ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
9d 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
9d 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
12d 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
13d 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
14d 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
18d 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!
ThenElection
20d ago
I often use it as a lookup tool and study aid, which can involve long conversations. But maybe that falls under "as a tool."
The last time I had a bona fide conversation with an LLM was maybe three months ago. These actual conversations are always about its consciousness, or lack thereof--if there's a spark there, I want to approach the LLM as a real being, to at least allow for the potentiality of something there. Haven't seen it yet.
ThenElection
26d ago
Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.
Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data.
Although the Hinge post that included their top line numbers has been scrubbed, it's still available on Wayback. They address your point directly:
When we look at the rate of men forming connections – rather than the rate that they are sent initial likes, as we did before – we find that index of inequality greatly decreases.
With straight men on Hinge, the Gini index of connections comes down to 0.324, or approximately the UK — a huge improvement.
As an aside, this movement toward equitability when dealing with connections exists with straight women too, so much so that the Gini index becomes meaningless.
That, arguably, supports your point (things are substantially less dire than looking at raw likes), though I think the credibility depends on how the junior data analyst defined "forming a connection."
What I'd love to see is the Gini coefficients of mutual matches for different dating apps in 2025.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Eh. I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't buy all the conditions (or even strictly any of your conditions, except for obesity, which if you can provide health insurance for your family is itself fixable) are necessary for a good wife. Many of them are also heavily correlated: condition a woman on simply being college educated and having a professional career, and the majority probably meet your criteria.
A woman could do the exact same thing: list 10 traits that are requirements for a man and calculate how large her dating pool is. And in fact we did this for a single female friend who was bemoaning her dating situation: when we added up all her requirements, there was an expectation of only a couple dozen men in the entirety of California who met them. Is that a sign of how bleak women have it, or more a sign that her requirements were unrealistic?
And, speaking from experience, I'm a 5'3" bisexual guy in what's probably the toughest dating market for men in the USA, and I managed to get happily married, though currently living the degenerate DINK lifestyle. And I've notched up more (opposite-sex) partners than my wife. My personal most-restricting requirement was to find a single woman who made approximately as much as me, which is likely more restrictive than all your requirements put together.
All that said, it's absolutely true that (at least initially) dating is harder for men than for women. I'm not sure that anyone would dispute that, though, and I don't think your model provides good evidence for it. Better would be to come up with some quantitative and more direct measure for how hard dating is (for each percentile of attractiveness) and estimate it to provide a comparison.
Or, if the goal is to actually solve the problem, learn to exhibit masculinity, lift weights, and constantly put yourself out there and cast a wide net.
In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.
The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.
Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.
ThenElection
1mo ago
LLMs generate gossip and tabloid drama about real celebrities; they wouldn't have any issues doing the same about AI-generated celebrities.
It will be a gradual process: first generating all the extras; then improving the real performances of real actors; then generated performances of dead actors; then licensed generated performances of live main actors; and then entirely generated main actors. And it won't be admitted at first. But having a reliable actor who always turns up sober and on time, looks like and does what exactly you want them to, has no time constraints, and doesn't take a substantial cut of the profits is a massive pull.
And if audiences insist on being sold a real life backstory about the actors to form parasocial relationships with them, well, Hollywood will be happy to generate and sell that to them too.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Sure. But I'm reminded of one applicant to Stanford whose admission essay about what matters to him was
#BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter ... (I'll spare readers the middle portion) ... #BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter
Neither crassly based nor woke should have a place in universities, but the standards applied for crassness are very much not equal across the ideological spectrum.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Palantir recently started offering a "Meritocracy Fellowship" (https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/7fa0ceca-c30e-48de-9b27-f98469c374f3) to tackle this from another angle: cut out the middleman directly. Recruit smart students straight out of high school based on objective measurements, pay them, and hire them directly after the program.
The big risk for the student: what if they don't get hired by Palantir? Will they, after four successful years there as a FTE, have enough prestige to get competitive market offers?
For Palantir, it's near a pure win. Get to rely on an IQ-proxy, pay them a relative pittance for several months, and then select the best X% of performers from that to make low ball offers to.
ThenElection
1mo ago
If a student wrote a "based" indigenous studies essay, would that help them pass the class to get the degree they're paying two hundred thousand dollars for?
Of course, there's the opportunity to write and think about things that aren't either kind of slop. But I'm very skeptical that equal standards would be applied. Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays (or the quality of them, or anything really).
Curious: what would be the legalities involved in running a scam like your conspiracy theory? The demand for this kind of stuff seems to far outstrip the supply of it. Could I go hire two people off of Craigslist, engineer a scripted social media outrage that results in one or both being able to successfully fundraise for ???, and then split the proceeds with them? Assuming I'm not paying them to do anything actually illegal.
The hardest part would seem to be me getting my cut (no real reason for them to pay me anything once they realize I'm not assuming any real risk or doing anything). Or maybe use an AI generated video with no other real people involved?
ThenElection
2mo ago
the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did
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.
ThenElection
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo ago
The flyers, from experience, are both needed and unheeded. And the floors heavier in engineering are worse about it.
ThenElection
2mo 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...)
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.
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