roystgnr
4d ago
Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences
Her largest survey had over half a million respondents.
roystgnr
5d ago
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
roystgnr
11d ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?
If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.
Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.
And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.
Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)
roystgnr
11d ago
Okay, I think I've edited out all my idiotic identity confusion from my reply. So, that said:
Always open to feedback
I actually have no negative feedback on your comment. My only other nitpick would be with:
it feels independent of comment quality
The bias here might be independent of comment quality, but it's not always large enough to be overwhelmed by comment quality. I see left-wing comments here get highly upvoted regularly, just not as highly upvoted (and not as consistently upvoted) as a right-leaning comment with the same quality would probably have been. So the effect of the bias depends greatly on comment quality: someone who's already on top of their game might not be getting too much unwarranted net negative feedback regardless of their politics, but someone who wanders in here to write right-wing cheap shots probably isn't made to feel as uncomfortable about that as they should be, whereas their left-wing counterpart probably gets scared off too quickly to consider improving instead of leaving.
roystgnr
11d ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).
It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?
From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.
Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.
You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded.
I know "they were asking for it" is a cliche of an awful thing to say, but I have to point out: you literally were [edit: the top comment literally was] asking for it, and @Hadad was wise enough to remind everyone of that in his first sentence of that comment. The line between a debate and an opinion poll is a bit of a blurry one on a forum, but I think it's clear enough that the distinction matters. If he'd presented those sentiments as if they were supposed to be a persuasive argument, I'd absolutely have downvoted them, but giving an honest (and bookended by caveats!) expression of his sentiments in response to an explicit query for general sentiments was fine. I still couldn't bring myself to upvote it, sorry @Hadad, but half of the point of this place is seeing what people say when they're not being squelched, and avoiding the squelching is important for that.
I'd say your own [the] top comment's vote score (currently +18 -24) would be more clearly deserving of complaint (except that that would go over even more poorly, as "people can't downvote me [us]!" always does). There are problems with your [the] comment that should have been fixed, but I could surely find comments here that had bigger problems but got a pass because they were right-leaning rather than (in context) left-leaning.
roystgnr
13d ago
There’s little glory in pushing the button.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
roystgnr
14d ago
Just to round out the space of anecdotes a little more: when I've called out LLMs in the past I've sometimes had them "correct" their incorrect answer to still be incorrect but in a different way.
(has anyone seen an LLM correct their correct answer to be correct but in a different way? that would fill the last cell of the 2x2 possibility space)
They're still very useful in cases where checking an answer for correctness is much easier than coming up with a possible answer to begin with. I love having a search engine where my queries can be vague descriptions and yet still come up with a high rate of reasonable results. You just can't skip the "checking an answer for correctness" step.
roystgnr
18d ago
I also can't imagine "somewhat subhuman", but everybody is in a bubble on these things. The percent of Americans who say that "sex between an unmarried man and woman" (not specifically prostitution! just sex!) is "morally acceptable" is at an all-time high ... of only 76%. If that also seems surprisingly low to you, then you're probably in a liberal bubble (93%) rather than in a conservative one (57%), and you might also be in a younger bubble (I'm seeing conflicting polls for the 1970s, but they're in the 30%-45% range). I'd bet polling results for the moral acceptability of prostitution would be lower: support for decriminalizing prostitution is still only around 50%, and presumably that includes people who still think it should be shameful but just don't think shameful things should all be illegal.
And as for "damaged goods" ... to go back to OP's example, Aella has been publicly looking for "someone to get happily married to" while aware of the issues there for about 5 years now, still fruitlessly. IMHO the phrase "damaged goods" is going too far, but "typically incompatible with marriage-minded men" might be fair, right? She's helped other married men break their wedding vows "over and over, with small variations on the amount of years and the guilt they brought with it", and though she makes a sympathetic case for them, making that case strengthens the conclusion that wedding vows just aren't her thing. It's understandably hard to find someone who will swear "for better or worse" if they fear "for better or else" in return.
That's not necessarily the end of the world. It sounds like she's made a lot of friends and a lot of money, and obviously she doesn't have trouble finding sex (or presumably short-term relationships) either. She could probably be happy with all that. And if she can't ... well, too many of her critics seem to be cruel or stupid or both (yes, I am aware of the irony here), whereas she seems to be a smart person who at least tries to be kind, so hopefully if it turns out that her decisions really needed to be criticized, she'll eventually get around to joining in on the criticism.
roystgnr
18d ago
That sets a single national standard for benefits
How do they take cost-of-living differences into account?
roystgnr
19d ago
The theoretical justification for it is something analogous to the idea of a Universal Turing Machine, though obviously not rigorous.
If we come up with any other test to determine "human-level intelligence", a test that can't be beaten by a "spiky" non-general intelligence that outperforms in unexpected areas (I'm old enough to remember when chess performance was a generally-accepted sign of intelligence!), then someone judging a Turing test can just use that other test. If it turns out that for some reason an AI really can't understand how to respond to a weird hypothetical about upside-down tortoises, then the judge can ask them about upside-down tortoises. If computers had sucked at chess, a judge could have asked the AI to play chess. Computers only start to beat a Turing test reliably when there's nothing a judge can come up with that they can't beat.
roystgnr
20d ago
Here of all places I should find it easy to remember to avoid oversimplification and overconfidence, but after a perfunctory "I'd bet" I pretty much dropped all expression of uncertainty, and you were right to call me out on that.
I'm not even saying you're wrong
It wouldn't be crazy to go that far. I (sadly, under the circumstances) think I've described the most likely explanation, but that doesn't mean it's more likely than not, because there's only one way for it to be right and there's at least a half dozen ways for it to be wrong. Even if every alternative I can think of seems much less likely, their sum (plus the sum of alternatives I couldn't think of) might be more likely.
roystgnr
20d ago
I'm making a lot of soup from very little meat here, I admit. The LAPD chief later said "I know that situation you’re referring to, with the member of the media. We saw that, we’re very concerned about it and we’re looking into that.", so hopefully there'll be more context later; I'm not finding anything in a quick search now.
It's hard to imagine what any exculpatory context will look like, though. I am somewhat sympathetic to anyone who tries to enforce Niven's Law 1a ("Never throw shit at an armed man.") but ends up accidentally enforcing Niven's Law 1b ("Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."), but I'd be surprised if that applies in this case. There's about 4 or 5 seconds after she's hit before we hear the sound of anyone (not necessarily the original cop; the camera has turned by this point) firing a second shot, and in the brief bit of that we have on video her assailant is lowering his gun barrel, not trying to adjust his aim or get another round ready, so he at least doesn't seem to think he's in any kind of imminent danger.
It's possible that he legitimately thought he spotted some danger before the shot, but realized it was a false positive and calmed down immediately afterward? That may be what happened in the famous Austin case from 2020: the video of a kid standing by himself harmlessly and getting his skull literally caved in by a beanbag round looks pretty damning, but the kid was apparently repeatedly throwing shit at the cops earlier, and the cop who shot him had just gotten multiple (incorrect) verbal reports that the kid now had a large rock in hand. The exculpatory evidence has a bit of a "cops closing ranks to protect a cop" vibe to it, and even the police report noted that there was no way the kid had a large rock as claimed, but the DA who dropped the case is so famous for conflict with the cops ("ran on a platform of ending prosecutions for low-level drug possession to focus on violent crimes, holding police officers accountable for misconduct, and pursuing restorative justice ... advocated against cash bail and promoted diversion programs to prevent felony convictions ... was asked to leave the funeral of fallen Austin Police Officer ... due to Garza’s history of prosecuting police officers") that I can't imagine him dropping this case unless he was confident he couldn't win it.
roystgnr
21d ago
Having grown up in a snowy place, I instinctively dislike white cars, because they scream "hard to see against the landscape" and "please deposit mud here."
Ha!
My city has hit 105F to 110F for 9 out of the last 10 years, yet I still see black cars here, which seem like an insane purchase choice to me.
roystgnr
21d ago
Player of Games and Use of Weapons have a somewhat similar dark vibe, and I could definitely see someone disliking those while liking other parts of the series. Maybe try Excession if you want to give the series one last chance? But frankly it sounds like the series just isn't for you, and you should switch to something else, and IMHO that's perfectly fine. It's a culturally influential (rimshot) series, but it's not the only or the best sci-fi book series out there.
in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases
The contrast between the general "which party should we go to next" culture of the Culture and the "what asshole tricks are we going to need to pull next to keep these people's parties from being ruined" culture of Special Circumstances is definitely intentional by the author, as is at least some of the way the assholishness "leaks" out of that supposedly self-contained organizational apparatus. IMHO the series would have been insufferable if you took away its insufferable characters, though; with just the external conflict it would have come across as just another Mary Sue "look how the universe becomes more awesome when more people think like me" Utopia story.
roystgnr
21d ago
They're already highly useful as a Super Google
If you're careful, they are. But that care requires twice as much checking: instead of just having to verify that the web page you find knows what it's talking about, you have to verify that the AI correctly summarized what it's talking about, and God help you if you just believe the AI about something for which it doesn't cite sources. But even Google's cheap "throw it in every search" AI seems to be much less likely to bring up unrelated web pages than the previous Google option of "let the search engine interpret your query terms loosely", and it's much less likely to miss important web pages than the previous Google option of "wrap most of your query in quotes so the stupid engine doesn't substitute unrelated-in-your-context words for your actual query terms", so it's still very useful.
The one thing I've repeatedly found to be most useful about current LLMs is that they're great at doing "dual" or "inverse" queries. If I knew I wanted the details of Godunov's Theorem, even a dumb search engine would have been fine to bring up the details of Godunov's Theorem - but when all I could recall was that I wanted the details of "some theorem that proves it's impossible to get higher order accuracy and stability from a numerical method for boundary-value problems without sacrificing something", but I didn't even recall the precise details, I wrote a wishy-washy paragraph for Claude and in the reply its first sentence gave me exactly the name of the theorem I wanted to search for. I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken to find what I was looking for with Google.
AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).
I'm currently not allowed to use a top-of-the-line model for my job (even though I mostly work on things that aren't ITAR or classified, we've got a blanket limitation to an in-house model for now), but I'm definitely worried that I'll have a skill issue when the rules get improved. What do you do to get AI help with a large code base rather than a toy problem? Point it to a github repo? Copy-and-paste a hundred thousand lines of code to make sure it has enough context? Paste in just the headers and/or docs it needs to understand a particular problem?
roystgnr
21d ago
Wait - do you get a lot of melee-only battles in Myth II? I only recall playing the first game, and that was a quarter century ago, but I vaguely recall there being enough ranged area-of-effect attacks (dwarf molotov cocktails, some fireball and lightning magics, an exploding suicide unit) that you had to keep your units spread out more often than not.
I do remember our Myth I multiplayer games getting up to some very weird tricks, though. Like: you'd have a dwarf throw a bomb, and then you'd quickly hit the ground below the airborne bomb with another unit's lightning, and the shock would accelerate the bomb high into the air and let it hit units practically on the other side of the map. We may have been evolving our tactics for Rule of Cool rather than for maximum victory rate, now that I think about it.
roystgnr
21d ago
it looks like the cop shot her on purpose, though I can't imagine why.
I'd bet that, ironically, the root cause is the same as the root cause of the protests becoming riots in the first place: because we're violent apes, and we evolved to rely on our own little groups' capacity for violence to protect us from all the other little violent groups, we therefore excuse even unprincipled violence by guys on "our side" rather than cracking down on it and risking intra-group conflict undermining our inter-group conflict. This gives sociopaths opportunities just as soon as they join whichever group gives them the most opportunities for their particular flavor of sociopathy.
When he saw someone who annoyed him, he got to make her suffer with no immediate consequences. It probably felt pretty sweet! The cops surrounding him didn't even turn to look and see what the hubbub was about, and he didn't even glance around to double check on that. He had about as much expectation of being punished by the other cops as the car-torchers had of being punished by other protesters. This asshole is doing more to undermine the support for aggressive law enforcement than the protesters are, and the jackasses waving Mexican flags in front of their barbarian pyres are doing more to undermine the opposition to mass deportations than the ICE and cops are, but because they're all superficially signaling commitment to their groups' cause, they don't get called on it by their other group members.
In general I'd guess police sociopaths are much smarter than rioter/arsonist sociopaths, because they found a group that will pay them overtime while they get to fuck around. Perhaps shooting a woman while a camera was pointed at her may have been going too far, but it is the LAPD, so even if some minor discipline eventually occurs we'll probably never know the details.
roystgnr
21d ago
roystgnr
24d ago
It looks like you only get taxed on the gains on your assets when you expatriate; you don't get re-taxed on anything that's already part of their cost basis.
roystgnr
24d ago
The first big unambiguous attack I recall was Tesla getting shut out of Biden's joke of an "EV summit" ... but the first big conflict I recall was that Musk was heavily opposed to Covid lockdowns, back before being opposed to Covid lockdowns was cool. Not sure who you would say was doing the alienating in that case.
roystgnr
24d ago
The "save a trillion dollars by rooting out fraud" overpromise wasn't one of Musk's usual sort, though. Sometimes he disappoints by fulfilling a promise in a half-assed weasel-worded way ("full" self-driving?), and usually he disappoints by presenting an improbable if-nothing-at-all-goes-wrong timeline for progress that eventually takes at least twice as long, but this time the promise was something that obviously was never going to be possible at all. Many voters were dumb enough to believe it, though, so it's not entirely unlikely that Trump's inner circle believed it too, and even Musk consistently kept acting like he was drinking his own ketamine koolaid.
roystgnr
24d ago
The time to become fiscally responsible by just cutting expenses was 30 years ago. Today we'd need to become fiscally responsible by cutting expenses and raising taxes. We won't voluntarily do that now either, so barring a miracle we'll eventually be forced to do it later (when lenders no longer imagine getting paid back for US treasuries and stop covering our deficits), and we'll grossly inflate away the US dollar too.
I have identified the problem.
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