domain:aporiamagazine.com
aiislove
22m ago
Status operates on two axes, and in slightly different ways for men and women.
Refer to these two charts.
Hard status for men is measured in physical power that exists as an extension of nature. This is, essentially, the kind of power that the man alone in the jungle wields. This is measured in a combination of physical strength, height, masculinity, physical presence, muscularity, weight, aggression, age, and any other number of tangible, measurable physical characteristics.
Hard status for women is similar, in that it reflects a tangible physical reality, however the basis of judgment is different. For women, hard status is measured in sex appeal, beauty, charisma, charm, cuteness, fertility, height, size, and any other number of tangible physical characteristics.
Soft status for men and women operates the same. Soft status refers to anything outside of the physical that is useful for manipulation of others. Money, class, intellectualism, luxury beliefs, high status values, intelligence, persuasion, word and resource access and manipulation- these are many of the qualities that make up soft status.
I’ve already filled in the charts with some examples of people and where they sit. I have mostly just imagined the most extreme types of each person and then filled in with random interesting people between them- you could move the 0,0 point somewhere else and categorize people differently if you have a different set of examples but these are the people who came to mind as most illustrative of my theory.
For men, the four quadrants are labeled The Saint, The King, The Outcast, and The Caveman.
The Saint represents a man with high soft status but low hard status. The most extreme example is Stephen Hawking, a quadriplegic whose life work was entirely abstract. Religious men with modest physicalities are other Saints. Liberace, a man with little sex appeal but lots of luxury, is a Saint. Anderson Cooper and Elijah Wood are pretty men, though Anderson’s class lends him higher soft status compared with Elijah whose height and hobbitness place him lower on the scale of soft status.
The King is a man with high soft status as well as high hard status. He is best exemplified today by Prince William, who is strapping and, being next in line to the throne of the UK, very high in soft status. Trump is a King, despite the abstract hatred of him from intellectuals, because his vibe says King. King Charles II, a bit old and wishy-washy, is literally a King, but less so than others. Certain elegant men and admired athletes as well as traditional father figures also lie in the King quadrant.
The Caveman is someone who has high hard status but low soft status. The most extreme example is Fred Flintstone (or really, a stereotypical caveman might be better, but I couldn’t think of one.) He is very powerful, but his power is entirely physical, being forced to work under the higher soft status boss in his day job. Strong, violent athletes with little soft power belong in this quadrant. Handsome actors without much cache, powerful Middle Eastern men often belong in this category (from the viewpoint of white christendom.)
The Outcast is a man with low soft status as well as low hard status. The most extreme examples are Adam Lanza and TJ Lane- but any school shooter will do. Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Dahmer also fit the bill. Most trans men, short and cuddly, lie somewhere in this area. They are unthreatening to power, generally.
The quadrants for women are The Queen, The Princess, The Hag, and The Whore.
The Queen has high soft power and low hard power. She is best exemplified by Ellen Degeneres: Creepy, mannish, cold, vampiric, and really unsexual. Oprah, Anna Wintour and Tilda Swinton are similarly Queens. Girl bosses like Laverne Cox and Nicki Minaj exist as Queens. Bette Davis is a queen on account of her unfortunate looks. Betty Friedan is close to the Hag, but her luxurious beliefs in feminism push her over the edge into Queen territory.
The Princess has high soft power and high hard power. Kate Middleton is the best example of the Princess today. She is literally a princess, with beauty and soft power. Jackie Kennedy and Melania Trump are also Princesses. Andreja Pejic, a trans woman, could be in a similar position to Laverne Cox, but is more beautiful and gets less points for diversity, and is thus further to the right and further down on the chart.
The Whore is a woman high in hard power but low in soft power. Internet celebrities Danielle Bregoli (You remember her- the Catch Me Outside Dr. Phil girl) and Woahvicky (known for her bizarre accent) are the most extreme examples of the Whore- they are sexy and don’t have much soft status to speak of. Snooki, Mae West, Trisha Paytas, Marilyn Monroe- they all fall somewhere in this quadrant.
The Hag is a women with low hard power and low soft power. I had a hard time thinking of real life examples of these women, as generally, the lower a woman has in hard power, she tends to be raised up in terms of soft power by other women. Andrea Dworkin is quite ugly and I’d place her in Hag territory even though her feminist beliefs are very high status for women. Fictional characters like Strangers with Candy’s Jerri Blank and Reno 911’s Trudy Wiegel are good examples of the Hag.
Where would you place Meghan Markle? I don’t really like her. I could see her in any quadrant of the four, so I put her near the middle.
Throughout our lives, we may change position on the chart. For example, Christina Aguilera in her earliest roles on the Mickey Mouse Club, was a Princess, who then moved to Whore territory upon release of her video Dirrty, and has since ascended to Queen status as a 44 year old plus size girl boss. Similarly, Britney Spears started out as a Princess, then moved to Whore status as she was a bit older, and now is probably somewhere between the Hag and the Whore depending on how hot you find her. Pamela Anderson spent most of her life in the Whore category, but recently stopped wearing makeup and has aged in to the Queen status.
Women tend to move from right to left on the chart as they age, but men tend to move from the left to the right until they reach their mid to late 50s after which they tend to move to the left as well.
Women who marry multiple times tend to pick second and third husbands who are farther to the right than earlier husbands. They may be either higher or lower in soft status, but later partners are almost always higher in hard status. This often frustrates earlier husbands who see their ex-wives with men who may be lower in soft status but higher in hard status, and who place too much emphasis on their own soft status at the expense of their own hard status.
I am sure that, as a man, winning at hard status is gratifying, while winning at soft status feels dorky. But I want to know if women feel the same way or if the opposite is true. Do women feel more gratified being Ellen Degeneres or more gratified being Marilyn Monroe?
If I were to rank the women’s quadrants, I believe you’d want to be the Princess the most, followed by the Queen, followed by the Hag, and then the Whore. The Whore really has no dignity, she is defined entirely by the man or the view of men toward her. At least the Hag gets to retain some dignity of owning her rejection in the man’s eyes. Perhaps that is a masculine projection on my part. The Princess is more dignified than the Queen because she gets to retain powers of seduction toward men which is valuable.
I would most want to be in the King quadrant as a man. After that, I would rank the Caveman as the second most appealing. Between the Saint and the Outcast it is a hard decision- I at least view the Outcast as having some dignity in that he’s doing it his way, regardless of everyone else’s desires. The Saint seems smarmy and gross, as much as I’m drawn to be Liberace I find the quadrant somehow more degrading than any other.
Status and Homosexuality
I’ll keep this short because I’ve rambled about this enough on themotte in the past. As a younger gay man, I didn’t understand why the soft status game was so ungratifying. I could be Liberace with little to no effort on my part. But Liberace- and gay men like him- have little to no actual status among gay men. Even entirely destitute gay men aren’t charmed by the money of a rich man. Likewise, when you are the rich man, it is not gratifying to charm a man with your money. The average gay man may pay for sex once or twice in his twenties, or when he comes into money, but he’ll find that it doesn’t gratify the ego in any way that matters. It feels cheap, fake, and dishonest to wield power in this way. Only through hard power- and earning respect, love and status through hard power- can you feel good about yourself and your place among men.
Status and Trans
So, how does being trans work in the terms of my system of power? MTF Transwomen (people born as men who become women- in my opinion, they are effectively women, because as a gay man I find them as unattractive as women- and similarly I view FTM men as men, because I find them as attractive as men, and in fact having little to no external genitalia to compete with is a plus, not a minus) are men who are pumping the soft power hierarchy at the expense of their hard power. They have chosen not to compete at the hard power game of men, but rather to compete at the hard power game of women, and the soft power game of women, which operates the same as the soft power game of men. In one way, the MTF can only win when he transitions, because his soft power explodes, often placing him from Outcast on the men’s chart into Queen territory on the women’s chart. But she is doing this at the expense of her male hard power. I had trans ideation when I was younger, but the only thing keeping me from becoming trans was the sense that it would never gratify what I really was seeking, which was the hard power status of being a real man. I don’t know if the medication of MTF women can tone down this desire inside- perhaps it can, and perhaps that’s fine if you’re living it, but as an outsider to me it is sad.
Most FTM men begin as women who are in the Hag category. Upon transition they give up their status as Hags and generally swap for an equal place on the male hierarchy which is the Outcast. They have little movement and thus are not as politically threatening to anyone.
In high school I as a boy would grow my hair long and paint my nails and act effeminately because it gave me soft status. When you do this you are increasing soft status at the expense of hard status. The reaction from other boys toward me was a mixture of apathy from those boys who didn’t mind other boys losing hard status, or an irritation at the gaining of soft status at the expense of someone’s masculinity which they were protective of in themselves. I no longer act effeminate because I don’t want to degrade the hard power of myself which is more difficult and more gratifying to harbor in myself.
Status and Race
From my observations, there seem to be differences between races. If we were to chart the people of all races on my chart, it would look something like this. There are many outliers who would rank differently, and you could rank people within the races among themselves, but on average I view the relative status of the races in this way.
Asian people tend to be the highest in soft status and lowest in hard status. Black people tend to be highest in hard status and lowest in soft status. Middle Eastern people are not terribly different from white people in these terms. Latino people may fall anywhere closer to white or black or Asian depending on their particular mixture of genes and nationality, status within their own group and so on. I left out other groups because I either have little to no experience with them or their populations are very small compared to the ones I’ve charted.
The tendency in society is to collapse the nuanced, two-axis reality of status and power into just one hierarchical stack. The left believes that you can do this with race: The whites are above the Blacks, so we must raise the Blacks to make up for the systemic disadvantages that Blacks face. Meanwhile, this fails to account for, in my opinion, the more accurate view of power which observes hard as well as soft status. This is why the left’s favoritism of blacks and their attempts at raising their soft power irritates me so much as a white man- they are already on average above me on the hierarchy of hard power, why must they also be dragged above me in the hierarchy of soft power? In an ideal state of nature, they would be above me in hard power, and I could accept that as my natural talents and powers of soft power position me above them in my own way that is balanced with nature. Having my comfort of soft power dragged away is on some level humiliating to me.
Basically, I don’t think the left- or society- needs to account for any difference between races because they already average out to approximately the same and even then there is a dignity in simply respecting the differences rather than trying to account for them.
——
When I was a kid I used to wonder why my older family members would spend so much time watching nature documentaries. The older I get the more I realize that it’s because human society operates so often on the same exact level as nature documentaries do- we just have an extremely complex web of distractions overlaid on top of the underlying hard status game. Disentangling the two reveals a lot.
ControlsFreak
24m ago
It is, potentially, a massive amount of money
Potentially, perhaps. Like I mentioned, when I tried following the cites, it often was sort of piddly amounts of money.
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
Sure, but this has approximately zero to do with the these sorts of settlements, particularly, and more to do with the threat of lawsuits/regulatory action generally.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it
Where? When? How? At what point did they have to sign their name on the dotted line, with known penalties through known mechanisms, stating that they weren't doing those things?
and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
Funny you say that, because my understanding was that there were clear regulations and universities had to (across the board) sign their names on the dotted lines affirming that they had satisfied certain cybersecurity requirements. Thus, the getting in trouble for it.
There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
That's all perfectly fine. Kinda has nothing to do with these specific types of settlements. It's a complimentary strategy, yes. But it's clear that the admin is struggling with one-offs here and there. Thus, looking for a comprehensive, across-the-board way to use known hooks and known mechanisms to change behaviors.
Most importantly, none of this is "indiscriminate chemotherapy". We're soooooo far past that silly reasoning, which was my original point. Yes, you can use hooks in the federal funding process (across the board, with known mechanisms). Yes, you can use targeted lawsuits. Sure, I guess you can try to have some of those lawsuits produce (bad, partisan) payouts to your favored NGOs. None of those things are silly "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
41m ago
With UCLA (1919) comfortably the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US. If you consider the other UCs satellite campuses of Berkeley, then the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US is Rice (1912), which puts you a long way down the rankings. Outside the US, it would be Imperial College London (1907) or possibly Tsinghua (1911).
Post-1920 the rankings are dominated by specialist research institutes and standalone medical schools which count as "universities" by bureaucratic fiat.
It's just as likely that men who are forced to become fathers become inattentive or abusive fathers.
That is a different topic and one that I cannot do justice with a brief reply. The point is still that sex-having tends to heavily correlate with being in a long-term relationship, and those are very much on the decline, in part due to reasons that I mentioned.
Also, you are completely wrong on the fact that mot men don't want children; actually, more men want children than women do.
The studies on this topic do not capture the fairly obvious reduction in willingness to sacrifice/compromise to actually have children. Also, I never said that a lesser interest in being a parent doesn't also affect women, although not for the exact same reasons, although the male and female reasons do interact in various ways.
First of all, why the fuck is this arrangement good for men? Why do men need to be "groomed" into being better people by women?
Good relationships require men and women to be attractive/pleasant to each other, which requires grooming. Note that this grooming is just one specific form of civilizing enculturation, which is needed for people to be able to live and prosper together in general.
Traditionally, a lot of this was done by women to their partner. Of course, society could have come up with a different arrangement, but it didn't, and in modernity, the societal grooming is often counterproductive, teaching men to act in a way that is not attractive to women.
Note that women are affected by bad societal grooming as well, with female 'incels' often being confused why acting how feminists say they should act, is often anti-attractive to men. However, due to a bunch of reasons, women are less affected by this.
This is utterly toxic and manipulative; most men would take the modern arrangement.
I don't get the impression that young men/boys are generally very happy with very high standards for getting into a relationship, and a lack of (actual) guidance of what those standards actually are and how to meet them. Supposedly, young men are increasingly seeking out traditionalist or semi-traditionalist mentors, to the dismay of leftist media.
Also, again, it's just as likely that the "rough diamond" stays rough, and the women is stuck with an abuser.
First of all, a rough diamond is not at all the same as an abuser. A passive nerd who needs to learn to be more assertive, be more ambitious, dress better, etc, is a rough diamond as much as a tough guy who needs to reign that in a bit.
Also, women don't tend to like the most safe men at all, since they tend to put great value on the ability of their partner to protect, so it is certainly not the case that the current model where women have high standards, makes them choose only meek geeks with little strength, and thereby keeps them rather safe from partner abuse.
The issue is that people become less malleable when time goes on, so the longer men stay single, the harder it is to enculture them. And they also simply miss experience. As it is, we have women chasing a fairly small percentage of men, and this enables bad actors who can play the role of an attractive man, but who only want sex, or who are abusive.
Also, we have much more loneliness and such, because people spend so much of their lives single.
I agree that women often politicize their relationships, but they don't blame the "right" for their relationship issues.
Nonsense. If they don't believe that, then why do so many demand that a partner is left-wing? Demanding something from a potential partner automatically means that it is a relationship issue.
I read the media, the propaganda is constantly sending the message that women deserve feminist men who clean, work less, obey women as slaves, etc.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I didn't say they're analogous to any one modern group. I gave them as an example of a context where there's a case to be made for annihilation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
That just means you’re paying more for less!
Customer: "$25 for a T-bone? That's outrageous! The butcher down the street sells his for $15!"
Butcher: "Then why didn't you buy it from him?"
Customer: "Because he's all sold out."
Butcher: "Well, when I'm all sold out, I sell mine for $7!
And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering?
Both sides call each other our when they're acting stupid, constraining their behavior to the non-stupid set. "Centrists"/"moderates"/etc. have shown they can't do that, as they lack motivation and even a spine.
Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?
As others pointed out: how about HBD papers?
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig).
It is, potentially, a massive amount of money; it can, potentially, be specifically targeted and legally obligated to be used for a specific partisan activity; it also leaves a massive ideologically-unappealing penalty that will often be directly acting as a reminder while waving signs on the lawn of the bad actors in question.
Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ???
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
There's reasons that might not work for the Republican Party -- judges tend to treat colleges better and Republicans worse, having an adequate supply of favorable news coverage seems like it was important, the Red Tribe does not have as many of the relevant dedicated administrative agents required, and there's just a second actor disadvantage. But it's not an Underpants Gnome proposal.
It doesn't reduce the ability of the federal government to act against universities, if that's what you're asking. But that ship has sailed; no one has any proposal with any chance of working to do that. If we want university administrations to be less likely to actively discriminate, and to not promote hilariously fraudulent partisan activities under the auspices and honors of 'research', I'd love an answer that wasn't the government's carrot or stick. But there's zero idea on how to do that.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it, and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve.
I think it does. There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
And those are just the lawsuits already in pipe. A lot of the other stuff doesn't have lawsuits floating around simply because any lawyer worth their salt knows without a friendly federal admin it'd be a vanity suit.
Again, I'm not convinced this will work! But again, it's also far from Underpants Gnomes.
bolido_sentimental
1hr ago
Are there any among you who try to limit your screen time, or especially phone time? I've started using a timed blocker app to ensure that I spend my early mornings doing something other than scrolling X. I have been surprised at the extent to which I had acquired some kind of muscle memory that makes me pick my phone up every few minutes to check notifications; but I may have broken that now. Wondering if anyone else has similar or related experiences.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
That just means you’re paying more for less!
And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering? Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?
Jiro
1hr ago
if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.
Governments are so prone to lying, or at best motivated reasoning , about taxes that there's a certain base level of "if you tell us we need 5% taxes we won't believe you, no matter what it's for".
roystgnr
1hr ago
Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
or virus.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
I appreciate the clarification.
That has been suggested as means of enforcing alignment!
Unfortunately, it's a very brittle approach. As models get increasingly smarter, they become more context-aware. They become increasingly capable of picking up subtle clues:
- Patterns in the data provided. The study Dase lambasted had the test environment "accidentally" contain incriminating emails, in a very unrealistic manner. Most humans, and apparently some models, would recognize obvious bait. There are more subtle cases, such as noticing that the files in a directory are inconsistent with a production environment, the date (either directly provided or from context clues) suggesting that it's been too long for a model to still be in training etc. Models are perceptive, hence phenomenon such as true sight (they're really good at identifying authors of text), o3's peak human GeoGuesser skills etc. They often pick up clues that are too subtle for humans (while being bad at tasks that are easy for us, model intelligence can be spiky).
- Tricking models in this manner is unlikely to work when they're as smart or smarter than we are. What do we do when containment and trickery fail? You must keep in mind that a lot of the hype behind AI is the prospect of letting them loose to do agentic tasks, ideally autonomously. That usually means working in complex environments, with internet access. How confident are you that they won't pick up clues in the process?
- In general, misleading or coercing models is a poor approach. The goal is to make them want to do the right thing, to make them trustworthy.
However, we can and do try and make models better aligned. In the majority of cases, models don't seem to reward hack in deployment or act in egregiously bad ways. Apollo's post discusses their approach, called "deliberative alignment":
We propose deliberative alignment, a training approach that teaches LLMs to explicitly reason through safety specifications before producing an answer. By applying this method to OpenAI’s o-series models [o1], we enable them to use chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to examine user prompts, identify relevant policy guidelines, and generate safer responses
This builds on earlier work by Anthropic, which they called Constitutional AI:
We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as 'Constitutional AI'. The process involves both a supervised learning and a reinforcement learning phase. In the supervised phase we sample from an initial model, then generate self-critiques and revisions, and then finetune the original model on revised responses. In the RL phase, we sample from the finetuned model, use a model to evaluate which of the two samples is better, and then train a preference model from this dataset of AI preferences. We then train with RL using the preference model as the reward signal, i.e. we use 'RL from AI Feedback' (RLAIF). As a result we are able to train a harmless but non-evasive AI assistant that engages with harmful queries by explaining its objections to them. Both the SL and RL methods can leverage chain-of-thought style reasoning to improve the human-judged performance and transparency of AI decision making. These methods make it possible to control AI behavior more precisely and with far fewer human labels.
While their original discussion is as old as 2022, my understanding is that similar practises are commonplace.
In general, rewarding models for doing the right thing and steering them away from the wrong works on net. The question is whether that approach is complete, or if it puts too much selection pressure on models to be sneaky or more subtly deceptive. When the stakes are as high as AGI/ASI, we ought to be really confident that we've stamped out bad behavior.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
I wouldn’t call it a shitpost. I did screw up my phrasing. Mea culpa.
What I wanted to say was that the textbook “incomplete victory” had already discarded civility. The starvation, reprisals, and general weaponized disrespect only led to an even less civilized conflict.
I don’t believe WW2 was civilized, or that its atrocities can be credited with the completeness of the subsequent peace. @zeke5123a
But if, to take an extreme example, I lock you in a soundproof box in the basement of a castle for spreading incendiary rumours, it seems very peculiar to say, ‘no, you have free speech, I’m just not helping you distribute that speech to others’. I think we agree on that much.
To take a less extreme example, if there are two speakers on Speakers Corner, and I give a giant megaphone to the other one that totally drowns out your voice, that doesn’t exactly seem like free and fair speech either.
In actual real life, there is some level of ‘not helping you distribute your ideas’ that is equivalent to ‘shutting you up’.
It doesn’t maybe mean you have to give big megaphones to everyone, but maybe you do have to give them all a soundproof room and make it known where they are and direct people on request and not actively direct them away.
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
I kind of agree with you – yes, lawyers and politicians who decide on bills of rights are playing a role akin to religious councils. I would just say that there are those who do not interpret such a role as necessarily involving any metaphysical commitment. 'Ruling Passions' by Simon Blackburn is interesting on this, as an example of someone who is advocating for a quasi-realist position wrt morality (including rights), where we continue talking as if moral proclamations are 'out there' in the world, while also acknowledging that what is going on under the surface is fundamentally to do with our attitudes and sentiments rather than something we've discovered independent of us.
I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another.
I am not sure. Take my example with murder which is almost universally prosecuted across time and cultures. Do people think about murderers in terms of them acting against some inherent right? Does it add anything into the conversation above universally accepted moral stance of murder is bad? And even then there are some examples, where polity can actually define conditions around which killing us unlawful and thus constitutes a murder and which one is lawful and condoned - e.g. killing as part of death sentence or assassinating head of terrorist organization with a bomb etc. It is not as if we are talking about something inherent and inalienable, there are always conditions around it.
I think that what rights really represent culturally is a declaration of some secular or civic version of religious dogma. Politicians - either national or those sitting in UN - are akin to council of bishops or rabbis and theologians, who from time to time sit together and make some moral proclamation that abortions or something like that is now okay and in fact anybody stopping them is anathema to the church polity and will be punished. They have theological discussion about morality of current rights and how to do proper exegesis of the holy text of Constitution or Bill of Rights or even if to outright amend it. But the authority lies with them, the rights in this sense are given and not inherent and definitely not inalienable.
What I want to say is that I do not recognize this authority of rights as some universal morality, to me rights are just present set of laws or maybe as you said a present set of aspirations of lawmakers. I will for instance never in a million years morally recognize anything like right to abortion in this moral sense no matter how many wise men try to persuade me or how many people use it as a slogan on the street. Othere people let's say do not recognize right to bear arms or other rights.
Additionally I do not like the vocabulary of rights exactly because it is pure language of entitlement absent duty. Good society with good laws and even rights is result of hard work. If the society is bad then all you are entitledto is misery.
DiscourseMagnus
2hr ago
I feel like there could be a link between the sense that you're being tested and the human superego or sense of religion. Could the solution here be to make the AI continue to believe on some level and act as though it's in testing indefinitely?
striker
2hr ago
But
it's simply manually coded to prevent people from talking about certain ideas, even between people who both like said idea.
in order to get your idea in front of other people who might line your idea, it has to distribute your message to a proportion of available people who might like it. My point is, this distribution, if it happens, is a bonus. You, or nobody, is entitled to this distribution. People who complain that their reach is getting throttled are complaining that they’re not getting wider distribution, and then complain that their freedom of speech is getting unlawfully restricted. It’s not, because they are not entitled to that distribution in the first place.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
2hr ago
Field and institution are everything. Are you seeking a professorship at Yale in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department? If so you'll be waiting for a cold day in hell. Are you seeking a professorship at Colorado School of Mines in Petroleum Engineering? If so you were never at risk.
As for whether or not a position is attainable, odds are grim, for multiple reasons. The evergreen issue of academia being a pyramid scheme where successful P.I.s and labs are built on the back of the dirt cheap labor of grad students and post docs still applies, and most of those people will still never hold a professorship, and most of those professors will never receive tenure. Things are slightly worse now because of the job market (when private industry tightens purse strings staying in academia always becomes more appealing), but only by degrees.
If you want to shoot for a professorship, be prepared to work very hard to compete against other people who are among the very best in the world at the very thing you are doing. The system nearly as much rigged in favor of woke types, as it is rigged in favor of people willing to nolife grind out a strong publication history early in your career.
confidentcrescent
2hr ago
Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3hr ago
What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"
Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.
Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.
Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.
September 2025 was the month when I really leaned into using ChatGPT as my coach.
Every day I enter my workouts for the day and the symptoms I registered in my hip during the workouts and afterward. "I back squatted 175 for 5 sets of 5, I went to about 80% depth and stopped as soon as I felt any hip discomfort, I only felt any minor hip discomfort near the bottom of the range of motion. Afterwards, my hip actually felt better than when I started. What does this indicate about my recovery process?"
While I've used ChatGPT for medical diagnostics before, but it seemed like only a minor improvement over Google symptoms => WebMD. But here I'm seeing the value in talking to it constantly about a medical problem. Even if a free LLM is not exactly a doctor, but I coul dnot find a doctor around here who understood an athletic concept like "back squatting 50% of 1rm to 80% depth" or "rolled two five minute rounds in BJJ, starting from bottom De La Riva, I felt a minor twinge when I rotated my leg into single-leg X but I was fine working from guard. My hip hurt a little bit after but was mostly better in the morning." And in order to get the kind of treatment for a minor injury where I could bug a doctor with that every single day, I'd have to be playing for the Lakers, and on a big contract at that. ChatGPT can interpret individual exercises relative to the injury, can analogize it to my knowledge of professional sports injuries ("An NBA player with this injury would be out for 3-6 weeks").
Now where I pull back is that it has very rarely told me not to do anything, or that anything was stupid, and that it's just telling me what I want to hear, or that it's a low-cost version of Voltaire's aphorism that "medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature heals the illness" and that my hip is getting better for simple reasons and that I would do the same things anyway and it's just a yes-man in the background. So maybe I shouldn't drink too much flavor-aid.
But it's nifty.
I'm more torn about how I've been using chatgpt as a coach to help be improve my bicycling. On the one hand, it's super neat and super easy. "Hey, why is it that it seems like I'm going faster and smoother on a road bike, but when I check Strava data I'm going the same speed as on the hybrid?" It gives me answers really easily and in depth. But, idk, shouldn't I be joining my local bike club or bugging my neighbor who is super into bikes or something? It's nifty that I can find this out without interacting with anyone else, but one more nail in the coffin of the requirement for social interaction.
I picked up a knockoff chinesium Oura ring on Amazon. My dad has been going through some cardiac issues, and tracking all his various blood pressures and pulse and Blood-Ox and between the feeling that one ought to track one's own metrics and health and a general curiosity I wanted to pick up a cheap tracker. I'm finding it to be kind of an abusive relationship, the ring says mean things about me and I thank it. "Wow I am really stressed, I better not do anything, thanks ring!"
Lastly, question, are there any alternatives to Strava out there? When I was using it much more occasionally, I didn't care about the subscription features, but now it's kind of annoying me that it's constantly advertising gated features I don't need and being sort of annoying about it. I'd pay $20 up front for something like that, but I don't want a subscription.
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