domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I hate 9-5s. With a burning passion.
Back in India, most of my jobs involved me working for 24 hours at a stretch, two shifts a week. There are places where 24 hours can be utterly grueling, such as ICU or ER jobs, but when I wasn't there, I usually managed to wrap up the bulk of my work by the evening and could look forward to a decent amount of sleep at night on average, if the nurses weren't overly neurotic. Wake up early, make sure nobody is likely to die before the next shift, write a handover, then scurry away back home.
This isn't a regular option right now, best case is a few 24 hour or 12 hour shifts a month, with 9-5s for the rest. This sucks, I come home drained, and barely have the ability to recuperate before the next day, let alone manage normal life admin or indulge in my hobbies. I miss the previous flexibility I had, why can't I just go and get a haircut at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Get hammered with friends on a Thursday night?
Not to mention the additional wasted time when it comes to traveling to and from work. That adds up when you're doing it 5 days a week.
anti_dan
1d ago
Basically everything that actually gives us longevity now was invented by 1950. Clean water, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines. There have been some significant developments in childbirth, but obviously that part alone is not the cost driver. It is end of life care, subsidies to hypochondriacs and the poor, and maintenance treatments like lifelong blood pressure meds and dialysis.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Controlling the minds of normies is extremely valuable. Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter for the money. He bought it to use it as a mouthpiece and more importantly to keep it from being used against him
Emptybee
1d ago
INTJ, every time. The amusing thing is, while I peg the I and T scales quite hard and am always comfortably N, I'm always around 51% J to 49%P. You'd think at least once I'd take the test on a day when P was up but, nope, never happens.
anti_dan
1d ago
Still, one only need to go to a criminal courtroom to observe that tattoos on females are indicative of criminality. A while back I was in court and a woman had been arrested on a fairly old warrant. It wasn't violence per se, but she made a stupid video of herself shooting a gun into the air. The kicker is it had one of those cheap auto-switch adjustments so it is technically an automatic per statute. She was, of course, 4 months pregnant and engaged. But she also had tattoos, the same ones from the video. So what do you do with a 22 year old who is clearly more mature than the 19 year old who was a reckless idiot, and also eligible for a very long prison sentence.
2D3D
1d ago
Best mecha anime was Macross Frontier, honestly. Others mentioned Code Geass below as well, which works. Both have good mech animation, good characters, good pacing. Most of the gundam examples have moments of brilliance bogged down by oceans of slog. The ones cited by others have great scenes or episodes and then multiple filler or slogs that just make it unwatchable.
But the true best robot anime ever is Megas XLR. A giant death robot with a hotrod for a head and a hotter redhead as the boss of the mechs 2 idiot pilots? Pure joy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Excellent! I’ll check it out.
Here’s my one and only experience with death note fanfiction THE HIT AND RUN. Don’t bother with the “post that inspired this” tumblr link; the premise should stand on its own.
rae
1d ago
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).
The issue is that OP is the lay person writing a long post full of complex semantic arguments that don’t pass technical muster, while passing themself as an credentialed expert, and accusing others of doing what they’re doing. That tends to rile people up.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
What? The majority of people here are either INTJ or INTP…
(Ok among the self reports here it’s only slightly tilted to INTx rather than super strongly tilted but I still think INTx is a solid majority)
However, there's a crucial distinction between representing causal relationships explicitly, structurally, or inductively, versus representing them implicitly through statistical co-occurrence
Statistics is not sexy, and there's a strong streak of elitism against statistics in such discussions which I find simply irrational and shallow, tedious nerd dickswinging. I think it's unproductive to focus on “statistical co-occurrence”.
Besides, there is a world of difference between linear statistical correlations and approximation of arbitrary nonlinear functions, which is what DL is all about and what LLMs do too. Downplaying the latter is simply intellectually disingenuous, whether this approximation is “explicit” or “implicit”.
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.
This is bullshit, unless you can support this by some citation.
We (and certainly orangutans, which OP argues are smarter than LLMs) learn through statistical co-occurrence, our intuitive physical world model is nothing more than a set of networks trained with bootstrapped cost functions, even when it gets augmented with language. Hebb has been clarified, not debunked. We as reasoning embodied entities do not model the world through a hierarchical system of computations using explicit physical formulae, except when actually doing mathematical modeling in applied science and so on; and on that level modeling is just manipulating symbols, the meaning and rules of said manipulation (and crucially, the in-context appropriateness, given virtually unbounded repertoire) also learned via statistical co-occurrence in prior corpora, such as textbooks and verifiable rewards in laboratory work. And on that level, LLMs can do as well as us, provided they receive appropriate agentic/reasoning training, as evidenced by products like Claude Code doing much the same for, well, coding. Unless you want to posit that an illiterate lumberjack doesn't REALLY have a world model, you can't argue that LLMs with their mode of learning don't learn causality.
I don't know what you mean by “inductively”. LLMs can do induction in-context (and obviously this is developed in training), induction heads were one of the first interesting interpretability results. They can even be trained to do abduction.
I don't want to downplay implementation differences in this world modeling. They may correspond to a big disadvantage of LLMs as compared to humans, both due to priors in data (there's a strong reason to assume that our inherently exploratory, and initially somatosensory/proprioceptive prior is superior to doing self-supervised learning of language for the purpose of robust physical understanding) and weakness or undesirable inductive biases of algorithms (arguably there are some good concerns about expressivity of attention; perhaps circuits we train are too shallow and this rewards ad hoc memorization too much; maybe bounded forward pass depth is unacceptable; likely we'd do better with energy-based modeling; energy transformers are possible, I'm skeptical about the need for deeper redesigns). But nobody here has seriously brought these issues up, and the line of attack about statistics as such is vague and pointless, not better than saying “attention is just fancy kernel smoothing” or “it's just associative recall”. There's no good argument, to my knowledge, that these primitives are inherently weaker than human ones.
My idea of why this is discussed at all is that some folks with math background want to publicly spit on statistical primitives because in their venues those are associated with a lower-status field of research, and they have learned it earns them credit among peers; I find this an adolescent and borderline animalistic behavior that merits nothing more than laughter and boycotting in the industry. We've been over this, some very smart guys had clever and intricate ideas about intelligence, those ideas went nowhere as far as AI is concerned, they got bitter lessoned to the curb, we're on year 6 of explosion of “AI based on not very clever math and implemented in python by 120 IQ engineers”, yet it seems they still refuse to learn, and indeed even fortify their ego by owning this refusal. Being headstong is nice in some circumstances, like in a prison, I guess (if you're tough). It's less good in science, it begets crankery. I don't want to deal with anyone's personal traumas from prison or from math class, and I'd appreciate if people just took that shit to a therapist.
Alternatively, said folks are just incapable of serious self-modeling, so they actually believe that the substrate of human intelligence is fundamentally non-statistical and more akin to explicit content of their day job. This is, of course, laughable level of retardation and, again, deserves no discussion.
P-Necromancer
1d ago
There are cases where "if you give an inch they'll take a mile" but there are also cases where small changes are catastrophized, so at the end of the day you kind of have to take it case by case.
I don't disagree; you've only got so much energy to care about these things. Not every issue is sufficiently important to sufficiently many people to foster this dynamic.
I do not think that a broad assertion that all politics is a maximalist, existential struggle is accurate as a general worldview, nor a common enough viewpoint to be assumed.
Not all politics, sure. I'd even grant that there have been times and places where no political questions were treated that way, or at least not at any scale. But though I take the general point, surely Israel/Palestine meets that bar? That's absolutely how people on both sides describe it.
In politics, victory leading to stalling out is actually more common than you might imagine. It's partially related to the idea of "political capital", where there's actually only so much appetite/time/attention/money for change to go around. Not uncommon is the situation where a major change leaves everyone exhausted and further efforts lose their urgency, or even provoke a counter-reaction in a kind of rubber banding effect.
Sure, this is true. I think I'd categorize it as a 'both sides lose' effect: one side lost the election, the other was failed or betrayed by their chosen representative. Actually accomplishing things is hard, so this is a reasonably common outcome. (Appearing to accomplish things is easier, though, and pissing off the other side is easier still; the Trump approach, which has proven very effective in motivating his base.)
A counter-reaction, though, is entirely in line with my theory. The question is whether it truly behaves like a rubber band (in that the oscillation is damped and will eventually stop), or like a swaying top (where the oscillations will only grow until it inevitably falls one way or the other).
Honestly I think it's more fair to say that societies are generally biased towards the status quo, rather than constantly hopping on runaway trains. This is especially true the more lower-d democratic a society is! So clearly Weimar Germany is a bad example. I think people forget that politics is ultimately downstream of the actual opinions of regular people, not the other way around.
This, though, I don't think I agree with. Well, the problem was bad in the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Republic wasn't particularly democratic, but that just means that democracy isn't a necessary condition. To build out the theory a little further, my contention is that you see this dynamic where disorganized (or poorly organized) groups compete over important goals; political parties in democratic countries are an example of this, but so is gang warfare and Israeli settlers/Palestinian terrorists.
But the cases where politics lacks this dynamic seem to me to be the ones where people are least engaged; single party states, effectively single party states (in that the parties don't really disagree on anything important), local politics (though those can be astonishingly vicious at times). Andrew Jackson made America much more democratic, but he certainly didn't reduce polarization.
I suppose I'm not really sure what you mean by how 'democratic' a society is. That regular people hold moderate views? That definitely helps, but I'm not sure what it has to do with democracy. That important questions are resolved via elections? I think that makes it worse. That people believe that important questions should be resolved via elections? Maybe -- it makes escalating to violence less likely, at least. But that's still more or less true of both major parties in America despite their increasing radicalism. I'll grant it's getting less true over time, though.
A two-state solution is almost by its very nature a compromise, and as they say, the best compromise leaves everybody at least a little angry. And didn't you yourself say that true escalation comes when both sides lose? So at least in my eyes, any two state solution, if actually implemented, is definitionally a détente.
Ah, well, I think it might be assuming the conclusion to call it a 'solution' (which I did as well), because I don't believe it'd actually end the conflict.
Right now, isn't a two-state solution clearly a win for Palestine? It's not everything they want, but it's far better than (apparently) permanent Israeli occupation. It'd count as a loss for both sides if they credibly committed to abandoning their claim on the rest of Israel, which 1. would, so far as I know, be incredibly unpopular and 2. no one in Palestine currently has the legitimacy to credibly commit to anything. (Plausibly a misstep on Israel's part, but plausibly not; not like those leaders were especially willing to negotiate a reasonable settlement before.)
Without that commitment, a two-state solution is just proof that Palestine's tactics are working, which I believe would only lead to renewed enthusiasm for them, coupled with much greater capacity to carry them out.
Again though I would ask the question: would a genuine attempt at a two-state solution, under Israeli-preferred lines, be accomplished via a high degree of force? I think the answer is a clear no, but I'd be interested to hear if you disagree and think it's really a plausible end-state of naked maximalist agenda-seeking by both sides.
Establishing the two-state solution wouldn't require any significant violence; Israel would just need to pull back to the line. I'm not clear on why they'd do that, but they could. If you're asking what it would take, practically speaking, to bring that about, I suppose sufficient international pressure could do it without (first order) violence.
I believe the violence would come after, when Palestine uses its newfound freedom to reorganize and rearm before attacking Israel again. Is there indication Palestine would be satisfied with a two-state solution? There might be, I suppose, but I haven't encountered it.
My position isn't that a two-state solution is the end-state; it's that it's the pendulum swinging the other way; in fact, the middle position is when the pendulum swings the fastest. (Though, given the relative strength of each side, I'm not convinced it is the middle position; Gaza's situation pre-October 7th is probably closer.)
Furthermore, geographic national boundaries in particular are, historically, way more sticky than you might think. Just look how awkwardly persistent the British and European decided lines are in the Middle East overall, despite their in many cases obvious unsuitability to match the facts on the ground!
I think this is 1. a relatively recent development and 2. motivated primarily by technological factors. The obsession with keeping borders exactly where they are was borne out of the incredible destruction of WWI and especially WWII -- it's too high a price, and any would-be conqueror needs to be shut down hard so people don't forget it.
In Europe, at least. I'm honestly not too sure why the taboo has (kind of) held in Africa and the Middle East. I suppose the same factors exist there to a lesser extent (in that they're less densely populated than pre-war Europe, and that military technology has actually mostly turned away from mass destruction towards precision over the past half century), and the First Gulf War probably set an example for anyone thinking about it. But that was relatively late in the period in question.
I suppose the fundamental reason is that the British didn't just draw lines on a map; they established governments for each of these new states, and each of those governments had a vested interest in not losing their territory, however little sense it made for them to have it. Defense is generally easier than offense, so it stuck?
As to the messy intermingling of peoples and the resolution thereof: it's worth noting that, when the game of musical chairs stopped in Western Europe post-WWII and the borders were 'fixed,' the Allies additionally engaged in an absolutely massive campaign of ethnic cleansing; putting everyone back where they belonged, you might say. This largely targeted Germans, but it was far from exclusive to them. The fact that those nations are so neatly sorted today is the result of a deliberate, forceful effort that would absolutely be called genocide today.
Was that actually a good idea in spite of the human cost? In retrospect it hardly seems necessary, but mainly because it's hard to imagine Germans and Frenchmen struggling to peacefully coexist, which I imagine was much less hard to believe at the time. I have more mixed feelings about the similar effort accompanying the separation of India and Pakistan, because it's very easy for me to imagine conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Not that there isn't conflict between the two now; separating populations that hate each other likely makes low-level violence less common and outright war more common. Not sure which end of that tradeoff is better.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
I think Judging Perceiving is just as strong in gauging what a person is like, but not named very well!
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
INTP this is the first Internet forum I've ever been on where a solid majority of the commenters aren't INTx, that's quite interesting.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
The lack of if being allowed only increases the street cred.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1d ago
This is a very nice article related to this: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/computational-tyranny/
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I want worker's revolution that provides me with enlightened socialist superiors
...said no communist ever.
"Superiors"? What is this reactionary talk, comrade? This is an egalitarian, classless society! Get with the program, or get your ass to Syberia.
faceh
1d ago
Pretty sure there are now multiple bot accounts that just repost the most-upvoted content on a sub from like a year ago, then add in the same top-upvoted comments on said post.
And from what I can tell Twitter is currently the place that most tightly interfaces with real life events in terms of both causing and quickly reacting to them.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
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.
sodiummuffin
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
My vague recollection of the online MTBI test I took was that every question boiled down to "are you stupid, Y/N?" and if you answer no you get INTP or INTJ, and if you answer yes you get something else.
I was INTP of course.
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