domain:slatestarcodex.com
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
The U.S. of white america would not be as safe as Europe, or indeed Canada, unless by ‘Europe’ you mean the Balkans and some ex soviet countries. White Americans also have higher crime rates than all French or all Canadians- although black Americans have higher crime yet still.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
It’s pretty common to run on, and sometimes push through, substantial easing of gun control in Latin America.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
Just want to chime in to say that gun rights are a standard part of the Latin American populist package- usually couched as ‘you, law abiding citizen, can protect your family from crime’- thé region having extremely high crime rates.
TheDemonRazgriz
15hr ago
If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
There are a LOT of morbidly obese people. This would still be a major customer base.
JarJarJedi
15hr ago
As you probably know if you are an American
This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2501/
wayfarer
15hr ago
antibiotics save far more lives directly than they take.
How antibiotics take lives, except allergic reactions and antibiotics overuse/misuse reducing their effectiveness?
Roolb
15hr ago
Ultimately, this comes back to the fundamental question of autonomy that cjet79 raised in the original post. If we don't trust competent adults to make informed decisions about their own deaths, even with appropriate safeguards and cooling-off periods, then we don't really trust them to be autonomous agents at all.
This is, naturally, not a very strong argument for assisted suicide, which creates an obligation on other individuals or the state to end your life.
SSCReader
15hr ago
I do not understand why you would have concerns about someone asking an LLM.
Well because an LLM is not a person. It doesn't have ideas or thoughts. It's not an interaction with a person at all. Asking another person to proofread not only gets you another set of eyes it gets you an interaction with an actual living breathing person, and now their messiness gets injected. Having said that I'm not saying the way you are using it at this stage is wrong necessarily. My point is basically about not confusing the destination with the journey.
Imagine if you want to get from A to B and you can 1) Use a teleporter (non 40K style or its another kettle of fish) 2) Get on a train or 3) Walk. 1) Means you don't have a journey at all, you just get from A to B swiftly and efficiently. If that is your goal it is the best option. But if you want to see the countryside, and look at sheep in a field on the way it is of no use at all. It replaces the journey with the destination 100%. The train limits what you experience on your journey but doesn't remove it entirely.
I think part of the charm of TheMotte is the journey, the back and forth, the tangents, the random weirdness that gets injected from messy human thinking. Maybe I'm wrong and the LLM usage you currently have won't reduce the kind of vector space for that kind of energy bouncing off. You may well be right that my concerns are overbaked! Hopefully so, because I would anticipate AI usage is just going to increase and maybe not everyone will resist the pull of having the usage pretty heavily circumscribed as you do.
I'd like us all walking together ideally, romping up and down the hills of discussion and the dales of Red vs Blue tribal responses from our messy little human brains. If we're on a train well that's a little worse form my perspective. And the closer it gets to a bullet train whizzing past the hills at 300mph the less I like it. A meandering steam train is probably ok as well.
I'm more musing than condemning just to be clear. You're an extremely valuable contributor here and I always read your posts with interest, and you have to remember, I am old after all. Shaking my fist at the Cloud and wearing onions on my belt is a time honoured tradition!
Thoroughlygruntled
15hr ago
I just looked up the numbers for Iraq and even if you take the figure of how many people aided and supported the insurgency, rather than actually took up arms, you're still at less than 1% of the population. It really doesn't take that many violent young men to make a nation effectively ungovernable.
Thoroughlygruntled
16hr ago
I don't know about that. First, there are the literal ethnic tribes in America that, while not all on the same page ideologically (to say the least), would all form independent loci of insurrection. See, e.g., roof Koreans, Sikh convenience store owners, etc.
Then you have the thousands of gun clubs, thousands of veterans groups, thousands of local police departments, and hundreds of tight-knit, rural red-kneck communities, all armed to the teeth. And that's before we get to any of the actual, honest-to-god militias and private military contractors around the country, or the sizeable proportion of the US military and national guards (or state guards like Texas's, which literally just won a standoff against the federal government over border policy just recently) that would surely defect against a tyrannical central government. Or the many thousands of veterans with first-hand experience in how to conduct an insurgency.
These may not be ethnic tribal groups, but the US has no shortage of well-armed men with deep fraternal ties to each other, often formed on literal battlefields.
Of course, many of these guys are weekend warriors who would melt into mush at the first sign of real oppression, but don't forget that America has spent most of the past 25 years at war, and it doesn't take that many people to actively resist before a territory becomes ungovernable. Look at the results when less than 1% of the Iraqi population actively participated in the insurgency against the US. Or the infamous statistic of how supposedly only 3% of Americans took up arms against the British during the American Revolution.
philosoraptor
16hr ago
I think the complaint is more one of prioritizing the letter of those principles in a short-sighted way, that undermines the reasons they were thought to be desirable principles. Like, if your speech rights can be trampled almost as much as if you lived in the old USSR as long as it's not government directly doing the dirty work, even if government played a large role in creating the conditions that made that possible, and libertarians are mostly standing by and letting it happen, that doesn't sound like a very libertarian world to me.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
16hr ago
What did you think criminal defense would be like?
Sunshine, rainbows, drinking champagne on unicorns, perfect 10s throwing themselves at me, etc. You know, the usual.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I knew when I wrote this that someone would come up with another exotic counterexample. I will not try to argue that flying a plane into a mountain is a special case of going the wrong way on a highway either.
Fine. I retract my claim and say that they are the second most harmful commonly occurring suicides, and patiently wait for someone to explain to me why that is still wrong.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
With most things, there are trade-offs. Like Scott, I stand beside the snakes and traders.
Cops have a non-zero systemic murder rate. This tells us fuck-all if they are net positive or not. Perhaps they are basically a criminal gang running a protection racket and kill everyone who does not pay up. Or perhaps they are mostly good once per 50 years two crooked cops will use their uniform to cover up a 2nd degree murder committed by one of them by planting a gun on the victim.
Or consider organizations with regard to systemic child abuse. Any organization whose members will have contact with kids will have a nonzero systemic child abuse rate, because you can sink any amount of resources into reducing the risk and organizations generally run on finite resources. However, there is a vast difference between "we should have considered the fact that the kid was waving at their teacher as evidence that they were in an abusive relationship and started an investigation" and "once we got too many complaints about the priest touching kids, we simply transferred them to another church".
Likewise with collateral damage. Either claiming that no civilian casualties are acceptable or that any are okay is foolish. Killing one civilian for every 50 killed enemies would in most wars be a conduct noble beyond belief, while killing 50 civilians per killed enemy would be excessively brutal.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
Thank you for taking the time to look into it yourself! All I did was copy and paste your prompt and egg the model on. It might be interesting to try the Agent mode, either on this prompt or a new one. I do have access, and I can try it when I get the chance.
SnapDragon
16hr ago
Yup, just came here to mention XKCD. Gotta love the emdash in the disclaimer, too!
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
So these are some curious results, and mirror the issues I was having with the models I tried. For Grim Reaper of Love, it does correctly not that 45Cat lists a May 1966 release date (which every model was able to do), and also correctly notes the May 28 Billboard review, which it was the only model to actually find, since most of the others just defaulted to the first date charted. The curious issue is with the ARSA data. It did indeed appear on the WLS June 10 chart. However, this was not the earliest chart it appeared on. That would be the May 9 KBLA chart, and the prior Monday would be May 2. The even more curious thing about it is that the single appeared in 35 charts documented by ARSA prior to the June 10 WLS chart, so I don't know why it would have picked that one. This is, I guess, somewhat of an improvement; the only other model I tried that even claimed to use ARSA data was Grok, and it simply made up entries that didn't exist! The most interesting thing about this, though, is that it didn't actually follow the instructions. Maybe I could have been a little more clear, but the instructions said:
If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date
Maybe I should have specified that I wanted the earliest date, which would have been the date of the May 28 review, making the correct date based on the data the model actually used to be May 23, 1966. Then again, I thought I specified early that the month of release given by 45Cat and RYM should take priority, so even if this wasn't clear, it should have preferred the May date. In any event, it didn't get the correct ARSA date, so this counts as a fail.
Moving on to Feel the Heat, US Copyright data gives a publication date of June 16, 1980. Maybe this was the search engine it was trying to use, but it nonetheless didn't use it. I give it props for using Cash Box, which I don't even use that much because the available data is fragmentary and not easily searchable (or at least it was when I started doing this a decade ago), and it does point to the correct issue. However, it runs into the same problem of following instructions when it was told to use the date preceding publication but inexplicably picks a date after the date of the issue. Honestly, there must be something up with the pro model, because the free ones I tried didn't seem to have any problem following instructions, and at least gave plausible dates based on the information they had. Here I get two dates that are not only incorrect, but don't actually follow the rule. I had high hopes for this but at this point I can only consider it a failure. If you're interested in running this further, I can try to make the rules a little more explicit and find some other releases to test how it can do different things, but suffice it to say my opinions of AI capabilities haven't appreciably improved.
Supah_Schmendrick
16hr ago
I've thought a lot about this issue for the last ten years, as many have, and it's hard to escape the feeling that public consent has been laundered by keeping the spotlight firmly on rare, sympathetic cases while the intent of campaigners has always been significantly more far-reaching.
This...seems like a fully generalizable description of basically all political activism in WEIRD democracies??
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
Man, I genuinely do not understand the intuition that drives people to think that there must be a catch to Ozempic. You are doing better by couching your claim in terms of likelihood, but even then, I think this is misguided.
The universe is cold and uncaring, but it isn't actively malevolent. There is no law of physics that demands some kind of equivalent exchange here. Sometimes we just get lucky.
Biology has homeostasis, but homeostasis can break, and it can also be reset.
Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment.
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.
If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.
homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full."
This is a reasonable concern, but I think it might misinterpret what homeostasis is trying to do in obesity. The obese state isn't a healthy, well-regulated system that semaglutide is mischievously disrupting. For many people with obesity, the homeostatic system is already broken. Their bodies are defending a pathologically high set point for weight, ignoring satiety signals that should be firing, and managing insulin poorly.
Think of it less like a functioning thermostat that you're tricking, and more like a thermostat that's already broken and stuck at 90 degrees (Fahrenheit, I hope, if that's Celsius then turn off the oven) . The house is sweltering, the air conditioner is running itself ragged, and the occupants are miserable. Semaglutide comes along, and it isn't just put a bag of ice placed on the temperature sensor to fool it. It seems to actually repair the sensor.
If I hadn't been awake for 48 hours, I might have linked to a recent paper that semaglutide reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by 50% even in people without diabetes. You can look that up. You might even simply read Scott's deep dive on the topic.
Semaglutide is a miracle. Such mundane miracles are rare, but they do happen. Penicillin was quasi-miraculous, but even in this age of people sweating bullets about super-bugs, antibiotics save far more lives directly than they take.
I don't know about the advisability of taking the long on your short, but I'd probably benefit from taking the opposite end of a normal bet instead of trying to convince you. I strongly expect to make money on that 1:1 exchange if that were somehow feasible.
Unexpected follow-up to my 2023 post:
As you probably know if you are an American, under the MUTCD (Manual of Uniform Traffic-Control Devices), generally speaking:
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The longitudinal lines that separate lanes traveling in the same direction are white. (§ 3B.06 ¶ 01)
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A double solid white line indicates that crossing the line is prohibited. (¶ 12)
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A single solid white line indicates that crossing the line is discouraged. (¶ 06)
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A broken (dashed) white line (12-foot segments separated by 36-foot gaps) indicates that crossing the line is not discouraged or prohibited. (¶ 05)
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A dotted white line (3-foot segments separated by 9-foot gaps) separates a through lane from an auxiliary lane that will diverge or end soon. One might say it indicates that crossing the line is encouraged, so that you don't accidentally get stuck in an auxiliary lane when you want to be in a through lane (or vice versa). (§ 3B.07)
The dotted line was not made mandatory until the 2009 edition of the MUTCD, so roadway authorities still are in the process of updating existing stripes. The project that I described in my 2023 post included a large interchange, in which I changed quite a few existing stripes from broken to dotted. After the project passed out of my hands and into the hands of the bigwigs and the Construction people, I largely forgot about it. We had to draw up a several-sheet addendum, because the pavement recommendation had expired and the updated version was significantly different; we had to draw up a one-sheet change of plan, because the Structures people accidentally told us to pave over a bridge that shouldn't be paved over; and the project's resident engineer had some questions regarding (1) utility coordination and (2) whether a bunch of cooking oil that had leaked from a restaurant's dumpster into the roadway would negatively affect the pavement treatment's adhesion to the existing surface. But that was it.
Fast-forward to this week. The project presumably was completed a while ago, though I don't recall specifically when. The project area is quite close to my office, but I never had any reason to drive through it since completion—until today, purely by chance. As I drive, I think to myself: "Hey, where are all the dotted lines that I drew on the plans?"
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The resident engineer is supposed to ensure that the contractor adheres to the plans. But apparently he dropped the ball here.
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After "substantial completion", the resident engineer is supposed to call the designer out for a field visit so that the designer can approve the work for "final completion" or point out any problems that need to be fixed before it can be approved. But the resident engineer never did that, either.
It presumably is way too late for this error to be fixed, so I don't know whether my boss will bother to explain the situation to the resident engineer's boss. But at least it isn't my fault.
pbmonster
16hr ago
For keeping me around? Same as most other team sports: charismatic coach, fun team mates, good built in social scene. Do you regularly go out for drinks/dinner after practice? Are your team mates... normal? I stopped kickboxing and BJJ because those attract a type of guys I can't hang with, in large numbers.
For starting? Convince me this is either more fun or a better workout than football/basketball/handball. Since I like the look of the classic swimmer physique, I'm already predisposed to believing the workout angle. Maybe stand next to your most broad-shouldered-and-slim-waisted team mate while recruiting.
Also, how's the learning curve? Am I going to be useless for the first year? That's no fun, I'd rather run after a ball if that's the case.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
Suicides by train are only topped by intentionally driving on a highway in the wrong direction as far as damage to broader society goes.
The pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 would like to have a word with you.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
The children are wrong.
Unless, that is, you (the general you, not you personally) actually want the increasingly totalitarian future in which humans are no more than the expendable and replaceable cells of some superorganism. I mean, we've been headed there for some four thousand years now, and most likely nothing can stop it in the long run, but allowing people to defend themselves looked like a pretty good roadblock for that particular prospect.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
I'm glad I remembered them as "Napoleon in Russia" diagrams. Finally, my university days were good for something.
Overuse or misuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections, which can spread to people who weren't even on said antibiotic. They can ruin the natural balance of the gut microbiome, causing Clostridium difficile infections. As you've mentioned, some unfortunate souls get nasty allergic reactions which can kill them from the anaphylactic shock. I'm talking about all the ways they can cause harm, with no carve outs.
Edit: They can also be hepatic enzyme induces or inhibitors. If not planned for, this can cause overdoses or underdoses of seemingly unrelated drugs.
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