domain:parrhesia.co
gattsuru
15hr 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.
Astranagant
15hr ago
I think there's a difference in meaning going on here.
Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs" whereas you seem to be meaning the type of person who will comb through reams of fine print to find the one technicality that lets them do what they wanted to all along.
Basically, subservience to law versus wielding the law as a weapon.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
15hr ago
Whatever Anthropic does with Claude seems to work. It's the most flavorful model without really trying too hard to be bubbly and quirky like GPT-4o. Of course, it has its own sycophancy issues, but nowhere near as bad as 4o. (The least sycophantic model I know is Kimi K2, which is incredibly cynical, which makes it interesting)
I am more inclined to go with the "easy problem" view, or perhaps a halfway position. Sycophancy isn't an insurmountable problem. If you're not careful, then trying to knock out obvious sycophancy will make the model more prone to looking for ways to subtly achieve the goal of tricking/convincing the user into giving positive feedback.
To a degree, we really must ask ourselves what "warm and empathetic" really means:
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If a five year old child asks for feedback on an essay, it is arguably almost always true that their writing sucks. That might be true, but it is a tad-bit unhelpful. The most socially adept/instrumentally useful answer (without outright lying) is to praise them for the effort, offer improvements, and tell them to keep at it. Of course, if you're in literary masters course, and the exact same standard of writing is presented before you, some more colorful verbiage might be appropriate.
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A lot of social interaction is lubricated by white lies, and a lot of what is deemed "politeness" isn't maximally truth-seeking.
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.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15hr ago
I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy(perhaps to the extent of preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict). Whether something like this ever happens is impossible to say but I don't think it's at all impossible, particularly if elite anti-America messaging continues at the same level of intensity.
There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.
The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.
charlesf
15hr ago
I'm to old to have ever used these, and my wife and I have been together since the 90s. However, where I work brings me into contact with a lot of college age and slightly older people who do use these apps to varying degrees. The young men are often getting together on breaks to critique each other's profiles, and the women get together to...also critique men's profiles. As far as I can tell there are a handful of distinct experiences being had here. If you are a good looking man, top 10% or better really, you can have sex with a lot of average women. If you are an average woman you can occasionally have sex with a very good looking man. If you are an average or worse man you can finance the above interactions while being strung along with the promise of maybe having the first experience described here, until you realize that's not going to happen and give up. Very rarely an actual enduring relationship will develop, but these seem more like a fluke than any intent of the app creators. The apps that empower the women even more than usual like Bumble seem to be loosing popularity too. In theory women like being the only party that can initiate a conversation. In practice they are terrible at it and generally unaccustomed to putting any effort into courtship at all. There also appears to be a fair amount of romance fraudsters as well, who seem to target both genders equally, through with different strategies.
TowardsPanna
15hr ago
You may be right about that!
FtSoA
15hr ago
Yes, and subsequently the FBI conducted further testing with zero failures. Supposedly, anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
15hr ago
The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.
Write like everyone is part of the conversation and you want them to be included in it.
Jiro
15hr ago
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.
The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
thejdizzler
15hr ago
It does get much easier with practice. I started a zipcar membership this year after having not really driven much since I was 17 and time on the road seems to make the most difference to my subjective feeling of how hard the driving was.
thejdizzler
15hr ago
Goals for last month didn't go particularly well. Got about 1/4: I was very social and even hosted a tapas dinner party with 12 guests at my house! I continued to scroll too much, masturbate/use porn and multitask at work. I think the social goal clicked for me (while the others didn't) because I had an actionable system to follow (go to this activity on this night, make plans with these friends this weekend), while the others didn't because I didn't have a system in place to keep me accountable and/or make the goals actionable. For this month I want to focus on systems:
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Reducing scrolling. I have cold turkey on my computer and a lock box for my phone. I can pre-decide what sites/apps are allowed during what times on my computer using cold turkey and don't have to use willpower to stick to it. Same with the phone, although I have to exercise my willpower to put the thing in the box at the set time. This isn't nothing, but is much easier than constantly trying to resist the siren call of the device.
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Scheduling free time and lab time. This is a Cal Newport suggestion. I found my reading habit wasn't as consistent as I would have liked, and am now trying to juggle Spanish, Italian, and English reading, as well as books for various book clubs (Marx, Kant, Spanish book club, etc.). The same applies for my lab work: when I need to do bench experiments they need to be planned out in advance. I can't just decide to a dissection Thursday afternoon because I need to prep, dissections+staining take 5-6 hours, and there's circadian rhythm effects that I have to keep track of between experiments. Of course the schedule doesn't need to be a prison, which I think Jordan Peterson has said, but it can be a guide. Spontaneity is heavily overrated.
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Making sure I sleep enough 5/7 nights a week (preferably 6/7). I'm running about 80 miles/a week these days, and I need to sleep well to recover. Plus everything (willpower, intelligence, emotional regulation, social IQ) seems to get better when I sleep more. Aiming for between 8.5-9 hours in bed 6/7 nights of the week, with one night a little more flexible for late social events. This does mean saying no to a few things, but it mainly means not procrastinating with scrolling and eating properly so I don't wake up in the middle of the night.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
It gets easier as you go. I remember when I was learning how to drive, the first time I merged from an on-ramp was super stressful. And that wasn't even a highway, that was a city road where traffic was going 35-40 mph! But now after years of practice, it's second nature to me. Keep it up, brother!
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
15hr ago
It gets even worse when you go off into the weeds of what WGS84 means, because EGM96 is part of that spec. Often times the only hint you get if WGS84 actually means "WGS84/EGM96" is a reference to a geoid or an ellipsoid. But oftentimes you don't get that, so you are left searching the data for an obvious reference point that gives the reference away.
Throw in the aforementioned Mavlink bug, and even the data is suspect.
Also everyone I've worked with at a three letter safety organization has gotten this wrong 100% of the time.
I don't fly anymore.
charlesf
15hr ago
In addition to the rituals of the active civic Roman religion, ancient Romans (and all ancient people) were incredibly superstitious to an extent modern people struggle to imagine. Magic and the supernatural were very obviously real to them. Worldly events, good or bad, had supernatural causes, or at least nudges, and the original Roman religion was the organic accumulation over time of how, when, where, why, and who interacted with this supernatural reality. Of note these needs did no go away when the empire adopted Christianity. Many changes were made to the religion of the apostles to satisfy the Romans need to interact with the supernatural forces that obviously drove all events on Earth.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
15hr ago
For once, being comparatively poor works in my favor. I qualified for the financial assistance, above the budget I said I was willing to bear by myself.
Are there details yet on where the writers will publish their work?
There's no centralized repository. I believe we're at liberty to post wherever we've been posting, which in my case, would be a combination of /r/SSC, The Motte, and my own Substack. I usually cross-post on at least two of the three, depending on the target audience.
I don't know the names of the other participants quite yet, until I confirm my attendance and get added to a Slack channel. If any other familiar faces show up, and they're not against me talking about it, I'll share.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
I can't say I'm not enjoying how LLM training keeps producing hard evidence for everything we low-agreeableness people have been claiming since times immemorial.
gattsuru
15hr ago
"Is undulation positive in reference to the earth's surface, or negative?"
Gods, I hate badly-defined coordinate systems.
Oh god, don't get me started on institutional confusion between the WGS84 ellipsoid model and the various EGM geoid models. Or the fact that Mavlink has a long going bug where they output altitudes in WGS84 allegedly, but in actuality it's EGM(96?), and the bug has been around so long, they've decided not to fix it because "now people depend on that behavior". At least that seemed to be the state of things last year.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
That’s certainly possible; I went through individually with an FSSP priest who recommended it but I didn’t try it.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
16hr ago
You know, I've long noticed a human version of this tension that I've been really curious about.
Different communities have different norms, of course. This isn't news. But I've had, at points, one foot in creative communities where artists or crafts people try to get good at things, and another foot in academic communities where academics try to "understand the world", or "critique society and power", or "understand math / economics / whatever". 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'm sure some of that is that the creative spaces I'm thinking of tend to be more opt-in. Back in the day, no one was pointing a gun at anyone's head to participate in the Quake community, say. Same thing for people trying to make digital art in Photoshop, or musicians participating in video game remix communities, or people making indie browser games and looking for morale boosts from their peers. Whereas people participating in academic communities often are part of a more formalized system that where they have to be there, even if they're burned out, even if they stop believing in what they're working on, or even if they think it's likely that they have no future. So that's a very real difference.
But I've also long speculated that there's something more fundamental at play, like... I don't know, that everyone trying to improve in those functional creator spaces understands the incredibly vulnerable position people put themselves in when they take the initiative to create something and put themselves out there. And everyone has to start somewhere. It's a process for everyone. Demoralization is real. And everyone is trying to improve all the time, and there's just too much to know and master. There's a real balance between maintaining the standards of a community and maintaining the morale of individual members of a community - you do need enough high quality not to run off people who have actually mastered some things. And yet there really is very little to be gained by ripping bad work to shreds, in the usual case.
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.
The thing is, on paper, you might well find that the first style of forum does end up validating people for their crappy mistakes. I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. But it's also true that people exist through time. And tacit knowledge is real and not trivially shared or captured, either. I feel like there's a more complicated tradeoff lurking in the background here.
Recently I've been using AI (Gemini Pro 2.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.1) to work through a bunch of quite complicated math question I have. And yeah, they spend a lot of time glazing me (especially Gemini). And I definitely have to engage in a lot of preemptive self-criticism and skepticism to guard against that, and to be wary of what they say. And both models do get things wrong some time. But I've gotten to ask a lot of really in-depth questions, and its proven to be really useful. Meanwhile, I went back to some of the various stackexchange sites recently after doing this, and... yet, tedious prickly dickishness. It's still there. I know those communities have, in aggregate, all sorts of smart people. I've gotten value from the site. But the comparison of the experience between the two is night and day, in exactly the same pattern as I just described above, and I'm obviously getting vastly more value from the AI currently.
erwgv3g34
16hr ago
From AntiDem's Ask.FM account:
Once we develop artificial wombs, will there be any reason to keep women around? Should we exterminate them all?
I think it was Matt Forney who pointed out that all the talk about women having to compete with porn and 2D waifus was ridiculous. If, as a real, live, human woman with a beating heart and a warm bosom, these things are even the tiniest bit of real "competition", there's something desperately wrong and you fucked up royal. Women are supposed to be our help-meets, our comfort, our joy, our safe harbor from the bitterness of this harsh world. Modernity destroyed that on the theory that turning them into cold, mechanical cogs in the corporate/industrial machine would somehow make things better. Did it? Maybe it did add an extra 2% to GDP. Any sane society would declare that some things are not for sale, and give it all up to have our women back. But I fear they're lost. Degrees and exceptions, yes, but bottom line, I think they're gone, and I don't see how we get them back any time soon.
And the worst part is, I can't even bring myself to care enough about them to even be angry anymore.
You don't really mean all that stuff about 3DPD, do you?
Don't I? Has anybody ever really liked 3DPD? The ancients believed that 3DPD were for procreation, but cuteboys were for love and pleasure. In fact, the ancients liked their cuteboys so much that the God of the Bible literally had to resort to threatening to roast them in a lake of fire for all eternity in order to get them to stop screwing cuteboys and to pay attention to their 3DPD wives instead. After that, some combination of strong patriarchy, social pressure, mythologizing (of the troubadour/romantic variety), and the abovementioned threat kept things going relatively smoothly for a good long while, but when deconstructors started breaking all that down for ideological reasons, an unintended consequence was that men started drifting away from 3DPD again, this time to internet porn and/or 2D waifus. It of course hasn't helped matters that feminism seems to have spent decades on a crusade to make 3D women as unpalatable as humanly possible. A couple of centuries ago, the strong constraints placed upon them by rigid gender roles had created a sort of 3D womanhood that was not without its charms. Now that they have been loosed, well... look at rates of divorce, and at birthrates. Men have "voted with their feet", so to speak. They have in some cases fled 3DPD altogether, and in others have fled any commitment to them.
You'd think this would send a message to 3DPD that maybe they should try to regain whatever charms they once had in hopes of enticing men back for more than some casual sex. But no - they seem to be doubling down on feminism, and headed down the Cat Lady Highway as fast as they can drive. Well, good luck to them, but I won't be along for the ride.
And from the comments of "Asia Is Not Our Salvation; It Is Our Suicide" by the same:
This article is full of the typical female inability to take any fucking responsibility whatsoever for anything they ever do wrong. Western women are such mannish, rude, petulant trash that their men have walked away and started searching for other options? It's the fault of men, or those Asian bitches they seem to like these days, or 2D cartoons, or Pornhub, or everything except the idea that you - YOU - fucked up. You want men to walk away from their Asian girlfriends or put down the anime body pillows? Then you - YOU - put in the effort to become the better option. You want a place to start? Here's an idea: stop bitching men out for noticing incentives and disincentives, and for taking a better deal over a worse one. That's not going to get your men to come back to you. Here's the thing - you can become the change you want to see, which involves effort, or you can just complain, which requires none.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16hr ago
Huh, I always heard that Courage was just nofap for Catholics who were Gay.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
I don't think I would go that far. Frequently you can find a middle ground of tact that is sensitive to the other person's needs without ultimately sacrificing honesty.
Lots of people claim that, then they find a "middle ground" which simply yields to the person in the wrong, perhaps while throwing a bone to the person untactfully insisting on accuracy.
I'm feeling down about everything lately. Is the Earth flat? I think the Earth is flat.
The shape of the earth has a been a much disputed subject for millennia. For many purposes, the assumption of a flat earth is perfectly acceptable for mapping and measuring. And land and space-based measurements have determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth is not spherical.
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?
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