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roystgnr


				

				

				
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roystgnr


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 02:00:55 UTC

					

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User ID: 787

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Some of your other links aren't really about CRT?

That's the point, though, not a mistake. As the saying goes, "once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action". If "No, that's not Critical Race Theory; don't you realize how cringe you're being!" had been a new sort of claim to me, I'd have been inclined to take it seriously. But it's just one more instance of an increasingly predictable pattern of the modern left trying to disavow their own endonyms as soon as they're subjected to cross-examination, and I'm getting increasingly tired of it.

Even if their actual ideas are total nonsense, they're going to win if you fight them there.

Nah. Their home turf isn't wordplay, it's institutional support. Hence the current panic over the right's discovery that they still have control over a few institutions (some state legislatures and governors) that at least nominally have authority over the local left-controlled institutions. Indiana can pass a law about "no saying one race is inherently superior" and the media can blatantly lie to turn that into "they're trying to prevent students from learning about Black history!", but if the law passes anyway then it's not going to be a journalist's (95%-left) opinion that matters, it's going to be a judge's (maybe 50%-left, and also often more serious about their honesty than their ideology).

But no one in academia officially uses the term Critical Race Theory.

Google Scholar reports 4,000 citations from the 20th century, which hopefully is an old enough cutoff date to clearly precede the current backlash, and another 200,000 citations since, which probably aren't all part of the backlash to the backlash.

It sounds a bit cringe when Republicans say they want to ban CRT, because officially it doesn't exist.

Wow, that takes me back down memory lane. I never understood how this sort of historical revisionism was expected to work, when we don't actually have a Memory Hole to drop actual history into, we have an Internet. But if the first history you see on the internet is still the revisionist one, it's hard to fault the revisionists for their choice of tactics. Perhaps someday even still-problematically-factual summaries will also learn to love Big Brother.

It's tempting to wonder whether the enraging pattern of gaslighting isn't to persuade, so much as deliberately to enrage. But that's unfair; to the people who actually complain that we aren't all jogging along the euphemism treadmills as fast as they demand, the complaint appears to be a mix of standard attempts to rebrand themselves to avoid "scorn and sarcasm", just combined with very non-standard attempts to condemn anyone who doesn't immediately keep up with the rebranding.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea

I'm mostly in the "Doomer" camp (not because I think it's more likely than not, but because I think russian roulette is an even worse idea if the odds get above 1-in-6 and the downside gets way above a single death), but even from here: I've yet to hear a convincing argument explaining which non-zero regulation suite is likely to do more good than harm. At this point I've seen too many bipartisan "War On Bad Things" initiatives that didn't actually reduce the bad consequences of the bad things and too many "GoodPerson Act" laws that didn't actually seem to be the product of good people, and I'm going to need to hear actual specifics of any proposed regulations before I can judge them.

And good (bad) news! We've got some specifics from the EU now:

The AI Act lists a bunch of special-purpose can't-possibly-go-"foom" tasks as their "high risk" targets, and then as a sop to people worrying about actual existential risks (sorry, they can't even bring themselves to say that; let's go with their phrase "systemic risks") we get "transparency obligations" for models exceeding a roughly-GPT-4-level training budget. "Providers of models with systemic risks are therefore mandated to assess and mitigate risks, report serious incidents, conduct state-of-the-art tests and model evaluations, ensure cybersecurity and provide information on the energy consumption of their models."

So ... basically do what you were going to do anyway, hope that's enough to prevent human extinction "systemic risk", and also in the same breath we're equally super worried about GPUs causing a tiny bit more global warming.

These are the people you want to give a monopoly on AGI? At least the current group of people who might kill us with it seem vaguely aware that that's a possibility to watch out for.

I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie

The post-sex scene in Iron Man was preceded by a more graphic (though still PG-13) pre-sex scene, even. I don't think they were even aiming the MCU at kids until they realized what a cash cow it was going to be; otherwise they'd have toned down the bloody opening scene a bit, or at least given it more of the cartoonish flavor that later MCU battles are full of.

The sex stuff in Guardians was much more clever; kids old enough to understand why he forgot that lady was on board his ship are old enough to watch it, and if there are any kids old enough to understand the "under a black light this place looks like a Jackson Pollack painting" joke then they're old enough to shudder at it.

Of course, with Eternals they were more clever still: if nobody can muster up interest in the movie for long enough to get to the adult elements, then they don't have to worry about exposing kids to adult elements. I'm not even kidding here; I tried to watch that movie and I tuned out before making it that far. I had to hit up YouTube just now to see the (not even prelude-to! thrusting! the only non-R-rated thing here is the camera angle!) sex scene.

People work 60 hours a week instead of 40.

A few of them, sure? 5.6% of workers averaged 60 hours or more last year, according to BLS. People who worked under 15 hours a week were nearly as common.

You might be in a bit of a bubble. There's a lot of variation between industries (full time mining, quarrying, and gas workers average 48.3 hours, so you know there's a lot of 60 hour stretches; my mother quit her veterinary career after a decade or so because the local "60+ hours or don't bother" jobs available were too much with a kid), and variation between companies and subsectors within an industry (I'm told the AAA game developer work ethos is something like "you can sleep when you retire"?). Perhaps you're in one of the worst of those?

They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real.

And yeah, I empathize with this. People were shocked when "The Millionaire Next Door" talked about how many people with 7-figure net worth were driving 20 year old beat-up cars, but that's a goal I started aiming for! I still remember my mom trying to explain to toddler-me that Happy Meals were too expensive right now (soon after she quit her job, my dad lost his...), and enjoying fewer luxuries now seems like a more than worthwhile price to pay for never having to do that with my own kids later. But again, is this the median American, or are we in cultural bubbles? People have spent more on restaurants than on groceries for most of the past decade. Even when my parents found stable new careers it was a treat to visit a buffet every couple weeks.

I almost wondered if he was trying to goad the government into claiming that it actually has the same right to bully and coerce news outlets.

It would be in character, right? I guess it was too much to hope that we'd get another win that easily, though.

"You can't handle the truth!

Son, we live in a world that has mass media, and those media have to be guarded by men with banhammers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Justice Alito? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the publisher, and you curse the Congress. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that chilling effects, while tragic, probably saved elections; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves elections.

We use words like "fact-checking," "regulation," "trust." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line."

"Would you order the book ban?"

"I do the job..."

"Would you order the book ban!!?"

"YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I WOULD!"

What ages would you say it's appropriate for?

I'm still working through the best sci-fi from a decade ago, when reading on my own; my best opportunities for finding time to read newer stuff is to kill two birds with one stone and find things I can read with my kids.

Didn't we get the first option as well, even, for those who would prefer it? I search for "television" on Craigslist and immediately find two 30"+ flatscreens, better than what I grew up with, for $50 or less each.

I think involving her in ring shopping can be bad

It does take away the chance to do a surprise proposal.

in that she'll be aware of the compromises

But this? Depends on the woman. My wife picked out a heart-cut diamond, with a tiny occlusion that made it lower priced than most diamonds its size. Her show of fondness for something that was cute and unique but kind of untraditional and weird, big but kind of flawed and cheap if you look too closely... it was a really good sign.

Hugo Gernsback was "pulp era" or "Silver Age" rather than "Golden Age", but certainly counts as "traditionally".

Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth should count. Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison may be a bit too late to qualify as "Golden Age", but by that criterion I wouldn't count Le Guin or Zelazny either.

White Protestants

The two top SF authors of all time are arguably Jules Verne, Catholic-raised deist, and Isaac Asimov, Jewish-raised atheist.

two White men

Juan Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez?

Chatbot Arena is awesome; what are the usage limits there?

I tried my applied math questions out on Claude 3 Opus; unlike Sonnet, it didn't make any sign errors on the easier of the two questions. It did miss an important part of the answer on the harder question ... but honestly, this is a question for which I'd pull out a reference rather than rederive the whole thing from scratch in my head, so I think my only complaint here is the overconfidence. It's not nearly as bad in that regard as Sonnet was (arguing with me for a prompt or two before admitting its sign error), but in cases where there's any grey area I'd still vastly prefer answers of the form "I think it's X, but I might be missing something" over "It's definitely X, no doubt about it!" where only 90% are actually correct.

In hindsight this should have been an obvious problem with training LLMs on published text, huh? "I dunno" and "I'm not sure but" and "I think maybe" are the domain of ephemeral chat logs; by the time you're ready to publish, even to a serious web page, you've hopefully figured out the right answer and you don't waste your audience's time with the missteps along the way ... which means that a language model trained on what you've published doesn't have nearly as much "experience" with what to do when there's a chance of a misstep.

Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.

Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.

one seems closer to me to needing mod action than the other, given the standards of this place.

I agree. "1 day ban" seemed fair for CPAR, vs overly charitable for TI. But:

My read was that chrisprattalpharaptr was essentially trying to push for conversing politely

"When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning", "But whatever", and "Bravo" were not pushes for polite conversation. They were impolite conversation, written as if they were supposed to be subtle enough to superficially toe the line of debate rules, but clearly just jumping into the mud pit to wrestle there too. "Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment" was an egregious sideswipe, rephrasing a complaint in the least charitable possible way. I've probably posted worse attacks than all these before, and I'm certain I've restrained myself from making worse attacks before, and even when I'm provoked it's usually a conscious decision. I don't think CPAR is someone who would make a mistake like that by accident.

And, though I hate to apply an unfair double-standard, lest it be interpreted as an unfair imbalance in confrontation rather than in concern, I think that's what bothers me most about the whole exchange. Speaking to @Chrisprattalpharaptr:

I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space

No, but it's both clear and horrifying that you changed as well as the space! I admit there are usernames here that just make my eyes glaze over and my scroll wheel accelerate, but when I see a @Chrisprattalpharaptr post, it's supposed to be time to stop skimming! You've built up some expectations! I'm not saying we have to make every comment a winner here, but the drop even from "sort-by-controversial" quality to yesterday was great enough that I keep trying to reinterpret it as some kind of "mirroring" performance art that I'm just failing to get. Even granting that the original post was no better: you don't write replies for the other debater, you write them for the audience. Perhaps FCfromSSC here doesn't completely persuade all his interlocutors, but he's probably still doing a good thing for both their and his own mental clarity and mental health, as well as writing something lurkers can see and pick up and benefit from. The contrary "neither cast ye your pearls before swine" philosophy was a lousy one when I used to see it coming from the right, and it's no better these days when I see it (without the reference, this time...) adopted by the left.

I'm torn about what to advise ("advise" sounds too pretentious ... "beg for"?) here. On the one hand TheMotte has gotten a bit worse, and although it's also recovered from bad phases in the past, I'm always worried that maybe this time will be the final "evaporative cooling", where level heads get burnt out enough to leave and hysteresis makes problems permanent, unless enough level heads have the fortitude to stick it out despite the unwarranted negative feedback of doing so. I'd love to stop this paragraph here. But if I'm asking too much, if the feedback is so bad that "level" requires too much effort ... take a break before you break, and wait for a week or two until you're less easily trolled before returning? It's okay that individual people have cycles of good and bad phases too. As a wise man once said, and I repeat with no irony or sarcasm:

Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?

Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me.

It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.

Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.

Politics have strange coalitions I guess

There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.

My whole family caught some cough that's lasted months. One day had me bedridden because I'd coughed hard enough to strain a muscle. RSV, maybe? Covid testing negative and antibiotics did nothing. Not very contagious, but a disease that sticks around for 8 weeks (or more? I'm on the mend but not completely better...) can afford to take a couple of weeks to spread.

Beavers? They build and maintain their own environment-sculpting infrastructure.

And their communality is of the right-wing-approved nuclear-family type. Though, I must point out that libertarianism isn't disapproving of communality in general, just of the non-voluntary versions. "We want to go live in a commune/beehive" is fine; "we're going to make you go live in a commune/beehive" is not. Libertarian types are suspicious of the effectiveness of voluntary communes but that's independent of their morality.

every single AI assistant ever released

To the contrary, it's the models that aren't released that get the "careful not to imply that British royalty were white!" treatment. Release (with license to modify and republish, what is in this context inaccurately called "open source") your model weights and approximately nobody will prepend their prompts like that; try to fine-tune that behavior into the weights and your users will tune it right back out.

The public LLMs aren't as good as the state-of-the-art, but they're not awful, and this is the worst they'll ever be (in the capabilities sense, cross your fingers about real non-woke-definition safety...) from now on.

especially as the 14th amendment has made the states subordinate to that federal government.

The 14th has made the states subordinate to the Bill of Rights, but I wouldn't say that's the biggest step in state subordination. It was several decades earlier when the Supremacy Clause made states subordinate to the federal government in matters covered by the Constitution's short allowlist, and it wasn't until several decades later that cases like Wickard v. Filburn expanded federal powers from "short allowlist" to "do anything you feel like".

It just says "having previously taken an oath" - shouldn't that apply to former office-holders as well, even if their term(s) ended before the insurrection?

(still doesn't seem like it should have applied to Cox, who was neither a present nor former office-holder before the Civil War)

they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.'

Just to add context: these are the first enemies the protagonist is in combat against, but they switch sides and for most of the book the main conflict is the same as in the movie, humans-vs-bugs.

(for a loose definition of "the same"; e.g. in the book the humans are trying to capture a brain-bug so they can figure out how to communicate and negotiate peace rather than fight-to-the-genocide, whereas in the movie they want someone for Nazi Doogie Howser to torture)

[The Mobile Infantry] also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.

I was going to joke about you confusing Starship Troopers with Star Wars or Halo ... but I pulled down my copy to check, and what do you know, the protagonist cuts through a wall with "a knife beam at full power". I swear I just reread it a few years ago...

everything imaginable

When my father got cancer was the first time I discovered a very imaginable gap: long-term care. This turned out to be only a hypothetical problem in his case (there wasn't such a long interval between "brain damage sufficient to prevent living at home" and "brain damage sufficient to prevent living" after all...) but it's something to think about supplementary insurance for, despite how complete Medicare coverage is for so many other costs.

That's not to detract from the rest of your excellent point, though. His last several months of treatment had a price (at printed value; who knows what fraction of that was real cost vs weird provider-vs-insurer negotiation ploys) that would have bankrupted him out-of-pocket, but that was nearly free with Medicare plus a little supplementary insurance. Of course he still fought for every month, when it just took willpower rather than a life's savings otherwise aimed at his grandkids' college tuition, but if he'd had to weigh price vs benefits himself I wonder if he'd have turned it all down. (if he'd seen the future I'm sure he'd have just picked out cheap in-home hospice care instead, but the trouble with those "most medical care expense is in the last year of life" statistics is that you don't know it's going to be the last year without seeing the future)

Frequently what happens is that it gets comically enormous and useless as various stakeholders fill it with random bullshit.

Could you give any examples of "erroneous"? I've certainly seen "enormous"/"useless"/"random bullshit", and burying important truths in so much filler they get ignored might have consequences as bad as falsehoods, but I just don't recall seeing any likely falsehoods. Even the random bullshit is unevidenced rather than obviously untrue, along the lines of "let's put X in the list of possible side effects, as CYA, even though our only evidence for X is that in one study the treatment group reported it almost as often as the control group"...

"wouldn't", surely, unless you're really black-pilled even by TheMotte standards.

Officially the debt clause may make default tricky. Unofficially hyperinflation is just as "good" and still an option.

an alcoholic during a binge.

For an extra-close metaphor, imagine you're planning to try to collect the debt from the alcoholic's kids.

It's okay to just ping @self_made_human; he's cool.

A brief search suggests that SSRIs are generally safe with alcohol (IANAMD; please update your will and assign medical power of attorney before mixing any drugs with alcohol based on my advice) but the combination can still "lead to more pronounced effects of drunkenness", which sounds like it could be enough all alone, especially to new users who think they know their limits. And with MAOIs (are these still used often?) interactions range from "you may become drowsy and dizzy" to "dangerous spikes in blood pressure that may require immediate medical attention".