domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
I am familiar, I the Jesus Prayer and occasionally prayer beads. I still think meditation in the Buddhist view is more flexible and able to look into different things, such as focusing attention on the body, or the breath, areas and objects of attention which are useful in the Christian path.
2rafa
8hr ago
Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.
In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.
Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
8hr ago
what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men?
All men can't earn above average (or whatever percentile $60k is) wage in the way that all women could have less than 5 lifetime partners. If they did, it wouldn't be above average anymore and the buying power of that money would be lower.
yofuckreddit
8hr ago
Man, having kids is magical. Getting to see the first time a human decides to take responsibility for their own skill and proficiency is an unmatched feeling.
I took a more passive-aggressive approach. We live in a neighborhood with a ton of kids. While pulling my oldest around in a trailer, I pointed out the 3-year-old girls pedaling on their own without training wheels (admittedly rare and Asian) and that he was older, so he should be able to do it.
A week later he was up without training wheels, and the week after he was pedaling a 12-mile round trip.
Now to get his younger sibling to do the same...
many centers of high economic and industrial development
So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap serf immigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!
I could well see that happening.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8hr ago
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her.
I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
I think that the sentence is generally more understood to express a preference for true beliefs for oneself and in cooperative settings. "Of course I told the Gestapo where the Jews were hiding, and destroyed them with the truth" is very much not a standard interpretation. Nor is there an imperative to destroy any respect your coworker might have for you by blurting "whenever I see you I fantasize about your tits". Same for consumer service.
Nor is it imperative to rub the truth into the face of an unappreciative audience. A religious person is very likely already aware of the fact that agnostic atheism is a thing. Telling them they are wrong once a day is not helpful.
A better example of a seemingly benign untruth might be homeopathy. Obviously it is bollocks. But the placebo effect is real, and larger if the patient is not aware of the fact that they are getting a placebo. So from a utilitarian perspective, it might seem beneficial to let your community believe some horseshite if it improves their health outcomes, and as long as you consider only direct effects, this might even be true (if you outlaw homeopathic "cures" for cancer and the like).
But the indirect epistemic consequences are devastating. "You know that orthodox medicine is wrong to deny homeopathy, why should you believe them if they claim that vaccines do not cause autism? Or why should you believe some adjacent ivory tower autofellating scientists that climate change is a thing?"
HereAndGone
8hr ago
Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.
And yet here we are.
Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.
Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.
Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.
But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.
fmaa
8hr ago
Here's Yudkovsky saying exactly that (but worse and with more words, as is his style). A common rationalist stance is that utilitarianism is what's correct, but deontology is what works for humans.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
8hr ago
I would consider that they might like being dirt poor and maidenless even less than being maidenless yet having other creature comforts. Especially if/when the state catches on and removes the social safety nets that currently make being dirt poor more tolerable than it had been at olden times.
Tree
8hr ago
Theta gang.
Other people do predictions all wrong.
Step one: they feel a slight change in temperature . Maybe they think polarization has increased, or atomization, resource use, artificial intelligence, immigrant problems, low TFR , etc. Could just be a vague feeling of unease with the way things are going.
Step two: they extrapolate that one thing to hell. So if you want a picture want the world in a hundred years, just delta times a hundred, aaaand you’re done. So one guy predicts the earth will be boiling, the other guy predicts total wireheading, another a 1000 IQ machine god, another complete resource depletion, another constant civil wars, yet another a zero point zero fertility rate, or a 99% amish population.
Why all the doomers are wrong:
Step One: It’s a very limited, myopic view. There’s a lot of randomness in the world. Where you are likely experiences some rate of temperature rise that is not typical. Some of the delta is pure gut feeling, nothing solid. There’s a lack of absolute assessment of the situation on a larger timescale. Are we as polarized as catholics and protestants in the religious wars? No, we’re very far from that.
Two: All the predictions are mostly contradictory, they refute each other, even though they may look like a sure-thing syllogism when looked at individually. The system is full of negative feedback loops that stop the simple extrapolation of even correctly identified trends. If a thing causes problems, the thing will eventually be limited, the problems mitigated.
Some of the arguments just look like an excuse to give up: they force this binary we’re screwed/we’re not screwed which doesn’t actually tell us anything . Even some of the worst ‘we’re screwed’ future scenarios they come up with would just be comparable to situations humanity already went through (civil wars, vast migrations, losing your home, starving poverty), and those people didn’t give up either. And that’s a small likelyhood. So chill and grill. Without forgetting to participate in the negative feedback loop of stopping the problems.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism.
If you are the Czar and you're the only one who needs to be a utilitarian, sure. If you need there to be lots of utilitarians, then assuming some commonality of interests lies are terrible because they cause people to calculate utility incorrectly. All moral systems are somewhat sensitive to false information, of course, but utilitarianism is particularly and notoriously so.
georgioz
9hr ago
Human bias being what it is, if you dislike any outcome for any reason, any good-faith honest calculation of utils of that outcome will certainly come out negative, and sufficiently so to meet whatever bar it needs to to justify not getting that outcome.
Exactly, I could have not said it better. Despite their posturing, they weaponize their dogmas - such as this Sagan's quip - to destroy what they do not like, while selectively not applying it to things they like such as polyamory.
I think it's more useful than this longer one which makes no concessions or commitments at all to any principles beyond one's own whims and preferences.
Yeah, it may be a useful white lie. Which again paradoxically is the exact thing that the sentence rails against.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
You're correct in that perfect recall or retention isn't feasible when using a large number of tokens (in my experience, performance degrades noticeably over 150k). When I threw in textbooks, it was for the purpose of having it ask me questions to check my comprehension, or creating flashcards. The models have an excellent amount of existing medical knowledge, the books (or my notes) just help ground it to what's relevant to me. I never needed perfect recall!
(Needle in a haystack tests or benchmarks are pretty awful, they're not a good metric for the use cases we have in mind)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Ah.. So that's how people were making epubs with ease. Thank you for the tip!
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit.
I don't think it's got much to do with copyright, it's probably just such a rare use case that the engineers haven't gotten around to implementing it. Gemini doesn't support either doc or docx, and those would probably be much more common in a consumer product. I don't recall off the top of my head if ChatGPT or Claude supports epubs either.
Has discussion died out in the web at large?
I'm on X, Instagram, Threads, reddit, discord, 4chan, literally anywhere I can go, and people just don't seem to chat much anymore. Or rather, what I mean is that people rarely have long conversations about the things they love. I know that passionate people still exist because they make fascinating Youtube videos, Substack articles, and Twitter threads, and I've had conversations of deep interest with friends in private, but I can't get these to occur in public spaces anymore despite my attempts. Even joining communities for the things I like doesn't work -- all the discords are dead.
It's all so strange, considering the internet I grew up with had a very opposite mindset. If you browsed GameFAQs for example, you'd constantly run into people who had a very deep knowledge of whatever game was being talked about, and they'd casually list off stuff like enemy drops and spawn rates because they had it memorized, to the point it was hard not to passively learn things. You could start a thread with any random question, and it would get at least 2 random nerds together to discuss the game in detail for several posts and deepen your knowledge. This just doesn't seem to happen anymore. Back in the day, even if a person didn't like a game they'd usually give you the reasons WHY they didn't like it, such as "the battle system is too easy to exploit" or the level scaling is bad. Nowadays you rarely get that.
Does anyone know what I mean? Broaching a topic like this is awkward because there's always the sense of, "Nah you're just nostalgic! You're old! You're looking in the wrong places!" But the more I explore, the more it seems things really have changed. Like maybe even the concept of "fanbases" and "fandoms" is actually outdated, as the number of people who care enough to talk about a piece of art once they've finished it is a tiny minority. Like we're all familiar with how bored adults binge watch Netflix shows while zoned out, and forget all about them soon after, but is this actually happening with games, movies, anime, etc. now too? Could this be why nobody's eager to talk about things? I really struggle to make sense of all this.
The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed).
Even decently smart, interested teens won't "grok" anything after you taught them those formula sheets. They'll need hours and hours of working with/thinking about the matter. They'll need examples, they need to manipulate the thing in their heads and on paper themselves. Hell, starting from scratch you'll need years just for them to "grok" what equations are, how the symbols are manipulated. Half of them won't really get it, ever. Proving theorems? Most people can't even do that after 12+4.
I think you hang out to much with the top quintile of the population, and you/they underestimate how much they where shaped through learning by osmosis during those "inefficient" 12+4 years.
Could/should the first 12 years be more efficient? Yes, but only for the smart/motivated third of a class. I personally think we should push those kids towards a proper classical education instead of cutting the time in half. The rest? They need to be taught by osmosis, and that takes forever. Both groups should do a lot more music and team sports as part of their daycare, I'd just make both mandatory.
That's the 12. As for the +4? I'm not denying that there are extremely expensive (time, resources) literacy verification and conscientiousness verification degrees. But the hard stuff can't be taught any faster. Engineering (yes, maybe excluding software - half a decade of commits on open source projects are superior to a BA). Medicine. Bio/pharma. Law. Basically, if you can get a post-grad degree and get a well-paying job outside of academia with it, it's probably because the jobs can't be done without the education.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
I think you may be confusing IRV and STV. STV is the multi-winner version of IRV, intended to produce proportional representation.
As for defending IRV:
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Clone independence is a huge deal. It is a much-bigger deal than what sort of candidates get elected, because it gives an escape valve against leaders going corrupt (since a clone can steal their seat). Approval voting is also clone-independent, but there are a ton of voting systems that aren't.
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Approval voting has a massive tactical voting problem. Specifically, an approval cutoff (that is, when you rank the candidates in order of preference, the point at which you stop approving) that does not divide the viable candidates wastes your vote. This is in play most of the time for most voters. Rampant tactical voting cases are bad because they disenfranchise the honest and principled in favour of the unscrupulous, and the world has more than enough of that. Its tactical voting problem is not as bad as plurality, but it is close. Now, of course, there is no system that never has tactical voting except for random-ballot (i.e., pick a ballot paper at random, and whoever's on that ballot wins), but IRV does much better than most in this regard; in most cases voting your true preferences is correct.
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IRV does not directly advantage compromise candidates. However, it's one of a few systems that if paired with compulsory voting invoke the Median Voter Theorem, and that does tend to produce compromise candidates. I'm not sure that approval does; I think maybe it might if everyone were to vote his/her true preferences, but that's not going to happen because of #2.
RenOS
something is wrong
9hr ago
Adoption has changed a lot over time, as multiple people here can testify. In times of war and scarcity, there will usually be more well-adjusted orphans than families wanting to take them in, so if you adopt you're likely to have a good experience.
However currently families wanting to adopt far, far outnumber well-adjusted orphans. It's not rare that you have to wait years, and even then you'll more likely than not end up with problematic kids. We know a couple who waited and eventually gave up because the only cases they got offered were so horrible that they didn't think they'd be able to handle that.
One of my colleagues helps out those foster families willing to take in the hard cases that are the majority and it's just sad. Teens with the mental development of a three year old are among the easiest. One girl just doesn't sleep at night, screaming for most of it. Others are so heavily physically disabled that they need help with everything.
Maybe you get lucky and the kid you adopted with fetal alcohol syndrome will turn out mostly fine except for minor develpomental deficits. Maybe you get super-lucky and an actually healthy kid somehow finds its way into the foster system. But generally it's hard and thankless and more likely than not, you will get kids that are dependent on support for life. You probably will not make a big difference, either.
Adoptions from the third world work a bit differently, especially from asia, but this can be very expensive.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9hr ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it)
Brideprice is negative (i.e. dowry) in the vast majority of cultures with strong monogamy norms. In the particular case of cisHajnal culture, the wedding-related flow of funds is traditionally from the bride's extended family to the newly-formed nuclear family.
sohois
9hr ago
I'm not 2rafa, but I would argue similarly on immigration. The advantage that the US has with immigration is that all their illegal immigration is Hispanic. They're not all people you would want in your nation, but the US has already integrated a huge number of them. There aren't big push factors coming that will massively bump numbers up in future, and in legal immigration the US system works pretty well, largely creaming off the best from the rest of the world. The US has relatively limited welfare which means most illegals are in some sense productive, or at least not active drains outside of the criminal elements. The US is also massive and very decentralized. Some states and cities will become swamped and turn into third-world entities, but there will still be dozens of productive urban areas with low levels.
In Europe, illegal immigration is coming from Africa and the middle east. These immigrants are much lower quality. They are poorly integrated, many going into ethnic enclaves and reigniting old tribal conflicts with other groups of immigrants, to say nothing of the dangers of Muslim immigration. They are attracted by generous welfare which they are increasingly exploiting, adding nothing to the host nations. Numbers are large and likely only to grow larger as their home regions increasingly destabilize. I can't speak for legal immigration for continental Europe, but at least in the UK they've somehow ended up importing millions of terrible unproductive immigrants in addition to the illegal flows.
Structurally, each individual nation is also poorly positioned to weather these floods. Productivity is often focused in a single primate city, and once you lose a London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, etc. you've lost most of the nation's growth. Individual areas can do little to fight against the waves. And all this is to say nothing of the respective strengths of the economies
Every Western society is now more urbanized and educated, plus there's porn, video games and everything else people blame for the fertility decline. It's going to be much harder to do anything today than in the 50s or 60s. Implicit, unspoken social technology that worked then has now broken or been broken.
I mean, think about what was happening in the 50s, what caused it then? A prolonged period of wages growth would certainly help but there are plenty of countries with huge wages growth today and cratering fertility. There's no reason to expect that to result in success. In Sweden they'd just come up with the welfare state. We still have welfare states and there don't seem to be much gains to be made there in terms of fertility despite huge amounts of money sloshing around.
We're left with other aspects of the 50s and early 60s that are a harder sell for the general public.
The golden age of eugenics. Mad Men-style sexism. Nuclear family as standard. The mindset and assumptions that put all of these into practice. Plus an overt, explicit understanding of what the goal is, precisely what we want and why rather than free market fundamentalism. Something besides treating the fate of nations like inexplicable changes in the weather, to be observed and adjusted to rather than altered and improved. That's what we're missing I think.
P-Necromancer
9hr ago
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
You know, I hadn't really internalized just how big this is. You got me curious about it. I uploaded something I'm working on -- 240k words, which, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, came out to about 400k tokens.
Honestly, I'm impressed that it works at all and very impressed how fast it works. Thought I'd at least have time to get up and get a drink, but it was already responding to my question inside 30 seconds. Just being able to throw compute at (essentially) reading a book feels magical, like nine women making a baby in a month.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. It... has a general idea what happened in the text, certainly. I wouldn't give it much more than that. I'm used to 2.5 being impressively cogent, but this was pretty bad -- stupider than initial release GPT 4, I want to say, though it's been long enough I might be misremembering. If you ask it concrete questions it can generally give you something resembling the answer, complete with quotes, which are only ~30% hallucinations. Kind of like talking to someone who read the book a few months ago whose memory is getting a bit hazy. But if you ask it to do any sort of analysis or synthesis or speculation, I think it'd lose out to the average 10-year-old (who'd need OOMs longer to read it, to be fair).
(Also, the web front end was super laggy; I think it might have been recounting all the tokens as I typed a response? That feels like too stupid an oversight for Google, but I'm not sure what else it could be.)
Not sure where the disconnect is with the medical textbooks you say you tried. Maybe the model has more trained knowledge to fall back on when its grasp on the context falls short? Or you kept to more concrete questions? As of now I think @Amadan's semantic compression approach is a better bet -- whatever you lose in summarization you make up in preserving the model's intelligence at low context.
(Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit. Anyway, RTF should work, but didn't for me. Eventually got something workable out of pandoc:
pandoc -f epub -t markdown_strict-smart-all_symbols_escapable --wrap=none
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle?
No - the question is "Can the 30th percentile 20something American man afford these things?" Half the population being too poor to date is a failure condition, telling young men to spend their 20s careermaxing and start dating in their 30s is incompatible with the cisHajnal marriage pattern, and the reversed gender pay gap for young childless people makes things worse.
cae_jones
10hr ago
The upper class in Qing China had some ritual involving a square of white silk, which was supposed to come out bloodstained as proof. Or so I've read in a historical fiction which may or may not be accurate (in which the newly weds deliberately faked the results so they wouldn't have to have sex the first night).
It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.
The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.
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