domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?
(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
The bigger question's going to be whether, even if this never becomes socially acceptable, it'll be possible to meaningfully restrict. You can put a norm out to punch anyone who wears these things, but it's only going to get harder and harder to spot them as the tech gets better.
That's a legal problem. Here in Russia, possessing a recording device that is not immediately obvious as a recording device is a crime. If you order them from AliExpress, the customs will let the cops know.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Why don’t you just ask people directly how rich/poor or urban/rural they are?
JTarrou
2d ago
A lot of pushback on the least important part of a month-old post for a pack of people who like to consider themselves smarter than the average bear.....
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
roystgnr
2d ago
IMHO the best rationalists (unlike myself) are extroverted. But if you interpret "in the LW sense" as "prone to endless navel-gazing akrasia on online forums", which IMHO is only a little unfair, then that selects for introversion too.
thejdizzler
2d ago
- 40 minute walk, 15 minute drive with usual traffic
- 40 minute walk, 20 minute bus ride
- 30 minute drive. Fruit, berries.
- 20 min walk 5 minute drive
- Looks like 22 minute drive
- 40 minute drive or 15 minute train from station that is about ~20 minutes away from where I live.
JTarrou
2d ago
People who work at a university aren't nearly smart enough to be on the far side of that slope.
roystgnr
2d ago
Sorting the people best at some trait into the jobs that most benefit from that trait is useful for society at large, even if every job would show some benefit.
Just because good engineers must communicate well and good journalists must understand math doesn't mean we could swap them around with no problems; the priority order differs from job to job.
And conscientious isn't quite a trait with no downsides like communication and math skills are. I've seen many a conscientious person buckle down to spend hundreds of hours brute forcing the implementation of a poorly conceived idea that a less diligent person would have pushed back on.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
How far away is the closest symphony orchestra that pays it's musicians?
15 minutes away by subway
How far away is the closest bespoke suit shop?
10 minutes away by foot
How far away is the nearest commercial farm (not hobby), and what do they farm?
50 minutes away by car, strawberries
How far away is the nearest Amtrak station?
Halfway round the world. 15 minutes away by subway if you're fine with any other long-distance trains
How far away is the nearest Walmart?
Halfway round the world. 40 minutes away by subway if Metro C&C counts
How far away is the nearest international airport?
25 minutes away by taxi, 45 minutes away by subway and express bus
VIM
2d ago
It wouldn't just be military aid, it would also be the diplomatic cover. If the American President had the foreign policy sensibilities of a Mamdani or a Fuentes then Israel would be instantly sanctioned and isolated. Considering Israel is entirely dependent on imports they wouldn't last long. At a minimum it would be impossible under such circumstances to maintain a standard of living comparable to what it manages today.
Remember that the US also pays Egypt and Jordan billions of dollars in aid every year as protection money for Israel. The real bill of protecting them is far higher than just the cost of the bombs.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
-
Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
-
Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
-
Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
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Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone."
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
roystgnr
2d ago
I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.
The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I owe you responses to the other posts, but I am a slow & lazy writer with a penchant for procrastination, and lurking. I'll answer this first because it's a quick answer. My motivations is that I'm deeply sceptical about people and the world. This is only partly related to LLMs but starts deeper. I'm sceptical and cynical about human motivation, human behavior, and human beliefs. I'm not really interested in weighing in about "intelligence" that's a boring definitional game. I use LLMs, they are useful, I use them to write code or documents stuff in my professional life. I use the deep research function to do lit reviews. They are useful, doesn't mean I think they are sentient or even approaching sentience. You are barking up the wrong tree on that one, misattributing opinions to me that I in no way share.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long
Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago
They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak
What is replacing them?
roystgnr
2d ago
magicalkittycat
2d ago
don't sell guns or sex
Those aren't speech. Those are definitely questions of autonomy, but they aren't speech. Which makes me think we're both having different conversations here.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy. Twitch generates about $2 billion in gross revenue annually. OnlyFans generates about $6 billion. It's just a better buisiness model if you are a young woman streamer to be titillating.
For me:
- About 100 miles
- About 150 miles
- About a quarter mile (Holsteins)
- About 35 miles
- About five miles
- About 110 miles
roystgnr
2d ago
like many Russian soldiers he was wandering around by himself during the day
I know you said "many", not "most", so I'm not really contradicting you, but I still can't resist the traditional reply image.
Even if it's almost a tautology that the Russian soldiers we see are the ones we can see, though, you've got to wonder why those ones didn't learn better. My theory is perhaps a stupid one, too informed by my having tried out Project Zomboid recently: you make what seems like a little mistake or you get a little unlucky, your position is revealed, and you find yourself someplace that seems (and probably is) too unsafe to stay, no matter how unsafe it also is to try to carry too much equipment somewhere else while there's a horde right outside. Then you take what turns out to be the last walk of your life, but it's not the walk that killed you, it's the circumstances that pushed you to it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I'm not sure what a "bespoke suit shop" is.
It means a place which will make a suit from scratch, to your measurements and specifications. It's expensive as you might imagine, but if you want something that a normal manufacturer doesn't make it can be the only way. I've thought about going to one of those, just because manufacturers don't make three piece suits in sizes large enough for me (and I like a three piece suit).
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Some items I'm looking at this week:
If you want a better / more rounded list, just use the RealClear media roundup portal. The link is to RealClearWorld specifically for global emergent news, but there are a number of other portals (technology, energy, military, US politics, etc.) which provide more articles, from a broader selection of sources, daily.
Fifteen miles; Three miles; three miles; three miles; eight miles; thirty miles. Slightly changed distances in different directions.
The Farm sells all kinds of things, and it’s a perfect example of how poisonous foreigners are to a community. This is a locally owned multigenerational farm, so they price things fairly because their neighbors are their community. They pay good wages, because they hire their neighbors and their neighbors are their community. They are devout Christians, so so they live humbly and give back to the community, which is their neighbors (the list of their giving is absurdly long). There are a lot of older adult workers, who are definitely “inefficient”, but there’s not a sociopath or a foreigner or a corporation owning it, so they care for those whom they hire. It’s a beautiful Americana farm and store. They sell organic, because like most Americans they have a distrust of most commercial pesticides.
If Indians bought the farm, all the employees would be overseas relatives; some of the proceeds would be sent back home; they would have to signal their wealth more, meaning resources wasted on commercial goods; they wouldn’t care about fleecing others; it is unlikely (but I suppose not impossible) that they have the morality to give lots of their profits away, and if they do, it is unlikely to be toward the White American community nearby but instead toward various Indian things, or perhaps to an elite institution that doesn’t need the money. If devout non-Christians owned the store, they would be giving back to their non-Christian institutions, meaning the resources are gone from the community.
Visiting is wonderful; everyone is nice and everything is cozy. It stands in stark contrast to the convenience stores (and in past decade, Dunkins et al), where you have some aggressive impolite overseas Indian staring at you the entire time, and everything is ugly and cheap, and they only hire their relatives.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.
No it's not.
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