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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 16hr ago

Thank you? What am I supposed to do now, warn myself? Temp-ban myself? I believe that the Ancient Chinese have written on the topic, but I'll leave it in the hands of the other mods.

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GBRK 16hr ago

It's worth prefacing this post by saying that obviously any government restriction on speech (minus libel, slander, perjury, andtrademark violation) is abhorrent.

But anyways, this is basically how every well-ordered society throughout history has behaved. Powerful, high-status men restrict the use of the mating strategies that lower-status men have a comparative advantage for. Women tacitly or explicitly support them because they don't want weak, low-status men making sexual advances that don't directly renumerate them. Painting anti-catcalling measures with the "feminist" brush is accurate to the point of describing that women benefit from them, but misses the fundamental truth that this behavior reinforces the position of already-powerful men, rather than dismantling it. That being said, it's still perfectly rational for feminists to support this. A matriarchal government would also seek to impede the reproductive success of low-quality vs high-quality men, and an anti-catcalling measure would still be in the cards; it's a rich-get-richer tactic rather than an explicitly patriarchal one.

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Southkraut The rain fell gentlier. 16hr ago

I'm sure you think you are very pleasant, and that you are a great conversationalist. I'm sure your mother thinks you're very handsome too.

Reported for antagonism.

Not because it's particularly bad (it obviously isn't), but because I hold you to higher standards! You are better than that.

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The_Nybbler If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner. 16hr ago

To be overtly sexually attractive, in public, and never have anyone comment on this in any way might be nice, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing one can reasonably demand be enforced by law.

No, they don't want no one commenting on it. They only want desirable men commenting on it, by whatever their standards are for "desirable". It's pure Hello Human Resources/SNL rules.

And using the media to disingenuously suggest to men that they are under real risk of serious punishment, not for sexual assault alone but even for comparatively innocuous, annoyingly antisocial behaviors like catcalling, has us wandering out into "actual psyop" territory.

The idea is for women to be able to filter the guys (or girls) they want from the guys they don't. The strategy is to put up a brickwall filter (a set of rules which allows no one to approach), which then filters out anyone too timid to ignore their rules. The stronger the punishment for breaking the rules (for someone who isn't too timid but is unattractive in some other way), the better the selectivity.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 16hr ago

Everything about the UK is a cautionary tale at this point. It's a conquered country.

They had two policewomen jog around with their camel toe's out (not joking, look at the photos). They do this for the same reason police in the US write tickets for people going 45 in a 30 instead of 90 in a 55. It's safer, easier, the person going a measly 45 is more likely to comply, and they just don't give a fuck.

I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown. Honestly I doubt that, unless you start seeing it at scale.

Personally, I think these two badged Karens had an idea, and nobody up the chain of command had the right IDPOL cards to shut it down. Or maybe it was a way to keep them busy and out of the way of people doing actual work.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 16hr ago · Edited 16hr ago

You know, I'm a person who has been described, in this very thread as:

I definitely don't have @self_made_human's endless energy for arguing here, but his takes tend to be quite grounded

Consider what that means when someone actually exhausts my patience. I think that says more about you than it does about me.

I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant

After all, even the most saintly are unlikely to like you very much if you say things along the lines of:

Now you're just throwing a hilarious Internet Shit Fit for having gotten called out on it. (About three comments! That's "for a while"! Mucho Internet Shit Fit...)

I'm sure you think you are very pleasant, and that you are a great conversationalist. I'm sure your mother thinks you're very handsome too.

Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works.

I think it works great. If I didn't have a firm commitment to not blocking anyone on this site, I would have blocked you a long time back. The next best thing is to ignore you, which is what I'm doing from now on. Being "unMottley" doesn't come at the cost of my sanity.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 16hr ago

Thanks. For what it's worth, I find the framework for that particular "experiment" just as dubious as you or Nostalgebraist think, but I don't come out of this with a takeaway that it discredits most of Anthropic's research.

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naraburns nihil supernum 16hr ago

I know that several Mottizens are American attorneys--have we got any solicitors or barristers about?

This week I've seen a couple of articles about Surrey policewomen posing as joggers to catch men harassing women out exercising. This is ostensibly to combat "violence against women," and this particular article's subheading reads:

Undercover female officers deployed in pilot scheme to tackle catcalling, resulting in 18 arrests.

As an American, my instinct was that this had to be sloppy (or deliberately misleading) reporting. For an expressive act like catcalling to rise to the level of unlawful harassment in the United States would require either a severe single incident, or (more often) a pattern of unwanted behavior and either actual or constructive ("a reasonable person would know") knowledge on the part of the harasser that the behavior was in fact unwanted. I know the UK lacks anything like the protection afforded to Americans by the First Amendment, but they aren't entirely without speech protections. Sure enough, the article seems to suggest that most men do just get "educated" (I assume a stern talking-to, maybe a pamphlet?) while the 18 arrests are for something more like actual assault. But attempting to ascertain the state of "catcalling" law in the UK sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

According to one article, the "first London fine for catcalling [was] dished out after undercover operation" in 2022. This was an application of a "Public Space Protection Order" (PSPO), which makes "certain anti social activities within a mapped area prosecutable"--including such diverse things as noisy supercars, protesting near abortion clinics, and "kerb crawling." Anyway this fine (£100) was issued to a man for making a "sexually suggestive remark to a woman in a late-night takeaway."

So, neither apparently severe nor an established pattern of unwanted behavior! With specific regard to harassment, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (PDF) suggests that any "unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them" qualifies, even if it is a single incident. The laws I was able to find use slightly different language, suggesting that harassment is anything a reasonable person thinks harassment is, plus "alarming the person or causing the person distress"--but also suggests that a "course of conduct" must include "at least two occasions in relation to that person" or "on at least one occasion in relation to each of" two or more persons in a group. But all of that may be moot, if these PSPOs are not specifically dealing in harassment law, but instead are more general mandates against whatever "antisocial" behavior local politicians can be convinced to be concerned about.

This is of course related to a common hack in "Common Law" jurisdictions with "reasonable person" standards: if you conduct a successful campaign to shift people's attitudes, you can actually change the law without ever changing the law. And people's attitudes are apparently changing! After the 2022 London fine, other parts of the UK took up the cause and expanded the penalties; the £100 fine was presumably deemed insufficiently punitive, and in 2024 the city of Bradford boasted of seizing four cars in a "catcalling crackdown."

Not everyone is impressed with this use of police resources. But what brought me up short, personally, was the asymmetry of it all.

I don't really understand catcalling, in approximately the same way I don't understand smoking, or aggressive driving--that is, I know that some people's preferences run that way, but I'm pretty sure it's because those people are to that degree some combination of stupid and inconsiderate. Particularly when a woman is on foot and her, uh, admirers are in a car, it is unequivocally terrifying to be abruptly shouted (or worse, honked) at from a moving vehicle. Wolf whistles from men on foot are less immediately terrifying but can portend a different sort of danger, and England has certainly had its share of sex assault scandals. So I rather see the objection to such behavior!

But in drawing the line between "inconsiderate" and "criminal offense," it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms. If you were a culture warrior back in 2014, you might remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman," which generated pushback from diverse angles (most of the men in the video were not white, a repeat of the experiment in hijab showed reduced harassment, a similar video taken in Mumbai recorded no instances of overt harassment, etc.). There seem to be cultural, demographic, and/or geographical contexts in which catcalling happens or does not happen, and "when women are exercising in public" seems to be the currently contested context, at least in the UK.

So where I find myself uncomfortable is in the way that the press and, presumably, the police PR are clearly tying catcalling, wolf whistles, and even sexual comments together with simple and sexual assault. The articles often admit, somewhere on page 3, that a lot of the objectionable behavior isn't (maybe can't be) prosecuted, but instead met with "education" efforts. "Did you know this frightens women?" Well, hashtag-not-all-women, surely? Rather like the epidemic of "dick pics" on dating apps, actually--"if today I catcall a hundred women and one of them flashes me her boobs, tomorrow I'll catcall a thousand women?"

In other words, "male sexual strategy," such as it is, is understandably disconcerting to women (especially when the men don't know the rules), but the reverse is also true. Women dressing in form-fitting or revealing clothing and parading themselves in full view of the public is something that some men find "alarming" or "distressing." You can see the result of laws that seek to minimize that distress. Is this just down to "women in the West were oppressed in the past, therefore it's fine to flip the script?"

My own personal position is that these are things that should not be decided by law, but by norms. If the 18 men arrested in Surrey were all arrested for touching a woman without clear invitation to do so, then I have no particular objection to their arrest (beyond the slight stench of entrapment that all "sting" operations inevitably report to my senses). But (if indeed this is happening) law enforcement officers dressing people down for a wolf whistle, much less fining them, much less throwing them in prison, seems excessively aggressive given the interest on the other side. To be overtly sexually attractive, in public, and never have anyone comment on this in any way might be nice, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing one can reasonably demand be enforced by law. And using the media to disingenuously suggest to men that they are under real risk of serious punishment, not for sexual assault alone but even for comparatively innocuous, annoyingly antisocial behaviors like catcalling, has us wandering out into "actual psyop" territory.

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JarJarJedi 16hr ago

If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure,

That is of course a complete nonsense. First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places. And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day. If Israel ever intended to be racially, ethnically or religiously purified, it is the most crappy purification job in the history of humanity. If you want any concept of ethnic or racial purity, Israel is the last place you want to look at.

It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks. True, not all states are national states - for example, in Europe some states gave up on the concept of national state and decided that territorial jurisdiction is all they need, and some states - like the US - have been built on a different model of nationhood. But nation state is still the most common example of how states come into existence, and there's nothing different with Israel - except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation. Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else, every commonplace economic inequality - which is extremely common in every diverse country, there are minorities which are more or less statistically successful - is looked at under the microscope and taken as proof of "second class citizenship", every common neighborhood quarrel between two loudmouth politicians is taken as the definite evidence of impending extermination of racially impure, even though it never happens, but the liars continue to lie.

then it is absolutely no surprise that the only solutions that it is willing to accept are permanent ghetto's, ethnic cleansing

You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions. In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space. Of course, claiming that Israel ethnically cleansed Israeli territory is utterly ridiculous - there are millions of Arabs living there. Claiming they are cleansing Arab territories is even more ridiculous - there's literally nobody BUT Arabs living there, and millions of them too. Now, if you said Gaza is a ghetto, where the Arabs is forcibly kept and prevented from leaving - what would be the solution? Of course, it would be to let them go. But this is exactly what they are vehemently opposed to! There was a lot of proposals to sponsor free migration of Gaza citizens to any place they like - except not a lot of places want them, and for those that do, they don't want to go there, and it'd be ethnical cleansing to allow them to go, right? This is a good example of how idiotic are the demands from Israel - if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves and completely cleansed from Jewish presence, that's a ghetto, bad thing. If you let them move whereever they choose, except of course eradicating the existence of Israel - that's cleansing. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Of course, the solution to this conundrum is simple. And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. They want Judenfrei from the river to the sea. Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead. It's not some "consequence of the occupation" - it has been like that for over a hundred years, way before the State of Israel existed (look up Hebron massacre of 1929). Is has been always the consistent policy since they started to formulate policies. That's their reasonable solution - that's their only acceptable solution. The final solution is the only solution for them. When you realize that, everything else is easy to understand. This is not all Arabs - those who do not subscribe to the final solution project, live peacefully as the citizens of Israel. Or moved on to live in other places. Maybe there's even some of such people in Gaza too, but the tiny minority. The majority identifies with Hamas project and their final solution. And until they stop doing that, they will be suffering the consequences of their choices.

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gattsuru 16hr ago · Edited 16hr ago

I'm not a fan of the tone (or, frankly, the length of the quote), but I'd ask that you look closer at the actual content. Compare aldomilyar's "I feel like the benefits I get from general disarmament outweigh the costs I get in the rare situation where I'm being attacked violently and would have had my gun at hand and be able to use it effectively, or I am achieving intense guerilla warfare against state oppressor of my choice." or Wanderer's "The idea that, if UK citizens fought back against the censorship laws, the government could bring lethal force to bear against the unarmed crowd is… I mean, I just don't think it's in the Western European Overton window."

((and those are the charitable ones; please smack me over the head if the most friendly description you can give of one of my posts is "comment raising a line of argument".))

I could debate these things, or challenge their underlying assumptions. But I'm not convinced that there's any level of evidence that would actually make them wrong: no external evidence has to impact someone's feelings at all, or their idea of what the overton window looks like. Some, like whether the various gun rights movements in gun-ban-heavy countries count, are so bizarre a claim as to make it believable someone's already tried that and failed. For all its other flaws, ChickenOverlord's copypasta is very specifically filed with claims that can be destroyed by a single existence proof.

If you want to make the argument that these posts are getting downvoted because of political allegiances, or that similarly vibes-based posts wouldn't get downvoted as hard, yeah, probably. But there's separate from whether these posts are good.

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mrvanillasky Indo Aryan Thot Leader 17hr ago

How old are you? ICs?

Hope you do not get marked for that lol, pretty stressul.

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roystgnr 17hr ago

Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.

I think it's still open to debate whether, in the absence of subsidized pure math research, we'd get the same mathematical advancements "never", "much later", "as soon as we need them", or "practically just as soon".

The fact that everybody thinks of (even their own!) pure math as "useless", right up until it turns out to be the foundation for quantum physics or something, is perhaps the best evidence for "never". I got my PhD in Applied Math (unspoken motto: do you want respect, or do you want job offers?), and it feels almost criminal when you hear about a mathematician coming up with an abstract toy only for someone more focused on science and engineering to come along generations later and say, "whoa, that solves my problem; yoink!"

As evidence for "as soon as we need them": the applied mathematicians haven't been just swiping everything; if you don't find something that solves your problem off-the-shelf, you take what you have and you expand it and tweak it and invent more of it until you do, and in the end you're still proving new theorems, just motivated by "this is how I can guarantee when my new algorithm will converge" rather than "theorems are fun!"

As evidence for "much later": the trouble with "do you want job offers" is that some job offers let you publish more than others, and if you're not getting subsidized via something like academic grants or civilian national lab research, it's downhill from there. Math is in part a cooperative team sport, and it doesn't work as well when you want to score in the "free advancement of human knowledge" basket but you're lucky if you get to shoot for "patent" rather than "trade secret" or "national security" instead.

And as evidence for "practically just as soon", I refer back to "theorems are fun!" There are some people who you can shunt off to a job as a patent clerk and it still won't stop them from playing with tensor calculus; if these are the sort who make the critical-path advances then we still get the advances.

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mrvanillasky Indo Aryan Thot Leader 17hr ago · Edited 16hr ago

Silicon Age Hinduism - A defence of Hinduism and an elaboration of what Bronze Age Pervert gets right

Recently, Bronze Age Pervert caused a stir by defending the single most fleshed out faith on the planet and the only living ancestral aryan faith, Hinduism. BAP or Bronze Age Pervert is an uber popular right-wing dissident on Twitter who is anti "desert cult" and is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche

Naturally, I saw a lot of butthurt takes since no sane religious person will ever debate religions in a logical manner as religious experiences and religions in particular work on you believing something to be totally true. What I found interesting was the idea that modern hinduism is totally detached from the vedic faith, which in itself is a motte and bailey fallacy, the person stating this believes that modern day hindusim is a different religion, therefore we can simply have a new revival and this helps you avoid giving any props to Indians given the current political climate. Another thing to note is that most of India, 80 percent or more, is Shudra (4th varna) or below; the first two varnas make up close to 10 percent of the population and only a small number in them live up to the ideals of old, religiously and genetically.

Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well. This is not what my argument is. Hinduism itself is a broad umbrella term for all sects that vary greatly but are driven by the ideals and beliefs in the Vedas and offshoots of such branches. Unlike an Abrahamic religion, your canon is not your holy book but your guru.

The aryans from the steppe were not white, the Vedas were not written by whites as whites or euros came into existence around the time the aryans came and mixed here. Aryans, therefore, are the ancestors to my people and you, the reader. Modern Hinduism has way too much voodoo, it does deviate from vedic ideals but the texts and the practices from said texts still live on. The human capital here kept getting worse and poorer, which meant that things like Gaudiya Vaishnavism seemed more appealing as the strict purity spiralling there can elect Krishna as Jesus, and then religious offerings and a grain-based impoverished diet could be seen as virtuous. Modern-day India is not some place I can ever defend despite being a resident; the vast majority of the people are beyond fixing and always have been. Hinduism is the faith I was lucky to be born with and I may tolerate some anti-H1B takes since mass migration is always bad, but I just cannot fathom the bad faith takes posted by online dissident Christians. Shiva worship was tpresent in the Indus Valley, so were castes, whilst aryans had varnas, which is something that ancient euros also had.

BAP get Hinduism better than most pagan dissidents and every single non hindu, plus a lot of Hindus. The aryan text, Bhagavat Gita for instance, is the most modern Hindu text that goes against the Vedas and yet I have heard podcasts where Euro nationalists who decry Christ for being brown talk about the Gita being an example of aryan virtue, failing to realise that Lord Krishna was dark. So was Lord Ram who by all accounts was the physical manifestation of Dharmik values.

Their skin colors may have been different, darker or fairer, it is irrelevant to their divine status. The central argument is that these people, upon falling out with their Abrahamic faith, look to the past and cannot deny the appeal of the most fleshed-out aryan faith. Saying anything good about Hindusim without asterisks means saying good things about Indians who unfortunately, do not have the best stock today, so claiming that all good things in HInduism were pre-Puranas (a lot of puranas are fan fiction btw, not all though) or that the current population has negligible traces of the past ones is a way to avoid falling into that box. Since conservatism is in many cases a retvrn to values, you have a hard time going against Christianity, which, if you can manage it, always leads to ancestor worship.

Modern-day Hinduism is not totally Voodoo, despite all the mountains of trash, outdated superstitious beliefs, the shaktipithas and the chosen few temples are alive. Modern India bends towards the pajeet stereotype more and more, even for those of higher birth, it still is the only surviving aryan religion. India was poor and backwards during medieval times; a lot of seasoned euro intellectual giants had a lot of admiration for our texts and scholars. Goethe was inspired heavily by Kalidasa.

I was 19 when I came across Curwen Ares Rolinson, who was a far-right youth leader on trial for hate crimes. He experienced a divine intervention and dedicated his life to the study of aryan faiths and started writing for his blog Arya Akasham, much of it makes little sense to me, but he persuaded me to look into theology. As a token of his appreciation, he parted away with a large amount of his life savings to help India during COVID, a loving gesture that I will forever appreciate. I came across him via survivethejive, who, of all the white pagans I know, is the most respectful towards Hinduism, since, despite a sane anti migrant stance, he can see what a living faith like that of his people could look like today and respect it. Anti Indian sentiment is at an all time high for multiple reasons including bad faith behavior from Indians, I am not trying to touch on that topic since I cannot justify sentiments against fellow indian passport holders, but I can never defend things like chain migration and seeing the nation that accepts you as a special economic zone to be exploited. I just want to dispel the myths around Hinduism being a white religion, as it predates whites and many other ethnicities, and the other false belief stapled with it, which is that the link between modern and Vedic Hindus is non-existent, as there are large enough pockets of real beliefs that exist. I see some of those things in my own life, and they are just divine.

I am not here to defend Hinduism against logical arguments. If you ever want to know if it's true, meditate, and you will experience what truth feels like. We are a dying people, but I have faith in Shiva, and I pray for the benefit of all beings.

P.S. will add links in a bit

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Corvos 17hr ago

But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.

AFAIK it's usually mandatory for all written code to be reviewed before it's merged into the code base. At my last company every Pull Request (submitted code) had to be reviewed by two people, plus or including the 'owner' of the files in question. Review is usually considered a very onerous duty to be avoided where possible, and in theory reviewers bear as much responsibility for the final output as the original writer. The purpose is partly to inspect the quality of the code and to make sure it's doing what's expected (even senior guys fuck up) and partly to make sure that at least a few people are familiar with each part of the codebase.

This was at a 'move-fast-and-break-things' company. The review standards at somewhere like Intel are of course significantly higher.

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SubstantialFrivolity I'm not even supposed to be here today 17hr ago

In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!

This certainly seems like a salient point (though of course, from my perspective the problem is that you are underestimating humans when you say this). I could not disagree more with your assessment of humans and our ability to reason. And if we can't agree on the baseline abilities of our species, certainly it seems difficult for us to come to an agreement on the capabilities of LLMs.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 17hr ago

I would argue that this is a temporary state of affairs. Current AI coding is at the level of an over-caffeinated intern (who is very knowledgeable, but less than practical). Thus, a great deal of oversight is necessary to make sure they aren't shooting themselves in the foot.

But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.

https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1955747420324946037

Even when agents pass on all human-written test cases, we estimate that their implementations would take 20-30 minutes on average to get to a mergeable state—which represents about a third of the total time needed for an experienced developer to complete the tasks.

In other words, a lot (but not all) of the theoretical time savings are eaten up by the need to understand, edit and improve their code. At present.

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ControlsFreak 17hr ago

No, I showed that my point was coherent

We can just read the comments. You never told me what your terms meant, because you couldn't. Perhaps you missed my edit back then, even though I recall doing it quickly, so I'll repeat it here just in case:

Let's change the syntax to make it clear. Suppose you had said, "I know my values are just as blurf (or not) as everyone else's." Suppose I inquired as to what you meant by values being blurf or not, or multiple values being equally blurf. It's not really helpful to say that there is nothing objective about blurf. It still simply fails to tell me anything about what blurf actually means.

Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them.

I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant? I think you might be confusing a pleasant conversationalist with a pleasant conversation. Most people don't like conversations where large problems with their stated positions are brought to the fore. That's fair enough. But that's probably what you find displeasing, the clear and obvious feeling in your gut that you know your position has a problem, and that you don't know what to do about it. I sympathize; I've been there. Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works. Moreover, it's unMottely.

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DefinitelyAnAlt 17hr ago

I understand. But gotta have.OpSec.

I'm less paranoid on my main. That profile is as hidden as sydney sweeney's assets. I share revealing and intimate information on this alt, so I edit out my comments on a monthly-ish basis.

May start using my main here for innocuous life updates

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roystgnr 17hr ago

Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2?

Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time (albeit not as much as it would have if Gaza still had 20% of the population), once it's not repeatedly reset, and sitting next to a Mediterranean beach can't hurt.

I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute, but they were selling Gaza a third of its power while still getting missiles fired at them; that's a lot better than the US would have treated any adversary in the same circumstances.

The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel.

Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.

More recently, Hamas proudly publishes video of digging up water pipes to turn into rockets. There's a weird example of horseshoe theory here, where fellow travelers sound affronted at "Hamas would do X" while Hamas brags "ha ha, look how awesome we are at X!"

This is why a surrender is a prerequisite to building up an economy. You need investment to support subsequent investment, not to be dismantled when there's enough of it to turn into another volley of pot shots.

Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened.

Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours. This is the sort of thing that requires a source.

The childish fantasy

Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.

I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation; that magnitude of error is often a good warning sign that you've been deriving facts from conclusions rather than vice-versa. Discovering that just once should provoke introspection akin to finding "just one termite" in your walls. But the correction doesn't seem to have nudged your perspective at all, and now we see it didn't even elicit politeness, so further corrections this far down-thread probably won't be productive either. I'll stop here.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 17hr ago · Edited 17hr ago

I mean, LLMs have solved IMO problems. If that does not count as reasoning, then I do not think 99% of living humans count as being capable of reasoning either.

Asserting AI inferiority based on the remaining 1% begins looking awfully like a caricature of a neonazi (unemployed alcoholic school dropout who holds himself superior to a white-collar immigrant because some guy of his ethnicity wrote a symphony two hundred years ago).

In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!

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DefinitelyAnAlt 17hr ago

Yeah. Remarkably senior team. No juniors. Youngest person is almost 30. Strong positive bias towards ICs rather than manager types.

Its still early, but digging it so far. Maybe less so if I get marked underperformer ☠️. Hoping I learn my way around to have impact before the first evaluation cycle.

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srf0638 17hr ago

Would you race?

I might try to throw down some big days, but I don't like recreational sleep deprivation, so not in a real serious sense. Maybe start with the Grand Depart, maybe not. You?

I've done a fair bit of solo travel both on and off the bike, never really struggled, but it's gonna be harder to schedule now that I have a serious gf. Or slow-play my hand and do it when I retire, there's at least one guy in his 70s on the Rigs of the Tour Divide series every year.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 17hr ago

No, I showed that my point was coherent, it is beyond me why you don't see that. It's not really my problem at this point.

Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?

Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them. You're welcome to read that thread and make of it what you will.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 17hr ago · Edited 17hr ago

BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"...

I was leaning into the joke. MTG nerds are a different breed.

On the topic of conic sections, the poster claimed:

However most histories of Greek mathematics say that conic sections were invented/discovered by Menaechmus, as a tool for doubling the cube, which is of course a useless problem from our modern point of view.

EDIT 3. Parabolic mirrors is not a real application. Of course, this is a nice property of parabola, but conic sections have many other nice properties. The legend of Archimedes burning ships with them is a legend, nothing more

Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math

They very much didn't start out that way.

And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!

That depends on how strict you want to be on the definition of non-Euclidean, spherical geometry, a limited subset, was used in celestial and terrestrial navigation as early as the first century CE, though real usage only boomed in the Age of Sail.

But that was for a very specific purpose, the idea that space itself was non-Euclidean came about much later. That is a lag of about 21 centuries.

While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!

I am happy to acknowledge availability and recall bias here. If there are topics in maths that have remained utterly useless and purely theoretical to this day, I am unlikely to have heard of them.

My overall point is that:

Maths is incredibly productive on net.
Even if we do have "99.9%" certainty that a particular field is unlikely to have practical applications, the benefits in the unlikely case that it does are usually substantial. If I came across a normal lottery and saw that my ticket had a 0.1% chance of winning billions, then I'd be spending quite a lot of money on lottery tickets.
Ergo, it is immensely sensible to subsidize or invest in maths as a whole. The expected value from doing so is positive. Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.

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The_Nybbler If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner. 17hr ago

People, not just you but in general, immediately leap from 'I don't like this opinion' to forming the worst possible interpretation of the post and then downvote.

It wasn't you who posted it, unless you're a corvid as well as a corvos. But the offending bit is:

Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?

The straightforward interpretation is that either you accept the insulting characterization in the first part, or you're completely out of touch (note the URL). This absolutely deserves a downvote.

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