domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
Yep, most ai takes on ssc are straight up bad and I'm willing to take a bet on llms crashing the markets or fizzling out hard.
Language models aren't going to lead to agi, asi, whatever they wish to describe it with. I go there and see smart people steeped in religious reverence, the sort mullahs have for Allah.
Scotts piece was terrible and the initial hullabaloo on AI takeoff was hilariously bad. My personal take is that we will never achieve it, and taking bets that cost nearly a trillion is not smart.
Finance barons are looked at as evil people who would fuck over the average Joe during a recession to get bailed out, what happens if techies do it?
Attaching random percentages to things and asking for studies for every thing stops being helpful after a while. Rationalists will deeply regret their ai takes.
roystgnr
3d ago
I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
Probably prompted by the op-ed a week or two ago, Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death?
The author made a very good case that some utilitarians aren't nearly wise enough to try their hand at maximizing expected utility and should just be deontologists instead.
Not intentionally, of course.
bolido_sentimental
3d ago
The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.
Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.
But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.
It's gotten worse, but the apps still work in some places.
For a straight man, a place must meet 3 criteria to have a good dating apps scene:
- Large - It's a numbers game. You needs lots of people. Top 10 Metropolitan statistical area is needed.
- Transient - Need young transplants coming in on a regular basis. Large grad student population is always good.
- Majority Female - Male demand >> Female supply. Having more women balances it out.
The NE corridor is probably the best place to be on dating apps. Boston - NYC - Philly - DC. West Coast (Seattle, Bay Area) is brutal. Note: Dating apps are hell for any man who isn't at least a 6.5/10, and stays a struggle until you make it past an 8/10.
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
It's run clubs and pickleball. We're in the Lululemon era of dating, where you must demonstrate a commitment to nondescript-fitness to be an eligible bachelor.
roystgnr
3d ago
This is the way.
You can't use LLMs for anything that you can't check yourself afterward; the hallucination rates are still just too high. But they're fantastic for cases where you'd like to use a search engine but there's just no way to turn your query into a list of words that (along with obvious synonyms) would define and sort the results.
"Tourist attractions in X" will get you to a TripAdvisor page that's fine. For "but not too expensive" you might be better off with the LLM than you would be manually searching a curated list. For "near a road trip route in between X and Y" and "oh, but we'd prefer to take a more northerly and high-altitude road in the summer heat" there was just no beating the LLM (actual example from my last vacation). It took surprisingly few queries like "here's what I vaguely remember about a fun trip with my parents in this state decades ago" to get to an answer like "here's the specific canyon and creek-side picnic site they probably took you to" (which, based on how familiar the drive felt when I took my own kids there, was probably correct).
You'd think that only works for fuzzy answers like vacation planning suggestions, but it's pretty good even for well-defined answers to fuzzily-stated questions. I'd never trust an LLM alone to tell me what Godunov's Theorem is or means, but when I couldn't remember the name "Godunov's Theorem" it was by giving a vague description to Claude that I found it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3d ago
What's his outlook towards the end of the book ? Is there a sense of deescalation with time, or is it the sort of hopeless resignation that I see from most experts ?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?
If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.
That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.
DradisPing
3d ago
So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.
There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.
But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.
To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.
While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.
Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.
However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.
Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.
So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.
There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.
In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.
Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.
So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?
Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.
They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.
It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
It would be a nice dogwhistle for "mudslime" (common slur for Muslim/Arab).
Aapje58
3d ago
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3d ago
It doesn't work because his name is pronounced : "Mum-daani". MudMaani doesn't have the same ring to it.
johnfabian
3d ago
I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit
FtttG
3d ago
Kind of sounds like a smaller-scale version of Mattress Girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), without any sexual contact between complainant and defendant alleged to have taken place.
gattsuru
3d ago
And the year-long Floyd-specific admin-motivated rule against promotion of violence. And everything that hit politicalcompassmemes. And the other cases where it was never clear exactly what motivated admins to intervene, it just happened.
And while I'm not impressed by the Joos-posting, I'll notice that the alternative at reddit was a poster getting AEO'd for merely looking like he was triple-parenthesising.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.
I don’t advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Well yes, it exists in relation to prevailing life paths is my point- I’m merely disputing the direction of causation.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
It’s in the Bible.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
3d ago
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
Hang on, are we using the same forum? themotte.org?
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
I once thought about whether writing original articles might be a way to attract a better audience, the way many organically found econlib and ssc, like I did.
Reddit will only swim leftwards, there are fewer "based" people there, you don't want excessive sneerclub attention.
As for how bad it is, Gina Carano got fired by Disney for normie boomer cuckservative posting, she recently settled with Disney as Musk was happy to foot the bill, every single post about it there is actively hostile.
I'm afraid, if we go back, people will paint a target, or at least the self censorship will neuter quite a bit of what we do.
I feel that the rationalist ideas are played out, we have gone through the bulk of the rat ideas, the vision for me is something new that goes beyond what we already have.
And props to zorba, my last week's comment about the internet being concentrated forgot to include reddit, having your own platform makes you sovereign, it's worth the troubles.
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
DradisPing
3d ago
At this moment in the US there are far more people with obesity than with cancer.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
Damn, I never knew yud wrote about quantum mechanics. Can you please tell me more about it.
Throwaway05
3d ago
It's both true and not true. If you give men an unlimited stipend and no consequences they'll go to strip clubs and buy hookers constantly. They probably know it's bad for them, but well people do shit that's bad for them all the damn time.
Dating apps are an equivalent for women, a constant parade of male attention and access to men they wouldn't have otherwise who in truth have no interest in them. A decent subset will abuse that, with intention or without. Eventually society and obligation will make them circle back (well for most).
Some may have insight into it or not.
"I want to fuck the prom king" isn't irrational when given permission to do so. It may be common but usually they grow out of it and it's a matter of when.
Yep. If everyone carried around a big red button that would kill them painlessly and instantly, even if they were never pressed "accidentally", I think most people wouldn't make it very long.
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