Shirayuki3
new account for Shirayuki2
User ID: 4553
As a response to @Ioper and @Primaprimaprima as well:
If you define woke and DEI as "women having increased economic power relative to men" in such a way that it applies globally across East Asia and the global south then ok sure, but I don't think that's a particularly useful definition.
The decline of traditional publishing in favor of online entertainment is pretty clearly globalized; the phenomenon of men retreating to online and non-traditional reading (e.g the narou / qidian scenes, basically web serials for Japan/China) and of course video games and the myriad of digital pleasures, while only women continue to read traditionally published books, is a fully globalized phenomenon, not just contained to Anglo societies.
It seems fairly clear to me that this is a phenomenon driven by women gaining more economic power relative to men across the entire world, and revealed preferences given the general availability of internet and smartphones. If you want to call this woke or DEI then sure I guess, but I don't think saying that China or Pakistan is woke is a particularly useful definition.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
You won't find something equivalent to Blood Meridian or Moby Dick published online
Most of Dickens' body of work was written as practically the equivalent of webserials for the Victorian era, as well as Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov. Even in the modern age I'd argue that lots of what's published online is better than what comes out of traditional publishing, and it's mostly status considerations as to why people denigrate works published online rather than anything to do with the format itself.
Shirayuki3
21d ago
That is a very high barrier to entry
Yeah that's fair enough, I agree that booktok / romantasy slop is now aggressively marketed to women in a way that reading is no longer marketed to men.
Still, I'm not really convinced this is a problem per se; on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire, and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?
I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue
IMO there's plenty of supply if you know where to look, frankly way more supply that any human could engage with in a thousand lifetimes, between the classics, modern web fiction, and non-traditional mediums (narrative indie games, graphic novels, visual novels etc). If the claim is more narrow that there's a supply issue within modern traditional publishing then I agree, but it seems like neither male producers nor male consumers as a whole are particularly interested in filling the gap, so it seems like a bit of a dead end. I'm not convinced that specifically lack of modern traditionally published books is why boys are reading less, when there's so much else available to read for those interested.
I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books.
Those are some interesting stats, but I'm not convinced that less boys reading is causal to reduced male educational / professional success (although it does seem likely that there are other factors of modernity causal of both less reading and less success).
The era where every upper-middle class man received a traditional liberal arts education and was conversant in the classics is decades past; nowadays your doctor's favorite movie is the Avengers and your lawyer plays Fifa in the one hour free he has every week to unwind. The pressures behind competitive careers nowadays don't really align with developing literary taste; I've had much more interesting intellectual conversations with underemployed third-world internet anons compared to the vast majority of the magnet school strivers that I went to school with. I'm not convinced that more reading would lead to more men in elite positions at all.
Shirayuki3
21d ago
Yes, a pause of frontier training while we sort out how we can do this safely seems our best move
Well, we've discussed this one before, but my position is still that wanting to pause frontier training is much like wanting to totally disarm every nuclear weapons state. Perhaps it's a noble goal to reduce x-risk in theory, but in practice no great power will ever allow themselves to be disarmed in such a manner and so it's impossible in practice to achieve such a goal. Additionally, the second-order effects of such a goal seem likely to be profoundly negative (the Cold War ex-nuclear weapons almost certainly would have lead to WW3, missing out on the potential economic and productivity gains of AI).
This is just a matter of closed labs being far ahead of open weights labs. If there was parity then open weights are categorically less safe as post training can sand off any alignment work done to prevent mass murder tasks.
I agree that open-weights models are less safe than closed-weight models of equivalent capability, but nobody, not even the Chinese labs themselves, believes that open weights are going to get ahead of closed weights in the short or medium term so this seems like a bit of a non-sequitur. I don't think you're really addressing the point I was trying to make in the original post, which is that it is closed-weights that is advancing the frontier, and thus it's much more likely that it is mistakes or malfeasance derived from closed-weight model access that is going to cause the feared harms.
we're all definitely going to die in this world
As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.
Please don't waste time critiquing exactly that example, the AIs are going to be smarter than we are and will come up with any attack vector to cause human extinction that's possible if one is possible
If we accept this as a premise, that the wrong prompt is going to kill everyone, then honestly what are we even doing here? Treat your loved ones to something nice and enjoy your life, because even with maximum safety someone is certainly going to fuck up and eventuate human extinction.
Someone at a frontier lab will make a mistake during KYC and give access to the wrong actor, or they'll make a mistake while setting guardrails, or a government will fuck up containment when using the unrestricted model they'll demand, or there'll be a particularly fucked up RL training run (HuggingFace incident on steroids) and that's going to be that for the human race; open-weight models or safety-gated models need not apply at all.
For example, there's a bunch of hand-wringing around biorisk lately, but it's illustrative to look at the actual bioweapons attacks that have happened in modernity. The preponderance of the evidence points towards the 2001 Anthrax attacks having been done by a employee at Fort Detrick, who would have certainly have been given access to hypothetical bioweapon-GPT. The only "successful" bioweapons attack ever carried out by a private organisation was from Aum Shinrikyo, who had ludicrous amounts of money and significant institutional connections; how hard would have it been for them to get a subscription to bioweapon-Claude?
Based on history, it seems much more likely that if AI-assisted bioweapons really do ravage the earth, it's going to be either because an American closed-weight lab sold a bad actor access to an unrestricted subscription, or because some lab or government fucks up containment and releases some gain of function monstrosity into the wild. Even in the realm of cyber, OpenAi and Anthropic have already been responsible for many more "cyber attacks" than abliterated GLM / Kimi or whatever; I don't really think the fingers are really being pointed at the right places here.
I agree with Opt-out here. It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism. Acknowledging I'm in a filter bubble, plenty of men in my orbit read; they just don't do it in a way that makes money for traditional industry.
They read Substacks, or they read Royalroad/web serials/fanfiction, or they "read" manga/indie narrative video games/visual novels, or they pirate all of their literature and the classics from Libgen and Anna's Archive. It's much easier than it's ever been to self-publish or release your work online without going via Big Publisher.
The difference is simply that female writers are disproportionately interested in the prestige of going via traditional Big Publisher, and female readers actually spend money with publishers and bookstores, driven by BookTok or whatever, and hence those industries move increasingly towards catering to the female userbases that actually make them money.
Trying to make men read in the same way that women like to read seems to me much like trying to make sports gambling appealing to women; perhaps in the interest of the industries trying to increase their profits, but honestly a waste of time for society at a whole to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.
Shirayuki3
23d ago
I once had such an experience with a compassionate, highly intelligent friend of mine (mid 6 figures earner as an engineer, frequent donator to charity, would gladly give the shirt off his back to someone in need).
It started off with him posting some milquetoast meme in the groupchat supporting some ridiculous rent control policy, and me replying with another milquetoast meme referencing the economic problems with rent control. This kicked off an extremely long argument, debating the relative merits and demerits of rent control, which concluded with him admitting that the proposed policy would almost certainly raise housing prices in the long run.
At this point, as I see him continuing to type, I think I've convinced him to stop supporting the rent control policy; but instead he writes "even if you're right on a utilitarian level, I just can't morally support increasing the rent of people in need".
With this masterstroke, he's depicted himself as the empathetic deontologist chad and me as the cold-hearted utilitarian soyjak, and all I'm able to do is agree to disagree and slink away with my tail between my legs.
I think that fundamentally the vast majority of humans are wired to prefer policies and actions that have obvious, visible benefits, even if on aggregate, they're net negative in a way that's difficult to explain. It's really only EA's (extreme autists) that can bite the bullet and advocate for policy wonk solutions such as means-testing welfare or UAE-style guest worker visas, with aggregrate net-benefit but that look evil on the surface.
To be honest, I'm pretty blackpilled on the future of politics in the age of a low trust society permeated by internet and social media. It seems almost certain that politics are going to become Latinized, a pendulum between left wing socialist populism and right wing strongman populism.
But what is there to be done about it?
In my view, the fundamental mistake that was made and is continuing to be made by the American tech elite, and more broadly the Western neoliberal project, is holding the belief that we live in an age where ideology is no longer consequential, an era commanded solely by capital. Muslim asylum seekers will become Western liberals because we will make the Muslims rich, Russia will liberalise because Europe will make the Russians rich, China will liberalise because America will make the Chinese rich; in the real world, asylum seekers remain unassimilated, Russia invades Ukraine, and China has designs on Taiwan not because any of this makes any economic sense, but because of the might of the ideologies held by the ummah, Putinists and Chinese nationalists.
Similarly, a lot of tech elites have a post-ideology view that as long as the proles are tossed a wad of cash, they'll be allowed to do as they please; in essence, that Americans will become Western liberals because Silicon Valley will make Americans rich. In the real world, people care about things like "dignity" and "long-term benefit", and fundamentally, Americans do not believe that data-centres, and the goals of big tech and big AI, are aligned with their wellbeing and prosperity (frankly correctly, in many cases), and are not willing to be bought off by those they perceive as their enemies; complaining about object-level inaccuracies like water use or electricity is simply missing the broader point that there is no trust and no belief that data centres will benefit Americans.
It is informative, I think, to compare the attitudes of the median Chinese vs the median American on the topic of AI. While perhaps apprehensive of great changes unseen in a century, the median Chinese person believes that they are governed by those who work for the benefit of China, and that the power of technology and AI is and will be harnessed for the benefit of the people. Chinese model labs don't boast about how they're going to make everyone unemployed, or how they, and by proxy lab shareholders, are going to rule the world; Liang Wenfeng instead talks, very reasonably, about how his aim is to make a restrained profit, and how the benefits of AGI are going to accrue to society.
To be clear: I, myself, am pro data-centre, because my belief is that the best way to improve aggregate human wellbeing is unceasing development of the productive forces, and that this development is going to require building out compute to support AI and robotics. For others, it is easy to sneer at the idiocy of the proles, as @aqouta does, or believe that the outcome is overdetermined by economic forces, and that the proles will inevitably be swept aside, as @DaseindustriesLtd does.
I find these views to be somewhat shortsighted; a study of history shows clearly that people prioritize their ideological interests over their rational economic interests, and that when ideology and capital clash, ideology often comes out triumphant, at the expense of the interests of capital. Did it make economic sense for Venezuela to nationalise their oil fields and plunge the formerly richest Latin American country into poverty? Did it make economic sense for the finest across two generations of European men to die horribly across Verdun, Stalingrad and Normandy during the World Wars?
It's crucial to contextualize that all of this backlash is happening while the misery index (unemployment + inflation) is essentially completely unaffected by AI. If, or when, this begins to change, and the backlash against data centres, and more broadly against Silicon Valley and AI, continues to intensify, I think it is not unlikely that a truly bi-partisan, populist, degrowth ideology begins to consume American politics. One could imagine a scenario where the Dems take the White House in 2028, crush Musk and the broader American AI industry with the power of the state, and enforce a neo-luddite Fortress America defended by two oceans and the strategic nuclear triad.
Does this vision make any economic sense? Not at all.
Is this sustainable as a long term vision for America? Not at all; Americans never learned the lessons that the century of humiliation engraved into the Chinese psyche.
The trap is believing it matters at all whether such a vision makes economic sense. At a certain breaking point it no longer matters, the people will try and lash out however they can against those they believe to be their ideological enemies, and while a single drop of water has no power and holds no threat, no human technology is yet able to stop a tsunami. I think it is extraordinarily important, for all our sakes, that big tech and the frontier AI labs realise that they have lost the mandate of heaven instead of acting as if though they are no longer a part of society, and sincerely take steps to rectify this before it is forced upon them by the state and by the people, and we all become much worse off for it.
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