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rokmonster

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joined 2022 October 04 06:01:17 UTC 

				
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rokmonster


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Lives under a rok.

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 October 04 06:01:17 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 1473


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Damit. Why didn't you link to the YT video the first time? Would have saved me a lot of time drudging through Pelosi's official statements. This is the kind of link I can save for use in future online arguments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.




While I agree that there was a very interesting dynamic with left-coded cries of "racism" being used by public health and "pro-science" professionals to pooh-pooh the need to close ports or intitute quarantines on points of entry in January 2020 (1), these particular statements by Pelosi were boilerplate well before the pandemic from 2006 to 2021, and only stopped when China went full Wolf-Warrior diplomacy in late 2021 and early 2022.


As evidence, I give you some other official announcments. The omission of years prior to 2017 just means I didn't bother looking for them, and the URL wasn't obvious.



Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.


(1) IMO, the Trump admin could have used the national emergency to close all border flows, left the US epidemiologically secure like Taiwan, and used the inevitable leak as further justification for border security. But Trump is incompetent, Trump's staff was incompetent, and the CDC isn't competent enough to quarantine tourists anyway.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does every country with a large uncontrolled land border have a drug problem? It's possible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.


My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.


I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In English, they say they're the Communist Part of China, or CPC.




This is a complicated topic to say the least. It seems to have arisen from a non-issue to an issue just as tensions between the US and China rose in 2020. (I'm reminded of the euphemism treadmill.) While the Chinese diaspora seems to prefer CPC, the English-language scholarly literature has long used CCP. Even the official media outlets of the Party seem to have no problem calling themselves the CCP occasionally (ex. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201710/27/WS5a0d0875a31061a738408157.html).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Please expand on those real and serious reasons. If Russian aggression is to be limited to Ukraine, why attempt to stir unrest in Moldova? (Why leave Moldova out of your bet?) Why do senior Russian officials admit an intention to "denazify and demilitarize" Poland? Was it because Ukraine was leaning towards joining Nato? If so, the same calculus must surely apply to Finland, too: "Finland’s accession to Nato would have serious military and political repercussions.".


I won't take your bet, but that's only because the Russian armed forces have broken themselves against the Ukranians and are rapidly losing the strength necessary to pursue a campaign in the Baltics. I propose the following alternative conditional bet: If Russia takes Kyiv in the next three months, then Russia will invade another of its neighbors before 2033.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That doesn't explain whay this is a problem in America. Seoul Subways are cheaper (1/40000 median income for a one way ride) and also lack bouncers (police enter the train 5 stops after an incident). We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For myself, I suddenly discovered their utility yesterday. They are much more effective at restructuring existing text than at answering questions (de novo text generation), and very very good at generating convincing (if not fully accurate) boilerplate. So the best application is summary or restyling ('please rewite this email to a superior a bit more formally', 'please restructure this bulleted list as a polite email'). Of course, everything submitted goes to OpenAI, so this opens up business secrets concerns, but everything typed into Office Home already gets sent to Microsoft by default via "diagnostic data."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you. This is encouraging.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yup. This is the way things are done in the rest of the world. If there is "affordable housing" it takes the form of little tiny apartments (like ... 6 square meters) which anyone can afford because they are minimalist. (Americans might call these tenements, and they are illegal.) Developers outside of the US seem to prevent claims of gentrification by grandfathering old tenants/owners into the new, larger units built on the same land.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It was horrible. I only survived because I had a supportive romantic partner. I was under so much stress that my hair whitened. Apparently stress kills melanocytes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My goal in writing these stories was to capture how AI set up to maximize profit could fuck over the little guy by optimizing existing business processes. I think that's more likely than anything else.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mostly survival and personal career progress. I'm planning on leaving after a few years, but I would prefer to do my small part to improve the culture.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm moving to a job on a campus in the US. The question of what to do about social justice, political conversations, and social justice training requirements has been vexing me for a while. I just got my first email from someone who has pronouns in their email signature, with a link to the campus policy on pronoun use. (Tl;dr: staff are "encouraged," to use pronouns and "expected" to treat people in accordance with their claimed pronouns.)


Here are my options:


    

  1. 

    Poe's strategy: Agree and amplify. I use all pronouns as claimed. I believe we should racially segregate as much as possible because that would be good for making Black communities into safe spaces for Black bodies, but we should do this by forcibly unhousing white people, because anything else would be gentrification. I take full responsibility for the racism of all the people of my race, and think we should give full reparations to all Black bodies. This probably codes as high-class, but there is a large chance of being unable to keep up with the charade and a small chance of being cancelled as a result. There is also a chance of value drift and the mental risks inherent in living a lie.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Mainland Chinese strategy: I don't talk about politics or social issues at all. If asked, it's because I can't keep up with it. (This is mostly true!) Probably codes as low-class in the US, but I won't be cancelled for my opinions, because I don't have opinions... at least until BLMII (LGBTQIA+ boogaloo) comes around and everyone who doesn't fly the Rainbow-BLM flag is cancelled.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Mask strategy: I don't talk much, but when pushed I shrug and concur with moderately pro-SJ shibboleths that I still believe. When in private with a trusted interlocutor, it's mask off. This is what I currently do, but SJ isn't a significant factor at all in my current social environment, so I am able to spend more time mask-off than mask-on.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Earnest SJW strategy: This is the highest-class option, but I don't think I can pull it off. I don't know the language, I'm doomed to stumble, and don't want to break my reasoning capacity that much, and it goes directly against my values, interests, and tribe.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Earnest Mottizan strategy: True honesty. I oppose SJ (because it is in direct opposition with my values) and I'm not afraid to say so... in a friendly way with a smile on my face. I support equal rights, but not equality of outcomes, which I don't think is ever possible. I think most SJ is just an elite conspiracy to shift focus away from class issues, with the richest of the rich supporting it because they are wealthy enough to avoid its negative side effects... which hurt black people too. I think unfettered immigration is bad for blacks in America, and I don't think SJ really helps the people it seeks to help, instead infantilizing them and removing their agency. I think the biggest problem facing black america is lack of interest in education, and the biggest problem facing women in STEM is that STEM careers suck: the pay is for tools, and no smart woman would enter them when other careers are low stress and more lucrative.  My experience living in a more conservative society has taught me that most SJW claims are false in traditional societies, etc. Etc.
    

    6. 



So, I guess what I'm asking is: what's the safest strategy, what's the best for my career, and what's the best way to spread my values? For those of you in US academia, what approach do you follow, and what works or doesn't work?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On the other hand, how many of the current crop of AI researchers were directly motivated by Eliezer, and how many followed independent paths? As computational power and GPUs improved (be it for gaming, for servers, or for bitcoin), gradient descent becoming practical was an inevitability. Once gradient descent became practical, researchers start pivoting to it, and the only barrier (that we know of now) is the availability of datasets and hardware. The snowball was doomed to start rolling with Hinton's publication of back-propagation in 1986.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Martian colonies have an asteroid dropped on them, and whatever pathetic escape craft we make in the next 20 years get swatted before they reach the orbit of Saturn.




In 20 years the AGI apocalypse will not be nearly as romantic as that. It is much more likely to look like a random bank/hospital sending you a collections notice for a home loan/medical treatment you definitely didn't agree to, bringing you to court over it, and putting you up against the equivalent of a $100M legal team. The AI-controlled Conglomerate wins in court and you spend the rest of your life subsistence farming as a side gig while all your official income is redireted to the AI Conglomerate.


For extra fun, if you are married, social media and increasing economic struggle poison your relationship with your spouse and both of you apply for the services of AI Legal. The hotshot AI Legal representatives fight acrimoniously, revealing every dark secret of both you and your spouse, and successfully breaking apart your marriage in divorce settlement. Honestly, you don't remember why you ever loved your ex-spouse, or why your children ever loved you, and you totally understand your real-world friends distancing themselves from the fiasco.  Besides, you don't have time for that anymore. Half your salary is interest on the payment plan for AI Legal.


As a smart and independently wealthy researcher, you look into training your own competing, perhaps open-source AI model to fight back against the Machine, but AI Conglomerate has monopolized access to compute at every level of the supply chain, from high-purity silicon to cloud computing services. In despair, you turn to old web and your old haunt The Motte, where you find solace in culture war interspersed with the occasional similar story of despair. Little do you know that every single post is authored by AI Conglomerate to manipulate your emotions from despair into a more productive anger. Two months later you will sign up to work for a fully-owned subsidiary of AI Conglomerate and continue working to pay off your debts, all while maximizing "shareholder" output.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No. In the specific incident that comes to mind we had an new student try to take credit for the results of a 3rd year PhD candidate after fixing/running the nearly-successful experiment while the older student was at a conference. Thankfully the PI saw through it. I'm sure it goes the other way too, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You're onto something here. Where I did my degree, the following was pretty much understood by all the students after their first few years:


    

  1. 

    The purpose of research grants is to get research done for the funder more cheaply than is possible in other sectors of the economy.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    The purpose of Professors is to get funding and write grant proposals. This means anticipating what research will be trendy and making a lot of friends among the people who staff grant proposal review committees.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    The purpose of the older graduate students is to do the research, write papers, and write grant reports, while mentoring the younger students.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    The purpose of the younger students is to study and learn, while assisting the older students on writing grant reports and doing experiments. Oh, and to teach undergraduate classes.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Graduate students needing additional mentorship must actively seek it.
    

    6. 



(We didn't have post-docs or research staff, but they basically allow scaling of the grant-writing work and supervisory work of professors.)


This was a decent system for graduate students who were self-driven and capable. It had many different failure modes, however: It rewarded professors for just enough surface level knowledge to come up with cool sounding projects that were in reality infeasible. It was hell for students who were given the new projects, because they had no mentors in their specialty, and had no idea that things were infeasible. Older students could be abusive or predatory, and unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results. Professors had a bias for sudents running simple but creative experiments over meticulous work that was actually necessary long term for good engineering.


Like you, I had a professor with only a surface-level knowledge of my research domain. I was often given bad advice and advice that wasted time. (The students figured out that our PI didn't read papers, but read abstracts and skimmed figures, which made for some funny misinterpretations of the literature.) The PI's feedback on student work was vague and hard to understand. However, when it came to overcoming stuck research projects my advisor was a genius. The experiment-breaking result became the new goal of the experiment, easily publishable. My advisor also eventually communicated an understanding of how to write a good research paper, after which all those vague comments suddenly made perfect sense. So the relationship turned out quite valuable.


The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.


Overall, it was a fun time, but I would probably recommend a gap year after a masters degree instead of a PhD. Travel the world, get more life experience, suffer less stress, have more fun, and in the end you didn't spend four years becoming the world's foremost expert in some experiment that is only performed in one lab.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which  depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:


    

  1. 

    HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.
    

    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Seems like the extent of contamination is scientifically a similar problem to something between fallout tracking and rocket engines (combustion chemistry). It would be really fun to build a team to model this but realistically noone will pay for it when the victims are a few thousand poor rurals in Ohio, except the companies seeking to minimize liability. Naturally the residents will be skeptical of the accuracy of any modeling done by chemical companies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.


As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference.




Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.


I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)


Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.


But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?




First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.


One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.


Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.