domain:youtu.be
Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:
If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.
Are you saying the BLM riots were more severe and destabilizing than J6?
It's as obvious to me as the opposite seems obvious to you. And not just because the deathcount is an order of magnitude higher.
I see it more as a sort of mob pressure release rather than an actual plan to become intimidating, but don't think that is a big deal.
I just see another irregular verb.
I release pressure. You riot. He is an insurrectionist.
What do you mean my degrees are more aligned to the targets?
You think trashing the desk of a congressman is a strictly less legitimate form of political expression than trashing that of random people or that of policemen. As a Frenchman I find that exceptionally weird. If anything the proper order of a republic would go the other way around.
Listening
6hr ago
Transhumanism is the chief ideology of TESCREAL fascists and extremely right-wing and problematic.
Ioper
6hr ago
Depending on where you are this might not be an option but I usually go to some restaurant or café in the city center with outdoor seating and do some people watching while drinking a beer, eating or having a coffee. If there is a waterfront you can also go there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones (the axis of thingspace), without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":
Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans
This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:
Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.
where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.
(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)
it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly
You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
relatively strong visuospatial skills (in the mental shape rotating sense)
I've put some effort into getting better at art within the last few years, and sometimes I think my inner shape rotator is actively hindering attempts to draw from life well. Proper shading is IMHO hard when you have strong sense of what the object colors should be: as a simple example the checker shadow illusion requires conscious effort to color properly.
I haven't ruled out that mental shape rotating might be useful at some future point, though. It seems like maybe it'd be helpful drawing without reference.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7hr ago
Well it would be a similar result, but not the same result. To synthesise what it told me into a sentence it was basically "stereotypes are real but just a guide, people are a composite of their genes and their upbringing."
Listening
7hr ago
and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did
I mean, alienating people who also don't like social conservatives, don't care how you dress, and don't care who you fuck, seems like a good way to make those questions more difficult.
... I don't think this is a good model. Even if you absolutely must frame it to sneer...
So, there's a joke that goes around in immigration contexts, where the CATO set think nationality is magic dirt, and national culture is food. And that's not a steelman, but it's not exactly an unfair criticism, either; there's a ton of long-built stuff just from one part of the US to another. If Alex Nowrasteh ended up in a SAW movie trap, you'd maybe get him to admit that cultural norms vary from one country to another rather than gnaw his own foot off, but I wouldn't bet on it. The idea that cultures tied to location of origin isn't just taboo, it's either unimaginable or a taboo behind a taboo. Nationality becomes what someone wants to do, in its most visible and immediate form.
What's that look like for gender, if a characteristic is only what the person wants to do? Well, what you were born with is a lot less actively chosen than what you carry in your pants, which is still a lot less actively chosen than what your call yourself. And that's clearly meaningless.
... but if you poke at it, that's not that incoherent. Yes, there are some obvious political compromise at the absolute edges (why is this butch a cis woman and this bitch trans male? why is that a femboy and that a transwoman?). But there's actually a lot of characteristics and terms we use like that: I use my current job title to describe my area of expertise, not the one I went to college over, and you'd probably be kinda weirded out if I used the field I started out with or what my family has historically done.
It's just not something you care about, and you see this as replacing a much more important term and concept. And it’s pretty reasonable to care more about what someone’s got in their pants than whether it’s wrapped in boxers or panties, and whether they want sir or ma’am even less. But that frame or most of the downstream characteristics are no more inaccessible to them than it is to you; the existence of "cis woman" as a term is a recognition of it.
Now, switching out 'trans woman' for 'lifestyle crossdresser' and 'trans man' for 'tomboy' isn't something the trans side is willing to offer for historical reasons even if soccons would accept it (and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did). Perhaps even more critically, it won't solve the problems you or most soccons actually have, here. There are serious and difficult questions about how much we're willing to tradeoff opportunity costs for one group against another group's ability to reinvent themselves (am I talking about 'ban the box' or anti-college-diploma efforts?), of how welfare and entitlements need prioritize things that are actively undesirable to the wild majority of voters, of freedom of self-expression against social and regulatory norms, so on and so forth.
Everything before those questions is just disputing definitions.
sockpuppet2
7hr ago
Yes, what do you think "useful" means?
Understanding the world, e.g., which hypothetical ancient Hebrewite government ministry would be better suited whale issues.
sockpuppet2
7hr ago
They should say that, rather than claim it's about spam. Also, don't they limit model choice and some proxy for "compute-per-conversation," anyway? What's the multiplier for the utility of n accounts, over 1 account?
Is there a clear quantification of cost/man-hour-replaced? Proton charges $9.99/month for proof-reading and shortening emails, which seems steep for such basic (presumably low-token-per-use) functionality, but they have to make things E2EE and their use-case doesn't really allow limiting per-month usage...
'all models are wrong, but some models are useful'
Yes, what do you think "useful" means? Of course, your evaluation of whats high-utility will have to include all sorts of knock-on effects - but it cant include things like "this is useful to say because its true". This is of course incoherent, you cant actually decide whats high-utility without knowing whats true, and Scott the human knows what truth is when its about normal topics - but thats what the argument of the post implies when taken seriously (you will notice that the section thats actually talking about how language works is very short relative to the post). Theres no conceptual role left for truth, as distinct from "the outcome of usefully structuring language".
Listening
7hr ago
who have not explicitly rejected that label
This seems irrelevant?
And once that is accepted, I think it would also be bad style to police the conduct of trans-women more restrictively.
Men are, of course, welcome to have whatever (legal) hobbies their hearts desire.
I don’t disagree that it’s appalling that physical fitness being neglected for the majority (although calling men “weak” and “feeble” as opposed to just unhealthy is an odd choice of language). It doesn’t really matter for the main point that there’s elite female athletes, but it’s still important to know that the delta is not that big at the extremes. The top female athletes are about ~10% worse than the top male ones, and if you look at something like a 5k run, the top females today are better than the top males from the 1930s. That’s way closer than most posters here would suggest, and to compete with female Olympians in most sports you’d still have to be in like the top 0.1% fittest men. The average Joe, even with a decent amount of training, doesn’t stand a chance.
But that’s getting aside from the main point. How exactly is knowing that he can easily surpass most women at sports with relatively little training supposed to dissuade the hypothetical autistic teenage boy from transitioning? If anything it might backfire and make him stop exercising altogether to match more female levels of performance/muscularity (and on estrogen, male performance is drastically reduced anyway).
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
Didn't care for the first couple chapters, and given how much everyone complains about the series I've never really heard anything good enough about it to bother committing to all that.
Listening
7hr ago
I am laughing as we speak. (And JK Rowling is posting as we speak. The windmills, the windmills are calling...)
(I admit "entirely voluntary eugenics program" was not on my Bingo card.)
Eh, actually 15 is still in the danger zone. Girls will have started puberty 1-2 years ahead (12-13) and so at 15 will still be ahead or apace
The adult women world champion football team is losing to the under-16 boys' teams (not even the champions) regularly.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I don't think it will lead to a global recession, since it isn't even a real business making real money. I think it will lead to a recession in the tech industry though. The problem as I see it is that they've probably reached the limit of how much cash they can shovel into research and development without seeing any real results in terms of people actually paying for the product, and so much has been invested thus far that the product will have to be fairly expensive to recoup those costs and actually generate a profit on the whole venture. The whole business model relies on them being able to give it away for free, and companies seeing enough potential that the productivity gains make it worth it for them to start paying. But while you hear about billions of dollars tech companies invest into it, you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases. The whole thing is unsustainable.
Keep in mind that single sectors leading to huge recessions are rare. The tech bubble in 2000 is one example, but that was a relatively mild recession, and the amount the overall economy was invested into tech at the time was far beyond what we're seeing today with AI. Back then any company that was somehow related to computers was getting massive financial investments, and ladies' investment clubs were investing in IPOs. Most of the AI bubble is centered around a few big players, and big players see stock price dips due to localized circumstances all the time, we just don't think too much about it. I used to work in the energy industry, which saw pretty big collapses in 1999, 2014, and 2019, but they didn't lead to national recessions, let alone global ones.
For another example, the US housing market actually crashed in 2006, but and it did cause a global recession, but only because the mortgages had been securitized and the banks had a ton of exposure. It took a full two years for this to play out, and no one payed much attention to the crash at first because it was initially presumed to be localized to the mortgage industry. And then there's the farm crisis in 1985, which wreaked absolute havoc in the Upper Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers were committing suicide in the barn, having lost farms that were in the family for over a century, while the banks that foreclosed on them became insolvent due the inability to resell the land. A new chapter in the US bankruptcy code was created specifically to deal with family farms. Yet the entire thing only gained national notice once musicians started raising awareness and holding benefit concerts. I see an AI slowdown having local effects, with limited influence on the wider economy.
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
Indeed. As AntiDem put it:
Is the existence of homosexual pride parades reason enough to re-outlaw same-sex sexual intercourse?
You ban it to preserve your society - your faith and traditions - against fatal poisoning by degeneracy.
Fifty years ago, the gay rights movement said that all they wanted was to be left alone to do as they pleased behind the privacy of closed doors. That was a lie. What they really wanted was to upend society in order to serve their own aims, to spread Cultural Marxism, and to bring low our faith and traditions. We know this, because that is what they have actually done. If it is a case of "they are always either at your feet or at your throat", then they shall be at our feet. And so it is: they have proven themselves to be the kind of monster you don't let out of the basement, so next time we won't.
We gave them an inch, they took a mile; next time they get nothing.
anon_
8hr ago
I don't think there's a rule against clearly attributed AI output. And I'm also curious.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
8hr ago
Violence committed on federal property is a bigger issue.
Why?
anon_
8hr ago
Well, #1 I'd make him do some sports. That's the easiest way for any teen to get on the path of appreciating the differences between men and woman. That girl who was good at tag? Guess what, when you both at 15 shes no good anymore
Eh, actually 15 is still in the danger zone. Girls will have started puberty 1-2 years ahead (12-13) and so at 15 will still be ahead or apace. The boys will overtake them, of course, but sometimes not quite at 15. It's just at the inflection point.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8hr ago
Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?
Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.
I thought Old Man's War wasn't half bad. It's far up from the disgustingly mediocre level of stuff that populates the Hugos these days.
But I don't think Scalzi is ever going to write anything that transcends being formulaic genre fiction. And him not being that great of a character writer probably is a big part of that, never mind the antics.
That said, I don't recommend holding his stuff in the same level of contempt as Martha Wells or something.
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