ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
2hr ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.
It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.
ThenElection
12hr ago
I mean it in the sense that LLMs are capable of creating a token stream that is identical to an AI researcher. This is mathematically proven--see various universality theorems--but has the critical drawback that it doesn't really give you any information on how to find that optimal set of weights.
A MLP absolutely could also do this, or even some absurd polynomial best fit (not, however, a ten or quadrillion dimensional linear model). What MLPs offer over polynomials and transformers offer over MLPs is increased training efficiency and stability for actually finding those weights.
ThenElection
14hr ago
We know that systems capable of acting like smart humans are possible (after all, there are smart humans). Will LLMs get us there? It's unclear. Could they, in the arid sense that there is some unknown collection of weights that would be capable of outputting tokens that simulate an OpenAI researcher working on novel tasks? Absolutely. (As to how to actually learn those weights, that's left as an exercise to the reader.)
I think the dynamism of the research program is relevant, though. Right now, you can, as an individual, decide to spend a quarter and a couple thousands in compute to research a particular area of LLMs and have a reasonable expectation of finding something interesting, and sometimes it's actually useful. This isn't merely hypothetical but is something happening every single day. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. Might there be some collection of a dozen different improvements on the horizon which, when taken collectively, would get us to AGI? Maybe. It's plausible, at least, while it's not plausible that a dozen different innovations are on the horizon that would enable a cheap base on Mars.
ThenElection
18hr ago
It depends on Amazon's exact implementation, but I just assumed it was a way for them to list a lower sticker price than what customers actually pay and expect the customer to just go through with the purchase anyway.
Similarly, back in 2021 due to increasing labor costs, a whole bunch of restaurants did start adding a fixed percentage "service fee" on the final bill that went into their general revenue (not a replacement for tipping). Was that anti-Biden?
I don't think so, and it wasn't perceived as such, the main difference being that Biden wasn't intentionally positioning himself as an advocate of higher costs in the same way Trump has positioned himself as an advocate of tariffs.
ThenElection
11d ago
The flyers, from experience, are both needed and unheeded. And the floors heavier in engineering are worse about it.
ThenElection
11d ago
I have no idea how much money my former employer wastes on toilet queuing time for men. The endless bouncing around from floor to floor trying to find an open stall. Apparently OSHA requires a certain number of toilets for a given employee count of either sex; when it's in the double digits, it's around 20 employees/toilet, but when it's in the triple, it increases to around 40/toilet.
At least we got to read weekly educational flyers posted in the bathroom about Testing on the Toilet (alongside other flyers asking engineers to remember to flush...)
ThenElection
16d ago
As one thinker just posted on Truth Social an hour ago:
THE BEST DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE!!!
ThenElection
17d ago
Human heads used to be bigger, though. And childbirth is much less likely to result in death now than before, thanks to human intelligence and the heroic efforts of professionals like yourself. And if increases in intelligence did offer a significant reproductive benefit, larger hips that enabled that intelligence would be selected for.
How valuable is intelligence?
One data point that I've been mulling over: humans. We currently have the capability to continue to scale up our brains and intelligence (we could likely double our brain size before running into biological and physical constraints). And the very reason we evolved intelligence in the first place was that it gave adaptive advantage to people who have more of it.
And yet larger brain size doesn't seem to be selected for in modern society. Our brains are smaller than our recent human ancestors' (~10% smaller). Intelligence and its correlates don't appear to positively affect fertility. There's now a reverse Flynn effect in some studies.
Of course, there are lots of potential reasons for this. Maybe the metabolic cost is too great; maybe our intelligence is "misaligned" with our reproductive goals; maybe we've self domesticated ourselves and overly intelligent people are more like cancer cells that need to be eliminated for the functioning of our emergent social organism.
But the point remains that winning a game of intelligence is not in itself something that leads to winning a war for resources. Other factors can and do take precedence.
This assumes that something like human level intelligence, give or take, is the best the universe can do. If super intelligence far exceeding human intelligence is realizable on hefty GPUs, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the effects of marginal increases in human intelligence.
Sibling non-CWR post: https://www.themotte.org/post/1836/scott-come-on-obviously-the-purpose
Wrote a comment there, but another thought:
I think Scott is attempting a kind of meta-joke. TPOASIWID is a very useful lens to interpret systems through, but in widespread DR Twitter use, it's mostly used as a way to ascribe bad intent to systems. And because TPOASIWID, you can only judge TPOASIWID by the use of TPOASIWID on Twitter, and so TPOTPOASIWIDIWID and that's creating bad Twitter takes, which isn't valuable or useful. QED.
Cute, but it misses the mark. It's about finding useful ways to interact with a system, not a universal acid allowing you to weak man any argument or analysis.
"When a person shows you who they are, believe them."
No update on opinion. What it means to me: the most useful way to interact with a system is through modeling what it does and how it does it. Not what it says it does, not how it originated, not what its creator intended it to do, not what its subcomponents think it does, not what you want it to do, not what purpose it having would be the best for the world, not what the documentation says it does, not what the label on the tin says it does.
If you don't do this, you will run into trouble. For example, consider corporate DEI training sessions. The entire DEI training ecosystem, including outside trainers/consultants and corporate HR, will publicly state that they are doing it to help reduce bias and discrimination (along with some secondary claims around it increasing efficiency and innovation). Suppose an employee took this at face value, and he's deeply committed to racial DEI. He does some research, and it turns out in general these sessions increase discrimination and racism. And he does further research and is able to prove, with incontrovertible empirical evidence, that the sessions at his own company are making employees materially racist. He reports this to HR; surprisingly, they seem to ignore it. He thinks his report is being missed because of an overworked HR department, and so he publishes his research and evidence widely within the company.
What happens, do you think?
If you take HR's statements of their purpose at face value, you would expect them to effusively thank him for pointing this out to them, quickly remedy the situation as quickly as possible, and maybe even give him a bonus for his exceptional effort in helping them achieve their purpose better.
If you think the purpose of HR is instead to tick boxes to protect the company from legal liability and to join in into popular fads, you aren't as sanguine about the employee's future. You might even expect him to be called into HR for public desanguination.
When it comes to personal decision making, people who use one of these heuristics for ascribing purpose to impersonal systems are going to do much better than people who use the other.
Scott's post is, frankly, lame and disappointing. He doesn't even mention Stafford Beer and only has interest in responding to Twitter randos.
ThenElection
19d ago
The 340 vs 440 score actually suggests the courts think that the retail job is harder than the warehouse job.
Apparently, the company had offered all of its retail employees the opportunity to transfer to the warehouse, and one of the plaintiffs had turned it down because the warehouse is loud and dirty and has very limited autonomy, and the only way she would ever take a job there is if... it offered a lot more money over her retail position.
You left out a third option: raise taxes on the entire country to equalize compensation across the different job classes. You even get to hit highly productive men (and women) more, creating even more equality.
Do this process enough, and you can eventually make sure part time yoga instructors get paid the same as the top researchers at DeepMind!
There's also the fourth option, of doing pretty much nothing and then complaining on BlueSky about the conservative incel wreckers for causing the Fourth Bubonic Plague.
ThenElection
20d ago
Why not just rotate in the cooks and cleaners into the garbagewomen roles, since they're equivalent jobs?
This would be especially good if you swapped in the elderly caregivers into the gravedigger roles. It aligns incentives: if your care receiver dies, you dig the grave for them.
Are either particularly likely to become arms factories?
My guess is that an Amazon warehouse is marginally more likely to, since the building itself would be larger, be better logistically, and have up-to-date infrastructure. But neither would have much ability to transfer either their machinery or skilled labor to arms production.
I guess the shoe factory could easily transition to making combat boots.
One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'
Chinese manufacturers will have to find some country, somewhere, that has a GDP roughly comparable to the USA, a growing middle class of hundreds of millions of people, and room to shift from savings to consumption.
The effects you highlight are real and interesting, but the country that will absorb most of the displaced exports is China itself. And that is going to be difficult and straining, even destabilizing.
ThenElection
25d ago
The fish tank was tucked away in a small room, which was hidden behind some furniture or something.
ThenElection
27d ago
In Harris's defense, she was just saying populist stuff that she had no real commitment to and would never actually implement.
Though, to be fair, I thought the same of the tariffs...
ThenElection
27d ago
"People in power" here being "people who have a 401k and buy things."
I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.
The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.
For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.
You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:
-
Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.
-
The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.
-
There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.
-
Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.
-
Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.
-
Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)
-
Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected
This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.
Agreed. What's nice is that this benchmark is now in a sweet spot. If models consistently hover around the floor or ceiling, there's no signal for whether your model is improving. Once it gets into the middle area, though, model quality can be measured and compared easily, and progress proceeds quickly. I expect this benchmark to be saturated early 2026 at the latest.
ThenElection
28d ago
This might just be a measure of partisanship, though. Two years ago, would the results be different?
Relevant update: the authors of the paper, which didn't include Gemini 2.5, just added its results to MathArena.
@self_made_human may be interested in this, since he was trying to evaluate 2.5 himself.
Tldr is the top line number is a step improvement over all existing models, but it's mostly from being able to complete the first problem. You can click on the first result cell to see its responses and the grader's scoring rubric. Some hypothetical higher risk of contamination since it's newer.
ThenElection
29d ago
The DA at the time was Gascon, who's usually described as "would be the most lenient DA of San Francisco of all time, if not for his successor Boudin."
If I recall correctly, after a wellness check by police (who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer, and decided, well, I guess that means he's fine), the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank.
I suspect there are also aspects of the circumstances which would complicate the case. Why would someone let a homeless vagrant live in his house with him? Absolutely everyone, even (or especially, really) in San Francisco, knows this is a really bad idea. But, to add some color, Brian Egg was a single man who worked as a bartender at a gay bar. My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing. In this type of situation, with no witnesses or material evidence, it'd be easy enough for the vagrant to claim the homicide was in self-defense against a rapist. And who knows, might even be true; even if so, the killing, dismembering, covering up, and other crimes would be enough for me to convict.
But that makes this an absolute stinker of a case. It would be salacious, the public would project whatever their own opinions are onto it, and the jury would get confused about what they're supposed to be considering. Better to just dump the case in a fishtank and hope no one notices.
I still find it shocking that everyone important just agreed to never talk about COVID and our response to it again. I don't know how anyone can discuss bad policies that wreck the economy without at least bringing it up to refute it being an example. It's like remembering the COVID shutdowns happened is icky and uncouth.
More options
Context Copy link