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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4356 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is the plan if no one posts here? Would it make sense to announce an impending shutdown of the subreddit so that people actually move?

Tomorrow I'm posting a new "Culture War thread" that links to this site. I also haven't had time to do this yet, but I'm going to be closing new posts entirely on the subreddit.

Basically it's going to have one or two stickied threads and a bunch of increasingly-old non-sticky threads.

Might be good to have an official move date, so everyone has some warning and it doesn't feel abrupt.

It's good to be back after several months of using alts like /u/exiledouta /u/spacerenrgy2 and others to circumvent a reddit giga fingerprint ban surprisingly not for unsavory Motte style arguments but the drawing of a forbidden orange cat.. @zorbaTHut now that you've had some time to get confidence in the new site's capabilities and limitations what changes if any do you think make sense to the format of the old sub? Still a weekly CW roundup? More than two pins? overhaul of karma system?

Welcome back! I admit I've been thinking of you when talking about someone who got Reddit-banned for doing something largely irrelevant.

Current plan is to keep things roughly as they are. I need to fix the pin system first but then I'll probably make sure it can do three pins. Gotta do some work on the theme. From there, it depends entirely on how much traffic we get; "the Motte is a pale shadow of its former self" is a very different outcome from "the Motte is thriving", and it remains to be seen where it goes from there.

the drawing of a forbidden orange cat..

Since we're out of the sight of the all seeing eye of Mordor Reddit admins (and this is the small scale questions thread), would you mind giving a TL;DR what that was about?

Background

The /r/drama subreddit has a long history of being the less politically correct version of /r/subredditdrama. The history of the community in the early days is not really necessary but provides some context to set the stage. As reddit became more and more censorious /r/drama tended to be one of the first places admins would try out their new restrictions, one of the biggest examples was removing the ability to 'ping' users like '/u/skoomadentist' so that they'd get a reddit notification that people were talking about them and wander into the sub to be generally fucked with. This came after a previous moratorium on following links into reddit threads to directly mess with the dramatic happenings(referred to as raiding or brigading) and it later became against to rules to even link directly to other reddit threads on /r/drama.

Eventually dramanaughts had enough of the oppression and founded rdrama.net using and developing the very source code that this site is running.

Event

Fast forward around a year and to most people's surprise the rdrama offsite is actually thriving and has a new mascot Marsey, the orange cat originally from a telegram sticker pack but extended to include thousand of variations by talented dramartists. Reddit holds their /r/place event and dramanaughts snap into action to do a little trolling and get the brand of the site out there. The whole operation is described well in this recap post. The troll is a little meta in that there shouldn't be anything offensive about the cat itself but overly online giga moderators and a couple low laying admins, most notable /u/chtorrr that were most involved in the general censoring of the old /r/drama were very aware of the icon and even though it wasn't explicitly against the rules made a point to try to prevent the icon from forming. In addition to the ability to post pixels without the normal five minute cooldown they deployed some account wide permanent unappealable fingerpriny/ip address bans to people caught placing orange pixels on the dramacat. I was one of those guilty people.

they deployed some account wide permanent unappealable fingerpriny/ip address bans to people caught placing orange pixels on the dramacat.

Man, I've seen people do some petty stuff but that really takes the cake.

I'm reminded of the thing with the NYT hit piece on Scott. Our self-proclaimed Paper Of Record writing a lazy sloppy hit piece on a small-time blogger because he objected to their plan to doxx him strongly enough to sting just a little bit.

Okay I get the motivation, but man, if there has ever in the entire history of the world been a time to take the high road, this would be it.

Hi guys!

:marseywave:

Hey! I love marsey too!

So, what are you reading?

I'm starting Minsky's Society of Mind, a classic AI text about building minds from smaller, mindless components. The current zeitgeist seems to be moving away from classic AI, but eventually we'll need better understanding of where precisely our machine-learning models fit in the broader scheme of knowledge. "Shut up and scale" doesn't seem entirely satisfactory. Maybe going over some slightly dust-covered ideas might spark some useful thinking. The book itself seems like a mix of aesthetic quirks and precision, and I seem to be in the mood for that.

Still on my second reading of Moby Dick, but made little progress. Not the book's fault. Also watched the 1956 movie, which was a pleasant surprise. Obviously it severely cut down the source material to fit within two hours, but it deviated very little and even lifted most of its dialogue verbatim from the book. They even let Ishmael do some narrating, rather than to cut the narrator and try to do without as most films-of-books do. The acting was decent, though somewhat unlifelike. Though the movie was entertaining overall, I gained absolutely nothing from it but I am pleased by the faithfulness of the adaptation.

Edit: This post had an image attached to it via CTRL+V, but it's not showing up. Trying again.

I gained absolutely nothing from it

What could you hope to gain, and could you gain it from the book as opposed to the movie?

I made that statement too brief - I gained nothing from watching the film that I did not already gain from reading the book. The film is superfluous to me.

The film offers a plot, characters, themes, imagery, actors, dialogue and music. The book contains most of those in greater depth and detail. What the film has that a book cannot was alright, above complaint, but not a significant gain.

Currently trying to work my way through 'Topology Without Tears'. I was working through a functional analysis book, but I found the proofs to be beyond my current capability. This topology book seems to have a smoother increase of challenge in the exercises, at least for the relatively early parts I've gotten through.

I think scaling is good enough for a lot of things we want AI to do, but I wouldn't be surprised if it starts having issues eventually. I think our current problem with most models at the moment is lack of control:

Such as generating an image with stable-diffusion and then doing slight modifications (different clothing, facial expressions, or backgrounds with the same person). This is possible through piecing together multiple models (I think people tend to use DALLE-2's outpainting, and maybe img2img?), but seems unsatisfactory and less powerful than it could be.

Text generation also seems to have similar issues, where NovelAI works surprisingly well for writing, but I've also had a lot of trouble with convincing the language-model that a character should have certain personality/behavior constraints. This also means NovelAI would struggle for doing something like dynamically generating a choose your own adventure story (where you can type in arbitrary things), since you can't get consistent constraints on character behavior or the setting they're in.

I think AI-safety would probably benefit from a designed AI 'core' which uses weaker ML modules, and then hopefully you can prove things about it. Though this is mostly because I consider interpretability to probably not reach a point where it is good enough.

I have been trying to get into Persuasion by Austen, after realizing that I'd never read a single Jane Austen novel. So far, funnier than I expected, but I'm missing a fair bit of context. There's also a lot more "tell rather than show" than I would expect, but that may just be the first few chapters.

I've been reading Stoic philosophy lately, and also Neuromancer. The latter has been a wild ride. I knew that it was the progenitor of cyberpunk, but I didn't realize how thoroughly other cyberpunk works rip it off. It's kind of hilariously shameless.

Are people sentimentally attached to the motte logo? I don’t recall seeing it much under the old.Reddit layout. Might this be a time to switch? I generally don’t love modern aesthetics, but I imagine someone could come up with something a bit better that still retains the motte and Bailey imagery.

There's a motte logo? Is it the weird liquid metal-esque image at the top of this site?

The image of a “motte and bailey” that reminds me of the box art from Castle II: Seige and Conquest.

At the top of the page I see liquid metal. Scrolling down I see a drawing of a medieval fortress.

Also the name itself. Through it's definitely too late to change this.

Scott himself, in the post where he introduced (popularised?) the term, said

This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.

This might be a topic better suited for the culture war roundup thread, but here goes:

The red tribe largely considers AR-15's a status symbol. In part this is because building/customizing AR-15's is a popular hobby for high IQ red tribers with a bit of disposable income, and no doubt this plays a role in the way both side talk about assault weapon bans.

So, what's the blue tribe equivalent of that phenomena? I'd say it's travel, except travel doesn't seem to be any kind of culture war flashpoint. I'd also say pet ownership, except that high IQ hobbies associated with pet ownership(dog training, for example) are probably associated with the red tribe more than the blue tribe. The closest thing I can think of is what I'd call fruity literature- novels or short stories with lots of superfluous gay stuff shoved in or outright centered around homosexual themes.

I'm not so sure about the premise that red tribe sees an ar15 as a status symbol, they're not really that expensive, one can be had for a couple hundred bucks which is within reach for basically any gainfully employed American so long as they can get past the legal hurdles. Blinging one out may be a kind of conspicuous consumption that is right coded and sends some kind of red tribe virtue signal. As a parallel to that I think you're looking in the right direction with pride type stuff. I'd say the ar15 of the blue tribe is probably something like drag queen story hour. Red tribe is vaguely against drag shows in general but is aware their critique of the general concept is not popular enough so they contain their push back to only against these less defensible(but still defendable) incarnations. And this push back induces even more demand for it from the opposing tribe.

Never heard of AR-15s being a status symbol. It’s just a tool to most people. I’m not sure people who customize their guns beyond optics are even red tribe. Seems more like a hobby for libertarians with disposable income.

The true red team status symbol is the Ford F150. Seems like every oil worker or other well-paid blue collar job blows their first paycheck on a down payment for a huge truck.

I would put both pickups and rifles as tribal signifiers, but in turn the items become status symbols from the bare bones to the customized to the collectible, delivering both superior function and conspicuous status signaling.

The hugeness of new trucks is likely driven by fuel standards, or lack of them based on wheelbase.

Many of us would prefer smaller light pickups that are no longer manufactured.

I think the AR is a really good tribal identifier, I wouldn't say status symbol any more than any other gun is, because it's a moderately priced buy in and it can serve a number of other purposes (checks boxes for theoretical "home defense," many hunting purposes, target shooting, TEOTWAKI, etc). It's a platform you can get into for $500, and it's a platform you can spec out for $10,000, and we've decided to call them all ARs as a concept and talk about them as one category. The AR branding/memeplex is the key here, it could just as easily come out very differently if more gun enthusiasts identified themselves by gun make rather than by gun category.

International travel is definitely both a similar tribal signifier and a minor culture war flashpoint, though typically more in the positive than the negative sense. I recall hearing at different times some version of "X% of Americans don't even have passports, how can you be so sure about the world if you haven't even seen the world?!" from different Blue Tribe cultural outlets. Having traveled abroad is an important Blue Tribe cultural signifier, the same girls I can picture saying they'd never marry a man who owned an AR would probably also say they'd never marry a man who didn't have a passport, who didn't want to go abroad to learn and experience. Of course, the magic of confirmation bias is that most people go overseas just to tell you what they already thought was true at home because they heard it on Twitter is now true by lived experience.

Nothing else is quite like an AR, in terms of commitment level and universality. Bad haircuts, tattoos, piercings used to play a similar role, but are largely irrelevant now, style is largely uniform across tribal lines. Food items and stuff like name brand waterbottles are good tribal signifiers, but a little more transitory/cheaper/lower cost signaling.

Blue Tribe has an anti-conspicious consumption bias, partly for Gaia-worshipping, and partly because flaunting wealth is very Trump and anything that can be remotely considered to be Trump is bad.

But surprise, surprise, that doesn't stop anyone from using wealth to flaunt status! You may notice a certain lifestylism by those who proclaim themselves liberal and socialist and egalitarian. Hobbies like travel, as you said, can cost an absolute fortune, while the person in question looks like a scruffy pleb. 'Minimalist' lifestyles that rely on the labor and effort of a half-dozen people, behind the scenes. Showing off the install of the solar panels on your house. Long hikes on the Appalachian trail (with equipment worth thousands of dollars.)

It turns out it is quite expensive to look authentically working-class. Blue Tribe elite try their darndest to not look like what they really are but like everything that exists, it is a commodity, sold at Whole Foods, the North Face, and your local gastropub.

I'll join the crowd picking at whether AR-15s as a class are status symbols or even largely purchased as status symbols. Individual sellers can be expensive or extremely expensive, but for the most part they're a fairly standard and fairly accessible centerfire rifle. Of course, when you see someone with a high-end reflex site and no cleaning kit, then 'status symbol' is one of the more charitable options.

((And a lot of this stuff is at least partly about deniable and even self-deniable 'stores of value'.))

Blue Tribe... depends a bit on the subculture. Honestly, more than the political alignment. I think Blue Tribers are a lot more likely than Red Tribers to focus on custom plastic or cloth trinkets, where Red Tribers might be more likely to spend on custom woodworking and large metalworking art, but to the extent that's even true, it's only true statistically and it's easy to come up with fairly simple outside causes.

Funko pops and hot sauces

I am looking for a good spy thriller / political thriller. I loved Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. The Minority Report series was also ok. I have no stomach for woke lecturing, so that must be absent. Any suggestions?

The Day of the Jackal is one of my favorites. The movie is great too.

Day of the Jackal

I'll check it out, thanks!

Have you read any Tom Clancy? Cardinal of the Kremlin is a good one along those lines.

In that case, The Americans is worth checking out. It's a multi-season series about deep cover KGB spies operating in 80s America. More accurate than most regarding missions and tactics, though a bit over the top on violence. It also depicts a mission substantially more elaborate and effective than any real KGB operation actually was. Good entertainment IMO though.

Not an actual question, just a minor announcement that I am hh26 from Reddit. In case anyone has paid enough attention to notice or remember me. I figured the migration was a good opportunity to change names. "hh26" was originally intended to be a throwaway account when I started casually participating in pro-trump subreddits, to keep my main from getting banned or tarnished by leftists reading my comment history. I eventually got bored of most of the mainstream subs and ended up using my main less and less, so I haven't posted on it in years and hh26 became my main, (I also eventually got bored of the fanatical devotion of the explicitly pro-trump subreddits, slightly before they got banned, and ended up mostly here). But I also got stuck with the name hh26 which is kind of silly and unmemorable.

Additionally, this being a new site without all the usernames claimed means I can claim something relatively normal looking like MathWizard.

I don't especially have a lot of direct relationships here, but post semi-regularly and occasionally get Quality Contributioned and would like to carry forth whatever good will and reputation I may have with me. I look forward to more interesting discussions and not being awful to each other.

Roughly the same for me. I was /u/MetroTrumper on Reddit. I like Trump, but I don't find it particularly interesting to participate in the "24/7 Trump rally" culture of those subs, posting low-effort comment memes constantly. So it became more of an account for posting about politics in ways that might be controversial. It felt somewhat less thrilled with the name, and might have switched over to a new Reddit account if we weren't switching to a whole new site.

You were MetroTrumper? Holy shit.

Also took the change to change my name; never really liked "blendorgat". I used to use a random phrase generator for all my usernames, but my paranoia levels have decreased somewhat. (Which is to say, I'm still using a randomly generated phrase, but not distinguishing between sites anymore...)

Oh hey, I didn't even think of using flair for that. That's pretty convenient, I'll probably do that for a couple months.

Roll call! Who made it over?

Southkraut, reporting in.

Hi

based

Don't forget, you're here forever

deleted

AmeDamnee

Someone please ping her. I know she had some trouble with the rules, but it's at least worth starting fresh.

Ditto for iprayem3 or whatever his name was. I thought he had great commentary prior to quitting.

they deleted their account. Was ame deisach? just tell them on acx/dsl if so

Yes. She's BothAfternoon as well, so somebody can just contact her on reddit.

Things just aren't the same without her.

I’d been mentally calling Ame “Punished Deiseach” for a while before she deleted, but it’s good to have confirmation.

Maybe remove the reference to her active account, though?

Seeing as she was apparently getting harassed across platforms.

Hola! Going to take a while to get used to the new interface, coming from old.reddit, but it's good to get away from that site.

Now I just need to figure out the custom CSS and get threads made clearer - seems hard to read.

Yo! Formerly posted as bigstrat2003 and substantial_layer_13 on Reddit.

I never connected the two usernames, but I did notice both were excellent posters. Welcome.

I have no particularly well-known handles on The Motte or SSC. For disclosure's sake, I was banned multiple times and evaded bans multiple times through alternate accounts and IPs whenever I felt the urge to post; that urge was uncommon, with gaps of months and sometimes years, but it did happen.

I am endeavoring to follow the rules here, though I do hope being removed from Reddit's iron clutch will see the mods lighten up a bit and permit a broader range of discourse and perspectives. I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence, for instance, but never have.

”I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence”

I think this is a very bad idea. It draws harmful unnecessary attention to the site. It’s one of the few things that can directly lead to the site being taken offline and admins investigated. I’m sure the philosophical underpinnings can be clothed in a different topic, for instance an historical overview of political legitimacy with emphasis on how violent actors gained political legitimacy.

Rather than justification, how about acquiescence?

I wouldn't necessarily advocate for violence against politicians, lawyers, bankers etc. If angry yet capable mob started building guillotines on capital hill I'd like to see where it goes before reflexive condemnation.

Hydroxyacetylene from reddit, made the jump.

TheMotte was the only ray of sunshine keeping me on reddit. Good riddance reddit! You were once a wonderful place to have open discussions, but that was a long, long time ago.

I don’t post a ton so not sure how much it matters, but as promised a few months ago, I made it!

I gotta look around and see if the RSS feeds work. I’ll prolly forget to check in if not.

Been two years since I last posted on Reddit, but I came over under a new name. In fairness I deleted and recreated Reddit names on a quarterly basis back in the day so I doubt anyone would link my previous identities together.

Hi, testing to see if I can reply to a poster.

Indeed you can.

I'm here.

Shambled to see that the comments are still floating in a sea of whitespace. I'd try to come up with some fixed CSS myself, but the idea that I'm supposed to make a PR on Github (and hence either associate my name-linked Github account or jump through whatever hoops are necessary to make a new and unassociated one) is discouraging.

edit: I'm using the following custom CSS now to have a bit more sanity:


*:not(.comment-text p) {

margin: 0px !important;

}


.comment-text p+p {

margin-top: 1rem !important;

margin-bottom: 0px !important;

margin-left: 0px !important;

margin-right: 0px !important;

}


.comment-text p:not(p+p) {

margin: 0px !important;

}


.comment, .comment-text {

padding-top: 0px !important;

padding-bottom: 0px !important;

}


.comment-collapse-desktop {

padding-right: 15px !important;

}


.list-inline-item {

margin-right: 5px !important;

}


.profile-pic-25 {

scale: 0.5 !important;

}

Unfortunately, main.css has a few !importants of its own enforcing padding (in particular on .comment .comment-body .comment-text) which I can't override.

edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.

I definitely plan to go over the comment theme and make a bunch of changes. It wasn't the priority - the main page was worse - and then I ended up not getting to it before the launch.

edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.

Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)

  • test

  • second

    • second level

    • sth sth

Known bug; we've actually had a half-finished fix for a while, but the person who wrote it hasn't had time to finish it, and we've been working on other stuff.

you can override main.css's !importants by giving your rules higher css precedences and also !important iirc. you can beat .comment .comment-body .comment-text with something like .. comment .comment-body .comment-text

solowng from reddit

More minimalistic Fevzi Pasha reporting

Howdy.

Made it. Was torn about whether to use my Reddit handle, or one of my normal handles, since I was never on The Motte that much.

I am here.... Now

Me.

Based. Welcome over.

Retaining my Reddit handle (defparameter *fur-name* "felis-parenthesis" "the cat who codes in Common Lisp")

Still alive and kicking 🤞

Hopefully for many centuries to come.

The same to you my man, see you around at Heat Death haha

Ilforte, belatedly reporting in.

o/

Not sure if it’s the right place to post this, but I noticed the new site does not hide the upvote/downvote count for 24 hours like on Reddit. Was that instituted on Reddit to discourage hive-mind behavior? Was that effective? And do we want to bring it here?

That's a good question!

Part of the reason I did that is because it was the most I could do. Reddit's vote system is kind of terrible and I really wanted to just disable it, but that simply wasn't possible on Reddit.

Here, I can just make the vote system less terrible. So I'm probably going to be aiming in that direction.

Expect something to show up in a few weeks on that :V

Lurked there. Will generally lurk here. Looking forward to the discussions.

Test post pls ignore

Okay.

Also testing. Just made an account.

Can the user name length rule be expanded to 35 characters?

I'm testing it out in the UI and honestly 25 characters is already a bit longer than comfortable. I think I'd prefer to stick to 25 characters.

Maybe someday this'll become a Trusted User thing.

Okay. I had a really good username that exceeds 25 characters. But this will do.

Also thanks setting this up, coming from a long time pre-Motte culture war roundup poster.

Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.

Edit 2: Someone sent me the reddit suicide report message. From 'System', so they are abusing baked in features. Really off to a dramatic start.

My first instinct was to give "reddit gold" to give a weightier kind of upvote, then I realized how messed up it is that reddit lets you buy influence directly.

Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.

Someone downvoting everything doesn't change the relative position of anything so it doesn't really matter.

I may be missing something, but I can't tell if people replied to my comment and cannot follow a chain of discussion from that, Am I missing something?

(Advance disclaimer: I'm new to The Motte, so this may be more appropriately posted elsewhere - please feel free to provide meta-feedback and advice for navigating this forum.)

I'm wondering about how this site is funded. Assuming enough volunteers with technical skills, the only cost would be that of hosting, which is presumably not much considering how cheap cloud infra is nowadays. That said, it's still nonzero, and I have the feeling that in order to protect the site, more scaling and hardening will be needed. I'd be happy to donate - I think this could be a great opportunity for financial transparency and an open discussion of money as it is used to support a truly non-profit tech endeavor. That said, there definitely may be drawbacks I'm not aware of.

A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.

The full server infrastructure right now is around $50/mo, which I'm just paying out of pocket. I do plan to set up a donation system at some point, but 24 hours ago I couldn't - Reddit doesn't allow it - and I suspect I'm going to have more important things on my plate for a while.

A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.

Yep, definitely a good start :)

If you're a coder, or visual designer, joining the development server and contributing would be helpful. Otherwise, post stuff that's good. The site doesn't work without people, and people don't show up without content.

If you want to go the extra mile, try posting links to the site, ideally to specific relevant posts, in communities with a similar tone. We really do need a source of fresh blood and that's going to be our biggest long-term struggle, I think.

Sounds great; happy to continue to engage and conscientiously socialize this forum's existence in other spaces where appropriate. I do software engineering and DevOps both at my day job and as a hobby, so I'd love to jump in and contribute to the development, but I'll have to check my contract first to make sure there's no virus in there for things I touch.

Anyone else feel like they are addicted to grand theories of everything? Anytime I get two minutes to myself to sit down and think I can't help but have my mind wander in the direction of psychohistorian style bullshit. Grand theories explaining the arc of history, of wokeness, or of financial booms and busts. Its all so enticing to me, but I'm pretty sure most of it is just a bullshit feeling that my mind spins up.

I already found the one grand theory of everything I’m pretty much planning on sticking to. It helped return my mental health, it taught me about music theory and politics, and I don’t believe I can see the world any other way now that it’s so deeply ingrained.

Triessentialism is the theory that there are three fundamentally different types of things, and fractally reiterates.

I had a phase like that.

Me and you both brother. After a lifetime of observation it feels like a unified theory is finally coming together. Things are starting to make sense. My very first lectures in linguistics in undergrad were bafflingly opaque. Unlike hard science we couldn't observe and measure anything physical, (well, phonetics aside). You can't see a noun. We (the humans) had to build up the concepts of syntax, morphology, phonology and so on. What we're describing has always existed but bringing it into conscious awareness and true definition meant seeing way beyond the fact that what goes up must come down.

So much of human behaviour is mystifyingly illogical yet mystifyingly consistent. Like linguistics, you can't see moral righteousness, you can't measure who whom. But we see these concepts in action consistently. We, the animals with the impulses driving this behaviour have had to step back from it, while practicing it, to watch it enough, understand it enough to crystallise it into something as easily digestible as: he is being domineering, they are being bullies, I am being assertive.

There's no Galileo of human behavior to hand these concepts down from on high. We're putting it together ourselves on the fly, right now, in this century. It's very exciting. In hard science they say there's no low hanging fruit left but the social sciences are nowhere near that. Scott, big Yud, they're the backyard scientists of yore. Psychologically we're still in an age where grand discoveries can be made by laymen.

Mainstream psychological understanding is still somewhere near where biology was with Spontaneous Generation theory: a total guess taken as fact for 2000 years.

Newton was 'addicted' to grand theories, too! "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy". Also a religious heretic, believing all sorts of random christian things.

Grand theories are fine, if they're true. If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue. Read some science, history (although the former - physics, chem, bio, etc - is more uniformly reliable than the second), speak to/read from all sorts of people, and come up with the useful ones!

If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue.

Yeah, but I think that's the problem - grand theories usually have a ton of exceptions, enough that using them in grand fashion will give you quite a few answers. In Tetlock's work on superforecasters, he found foxes beating hedgehogs (one summary here - https://www.themotte.org/post/1/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-04/587?context=8#context). The grander the theory, the more likely that it's got flaws that will result in poor object-level predictions.

Eh ... there are a lot of 'grand theories' that aren't grand in retrospect. Like - wow, everything is on a computer today! Proposing that in 1900 would've certainly been "grand", yet it happened. And narrow theories can also be very wrong too!

It ends up declaring - "ambitious theories are wrong". Which is often true, but ambitious theories are also useful if correct, so you shouldn't give up trying them

For forecasting - well, isn't "forecasting is a useful methodology in general" a grand theory? I think what Tetlock's seeing is -

I guess there's also a bit of "if you aren't being serious, it's incredibly easy to make a fake grand theory by just claiming things at random" - but unserious narrow theories aren't better than unserious grand theories. That might be what's causing the thing - historians do narrow work on the travel time of mail carriers in Derbyshire in 1750, some blogger declares all the world's problems are because of rent control. but the blogger isn't going to be more correct if he declares something about mail carriers in derbyshire.

Is there any reason why one is called the fox and the other the hedgehog?

I have absolutely no idea. Good question.

I have an ambivalent stance of loving a "good" (as in: intuitive) grand theory but also having been trained by endless tearing apart of those theories by historians combined with just a general distrust in my own knowledge and ability to judge between them.

But they're so much more...fun than the narrower works that historians actually respect!

I feel it too.

Perhaps it’s easier to see in others, and easiest to spot in the sort of policy wonk most likely to write an elaborate justification.

But it’s a real, seductive feeling.

I just try and hold on to Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors.

it was suggested that we have a cute animal mascot. I propose Quincy the heavily armed Quokka standing atop a castle’s battlements.

How about this for a mascot?

https://www.deviantart.com/klaatu81/art/Cartoon-Chess-Pieces-596793102

Any community I see with that as a mascot I would get an automatic instinct to bully.

I mostly jest but I think we need something more.....less cartoony.

This was like my second try with Stable Diffusion. What a time to be alive.

/images/16624181379188077.webp

Yep, that’s what I was imagining. I’m making it my “site image” in my settings, thanks!

I love that his rifle is sprouting mini-mottes -- we have more mottes than you can imagine, motherfucker.

No idea where the name came from, but it was/is a scare group for anti-trans activists.

Post all your worst excesses here, etc. etc.

It's a forum for doxxing mentally ill overly online types. Their basic aim is humor value in these people's often seriously screwed up lives.

Given the overlap in groups, it should come as no surprise that their targets are disproportionately trans(and specifically trans activists), which is where the headline news controversy comes from. I'm not going to say it's uncontroversial when they just go after random schizos, but it doesn't make the news.

You know any kids who would taunt their crazy neighbor or a mentally unstable hobo to provoke a tantrum? KF is these kids, but on a global scale.

Kiwi Farms is basically a gossip forum about internet personalities. They have a surprisingly high share of female users and even a sub-forum to discuss cosplay/makeup content creators, fat acceptance activists, trans people, and other girly things.

Originally, the site was called CWCki Forums, and they focused on documenting and discussing the life of an individual known as Chris-chan, or Christian Wenston Chandler (CWC), author of the Sonichu webcomic and prone to many hi-jinks. In the beginning of 2015, it appears they moved to the domain kiwifar.ms, and eventually to kiwifarms.net.

In Kiwi Farms, they have a term 'lolcow' for people that are walking disasters and that are 'farmed for endless lols'. These are the people that they initially focused on discussing, but as the community grew, they moved on to discuss online personalities and online communities more widely.

The owner of the site appears to be some degree of free speech activist. The posts on the site are allowed to include slurs against various minority groups. On the site, it's allowed to doxx the individuals that are discussed, as in release identifying information about them. More infamously, Kiwi Farms were one of the few sites not to take down the footage from the Christchurch massacre.

Kiwi Farms also has a reputation for being a platform for anti-trans activism. They harbor a number of TERFs and other people against trans rights activists or trans people in general. More recently, this lead to the #DropKiwiFarms campaign in response by trans activists, and this eventually lead to Kiwi Farms being dropped from Cloudflare. This lead to the migration to the URL kiwifarms.ru and a Russian DDoS protection service. However, this service caved under the network load.

Currently, Kiwi Farms is only accessible through Tor at http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/

To add on to what others said, their culture around "lowcows" has become really toxic. You could perhaps describe the userbase as looking for blood rather than milk. Many famers are downright hateful to the lolcows. The alternate crowd (like rdrama) is more akin to watching wierd and bizarre indie movies: It's wierd, but in an interesting or morbidly facinating way.

I think this site has a real chance to be greater than the subreddit. Just a few thoughts/concerns —

  • There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity. We should go so far as to crowdsource funding for a 3rd party IP-related security assessment ( I do not know personal security experience of admins). This has added benefit of being a marketable tag on, “you can feel safe regarding your IP address”, etc.

  • Pages instead of “view more comments”. This is easier to see how many top-level posts in the thread have been missed, as well as navigating to old threads. (Also, is there a way to “favorite” threads and receive notifications when it has been updated?)

  • It might be a good idea to label this site a beta version with a later official launch date in six months, as they do with video game releases. Why? It gives new users a feeling of exclusivity while excusing new site mishaps and beginning retention problems.

  • The weekly threads should be every other weekly, to boost the number of “total comments” counts, to retain and increase user retention. Reddit did this by increasing upvote counts artificially. In facts, giving each user a +5 points per upvote (and perhaps one daily +10 ability for well-liked comments), while difficult to implement, is a great way to increase engagement subconsciously. We should not shy away from using the full weight of psychology to make his site better than Reddit, for many utilitarian reasons, not the least of which is fuck reddit.

  • TheMotte on Reddit should advertise the new site with daily posts, maybe “best ofs”, not threads, with screenshots of the new site, to remind and entice subscribers on Reddit to move to the new location. Emphasize ease of signing up (20 second sign up).

  • If this site eventually develops a filter mechanism for new users, ie we want 100 people to try the site and 20 to stay, there are lots of ways to attract new members. The problem with, say, subtly talking about this forum on a philosophy forum to attract new members is that you don’t want to be overrun by bad posters. So, while it’s not best to do this now, in the future if we want site to grow in popularity, a kind of “new user filter” would be great. Something like “one allotted post per day” for new users until sufficiently upvoted over the course of a week. Just an idea to think about later on, when site is fully colonized by original users.

There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity.

I'm not up on the current state of the art here, but I think VPN companies have been pushing a lot of scare mongering regarding IP addresses and how easily they're tied back to individuals. They can pretty easily be tied to ISPs, and sometimes to unique clients within an ISP, but it doesn't map to an individual. At best it would map to a single customer network, but even if it's a home network my understanding is that ISPs don't generally reveal IP-to-customer mappings without a subpoena, and I don't really expect postings here to rise to the level of legal involvement. And even then, the public IP logged on the web site might well be hidden by carrier-grade NAT, which is IIRC pretty common in mobile telephony. If you're really concerned, I recommend finding public WiFi without unique login credentials (your local Starbucks or the library) or using a VPN (although some VPNs keep logs). Bonus points for using a device that scrambles MAC addresses on a per-connection basis, which I believe the iPhone and some Android devices can be configured to do, and even Windows supports.

This used to be an issue with peer-to-peer filesharing users, and may continue to be, but I don't really travel in those circles these days. Also watch Zorba's warrant canary on the Contact Us page.

Great advice here, from someone with sales experience. The piece about the beta I especially like, although I could see it being controversial.

I'd like to see perhaps an optional flare/avatar for moving over in the first X amount of days, or being for instance in the first 1,000 unique accounts created. Of course then you may incentivize people making more than one account... Perhaps a karma threshold instead.

Overall I think now that we can control more aspects of the site, we should strongly incentivize joining the site, and helping create high quality content here in this critical period.

It’s painful not being able to browse the site with the old.reddit.com interface (or visual equivalent).

There're extensions that let you set your own css for any site, and a thread (two, in fact) for people to share their modifications. Maybe someone will come up with something you like.

You can change the css of the site natively in settings > custom css. However creating a css to mirror the css of old reddit would be quite time consuming.

The main css thread’s OP has a pretty close to old.reddit feel; I noted my modifications to that css in a thread on that post.

Polygraphs are really unreliable, you can fail them pretty easily. Usually they take a baseline reading before asking the tough questions but sometimes even that doesn't work. Imagine how bad it would be if your friend was telling the truth and the polygraph said they were lying.

Is it possible you can get over this issue some other way? If this is really serious enough that you want a polygraph why are you trying to stay friends at all?

Haven't done a deep dive, but one of the reasons the IC still uses polygraph tests for clearance is that most people aren't extremely skilled liars, or sociopaths. If someone does a polygraph and isn't either extremely good at lying or is highly emotionally detached, just observing their behavior should be enough for you to tell.

This of course assumes you're somewhat good at or confident in your skill of reading other people.

ETA: All this being said, I would recommend trying to reconcile with the person unless there's a lot at stake (ie. serious financial or legal repercussions)

I feel like it's time to stop and think about the nature of your relationship if that's where it's going.

Decide how much you trust/distrust him without external help and go from there. Social intuition is a wonderful tool, and if you get it wrong you'll learn from the experience and get better.

It's too involved of a relationship.

That pattern sounds dangerous, both in this specific instance and in the more general case.

You can definitely take "trust but verify" too far, especially with friends and romantic partners (rather than professional associates).

Can't help you on the truth-detecting end, but it sounds like you already realize you cannot trust this person. That doesn't have to get in the way of being friends going forward. Just...don't trust him with anything.

Polygraphs are basically pseudoscience. Their real utility is not any actual lie-detecting ability, but rather as an interrogation tool used by the police that provides pressure and acts as a form of manipulation for the police. Most people believe that polygraphs work and even those that don't at least have some niggling doubt in the back of their mind.

You're going to have to solve this the old fashioned way, through sleuthing if at all possible. Otherwise you're just going to have to take things on faith one way or another.

I would caution strongly against using a polygraph if you have any regards for the person being interrogated at all. It is by no means a pleasant experience, physically or psychologically. This is by design, since the point is basically to make you uncomfortable and play mind games with you until you admit the thing that the person ordering the polygraph wants you to admit to (or whatever other secret it happens to flush out) or the interrogator runs out of tricks.

Anybody know if /u/self_made_human or other transhumanists made it over to the new site? I know it's a small part but the transhumanism discussion here has been one of my favorite aspects of the community.

Have we figured out robot hearts or lab grown hearts yet?

There are certainly people trying, this study from 2015 claims to have grown 'functional human myocardial-like tissue of multiple complexities.' (1) Not well read enough to comment on the accuracy, but the field is certainly advancing.

1 - https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circresaha.115.306874

You know I just had a thought bubble. Perhaps the reason societies used to seem far more stable in the past is because anyone who acted outside the system or had such tendencies used to die out, but in modern times for the first time we are keeping all personality types alive and functional in a society.

So we have extreme traditionalists and futurists existing within the same system to extremes that wouldn't have been possible in the past.

Nice. I look forward to perfected body replacements for every single part of the body.

Liver replacement business would boom.

Didn't Jarvik make a robot heart a few decades ago?

Doesn't count as "figured out" until we make a robot heart that doesn't suck. Making a working pump isn't hard, but making one that won't clot blood and won't trigger immune rejection (and won't limit mobility and won't fail to deliver enough O2 when you exercise and won't be too big and won't ever break and...) seems to be much harder.

I'm touched to be called out by name, and am certainly more than happy to remain one of the resident transhumanists!

This (1) post makes me think there should be research into a Dunbar's number for internet communities. Anyone know of interesting writing on the topic?

1 - https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/l8id4/did_digg_make_us_the_dumb_how_have_reddit/

Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.

Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:

Quite remarkably, the mean rates of contact in each layer are extremely close, especially for the Facebook datasets, to those found in (and, indeed, used to define: Dunbar and Spoors, 1995) the different layers in egocentric offline personal social networks (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). This suggests that the online environments may be mapping quite closely onto everyday offline networks, or that individuals who inhabit online environments on a regular basis begin to include individuals that they have met online into their general personal social network, treating the different modes of communication as essentially the same.

I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.

Wow thanks for the link, had no idea that Dunbar was so prolific. This is interesting, I would definitely need to do some more reading before I could judge whether it was accurate.

I'm quite curious to see how online communities are different from physical communities. I wonder if VR will have a noticeable effect - I could see communities shrinking again due to the somewhat 'in-person' nature of VR.

he's producing papers at an insane rate

Are big name researchers like him actually doing any of the grunt work or just get handed authorship for having answered one question asked by a PhD student?

Yeah yeah not all researchers, but in the ML space I usually see some very big names appear as 5th or 6th authors in inconsequential papers and am left wondering, why are they even there?

The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.

I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.

Roughly how many users have migrated so far?

700 total registered users. I have no idea how that compares to Reddit's 19,000 subscribers; some of the tools we have now are providing a rather interesting look into the internals, and there's a lot of users whose names I have never seen at all who are dutifully upvoting things that are good and downvoting things that are bad. I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)

Also, those 19,000 subscribers probably included a lot of dead accounts, Reddit never pruned them at all. So we were never going to get anywhere near that number.

The stats I have also say that we have 150 active users on the site at this very moment, about half of which have registered accounts, but it's hard to say how this compares to the Reddit numbers (currently 2500); the concept of an "active user" is inherently very subjective and we never knew what the hell Reddit was doing anyway, every few months it would jump up by an order of magnitude for a day and we never had any idea why. I always assumed Reddit's numbers were garbage or at least garbage-adjacent.

You could try to invite the intellectual userbase of rdrama. That's how I ended up here. Some guy messaged me and told me I would be more appreciated here.

Agreed. Haven't had to report anything yet.

I think we did pretty well.

:marseydoubt:

They aren't really trying to actively troll you. Individual morons coming in so far.

Good to hear that we have a large amount of folks already here, day two (one?) of the official move. Personally I'm a long-time lurker who didn't post out of a combination of fear of reddit admins/old health issues, and this move has changed my mind on posting. My favorite internet community facing an existential threat has given me enough motivation to get over the hump, so to speak.

I've seen a similar sentiment elsewhere already, and I like to think many quality posters who held back in the past for some reason will come in out of the cold and help us keep this place alive, and high quality.

I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

Where else would we get our reading material from? I usually don't post much because I don't particularly enjoy writing like people here do, and I usually feel more pain than joy when I do post. I do mostly enjoy skimming every weekly culture war or small-scale questions thread, and also the other non-weekly random topic threads.

I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

Ohai. I was never subscribed, but despite that I was a frequent reader I think I was effectively invisible to moderators. I have cycled through various reddit accounts over time but in the past the "you are a member of [...] therefore you are [...]" dynamic seemed best avoided and I avoided controversial memberships. (Ironically I've recently reached the "actually I don't care anymore ban me whatevs" point, but I also feel like reddit may be about to implode as a useful resource thus rendering it all moot.)

Imported lurker who was always just invisible before, here to confirm we're here.

I never committed to making an account on reddit, but I've been reading and keeping up with the Motte for quite a long time now. Came through the usual slatestarcodex route (is it even the usual route these days?) but I was never too engaged with the SSC subreddit's general flavors of discussion.

It's a challenge to imagine myself as an effortposter by any stretch, but I'm really keen on what this community is all about and I'm happy to be here anyway.

Going from pure lurker to attempted effortpost-er can be intimidating if you aren't a natural writer. But if you have a subject that you are passionate about then that passion will carry through even if you find the idea of be awarded an AAQC to be challenging to imagine.

Speaking of user statistics, I wonder about those moments on the subreddit where the number of active users spiked into the thousands - like, uh, seems to be happening right now, if my memories of normal activity levels are correct. My guesses about why those happened before were that something from The Motte was linked in some high-traffic thread on some high-traffic subreddit, but was never able to find any proof of that happening whenever I checked, and didn't notice any influx of new posters going "what's this about" at any point, either.

If there's a lot of attention on the subreddit right now, I think it's pretty obvious why that is, but we've never fled the platform before. But of course, knowing Reddit, I wouldn't expect the mod team could have any more insight into whatever was generally going on than I, a random hitherto-lurker, would.

So that's a totally reasonable guess! But . . . as near as I can tell, it's wrong. Or something's wrong. Mods actually do have some info about subreddit traffic - there's a page with traffic graphs - and we've never seen any significant jump in traffic while one of those spikes was going on. Including right now, in fact, this is pretty much normal for this time of day (which is in itself confusing?)

Either something else is going on there, or the traffic graph is the one lying to us.

(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)

Hi to you, too! I've been lurking since the SSC subreddit days, just never registered because I didn't want to get involved with Reddit.

One thing I've noticed since the move is that there seems to be heavy cross-pollination with /r/drama. This seems odd to me; I wouldn't expect there to be much overlap between the two communities. Is there any reason other than the commonality of Reddit diaspora?

We forked their codebase; they’re talking about us because they think that’s interesting.

It's actually reassuring that I'm not the only one confused about that! Not that I'm assigning any particular positive or negative valence to it ... they seem like a lively bunch ... I just wouldn't have guessed.

Does it have to do with us building the site out of their codebase or is the relationship an old one that I've just never noticed?

There's also been a somewhat-substantial userbase overlap even before this, from what I remember. Can't say I really understand it, myself, because it seems like it would have to be an absolute Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, but I suppose people are multifaceted.

Now that Stable Diffusion has been public for a week - what will be the next field to be revolutionized by AI?

(And if your answer is "writing" or "music", I'd like to hear what field you think will be next after those. Those are obvious candidates because AI systems are already in use in those fields and/or will be shortly, but due to structural differences between those fields and the visual arts, I'm skeptical that AI will have the same seismic impact there that it's currently having in art.)

Architecture. Since you can run the output through a layer that will check that the structure will not collapse, you will be able to ask the AI to design whatever you want and it will spit out a viable blueprint. Want a tower on your McMansion? Just use cad+img2cad to add it to the existing structure.

Ironically, perhaps, I expect you'll still need human contractors and workers involved to do most of the actual construction.

I'm here for procedurally-generated, tailored buildings.

I expect less new fields getting revolutionized and more currently AI friendly fields getting huge upgrades.

Imagine call center AI that actually sounds fully human or AI assistants that sound fully human.

However, sticking to the spirit of your question, my answer would be mathematics. With Mathematicians only existing to reevaluate the solutions given by AI to confirm they would work. Mathematics would become far more an engineering field than a person coming up with a solution on their own field.

I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.

Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.

AI is more likely to replace technical jobs than manual jobs though. It's easier to program an AI to figure out a trillion parameters of data then to teach it to walk. Welcome to the upside down where the safest job will be factory worker.

Said tongue in cheek.

To a degree, yes. People who have a high-level understanding of their field, however, are those best placed to use new AI tools. Likewise, statisticians didn't disappear because we built better tools for statistical analysis, rather the demand for statistical education has never been higher. The tools are still used by someone and we tend to see the lowest rung automated away and smaller numbers of usually better educated employees getting productivity increases. Usually what this looks like is a lot of the lowest-skill (or those with a very narrow skillset) employees lose their jobs - the invention of the mechanical (and later electronic) calculator removed the need for human calculators, but engineers and mathematicians are still a thing.

Theorem provers do all of the evaluation work ... for those specific results which have been painstakingly translated into the theorem prover's language, which to a first order approximation is zero percent of the new and interesting results.

Training a transformer AI on MetaMath (or on Coq results, whatever large database has both complete proofs and adequately verbose comments), combined with the verifier itself, might be enough at this point to create a "math-paper to formal-proof" translator. Skimming through comments I see a lot of links back to the papers which originally published each theorem, which certainly ought to qualify as "adequately verbose" even if the database comments themselves are fairly terse.

Doing creative work would of course be more interesting ... if we could only define what's "interesting". 378+135=513 is a theorem among infinite others, but nobody cares about it. We tend to like math if it eventually has endpoints with real-world applications, and it's a bit hard to put that into an evaluable loss function. We also tend to like theorems if they're more general, and if they're short to state but long to prove, and if they're on the shortest path to proving other theorems, and maybe there's something to those criteria that could be quantified well enough to point a Neural Net Monte Carlo Tree Search in the right direction?

Unfortunately I think sales will be sooner than most people think. The AI to automatically get rid of your accent in real time on a phone call already exists - from there you only need to be able to accurately feed phrases/words to the AI and it will be a better salesperson than most could hope to be. An AI also doesn't get discouraged, which from what I have seen is the #1 reason people leave sales.

I think music will be differentiated into different groups. People love concerts, and being able to physically play an instrument has always been, to my mind at least, much more impressive than being an artist. It's 'cooler' if you will, to play guitar than to wield a paintbrush.

Writing is, well, the writing is already on the wall. GPT-3 is incredible, and scaling shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. (1) I'm extremely confident that many lower-quality blogs are now entirely GPT-3, and instead of hiring ghostwriters, which is a shockingly common practice, writers will just use GPT-4 or 5 to offload their work. I'm neutral on whether or not this is a good thing.

Ironically I now think taxi drivers, who I once thought would be the first to go, will probably last pretty long. Mistakes are far costlier when driving than when creating a piece of art, or a piece of writing. One of the ways I view different jobs is how serious the immediate consequences are when you fail.

1 - https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.

Scams. Imagine an AI that calls your grandmother claiming to need money, sounding exactly like you, using voice recognition and GPT-N (fine-tuned on previous successful scam calls and prompted by a selection of your own social media information) to reply.

It'd work just as well on non-English speakers too, so nations that have up to now been more or less immune to Indian/Nigerian scammers due to the language barrier will now get targeted just as easily — and they don't have any sort of resistance from being exposed to the current "weak" versions of the scams either.

For a few months many of my neighbors repeatedly got scam phone calls with my name and number on the Caller ID. I supposed in a few years these calls will also have my voice.

Speaking of phone scams, does anyone know of a way to block an entire area code minus a whitelist? I get so many spam calls (or group texts; those are the worst because of the other victims' subsequent "remove me from this list" mass-replies) purporting to come from my home region, where everyone who'd have a reason to contact me is already in my contacts, and blocking every other available number on those sequential group-texts one by one gets tiring. (Though I expect I've taken an appreciable bite out of all the nearest few thousand numbers already, anyway...)

Acting. Once we have a Stable Diffusion for movies (Any guesses on when this happens?), few will hire actors. We will likely have an explosion in content as anyone who can write can make a film, and lots of book get quickly made into movies. I can't wait for the Worm movie.

Finance, if it hasn't already behind the scenes.

There's a lot of intermediaries who currently get paid pretty handsomely for a job that is, at core, just channeling money from one account to another and explaining what they did and why to a human. And 'money' just means a digital entry on a ledger for most purposes, now.

I see no reason why an 'investment/financial advisor' can't be completely replaced by a bot that listens to the customer's situation and goals, and based on its learning from a dataset of billions of similar situations, spits out recommendations for how to invest or otherwise distribute one's money to achieve that goal.

Same for stock brokers. Same for financial analysts. Same for Tax advisors, even (see my point about law, below).

Factors vitiating against this: Regulations and distrust of AIs to handle one's money.

I know that banks and credit card companies are already using AI to detect fraud and handle customer service. The question is when they'll allow/be allowed to give the AI the ability to access customer accounts directly.

Also: Law. At least the transactional side. There are already HUGE databases of highly structured information about every single topic that is relevant to the practice of law, and legal writing is, by it's nature, very predictable and rigidly formal such that any AI should easily be able to produce human-passing work that can match all but the most learned and innovative jurists for quality.

I have to assume we are mere months away from some company announcing that they've trained an AI to draft and analyze contracts and similar legal documents, AND to draft motions complete with legal citations based on a description of the desired motion and outcome.

This kills legal assistant and paralegal jobs instantly. It also carves a big gaping whole out of available attorney jobs.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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