domain:forecasting.substack.com
Edawayac_Tosscount
1d ago
Perhaps it's not a good model for the average terrorist, but it worries me that if this kind of violence becomes popular, the uncommon clever terrorist could commit this sort of violence serially; think of an indirect attack with a lethality similar to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting or worse, executed by someone who was justifiably confident they could get away with it multiple times.
KingOfTheBailey
1d ago
Roses are red
Violets are blue
...wololo...
Now roses are too!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
They are cultivating a narrative, but
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They are quite constrained in this. In particular, they cannot cultivate a narrative that will make those who consume mainstream-left media not hate them.
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They are trying to be scary at least some of the time. But not hateable. Consider all this handwringing about the Pokemon soundtrack... does the Pokemon soundtrack make them seem scary and hateable? Hardly. It's whimsical; that part is aimed not at generating fear or hate, but at convincing the convincible that they are doing their job.
MollieTheMare
1d ago
During previous elbow injuries, I've had great success working it out with exercises, either flexing the wrist against tension using rubber bands or getting a Tyler bar. But nothing I've found has really helped with this one.
I'm going to go against the grain of the rest of the advise here and recommend you find an exercise that gets a bunch of blood pumped into the area. I would argue that like a 2/10 on pain, like a knot is getting worked out but not like I definitely am tearing something more kind, is a good sign. I like the Gyro Ball for a good forearm active stretch rehab thing. Hits the forearms from a bunch of different angles. Not a medical doctor, and it seems like this might be higher up than would get hit. If noticeably inflamed maybe contrast baths, starting and ending with hot.
I also recommend forgetting the hammer curl exists as an exercise. Incline curls, chins, and Bayesian curls (I'm sorry I didn't make up the name) as primary biceps exercise. Preacher curls, barbell curls, regular old dumbell curls, etc as secondary biceps exercise. IMO, hammer curl are way overrated with normally a better exercise for any particular objective.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Imagine you are a dyed in the wool red triber. You agree with 99% of everything Trump is doing. Then one day, Trump decides we should all cut off our dicks. And suddenly you start seeing all your friends at church cutting their dicks off. They're cutting the dicks off their kids too! You might make it your singular purpose to try to lead your tribe, with whom you agree on 99% of all other issues, back to the land of sanity.
I don't envy Jesse Singal. He seems to honestly believe this is a mistake and not a conflict. He honestly thinks he can convince Democratic politicians and policy makers to reverse course, even 20%. If only those damned Republicans weren't also on his side of this issue, making his side all crazy, and doubling down on all the dick chopping.
Wait, I think I mixed up my metaphors there at the end...
Oh wait no, I'm good.
ThenElection
1d ago
It's always surprised me that there are so few mass casualty events; I could name two or three attacks that would kill a thousand plus. I don't know if those targets are non-obviously hardened in a way that would prevent a successful attack, or if my estimate of the number of extremely violent/insane people in society is off by an order of magnitude.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Based.
There's a currency joke to be made here. I'm not sure what it should be, but I'll pretend to be upset that you didn't make it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I'd like to blame that on surstromming, but that's a Swedish thing. Maybe it's just lutfisk in general, that stuff can't be good for your mental health.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.
(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Wait, so it's literally about pancakes and waffles?
That makes this meme prescient. The only error is that it assumes this is restricted to Twitter. I'm not sure if I'm having a seizure, if the simulation is glitching, or if it's an intentional reference. It's probably the last one, in all honesty. Nick Land lands another blow.
I'm glad that Bluesky exists, albeit only because it's a containment hub for the most insufferable X users. Apparently they're also too insufferable for themselves. People planning to start new social platforms take note, founder effects rule everything around you.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The main distinction is that the right-wing witches were driven out by the left-wing witches, while the left-wing witches left because they were unable to continue to keep the right-wing witches out.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Here is my proposal for reforming the cash system:
This sounds like a Friday Fun Thread topic to me.
Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless.
[citation needed]
Only the penny and the nickel cost more to mint than their fiat value.
YE_GUILTY
1d ago
Related, from before this latest flareup in the Singal War: Nate Silver on "Blueskyism," (briefly: being horrid exclusionary scolds) which he considers to be the left's greatest weakness at present.
PreformancePertension
1d ago
Sounds like we're creating a lot of new jobs at Google figuring out how to automatically track a user's tax jurisdiction before they get shown an ad. I only vaguely remembered that there were a lot, but now that I look, I find out that Missouri has ~1,400 individual tax jurisdictions. Completely bananas.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
This is starting to read like a Python skit.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1d ago
Eliminate pennies and nickels. Keep dimes and half-size half-dollars, and replace quarters with gold-colored quinters, $.2 pieces. Coins are the only arithmetic most people use, and it’s worth it to me to have them.
Alternately, return to pieces of eight: 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 of a dollar. It’s what stocks incremented in for most of Wall Street’s existence, it’s good enough for me.
Add the $200 featuring Alan Greenspan, one of Rand’s disciples.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
I think you're conflating two very different things here: "lying to yourself" versus "being a computationally bounded agent operating under uncertainty."
Nothing you've described about the burger scenario is a lie. Seriously, none of it. The only way it might be is if I had a strong suspicion burgers were far more unhealthy than I was acknowledging, but refused to do the research because I was afraid of the results. That would be lying. Not doing exhaustive research isn't.
Information comes at a cost. You also have to spend the opportunity cost of time spent processing that information. Taken to its limit: are you sure that opening your eyes isn't bad for you? With arbitrary confidence? What if rolling out of bed gives you a stroke? Did you read the literature on the link between sedentary lifestyles and DVT risk? If you did, did you run a replication? Did you pre-register your claims?
We are, unfortunately, computationally bounded entities. We have to prioritize. You recognize that, which makes it all the more absurd that you even raise it in the first place. The topic we were debating was lying, which is not the same as failure to instantiate the idealized form of perfect rationality.
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
This is profoundly unhelpful. If you're postulating that there must be some kind of lie lurking in my worldview that I'm willfully or accidentally blind to, and that it's effectively unfalsifiable from both of our perspectives, why bother asking? You can't trust my answer either way.
But fine, I actually did something about this, even before I swe your comment. I fed several hundred of my comments into two LLMs and asked them to carefully review them for evidence of lies I'm blind to. The best candidate they found was that I hadn't signed up for cryonics without doing my own cost-benefit analysis, just reading other people's. Fair enough, though I'd call that laziness rather than self-deception, and I'll probably fix it at some point. Nothing else stood out. If you have a better method for interrogating myself for falsehood, I'm all ears.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth?
When have I ever claimed to be a universal Truth detector? I'm a goddamn Bayesian (or trying to be), so of course I'm aware of the importance of accounting for uncertainty. It's entirely possible that I hold false beliefs. In fact, it's practically guaranteed.
The thing is, if I knew where I was wrong, I would just correct myself. And spending "each available moment of time" self-scrutinizing is daft and counterproductive for agents that want to do other things with their time. I'm such an entity. But I do spend a ridiculous amount of time intentionally trying to learn things and examining my understanding. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, and appreciates having my errors shown to me. Why else do you think I'm hanging out on this forum?
What I do is consider the value of truth, accounting for the unavoidable tradeoff between accuracy and relevance. Does it matter if the 12th digit of Pi is odd or even? Not in the least to me. Even five post-decimal digits are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe down to a hydrogen atom.
Does it matter what the risk of AI extinction is? Or the evidence for HBD? On the most appropriate antipsychotic for the obese? Believe it or not, I try to do my due diligence on things that actually matter.
For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
Those people are engaging in far more motivated reasoning than I am (assuming I am). The difference between having unknown blind spots and knowingly adopting a belief system you privately reject is not one of degree, it's one of kind.
Hoffmeister explicitly stated he doesn't believe the Book of Mormon is historically true, then got baptized into a church whose central truth-claim is that it is historically true. That's not computational boundedness. That's not rational resource allocation. That's not honest uncertainty. That's adopting a belief system you privately reject for instrumental benefits, or at least acknowledging that the process might turn you into a person who cares less about the truth. That's what I'm calling lying to oneself, and it's genuinely different from the everyday epistemic compromises we all make.
Everyone has some motivated reasoning, sure. I believe I do much less of it than most, and when I do, it's by accident. But there's a difference between "I round off my exercise benefits slightly because I want to feel good about myself" and "I'm joining a high-demand religion whose foundational claims I think are false because I want community and a trad wife." The magnitude and stakes matter.
Do you think there's any belief system someone could join that you'd consider epistemically irresponsible? If Hoffmeister had said 'I don't believe the earth is flat, but I'm joining a Flat Earth society because they seem nice and I want friends,' would you defend that the same way? If not, what's the relevant difference?
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Well, sure, the phrase "their optics suck" is ambiguous. I think it can cover either of "ICE are unsuccessful at shaking off an unwanted bad reputation" or "ICE are successfully cultivating a bad reputation", and I agree the latter seems more likely, though some people in this thread vehemently deny it even as other ICE-supporters embrace it. But it still seems fair to call that "their optics suck", it would just mean that their optics suck on purpose for some inane galaxy-brained reason.
Pongalh
1d ago
You say 99% on their side, and yet his discussion of trans issues is way more than 1% of his output. IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
1d ago
Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Based.
I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3. But Ayn Rand would be funny enough that I’m on board with it.
That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).
The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.
But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.
No_one
1d ago
porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
Porn isn't banned. It's just hidden behind 'sensitive content' which, with the wrong setting, can be displayed automatically.
SnapDragon
1d ago
Your travel analogy is awful - it is often very valuable to solve 80% of a problem. A better analogy would be if your travel agent offered you a brand-new cheap teleportation device that had a range of "only" 80% of the way to Hawaii, but you had to purchase a flight for the last 20%. Which would obviously be great! AVs are the exception here, since you need to actually solve 99% of the driving problem for them to be useful (telepresent drivers "stepping in" can help a bit, but you don't want to depend on them).
Uh, and I don't think $64 per licensed driver in America is going to buy them two Ford-F150s. You might want to check Car and Driver's math. (What is with people being unable to properly divide by the population of the US? Does their common sense break down when dealing with big numbers?) Amusingly, I've never seen GPT4+ make this magnitude of a mistake.
Anyway, we should (and will) be taking the next decade to put smart models absolutely everywhere, even though they sometimes make mistakes. And that's going to be expensive. The major risk of AI investment is definitely not the lack of demand. As OP mentioned, the risk really is the lack of "moat" - if you only have to wait a year for an open-source model to catch up with GPT, why pay OpenAI's premium prices?
One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.
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