raakaa
2yr ago
Apparently, that extension doesn’t support Mandarin or Japanese (among other languages), so I refrained from suggesting it (in case the OP’s primary use case for Twitter translation is, say, understanding what Japanese artists are saying on their feeds).
Regardless, the fact that it works locally for the languages that it does support is still a testament to the pace of NLP research. How does it compare to something like DeepL, in terms of translation quality?
raakaa
2yr ago
It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.
raakaa
2yr ago
In the article is a quote from the LARPing group’s own self-description:
"Our LARP explores the mythos of the American Dream - or more so the Broken American Dream. Players experience human stories, portraying characters with unique backgrounds. They face their daily life and the issues that come with it. Some are universal or similar to the ones in Poland (such as struggling to provide for your family or combating addiction), and some are specific to the U.S. (such as reliance on private health care or the prevalence of firearms). We wanted to create an immersive experience about facing those hardships both as an individual and as a community, about making impossible choices, about finding your place in your small homeland.
Emphasis mine. Whether it’s outright mockery or something more sympathetic isn’t so easy to tell from just the article (the quoted description makes it seem the latter, the donut-wielding cop provides evidence for the former), but even if the LARPers talk about the universality of the American redneck struggle, I still don’t read this as an identification with redneck culture itself. And it’s certainly not a celebration.
raakaa
2yr ago
Yep, that’s the big irony. Of course, the most parsimonious way you can analyze it is as an out-group/far-group thing: Middle Easterners are the far-group, Anglophone anti-LGBTers are the out-group.
raakaa
2yr ago
But that’s not the point of painting the bench rainbow-colored in the first place. It’s not just that the activists painting the bench would personally prefer to see a rainbow bench— they’re explicitly doing so in order for other people to see it. “We’re loud, we’re proud” and all that. If such augmented reality goggles emerged with an option to display the bench brown, then that would be tarred as homophobic.
In fact, this hypothetical almost perfectly recalls that actual time when mods for a Spiderman game that removed rainbow flags from the game were scrubbed from all mainstream modding websites.
raakaa
2yr ago
Jews and Muslims won’t accept the idea of compromise or shirk because they have true book and therefore you simply cannot violate the book and be a good believer.
The problem comes when you can find increasingly contorted justifications using the book to (attempt to) excuse whatever behavior you want. For example, this article describes how the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, a rather large organization of rabbis adhering to the movement/branch of Conservative Judaism, voted on specific rituals to be used in gay Jewish weddings. While the rabbis do pay lip-service to the Book, they ignore its spirit. For example:
“We acknowledge that these partnerships are distinct from those discussed in the Talmud as ‘according to the laws of Moses and Israel,’” said Nevins, referring to the words used in kiddushin, “but we celebrate them with the same sense of holiness and joy as that expressed in heterosexual marriages.”
So yes, there is an acknowledgement that these marriages aren’t quite by the Book— but who really cares, there’s still the holiness and joy, and certainly no reference to Leviticus 18:22. And by the way, sufficient wordcelery will do away with that prohibition directly.
That’s why Kulak, in this article, seems to be emphasizing not the Book so much as the culture. Words can be twisted; culture cannot.
Indeed, the poster two replies up doesn’t seem to be stating this prescriptively, but others explicitly do. For instance, consider this famous speech delivered by Robert Heinlein at the U.S. Naval Academy to soon-to-be officers: he explicitly says that male sacrifice is a moral duty because a tribe deprived of men can survive, while one without women and children is doomed for extinction. (I’d provide an exact quote, but for some reason, pasting isn’t working on iOS. God bless Apple; it really just works.)
raakaa
2yr ago
The thing about lockdowns, at least in the U.S., is that their continued existence after COVID was found to be non-lethal wasn’t merely a costly mistake, but a form of political imprisonment. This may sound dramatic; let me explain.
In May 2020, police were kicking kids out of playgrounds in my blue town while marches and protests in memory of George Floyd were not only allowed, but encouraged. Remember, The Science declared that “racism is a bigger public health issue than COVID”. This unmasked (heh) the true nature of the lockdowns: citizens were imprisoned unless they were to participate in Party-approved political functions. Note that I do not suggest that the lockdowns were concocted from the beginning in order to achieve this aim; no cabal of doctors got together and crafted this plan back in March. But the effect of the lockdowns was equivalent to political imprisonment.
That’s why I have more anger towards the lockdown and its proponents than I would harbor if they were merely another entry in the list of costly mistakes committed by our technocrat rulers. It is precisely because they were wielded as a political weapon that they ought be scorned as one.
raakaa
2yr ago
Being charitable, let's consider this post in the context of (pseudo-?)Impassionata's previous top-level post post-return to TheMotte:
[R]ighteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity [sic] of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.
To me, the argument seems to be as follows. "Only nerds think of humans as rational agents", so they are blind to their own irrational or unjust impulses. Thus, when they follow the proper script for interacting with girls, they think that they ought be rewarded for acting in accordance with this rational system of "rules". As such, when they are justly pushed into a locker instead, they have no clue why. The hero jock, on the other hand, is able to cut through the bullshit, understand the nerd's diabolical motives for what they are (motives that the nerd has successfully wordcel'd himself into not even understanding himself), and intuitively punish him for this, stepping outside the bounds of reason.
Now, Control-F nerds with heterodox high-decouplers, who coolly and rationally debate the viability of ethnostates or the lack of consciousness in women. Any convincing arguments put forth are nothing but mere post-hoc rationalizations of preexisting evil beliefs, just as the nerd's talking-to-women script is merely a means of covering up impure desires. It's similar to the whole "Elephant in the Brain" thesis: any debate is not meant to arrive at the truth, but rather, to persuade others and even oneself that their own cause is the truth. As such, it is the role of the just person to ignore all of this reasoned argumentation and use whatever tools are necessary in order to silence hateful views.
...
I personally am skeptical of this thesis. Is conversation and debate really that futile? If so, then pseudo-Impassionata is wasting his time by engaging in conversation and debate here. Even he must recognize then, assuming that he's not just trolling or motivated by a primal desire to win online arguments, that there is utility in debate. At the very least, it can cut away the cruft that accumulates on top of an issue, revealing the fundamental loci of disagreement beneath. But I won't waste time on this, because more has been better written on this subject.
Instead, I'll indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis: what's with this common theme of bullying nerds? Indeed, a while back, either here or in one of our previous venues, there was a post noticing a tendency for masculine posturing among a certain subset of progressives, a fixation on positioning themselves in apposition to loser dork hateful nerds. I believe that the post was written in the context of reproductively viable worker ants, which makes the fixation ironic: anyone involved in that has to be blind to not see that they're a nerd. So what gives? One hypothesis is that it's an attempt by Theater Kids (I would be grateful to anyone who knows where the comment introducing that framing is) to gain some amount of status by putting down the other group that seems to inhabit the same rung of the social ladder, Math Geeks. This would explain both the odd posturing and the focus on the "Hollywood" (as anti_dan put it above) narrative of jocks versus nerds. Maybe throw in that one "high school is the last time in your life that you can be someone" comment as well? (Again, I'd be grateful to anyone with a link.)
I don't know how much this hypothesis is actually worth anything. But in an effort to avoid merely sneering, I'll flesh it out a bit: I do think that an underrated determinant of which side Very Online people take in the Culture War is the degree to which they enjoy playing social games. Anecdotal evidence:
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In my own experience, one of the factors that repelled me from Team Progress was noticing that the rules offered by progressives for dating as a man do not align with the actions of the most successful men.
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A post (again, I don't have the link) on morlock-holmes.tumblr.com that I remember reading talked about a play, which was to star a white male lead, in which the playwright queried a diverse group of progressives on how to write this straight white male; the answers were all things like "Make him a good listener", "Make sure he stays in his lane", "Make him active in ceding to women's insights". The kicker is that when the play was finished, all the same members of the group hated the lead for his annoying lack of backbone.
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That one comment here on TheMotte saying that when whites move into a neighborhood, it's gentrification; when whites move out, it's white flight; when whites live among PoC, it's colonization; when whites live apart, it's segregation: so where are whites supposed to live?
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The frequent thesis that the constant "firmware updates" for progressive terminology are important from a status signaling perspective.
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The "self-hating" whites from "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" who don't actually hate all whites.
The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments. If you're the kind of guy who can recite a litany of rules for dating without slipping up, but then know exactly when to break them in practice, then you're rewarded by progressivism: your less-adept competition is filtered out. If you're able to tolerate and write screeds against whites despite being white yourself, then you're rewarded: you draw suspicion towards less-progressive whites, while proving that you are "one of the good ones". If you can orate against the evil of toxic masculinity while still being able to take charge when it counts, then you're rewarded by progressivism.
Hence why Theater Kids are more progressive and why Math Geeks, who axiomatize and theorem-prove, are more likely to fall into heterodoxy. It's no surprise, then, that the progressive is arguing via indirect social shaming ("you all are nerds who deserve to be shoved into lockers by Cool Jocks like me") against rational debate.
Does this idea make sense? Does it accord with your own experiences?
raakaa
2yr ago
Very reasonable analysis. Thinking about the younger second-generation/first-generation-but-moved-at-a-young-age Chinese immigrants that I know, they tend to be rather anti-CCP (and although that doesn’t necessarily mean “pro-America”, it counts for something). And on the flipside, as you said, I’ve met young whites who are very careful to not say anything that might be recorded as being anti-China, lest it impair a future career eastward.
I suppose that in my original post, I was thinking more along the lines of young progressive second-generation immigrants I’ve met (often Latino) who loudly proclaim the evils of America (think “woke”, not “tankie”), put on affected accents, and declare their intent to return to their mother country — eventually. But lots of these progressive values that manifest as anti-Americanism are fundamentally American, and in the anecdotal cases I was remembering, it doesn’t look like the fabled return to the motherland is coming any time soon. I guess that I was conflating Blue-Tribe-ism with anti-Americanism.
There was the Ni’ihau Incident, in which the Japanese-Americans on the island immediately went to help the downed pilot — but in the context of, for example, the 442nd Infantry Regiment, this one incident can likely be counted as a rounding error.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder whether changing attitudes towards assimilationism also change the calculus. My cursory intuition: immigrants were far more pushed to assimilate back in the ‘30s and ‘40s than they are in these ‘20s, where metaphors like the “melting pot” are derided, the very notion of a “cricket test” is tarred as racist, and having a non-American (or better yet: non-Western) culture and family living in their Old Country is treated as a sign of moral worth. As such, I’d expect the number of “would-be-treacherous immigrants” to have risen.
(I recognize that this last bit contains a large number of rather unfounded assertions; I would like to provide concrete examples and details, but alas, phoneposting won’t allow me to do so.)
raakaa
2yr ago
In other news, Forbes did this hit piece on Emad because of... reasons?
Paranoid conspiracy time: there's a large push in the ML world to limit the access that the public has to powerful models. Lots of this is couched in the language of "AI safety", but this term tends to be used less in the Yudkowskian "you've been transmogrified into a paperclip!" sense and more in the "it is unsafe if your model says anything that would make your modal San Franciscan feel icky" [1]. Because we don't want people using AI to output wrongthink or insufficiently-diverse generations [2], we must have strong gatekeepers preventing tous pollous from using these models to engage in harmful and/or toxic behavior. Naturally, the journalists at Forbes are cut from the same political cloth as our AI safety guardians. They too recognize the danger that AI-powered hate speech and hate images can pose.
Enter Emad "Prometheus" Mostaque. He gives the plebs access to an image-generation model that enables them to spit out all the non-diverse, objectified pin-up bimbos that they want. This is the exact fear, finally come to pass! Therefore, is it any wonder the journalists would seek to discredit Mostaque? Failing to do so could mean that his next project, whatever it may be, succeeds, and allows an even greater torrent of unsafe content to be spewed onto the net. Given these beliefs, it's only rational to attack the man.
[1] For an example of what "safety" means in practice, check out the old LaMDA paper from Google, in which the model fine-tuned for "safety" no longer says that it is understandable why people would be opposed to same-sex marriage; it instead vocally supports it. Anthropic's RLHF paper has its further-lobotomized model make a strong denunciation against plastic straws as well. These might not seem like a lot, but it's clear which side these models are playing for. Additionally, note that "safety" is used as an explicit rationale for not releasing models; OpenAI says as much in their GPT4 paper.
[2] Recall that DALL-E 2 was found to be modifying humans' prompts in order to add characters of specific races to the image outputs. The original post in that reddit thread was, of course, deleted, but I remember the evidence being pretty compelling (Gwern ended up weighing in at one point).
raakaa
2yr ago
Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.
Here's a claim I'll put out there: men are already largely valued by how much women want to have sex with them. Or speaking more precisely, there are certain markers of social fluency / status / desirability that matter more, when it comes to making snap social judgments regarding a man's value, than his skills and abilities. This is where you get anecdotes like this one related in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, in which the nuclear scientist's girlfriend laughs at his attempt to demonstrate value through his (scientific) skills and abilities. Or alternatively, all the scoffing and schadenfreude-ing at Minecraft creator Notch for leading a life of loneliness despite creating the best-selling video game in history (although that can be argued to be driven by sour grapes ("I might not be friggin' rich like him, but at least I get poon!") and general antipathy towards his politics). Actually, it might be more apt to say in men's case that they are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them.
[ Note, by the way, that I'm talking about "value" here rather than "success" (the latter of which I'm taking to mean "success in a corporate / academic / career context", given that words like "skills and abilities" and "success" tend to be used more in that domain these days rather than, for instance "skills and abilities as a parent" or "skills and abilities as a Little League coach"), because I don't believe that career success and the like for women is all too tied to sex appeal. Here's an anecdote, but most high-achieving Women In STEM that I see are not lookers, to say the least. I've heard similar from people in other "intelligence-heavy" (so to speak) fields such as law. Now, maybe the situation is different in more public-facing or "soft-skills"-heavy roles like marketing or management - but frankly, we know that men in those areas are also selected for attractiveness. So if the claim is that women are only able to advance in their careers to the extent that they're attractive, then that's a claim that I personally don't buy. (I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.) ]
But returning to the original idea: if women value me because they all wanted to have sex with me - well, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world by me. Of course, one could note that sex is for men what commitment is for women, and say that a fairer analogy would be to say "how would you feel if women valued you to the extent that they found you emotionally useful?" In that case, I wouldn't be quite as happy; but to say that this analogy would be fairer would be to ignore a key component of what it means for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman. It's the same component that's ignored when women get mad at guys for asking them on dates after a long period of friendship: "Uggh, he only wanted to use me for sex?" No: for a man (going by my own experiences and those of other men I know), when you're attracted to a woman sexually, then everything about her becomes more attractive. Her jokes become funnier; her insights more profound. It leads to a self-reinforcing feedback loop of attraction (because when these other qualities become more attractive, then this raises the level of physical attraction as well). Take that into consideration and being valued as a woman because a guy wants to have sex with you seems pretty nice, given that it comes as a package deal with him valuing you as an intellect and a wit.
Then again, this entire post is largely a "grass is greener"-type situation, now, isn't it. I do stand by the claims that "men are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them" and "being valued as a woman for your sexual attractiveness is pretty nice", but I understand that it's not necessarily all peaches and cream.
raakaa
2yr ago
I don't have a good grasp of what would be necessary to demonstrate qualia
One key point in the definition of qualia is that there need not be any external factors that correspond to whether or not an entity possesses qualia. Hence the idea of a philosophical zombie: an entity that lacks consciousness/qualia, but acts just like any ordinary human, and cannot be distinguished as a P-zombie by an external observer. As such, the presence of qualia in an entity by definition cannot be demonstrated.
This line of thinking, originated in the parent post, seems to be misguided in a greater way. Whether or not you believe in the existence of qualia or consciousness, the important point is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness is necessarily tied to intelligence. A calculator might not have any internal sensation of color or sound, and yet it can perform division far faster than humans. Paraphrasing a half-remembered argument, this sort of "AI can't outperform humans at X because it's not conscious" talk is like saying "a forklift can't be stronger than a bodybuilder, because it isn't conscious!" First off, we can't demonstrate whether or not a forklift is conscious. And second, it doesn't matter. Solvitur levando.
I recently read this article, which seems to have awoken some latent bleeding heart in me. As a result, it’s got me thinking about wealth redistribution, whence the following questions:
I understand that this post betrays a real naïveté in both economic knowledge and worldly experience— so I’ll admit that I’m a decent bit embarrassed about making it, but I figure that a Small-Scale Question Sunday thread is the best place to ask this.
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