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So I just ate an automated 3-day reddit ban for saying we should bomb the tigrayan militants responsible for their genocidal strategy of raping and genitally mutilating women. I can't really complain about that: I was knowingly in violation of reddit's "no advocating violence" policy. I have been before, and I will be again, probably until I get permabanned, because sometimes violence is the solution. Thomas Aquinas will back me up there.
But what's interesting to me is the "automated" part. Now, I've faced my fair share of human disciplinary action before. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes its not. But either way, the humans involved are trying to advance some particular ideological goal. Maybe they blew up because Ii contradicted their policies. Maybe they developed a nearly autoimmune response to any kind of NSFW post becauseof prior calamities. (Looking at you, spacebattles mods.) Maybe they genuinely wanted to keep the local standard of discussion high. But reddit's automated system is clearly not designed for any of that. Rather, its most fundamental goal seems to be the impartial and universal enforcement of reddit's site-wide rules to the best of its capability.
I agree with yudkowsky on the point that an "aligned" AI should do what we tell it to do, not what is in some arbitrary sense "right." So I'm also not going to complain about how "cold and unfeeling AI can't understand justice." That would be missing the the forest for the trees. It's not that AI aren't capable of justice, it's that the reddit admins didn't want a just AI. They wanted, and made, a rule-following AI. And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.
Well, really it's "make as much money as possible." But while AI are increasingly good at tactics-- at short tasks-- they're still very lacking at strategy. So reddit admins had to come up with the strategy of making anodyne discussions, which AI's could then implement tactically.
The obvious question is: "why?" To which the obvious response is, "advertisers." And that would be a pretty good guess, historically. Much of reddit's (and tumblr's, and facebook's, and pre-musk twitter's) policy changes have been as a result of advertisers. But for once, I think it's wrong. Reddit drama is at a low enough ebb that avoiding controversy doesn't seem like it should be much of a factor, and this simultaneously comes as a time where sites like X, bluesky, and TikTok are trying to energize audiences by tacitly encouraging more controversy and fighting.
Which brings me to my hypothesis: that reddit is trying to enhance its appeal for training AI.
Everyone knows that google (and bing, and duckduckgo, and yahoo) have turned to shit. But reddit has retained a reputation for being a place to find a wide variety of useful, helpful, text-based content. That makes it a very appealing corpus on which to train AI-- and they realized that ages ago, which lead to them doing stuff like creating a paid API. This automated moderation style isn't necessarily the best for user retention, or getting money through advertisement, but it serves to pre-clean the data companies can feed to AI. It's sort of an inverse RLHF. RLHF is humans trying to change what response strategies LLMs take by making tactical choices to encourage specific behaviors. Reddit moderation, meanwhile is encouraging humans to come up with strategic adaptations to the tactical enforcement of inoffensive, helpful content. And remember what I said about humans still being better at strategy? This should pay out massive dividends in how useful reddit is as training data.
Coda:
As my bans escalate, I'm probably going to be pushed off reddit. That's probably for the best; my addiction to that site has wasted way too much of my life. But given the stuff I enjoy about reddit specifically-- the discussions on wide-ranging topics-- I don't see replacing reddit with X, or TikTok, or even (exclusively) the motte. Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats. And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
Speaking of which, /u/JTarrou, what did you get the mop for?
Oh, a throwaway line about NPR hosts getting flogged.
I suspect my recent comment of the week about race and IQ to be the real culprit, but they got Capone for tax evasion.
Kind of a tangential question but
What’s the source on high IQ people becoming less attractive looking? I’ve only ever read that it’s positive for men and neutral for women
There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).
I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas. Height is correlated with athleticism, to a point. At some height, you can't move properly, so the tallest man in the world never plays basketball. Same thing with geniuses. At the real high reaches of IQ, these people are statistical freaks, and they generally look like it.
To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me, and they are all much, much uglier. To the point a few look retarded/disabled. Even beyond the physical stuff you can see in a picture, their mannerisms, twitches and behaviors would be hugely off-putting to most people.
My theory is that attractiveness is generally correlated with IQ, but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.
Seems odd, what’s getting “traded off” for higher IQ? My understanding was mutational load is why higher IQ = better looking, as more mutations generally makes you uglier and dumber
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As I understand it there is a large cluster of people whose strengths and weaknesses come out to around average. There is a somewhat smaller cluster of people who are dumber, less athletic, uglier, etc than average, but well within normal variations. There is a smaller cluster of people who are about a standard deviation above in every trait, and an even smaller cluster that is more than two standard deviations below in every trait(tards are usually ugly and unathletic to go with it), but no corresponding cluster of people more than two standard deviations above average on every metric. Looking back at the people noticeably smarter than me who I've met, they've been overwhelmingly male so caveat about judging their looks, but their appearances follow the same distribution as everyone else's. The one woman was not very pretty but more of a slightly below average than ugly.
This isn't DnD where you have a set number of character points to spend. Some people get a better hand than others. There are beautiful, highly athletic people with genius level IQ. Not very many of them, but they exist.
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You don't get out much I take it?
How ugly do Nobel Prize winners look? I think it's a pretty standard finding that there is only a small positive correlation, but if you look at say top 20% IQ vs. bottom 20% I think it's pretty clear who looks better. (Obesity make this all the more obvious.)
As Yud would put it, the tails come apart.
Here's why you're probably less smart than you think you are:
Height's relationship to athleticism is a pretty bad example because those are both physical things. Height comes with performance tradeoffs due to physics, and in certain sports that is very apparent. Being extremely tall also tends to come with greater fragility and various health ailments at higher rates because it's "out of spec."
Intelligence and beauty are completely different things. There's no inherent trade offs for the shape of one's face with the performance of one's mind. There's also no reason to believe sexual selection would totally divorce the two.
People also try to believe that being really smart means you also are not as good as various mental things, or have a higher risk of mental health problems.
Which to my knowledge is all bogus cope because most humans don't like to realize that life is actually just unfair and it's not a like a video game with a finite amount of skill points for a character.
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In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.
I think- university employees being a small group that's super confounded- it'd be better to compare freshmen at state flagships to seniors in high school. There's not that big of an age difference and state flagships usually take only the top x%.
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People who work at a university aren't nearly smart enough to be on the far side of that slope.
Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?
(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)
Obvious fake is obvious: everyone knows Bielefeld doesn’t exist. Try again with a real German town.
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There's certainly a relationship once you get into abnormal cases; there are a number of conditions (e.g. Downs) which result in low attractiveness and low IQ. But checking out Nobel Prize winners (including finding pictures of them when younger in many cases) doesn't result in a list of uggles.
In computer science and related fields, I can say that Theodore Kowalski (fsck), Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, and Benoit Mandelbrot didn't have obvious twitches.
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Statistics says that it will look that way even if they don't.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart
A lot of pushback on the least important part of a month-old post for a pack of people who like to consider themselves smarter than the average bear.....
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
And don't look up more recent pics of Kelly LeBrock.
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