ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2d ago
Offering a data point of myself:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
I would reject it, though I'm not sure I represent the typical Mottezan's viewpoint. Then again, I question whether the typical Mottezan is even a meaningful category.
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Yes.
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
Word games, but "meritocracy" and "individualism" are just pointers to confused concepts that are themselves products of a long series of word games.
ThenElection
6d ago
For tattoos in particular: it entirely depends on context. On a ski trip back during Covid, we had a mixed gender group, and all the girls had tattoos of various sorts, and none of the men did. That led to some teasing: all the men are squares etc. But the idea that they indicate some latent violent criminality in the women is laughable: all of us were well-educated and had highly paid corporate jobs, and I would be surprised if any of us had gotten into a violent altercation in our lives. It functions more as a piece of jewelry or clothing to show off how cool and stylish you are, which women care about and men don't.
It's a silly fad (and I'm sure some will regret getting one when the fad dies), but whatever tattoos might have once indicated about a person (besides wanting to be perceived as cool) is gone since they've been normalized. At least for most tattoos: face tattoos still provide a useful signal.
ThenElection
6d ago
Note to self: the best way to get @DaseindustriesLtd to write a lengthy comment on an ML topic is to write a post confidently and aggressively wrong about the topic.
Going to take a bit of a different angle than most people: yes, agriculture is a highly intelligent system, one that outperforms all of humans, sophisticated numerical models, LLMs, and chimps in its niche.
It has its actuators (trucks, etc), and it has its neurons (individual humans and collections of humans). And a learning signal: prices (or, as a TD signal, profit). As a system, it manages to do things nothing else is capable of: no human or computer is smart enough to process all the information needed for it to succeed in its niche, and the individual humans are not organizing production and consumption so much as synapsing to other neurons based on the signals the system provides.
Asking if a combine is intelligent is like asking if a voltage differential across a membrane is intelligent. No, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
(I don't know, do the modern models even have them today?)
They do; operating directly on one-hot tokens would be prohibitively expensive.
But they're not central to the power of modern LLMs. You can even run an ablation where you use unlearned, static, entirely random embeddings (so, nearly every embedding is approximately orthogonal to every other embedding; semantic similarity would have zero relation to cosine similarity). The later layers are still able to learn syntax and semantics on their own, albeit with significantly increased loss.
Which speaks to the power of transformers: you'll get far more coherent text out of transformers with even random embeddings than some novel architecture made of simple linear combinations of word2vec.
ThenElection
7d ago
There's an important kind of intelligence that apes lack but LLMs possess.
There are even kinds of intelligence apes possess that humans lack. Particularly, short term spatial memory: sequentially flash the numbers 1 through 9 on a touchscreen monitor at random positions, and have the subject then press the monitor at those positions in order. Chimpanzees, even young chimpanzees, consistently and substantially outperform adult undergraduate humans, even when you try to incentivize the human. Does that mean chimps are smarter than humans?
Intelligence is very spiky. It's weird, but different substrates of intelligence lend themselves best to different tasks.
ThenElection
9d ago
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
ThenElection
12d ago
for the crime of lasting success in her field
This misplaces the crime. Mamet's primary crime isn't success, but being a very visible Trump supporter. For him to then have the gall to have made a play about Weinstein and #metoo is violating the principle that sexual impropriety in the arts is something the Left has the right to frame and self police.
ThenElection
13d ago
It's too early to tell, IMO. You had e.g. Newsom saying that MTF trans kids shouldn't play in sports for a bit, so Democratic politicians definitely were seeing the need for a course correction.
Unfortunately, it is (correctly) perceived that Trump has made a series of unnecessary self-owns, so now the "keep the same playbook and hope the ebb and flow of politics brings us back to power" segment has renewed leverage in the intra-party dispute. Mid-terms will determine which view gets to compete in 2028.
ThenElection
20d ago
I think Tony Hsieh of Zappos (barely) broke into the billionaires club, and he had a tattoo and threw tattoo parties for employees.
Not sure if that's a strong recommendation.
ThenElection
21d ago
Just want to echo your experiences.
It has other knock on effects, as well. I used to smoke... Well, too much. I had tried to quit multiple times and failed. A few months ago, I realized I hadn't smoked in over a week. This was despite putting zero conscious effort into it.
It's an insanely powerful drug, and it makes me worry about other things it's doing to my nervous system. At the least, the fact that effects apparently disappear when you go off it is reassuring. Regardless, the positive health effects absolutely must outweigh any negatives.
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
ThenElection
28d ago
I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.
ThenElection
28d ago
But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.
I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)
ThenElection
28d ago
I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.
How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.
ThenElection
28d ago
Of course not. Your obligation is to get a well paying job at an AI company, usher in the apocalypse, and convert the universe into computronium, which can run innumerable simulations of bee lives in lands of endless flowers and honey and free of suffering.
ThenElection
28d ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
Yes, the world at that point was a powder keg, and you can name at least a dozen incidents before the assassination that could have set it off. The assassination was far from the root cause, but it was the proximate event in a spiral.
The world is in a similar state today, and normalcy bias is what prevents us from seeing it. Seemingly minor events can trigger repercussions far out of expectations if conditions are right.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The elites of the USA (who are often to be said to be captured by the left) are pro-Ukraine, pro-Israel, though. A substantial fringe of academics and student protestors doesn't change that.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The risk is that this escalates to a broader conflict. Not Iran vs whoever--Iran is a paper tiger, and all other factors being equal it's good that it's now further from getting nukes than it was (one hopes). But I'm worried this triggers a series of international incidents that leads to a Taiwan war. Although it seems far-fetched, it also seemed far-fetched that an assassination of an archduke could spiral to a world wide conflagration.
Iran needs to respond somehow, for domestic political reasons if nothing else. And, one thing leads to another, and Hormuz ends up mined, and China decides, well, the world is going to suck for a couple years and the US is otherwise occupied, might as well take advantage of the moment.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.
ThenElection
1mo ago
As a bi guy, I've dated both men and women. And it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to get a date with a man than it is with a woman. Quantitatively, my inbound like/match rate online was literally 100x when matching with men (I'd get a number of likes in a day with men that it'd take me almost a year with women).
Sure, a fair bit of that was just casual sex. But even if 75% were just looking for casual sex, that's still an order of magnitude more ease dating men than women.
I suspect this mismatch is that your "average man" encompasses a lot of things that make him substantially above average.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Why should you care? Well, it's your prerogative to or not. But two reasons:
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As young men drop out of the caring game, that makes the market (both economically and sexually) less competitive. There are more opportunities and niches to get utility from. Still less than a hypothetically static situation, but people dropping out mitigates some of the increased difficulty.
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It's far better to strive and create than to passively survive. For society, sure, but also better for you as a person. There are forms of joy that aren't available to someone just existing.
ThenElection
1mo ago
But... There's no way that Aella would actually have trouble finding a partner who wants kids who is okay with her lifestyle. Not some captain of industry, but also not some random meth addict on the street either. There are plenty of total simps in tech with a solid paycheck who'd be thrilled to go for her, and she knows that.
This is all a marketing gimmick. Come save the poor whore with a heart of gold and a mind of platinum!
At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
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