popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Defining AGI would mean defining intelligence, which I can't do.
For my purposes, AGI is when you can put multiple humans and a chatbot in an IRC channel, offer a cash reward to identify the chatbot, and the humans do not accuse the actual chatbot at a disproportionate rate.
GPT4 passes the Turing test only if the human isn't examining it all that closely.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I was thinking of linking @FiveHourMarathon's response to you but didn't have the energy to search.
Wasn't this a fake?
I strongly suspect this is fake. Notably "They have homes, family & friends. Tyrants threaten us with bombs? Just remember, they have moms!"
This feels like a novel creative leap between concepts that I don't ever see in ChatGPT output. Specifically in the mind of the writer: "We can't win a straight up firefight against the airforce -> try terrorism? -> maybe target politicians' families -> write something into the poem about Moms".
I haven't yet spit out the $20 to test drive GPT-4, but in my experience it doesn't do creativity of this kind.
EDIT: This was in February, before GPT-4. GPT-3 cannot even handle cadence and iambs. It's fake, Jim.
First off, I'm well aware of the perils of the availability heuristic.That said, I have been hearing convincing-sounding warnings of imminent disaster my whole life. Is this your first panic of this kind? Some doomer warnings I still believe are, at their kernel, true. But the future doesn't arrive as quickly as you think.
And let's say I'm wrong and the future does arrive quick, singularity style. This is a future you can't prepare for. With climate change or peak resources, you could at least take up homesteading and buy guns and land in Canada. Afraid of nuclear war? Build a fallout shelter. Etc etc.
There is nothing you can do to prepare for singularity even if the doomer warnings you're hearing are true. If people with coding jobs are in big trouble everyone's in big trouble. Let be.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Lizzardspawn is saying that 40%~ of women polled with low body counts aren't divorcing because they can't abandon the one guy who was willing to take them. So, the common cause of low divorce rate and low body counts is desperation, rather than chastity or high relationship ethics.
I do not find this interpretation of the data convincing as, in my experience, 40% of women in their teens and twenties do not struggle to find partners willing to bed them.
Yes, though I wasn't keeping up with those house cleaning + social life + family obligations you speak of. Easy peasy computer job with time for eg Reddit browsing, though that didn't help with novel writing. Too many interruptions. You need to block out time to get anywhere.
I may be contradicting myself, but the time commitment isn't that crazy — reserving an hour a day for pure writing got me there after a year. It's just that the time you spend is not pleasant at all. Writing a novel is a vacuum cleaner for spare mental energy. You're thinking all day how you're going to translate a few bullet points into a chapter. And then you type your thoughts, one by one, in grueling ego battle. Often you end up staring at a page of work you grunted out and thinking, wow, this is worthless, I'm probably going to cut this in editing. And you do.
Not very fun compared to spending that same time browsing The Motte.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.
The "uncertainty of paternity" exception remains in effect because it's socially taboo to ask for genetic verification of paternity. And even so, the husband may still be liable for alimony after a divorce caused by infidelity.
It remains important to be convinced in the reliability of your partner before marriage. Low body count is an honest signal for that worry. (Although, like other honest signals, it's unreliable and can be faked.)
popocatepetl
2yr ago
“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”
I wrote a 100k word novel once, and it was worth it. But it was also an incredible volume of work. The highs are very high, but most of the writing process is tedious. I don't blame GRRM and others for wanting to "be" a writer, without, you know.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I admire the Farseer books, although I found them frustrating as a boy. The weakest parts are, as you say, the hamfisted social commentary. Hobb could not have been more blatant about the analogy between closeted gays and wit-bonders if she tried.
What fascinated me was her anti-fantasy approach. From just the plot synopsis, FitzChilvary seems to have gone on a standard set of fantasy adventures and achieved a standard set of fantasy great deeds. And yet he never gains status. Near the very end of the series, he is the equivalent of the CNA in a group care home. No one knows his name. Those who do have a low opinion of it.
But Hobb doesn't present any wallowing by FitzChivalry as valid. He was acting out of selfless intentions, not for personal glory... right?
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners?
Given how politically charged the topic is, it's more useful to look at how people act rather than what they claim. Women lie downward about their number of sexual partners. Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status?
Do you believe women are just being paranoid?
but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much
I don't think this demonstrates that. Relationship success for women is about quality of partner instead of whether they can marry. Or even exclude "for women" if you find that controversial. Lower your standards enough and practicially anyone can marry.
Another thought. Male-oriented romances do exist in droves, but they tend to be chameleons. One, it's easy to mischaracterize a male-oriented romance ("Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.") as a novel about X. Second, the flipside of the open secret that females are hypergamous is that males want to sleep around, or at least be the sort of man who is able to sleep around but virtuously declines. In male-oriented romances, the protagonist will have one madonna they want to prove themselves to, and a gaggle of discreet admirers.
To give an example, Name of the Wind is secretly male Twilight.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
romance novel for men: man wants woman, ends up doing X to get her?
Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.
romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him
Man courts woman with low self esteem. Man has severe character flaw or skeletons in closet. Man fixes woman's self esteem, woman fixes man.
I do think people have an ethical obligation not to be politically militant on subjects where they haven't done the legwork. The "time" required depends on the subject.
What makes you say the time should differ? Presumably, if I need to research something, I can find the relevant meta-reviews and literature overviews fairly quickly if its a non-history field.
Important political questions are a bundle of (a) values, and (b) a gobsmacking number of empirical claims. To become a militant advocate of minimum wage increase/abolition probably requires a modest investigation into whether it affects job creation, consumer prices, and skill aquisition, as well as interrogating your values on deploying state power against voluntary exchanges and transferring wealth between classes. To become a militant advocate of radical economic changes like communism or georgism, on the other hand, should require an almost unfathomable amount of research into the science of economics and investigation into the values underpinning our status quo.
One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job an
I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run.
Antebellum figures in the Deep South used a version of that argument (laced with an assumption of elite superiority) -- civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO. Serfs/slaves were made unnecessary by technological improvements.
However, more common was the argument that the franchise should be restricted to those with a fixed stake in the country, who wouldn't simply vote themselves unsustainable handouts from the treasury. See: the Putney Debates.
EDIT: It appears I misread you and just popped off on something on my mind. I'll leave it here anyway. See the last paragraph for a thought on your actual question
Virtually any altruistic use of time would be more ethically sound. Zero effort.
I believe voting would work better like jury duty, where a small representative sample of the population is picked and make it their full time job to become politically informed. Of course, this annuls one of the main adaptive benefits of a democracy, which is giving people a "Close Door" elevator button to press when they're frustrated which usually does nothing.
I do think people have an ethical obligation not to be politically militant on subjects where they haven't done the legwork. The "time" required depends on the subject.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
That's explanation 3b-1.
In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.
This is a misunderstanding of fat tailed distributions. The mean (can't find the median) life expectancy was even worse, but this is because child mortality <5yo approached 30%. I can't find the adult mortality rate in India then (that is, the chances of dying between 15-60) but generally in history those who escaped early childood had a reasonable shot at gray hairs.
However, from evolution's perspective, it's true that the psychology of the female past the early 40s is likely pretty irrelevant. She has raised any offspring past the critical period. Maybe there is some selection effect from her acting as a wise grandmother.
Male psychology, though, remains important until old age. The male "mid life crisis" coincides with his wife's menopause, so you could infer evopsych is working specifically against lifelong monogamy.
EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing
Nah he's not a troll. I think he's adopting a "woke is more correct than the mainstream" view that we do actually care about keeping whites on top of the totem pole, and should stop deluding ourselves and pretending like our objections are colorblind. I don't agree, but I'm not sure I want to counter his deductions because it seems like a convo where I'll be psychoanalyzed at every step.
EDIT Or maybe I spoke too soon...
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue.
I happen to be re-reading Atlas Shrugged through audiobook on x1.5 speed mostly out of spite for its anti-fans. I appreciate her depiction of a communist dystopia which is, if anything, less dystopic than the real thing. But it's driving me insane how much her "greed is good" pitch relies on her putting pro-charity arguments in the mouths of the most snivelling hypocritical wretches you ever met, while having callipygian I-invented-calculus-at-age-twelve gigachads tell you how they only work for money.
It would be so much the better book if she left it as "yeah, communism sounds nice but everything falls apart."
but little Billy doesn't own the house in common, neither legally nor in reality.
"Own" is a contract with the larger society. Billy gets to live in it and use it and the things in it in accordance to his needs. Dad pays the mortgage and does 80% of the yardwork in accordance with his abilities. If Billy shatters his spine and becomes paraplegic, he can do 0% of the work and not only will his claim to the resources of the house not be threatened, it will increase and Stacey will be expected to pick up the slack and forgo things she used to get that the house can no longer afford.
The bit that seems interesting to me is that this could plausibly boil down to evo-psych. Maybe we're communists at heart because we're evolved for communism? Large societies are pretty recent, after all...
Below Dunbar's number, we're all communists, and it works. Your family is a commune.
The higher you go above Dunbar's number, the harder it becomes to detect and handle defectbots.
Then, at scale, sub-dunbar units within the society themselves become defectbots. You can see the collapse of communism by looking at societies as they scale in size, from bands to tribes to chiefdoms and then states.
If you don't care about race there is no reason to care about Aragorn being black any more than that there is reason for you to care that the hero is destined to become king.
It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.
You're being a little too glib in dismissing "we just don't want the character changed" and "we want verisimilitude in a medieval western european setting" as motivations. For the first, I'd love a test case where hollywood whitewashes an iconic black character (say, Morpheus) to see if it inspires the same indignation in me. Hollywood has yet to indulge.
As for the second.... it's a turnoff to me that modern fantasy depicts societies where the ethnic makeup makes no goddamn sense. A well-realized setting is the draw of the genre. I want fantasy settings where the creator has designed the entire history of their world, far past what could possibly be useful, and then writes a plot set in that world. Back in the day Morrowind had relatively few white people, and none in the uncolonized bedouin interior, and I loved it; everything in the world was carefully considered. Modern studio fantasy writers, though, don't write like this. They reason backwards from the requirements of their story. Aragon must be black, not because the creator thought of the migration patterns of the Numenoreans coming from the tropics of whatever, but because... he's just black, okay? End of story.
The fact they don't care about the internal logic of the setting bleeds into everything else in worldbuilding. Rings of Power was not shit because Harfoots were racially diverse; it was shit because the writers were the sort of people who didn't care why the Harfoots would be racially diverse.
That's just what mainstream democrats believe is happening. Search "Rosa Parks" on Reddit, where a story is making the rounds that textbooks in Florida are scrubbing all references to race in the Rosa Parks story. (Some side-by-side examples are included in this article.)
The real story is that the editors on the textbook publisher's staff went way overboard in interpreting the law (I suspect intentionally), which only forbids teaching that "any group is inherently racist, implies a person can be considered oppressed because of their race, or infers that one should feel guilty because of actions committed by members of their same race." This sort of nuance does not make the main articles, let alone the headlines, so most people will never see it.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this.
I think about this a fair bit. Here's a minddump of theories I've heard. (Yours is 3a-1)
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Intentionally creating controversy
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as a marketing device
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as a hedge against criticism
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Purity spirals in the writer's room
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because an oversupply of creatives is making creatives snipe at each other
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because "wokes" drove "non-wokes" out and cancer naturally gets cancer and dies
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Wanting to overwrite the classics
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because they can't create anything good of their own
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due to remakes being safe and lucrative, and raceswapping justifies remakes.
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due to a religious zealot/political commissar's mindset inhibiting creativity
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because they want to merge minorities into the western cultural tradition
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for the minorities, who feel no connection to our medieval, victorian, or western stories because they were slaves/tribesmen.
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for whites, who might otherize minorities if they're not present in popular classics.
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because they want to propagandize The Great Replacement, etc
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They hate you
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because creatives are blue tribe, and pissing you off pleases them.
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because they see certain genres as watering holes where undesirables gather and want to colonize and disrupt those spaces
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Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?
Eventually, cultural differences between CurrentYear and the 1980s will grow too great for most to enjoy its media. How many books do you read from before 1920? If social justice envelops the institutions that produce popular culture, their values will become difficult to escape. In the past few years I've seen even novelists, who should be most insulated from institutional takeover, kowtow. And I've heard grumblings about something needing to be done about media from Japan, etc.
I see your point but I think @non_radical_centrist has one, too. Let's say we develop an AI that perfectly emulates a 70 IQ human named
LLM-BIFF. That's general intelligence. Set all super-computers on earth to runLLM-BIFF. DoesLLM-BIFFrecursively self-improve itself to becomeLLM-SHODAN?There must be a narrow window of AI sophistication in which we have a generally intelligent program, but nevertheless one not intelligent enough to bootstrap itself and trigger a singularity. Whether this window lasts one iteration of AI development or much longer is the question.
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