domain:lesswrong.com
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
We aren’t that, though.
Pongalh
6hr ago
Indeed there was an infograph recently of most popular social media worldwide and Finland stuck out as being the only one where Threads reigns supreme
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
6hr ago
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile
I agree it doesn't cause it, but the correlation is present.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6hr ago
but there isn’t really a replacement for illegal labor on farms
Actual visas for the particular types of workers you want to bring in would be the way a functional country would handle this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
I've been reading and posting on Threads recently. There seems to be an interesting division between Finnish Threads (essentially a hornier version of normie white-collar millennial Twitter, somewhat leftlib but mostly apolitical) and American Threads (dumber Bluesky). Threads is probably somewhat more popular in Finland than many other countries for reasons I haven't really understood, so that probably contributes.
TK-421
6hr ago
This is the political angle that Trump can show to his base. It's not actually going to him - well, some might slosh off - it's a demonstration of his reinvigorating of the American economy. Bringing in the bacon. The same triumphal vibe as DOGE or the tariffs. It's a win, a smart deal, and it's going to lead to years of bigger negotiations as the distribution networks reconfigure.
(Also years of lawsuits. That's the same thing as a negotiation.)
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
Yeah so my problem with the idea of Christ as the “perfect example which all of us must try to emulate” is that Christ was basically exempt from a lot of our terrestrial concerns, on behalf of being a divine being with magic powers. I obviously cannot emulate Christ’s supernatural healing powers, nor can I emulate his ability to rise from the dead. If I attempt to emulate those, I will actually just make my life worse, and look very stupid in the process. Furthermore, there are aspects of Christ’s life which I actively wish not to emulate: the whole “being tortured and then martyred” thing, obviously, but also the part where he died unmarried, childless, and penniless. Things like material resources and a familial posterity were unimportant to Christ because they were distractions from his mission (which he knew to be fairly short-lived in a temporal sense), but they are (and should be) extremely important to humans. Taken to its logical extreme, a world in which every human tries to live the most “Christ-like” life possible is an anarcho-primitivist proto-Communist world, devoid of the concentrations of wealth and power that allow for anything resembling higher civilization to take shape. This is a world to which we can aspire only if we truly believe that Christ’s return is literally imminent within our lifetimes, rendering any need to build for the future irrelevant.
So, which elements of Christ’s life and personality should I, or can I, seek to emulate? I can emulate his kind-heartedness, his boundless self-control and resistance to temptation, and his leadership qualities. I can strive to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to those around me, and I can strive to eliminate within myself passions and temptations which lead me to harm myself and others. I can imbue my actions with a greater import because I know that I am being watched and that there is a higher plan toward which I should focus my efforts. This, to me, is the most a religion can really demand of its adherents. That’s also what, to me, separated something like Mormonism from a “cult” in the way modern people use the term. A literal reading of the Biblical Christ’s imprecations would lead an adherent to give up all material possessions, to abandon his or her family and loved ones, and to eagerly await the rapidly-approaching end times. Since the end times did not actually occur during the lifetimes of the church’s early converts, I think it’s safe to say that not everything Jesus said was meant to be interpreted totally literally.
TK-421
6hr ago
I strongly encourage you take a dive with the AI of your choice on the subject. Every layer has deep complexity and I now understand why networks, stations, affiliates, even the bigger entertainment conglomerates are structured the way they are. The technical implementation details are interesting for their own sake but you can really start to see how they dictate a big sector of the economy.
07mk
6hr ago
with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6hr ago
Why should the $25-50B go to Trump? I would think it would go towards the federal budget.
TK-421
6hr ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets.
My apologies, I wasn't trying to ignore you. I considered calling out that many people who rely on OTA for TV and analyzing their alternatives but the original post was already getting long.
The short answer is that I don't care about you and I think others shouldn't either. It's a cost benefit analysis. I acknowledge that many people will lose access to OTA TV. My expectation is that most, 90%+, will be able to substitute the entertainment they get from local TV from any of the others in our modern grab-bag of entertainment distribution. Many are elderly people who will barely notice if the TV at the nursing home is repurposed for streaming. But even if more people are affected than I think I still don't think it's enough to overcome the benefits. I am sorry grandma, your stories are using a common resource that we need for growth.
There are emergency and public notification functions that OTA TV also serves. I think in many cases that information can be disseminated through other means but if there's a very low cost way to keep that or if the buyer of the spectrum can easily provide the service then sure, but it's these kinds of little carve outs and extra requirements for tiny populations that leads to the administrative and contracting bloat we are fighting. Sometimes maintaining backwards compatibility really is too expensive and we should make the change and let market forces solve for the edge cases.
theincompetencetheorist
6hr ago
Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.
I just use it as a reference to the controversy that is in the beginning of it and from someone who is really angry about waffles. It is actually the lack of insight that is the main point of using it.
Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.
It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.
TeknOShEeP
6hr ago
only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different
Yes, 4chan is for my literal shitposting (on my employer's time of course), the motte is for when I am waiting on civilized company. One can have different voices tailored to different environments.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
As I’ll continue to say, if Joe exotic can turn men gay, it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight. This amounts to viewpoint discrimination in therapy, which is mostly garbage anyways.
...Are we suggesting therapeutic meth addiction as a youth therapy?
Its witches all the way down.
Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7hr ago
Were I in one of these roles that benefit so highly, I personally wouldn't be bragging about how much of my workload is able to be automated.
This is starting to happen in consulting.
All the big consulting firms are crowing about how "AI forward" they are, as they think that is good marketing and brand positioning to clients to show how technologically advanced they are, etc.
It probably is good marketing.
But in a few client meetings now, questions like "so if you're so much more efficient with AI, why are we paying a 7% technology fee?" Or "if your using AI to automate and make your people's time more efficient, can we pay for less time?"
Some of these questions are humourous, some not. But the vibe is building and it's funny to watch. I have a feeling consulting margins are about to start experiencing some pricing pressure as the increase in productivity is turned into margin wars.
TeknOShEeP
7hr ago
These people are laboring under the misapprehension that their voice is so desired other people will follow them to wherever. In reality, no one cares, and it makes no sense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
One of the things I learned in the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco was that I actually didn't understand how the network TV system worked.
Rov_Scam
7hr ago
Imagine you're planning a vacation. Your dream vacation is Hawaii; your second choice is Myrtle Beach, but that would only be about half as fun. So you call a travel agent, and find out that you unfortunately don't have enough money for a flight to Hawaii. On the other hand, you could drive to Myrtle Beach, which wouldn't be nearly as expensive. Now suppose the travel agent calls you back and offers you the following proposition: "You can't afford to fly to Hawaii, but I've found a reduced rate ticket that will get you 95% of the way there for only 20% of the full price. Granted, it doesn't quite get you to Hawaii, but isn't getting 95% of your dream vacation better than settling for Myrtle Beach, which is only worth half?"
This is obviously nuts, because getting 95% of the way to Hawaii puts you somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's pretty obvious that if you can't get all the way to Hawaii then you're better off going somewhere else entirely. 80%, or 90%, or whatever of a marketable product is no product at all. 80% autonomous cars are regular cars with fancy cruise control (which is itself only used a small percentage of the time), and 80% of whatever AI is aiming for is fancy, expensive, inefficient Google. And saying you're 80% of the way there is more or less meaningless when it comes to technology investment. It's a vague term that has no bearing on actual numbers; it certainly doesn't mean that you're 80% of the way there time-wise or that you've spent 80% of what's necessary to get to 100%, just as the last 5% of the way to Hawaii costs four times as much as the first 95%.
In 2020, The Information estimated that the AV industry had spent $16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare. OpenAI's recent projections for 2025 predict $7.8 billion in operating losses and a $13.5 billion net loss. One company in one year manages to spend half the money that the entire AV industry spent in a decade. And incidentally, the amount of money spent on AV research has actually gone up since then, yet you admit yourself that the improvements haven't exactly been dramatic.
AI companies want to spend another trillion or so in the next five years. Will it get them to that magic 100% mark where they can actually sell something for a profit? Nobody knows, but if it can't, I'm willing to guess that the industry's proposed solution will be to spend more money. The point I'm trying to make is that the amount of money they want to spend simply does not exist, and even if it did spending it is not justifiable to someone who eventually expects to turn a profit. If the amount being spent were on par with AVs I'd be more optimistic, but it's exponentially larger. There's going to be a point where the funding isn't going to be there, VC firms are going to have to eat their losses, and there will be a bear market in tech investment where AI is practically a dirty word. This isn't like AVs where the amount of money involved is small enough that companies can quietly make small gains that take years rather than months; it's significantly worse.
TeknOShEeP
7hr ago
Lol, they can of course return to twatter. Twatter (as they loudly decry at every opportunity) has virtually no standards or "safety", it basically follows the bare minimum of US law (so no CP or active calls to violence) with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff). There's literally a million people talking shit about Elon and Trump all day every day, the only difference is these comments are not being artificially boosted and have no official seal of approval, so they have to stand on their own merits (which they seldom do).
I am greatly enjoying watching BlueSky descend into a ratfuck, because it reveals the true nature of the people who populate it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7hr ago
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces?
But I already told you that I don’t believe that. It’s actually not required for me to express that belief! At least, nobody has required me to thus far. As I said, the missionaries who spearheaded the process of my baptism are aware that I don’t believe that! It was part of the very first conversation I had with them, before I even went to church with them!
Now, there are things I was asked to affirm in my baptism interview to which I could only answer “yes” given a non-literal interpretation of the question. An example would be, “Do you believe that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith? Do you believe that [current church president] is a prophet of God? What does this mean to you?” Now, the Church does have an official stance on what it means that “the gospel was restored”: because of the Great Apostasy, God revoked the keys of the Holy Priesthood from all earthly churches, until finally providing several otherworldly visions to Joseph Smith in the 1820s and then leading him to discover and translate the plates containing a historical account of Christ’s true teachings to the Nephites. This account shows humanity how to return to the pure gospel and worship practices given to Adam and promulgated among the first generations of human prophets.
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
The church’s concept of “continuing revelation” and its relative youth mean that its theology is still very much being built and codified and refined as we speak. It can respond in a more agile way to emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics, archaeology, and astronomy. It’s not beholden to millennia-old canon. To me, all of that is what I mean when I say that this church is “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ”. Whether or not the golden plates were literally written by ancient Hebrews is irrelevant to me.
When we’re assessing the value of a particular Noble Lie, we have to assess what belief in that lie actually demands of its believers in the here and now. I would argue (and have argued) that the belief in universal human cognitive homogeneity is bad not simply because it’s false, but far more importantly because of the specific object-level beliefs and political actions which it obligates. If somebody agreed with all of my political positions, but did so basically by accident as a result of false-but-useful beliefs, it would be counterproductive for me to try and reason him out of those beliefs.
Furthermore, many Noble Lies have a neutral or even unambiguously positive effect on their believers. For example, let’s say I was actually adopted at birth, but raised to believe that my adoptive parents were my biological parents. Now, we can come up with reasons why knowing the truth might be (or might at some point become) instrumentally valuable for me: perhaps I have some hereditary predispositions toward certain conditions, and knowing my true parentage may help me more effectively navigate my medical decisions; also, if there is some not-insignificant chance that my true parentage will be revealed to me later in life against my will, it would have been better for me to have been made aware of it early and in a gentle way, so as to reduce the feelings of betrayal and identity crisis. That being said, for most adopted individuals, it’s actually far more adaptive and identity-affirming to go their whole lives believing the “lie” rather than to be confronted with the truth.
So, is any given religious belief more like a lie that makes its believers stupider and more evil? Or is it more like a harmless lie that is, on average, equally as — or more adaptive than —knowing the truth? Certainly the religion to which I’m converting does demand some pretty specific object-level beliefs and actions. I happen to think that, with the exception of the prohibition on coffee and tea, the demands it makes of its members all have very clear benefits from a consequentialist perspective, and generally make its believers into better people, with better political beliefs and a better lifestyle, than the alternative. Go peruse /r/Mormon, and especially /r/ExMormon, and you’ll get an idea of the sorts of people who hate the church: the most cynical, MSNBC-brained, Reddit-poisoned people in existence. If those are the church’s enemies, I have to say that I prefer those who have figured out how to live with the Noble Lie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
I dunno. I can't speak for every other human alive, but I think I go through my days with a negligible amount of fooling myself involved.
When I do, it's more of a "just one more turn of Civ before I go to bed" thing rather than true self-delusion. I knew I wasn't particularly likely to stick with going to the gym, but it was still positive expected value to try.
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I eat fast-food despite knowing it's bad for me. I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides. Which is all true, at least for me. I'm not crying while pigging out and then telling myself it won't happen again.
Is that really so hard to go through life without lying to yourself? I don't think so. If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me. I have meaning, I have hobbies and friends. I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Acting against one's idealized self-interest is not lying. Having moral failures and being a flawed human being is not lying. Being ignorant is not lying. To lie requires you to know the truth and then deny it.
Or evidence that their optics are exactly what they want them to be and they're reasonably competent at cultivating the appearance they want to have. So far I see no evidence that ICE wants to cultivate an image of professionals who dot every i and cross every t, and quite a bit of evidence that they want to cultivate an image as badass thugs who are getting shit done in terms of kicking anyone illegal out of America, no matter who they are and no matter why they think they're safe.
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