vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.
The goal isn't to find a single, simple master explanation for everything. The goal is to find the minimum number of explanations with the maximum amount of explanatory power.
Pure HBD clearly doesn't serve as a complete explanation. For example, African Americans are about 20% White admixture and have IQs of 85. If we think that 100% of the difference between African Americans and Whites is explained by genetics, we can predict the average IQs of Subsaharan Africans with the equation: (0.80x) + (0.2 * 100) = 85, and predict that their IQ should be around 81. And yet most of the numbers I see HBD people cite for Subsaharan African IQ are far lower than that. I've sometimes seen claims in the high 60's. A genetic difference between African Americans and Whites, implies a strong environmentally-mediated difference for Subsaharan Africans and African Americans.
But if we're already going to allow that environment effects can cause a one or more standard deviation in IQ from what we expect, I think we then have to double back and question our originally granted assumption that the IQ differences between African Americans and Whites is 100% genetic. It has got to be a mix, and if it is a mix, I don't think we can yet say where African Americans will top out.
On the other hand, I think the nutrition + parasites + tropical diseases explanations seem to have a lot of explanatory power. They're not another thing to memorize, they make predictions that I tend to think are born out in the data, even if they can't explain all of the difference with best estimates for effect size.
I never had a sense that painting your nails in general was lower class behavior, and my mom, who is an engineer, often had painted nails when I was growing up (and still occasionally does.) Maybe it's a regional thing? Perhaps looked down on because of the vanity of focusing on your appearance in this way?
Now, what I do consider somewhat lower class is incredibly long nails, or fake nail extensions. My mom painted her finger and toenails, but she didn't keep her nails impractically long. She had work to do.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
Those exceptions are non-fiction.
I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.
(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)
This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.
Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.
However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.
The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.
To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.
Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.
For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.
Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.
However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?
Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.
As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.
I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
For me it, it is more about pragmatism. Most court-mandated expansions of civil rights in the United States started underwater with the public, and got more popular over time. Roe v Wade did not, and instead it created a wedge issue that made the quality and tenor of American politics worse over the affected period. I actually think politics (narrowly considered) has gotten slightly better since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, because the abortion debate has cooled down as a national issue, and become a state-level one.
Based on the review you linked, it sounds like the book was written by someone who used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and it draws on her experiences from that time (even if she adds supernatural elements.) While it is still probably crap (since 90% of everything is crap), that at least feels like a book that could have some interesting roman à clef-style presentations of real experiences the author had, if it was in the hands of a competent writer.
There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water.
There definitely seems to be a one reality, two screens effect here.
Pro-life people like you get to claim that the battle is lost, and abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right. While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.
I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.
We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".
While I'm sure much of the grey tribe are more "blue" when it comes to the abortion debate, I actually don't think that the combination of positions you outlined here is a very common one overall.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I believe humans can walk untrodden ground, that we have the ability to do things that are not causal mechanistically related to external stimuli in a way that an LLM currently does not. If you want to profer that you are just a flesh-bag robot with no free will, that is a belief system, but I'm not sure you'd like the ramifications of essentially being an object.
My feeling has always been that free will of this style is undesirable.
Consider something I do every day, like drive to and from work. I want my actions to be causally determined by my character, my memories and experiences and the kind of person I am, because I would never just decide to randomly swerve my car and hit the concrete barrier between the lanes at max speed.
But if I have the kind of radical free will that you propose, then there's always a possibility that, in spite of my upbringing, and the moral character I have spent my whole life cultivating and inhabiting, I could just make the random decision, causally unburdened by anything that has come before, to slam into the concrete divider head on at max speed in my car. I don't want the free will to "walk untrodden ground" that you propose. In a very real sense, it seems to me that whatever a-causal "decider" there is in me in such a situation, must not be me, since I would never have chosen to do the things a truly free version of myself would have chosen.
On the other hand, if I inhabit a deterministic universe, then I at least can know that whatever I do, it will be causally downstream of the person that I am, and that is comforting, regardless of whatever my ultimate fate will be. At least, on some level, I can say that I am truly the agent acting in the world, and reaping the consequences of my actions.
If we can't test it, it may as well not exist. Having feelings, alone and distinct from all outcomes and outputs, is not a test.
This feels like the same kind of overly simplistic reductionism that the behaviorists engaged in.
I think internal mental states are a sensible thing to talk about. There are chatbots we can be very sure have no internal mental states: The very simple ones (like Eliza), but also the ones that would take more space than the entire universe like Ned Block's Blockhead thought experiment of a chatbot consisting of a giant lookup table of every possible sentence of some arbitrary length.
But for entities between those two extremes, we have to learn more about how they're actually working in order to say whether they have internal mental states or not.
While it is far from definitive, I remember the interpretability research on ChessGPT (an LLM trained only on chess games in chess notation), found that there was representation of the state of the chess board inside the LLM, because it turns out that the best way to predict the next move in a game of chess is to realize that there is a chess board with pieces on it, and particular moves are legal for certain pieces. That is, you must be able to reverse engineer chess to predict the next token in chess notation.
I wonder what the implications of that are for LLMs that do a reasonable job of replicating the emotional arc of a conversation with a person? I don't actually think it is totally implausible that the best way to predict what a human will say next is to essentially reverse engineer human cognition. Maybe what an LLM is doing when it plays the part of helpful assistant is that it is actually doing something very analogous to what a helpful human assistant's brain would be doing under the same circumstances?
We evolved to have a constant experience-reaction feedback loop. If a bee stings me, the signal takes time to travel up my arm, get to my brain, and then be processed into action on my part.
If we imagine alien anthropologists who move and react to things in femtoseconds, they might look at humans staying still for eons as a bee lands on them, stings them, and then just let the bee stay there for millions of femtoseconds before slapping it and conclude that we're not truly conscious. We're constantly "starting and stopping" actions when nothing is going on, even if we have a relatively continuous, rolling awareness.
I don't see how it is that different from LLM's in principle, except that because we're designing them, we have to be the ones to put them into an agentic loop to accomplish things.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Basically, it comes across as "Who are you going to believe? My heckin' sciencerino and philosophy, or your own lying brain?"
I mean, to be fair, the reality of the universe revealed by science and philosophy is extremely unintuitive to humans.
To pick just one example, atoms or subatomic particles are the foundational material of reality, and yet in everyday life we basically never perceive ourselves as interacting with such tiny objects. We only don't perceive their reality as weird because we're educated from a relatively young age to understand atoms and the consequences of their existence.
The subjective experiences of humankind have been wrong about the nature of reality on question after question, but you think we can still trust those subjective experiences to justify belief in free will, or a basis for morality grounded in something other than human well-being and suffering?
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Right, but if you believe the brain has functional modules that serve relatively discrete functions, that might also be how human brains and memory work (at least at a very high level of abstraction.)
I'm a fan of something like global workspace theory in human consciousness, and I find it extremely plausible that if we "plug together" the right kinds of functional systems in the right way, we could reproduce by artifice what evolution produced naturally, and make an artificial consciousness.
We already have reason to believe that, for example, recognizing faces is a relatively discrete function in the brain, and a person can suffer localized brain damage that robs them of that capability while they retain all of the other functions we consider essential to conscious human existence. If we just keep giving LLM's more tools, better memory management, and create feedback loops to let them introspect, I don't see any reason in principle they couldn't become truly conscious (assuming, of course, they're not already.)
One problem with both LLMs and sapient aliens, is that the intuitive leap to their consciousness is always going to be bigger than the intuitive leap to other humans being conscious. I just have to think other humans are probably the same kind of thing I am to believe they are conscious. For LLMs or sapient aliens, I have to believe that a completely different architecture that developed under very different conditions is conscious in a way somewhat similar to me. In this respect, consciousness is always going to be more fraught than "easier" questions, like "does it behave in rational, goal-oriented ways?" or something.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Planes also exist, if one is not truly destitute.
I assume there exists some pro-choice charity that would pay for plane tickets, even if one was destitute.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I actually don't agree with that.
This is on the level of criticizing anti-abortion advocates for being insincere because they don't blow up abortion clinics anymore.
It is possible to believe someone or something is a great moral evil, to say so in the public square and to honestly believe that either morally or tactically it would be a mistake to do something norm-violating to stop that evil.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated." Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism.
I guess part of my problem here is how broad should I consider my "we/us"?
I'm broadly anti-Trump, but I'm also an independent who didn't vote for either of the major parties in the last presidential election. Do I have some responsibility to reign in the other anti-Trump people, even if they would hate my guts if they knew all the things I believe?
Realistically, what power do I have over anyone in the anti-Trump movement? And in the case of lone autistic weirdos, who realistically could have intervened to stop this specific would-be assassin?
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
I mean the Unabomber was quite smart, and also opted for bombs over guns.
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
I'm not sure how wise it is to be giving such recipes on this forum either. I doubt you'll direct the Eye of Sauron our way, but it never hurts to be safe, especially when your point could have just as easily have been made by simply saying something like, "You can make homemade C4 out of materials that are freely available in the US, and then delivering it via a drone would be trivial" or something like that.
Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I do think it is lucky that people who want to hurt others are mostly uncreative. I have definitely come up with ways of doing mass damage that I'm surprised have never actually happened in the United States, since I wasn't thinking particularly hard about the problem. It just seems like we are lucky that when humans are high in the desire to do mass violence, they mostly tend to be low in traits like intelligence that correlate with successfully perpetrating the most harmful kinds of mass violence.
That's one of the worrying things about AI for me. While I know all of the big AI labs test for this, and have their own systems in place to detect users trying to use LLMs in this way, I really worry about what will happen if someone is able to manufacture a bioweapon they otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture thanks to an LLM.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
So it seems like the only way that the shipment of oil can return to a normal state is if Iran is backed into a corner and is forced to stop what they are doing.
So, your offer is to spend more money and resources (and potentially American lives) to get us close to the status quo antebellum?
I don't see how it is hard to think that the US just shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place, and should have kept Israel on a leash and told them to play nice. But having gotten ourselves into this mess, it is only a good idea to stay in it if we have both clear goals for the political outcome we want, and a realistic path to achieving that. Do we have either of those things?
It seems like the Trump administration is holding out for nuclear concessions, but are they going to get them for a cost that is acceptable to American voters? I suppose we shall see.
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
An effect being irreducibly uncertain for particular models or measurements isn't the same as it not happening. You just need some other way of measuring and modelling what you care about that isn't irreducibly uncertain, or lots of weaker methods that can add up to a more powerful method.
I so happy that when I was ~12, my teachers thought it was wise to teach me and my entire class the world was doomed.
That was irresponsible of them. Unless there's unexpected feedback loops, there was always the possibility of humanity just spending more to deal with the effects of climate change. We don't even need sci fi technology, the Netherlands has been below sea level for its entire existence. It's just expensive, but in a rich world with the energy of fossil fuels it was always plausible that we would have the energy to deal with it long term.
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
Sure, but the speed was almost certainly slower and easier to keep up with without making it your full time job. My concern is that the speed at which LLMs can ape us will make it a losing proposition to try and avoid all "LLM tells" in human writing in the long term.
Don't get me wrong. People are anti-AI enough that there are going to be lots of people trying to make their writing sound as un-LLM-like as possible. I just don't want to play that game.
vorpa-glavo
16d ago
My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.
Part of me almost wants to stand on principle and just refuse the start of the treadmill. I was here first. Obviously, I don't want people to think my human-made writing is actually LLM writing and dismiss it without actually engaging with the content, but I've already had my human-made writing dismissed this way on Reddit and in that very thread most of the comments agreed that I didn't actually have much of an LLM voice. Might as well just write how I write, and perhaps if everyone else does the treadmill my writing will start sounding human again without me having to change.
I am talking about Lockean liberalism, which was not "secular", even if its teachings differ from the Catholic church's.
Surely, "free speech" or "right to property" implies that at least some actors in society have positive duties to act a particular way? Otherwise, how does a Lockean Liberal defend these rights in practice?
Absolutely not. The fundamental basis of libertarian view of right is that of self-ownership,
There is more than one construction of libertarianism. I tend to fall more in the consequentialist/utilitarian foundation for libertarianism, though I do have a lot of sympathy for the side that starts with freedom as their starting point.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
Not because Trump wouldn’t have sex with an escort in a Russian hotel room, but because wanting to be peed on is a weird fetish thing, and for the kind of person who whose idea of good sex is fucking his friends’ wives to get off on being ‘the man’, that is the fetish, the woman and what you do with or to her or what she does to you aren’t, except in the most perfunctory way to say that you did. Okay, I’m explaining this badly, but I mean that this is someone for whom sex is about what it means, about power, about who and whom. What simply isn’t important to that kind of thing.
While I agree with you that the pee tape stuff is almost certainly fake, I don't think your argument here actually does a good job dismissing it.
Five minutes on the right part of Deviant Art will show that many seemingly unrelated fetishes can all be enjoyed by the same person. Sure, most people gravitate to just one or two, but some "lucky" people seem to be interested in a wide variety of fetishes. Cucking other guys, and watersports can all be enjoyed by the same person.
The better argument is just that the "pee tape" was salacious nonsense from the Steele Dossier, and people have always loved salacious rumors about the rich and powerful, from Justinian and his wife, to Elagabalus, Nero or Caligula. Some of those rumors might have actually been true, but the fact that humanity seems to love such rumors so much they made it into the historical record should make us highly suspicious of whether they are true or false whenever we hear a new claim in that style.
I'm not actually sure most of these people understand the "heritability" that twin studies are measuring. The way the math works, the heritability of number of legs is close to 0 (because there is basically no variation in leg count), even though we are quite sure that number of legs is 100% determined by genetics. And the equation we use spits out different heritability numbers under different social arrangements: the heritability of literacy is different in places where women aren't educated vs. where women are.
And I honestly lost a lot of faith in Twins Reared Apart studies when I learned a lot of them allow for a shared environment until the age of 8 - it isn't all just twins separated at birth (because there are not enough such twins for most studies.) 8 years is a long time in childhood development, and while I think the Classical Twin Design of looking at identical and fraternal twins raised together is slightly better, I still don't think we can rule out that identical twins end up with more similar "environments" because they look more like one another (and like it or not appearance matters for humans.) I think a lot of the missing heritability between twin studies and GWAS studies is probably explained by weaknesses in twin study design.
One of my friends recently "came out" to me as an HBD person, and I was honestly unimpressed with a lot of his examples (though I don't expect every random HBD person to be a Motte-caliber racial scientist.) He seemed completely dismissive of things like parasites and disease burden as a partial explanation of Subsaharan African low IQ, seemed to not fully grasp at all times how averages and standard deviations worked (since a decent portion of African Americans will end up with IQs of 100+ or 115+, and yet he seemed to reason as if they were all dummies, even if he was perfectly willing to acknowledge "outliers"), and I just didn't think he applied the rigor I know HBD people are capable of in general. (He never brought up GWAS studies or polygenic scores even once!) HBD is an interesting hypothesis, I just want to see well-constructed arguments for it.
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