official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
And on the meaning side, we long ago reached the age where, per John Adams, the majority of the population could “ study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”. They choose to collect Funko Pops, play slot machines or gacha games, watch reality TV and porn.
You and everyone else here (including @DaseindustriesLtd) are way too optimistic. You envision the failure mode of a UBI program as some recipients choosing a half-time job as a cashier over composing poems. The absolute worst possibility is them playing video games all the time.
We have had multiple attempts at UBI already, even if they weren't called that and differed in various unimportant aspects. Paris banlieues, US projects where 95% of inhabitants are on the dole--oh how you'd want them to play vidya all day instead of filling their upper levels of Maslow hierarchy with doing drugs, selling drugs, murdering other drug sellers, theft, robbery, general destruction of property, rape, riots, arson, every antisocial thing you can come up with they actually do. And they form a generationally unemployed underclass, a lot of people with no respect for labor and nothing but contempt for the hand that is feeding them. And they vote, besides burning up cars for fun.
This is the hard problem that any UBI-like proposal has to solve, not the pedestrian stuff like not preventing people from having part time jobs or removing unnecessary barriers to getting healthcare.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
What story below, I can't find it?
Anyway, as one of the active participants in the cat thing, usually there are misconceptions going in both directions. First of all, rdrama people weren't entirely innocent since we actually included our site name in the picture eventually, which was a no no even for most benevolent sites and a no no no hell naw for us.
Weird things happened afterwards though. First of all, instead of using the official offensive content removal tool that just erased rectangles Chtorrr and Redtaboo started erasing our site name and then the cat pixel by pixel with no time delay. Worse, Chtorrr was not just erasing it but replacing it with a neighboring chaos chess pattern, both pretending that it's a routine overtake by them and giving them the unfair advantage of placing a pixel every second instead of every five minutes.
Then the next day shit hit the fan all over reddit, and attempts to censor it only added fuel to the fire. Then it went beyond reddit, for example a World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold made a video accusing admins of cheating that got 150,000+ views. Naturally, being on the business end of a pointed crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand angry people was not fun for the admins in question, and again, that's just from one source (but one of the biggest ones). So there was much not entirely unjustified whining about stochastic terrorism from the admin-loving mods.
It also felt kinda surreal for me, I can't really wrap my head over angering 150,000 people. And we didn't actually do this on purpose at all, it's like how people describe Steve Jobs as having a reality warping field around him that would make people to shoot for the stars, apparently we have something like that that makes people act very stupid, we drew our cute cat and admins (and then admin-supporting mods) went full retard in all the worst possible ways and brought it all on themselves.
Anyways, pretty much everyone involved on our side got a very special ban wherein reddit tells you that your password is wrong no matter what. You can still get a reset password link and it seems to work but nope. I actually tried to talk with the support about it, the only thing that came out of it was that they linked me to a page that admitted that it's a thing reddit might do. They also unleashed the full power of ban evasion detection on us, so I still haven't managed to make a working reddit account (though I do have some ideas about it). I don't know if there were any innocents swept along us, I asked mods of /r/cats (we got a recruitment post there!) if they heard any such reports and they said no, but of course it would be hard for a random stonewalled victim to report anything via reddit itself.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.
From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
I don't understand this line of argument.
When you don't understand some argument and want help with that, you should try to explain what in particular you don't understand, which parts you're able to follow and where it loses you, paraphrase confusing parts in your own words to see if you understand it correctly and explain why it sounds unconvincing to you. Just stating that you don't understand without any elaboration sounds like bait.
On a related note, here's a funny tweet from a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1590722899702591489
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
The USA and the UK are not real countries I guess. I mean, I'm firmly on the Ukraine side as far as self-determination goes, but this now twice-removed linguistic bullshit is just ridiculous.
Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name comes from Slave?
It's the other way around, technically. Slavs is a self-name coming from the words "word"/"glory", which then gave Romans the word for slave because they kept importing those peoples as slaves.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
It gets funnier than that! They started autoremoving posts on /r/doggrooming/, and Chtorrr was too incompetent to realize that she can see the removed post because she's an admin!
https://rdrama.net/post/89433/reddit-is-cracking-down-on-dog (check out Snappy's snapshots)
I stumbled upon this post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgqh99SHsCv3jJYDS/we-found-an-neuron-in-gpt-2 where the authors explain that they have found a particular "neuron" activations of which are highly correlated with the network outputting article "an" versus "a" (they also found a bunch of other interesting neurons). This made me thinking, people often say that LLMs generate text sequentially, one word at a time, but is that actually true?
I mean, in the literal sense it's definitely true, at each step a GPT looks at the preceding text (up to a certain distance) and produces the next token (a word or a part of a word). But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in between, and as the "an" issue suggests this literal interpretation might be obscuring something very important.
Suppose I ask a GPT to solve a logical puzzle, with three possible answers, "apple", "banana", "cucumber". It seems more or less obvious that by the time the GPT outputs "The answer is an ", it already knows what the answer actually is. It doesn't choose between "a" and "an" randomly, then fit the next word to match the article, it chooses the next word somewhere in its bowels, then outputs the article.
I'm not sure how to make this argument more formal (and force it to provide more insight contrary to the "it autocompletes one word at a time"). Maybe it could be dressed up in statistics, like suppose we actually ask the GPT to choose one of those three plants at random, then we'll see that it outputs "a" 2/3rds of the time, which tells us something.
Or maybe there could be a way to capture a partial state somehow. Like, when we feed the GPT this: "Which of an apple, a banana, and a cucumber is not long?" it already knows the answer somewhere in its bowels, so when we append "Answer without using an article:" or "Answer in Esperanto:" only a subset of the neurons should change activation values. Or maybe it's even possible to discover a set of neurons that activate in a particular pattern when the GPT might want to output "apple" at some point in the future.
Anyway, I hope that I justified my thesis that "it generates text one word at a time" oversimplifies the situation to the point where it might produce wrong intuitions, that when a GPT chooses between "a" and "an" it doesn't yet know which word will follow. While it does output words one at a time, it must have a significant lookahead state internally (which it regenerates every time it needs to output a single word btw).
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Scrapes and cuts, especially scabs, itch too.
It's not comparable at all. A cut doesn't begin to itch until after several days, and don't itch at anywhere the intensity proportional to the affected area. Needle pricks don't itch at all and they are tens or hundreds of times larger by area than mosquito bites. So no, it's evidently a reaction to the anesthetic stuff they inject.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Why do mosquito bites itch?
Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".
I discovered a fascinating thing.
There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.
Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?
But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm
Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):
How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.
Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
I think that what you're looking at is https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ but the "thrive" side are not chill hippies, but the people who compete with their fellow man rather than with sabertooth tigers etc. So "survivalists" like small rigid hierarchies because they are good for surviving a zombie apocalypse, while "thrivists" like huge social hierarchies where they can backstab their way to the top with utter disregard for external reality.
From that point of view "First it's Protestantism (Conformist) vs Catholicism (Conscientious)" gets it exactly backwards.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
One thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that Russian Bots are a paper tiger, probably.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.
I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.
If the cremation of a single body requires a lot of external energy, then why wouldn't that scale with the cremation of 5000 bodies? It absolutely would. The external energy must have a source to sustain hours of cremation.
Have you considered leaving arguing your points to someone better intellectually equipped for that? Because the only thing you have achieved here was making me more sympathetic to SJWs who say that holocaust denialists are too stupid and impervious to logical arguments so instead of engaging them in a marketplace of ideas we should silence them lest they spread their nonsense to other very stupid people. I'm not trying to offend you, I'm honestly informing you about the result your arguments here have achieved.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
That's definitely a position.
There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.
There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
That aside, in real life self-described EAs universally seem to advocate for honesty based on the pretty obvious point that the ability of actors to trust one another is key to getting almost anything done ever, and is what stops society from devolving into a hobbesian war of all-against-all.
There's a problem with that: a moral system that requires you to lie about certain object-level issues also requires you to lie about all related meta-, meta-meta- and so on levels. So for example if you're intending to defraud someone for the greater good, not only you shouldn't tell them that, but if they ask "what if you were in fact intending to defraud me, would you tell me?" you should lie, and if they ask "doesn't your moral theory requires you to defraud me in this situation?" you should lie, and if they ask "does your moral theory sometimes require lying, and if so, when exactly?" you should lie.
So when you see people espousing a moral theory that seems to pretty straightforwardly say that it's OK to lie if you're reasonably sure you're not getting caught, when questioned happily confirm that yeah, it's edgy like that, but then seem to realize something and walk that back, without providing any actual principled explanation for that, like Caplan claims Singer did, then the obvious and most reasonable explanation is that they are lying on the meta-level now.
And then there's Yudkowsky who actually understood the implications early enough (at least by the point SI rebranded as MIRI and scrubbed most of the stuff about their goal being creating the AI first) but can't help leaking stuff on the meta-meta-level, talking about this bayesian conspiracy that, like, if you understand things properly you must understand not only what's at stake but also that you shouldn't talk about it. See Roko's Basilisk for a particularly clear cut example of this sort of fibbing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Everyone in the USA still believes that the USA is the first etc etc. The only thing that matters is the domestic response to foreign posturing. "I'm against America First" is a viable posture in America because nobody in America really believes that America could be anything but first.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers.
There could be other reasons than hidden motives for that. Consider for example that one of the largest debate here recently was about a completely hypothetical situation involving red/blue pills. Or imagine a technical discussion about some software engineering problem, those can get quite heated too.
So, first of all, sufficiently complex problems tend to be like icebergs, with only a small part being easily communicable, and a lot of underwater assumptions, connections, and intuitions that are personal to you.
For example, if the concerts at that place are always on Thursdays which I know because I'm a regular there, and you have never been there before, I'm sure as hell double checking your claim. Or if your answer to the physics problem is not just different from mine but doesn't make any sense given all other stuff I learned about the problem while working on it, I'm likely to start by asking pointed questions about those discrepancies instead of humbly assuming that one of us just made an arithmetic error somewhere and that could as well be me. And of course in case of software engineering, "your approach is going to suck, I feel it in my bones as a result of decades of experience that I can't just spend years relaying to you here"...
Second, that last example doesn't fit into your model even if it does have an underlying conflict of interest. I can 100% honestly believe that my approach is superior for complicated reasons I can't articulate convincingly enough, and I don't want to waste my time implementing your inferior solution, while you honestly believe and feel the exact opposite. So that seems to be a conflict of interest, but we both can easily be 100% open about it because it's actually driven by a factual disagreement.
That's not to disagree with your main thesis, that there's a lot of "bad faith" arguments, so much that it becomes a counterproductive label. But you're both too optimistic and too pessimistic about that, because there's also a lot of hard to reconcile factual disagreements.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
GPT failed me on this, so I'm asking you folks: Find a sci-fi short story about a politician who was denied rejuvenation treatment and started a campaign against it in revenge, only to discover that being elderly he forgot to check mail and missed a letter offering permanent immortality as a space colonist. That plot twist came after he talked to a friend who explained that the only reason the treatment didn't grant permanent immortality was because of the lack of living space, once the space colonization issues were solved everyone would be allowed to become immortal.
I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's not even some psychological bias, it's a legitimate heuristic. A position can be defended with facts/logic/reason or with appeals to authority, social pressure and threats. A position that is true can be defended with both, a position that is false much is easier defended with the latter. If some position is pretty much exclusively defended with the latter, that's a good evidence that it is false.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
But I think there are lessons for the “anti-woke” too. That is, relative age effects are a proof-of-concept for significant arbitrary privilege being a real thing. A fair amount of anti-woke arguments claim that gender and racial disparities may disappear entirely when controlling for confounding variables (e.g. the gender wage gap or the racial policing gap).
My objections have been always on the meta-level: I don't doubt that there are some structural isms, but can we have an honest discussion about how much of inequality of outcomes is due to them and how better to approach that? We can't, and that's bad because I'm pretty sure that in several important aspects the pendulum has swung too far a long time ago and this hurts the supposed beneficiaries of anti-ism discriminatory policies as well, in unexpected ways even. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae#1990s left a lot of black and poor people homeless and with a destroyed credit rating, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Race_and_gender put the majority of educated blacks in the US into a sort of indefinite indentured servitude, and having a 60:40 college+ educated female to male ratio makes dating not very fun for those women. This is what you get if you shut down open discussion because you think that the only problem is evil ciswhitemales and nothing could possibly go wrong if you shut them off and follow the road paved with good intentions.
My cats clearly don't understand how doors work.
They don't even understand that I open doors. One has learned that if she stands with paws on the door and looks at me and meows then the door opens sometimes, but I'm really not sure that she understands that it's I who opens the door, she just knows that "the door's open" tends to happen after "meow near the door". She doesn't understand "push on the door" leads to "door opens", I checked.
How would something like that work for humans? I mean, is it possible to imagine beings that are so above us as we are above cats and who affect our lives in meaningful (open doors etc) but incomprehensible ways? Like I have a literal guardian angel, I pray to it (like my cat meows to me), and then somehow things work out better for me, in an incomprehensible way. How could that work? How could an angel "opening a door" for you appear to a human?
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