sodiummuffin
23hr ago
And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.
Well, really it's "make as much money as possible."
I think people really tend to overrate how much people prioritize maximizing corporate profits compared to ideological motives. Reddit higher-ups genuinely think it's bad when users "advocate violence", they mentally associate it with some sort of Reddit lynch-mob psyching themselves up to murder someone or with those news stories blaming the Rohingya genocide on Facebook. They might also mention something about advertisers if you asked but mostly they just genuinely think it would be morally wrong to allow it, so they created site-wide rules about it many years ago. Much more recently they made an AI to do moderation at scale. The AI can't distinguish between your post and the sort of advocating violence they actually care about, in part because the distinction isn't articulated anywhere or even really thought-out. LLMs aren't relevant because they want pacifist training data, LLMs are relevant in that "automated Reddit moderator banning people for advocating violence" is now something that can exist at all. Anthropic literally scanned millions of print books for more training data, AI companies are not trying to do alignment by sanitizing violence from their training data, especially not in such a roundabout way.
YoungAchamian
23hr ago
I think this gets into what is a "world model" that I owe self_made_human a definition and a response to. But I'd say cause-effect relationships are indeed patterns and regularities, there's no dispute there. However, there's a crucial distinction between representing causal relationships explicitly, structurally, or inductively, versus representing them implicitly through statistical co-occurrence. LLMs are powerful precisely because they detect regularities, like causal relationships, as statistical correlations within their training corpus. But this implicit statistical encoding is fundamentally different from the structured causal reasoning humans perform, which allows us to infer and generalize causation even in novel scenarios or outside the scope of previously observed data. Thus, while cause-effect relationships certainly are patterns, the question isn't whether LLMs capture them statistically, they clearly do, but rather whether they represent them in a structured, grounded, explicitly causal way. Current research, that I have seen, strongly suggests that they do not. If you have evidence that suggests they do I'd be overjoyed to see it because getting AIs to do inductive reasoning in a game-playing domain is an area of interest to me.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
I do get what they lived through, though I disagree with the entirety of their political bent and find the role they played in the spread of identity-Marxism and its promulgation into Western academia to be extremely harmful (my initial comment in this thread detailing Marcuse's "solution" for the West contained a very scornful remark about how he should have just stayed in Germany and let the Nazis take him; I had the good sense to edit it out because the second I wrote it I just thought "Jesus Christ").
But the lack of self-awareness more broadly in their political scholarship really gets to me. Their writings are full of the idea that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order". The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Of course, when you're usurping a liberal system yourself and subverting it to your own ends, well, to use the Weimar Republic analogy, you need to ask yourself the question: Are we the Nazis? It's not as if most Nazis believed they were horrible people doing bad things, after all; they believed they were entirely justified, and their rationale for censorship and repression was undoubtedly similar. How do you know that's not what you're doing?
I will say I think the wars of the 20th century irreparably shaped philosophy, art and thinking in ways that seem to have been a net negative (to me at least). Things start getting very strange during the inter-war period, and then go absolutely wild post-war. This was a period where the idea of jettisoning virtually every vestige of the Enlightenment became vogue, and you can see that trend exemplified in many domains like political philosophy, architecture and art. There were thinkers who advocated it beforehand, but the early 20th century was the point where it spread like wildfire, and WW2 in particular resulted in a lot of the radical German left arriving on American soil; an environment without any antibodies to their memes. Ideals like liberalism and nationalism, the notion of reason and empiricism being desirable, as well as the rationalist neoclassicism of the era, were ravaged in the fire of the wars.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.)
Nietzsche is good. I've had a gander at some of his stuff, though like the other commenter I half-think this is cheating. Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making. You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone. Some of what you've mentioned here about your engagement with continental philosophy seems to confirm that belief.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis.
This is fair; continental philosophy is a very wide-spanning term that encapsulates a lot of very different philosophical traditions. Still, they have undoubtedly influenced each other and there is a lot of crosstalk, and that broad assertion about "continental philosophy" was just meant as a description of the general trend in my experience - not excluding of course that there is some continental philosophy I can and do actually enjoy.
Also, from your other comment further down in the thread:
I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
EDIT: removed a section
faceh
23hr ago
Partly explains why people can be so flaky about attending events (or dates) that they in theory agreed to.
They overschedule and end up more tired than they expected when the time comes.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In work vehicles? They would have been insured commercially. Neither will work again(at fault accidents are a killer for driving a commercial vehicle), but both insurance policies have the money.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Country has been having a thing recently, it's really just pop music that's rebranded.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I was first introduced to myers-briggs in a religious ed class. I've noted before that Catholic school religious education is essentially useless- not from an it's all fake perspective(I am not an atheist) but from a 'there is no curriculum and so we learn nothing but the teacher's personality' perspective. We had guest lectures on the ancient aliens theory. We watched movies. We learned interesting, but not particularly relevant, facts about church history. Once a year, we picked a saint and wrote a biography. I submitted the exact same thing every year; so did half the rest of the class. Nobody ever noticed. If there was something on campus, we got out of religion class to go to it. If there was a project to do, we had study hall. If the teacher had some sort of personal idiosyncracy, 'the intersection of a vegan diet and the Catholic faith' could eat up several class periods. I liked the older teachers better than the theoretically better qualified ones.
Anyways, one of the projects given to absorb classtime was to research myers-briggs and write about your temperament in connection with faith. This was incredibly vague and, as I recall, like one half of one paragraph. It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
So you're a filthy casual?
You know.... unironically yes, but only because I feel like the ground shifted from underneath my feet. I mean, minus the mobile gaming thing but let me explain.
I think nearly all gaming up until mobile gaming and esports would be considered casual to modern sensibilities. There were no global rankings for Quake, you might even play only the single player game and never venture online with QuakeWorld! You might only play custom maps for StarCraft or WarCraft III. Did StarCraft even have a global ranking system or did that not start until StarCraft II? Jagged Alliance IMHO is hardcore as fuck, but it's also largely a sandbox for fucking around and beating it at all represents a substantial achievement.
None of these games have the sort of cutthroat competition a global ranking system introduces, nor the sort of metagame progression or constant attaboys of unlockables, achievements or cosmetics that mediocre modern games might shower you with to try to keep you around. They aren't super sweaty, and you can probably see everything they have to offer in terms of novelty in about 10-20 hours.
And yet, the moment to moment gameplay of them is so fun, I return to them over and over and over again. I don't need a global ranking, achievements, or loot crates to make Quake 3 on a LAN just as fun as it ever was in 2000. Or playing through the StarCraft campaign again. Or firing up Jagged Alliance for the first time a few years ago. They were made fun for fun's sake. And that, unironically, seems to code as "casual" now.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man--the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him [...]
this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift--these are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting "the bounce" Saturday night holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate--and do not think it necessary to. [...]
"You see that bookkeeper," said a foreman to me in a large factory. "Yes; what about him?" "Well, he's a fine accountant, but if I'd send him up-town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street would forget what he had been sent for."
"A Message to Garcia", Elbert Hubbard, 1899.
I sometimes wonder if I've just been very lucky in my professional career, or if people are actually significantly more competent and professional and capable as a baseline than they used to be.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
It's not a circular argument at all, because it's not the only reason why Tiktok is a threat. It's an auxiliary point of "Hey shit this is so dangerous that two presidents in a row would rather break the law than stop it" with the main danger being ya know, the reason we passed the law to begin with.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up. Now it’s mostly low effort and tryhard shlock that most people have heard some version of before. The memes are not original, in fact they’re basically the same stuff that would have been posted there 20 years ago with names updated. The AITAH and similar talk forums are basically barely realistic fanfic level crap that doesn’t even bring up interesting discussions— and the user is never the asshole because Reddit doesn’t think any relationship is worth working through the slightest problem for. Like if she burned your dinner, you should dump her immediately, if not sooner, and be sure to ruin something she loves on the way out the door.
Avant Garde stuff does not come from places curated to mainstream tastes. TBH I’d look at 8chan or something for that kind of future opinion shaping.
That's how Anglo-Americans traditionally (read pre-CRA) viewed it. That's not how continental Europeeans ever viewed it.
Ok well in the case of us (me, and the jubilee guy) being American, the American view is pretty relevant here.
And considering how poorly Europe has been on free speech lately, I'm even less enthused about their philosophy.
Consider a church that a large majority of your society attends (let's call it the catholic church, for "universal"). Let's say this catholic church has formal processes that would impose specific penalties on its members if they associate with people deemed unsavory by the institution. This is not a government institution, and yet it possesses large powers of censorship through this simple application of freedom of association.
If you get large enough it basically becomes a psuedo-government at that point and I would entertain the argument. Throughout much of history, this has been the case so yeah I'd agree we should be cautious.
But America is widely diversified. There is not a single corporate/religious/etc other private entity with that power. In many ways this can beneficial for them because there's a shit ton of powerful rich groups willing to support you. Shiloh Hendricks as an example made almost a million dollars just for being a viral cancel culture focus.
It certainly doesn't seem like there is an all encompassing major institution where dissent = failed life if even the closest thing to that has its victims made millionaires. Maybe it tries, but it's been proven over and over again to be lacking in power outside of a limited subset of society.
GBRK
1d ago
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
I wasn't, but by my estimation the built in software features accurately figure out the state of my body. Maybe the software has just been updated since you tried your experiment.
faceh
1d ago
I'm three years into my ban from Reddit and its been the best thing that ever happened to me.
I think its now obvious that reddit isn't driving any real world events anymore, its not even a bellwether for how the internet feels about national or global events. I watched from the sidelines when the proles got all uppity because Reddit was going to start charging for its API (and thus killing off popular free apps) thanks to AI scraping and such.
Mods organized protests, users voiced their anger... and the Admins clamped down on everything, replaced the worst offenders, ignored the dissent, and things rolled on as before. Nobody even mentions it now.
If Reddit users can't even influence outcomes on the site itself, they're pretty useless for influencing anything outside of it, no? So you would ONLY want to be on there if you could acquire useful information somehow, or b/c you enjoy an echo chamber. Or porn.
Corvos
1d ago
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them
Yeah, this was basically my big problem as well. I think it can work, it just needs to accept that mood management requires more than a ping and a condescending message.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
This only works until AI decides to turn the whole planet into computronium. Which will take, what, a couple of years, tops? The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight; we need to shut it all down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I have a playlist of BJJ instructional videos miles deep that I want to study to learn more about aspects of BJJ I need to work on. But whenever I have free time to devote to BJJ, I'm at the gym rolling. If it's a night I'm not rolling, it's either because I'm too busy at work, or that I'm doing some other workout or activity, or I'm spending time with my wife; so I don't have the time to watch the instructionals, the entire BJJ time budget is eaten up by going to the gym. So it might be that they have a few hours a week to devote to this goal, and their choices are flashcards or happy hour, and they pick happy hour.
For that matter, if I had a magic trick to just make myself better at Jiu Jitsu, downloaded into my brain Matrix style, I don't know that I'd really want to be an insta-black belt. I'm not sure that would make the hobby more fun for me. I might want to be better than I am, maybe closer to Blue Belt, knowing more about how to handle certain situations I get trapped in, or how to avoid stalling out mid roll, but part of the fun is learning and I'd hate to skip over that.
Relatedly, I could probably get better at rock climbing if I spent time fingerboarding, but I don't. I find it boring and distasteful, and I don't really want to train rock climbing that way. I mostly just want to climb, and if I get better I get better. And some people look at that and say I don't really want to get better, but in my mind I do want to get better, my way; I want to get better, but I want the aesthetic experience more, getting better isn't the end unto itself. Like playing Pokemon and picking a min-maxed well balanced team of 3 good pokemon, vs just catching your favorites and figuring out how to make them work. The latter player wants to beat the game, but not as much as they want to beat the game with Venusaur and Scyther on their team.
That being said, I feel like you're seeing some kind of selection effect here. Most people suck at things, and they keep sucking at them, and they stop doing things they suck at after a while. The 75th percentile person who tries to learn Spanish in the sense of downloading DuoLingo or buying some books never learns any Spanish at all. What makes the people at your meetup group unusual is that they're continuing to put effort in, which probably relates to the low-investment social habit.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
They mostly expect to have normal jobs. Accountant, plumber, teacher, cop, that sort of thing.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
But the median non-human animal is probably a termite whose population size is measured in the zillions of myriads, not some endangered species. Because many of these species are un-extirpatable(see rats, cockroaches, etc) and others are beneath our notice but benefit strongly from us(pigeons etc).
Maybe, in the event that AIdoomers aren't just huffing, there will be tribes of feral humans living in the now abandoned wastes, farming and fishing and whatnot. Maybe feral humans will be tapped into the automated powerplants, and this is as beneath skynet's notice as the squirrels in your attic. Maybe AI will write pocket articles about 'what to do when a tribe of feral humans camp between the cooling towers of your datacenter'. I told chatgpt to write that article, actually. Suggestions included decoy towers.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood : Closer to 8 than it is to 7
A show that frustrated me. Too tropey, too many characters being retarded. I find it hard to articulate my dissatisfaction in a satisfactory way.
FMAB represents everything that's simultaneously right and wrong with shounen storytelling. The worldbuilding is genuinely excellent: alchemy as magic system with consistent rules and costs, political intrigue that feels like actual statecraft, character motivations that make sense within their contexts.
But the show consistently undermines itself with genre conventions that feel obligatory rather than organic. The power of friendship speeches, the reluctance to actually kill major characters, the way complex moral situations get resolved through superior firepower, it all feels like the show is checking boxes rather than exploring the implications of its own premise.
You should really try the original Fullmetal Alchemist.
First of all, if you only watched Brotherhood, you completely missed the setup, because Brotherhood speeds through the early episodes on the assumption that you have watched the 2003 version. Second, it is a much darker, cerebral, and emotional story. It's not filled with fights and comedy and friendship speeches the way Brotherhood is. 2003 avoids the standard battle shonen cliches in favor of telling a more dramatic and philosophical story using the exact same setting and characters.
It's like Fullmetal Alchemist for grownups.
My own recommendations:
Erased (AKA The Town Without Me) is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. It's also only one cour long.
The Promised Neverland. The first season is incredible, and ends at a very natural stopping point, but definitely leaves room to continue the story. The second season is legendary for how bad it was, and most fans pretend that it doesn't exist. It works really well if you choose to treat it is as a single-cour anime. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Except there was a really loud leftist/arab group celebrating Oct. 7 basically immediately. There were "Al Aqsa Flood"/pro-Palestinian parades/celebratory demonstrations in several US cities in early October, 2024, and lots of random hang-glider imagery.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
Maybe I hadn't aged enough, but I didn't notice myself having a reaction like this before. It was more of a cursory "she's young and pretty, but not my thing" thing.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
Guns in the UK? I thought you weren't allowed even pointy scissors and pocketknives that lock.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
One use I have for MBTI (InTx btw) is safely demonstrating diversity. Not on a forum like ours, where INTJ/P are dominant, but in a more normie company it can be eye-opening how different people are. Like, a guy you are buddies with tells you he's an ESFJ and you're like "woah, he should be the complete opposite of me, he has answered every question on this quiz wrong and yet he's still a human being I enjoy working/studying/hanging out with".
Possibly, I can get where it feels like they are lording it over all the peons in the thread and why that would be frustrating. But at the same time I think they have some frustration about all the lay-peeps writing long posts full of complex semantic arguments that wouldn't pass technical muster (directionally). I interpreted the whole patent + degree bit as a bid to establish some credibility, not to lord it over people. I also think they aren't directly in the LLM space (I predict the signal processing domain!) so some of their technical explanations miss some important details. This forum is full of autists who can't admit they are wrong so the later part is just par for the course. No idea why everyone needs to get so riled up about this topic.
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