domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13hr ago
I have a few use cases.
- Shitposting. By far the most value I get out of LLMs, to be honest - asking ChatGPT to generate a story where a friend had a steamy romance with Optimus Prime (and then sending it to said friend) had me giggling for like an hour after.
- Spanish practice. I hold LLMs at arms' length because of the way they work (being based around predicting what the next token will be rather than actual understanding of the problem domain), but that approach works just fine for language because it's how we learn language. So I have a lot more willingness to accept the methodology in this problem domain. Plus I don't have any other chances to practice Spanish (cause it isn't socially acceptable to just go up to people who look Latino and talk Spanish to them), so even if it's flawed it's the best I have.
- Generating bash scripts at work. A bash script should be very short (10-20 lines), which means LLMs tend to perform better, and it's easy for me to check at a glance (or at worst, check the syntax is correct in the shell). That said as soon as you get outside bash syntax, there be dragons - LLMs do not (in my experience) do well with things like generating curl requests for vendor APIs. The basic syntax is almost always correct though, which is useful to me because I loathe writing bash.
- Similarly to the above, generating example code for APIs that I know well enough to recognize at a glance if it's correct, but not well enough to write myself without having to poke through the docs. For example, the python threads API. I can ask an LLM to generate a script doing X with threads, and I know instantly whether it's correct, but it would take me probably 30 minutes of poking at the threading docs to write it myself.
All in all, not a ton of actual value for me, but it is non-zero value. Unfortunately LLMs still fall over pretty hard when I try to hand them things that are more challenging for me. For example, recently I asked ChatGPT to do some weird conditional thing in Terraform (which turned out to be impossible as far as I can tell), and instead of saying "that's not possible" (useful, would've saved me a lot of time going down a bad path) it kept hallucinating code which was very sensible and would be nice if it worked, but isn't actually valid syntax. This is unfortunate because that's where the real value would be - I don't need or want an LLM to write code which I can very easily write myself (faster than it'll take me to check the LLM output), but I would like it to assist with things that are on the edges of my subject matter knowledge. Alas, that doesn't really work well right now, but I do get some minor value from the cases I mentioned.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
This seems like it’s born from this particular woman’s anti-marriage ideology than from a strong commentary on hotness.
He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people
We should really let him back; we have a lot of libertarians and alt-right types but not so many God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III Red Tribers. He added color to the place.
bolido_sentimental
14hr ago
I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.
It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
It’s worth noting how total the failure of safe, legal, and rare was- this ain’t even a ‘in practice, Dutch hospices give power of attorney to people who don’t agree with their patients on end of life issues’. Abortion advocates literally don’t advocate for it being rare.
gattsuru
14hr ago
My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.
I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.
I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.
((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))
Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.
astrolabia
14hr ago
... unless it were encased in bone!
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
But the Republican legal movement is overwhelmingly Catholic, which is not by the standards of US conservatives particularly Zionist.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I do not use LLMs as therapists or "buddies".
You know, that shouldn't be unusual enough to count as based. And yet... based tbh.
Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies
What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular?
We don't. The City of Man, as St. Augustine called it, can and does function by harnessing the fear and cupidity of its population. Even in nominally Christian societies, most people obey the law because they fear punishment, and most people labor because they want goodies. Earthly societies work like this. Even the devils in Hell maintain a society that "works" like this. Satan is the top dog; he has goons like Mammon and Baal under him, and every level of the pyramid oppresses those beneath them, and fears and envies those above them.
Of course, the City of Man periodically falls apart. Countries rise and fall, elites are circulated, the 'good times, weak men, hard times' meme cycles. And of course, the City of God, the group of people who obey and work for the sake of love; whether visibly Christian or not, help society run more smoothly. But the Christian church is not One Weird Trick for curing social decay. The visible church is not the City of God. Wheat and tares are mingled together. If anything, whenever the visible church grows more powerful, the City of Man infests it more thoroughly for cynical reasons. "Evil Catholic Church" is not just a Final Fantasy trope.
That said, whenever you see the City of Man being stable via repression, with a degenerate and gluttonous overclass (see China or North Korea); or whenever you see the City of Man losing stability, and devouring itself alive like a swarm of maggots bursting out of a rotting corpse (see the West), that's a hint you don't want to live in place that operates like the City of Man.
"Become Christian to restore the West" is both a trap and easily deboonked. Become Christian because you realize this is not your true homeland. That's it. 🤷♂️
astrolabia
14hr ago
Yep. If everyone carried around a big red button that would kill them painlessly and instantly, even if they were never pressed "accidentally", I think most people wouldn't make it very long.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
14hr ago
Yep, most ai takes on ssc are straight up bad and I'm willing to take a bet on llms crashing the markets or fizzling out hard.
Language models aren't going to lead to agi, asi, whatever they wish to describe it with. I go there and see smart people steeped in religious reverence, the sort mullahs have for Allah.
Scotts piece was terrible and the initial hullabaloo on AI takeoff was hilariously bad. My personal take is that we will never achieve it, and taking bets that cost nearly a trillion is not smart.
Finance barons are looked at as evil people who would fuck over the average Joe during a recession to get bailed out, what happens if techies do it?
Attaching random percentages to things and asking for studies for every thing stops being helpful after a while. Rationalists will deeply regret their ai takes.
roystgnr
14hr ago
I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
Probably prompted by the op-ed a week or two ago, Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death?
The author made a very good case that some utilitarians aren't nearly wise enough to try their hand at maximizing expected utility and should just be deontologists instead.
Not intentionally, of course.
bolido_sentimental
14hr ago
The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.
Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.
But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.
It's gotten worse, but the apps still work in some places.
For a straight man, a place must meet 3 criteria to have a good dating apps scene:
- Large - It's a numbers game. You needs lots of people. Top 10 Metropolitan statistical area is needed.
- Transient - Need young transplants coming in on a regular basis. Large grad student population is always good.
- Majority Female - Male demand >> Female supply. Having more women balances it out.
The NE corridor is probably the best place to be on dating apps. Boston - NYC - Philly - DC. West Coast (Seattle, Bay Area) is brutal. Note: Dating apps are hell for any man who isn't at least a 6.5/10, and stays a struggle until you make it past an 8/10.
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
It's run clubs and pickleball. We're in the Lululemon era of dating, where you must demonstrate a commitment to nondescript-fitness to be an eligible bachelor.
roystgnr
14hr ago
This is the way.
You can't use LLMs for anything that you can't check yourself afterward; the hallucination rates are still just too high. But they're fantastic for cases where you'd like to use a search engine but there's just no way to turn your query into a list of words that (along with obvious synonyms) would define and sort the results.
"Tourist attractions in X" will get you to a TripAdvisor page that's fine. For "but not too expensive" you might be better off with the LLM than you would be manually searching a curated list. For "near a road trip route in between X and Y" and "oh, but we'd prefer to take a more northerly and high-altitude road in the summer heat" there was just no beating the LLM (actual example from my last vacation). It took surprisingly few queries like "here's what I vaguely remember about a fun trip with my parents in this state decades ago" to get to an answer like "here's the specific canyon and creek-side picnic site they probably took you to" (which, based on how familiar the drive felt when I took my own kids there, was probably correct).
You'd think that only works for fuzzy answers like vacation planning suggestions, but it's pretty good even for well-defined answers to fuzzily-stated questions. I'd never trust an LLM alone to tell me what Godunov's Theorem is or means, but when I couldn't remember the name "Godunov's Theorem" it was by giving a vague description to Claude that I found it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14hr ago
What's his outlook towards the end of the book ? Is there a sense of deescalation with time, or is it the sort of hopeless resignation that I see from most experts ?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14hr ago
Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?
If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.
That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.
DradisPing
14hr ago
So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.
There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.
But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.
To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.
While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.
Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.
However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.
Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.
So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.
There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.
In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.
Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.
So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?
Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.
They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.
It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
It would be a nice dogwhistle for "mudslime" (common slur for Muslim/Arab).
Aapje58
14hr ago
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14hr ago
It doesn't work because his name is pronounced : "Mum-daani". MudMaani doesn't have the same ring to it.
The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership
(More than a shower thought, less than a fully formulated theory.)
While the median person in the US is still in a romantic relationship, singlehood is on the rise, with some claiming a prevalence of 30%.
It is very apparent that the median man and the median woman have quite different ideas about what they seek in a romantic or sexual relationship, with men being more interested in casual sex and women being more interested in long-term relationships.
(
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not. Realistically, quite a lot of the opportunities for no-strings-attached sex in the ancestral environment were probably wartime rapes, but there were likely opportunities for consensual casual sex as well.
For women, it was likely more complicated. There was a selection for pair bonding to secure paternal investment -- because that increased the reproductive chances of the kids. If one had paternal investment, one would have preferred someone had has the status or ability to provide well for ones family.
On the other hand, one also wanted to select for genetic fitness to boost the reproductive chances of one's offspring. For a lot of traits, this coincided with being a good provider: being a great hunter is partly genetic, so there were both immediate and genetic reasons to prefer such a mate. While being the victim of wartime rape was quite bad also from a genetic point of view (zero paternal investment!), having a partner who was genetically inclined to wartime rape was preferable. One also wanted a partner who was winning the Keynesian hotness contest in your society, because that will bode well for the reproductive success of one's sons. If all the other women of the society thought that men with blue eyes were icky, marrying a blue-eyed man was a very bad reproductive strategy!
In short, from kitchen table evo psych, the ideal man was someone who had a lot of sexual success who was also willing to enter a committed long term relationship.
)
In my world-model, the median single woman going on a successful tinder date is going to meet a man who is great at getting tinder dates and convince them to have sex with him. This is a highly specialized skill. Women pass 95% of the suggestions. Together with a 2:1 gender imbalance towards men, this means that the average man who gets a match probably had to outcompete 30-40 other men to get there. However, being found hot by one woman is strongly correlated with being found hot by another woman. Of course, part of being found "hot" here is "being willing to breadcrumb women into thinking that there is a long term potential".
There are probably men who are moderately successful at dating which use apps for a while, find true love in their fifth match and live happily ever after, but those are also unlikely to stay on the apps (and if they are, will likely state outright that they are in a happy primary relationship, which will likely lower their appeal significantly).
While most of the men using online dating are trying to get laid with little success, I think that for the few men who are able and willing to sacrifice time, money, and ethics to get really good at tinder (or the offline equivalent: being a PUA), stringing along three or four women seems achievable.
While the link in the last paragraph bemoans the fate of these women, I think that it is fair to say that their revealed preference is to pay with sex for the illusion that a hot promiscuous guy is going to go exclusive (or primary) with them any day now. There is a difference between being the hottest unconquered available woman within driving distance on some cloudy Wednesday and being the woman who will make him forget about all other women, forever, though. Relatedly, if a real Nigerian royal had trouble getting money out of the country, chances are they would contact specialized firms on the Cayman Islands, not random owners of email addresses. (That does not change the fact that scamming or lying to get laid is evil, though.)
(Of course, this is not only an online thing. For most offline social situations, the workplace rules are more or less in effect. You have to know what your relative status and SMV is and what you can get away with. Also, flirting is all about deniability and avoiding establishment of common knowledge. I would argue that the possibility to commit a social faux-pas is intentional, being willing to do something which would be transgressive if you had read the signs wrong is a costly signal to send and generally appreciated if you are right. In the real world (at least outside Aella's RMN parties), people do not wear wristbands indicating what they are comfortable with, so engaging with women is left to those men who either are good at reading the cues or who do not care if they come across as sex pests to any women who are uninterested. Dark triad and all that. For spectrum-dwellers like myself, the main advantage of online dating is that women there can be safely (if mostly futilely) approached: as long as you do not use crass sexual language or send unsolicited dick picks, you will be considered background noise, not a sex pest.)
--
On the flip side, catering to the sexual and romantic needs of single men is also a trade which greatly benefits from specialization. Para-social relationships allow for economics of scale far beyond what the fuckbois can achieve. With straightforward porn, there is little malicious deception going on (stepsibling status aside), but I think that there is a niche of softer content (e.g. without guy participation) where romantic attachment from the audience is actively encouraged, and the relevant persona's foster an air of singleness despite being in a happy relationship or married.
--
This symmetry is not perfect, of course. The fuckbois are motivated by their sex drive or some obsession, while the women selling sex to men online are mostly motivated by cash.
Given that this is the CW thread, I should probably show some links to the culture war.
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