domain:mgautreau.substack.com
astrolabia
1hr ago
... unless it were encased in bone!
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
But the Republican legal movement is overwhelmingly Catholic, which is not by the standards of US conservatives particularly Zionist.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
I do not use LLMs as therapists or "buddies".
You know, that shouldn't be unusual enough to count as based. And yet... based tbh.
Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies
What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular?
We don't. The City of Man, as St. Augustine called it, can and does function by harnessing the fear and cupidity of its population. Even in nominally Christian societies, most people obey the law because they fear punishment, and most people labor because they want goodies. Earthly societies work like this. Even the devils in Hell maintain a society that "works" like this. Satan is the top dog; he has goons like Mammon and Baal under him, and every level of the pyramid oppresses those beneath them, and fears and envies those above them.
Of course, the City of Man periodically falls apart. Countries rise and fall, elites are circulated, the 'good times, weak men, hard times' meme cycles. And of course, the City of God, the group of people who obey and work for the sake of love; whether visibly Christian or not, help society run more smoothly. But the Christian church is not One Weird Trick for curing social decay. The visible church is not the City of God. Wheat and tares are mingled together. If anything, whenever the visible church grows more powerful, the City of Man infests it more thoroughly for cynical reasons. "Evil Catholic Church" is not just a Final Fantasy trope.
That said, whenever you see the City of Man being stable via repression, with a degenerate and gluttonous overclass (see China or North Korea); or whenever you see the City of Man losing stability, and devouring itself alive like a swarm of maggots bursting out of a rotting corpse (see the West), that's a hint you don't want to live in place that operates like the City of Man.
"Become Christian to restore the West" is both a trap and easily deboonked. Become Christian because you realize this is not your true homeland. That's it. 🤷♂️
astrolabia
1hr ago
Yep. If everyone carried around a big red button that would kill them painlessly and instantly, even if they were never pressed "accidentally", I think most people wouldn't make it very long.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
Yep, most ai takes on ssc are straight up bad and I'm willing to take a bet on llms crashing the markets or fizzling out hard.
Language models aren't going to lead to agi, asi, whatever they wish to describe it with. I go there and see smart people steeped in religious reverence, the sort mullahs have for Allah.
Scotts piece was terrible and the initial hullabaloo on AI takeoff was hilariously bad. My personal take is that we will never achieve it, and taking bets that cost nearly a trillion is not smart.
Finance barons are looked at as evil people who would fuck over the average Joe during a recession to get bailed out, what happens if techies do it?
Attaching random percentages to things and asking for studies for every thing stops being helpful after a while. Rationalists will deeply regret their ai takes.
roystgnr
1hr ago
I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
Probably prompted by the op-ed a week or two ago, Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death?
The author made a very good case that some utilitarians aren't nearly wise enough to try their hand at maximizing expected utility and should just be deontologists instead.
Not intentionally, of course.
bolido_sentimental
1hr ago
The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.
Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.
But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.
It's gotten worse, but the apps still work in some places.
For a straight man, a place must meet 3 criteria to have a good dating apps scene:
- Large - It's a numbers game. You needs lots of people. Top 10 Metropolitan statistical area is needed.
- Transient - Need young transplants coming in on a regular basis. Large grad student population is always good.
- Majority Female - Male demand >> Female supply. Having more women balances it out.
The NE corridor is probably the best place to be on dating apps. Boston - NYC - Philly - DC. West Coast (Seattle, Bay Area) is brutal. Note: Dating apps are hell for any man who isn't at least a 6.5/10, and stays a struggle until you make it past an 8/10.
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
It's run clubs and pickleball. We're in the Lululemon era of dating, where you must demonstrate a commitment to nondescript-fitness to be an eligible bachelor.
roystgnr
1hr ago
This is the way.
You can't use LLMs for anything that you can't check yourself afterward; the hallucination rates are still just too high. But they're fantastic for cases where you'd like to use a search engine but there's just no way to turn your query into a list of words that (along with obvious synonyms) would define and sort the results.
"Tourist attractions in X" will get you to a TripAdvisor page that's fine. For "but not too expensive" you might be better off with the LLM than you would be manually searching a curated list. For "near a road trip route in between X and Y" and "oh, but we'd prefer to take a more northerly and high-altitude road in the summer heat" there was just no beating the LLM (actual example from my last vacation). It took surprisingly few queries like "here's what I vaguely remember about a fun trip with my parents in this state decades ago" to get to an answer like "here's the specific canyon and creek-side picnic site they probably took you to" (which, based on how familiar the drive felt when I took my own kids there, was probably correct).
You'd think that only works for fuzzy answers like vacation planning suggestions, but it's pretty good even for well-defined answers to fuzzily-stated questions. I'd never trust an LLM alone to tell me what Godunov's Theorem is or means, but when I couldn't remember the name "Godunov's Theorem" it was by giving a vague description to Claude that I found it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
What's his outlook towards the end of the book ? Is there a sense of deescalation with time, or is it the sort of hopeless resignation that I see from most experts ?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2hr ago
Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?
If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.
That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.
DradisPing
2hr ago
So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.
There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.
But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.
To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.
While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.
Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.
However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.
Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.
So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.
There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.
In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.
Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.
So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?
Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.
They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.
It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
It would be a nice dogwhistle for "mudslime" (common slur for Muslim/Arab).
Aapje58
2hr ago
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
It doesn't work because his name is pronounced : "Mum-daani". MudMaani doesn't have the same ring to it.
johnfabian
2hr ago
I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit
FtttG
2hr ago
Kind of sounds like a smaller-scale version of Mattress Girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), without any sexual contact between complainant and defendant alleged to have taken place.
gattsuru
2hr ago
And the year-long Floyd-specific admin-motivated rule against promotion of violence. And everything that hit politicalcompassmemes. And the other cases where it was never clear exactly what motivated admins to intervene, it just happened.
And while I'm not impressed by the Joos-posting, I'll notice that the alternative at reddit was a poster getting AEO'd for merely looking like he was triple-parenthesising.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.
I don’t advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Well yes, it exists in relation to prevailing life paths is my point- I’m merely disputing the direction of causation.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
It’s in the Bible.
My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.
I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.
I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.
((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))
Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.
More options
Context Copy link