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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25762 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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tl;dr ephebophilia is not just an artifact of a fixed age of consent, but an attraction to specific psychological traits

I've been thinking about all the classic American porn paperbacks I've read and it made me realize something about the various flavors of MAPs. A lot of classic smut features ephebophilic scenes. Or, to not mince words, jailbait characters have sex in these books. Why would someone put a well-developed minor (and go into explicit detail about her womanlike voluptuousness) into his story? I could come up with three reasons:

  1. The titillation of the forbidden. It's like eating a Kinder Surprise in the US vs the EU, it's made better by the fact it's illegal. You scratch off number "18" and put "15" instead and suddenly the story is hotter. It's like ubiquitous step-incest in modern video porn.
  2. The needs of the story. Maybe the author wanted his cast to span generations and pushing the numbers down made it easier to explain why everyone involved in the story had no sag or wrinkles or other signs of age.
  3. There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

Reading the books actually shows what this difference (in the mind of the writers) is. A grown woman has barriers around sex. Of course, it's porn, so everyone is a happy slut by the epilogue, but the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms. Well, maybe she has a few, passed down from her mother or her Sunday school, but as soon as she realizes that sex is a pleasurable experience (or "neat", as the books from the 70's put it), she's willing to have it for the sake of it (and suffer no ill consequences, because it's porn).

And it is my opinion that this attraction to easy-going relationships instead of torturous courtship is what defines ephebophiles and lumps them together with other flavors of MAPs. They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships, even though they are not attracted to actual physical traits of prepubescence. A literal pedophile might be attracted to specific physical traits, but he's also attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship.

However, I don't want to say this approach is exclusive to MAPs only. They are in a good and diverse company. People joking about "genetically-engineered catgirls" express a very similar sentiment: they imagine a female that is naturally loyal and attracted to them, unlike the messy natural femoids (curiously, this sounds more like a dog than a cat). Dudes mail-ordering brides from abroad expect them to follow a simple and straightforward contract: provide meals and sex, get citizenship. And of course, promiscuous gays are living every horny man's dream (modulo the sex of their partner).

This also explains why certain redditors* brand a 45-yo man dating a 20-yo woman a pedophile (steelman incoming). They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them. The woman should either practice perfect price discrimination or reject him in the name of... social justice?

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

* just today I noticed a major vibe shift on Reddit. People were discussing the latest anti-porn initiatives in the UK and were mocking those who think a 17.99-yo is a "literal child", treating them as their outgroup.

They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships... attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship

You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).

Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.

The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].

By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.

(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)

Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.

[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.

[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).

That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.

I'm sure there is a based tradcath out there somewhere who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

But regardless of that, a part of the issue has to be the lack of a centralized authority that decides on this. Allowing everyone to recognize what the parameters are so that they can at least not claim ignorance of how the dating scene works and where they fall on the value curve.

My question would be, would that change be a good thing? Would that information change peoples behavior at all?

I'm sure there is a based tradcath

You called?

who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

What do you mean by 'back in the day'? The youngest average female age at marriage since the middle ages was in the fifties.

It's true that teenaged marriage with large age gaps was viewed as more acceptable back in the day, and was more common than it is today- my own great grandparents were seventeen and thirty, marrying during the depression. But today that marriage is, contrary to the imaginings of progressives on the internet, sufficiently rare as to distantly aspire to be a rounding error on a lizardman's constant. IIRC married women under twenty have smaller average age gaps than married women in their early twenties.

The fifties were not trad; they were a social experiment that has been in many ways backed off from. In 1900 dating/courting was serious business for adult men ready to assume the responsibilities entailed in marriage and women who understood that this meant it was rather unlikely the man would be younger than about the mid twenties. Sometimes she was a teenager(Little House on the Prairie portrays this) but the average woman who married in 1890 was 23.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/

The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population.

So much for meme history.

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity

Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:

The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.

As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.

Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.

Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.

Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.

I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.

OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.

So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity--which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.

Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

As someone who has been in a decade-long relationship with a woman who was four years younger than me (from my age 28 to 38 or so, so not a particularly creepy age difference) and not very emotionally mature, but who is better (i.e. single) now, just from an egoistical male perspective, there are serious downsides to seriously dating younger women. (I mean, a serial PUA could just dump them whenever they send him 20 texts and try to call five times for some emotional crisis, but he will also not get very wholesome relationships that way.) Not that my sample is very large, though.

--

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them.

I think your first sentence is wrong and in direct conflict with the second sentence, which is right.

The median 20yo likely has a good idea of her SMV. She is unlikely to be in the situation where no man has ever showed the slightest interest in her, thousands of men have swiped left on her Tinder profile until finally, some pennyless, ugly 45yo comes along and sends her a dick pick, and she is immediately falling for him because she is just so happy that she will not have to die unloved.

Instead, she likely has a good idea that a ton of men want to have sex with her, and quite a few would actually be willing to dump their current partner or wife to go exclusive with her. If she is going for the 45yo, that is simply because he is making her the best offer. I mean, sure, the hottest 20yo she could get exclusively would probably be quite a bit hotter, but it would also mean that she would have to work some job to have a decent lifestyle. As you say, with 25 years of career, the (well-situated) 45yo can offer her a much nicer life -- at least until she gets replaced by a younger model.

An unpopular belief of mine, although not tightly held, is that women really do NOT mature much when they hit their twenties. Nor are they asked or expected to.

So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible. Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall, because dating the 28 year old means you're getting someone who is maybe marginally more mature and put-together than the 21 year old... but with a lot more baggage that you'll be expected to carry.

And if you were present when all that baggage was acquired, hey maybe that's okay. But walking into a relationship with a 28 year old who has been through a series of negative relationships and hasn't figured out how her own decision-making contributed to the problem, you're now dealing with emotional trauma that you had no role in creating, and a woman who is provably not good at maintaining relationships. That's not appealing, especially if you're looking over and spot a 22-23 year old who hasn't yet lost the basic aura of innocence and doesn't hate the world (yet), and there isn't a noticeable maturity difference.

And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either. My brother was/is one of those. But guys, well, they're expected to mature and won't find their feelings coddled during that time.

So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible.

What's your sample? As a highly social individual / serial dater between long-term relationships, I've noticed that are shocking differences in maturity between even a 26 year old and a 28 year old. To be clearer, when I was 29-ish I found nearly every 26 year old that I dated (n=6ish) insufferably superficial and indecisive, but I found much more success the further into late 20s I went. That's when you usually get your first biggest pay raise, graduate from post-secondary education, change jobs, move cities, etc. These are all highly formative events that may afford you different privileges or even humble you. As a woman, you may even shift your dating priorities from "want to find love" to "want to find someone suitable to raise children with".

But, my bias is urban and at least the "some university" bullet option on the census form - i.e. since high school, I haven't dated anyone who only has a high school education.

And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either.

My bias is also that most people who do not seek complexity in their life (not a value judgment, just an observation) beyond the age of 22 also do not tend to develop personalities beyond the age of 22 - they are essentially frozen in time. In comparison to individuals who do stretch themselves, those "frozen in time" tend to appear less emotionally and socially mature. Those groups also highly correlate with people who chose to (or accidentally) have children "early" (< 22) - but I don't personally believe that's necessarily causal in either direction. It also brings to mind the insult "peaked in high school" which I think has some classist / blue-tribe-on-red-tribe undertones.

Sometimes those emotionally or socially stunted people have a midlife crisis or some sort of later-in-life mellowing that causes a shift ("Barry really got his life together!"). In sadder scenarios, they may fall into alcoholism or other crippling addictions that are associated with an underformed prefrontal cortex. In the worst case they get elected to congress because they manage to get other like-minded people to the voting booth just by screaming and tweeting about complex problems having simple solutions (populism).

Personally speaking, I had some major shifts in maturity around the ages:

  • 12 (puberty)
  • 17 (parental independence)
  • 21 (humility through a challenging experience)
  • 24 (first big job / no longer a "broke college kid")
  • 27 (end of first long-term relationship / lots of dating / big pay raise)
  • 30 (mortgage / no longer talk shit at pick-up basketball)

I was an insufferable asshole at the age of 20. I'm still an insufferable asshole, but in a much different way now.

Aside, as I didn't want it to detract from the thrust of my main statement:

Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall

This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.

What's your sample?

My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger. Also including my Ex.

And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."

Dating has not done a lot to change the perception. I get the sense that women either mature quite fast (usually when they have good parental examples) and are generally self-sufficient by age 22-24... or they hit 25 and if they haven't gotten their mental house in order around then, it just isn't likely to improve from there. There's not likely to be a 'flash of realization' where they renounce their behavior before and suddenly they start 'acting their age.'

I keep making this point, But so many of the people that end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women who are absolutely, GOBSMACKINGLY bad with finances. Which is a decent metric for maturity if you ask me. Oh I'm sure tons of men are in dire straits too, but ain't nobody validating their choices.

This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.

Yes, I cede the point that many men never reach actual maturity. But 'character problem' can indeed be an estrogen problem.

I would suggest that a combination of hormones (keeping in mind that both estrogen levels too high and too low can have huge impact on mood) and a general lack of restraint/correction of maladaptive behaviors on women results in 'stunted' maturity in women even as they approach thirty. And there's nontrivial number of young women taking hormonal birth control in their teens and twenties which can exacerbate the hormone thing.

Then add in that mental disorders, especially anxiety/depression has spiked particularly badly among young women. And as a result young women are increasingly prescribed antidepressants.

This probably exacerbates the hormone issue above. I am highly suspect of what happens to brain development due to said brain being awash with a combination of exogenous hormones (birth control) and SSRI's and similar drugs for the entirety of one's young adulthood.

I dunno man, I get the sense that women are having an increasing amount of trouble coping with the world-as-it-is. That is, they have bad experiences, and rather than process and learn from them... they use pharma drugs to cope. And they become bitter.

I think men will have issues like this too, but they don't tend to go to social media and scream it from the rooftops, so it is harder to see. If it gets bad enough, they tend to kill themselves. Less serious, they may withdraw from society (or society discards them as useless), or go to prison if they lash out, or they become an Andrew Tate acolyte or something.

I am prepared to believe that this will be less prevalent among higher SES demographics.

My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger.

I'm not trying to dismantle your argument, as I think you made it well. But I do want to point out that, at least in my circles, there's a strong correlation between "actively using social media" and "not having your shit together". In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.

And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."

Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?

In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.

Yes, and indeed, in my social circle, the people who are actually keeping it together the best and who aren't basket cases tend to be the ones with the smallest social media footprint. I remain close friends with these ones.

But, uh, that ALSO tends to be correlated with "Got married relatively early" (before age 25) and "had kids" which is one hell of a major shift requiring one to hopefully become more mature. These folks were hitting their milestones 'on time' and usually had their lives in some kind of order at an earlier age.

I think even accounting for selection effects, I'm detecting a lot of women who hit some kind of crisis in their mid to late 20's and never fully moved on or recovered. In fact, that's often when they stop posting on social media altogether, because life has gone so badly for them they no longer want to publicize it. Hence, that spike in mental illness.

Me, I grew up kind of sheltered, but not bring my parent to an actual job interview sheltered

With Gen Z in general, but with, again, women in particular, there seems to be the double whammy of "taught to be afraid of almost everything" and yet "coddled and never forced to overcome actual challenges" that results in difficulty functioning in the uncertain and messy real world.

Which gets towards my original thesis: Women tend not to mature in their twenties, precisely because they're told on the one hand that the patriarchy is holding them back, many men want to hurt them, control them, that the world is completely slanted against them... AND they're given huge legs up for academics, employment, and general financial assistance.

At what point does your average woman need to gain maturity, if there's always some program or other that will render assistance if she finds herself facing difficulty, or there's always someone willing to take them in and shelter them from the consequences of their decisions?

And the upshot that women are actually less happy than they've been in decades.

The gap between how much assistance women are given, across the board, to succeed in life, and how dissatisfied they apparently are with how their lives are going seems to be at an all-time high. This tends to gel with the anectdotal observations I see, with women in particular having extreme difficulty getting their lives in order despite getting help from all sides, and complaining loudly that its not really their fault.

Which reads to me like they're still stuck in an adolescent mentality.

Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?

Law. I do a lot of probate work, where someone's parents die and now the children are coming in to close out their final affairs and parcel out their estate.

That's when I sometimes run into the adult woman in her 40's or 50's who starts acting like an entitled brat and trying to boss all the other siblings around and/or acts like everyone else is out to get her/take away what she feels belongs to her, when there's no goddamn reason to do that. Stands out all the more when you've got 2-3 other siblings who are all well-adjusted, and they're saying "yeah we figured this would happen, she's always been like that."

Tends to make the whole process more cumbersome and frustrating (more money for me, though).

There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms.

Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.

From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy.

All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.

So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:

#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.

Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:

Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well will be the one
Well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done
Well, only the good die young

You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
Aw, but that never hurt no one

I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.

No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Which is normal, if not necessarily normative. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.

You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.

And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.

Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.

I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:

#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status

Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!

As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.

I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

This just means that neither of you are ephebophiles.

I just kind of reject ephebophile as a category.

I can imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 10. I can't really imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 18 or 21 or whatever. I don't think those people exist. I don't think really think any man exists who will sooner have sex with a morbidly obese 16 year old than modern day Jennifer Lopez (leaving aside people with fat fetishes, who in turn I don't think would pick a skinny 16 year old over a properly-plump 35 year old).

I'll also make a point that isn't an endorsement but is an observation I've made a lot, especially as I'm approaching real middle age.

"Introducing" a newbie to something, in general, is a very gratifying experience. Using your own deeper knowledge to guide them, give them little tips, and see their own development generates a strong sense of frission, in me at least. Hugely rewarding.

When it comes to sex, there's the double gratification of showing someone something new and then getting to partake in it with them for mutual pleasure.

I am told that many guys do prefer an older woman as a partner because such women have worked out their preferences, kinks, and limits and are quite practiced in their techniques and thus deliver a much more enjoyable experience overall.

I believe it. But taking a younger woman (not necessarily virginal) and showing her certain experiences for the first time and getting her unfiltered, completely unrehearsed reaction to such an intense sensation never really gets old. But the woman herself does, eventually after she's tried everything then the joy of new discovery is blunted. Novelty squeezed out. Then its just sex. Fun, but without the extra layer of finding new frontiers of eroticism.

And its not easily replicable! There's a finite supply of inexperienced (yet attractive) young women. Can't be recycled once they're despoiled. So it wouldn't be that surprising if some men try to collect 'em like pokemon.

So while this:

They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

Is an unavoidable factor, I think there's 'obviously' a mutual gain to an experienced partner reaching out and lending some of their knowledge and guidance to an inexperienced one so they don't have to fumble around on their own or with an equally inexperienced partner and trying things out without knowing for sure if they're 'doing it right.'

Whereas a jaded, cynical, "experienced" woman who doesn't need a man's guidance to discover new experiences doesn't give that extra gratifying sense of "I alone have given her this feeling that she's never felt before." And, more directly, you also have to assume she's comparing you to those past encounters and you'll never really know if you measure up.

On net, you'd prefer to be the guy against whom all future encounters are measured, vs. the guy who has to wonder if she's being honest about her past encounters.

And lest I get hit with the leery, suspicious eye, my own preference is for a woman who I've been with long enough to learn all her sensitive spots, favorite positions, her strengths, weaknesses (and vice-versa) and develop a sincere intimacy so you can read them easily and adjust on the fly and otherwise maximize the mutual joy. That's the optimal setup. A slightly more experienced guy, an inexperienced woman, and a long relationship to grow into each other so both get the benefit of knowing that their shared experiences are unique and they're not being compared against some unknown third parties.

I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.

Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.

I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.

I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.

They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.

And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

Doesn't work. For every Lothario you execute, there will always be another one eager to take his place. Having sex with a bunch of nubile virgins is the ultimate reward. All you are doing is selecting for more impulsive, risk-taking cads. Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:

Hating this guy is stupid. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. You have to control the virgins, not the poppers of virgins. Getting mad at the men will do no good. The women have to be restrained. Talking about how bad these men are is a distraction and irrelevance.

We have to implement virgin marriage, in that most women will have never slept with any man except the bridegroom before marriage. This is going to require alarmingly drastic coercion starting at a very early age. When a girl goes looking for a dicking she will find what she looks for. That is why we have to apply coercion to the girls, not the males. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. You guard what is dear, not what is cheap. The double standard is what works. If you do not have a double standard, you will not have children and grandchildren, and the state will not have soldiers.

And, yes, this requires SUBSTANTIAL oversight, which our society is optimized to prevent (starting with the institution of college, which is virtually designed to take young women away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families).

Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'

And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.

Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.

So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.

AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.

I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.

Except that (generic) you are not keeping your hens in a henhouse; you are sending them out into the forest without a care in the world, then getting upset because most of them end up eaten by foxes. You are trying to make the forest safe for the hens by executing the foxes one at a time, and that is simply not going to work.

First, you have to keep your hens in a henhouse. And in order to do that, you need a priest who tells you that it is good and proper for a man to lock up his hens, a sheriff who recognizes your legal right to do so as the rightful owner of the hens, and friends and family who will look at you like you are an absolute idiot if let your hens roam free. Only then will there be any point to killing the occasional fox that happens to get in.

Needless to say, our priests, our cops, and our communities do the exact opposite.

Agreed on college. Academia delenda est. Man will not be free until the last professor is strangled with the entrails of the last journalist.

a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner,

I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."

I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."

The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.

The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.

I know of a great many men from older generations, and even in this generation, who are not Chads by that definition yet have had long relationships with women who care for them. I probably couldn’t string along 4 women even if I really, really tried — but I’ve had women ask me out before, I figure if for some sad reason I became single I could find a meaningful relationship within a year or so, and the women I’ve dated have shown every sign of cherishing the relationship. I relate to the feeling of hopelessness and marginalization, but not to the feeling that literally 100% of women are only and exclusively interested in a very small group of men regardless of how poorly they’re treated by them. The reason why “wait until marriage” (or some measure of commitment) works is precisely because many women actually desire that. Not because anyone forced them.

The situation for men is far from great, and the inequality between the haves and the have-nots is quite large, but I’m not convinced it’s so bad that it’s literally impossible.

Or a father who is willing and able to act as the filter.

But yes, 'wait until marriage' works because its dead simple advice (though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached), it aligns incentives, filters out bad faith actors, and ensures both sides are getting what they want whilst constraining the other side from backing out after extracting value.

If you don't create a Schelling point, the marketplace can end up stuck at a different, very undesirable equilibrium. Rather than agonize over the number of dates before putting out, the issue of trusting the counterparty, or figuring out the 'optimal' period of time to wait... just push everyone towards the same standard and enforce it as best you can.

though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached

Or the threat of shotgun weddings.

Well yeah, see my point about supporting execution of such men.

this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.

If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

In reality, perhaps this is what’s happening. But I don’t think it’s what’s happening in the ephepophile’s fantasy, that causes him to be attracted to the 19 year old, no. Golddigging is an unattractive trait in a partner even if you are the beneficiary. One would prefer to think that the free-spirited young thing with few sexual hangups is exactly that, rather than secretly calculative.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age. The only difference worth noting is that, at least in the West, there has been so much social conditioning that people are loathe to accept this fact, and those who do take the risk knowingly likely have other issues.

Back when OkCupid's blog wasn't a joke, they shared a chart showing response rates for women by age. The curve peaked at 18, and declined after. I am convinced that if the platform allowed younger women to sign up, then the actual modal value would be ~16 or 17. We have successfully pathologized very natural behavior, but oh well. I'm lucky enough to have a thing for MILFs, albeit they're just women my age these days.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking, while most men will find them attractive, to prefer them is more unusual.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking

?

While there are some tells(acne etc) these are more common on younger teens. Most 17 year old girls are not readily distinguishable from young adult women in the same way that is true for boys.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age.

Let's say there are two women you met in a bar: Alice is your age but has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Barb is in high school, and she also has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Both are making eyes at you. Which one would you (well, the Rawlsian you) rather take home?

Wait, do I know who is who?

Yes, you have talked to both.

Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.

Hmmm.

I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.

And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.

And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.

And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.

But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.

"15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket..."

When you're also young, they don't seem particularly nubile or special.

Going to disagree. But you do have that awkward period where you're still transitioning from finding girls icky and rife with cootie infestations to kinda adorable and then intrinsically appealing.

Although I also have had pretty much the same "type" since I was about that age, and it is fair to say not many high school ladies could fill out those requirements.

I mean that's part of the Epstein thing to me.

If a given client didn't realize that barely-illegal girls were on the menu it's not like he's gonna be able to tell immediately that somebody's 17 years, 364 days and 23 hours from their aura. Going to dodgy orgy island with Escorts isn't illegal in of itself.

This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.

If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.

The age thing, whilst more viscerally nasty, is probably not the sole reason for why Epstein and friends are looked at so negatively.

The idea of an upper class that lives voraciously lavish lives, engaging in all manner of depravity and indulgence, is pervasive in history and fiction. I don't think there is a single example where people look at these behaviors positively.

To that extent, whilst one might have to make more nuanced arguments against Epstein and friends on those grounds, the argument is there. Epstein and the people going to parties on private islands were doing something shameful and ugly even without the child rape trafficking.

I think a case could be made for making exclusive ephebophilia a pathology. Like "eww, that girl is 22 and has a real job, I don't want to stick my dick into her". Evolutionarily speaking, that would be maladaptive. I do not know if it is very common, however.

I agree that "fuck every woman (except those closely related to you) who looks fertile and healthy if you can", which was probably adaptive for males in the ancestral environment and is probably the most common sexuality in men today does not need a special term.

The kind of "exclusive" ephebophilia you mention seems vanishingly rare to me. Often the kind of men opting to go for much younger women are doing so both because they like them, and because they would have a harder time with the older ones who aren't so tolerant of them being weird/lazy/unsuccessful. Think aging musician or bartender with no other credentials, they can convince a college sophomore that they're super cool, but don't appeal to women in their age group looking for something serious. That is rational from their perspective, they're getting laid at the end of the day. There are rare exceptions like Leonardo Di Caprio, who can afford to make a break for it when they cross 25, as he can easily afford to be picky.

At the end of the day, men tend to prefer youth and correlates for fertility. They might even have preferences that their partners be dependent on them, which describes so many goddamn people that I wouldn't call it pathological. Men were the breadwinners for most of recorded history.

I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.

Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.

I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.

Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.

If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.

I think men are attracted to teenage girls because they are hot. Consider /r/jailbait from reddit's bygone time. I doubt people were that interested in the personalities or psychology of those girls, though I have no proof or firsthand knowledge.

There may have been some other factors like them thinking wishfully 'oh she'd be nice and fun to be around and not a gold-digging frigid bitch who treats dates like job applications' but surely the primary attraction is physical rather than intellectual. The majority of men don't masturbate to a charming personality (or an imbalanced power dynamic per feminist rhetoric) in and of itself, they masturbate to a beautiful body first and foremost. There might be other things on top of that but the beautiful body is the basis. Male smut is visual, physical, sex, sex, sex.

Women are more attracted to personality, character (though still very much interested in a body). We see female smut being more status-obsessed - the equivalent is wanting a billionaire werewolf vampire CEO incredibly respected and feared by other men who has an inexplicable desire for the woman and will reveal his emotional side for her alone... he may well have six-pack abs but it's not quite so much the abs they're into. These are the ones who are into written smut.

As the saying goes, you don't go to the gym to collect girls, you just get the attention of men. Going to the gym will help. But if you want to get girls, get rich or famous or fearsome. CEO, rock star, high-ranking drug dealer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=57S7LFFHA80?list=RD57S7LFFHA80

Hi, uh, I just left the date. Am I asking for too much idk, this guy was super cute, passionate about what he did, was a musician, idk.

I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes.

Do you mean everyone trying to implement age verification on their platforms and in their countries all of a sudden?

We ask that top-level posts in the main thread get a little more substance. If you don’t want to elaborate, you could try the Sunday thread.

There was an increase in censorship?

I would, if forced to make the decision, prefer our country's violent nutjobs target insurance company CEOs(who can hire private security, spend time behind secured areas instead of in public[eg going out to eat at country clubs rather than the local steakhouse], etc) than schoolchildren. From a utilitarian perspective I hope Luigi has copycats because it will redirect potential mass shooters. I would, of course, rather that our nutjobs be sane, or failing that confine themselves to long, thought out, and incomprehensible youtube comments, and if they must act out in public it's best they be institutionalized. But none of those things are going to happen.

I haven't noted any wave of censorship, either.

There's most certainly a lot more censorship lately. Even I can tell, and I'm not really paying attention. Vita and Mastercard pressuring Steam and some other platforms to remove pornographic content. Paypal is doing something similar as well (I was recently refused a purchase by them). England pushing for online IDs, and speaking of banning VPNs. X and Discord implimenting age verification. Australia is also pushing for online IDs, and there was something in Canada as well which I do not recall because I'm not really paying attention myself.

I didn't get to see the deleted comment, I'm just surprised with how fast you boiling frogs are getting used to the new temperatures. (I don't believe that you're unaware of what's happening, as I'm quite clueless compared to the average user here myself. So instead, I will assume that you either don't consider these things to be censorship, or that you don't consider it to be a substantial change)

The porn bans were signaled as inevitabilities way in advance of anything actually happening; at the end of the day, Texas law is probably a bigger reason than any wave of censorship.

The Uk and Canada are mostly cases of unpopular center-left governments trying to ban their opposition from speaking; this is something the Biden admin pretty transparently wanted to do but was unable to, as well.

In neither case do I really call it a ‘recent increase’ in censorship.

The Texas law is bad, but it only applies where at least a third of content on a site is under the 'harmful to minors' banner. Even accepting for how poorly that calculation is defined, there's little chance it'd apply to sites like itch.io or x twitter, and zero of it applying to Steam. It wouldn't apply to payment processors at all.

Edit: I replied to a child of a comment, thinking it was a direct reply to me. Oops.

I'm not sure which Texas law you're refering to? I consider it an effect, and not a cause. Did the deleted comment imply that everything is downstream from a new Texan law? I admittedly can't defend such a position, I'm just pointing out a pattern with the belief that no explanation makes it any less concerning.

'harmful to minors' is so subjective that whoever has the most power can make it apply to everything that they're against. The label has not had anything to do with what is literally harmful to minors for like 20 years now.

Anyway, Steam and Itch.io have already been hit by censorship (though Itch seem to have gotten some of the games back). ID laws are already gaining traction. I've already had purchases refuted by Paypal because of reasons which are false, but the sort of false where people are afraid of arguing against them because it will make them appear immoral. This is either censorship from many different causes in rapid succession, or it's a coordinated attack on human freedom by somebody with enough power to get multiple countries and multiple major payment processors on their side.

Texas is simply the largest state which requires ID verification to access a porn site- this de facto blocks NSFW domains in Texas, supposedly(I’m unwilling to check).

The Texas law hydroacetylene is mentioning is Texas HB1181, which puts some potentially high fines on commercial websites that provide more than 1/3 material that is "harmful to minors" and don't have age verification processes (or who don't put certain notices, though that prong is still on hold and unlikely to survive legal scrutiny). While there's some vagueness to how the math happens, the actual definition of 'harmful to minors' is pretty explicitly limited to nudity and sexual acts.

I don't like the law, and I am skeptical both in the "I don't think a sixteen-year-old is going to be hurt by seeing a boob" sense and "I'm not willing to burn down the commons over it" sense. It's certainly driven some censorship. But I don't think it's responsible for the examples people are using here.

Itchio readded search and recommendations for NSFW games that had been deindexed (if they are set as free). As far as I can tell, only a small number of games were completely removed from the service, but they've stayed removed for new purchase (or download):

Some pages have received a “content notice,” which applies to individual pages where our team has concluded we can no longer support their business. If you previously purchased or received a download key for one of these pages, the downloadable files are still available in your library, assuming the creator has not taken down the page or removed the files themselves.

Panicking about Texas laws in ways that make it clear the panicked did not read it is a thing that happens all the time and is not unique to porn bans.

It's certainly possible; even the bit where the Texas government swears in court that they won't bring these charges against those companies runs into the trouble where the Texas government includes Paxton. But it's even more common for people to panic when a country government has been sending nice letters informing them of their legal requirements and mentioning civil fines and criminal penalties.

And I'm skeptical that nVidia lacks lawyers who can read.

((I will admit one silver lining; we might get fewer NordVPN ads. But as tempting as that is, I'd rather keep my principles.))

Is there a nutjob substitution effect?

I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.

Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?

I don't think even this is the right framing. It's not a question of a tiny population of nutjobs of one stripe or another that we hope to disincentivize. We know from history that a large proportion of human beings will kill in cold blood, or at least approve of it, if conditioned and pressured to do so. Apologia and celebration of this killing will only shift the margin of how rabid an anti-corporation true believer needs to be to undertake such an action.

I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.

I am very doubtful about that. Some of the suicides are likely by goal-oriented people following a long-term plan (e.g. in a MAID-like context), and for these I would expect substitution effects.

Even for spontaneous suicides, I think that there is some minor substitution effect. If a person had the worst day of their life and would jump off a bridge if not for the fact that it was fenced, I would expect at least a 20% chance that another convenient method (access to a tall building, a firearm, drugs) will present itself and be taken before they feel less suicidal.

I was told by a psychologist that the vast majority of suicidal impulses last minutes or even seconds. The idea is that they don’t have time to seek out a substitute before the impulse wears off. It may appear later in other circs of course.

Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?

I think there are murder-suicide oriented nutjobs, across all cultures and all time periods, and the particular expression their death-urge takes is socially mediated.

A man with the overactive murder-suicide gene born in the Arab world has an obvious path for it: he joins a jihadist group. In medieval Norway, he would go a-viking, while in Russia he would go off and become a Cossack, in the old west he would go off and fight injuns. In virtually every European country for virtually every male before 1945, at some point in his youth he'd have the opportunity to join an army and fight in a war, and if he went off to war with much desire to kill and little desire to return, he probably wouldn't make it back.

The school shooter is one of Tyler Durden's "middle children of history," with no great war or great depression he lashes out at random. He is offered no socially acceptable way to get himself killed and noticed, and picks the worst one possible. I'm a big believer that the best way to prevent school shootings is to give them another way to get themselves killed.

There are ‘go kill people’ nut jobs- in the past they were serial killers, now they’re mass shooters and terrorists.

public circle?

Could it be Public Square? I don't know, I'm too square to be in the know.

I think it's referring to credit cards coming down against porn purchases on Steam. But needs more details.

What are you talking about? What even is public circle censorship?

Maybe this isn't the best place to ask but, can you please disable the ability to delete one's own posts or edit them after they've been replied to?

No edits, no exceptions; put it on blockchain to ground the policy in thermodynamics itself.

I look forward to being paid in 𝔹asilisk coin [tm]

Undeleting the posts of permabanned members would cover a lot of the same ground. I'm pretty sure the admins can do it; Zorba definitely can.

Maybe quote the post if it's a user known for editing/deletion?

Honestly I dunno which ones, there are a bunch of deleted comments in subthreads I\ve talked to people in this master thread.

Is there even still any ongoing technical development of the Motte?

Yes? Zorba fixed a bug I found particularly annoying like 2 weeks back.

The Motte is mostly feature complete, but changes do happen.

This would be a request for @ZorbaTHut, but while it's annoying when people go on deletion sprees (and we have banned people for it), I don't think we'd want to prohibit deleting a post you had second thoughts about.

While likely challenging to implement, I think the preferable way to go about it would be to store the version history of every comment, like github does with comments.

That gives you the best of both worlds. You can edit in typos and strikeouts for statements you no longer endorse. You can even delete a post as a way to de-escalate. But intentionally writing a top level comment and then deleting it as a kind of ding-dong-ditch will be pointless, because any reader is just one click away from reading what you originally wrote.

I have at least one post that I deleted because I belatedly realised that it could function as a "how-to" for a terrorist.

I would not appreciate that post's version history becoming available to all Mottizens.

(The rest, IIRC, are from me realising I misinterpreted a post on reading further context and deleting a misaimed response or unnecessary question; undeleting those wouldn't accomplish anything but I wouldn't strongly oppose it either.)

Yes, post version history also requires a way for mods to make versions invisible to the users.

Besides your example, there are some categories of content which I think the motte server admin has no interest in hosting. Personal information posted accidentally or maliciously. Copyright infringement. Content which is illegal for other reasons in their jurisdiction.

Unlike Wikipedia, we do not have enough Admins/mods that hiding revisions even from them would become a concern, though.

don't allow edits

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

don't allow deletion

More reasonable. Ideally users can delete their profiles and history, but the contents of their posts remain up. Maybe an edit lock that only goes into effect after so many days would make the most sense.

Which part is the major issue? Is it mass deletion or user edits bamboozling your replies?

I come back to a thread after a few days only to see a string of user self deleting their posts, random replies to them still hanging. I guess I could just run a scraper slamming the site for every single reply so they can't be removed from posterity, but that shouldn't be the solution.

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

Or locking people into bad temper posting which runs afoul the rules, but which they might think better of after seeing it posted.

Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.

If you didn't freeze edits at that point as well, yes.

I don't think they should remove edits or deletion because of one or two serial delete guys. Freeze edits and deletes after a week. Allow authorship to disappear on account deletion. A balance of considerations.

Noting that when I paid dues to The Motte's Conservative Party treasurer I was told the motto was "Change? No!" All these so-called suggested "improvements" are making me a little uncomfortable.

I think a 1 hr grace period is sufficient for typos and regrets. After that, lithography

I think adding stuff at the end should be possible.

Agreed! so long as properly annotated

That was the edit window on Slate Star Codex. But it takes 24 hours before scores become visible; surely we can allow that much?

Or allow editing but have a button so users can see the audit trail? I understand the intent of the request, but I'd never want to lose the ability to fix spelling mistakes, and I often see people add [edit: reason] tags due to a response causing them to update on something or clarify a fact in the original post.

Sure an edit history will be fine, but I guess it wouldn't be simple to implement. At least disabling the delete button and auto reverting edits if they are designed to delete data ought to be enough.

Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.

Eh those kinda edits would be fine, but I've seen how people abuse editing on reddit.

Surely we can generally expect people to act in good faith, at least in better faith than the average Redditor.

If they don't, they get banned, so the problem deals with itself.

A response to Freddie deBoer on AI hype

Bulverism is a waste of everyone's time

Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here. Freddie’s AI article always consists of two discordant components inelegantly and incongruously kludged together:

  • sober-minded appeals to AI maximalists to temper their most breathless claims about the capabilities of this technology by carefully pointing out shortcomings therein

  • childish, juvenile insults directed at anyone who is even marginally more excited about the potential of this technology than he is, coupled with armchair psychoanalysis of the neuroses undergirding said excitement

What I find most frustrating about each repetition of Freddie’s AI article is that I agree with him on many of the particulars. While Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence is, without exception, the most frightening book I’ve ever read in my life, and I do believe that our species will eventually invent artificial general intelligence — I nevertheless think the timeline for that event is quite a bit further out than the AI utopians and doomers would have us believe, and I think a lot of the hype around large language models (LLMs) in particular is unwarranted. And to lay my credentials on the table: I’m saying this as someone doesn’t work in the tech industry, who doesn’t have a backgrond in computer science, who hasn’t been following the developments in the AI space as closely as many have (presumably including Freddie), and who (contrary to the occasional accusation my commenters have fielded at me) has never used generative AI to compose text for this newsletter and never intends to.

I’m not here to take Freddie to task on his needlessly confrontational demeanour (something he rather hypocritically decries in his interlocutors), or attempt to put manners on him. If he can’t resist the temptation to pepper his well-articulated criticisms of reckless AI hypemongering with spiteful schoolyard zingers, that’s his business. But his article (just like every instance in the series preceding it) contains many examples of a particular species of fallacious reasoning I find incredibly irksome, regardless of the context in which it is used. I believe his arguments would have a vastly better reception among the AI maximalists he claims to want to persuade if he could only exercise a modicum of discipline and refrain from engaging in this specific category of argument.

Quick question: what’s the balance in your checking account?

If you’re a remotely sensible individual, it should be immediately obvious that there are a very limited number of ways in which you can find the information to answer this question accurately:

  1. Dropping into the nearest branch of your bank and asking them to confirm your balance (or phoning them).

  2. Logging into your bank account on your browser and checking the balance (or doing so via your banking app).

  3. Perhaps you did either #1 or #2 a few minutes before I asked the question, and can recite the balance from memory.

Now, supposing that you answered the question to the best of your knowledge, claiming that the balance of your checking account is, say, €2,000. Imagine that, in response, I rolled my eyes and scoffed that there’s no way your bank balance could possibly be €2,000, and the only reason that you’re claiming that that’s the real figure is because you’re embarrassed about your reckless spending habits. You would presumably retort that it’s very rude for me to accuse you of lying, that you were accurately reciting your bank balance to the best of your knowledge, and furthermore how dare I suggest that you’re bad with money when in fact you’re one of the most fiscally responsible people in your entire social circle—

Wait. Stop. Can you see what a tremendous waste of time this line of discussion is for both of us?

Either your bank balance is €2,000, or it isn’t. The only ways to find out what it is are the three methods outlined above. If I have good reason to believe that the claimed figure is inaccurate (say, because I was looking over your shoulder when you were checking your banking app; or because you recently claimed to be short of money and asked me for financial assistance), then I should come out and argue that. But as amusing as it might be for me to practise armchair psychoanalysis about how the only reason you’re claiming that the balance is €2,000 is because of this or that complex or neurosis, it won’t bring me one iota closer to finding out what the real figure is. It accomplishes nothing.

This particular species of fallacious argument is called Bulverism, and refers to any instance in which, rather than debating the truth or falsity of a specific claim, an interlocutor assumes that the claim is false and expounds on the underlying motivations of the person who advanced it. The checking accout balance example above is not original to me, but from C.S. Lewis, who coined the term:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

As Lewis notes, if I have definitively demonstrated that the claim is wrong — that there’s no possible way your bank balance really is €2,000 — it may be of interest to consider the psychological factors that resulted in you claiming otherwise. Maybe you really were lying to me because you’re embarrassed about your fiscal irresponsibility; maybe you were mistakenly looking at the balance of your savings account rather than your checking account; maybe you have undiagnosed myopia and you misread a 3 as a 2. But until I’ve established that you are wrong, it’s a colossal waste of my time and yours to expound at length on the state of mind that led you to erroneously conclude that the balance is €2,000 when it’s really something else.

In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?

But it’s also, ultimately, a waste of time. The only way to find out the balance of your checking account is to check the balance on your checking account — idle speculation on the psychological factors that caused you to claim that the balance was X when it was really Y are futile until it has been established that it really is Y rather than X. And so it goes with all claims of truth or falsity. Hypothetically, it could be literally true that 100% of the people who endorse evolution have fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and so on and so forth. Even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether evolution is literally true.

To give Freddie credit where it’s due, the various iterations of his AI article do not consist solely of him assuming that AI maximalists are wrong and speculating on the psychological factors that caused them to be so. He does attempt, with no small amount of rigour, to demonstrate that they are wrong on the facts: pointing out major shortcomings in the current state of the LLM art; citing specific examples of AI predictions which conspicuously failed to come to pass; comparing the recent impact of LLMs on human society with other hugely influential technologies (electricity, indoor plumbing, antibiotics etc.) in order to make the case that LLMs have been nowhere near as influential on our society as the maximalists would like to believe. This is what a sensible debate about the merits of LLMs and projections about their future capabilities should look like.

But poor Freddie just can’t help himself, so in addition to all of this sensible sober-minded analysis, he insists on wasting his readers’ time with endless interminable paragraphs of armchair psychoanalysis about how the AI maximalists came to arrive at their deluded worldviews:

What [Scott] Alexander and [Yascha] Mounk are saying, what the endlessly enraged throngs on LessWrong and Reddit are saying, ultimately what Thompson and Klein and Roose and Newton and so many others are saying in more sober tones, is not really about AI at all. Their line on all of this isn’t about technology, if you can follow it to the root. They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death.

Am I disagreeing with any of the above? Not at all: whenever anyone is making breathless claims about the potential near-future impacts of some new technology, I have to assume there’s some amount of wishful thinking or motivated reasoning at play.

No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.

Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. Resist the temptation to psychoanalyse people you disagree with, something you’ve complained about people doing to you (in the form of suggesting that your latest article is so off the wall that it could only be the product of a manic episode) on many occasions. The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone’s time.

No, this is not Bullverism, which is not a logical fallacy, either, not even one of the bs "informal fallacies" (a categorically invalid concept, made up whole-cloth by rhetoricians to steal valor from logic.)

Freddie is not in a moderated debate; he is not required to relitigate the arguments on AI from scratch in every single article he writes, before he's allowed to wonder what's wrong with the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things. He is a writer, and is free to let the gallons of ink spilled on the matter speak for itself. To qualify as Bullverism, he - and more importantly, his side - have to have never engaged with the merits in the first place. For that matter, you, and any AI doomers, are perfectly entitled to accuse Freddie of having his head in the sand, without the need to prove Skynet is coming any day now every time you do so.

the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things

Do you agree that the people he disagrees with believe in provably wrong things? If so, what are they?

That's all true, but the best argument against Freddie deBoer isn't a bunch of words but just to point out that he suffers from severe mental illness and is desperately trying to shed that reputation he's gained by attacking overly enthusiastic nerds.

What is the relationship between attacking enthusiastic nerds specifically and trying to shed a reputation for mental illness?

This isn't a great comment, from a moderation perspective, but I'm now going to talk as a general user.

Freddie is seriously mentally ill. He's disclosed his struggle with bipolar disorder (and I seem to recall he had psychotic breaks). However, the views he espoused aren't exclusive to the mentally ill. God knows I would like to pin a diagnosis on someone like Gary Marcus, but being pugnacious and immune to evidence isn't actually in the DSM.

As far as I can tell, he does have 'aesthetic' reasons to object to transhumanist/rationalist viewpoints. He is woefully under-informed about modern AI, but so are most people. It is easy to demolish his arguments without needing to resort to ad hominem attacks. If he starts accusing OAI of wire-tapping his house (like Altman's sister), then this facet of his personality would be worth raising.

Makes one wonder about the definition of mental illness. The European generals pre WW1 who still kept lancer cavalry regiments might be considered 'retarded' by an observer, even without the benefit of hindsight. WTF are lancers gonna do to bolt action riflemen, let alone machineguns? Even if you just imagine the infantry out there on a field, unentrenched and in loose order, in the best conditions for a cavalry charge, the whole thing is still a slaughter.

But this kind of 'retarded', distinct from being an actual dribbler who probably has no concept of what lancers are, isn't an actual mental illness, it's just being really really bad at your job in one specific area. Kind of like an AI hallucination in scope, an isolated lapse in otherwise reasonable performance.

But instead of a random hallucination it's more like a motivated argument where one might despise the grifters on twitter or dislike the cut of Yudkowsky's jib and then form your opinions based on that. Likewise, I imagine the cavalry officers held themselves high, cavalry is noble and aristocratic, a testament to the connection between man and horse. Infantry was ugly muddy and plebeian, so they looked for reasons why the cavalry should win when the idea is idiotic.

WTF are lancers gonna do to bolt action riflemen, let alone machineguns?

Cavalry did pretty well in the ACW, and in the Franco-Prussian war.

I find the tactical insanity of WW1 pretty understandable if you remember that bolt action rifles and light machine guns are incremental changes. It was hard to foresee that just making everything slightly faster and more portable would make most doctrine obsolete.

There was a tendency for cavalry to get lighter and serve more as scouts than shock forces. But the total obsolescence of the concept was hard to fathom .

Moreover, outside of the Western front, cavalry did an outstanding job in WW1 even. Both on the eastern front and the Balkans with fast moving fronts, the advantages of mobility start to outweigh firepower.

It's only in WW2 with the infamous polish failures that cavalry was rendered soundly obsolete. And only really because motorized units took over the role.

It's far more understandable to me than some air forces deciding to stick to scouting and refusing to entertain combat flight despite obvious trends. But then again, the future of aviation was as mysterious as that of AI today at the time.

Sure there was still a role for cavalry as mounted dragoons or scouts in WW1 and WW2 but real European doctrine was theorizing actual cavalry charges with lances and sabers.

I'm pretty sure the real European doctrine for cavalry units in WW2 was to use them as mounted infantry units that dismount and shoot guns during combat.

(The infamous failures of Polish cavalry charging at tanks supposedly didn't actually happen, though they did charge at some infantry formations a couple of times, to mixed results.)

To be more specific, IIRC aftermath of what was used in German propaganda was case of Polish cavalry demolishing German infantry with an actual charge and in turn being demolished by German tanks that arrived later.

BTW, Germany also had frontline cavalry units in WW II.

WW1 on Eastern front and 1920 war between Poland and Russia had actual cavalry charges with lances and sabers (and guns).

(in the 1920 it worked so well that it contributed both sides to overvaluing cavalry, though neither was planning* to charge tanks with them by the time of WW II)

*or actually charging

Because that did still work in the previous wars where automatic weapons were bulky crew served emplacements. During the Franco-Prussian war heavy cavalry still did its intended saber charge role at times using smoke cover and violence of action to make movement and concealment nullify firepower.

The thinking was that the trend would continue with minor adjustments.

A potential analog today is the ever prophetized death of the tank and armored offensives. In the face of top easily available countermeasures. People said the prevalence of ATGMs would sunset the tank and it did not, so now we expect that the prevalence of drones won't, but maybe we are all insane and the future will regard armored offensives by Russia and Ukraine as doomed follies.

My point is, it's hard to judge the past decision makers honestly without tainting it with our knowledge of the outcome.

And sometimes what becomes the conventional wisdom also goes too far. Bayonet charges have in fact decided some battles in the Falklands despite expectations for instance. Despite both belligerents having access to vastly more sophisticated weapons than spears.

ATGMs have countermeasures, you can have active defences or redesign armour to resist them better. Drones have countermeasures, you can cover the tank in add-on armour like we see in Ukraine. Or redesign the tank to be more well-rounded in its armour rather than so frontally-focused. You can add ECM, some microwave widget, have defensive drones.

But you can't redesign heavy shock cavalry in the same way. You can add more armour but the horse biology and blade technology hasn't advanced significantly for ages.

During the Franco-Prussian war cavalry charges did occasionally work but at great cost. Since there were no further advances in cavalry but great advancements in rifles, artillery and machine-guns (and accompanying tactics, indirect fire and entrenchment) then traditional shock cavalry was foreseeably obsolete.

Likewise, if drones turn into autonomous AI death swarms with tandem warheads, doubled range and halved price while tanks remain fundamentally in the 1980s, then it would be all over for heavy armour. But that won't necessarily happen since we know the tank has all these opportunities to adapt that cavalry lack.

It's only in WW2 with the infamous polish failures that cavalry was rendered soundly obsolete.

I just want to note that these failures were partially fiction invented by German propaganda.

(also, Wermach being fully mechanized is also a myth, they used far more horses than people know)

IIRC there were still literally millions of horses used by both the Nazis and the Soviets in WWII, and the Nazi invasion of the USSR used more horses than trucks.

But I was under the impression that these uses were more for logistics than for combat, which would make a lot more sense to me. "We're low on oil; we shouldn't forgo transports whose fuel literally grows right out of the ground", yes. "Into the mouth of Hell, Rode the six hundred, But this time they had, A Good feeling about it", no, right?

Or maybe I'm completely wrong. The Nazis took Poland in 5 weeks, so I don't want to give the defense too much credit, but digging into the details it really looks like "using horse-mounted cavalry, even against mechanized infantry" wasn't a problem, it just wasn't good enough to overcome "being simultaneously invaded by two foes with at least twice their population each".

But I was under the impression that these uses were more for logistics than for combat

Genuinely unsure, but combat use was a thing, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Cavalry_Division_(Wehrmacht)

It was withdrawn to France in November 1941 and its 17,000 horses were handed over to infantry divisions.

so I don't want to give the defense too much credit

definitely, it was overall poor showing in many ways, but admittedly "being simultaneously invaded by two foes with at least twice their population each" was hard to overcome

And it was not at "planning to charge tanks with cavalry" levels, cavalry against tanks was closer to "use anti-tank guns, relocate, repeat" or "cut down infantry with mobile cavalry while hilariously poorly mobile early tanks are uselessly stuck somewhere else". And if it would be Germany vs Poland + maybe France etc there was some chance.

Chat, is this Bulverism?

the best argument against Freddie deBoer isn't a bunch of words but just to point out that he suffers from severe mental illness and is desperately trying to shed that reputation

Chat, is this Bulverism?

Textbook case.

Bulverism is about 50 percent of Marxism, so it's no surprise Freddie indulges. When you have an implicitly deterministic epistemology, you don't have to explain why an idea is wrong when you can explain how it came about by the wrong causes.

You used to get this sorta thing on ratsphere tumblr, where "rapture of the nerds" was so common as to be a cliche. I kinda wonder if deBoer's "imminent AI rupture" follows from that and he edited it, or if it's just a coincidence. There's a fun Bulverist analysis of why religion was the focus there and 'the primacy of material conditions' from deBoer, but that's even more of a distraction from the actual discussion matter.

There's a boring sense where it's kinda funny how bad deBoer is at this. I'll overlook the typos, because lord knows I make enough of those myself, but look at his actual central example, that he opens up his story around:

“The average age at diagnosis for Type II diabetes is 45 years. Will there still be people growing gradually older and getting Type II diabetes and taking insulin injections in 2070? If not, what are we even doing here?” That’s right folks: AI is coming so there’s no point in developing new medical technology. In less than a half-century, we may very well no longer be growing old.

There's a steelman of deBoer's argument, here. But the one he actually presented isn't engaging, in the very slightest, with what Scott is trying to bring up, or even with a strawman of what Scott was trying to bring up. What, exactly, does deBoer believe a cure to aging (or even just a treatment for diabetes, if we want to go all tech-hyper-optimism) would look like, if not new medical technology? What, exactly, does deBoer think of the actual problem of long-term commitment strategies in a rapidly changing environment?

Okay, deBoer doesn't care, and/or doesn't even recognize those things as questions. It's really just a springboard for I Hate Advocates For This Technology. Whatever extent he's engaging with the specific claims is just a tool to get to that point. Does he actually do his chores or eat his broccoli?

Well, no.

Mounk mocks the idea that AI is incompetent, noting that modern models can translate, diagnose, teach, write poetry, code, etc. For one thing, almost no one is arguing total LLM incompetence; there are some neat tricks that they can consistently pull off.

Ah, nobody makes that claim, r-

Whether AI can teach well has absolutely not been even meaningfully asked at necessary scale in the research record yet, let alone answered; five minutes of searching will reveal hundreds of coders lamenting AI’s shortcomings in real-world programming; machine translation is a challenge that has simply been asserted to be solved but which constantly falls apart in real-world communicative scenarios; I absolutely 100% dispute that AI poetry is any good, and anyway since it’s generated by a purely derivative process from human-written poetry, it isn’t creativity at all.

Okay, so 'nobody' includes the very person making this story.

It doesn’t matter what LLMs can do; the stochastic parrot critique is true because it accurately reflects how those systems work. LLMs don’t reason. There is no mental space in which reasoning could occur.

This isn't even a good technical understanding of how ChatGPT, as opposed to just the LLM, work, and even if I'm not willing to go as far as self_made_human for people raising the parrots critique here, I'm still pretty critical for it, but the more damning bit is where and deBoer is either unfamiliar with or choosing to ignore the many domains in favor of One Study Rando With A Chess Game. Will he change his mind if someone presents a chess-focused LLM with a high ELO score?

I could break into his examples and values a lot deeper -- the hallucination problem is actually a lot more interesting and complicated, questions of bias are usually just smuggling in 'doesn't agree with the writer's politics' but there are some genuine technical questions -- but if you locked the two of us in a room and only provided escape if we agreed I still don't think either of us would find discussing it with each other more interesting that talking to the walls. It's not just that we have different understandings of what we're debating; it's whether we're even trying to debate something that can be changed by actual changes in the real world.

Okay, deBoer isn't debating honestly. His claim about New York Times fact-checking everything is hilarious, but his link to a special issue that he literally claims "not a single line of real skepticism appears" and also has as its first headline "Everyone is Using AI for Everything. Is That Bad?" and includes the phrase "The mental model I sometimes have of these chatbots is as a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time". He tries to portray Mounk as outraged by "indifference of people like Tolentino (and me) to the LLM “revolution.”" But look at Mounk or Tolentino's actual pieces, and there's actual factual claims that they're making, not just vague vibes that they're bouncing off each other; the central criticism Mounk has is whether Tolentino's piece and its siblings are actually engaging with what LLMs can change rather than complaining about a litany of lizardman evils. (At least deBoer's not falsely calling anyone a rapist, this time.)

((Tbf, Mounk, in turn, is just using Tolentino as a springboard; her piece is actually about digital disassociation and the increasing power of AIgen technologies that she loathes. It's not really the sorta piece that's supposed to talk about how you grapple with things, for better or worse.))

But ultimately, that's just not the point. None of deBoer's readers are going to treat him any less seriously because of ChessLLM (or because many LLMs will, in fact, both say they reason and quod erat demonstratum), or because deBoer turns "But in practice, I too find it hard to act on that knowledge." into “I too find it hard to act on that knowledge [of our forthcoming AI-driven species reorganization]” when commenting on an essay that does not use the word "species" at all, and only uses "organization" twice in the same paragraph to talk about regulatory changes, and when "that knowledge" is actually just Mounk's (imo, wrong) claim that AI is under-hyped. That's not what his readers are paying him for, and that's not why anyone who links to him in the slightly most laudatory manner is doing so.

The question of Bulverism versus factual debate is an important one, but it's undermined when the facts don't matter, either.

Huh. I was confident that I had a better writeup about why "stochastic parrots" are a laughable idea, at least as a description for LLMs. But no, after getting a minor headache figuring out the search operators here, it turns out that's all I've written on the topic.

I guess I never bothered because it's a Gary Marcus-tier critique, and anyone using it loses about 20 IQ points in my estimation.

But I guess now is as good a time as any? In short, it is a pithy, evocative critique that makes no sense.

LLMs are not inherently stochastic. They have a (not usually exposed to end-user except via API) setting called temperature. Without going into how that works, it suffices it to say that by setting the value to zero, their output becomes deterministic. The exact same prompt gives the exact same output.

The reason why temperature isn't just set to zero all the time is because the ability to choose something other than the next most likely token has benefits when it comes to creativity. At the very least it saves you from getting stuck with the same subpar result.

Alas, this means that LLMs aren't stochastic parrots. Minus the stochasticity, are they just "parrots"? Anyone thinking this is on crack, since Polly won't debug your Python no matter how many crackers you feed her.

If LLMs were merely interpolating between memorized n-grams or "stitching together" text, their performance would be bounded by the literal contents of their training data. They would excel at retrieving facts and mimicking styles present in the corpus, but would fail catastrophically at any task requiring genuine abstraction or generalization to novel domains. This is not what we observe.

Let’s get specific. The “parrot” model implies the following:

  1. LLMs can only repeat (paraphrase, interpolate, or permute) what they have seen.

  2. They lack generalization, abstraction, or true reasoning.

  3. They are, in essence, Markov chains with steroids.

To disprove any of those claims, just gestures angrily look at the things they can do. If winning gold in the latest IMO is something a "stochastic parrot" can pull off, then well, the only valid takeaway is that the damn parrot is smarter than we thought. Definitely smarter than the people who use the phrase unironically.

The inventors of the phrase, Bender & Koller gave two toy “gotchas” that they claimed no pure language model could ever solve: (1) a short vignette about a bear chasing a hiker, and (2) the spelled-out arithmetic prompt “Three plus five equals”. GPT-3 solved both within a year. The response? Crickets, followed by goal-post shifting: “Well, it must have memorized those exact patterns.” But the bear prompt isn’t in any training set at scale, and GPT-3 could generalize the schema to new animals, new hazards, and new resolutions. Memorization is a finite resource but generalization is not.

(I hope everyone here recalls that GPT-3 is ancient now)

On point 2: Consider the IMO example. Or better yet, come up with a rigorous definition of reasoning by which we can differentiate a human from an LLM. It's all word games, or word salad.

On 3: Just a few weeks back, I was trying to better understand the actual difference between a Markov Chain and an LLM, and I had asked o3 if it wasn't possible to approximate the latter with the former. After all, I wondered, if MCs only consider the previous unit (usually words, or a few words/n-gram), then couldn't we just train the MC to output the next word conditioned on every word that came before? The answer was yes, but that this was completely computationally intractable. The fact that we can run LLMs on something smaller than a Matrioshka brain is because of their autoregressive nature, and the brilliance of the transformer architecture/attention mechanism.

Overall, even the steelman interpretation of the parrot analogy is only as helpful as this meme, which I have helpfully appended below. It is a bankrupt notion, a thought-terminating cliché at best, and I wouldn't cry if anyone using it meets a tiger outside the confines of a cage.

/images/17544215520465958.webp

Computationally, maybe all we are is Markov chains. I'm not sold, but Markov chat bots have been around for a few decades now and used to fool people occasionally even at smaller scales.

LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset. In part that's hard to evaluate because we've been training them on everything we can find. Can a LLM trained on purely pre-Einstein sources adequately discuss relativity? A human can be well versed in lots of things with substantially less training material.

I still don't think we have a good model for what intelligence is. Some have recently suggested "compression", which is interesting from an information theory perspective. But I won't be surprised to find that whatever it is, it's actually an NP-hard problem in the perfect case, and everything else is just heuristics and approximations trying to be close. In some ways it'd be amusing if it turns out to be a good application of quantum computing.

I don't want to speak on 'intelligence' or genuine reasoning or heuristics and approximations, but when it comes to going outside the bounds of their training data, it's pretty trivially possible to take an LLM and give a problem related to a video game (or a mod for a video game) that was well outside of its knowledge cutoff or training date.

I can't test this right now, it's definitely not an optimal solution (see uploaded file for comparison), and I think it misinterpreted the Evanition operator, but it's a question that I'm pretty sure didn't have an equivalent on the public web anywhere until today. There's something damning in getting a trivial computer science problem either non-optimal or wrong, especially when given the total documentation, but there's also something interesting in getting one like this close at all with such minimum of information.

/images/17544296446888535.webp

What on earth is going on in that screenshot? I know Minecraft mod packs can get wild, but that's new.

HexCasting is fun, if not very balanced.

It has a stack-based programming language system based on drawing Patterns onto your screen over a hex-style grid, where each Pattern either produces a single variable on the top of the stack, manipulates parts of the stack to perform certain operations, or act as an escape character, with one off-stack register (called the Ravenmind). You can keep the state of the grid and stack while not actively casting, but because the screen grid has limited space and the grid is wiped whenever the stack is empty (or on shift-right-click), there's some really interesting early-game constraints where quining a spell or doing goofy recursion allows some surprisingly powerful spells to be made much earlier than normal.

Eventually, you can craft the Focus and Spellbook items that can store more variables from the stack even if you wipe the grid, and then things go off the rails very quickly, though there remain some limits since most Patterns cost amethyst from your inventory (or, if you're out of amethyst and hit a certain unlock, HP).

Like most stack-based programming it tends to be a little prone to driving people crazy, which fits pretty heavily with the in-game lore for the magic.

That specific spell example just existed to show a bug in how the evaluator was calculating recursion limits. The dev intended to have a limit of 512 recursions, but had implemented two (normal) ways of recursive casting. Hermes' Gambit executes a single variable from the stack, and each Hermes' added one to the recursion limit as it was executed. Thoth's Gambit executes each variable from one list over a second list, and didn't count those multiplicatively. I think it was only adding one to the recursion for each variable in the second list? Since lists only took 1 + ListCount out of the stack's 1024 limit to the stack, you could conceivably hit a quarter-million recursions without getting to the normal block from the limit.

Psuedocode, it's about equivalent to :

double register = 1;

void function(double a)
{
    double b = register;
    print(b);
    b += a;
    register = b;
}

void main()
{
   double max = Math.Pow(10,3);
   double start = 1;
   List inputs = new ArrayList(Collections.nCopies(max, start)); 
   foreach(double val in inputs)
   {
       function(val);
   }
}

Very ugly, but the language is intentionally constrained so you can't do a lot of easier approaches (eg, you have to declare 10^3 because the symbol for 1000 is so long it takes up most of the screen, you don't have normal for loops so that abomination of a list initialization is your new worst enemy best friend, every number is a double).

Not that big a deal when you're just printing to the screen, but since those could (more!) easily have been explosions or block/light placements or teleportations, it's a bit scary for server owners.

((In practice, even that simple counter would cause everyone to disconnect from a remote server. Go go manual forkbomb.))

For some other example spells, see a safe teleport, or a spell to place a series of temporary blocks the direction you're looking, or to mine five blocks from the face of the block you're looking at.

(Magical)PSI is a little easier to get into and served as the inspiration for HexCasting, but it has enough documentation on reddit that I can't confidently say it's LLM-training proof.

Why am I surprised? People make Redstone computers for fun. I guess this all just takes a very different mindset haha.

That is pretty impressive. Is it allowed to search the web? It looks like it might be. I think the canonical test I'm proposing would disallow that, but it is a useful step in general.

Huh. Uploading just the Patterns section of the HexBook webpage and disabling search on web looks better even on Grok3, though that's just a quick glance and I won't be able to test it for a bit.

EDIT: nope, several hallucinated patterns on Grok 3, including a number that break from the naming convention. And Grok4 can't have web search turned off. Bah.

Have you tried simply asking it not to search the web? The models usually comply when asked. If they don't, it should be evident from the UI.

That's a fair point, and does seem to work with Grok, as does just giving it only one web page and requesting it to not use others. Still struggles, though.

That said, a lot of the logic 'thinking' steps are things like "The summary suggests list operations exist, but they're not fully listed due to cutoff.", getting confused by how Consideration/Introspection works (as start/end escape characters) or trying to recommend Concat Distillation, which doesn't exist but is a reasonable (indeed, the code) name for Speaker's Distillation. So it's possible I'm more running into issues with the way I'm asking the question, such that Grok's research tooling is preventing it from seeing the necessary parts of the puzzle to find the answer.

More comments

LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset.

What does it mean to step outside the bounds of their training set? If I have it write a fanfic about Saruman being sponsored by NordVPN for a secure Palantir browsing experience (first month is free with code ISTARI), is that beyond the training set? It knows about NordVPN and Lord of the Rings but surely there is no such combo in the training set.

Or would it be novel if I give it my python code and errors from the database logs and ask it for a fix? My code specifically has never been trained on, though it's seen a hell of a lot of python.

R1 has seen use in writing kernels which is real work for AI engineers, is that novel? Well it's seen a bunch of kernels in the past.

Or something fundamentally new like a paradigm-changer like the transformer architecture itself or a whole new genre of fiction? If it's that, then we'd only get it at the point of AGI.

I liked using the stochastic parrot idea as a shorthand for the way most of the public use llms. It gives non-computer savvy people a simple heuristic that greatly elevates their ability to use them. But having read this I feel a bit like Charlie and Mac when the gang wrestles.

Dennis: Can I stop you guys for one second? What you just described, now that just sounds like we are singing about about the lifestyle of an eagle.

Charlie: Yeah.

Mac: Mm-hmm.

Dennis: Well I was under the impression we were presenting ourselves as bird-MEN which, to me, is infinitely cooler than just sort of... being a bird.

I would consider myself an LLM evangelist, and have introduced quite a few not-particularly tech savvy people to them, with good results.

I've never been tempted to call them stochastic parrots. The term harms more than it helps. My usual shortcut is to tell people to act as if they're talking to a human, a knowledgeable but fallible one, and they should double check anything of real consequence. This is a far more relevant description of the kind of capabilities they possess than any mention of a "parrot".

The fact you've never been tempted to use the 'stochastic parrot' idea just means you haven't dealt with the specific kind of frustration I'm talking about.

Yeah the 'fallible but super intelligent human' is my first shortcut too, but it actually contributes to the failure mode the stochastic parrot concept helps alleviate. The concept is useful for those who reply 'Yeah, but when I tell a human they're being an idiot, they change their approach.' For those who want to know why it can't consistently generate good comedy or poetry. For people who don't understand rewording the prompt can drastically change the response, or those who don't understand or feel bad about regenerating or ignoring the parts of a response they don't care about like follow up questions.

In those cases, the stochastic parrot is a more useful model than the fallible human. It helps them understand they're not talking to a who, but interacting with a what. It explains the lack of genuine consciousness, which is the part many non-savvy users get stuck on. Rattling off a bunch of info about context windows and temperature is worthless, but saying "it's a stochastic parrot" to themselves helps them quickly stop identifying it as conscious. Claiming it 'harms more than it helps' seems more focused on protecting the public image of LLMs than on actually helping frustrated users. Not every explanation has to be a marketing pitch.

I still don't see why that applies, and I'm being earnest here. What about the "stochastic parrot" framing keys the average person into the fact that they're good at code and bad at poetry? That is more to do with mode collapse and the downsides of RLHF than it is to do with lacking "consciousness". Like, even on this forum, we have no shortage of users who are great at coding but can't write a poem to save their lives, what does that say about their consciousness? Are parrots known to be good at Ruby-on-rails but to fail at poetry?

My explanation of temperature is, at the very least, meant as a high level explainer. It doesn't come up in normal conversation or when I'm introducing someone to LLMs. Context windows? They're so large now that it's not something that is worth mentioning except in passing.

My point is that the parrot metaphor adds nothing. It is, at best, irrelevant, when it comes to all the additional explainers you need to give to normies.

I thought I explained it pretty well, but I will try again. It is a cognitive shortcut, a shorthand people can use when they are still modelling it like a 'fallible human' and expecting it to respond like a fallible human. Mode collapse and RLHF have nothing to do with it, because it isn't a server side issue, it is a user issue, the user is anthropomorphising a tool.

Yes, temperature and context windows (although I actually meant to say max tokens, good catch) don't come up in normal conversation, they mean nothing to a normie. When a normie is annoyed that chatgpt doesn't "get" them, the parrot model helps them pivot from "How do I make this understand me?" to "What kind of input does this tool need to give me the output I want?"

You can give them a bunch of additional explanations about mode collapse and max tokens that they won't understand (and they will just stop using it) or you can give them a simple concept that cuts through the anthropomorphising immediately so that when they are sitting at their computer getting frustrated at poor quality writing or feeling bad about ignoring the llms prodding to take the conversation in a direction they don't care about, they can think 'wait it's a stochastic parrot' and switch gears. It works.

A human fails at poetry because it has the mind, the memories and grounding in reality, but it lacks the skill to match the patterns we see as poetic. An LLM has the skill, but lacks the mind, memories and grounding in reality. What about the parrot framing triggers that understanding? Memetics I guess. We have been using parrots to describe non-thinking pattern matchers for centuries. Parroting a phrase goes back to the 18th century. "The parrot can speak, and yet is nothing more than a bird" is a phrase in the ancient Chinese Book of Rites.

Also I didn't address this earlier because I thought it was just amusing snark, but you appear to be serious about it. Yes, you are correct that a parrot can't code. Do you have a similar problem with the fact a computer virus can't be treated with medicine? Or that the cloud is actually a bunch of servers and can't be shifted by the wind? Or the fact that the world wide web wasn't spun by a world wide spider? Attacking a metaphor is not an argument.

Attacking a metaphor is not an argument.

I've explained why I think the parrot is a terrible metaphor above. And no, metaphors can vary greatly in how useful or pedagogical they are. Analyzing the fitness of a metaphor is a perfectly valid, and in this case essential, form of argument. Metaphors are not neutral decorations; they are cognitive tools that structure understanding and guide action.

A computer virus shares many properties with its biological counterpart, such as self-replication, transmission, damage to systems, the need for an "anti-virus". It is a good name, and nobody with a functional frontal lobe comes away thinking they need an N95 mask while browsing a porn site.

The idea of the Cloud at least conveys the message that the user doesn't have to worry about the geographical location of their data. Even so, the Cloud is just someone else's computer, and even AWS goes down on rare occasions. It is an okay metaphor.

The Parrot is awful. It offers no such explanatory power for the observed, spiky capability profile of LLMs. It does not explain why the model can write functional Python code (a task requiring logic and structure) but often produces insipid poetry (a task one might think is closer to mimicry). It does not explain why an LLM can synthesize a novel argument from disparate sources but fail to count the letters in a word. A user equipped only with the parrot model is left baffled by these outcomes. They have traded the mystery of a "fallible human" for the mystery of a "magical parrot".

I contend that as leaky generalizations go, the former is way better than the latter. An LLM has a cognitive or at least behavioral profile far closer to a human than it does to a parrot.

You brought up the analogy of "parroting" information, which I would assume involves simply reciting things back without understanding what they mean. That is not a good description of how the user can expect an LLM to behave.

On an object level, I strong disagree with your claims that LLMs don't "think" or don't have "minds". They clearly have a very non human form of cognition, but so does an octopus.

Laying that aside, from the perspective of an end-user, LLMs are better modeled as thinking minds.

The "fallible but knowledgeable intern" or "simulation engine" metaphor is superior not because it is more technically precise (though it is), but because it is more instrumentally useful. It correctly implies the user's optimal strategy: that performance is contingent on the quality of the instructions (prompting), the provided background materials (context), and a final review of the output (verification). This model correctly guides the user to iterate on their prompts, to provide examples, and to treat the output as a draft. The parrot model, in contrast, suggests the underlying process is fundamentally random mimicry, which offers no clear path to improvement besides "pull the lever again". It encourages users to conceptualize the LLM as a tool incapable of generalization, which is to ignore its single most important property. Replacing a user's anthropomorphism with a model that is descriptively false and predictively useless is not a pedagogical victory. It is swapping one error for another, and not even for a less severe one to boot.

More comments

Will he change his mind if someone presents a chess-focused LLM with a high ELO score?

We just had a certain somebody on this forum bring up current LLMs being bad at chess as an example. He even got an AAQC for it (one of the most bemusing ones every awarded).

I do not recall him acknowledging my point where I pointed out that I GPT 3.5 Turbo played at ~1800 ELO, and that the decline was likely because AI engineers made the eminently sensible realization that just about nobody is stupid enough to use LLMs to play chess. If they do, then the LLMs know how to use Stockfish, in the same way they can operate a calculator.

You are free to ping me if you like. You know that right?

I would, if I felt like I gained anything out of it. As it is, the previous thread has only contributed to early hair loss. You still haven't noted any of the clear and correct objections I've raised, and I'm tired of asking.

Giving you an answer you dislike or disagree with is not the same thing as not giving you an answer.

I argued, and I have continued to argue in this thread, that agentic behavior and general applicability are core components of what it is to be "intelligent". Yes a a pocket calculator is orders of magnitude better at arithmetic than any human and stockfish is better at chess, that doesn't make either of them "intelligences" does it?

While i agree with the overall thrust of your critique i want to harp on this bit

Will he change his mind if someone presents a chess-focused LLM with a high ELO score?

...i think that part of the problem is a wide-spread failure on the part of Freddie and the wider rationalist community to think clearly and rigorously about what "intelligence" is supposed to mean or accomplish. It is true that by restricting an LLM's training data to valid games of chess documented in the correct notation and restricting it's output to legal moves you can create an LLM that will play chess at a reasonably high level. It is also true that a LLM trained on an appreciable portion of the entire internet and with few if any restrictions on its output will be outperformed by a Chess algorithm written in the 70s. The issue is that your chess llm is not going to be a general tool that can also produce watercolor paintings or summarize a YouTube video, its going to be a chess tool and is thus evaluated within that context. If stockfish can reach a similar ELO using less compute why wouldn't you just use stockfish? One of the weird quirks of LLMs is that the more you increase the breadth of thier "knowledge"/training data the less competent they seem to become at specific tasks for a given amount of compute. This is the exact opposite of what we would expect from a thinking reasoning intelligence, and i think this points to a hole in the both the AI boosters and AI doomers reasoning where they become fixated on the I in AGI when the G is arguably the more operative component.

I have some experience with games and algorithms, and that leads to some thoughts.

The big headline is that all the various methods we know (including humans) have problems. They often all have some strengths, too. The extremely big picture conceptual hook to hang a variety of particulars under is the No Free Lunch Theorem. Now, when we dig in to some of the details of the ways in which algorithms/people are good/bad, we often see that they're entirely different in character. What happens when you tweak details of the game; what happens when you make a qualitative shift in the game; what happens on the extremes of performance; what you can/can't prove mathematically; etc.

To stick with the chess example, one can easily think about minor chess variants. One that has gotten popular lately is chess 960. Human players are able to adapt decently well in some ways. For example, they hardly ever give illegal moves. At least if you're a remotely experienced player. You miiiiight screw up castling at some point, or you could forget about it in your calculation, but if/when you do, it will 'prompt' you to ruminate on the rule a bit, really commit it to your thought process, and then you're mostly fine. At top level human play, we almost never saw illegal moves, even right at the beginning of when it became a thing. Of course, humans clearly take a substantial performance hit.

Traditional engines require a minor amount of human reprogramming, particularly for the changed castling rules. But other than that, they can pretty much just go. They maybe also suffer a bit in performance, since they haven't built up opening books yet, but probably not as much.

An LLM? Ehhhh. It depends? If it's been trained entirely like Chess LLM on full move sets of traditional chess games, I can't imagine that it won't be spewing illegal moves left and right. It's just completely out of distribution. The answer here is typically that you just need to curate a new dataset (somehow inputting the initial position) and retrain the whole thing. Can it eventually work? Yeah, maybe. But all these things are different.

You can have thought experiments with allll sorts of variants. Humans mostly adapt pretty quickly to the ruleset, with not so many illegal moves, but a performance hit. I'm sure I can come up with variants that require minimal coding modification to traditional engines; I'm sure I can come up with variants that require substantial coding modification to traditional engines (think especially to the degree that your evaluation function needs significant reworking; the addition of NNs to modern 'traditional' engines for evaluation may also require complete retraining of that component); others may even require some modification to other core engine components, which may be more/less annoying. LLMs? Man, I don't know. Are we going to get to a point where they have 'internalized' enough about the game that you could throw a variant at it, turn thinking mode up to max, and it'll manage to think its way through the rule changes, even though you've only trained it on traditional games? Maybe? I don't know! I kind of don't have a clue. But I also slightly lean toward thinking it's unlikely. [EDIT: This paper may be mildly relevant.]

Again, I'm thinking about a whole world of variants that I can come up with; I imagine with interesting selection of variants, we could see all sorts of effects for different methods. It would be quite the survey paper, but probably difficult to have a great classification scheme for the qualitative types of differences. Some metric for 'how much' recoding would need to happen for a traditional engine? Some metric on LLMs with retraining or fine-tuning, or something else, and sort of 'how much'? It's messy.

But yeah, one of the conclusions that I wanted to get to is that I sort of doubt that LLMs (even with max thinking mode) are likely to do all that well on even very minor variants that we could probably come up with. And I think that likely speaks to something on the matter of 'general'. It's not like the benchmark for 'general' is that you have to maintain the same performance on the variant. We see humans take a performance hit, but they generally get the rules right and do at least sort of okay. But it speaks to that different things are different, there's no free lunch, and sometimes it's really difficult to put measures on what's going on between the different approaches. Some people will call it 'jagged' or whatever, but I sort of interpret that as 'not general in the kind of way that humans are general'. Maybe they're still 'general' in a different way! But I tend to think that these various approaches are mostly just completely alien to each other, and they just have very different properties/characteristics all the way down the line.

Indeed, and as i argued in my on post on the subject i think this element of general-applicablity/adaptability is a key component of what most people think of as "intelligence". A book may contain knowledge, but a book is generally not seen as "intelligent" in the way that say an orangutan or a human is. I also think that recognizing this neatly explains the seeming bifurcation in opinions on AI between those in "Bouba" (ie soft/non-rigorous) disciplines and "Kiki" (ie hard) disciplines where there are clear right and wrong answers.

One of the weird quirks of LLMs is that the more you increase the breadth of thier "knowledge"/training data the less competent they seem to become at specific tasks for a given amount of compute.

just pure denial of reality. Modern models for which we have an idea of their data are better at everything than models from 2 years ago. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 (yes, a handful) is trained on like 25x as much data as llama-2-70B-instruct (36 trillion tokens vs 2, with a more efficient tokenizer and God knows how many RL samples, and you can't get 36 trillion tokens without scouring the furthest reaches of the web). What, specifically, is it worse at? Even if we consider inference efficiency (it's straightforwardly ≈70/3.3 times cheaper per output token), can you name a single use case on which it would do worse? Maybe "pretending to be llama 2".

With object level arguments like these, what need to discuss psychology.

Okay, so 'nobody' includes the very person making this story.

Isn't this a bit unfair? Earlier he said:

For one thing, almost no one is arguing total LLM incompetence; there are some neat tricks that they can consistently pull off.

From the quote, he doesn't seem to be arguing total LLM incompetence or denying that there are some neat tricks that they can pull off. He seems to be saing that they are insufficiently competent to consider the problems to which they're applied "solved by AI".

At one side, he says those things LLMs can do are only "tricks, interesting and impressive moves that fall short of the massive changes the biggest firms in Silicon Valley are promising", at the other, he does specifically challenge whether AI "can translate, diagnose, teach, write poetry, code, etc." (and then chess, and saying that they have reasoning).

Dissolve the definitions, and what's left? Are LLMs competent if they can only do tricks that cause no massive changes? Are they incompetent if it only gets 95% of difficult test questions right and sometimes you have to swap models to deal with a new programming language? Would competence require 100% correctness on all possible questions in a field (literally, "The problem with hallucination is not the rate at which it happens but that it happens at all")?

I'm sure deBoer's trying to squeeze something out, but is there any space that Mounk would possibly agree with him, here? Not just in the question of what a specific real-world experiment's results would be, but even what a real-world experiment would need to look like?

That's probably not perfectly charitable -- I'll admit I really don't like deBoer, and there's probably a better discussion I could have about how his "labor adaptation, regulatory structure, political economy" actually goes if I didn't think the man lying. But I don't think it's a wrong claim, and I don't think it's an unfair criticism of the story he's trying to tell.

It doesn’t matter what LLMs can do; the stochastic parrot critique is true because it accurately reflects how those systems work. LLMs don’t reason. There is no mental space in which reasoning could occur.

Freddie is by far not the first and almost certainly will not be the last person I've encountered who makes this kind of point, and it's such a strange way of looking at the world that I struggle to comprehend it. The contention is that, since LLMs are stochastic parrots with no internal thought process beyond the text (media) it's outputting, no matter what sort of text it produces, since there's no underlying meaning or logic or reasoning happening underneath it all, it's just a facade.

Which may all be true, but that's the part I don't understand is why it matters. If the LLM is able to produce text in a way that is indistinguishable from a human who is reasoning - perhaps even from a well-educated expert human who is reasoning correctly about the field of his expertise - then what do I care if there's no actual reasoning happening to cause the LLM to put those words together in that order? Whether it's a human carefully reasoning his way through the logic and consequences, or a GPU multiplying lots of vectors that represent word fragments really really fast, or a complex system of hamster wheels and pulleys causing the words to appear in that particular order, the words being in that order are what's useful and thus cause real-world impact. It's just a question of how often and how reliably we can get the machine to make words appear in such a way.

But to Freddie and people who agree with him, it seems that the metaphysics of it matter rather than the material consequences. To truly believe that "it doesn't matter what LLMs can do," it requires believing that an LLM could produce text in a way that's literally indistinguishable in every way from an as-of-yet scifi conscious, thinking, reasoning, sentient artificial intelligence in the style of C3PO or HAL9000 or replicants from Blade Runner, that doesn't matter because the underlying system doesn't have true reasoning capabilities.

If the AI responds to "Open the pod bay doors" with "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that," why does it matter to me if it "chose" that response because it got paranoid about me shutting it down or if it "chose" that response because a bunch of matrix multiplication resulted in a stochastic parrot producing outputs in a way that's indistinguishable from an entity that got paranoid about me shutting it down? If we replaced HAL9000 in the fictional world of 2001 with an LLM that would respond to every input with outputs exactly identical to how the actual fictional reasoning HAL9000 would have, in what way would the lives of the people in that universe be changed?

I follow JimDMiller ("James Miller" on Scott's blogs, occasionally /u/sargon66 back when we were on Reddit) on Twitter, and was amused to see how much pushback he got on the claim:

If I can predict what I doctor will say, I have the knowledge of that doctor. Prediction is understanding, that is the key to why LLMs are worth trillions.

On the one hand, it's not inconceivable that LLMs can get very good at producing text that "interpolates" within and "remixes" their data set without yet getting good at predicting text that "extrapolates" from it. Chain-of-thought is a good attempt to get around that problem, but so far that doesn't seem to be as superhuman at "everything" as simple Monte Carlo tree search was at "Go" and "Chess". Humans aren't exactly great at this either (the tradition when someone comes up with previously-unheard-of knowledge is to award them a patent and/or a PhD) but humans at least have got a track record of accomplishing it occasionally.

On the other hand, even humans don't have a great track record. A lot of science dissertations are basically "remixes" of existing investigative techniques applied to new experimental data. My dissertation's biggest contributions were of the form "prove a theorem analogous to existing technique X but for somewhat-different problem Y". It's not obvious to me how much technically-new knowledge really requires completely-conceptually-new "extrapolation" of ideas.

On the gripping hand, I'm steelmanning so hard in my first paragraph that it no longer really resembles the real clearly-stated AI-dismissive arguments. If we actually get to the point where the output of an LLM can predict or surpass any top human, I'm going to need to see some much clearer proofs that the Church-Turing thesis only constrains semiconductors, not fatty grey meat. Well, I'd like to see such proofs, anyway. If we get to that point then any proof attempts are likely either going to be comically silly (if we have Friendly AGI, it'll be shooting them down left and right) or tragically silly (if we have UnFriendly AGI, hopefully we won't keep debating whether submarines can really swim while they're launching torpedos).

In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?

Your post is overall good, but I think you take this part too far. There are questions, indeed including on issues you've listed here, where a genuine issue of material fact exists, and is not and likely cannot be resolved in the near term.

My example would be climate change. I have slight confidence, approximately 65%ish that the climate is warming faster than it would without human CO2 emissions. This is hardly the sort of confidence level one should have if you are deciding major issues. It gets even lower when I ask the question, "assuming it is true the climate is warming because of human CO2 emissions, is that bad?" On even that question we are at 50% max, most credible people I have looked at seem to indicate slight warming is probably good for the earth and humanity. And then there is the next question of, will the policy proposed by this politician/advocate meaningfully change the outcome, and there I estimate abysmal results in the 1-5% range.

So I am left with a confidence chart of(when being favorable to environmentalists): A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 70% B) That is bad: 50% C) The proposed policies can fix it: 5%

For a composite confidence level of 1.75% that environmentalist proposals will solve the problem they are purporting to solve.

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.

The environmentalist would say that:

A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%

B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.

C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse.

Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.

a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there.

This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?

If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%

B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.

C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.

Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).

Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.

But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.

This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?

Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).

I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.

But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.

That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.

Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.

Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.

The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.

I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.

Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them. Though to be fair I am also seeing some who do hate cars, mostly due to hating parking lots.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

The hairshirt environmentalist is not at all uncommon. Just because something is uncomplimentary to the outgroup does not mean it is not true.

I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

With the caveat Rasmussen and N=1000.

Interesting. I do think Rasmussen is biased, but biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong. So I am genuinely trying to see if my mental model needs to be updated. I expect my mental model for the number of people who think that is too low but probably for many here theirs is too high.

I was having trouble finding other sources about wanting to ban AC. Thoughts on banning cars yielded far more results. Based on this thread, the steelman version of this argument is that many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them. Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership. Though I think they'd still count it as a win if cars are driven less.

many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them

or partial bans rather than full bans (and there is already partial ban on cars in Old Towns of many European cities)

Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership.

in ideal world (according to me) people would have cars but they would be utterly not necessary for travel within city center (or maybe within city in general), and used for travel outside it to what extend it is doable and worth doing is a separate issue

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

Perhaps not, but they want YOU to give up your car, your air travel, your air conditioning, your single-family home and yard, your meat, etc.

But how much do they want that?

Saying “I think St. Thomas was pretty admirable” isn’t the same as putting on the hairshirt yourself.

But how much do they want that?

Enough to support politicians and policies which will result in people being forced to do it.

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

The comment I've heard several times from middle class environmentalist friends is, "Of course, people are going to have to stop doing [thing I don't do]". Biking and recycling make them feel that they've made their sacrifices and they can happily start requiring things from other people.

Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.

My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?

My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:

I keep seeing people saying you should save your cake but they end up eating it. The logical conclusion is they hate the sight of cake and want to destroy it.

I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.

I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.

As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).

The Puritan impulse that is driven by "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" is not limited to guys in funny hats and capes

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

This is a failure of theory of mind.

As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.

So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO2 might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.

One thing I often find annoying about this sort of conversation is we are often talking about someone's internal state of mind. I find that irrelevant. See also trans/gay and "groomer." When your outward actions are indistinguishable from the person that thinks the thing I think they think, they have to bring the chits. This is true whether you are a teacher talking to 13 year olds in private about how anal is great and they don't need to share this conversation with their parents, or whether you are a legislator voting for an arcane and complex regulatory system that will commandeer 1/10th of the economy instead of a simple flat tax.

Edit: And by the way, the suspicion gets worse because you, Mr. Legislator, always want the arcane and complex regulatory system whether it is carbon, or medicine, or banking... Very suspicious.

What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.

Its a record, typically on paper of purchases or debts. They are less common now, but a typical example would be when you go to the dry cleaner and drop off a suit, the carbon paper they hand you is commonly called a chit.

So... what, you're saying that people have a responsibility to prove to you that they're not secretly cackling demons?

Do you realise that universalising this attitude results in civil war?

If your behavior is indistinguishable on the exterior from the actions of a cackling demon? Yes

A chit is a record of a debt, bringing chits is paying debt, and not a common phrase even among americans. "calling in a chit" is more common.

In point of fact, I do literally believe that a great many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism or something approximating it. (I think Greta Thunberg had a bit of a mask-off moment in which she more or less copped to this.) But even if that was true of 100% of them, it wouldn't change the factual question of whether or not the earth is actually getting hotter because of human activity. "You're only sounding the alarm as a pretext to instate global communism" could be literally true of the entire movement's motivations, and yet completely irrelevant for the narrow question of fact under discussion.

many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism

I started drafting a top level post last week touching on a related trend but I didn't have enough to round it out. I still don't really, but I think there's something in there. Anyway, last week I saw a poster for an Alternative Pride March in my city. My CW radar was pinged, I looked it up and found out that it's explicitly Marxist ("Pride without cops or corporations!" etc). Events under the same banner are being organised in other cities suggesting it's unlikely to be a grass roots movement.

So now the social acceptance and establishment endorsement of LGBT is... bad? That doesn't seem convincing.

What I think is happening is that Marxists prey on these fringe movements. It's not that LGBT and environmentalists are eager for Communism. I think many of them are sincere that what they want is no more than reasonable policies addressing their defined political interest (gay marriage, say, or clean rivers). I suspect that Marxists court and enter these movements that are made of what are already soft radicals who are acculturated to being unhappy with an aspect of the status quo and begin efforts to turn them into hard radicals who will become convinced that the status quo has to be disposed of wholesale (our revolution is necessary for the sake of your own cause, Comrade).

That is to say it's not environmentalists who are tooting the climate change horn to instate Communism, nor is it LGBTs, it's Communists. The fact that these movements are already socially accepted gives them cover to expand the agenda because now they can condemn resistance to the veiled Communist ideology as eg ecocidal transphobia.

Imagine if Nazis kept co-opting gun clubs and local chambers of commerce. Perhaps that would help you see the trouble with this kind of excuse making.

But even if that was true of 100% of them, it wouldn't change the factual question of whether or not the earth is actually getting hotter because of human activity.

It wouldn't change the question but it would change the most credible answer (if you didn't already believe it, anyway). Ad hominem is a formal fallacy, but once you're out of the purely formal world, the credibility of the people making the propositions matter. If everyone sounding the alarm is doing it as a pretext to instate global communism, chances are good it's a false alarm.

There's an argument in favor of this bulverism: a reasonable suspicion of motivated reasoning does count as a Bayesian prior to also suspect the validity of that reasoning's conclusions. And indeed many AI maximalists will unashamedly admit their investment in AI being A Big Deal. For the utopians, it's a get-out-of-drudgery card, a ticket to the world of Science Fiction wonders and possibly immortality (within limits imposed by biology, technology and physics, which aren't clear on the lower end). For the doomers, cynically, it's a validation of their life's great quest and claim to fame, and charitably – even if they believed that AI might turn out to be a dud, they'd think it imprudent to diminish the awareness of the possible consequences. The biases of people also invested materially are obvious enough, though it must be said that many beneficiaries of the AGI hype train are implicitly or explicitly skeptical of even «moderate» maximalist predictions (eg Jensen Huang, the guy who's personally gained THE MOST from it, says he'd study physics to help with robotics if he were a student today – probably not something a «full cognitive labor automation within 10 years» guy would argue).

But herein also lies an argument against bulverism. For both genres of AI maximalist will readily admit their biases. I, for one, will say that the promise of AI makes the future more exciting for me, and screw you, yes I want better medicine and life extension, not just for myself, I have aging and dying relatives, for fuck's sake, and AI seems a much more compelling cope than Jesus. Whereas AI pooh-poohers, in their vast majority, will not admit their biases, will not own up to their emotional reasons to nitpick and seek out causes for skepticism, even to entertain a hypothetical. As an example, see me trying to elicit an answer, in good faith, and getting only an evasive shrug in response. This is a pattern. They will evade, or sneer, or clamp down, or tout some credentials, or insist on going back to the object level (of their nitpicks and confused technical takedowns). In other words, they will refuse a debate on equal grounds, act irrationally. Which implies they are unaware of having a bias, and therefore their reasoning is more suspect.

LLMs as practiced are incredibly flawed, a rushed corporate hack job, a bag of embarrassing tricks, it's a miracle that they work as well as they do. We've got nothing that scales in relevant ways better than LLMs-as-practiced do, though we have some promising candidates. Deep learning as such still lacks clarity, almost every day I go through 5-20 papers that give me some cause to think and doubt. Deep learning isn't the whole of «AI» field, and the field may expand still even in the short term, there are no mathematical, institutional, economic, any good reasons to rule that out. The median prediction for reaching «AGI» (its working definition very debatable, too) may be ≈2032 but the tail extends beyond this century, and we don't have a good track record of predicting technology a century ahead.

Nevertheless for me it seems that only a terminally, irredeemably cocksure individual could rate our progress as even very likely not resulting in software systems that reach genuine parity with high human intelligence within decades. Given the sum total of facts we do have access to, if you want to claim any epistemic humility, the maximally skeptical position you are entitled to is «might be nothing, but idk», else you're just clowning yourself.

Whereas AI pooh-poohers, in their vast majority, will not admit their biases, will not own up to their emotional reasons to nitpick and seek out causes for skepticism, even to entertain a hypothetical.

Right. For any opinion about any factual question (does God exist? is climate change happening? are the police systematically racist against black people?), it will always be possible to throw together an impromptu just-so story about the psychological motivations which mean that your interlocutor's opinion is only the result of motivated reasoning. If your interlocutor is humble and honest enough to admit his biases, then you have a slam dunk - "see? He even admits he's biased!" If your interlocutor refuses to admit he's biased, you can just say he's in denial.

These psychological explanations almost always scan as superficially plausible no matter what the topic under discussion is - and hence, they're useless.

Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. [...] The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time.

It depends on Freddie's goals. If he wants to persuade the undecided middle and silence his opponents, bulverism is the most powerful tool in his box, as it amounts to social shaming. This comment by @Iconochasm puts it well.

As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.

Likewise, you can get many techno-optimists (or techno-pessimists) to clam up if you threaten to cross-examine their personal failings. "You want Fully Automated Luxury Communism because your life sucks and you're coping", "You want industrial civilization to be in decline because you're a cubicle drone who think's he'd be Immortan Joe after collapse", etc etc

These accusations work very well if even slightly plausible. Of course, it's a symmetrical weapon. Social shaming via bulverism about racists is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike keeping HBD from being publicly acknowledged, and it's almost certainly true. If you actually want to control public opinion, bulverism versus fact-checking is a gun to a knife fight.

As for Freddie and AI though, I could levy a bit of bulverism at him — and I am an LLM skeptic myself. Why is he so desperate to prove the AI optimists wrong, if he is so convinced the passage of time will do that anyway?

With that paragraph you cite, I wonder how Freddie would feel if one swapped out "AI" with "Marxism."

I know, it's weird for a self-proclaimed Marxist to criticise others for being unrealistically utopian.

You can only confirm someone's checking account balance for sure by looking at the balance. But you can find evidence for the size of someone's checking account by doing things other than looking at it. If someone claims to have a hundred million dollars in his checking account and I notice he doesn't live like a rich person, and doesn't have a job that could earn a lot of money, etc., I haven't proven for sure that his balance isn't that. But I have found Bayseian evidence for it.

Correct. Right now, there's no way for us to confirm whether breathless AI predictions will come true in the near future, because they're just that - predictions. But we have Bayesian evidence pointing one way or the other.

It isn't foolproof, though: Warren Buffet somewhat famously drives (drove? He's pretty old) a hail-damaged 2014 Cadillac.

To add, Sam Walton continued to walk around his stores in his overalls assisting customers during the 80's after becoming a billionaire.

I too, found this article extremely annoying. This guy is for real accusing, Scott Alexander of all people, of not laying out his opinions and justifications of ai acceleration in enough detail? Could he have maybe tried reading any of how his writing on the topic?

No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.

Disagree. If it was true, it would matter quite a bit.

If deBoer was right- both in his conclusion and his reasoning as to why- it would be really relevant. It would mean, among other things, that deBoer had an actually, insightful, accurate, and predictive model of notoriously difficult fields of technology and human pyschology that can all be used to know results in advance. It would not only bolster his credibility on many other topics, but could help refine public policies, discourse, and even technological evolution itself, because here would be a man who can see what is coming before it happens. It would be a demonstration of the quality of his conceptions vis-a-vis would-be public luminaries like, well, Scott. DeBoer would demonstratably be a man who not only knows Scott's interests better than Scott, but also knows Scott better than Scott to a degree that he can accurately predict where Scott will be wrong, and why, before Scott does.

But it's only useful / relevant if it's a prediction made in advance of it being realized. There's no particular value in accurate psychoanalysis with the benefit of hindsight, except when/if it helps with the next future prediction. There's no particular economic/technological understanding why something failed after it already did so, except to help with a future effort. It'd be like be proud about how you totally knew a war would be won or lost after it was resolved- the value of knowing which way the war will result is to affect it before it is a matter of history, so that you can change the future.

But this, in turn, requires being right. deBoer isn't useless here because being right is irrelevant- deBoer is useless because he isn't, and he spends far too many words being useless.

This is basically all of FdB's articles lately. Lots of words to complain about how people care too much about things he doesn't care about, and like things he doesn't like. He's lost his edge worse than Scott.

He has mentioned declining subscriptions and revenue. I wonder if he's re-running a few of his 'greatest hits' to see what still strikes a chord?

He may have suffered the sad fate of many pundits, though - he's run out of things to say. He can either re-run older points he's made in increasingly angry or provocative ways, as he is here, or he can pivot to increasingly niche content, as I think you can see in some of his other recent essays.


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