rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
It will straight up try to lie to me about how certain language features work.
I have also had this experience. Learning a new language and I couldn't tell whether my code was right or not. Claude Opus 4 spent an hour saying "oh sorry my previous code was wrong," and then give me slightly-rewritten copy of the same thing which had the same problem - it crashed on some function. Finally I suggested an environment setup issue and turned on search and it figured it out (a function it was using was deprecated two years ago). But the number of times it told me "oh you're right, I was wrong, here's a fix", and for the fix to not fix the issue was incredibly frustrating.
I had a similar loop with GPT-o3 a few weeks later, where it just made up academic references in my new (to me) sub-subfield. I swore at it, and had the chat banned for inappropriateness :)
This is awakening me to a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia effect: if the LLMs are this wrong and this stubborn in areas where I can test its output, where else is it wrong? Can I trust it in the rough analysis of a legal situation? In a summary of the literature on global warming? In pulling crime stats? I'm inclined to think it shouldn't be trusted for anything not either harmless or directly verifiable.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Your houses seem much more generous than the IPMC. I think it matters a lot more how the space will be used: 8 adult occupants in a sharehome will probably want their own bedrooms, whereas 8 occupants in a family home will probably end up bunking together (married couples) or on bunkbeds (kids). A family will probably be having dinner all at the same time, and so will require a larger dining area than a group of flatmates, but the flatmates might prefer to have more showers.
Speaking of bathrooms, is there a reason you have a bathroom per bedroom? Growing up we had one for three bedrooms, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised if luxury dormitories had one per room.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Hello fellow lurker. I used to be a leftist. Then the left changed. Now I consider myself a classical liberal.
I happen to agree with what you claim is the "Motte consensus", but I think most modern social justice "liberals" would agree, too.
- "Anti-meritocracy." Just like everybody likes the idea of free speech and nobody actually likes free speech, everyone likes the idea of meritocracy, but nobody actually likes it, especially for their children. The elite who created Harvard instituted admissions interviews 1922 so that they could keep the high-performing jews out. Now that Asians are the outperforming minority, they discriminate against Asians. More generally, elites consistently find ways to game the metrics of meritocracy so that we can live under a facade of meritocracy, which justifies their social status. In reality, our institutions love putting weights on the scales, and those who pass the "meritocratic" tests have been selected because their selection benefits the elites.
Note that here the social justice position is the anti-meritocratic one.
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People who believe they gained their position through meritocracy are less likely to be charitable to the less fortunate: Prompting people to attribute their success to skill or hard work lowers their willingness to share windfalls or support public goods.. As I read it, less likely to believe in a noblesse oblige. This is, to me, a classic symptom of American dysfunction: instead of thinking a la Henry Ford about the impacts of their greed on the less fortunate, the modern upper-class is happy to raise the rent on the rest of us until we can't pay anymore. (This is enabled by their ability to financialize, lobby, and snuff out actual market competition.)
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I would submit that the modern left in academia also dislikes meritocracy, but because it sets up a heirarchy. Example 1, Example 2
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On Individualism. The individualism/collectivist dichotomy is something that every society needs in moderation. Too much collectivism, and you get stuck in your current rut. Too much individualism, and you cannot solve collective action problems. Too much collectivism expresses itself as groupthink, stifling social pressure, following tyrants, and people voting for the "popular" candidate in elections. Too much individualism and you have a bunch of selfish psychopaths who are impossible to govern. To put this another way, collectivist meritocracy is why every Korean kid is pushed to go to the same colleges, but rampant individualism is why Russians and Americans cannot exit burning planes quickly, but Japanese can.
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Anti-individualism. I would assert that both the left and the right in the US are currently anti-individualist. The social justice left is collectivist in that it sees people as representatives of their demographics and in that it will brook no dissent. The moderate left is collectivist in that it believes that children should go to public schools for their education. The moderate right is collectivist in that it embraces orthodox religious and moral norms, and the radical right shuns leftist-adjacent behaviors and has its own shibboleths.
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But individualism is all highly relative. Any American plopped into Japan would struggle to maintain Japanese social norms, whether that individual be from the left or the right. There is a certain socialization and mindset that is inculcated in early schooling in more collectivist societies, and Americans don't get that in their kindergartens and elementary schools.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
8mo ago
This is interesting. I think this might be very much a US phenomenon. It would be even more interesting to look at how this varies between cultures and between countries.
In the US cultural context, rich men usually got rich by either having upper-class connections or by being workaholics. In the former case, they are beholden to upper-class cultural norms, which condition a certain status and social acceptability with a similar-age bride from a family of similar class. This might make the young bride less attractive even to this subset of the rich.
Among the US nouveau riche, social skill development is stunted by workaholism, and this probably limits their ability to date young upper class woman. The young upper-class American women I have met recently seem to have their creep detector tuned up to 11 and to habitually present an attitude of cynicism. Which is to say that they will probably make an older man really work for it while they are young, go single for a long time, and not marry until they are late in fertility, starting to get desperate, and cannot afford to be so bitchy.
In the US, there is also a lot of financial risk to marrying young women. Younger women are generally more likely to lose interest in their partner after the first few years, and the loss of 50% of assets during no-fault divorce makes their departure really expensive to rich men.
But thinking of other countries I'm familiar with, it seems that even where 50% split of assets during divorce is not common, compensating social dynamics exist which make the rich man/young woman pairing less common than one would expect. Korea completely lacks the financial divorce risk, but makes up for it with increased social pressure and higher standards for social acceptability, which pushes all relationships (and especially marriages) into similar age brackets.
Perhaps a good experimental counterexample for my explanation would be China, which has low divorce risk and fewer social norms. I think women there get very very picky about their partners' finances, which would predict that rich men there will skew toward younger women and middle-class men there go unmarried until later in life.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
8mo ago
For countries which are not China, it seems that there is a bit of a "market correction" for tariffs: high US tariffs reduce demand from the US, tanking the exporting country's exchange rate to the dollar, which makes those imports more affordable, after which point the prices don't seem so high anymore even including tariffs. The Fed estimated that this feedback loop reduces the effect of tariffs by about half. Trump's recent announcement of tariffs on Korea and Japan increased the exchange rates there by about 2%, which is the TACO-inclusive correction.
In the case of China, though... well, they tend to try to peg the RMB to the dollar (although it hasn't been pegged directly since 2010), so I imagine the effect will be much worse for them.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
8mo ago
I'm confused as to what your claim was. I found a banned comment of yours stating that
The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.
It seems like @RandomRanger quoted it accurately enough, but source quote you provide in this comment is only very weak Bayesian evidence for this claim.
In fact, the quote you provide is much more consistent with the claim that "Republicans see class instead of race, and migrants fleeing opens up jobs traditionally taken by lower/working class citizens." No need for extra drug epicycles at all.
I may add here that the above classic Republican claim is consistent with where migrants work, but unemployment in those sectors is going up faster than elsewhere, so clearly the story is more complex.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
8mo ago
SIS
Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
10mo ago
Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now? I've been worried that the Pax Americana is coming to an end, our Republic's core can no longer maintain its security, and that the international shipping lanes are seeing a lot more instability than before. But if Trump is to be our Caesar, then we will lose our Republic well before the point when our Pax Americana breaks down.
My focus right now is in settling and raising a large family, so where to settle in Roman times? I think "in Rome" proper is out: the city saw numerous riots and insurrections during the political chaos at the end of the Republic, and one does not want one's family caught in the chaos. However, the benefits of being a citizen of Rome were vast, with increased legal rights, commercial rights, and freedom of movement, so one probably wanted to raise one's children within the Empire (Saint Paul as a citizen of Rome was able to walk all around Modern Turkey unaccosted.) One also wants the benefits of industrial civilization (toilets!), so life outside the Empire is also not recommended.
What about the provinces? It depends a lot on the province. Some of them were subject to regular warfare and raids. The marker of these was that they were highly militarized and the risk of invasion was known. The provinces in the "middle ring" of the Empire were probably the safest place to be.
The other major dangers of industrial civilization are subfertility and industrial contaminants. The cities of Rome had poorer sanitation (more plague), high poverty, and greater rates of lead poisioning. Fertility among the elites was also much reduced in Rome due to later age at marriage and smaller family size. The provincial fertility rates were so much higher that the elite became more provincial toward the time of the Late Empire.
So, what would this mean in the modern day? Avoid the core cities due to low safety and low fertility: New York, London, DC, SF. Avoid the threatened periphery due to risk of invasion: Taiwain, Poland, Korea, and states with lots of military infrastructure like Nevada and the Great Plains states (Map of Nulear complexes 1 Maps of silos and predicted fallout patterns). It looks like the winning strategy is to settle the prosperous provinces: the eastern Midwest, Southern canada, Southern France, or Scandinavia.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
11mo ago
The judge can order El Salavdor to comply. If El Salvador fails to comply, start seizing Salvadoran assets in the United States. Seizure of foreign nations' assets in the United States has been done before.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
11mo ago
Needs several large defense conglomerates to be broken up. In the 1980s there were hundreds of defense contractors. Now there are a handful.
So many questions. (1) What does it mean to be "clowned" by someone? (2) How do superchatters interact with someone during a fight? (3) What does "keep things real" mean in this context? (4) Could you confirm the following summary?
Some black guy who is a real-life fighter got into a play fight via family connections and a little pushing from Dad. He was humiliated in this play fight, took it personally, and then decided to get real revenge on the white guy who made him look impotent. He completely lost control of his emotions, resulting in serious injury to the white guy. Culture war because of its impact on race relations within the subculture of people who watch this stuff.
Is that a proper summary?
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