domain:natesilver.net
2rafa
5hr ago
Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.
2rafa
5hr ago
Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
I'm reasonably sure I did see him say that, once or twice, but others were simply using reaction images of him to make the same point.
I don't think 4o is that harmful, really, but it's a bad look for Altman to make a fuss about reducing the sycophancy in GPT-5 and then immediately cave. At least he also caved on the ridiculously low rate limits.
2rafa
5hr ago
Switzerland is less homogenous than much of Western Europe and has relatively large amounts of non-European immigration. In any case, given that legal euthanasia is nonexistent in the Islamic world (for largely the same religious reasons Christians oppose it) I find it hard to believe mass immigration from there will lead to greater permissiveness.
The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.
Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman.
Which is to say, they don't actually count those men in their own personal calculation of what "men" are like. If you tell these women that a huge portion of men are actually not able to get matches on tinder, or can't successfully approach women, and thus are unable to find a relationship despite honest best efforts, these women will simply disbelieve you. Availability Heuristic and all that.
So from their perspective, the men that they notice and pursue, i.e. the ones that actually 'exist' for them, are doing just fine. In fact they're doing TOO well, its not fair that he can just pump and dump her because she's one of 5 or 6 others he has on tap!
I'd say that most of the intersex animosity is because women see the top, call it 20% of men as "men" and the bottom 50% as nonentities that don't enter their thought processes at all. And then there's that awkward 30% of men who are in a superposition of 'man' and 'not man' unless and until a woman decides to pay them attention.
If they only compare themselves to the upper 20% of guys, and ignore the bottom 50%, then mentally yeah it feels like SHE is the disadvantaged one in this situation. They can ignore things like the male suicide rate, the fact that most of the crappiest jobs are male-dominated, and that men are generally disfavored by the law because they only see the top 20% of dudes, who ARE in fact doing really well, and assume that's representative. And boom, there's your patriarchy.
Meanwhile, the other 80% of men are painfully aware of their own status, and are finding that every woman they attempt to approach is in fact pursuing those top 20% of guys, and, as noted, is un-self-aware of this factor, and disregards the experience of the vast majority of men when judging them.
So women are mad at 'men' because the only men they care about are rejecting them in the end, refusing commitment but taking sex.
Men are mad at 'women' because when women get mad at those top men, they put ALL men on blast, and that catches a lot of guys in the crossfire who have not done a damn thing to deserve it. They're being treated like villains ON TOP of being rejected by women en masse because those top men are gleefully exploiting their position, and women are incapable of regulating their own marketplace so are getting increasingly distressed and lashing out.
And uh, it looks like said men are getting very, very fed up with this.
And no, this is NOT explained solely by manosphere influencers. Even men who are successfully dating seem to believe less in gender equality. Because those top 20% of guys probably have come to understand women from the other side.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5hr ago
I really don't.
Jiro
5hr ago
When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them?
If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.
And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
they were going to kill it entirely, but so many people have become addicted that Altman relented. Big mistake.
I've been skimming Elizer's twitter occasionally this weekend to see if he posted any "HAHAHAHAH FUCKERS I WARNED YOU/TOLD YOU SO" but I'm wondering if he's getting sick of saying it
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5hr ago
There are things that work in a high trust society that don't in a low trust society. Switzerland, notably, almost singularly in Western Europe, is still super homogeneous, and hasn't thrown open it's welfare state to 3rd worlders. Good for them that they haven't manage to slide down some slippery slope when it comes to assisted suicide. But they've made profoundly different choices about the type of nation they want to be than just about all their peers. I doubt we can pick and choose how we wish to emulate them without there being significant unintended consequences.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
Is anyone watching the chatGPT 5 "bring back 4o" meltdown on /r/chatGPT and /r/OpenAI?
It's insane. People are losing their shit about 4o being taken away to the point it's back now (lmfao). There's also a huge push of "don't mock others for using 4o as a trusted friend you just don't understand". It's honestly equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
For additional fun, browse the comments, obviously there are idiots on the internet, but these people are cooked.
I had thought the internet collectively agreed that RLHF had resulted in glazing that was a huge issue. But it turns out a sizable amount of people actually loved it.
Also funny, gpt5 can glaze you if you ask it, but I guess the median Redditor complaining about this doesn't understand custom instructions. Similarly, people are clearly giving gpt5 custom instructions to be as robotic as possible and then posting screenshots of it... being robotic.
The whole thing makes me rather worried about the state of western society/mental health, in the same way that OnlyFans "chat to the creator" feature does. We need government enforced grass-touching or something.
Around 2018, someone linked me to a few SlateStarCodex essays (IIRC In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup). Pure bliss. I spent days binging Scott essays. I'd finally found someone who thought in the same idiom I did, after a whole life feeling like a space alien.
Post a few years lurking /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte, here I am. This is despite me disagreeing with Rats on most things on the object level.
2rafa
6hr ago
The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.
The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.
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).
There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).
2rafa
6hr ago
If we respect basic autonomy, why should an adult’s adult children have to sign off on whether they are allowed to end their life? As @self_made_human says, Switzerland has had legal euthanasia since the 1940s, and major clinics offering the service since the 1980s.
This is in possibly the most civilized country in the world, certainly in the top 3. People live better, longer, healthier lives in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. Things in Switzerland just work. Even from other wealthy countries like the US, going to Switzerland often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium. Along almost any scale it would be good for any other country to become more like Switzerland, and bad for Switzerland to become more like any other country.
The functional outcome of articles like this is for other Western countries to try to start banning their terminally ill citizens from going to Switzerland. This would be laughable, since you can just cross the border, but the effect would be to harass innocent people for no reason.
Pitt19802
6hr ago
I found that it is very good at telling me which book I am trying to remember from a few hazy recollection of what the book was about.
I was trying to remember which book about basketball stats I read about 15 years ago which had a chapter comparing the relative merits of Tyson Chandler and Eddie Curry. Google gives you a sea of links to those guys wikipedia and basketball reference pages.
Chat GPT immediately knew it was 'The Wages of Wins' by David Berri, had a command of the basic thesis of the book in a way that jived with my memory of the book, was able to contrast and compare the arguments from the book with other books on sports statistics, talk about the various assumptions the arguments from those books relied on.
I was honestly pretty blown away at how useful it was in contrast to google searching.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6hr ago
This is by far the best functioning Reddit clone I've seen
Calling it a clone is even wrong, as it's better than Reddit lol
Corvos
6hr ago
I have no problem with his beliefs, though I don't also share them. The problem was that he was so totally certain of the rightness of his own beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else's that he had absolutely no interest in genuine discussion. He didn't bother trying to understand anybody else's objections to his arguments, and even asserted multiple times that he knew what his interlocutor thought better than they did. Any effort made trying to engage with him would never be returned and I stopped bothering. I think that attitude is more corrosive to the Motte than overt shitposting.
faceh
6hr ago
Discovered HPMOR and subsequently Lesswrong During the summer after my 1L year, so this would have been 2012.
It was timely, I was struggling with where I was going to aim my career and life goals and having an epistemic crisis (I had no idea how to figure out what I wanted to do, because I felt unable to accurately judge the information I was given). I absolutely credit the Sequences and the other figures in there for helping me figure out my life enough to get where I am now, quite comfortable with my current position. And it eventually helped introduce me to the people who are ACTUALLY part of my (Red-tinged grey) tribe, and I feel accepted there.
I was rat-adjacent for a while, now at best I'm adjacent to the rat-adjacent b/c there's a current in the ratsphere that is kind of toxic to anyone who isn't neurodivergent in a very specific way. Most humans are just not going to be able to adopt their way of thinking, and exposure to it can have very negative effects in their life.
The Effective Altruists got out of hand for a while there and some of them blew up in ways that I considered foreseeable. Let's not speak of the Zizians.
So I'm happy to remain on the periphery because the skills they teach are extremely valuable, their insights are useful, but many of them seem completely lost when it comes to applying those to effect positive change in the real world, and they often actively oppose those who are effective (mostly) positive change.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership
(More than a shower thought, less than a fully formulated theory.)
While the median person in the US is still in a romantic relationship, singlehood is on the rise, with some claiming a prevalence of 30%.
It is very apparent that the median man and the median woman have quite different ideas about what they seek in a romantic or sexual relationship, with men being more interested in casual sex and women being more interested in long-term relationships.
(
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not. Realistically, quite a lot of the opportunities for no-strings-attached sex in the ancestral environment were probably wartime rapes, but there were likely opportunities for consensual casual sex as well.
For women, it was likely more complicated. There was a selection for pair bonding to secure paternal investment -- because that increased the reproductive chances of the kids. If one had paternal investment, one would have preferred someone had has the status or ability to provide well for ones family.
On the other hand, one also wanted to select for genetic fitness to boost the reproductive chances of one's offspring. For a lot of traits, this coincided with being a good provider: being a great hunter is partly genetic, so there were both immediate and genetic reasons to prefer such a mate. While being the victim of wartime rape was quite bad also from a genetic point of view (zero paternal investment!), having a partner who was genetically inclined to wartime rape was preferable. One also wanted a partner who was winning the Keynesian hotness contest in your society, because that will bode well for the reproductive success of one's sons. If all the other women of the society thought that men with blue eyes were icky, marrying a blue-eyed man was a very bad reproductive strategy!
In short, from kitchen table evo psych, the ideal man was someone who had a lot of sexual success who was also willing to enter a committed long term relationship.
)
In my world-model, the median single woman going on a successful tinder date is going to meet a man who is great at getting tinder dates and convince them to have sex with him. This is a highly specialized skill. Women pass 95% of the suggestions. Together with a 2:1 gender imbalance towards men, this means that the average man who gets a match probably had to outcompete 30-40 other men to get there. However, being found hot by one woman is strongly correlated with being found hot by another woman. Of course, part of being found "hot" here is "being willing to breadcrumb women into thinking that there is a long term potential".
There are probably men who are moderately successful at dating which use apps for a while, find true love in their fifth match and live happily ever after, but those are also unlikely to stay on the apps (and if they are, will likely state outright that they are in a happy primary relationship, which will likely lower their appeal significantly).
While most of the men using online dating are trying to get laid with little success, I think that for the few men who are able and willing to sacrifice time, money, and ethics to get really good at tinder (or the offline equivalent: being a PUA), stringing along three or four women seems achievable.
While the link in the last paragraph bemoans the fate of these women, I think that it is fair to say that their revealed preference is to pay with sex for the illusion that a hot promiscuous guy is going to go exclusive (or primary) with them any day now. There is a difference between being the hottest unconquered available woman within driving distance on some cloudy Wednesday and being the woman who will make him forget about all other women, forever, though. Relatedly, if a real Nigerian royal had trouble getting money out of the country, chances are they would contact specialized firms on the Cayman Islands, not random owners of email addresses. (That does not change the fact that scamming or lying to get laid is evil, though.)
(Of course, this is not only an online thing. For most offline social situations, the workplace rules are more or less in effect. You have to know what your relative status and SMV is and what you can get away with. Also, flirting is all about deniability and avoiding establishment of common knowledge. I would argue that the possibility to commit a social faux-pas is intentional, being willing to do something which would be transgressive if you had read the signs wrong is a costly signal to send and generally appreciated if you are right. In the real world (at least outside Aella's RMN parties), people do not wear wristbands indicating what they are comfortable with, so engaging with women is left to those men who either are good at reading the cues or who do not care if they come across as sex pests to any women who are uninterested. Dark triad and all that. For spectrum-dwellers like myself, the main advantage of online dating is that women there can be safely (if mostly futilely) approached: as long as you do not use crass sexual language or send unsolicited dick picks, you will be considered background noise, not a sex pest.)
--
On the flip side, catering to the sexual and romantic needs of single men is also a trade which greatly benefits from specialization. Para-social relationships allow for economics of scale far beyond what the fuckbois can achieve. With straightforward porn, there is little malicious deception going on (stepsibling status aside), but I think that there is a niche of softer content (e.g. without guy participation) where romantic attachment from the audience is actively encouraged, and the relevant persona's foster an air of singleness despite being in a happy relationship or married.
--
This symmetry is not perfect, of course. The fuckbois are motivated by their sex drive or some obsession, while the women selling sex to men online are mostly motivated by cash.
Given that this is the CW thread, I should probably show some links to the culture war.
- The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.
- I think that the broader feminist culture considers the 'man-centered' woman to be a victim of patriarchy, while they would consider someone guy who pays 300$ a month to some boob-flashing video game streamer an icky incel (who may or may not victimize the streamer, depending on the brand of feminism).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
I have a few use cases.
- Shitposting. By far the most value I get out of LLMs, to be honest - asking ChatGPT to generate a story where a friend had a steamy romance with Optimus Prime (and then sending it to said friend) had me giggling for like an hour after.
- Spanish practice. I hold LLMs at arms' length because of the way they work (being based around predicting what the next token will be rather than actual understanding of the problem domain), but that approach works just fine for language because it's how we learn language. So I have a lot more willingness to accept the methodology in this problem domain. Plus I don't have any other chances to practice Spanish (cause it isn't socially acceptable to just go up to people who look Latino and talk Spanish to them), so even if it's flawed it's the best I have.
- Generating bash scripts at work. A bash script should be very short (10-20 lines), which means LLMs tend to perform better, and it's easy for me to check at a glance (or at worst, check the syntax is correct in the shell). That said as soon as you get outside bash syntax, there be dragons - LLMs do not (in my experience) do well with things like generating curl requests for vendor APIs. The basic syntax is almost always correct though, which is useful to me because I loathe writing bash.
- Similarly to the above, generating example code for APIs that I know well enough to recognize at a glance if it's correct, but not well enough to write myself without having to poke through the docs. For example, the python threads API. I can ask an LLM to generate a script doing X with threads, and I know instantly whether it's correct, but it would take me probably 30 minutes of poking at the threading docs to write it myself.
All in all, not a ton of actual value for me, but it is non-zero value. Unfortunately LLMs still fall over pretty hard when I try to hand them things that are more challenging for me. For example, recently I asked ChatGPT to do some weird conditional thing in Terraform (which turned out to be impossible as far as I can tell), and instead of saying "that's not possible" (useful, would've saved me a lot of time going down a bad path) it kept hallucinating code which was very sensible and would be nice if it worked, but isn't actually valid syntax. This is unfortunate because that's where the real value would be - I don't need or want an LLM to write code which I can very easily write myself (faster than it'll take me to check the LLM output), but I would like it to assist with things that are on the edges of my subject matter knowledge. Alas, that doesn't really work well right now, but I do get some minor value from the cases I mentioned.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
This seems like it’s born from this particular woman’s anti-marriage ideology than from a strong commentary on hotness.
He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people
We should really let him back; we have a lot of libertarians and alt-right types but not so many God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III Red Tribers. He added color to the place.
bolido_sentimental
6hr ago
I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.
It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
It’s worth noting how total the failure of safe, legal, and rare was- this ain’t even a ‘in practice, Dutch hospices give power of attorney to people who don’t agree with their patients on end of life issues’. Abortion advocates literally don’t advocate for it being rare.
gattsuru
6hr ago
My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.
I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.
I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.
((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))
Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
The thing is, the top 20% of these men that don't get married are frankly throwing a lot of their life and use to society out the window by continuing to live the lifestyle of a Lothario. Not only does stringing 2-4 women a long at a time embitter those women and make it more difficult for them to stably pair bond, the sheer amount of time that it takes to juggle these relationships impacts your ability to do work, have friends, take care of yourself, and generally contribute to society. These men are also ruining their own ability to pair bond by engaging in this lifestyle. Consider two examples. One of my current roommates, let's call him James, has lived like a Lothario almost the entire time I've known him. Long term "girlfriend" back in California who he constantly cheats on with a rotation of 2-3 women here in Baltimore. Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked), but it's hard not to see how this behavior is ruining his life. When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape. Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women. He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit and ruining women. The other example is my friend Saul, who used to live this kind of lifestyle, until he started dating this girl Deborah. They got married last year, and since then his efforts around the house, at work, with friends, and with his art projects have skyrocketed because all that time he was spending at bars and on tinder is now going into his actual life.
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