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
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
36m ago
Civ 3 was peak except for the stupid global warming mechanics. 4 was really good, especially with the live map editor. 5 and onwards have been sore disappointments for me, and the more I look at 7, the harder I gag.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
37m ago
https://playclassic.games/games/turn-based-strategy-dos-games-online/play-sid-meiers-civilization-ii-online/play/
You can play 2 online, via this emulator I linked.
To be the devil's advocate here, that's not true in practice. Drunk driving without killing someone is punished because it could have lead to someone dying as a consequence, or at least severely increased the risk of an adverse outcome.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
51m ago
Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.
The human brain is obviously finite, and doesn't have infinite capacity. Yet, I find the idea that merely learning additional languages has any risk of exhausting its stores to be highly unlikely.
The plausible range is vast, ranging from a mere 10 terabytes to tens of petabytes. Whatever the figure in question, languages definitely do not take up a significant fraction. Even tiny ass LLMs, with only a few billion parameters, are fluent in multiple languages. They are a tiny fraction of the complexity of the brain at best.
Further, the claims that learning new languages hampers fluency in the mother tongue is quite controversial. Not using a language for the majority of speech will obviously have deleterious effects, but language acquisition has steeply diminishing returns. Speaking English for 40 years will not make you twice as fluent as when you were 20.
I also find the claims about Singaporean English... questionable at best. There are all kinds of English derivatives and dialects, and it's no surprise that the locals learn those instead of standard English. That's what they're growing up hearing or speaking! Being fluent in Singlish is just as valid as being fluent in Anglosphere English.
To further hammer the point home, IQ doesn't seem to be that big of a factor. Africans tend to me trilingual or better, often speaking a mother tongue, another local language, and then a trade dialect such as English/French/Arabic or Swahili. They find that entirely normal and not a big deal.
Most people who suffer from additional language acquisition grew up in a linguistically impoverished context, just speaking to immigrant parents provides a much poorer experience than growing up in a country where most people speak the language. There's also the issue of the motivation to learn, which is often lacking. If you're thrown into a brand new country and have no choice but to start learning the language to survive, then you're going to be much better and faster than someone whiling away time on Duolingo.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
You have me sold. More novels need alcoholic monkeys, Daoist or not.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
One of his wives? That's taken me aback more than the cancer has.
On the plus side, he has wives to spare. Smart man.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
He is a beneficiary of the UK immigration policy, and therefore sees it as a smashing success.
I am a beneficiary of the UK immigration policy. I very much don't see it as a smashing success. Count makes us look bad, and even if he didn't, I have great distaste for people who bite the hand that feeds them.
If he expressed his Great Replacement desires in more formal language, perhaps referring to genetic groups instead of "mayos", would his posts be under less scrutiny?
Yes. 100%. It would be quite trivial to rephrase everything he has to say in a manner that is minimally inflammatory. Some opinions will inherently piss people off, no matter how politely stated. We account for this, and let them stand.
I'm going to sacrifice even more of my lunch-break, and take on the burden of providing an example of how Count could have made the same point without breaking the rules:
This incident highlights what I see as a structural weakness in the American legal system regarding accountability for government agents. It's interesting to contrast the US concept of "sovereign immunity" with legal frameworks like the UK's, which allows for "exemplary damages" specifically to punish "arbitrary and oppressive conduct by a servant of the government." The latter seems to provide a stronger check on potential executive overreach by creating a more direct path for redress.
If the reporting is accurate, the false notification of the man's death is particularly concerning. It points to a breakdown in process and professionalism that seems severe, even accounting for the complexities of immigration enforcement. It raises questions about the institutional culture within ICE and what safeguards are in place to prevent such grievous errors.
This seems to align with critiques, like those once made by Lee Kuan Yew, that American institutions can sometimes lack the deeply ingrained cultural norms that act as informal checks on behavior in older states. My read is that this isn't an issue of malice, but perhaps a cultural immaturity where adherence to formal process can sometimes override basic considerations of human decency, leading to outcomes that are both unjust and counterproductive.
The second version makes the exact same three points:
- The US legal system has structural flaws for redressing government misconduct compared to the UK.
- The agency's actions demonstrate a shocking lack of professionalism.
- This may be symptomatic of a broader American cultural issue related to its relative youth as a nation.
The difference is that the rewrite focuses on systems, policies, and ideas. It critiques without insulting. It frames the point about national character as an analytical observation from a historical figure, not a childish insult. It invites a counter-argument ("Actually, sovereign immunity is vital because...") rather than a flame war ("How dare you call us a steaming pile of shit!").
That is the standard. It's not about what you say, but about making a good-faith effort to say it in a way that contributes to a discussion. Count consistently and deliberately chooses not to.
The civility requirements do seem to be more stringent on the left than the right, probably because when someone insults the Left there's not a lot of push back.
We can't please everyone, but even the perception of such bias is concerning. Take it from me, that we take this concern seriously, and have been debating it internally. I'm not going to name names, but a certain someone, who is a right-wing darling, will not enjoy it if we decide that we need to make an example.
Of course, that's an extreme outcome, and we generally try not to make examples for the sake of it. Many lengthy explanations have been written about why the perception of anti-leftist bias might exist here, including even in its absence. I can't rule out that it isn't, in fact, absent, but take my word for it that we care about fairness as well as the appearance of fairness.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
It is very kind of you to believe that Count isn't being disingenuous. Donning saintly levels of forbearance and patience:
We're less concerned with what's in a user's heart of hearts and more with the mess they make on the floor. The relevant question for us isn't "Does he believe it?" but "Is he posting in order to start a fire?" This is where you get the "sincere troll." This is the user who may genuinely hold an opinion, but chooses to express it in the most inflammatory, condescending, and insulting way possible, because the hostile reaction is a core part of what they want. The outrage is the point, not a byproduct.
Let's grant that Count sincerely believes the UK's legal system is superior. The sincerity of that belief doesn't make phrases like "steaming pile of shit" or telling an entire country to "apply for readmission to the human race" anything other than deliberate, high-octane provocation. He knows it's inflammatory. He chooses those words precisely because they're inflammatory. That's baiting. You can already see the fish biting in this thread.
Sincerity isn't a defense for deliberately "waging the culture war," which is explicitly against the rules. He's not just expressing an odious opinion; he's lobbing a grenade wrapped in an opinion, and he does it over and over again. Whether he's a nihilist who believes nothing or a zealot who believes everything, the result for the thread is the same: heat, not light.
We don't moderate beliefs (or at least we try not to), we moderate behavior. And his behavior is consistently that of someone trying to start a fight, and then scream about police brutality.
Since I have your attention, I must remind you that you're on thin ice yourself. Your posts are popular, you've got AAQCs, but you're flying too close to the sun. Do yourself a favor, and take extra care to couch your language in a manner that minimizes opportunities for it to be misunderstood. This is for our sake too, I do not look forward to the shitstorm in the comments that will ensue if we have to bite the bullet. Don't make us, please.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348537?context=8#context
I did write a longer explanation, so you don't have to just take my word for it!
Fair question. The line between a passionate, strongly-worded argument and trolling can be blurry, and if this post existed in a vacuum, without any knowledge of Count's antics, it would have been unobjectionable. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The problem isn't the topic: it is the user, the pattern, and the presentation.
To put it plainly, trolling isn't just about what you say, but why and how you say it. The goal of this forum is to "optimize for light over heat." Trolling optimizes for heat, exclusively. Count does occasionally provide light too, but in the same manner that lighting your house on fire helps find the keys during a blackout.
Breaking down this specific post:
-
Performative, Over-the-Top Language: The post isn't structured for discussion. It's a screed. Phrases like "total emptiness of its own fundamental depravity," "steaming pile of shit," and "apply for readmission to the human race" are pure flamebait. They're designed to provoke outrage, not invite reasoned disagreement.
-
Deliberate, Gratuitous Antagonism: The constant, almost comically exaggerated praise for the UK system versus the condemnation of the US isn't a good-faith comparison. It's tribal button-pushing. "august by American standards, by our standards there is terraced housing within 5 minutes walk of me that is older" is a perfect example. It adds zero substance and exists only to be condescending and get a rise out of American readers. It's a classic "Boo outgroup!" move.
Now, the crucial part: context.
BurdensomeCount has a long, long history of this exact behavior, for which he has been repeatedly warned and banned. His schtick is to take a kernel of a real argument and wrap it in layers of aristocratic, elitist, and often racialist provocation. You can see it all over his comment history (make sure to sort by negative votes):
- His entire "dissolve the people and elect another" argument where he calls for replacing "low human capital natives" with "elects" (migrants).
- His frequent use of terms like "low tier people," "mayos," and "proles" while positioning himself as a superior "elite human capital" finance professional.
- His open admission that he wants to "punish" Europe by flooding it with migrants to watch "progressive modernity" collapse, and that he does this with "glee."
He isn't arguing to understand; he's arguing to provoke, to feel superior, and to watch the fireworks. He knows exactly which buttons to press. This latest post is just his standard formula applied to a new news story: find a legitimate grievance, crank the rhetoric to 11, lard it with condescending UK-vs-US bait, and serve it up to see who bites. And people will bite, they will get mad, while Count laughs away or engages in performative denialism.
In short, he's not engaging with the culture war; he's waging it, which is explicitly against the rules of the thread. He's a "masterful" troll in that he's very good at it, but that doesn't earn him an indefinite pass.
I like Count. He amuses me, like a monkey that is very good at flinging shit. He also annoys me and tars other migrants by association, coming off as immensely entitled, ungrateful, and willing to bite the hand that feeds. But that is a personal stance, and not what he's being modded for.
His mistake is to assume that the Motte runs like an actual court of law. While this particular comment wouldn't sway a judge, Lady Justice might be blind but I'm not. We know Count.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
Granted, I'm not familiar with BurdensomeCount's other posts.
That's the issue. Count has a long time history of trolling and yanking on chains, going back to the subreddit days. He's masterful at making incredibly inflammatory statements with just enough of a veneer of sincerity to pass muster. He's an ur-example of barely toeing the line.
This would serve as a great example. Look the mods, being so heartless and evil, banning a poor participant on the forum for expressing sincere concern about government outreach? It's only when you take into account everything else he's done that it falls through. I'll let someone fill in with a more exhaustive explanation since I'm at work, but in short, this ain't new.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
"Innocent until proven guilty" might work in the legal system, but the medical one goes by "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras".
Please pull the other one guvna', it's got bells on it.
I miss the old BC,
straight from Canary Wharf BC,
the Alawite rule BC
I hate the new BC,
This shtick got old BC,
Breaks all the rules BC,
thinks the mods are fools BC,
Ahem. Count, the mods are not retarded. I might often be quite entertained by your shenanigans, but they're better reserved for /r/drama, and being occasionally amusing isn't sufficient to let you off.
Hell, I was going to let you off, but then I remembered I have to actually set an example every once in a while, and I took a look at your moderation log. You have that one AAQC to your credit, and a laundry list of warnings, temp bans, and even a perma ban that was cut down because someone spoke up for you.
The second-last entry is "More baiting. Really should permaban him next time."
I really dislike permabanning people. Hate to do it, I'm a bleeding heart that way. I will find a middle ground and say you can sit in the corner for another 60 days, and consider that lenient. In the meantime, you can consider opening a bait-and-tackle store or drying your copious tears with stacks of money, or whatever it is finance people do. Consider this provisional, if the other mods want to extend it, or make it permanent, I'm not going to say a word.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
I have to give it to you, if this is bait, then it's well done. From most other commenters, I would have assumed that they had genuine, sincere concern.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
15hr ago
C'mon George, 90% of Indian men end up with a pot-belly eventually, no points for that guess haha. Of course, Ozempic must have its say.
conservatively cut
Hair sounds right, but I have faded sides and back. No overbite, I have excellent teeth! At least 2 people have asked me, unsolicited, if I had them done in Turkey, though they were very drunk.
I, apparently, have surgeon's hands. A surgeon said so! Ignore the fact that said surgeon is my dad. But women do like 'em.
Hmm.. On the colors. I think you're on to something there.
Still not a fan of those spikes off the field.
Genius is never appreciated in its time. Alas.
You could be a sympathetic minor character in a Spielberg movie set in New Delhi, but you get revealed as evil in the end.
I do not know what this implies, but I suppose getting eaten by a dinosaur isn't the weirdest thing that could happen in Delhi.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
I think I've described myself quite a few times, but I'll bite.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
I'm usually shy of card games or deck builders, but I've heard good things about it. I'll give it a shot!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
17hr ago
I'd be happy to take a look at yours if you share a link!
(Theft of Fire was great, the author needs one lit under his ass so he comes out with the sequel quick)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
17hr ago
I'm an early adopter of LLMs, but using them to "write" the thing would be counterproductive. If I had to give an estimate, less than 1%.
I use LLMs for:
- Editing
- Brainstorming
- Research
- As an alpha reader
Research is the big one. I remember, back in the GPT-4 days, I asked it to help make a certain Jamaican character's patois more realistic. Didn't think much of it, till six months later, when an actual Jamaican reader left a comment saying that he was really impressed at how authentic it was, and asked me if I'd asked a native speaker.
Writers are often advised to write what they know, and it's remarkable how easy it is to know more these days. I used to trawl Wikipedia articles and crib notes back in the day, now you can just ask an alien intelligence.
Hmm.. What else? There are half a dozen chapters I illustrated with the help of AI image generators. More of a novelty than anything, but it was super cool that it was even an option.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
17hr ago
No.
(You're gorgeous)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
As I elaborated on in another comment in this thread, I do not think that some moving of goalposts is necessarily illegitimate. Our specifications can be incorrect, no one's immune from good old Goodhart.
Yet AI skeptics tend to make moving the goalposts into the entire sport. I will grant that their objections exist in a range of reasonableness, from genuine dissatisfaction with current approaches to AI, to Gary Marcus's not even wrong nonsense.
There is a more subtle issue with LLMs writing computer programs. We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data. We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
This is an interesting concern, and I mean that seriously. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be empirically borne out. LLMs are increasingly better at solving all bugs, not just obvious-to-human ones. The ones in commercial production are not base models, naively concerned only with the next most likely token (and which necessarily includes subtle bugs that exist in the training distribution), but they're beaten into trying to find any and all bugs they can catch. Nothing in our (limited but not nonexistent) ability to interpret their behavior or cognition suggests that they're deliberately letting bugs through because they seem plausible. I am reasonably confident in making that claim, but I hope @faul_sname or @DaseindustriesLtd might chime in.
At the end of the day, there exist techniques like adversarial training to make such issues not a concern. Ideally, with formal verifications of code, you can't have unwanted behavior, ruled out by mathematical certainty. Of course, interpreting that you haven't made errors in formulating your specification is a challenge in itself.
One old school of AI imagined that the language of thought would be importantly different from natural language. The architecture of AI would involve translating natural language into a more rigorous and expressive internal language, thinking in this internal language and then translating back to natural language for output. LLMs do perhaps partially realise this dream. The tokens are placed in a multidimensional space and training involves discovering the latent structure, effectively inventing that training run's own, custom language of thought. If so, that is a win for the bitter lesson.
There's been a decent amount of work done on dispensing with the need for tokenization in the first place, and letting the LLM operate/reason entirely in the latent space till it needs to output an answer. It seems to work, but hasn't been scaled to the same extent, and the benefits are debatable beyond perhaps solving minor tokenization errors that existing models have.
Human language, as used, is imprecise, but you can quite literally simulate a Turing machine with your speech. I don't see this as a major impediment, why can't LLMs come up with new words if needed, assuming there's a need for words at all?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I am agnostic on LLMs being conscious or having qualia. More importantly, I think it's largely irrelevant. What difference to me does it make if an unaligned ASI turns me into a paperclip but doesn't really dislike me?
Is a horse happy about the fact that the tractor replacing it isn't conscious? It's destined for the glue factory nonetheless.
We have no principled or rigorous way to interrogate consciousness in humans. We have no way of saying with any certainty that LLMs aren't conscious, even if I am inclined to think that, if they are, it's a very alien form of consciousness.
You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I'm talking about whoever is doing the assessment of consciousness being "aware" of the fundamental limitations of the entity they're testing. I could, in theory, administer a med school final exam to Terence Tao, and he'd fail miserably. I would be a bigger idiot if I went on to then declare that Tao is thus proven to not be as smart as he seems. That meme about subjecting a monkey, fish and elephant to the same objective test of ability in the form of climbing trees, while usually misapplied, isn't entirely wrong.
I also don't mean to make any implications about "interiority" here. I would happily say that an LLM is "cognizant" of fact X, if say, that information was in its training data or within the context window. No qualia or introspection required.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
You're probably right. The biggest driver was just being able to sneak in games while work was slow.
Civ 7 heavily cribbed off competitors like Humankind, and for all the wrong reasons.
The ability to change civs could have been so good. All they needed to do was to be sensible about it.
Start as Rome in the Classical era? Become some kind of post-Roman state in the medieval era, be it Byzantium, France, Germany, England or, if you want to stretch it further, the Ottomans.
Go English? Get the option to remain that way post Enlightenment, or perhaps fork off to America.
You could add more leeway, especially for dead-end states, but avoid absurdities like Caesar running China, or America being a thing in the fucking Stone Age.
The idea of their being an ebb-and-flow to progression, with setbacks at the end of each era, that works great in theory for preventing rampant snowballing, but the current execution is utter ass.
Sigh. I'll go back and look lovingly at my copy of Civ 4. Last entry I wholeheartedly enjoyed.
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