel like your average 35-year old man is less attractive than a 45-year old who has worked to keep his hair and stay in good shape.


Does this track with anyone else?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree and think that's true - I was accelerated in high school, but then the program got shut down and I got put with the speds for a few months (on the basis that the special education teacher was trained in gifted education) until they decided to put me back into regular classes. Spending time with a guy who couldn't read did nothing for me, nor did it help him. I viewed him with contempt because I hated being sat with him, and he was barely aware of anyone's existence at all.


I'm just outlining the logic of 'something can be net zero-sum yet be bad for some and good for others'.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The obvious business use-case is meetings and the like. As technology advances I expect the ability to do in-person meetings virtually to be a huge draw (though adoption will be incredibly slow as dealmakers and salespeople are rarely first adopters of technology - if we reach the ability to do this in 2040 it's only going to be a major thing in 2060-2070 and will probably only reach the majority of first world people by 2080 at least) especially with WFH offices.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Interview with chief Australian spy re: possibility of great-power war (among other things)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for October 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Land value doesn't stem from what's built on it but rather what surrounds it. You might uglify your own house to reduce your taxes, but the majority of that loss in land value (and hence reduction in tax) will go to people around you. There's a big collective action problem that would need to be solved for that to take place.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This isn't true. Zero-sum means the overall effect of the peers is zero-sum - we have a number of children, and some offer bonuses and others maluses to the performance of their peers. This is the traditional argument for removing ability-streamed classes, incidentally, that we need to put the smarter kids in with the dumber ones in order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to get the adjacency bonus from the smart kids.


I'm not sure things function that way in reality - it runs up against obvious limitations like 'putting a mentally disabled kid in the accelerated class is going to badly screw someone over, or possibly everyone involved depending on how you run things' but the peer effects being zero-sum means your peers do have an effect on performance, but the positive externalities are strongly connected to better students who in turn yield said positive externalities themselves.