domain:npr.org
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor"
Debatable. Over my life time America went from "the promised land" to "not sure if this is worth the bother of moving half way across the world" to "it's definitely not worth the bother, plus they lost their marbles culturally". Though this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Europe made no shortage of idiotic political/economic decisions during that time itself, including importing it's own set of anchors, as well as America's cultural trends.
If I had any intention of moving across the world, I'd probably be picking China, not the US.
Jiro
29m ago
Normies have the idea that a price is based on cost, plus a certain amount of profit. Charging more for a product because the customers are less price sensitive rather than because the product costs more to make is considered cheating the customer.
Rationalists may not think that way, but everyone else does. If pink razors cost the same to make, but women are willing to pay extra for them, charging extra is dishonest.
Jiro
34m ago
I wonder if some of the problems people have with this kind of in-group bias is the reverse: immigrants who are culturally different and need to exert a lot of effort to catch up will get along with mainstream Americans, but immigrants who are multiple generation assimilated are more likely to use their immigrant heritage for identity politics.
Unfortunately that is past the point where Reddit lets you search. (You may see posts suggesting that Reddit only returns 1000 posts but narrowing it down will work. Narrowing it down will not work.) But I can come up with some related posts:
Moderator tells me that I can be abrasive but not antagonistic
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
51m ago
I am agnostic on LLMs being conscious or having qualia. More importantly, I think it's largely irrelevant. What difference to me does it make if an unaligned ASI turns me into a paperclip but doesn't really dislike me?
Is a horse happy about the fact that the tractor replacing it isn't conscious? It's destined for the glue factory nonetheless.
We have no principled or rigorous way to interrogate consciousness in humans. We have no way of saying with any certainty that LLMs aren't conscious, even if I am inclined to think that, if they are, it's a very alien form of consciousness.
You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I'm talking about whoever is doing the assessment of consciousness being "aware" of the fundamental limitations of the entity they're testing. I could, in theory, administer a med school final exam to Terence Tao, and he'd fail miserably. I would be a bigger idiot if I went on to then declare that Tao is thus proven to not be as smart as he seems. That meme about subjecting a monkey, fish and elephant to the same objective test of ability in the form of climbing trees, while usually misapplied, isn't entirely wrong.
I also don't mean to make any implications about "interiority" here. I would happily say that an LLM is "cognizant" of fact X, if say, that information was in its training data or within the context window. No qualia or introspection required.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
54m ago
Well, that sucks. People really are getting their history in all the wrong places.
OliveTapenade
59m ago
...I think that's what the Sunday small-scale question thread is for.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Well, I will grant that on the latter definition, LLMs are 'intelligent'.
I don't think I would grant it on the former definition, because I take building a model of the world to be a claim about conscious experience, which LLMs don't have. LLMs are capable of goal-directed activity, for whatever that may be worth, but I think having a model of the world implies having some kind of mental space or awareness. You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I mention this because I notice in AI discourse a gulf where it seems that, for some people, LLMs are obviously intelligent, and the idea of denying that they are is ridiculous; and that for other people LLMs are obviously not intelligent, and the idea of affirming that they are is ridiculous. I'm in the latter camp personally, and the way I make sense of this is just to guess that people are using the word 'intelligent' in very different ways.
aldomilyar
1hr ago
I've seen people stating they essentially believe Bridgerton's portrait of the period is racially correct, even if they acknowledge that the queen figure doesn't exist.
aldomilyar
1hr ago
I think it's a combination of a few things
- These modifications largely only go one way in modern culture. There'll be Black Blitz sufferers, but there will be no White characters in an equivalent tale about Africa 500 years ago
- A lot of people are staggeringly ignorant and take this sort of thing at face value, promoting this sort of 'eternal present day' mindset in which it becomes impossible to think rationally about historical topics since you're essentially imagining the current level of affluence and racial integration to have extended back forever. I've met people who genuinely think Bridgerton is a historical tale.
erwgv3g34
1hr ago
Not that there is anything wrong with taking the high road and turning your back on media, but there's at least two good alternatives:
One: Watch old stuff. No, that's not the same as rewatching stuff you already like, because nobody has enough time to consume all the multiple lifetimes of classics that already exist.
If you are a science fiction fan, for example, can you seriously tell me that you have already watched all of Star Trek (the pre-Enterprise stuff), Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits? If you are a film buff, have you honestly already tried going down the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, or all Best Picture winners made before the year 2010? If you are an animation guy, have you truly already watched all 2D entries in the Disney Animated Canon, Don Bluth's entire filmography, and the standard recommendations of Gargoyles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the DCAU, as well as hidden gems like Exosquad?
I doubt it.
Two: Watch foreign media. The woke mind virus may have taken over the Anglosphere, but Asian stuff remains largely isolated. You could embrace the hallyu and watch one of the very nice K-dramas that are going around, most notably Squid Game. Or you could dive into anime, which is truly a completely different world; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:
The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.
In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.
I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.
Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
You're probably right. The biggest driver was just being able to sneak in games while work was slow.
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language
That doesn't sound very autistic at all, actually.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
As a child of immigrants myself, I appreciate the liberal cosmopolitan attitude: many of the kindest and most considerate people I have met have been whites who took great pains to live up to the color-blind promise. And I do reciprocate those feelings. But many immigrant and children of immigrants do not feel as I do. You can pave over a lot of problems with prosperity and wealth, but when times are hard those attitudes will come to the fore.
This is not illustrative of much though, in the end. You can't really look at a bunch of women's clothing, check for ones that have pockets, see that the items with pockets can do well and then draw any conclusions about whether the lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven or not.
Let's say that 15% of women, if given a choice, would make the tradeoff and select clothing with pockets over those that don't, and that for the remainder, it's the reverse. Let's say that a smaller percentage of women would be willing to pay extra for pockets due to the additional cost of sewing on functional pockets (note that pockets are a pain in the ass. Even the non-functional ones, if they have flaps and bindings and the rest, but the functional pockets take a lot more time even than that). In a situation where ~13% of women's pants have functional pockets, and the remainder do not, you will still be able to see that clothing with pockets sells well even when the relative lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven.
Unfortunately there is no economic study on this I am aware of, likely because the topic is trivial and the answer is obvious. Most of the literature I am able to find on it is ideologically-infused sociology without even the slightest hint of rigour. All I can say is that personally, as a dude, I actually don't like pockets, it doesn’t feel particularly secure and I often carry a sling bag along with me in non-professional circumstances where it would be more socially acceptable for me to do so. I assume that the incentive to just use purses is greater when you want to carry makeup and other items (the women I know pack a shit ton of stuff in their purses for random contingencies that never materialise).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
I can't fathom Total War working well on mobile. And why not get it on PC, where you can use one of the many mods? I just don't see any upside here, get it on PC imo.
phailyoor
2hr ago
If the letter is real, then showing the letter itself will lend a certain amount of legitimacy without giving up the source. It won't be proof but it would be a whole lot more believable.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
So, he wants to run a hanania republic.
The arc of history bends towards machine dominance in all tasks. Just the other day we had OpenAI's contender come second to some Polish genius who was practically sweating blood in an invite-only programming optimization contest.
https://officechai.com/ai/openai-places-second-behind-human-coder-at-atcoder-progmming-event/
But we can't retrain Psyho for 10,000 years of subjective time on more optimization. His brain is capped at 20 watts or so, just like the rest of us. God isn't going to release homo sapiens max (now with denser neurons and a bigger cerebrum!). The bioethics brigade won't let us step it up and nobody has the balls to ignore them, plus it's too late now. In contrast, Nvidia has a 2-year release timescale.
One would think after watching various chess masters get crushed in the 80s and early 90s we'd have learnt. But it's like you said, nobody learnt anything 'Oh it can beat an amateur but a master has deep conceptual understanding' -> 'oh it can beat a master but Kasparov has deep intuition' -> 'oh it's a nothingburger, let's move on to text'. We continue to not learn the trend even today when progress is much faster and in many more domains. Gary Marcus somehow still has a following, he's the Gordon Chang of AI.
phailyoor
2hr ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language (my friends and I came up with an insane number of codewords for too many things) so maybe you caught me in some sort of subconscious trap. Irregardless, I will still not say the words.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Can't he find some way to put pressure on Murdoch and Newscorp to give in? Donald Trump does have considerable resources for suppression and dirty tricks. He's trying to put the screws on Elon right now but perhaps doesn't realize Elon's preparedness to shoulder costs for his beliefs. But Elon Musk is an exception and not the rule among major business leaders.
Now if it's Murdoch + Elon + broad billionaire coterie who are unhappy with tariffs and generally erratic behaviour then I can see how Trump might be outmatched here.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
I just found out that Total War Medieval II is available on mobile devices, and I'm tempted to buy it. It's one of the few entries in the franchise I missed out on, I played more than my fair share of Rome 1, it ran surprisingly well on a shitty 'netbook'.
Unsure whether to buy it there, on pc, or just hold out for a remaster.
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
Hanania-chan is tsundere?!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
AI art is a democratizing force, anyone can use it. Consider George Droyd for instance, a Solana shitcoin supported by AI video memes: https://x.com/FloydTerminal
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1927219300055572563
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1888370796550373792/video/1
The far-right has less resources for art (see https://x.com/DacistRapian, clearly talented and artsy but nobody is going to give him money, he keeps getting banned off twitter and making new accounts) and the MAGA-right just aren't that rich in art either, though they do have resources. MAGA by nature is not well-organized, not a top-down force. It's mostly Trump charisma and the sincere effort of his supporters, not a honed hollywood/media operation. There's no Trump equivalent to the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(2024_film), which is basically a hatchet job on Trump. They don't have the resources or the organization. When they do try and do something top-down it often ends up being hideously crass and cringe.
What people on the right can do and do well is repurposing and rearranging other art for their own purposes. The only time I see The Apprentice referenced online is when the film version of Trump gives his sigma speech about tactics and Trump supporters go 'based!' see here for an example. They reappropriate the work of others: https://x.com/PierceKeaton/status/1865222291157598458
Or in 2016, remember MAGApedes? Can't Stump the Trump? WH40K God-Emperor memes? Today on the far right there are chudjaks, soyjaks, basedjaks and troonjaks. That was all bottom-up stuff. It's the opposite of hard to MS Paint up a drawing.
AI art is a natural extension to the resource-poor, bottom-up approach. One person can do it in a few hours with a trivial amount of money, often for free. It meshes poorly with the left-wing top down approach. Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert were running with million dollar budgets, Colbert supposedly was burning through $100 million a year, which is why his show was cancelled. With those resources there's no need for AI art, you can just do it the slower, more expensive way. The left are the slow-moving established players, the right are the disruptive start-ups, they're always going to make more use of new technology.
I can confirm that I have bought womens' razors at times because they were cheaper (slightly) and didn't have the dumb 'lubricating strip' that clogs up with beard if you don't shave often enough.
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