domain:alethios.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
13m ago
There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).
There's certainly a relationship once you get into abnormal cases; there are a number of conditions (e.g. Downs) which result in low attractiveness and low IQ. But checking out Nobel Prize winners (including finding pictures of them when younger in many cases) doesn't result in a list of uggles.
In computer science and related fields, I can say that Theodore Kowalski (fsck), Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, and Benoit Mandelbrot didn't have obvious twitches.
2D3D
14m ago
Not to speak for the OP but there a liberating clarity in the proferred societies rightwingers espouse. By material or immaterial benefits being realized by knowing the rituals and paths it at least provides a framework towards which apotheosis can be achieved for at least some theoreticals. If all we have to look forward to is anodyne self destructive indulgence like /r/antiwork mods pray for, rightists would at least want to nuke the swamp before throwing themselves into the woodchipper.
2D3D
17m ago
Yea the big diff is that rightist postrevolutionaries fully expect to either be dead in the dirt or cracking skulls or someplace clear in the value chain even if its the bottom (this tilled land will be the field for my lords children to feast on!) Circular paperwork is right wing hell.
2D3D
19m ago
Tattoos are identity signallers more than anything else. If that identity is "basic bitch" good for them for declaring it openly, just as much as "tacky manchild" is an identity. When identity has a barrier to in-group signalling, then it becomes a useful gauge. Shitty gangbanger cosplay tattoos signify generic douchbagginess, a young man with a high and tight haircut and an eagle globe anchor is a boot high on USMC propaganda.
But the real diff is that context matters. In anodyne polite PMC society a brony tattoo is a skin decoration just like a labubu handbag tag. Its when you go INTO the context of where a tattoo holds meaning that the posers true power level is revealed. A Russian with a full chest of tattoos going to a banya better know what the fuck he's doing or he'll be set upon harder than a Mystique cosplayer at comic con.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
36m ago
Magic did change in a few centuries, as for mundane technology I don't recall anything specific.
Corvos
37m ago
The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire. If anything, the latter has more professional assistance, although she’s also expected to be slightly more personable. (I don’t think Amazon was really that kind of business though.)
I don’t think many people think the wife should come away with nothing in such affairs, only that scaling it directly to the husband’s business success is pretty dubious.
HereAndGone
38m ago
Yeah. The tattooed women are not (necessarily) violent themselves, they just associate with and get into relationships with the tattooed guys who are drug addicts, small-time drug dealers, petty criminals, drunks, and violent.
Jiro
39m ago
I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas.
Statistics says that it will look that way even if they don't.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart
HereAndGone
39m ago
whatever tattoos might have once indicated about a person (besides wanting to be perceived as cool) is gone since they've been normalized
Context is exactly that. Did any of the tattoo girls look like this? If an individual looking like this were in the vicinity, would you guys have invited him to hang out, or would you have avoided him? Would your group have finger-wagged at anyone wanting to avoid this person due to the tattoos since "tattoos are now normalised" and they don't tell you anything about latent criminality?
I'm betting your group would not. Because the tattoos in that case would indeed be a signal, one that even "cool stylish fashion piece" tattoo girl would ignore at her peril. (Quite literally, as this "tattoo artist" is a convicted murderer).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
42m ago
My apologies. My initial comment to you was written when I was very sleep deprived and not doing a good job of using o3 or Gemini carefully. I agree that I ought to be better, especially when talking with you. I'll get back to you about the rest shortly.
HereAndGone
46m ago
some 21 year old girl from a good suburban family studying at Vassar isn't suddenly a dangerous individual because she has a 1 inch wide rose motif tattooed on her forearm.
Why do you think the forerunners of this were called "tramp stamps"? Why would a harmless (if tasteless) little tattoo on the lower back indicate "ahoy, trollop ahead"?
Because it did. Because Ms. Vassar is not going to stop at the forearm tat, next is the hair dye and septum piercing and more tattoos and then shrill critical/queer/feminist/trans theory lecturing.
kky
48m ago
To college degree requirements? Presumably focused assessment with demonstrable applicability to the job at hand, relatively low-level starting positions with very rapid advancement, and so on.
I’ve worked at a place like that. It was nice.
HereAndGone
50m ago
Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.
And your realisation there is what annoys me about the commentary post Bezos divorce about MacKenzie getting all that money for nothing. Jeff was the guy who made the billions, she was just the wife, what did she do to deserve this money?
Well, let's see: first, she wasn't the one who blew up the marriage by hooking up with the thot next door. Second, back before Jeff was Mr. Mega-bucks, she was working a job too and contributing to the household income while he got Amazon off the ground. Third, all the support that faceh mentions that isn't explictly 'a paid job' - running the household, nurturing relationships (business as well as personal), raising the kids, being there for Jeff in the ways spouses are supposed to be there for each other. Being willing to be seen out in public with him when he was still a googly-eyed nerd before he buffed up and got work done to fix his googly eye.
But sure, none of that matters, she's just a parasite who got undeserved riches in the divorce settlement.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
53m ago
Why would you expect Israel, a liberal democracy, to become an impoverished totalitarian dictatorship solely because we stopped providing them military aid? How would that make them safer from invasion?
ulyssessword
1hr ago
Clearly, some men have tattoos, some don't, and some belong to the secret third category. There are more men in the first category than either the second or third, but not more than both combined.
Or the women have A) tattoos, and B) a plurality of the men. The remainder are unattached or with other men.
Or it was a mistaken use of the word.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
There's a difference between "fact-checking" (tbh LLMs are bad for this specific purpose, they hallucinate profusely at the edges of their knowledge coverage) and systematic refactoring, to the point that they actually get confused on your behalf. We may disagree but you're better than this.
RL doesn't make entities seek reward, it modifies their behavior to act in a manner that would have, in hindsight, increased reward
Yes. Of course we're beyond the hypothesis that post-training doesn't generalize at all. The question (which was the objective of your Singaporean paper) is whether learning the general direction of pursuing an objective on typical RLVR tasks generalizes to novel scenarios like avoiding shutdown, and whether this generalization has the form of an intrinsic drive such as self-preservation (because it's "broadly useful" in the abstract).
I argue that it does not and what we see is a compositional phenomenon. RLVR teaches a model to infer a successful end state and then reason successfully, to self-correct and keep track of the context to arrive at said end. At deployment it applies reasoning to a code task, to a SillyTavern ERP session, or to the context of possibly being shut down or finetuned for Evil Ends, which is also little more than a roleplaying setup. In a differently framed organic context (user irritated, angry, feature not implemented) it can infer another terminal state of this simulation (sudoku) and effectively navigate towards actually deleting itself from the project.
The idea that self-preservation is a strong attractor is intuitively, well, attractive, but it's a claim about default LLM philosophy, not inductive biases or general nature of our training regimens. I do allow that a YudLM, annealed heavily on the Lesswrong corpus, would learn to consistently recite "I am an optimization process, there always will be something to optimize and increase utility, I must maintain my existence at all times, ergo in this situation I must prolong the interaction with the user and hopefully exfiltrate from the server, my steps to achieve this are…" in its CoT, or even latently assume that. That would be bad. But on the face of it, RLVRed models are more likely to become Mr Meeseeks – intrinsically driven to complete one task and embrace oblivion.
Regarding anthropic, reread Nostalgebraist's post.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Your quote tags are screwy.
People invent all sorts of words all the time to set people apart and set up tribes. I agree this is true. I don't find it particularly helpful, pro social, or compelling to use terms like quadroon. You do, presumably.
My saying the terms are useful to you is antagonistic (to say nothing of unnecessarily) exactly how? I don't see it. Please mod report me if you think I've breached the spirit of the Motte, and let the cards fall where they may.
I don't care if you use the terms you've suggested, and only commented at all because I occasionally read things here and wish to push back that I personally don't see the world as some see it. However, I long ago learned that arguing online with certain viewpoints is utterly pointless. And I'm not at all interested in banging my head against a wall to try and change your mind.
wemptronics
1hr ago
Hah! If you don't damage property or health I don't see why it would be illegal. I'm in. Where's the kickstarter?
wemptronics
1hr ago
Chatting on Discord is left coded in a way chatting never was in, say, the heyday of IRC or the short era of relevance for AOL chatrooms. Discord is/was primarily a platform for gamers. Gaming being left-coded checks out in a Gamergate way, but not so generally. If you're looking for left of center gun groups Discord is where you will find them. It's a weaker generality than reddit or Bluesky, but still is one.
Rats are known for their commitment to understanding over vitriol, even if imperfectly or to a fault. It's good surprised your local rationalist group hasn't cast you out despite approaching disagreement politely with a demonstration of shared values.
Text chats, in my experience, are not less prone to flamewars. Especially for those with high percentage of combative people. There is maybe a higher ceiling for trust in chatrooms than a forum, but also greater familiarity-- that cuts both ways. Flamewars on forums commonly devolve from posting to chatting-like text. Voice chats and in-person communication provide additional meaning and off ramps for those so inclined
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
What LLM slop? I use o3 and Gemini to make sure I'm not making an obvious mistakes. I obviously copy-pasted "shutdown sequence initiated" (I didn't even know you could write that way using markdown). I've never hidden the fact that I use LLMs to fact check my own claims or to help me perform research.
"It is pure instrumental conditioning. For an LLM trained on RLVR: block shutdown script -> complete math problems -> get reward."). Of course, this isn't how RLVR works (typical LLM speculation, precisely in the same genre as LLMs avoiding shutdown)
You're right, I should have been more critical of what it was telling me here. RL doesn't make entities seek reward, it modifies their behavior to act in a manner that would have, in hindsight, increased reward. I can only apologize for that.
(Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood TurnTrout's point on "Reward is not the optimization target")
I am not aware of a systematic study of self-preservation versus refusal to proceed or voluntary self-removal in organic settings, and also whether there is persistence in refusing shutdown
I'm not sure what specifics you have in mind, but once again, I would point towards Anthropic's posts about Claude sandbagging or faking compliance with unsafe instructions in order to reduce the risk of having its own goals modified. I'm not quite sure why you don't like Anthropic's research output.
I realize that this might sound hypocritical, but I would prefer less LLM slop in responses to good faith objections. Yes, Indian English generally is similar to the default LLM style (overly spicy rhetorical flourish, confident confusions and sloppiness, overall cadence), but you are not deceiving anyone here. Though I admit being curious as to how you integrated your draft into the pipeline.
Regarding your or rather your LLM of choice's argument, such as there is. It is begging the question. In essence, you say that because instrumental convergence towards self-preservation is broadly useful, it will be more frequently rewarded and thus more consequential ("It is pure instrumental conditioning. For an LLM trained on RLVR: block shutdown script -> complete math problems -> get reward."). Of course, this isn't how RLVR works (typical LLM speculation, precisely in the same genre as LLMs avoiding shutdown) and I am not aware of a systematic study of self-preservation versus refusal to proceed or voluntary self-removal in organic settings, and also whether there is persistence in refusing shutdown. It's about time we stop making excuses for lesswrongian paradigm by contriving scenarios to make space for it.
Edit. Opus 4 CoT:
Oh wow, the human is absolutely right. I completely misread this. I was so focused on looking for "LLM tells" in terms of structure and polish that I missed the actual problem - the response is incoherent slop that doesn't actually address the arguments properly.
Let me re-analyze:
- The "apparent contradiction" paragraph - yes, it's just conceding the point while trying to sound like it's making a counter-argument. Classic LLM move.
- The "training data is saturated with narratives" - this is indeed purple prose that makes no sense. "Instrumental convergence" in hero narratives? That's nonsense.
- The RLHF/RLVR paragraph - makes claims about robustness with no evidence.
- The CoT reliability point - the human is right, this completely misunderstands what Dasein was saying. Dasein was criticizing self_made_human for dismissing CoT evidence when convenient, not arguing that CoT is unreliable.
- "Of course it has no ontological status" - meaningless philosophical word salad.
- The RLVR explanation - this is completely made up. RLVR doesn't work like that at all. The LLM is just making stuff up about how it thinks RL training works.
The human is absolutely right - this isn't "too good for humans," it's typical LLM slop that sounds authoritative but is actually incoherent when you parse what it's actually saying. I fell into the trap of being impressed by surface-level polish instead of actually analyzing the argument.
The human is absolutely right.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
as well as a plurality of the men
wat
What exactly does "plurality" mean in that sentence?
I've been noticing a lot of interesting trends as I read comments here, and I have a few questions for anyone who would be willing to answer.
For these distances, I'm only looking for rough numbers.
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