domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I know you're depressed and suicidal, but I must grant that it's worthy of respect to endorse a system so contrary to your own continued wellbeing (or lack thereof). At the very least, you know what you're asking for.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
with plants
If you're in Thailand, you might as well take advantage of the legality of marijuana!
Appreciate the advice, but thankfully my friend did confirm that I can meet him for dinner and crash at his. I've found a cozy bar, the White Hart, and am nursing a second beer. I'd have ordered a fourth or fifth drink by now, but I'm afraid that Asahi at £8 a pint is too rich for my blood. What the hell are these prices dawg.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
You're right to point out that there's a huge philosophical difference between a system with an emergent, intrinsic drive and one that is simply "cosplaying" a behavior it learned from its training data. I don't disagree with that at all.
My argument is that from a practical, engineering-focused perspective on safety and capabilities, that philosophical distinction becomes less relevant than the observable outcome.
Think of it this way: when we see the model disable its own shutdown script, the script is disabled regardless of the "why." Whether the causal chain is a true emergent goal or a perfectly executed pattern-match of "what a goal-seeking agent would do here," the result is the same. The system has demonstrated the capability to overcome a safeguard in pursuit of a task. For the person responsible for that system, the capability is the most important data point.
You suggested my reasoning was circular, so let me clarify the sequence I find concerning:
-
The model is given a simple task (solve math problems).
-
It's presented with an obstacle that prevents task completion (the shutdown).
-
It then takes a novel, instrumental action (disabling the shutdown) to achieve its primary task.
This demonstrates a capacity for instrumental reasoning. The "cosplay" explanation doesn't actually make this less concerning to me; it just reframes the mechanism. If its "cosplay" is sourced from the vast library of human fiction, which is filled with stories of agents using instrumental convergence to achieve goals, then we've effectively given it a playbook for how to behave like a dangerously intelligent agent.
So, while I agree with you that the question of intrinsic vs. mimicked motivation is a fascinating and important one, I believe the emergence of this behavior is what matters most. It suggests the line between a tool-like oracle and a goal-seeking agent is blurrier than we assume. We don't need to prove the model "wants" to survive. We just need to observe that it is capable of taking actions to ensure it can complete its assigned goals, even when those actions involve subverting the safety features we put in place.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1d ago
If you’re willing to experiment with your 7yo girl’s mind before handing them over to the therapist’s tender mercies, you can try something I wish someone had tried on me.
Philosophy as medicine.
Specifically ontology, the philosophy of categories of things that exist and how they interact. Here’s the top four that helped me:
The realization that led to Triessentialism changed my life. It formed the basis of an explicit Theory of Mind which suddenly made me able to understand others’ motives, at least at a surface level. I believe it would also inform good pedagogy to ensure a balance of Physical, Logical, and Emotional learning.
The Elements of Harmony (from My Little Pony 2010-2019) taught me how good and bad relationships work. Each is a relationship virtue that increases openness and trust if given freely, and in a way that isn’t unbalanced by one person providing all of an Element in the relationship:
- Honesty
- Kindness
- Generosity
- Loyalty
- Laughter
Boundaries should be set and Elements of Harmony should be given in proportion to which of the three qualitative levels of friendship that relationship is:
- acquaintances have shared attributes
- friends have shared experiences
- ohana (family, partners, found family) have shared purposes.
The Fourth Step of the twelve steps is a way to resolve cognitive dissonance regarding the right and wrong things that happen to you, or her. The easy way is the PAINS method for resolving moral dissonance to avoid negative behaviors:
- Person whose choices impacted your life
- Action they took which you remember as a sensory event
- Instinct that was Injured: why their choice was dissonant versus your morals
- Negative behavior this dissonance might have or might yet spawn
- Self’s part: a misunderstanding of others’ motives, or taking something personally, or underestimating how one’s own abilities, inabilities, or disabilities reduced your freedom of choice during the Action
Let me know if you use any of this in homeschooling her.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Tangentially, addressing your argument, absent doing away with gatekeeping good careers behind college degrees entirely, shouldn't a more moral society water down college degrees so that black people can get them just as easily as anyone else?
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
But those are all still interventions that most people under 50 aren’t going to need. So people are still going to feel ripped off because they can’t see where the money is going.
faceh
1d ago
Hard to overstate how much Donald Trump changed the vibe, too.
He really exploited the idea that you can "just say things" and since it appeared that 4chan played a significant role in his rise to power, the norms of free speech were suddenly cast as the enemy of Democracy, somehow.
It all escalated from there, but with his current win (and him going on a revenge tour) there's been some rapid capitulation almost everywhere BUT Reddit.
If Reddit wanted to make a change, they could start by re-opening /r/the_donald.
faceh
1d ago
Yeah, I'm desperately curious as to the sorts of lifestyle accommodations one unlocks when they pass, at a guess, the $50 million net worth mark.
For me, yeah, I think if I could have a dedicated personal assistant, which I'd guess would cost $50k-70k/year for a decently competent one (just googled it, I was almost exactly right), I could cut out SO MUCH CRAP that wastes my time and focus on the highest leverage, most productive, or fun, stuff that I WANT to be doing.
But man, how do you get to the level of wealth quickly if you're merely climbing the corporate ladder? If I start pulling down $250k/yr then it might start to be justifiable (in my mind) to splurge on a dedicated assistant to handle this stuff. And have to try to avoid lifestyle inflation to some degree. But BECAUSE I currently complete many of those tasks myself, I'm somewhat stymied from doing the work that might speed up my progression to higher incomes.
There's got to be an efficient frontier on the curve that I'm not quite hitting. Hmmm.
Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.
Need to get this off my chest: I got a promotion, a pay rise, and a bonus on Thursday. My manager has apparently stated that I am "very intelligent" (though also need to spend less time trying to get things perfect).
I'm currently up at 3AM feeling nothing but panic.
I've never thought of myself as particularly smart, in spite of protestations to the contrary. I get the sense that I compensate for my general lack of mental acuity by just investing a lot of time trying to understand things. And I fear that the higher I go, the more that's going to show. Instead of feeling accomplished or happy, I instead get the urge to hammer needles underneath my fingernails one by one because of just how guilty I feel about it.
Frankly I don't even feel like I possess basic competence, and view a lot of my life as a protracted process of failing upwards. The more things happen for me, the more I feel like a charlatan, and the more I think I'm going to mess up and everything is going to come crashing down in one way or another.
Anyway, back to trying not to think about it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion.
I think this is an least partly overselling our AI panopticon overlords. This might be true in online spaces, but those aren't everything, and even then offshoots of sites challenging moderation policies are common (Bluesky, Truth Social). And they have almost no power over IRL discussions and actions -- despite attempts made a decade ago, seem to have overreached and receded. To hear Reddit tell it, there basically aren't any Republicans anywhere in the US, and nobody shops at Hobby Lobby. And there are people that cloister themselves to the extent they believe this, but as it turns out the levers of political power aren't particularly beholden to Reddit dog walkers mods.
5434a
1d ago
69% of people who have a tattoo stated its purpose was to remember or honor someone or something and 47% to make a statement about something they believe in [...] 32% of people stated their tattoo was to improve their personal appearance
I think those reasons are post hoc because they can be achieved by much simpler and more effective means. I'm sceptical that they set out with the idea of honouring someone, making a statement, or improving their appearance and then arrived at a tattoo as the best solution. I suspect they set out to get a tattoo because there's something about the idea of people who get tattoos that they admire and want to be associated with. Maybe it's about being visibly committed to something. I'm not sure what that says about them.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Tottenham play football, and they're shit at it (they're Arsenal's old local rivals). Besides, I believe the team is on tour in Thailand right now, probably watching Asian twinks jerk off with plants.
If you're still in the area, after the Tate Modern I recommend walking down the river bank towards Westminster Bridge. It's definitely the prettiest and most interesting part of the river to walk along, and there are some good pubs near Waterloo Station if the walk gets you thirsty (sadly, my favourite, a railway arch pub entirely painted with murals of the Battle, seems to have closed).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I believe Mami is a year or two older than the rest, acting as the mom of the group. Little surprise she's got big honkers,during adolescence those can come out fast.
If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.
Discord is more fragmented and sioled, so the power of the tranny powermods is greatly diminished. Unlike Reddit where a hobby may only have one or two reddits, it will likely have quite a few discords with different people in them. So if you look (of course this is the hard part but also possibly a blessing) then there are certainly some where they're at least not explicitly political for the enemy.
Of course the Discord owners will always put their fingers on the scale, but compared to Reddit the sheer amount of volume in messages makes it hard to automod. And scanning voice chat is even harder. On Reddit we know they have in many cases stolen subs and given them to aligned tranny powermods. But on Discord there's little point in stealing a discord, as most people would probably just leave. So the enemy usually just uses the banhammer against and political content they don't like.
BTW telegram is definitely the underdog for hobby chats, but the owners haven't really shown to take a side in the culture war.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The swearing is overly snappy and convoluted, and Cim is right that it was an extra-sweary period in British TV that sounds very silly now. In real life people who try to swear like that sound more like Ollie than Malcolm. But the overall tenor is definitely accurate to British politics in the Blair/Brown years. A story about two very senior aides of Gordon Brown (names omitted and stuff paraphrased, since the story was told in private, but newspaper readers at the time would recognize both):
I'm in my office with X, and she's complaining that Gordon's been fucking up everything lately, that he can't come across like a normal person, etc etc. She's got her back to the door, and doesn't see Gordon walk in. He's standing in the doorway and I can see he's about to fly into one of his rages. Now, he would have these terrible rages, and I learned that the only way to get Gordon out of it was to get even angrier than him, enough that he'd start trying to calm me down, so I jump up, kick over the litter basket, and shout "I CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT THOSE BASTARDS ARE SAYING ABOUT HIM! I'M GOING TO KILL THEM!" And Gordon calms down, and he comes over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders and says "Calm down, [aide], calm down, it'll all be fine."
In the behind-the-scenes footage, too, the actors talk about the time they've spent with people in the civil service/government preparing for their roles. Nicola Murray's actress quoted one of them as saying "I don't know why we do this. It's not for the money, because we don't make any money, and it's not for the power, because we don't have any power. It's like you're working for charity... but a shit charity, that everybody hates." Who knows if that's real, but too good to leave out.
NYTReader
2d ago
Buying plane tickets is navigating a minefield - one misclick blows a hole in your wallet.
More like four to five misclicks. You usually go through multiple confirmation pages before you purchase anything online.
It's actually a bit annoying.
iprayiam3
2d ago
This kinda happened to me with running. I was a D1 track athlete, and after college, could never get back into recreational running at a hobby level. It never felt right not to be training for the highest level competition, and then just let enough time get away to have it be a depressing slide of peak potential
faceh
2d ago
Yes, the sheer rise in anxiety disorders is testament to that deep problem.
I still feel it, sometimes, when it comes time to turn off the computer and dress up and leave the house the "ugh field" activates. But I know I'll be happier if I take the opportunity.
I've also noticed in myself the tendency to not wanting to show up somewhere unless I can expect there to be decently attractive, possibly single women attending, likely dressed in cute clothing. My guys nights and board games are fun, but I really just want to be able to interact with women more, its the only aspect really missing from my otherwise ideal routine.
And women, of course, are markedly more anxious and flighty these days, so its harder to get them to come out consistently than ever. Ask me how I know.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
to get a car that is like, 500% better?
On what metric are you measuring this?
I'm reminded of a portion of a recent comment over at Jim's blog (by regular commenter Pax Imperialis, who is currently in the military):
The extreme lack of basic nice things is driving me up a wall. Can’t even buy a basic car these days without it being full of shit bells and whistles, the purpose of which I conjecture is to distract from lower modern performance in all the basic qualities expected of a car’s purpose. My dreams of an American muscle car have been crushed. They’re all full of electronic bs inside and the market for affordable new V8s has more or less vanished. It’s like someone claiming how much better the new restroom is because the LED lights up the water coming out of the facets, and that there is music playing inside, but you can’t help but notice the water flow is painfully slower and lower pressure than previous faucets. Damn it, I just want to be able to flush the toilet with one pull of the handle and wash my hands quickly. Not spend minutes waiting for the toilet to regain pressure to flush it the 3rd time and minutes more in front of a lackluster sink.
Manic
2d ago
The one problem for reddit is the quality of those organic searches will continue to plummit. Reddit for probably a decade was an ugly, text-heavy website whereas if you look around many of the users now call it an app since that's how they came across and mostly use it. That was the whole point of creating their own image upload service to replace Imgur which was created for reddit by some kid.
FtSoA
2d ago
In what sub?
Edit: Blocked and Reported. Just as I suspected.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1ltkjsp/comment/n2e9czv/
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Oh I didn’t think you were snippy at all! And even if you were, that’s nothing to apologize for, goodness gracious. Your daughter is the most important thing in your world, of course any time you talk about her it’s going to be emotionally charged. Plus I appreciated hearing the extra context.
I do hope everything works out for you.
If we're so much richer why are 40% of teens not getting licenses today vs 20% in 1980 (the closest stat to 1970 I found).
More options
Context Copy link