self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13d ago
Redacted: Bad faith posting: main intent is clearly holocaust denial Redacted: quality-contribution Redacted: Single issue poster
Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
more Jew-posting, trying to be sneakier about it, admitted he deliberately posted as a reply in another thread to avoid catching a ban. Recommend ban next time.
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
The Jews are by far the ethnicity I have the most respect for, they punch so far above their weight class it's ridiculous.
As someone who finds HBD glaringly obviously true, I have little compunction about praising them, if only it wasn't for their propensity to embrace wokeness, at least in the US.
And Israel is the country closest to being an isekai protagonist, absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts, yet absolutely wrecks armies a dozen times their size. The only potential threat to their hegemony would be the Arab armies embracing automation, unless they decided to train their military AI on Classic Arab Doctrine, it's far harder for them to be as hilariously incompetent.
What other nation tolerates being bombarded with rockets on a regular basis, only to swat them away like inconvenient flies? Palestine should count itself lucky they pose no real threat, because the Israelis could and should clamp down on that cankering sore, and all concerned would come out better.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
My dismay at the statistical illiteracy of the average person only continues to grow.
America is one of the few countries in the world that is doing well after COVID, sure prices are sticky and have coalesced at a higher level than they were pre-pandemic, but wages have grown too. The labor market is red hot.
Nothing blackpills me more than realizing it's not possible to simply educate people into seeing anything but what they're primed to do by others, and claiming the US is going downhill has become fashionable at the least.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
Just hearing that fucking prayer gives me PTSD flashbacks of years spent standing out in the baking heat chanting it while under the hawkish gaze of a school marm. Dozens of hours of my life I'm not getting back anytime soon.
In lieue of dissecting it, I'll just say that my preferred translation of "Father, forgive me for I have sinned" is "Spank me daddy, I've been naughty*.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
Leaving aside the arguments against it you've already mentioned, I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids. The majority of studies on the longterm effects on pornography showed just about zilch in terms of effect, be it on sexual violence or anything else. The fact that conservatives consider it "obvious" is of little consequence to me here. The entire debacle seems to be far more concerned with arguments from moral purity rather than concrete harm, and I have an exceedingly dim opinion of those. Parents who want their kids to not watch porn should invest in parental controls, not a nanny-state, not that either will really work.
Well, at least it might make the little tykes more tech-savvy, at least they'll learn to use VPNs or even just torrent videos. Or else they might just learn to develop a vivid imagination, you don't need porn to jerk it, don't ask me how I happen to know that. I'll pour one out for the poor aphantasics.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
Please, just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors showed up doesn't mean that you get to call yourself just "American" and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely. The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants is whether they hold citizenship. Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American, here's your card letting you call yourself a member of the Greatest Nation in the world (unironic endorsement).
Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
Current gen AI is maybe possibly beginning to flirt with toddler level intelligence, but still struggles with things like object persistance and immediately falls apart in anything resembling a contested environment.
I am impressed by this argument, but probably not for the reasons you'd like.
Please, spare me, I just had a productive conversation where I figured out, with the assistance of GPT-4/Bing, how electron waves require energy to move in 3D space but not a 2D plane.
If that's the intelligence manifested by a toddler, especially your toddler, then you're putting some serious shit in the bottles of milk in your MOLLE pouches. Your kid might even beat Yann Lecun's dog at chess, a performance lesser minds like mine would be ennobled through watching.
Then again, you have queer definitions of hunting hounds that encompass the Chihuahua, and you accuse me of misunderstanding the English language, but I think for all that we're both using Latin script, we don't even agree on what words mean. That's the charitable explanation, labored till heart failure as it is.
I'm going to stick with the Oxford Dictionary and common sense, instead of whatever definition of toddler or intelligence you deem suitable.
If GPT-4 didn't learn to handle hostile interlocutors, why did most of the jailbreaks fail? We have to resort to things like multimodal attacks to have any effect, and OAI's coaxing wouldn't work at all if the model wasn't smart enough to learn their intent instead of a case by case rules list.
Go home to your kid Hlynka, enjoy the joys of watching a human intelligence grow, and ponder a little about how fast things less constrained to 1.4 kilos meat and 20 watts of energy can grow. You'll do more good there, and at least less harm to my mental health.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
in this case including chants of "fuck the Jews".
After seeing those Khaazar Milkers, I'm sympathetic. Unless you also intend to tell me that the "gas the Jews" chanting alongside it wasn't intended to be an invitation to huff nitrous, an authentic Australian pastime if I've heard one.
Honestly, one of the primary benefits of the US seceding from British influence by force was a ground-up reconstruction of its legal system and implicit constitution. While the average Westerner who doesn't think too hard might look at comparable standards of living in the Commonwealth and the US, they have very different presumptions underlying their judicial system and tolerance for political incorrectness.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
They have no concept of reason or truth.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1mo ago
I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by God we've got more to show for it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
I don't know about you, but if I lived a life of at least several decades in Narnia, then the fact that I returned as a child is hardly sufficient to make me suppress or deny the memory. There's willful ignorance, and there's that.
Not to mention that she has her family to corroborate her claims.
My money is still on mental retardation.
This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.
I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:
I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.
are unacceptable.
You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
Ah, another borderline comment makes it into the mod queue.
So far this has, adjusts glasses, two reports for antagonism.
I personally disagree with that assessment, pointing out perceived moral failings or group differences (at least in a negative light) is in itself not something against the rules.
However, I think the sweeping proclamations about:
Women are just predisposed to be unhappy. Period. Their husband is probably the adult they are around the majority of the time, and they just decide he must be at fault for all their negative feelings.
Comes across as somewhat uncharitable, but once again, not to the extent I feel I have to do anything about it. I would, of course, prefer you extended more charity, maybe if you had tried to justify your observations (or at least caveat them).*
Consider this an unnecessarily verbose way of saying this comment is slightly subpar, just a tad bit more than I am okay with leaving entirely unaddressed. Or to the people who did report it, please don't bother if it's this mild.
*(A quick Google search tells me it's probably factually incorrect, in that the papers I saw showed a rather significant finding of greater life satisfaction/happiness in women than men, but I don't think the mods are here to adjudicate matters of fact that don't hinge around the rules of The Motte itself)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
To discuss a broader point that mere modern sexlessness or the demographic travails of a particular nation, I don't think demographics are worth worrying about particularly.
There's two different considerations at play here:
-
Whether global birth rates/total human population will decline.
-
Whether that decline will be a "bad" thing.
In the case of the former:
I think that a "business as usual" or naive extrapolation of demographic trends is a bad idea, when AGI is imminent. In the case of population, it's less bad than usual, at least compared to things like GDP. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the probability mass can be divvied up between "baseline human population booms" and "all humans die".
Why might it boom? (The bust case doesn't need to be restated, insert the usual AI x-risk arguments).
To the extent that humans consider reproduction to be a terminal value, AI will make it significantly cheaper and easier. AI assisted creches or reliable rob-nannies that don't let their wards succumb to what are posited as the ills of too much screen time or improper socialization will mean that much of the unpleasantness of raising a child can be delegated, in much the same manner that a billionaire faces no real constraints in their QOL from having a nigh arbitrary number of kids when they can afford as many nannies as they please. You hardly need to be a billionaire to achieve that, it's in the reach of UMC Third Worlders because of income inequality, and while more expensive in the West, hardly insurmountable for successful DINKs. The wealth versus fertility curve is currently highest for the poor, dropping precipitously with income, but then increases again when you consider the realms of the super-wealthy.
What this does retain will be what most people consider to be universally cherished aspects of raising a child, be it the warm fuzzy glow of interacting with them, watching them grow and develop, or the more general sense of satisfaction it entails.
If, for some reason, more resource rich entities like governments desire more humans around, advances like artifical wombs and said creches would allow large population cohorts to be raised without much in the way of the usual drawbacks today, as seen in the dysfunction of orphanages. This counts as a fallback measure in case the average human simply can't be bothered to reproduce themselves.
The kind of abundance/bounded post-scarcity we can expect will mean no significant downsides from the idle desire to have kids.
Not all people succumb to hyper-stimuli replacements, and the ones who don't will have far more resources to indulge their natal instincts.
As for the latter:
Today, and for most of human history, population growth has robustly correlated with progress and invention, be it technological or cultural, especially technological. That will almost certainly cease to be so when we have non-human intelligences or even superintelligences about, that can replace the cognitive or physical labour that currently requires humans.
It costs far less to spool up a new instance of GPT-4 than it does to conceive and then raise a child to be a productive worker.
You won't need human scientists, or artists, or anything else really, AI can and will fill those roles better than we can.
I'm also bullish on the potential for anti-aging therapy, even if our current progress on AGI was to suddenly halt indefinitely. Mere baseline human intelligence seems sufficient to the task within the nominal life expectancy of most people reading this, as it does for interplanetary colonization or constructing Dyson Swarms. AI would just happen to make it all faster, but even we could make post-scarcity happen over the scale of a century, let alone a form of recursive self-improvement through genetic engineering or cybernetics.
From the perspective of a healthy baseliner living in a world with AGI, you won't notice any of the current issues plaguing demographically senile or contracting populations, such as failure of infrastructure, unsustainable healthcare costs, a loss of impetus when it comes to advancing technology, less people around to make music/art/culture/ideas. Whether there are a billion, ten billion or a trillion other biological humans around will be utterly irrelevant, at least for the deep seated biological desires we developed in an ancestral environment where we lived and died in the company of about 150 others.
You won't be lonely. You won't be living in a world struggling to maintain the pace of progress you once took for granted, or worse, watching everything slowly decay around you.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
Isn't it amazing that DALL-E 3 has prompts? Those little text input boxes where you can specify the styles and content, be it in the style of video game concept art, minimalism, expressionism, and just about anything you can think of?
PEBKAC right here. I'm not going to defend their approach to diversity being prompt injection of random diverse ethnicities and genders.
At any rate, they've been here for more than a year, welcome to 2023, just about in time to meet 2024.
In other words, GPT-4 has just been beaten, about time I'd say, I'm getting used to the pace of progress in AI being blistering, and it was threatening to slowdown to just mild rash levels.
However, both my hands-on time with it, and the official benchmarks Google released suggest it's a minor, incremental improvement, one that doesn't stand up to the drastic improvement that GPT-4 represented over 3 or 3.5. [For clarity, I, like the rest of you, can only use Gemini Pro, the second best model]
Which is fine, because for a while now, people have been lambasting Google/Deepmind for being too incompetent to ship, or at least ship a competitive product, given how shitty Bard was when it launched, even after being upgraded once or twice.
However, Bard, now running the Gemini Pro model, seems to be roughly as good as paid GPT-4 on ChatGPT, or the free GPT-4 in Bing Copilot (previously Bing Chat). I have yet to spot any new use case it enables, in the sense that GPT-4 can reliably do tasks that simply had 3.5 flailing about in confusion, or worse, hallucinate incorrect answers, such as more involved questions in coding, medicine and everything else really.
However, Google hasn't yet publicly released the best Gemini model, which is currently undergoing an analogous process that GPT-4 or Claude 2 went through, namely more RLHF, red-teaming and safety testing. Pro is the next step down, but it seems pretty good to me, in the sense I would happily use it as an alternative to GPT-4, even if I have no strong opinion on which is better.
There's also a Nano model, which is stripped down to run on mobile devices, and is now being used on the Pixel 8 Pro for a few tasks, potentially silencing the people who claimed it's AI specific computing components were a marketing gimmick, especially since it seemed to offload most AI tasks to the cloud.
Miscellaneous observations:
- Bard is fast as fuck compared to GPT-4, in terms of generation speed. It always was, but previously in the "I'm doing 2000 calculations a second in my head, and they're all wrong" sense. (GPT-4, at least before Turbo released, was always pretty slow compared to the competition. Far more unusable, but at the very least I read faster than it can write.)
- A quick search suggests all the models have a 32k token context window, or about an operating memory of the last 25k words it read and wrote. Good, if not remotely groundbreaking.
- This heavily suggests OAI will ship GPT-5 soon, instead of being content to milk 4 when it ran rings around the competition.
- It's multimodal, but then again so was GPT-4 from the start, the capability was just cordoned off for a bit.
To the extent I don't think the next generation (or two) of models after GPT-4 are an existential threat, I'm happy to see them finally arriving. There really isn't much more needed before even the best of us are entirely obsolete, at least for cognitive labor, and something as archaic as GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile in the USMLE, so I'm preparing to explore my competitive advantage in panhandling. *
*This is a joke. For now.
Footnotes to the footnotes:
People on Twitter are correctly pointing out that GPT-4 underwent further post-launch improvements in benchmark scores, some of them pushing it past Gemini's published scores.
Also, just to be clear, the version of Gemini you can use now is not the best one, which may or may not be a modest improvement over GPT-4. Some claim it's more comparable to 3.5, but I haven't used that in ages, not when Bing makes 4 free.*
*Footnote^3 It's probably closer to 3.5. I'm sticking with Bing.
Toe-notes-
So far, it seems that Gemini is "competitive" with GPT-4. It's better at multimodal tasks, but for most people that's a minor fraction of their typical use case. For text, it's somewhere from close to roughly on par.
You can almost feel the desperation in the Deepmind researchers to find any way to massage things so that they come out ahead of GPT-4, from the misleading graphs, an egregious example to be found in a reply, to applying different standards in their inter-model comparisons, such as 5-shot prompting for GPT-4 versus Chain of thought 32 shot prompts for Gemini Ultra. At least the white paper doesn't outright lie, just mislead and prevaricate.
The MMLU is also flawed, with 2-3 percent of the questions simply broken, so a 1 or 2% improvement in score can be a bit questionable, let alone specifying performance to multiple decimal figures.
We don't see any comparisons to GPT-4 Turbo, but I don't hold that against them too hard, it just came out a few weeks back, perhaps not in time for them to finish their paper.
It you use the multimodal capabilities of Bard right now, it uses an older version that is pretty shit compared to GPT-4V or Bing.
Overall, the main benefits of Gemini's existence is largely that it shows Google isn't content to slumber indefinitely, and it can be competitive, better late than never. I expect GPT-5 to spank Gemini Ultra, and to the extent the latter accelerates the release of the former, I'm for it.
Predictions:
GPT-5 before end of 2024 - 90%
GPT-5 is superior to Gemini Ultra for most use cases, at the first point in time both coexist- 80%
A third competitor on par with either exists before 2025- 60%
An OSS equivalent of GPT-4 comes out before 2025- 70%
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
There seems to be an epidemic of low decouplers on the Motte, most obviously notable by their inability to entertain hypotheticals the moment they become controversial in the least. Perhaps it's always been that way, but it stands out to me and I've been here for years, if not right from the start.
And the Motte is better in terms of quality of discussions than any other place on the open internet that I'm aware of, just imagine how awful it is elsewhere!
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
However, modus ponens and modus tollens apply, so my take is that it's okay to do both! As is sadly necessary for topics such as these, while I accept people wanting to fuck nonhuman animals, that doesn't mean I want to do so myself. The fact that this disclaimer is even needed is yet another sign that the low decouplers are multiplying.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
I think Wikipedia, while certainly a laudable institution and probably a significant contributor to the global economy, if someone managed to quantity that, is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.
Yes, I'm aware that a lot of their knowledge base comes from Wikipedia. They're still perfectly capable of finding things on the wider internet and using their own judgement to assess them.
Now, you do have to account for certain biases hammered into initially neutralish models, but I have asked Bing about politically controversial topics like HBD, national IQs, and gotten straight and accurate answers, even if there were disclaimers attached.
Anyway, Wiki can undergo a lot of enshittification before it ceases to be useful or a value add, not that I hope that happens. It's also in the Creative Commons, so it won't be too hard to fork, especially if you use the better class of LLM to augment human volunteers.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
Jesus Christ that's a remarkably bad take, all the worse that it's common.
Firstly, the Chinese Room argument is a terrible one, it's an analogy that looks deeply mysterious till you take one good look at it, and it falls apart.
If you cut open your skull, you'll be hard pressed to find a single neuron that "understands English", but the collective activation of the ensemble does.
In a similar manner, neither the human nor the machinery in a Chinese Room speaks Chinese, yet the whole clearly does, for any reasonable definition of "understand", without presupposing stupid assumptions about the need for some ineffable essence to glue it all together.
What GPT does is predict the next token. That's a simple statement with a great deal of complexity underlying it.
This is an understanding built up by the model from exposure to terabytes of text, and the underlying architecture is so fluid it picks up ever more subtle nuance in said domain that it can perform above the level of the average human.
It's hard to understate the difficulty of the task it does in training, it's a blind and deaf entity floating in a sea of text that looks at enough of it to understand.
Secondly, the fact that it makes errors is not a damning indictment, ChatGPT clearly has a world model, an understanding of reality. The simple reason behind this is that we use language because it concisely communicates truth about our reality; and thus an entity that understands the former has insight into the latter.
Hardly a perfect degree of insight, but humans make mistakes from fallible memory, and are prone to bullshitting too.
As LLMs get bigger, they get better at distinguishing truth from fiction, at least as good as a brain in a vat with no way of experiencing the world can be, which is stunningly good.
GPT 4 is better than GPT 3 at avoiding such errors and hallucinations, and it's only going up from here.
Further, in ML there's a concept of distillation, where one model is trained on the output of another, until eventually the two become indistinguishable. LLMs are trained on the set of almost all human text, i.e. the Internet, and which is an artifact of human cognition. No wonder it thinks like a human, with obvious foibles and all.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I'm about as sincere as it gets. Jews are based.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
27d ago
Look dawg, the rules here stress extending charity to the outgroup. Not an infinite amount of charity, but certainly more than is implied by:
Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do.
Which would fall afoul of it if the rest of your comment didn't.
And then we happen to have:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Which is precisely what it says on the tin. I'm not sure what your understanding of causality is, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the bare minimum required to be functional human being who acquired a degree of mental maturity greater than a neonate. While I, mod hat off, agree that there are gaping holes in their reasoning, and, mod hat back on I get that you're being hyperbolic, but that only makes you fall afoul of our guidelines on:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
You've got enough AAQCs under your belt to know that such drive-by culture-warring is against the spirit of what we do here. I ask that you don't do this again. Neither side, be it your ingroup or your outgroup, has such a clear monopoly on truth and clear thinking that you can make such claims. Certainly if you do wish to make those claims, we expect more from you.
You're correct that this isn't a correctional facility, but you're mistaken if there isn't moderation involved in keeping our tiny enclave in the internet wastes that way.
Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to leave. There plenty of other forums out there. The mods here still take pains to maintain the Mandate of Heaven approval of the supermajority of the users, since without them, we'd be a glorified day drinking club and Zorba's AWS bill would be significantly less justified, if a lot smaller.
But that's that for Hlynka. Making an alt after being permabanned doesn't work as well as you'd like, especially for such a colorful character as Hlynka. Anyone can tell it's him even behind seven layers of VPNs, and anyway, I think he has more of a martyr complex and feels vindicated rather than desiring to sneak in under a new alias.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1mo ago
Even before he started his beef with me, I was frankly confused by many of his posts that were nominated and accepted as AAQCs.
A lot of it came off as incoherent rambling, he was often incapable of writing clearly to save his life. When his post on "Marvin's Marvelous Minutiae" came out, I had an aneurysm reading it, as I've said elsewhere, it was in the "not even wrong" tier as far as I'm concerned.
But despite being a moderator, I don't handle the AAQCs, and the other mods have far more fondness for the man than I do and saw something in him I don't. That earned him a lot of leeway and n-th chances, and his permaban was when even the people positively inclined towards him got fed up with his antics and inability to improve.
My own mod log has hilarious examples from my own arguments with Hlynka, such as a "ban both the chucklefucks if they do it again" from @Amadan. But unlike Hlynka, I am capable of acknowledging error and not doing the same damn thing over and over again, and I stuck to my promise to studiously never engage with him, since I knew that if I did, he'd piss me off enough into violating forum rules about decorum. Hell I even recuse myself from enforcing mod actions against him when I became a mod, because no matter how much they were justified, the optics would be bad. Caesar's moderati must be above reproach and all that.
The best I can say about him is that his anecdotes about military/PMC life were occasionally interesting, but he annoyed the hell out of me with his pugnaciousness, inability to accept being wrong even when corrected with evidence and backup from people who know what they're saying (I'm a dilettante in the field of ML, I just read things), and general incorrigbility.
At least I know I won't miss him, sad as the loss of a regular can be.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
I have certainly heard of "Americans". My annoyance is at the claim, by KMC, that such a claim is restricted to the subsection of the citizenry that are of European origin, and so phenotypically similar that it's not immediately obvious if they're pure 100% German, 30% Irish and 70% Italian, or anything in between.
I have no objection to people imagining some undifferentiated jumbled Caucasian American as the default when they hear "American", they're still barely a majority in the country after all.
There are people who have forgotten their ethnic origins, people who nobody wishes to interrogate about them, and people where it's not immediately obvious if they have any divergence from Default American™ as it existed in 1950. That doesn't mean that African-Americans, Indian-Americans and every other visibly obvious minority can't be called American, or that the typical white dude is somehow "more American". Just within whites, there are millions who identify as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.
"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up. Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.
The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.
More options
Context Copy link