Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Yep, this is an example of GPT insisting on something like an ABABABABA rhyme scheme (grace/race, name/game, etc.), which is actually quite an odd one that you would rarely see a person using, since it's difficult to get good rhymes if you're using the same one so often (see: rhyming race with embrace). My theory is that, beyond what's going on under the hood causing trouble with sticking to form, GPT is bad at selecting good rhymes, because good rhymes are generally in some way unexpected and present novelty to the reader - i.e. the opposite of predicting the next token.
I wanted to test your theory about trivia questions, so I tried a little test - asked it to give me some trivia questions on Roman history, and then to give me a harder set. The first set was very simple (amusingly, two consecutive questions had the same answer: Julius Caesar, and two questions in the second set also had Caesar as the answer), but the second was more interesting. One or two were hard enough to stump me, which made sense, but at least three were historically inaccurate as questions, and so were the answers that ChatGPT gave. The most incorrect was claiming that damnatio memoriae was instituted by Domitian, but it also had mistakes reflecting a pop-historical conception of what the Roman Empire was. I guess this is an example of ChatGPT's repetition of consensus, and that aspect makes it inherently difficult to write good trivia questions.
As a poet, it's also awful at poetry. It writes some painful doggerel about whatever subject you choose, and seemed incapable of following instructions about form, meter, or length. A while back I tried to get it to write a Spenserian stanza, and it wrote the same ABAB four-line stanzas over and over again no matter how hard I tried to explain what a Spenserian stanza was (ABABBCBCC).
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Speaking purely about what I know, the Kyoto School is one of the most impressive philosophical movements of the 20th Century. Probably top ten rather than top five, but still great and largely unheard of in the West - for instance, I find Religion and Nothingness to deal with some Kantian problems in a way which both prefigured and exceeded modern Western Kant scholarship. Of course, they highly are influenced by Heidegger, who is sometimes called an existentialist, but at the least it's very expensive existentialism.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Yeah I just couldn't resist talking about football, too excited for the season starting.
The HBD point is kind of interesting, because both of the main 'black' sports have a much greater selection for body type which would presumably crowd out a lot of athletes who are smart but don't have the right body. But, while basketball does demand some serious tactical nous and on-the-spot thinking, american football is much more about getting really big guys and having them follow specific tactics to ram into each other, while giving themselves traumatic brain injuries - and when I think of famous black athletes doing really stupid stuff, it's pretty much all american football players and not NBA players.
Also I think both of us have confused motte and bailey here, I meant to say that the motte of your point is sound but I'm not sure about Cowen's bailey.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
To add to the other comments, it's far easier to injure yourself with dumbbells rather than a barbell. For DB bench you need to know how to fail safe and be ready to do it even at the limits of exertion, for BB bench you just need to not drop the bar on yourself. They also exert more force on your shoulders in a dangerous position, particularly in incline bench, which is good for training stabilizers but also carries a higher risk if you ego lift.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I think Cowen is just overrating the intelligence of his examples, which is a particular weirdness of basketball fans (probably trying to signal their own intelligence despite following a sport with a pretty dumb fanbase). LeBron is notorious for pretending to read. I'll give him Jordan, who clearly has impressive business sense, and trust him on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom I only know from Airplane! In general, top athletes are surrounded by a large staff trying to make them appear as well as possible to the public, including media coaching and PR.
In the sport I follow, football (no, football football), intelligence seems to be all over the place, and somewhat but not entirely correlated with "football IQ." The easiest way to see this is by looking at the jobs they take after their playing career, with most top managers having played a high-football-IQ game rather than a physical one, often in midfield - Guardiola, Ancelotti, Wenger, Arteta, etc. all fit that mould, and Klopp describes his playing career by saying "I had fourth-division feet and a first-division head." Meanwhile, a lot of top players become pundits based off reputation, and quite frankly come across as pretty thick, if good at courting controversy in the mode of modern media. Or, to take an example of current players, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal team around the same time, and had very similar promise until ESR's injuries and Saka's break-out, but ESR is known among the team for being humorously dim while Saka scored relatively similar exam results to people I know from top private schools.
The bailey of your point is sound, I think, it's rare for top top athletes to be that stupid (much below 100IQ it would take a lot of crystallized intelligence just to understand top-level tactics). I'm sure most top footballers are above average intelligence, but not that much above average and generally quite uneducated. So there's definitely a floor for required intelligence, but at the highest level it's something which is important but can be traded off against other aspects of one's game, such that the smartest players aren't the best players and the best players aren't necessarily so smart that a guy like Tyler Cowen should be fawning over them and reading the books they "wrote".
(To address the elephants in the room: Ronaldo isn't that smart but makes up for it by sheer force of will. Messi is probably very smart but so cripplingly introverted he doesn't let it show off the pitch.)
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I'm reading Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes - I happened to travel with Professor Mayer some time ago, and learned a tremendous amount about Classical urbanism, art, and life in that time, most of which I've not encountered in my other history reading. Heard he had a book published, so naturally decided to give it a look. Also dipping into the print version of Land's Xenosystems published by West Martian Press, a great little outlet which I encourage Urbit folks, dissidents, and internet weirdos to support.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
You aren't doing yourself any favors by comparing yourself to the 1 well-compensated profession that even practitioners themselves will admit is a scam.
I think you may have misread that - consultant doctors =/= management consultants. A "consultant" in medicine referrers to a specialist who has completed training.
It depends if you have the time, inclination, and knowledge to cook large quantities of food you enjoy. Trying to dirty bulk on fast food and protein is pretty miserable if you're not spiritually fat, and if you're not a cooking type the sort of diet I bulked on for busy times in college (oats, plain ground beef, protein shake with milk and olive oil) isn't very pleasant either.
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