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Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
13hr ago
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor.
The relation of the humanities to "reality" varies so drastically from field to field, and even from paper to paper, that it's almost impossible to make generalizations. You have to just take things on a case by case basis, determine what the intent was, and how well that intent was executed upon.
If we're going to regard analytic philosophy as one of the humanities (as you seem to do), then the "reality anchor" is simply how well the argument in question describes, well, reality, in addition to its own internal logical coherence. You have previously shared your own philosophical views on machine consciousness and machine understanding. Presumably, you did think that these views of yours were well supported by the evidence and that they were grounded in "reality". So it's not that you devalue philosophy; it's just that you think your own philosophical views are obviously correct, and the views of your philosophical opponents are obviously incorrect, which is what every single philosopher has thought since the beginning of recorded history, so you're in good company there.
Literary studies can end up being quite empirically grounded. You'll get people who are doing things like a statistical analysis of the lexicon of a given book or a given set of books, counting up how many times X type of word appears in Y genres of novels from time period Z. Or it can turn into a sort of literary history, pulling together letters and diary entries to show that X author read Y author which is why they were influenced to do Z kind of writing. Even in more abstract matters of literary interpretation though, I think it's rash to say that they have no grounding in empirical fact. There's a classic problem in Shakespeare studies, for example, over whether Shakespeare intended Marcus's monologue in Titus Andronicus to be ironic and satirical. I believe that most people would agree by default that there is a fact of the matter over whether Shakespeare had a conscious intent or not to write the speech in an ironic fashion (this assumption of course reveals philosophical complexities if you poke at it enough, but, most people will not find it to be too troublesome of an assumption). Of course the possibility of actually confirming this fact once and for all is now forbidden to us, lost as it is to the sands of time. But, since we know that people's thoughts and emotions influence their words and actions, we can presumably make some headway on gathering evidence regarding Shakespeare's intent here, and make a reasoned argument for one position or the other.
Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense.
One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to interrogate fundamental assumptions about what an "outcome" even is, which outcomes are desirable and worth pursuing in a given individual context, and what it means to actually "measure" a given "outcome". Presumably, empirical psychiatry does not take these questions to be its proper business, so it's unsurprising that there would be a divergence in perspective here. (If someone were to present with complaints of ritualistic OCD behaviors, for example, then psychoanalysis is theoretically neutral regarding whether the cessation of the behavior is the "proper" and desirable outcome. It certainly may very well be the desirable outcome in the majority of cases, but this cannot be taken as a given.)
Tree
13hr ago
I don’t care enough to get into a 50-page yudkowski talmud brain debate on the theory, I admit it. But my explanation of this particular quirk has an elegant simplicity that smells of truth, in my opinion. AI enthusiasts here think they’re talking to a novel, alien intelligence. The one-shotted normies are not that different, they think they’re talking to god. I think they’re talking to Karen.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
13hr ago
Heh. I demand partial credit for setting up the shot for you.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
13hr ago
Well, they accepted Motte posts in the submission statement! God knows I'll probably be coming here and begging people to give me ideas or to start a fight just so the creative juices get flowing.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
13hr ago
People who try to keep objects in the air properly stratified by altitude. And as a bit player on the outside, oh the things I've seen.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
13hr ago
"The Earth is Earth shaped"
Can't argue with that. Who cares if it's tautological?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
13hr ago
These LLMs are not like an alien intelligence, an independent form of intelligence. They consist of amalgated quora answers. They’re very good parrots, they can do poetry and play chess, they have prodigious memory, but they’re still our pet cyborg-parrots. Not just created by, but derived from, our form of intelligence.
The number of terrible takes on AI on this forum often seem to outweigh even the good ones. Few things make me more inclined to simply decamp to other parts of the internet, but alas, I'm committed to fighting in the trenches here.
Unfortunately, it takes far more work to debunk this kind of sloppy nonsense than it does to generate it. Let no one claim that I haven't tried.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
13hr ago
People usually don't want their children to remain children forever. That's called Down's syndrome.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
14hr ago
And in some academic departments like English or any type of Studies department, glazing the work of others (especially the work of your direct superiors in the social hierarchy) is the norm.
Well, a very close acquaintance of mine is in an English department, and all I can say after the last 10 years is that, while there absolutely is a lot of that style of glazing (a lot of the communication styles are heavily female and rely on huge amounts of validation, or at least that's my impression), it has been tangled up with the most awful Campus Reform-style it'd-be-a-caricature-if-you-didn't-see-it-first-hand race/gender/sexuality crabs in a barrel dynamics and hierarchy arson you could imagine... and she has peers in a number of peer departments at other universities who went down that road as well. It seems like it's quieted down over the last year or so, but it was honestly beyond parody for a few years there. A whole lot of mid-career Gen X people were just putting their heads down, taking their beatings, and waiting for it all to blow over. But yes, to be fair, it actually had a deep family resemble to some of the insane art community dynamics you are describing, too, which I have read stories about.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
14hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
But in the academic communities, public critique is often treated as having a much higher status. It's a sign that a field is valuable, and it's a way of weeding "bad" work out of a field to maintain high standards and thus the value of the field in question. And it's a way to assert zero sum status over other high status people, too. But more, because of all of this, it really just becomes a kind of habit. Finding the flaws in work just becomes what you do, or at least that was the case for many of the academic fields I was familiar with (I've worked at universities and have a lot of professor friends). And it's not even really viewed as personal most of the time (although it can be). It's just sort of a way of navigating the world. It reminds me of the old Onion article about the grad student deconstructing a Mexican food menu.
My last ex was a PhD literature student in a very prestigious university. One of her perennial complaints was that I did not take as much interest in her work as she would like, which, though I denied it at the time, has a kernel of truth. The problem was not a lack of interest in her as a person, but in the nature of the intellectual game she was required to play.
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor. A field has a strong Reality Anchor if its propositions can be tested against something external and unforgiving. An engineer builds a bridge: either it stands up to traffic and weather, or it does not. A programmer writes code: either it compiles and executes the desired function, or it throws an error. A surgeon performs a procedure, the patient’s outcome provides a grim but objective metric. Reality is the ultimate, non-negotiable peer reviewer.
Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense. Does the intervention improve outcomes in a measurable way? If not, it is of limited use, no matter how elegant the theory behind it.
When a field loses its Reality Anchor, the primary mechanism for advancement and evaluation shifts. The game is no longer about correctly modeling or manipulating the world. The game becomes one of status. Can you convince your peers of your erudition and wit? Can you create ever more contrived frameworks while studiously ignoring that your rarefied setting has increasingly little relevance to reality? Well, you better, and it is best if you drink the Kool-Aid. That is the only way you will get grants or cling on to a barely living wage. It helps if you can delude yourself into thinking your work is meaningful, since few people can handle the cognitive dissonance of genuinely pointless or counterproductive jobs.
Most physicists agree on the laws of physics, and are arguing about more subtle interpretations, edge cases, or speculating about better models. Most nuclear engineers do not disagree that radioactivity exists. Most doctors do not doubt that paracetamol reduces pain. Yet, if you go to the cafeteria of a philosophy department and ask ten people about the true meaning of philosophy, you will get eleven contradictory answers. When you ask them to establish consensus, they will start clobbering each other. In a field anchored by social consensus, destroying the consensus of others is a viable path to power.
Deconstructing a takeout menu, as in the Onion article, is the logical endpoint: a mind so trained in critique that it can no longer see a thing for what it is*, only as an object to be dismantled to demonstrate intellectual superiority. Critique becomes a status-seeking missile.
*I will begrudgingly say that the post-modernists have a point in claiming that it isn't really possible to see things "as they are." The observation is at least partially colored by the observer. But the image taken by a digital camera might be processed, but it is still more neutral than the same image run through a dozen Instagram filters. Pretending to have objective reality helps.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
If.
ABigGuy4U
14hr ago
Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!
If we regularly expected children to be helicopter pilots, doctors and heads of state, then yes I think them acting like regular children would be a big problem.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
14hr ago
If you want a partial solution:
I often write lengthy essays, which LLMs praise by default. I know that at least part of this is sycophancy. What I usually do is copy and paste it, but then claim that this isn't my work, it's something I found on the internet, and then ask for critique.
I suspect that something along these lines will work for you. If you want models that do relatively well at pointing out issues without you prompting, Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and now GPT-5-Thinking seem to be better than the norm.
DelendaEst
14hr ago
Even with claude I have the issue that if I give it what I think an issue is it will tunnel vision on that. I'd appreciate more pushback when I am wrong when I am trying to work through a problem. Trying to add some uncertainty to the tone of my request can help but is often not enough.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
14hr ago
I think Tree made a cogent point.
Take, for instance, the stereotypical trap question: 'do you think this dress makes me look fat?'
Optimizing for accuracy: 'You weigh 120 kilos, you look fat in everything' is true, accurate, and also not soft and cuddly or empathetic.
Optimizing for warmth: "You look wonderful, honey!" Inaccurate, probably an outright lie: but the right answer.
If we teach LLMs to speak in a feminine manner to spare feelings/face, we're teaching them to lie to us: of course accuracy would go down.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
14hr ago
I disagree on empirical grounds. Altman is a snake, but even he agreed that GPT-4o was concerningly sycophantic, and removed it, while framing 5 as less sycophantic. This caused a revolt by giga-fried 4o addicts, and he relented. Of course, the objections were also more general, I was personally annoyed by the sudden deprecation of 4.1 and o3, and the reduced rate limits, which many other people objected to.
Consider this:
Would you pay more for a therapist or a nuclear engineer (presuming you had any use for the latter)? LLM companies are desperately fighting to move up the value chain, they all want to sell their models as equivalent in performance to PhD candidates, or independent agents capable of doing high value knowledge work. That's what brings in the big bucks from other businesses or HNWIs who will pay >$200/m for pro plans. Having a buddy to chat to definitely brings in money, but it's a rounding error in comparison.
They want to make money from both markets, but one just makes way more sense to focus on. Especially since people will prefer intelligent + sycophantic to less intelligent + equal amounts of sycophancy.
FtSoA
14hr ago
From what was revealed, the gun belonged to the guy who was killed after he set it down on the table, aimed at himself.
If we find out it was not the gun of the guy that killed him then who knows what happened. Foul play? Horse play? Total accident?
One should never fling a loaded gun or flag oneself or another to the utmost degree possible.
roystgnr
14hr ago
The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians.
Letting Israeli settlers move to the Gaza Strip was policy after they took it from Egypt in the Six Day War in 1967 (Gaza Strip population 380 thousand), but that ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving the Gazans (population 1.3 million) with everything within the Egyptian borders from 1948, all of which they retained for the next 18 years, until after October 7th (population 2.2 million, 40% 15 years old or younger).
Israel has been taking ever more land from the West Bank, but (correct me if I'm wrong!) the Palestinians there have generally been stuck in the enclaves there, not displaced to Gaza.
If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
In charge de facto, with full popular support? It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent. The first Gazan rocket attack after the Israeli withdrawal was "several hours later"! Instead of setting internal security to torturing and killing political opponents and "collaborators", I'd reserve war-related prosecution and imprisonment for anyone who commits perfidy after the surrender.
Just "in charge" de jure, still having to negotiate peace and prevent violations of it but within a population that's still only 40% in favor of negotiations vs 30% in support of armed resistance? I'd probably shave my facial hair, try to buy a fake id, and otherwise "disappear" before the next war over who's really in charge or the victors' decision to execute me as a collaborator.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
14hr ago
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
I think the tails will come apart in the marketplace before the come apart on a technical level. LLMs will get enshittified like everything else, if they haven't begun enshittified. They are optimized for engagement and selling access more than they are optimized for productivity. An effective LLM is an LLM that puts itself out of a job in many tasks.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
14hr ago
And what I've noticed, at least in my time in such communities, is that the creator spaces if they're functional at all (and not all are) tend to be a lot more positive and validating. A lot of the academic communities are much more demoralizing.
I think that's probably true as a general trend, but it also heavily depends on context. A lot of art communities (writing, music, photography, etc) can be vicious, especially when there's a palpable sense that you have a lot of people competing over very few economic opportunities. And in some academic departments like English or any type of Studies department, glazing the work of others (especially the work of your direct superiors in the social hierarchy) is the norm.
Tree
14hr ago
I want women to be included in the conversation.
Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?
gattsuru
14hr ago
That's true. Looking it up, there's a few services offering something similar in the US, albeit generally for much more limited sets of diseases or limited to specific states or demographics (or both). I was under the impression that most of them wanted to include 'professional counseling' as part of the service, but it does look like some of them are just taking the 'ship a spit-test to everybody' approach. I dunno that I'd put anywhere near as much trust in it as in the standard full-spectrum-professional result, but a) I don't have a typical risk analysis here and b) I've been out of the dating game long enough to not be familiar with current norms.
Not even close to original with them. Plato famously said the same with the Allegory of the Cave, and there's Kant's noumena.
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