domain:slatestarcodex.com
Terracotta
3hr ago
It’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board.
OK, this has mystified me for a long time. I use LLMs for various editing, writing, coding tasks, occasionally to kludge a moderator for party games, to simulate human feedback on human-oriented questions, and once in a long while to suggest a starting point for a lit review or to locate a half-remembered link. But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?
When I see a granny or a teen just asking ChatGPT, I assume it's because they can't internet, can't read, or don't give a shit about the quality and provenance of their information, but for a super-online, epistemically hyper-aware Mottizen to do this feels like hearing someone say they hire a guy to order all their food, chew it and spit it in their mouth.
TwiceHuman
3hr ago
I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.
IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"
"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.
And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:
1: You're innocent until proven guilty.
2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.
3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.
4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.
I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them
SSCReader
3hr ago
This is a region where walking into the wrong neighborhood could get you shot.
Well we still have the murals and your chances of being shot have gone way down. Though FYI seeing which colours the kerbs are painted or which flags are on the lampposts is probably easier as there aren't that many murals, you may have to walk a while to work out where you are if relying on murals alone.
You chances of being shot in the wrong region weren't zero, but they weren't massive even at the height of the Troubles. I was on the Falls road (Catholic area) a fair bit even though I was Protestant. Without checking where someone keeps their toaster, or talking to them about schooling you can't tell a Catholic from a Protestant in general just by looking. Hence the old joke about a Jew being stopped by Paramilitaries.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Why not frame it like cigarette smoking?
I don't think people look down on people on a deeply moral level for smoking nowadays, but it's definitely at the level of "Yo, how can you be so stupid? Those cause cancer. And we've know that for years"
I won't judge a woman for going through a ho phase, but I'll shake my head and think "Any smart and respectable man is going to find a subtle way to filter you out. And we've know that for years."
I would also apply this exact same logic in reverse to a man. You spent your 20s and 30s dogging chicks and being a cad / skeezer? Well, in your 40s, any worthwhile woman is going to find a way to filter you out as well.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
Maybe so, although state elections also aren't relevant to people outside the state. I couldn't care less who is the governor of NY, nor the mayor of NYC, because it doesn't affect my life one iota.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Boats boosts it by approximately four billion.
Owning a boat is financial masochism. I've never done it because literally every blog on the planet - including super bro boat blogs - categorically informs you that it's a horrible idea. Yes, yes, "if it's a true passion" -- but, if it is, then you'll deal with the logistics of renting or chartering.
But got-damn to the bitches love a boat. My first experience with this was doing a half day rental of a pontoon boat on a B-Tier lake in greater Appalachia. This was not Miami, Catalina Island, Mykonos, what have you. This was a hot-ass august day on a "lake" that was made when Uncle Sam dammed a river 80 years ago.
The bikinis were on only until they were off. Sound track of Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot giggles. As I was the guy who decided to rent the boat and then drive it, my girlfriend was the ring leader and, although I didn't pursue it, I kind of felt like she was listing threesome on the menu.
Although I now see it for the moral sugar-high-and-crash that it was, and would never orchestrate a similar scenario, I cannot lie and say the memory isn't a warm one.
I have zero inclination to buy a boat, but when I drive past a marina in the summer in some of these mountain lakes, I smile, turn up the Kenny Chesney, and go back.
Tree
3hr ago
That's very high. In germany in a legal bordello it’s 50-100 euros for half an hour.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
In Northern Ireland during the Troubles (a period of civil war waged by clandestine paramilitaries roughly along religious sectarian lines), neighborhoods in the major cities would have large political murals on buildings and walls that marked the area as either Protestant or Catholic. This is a region where walking into the wrong neighborhood could get you shot.
gattsuru
3hr ago
Hm. That's the third time in a week I've seen the topics overlap, but at least in my neck of the woods it's not something people treat as interchangeable. Might put some feelers out to figure out of that's just a linguistic change or if people are getting genuinely confused on the matter.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.
Style and phrasing is straight out of The Last Psychiatrist and Sadly, Porn.
Well done.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Here's my prognostication:
A disproportionate number of western women enter their 40s and 50s single, never married, and childless. It doesn't matter if they "realize" they want a family or not. Instead, the tyranny of aging means they will simply get less male attention as time goes on. Gracefully accepting defeat isn't something many humans do, so they will rebel in their own way. Not against men in some sort of wide scale "Go Girlboss!" moment. Instead, they will attack the easiest to spot targets with the lowest possibility of retaliation; young women.
The great reckoning will thus be these spinsters attempting to shame or otherwise emotionally blackmail these younger women not into avoiding the older generations mistakes (see: failure to accept defeat) but into agreeing with the spinsters ahead of schedule. Recommended Slogan: "The only way to be a feminist in 2035 is to admit that all men are evil. Defund the patriarchy!"
But young women themselves will largely see this for the spite fueled grift that it is and veer away from anything that even resembles this. They'll continue to be pretty and young and go on dates, but perhaps not put out as much, and perhaps seek the counsel of trusted male friends on their potential mates. Play this tape forward enough and all of a sudden the "cool girl" thing to do is to take things slow, pair bond hard, and get married early and have babies.
My primary support for this prediction is that it's already happening. Gen Z women, from the survey's I have seen, are super divided between "all men are evil" levels of feminism and "lol, I just want to be a mom" levels of trad. There isn't much of a middle ground. I've also seen some millenial women, after having become moms, hit the hard defect button out of the sisterhood. My anec-data of note was seeing a FAANG director-of-something-made-up leave that $500k / yr job to be a SAHM after taking an extended maternity leave and changing her mind to "whoooaaa babies are way better than spreadsheets."
In business, there's always a lot of discussion about the unit economics of company. Simply put, does selling one unit of your product to a customer cost more than you're selling it for? In startup land, the answer to this question can be "yes" for some amount of time. In a high growth setting, paying to buy up market share can be a viable strategy. But, eventually, the answer has to be "no." If it isn't, you're running a structurally negative return and it's just a matter of time and debt before the company dies.
I see failing ideologies like third wave feminism in this regard. You can have whatever worldview you want, but if having and professing that worldview leads to a lifestyle that cannot support itself in the long term, eventually that worldview dies out. Freezing eggs, looking for sperm donors, and then being a single mother is a far far higher risk, lower return, more expensive, and more complicated strategy than "get married. have kids" You can try to find some sort of grey middle ground, which has been the entire experiment since, roughly, the late 1990s / early 2000s, but I think the experiment has shown that middle ground is, at best, a thin isthmus rather than a lush and wide peninsula (geography metaphors for the win).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3hr ago
I'm not sure whether this counts as culture-war material, but it definitely is political, and I found it extremely interesting.
Daily Telegraph (found via Breitbart):
Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal will cost 10 times more than he claimed, official figures reveal.
The Government’s own estimate of the cost of giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is almost £35bn, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act – far higher than the £3.4bn figure Sir Keir has previously used in public.
Labour ministers now face claims that they misled Parliament and the press with an “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.
An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.
The UK will pay £165m a year to rent Diego Garcia for the first three years.
The rent payments will then be set at £120m a year, increasing in line with inflation from year 14.
The document shows that civil servants were first instructed to lower the cost of the deal on paper to £10bn, to account for an estimated annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over 99 years.
Then it was reduced again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year using the Treasury’s Social Time Preference Rate, a principle that money spent immediately has more value than funds earmarked for future spending.
The final figure was calculated to be 90 per cent lower than the cash value of the payments the UK will make to Mauritius over the next century, in what critics say was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.
Writing for The Telegraph, Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “Instead of owning up to the costs, Labour have used an accountancy trick to claim the amount was only a mere £3.4bn.”
Foreign Office sources insisted ministers had used a “standard” calculation for long-term government spending, and denied accusations that it was part of a “cover-up”.
However, other projects announced by Labour have not used the same method, which has allowed ministers to advertise higher spending on popular policies. Angela Rayner has since launched a 10-year affordable homes plan that included inflation-level increases in government spending as part of the cost of the policy – a method not used with the Chagos deal.
I'm getting flashbacks to my Engineering Accounting class in college. Calculations in this vein definitely are used on a regular basis for cost–benefit calculations in engineering. And a long-term discount rate of 5–6 percent certainly sounds reasonable to me. But, if discount rates are being used selectively rather than uniformly, that indeed would count as an "accountancy trick".
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
The respective answer for faceh's question would be "just buy GFE from her onlyfans".
bolido_sentimental
3hr ago
We're around the same age and I've been considering the same question. Like others have said, it's basically a question of taking whatever skills you have to whatever the largest employer is. If I were going to try and move to Muncie, Indiana, then I'd try and see what kind of jobs I could get at Ball State University, or at the Magna plant. If you're IT (like I am), you see what MSPs serve the area and see if they need an engineer, or you try and get on as a sysadmin at whatever businesses there are.
Career paths - as you note, you're kind of locked in with what you've got unless you want to learn a new skill. My barber says he'd train the right person from scratch if he liked him. Every town has lawyers, every town has accountants, every town has police, every town has clergy; but it's hard to transition into one of those things without being ready to change your life tremendously. Nevertheless I have been thinking about it anyway.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.
Oh, that's easy. Blowjobs.
Would you then contest the assertion that women are fundamentally lesser than men? I think that @To_Mandalay is essentially correct in this thread about how women have always been considered lower on the Great Chain of Being than men, do you disagree?
In Christ there is no male nor female; excepting that, yes, women are obviously lower on the great chain of being, inasmuch as children are. This isn't wrong or bad. It becomes wrong and bad when we train them from birth to be upset about it.
It's literally Satanism. He teaches men that we should be as God and should resent the One who loves us and upon Whom we depend. Imagine teaching an eight year old that he should reject all guidance and authority from adults and make his own way and cultivate anger and disrespect for his parents. This is not good for the child.
I don't hate women at all, though I do empathize with women who seem to hate themselves like this poor soul
Yeah, that's the fault of men who allowed women too much freedom across domains such that they ended up stuck in this woeful state.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me for women to feel trapped by their biology, to despair that their ordained purpose is mere continuance of the species while the men drive forwards the transcendence of Man.
Well that doesn't hold at all. Motherhood is one path for women, and the right one for most, I expect; but at some point the kids are bigger and there are numerous ways for women to contribute beyond just birthing and nursing. Society used to be rife with social organizations run by women and we were all better off for it. Having some kids only takes a few years and then women usually end up with plenty of options for doing other things. This whole complaint is just a boogeyman scare tactic designed to divorce us from each other at ruinous expense to all.
The other path for women is loosely defined as 'monasticism', i.e. foregoing family to devote their lives to greater service to all. Also an acceptable path, though as I say wrong for most.
Believe it or not, women are prone to being very happy about being women without enemy action convincing them otherwise. Each of us has our place in the Great Chain of Being; embracing that is wisdom itself.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to scroll tiktok instead of engaging in conversation.
You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.
Corvos
3hr ago
(You were in Japan, you've seen bidets that look like they came from the 22nd century. I don't know how they solve the issue there, but it's probably more elegant)
That's where I'm coming from. I tried it a couple of times - there's a wand that comes out under you and squirts - but it felt like having a water pistol shot at my tender regions. Then I was dripping wet for five minutes. It seemed so obviously inconvenient that I'm mystified by their popularity, but lots of people keep telling me it's the best thing since tummy rubs and they aren't all cultural bidet-users so I figure there must be something to it and maybe I was using it wrong.
In general though it seems to me that paper works far better. Of course you can make it sound disgusting, in the same way people who only had showers growing up will recoil if you talk about baths being 'lying in your own filth' but in practice it's fast, hygienic enough, self-disposing and requires little equipment.
Or to put in another way, I never got past the first stage of this clip from Thermae Romae.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.
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No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.
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Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.
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The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.
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Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.
Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.
gattsuru
4hr ago
That's part of it, but it's also just really common for a gay guy's first crush (and fairly common for first half-dozen crushes) to be straight guys, or closeted het-passing guys. Unless you join a LGBT org early, it's hard to avoid. That doesn't necessarily impact your tastes once you grow up a bit, but it's definitely something can throw a curveball in.
Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.
Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.
DelendaEst
4hr ago
Poor James never knew how close he came.
According to OP James has a pattern of stealing women from his lovelorn roommate. Such a fellow is lucky to still have all his teeth, and if he continues in that vein will not have them all for long.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
Seconding, please elaborate!
oats_son
4hr ago
Whoa, at those rates, degeneracy sounds alright! I thought the average escort was like $500 judging by what Backdoor Backpage or whatever the hooker website is called, and then on that site, they were all covered in piercings and tattoos or were unshaven and all had descriptions about discovering themselves or something. Somehow your $150 average number sounds wrong, though.
Based comment of the week. I can only yeschad.jpeg so hard to this.
I remember having a conversation once at a party where I voiced my interest in what it would be like to date someone and intentionally remain celibate until marriage. The other party, a Thoroughly Modern Woman, immediately voiced the objection "But what if they're bad at sex?!"
I respond by telling her to think it through. In my hypothetical, the dating is the same as it is now, just no sex. We find each other attractive, we share important experiences, we trust one another, we integrate into each other's family life etc. If we assume all of that exists (which we have to, because, in this hypothetical, we're getting married) ... then how in the hell could the sex be bad?
"Here's this person who I find physically attractive, deeply care fore, have spent x months or years with, and have thought about as a long term partner for much of that time .... oh, fuck, she doesn't immediately know how to swivel her hips. Cancel it, cancel the whole damn thing."
It's such a laughable thought to genuinely worry that, on a wedding night, one or both partners is confronted with the horror - the absolute horror - that the other party isn't particularly gifted and one of life's most insanely pleasurable activities.
But that's what modernism has brought us. "He/she has gotta fuck good" is on the same checklist as "trustworthy" and "reliable"
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