domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Being brutal against the locals is not an effective way to win.
You just cherrypicked several unsuccessful attempts even in relatively late times. Croats literally performed ethnic cleansing of Serbs under NATO umbrella and were successful. Czechoslovakia and Poland were absolutely brutal toward native Germans living in the area for 500+ years and were successful in solving the "German problem" creating ethnically homogenous states. Plus don't forget about ongoing war in Ukraine with "war crimes" aplenty.
What you described is all poxy/colonial wars with little to no investment of local population. The comparison of Israel as a colonial power similar to France in Algeria is absolutely misguided, millions of Israelis cannot just pack and leave such as French from Algeria or Americans from Vietnam or Soviets from Afghanistan. Again, just look at Ukraine war where Russians are willing to shoulder losses two orders of magnitude higher compared to their previous colonial military engagements. It is a completely different game.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
14hr ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
...which is sometimes a rational choice, because the penalty for getting caught is frequently less than the gains from crime. Changpeng Zhao seems to be doing alright for himself.
Seriously, more countries need to have the penalty of "all your money are belong to us" on the table for financial criminals and/or actually use it.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
The current beauty standard is a historic anomaly that should be discarded.
Isn't pro-ana a thing of the 10's or even 00's? There are more overweight and obese girls in the first-world countries than there are dangerously underweight ones. 120 pounds is a perfect weight to be at.
I agree that a gym membership is a good idea. Especially if @CriticalDuty can gawk at the girls there in a way that looks like he's trying to hide it from his GF, but is still obvious to her. Show her what the most attractive body type looks like.
raakaa
14hr ago
I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it. But the show that I remember has quite a bit more going on than you’ve seen in the first few episodes.
I think that a big part of the problem is the attitude that one has when going in and watching the series; I’ve met big anime fans in real life who bounced off of it for this reason too, expecting well-choreographed tactical fights with a deeply-thought-out power system like many modern battle shounen series instead of GIGA DRILL BREAKER ad infinitum. But to me, that’s like watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet and asking “Why didn’t Shakespeare go into more detail about the political chaos of Renaissance Italy instead of this stupid love story?” TTGL operates on vibes rather than carefully engineered magic systems, and that’s the level that the show is best appreciated at.
More specifically, the way I think of TTGL is this. If you (I) watch it when you’re young, you love it because of the epic fights and the horniness and the increasing power levels and “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down”. If you watch it a few years later, further into your teenage years, and that awkward time isn’t treating you particularly well, then watching a show about “believing in the you who believes in yourself” and “doing the impossible” might be exactly what you need, even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots. But then if you watch it yet again as an adult, you realize: hey, maybe kid me was on to something, and the “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down” plotline has a lot more real-world relevance than teenager me, who figured that it was just a metaphor for depression or something, thought.
This fundamental thematic conflict in the series, which becomes particularly apparent in the second half (and particularly towards the end at that), could be boiled down to “growth vs. degrowth”: at what point does technological and economic progress need to be stopped entirely, lest humanity collectively shoot ourselves in the face? How much of our own humanity and dignity should we sacrifice in order to prevent this? [1] I’d say that these are questions that’ve gained particular relevance (in public discourse) in recent years, both with climate change and now (more recently) with AI. Without getting into spoiler territory here, one thing that I found TTGL to do extremely well was to “aestheticize” these questions and translate them from an abstract debate about policy into something that “feels” important on a direct, gut level. The show take a rather refreshingly techno-optimist stance on these questions (which made me reconsider some of my own personal aesthetic attitudes towards them—more on that later), but still provides an appropriately healthy level of nuance (which is most strongly made clear in the series’s controversial ending that large numbers of its Internet fanbase refuse to understand).
Now, as I write this, I realize that “being made to feel certain questions strongly” does not make an anime series high art. What I wrote here unfortunately reminds me of some image collage I’d seen created by a One Piece fan, which insisted something like “One Piece is not a childish anime! It deals with themes like poverty and racism!” It’s clear that whoever made that image had a horrifically stunted aesthetic sense, one that hadn’t developed past the 7th-grade English class stage of “good art = deals with ‘themes’ that can be summed up in one word”. And yet here I am, going and saying “TTGL is a good series because it deals with ‘themes’ like ‘growth vs. degrowth’”—alright, that’s great, but why should I care if a show “deals with themes”? And if I tried to rebut by saying “well, maybe it changed my opinion towards those themes”, then that would only reflect badly on me: I don’t particularly consider myself a Rationalist, but I know well enough Not to Generalize From Fictional Evidence.
But if there is a nugget of value to be salvaged from the assertion that “TTGL is a good series because it addresses the question of ‘growth vs. degrowth’”, it would be this: TTGL presents an aesthetic of (responsible) techno-optimism which is compelling, in the sense that it helps me to understand why it would feel good to live in a techno-optimist world. Even though techno-optimism can be considered, like many isms, as a set of policy prescriptions or economic attitudes, man cannot live by policy prescriptions alone; there has to be some sort of narrative that structures how he will relate to the society formed by that set of policy prescriptions.
For example, you could take two different people living in the same society in the same (or similar) material circumstances, who nevertheless have polar opposite instinctual emotional attitudes towards that society. One guy sees that OpenAI and DeepMind have created AIs that placed 1st on the International Math Olympiad and thinks “Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.” Now, if you’re in a position where you can affect policy (be it at the political level or at the market level), there is an asymmetry between these positions: executing the policies associated with the wrong one (whichever it may be) could spell mass disaster. But if you’re just some guy—then these are just different ways of relating to the world, on an emotional level that most directly shapes your own life.
So if a piece of art (or a TV anime series) gets you to relate to the world in a different way at the personal level, even if only provisionally, then I’d say that that’s a point in its favor: it was able to enrich your collection of mental attitudes towards the world [2]. And since TTGL did that for me, to some extent, I have to say that I found it to be a good series.
Now here’s the part where I apologize for this massive rambling text dump. Forgive me; I ended up getting way too carried away. Anyway, I’ve never watched Gundam or Macross, but from what I understand, there’s quite the convoluted viewing order for those franchises, so be aware of that before you jump in.
[1] Only writing this now do I realize that this too is an expression of the lingering trauma from the atomic bombs in the Japanese psyche. It’s not quite as obvious as in e.g. “Giant Robo”, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
[2] Of course, there are some “attitudes towards the world” that are just harmful and not suitable for most humans who want to live a good life. E.g. regularly watching cartel snuff videos probably doesn’t foster attitudes conducive to eudaemonia. But I don’t think that TTGL belongs in that category.
TowardsPanna
14hr ago
What connection are you drawing and what do you think the mechanism might be?
functor
14hr ago
Creating a jewish state by genociding all the people living there including a large portion of Christians is abhorrent. Palestine's best asset is jews posting content in English and showing the world what Talmudic logic is like.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
and using slop to eventually criticize the concept is still using slop.
This reminds me of early Sorokin. His first works all used the same template: they started out as workmanlike and uninspiring Socialist realist prose, but then, when you least expected it, there would be a whiplash-causing genre twist and the story would devolve into a scatological surrealist nightmare.
Literary critics raved about him, but I always felt kinda cheated: at the end of the day you got me to read some crappy Soc-real fiction and the gross-out punchline was amusing just the first couple of times. At least /u/shittymorph writes just a couple of paragraphs before the punchline.
Later Sorokin got better, writing actual framing stories. When the caterpillar scene happens in the middle of alt-history political satire it's much easier to accept it as a well-timed mood breaker.
Botond173
14hr ago
This concept is similar to the Trotskyite concept of 'no war, no peace'. (That the policy ended in disaster and Brest-Litovsk bodes ill.)
I’ll nitpick a bit if you don’t mind. Trotsky wasn’t exactly an idiot. The new Bolshevik regime was very far from stable in early 1918. In Brest-Litovsk they gave up the Western periphery of the collapsed Russian imperial state, areas they weren’t in effect controlling anyway, in exchange for stabilizing their dictatorship in the central areas with the approval of the German government. This was vital for their survival.
The treaty fulfilled two important roles.
The Germans were supporting the Bolshevik movement in the first place, and the only way they could repay their financier was by making a ceasefire and thus ending WW1 on the Eastern Front, and by surrendering territory, mostly farmland which the Germans (and Austrians) had a dire need of. And this is what they did.
It was also in the best interest of the Bolsheviks to give the impression to the outside world that the German imperialists forced them to sign a peace treaty at gunpoint. This is why the treaty was only signed after the Germans took the territories they wanted.
Lizzardspawn
14hr ago
Millions of Afghans died in the 80s. Millions of Vietnamese died, France was brutal against the Algerians. Being brutal against the locals is not an effective way to win.
It is. They just weren't brutal enough.
Felagund
15hr ago
If you want to have a constructive discussion, the single most useful thing you can do is to think about how you might be wrong. It's not easy, I sure don't live up to it as much as I ought to, but I promise. It's worth it.
One real benefit of putting your arguments in writing (in the context of a sincere argument) is that it motivates this. This is a major reason to argue with people that you will disagree with—even if it is hard to convince others, the argument will add nuances to your view, and point out where your position is weaker in a way that is often fruitful in leading to a greater understanding.
Botond173
15hr ago
And let’s also keep in mind that all of this is happening at the same time when rates of obesity, mental illness, hysteria, violence, alcoholism, antidepressant and prescription pill abuse and drug use in general have been rising among Western women for a long time.
functor
15hr ago
The differential between Palestine and Israel in terms of military capacity is greater than ever:
Far from it. Missile tech and drone tech is more dispersed than ever. Israel can't even occupy an area smaller than a municipality in almost two years even with exceptional brutality. Israel is a small country stuck in the same quagmire as South Vietnam, French Algeria or Rhodesia. They are never going to be a functioning country and permanently stuck in a state of emergency.
It is chutzpah of the highest order to rely on the charity and good will of your enemy to feed your people.
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal. Israels behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what jewish mindset is and that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Palestinian strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like. There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years and having them quoting biblical genocides while massacring starving Christians is an excellent way to bring back the west to our historical view of them.
Millions of Afghans died in the 80s. Millions of Vietnamese died, France was brutal against the Algerians. Being brutal against the locals is not an effective way to win. The British counter insurgency in Northern Ireland was far more effective.
Botond173
15hr ago
The existence of this, and of the "Are we dating the same guy" Facebook groups, is further perfect proof that the 80/20 rule is true.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
15hr ago
And this, this is why I have no interest in anime.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
15hr ago
In the interest of full disclosure, I've sat down to write a reply to you three times now, and the previous two time I ended up figuratively crumpling the reply up and throwing it away in frustration because I'm getting the impression that you didn't actually read or try to engage with my post so much as just skimmed it looking for nits to pick.
You your whole post is littered with asides like.
Calling them Large "Language" Models is a gross misnomer these days, when they accept not just text, but audio, images, video or even protein structure
When I had very explicitly stated "Now in actual practice these tokens can be anything, an image, an audio-clip, or a snippet of computer code, but for the purposes of this discussion I am going to assume that we are working with words/text."
and
Operations are not limited to dot products
When I had very explicitly stated that "Any operation that you might do on a vector" could now be done on the token. So on and so forth.
You go on a whole tangent trying to explain how I need to understand that people do not interact with the LLM directly when I very explicitly stated that "most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model."
And trust me, I am fully aware that “Mary has 2 children” and “Mary has 1024 children” are empirically distinct claims, I don't need you to point that out to me. The point of the example was not to claim that the numbers 2 and 1024 are literally indistinguishable from each other. The point was to illustrate a common failure mode and explain why LLMs often struggle with relatively simple tasks like counting.
With that out of the way...
I find your fish vs birds and judging whales by their ability to climb trees examples unconvincing for the same reasons as @Amadan below.
In the post that the OP started as a reply to, you accused society of "moving the goalposts" on AI progress but I disagree.
If you ask the average American about "AGI" or "AI Risk" what are the images that come to mind? It's Skynet from The Terminator, Cortana from Halo, Data from Star Trek TNG, the Replicants from Blade Runner, or GLaDOS from Portal. They or something like them is where goalposts are and have been for the last century. What do they all have in common? Agentic behavior. It's what makes them characters and not just another computer. So yes my definition of intelligence relies heavily on agentic behavior, and that is by design. Whether you are trying to build a full on robot out of Asimov, or something substantially less ambitious like a self-driving car or autonomous package sorter, agentic behavior is going to a key deliverable. Accordingly I would dismiss any definition of "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) that did not include it as unfit for purpose.
You say things like "Saying an LLM is unintelligent because its weights are frozen is like saying a book is unintelligent." and I actually agree with that statement. No a book is not "intelligent" and neither is a pocket calculator, even if it is demonstrably better at arithmetic than any human.
You keep claiming that my definition of "intelligence" is inadequate and hobbling my understanding but I get the impression that I have a much clearer idea of both where we are and where we are trying to get to in spite of this.
If you think you have a better solution present it, as I said one of the first steps to solving any practical engineering problem is to determine your parameters.
Moving on, the claim that LLMs "know" when they are lying or hallucinating is something you and I have discussed before. The claim manages to be trivially true while providing no actionable solution for reasons already described in the OP.
The LessWrong stuff is not even wrong, and I find it astonishingly naive of you to assume that the simple human preference for truth is any match for Lorem Epsom. To volley one of your own favorite retorts back at you. "Have you met people".
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
15hr ago
Why are lawyers so expensive?
- Is the supply of lawyers artificially constrained?
- Is lawyering so hard that the supply of acceptable quality lawyers is naturally constrained?
- Is the influence of lawyers on the outcome of a trial so outsized that parties want to pay insane premiums to maximize the probability their lawyer is the better one?
All these would require completely different solutions.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16hr ago
Maybe. I tend to remember certain things but I don't remember much in this case. I have him as a family man but picturing "family man" isn't a visual image.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16hr ago
Again this isn't me being Kreskin it's just the vibe I get when I read the person's posts.
Early 30s Russian male, keep your hair short, scruff which could be beardy but you don't let it get too far, pale eyes, high forehead. If I had to pick a color it'd be orange. That's probably because of the word sun.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
16hr ago
You should get her a gym membership and spike a lot of the food you guys eat with olive oil. These two should help her get a higher appetite and also sneak in extra calories. This is a terrible spot to be in. Being thin is not healthy. Confront her, you are her boyfriend.
The current beauty standard is a historic anomaly that should be discarded. The aspirational body type for a girl today is slowly changing, and it's a good sign. She may need counselling. Props to you for intervening. Put your foot down.
Botond173
16hr ago
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
The thing traditionalists don't seem to have a satisfying answer for is "why is gayness uniquely bad"? Why does it uniquely fuel identarianism, if it does? When I consider the question of "if it wasn't this, would it have been something else?", I think back on all the times it has been something else, and note that there's nothing unique/special to non-straightness that lends itself to being used as a weapon in this way.
I'm a little confused here.
Firstly, social conservatives and particularly conservative Christians do have quite detailed answers for why same-sex relations are morally bad. If you aren't satisfied, presumably you either don't find those answers convincing, or you aren't aware of them, but I suppose neither strikes me as a particularly devastating criticism. Let's charitably assume that you are familiar with and unconvinced by, for instance, teleological arguments, or arguments from natural law. It's not clear to me why that in itself should be that concerning, particularly since my suggestion here is not "social conservatives are absolutely correct in everything they have asserted", but rather "social conservative predictions coming true is an opportunity to re-evaluate their earlier claims". Social conservative arguments around sexual morality might be only partially true, or might lead to some pragmatically true conclusion for the wrong reasons; in either case it would still be worthwhile to revisit their arguments and see what might be salvaged.
Secondly, social conservatives do not claim that same-sex relations are uniquely bad, and I don't know where you got that idea. Let's assume a traditionalist Christian approach here. That approach is that same-sex relations are one species within the wider category of sexual sin. The category of sexual immorality or porneia is quite a broad one, and the reasons why same-sex unions are bad (illicit, to be discouraged, sinful, whatever language you like) are substantially the same reasons why many other forms of sexual behaviour are bad (this is where progressives would get very angry at the comparison between homosexuality and various other paraphilias).
So I'm not sure I understand your retort here. Social conservatives have explained why same-sex relations are bad at great length, and they have not argued that same-sex relations are uniquely bad in a way that sets them apart from any other sexual immorality. What's left here? You don't find conservative arguments against same-sex relations convincing? Well, good for you, I suppose.
without ultimately falling back on some variation of "sin"- if they had a better argument, they'd be making it- then I judge they're no different than those who also have the same definition of sin but with the who and whom switched.
Replace the word 'sin' with 'bad', if you prefer. It doesn't make much practical difference. I'm often baffled by the way secular people seem to understand the word 'sin'.
Botond173
16hr ago
None of my half-dozen female cousins are whoring themselves out.
With all due respect, they probably won't have many problems keeping you in the dark about if they are indeed doing so after all.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
16hr ago
Great post OP. On the part about Yud and the people over at LessWrong, rationalists as a whole, a few weeks ago, I posted about the religious fervour many have for AI as the future sentient god. To me, it feels like the sci-fi idea of Skynet fills a god shaped hole in their hearts, and they cannot rationalise normal religious values on a mass scale.
For instance, neither Scott nor Yud are programmers; this is not to chide them, there are plenty of MMA scouts who get MMA better than top coaches or fighters, but these are few and far between, and they cannot affect the game as much as a live player can. If you have not worked on basic ML models and know about the way some of the architectures work, you can arrive at conclusions that stretch the current capabilities or your perception of them with a future where the improvements never cease, which to me seems ludicrous in a way.
Scott's 2027 post and Yuds AI ramblings seem extremely improbable, and given that I foresee an economic meltdown thanks to the corporate and vc greed behind the modern ai bubble, these statements would be used to question the non-AI things they post, things that are actually really good. We have a lot of trouble understanding intelligence, the human brain and how the two interact. There are systems within the body that make some of their own decisions iirc. It's truly fascinating as a field to study, the usage of AI propaganda like AGI is here by conning former YC president and Paul Graham's favourite human being, Sam Altman, and you will be jobless by every podcaster's favourite CEO, Dario Amodei, will be remembered. For anyone unaware of how low people can stoop, Austen Allred lost hundreds of millions by lying and PG still defends him, as he shifted his grift to learn programming via my bad bootcamp to learn AI via my bad bootcamp.
Theranos apparently did not get VC money, the Bay Area is where a lot of ratioanlists live, a lot of VCs are aware of the ideas, this must have had some role with the hype as rats are usually very smart, decent people. Regardless, this was a very well-worded out take on this issue. I have a rough outline that matches your worldview, though it is nowhere as precise, nor could I have presented it in a decent manner.
The current genocidaires of China (by internment), Iran (by ethnic displacement) and North Korea (by starvation) are currently suffering zero consequences for their actions. Suppose that yes, Israel is stuck with such a charge. So what? That's not a strategy, that's a tactic, one that is failing. If your logic is then 'the Jews will be ashamed, and everyone will embargo them into dissolution' then it is incomplete. Who, if anyone, would try and enforce any consequence?
The Arabs aren't lining up to invade Israel. Certainly, the Europeans lack the capacity. Indeed, the expected behavior of the international community to an active genocide is to do nothing and fiercely regret its aftermath.
But that's ceding the point, and accepting the charge on face value. If they are at war, then they are not responsible for feeding the enemy's civilians. The Allies didn't worry themselves about their enemy's starving civilians. Neither did the Axis. If they are not at war, and they are policing occupied territory, then they can distribute aid as they wish. They don't need to feed those who are waging a guerilla war against them, or incorporate them into their aid mechanism. The Americans didn't worry themselves about feeding the Taliban.
So which one is it?
Israel is a small country, but Gaza is even smaller. It is perfectly possible for them to enforce a complete blockade on their terms. This is not something any other colonial occupying power has had the power to accomplish. Israel wants a total and complete surrender, unconditional and without third party mediation. The longer it takes, the worse the Palestinian people will suffer. They want a political solution that solves the Gaza problem forever, no matter how much the international community calls them war criminals. What do they care? They're already a pariah state to half the world.
They're never going to return back to the status quo. UNWRA and the NGOs will never be allowed back. Using food as a tool for regime change isn't moral in the least, but then again, kidnapping civilians for use as hostages at the bargaining table isn't moral, either.
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