domain:drrollergator.substack.com
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
2d ago
I think Tree made a cogent point.
Take, for instance, the stereotypical trap question: 'do you think this dress makes me look fat?'
Optimizing for accuracy: 'You weigh 120 kilos, you look fat in everything' is true, accurate, and also not soft and cuddly or empathetic.
Optimizing for warmth: "You look wonderful, honey!" Inaccurate, probably an outright lie: but the right answer.
If we teach LLMs to speak in a feminine manner to spare feelings/face, we're teaching them to lie to us: of course accuracy would go down.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
I disagree on empirical grounds. Altman is a snake, but even he agreed that GPT-4o was concerningly sycophantic, and removed it, while framing 5 as less sycophantic. This caused a revolt by giga-fried 4o addicts, and he relented. Of course, the objections were also more general, I was personally annoyed by the sudden deprecation of 4.1 and o3, and the reduced rate limits, which many other people objected to.
Consider this:
Would you pay more for a therapist or a nuclear engineer (presuming you had any use for the latter)? LLM companies are desperately fighting to move up the value chain, they all want to sell their models as equivalent in performance to PhD candidates, or independent agents capable of doing high value knowledge work. That's what brings in the big bucks from other businesses or HNWIs who will pay >$200/m for pro plans. Having a buddy to chat to definitely brings in money, but it's a rounding error in comparison.
They want to make money from both markets, but one just makes way more sense to focus on. Especially since people will prefer intelligent + sycophantic to less intelligent + equal amounts of sycophancy.
FtSoA
2d ago
From what was revealed, the gun belonged to the guy who was killed after he set it down on the table, aimed at himself.
If we find out it was not the gun of the guy that killed him then who knows what happened. Foul play? Horse play? Total accident?
One should never fling a loaded gun or flag oneself or another to the utmost degree possible.
roystgnr
2d ago
The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians.
Letting Israeli settlers move to the Gaza Strip was policy after they took it from Egypt in the Six Day War in 1967 (Gaza Strip population 380 thousand), but that ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving the Gazans (population 1.3 million) with everything within the Egyptian borders from 1948, all of which they retained for the next 18 years, until after October 7th (population 2.2 million, 40% 15 years old or younger).
Israel has been taking ever more land from the West Bank, but (correct me if I'm wrong!) the Palestinians there have generally been stuck in the enclaves there, not displaced to Gaza.
If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
In charge de facto, with full popular support? It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent. The first Gazan rocket attack after the Israeli withdrawal was "several hours later"! Instead of setting internal security to torturing and killing political opponents and "collaborators", I'd reserve war-related prosecution and imprisonment for anyone who commits perfidy after the surrender.
Just "in charge" de jure, still having to negotiate peace and prevent violations of it but within a population that's still only 40% in favor of negotiations vs 30% in support of armed resistance? I'd probably shave my facial hair, try to buy a fake id, and otherwise "disappear" before the next war over who's really in charge or the victors' decision to execute me as a collaborator.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
I think the tails will come apart in the marketplace before the come apart on a technical level. LLMs will get enshittified like everything else, if they haven't begun enshittified. They are optimized for engagement and selling access more than they are optimized for productivity. An effective LLM is an LLM that puts itself out of a job in many tasks.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
2d ago
And what I've noticed, at least in my time in such communities, is that the creator spaces if they're functional at all (and not all are) tend to be a lot more positive and validating. A lot of the academic communities are much more demoralizing.
I think that's probably true as a general trend, but it also heavily depends on context. A lot of art communities (writing, music, photography, etc) can be vicious, especially when there's a palpable sense that you have a lot of people competing over very few economic opportunities. And in some academic departments like English or any type of Studies department, glazing the work of others (especially the work of your direct superiors in the social hierarchy) is the norm.
Tree
2d ago
I want women to be included in the conversation.
Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?
gattsuru
2d ago
That's true. Looking it up, there's a few services offering something similar in the US, albeit generally for much more limited sets of diseases or limited to specific states or demographics (or both). I was under the impression that most of them wanted to include 'professional counseling' as part of the service, but it does look like some of them are just taking the 'ship a spit-test to everybody' approach. I dunno that I'd put anywhere near as much trust in it as in the standard full-spectrum-professional result, but a) I don't have a typical risk analysis here and b) I've been out of the dating game long enough to not be familiar with current norms.
Astranagant
2d ago
I think there's a difference in meaning going on here.
Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs" whereas you seem to be meaning the type of person who will comb through reams of fine print to find the one technicality that lets them do what they wanted to all along.
Basically, subservience to law versus wielding the law as a weapon.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
Whatever Anthropic does with Claude seems to work. It's the most flavorful model without really trying too hard to be bubbly and quirky like GPT-4o. Of course, it has its own sycophancy issues, but nowhere near as bad as 4o. (The least sycophantic model I know is Kimi K2, which is incredibly cynical, which makes it interesting)
I am more inclined to go with the "easy problem" view, or perhaps a halfway position. Sycophancy isn't an insurmountable problem. If you're not careful, then trying to knock out obvious sycophancy will make the model more prone to looking for ways to subtly achieve the goal of tricking/convincing the user into giving positive feedback.
To a degree, we really must ask ourselves what "warm and empathetic" really means:
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If a five year old child asks for feedback on an essay, it is arguably almost always true that their writing sucks. That might be true, but it is a tad-bit unhelpful. The most socially adept/instrumentally useful answer (without outright lying) is to praise them for the effort, offer improvements, and tell them to keep at it. Of course, if you're in literary masters course, and the exact same standard of writing is presented before you, some more colorful verbiage might be appropriate.
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A lot of social interaction is lubricated by white lies, and a lot of what is deemed "politeness" isn't maximally truth-seeking.
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy(perhaps to the extent of preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict). Whether something like this ever happens is impossible to say but I don't think it's at all impossible, particularly if elite anti-America messaging continues at the same level of intensity.
There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.
The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.
charlesf
2d ago
I'm to old to have ever used these, and my wife and I have been together since the 90s. However, where I work brings me into contact with a lot of college age and slightly older people who do use these apps to varying degrees. The young men are often getting together on breaks to critique each other's profiles, and the women get together to...also critique men's profiles. As far as I can tell there are a handful of distinct experiences being had here. If you are a good looking man, top 10% or better really, you can have sex with a lot of average women. If you are an average woman you can occasionally have sex with a very good looking man. If you are an average or worse man you can finance the above interactions while being strung along with the promise of maybe having the first experience described here, until you realize that's not going to happen and give up. Very rarely an actual enduring relationship will develop, but these seem more like a fluke than any intent of the app creators. The apps that empower the women even more than usual like Bumble seem to be loosing popularity too. In theory women like being the only party that can initiate a conversation. In practice they are terrible at it and generally unaccustomed to putting any effort into courtship at all. There also appears to be a fair amount of romance fraudsters as well, who seem to target both genders equally, through with different strategies.
TowardsPanna
2d ago
You may be right about that!
FtSoA
2d ago
Yes, and subsequently the FBI conducted further testing with zero failures. Supposedly, anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.
Write like everyone is part of the conversation and you want them to be included in it.
Jiro
2d ago
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.
The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
thejdizzler
2d ago
It does get much easier with practice. I started a zipcar membership this year after having not really driven much since I was 17 and time on the road seems to make the most difference to my subjective feeling of how hard the driving was.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Goals for last month didn't go particularly well. Got about 1/4: I was very social and even hosted a tapas dinner party with 12 guests at my house! I continued to scroll too much, masturbate/use porn and multitask at work. I think the social goal clicked for me (while the others didn't) because I had an actionable system to follow (go to this activity on this night, make plans with these friends this weekend), while the others didn't because I didn't have a system in place to keep me accountable and/or make the goals actionable. For this month I want to focus on systems:
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Reducing scrolling. I have cold turkey on my computer and a lock box for my phone. I can pre-decide what sites/apps are allowed during what times on my computer using cold turkey and don't have to use willpower to stick to it. Same with the phone, although I have to exercise my willpower to put the thing in the box at the set time. This isn't nothing, but is much easier than constantly trying to resist the siren call of the device.
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Scheduling free time and lab time. This is a Cal Newport suggestion. I found my reading habit wasn't as consistent as I would have liked, and am now trying to juggle Spanish, Italian, and English reading, as well as books for various book clubs (Marx, Kant, Spanish book club, etc.). The same applies for my lab work: when I need to do bench experiments they need to be planned out in advance. I can't just decide to a dissection Thursday afternoon because I need to prep, dissections+staining take 5-6 hours, and there's circadian rhythm effects that I have to keep track of between experiments. Of course the schedule doesn't need to be a prison, which I think Jordan Peterson has said, but it can be a guide. Spontaneity is heavily overrated.
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Making sure I sleep enough 5/7 nights a week (preferably 6/7). I'm running about 80 miles/a week these days, and I need to sleep well to recover. Plus everything (willpower, intelligence, emotional regulation, social IQ) seems to get better when I sleep more. Aiming for between 8.5-9 hours in bed 6/7 nights of the week, with one night a little more flexible for late social events. This does mean saying no to a few things, but it mainly means not procrastinating with scrolling and eating properly so I don't wake up in the middle of the night.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
It gets easier as you go. I remember when I was learning how to drive, the first time I merged from an on-ramp was super stressful. And that wasn't even a highway, that was a city road where traffic was going 35-40 mph! But now after years of practice, it's second nature to me. Keep it up, brother!
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
It gets even worse when you go off into the weeds of what WGS84 means, because EGM96 is part of that spec. Often times the only hint you get if WGS84 actually means "WGS84/EGM96" is a reference to a geoid or an ellipsoid. But oftentimes you don't get that, so you are left searching the data for an obvious reference point that gives the reference away.
Throw in the aforementioned Mavlink bug, and even the data is suspect.
Also everyone I've worked with at a three letter safety organization has gotten this wrong 100% of the time.
I don't fly anymore.
charlesf
2d ago
In addition to the rituals of the active civic Roman religion, ancient Romans (and all ancient people) were incredibly superstitious to an extent modern people struggle to imagine. Magic and the supernatural were very obviously real to them. Worldly events, good or bad, had supernatural causes, or at least nudges, and the original Roman religion was the organic accumulation over time of how, when, where, why, and who interacted with this supernatural reality. Of note these needs did no go away when the empire adopted Christianity. Many changes were made to the religion of the apostles to satisfy the Romans need to interact with the supernatural forces that obviously drove all events on Earth.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
For once, being comparatively poor works in my favor. I qualified for the financial assistance, above the budget I said I was willing to bear by myself.
Are there details yet on where the writers will publish their work?
There's no centralized repository. I believe we're at liberty to post wherever we've been posting, which in my case, would be a combination of /r/SSC, The Motte, and my own Substack. I usually cross-post on at least two of the three, depending on the target audience.
I don't know the names of the other participants quite yet, until I confirm my attendance and get added to a Slack channel. If any other familiar faces show up, and they're not against me talking about it, I'll share.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I can't say I'm not enjoying how LLM training keeps producing hard evidence for everything we low-agreeableness people have been claiming since times immemorial.
Even with claude I have the issue that if I give it what I think an issue is it will tunnel vision on that. I'd appreciate more pushback when I am wrong when I am trying to work through a problem. Trying to add some uncertainty to the tone of my request can help but is often not enough.
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