domain:cafeamericainmag.com
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
8hr ago
I wouldn't discount the possibility that even now he has somewhere an alt that will pick up his ball and keep running for the goal. I do not write this based on some knowledge of his character, just that this is a time-worn strategy of many who get banned.
biboo-taxation
8hr ago
Today, OpenAI released a new update that will put more mental health guardrails on ChatGPT. I'd been hearing about chatbots inducing psychosis and I'm assuming it was a response to that. But looking into the topic more I'm astounded how much of average people's mental health is becoming tied to these chatbots. Not just people with severe mental illness but perhaps even the majority of all people that use chatbots.
A recent survey shows:
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49% of LLM users who self-report an ongoing mental health condition use LLMs for mental health support.
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73% use LLMs for anxiety management, 63% for personal advice, 60% for depression support, 58% for emotional insight, 56% for mood improvement, 36% to practice communication skills and 35% to feel less lonely.
A quick browse of reddit down this particular rabbithole quickly makes me realize how many people are already talking to chatbots as a friend/therapist. My impression is that its similar to the early days of online dating. People are sort of embarrassed to admit they has an AI friend, but with numbers increasing rapidly the younger you go. I've seen numbers between 10 and 50(!) percent of young people have used AI for companionship.
In retrospect, it would be shocking if AI therapy didn't take off. Probably the biggest barrier to getting therapy is cost and availability. Chatbots are available 24/7, essentially free, and will never judge you. The rate of mental illness is rising particularly among young people so the demand is there. But it's not just that, the idea of therapy is ingrained into today's culture. There's a sense that everyone should get therapy, who among us is truly mentally healthy, etc. I could easily see it becoming as ubiquitous as online dating is today.
I admit personally I'm relatively skeptical of therapy in general. As I understand it, it doesn't really matter what therapeutic method you use the result are about the same, so probably most of the benefit comes from just having someone you can vent to who is empathetic, and won't judge or get bored. If that's the case then AI therapy is probably as good or better than human therapy for cases that are not severe. On reddit I see a lot of comments that say that AI therapy has helped them more than years of human therapy and I can believe that.
So if AI therapy is helping so many people is that a good thing? I see a lot of parallels between AI therapy and AGI's alignment problem. I believe people when they say they went to therapy and they report feeling better. I'm not really confident that they came out with a more accurate view of reality. Recently I want down another tangentially related rabbithole about an online therapist that goes by the name of Dr. K, who has publicly streamed their therapy sessions (for legal reasons he doesn't actually call them therapy sessions). The thing that struck me is just how vulnerable a state of mind people are in during therapy, and the very subtle way that assumptions about reality can be pushed on them.
So if you consider how impressionable people are when receiving therapy, and how its becoming increasingly common for adults to use chatbots for therapy, and how it's becoming increasingly common for kids to grow up with chatbots as friends, then it really makes the potential impact of subtle value assumptions in these models loom large.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
As a member of "some overlap" I'll say this works both way. The people screaming bloody murder about BDS, would see the kind of laws directed against it as an egregious violation of their basic civil rights, were they directed at an anti-Muslim boycott.
Mantergeistmann
9hr ago
As I often do, I like to consider a counterfactual: suppose there was a movement that existed to boycott only Muslim nations. Now, it wasn't against Muslims, per se, just that for mumblemumble reasons it only called for those nations to be boycotted, and for nations that are demonstrably worse at human rights like the likes of North Korea to be not sanctioned.
I don't think a lot of the people complaining about anti-BDS would also be complaining about being anti-Muslim-Nation-boycotts. Sure, there'd still be some overlap, but not enough to really make the news.
I dunno man, it's complicated and frustrating, but the gay community is a one big "be careful what you wish for" cautionary tale, whenever I get frustrated with the male/female sex-drive difference.
FistfullOfCrows
9hr ago
There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”
Imo women would be far happier if they had the same mindset. Suddenly getting a dick pic wouldn't be a drama in three parts, it would be a mild, huh he likes me that much, here's some tits.
Mods do not judge the quality of arguments here.
I feel obligated to point out that obviously you do. The rules are full of guidance about specific qualities of arguments. Perhaps you mean to say that the mods aim to evaluate meta argument qualities, not object level.
So, actually, at the risk of being egregiously obnoxious, in the context of that comment chain, which rule(s) exactly did I break? Actually, why don't all mod warnings come with a citation? That's standard in many a Reddit forum. Don't make us guess.
Is it, by definition, always low effort to provide a link for which the context has been established and/or is self-evident? Since this platform does not allow me to provide a screenshot, a link is actually a pretty relevant counterargument for the claim that was being contested.
Would I have been fine if I had merely had a preamble of something like: "If you click on this hyperlink to a google search, as I previously recommended you conduct to evaluate the evidence for yourself, you will be able to see a fair number of posts on the topic you claim does not really get covered in EA circles."
I'm telling you what your available options are here. Not everywhere else on the Internet, but here.
Not very charitable of you regarding my reading comprehension, I must say. I've only been participating since the olden Reddit days. Never even been banned. Perhaps it was only the soft bigoty of low expectations.
People can make bad arguments. You may point out why they're bad.
God bless the Motte. Mods for, of, and by the people.
EDIT: How could I forget. Is it not implicit in the rules and the epistemic heritage of this forum, the rationality sphere and SSC, that basic norms of logic and reason and evidence are expected? A basic epistemic methodological sanity baseline. Clearly the rules indicate awareness of such concepts, but perhaps they are taken as omissible.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
10hr ago
Maybe. The only tattoo covered WWE fan I know is a sysadmin with hilariously idiosyncratic views on politics.
odd_primes
10hr ago
Loads, this one only came to prominence because of the recent focus on Israel/Palestine.
Personally as king of DOGE I would have abolished the TSA, fired most of them, and transferred the rest to ICE. It's an obscene waste of time and money on security theater that is universally hated, yet somehow employs over 60,000 people.
TitaniumButterfly
10hr ago
If they aren't, and it is ever possible that someone other than the Author-Empowered God Stand-In ever claims (or even challenges) that power, then there is not just no story, but no possibility of a story, because the superintelligence would just turn off the laws of physics that permit its enemies to have ever existed.
Now you're just making the opposite mistake, which is assuming that the laws of physics are entirely mutable.
A superintelligence would need to derive a benefit from the existence of a non-sterile galaxy commensurate with the risk of another superintelligence popping up in it and saying "Fuck you and the light-cone you rode in on."; even if it doesn't go full paperclip-maximizer, shouldn't a superintelligence be like "Hey, the fact that failure is a dramatic possibility means that we should pre-empt this?"
This doesn't make any sense from any angle. There's no way to evaluate the values of a superintelligence. Also, there's no reason to assume they wouldn't have plenty of time/ability to stop such a thing from happening, nor foreknowledge that it would be impossible for a competitor to spring up fully formed.
The implication in the book is that galaxies are nurseries where the (distant) equivalent of new child deities arise, and they care to allow that to continue.
OliveTapenade
10hr ago
Didn't Sarah Palin do that? She discovered in 2008 that her child, prior to birth, had Down syndrome, and publicly chose to keep the baby. She was wealthy, it was relevant to the 2008 election campaign so I think it's fair to say she was, at least in part, signalling her strongly pro-life views, and she was certainly white. She's the highest profile example I can think of.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
I wonder how many ballooning programs like this are there. DOGE was such a waste of opportunity.
The big change is that the grant amounts have skyrocketed in recent years. When the program was created in 2004, funding was around $25 million per year. The program was proposed and lobbied for by Jewish groups. Last year the total was $454 million, and synagogues receive a disproportionate amount of funding.
https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/nonprofit-security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_Security_Grant_Program
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
Surely this would be worth a few theories on how the Pharaoh's PAC owns the US government but nope. Zilch.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Is it worth discussing in the way he's discussing it? And even if it was, 90% of the time the dude runs away when you give him a thoughtful response.
anon_
11hr ago
On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.
I don't think that's really the danger here. If the BLS statistics aren't trusted, some actors are going to do their best to fill in a trustworthy answer. The problem there won't be their honesty, but that the data are not going to be evenly available. We'll go back to information asymmetries rather than public knowledge.
anon_
11hr ago
So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?
Getting the exact numbers 3 months later is just not as useful as getting directionally-correct ones fast.
anon_
11hr ago
The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.
I don't see any congressional approval for this condition anywhere in the statute, so I expect it won't last long in court.
To back up a bit, there is a whole area of law concerning when and how the federal government can attach strings to money granted to the states, because doing so can in some cases be coercive (see. e.g. SD v Dole). Since it raises constitutional concerns, the Court has said that Congress must do so in unambiguous terms. This is likewise a parallel with various other kinds of Federal preemption: Congress can preempt a variety of State laws, but respect for State's rights mean that if it wishes to do so, it has to legislate it clearly rather than having the courts infer preemption.
As I see it, this is just a totally illegal addition of "terms and conditions" to the spending that Congress didn't justify. It might arguably within the power of the Federal Government to impose such a condition, but seems very obviously not within the power of the executive, acting without a clear congressional statement, to do so.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.
Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
I think Cameron's tale of noble primitivism is especially imperilled by his massive use of CGI, SFX talent and all the technical wizardry that only a huge industrialized civilization can provide. It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.
Also, it is kind of funny to imagine humanity burning all the enormous fruits of their fusion age infrastructure with desperately, insanely incompetent management. As you say, tactical nukes and long-range missiles would make it child's play to crush the natives.
But what if the company that got the contracts doesn't want to use nerve gas or clusterbombs against the natives? What if they want to sell lightly armoured mechs with convenient glass windows for the Navi to shoot through? Then they'll need to buy more light mechs. The contractors on the ground don't want an in-and-out raze-and-burn, they want a forever war. The advisors, the logistics people, the starships transporting troops around... It's all a pretend war to extract money from somebody.
What if the tools to fix Earth are already there but 'ethical reasons' prevent them being used? Some idiot politician banned doing things the right way after some dumb scare so they have to mine unobtanium from light years away and throw away soldier's lives with comically stupid gear rather than embarrass the political consensus?
Anyway, the humans have great aesthetics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-YM8mCG7Co
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white
Why? They're old, and got into their position before the discrimination regime was implemented. Is there a rule somewhere that we have to wait 2 generations for discrimination to run it's course, before we're allowed to call it discrimination?
This is about making democrats fight each other.
This seems like a really sad claim. At least "to counter illegal discrimination" would be a somewhat acceptable excuse for cutting emergency aid for tornado/fire/hurricane/earthquake victims, many of whom of course would be centrist/conservative/griller types because even the most partisan of states still tend to be like 60/40-65/35, it'd at least be for a nominal cause of reducing harm elsewhere even if I disagree that BDS is so harmful that it's worth cutting emergency aid.
But to cut aid to own the libs? That's the reason? Just seems cruel then.
Edit: Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas. Hopefully they wouldn't do that, but it's very easy for them to just shrug and go "welp it's not enough of an emergency for the feds so that rural area can just deal with it themselves"
ulyssessword
12hr ago
Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.
Tell that to the FEMA employee that told workers to skip Trump-voting houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Anti-White discrimination may be a hard sell, but it's not impossible.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
12hr ago
You've clearly never debated a flat earther and it shows.
Wrong.
If a flat earther showed up here, you'd be required to follow the same rules.
I'm telling you what your available options are here. Not everywhere else on the Internet, but here.
"Don't do this" ought to also apply to people who won't do the very basics of epistemic due diligence.
Mods do not judge the quality of arguments here. People can make bad arguments. You may point out why they're bad.
If you think the argument is so bad as to not be worth the effort, you may choose not to reply.
Those are your options.
We all come to miss at least some of the fallen for livening things up around here.
Kind of hilarious how much drama is generated here over banning people for being dramatic.
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