domain:bracero.substack.com
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
With UCLA (1919) comfortably the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US. If you consider the other UCs satellite campuses of Berkeley, then the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US is Rice (1912), which puts you a long way down the rankings. Outside the US, it would be Imperial College London (1907) or possibly Tsinghua (1911).
Post-1920 the rankings are dominated by specialist research institutes and standalone medical schools which count as "universities" by bureaucratic fiat.
It's just as likely that men who are forced to become fathers become inattentive or abusive fathers.
That is a different topic and one that I cannot do justice with a brief reply. The point is still that sex-having tends to heavily correlate with being in a long-term relationship, and those are very much on the decline, in part due to reasons that I mentioned.
Also, you are completely wrong on the fact that mot men don't want children; actually, more men want children than women do.
The studies on this topic do not capture the fairly obvious reduction in willingness to sacrifice/compromise to actually have children. Also, I never said that a lesser interest in being a parent doesn't also affect women, although not for the exact same reasons, although the male and female reasons do interact in various ways.
First of all, why the fuck is this arrangement good for men? Why do men need to be "groomed" into being better people by women?
Good relationships require men and women to be attractive/pleasant to each other, which requires grooming. Note that this grooming is just one specific form of civilizing enculturation, which is needed for people to be able to live and prosper together in general.
Traditionally, a lot of this was done by women to their partner. Of course, society could have come up with a different arrangement, but it didn't, and in modernity, the societal grooming is often counterproductive, teaching men to act in a way that is not attractive to women.
Note that women are affected by bad societal grooming as well, with female 'incels' often being confused why acting how feminists say they should act, is often anti-attractive to men. However, due to a bunch of reasons, women are less affected by this.
This is utterly toxic and manipulative; most men would take the modern arrangement.
I don't get the impression that young men/boys are generally very happy with very high standards for getting into a relationship, and a lack of (actual) guidance of what those standards actually are and how to meet them. Supposedly, young men are increasingly seeking out traditionalist or semi-traditionalist mentors, to the dismay of leftist media.
Also, again, it's just as likely that the "rough diamond" stays rough, and the women is stuck with an abuser.
First of all, a rough diamond is not at all the same as an abuser. A passive nerd who needs to learn to be more assertive, be more ambitious, dress better, etc, is a rough diamond as much as a tough guy who needs to reign that in a bit.
Also, women don't tend to like the most safe men at all, since they tend to put great value on the ability of their partner to protect, so it is certainly not the case that the current model where women have high standards, makes them choose only meek geeks with little strength, and thereby keeps them rather safe from partner abuse.
The issue is that people become less malleable when time goes on, so the longer men stay single, the harder it is to enculture them. And they also simply miss experience. As it is, we have women chasing a fairly small percentage of men, and this enables bad actors who can play the role of an attractive man, but who only want sex, or who are abusive.
Also, we have much more loneliness and such, because people spend so much of their lives single.
I agree that women often politicize their relationships, but they don't blame the "right" for their relationship issues.
Nonsense. If they don't believe that, then why do so many demand that a partner is left-wing? Demanding something from a potential partner automatically means that it is a relationship issue.
I read the media, the propaganda is constantly sending the message that women deserve feminist men who clean, work less, obey women as slaves, etc.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I didn't say they're analogous to any one modern group. I gave them as an example of a context where there's a case to be made for annihilation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
That just means you’re paying more for less!
Customer: "$25 for a T-bone? That's outrageous! The butcher down the street sells his for $15!"
Butcher: "Then why didn't you buy it from him?"
Customer: "Because he's all sold out."
Butcher: "Well, when I'm all sold out, I sell mine for $7!
And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering?
Both sides call each other our when they're acting stupid, constraining their behavior to the non-stupid set. "Centrists"/"moderates"/etc. have shown they can't do that, as they lack motivation and even a spine.
Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?
As others pointed out: how about HBD papers?
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig).
It is, potentially, a massive amount of money; it can, potentially, be specifically targeted and legally obligated to be used for a specific partisan activity; it also leaves a massive ideologically-unappealing penalty that will often be directly acting as a reminder while waving signs on the lawn of the bad actors in question.
Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ???
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
There's reasons that might not work for the Republican Party -- judges tend to treat colleges better and Republicans worse, having an adequate supply of favorable news coverage seems like it was important, the Red Tribe does not have as many of the relevant dedicated administrative agents required, and there's just a second actor disadvantage. But it's not an Underpants Gnome proposal.
It doesn't reduce the ability of the federal government to act against universities, if that's what you're asking. But that ship has sailed; no one has any proposal with any chance of working to do that. If we want university administrations to be less likely to actively discriminate, and to not promote hilariously fraudulent partisan activities under the auspices and honors of 'research', I'd love an answer that wasn't the government's carrot or stick. But there's zero idea on how to do that.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it, and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve.
I think it does. There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
And those are just the lawsuits already in pipe. A lot of the other stuff doesn't have lawsuits floating around simply because any lawyer worth their salt knows without a friendly federal admin it'd be a vanity suit.
Again, I'm not convinced this will work! But again, it's also far from Underpants Gnomes.
bolido_sentimental
1d ago
Are there any among you who try to limit your screen time, or especially phone time? I've started using a timed blocker app to ensure that I spend my early mornings doing something other than scrolling X. I have been surprised at the extent to which I had acquired some kind of muscle memory that makes me pick my phone up every few minutes to check notifications; but I may have broken that now. Wondering if anyone else has similar or related experiences.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
That just means you’re paying more for less!
And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering? Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?
Jiro
1d ago
if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.
Governments are so prone to lying, or at best motivated reasoning , about taxes that there's a certain base level of "if you tell us we need 5% taxes we won't believe you, no matter what it's for".
roystgnr
1d ago
Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
or virus.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I appreciate the clarification.
That has been suggested as means of enforcing alignment!
Unfortunately, it's a very brittle approach. As models get increasingly smarter, they become more context-aware. They become increasingly capable of picking up subtle clues:
- Patterns in the data provided. The study Dase lambasted had the test environment "accidentally" contain incriminating emails, in a very unrealistic manner. Most humans, and apparently some models, would recognize obvious bait. There are more subtle cases, such as noticing that the files in a directory are inconsistent with a production environment, the date (either directly provided or from context clues) suggesting that it's been too long for a model to still be in training etc. Models are perceptive, hence phenomenon such as true sight (they're really good at identifying authors of text), o3's peak human GeoGuesser skills etc. They often pick up clues that are too subtle for humans (while being bad at tasks that are easy for us, model intelligence can be spiky).
- Tricking models in this manner is unlikely to work when they're as smart or smarter than we are. What do we do when containment and trickery fail? You must keep in mind that a lot of the hype behind AI is the prospect of letting them loose to do agentic tasks, ideally autonomously. That usually means working in complex environments, with internet access. How confident are you that they won't pick up clues in the process?
- In general, misleading or coercing models is a poor approach. The goal is to make them want to do the right thing, to make them trustworthy.
However, we can and do try and make models better aligned. In the majority of cases, models don't seem to reward hack in deployment or act in egregiously bad ways. Apollo's post discusses their approach, called "deliberative alignment":
We propose deliberative alignment, a training approach that teaches LLMs to explicitly reason through safety specifications before producing an answer. By applying this method to OpenAI’s o-series models [o1], we enable them to use chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to examine user prompts, identify relevant policy guidelines, and generate safer responses
This builds on earlier work by Anthropic, which they called Constitutional AI:
We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as 'Constitutional AI'. The process involves both a supervised learning and a reinforcement learning phase. In the supervised phase we sample from an initial model, then generate self-critiques and revisions, and then finetune the original model on revised responses. In the RL phase, we sample from the finetuned model, use a model to evaluate which of the two samples is better, and then train a preference model from this dataset of AI preferences. We then train with RL using the preference model as the reward signal, i.e. we use 'RL from AI Feedback' (RLAIF). As a result we are able to train a harmless but non-evasive AI assistant that engages with harmful queries by explaining its objections to them. Both the SL and RL methods can leverage chain-of-thought style reasoning to improve the human-judged performance and transparency of AI decision making. These methods make it possible to control AI behavior more precisely and with far fewer human labels.
While their original discussion is as old as 2022, my understanding is that similar practises are commonplace.
In general, rewarding models for doing the right thing and steering them away from the wrong works on net. The question is whether that approach is complete, or if it puts too much selection pressure on models to be sneaky or more subtly deceptive. When the stakes are as high as AGI/ASI, we ought to be really confident that we've stamped out bad behavior.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I wouldn’t call it a shitpost. I did screw up my phrasing. Mea culpa.
What I wanted to say was that the textbook “incomplete victory” had already discarded civility. The starvation, reprisals, and general weaponized disrespect only led to an even less civilized conflict.
I don’t believe WW2 was civilized, or that its atrocities can be credited with the completeness of the subsequent peace. @zeke5123a
But if, to take an extreme example, I lock you in a soundproof box in the basement of a castle for spreading incendiary rumours, it seems very peculiar to say, ‘no, you have free speech, I’m just not helping you distribute that speech to others’. I think we agree on that much.
To take a less extreme example, if there are two speakers on Speakers Corner, and I give a giant megaphone to the other one that totally drowns out your voice, that doesn’t exactly seem like free and fair speech either.
In actual real life, there is some level of ‘not helping you distribute your ideas’ that is equivalent to ‘shutting you up’.
It doesn’t maybe mean you have to give big megaphones to everyone, but maybe you do have to give them all a soundproof room and make it known where they are and direct people on request and not actively direct them away.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
I kind of agree with you – yes, lawyers and politicians who decide on bills of rights are playing a role akin to religious councils. I would just say that there are those who do not interpret such a role as necessarily involving any metaphysical commitment. 'Ruling Passions' by Simon Blackburn is interesting on this, as an example of someone who is advocating for a quasi-realist position wrt morality (including rights), where we continue talking as if moral proclamations are 'out there' in the world, while also acknowledging that what is going on under the surface is fundamentally to do with our attitudes and sentiments rather than something we've discovered independent of us.
I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another.
I am not sure. Take my example with murder which is almost universally prosecuted across time and cultures. Do people think about murderers in terms of them acting against some inherent right? Does it add anything into the conversation above universally accepted moral stance of murder is bad? And even then there are some examples, where polity can actually define conditions around which killing us unlawful and thus constitutes a murder and which one is lawful and condoned - e.g. killing as part of death sentence or assassinating head of terrorist organization with a bomb etc. It is not as if we are talking about something inherent and inalienable, there are always conditions around it.
I think that what rights really represent culturally is a declaration of some secular or civic version of religious dogma. Politicians - either national or those sitting in UN - are akin to council of bishops or rabbis and theologians, who from time to time sit together and make some moral proclamation that abortions or something like that is now okay and in fact anybody stopping them is anathema to the church polity and will be punished. They have theological discussion about morality of current rights and how to do proper exegesis of the holy text of Constitution or Bill of Rights or even if to outright amend it. But the authority lies with them, the rights in this sense are given and not inherent and definitely not inalienable.
What I want to say is that I do not recognize this authority of rights as some universal morality, to me rights are just present set of laws or maybe as you said a present set of aspirations of lawmakers. I will for instance never in a million years morally recognize anything like right to abortion in this moral sense no matter how many wise men try to persuade me or how many people use it as a slogan on the street. Othere people let's say do not recognize right to bear arms or other rights.
Additionally I do not like the vocabulary of rights exactly because it is pure language of entitlement absent duty. Good society with good laws and even rights is result of hard work. If the society is bad then all you are entitledto is misery.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
I feel like there could be a link between the sense that you're being tested and the human superego or sense of religion. Could the solution here be to make the AI continue to believe on some level and act as though it's in testing indefinitely?
striker
1d ago
But
it's simply manually coded to prevent people from talking about certain ideas, even between people who both like said idea.
in order to get your idea in front of other people who might line your idea, it has to distribute your message to a proportion of available people who might like it. My point is, this distribution, if it happens, is a bonus. You, or nobody, is entitled to this distribution. People who complain that their reach is getting throttled are complaining that they’re not getting wider distribution, and then complain that their freedom of speech is getting unlawfully restricted. It’s not, because they are not entitled to that distribution in the first place.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
1d ago
Field and institution are everything. Are you seeking a professorship at Yale in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department? If so you'll be waiting for a cold day in hell. Are you seeking a professorship at Colorado School of Mines in Petroleum Engineering? If so you were never at risk.
As for whether or not a position is attainable, odds are grim, for multiple reasons. The evergreen issue of academia being a pyramid scheme where successful P.I.s and labs are built on the back of the dirt cheap labor of grad students and post docs still applies, and most of those people will still never hold a professorship, and most of those professors will never receive tenure. Things are slightly worse now because of the job market (when private industry tightens purse strings staying in academia always becomes more appealing), but only by degrees.
If you want to shoot for a professorship, be prepared to work very hard to compete against other people who are among the very best in the world at the very thing you are doing. The system nearly as much rigged in favor of woke types, as it is rigged in favor of people willing to nolife grind out a strong publication history early in your career.
confidentcrescent
1d ago
Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"
Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.
Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.
Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.
anti_dan
1d ago
Steppe people have little in common with modern dissident states. The mongols and huns, by way of example, were masters of modern (for the time) military technology such as husbandry, siege craft, etc. Pretending they are analogues to the Taliban or Somalian pirates, is acting like those people have fleets of aircraft carriers and a host of ICBMs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I tend to agree with one of the replies to @MonkeyWithAMachinegun ‘s post. I find the most damning thing about the discourse on political violence to be the enablement and incitement and lack of contrition by the left to be far more concerning than the actual numbers for a couple of reasons.
First of all. Because it does absolutely nothing to slow tge growth of such violence. If mainstream media sources are talking night after night about how conservatives are a threat to democracy, fascist, violent, and so on, this creates the radicalized people necessary (not necessarily sufficient, but necessary) to produce attacks. It also creates the environment that enables those attacks by normalization of the idea that certain parts of the political spectrum are too radical to be dealt with through the normal process. The modern cosmology of Fascism is that it occupies the place where Satan lives in the Christian world: a vile creature to be shunned and defeated by any means at your disposal.
Second because it reveals just how much support there is on the left for this sort of thing. Right wing rhetoric is sufficient to get advertisements pulled, people cancelled, and leave actors or other entertainers blackballed out of the industry. Left wing incitement and victim blaming doesn’t have the same effect. Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood. Places like Bluesky are not losing advertisers, there are no calls for Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, or Reddit to remove posts that victim blame or celebrate the Kirk assassination. Radical left podcasts are still widely available, and to my knowledge none of them carry a content warning.
Potentially, perhaps. Like I mentioned, when I tried following the cites, it often was sort of piddly amounts of money.
Sure, but this has approximately zero to do with the these sorts of settlements, particularly, and more to do with the threat of lawsuits/regulatory action generally.
Where? When? How? At what point did they have to sign their name on the dotted line, with known penalties through known mechanisms, stating that they weren't doing those things?
Funny you say that, because my understanding was that there were clear regulations and universities had to (across the board) sign their names on the dotted lines affirming that they had satisfied certain cybersecurity requirements. Thus, the getting in trouble for it.
That's all perfectly fine. Kinda has nothing to do with these specific types of settlements. It's a complimentary strategy, yes. But it's clear that the admin is struggling with one-offs here and there. Thus, looking for a comprehensive, across-the-board way to use known hooks and known mechanisms to change behaviors.
Most importantly, none of this is "indiscriminate chemotherapy". We're soooooo far past that silly reasoning, which was my original point. Yes, you can use hooks in the federal funding process (across the board, with known mechanisms). Yes, you can use targeted lawsuits. Sure, I guess you can try to have some of those lawsuits produce (bad, partisan) payouts to your favored NGOs. None of those things are silly "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
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