domain:web.law.duke.edu
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
You've an interesting post and edit history. I only write this as it's hard for me to comment or interact in any genuine way (in this type of encouragement thread) with post-ers who appear to redact / obfuscate everything they post.
Anyway, yes, survival is a good first goal.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
How do you get up to speed in a situation like this?
I often find myself, well, maybe not the stupidest, but far from the smartest in the room. I don't want to interrupt the smart people when they're going a mile a minute doing something important every time I lose the thread, but if I never ask questions I never get better at keeping the thread. What do?
5434a
5hr ago
Very cool. I sometimes entertain an idle daydream about cycling around the Alps for my mid-life crisis (around as in around the comparatively lower elevation periphery, not around as in through). I'd definitely want a more road based route than that though.
Sounds like an awesome trip. Bikepacking has always fascinated me, but I've never been brave enough to embark on a "real" expedition like this one.
I'm a bit surprised that power was such an issue. What kind of power bank did you use? For (American style) backpacking using a power bank to charge devices, then charging that when you have a stop with wall power, is a somewhat common strategy. At 30W even a 15 minute charge while using the bathroom at random chalet or ski-lift should make an appreciable difference. A reasonably compact travel charger should be able to do 60W now, though you might be limited in light weight banks that can handle that kind of power.
I know that drinking directly from alpine melt is very common, but I always used a Sawyer Mini when drinking from streams in Switzerland. I once drank from a stream thinking we were well above cow level, ran into a Chamois 100 meters up stream. I assume they can pick up E. coli or giardia from all the cows. Aquamira might be lighter weight and more compact if you are space limited. For serious GI problems I recommend bring Pepto Bismol when traveling in continental Europe. It's surprisingly hard to get in parts of the continent. Not medical advice, but, it seems more effective when combined with imodium (which is available) than either alone. Again, combine at your own risk, the directions probably tell you not to do that. IMO though, better than having a blowout on the plane.
I guess you were bathing in a touristy part of Montreaux? There used to be a beach oh the other side of Lac Léman in Versoix that I quite liked. It had a roped off swim area and a floating platform. So it's not that weird to swim in the lake, just location dependent.
aqouta
5hr ago
"Mauritanians could be here" he thought, "I've never been on this island before. There could be Mauritanians anywhere." Made in the USA reverberated his entire airbase, making it pulsate even as the $9 Billion subsidy circulated through his powerful thick military budget and washed away his (merited) fear of soviet aligned countries. "With bombs you can drop them anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
Throwaway05
5hr ago
...And for the lovely anecdote I mentioned, from Nancy McWilliams's Psychoanalytic Diagnosis:
I've been trying to get people here to read that for years! I appreciate the parallel advertising.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
Even in that case, you can easily satisfy yourself using hookers. According to quick AI search the prices ranges from $20 per hour for street hookers to around $150 for average escort to $300 plus for high end hooker in USA.
This fails to "price in" the associated legal risks — reputational damage, arrest, fines, jail time.
philosoraptor
6hr ago
A quick aside about Kant, since so many people blame Kant for things that he really had little or nothing to do with (I recall a program on a Catholic TV channel where they accused Kant of being a "moral relativist", which is... distressing and concerning, that they think that...).
Related pet peeve of mine - ask a roomful of medical ethicists (who should bloody well know better, and to be fair some of them do) about Kant and "autonomy". It's darkly hilarious. Just because Kant made extensive use of a word that is often translated as "autonomy", a lot of people seem to think he held something like a modern medical ethicist's typical views about the importance of self-determination, informed consent, and so on. This is almost the exact opposite of the truth. Kantian "autonomy" means you have to arrive at the moral law by your own reasoning, and not out of (say) social pressure, for it to really "count" - but there's only one moral law, and it's the same for everyone, with zero space for individualized variation.
(And you aren't really acting morally unless you follow it out of duty, not because it feels good or gets good results. Just arriving at the same object-level conclusions about how to act isn't enough.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6hr ago
I think the subset of the human species that has the necessary skills to achieve interplanetary spaceflight is probably going to figure something out in time.
What is your basis for concluding this? Because as I look at things, my view is that we most likely won't. (It seems to me like humanity has already peaked back in the late 20th century, things will never be that good again, and it's all downhill from here.)
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
Your argument only really makes sense insofar as one agrees that there is substance behind the hype. But not everyone does, and in particular I don't. So to me, the answer to your last question is "but the world hasn't changed". You seem to disagree, and I'm not going to try to change your mind - but hopefully you can at least see how that disagreement undermines the foundation of your argument.
This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.
If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.
Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".
If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it,
If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)
Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
I think it matters what you intend the system to be used for. There’s probably a market for a sycophantic waifu or friend bot. But I don’t want my accountant to act like my best friend. In fact, I’d personally trust business or career advice less if I thought the human or bot giving the advice was trying to be my friend or appear as my friend.
SnapDragon
6hr ago
I definitely don't have @self_made_human's endless energy for arguing here, but his takes tend to be quite grounded. He doesn't make wild predictions about what LLMs will do tomorrow, he talks about what he's actually doing with them today. I'm sure if we had more people from the Cult of Yud or AI 2027 or accelerationists here bloviating about fast takeoffs and imminent immortality, both he and I would be arguing against excessive AI hype.
But people who honestly understand the potential of LLMs should be full of hype. It's a brand-new, genuinely transformative technology! Would you have criticized Edison and Tesla at the 1893 World's Fair for being "full of hype" about the potential for electricity?
I really think laymen, who grew up with HAL, Skynet, and the Star Trek computer, don't have good intuition for what's easy and what's hard in AI, and just how fundamentally this has changed in the last 5 years. As xkcd put it a decade ago: "In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible." At the time, the path we saw to solving that "virtually impossible" task (recognizing birds) was to train a very expensive, very specialized neural net that would perform at maybe 85% success rate (to a human's 99%) and be useful for nothing else. Along came LLMs, and of course vision isn't even one of their strengths, but they can still execute this task quite well, along with any of a hundred similar vision tasks. And a million text tasks that were also considered even harder than recognizing birds - we at least had some experience training neural nets to recognize images, but there was no real forewarning for the emergent capability of writing coherent essays. If only we'd thought to attach power generators to AI skeptics' goalposts, we could have solved our energy needs as they zoomed into the distance.
When the world changes, is it "hype" to Notice?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
6hr ago
I cannot recommend The Secret History highly enough, incidentally.
I'm happy to put it on the list. If you have a few other recommendations for someone who enjoys Ellis and is open to Tartt, then please fire away.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
7hr ago
9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong.
The 9/11 Attack Considered as a Self-Help Group for Depression.
Osama Bin Laden was the organizer of the therapy session.
The north tower got off to a bad start.
roystgnr
7hr ago
Why is this comment +10,-16 for merely making an argument?
Possibly for the false assertions in the arguments' premises; probably for the insulting phrasing and meme at the end.
Or this one? +10,-12
This is a good example; thanks. Many of the counterarguments to it ended up looking better than the arguments, but the only thing asking for a downvote is the "just laughable" swipe at the top, and that's unrepresentative of the care taken in most of the rest of it.
Does not even get small meaningless negative reinforcement via stupid internet points.
For zero negative reinforcement, there's always cat -v /dev/random. You'll get all the arguments, sooner or later.
I'm fine with negative reinforcement for bad arguments. Good counterarguments, at least if there's a dogpile of them, are themselves something of a negative reinforcement, don't you think? I just don't like it being expressed via what's supposed to be a count of negative reinforcement for bad comments. The "karma" vs "agreement" vote counts on LessWrong and similar sites now are an interesting experiment in separating those. I don't know what the correlation coefficient between them is (or what I'd expect it should be, for that matter), but their distinction is respected enough that even infrequent readers like me often come across the "this is really interesting even though it's wrong" score combo. The "I agree with this but it's a bad comment" combo seems rarer, but that may just be an artifact of the crowd or the subject matter there; for culture war discussions I fear I'd want to assign it a hotkey.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
suicidal intent always means depression, without exception
I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.
9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.
Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.
If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.
A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.
Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.
I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.
But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.
philosoraptor
7hr ago
What if you conceal it in a mirror or somewhere non-obvious? Neither Epstein nor the average prisoner is a secret agent with bugfinding tools.
As you practically said yourself, this is spy-novel stuff. You are almost certainly greatly overestimating the budget and technological sophistication involved.
Besides, much of the purpose of such things is to serve as a deterrent. Hiding them works against that. (As well as being able to maintain or replace them easily, not that this was a high priority in this case on anyone's version of events.)
SSCReader
7hr ago
Just to point out though none of that supports your claim that their reply would be obviously less correct on quora. That's the claim that you need to buttress. Do you see why?
Because someone answering a particular quora question is self-selecting. First to be on quora in the first place and second to answer that particular question.
It could be 8 out 10 women have worse general knowledge, but that given the selection pressures men and women's answers on quora are equally correct because only the 2 out of 10 women post there, and so on and so forth.
You can't evidence a specific claim like this with general statistics. Consider: Men generally have less knowledge of fashion than women. Positing this is overall true for a moment, it doesn't mean that men answering fashion questions on a website will statistically answer worse than the women, because it is highly likely those men are very unusual, otherwise they wouldn't be answering questions on fashion in the first place. They are very likely to have greater fashion knowledge than the average man. Whether they have more knowledge than the average woman on the website we could only determine by analyzing answers on the platform itself.
So you still haven't actually evidenced the women on quora would be obviously less correct in general. You may have evidenced that if you pick a random woman and ask her a general knowledge question she will on average do worse than a random man. But that wasn't your claim.
To evidence a claim about quora you will have to analyze data from quora (or something similar perhaps), or find a way to unconfound the general data to account for selection effects on quora. Which in itself probably requires you to analyze a lot of data about quora.
Or to put it another way, the fact 8 out of 10 men know little about the goings on on Love Island, doesn't tell you much about the level of knowledge a man who CHOOSES to answer a question on Love Island has. Because interest in the topic is a factor in both level of knowledge and wanting to answer the question.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7hr ago
I am not interested in debating the object level truth of this topic. I have engaged in such debates previously, and I found the arguments others put forward unpersuasive (as, I assume, they found mine). I'm not trying to convince @self_made_human that he's wrong about LLMs, that would be a waste of both our time. I was trying to point out to him that however much he thinks he is critical of LLMs (and to his credit he did provide receipts to back it up), that is not how his posts come off to observers (or at least, not to me).
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
7hr ago
Note that I claimed that the support of experts (Geoffrey Hinton is one of the Nobel Prize winners in question) strengthens my case, not that this, by itself, proves that my claim is true, which would actually be a logical fallacy. I took pains to specify that I'm talking about Bayesian evidence.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, one of the classics that humans have noted since antiquity.
Consider that there's a distinction made between legitimate and illegitimate appeals to authority. Only the latter is a "logical fallacy".
Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but for the invention of neural networks. I can hardly see someone more qualified to be an expert in the field of AI/ML.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
An argument from authority can be fallacious, particularly when the authority invoked lacks relevant expertise.
This doesn't mean your claims are false, of course, just that the argument you made in your previous post for your claims is weak as a result.
It would be, if it wasn't for the veritable mountain of text I've written to explain myself, or the references I've always cited.
rae
7hr ago
consistent in claiming that (contra your interlocutors) they can reason, they can perform a variety of tasks well, that hallucinations are not really a problem, etc. Perhaps this is not what you meant, and I'm not trying to misrepresent you so I apologize if so. But it's how your posts on AI come off, at least to me.
When someone writes something like that, I can only assume they haven’t touched a LLM apart from chatgpt3.5 back in 2022. Have you not used Gemini 2.5 pro? O3? Claude 4 Opus?
LLMs aren’t artificial super intelligence, sure. They can’t reason very well, they make strange logic errors and assumptions, they have problems with context length even today.
And yet, this single piece of software can write poems, draw pictures, write computer programs, translate documents, provide advice on countless subjects, understand images, videos and audio, roleplay as any character in any scenario. All of this to a good enough degree that millions of people use them every single day, myself included.
I’ve basically stopped directly using Google search and switched to Gemini as the middle man - the search grounding feature is very good, and you can always check its source. For programming, hallucination isn’t an issue when you can couple it with a linter or make it see the output of a program and correct itself. I wouldn’t trust it on its own and you have to know its limitations, but properly supervised, it’s an amazingly capable assistant.
Sure, you can craft a convincing technical argument on how they’re just stochastic parrots, or find well credentialed people saying how they just regurgitate their training data and are theoretically incapable of creating any new output. You can pull a Gary Marcus and come up with new gotchas and make the LLMs say blatant nonsense in response to specific prompts. Eppur si muove.
celluloid_dream
7hr ago
No, and if those posts had been left at +1,0 I would not have said a word.
This is solely about the negative reinforcement on unobjectionable comments that merely have an unpopular opinion. The people who downvote those are doing this forum wrong. I will die on this hill.
Whether or not "patriarchy" is a system that was codified (as in the Abrahamic religions) or simply a set of norms that turned out to be optimal for dealing with pre-industrial (or, perhaps more properly, pre green revolution) life, the idea is that beyond a certain point an excess of male intrasexual competition is bad because energy spent on that (be that fighting and killing each other in more primitive contexts, or power-swiping on dating apps and spending tons of time and money in bars for the non checked out in our present context) isn't spent on more useful things like working (This can still be seen by the fact that married men still earn more money than their unmarried counterparts.).
Likewise, some degree or another of enforced monogamy fixes the failure that in a purely free market the sexually successful male is completely relieved of obligations toward women or their children because the value of a given woman for those men rapidly approaches zero (aka. "a bitch is a bitch").
That such an arrangement also boosts fertility by enabling the median man to have a wife and children (that he is in turn obligated to provide for and defend) and that said arrangement is good at securing the loyalty of average men is a nifty bonus.
IMO the easiest way to demonstrate that patriarchy hindered certain men rather than women is merely to ask who dismantled it. Was it women? Not really. Sure, the feminists were a thing and they went along with it for their own reason, and capitalists were certainly happy to get a new supply of labor, but it was largely a bunch of upper-class male lawyers who did it.
Edit: Something I failed to convey is that patriarchy has fallen apart in large part because it's been rendered obsolete (save for the "enabling fertility" part, anyway; we haven't figured out how to get women to take what they can get instead of living childless in someone's Tinder harem or giving up out of despair for how lacking they perceive their options to be). Male provision and protection are pretty much worthless, and even loyalty to a cause or group doesn't mean much in a world where real existential threats to elite (or elite through scumbaggery; you can't take what doesn't exist from those who don't have it) men are rare.
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