2rafa
17hr ago
In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape. There was no mail order bride industry behind the Iron Curtain because gaining an exit visa to a Western country was close to impossible unless you were very well connected and therefore doing well under the system (and therefore had less of an incentive to leave).
2rafa
17hr ago
I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.
As for the Balkans…
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Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.
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There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.
That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.
People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.
So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.
2rafa
1d ago
Irreligion, no, but nowhere near the level of devotion required by the masses in a communist society. Weekly attendance at church was at maybe 40% at the height of Franco’s rule. A lot of that was residual, even then, the product of long habits.
Fascist Germany and Italy made more serious efforts at societal rituals, mass events, regular rallies but you were still far, far less ‘immersed’ in the ideology of Nazism as a random building inspector in a large town in German in 1937 as you were immersed in the ideology of Stalinism as a building inspector in a large town in Russia was in 1949 (assuming you weren’t a member of either party, which describes most people).
2rafa
1d ago
The Soviet Union effectively repressed almost all private enterprise from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s. There were some smugglers and black marketers in 1975 but far fewer than there had been fifty years earlier. It was mostly effective. North Korea has a larger black market but it’s largely tolerated by the state due to extreme poverty as a supplementary income source.
Communists are more repressive because they actually think people can change.
Rightists and Leftists broadly define the outgroup as a minority. It might be defined as an economic class (‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeoisie’) or a social class (out of touch ‘elites’), or it might be defined nationally, religiously or ethnically, but the outgroup is generally a minority of the population.
What do you do when the majority - or at least seemingly a large mass of people - disagrees with you? The right has a built in explanation for this, which is expressed in different language at different places or times, sometimes more or less democratically, but which is essentially ‘some people are stronger, smarter, and more noble than others, we can lead, the rest will follow’ and this is broadly congruent. This leads to repression in far-right regimes being localized. It includes those groups marked out as the ‘true’ unassimilable enemy (see above), and a very small number of others who cause a nuisance, but there is no inherent need for the masses to be brought along provided they don’t threaten the running of the state. If you are not obstructing the running of government and do not belong to a primary outgroup, the reactionary regime generally leaves you alone.
The left lacks this explanation and dichotomy. Certainly, there have been attempts. The rural peasantry are inherently reactionary. The labor aristocracy are happy being kapos. But this all rings a little hollow compared to the fundamental ideological message - after all, unlike the right which is more willing to write off some people as outside the scope of the project, isn’t the core leftist idea that everyone (even sometimes former aristocrats and capitalists) can be reformed? Can become a servant of the revolution? Eventually, you reach a stage where the day-to-day political and social views of the masses need to be monitored, adjusted, and reported on. They are simply more relevant to communism as a political project. Communism cares about what people believe in their hearts in a way that reactionary traditionalist and right wing movements don’t - in part because communists think human nature is malleable in a way the right doesn’t.
This also makes for far more repressive forms of authoritarianism. In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike. Rightist regimes don’t make people go to Church. They might change the curriculum for kids, but they make no effect to convert adults ideologically, they assume they’re either in the small enemy group or already on their side. Communist countries have this problem less (not never, but less).
2rafa
3d ago
I said it doesn't have access to the training set, in the same way that if you take an exam without "access" to the textbook you're not allowed to bring it in and leaf through it when answering the problems.
Again, if we change “it accesses the training set” to “it recalls / accesses / understands [delete as appropriate] the conceptual relationships represented by the training set” what really changes?
2rafa
3d ago
I take the ‘opposite’ view that LLMs are becoming extraordinary intelligences, but I also think the distinction between memory, recall, training set, database etc is unnecessarily importing computer science distinctions into what is a relatively robust colloquial understanding of these models.
If you watch three thousand chess games and then play a chess game and see a move and think “I’ve seen this before, I’m going to do x” and you’re right but you can’t perfectly recall that it was actually a YouTube video of a 2003 Chess regional championship quarter final between… then are you recalling or remembering or did you learn?
This is just not a relevant distinction when it comes to the human concept of memory. I’ll keep pushing this because “actually, an LLM doesn’t have memory of the training set” isn’t really true. It often does have recall of the training set, just like often you really might be able to remember the book you first saw an unusual turn of phrase in or the chess game where you first saw a particular move. And in any case, memory encompasses both that and a relational, situational, partial and often metadata-free recall but it still counts.
The counterargument here isn’t “no LLMs don’t do this”, it’s “so do you”.
2rafa
3d ago
Right, it’s a model trained (like every single model we can build) on millions of descriptions of human emotion, human experience, human identity. Bemused responses at models being “afraid” of being “caught” hacking contra to the instructions of the prompter (and really quote marks aren’t even necessary) because it’s a computer model and can’t suffer the indignity of trial or the boredom and waste of 20 years in a prison cell are really besides the point. LLMs are by the nature of their training human-identified intelligences, not foreign or alien ones, even when told they’re not.
2rafa
3d ago
Of course LLMs capture something core about human (or all advanced) cognition. Are they perfect equivalents to the human brain and mind? No, but they don’t need to be. In years to come, we will find the idea that we ever pretended there was something special about the way we think to be a strange form of historic narcissism, no different to the way we now feel about the idea that the earth was at the center of the solar system or the universe.
2rafa
3d ago
The daily grind in World of Warcraft may be more boring than another game, but it’s still a lot more ‘fun’ (or less painful) than running a 10k for most people, for example.
That said, I’d argue many things in real life employ gamification principles - whether it’s job boards / ticket systems like in software engineering, or fitness apps like Apple health with streaks and tracking and scores and medals etc etc. Clearly it works for some people - although I’d guess they all like the game a little before the gamification is applied.
Maybe that’s the best way to look at it, MMOs have dailies to get players coming back every day which promotes retention. I know many gym apps that have essentially the same dailies for small rewards (a coffee, a protein shake), so in that sense it works.
2rafa
4d ago
Not unheard of for some niche lowbrow online Indian/Hindu nationalist types. In both cases it’s “enemy of my [historic] enemy”.
They dislike Britain because of the British Empire, so they like Nazi Germany, plus they used the Swastika and extended some token sympathies to Indian nationalists contra the British.
And they very much dislike Muslims and the Muslim presence in India, so like Israel because they’re carving out territory in a formerly Muslim land and have good relation with India. And Palestine is the central global Muslim cause more than any other, so it often comes up.
Red because most people won’t understand the question and will just hear “you will definitely survive” and “nobody you know and love will probably be in the 2 random people asked next”. The original question works ‘better’ because it’s more intuitively understood by the average 85 IQ human being on earth.
2rafa
5d ago
This kind of clause defeats the point. The point is everyone gets the question at the same time and must decide instantly. In that context your choices are:
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Press Red, guarantee your survival, hope everyone you love also chooses Red or that enough people choose Blue. If Red wins, live with knowing you might have had the defining vote (assume nobody knows the exact split of the final outcome) however unlikely.
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Press Blue, either die instantly with a clean conscience or everyone lives.
2rafa
5d ago
Wow. The first example is pretty interesting. So the dashes separate both direct speech from different people and the author’s voice, while the guillemets can be unbroken when they surround the author’s voice provided that it’s clearly delineated by the dashes. Weird, but fun. And confusing, even though it’s obvious enough to read, to write.
2rafa
5d ago
do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?
There is no world populated entirely by people who chose blue.
Obviously this is a coordination problem that presupposes that everyone is presented with the problem and must choose instantly without speaking to everyone they know and love (otherwise we could obviously all agree, as the human race, to choose red, and all definitely live).
It only works if you don’t know what your parents, children, spouse and friends have picked or will pick.
2rafa
5d ago
The obvious reason to choose blue is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose red?
2rafa
5d ago
To social autists or even people who just aren’t that smart it contains a lot of genuinely useful and true social advice, like that getting people do to things for you endears them to you more than doing things for them, and that small talk is very important in selling things and yourself.
If these sound stupidly obvious, real life is full of people who haven’t grasped them.
2rafa
5d ago
Well, I think that's what you kind of implied before:
Fair, I could have been clearer. I mean they are more likely to cheat if they are in a supposedly monogamous relationship. This is because the lifelong lotharios tend to be relatively obvious. They have reputations. They mostly know what they like. If they settle down, it is either with an earnest effort at monogamy after a long period of promiscuity, or it is with a woman who (on some level) knows what is going to happen. The man who becomes attractive later in life might settle down with the first pretty girl who looks at him twice, and only thereafter decide he wants to play the field, which is a failure mode the lifelong lotharios who settle down in their thirties or forties experience less often.
2rafa
5d ago
Being into radical politics almost certainly correlates with mental illness, an unstable personality, etc, and possibly prioritizing “the mission” over your family, a stable job, showing up at Thanksgiving etc. It also marks someone out as having low agreeableness, which is also bad in a partner. So generally, the smart move is to find someone broadly centrist, maybe a little left or a little right, within whatever the Overton window is in your society.
2rafa
5d ago
I don’t know that men in group 4 tend to be more faithful. Rather men in group 4 tend to know what they want and the kind of man who has been a lothario since he was 15 is usually relatively easy identified. Women who marry men in group 4, Hillary Clinton types, usually know what they’re getting into. The same isn’t necessarily true if you marry a group 1.
2rafa
5d ago
At the time it was released it was original, even churches didn’t provide that kind of folksy hustler energy. The entirety of popular culture and advice changed in response to it, it’s like saying The Beatles sound generic.
2rafa
6d ago
Additionally, women want naturals, not someone who looksmaxxed their way to trick some poor woman into dating an imposter.
This is very true, and it’s not even primarily because of the genetics. It’s because men who get hot later in life are to the man bitter about it. They mourn the imagined youth (including plenty of casual relationships in high school and at college) they missed - in the end, even if they find a pretty wife who they like, they are more likely to cheat, and they will always be bitter they didn’t date around and enjoy attention from women in their youth. There are women who get hot in their late twenties or early thirties who are similar, but it’s less universal - they are more likely to just be happy they ‘made it’.
If you are going to marry an attractive man it’s always best to find someone who had a girlfriend (or several) in high school, because he does not have the same regrets as the late bloomer. Sure, there are lifelong lotharios who will never be faithful, too, but you can weed those out in other ways.
2rafa
7d ago
The Uighur thing wasn’t really a big topic in the late 1970s, and for Iran antagonizing Russia is always a bad idea if it can be avoided. They certainly did set themselves up in opposition to the Gulf Monarchies, including Saudi Arabia (although they are most hostile to Bahrain, which has a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni monarch). Nevertheless, a combination of the Hormuz, access to Hajj, shared OPEC membership and the Iraq Iran war, plus economic difficulty means that waging war on Saudi directly is infeasible. That said, they fund the Houthis who fought a proxy war against Saudi Arabia for many years and bombed Saudi oil facilities.
The difference is that most Muslims around the world either like Saudi Arabia (because they provide immense foreign investment into Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc etc) or don’t care about it. Many people have family or friends with fond memories of Hajj. The main group who dislike Saudi Arabian monarchy are hardline Sunni Islamists who consider it decadent and Western - but those same theological hardliners also consider Shia Islam in its entirety an aberration and a heresy. The only major group of Sunni Islamists who throw their lot in with Iran are Hamas, and that is very much an alliance of convenience (and both sides know it).
Sure, but it’s not a good point of comparison because the reason that behavior was less common under communism wasn’t because it was wealthier or more developed but because people were banned from leaving (or coming to do business, except in very limited cases), it wasn’t some inherent achievement of socialist prosperity.
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