Shrike
5hr ago
I think that visible shifting of Jews towards the right would possibly (one way or another) mitigate the groyper problem, yeah. However I do think the timing and numbers will be important, otherwise instead the right could end up in a civil war like the left.
The truth is though that the groypers just aren't going to have institutional support on the right, I don't think. There aren't really right-wing racist billionaires. From what I can tell on the left the institutional support comes from political machines, and I don't think there are any groyper political machines either, just Discord servers. Which is not nothing, but I think the main thing they have going for them is the bipartisan opinion turn against Israel over the last couple of years.
Shrike
5hr ago
Right, I suspect both on the left and on the right you can find spaces that are friendly towards Zionism, but I think those places on the right are much easier to find because they advertise.
Shrike
14hr ago
Was that the nationally representative poll with 1000 respondents? Which would indicate only a handful of Jews in the sample?
Shrike
14hr ago
I think the relevant question to be asking is if young Jews find right-wing or left-wing elite spaces more accommodating. There's certainly a groyper problem on the right, but the anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish climate at the formative institutions seems, from what I can tell from a distance, to be left-coded.
Shrike
14hr ago
near 100% of these "so and so is a bubble" warnings/predictions never come true.
I think the biggest tech frenzy since 2007 would be crypto, which has not exactly been bubble-free. I'd be very interested in your top bubble predictions that never panned out.
Shrike
14hr ago
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but I think there's a few things worth addressing. The first is that there's going to be massive domestic demand within China for a domestic AI, because China is cognizant (as you point out) of the necessity.
The second is that open-weight models have been having a moment recently, which indicates that there's a future for Chinese models even in a world where the best models are American.
Finally, I'm not sure you're right about the STAR50. AMEC and SMIC don't match that description (they are decades-old chip fabs, SMIC being the largest in China), and those are just a couple that caught my eye.
Shrike
20hr ago
The 2000 dotcom bubble or 2008, where high valuations led to sudden corrections, are outliers.
The AI bubble predictors have already proven correct, just...in China.
Setting aside China, I'm not sure that your heuristic here is correct or that looking back over the past couple of decades is the right period to be searching. Besides the dot-com bubble, past situations analogous to AI would have been the railroad and perhaps electrification, and in both cases there were bubbles that popped (the second intertwined with the Great Depression).
One of the ways in which I think that AI is not like past bubbles is the fact that the technology is not yet mature. I don't mean this in an "AI is bad way" but rather that it's sort of unknown what the "meta" will be. New advancements might make running models on your home device easier and hurt the primes, or it might result in newer and powerful models that only large organizations can run. With railroads, the internet, and electrification, even though there was a great deal of technological advancement left before they were laid down, the general shape the technology would take was fairly well established in a way I am not sure AI is. This could be good, or bad, but I do think it makes prediction sort of fraught.
Shrike
20hr ago
AI is simultaneously the best tool for learning, and the best tool to avoid learning that mankind has ever devised.
YEP
Shrike
2d ago
At the time, Spain was referred to as fascist, and Franco a Falangist (which from what I can tell was technically true in the most amusing possible way).
I don't really have a dog in the "what counts as true fascism?" hairsplitting fight. If your point is that Franco was too smart fight a silly, self-destructive war in the name of ideology, I think you're right. But I also think that Franco's Spain would be widely reviled as fascist if it existed today (and it's still often referred to as fascistic).
I'm not saying this out of some pro-fascistic sensibility, by the way, it's just that Italy, Spain, and Germany were all having a moment during the 1930s and people sort of forget about Spain. Sort of how people forget what Vietnam got up to after the Vietnam war.
Shrike
2d ago
I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.
And thanks to meddlesome medical ethics rules you never will!
just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.
Yes, exactly.
Shrike
2d ago
Actually existing Fascism ended up with their cities reduced to rubble and their countries occupied by foreigners which a way worse outcome then electing some leftist.
This never happened in Spain.
Shrike
2d ago
I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain. Everything we know about pain strongly suggests that it's more than emergent "electric patterns" - plants have electric patterns, but we are pretty sure they don't experience pain.
Generally thinking I think it's very easy for people to accidentally pattern-match functional purpose onto qualia when discussing these things. But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.
Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.
Shrike
3d ago
Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted?
Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret.
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are);
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
Shrike
3d ago
The actual quality of "the feds" depends on the fed. Some of their personnel (NSA geeks, Navy nuclear technicians) are extremely intelligent (at least as far as test-taking goes).
The areas of the federal bureaucracy that select for politicking in particular are quite capable of pulling off conspiracies.
Shrike
3d ago
I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act.
I'm not sure I really buy this distinction in common use; this would move hypothesizing about e.g. UFO cover ups mostly out of the realm of a conspiracy theory, since presumably it's not actually illegal for the government to e.g. conduct crash retrievals and reverse-engineering and classify all of their findings.
Shrike
3d ago
This basically misunderstands the dynamics at play in real life wholesale:
- Large groups of people can in fact be fairly good at closely cooperating without leaking information.
- Generally speaking, leaking information often does not "matter." Many leaks happen without impacting the broader consciousness. Furthermore, becoming "fully" public does nothing to stop the conspiracy, at least not in a timely manner. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Look at the roughly 70 years of leaks from the U.S. government that UFOs are real, have crashed, and that alien bodies have recovered. Look at the recent revelations that your Samsung television is spying on you. Look at my prior comment on conspiracy as a coordination problem. Jurassic Park understood this.
- Leaks are not necessarily true (see #2), and dedicated actors see to it that false leaks are common enough to shield real ones.
- Public perception largely does not matter; good conspirators typically target the relevant "policymakers" and not the public. But to the extend that public perception does, it's quite possible to change it. There are entire industries dedicated to doing both of these things openly.
- Finally, unless you define "conspiracy theory" to only refer to criminal conspiracies (which would mean that, for instance, UFO conspiracy theories aren't) plenty of conspiracies are perfectly legal. In fact, they are so legal that you hardly need to hide what you are doing. Sometimes it's in fact mandatory and required by law. "Covering up a crime" is illegal, but "providing a rigorous defense to the accused" is in fact not just permitted but required, and even though they both can tend towards the same end. A team of people working together to get a criminal off the hook on a technicality only doesn't register as a conspiracy to us because they don't need to do it covertly.
This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister. Obviously there are in fact covert actions that take place, but real life conspiracies (much like real life espionage) operates on a spectrum from covert to overt, and overt actions can be chained together with less overt actions to achieve desired goals.
It's true that the straw-man conspiracy theory, with 300 bloodsuckers sitting on thrones in Lichtenstein somewhere deciding the fate of the world isn't true (at least, I don't think it is; I haven't had direct personal experience of it) but the popular version of a conspiracy theory, where hidden forces work behind the scenes to sway the fate of the nation, is basically true. It's just that general shape that it takes is so familiar that it doesn't strike us as a conspiracy, because we're all conspirators. We've (almost) all signed an NDA, or spilled a rumor at just the right time, or "gundecked" a report to keep somebody from looking bad. And the "big" conspiracies often aren't really different from this in mechanism, only in ambition.
However these basically mundane ways can be very effective. They're just not very satisfying to people who are excited to learn about Hyperborea, lizard shape-shifters, or at least something out of a James Bond movie. Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades, and the details are so mundane that when they are released, conspiracy theorists and the public alike are barely aware of it, even though it's a textbook case study of supposedly-mythical "Deep State" at work.
Shrike
3d ago
I would guess that the majority of Catholic priests believe in demons, although as far as I can tell there's no solid polling data on it. They certainly have a number of notably vocal exorcists, which is notable in part because (IIRC) the Catholic Church requires a psychiatric evaluation before performing an exorcism to screen out more mundane issues.
Education isn't a barrier to religious belief (indeed, in the United States, education correlates with religious practice) so I'm not really sure that it's as important to this question as you think, particularly since there's an obvious selection bias in the priesthood. I do get the impression that many Catholic clergy in the United States (and I assume the EU) were often much less attached to church dogma than one might think, but as I understand it the situation has reversed and younger priests in the US are trending much more conservative.
Shrike
4d ago
Catholics also believe in witchcraft; using divination and magic is explicitly forbidden in the catechism of the Catholic church.
Protestants and Catholics both believe in demons and practice exorcisms, but Catholics practice is a bit more media-friendly because they have a formal system for it, ancient lore, and visually striking, immediately identifiable vestments.
Shrike
6d ago
It's very ironic that as soon as Dase is banned, Anthropic announces they believe LLMs can do formal code verification at scale which (if true and if implemented) would massively vindicate his belief in "defender's advantage."
Shrike
6d ago
It hasn't gotten any easier to strike mobile, camouflaged missile or drone launchers.
It almost certainly has, although that's "since the SCUD hunt" and not "since the last time Iran and the US shot at each other." I would be very surprised if e.g. ground moving target indicator software haven't massively improved over the past 20 years, particularly with new AESA radars.
Shrike
6d ago
Does proprietary code even exist anymore?
"For my first act, I'm going to obliterate the source of revenue of my most obvious customer!"
Maybe the next big release from the primes will be an Opus-performing LLM you can run on your laptop.
Shrike
8d ago
We have every reason to think it's multiple intelligences fused into a single whole because we've learned that when the body (in particular, the brain) suffers damage to specific regions, intelligence doesn't necessarily fall uniformly but may degrade relative to certain specific skillsets depending on what part is impacted. Certain things we may not think of as relating to intelligence (such as emotions) also seem to help us perform more intelligently in real life.
This doesn't mean Gardner specifically is right or that g is a useless concept. But it also doesn't mean that people are wrong to talk as if there are discreet intelligences.
We can see this naturally if we look at other aspects of the human body; for instance, upper body strength is correlated with itself (if you're good at one upper body exercise, you're likely good at another). But that doesn't mean that there aren't specific muscles at play. And two people with identical genetic muscular potential can focus on different sets of exercises in a way that they become better than each other at those specific sets, even if everything else is equal, because "upper body strength" is really measuring a combination of the strength of a bunch of different muscles that can be isolated, but not entirely.
Shrike
10d ago
If it happens, which doesn't seem to be a given. There doesn't seem to have been much of one in Russia after World War Two, for instance.
Yeah, what I should have written is along the likes of what hydro wrote below.
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