ThenElection
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User ID: 622
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
ThenElection
8d ago
I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.
ThenElection
8d ago
But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.
I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)
ThenElection
8d ago
I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.
How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.
ThenElection
8d ago
Of course not. Your obligation is to get a well paying job at an AI company, usher in the apocalypse, and convert the universe into computronium, which can run innumerable simulations of bee lives in lands of endless flowers and honey and free of suffering.
ThenElection
8d ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
Yes, the world at that point was a powder keg, and you can name at least a dozen incidents before the assassination that could have set it off. The assassination was far from the root cause, but it was the proximate event in a spiral.
The world is in a similar state today, and normalcy bias is what prevents us from seeing it. Seemingly minor events can trigger repercussions far out of expectations if conditions are right.
ThenElection
19d ago
The elites of the USA (who are often to be said to be captured by the left) are pro-Ukraine, pro-Israel, though. A substantial fringe of academics and student protestors doesn't change that.
ThenElection
19d ago
The risk is that this escalates to a broader conflict. Not Iran vs whoever--Iran is a paper tiger, and all other factors being equal it's good that it's now further from getting nukes than it was (one hopes). But I'm worried this triggers a series of international incidents that leads to a Taiwan war. Although it seems far-fetched, it also seemed far-fetched that an assassination of an archduke could spiral to a world wide conflagration.
Iran needs to respond somehow, for domestic political reasons if nothing else. And, one thing leads to another, and Hormuz ends up mined, and China decides, well, the world is going to suck for a couple years and the US is otherwise occupied, might as well take advantage of the moment.
ThenElection
22d ago
I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.
ThenElection
23d ago
As a bi guy, I've dated both men and women. And it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to get a date with a man than it is with a woman. Quantitatively, my inbound like/match rate online was literally 100x when matching with men (I'd get a number of likes in a day with men that it'd take me almost a year with women).
Sure, a fair bit of that was just casual sex. But even if 75% were just looking for casual sex, that's still an order of magnitude more ease dating men than women.
I suspect this mismatch is that your "average man" encompasses a lot of things that make him substantially above average.
ThenElection
24d ago
Why should you care? Well, it's your prerogative to or not. But two reasons:
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As young men drop out of the caring game, that makes the market (both economically and sexually) less competitive. There are more opportunities and niches to get utility from. Still less than a hypothetically static situation, but people dropping out mitigates some of the increased difficulty.
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It's far better to strive and create than to passively survive. For society, sure, but also better for you as a person. There are forms of joy that aren't available to someone just existing.
ThenElection
29d ago
But... There's no way that Aella would actually have trouble finding a partner who wants kids who is okay with her lifestyle. Not some captain of industry, but also not some random meth addict on the street either. There are plenty of total simps in tech with a solid paycheck who'd be thrilled to go for her, and she knows that.
This is all a marketing gimmick. Come save the poor whore with a heart of gold and a mind of platinum!
ThenElection
30d ago
I often use it as a lookup tool and study aid, which can involve long conversations. But maybe that falls under "as a tool."
The last time I had a bona fide conversation with an LLM was maybe three months ago. These actual conversations are always about its consciousness, or lack thereof--if there's a spark there, I want to approach the LLM as a real being, to at least allow for the potentiality of something there. Haven't seen it yet.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.
Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data.
Although the Hinge post that included their top line numbers has been scrubbed, it's still available on Wayback. They address your point directly:
When we look at the rate of men forming connections – rather than the rate that they are sent initial likes, as we did before – we find that index of inequality greatly decreases.
With straight men on Hinge, the Gini index of connections comes down to 0.324, or approximately the UK — a huge improvement.
As an aside, this movement toward equitability when dealing with connections exists with straight women too, so much so that the Gini index becomes meaningless.
That, arguably, supports your point (things are substantially less dire than looking at raw likes), though I think the credibility depends on how the junior data analyst defined "forming a connection."
What I'd love to see is the Gini coefficients of mutual matches for different dating apps in 2025.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Eh. I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't buy all the conditions (or even strictly any of your conditions, except for obesity, which if you can provide health insurance for your family is itself fixable) are necessary for a good wife. Many of them are also heavily correlated: condition a woman on simply being college educated and having a professional career, and the majority probably meet your criteria.
A woman could do the exact same thing: list 10 traits that are requirements for a man and calculate how large her dating pool is. And in fact we did this for a single female friend who was bemoaning her dating situation: when we added up all her requirements, there was an expectation of only a couple dozen men in the entirety of California who met them. Is that a sign of how bleak women have it, or more a sign that her requirements were unrealistic?
And, speaking from experience, I'm a 5'3" bisexual guy in what's probably the toughest dating market for men in the USA, and I managed to get happily married, though currently living the degenerate DINK lifestyle. And I've notched up more (opposite-sex) partners than my wife. My personal most-restricting requirement was to find a single woman who made approximately as much as me, which is likely more restrictive than all your requirements put together.
All that said, it's absolutely true that (at least initially) dating is harder for men than for women. I'm not sure that anyone would dispute that, though, and I don't think your model provides good evidence for it. Better would be to come up with some quantitative and more direct measure for how hard dating is (for each percentile of attractiveness) and estimate it to provide a comparison.
Or, if the goal is to actually solve the problem, learn to exhibit masculinity, lift weights, and constantly put yourself out there and cast a wide net.
In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.
The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.
Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.
ThenElection
1mo ago
LLMs generate gossip and tabloid drama about real celebrities; they wouldn't have any issues doing the same about AI-generated celebrities.
It will be a gradual process: first generating all the extras; then improving the real performances of real actors; then generated performances of dead actors; then licensed generated performances of live main actors; and then entirely generated main actors. And it won't be admitted at first. But having a reliable actor who always turns up sober and on time, looks like and does what exactly you want them to, has no time constraints, and doesn't take a substantial cut of the profits is a massive pull.
And if audiences insist on being sold a real life backstory about the actors to form parasocial relationships with them, well, Hollywood will be happy to generate and sell that to them too.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Sure. But I'm reminded of one applicant to Stanford whose admission essay about what matters to him was
#BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter ... (I'll spare readers the middle portion) ... #BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter
Neither crassly based nor woke should have a place in universities, but the standards applied for crassness are very much not equal across the ideological spectrum.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Palantir recently started offering a "Meritocracy Fellowship" (https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/7fa0ceca-c30e-48de-9b27-f98469c374f3) to tackle this from another angle: cut out the middleman directly. Recruit smart students straight out of high school based on objective measurements, pay them, and hire them directly after the program.
The big risk for the student: what if they don't get hired by Palantir? Will they, after four successful years there as a FTE, have enough prestige to get competitive market offers?
For Palantir, it's near a pure win. Get to rely on an IQ-proxy, pay them a relative pittance for several months, and then select the best X% of performers from that to make low ball offers to.
ThenElection
1mo ago
If a student wrote a "based" indigenous studies essay, would that help them pass the class to get the degree they're paying two hundred thousand dollars for?
Of course, there's the opportunity to write and think about things that aren't either kind of slop. But I'm very skeptical that equal standards would be applied. Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays (or the quality of them, or anything really).
Curious: what would be the legalities involved in running a scam like your conspiracy theory? The demand for this kind of stuff seems to far outstrip the supply of it. Could I go hire two people off of Craigslist, engineer a scripted social media outrage that results in one or both being able to successfully fundraise for ???, and then split the proceeds with them? Assuming I'm not paying them to do anything actually illegal.
The hardest part would seem to be me getting my cut (no real reason for them to pay me anything once they realize I'm not assuming any real risk or doing anything). Or maybe use an AI generated video with no other real people involved?
Just want to echo your experiences.
It has other knock on effects, as well. I used to smoke... Well, too much. I had tried to quit multiple times and failed. A few months ago, I realized I hadn't smoked in over a week. This was despite putting zero conscious effort into it.
It's an insanely powerful drug, and it makes me worry about other things it's doing to my nervous system. At the least, the fact that effects apparently disappear when you go off it is reassuring. Regardless, the positive health effects absolutely must outweigh any negatives.
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