popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Interesting. I'll give it a shot.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I’ve started putting my phone in grayscale to reduce distractions/addictiveness. It works quite well I’d recommend other folks try it.
Are you sure it isn't that you've made a conscious effort to be less distracted by your phone, and so you're less distracted by your phone?
This feels like a One Weird Trick, such as my aunt advocating everyone put lemon in their icewater after she lost five pounds in a month. Turns out she was just motivated to lose weight that month, tried a method, and ascribed her (temporary) success to the method rather than the underlying true cause of paying more attention to what she was shoving down her mouth.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Browsing a few pages of twitter I'd say its 15% supportive 85% "they look so uncomfortable" "how could he do this to his family" etc.
I searched "MrBeast Chris" on the Latest tab and I'd say more like 5%/95%. I'm shocked there's no immune response yet. Usually when a transphobia-inspiring event breaks on social media, the trans-rights side of things quickly mobilizes and swarms over the field of battle. They care more.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
To take this beyond my-anecdote vs your-anecdote, higher cognitive ability is associated with more support for free speech across ideologies. But while classical liberals support free speech, not everyone who supports free speech is a liberal.
(I suspect the connection is that smart people hold more beliefs heretical to their in-group, so opposition to punishing heretics is self-interested.)
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It's a troll. He posted a few wacky top-level takes a few weeks ago promising to respond to comments later, and never did.
Probably to expand the audience reach. Seems like a common-sense tactic - bring on people for different demographics to identify with easier
Maybe that's the idea. But when every organism that emerges to dominate a certain niche looks like a crab, it's probably unwise to genetically engineer yourself away from those traits, even if it makes sense on paper.
In hindsight it seems kind of like Ryan's death was the writing on the wall for that site.
Friendly PSA for overweight mottizens. See a doctor if you're over 35 BMI. Normal for Americans does not mean normal.
It happened within a week of his wedding...
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Possible counter example could be Chapo Trap House. They have men and one woman. On an unrelated note I listened to part of two episodes and found it completely unlistenable. Terrible audio content. But it is inexplicably popular as far as podcasts for socialist zoomers go.
The one thing I know about Chapo is that they were the only left-leaning community extreme enough to be banned from Reddit during the 2020 banwave. Quite a feat.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups?
Anecdotal thought. I've noticed that parasocial relationship shows for young losers — usually podcasts — emerge and grow wildly popular with all-male casts. At some point, the viewership numbers make them something of an institution, rather than a garage-band operation. They feel compelled to include a female co-host. The show then reaches cultural eclipse.
Prototypical example: Giant Bomb
There's some level of tension and inhibition that comes with mixed-sex groups. It's not universal and it's hard to prove, because no will admit "I'm afraid of saying something creepy in the presence of a female", but I'm convinced the dynamic is real.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?
Remember The Motte is an intellectual offshot of a movement that finds torturing someone for fifty years to prevent 3^^^3 people from getting dust in their eye a compelling moral dilemma. Ask the average Jane on the street. She'll choose dust and not even think about it.
We're in a filter bubble that selected for people inclined to considerations like "the realistic alternative to a new nuclear plant now is coal, and coal emissions will cause Y QALYs lost to cancer, compared to Z risk of a nuclear accident causing a few thousand deaths and making a 30mi by 30mi area around the plant uninhabitable for 3000~ years". Even doing these calcuations mentally and filling in made-up statistics, I think the case for nuclear ends up looking rosy.
Most people, even most pro-nuclear people, do not think this way.
I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
It's no surprise that AI experts struggle to refute Yud, and the strength of his argument isn't the reason. They're actual quokkas, getting bullied by a slightly dysfunctional and small-toothed, but trueborn sociopath. There hasn't been a bigger fish in the pond simply because more gifted and charismatic sociopaths pursued better feeding grounds.
That's really interesting. I came to SSC for the culture war stuff, not AI risk, and never spent much energy evaluating the "Big Yud is a fraud" claim that's been floating around since forever. It makes sense that there would be a food chain of clout chasers, though I never thought of it in quite those terms. Socially unimportant pools attract the least impressive scavengers.
Yud never worked for pay in his life, of course. Now I wonder who this reminds me of, there was some guru-like theorist of labour and stuff...
I feel that's a bit unfair. While Marx was a NEET who indrectly caused more deaths than Genghis Khan, he didn't free-ride off other theorists who actually invented his ideas while barely understanding them. Marx cooked that souffle himself, for better or worse...
I can see why Scott cut the posters here out of the loop.
Scott is still on good terms with The Motte AFAIK. He even offered to host ads for the site after our migration. We parted ways because people who disliked the Culture War thread harassed him and IRL swatted him.
The comic is an extremely popular meme representation of the pattern I'm talking about. I don't endorse the particulars of it, but do think what it descibes is basically true. The pattern is: thing-focused nerdy quokkas assemble in a space, build something socially powerful, and then the space is subsequently colonized by people-focused power-seeking outsiders. See: Silicon valley culture, 90s to present. (A tragedy described in a certain paranoid rant) And in a million little nerdy hobbies. (This being the farce.)
And if you think you need to have bad social skills as a precursor to being good at things, reevaluate your model of the world.
I do think bad social skills are deeply correlated with a certain type of raw creative energy. They are also correlated with being a quokka. This leads to getting Edisoned as a Tesla.
It's too many times in my life I've found out, on investigation, that my biggest programmer and intellectual heroes are poorly dressed weirdos who literally eat shit out of their toes, for example. Or look like Scott or Yud IRL. These sorts of highly capable misfits get shunted off to the side when it's time for an invention/hobby/movement to go mainstream.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
As much as I'd like to make an Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte joke, I don't think this is a case of an earnest nerd space getting coopted by trend-chasers. Most of those comments don't read to me as saying "Like, yikes. NERD", but rather, they want his arguments taken seriously and wish he'd present himself better for the normies.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
What would happen to the crime rate? Would is barely budge? Double? 10x?
Society would fragment into smaller units that would have their own ways of addressing crime. Probably with something like the Taliban demanding tribute, adjudicating disputes, and lynching wrongdoers. For violent conflicts between these units, society would reinvent a slavery/genocide choice for the conquered such as you saw in the classical world. There'd be very little violent crime as we think of it, but a whole lot of war.
More likely, the government would fall to a coup and start policing violent crime again.
Asking what would happen to the crime rate in a state with no police is like asking what would happen to interest rates in an economy that abolished money. A state with no police is not enforcing a monopoly on violence, and so is not a state.
I wrote this entire post without chatGPT, to prove something I guess. It took hours. I had to look up some new concepts, read enough to understand them, revisit old essays I read, and review them to refresh my memory. After all that, I had to use my dumb fingers to tap buttons on my dumb keyboard, over and over again.
I'm the idiot holding the hand axe. I'm the imbecile mangling my shins with rock debris. Why bother?
This feels premature. Your post is still more interesting than anything I've read that I know to be generated by GPT. Just look at the paragraph above this. In about a hundred words, you spontaneously generated and peppered in about a dozen evocative analogies and metaphors that GPT is terrible at. And that's hardly the only place GPT struggles.
You may be useless eventually, but for now LLMs are a labor saving tool. The better comparison for now is that you need to pick up and learn to use the chainsaw. It doesn't know where to point itself, yet.
We may in fact be entering a golden age of hobbyists creating art/mods/open source software projects. Many times in my life I've thought "Wow, I have a really cool idea for X", but to actually implement X would require me spending 100+ hours mastering some boring technical skills like obscure markup languages or a certain style of pixel art. With AI image generation and LLMs? You'll be able to marshal your special (for now!) human creativity and intuition and let this fancy chainsaw cut through all the boring wood for you.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I agree that we probably don't get doom from literally just stacking more layers. The concerning thing is that these seem like easier problems to solve than I would have expected getting computers to understand concepts would be. I still think we are at least one or two BIG breakthroughs from true AGI (the kind that makes humans obsolete). Those could come tomorrow, or they could come 10 years from now, or never.
This is the way I think about it, too. Despite popular fears, Deep Blue was never going to reach AGI no matter how much you refined its algorithm or how much computing power you gave it. Chess, like writing a five paragraph essay, was a test we used to measure the unobserved variable of intelligence, so people assumed that once a machine could play chess as well as humans (or research and write a five paragraph essay as well as humans), humans were presently donezo. But that unobserved variable is a tricky thing to define, and so, to engineer.
Every year offers a small chance that someone grasps the key insight that yields an AI capable of recursive self-improvement. But it's unpredictable when this insight will arrive. We don't know the shape of the thing we're fumbling for.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I prefer effortposts being top level whether they're responses or not. Otherwise they get buried.
That said I'd support a rate limit on top level posts for certain topics. Do we need three Holocaust revisionism subthreads in a single week? I get the impression this conversation is driven by 1.5 cranks who care about the topic and lots of other people who can't bring themselves to shrug and leave their arguments unaddressed.
I mean, this just seems like it totally gives up on deciding what sort of impact climate change itself will have on your country.
One would think, maybe rather optimistically, that environmental policies are, well, about the environment? Surely the actual environment has to come into it somewhere. Instead, this sounds like the only question is the political struggle - for the sake of itself.
That's the way politics actually work, though. I'm not implying that's how it "should" work, and I guess if you had to ask me one way or another, climate change is a serious issue that "should" be adressed — all the little Finlands in the world "should" virtuously decarbonize as China increases its daily burn of oil by 500k barrels/day per year, and all the little Finnish politicians "should" spend their political capital on climate action rather than own hobby horses or policies to earn them votes, and all the little Finnish voters "should" cast ballots to impoverish themself for the Greater Good while American SUVs get bigger by the year. That's not how it goes. People are not willing to set themselves on fire to warm up a room that's slowly getting colder.
Dan Ariely is discredited as a behavioural economist but I agree with everything he says here. People don't care about climate change. This isn't because they're lying, but because it's almost psychologically impossible to care. When activists agitate for climate action, it's mostly in service of something they actually do care about, like dismantling capitalism or dunking on conservatives who don't believe the science. When voters vote for climate change, it's to assuage a vague worry in their stomach; that vague worry immediately goes to the nether realm when economic hardship or another emotionally salient issue emerges.
Political parties have to respond to what their constituencies want, or Moloch destroys them. What their constituencies want is to know that Something Is Being Done™, not for something to actually be done, at cost. It's the same reason they put up useless plexiglass and had you wear masks to your restaurant table during Covid. It's the same reason towns across the US make a huge fuss about their recyclying programs and separating your various types of garbage, when 90% of it ends up landfills halfway across the world anyway.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Having said that, I've recently moved away from thinking big corporations make woke decisions only because it directly improves their profit. It's hard to explain things like really aggressive diversity hiring at tech companies.
So leaving ESG scores aside.
There's an easy Scylla and Charybdis metaphor to be made for companies deciding their level of wokeness. If a company acquiesces to internal activists with zero hesitancy, it ends up as a "Go Woke Go Broke" anecdote. On the other hand, if it ignores the social justice zeitgeist entirely, it stands out as a tall nail to be hammered down by lawsuits or activist fury.
As for really aggressive diversity hirers? They're just sailing a little too close to Charybdis. This might happen because it's safer/more satisfying for the people in charge of hiring, though not for the organization they work for.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
the main culture war in Finland still is basically what could be described as "environmentalism vs. standard middle-class way of life", ie. whether the so called green shift and strict climate targets are electorally compatible with people's fears over losing their job, seeing costs of living (fuel, electricity, food etc.) go up, and generally whether environmentalism is just an urban academic fad incompatible with normie life, particularly in rural areas.
The dilemma facing progressive parties everywhere is that while saying "We need to address climate change" is popular, measures to address climate change aren't. In recent years, Covid has good and well emptied people's tank of virtuous self-sacrifice. Even if it hadn't, climate change doesn't present a visible immediate threat like Covid did. If you mess with food and fuel prices, the apolitical masses will leave the sideline.
The ideal strategy, of course, is to pay lip-service to the cause, pass a few paper straw initiatives, and let be. Unfortunately, this strategy risks you getting overrun by True Believers who grab the wheel and try to steer you into an iceberg. (See: "Defund the police")
The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate.
I'm all for analogies between America and late Republican Rome. But one difference that gives me pause is that American elites seem pretty damn united. In Republican Rome, the consulship and other elected positions were the height of prestige, and elites would stab each other in the back to win them. Many populares were not true believers. They were opportunists. For example, Crassus, who bankrolled Caesar in his early career and became a triumvir, hardly screams "champion of the people".
In our timeline, political office is not particularly prestigious. Very few of the uber-elite aspire to be president, with Trump being a rare example of one who did. So while Trump was willing to take up the banner of rust-belters and hillbillies and come at the king, who's the next clout-chaser with his resources who will? Elon?
All this Rome talk puts Mike Duncan on the brain. I basically agree with him that "a unified ruling class is a tough nut to crack."
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Welcome. I'd recommend you take this post into the shop and try again, you'll probably get a more interesting response.
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This would be more appropriate in the Culture War Roundup thread.
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You're saying something with a massive inferential distance from what most people talk about around here. Try to anticipate and address in advance common objections like the one @Mewis brought up (why the peak of conventional oil didn't translate to peak oil, why EROI is an insurmountable challenge that technology can't address, etc)
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Links use this format: [inferential distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances)
Things like lemons in your drinking water are not placebos, they're red herrings. What is "working" is your mindfulness towards the problem you're working at. As soon as that mindfulness fades, you start focusing on your career rather than your weight, the lemon in water is revealed to have been doing nothing. You could have been trying any approach — eating only purple foods, restricting nightshades, activating your almonds, etc
The "gains" you got from putting lemon in your icewater evaporate. And in your eagerness to evangelize the lemon-in-water method on your Facebook feed, you've polluted everyone's information ecosystem and distracted people from approaches that might work durably.
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