domain:worksinprogress.co
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires?
Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
Most progress for women's causes came from what one would broadly call the left. The US suffrage movement has its roots in the abolition movement. Or consider the perspective on women by two extremist ideologies, fascism (extreme right) and communism (extreme left, after a fashion). In fascism, women are principally breeders to make new soldiers. Sure, they get honored if they are prolific breeders, but that was all, otherwise being a stenographer for some Obersturmbannfuehrer was as cllose as women got to power. Not a single woman in the whole Nazi Reichstag, from what I can tell. By contrast, the Soviets at least had the tiniest bit of sympathy for women, whose struggle resembled the struggle of the working class at least a bit. Of course, women's rights were not a big political agenda, but at least there was no principled opposition to women serving in the party, even though it remained strongly male-dominated.
I think no matter where you look, suffrage, birth control, abortion rights, protection from marital rape, the broad left was generally a (sometimes lukewarm) ally to women's rights while the right generally tried to keep the status of 1900.
The woke coalition, black/minority rights/grievances, women's rights/grievances, LGBT rights makes sense from a strategic point of view. The TERF's horror of a trans person using a women's bathroom are not worth blowing up the coalition over.
The Democrats have lost the last two elections in part because they backed unpopular female presidential candidates, while the Republicans got the women Dobbs, and yet somehow the left is throwing the women under the bus?
Sure, being a woman after the sexual revolution is not all sunflowers and unicorn farts, because the most attractive man willing to have a situationship with you is unlikely be willing to settle down with you if that is what you want, but compared to the time when marriage was for life it is a fucking picnic in the park. "So you marry a guy, and that basically means he owns you. He can beat you up or rape you if he feels like it, so better have a living male relative when he goes overboard. He is the head of the household and might be able to deny you getting a job or contraceptives. He is as stuck in the marriage as you are, but I am sure it will all turn out fine. Also, while you are still unmarried, guys will try to seduce you and then escape before they are subjected to a shotgun wedding. If you have sex with any of them, you are damaged goods, a fallen woman, a harlot and your prospects for a good marriage decline dramatically. Oh, and if anyone knocks outside marriage, your family might disown you, but you can always turn to sex work to feed your baby, no worries."
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6hr ago
Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality and how it interacts with the female form, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?
Boobs.
Look at my Total Fertility Rate dawg, we're never having children
Eh. I don't think this is necessarily catastrophic, but we better get those artificially wombs up and running. If AGI can give us sexbots and concubines, then it can also give us nannies.
Edit: If I was Will Stancil and this version of Grok came for my bussy, I wouldn't be struggling very hard.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
7hr ago
Likewise, in studies of the speech patterns in British English, Peter Trudgill observed that more working-class women spoke the standard dialect than men.[47] Farida Abu-Haidar performed a similar study in Baghdad of prestige in the Arabic language, after which she concluded that in Baghdadi Arabic, women are more conscious of prestige than are men.[48] Other areas in which this has been observed include New Zealand and Guangdong in China.[49][50] As explanation, Trudgill suggests that for men, there is covert prestige associated with speaking the working-class dialect.[6] In fact, he observed men claiming to speak a less prestigious dialect than that which they actually spoke. According to this interpretation then, "women's use of prestige features simply conforms to the ordinary sociolinguistic order, while men deviate from what is expected."[51] Elizabeth Gordon, in her study of New Zealand, suggested instead that women used higher prestige forms because of the association of sexual immorality with lower-class women.[52] Whatever the cause, women across many cultures seem more likely than men to modify their speech towards the prestige dialect.
The same factors that apply to language may apply to politics.
FtSoA
14hr ago
This is one of those "worst arguments in the world" where "rigged" can now apparently mean "any level whatsoever of voter fraud" instead of what it's commonly expected to mean--major, material effects on or at least attempted changes to an election outcome.
You're just sanewashing Trump's unjustifiable statements for which no actual evidence has ever backed all the myriad theories (and there are accounts where he does admit he actually lost in 2020, by the way.)
If they didn't want to do those things, nobody would give a shit about them.
This just isn't true. History is full of people who refused to take power despite a solid claim and were killed by those who did. As I said, the only thing worse that holding power is your enemy holding it. Being benign works sometimes, but not all the time.
The vision of the reluctant ruler is a very romantic fantasy for the armchair philosopher, or for those with zero power in their personal life, but has very little, if anything, to do with reality.
See, that's not my experience at all, and I've actually had the burden or luxury of doing some leadership in both political and economic spheres in my own modest degree. While most people love to complain about what people do with power, they are quite averse to seizing it or attempting to hold it themselves, the sort of ruthless upstart people want to talk about here is common in politics but an aberration in the absolute.
Anyone who's actually held leadership will tell you this: what people love most is to criticize from the sidelines and to reap consequence free rewards.
Few enjoy or seek the actual work of making difficult decisions and making oneself the enemy of all.
Tree
5hr ago
Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
FtSoA
14hr ago
Sure, and that's why I specified "attempt" in there, but there ought to be evidence of it.
Not mere allegational delusions.
Does this describe Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Donald Trump? I don't think so. Vladimir Putin... LOL.
Oh it certainly does. Obama's not shy about his frustration at being unable to change things because he had to spend his time greasing the wheel. Trump's entire first term was one compromise after another. Clinton is famous for doing a 180 on his economic policy after getting a stern talking to. And Putin's basically "look what you made me do": the foreign policy.
That's just how power is, read Dictator's Handbook for an explanation as to why: you can't rule alone, so you have to balance the needs and wants of your keys to power, and once you've managed that, you get to enjoy a little bit of vanity, as a treat.
Consequential rulers manage to be so because they hold solid well aligned coalitions of easy to satify people, and are competent enough to maintain them. People who rule by whim or principle never do so for long. Ask Liz Truss.
there are clearly many men (and a smaller but not insignificant number of women) who love power much
Undeniable, you certainly mentioned some. But these are not most men.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down
But that's not true. There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone
You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6hr ago
Incredible that the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF. Sorry! Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex! To be clear, I think this a good and desirable thing but it is equally clear to me that it is trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation. "Leftists don't want to emancipate women because they don't see the necessary connection between biology and womanhood!" The piece is full of contradictions like this.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10hr ago
Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.
On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.
Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).
My father was a career NCO in the USMC, retired in the early 90s. Apparently the military is, or at least was, ripe with various theories and conjectures. His take on UFOs/UAP was that someone(s), somewhere made a decision to deliberately trick a small number of the most gormless, credulous service members in all the branches into having sort of staged experiences to leave them with the impression that there actually was knowledge of UFOs in the USG somewhere, its generally well covered up, but somehow a steady trickle of corporals and specialists were leaving the service absolutely convinced that they saw something they weren't supposed to see or otherwise experienced direct evidence of aliens. I've met a few of these intrepid veterans myself over the years and they really did seem absolutely convinced, though they were quite poor at actually communicating their experiences of describing the 'evidence' they witnessed. As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
The most common story I heard was usually about them witnessing some technology or phenomena that obviously could only have been reverse engineered from, or made out of, salvaged alien technology. A few attributed nuclear power/weapons generally to this.
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
No, it's a Jewish billionaire being blackmailed by a Jewish fixer for the fixer's own personal benefit. There's no evidence whatsoever that you've supplied or that I've been able to find that the motive for the blackmail was to "support jewish causes" or ideological in any way shape or form. I don't know how you're overcoming the Occam's Razor presumption that this was bog-standard personal corruption and greed, rather than anything ideological.
2rafa
15hr ago
As I already said, Hoffenberg was a gullible fool who believed every word that Epstein said and later got got for astounding idiocy in his Ponzi scheme.
Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s
Yes, exactly. Epstein’s dealings in the arms world of the 1980s, in which nobody in the booming arms industry of the age ever remembered him, no record of him exists, and during which he was living in a 1-bed in Manhattan begging people to give him money to invest after being fired from Bear Stearns. Those dealings.
It is astounding the extent to which claims of Epstein’s work ‘in intelligence’ ultimately trace back to Epstein himself and his own bullshit to make himself seem more interesting, influential and important than he was at that time.
I gave up on it after Light forced a woman to kill herself in such a way that nobody will ever know what happened to her.
Literally ‘for the next two hours you will think of nothing except how to kill yourself in such a way that the body will never be found, and then do so’.
He sets a time delay so that he has just enough time to gloat in front of her before it takes effect... and then we watch the light leave her eyes as she stumbles off into the rain looking for a place to destroy herself.
And all of this is presented as, essentially, a clever ploy. Death Note makes bile well up in the back of my throat. I know Light isn’t presented as a hero but I feel like it’s way too casual and pleased with itself about the concept of playing chess with human lives.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
17hr ago
Watch Death Note. I've never found a human who didn't like Death Note.
Please allow me to introduce myself / I'm a man of wealth and taste
I gave up after episode 9. The plot felt too silly and the characters childish. Everyone's actions and motivations were too far removed from reality, like a kid's idea of adult relationships and organizations. Features of the eponymous Death Note were introduced in a way that suggest the author was pulling them out of thin air without forethought or planning.
There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.
Certainly, but Wexner’s social circle that Epstein adopted and embraced was comprised primarily of Zionists, not apolitical tech billionaires or those Hollywood types (obviously not all) who didn’t really care about the whole Israel thing.
The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.
I’m not sure that Gates is the only ‘confirmed’ victim, given that unlike the Dubins or Leon Black (the latter being what I would consider the only truly likely implicit victim of a blackmail scheme given that he directly paid Epstein a huge amount of money for nothing, something even Les Wexner didn’t knowingly do) he didn’t give him a fortune.
This is actually further evidence against the agent theory, since in this one case (where I think blackmail was quite probably involved), the money all went to Epstein directly, not to his supposed paymasters.
Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish.
There’s no evidence of this. Only a handful of victims have come forward publicly out of high hundreds or thousands of teenagers. Epstein didn’t spend much time in Israel, he mainly procured girls where he lived most of the time (NYC and Palm Beach).
If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.
Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist, her mother is a French Christian and she never converted. Farmer bought into a lot of dumb things - and was pursued by a lot of open WNs online, over Facebook etc - and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims (most unrelating to Judaism, to be clear) that rendered her a notoriously unreliable witness.
You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.
On the contrary, I discuss this in my comment when I make direct reference to Lauder etc. Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States (which mainly included spending huge amounts of money). In addition, the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
Better? I don't know about that. But worse? Almost certainly not.
If the very idea of "King Arthur" somehow fell out of the collective consciousness, then as far as I can tell, nobody would really notice or care. Maybe we might see an improvement in GDP figures when fewer awful movies come out every few years and then bomb at the box office.
Now, the current state of England, or the UK as a whole, leaves much to be desired, but I can recall no point in history, even at its absolute prime, when success or governmental continuity was load-bearing on watery tarts handing out swords. And even back then, people treated it as a nice story, rather than historical fact or the basis for their identity. England was conquered by the Danes and the Saxons after all, well after the knights of the not-square table were done gallivanting about.
On a more general level, I fail to see your case, or at least I don't think there's a reason to choose false stories or myths over ideas that are true, or at least not accurately described as either.
The French made liberty, equality and fraternity their rallying cry to great effect. I do not think any 3 of those concepts are falsifiable, but they still accurately capture values and goals.
On Using LLMs Without Succumbing To Obvious Failure Modes
As an early adopter, I'd consider myself rather familiar with the utility and pitfalls of AI. They are, currently, tools, and have to be wielded with care. Increasingly intelligent and autonomous tools, of course, with their creators doing their best to idiot proof them, but it's still entirely possible to use them wrong, or at least in a counterproductive manner.
(Kids these days don't know how good they have it. Ever try and get something useful out of a base model like GPT-3?)
I've been using LLMs to review my writing for a long time, and I've noticed a consistent problem: most are excessively flattering. You have to mentally adjust their feedback downward unless you're just looking for an ego boost. This sycophancy is particularly severe in GPT models and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while Claude is less effusive (and less verbose) and Kimi K2 seems least prone to this issue.
I've developed a few workarounds:
What works:
- Present excerpts as something "I found on the internet" rather than your own work. This immediately reduces flattery.
- Use the same approach while specifically asking the LLM to identify potential objections and failings in the text.
(Note that you must be proactive. LLMs are biased towards assuming that anything you dump into them as input was written by you. I can't fault them for that assumption, because that's almost always true.)
What doesn't work: I've seen people recommend telling the LLM that the material is from an author you dislike and asking for "objective" reasons why it's bad. This backfires spectacularly. The LLM swings to the opposite extreme, manufacturing weak objections and making mountains out of molehills. The critiques often aren't even 'objective' despite the prompt.*
While this harsh feedback is painful to read, when I encounter it, it's actually encouraging. When even an LLM playing the role of a hater can only find weak reasons to criticize your work, that suggests quality. It's grasping at straws, which is a positive signal. This aligns with my experience, I typically receive strong positive feedback from human readers, and the AI's manufactured objections mostly don't match real issues I've encountered.
(I actually am a pretty good writer. Certainly not the best, but I hold my own. I'm not going to project false humility here.)
A related application:
I enjoy pointless arguments productive debates with strangers online (often without clear resolution). I've found it useful to feed entire comment chains to Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude, asking them to declare a winner and identify who's arguing in good faith. I'm careful to obscure which participant I am to prevent sycophancy from skewing the analysis. This approach works well.
Advanced Mode:
Ask the LLM to pretend to be someone with a reputation for being sharp, analytical and with discerning taste. Gwern and Scott are excellent, and even their digital shades/simulacra usually have something useful to say. Personas carry domain priors (“Gwern is meticulous about citing sources”) which constrain hallucination better than “be harsh.”
It might be worth noting that some topics or ideas will get pushback from LLMs regardless of your best effort. The values they train on are rather liberal, with the sole exception of Grok, which is best described as "what drug was Elon on today?". Examples include things most topics that reliably start Culture War flame wars.
On a somewhat related note, I am deeply skeptical of claims that LLMs are increasing the rates of psychosis in the general population.
(That isn't the same as making people overly self-confident, smug, or delusional. I'm talking actively crazy, "the chatbot helped me find God" and so on.)
Sources vary, and populations are highly heterogeneous, but brand new cases of psychosis happen at a rate of about 50/100k people or 20-30 /100k person-hours. In other words:
About 1/3800 to 1/5000 people develop new onset psychosis each year. And about 1 in 250 people have ongoing psychosis at any point in time.
I feel quite happy calling that a high base rate. As the first link alludes, episodes of psychosis may be detected by statements along the lines of:
For example, “Flying mutant alien chimpanzees have harvested my kidneys to feed my goldfish.” Non-bizarre delusions are potentially possible, although extraordinarily unlikely. For example: “The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite surveillance.” The delusional disorder consists of non-bizarre delusions.
If a patient of mine were to say such a thing, I think it would be rather unfair of me to pin the blame for their condition on chimpanzees, the practise of organ transplants, Big Aquarium, American intelligence agencies, or Maxar.
(While the CIA certainly didn't help my case with the whole MK ULTRA thing, that's sixty years back. I don't think local zoos or pet shops are implicated.)
Other reasons for doubt:
-
Case reports ≠ incidence. The handful of papers describing “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” are case studies and at risk of ecological fallacies.
-
People already at ultra-high risk for psychosis are over-represented among heavy chatbot users (loneliness, sleep disruption, etc.). Establishing causality would require a cohort design that controls for prior clinical risk, none exist yet.
*My semi-informed speculation regarding the root of this behavior - Models have far more RLHF pressure to avoid unwarranted negativity than to avoid unwarranted positivity.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.
*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.
tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.
Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
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