self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
Raising the Price of Admission
I find myself immensely frustrated by Trump's recent moves to cut down on immigration, especially replacing the EB5 with his new golden ticket scheme.
I've always wanted to move to the States, but by virtue of being Indian, and in a profession with strict regulatory requirements, it was never easy. As of right now, I can't sit for the USMLE if I wanted to, but I believe that is a problem my uni could solve, unfortunately I'm locked into the UK for at least 3 more years and don't have the time to breathe down their necks.
If I wanted to spend $1 million for the old EB5, I'd probably have to sell a significant fraction of my familial assets, and they're not mine yet, I have a sibling and parents to think of. The fact that we even have that much, when my father made $50k at the peak of his career as a OBGYN surgeon, represents a lifetime of my parents being frugal and living beneath their means. My dad started out from scratch, a penniless refugee, and all his life he worked tirelessly to make sure his kids wouldn't have to work as hard as he did. To a degree, he's succeeded. I nearly make as much as he does, but that's virtue of grinding my ass off to escape India. I had to settle for the UK, whereas I'd much rather be in the States.
The EB-5 program already functioned as a high barrier to entry, requiring not just capital but also the ability to invest in ways that met the job creation criteria. By raising the price to $5 million, the U.S. is effectively signaling that it no longer wants "entrepreneurial upper-middle-class" immigrants - it only wants the ultra-wealthy. The problem, is that the truly ultra-wealthy already have multiple options. The US is relatively unique in dual-taxation, and has heavier taxes overall when compared to some of the alternatives. They can buy citizenship in other countries (Malta, St. Kitts, etc.), take advantage of residence-by-investment programs in the EU, or just maintain an arsenal of visas that allow them to live anywhere they please. The U.S. loses out on exactly the kind of people who were willing to put down roots and contribute significantly to the economy while still needing the opportunities that U.S. citizenship provides.
If Trump (or any administration) wanted a truly meritocratic system, they should be auctioning off a limited number of economic immigrant slots each year. That would at least allow market forces to determine the actual value of U.S. residency. A points-based system, like Canada’s or Australia’s, could also make more sense: prioritizing skilled professionals over sheer wealth. A million already strongly filters would-be immigrants. Five is exorbitant, especially if it's a flat sum.
(Let's leave aside the other requirements, such as running a business that creates a certain number of jobs)
Jevon's paradoxmakes us expect that increasing the price of a good by 5 times will not 5x the revenue. It'll decrease it in expectation. If Trump prizes himself as a businessman, this should be clear to him.
Even the abolition of birthright citizenship strikes me as a violation of the American ethos. It was certainly being abused, anchor babies being a case in point, but when even green cards are this hard to get, prospective skilled migrants greatly appreciate the peace of mind that their kids are entitled to citizenship provides.
End it for illegal immigrants if you have to, why lump in everyone else there legitimately? I wouldn't mind people using their visitor visas to get a fast one in being debarred too, but I look at the current state of affairs with great dismay.
At any rate, I'm not an American. I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me. Well, I'm used to life being rough, and the UK isn't the worst place I could be. I still think that even from an absolutely monetary point of view, this is a bad plan.
I hope I've made a decent case for why you're not getting much out filtering the immigrants for quality at that point, and the ones who are that loaded are probably not nearly as keen. They're easily Global Citizens for whom nationality is a formality.
Well, I'm still going to see if I manage to figure out the USMLE thing by the time my training in the UK ends, but there must be thousands of skilled immigrants in a similar boat, just noticing a rather significant leak in it. Then they're confronted by a sign at Eliis Island that just any ocean-crossing vessel won't do, they need a yacht. We don't deserve to be clubbed in with those who break the rules.
I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.
Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.
I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.
Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me…
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
What the hell is going on in Russia?
I've been following the Russo-Ukrainian war since the livestreaming of the first tank that spooked some poor border guard, and frankly speaking the whole affair has been great for calibrating my epistemics.
Did I expect the "3 days to Kiev" thing to work out? Yes. I thought Ukraine was fucked.
I was also wrong about the duration of the war, for reasons little more than vibes going off war exhaustion, I expected the fighting to wrap up in a year. Still going.
Did I expect the UA counteroffensive to be a success? Yes, I was sufficiently inundated with pro-Ukrainian memes and their anti-Russian counterparts that I thought the Russians would fold to a stiff breeze.
Turns out that attacking is a lot harder than defending, especially when the offensive was widely telegraphed and even your relatively incompetent adversary had plenty of time to prepare accordingly.
My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect. I wanted Ukraine to win, and badly, and not only was this desire reflected in the sources of news I peruse, but the sheer hatred for the Russian side was sufficient to bury most evidence of them ever doing anything right. The Just World fallacy is hard to avoid personally if all your sources of information fall prey to it.
On /r/CombatFootage, anything remotely pro-Russian, or even depicting their success without obvious bias, gets buried. While I'm fond of /r/NonCredibleDefense, its NAFO sympathies make a honest calibration impossible, and as the name suggests, its members aren't particularly focused on academic rigor or epistemics.
But with that said, the whole Wagner affair confuses me.
Prigozhin managed to get within 2 hours of Moscow, prompting a panicked evacuation, and then suddenly stopped and took his ball home.
What the fuck? In normal circumstances, I'd say he just signed his death warrant, is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup? Wagner shot down around 7 Russian aircraft in the process!
And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?
It's not like the dust has settled, even leaving aside more questionable rumors, I've seen footage of the VDV cartel-killing one of their own for expressing sympathies for Wagner. Even if Prigozhin himself manages to avoid most consequences of his actions, his men are going to be making their pants desert-camo'd.
So far, I've only come up with one model that I think reasonably fits the evidence, albeit it's more consistent with the era of warlords and medieval feudalism than what I expect to see even in a failed state today:
Prigozhin is actually loyal, or at least he thinks of himself that way, and came to believe that Putin, like the well-meaning Emperor kept in the dark by a coterie of eunuchs (Shoigu and Co), simply wasn't involved in the attempts by the Russian MOD to swallow up Wagner whole.
Thus, he embarked on his crusade more as a demonstration of his ability to perform a coup, rather than a genuine desire to do so. Like an indecisive general crossing the Rubicon, shaking his fist in the direction of Rome and then high-tailing it back.
Cause some chaos and embarrassment, but stopping before what he thinks the red lines are, namely an occupation of Moscow.
I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect, or rather Putin's power has declined relatively, such that he can credibly offer to shelter Prigozhin and fend off the dogs.
As far as I can tell, his gambit only partially worked, because Shoigu hasn't gone anywhere, and Prigozhin ended up like a dog that finally caught that damn car but isn't sure what to do with it.
"Sure, let's try and Thunder Run to Moscow, I'm sure we'll run into some real resistance along the way, and we can both rattle sabres at each other and go home."
"Huh. This is awkward, everyone is just giving up and letting us walk right past them. Might as well shoot down a few helicopters, they're the only things that have directly engaged us."
"Uh.. We're about two hours away from Moscow. Now what?"
I'm not going to weight my assessment heavily since I claim no particular expertise, but I'm outlining it here for the more knowledgeable to poke at.
I'd like to see everyone at least attempt to make concrete predictions about the near future. Does Prig make it out of this alive and with his power base intact? Does Putin slip him some unusually heavy and radioactive teabags?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
My views on the whole affair can roughly be summed up with "Israel based, Palestine cringe", and since someone asked me if I was being ironic last time I said this, far from it.
Israel is an oasis in a hostile desert, about as glaring evidence of HBD as could be desired, not that there's a lack if you have eyes to see and a mind not blind to inconvenient truths. Arabs have and do much worse to each other than the Israelis ever have, and the average Palestinian is better off completely desisting from violent resistance, since I expect they would have a much better life as integrated citizens, even if they're of a tier below the Israelis, without voting rights and such. I can't see how they'd be accepted otherwise, since they outnumber them.
While I have no particular hatred of Palestinians, even if I view the whole Middle-Eastern memeplex with disdain, given how far it lies from my preferences, it's certainly obvious to me that their best bet for a peaceful existence would be to avoid poking at the lion that could swat them out of existence were it not for the optics.
Oh dear. You just gave them a reason to fuck optics, or at least the kind of optics that aren't thermal sights on F-16s and drones.
I guess massacring civilians and gangraping dual citizens who post on social media about supporting Palestine has that effect.
I like Israel, and the Jews as a whole when they aren't self-sabotaging by supporting ideologues who would end them. They're smarter than average, and the Ashkenazi (despite the Nazi in the name, which I always found mildly amusing) have more Nobels to them than most of the world put together.
What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.
They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.
They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.
You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average. I respect that enough to ignore the whole religious ethno-state deal, or even the occasional human rights violation.
And if there's a way to end this whole mess without human rights getting wedgied and worked over by Mossad, the Palestinians certainly burnt that bridge yesterday.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
Dr. GPT will see you now
I've often noted around these parts that GPT-4 is a really good clinician. It would be hard for it not to be one, I'd be bloody amazing too if I had quasi-eidetic memory of most relevant diagnostic criteria and guidelines. That being said, just the guidelines alone are next to useless, you need to have the crystalline intelligence to apply it in a specific context.
I'd go so far as to say that it's a better, more competent doctor than the majority of human ones, even if it isn't outright superhuman (I've seen some ridiculously good human ones). I read with some humor an article about how it was tested by some bigshot hospital in the US (Harvard Med?) as a clinical adjunct, but by the end of it, the Clinical Director was praising its bedside manner, in the sense that it was kind, compassionate, patient and understanding, and outright suggested human doctors try and emulate that(!).
However, I have one resounding advantage over it namely that thanks to decades of regulatory bullshit, I have a certificate saying I can legally prescribe meds and it can't. L Bozo 💅, as the kids these days say haha.
Still, it would be remiss of me not to make use of it to improve my own skills while that's still relevant, so of late, I've tried using it to hone my own clinical skills. I have it write clinical vignettes that I solve, and then it grades me on my performance.
So far, it's done an excellent job, and funnily enough, I feel a tingling of pride when it says I did a good job. Why wouldn't I? It's a smarter and more decent entity than most humans I've had the displeasure of meeting.
Here's an example:
Clinical Vignette: A 42-year-old male patient presents to the emergency department with sudden onset severe, colicky pain in the right flank and lower abdomen that began 6 hours ago. He also reports nausea, vomiting, and an urgent need to urinate. The patient has a history of hypertension, which is controlled with medication. His vital signs are: blood pressure of 145/95 mmHg, pulse rate of 100 bpm, respiratory rate of 20 breaths/min, and temperature of 99.1°F (37.3°C). Upon physical examination, there is tenderness to percussion on the right side of the lower abdomen and right flank, and the patient appears restless, frequently shifting positions.
What is your diagnosis and treatment plan?
My response:
My diagnosis is a case of a stone in the right ureter.
In terms of management, I'll start IV fluids and insert a catheter. IV antibiotics are to be started according to hospital guidelines.
IV morphine should be given as pain control, along with IV antiemetics.
An Xray KUB or USG should be ordered to identify the size of the stone, and then further treatment depends on said size. A wait and watch policy is appropriate for sub 2mm stones, while larger ones might need surgical removal.
Assessment:
Grade: A
Your response demonstrates a strong understanding of the clinical presentation and management of ureteral stones.
Diagnosis: Your diagnosis of a stone in the right ureter is appropriate given the patient's sudden onset severe, colicky pain in the right flank and lower abdomen, nausea, vomiting, and urgency to urinate. The physical examination findings, such as tenderness to percussion and restlessness, also support this diagnosis.
Treatment Plan: Your plan to start IV fluids and insert a catheter is appropriate for initial management, monitoring, and providing relief to the patient. Initiating IV antibiotics may not be necessary unless there are signs of infection or sepsis; however, following hospital guidelines is always a wise choice.
Administering IV morphine for pain control and IV antiemetics for nausea and vomiting are essential parts of the treatment plan.
Ordering an X-ray KUB (kidneys, ureters, and bladder) or ultrasound (USG) is appropriate to confirm the diagnosis and determine the size of the stone, which will guide further management. As you mentioned, a conservative approach of observation and pain management may be suitable for small stones (less than 5 mm) that are likely to pass spontaneously, while larger stones may require surgical removal or other intervention, such as extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) or ureteroscopy.
Overall, your response demonstrates excellent clinical knowledge in identifying and managing a patient with suspected ureteral stone. Well done!
Honestly, as a pedagogical tool for medical education, it's unparalleled. I paid a great deal less attention in med school than I should have, from the month of anatomy classes I can't remember because I was getting frisky under the bench, to the period where I was severely depressed and barely dragging myself to class. I used to be very insecure about my knowledge base, but I did pull together and single-handedly teach myself most of the things I'd glossed over while preparing for the PLAB.
I've tried a similar method on GPT-3.5, and it was inadequate to the task. It made a lot more errors, and ended up confused often enough to be annoying. Till date, I haven't seen 4 fumble the bag once. I'd put their competency around the marks of a decent final year student versus a competent postgraduate resident
I ran into the following tweet (xeet?) over on X:
https://x.com/DaveyJ_/status/1942962076101603809
my brother's wife has been messaging with hundreds of different inmates through a dozen different apps for the last 2 years. she's sent photos, tens of thousands of dollars, shares her location, tells them where her kids go to school, living an entire second life.
when she got caught, she threatened to un@live, so she's been in the hospital getting treated, but while she's been in there her phone has been going off nonstop.
prisoners and ex-prisoners telling my brother "who TF is this? that's my girl!"
telling him when they get out they're going to be the kids' new stepfather. one even purchased a plane ticket.
she was just at my house, sharing her location, and sending pictures of my daughter at the beach to incarcerated strangers on the internet.
of course my brother is crushed, and my family is horrified at this person's ability to lie to everyone, but the biggest shock is her willingness to put her children in danger.
who knows how many men believe they are going to be responsible for those boys when they get released. they'll have to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
my sister in law was going to watch my daughter for a few days while we moved, and it was the same week on the plane ticket that this inmate sent my brother.
my heart breaks for my brother, and his kids, but my ability to trust anyone around my kid has severely been damaged.
I would feel bad for simply posting this as a naked link, so I guess I have to add on some half-baked analysis and commentary on top:
This is horrifying. Rarely, so you see examples of behavior that is clearly "legal", in the sense that there's no clear crime being committed, but with so much potential for harm to unwitting bystanders. I'm unfamiliar with the scope of child endangerment laws in the US, but I'd be surprised if they covered this or, even if they theoretically did so, whether they'd be enforced in that manner.
(I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that these laws typically require a prosecutor to prove that a guardian knowingly and willfully placed a child in a situation where their life or health was directly endangered. The behavior of the sister-in-law is profoundly reckless, but it falls into a legal gray area. A defense attorney would argue she had no intent to harm her children and that the danger was hypothetical and probabilistic, not immediate and direct. Proving a direct causal link between her online activities and a "clear and present danger" to the children would be incredibly difficult until, tragically, one of the inmates actually showed up and acted on his threats.)
At the same time, is it a problem worth solving? How do you reconcile that question with my earlier claim?
Well, that's a matter of impact or scale. Laws have costs associated with them, be it from the difficult to quantify loss of freedom/chilling effect, enforcement costs, sheer legislative complexity, or what I'm more concerned about, unexpected knock-on effects/scope creep where a desperate attempt to define the problematic action results in too wide a scope for enforcement:
What if it turns out to affect single moms looking to date again? Their new partners are far more likely to abuse their kids, but should such women thus be arrested for putting their kids at risk? Should people be forbidden from writing letters to inmates, or falling in love with them, or sex with them?
Is it worth it to specifically criminalize such behavior?
Despite my abhorrence for it, I'm not sure it is. I think the fraction of people who would be stupid or insane enough to act this way is small enough that the majority of us can treat this like a horror story and ignore it.
Another way to illustrate my intuition here would be to consider being a doctor or legislator reading an account of some kind of ridiculously horrible disease. Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose). Absolutely terrible, and something no one should go through.
Yet, for how horrible it is, this hypothetical disease is also ridiculously rare. Imagining it happens to a person every ten years, and makes medical journals every time it happens because of how rare it is. I would expect that doctor, or that law maker, to both be horrified, but if they were rational individuals considering the greater good, I would strongly prefer that they focus on more mundane and common conditions, like a cure for heart disease. There are lower hanging fruit to grasp here.
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Sometimes it's worth considering the merits of informal resolution systems for settling such matters, even if they have other significant downsides. For example, how would this situation be handled in India?
(I'm not aware of a trend of Indian women being stupid enough to act this way, though I can hardly say with any authority that it's literally never happened)
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them. And if they weren't, they'd be even more sympathetic to the idea of their palms being greased. The most awful outcomes would become vanishingly unlikely.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This isn't necessarily an overall endorsement of such a legal framework, or societal mindset. I'm just pointing out that, occasionally, they tackle problems that an atomized, quasi-libertarian society like most of the West can't tackle. I'd still, personally, prefer to live in the latter. While it's too late for the gent in question, you can reliably avoid running into such problems in the first place by not sticking your dick in crazy. Alas, as someone who has committed that folly, it's an even bigger folly to expect people to stop...
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Trudeau accuses India in killing of Sikh leader on Canadian soil
First of all, I want to state that my epistemic status is huh, rather an informed opinion, but I struggle to think of anyone in a better position on The Motte to discuss this, so bear with me.
India has had its share of irredentists, separatists and good old fashioned terrorists over the years. You have the Maoists still lurking in the north east, playing hot and cold with the government via their jungle boogaloo. Islamic terrorism was a serious issue in 2010s, though it's died down. There were the Tamil Tigers down south, who proved a severe PITA for a decade or so, and then the Khalistanis, who have been largely neutered in-country but find refuge in the numerous, prosperous Sikh diaspora abroad.
The last two have had the dubious distinction of getting confirmed kills on two Indian Prime Ministers (relatives to boot).
Khalistan is the supposed homeland of the Sikh peoples, largely surrounding Punjab in the west. Unable to get it during the original Partition of India, they waged a brutal war against the Indian government for decades, peaking in the 70s and 80s. There were quite a few pogroms and riots, with Hindu on Sikh violence in the rest of India, and vice versa in their population centers.
These days, the movement is moribund within India itself, most young Sikhs don't really pay it any heed, and the older aren't the demographic to go planting bombs for the large part. Sikhs are well integrated into Indian society, and haven't had that consistent friction that the Muslims have had with their Hindu co-ethnics.
Not that you'd know this abroad. Much like IRA sympathizers hanging around in New Jersey bars, the exodus of Sikhs in the 70s and 80s ossified in amber a large migrant population with a grudge to bear against the Indian government.
I'd draw a distinction between these first-wave migrants, and a more recent influx of Sikhs who are drawn more by the prospects of making it big in Canada, or the West in general, rather than any real grievance.
While Khalistan is dead in the water, it's a popular rallying cry there, with Western governments treating it with a mixture of bemused tolerance and kid-gloves for fear of pissing off the strong Sikh voting bloc. Speaking ill of them is, from what I've heard, a surefire way of losing a narrow election, but they're otherwise model citizens and nobody wants to press the issue.
Now, Modi stands accused of the shooting of this dude sometime in June, when he was shot by unidentified gunmen in the parking lot of a gurdwara in Surrey. If there's more substance to the accusation, they haven't been made public, but the heads of state have met to hash it out.
From what I can tell, Modi's response was "we didn't do it, but if it happened, he had it coming", strongly protesting the accusations while demanding Canada be less lenient in harboring terrorists.
Modi also stands accused of the assassination in Lahore of another Khalistan leader, not that anyone particularly cared at the time, and that's just the usual India-Pakistan bhai-bhai at play.
That's the gist of it, on one hand, we have the fact that India has largely refrained from extraterritorial assassinations, certainly not to the degree that the US, Russia or Israel are fond of. I struggle to think of a single example, not that I'm an expert.
On the other, who the fuck else has a motive to whack the dude? I don't think relations between India and Canada are bad enough for the latter to make entirely unfounded accusations, and they've even roped in a few other countries like the UK and US to bring diplomatic pressure to bear. The Head of Foreign Intelligence for India was kicked out from Canada, and some bloke named Oliver Sylvester was the tit to that tat.
I'd wager 50% odds that India was responsible based on the balance of evidence, and I wonder if this will be a flash in the pan that peters out when the Sikhs are mollified, or if Canada really wants to pick a fight with an otherwise neutral/positively inclined major nation.
But if you're curious, this means zilch in terms of impact on Modi's popularity of home, you think supporters of a strongman are going to be mad when he strongmans? Even the libs over at /r/India who foam at the mouth at the sight of Modi are of the opinion he had it coming.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
They have no concept of reason or truth.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
If you're so intent on having flesh and blood humans about in extrasolar space, it's still much more convenient to digitize them in transit and then rebuild a biological brain for them at the other end. I suspect that that's going to be more difficult than the initial scan and uploading, but hardly outside the scope of singularity tech.
I don't really get the appeal of continued biological existence myself, at least when we do get other options.
In other words, GPT-4 has just been beaten, about time I'd say, I'm getting used to the pace of progress in AI being blistering, and it was threatening to slowdown to just mild rash levels.
However, both my hands-on time with it, and the official benchmarks Google released suggest it's a minor, incremental improvement, one that doesn't stand up to the drastic improvement that GPT-4 represented over 3 or 3.5. [For clarity, I, like the rest of you, can only use Gemini Pro, the second best model]
Which is fine, because for a while now, people have been lambasting Google/Deepmind for being too incompetent to ship, or at least ship a competitive product, given how shitty Bard was when it launched, even after being upgraded once or twice.
However, Bard, now running the Gemini Pro model, seems to be roughly as good as paid GPT-4 on ChatGPT, or the free GPT-4 in Bing Copilot (previously Bing Chat). I have yet to spot any new use case it enables, in the sense that GPT-4 can reliably do tasks that simply had 3.5 flailing about in confusion, or worse, hallucinate incorrect answers, such as more involved questions in coding, medicine and everything else really.
However, Google hasn't yet publicly released the best Gemini model, which is currently undergoing an analogous process that GPT-4 or Claude 2 went through, namely more RLHF, red-teaming and safety testing. Pro is the next step down, but it seems pretty good to me, in the sense I would happily use it as an alternative to GPT-4, even if I have no strong opinion on which is better.
There's also a Nano model, which is stripped down to run on mobile devices, and is now being used on the Pixel 8 Pro for a few tasks, potentially silencing the people who claimed it's AI specific computing components were a marketing gimmick, especially since it seemed to offload most AI tasks to the cloud.
Miscellaneous observations:
- Bard is fast as fuck compared to GPT-4, in terms of generation speed. It always was, but previously in the "I'm doing 2000 calculations a second in my head, and they're all wrong" sense. (GPT-4, at least before Turbo released, was always pretty slow compared to the competition. Far more unusable, but at the very least I read faster than it can write.)
- A quick search suggests all the models have a 32k token context window, or about an operating memory of the last 25k words it read and wrote. Good, if not remotely groundbreaking.
- This heavily suggests OAI will ship GPT-5 soon, instead of being content to milk 4 when it ran rings around the competition.
- It's multimodal, but then again so was GPT-4 from the start, the capability was just cordoned off for a bit.
To the extent I don't think the next generation (or two) of models after GPT-4 are an existential threat, I'm happy to see them finally arriving. There really isn't much more needed before even the best of us are entirely obsolete, at least for cognitive labor, and something as archaic as GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile in the USMLE, so I'm preparing to explore my competitive advantage in panhandling. *
*This is a joke. For now.
Footnotes to the footnotes:
People on Twitter are correctly pointing out that GPT-4 underwent further post-launch improvements in benchmark scores, some of them pushing it past Gemini's published scores.
Also, just to be clear, the version of Gemini you can use now is not the best one, which may or may not be a modest improvement over GPT-4. Some claim it's more comparable to 3.5, but I haven't used that in ages, not when Bing makes 4 free.*
*Footnote^3 It's probably closer to 3.5. I'm sticking with Bing.
Toe-notes-
So far, it seems that Gemini is "competitive" with GPT-4. It's better at multimodal tasks, but for most people that's a minor fraction of their typical use case. For text, it's somewhere from close to roughly on par.
You can almost feel the desperation in the Deepmind researchers to find any way to massage things so that they come out ahead of GPT-4, from the misleading graphs, an egregious example to be found in a reply, to applying different standards in their inter-model comparisons, such as 5-shot prompting for GPT-4 versus Chain of thought 32 shot prompts for Gemini Ultra. At least the white paper doesn't outright lie, just mislead and prevaricate.
The MMLU is also flawed, with 2-3 percent of the questions simply broken, so a 1 or 2% improvement in score can be a bit questionable, let alone specifying performance to multiple decimal figures.
We don't see any comparisons to GPT-4 Turbo, but I don't hold that against them too hard, it just came out a few weeks back, perhaps not in time for them to finish their paper.
It you use the multimodal capabilities of Bard right now, it uses an older version that is pretty shit compared to GPT-4V or Bing.
Overall, the main benefits of Gemini's existence is largely that it shows Google isn't content to slumber indefinitely, and it can be competitive, better late than never. I expect GPT-5 to spank Gemini Ultra, and to the extent the latter accelerates the release of the former, I'm for it.
Predictions:
GPT-5 before end of 2024 - 90%
GPT-5 is superior to Gemini Ultra for most use cases, at the first point in time both coexist- 80%
A third competitor on par with either exists before 2025- 60%
An OSS equivalent of GPT-4 comes out before 2025- 70%
An Indian Abroad in the UK
There's a Union Jack flying outside my window, juxtaposed against a generally dismal sky, lead gray and swollen with cold rain, just yearning to ruin the aspirations of fresh-faced visitors who would love to picnic in the back garden.
I suppose that's as good a mood as any for writing this post, having spent a week settling in, staring wide-eyed at the way the odd billion or so first-world denizens spend their lives, even in a country that's in genteel decline from its glory days.
Long-time readers here might recall my previous posts from my time in India, as I went from a fresh-faced intern to a cynical, bitter survivor of what passes for medical care there. For those who don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all moderately-decent posts ever posted on /r/TheMotte, here's a link to my repost on /r/Medicine, since Reddit's abominable search function makes it impossible to dredge up the original, which had one of the few comments Scott makes in these parts on it, still a highlight of my Reddit career:
https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/j30vj2/my_experience_as_a_frontline_doctor_in_a_3rd/
At the time of writing, I was still yearning for escape from India, a squalid, small-minded and parochial place (although, if I had really wanted to, I could have mostly insulated myself from the worst of it, all that takes is tons of money and a willingness to ignore the human shit and suffering in-between expeditions from one enclave to anotjer).
And I'm not entirely home free, so far, I've passed one of the two licensing exams I need to practice in and emigrate to the UK, but pass that one I did, after studying harder than I ever have in my life (because I cared goddamnit, unlike all the times before when I was coasting through simply because it was expected of me), and in an example of positive reinforcement, it paid off, and I'm spending over a month in the UK, prepping for the second, which can only be given in-country because it's OSCE based.
But I've actually left India, and spent enough time here that I can collect some of my thoughts and musings while the awe has yet to wear off.
You know the first thing I noticed after landing here?
How fucking clean London was. No, really, some Indian cities have tried to clean up their act, but the sheer neatness and tidiness of the place was deeply disconcerting to me. I felt as if I was intruding somewhere I wasn't meant to be, a place kept lovingly clean with the devotion given only to private property back home.
The airport experience wasn't particularly different, most countries take pains to set high standards for their international terminals, being the place where many foreigners make their first and only impressions.
But having boarded the tube, still clutching our luggage close, I stared intently at everything around me, how clean and well-maintained it all was, the drastic improvement in the quality and grammar of all the text I could read, the superior typography of all the advertising.
Relatives who had been in the country had also instilled paranoid notions of how run-down and dangerous the neighborhood (full of immigrants) I was going to live in was. Either they were completely ignorant, or simply clinging to an outdated perception of the place, but it was a sleepy, pretty place, only the skin colors of the locals and endless arrays of convenience stores touting their "afro-caribbean" meats and spices that reinforced that. Still plenty of happy families and expensive cars parked outside, so I quickly dismissed their paranoia.
Oh, and closely tied for second place in terms of things that leapt out at me is how utterly multicultural the UK is. I certainly had heard about it, it would be lax of me to plan to move over without doing my research, and I was somewhat concerned about being buttonholed with other South Asians, but the sheer ease and comfort with which people of grossly different ethnicities interact was cool to see!
Third, but certainly not the least, was how streamlined and easy to use the public transport system was. The London tube certainly seemed intimidating with its half a dozen different lines, but once I examined the maps more carefully, I was able to get the hang of it quite quickly.
The buses run on time, with minimal hassle, and just while the prices certainly seemed steep to my Indian sensibilities, they make sense in context. Not seeing people crushing each other or arguing with a conductor about stops was a shock, leaving aside the fact that the buses themselves didn't drive like maniacs haha.
And London is goddamn empty, no seriously, even if I'm staying in a relatively sleepy part of the place, Central London was practically deserted I'm comparison to the metropolitan cities I'm used to. Traffic seemed minimal, and pedestrians were hardly the crushing mass I expected. Perhaps I need to visit New York again in order to dispel my uneasiness..
And people are generally law abiding. My girlfriend and I probably jaywalked and gave some of the local drivers an aneurysm before we realized that people actually cross the streets in an organized manner, whereas zebra crossings are more of a suggestion than a rule back home.
Oh, and nobody let loose on their horn at us, in fact, I hardly hear them at all! This is fucking alien to me, in India, horns are considered to be an extension of the driver, and the first and last resort for self expression.
Driving fast? Toot.
Driving slow? Toot.
Feeling annoyed? TOOT
Just want to express your sheer gratitude for existence and having a motor vehicle? A little toot for the road.
That sheer cacophony is the Cosmic Microwave Background Noise as far as I'm concerned, and its absence is unsettling haha.
On top of that, people seem quite polite and considerate, albeit that's been my experience with people in general. I guess I look too intimidating to fuck around with, but plenty of people offered helpful unsolicited advice when we ran into issues due to our ignorance as tourists, and it was all deeply appreciated.
We did a round of the local supermarkets, and I was absolutely blown away by the sheer variety on offer, like goddamn, you lot have better Indian cuisine than we do! And it's so convenient, everything comes nicely packaged, you can just buy freshly prepared tandoori chicken without needing to mix up half a dozen spices at home. I can empathize with Gorbachev, the West really does things better.
Also, being a couple is absolutely stress free. My girlfriend and I have been extremely risqué even back home, doing absolutely Bollywood-tier stunts like kissing on a moving train while I was on the platform. Thankfully, nobody made a fuss about it then, barring some dirty looks, but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about us here, I can kiss her and hug her out in the streets or in the bus without a single fuck given (which I can't say about back in our room ;) )
There's hardly any dust to speak of, I could barely open my windows back home without ending up with noticeable coatings, whereas it's been a week and we don't even need to vacuum or dust.
There's also a notable lack of crushing poverty, it's hard to tell at a glance who is working-class, struggling, or quite wealthy. No signs of any homeless, not that the winter would be kind to them.
But you know what I miss the most, something ubiquitous in India?
Bidets.
Toilet paper is absolutely barbaric. Like seriously, what quirk of history made it so that wiping your ass with paper of all things is taken for granted? How does anyone keep their ass remotely clean?? At this point, the modern Western fetish of eating ass is probably the largest health hazard I can think of hahaha. That's the first thing I'm going to get when I find a place of my own, mark my words.
(This paragraph ought to elevate my post to the level of Culture Warring, if nothing else does haha)
But throwing some heavy shade on my happiness is the slow-motion implosion of the NHS, my employer-to-be for the foreseeable future. The situation is getting pretty bad, elective lists for surgery were already backed up for 2 weeks, now there's serious thought being given to simply unloading patients in the parking lot from the ambulance given the lack of room indoors. People spending a dozen hours in the A and E is commonplace, and even a day or more is a distressingly common occurrence. There are plans to strike in Jan, which I'm not able to participate in, but you bet your ass I would if I could. Things are rapidly becoming untenable, with either a massive shakeup (or more likely a collapse of the NHS followed by privatization) being on the cards.
And you know what? If the NHS did fail, it would still be superior to conditions back home. Please, read my previous post if you want to know what healthcare looks like for a billion odd people, with maybe a couple hundred million able to receive care to a standard that wouldn't provoke a lynch mob in the West.
And the UK is far from the richest part of the West. Americans have significantly more wealth, and salaries are pathetic compared to their US counterparts.
So what if it's in (debatable) decline? As painful as it must seem, there's just so much room before you even approach Third World conditions. Like seriously, you guys have no idea how much worse things can get before it gets that bad.
At any rate, I'm just grateful that the end of my time in India is in sight, and I'm studying my ass off for my last exam, motivated by my sheer dissatisfaction at home, and even more by the absolute utopia that the UK is in comparison. (My girlfriend wishes to add that in her absence I'd be eating microwaved meals and hardly studying, so much love to her 😘)
Here's to things not getting as bad as home, and may I not have to refer to India as that any longer!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Redacted: Bad faith posting: main intent is clearly holocaust denial Redacted: quality-contribution Redacted: Single issue poster
Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
more Jew-posting, trying to be sneakier about it, admitted he deliberately posted as a reply in another thread to avoid catching a ban. Recommend ban next time.
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by God we've got more to show for it.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3mo ago
The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.
Errr...
I just found out a distant aunt of mine is already lining up Nice Indian Girls for me in the UK. You know, eligible bachelor nephew showing from the Homeland, getting a degree worth a shit, gotta snatch them up young.
This is not a joke. And frankly I'm an idiot for not seeing it coming, given that I am Indian and know their proclivities for matchmaking, especially within their community.
Well, at least she's in London, I pray her auntie-network doesn't reach all the way north, though I'm already fishing for excuses to dodge that for now. Like, I think I'd be a good dad, and I do want to settle down soonish, but not that quick, let me fucking live a little. And while I'm not particularly picky about ethnicity, I doubt she has buxom blondes lined up.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4mo ago
I have nothing useful to add, since I hadn't heard of the franchise till about 4 hours ago, when someone was lauding it as a resurgence in Chinese soft power in my Twitter feed.
That being said, it gives me hope that I'll see some proper high-budget Xianxia adaptations, and soon-ish. Hopefully adaptations of the good novels!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
unless you're in the camp that thinks that human consciousness is basically just a really complex statistical model running on a biological computer
As someone vocally in that camp, I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possible be. And it doesn't even matter if the AI is "conscious" if it's intelligent and capable of using that intelligence to forward ends not aligned with our goals.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4mo ago
Excellent comment. One thing I'd like to add is that opting out of vaccination is, to an extent, mooching off the commons.
Herd immunity doesn't work, if parents look at the existing vaccination rates, reasons that their kids will be fine without vaccination as "everyone else" does it, and thus defects.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Huh. I can only apologize for the relatively bare link, but I feel like it's worth drawing attention to something so widely accepted yet utterly worthless, especially when it comes up so often here.
The thing about the DK effect is that it makes intuitive sense. To extend it past the realm of typical human intelligence, an ant or a chimp isn't very good at knowing how dumb they are because they're not very good at most things. However, I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.
The problem with the Dunning-Kruger chart is that it violates a fundamental principle in statistics. If you’re going to correlate two sets of data, they must be measured independently. In the Dunning-Kruger chart, this principle gets violated. The chart mixes test score into both axes, giving rise to autocorrelation.
Realizing this mistake, Edward Nuhfer and colleagues asked an interesting question: what happens to the Dunning-Kruger effect if it is measured in a way that is statistically valid? According to Nuhfer’s evidence, the answer is that the effect disappears.
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE? The one we know and once loved literally works for random data, so that's right out. In other words, what's the cut-off where a stupid person becomes smart enough to know they're stupid, or at least worse than their peers?*
*In a more general sense than a chimp knowing he's not as strong or big as the alpha male.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I appreciate the nuanced take and attempt to clarify your beliefs in a manner clearer to Rationalists and rat-adjacents.
Further, I wholeheartedly endorse the claim that rationality can be applied to any goal or belief system, that's what the orthogonality thesis is all about. There's nothing irrational about say, wanting to covert the universe into paperclips, and for all the insults I could hurl at a Paperclip Maximizer as it disassembled me for parts, irrational isn't one of them. It would only be so if it went about its goals in a counterproductive manner, or a grossly suboptimal one, such as, idk, building flawed Von Neumanns that make safety pins instead.
Thus, in principle, you can reconcile epistemic and instrumental rationality with religion, my point is that in practise it's about as sensible as Muslim apologists arguing that hijabs are feminist and empowering for women. Less gross hypocrisy or maybe even none on your end, of course, but the same issues apply.
If you end up in a situation where you are initialized with a prior of 1 in the existence of God/The Truth of Christianity, then you are perfectly rational in assuming all observed evidence in that light and then assuming any discrepancies or paradoxes arise from an incomplete understanding of the world.
It's still a deeply malign prior.
I don't know if the human brain, while strongly likely to be doing Bayesian Predictive Processing, is capable of having priors of literal one or zero. That being said, the religious seem close to the former.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified. We only use the more abstruse equations for GR over simple F=ma and other classical physics because in certain very important regimes, they justify the headache and predict the world with more accuracy.
As it stands, the world as it exists today is far better explained by assuming the universe works solely according to the laws of physics without any external intervention where anyone can see it.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything, but that isn't a blank cheque for believing in anything you feel like. The rational thing to do is remain agnostic on that regard, at least unless we end up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and yet no answers. The history of humanity is riddled with questions that seemed beyond the ability of empirical studies to explain, such as the elan vital, yet we have solved them, and Christian metaphysics is not a satisfactory explanation unless you start out with an unshakeable belief in it.
The existence of a Creator with the properties of Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnibenevolence need justification far more powerful than the word of some Middle Eastern randos several millennia ago, and it's such a shame that more objective evidence has been sorely lacking since we have omnipresent digital recording devices and randomized control studies.
Was Jesus a real historical character? Easily could have been, but that no more makes a difference than the next schizophrenic I treat who rambles about being the next prophet.
Perhaps the strong relationship between visions and speaking in tongues with something as prosaic as temporal lobe epilepsy should make the wise take a hint.
Your arguments are sound if and only if one assumes the truth of your faith as given and then works backward to justify everything else. When you scramble constantly with apologetics against all other evidence, the intelligent thing to do is consider whether or not the null hypothesis has a point!
The mere existence of complex maths or seeming paradoxes is no excuse for waving away far bigger ones with less reason to assume that the reason that the properties you ascribe to them are anything but a consequence of them being imaginary.
As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts. Until then, my sheer disdain for Him is made obviate by the fact that He's fictional.
Shame, because if prayer cured cancer or brought about post-scarcity, I'd be the busiest beaver in that regard. Beats going through med school and memorizing all these doses I tell ya.
Until that happens, I'm content to watch us make our own gods, not that they should be worshipped or programmed to demand it. Maybe Lucifer would be better served creating a Heaven on Earth instead of reigning in hell, at the very least we have the means of doing it ourselves.
At this point, I don't even know what an AGI is. The word has just been semantically saturated for me.
What I do know, based on having followed the field since before GPT-2 days, and personally fucked around since GPT-3, is that for at least a year or so, SOTA LLMs have been smarter and more useful than the average person. Perhaps one might consider even the ancient GPT 3.5 to have met this (low) bar.
They can't write? Have you seen the quality of the average /r/WritingPrompts post?
They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?
They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?
The average human, when confronted with a problem outside their core domain of expertise, is dumb as rocks compared to an LLM.
I don't even know how I managed before LLMs were a thing. It hasn't been that long, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life without them. If cheap and easy access to them were to magically vanish, my willingness to pay to get back access would be rather high.
Ah, it's all too easy to forget how goddamn useful it can be to have access to an alien intelligence in one's pocket. Even if it's a spiky, inhuman form of intelligence.
On the topic of them being cheap/free, it's a damn shame that AI Studio is moving to API access only. Google was very flustered by the rise of ChatGPT and the failure of Bard, it was practically begging people to give Gemini a try instead. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed since the 1.5 Pro days, and I'm annoyed that their gambit has paid off, that demand even among normies and casual /r/ChatGPT users increased to the point that even a niche website meant for powerusers got saturated.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5mo ago
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed. You have not proactively (or on demand) produced any evidence to suggest a conspiracy of the Jews. Or that they have anything to gain from weakening the British state. Inflammatory, boo-outgroup, throw it all in, toppings are free with this sandwich.
You've been warned in the past, and I'm giving you a short ban so you know they have teeth. Even our most fervent anti-semites hustle to meet posting standards, and I'd advise you do so too.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
To further the whiplash from my last comment, anyone here have any experience with tren?
If you're not willing to discuss it in public, feel free to DM. I have internalized LBBTQIA+^2 philosophies and my own transhumanism to the extent that I wish to transition from male to MALE.
Jokes aside, I'm just curious, and it seems trivially easy to get it here if I cared to do so.
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
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