07mk

07mk 51m ago

The average Democratic office-holder lives in a woke bubble where "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a correct description of the local usage of the word "woman".

I don't believe this is true. I don't think the average Democratic office-holder lives in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble" (though almost undoubtedly he lives among far more woke people than the general population). And, as someone who does live in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble," I don't think that actually is the correct description of the local usage of the word "woman" in such a bubble.

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07mk 1hr ago

Indeed. One common hypothesis is that whoever came up with "It's OK to be white" was consciously trying to ape the exact tactic followed by whoever came up with the "Black Lives Matter" slogan (or whoever decided that that phrase ought to be coordinated around).

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07mk 2hr ago

Privilege discourse always seemed exactly backwards to me. If you have two people with the same exact nature, one white and one black, who is privileged in post-1970s America?

Why would you assume the same exact nature and circumstances for what is clearly a judgment on a group's standing?

Privilege isn't a judgment on a group's standing, though. It's about the standing of an individual relative to another individual when, all else being equal, the only differences between the 2 are some particular characteristic in the approved list such as race, sex, sexual orientation, sexual identity, immigration status, etc. We know this, because policies that are meant to counteract the differences in privilege of people who are different in, e.g. sex, discriminate against individuals on the basis of that individual's sex, not on the basis of the specific privileges/lack-thereof that that individual actually, truly did encounter, that are downstream of that individual's sex.

If privileges truly were judgments on groups rather than on individuals, the people who are the strongest proponents of policies to counter the differences in privilege would be the strongest opponents of any policies that discriminate individuals on the basis of the privilege-level of the group they belong into, because that would be a gross perversion of their ideology that also makes their ideology look uglier to others. But that doesn't really happen.

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07mk 2hr ago

But the only reason that it can be posted not as an innocent statement but effectively as a gang sign is because the actual innocent statement is in direct conflict with the revealed beliefs of the people who object to this. The act of judging this statement as the sign of a hostile gang is, in itself, the act of rejecting that innocent statement.

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07mk 2hr ago

I feel like this opinion, not specifically about Palestine but generally about Muslims in the Middle East, was very common-to-nigh-ubiquitous in the early-mid-2000s pre- and early-War on Terror. I think the way that things played out in the intervening years has made this opinion much less popular.

However, as they say, there's a sucker born every minute, and a substantial portion of the people in the "pro-Palestine" side of this culture war were born too late to be old enough to pay attention to the War on Terror in the 2000s-2010s. So, despite being less popular, I could believe that there is still a substantial proportion of these people (maybe even a majority!) who believe this sort of thing about Palestine specifically and Muslim nations in the Middle East generally.

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07mk 2d ago

Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?

My immediate guess is that the opportunity cost went up by a lot. The places that anyone, rich or poor, can park their money in order to get more money has become larger, more diverse, and more easily accessible in the last few centuries - even just in the last few decades, really. So the relative attractiveness of spending a few hundred million USD to make a film has gone down, compared to investing that into other things.

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07mk 3d ago

This is just classic Toxoplasma of Rage thing, though. The most effective way to project your power to get your preferred way over that preferred by your enemies is to have your way even when having your way is clearly unjust, because that shows that your side is so powerful that even having justice on their side doesn't give your enemies enough to defeat you.

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07mk 4d ago

Are LLM-driven crises significantly different?

That's an empirical question that I hope we never learn the answer to (because it never happens, not because we all die before anyone can check). Off the top of my head, the fact that LLMs aren't tied to one human body and its many biological limitations and lacks human psychology means that whatever crisis it creates can be reinforced and defended against attempts to solve it without need for rest or sleep, and also the LLM can't reasonably be coerced or bribed to stopping the crisis or at least not making it worse, and these differences seem like they would likely lead to downstream differences in how crises play out. Specifically, it seems likely to make crises worse, more prolonged, or centered around more obscure vulnerabilities. It's an open question as to if LLM-driven defenses against/solutions to crises will make it such that these crises will be, on net, worse or better, or, more or less common than human-hacker-driven non-AI-based crises. Again, I hope we never get an empirical answer to that question.

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07mk 4d ago

If it turns out that a rather banal culture war event about a mainstream Christopher Nolan film is what compels the creation of the techniques and tools to generate feature-length Hollywood-quality (in the sense that someone presented with that film and an actual Hollywood film has no better shot than a coin flip at guessing which one was the actual Hollywood film) films using AI tools, it would be a pretty hilarious result. Like how Will Smith's name will be forever immortalized in the annals of history as the guy whose depiction of eating spaghetti became a de facto standard AI video generation benchmark.

Speaking of which, back in ye earlye dayes of Stable Diffusion in 2022, Emma Watson had become a de facto standard benchmark for AI photo-like image generation, but I think that was abandoned a long time ago, to the extent that I think she won't be remembered for this. I haven't heard much about Watson recently or really, after Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, which is like a decade old now, and so perhaps 2022 was getting close to the end of her run of popularity, riding off the Harry Potter wave.

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07mk 5d ago

I believe it varies by jurisdiction in the USA. Eg recently, in the Texas murder case of Karmelo Anthony, the jury first decided the guilt and then the same jury spent more time deliberating to decide the exact sentence. From the reporting about the case I read, this was binding, not merely a recommendation.

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07mk 5d ago

If we had insight into why or how the intelligence of GLM-5.2 led it to producing text suggesting you find an office supply store instead of e.g. sending signals to the Internet to manipulate people into generating paperclip factories to the extent the rest of civilization or even the universe breaks down, to such an extent that we could induce future, likely more intelligent, AIs to also behave that way, a lot of the pessimism about AI doom would be addressed. Unfortunately, I don't think we have such insights, and the observed behavior of any particular AI or even set of AIs doesn't help us gain it.

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07mk 5d ago

uhhh no, "misalignment" is not a simple thing, accepting that it did indeed do all this very complicated behavior completely on its own requires substantive belief in complicated theories.

What are the complicated theories that are required to be true for OpenAI's claims to be true (or at least plausible)?

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07mk 5d ago

I feel like I've seen similar phenomena with "guillotine" and "niche." I tried for a while in high school to get people to pronounce the "ll" in "guillotine" like in English instead of like in French, but I gave up because the French pronunciation was too popular. With "niche," that word is niche enough that during the rare occasions it's used, I'm still holding fast to the proper pronunciation of "nitch" instead of "neesch." I recall that, when I was young, "neesch" was kind of a marker of someone trying too hard to sound fancy while actually exposing their own ignorance, but now it seems like "nitch" is becoming a marker an ignoramus philistine who doesn't know that the proper way to pronounce "niche" is "neesch."

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07mk 6d ago

I'm, unfortunately, a pretty a messy and somewhat dirty guy, but I find the standard of "obviously dirty one way or the other" to be far too high for determining whether I care about the dirtiness of something that's going to directly touch various parts of my skin all the time.

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07mk 6d ago

If someone's floors clearly doesn't meet the standard that you find acceptable to walk on with socks, it seems reasonable to refuse to enter without shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to take off your shoes indoors. Much like how if someone's shoes are clearly very muddy or dirty, it seems reasonable to refuse entry to them without taking off their shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to allow people to keep their shoes on in your home.

In typical cases, though, I'd say the dirtiness of shoes that have been worn outside is far beyond the dirtiness of the floor of a household where everyone takes off their shoes in a way that the dirtiness of such a floor isn't far beyond the dirtiness of the socks of a typical person. The former involves bringing dirt from foreign/outdoors/public sources into a private/personal space, whereas the latter is just private/personal dirt being swapped around. Personal dirt can certainly be dirtier/more mysterious than public ones, but in typical cases where people put in effort to taking care of their homes, it tends to be the opposite.

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07mk 6d ago

All research and talk about online dating for men in the past couple decades has indicated that there's a very skewed bimodal distribution, where the vast majority have little-to-no luck, and a small minority have very good luck. If your experience with online dating is significantly more positive than what is generally perceived by men, then the most parsimonious explanation is that you are in or at least near that small minority.

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07mk 6d ago

Unless a guest is coming over from an attached house or another apartment unit with direct access to your own, or unless the guest is strictly carried on something where his shoes don't touch the ground, I'm not sure it's possible for the footwear that someone wore while traversing to your house not to be dirty. Even if, e.g. this friend was your neighbor across the hall in your apartment building, he's going to take at least one step in the shared hallway, which will inevitably have some grime from neighbors stepping on it with outdoors shoes, some of which will get on his shoes before entering your home. And someone walking on the sidewalk or on the driveway to/from their car is going to expose their footwear to even more grime than that.

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07mk 6d ago

That's an optimistic view, which I've had for about 4-5 years, but I'm growing more concerned that a more pessimistic view would be correct. I have a baked-in assumption that GPUs will keep getting cheaper and faster, to the extent that it's likely just a matter of time before any loser can open a cereal box and get a random toy as a gift that has more compute than necessary to store and run Mythos/Fable, orders of magnitude faster than it is possible for Anthropic executives to run on their private instances right now. In such a future, obviously Mythos-level LLMs can't realistically have their access gated, not unless we believe that Anthropic has some "secret sauce" that makes replicating or even emulating their models impossible without it (which may be the case, but I don't think it is). So free or at least open/easy access to AIs at least as intelligent as Fable seems likely to become near ubiquitous, like how electronic light used to be mind-blowing less than 2 centuries ago but is such a bore now that the average person probably carries like 3 electronic things that make light as a side-effect while barely noticing.

But also, in such a world, presumably ~~Anthropic's~~ SpaceX's data centers that Anthropic rents will be that much more powerful, where, e.g. they'll run AI models that are so much more intelligent than Mythos that only having access to Mythos compared to what you could get for paying $100/month to Anthropic for the rest of your life is like choosing to be Forrest Gump-level intelligence in a world where paying a monthly subscription gets you access to Albert Einstein-level intelligence. If the relative gap is large enough, then the absolute increase in access to intelligence to everyone might be swamped out due to loss in positional status.

How the political/culture/ideological/religious wars that will be fought around inequality in access to artificial intelligence should be interesting to see, in comparison to the ones fought around inequality in access to money or around inequality in access to natural intelligence.

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07mk 6d ago

Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.

There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.

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07mk 7d ago

"Cosplay is not Consent" was a common phrase in cons since at least early 2010s, which was around when I was going to cons. As best as I can tell, like many things happening around harassment around that time, it seemed that the sign wasn't necessary, but was rather deemed so by people who found it useful to do so.

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07mk 7d ago

How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?

This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.

It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.

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07mk 11d ago

... can you please pick a principled position? You might learn something, if you actually made a single falsifiable claim and tried to honestly discuss it, rather than throwing out a general shitstorm of "my outgroup is bad" without ever committing to a single coherent position.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Or, to speak plainly, please do not feed the trolls. Or, to speak even more plainly, don't wrestle a pig in the mud; you both get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.

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07mk 11d ago

Thanks, the shift from 2013-2014 to 2023-2024 does indicate that young adults are being more disciplined in terms of eating out compared to to 10 years ago. To be fair, the whole "Avocado toast" argument is like 10 years old as well, so the same sort of phenomenon could have been happening 10 years ago. But it certainly seems that gen Zs do have grounds to complain to millennials that their relative financial struggles aren't due to relative food irresponsibility.

And if we presume 0-24 is mostly reflective of 18-24, that's actually a really striking outlier. Perhaps the youngest adults have trouble adapting to being responsible for their own food and make large mistakes in their first 6 years which they learn from fairly quickly.

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07mk 11d ago

It's hard to get much out of one snapshot like this compared to, say, comparing this against the stats from 2013-2014 and shifting the age groups by 1. 0-24 is one I'd like to see broken up further, since that includes every child but also people up to 6 years into adulthood.

It's certainly interesting that eating out as a proportion of eating in general keeps going down almost monotonically as the age group goes up. I can see the point that older people tend to spend less time socializing at bars and restaurants and more time at their homes which also tend to be more comfortable. But also, older people tend to be more wealthy, and restaurant food is much more expensive than home-cooked ones, and so it's not a priori obvious that this is the force that would have won out.

It's also almost shocking to me that a whopping 50% of 25-34 and pretty close to it of 35-44 food-eating is done away from home. That's likely around 10 meals a week, which is 2x per weekday. Lunch at work accounting for 5 of those makes sense, and then perhaps another 2-3 for an occasional dinner, but the median or mean person in these age groups hitting 5+ extra dinners/breakfasts/brunches (on top of assuming eating lunch at work all 5 days) when, among adults, these are likely the lowest-paid, least-wealthy groups (discounting the child-including 0-24 for now) is somewhat surprising to me. It indicates to me that there's a lot of fat to be cut (no pun intended) in a median/mean 25-44 year-old's food budget.

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