roystgnr
11hr ago
Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval
I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.
In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)
But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.
So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.
roystgnr
1d ago
“I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct
And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!
roystgnr
2d ago
there's no model of a chessboard in the system, which is why it sometimes makes illegal moves.
On the one hand, yeah, this is totally true, hence the hack where you basically just tell it to use its own output as scratch paper and suddenly it performs much better.
On the other hand, it's always praising with faint damnation when I hear LLMs dismissed as subhuman based on criteria that would also exclude half the kids and a good fraction of the adults I meet. "They sometimes try to make illegal moves when playing chess! Why I never! My brain can do without scratch paper entirely, except of course for hard things like long division, or playing chess without looking at the board."
I believe it was William Poundstone who proposed the idea that consciousness means that an intelligent system has a model of the universe which is so sophisticated that the model contains a sophisticated representation of the system itself. Using this criterion, I would say that LLMs are not conscious at the moment. Their modeling is arguably too rudimentary.
This is a good attempt at definition, and I'd also agree with your conclusion ... though honestly, in this debate I'd award at least an A-minus worth of partial credit to anyone who proposes any clear definition at all. There are an astonishing number of people (on X, at least; discourse here is a little better) who seem to think that "the hard problem of consciousness" is actually so simple that nothing more explicit than "I'll know it when I see it" is necessary.
roystgnr
4d ago
Instead, we all repeat one nice little lie: "somewhere in this world there's your other half waiting for you, one day you'll understand you're made for each other".
This is definitely not in the set of "lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true". It can mislead people into:
- cutting short relationships when the "honeymoon period" / "new relationship energy" fades (if loving someone becomes less dramatic and requires more work, doesn't that mean they're not Made For You?)
- obsessing over unrequited love or love with insurmountable practical obstacles instead of moving on (fate will bring back "The One who got away", right?)
- rejecting compromise and neglecting self-improvement (why would you have to change when Your Other Half will love you exactly as you are?)
- being less understanding and helpful for their partner's self-improvement (would Your Soulmate be wrong to begin with?)
- neglecting communication (wouldn't someone Made For You already know what you need?)
- falling for Borderline Personality Disorder and/or manipulative people (with The One it'll be love
bombingat first sight, right?)
I once saw this summarized most succinctly as "every woman I know who thinks there is such a thing as a "soulmate" is still single".
The converse of this doesn't have to be some sort of heartless "Sexual Market Value is a commodity and you should upgrade whenever you find a better deal" antithesis philosophy, though. Perhaps the best way to express the synthesis here is "soul mates aren't just found, they're made".
The phrase "sexual market value" does seem to reek of commodification and oversimplification, but ... we still talk about "the housing market" despite the word "the" being something of a misnomer, right? Even if two people have exactly the same budget for housing: One person can place more value on proximity to big city amenities and another on proximity to rural open space. One can place more value on square footage and separation and another on neighborhood density and walkability. One can place more value on modernist style and another on history. Etc. etc. We still try to quantify the point where supply meets demand with a single cash value, although doing this is a full time real estate appraiser job ... and once a place is sold, it's not likely to be resold just because the local relative price goes up a few percent to pay the agents' fees, is it? When people own a home they put a lot of effort into moving everything in, redecorating and repainting and landscaping and even renovating it to suit their tastes, setting down roots in the neighborhood and the city, etc. etc. People will notoriously hang on to a specific house that might have become suboptimal for them based on their original less-individual criteria, because of the "memories it now holds" or just "to keep it in the family".
Love is kind of like a much more extreme and two-sided version of that sort of attachment. Both people do have to bring something to the table from the start, and there are a lot of romantically valuable qualities that are nearly universal, and none of that should be ignored because it seems impersonal to do so. But exactly what sort of "something" is most valuable is still somewhat personal and subjective, such that even if you can say "he's a 6" and "he's an 8" in some sort of "averaged over all partners' preferences" sense, it shouldn't be surprising to see the "6" end up with an "8" and the "8" with a "6" and all four people thrilled by the results. And despite the common phrase "end up with", that's never the end, right? Even simply dating causes attachment to grow, helps people to get better attuned to teach other, and helps people find out who they're already attuned with in less obvious ways (sometimes you really don't "just click"), ideally reaching the point where even a "10-to-average-partners" can't compete with an "11-to-me" ... and marriage and kids aren't simply an epilogue to that process, they're an accelerant. In the end you do end up with a soul mate, not because you found the one Out There Waiting For You, but because both of you made yourselves and made each other that way.
roystgnr
6d ago
AI is still at the state where it will sometimes confidently tell you something completely wrong, and yet for simple blocker issues this is still immensely helpful, because you can just try out what it told you, and 90% of the time you get to declare victory, and the other 10% you're just back where you started.
In fact, there's a bit of grey area in between - twice recently I've seen an AI come up with a solution which was definitely wrong or incomplete in some way, but which was much easier to fix than solving the problem from scratch would have been.
For complex issues and design issues, AI can easily paint you into a corner by generating reams of redundant/spaghetti/inflexible code that solves your immediate problem but is unmaintainable in the long run, but in general it's getting better so fast that I'm not sure how long this warning will be necessary.
roystgnr
6d ago
"unless"? Did Bezos leave his first wife before she kicked him out? He was cheating on her for like a year before it went public; I'd assume he would have been happy "getting the best of both worlds" indefinitely if he'd managed to keep getting away with it.
roystgnr
6d ago
Yeah, "handful" was grossly wrong. 30% for "more welfare", geographically non-uniform, means there's probably going to be somewhere you can get a plurality to vote for seizing the means of production ... grocery retail? really? ...
But my point is just that, if loud vocal support for more welfare seems to be coming disproportionally from college students, that's because of a disproportionality in "loud" and "vocal", not in "support".
roystgnr
6d ago
Yeah, but if you try denying it to the wrong guy
Yeah, that's what the Schrödinger's Rapist conversation was all about. Men who didn't understand that women inductively match "a stranger is trying to flirt with me" to frighteningly high odds of "and he might get really nasty or dangerous about it if I'm even a bit too gentle or too harsh (or both, because nasty men aren't all big on logic) about shutting it down", arguing with women who didn't understand that making the guys nice enough to listen about this problem more wary just ends up increasing the proportion of public flirtation coming from nasty men who would never have listened in the first place.
You have to be careful with your signalling.
I admit I suddenly developed a lot more sympathy and respect for women with "resting bitch face" (and even for some non-superficial negative personality traits) when I realized how useful that probably is as a defense against accidentally signaling (or being mistakenly perceived as signaling) invitations they didn't want to offer. Even if the person making a pass isn't at all nasty, more explicit rejections are much more emotionally upsetting to give! In the moment it hurts more to be rejected than to reject someone, but (unless there was a reason for rejection more substantial than "I'm not very attracted to you") IMHO the pain of being rejected goes away faster.
roystgnr
6d ago
Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?
Currently the demographic most likely to say US national spending on welfare is "too little" is people with "less than high school" education (vs high school graduates and college graduates), and this is the case far more often than not, although the correlation with education seems surprisingly weak in general - high school graduates' and college graduates' responses are pretty much neck-and-neck.
That's not an apples-to-apples question, I admit. Might there be people who think we should overthrow capitalism altogether and perfect the New Soviet Man or whatever but who also don't want any more money going to today's lumpenproles? It still seems like a good indicator.
roystgnr
6d ago
States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly
Taking this consistently, we must conclude that Russia should get to conquer Ukraine, by a vote on the order of 130M to 30M.
Recall that originally state meant, well, "state", not "prefecture".
roystgnr
6d ago
Where did you read this?
Not OP, but this off topic comment thread was interesting enough that I saved some of the best quotes (from the top reply) and was able to find it again now, a decade later.
This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
You and everybody else still single, right? (...as well as those of us who are married but would like to give our kids useful advice and have grandkids someday, honestly) It feels like the Sexual Revolution burned all the oversimplified restrictive scripts that one might have read in some stuffy old Guide to Mannerly Courting, but then instead of the result being "we're all free! we can just do what feels right!" it turned out to be "you're still screwed if you don't follow the right script, but now everybody disagrees about what the right script should be and it's too contentious to talk about or write down".
I'm not even sure if the above interpretation of proper flirting hasn't also already been obsoleted by cultural changes! (I was already married ten years ago, thankfully, and it's even harder to analyze this stuff from a distance) After ten years of "you find a guy by just swiping right", do women still know or care about the old "you can find a guy by giving plausibly-deniable signals of invitation and escalation" techniques? Ten years after this cute comic prompted the "Schrödinger's Rapist" debate, are men still eager to try carefully interpreting possible plausibly-deniable signals? Granted, the remaining alternatives are awful, but it feels like they're all that's left.
"Oh now this one's just plain sick!"
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