Jesweez
8d ago
The average person has some domain where they know much more than an LLM does though. LLMs are good at having a pretty decent level of skill in most domains. Until it’s your domain and you ask it something and get an answer full of naive conclusions and inaccuracies.
Jesweez
8d ago
Do you have no free will and every action you have ever taken is just a long recursive context window constantly reprompting you?
That’s actually a pretty good phrasing of the viewpoint that free will is an illusion.
I don’t really subscribe to it or believe that LLMs are anywhere near consciousness.
But I don’t think what we do when prompted by stimuli or not prompted by stimuli is a very good argument against it, we’re very clearly a sort of very complex system that’s designed to respond to particular stimuli with particular responses. And even what we do in the absence of stimuli (eg, hallucinate, run through our memories, imagine random scenarios, dream) is something that I could easily see some digital mind be set up to do.
Then again, if it was doing all this I’d be moved closer to the position that it might have some form of coexisted in there, which for LLMs I’m much closer to 0 probability.
Jesweez
8d ago
But it fundamentally is that, RL just shapes what types of token prediction paths it tends to go down. (At least that’s how I understand it)
I think it’s widespread on the left and even in me, I’m a dude but I’d have a really hard time dating a girl who’s values are so different than mine.
Even if I just wanted to sleep with her, being too conservative is sort of a turn off. She’d have to be really hot to make up for it and then I’d be disappointed in myself later, haha. Which is weird because I can’t say the same thing for other persuasions. Like if a girl was a hardcore socialist, that’s not a turn off, I could totally sleep with her, but relationship-wise It’d probably end up becoming too annoying to be worth the trouble.
I actually think if you surveyed most of my male friends on this they’d probably say similar things.
But I don’t think this works the same for conservatives for some reason? Maybe it’s just that women are more liberal usually so it’s expected and it’s kind of a normal trope that a man is more conservative than a woman and those relationships can work out.
Jesweez
16d ago
I’ve never understood why god would create beings that are so primed to want things that we end up describing as evil.
We’re not really just here as neutral choosers with free will. Take drugs for example, we’re literally designed at a neurological level to become hopelessly addicted to heroin if we touch the stuff.
That seems quite cruel to do to a being as its designer. We could easily be designed such that there aren’t a bunch of substances lying around that induce extraordinary pleasure and then horrific dependence.
Similarly, a lot of evil that people do is a result of how their brains are wired. Pedophiles for example, to a large extent seem to be wired in such a way that they derive pleasure from that, with the best outcome that they just never act on this desire that’s to an extent built into their neurobiology. Why would you make someone like that, and if you cared for the beings you designed, however it is that the mistake entered into them, wouldn’t it be so much kinder to just remove the mistake that somehow got into their brains on your watch? Both for the sufferers and for anyone they may end up harming or abusing?
Instead religion seems to treat it like a willpower problem. One with eternal consequences. Yet reality seems to repeatedly indicate that it’s not really a willpower thing, more often it’s some form of brain problem that leads to a large fraction of evil. Like the guy who developed a brain tumor and started having constant violent urges until he shot up a bunch of people at a university, and left a note saying please study my brain I just know something wrong happened to it. Or the guy who took the metal stake though his brain and lost all self control and self inhibition.
Materialist models seem to explain a lot of this quite well. Someone has some form of perversion, or is even just gay, well it looks like the function of the brain that generates objects of sexual desire just happened to develop on the wrong object in this case. Or this guy suddenly started having violent urges all the time, oh look, there’s a tumor pressing on the part of his brain relating to aggression.
But if we’re in a Christian worldview… how horrific is it that the stakes of this guys eternal soul were decided by a tumor and that god tested him like that, or that the pedophile or addict is burdened with constantly needing to resist what seems to be a fault in the architecture of their brains, as if in many cases the evil was designed into them from the start or came about in their very biology in some cases through no fault of their own.
Jesweez
16d ago
It would have sucked if he was successful and this was what we had to put in the history books
Jesweez
16d ago
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both sides might consider the other more of a threat for matters that concern them than some Iranian mullah is
Jesweez
1mo ago
Oh IDK, stumbling into a quagmire scenario with a country that can strangle the global economy with barely any effort applied, while needing to either concede on unfavorable terms or invade and dedicate enormous resources to secure shipping across a rugged and populated coast where any one random attack that slips through on the previous traffic of hundreds of ships per day is a major failure. Effectively devoting enormous financial and military resources to return something back to what was already the status quo before starting the war.
All for the strategic purpose of… making sure that all countries never trust in the validity of a deal or agreement with the US again.
Jesweez
1mo ago
I have is there doesn’t seem to be many claims of pedophilia or sexual degeneracy in maga
This statement and this thread more generally is the biggest “we’re watching two different movies” moment I’ve ever had.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Not here to argue either point but what’s the source on these precision claims?
Pretty big warfare development if true!
I do think historical experiences affect a cultures outlook and subsequently behavior.
Modern Chinese politics is meaningfully affected by the century of humiliation.
The tone of Slavic cultures is shaped by repeated wars, famines, and massacres.
Turkish politics is influenced by memories of the Ottoman Empire.
There’s certainly a forgetting curve. We probably shouldn’t study Charlemagne in order to understand what Emmanuel Macron is likely to do tomorrow.
(Edit: Then again, Charlemagne looked back to Roman emperors, was himself relevant to how Napoleon behaved, the French Revolution drew from ideas from the Roman republic, and modern France has dim recollections of all of this built into its cultural identity as well as experiences from both victory and defeat in the world wars. Part of the founding mythos of being French includes empires and revolutions and it gets reflected in French behavior, such as a penchant for frequently protesting and rioting in the streets. Just as the American frontier is long gone but still affects our culture).
Continuing where I earlier left off…
But I do think there’s some historical continuity that gets built up. Having had all your cities razed, suffering a famine, conquering half the world, having an empire crumble, I think all of these things have influences on a culture that ripple across centuries.
Americans today always talk about how we are so optimistic while Europe is just this museum society. But basically all of those cultures had periods of floridly mad optimism in their history at different points, usually coinciding with when they built those structures.
Maybe we are just a uniquely optimistic and exuberant culture and will remain that way forever. But we haven’t even existed for long enough to know the other side of the coin, we’ve never even had the experience of being bested by a rival for example. And although it’s tempting to believe that we’re uniquely ordained by God or fate to never suffer such a disgrace and will never see the other side of the coin (like from the article, god is an Englishman, we invented the modern world and have its largest ever empire ffs), I’d say our time in the sun has its limits just as it does for all world dominant cultures. (Possibly coming soon if you believe Ray Dalio’s model). And after having experienced both the rise and fall, we’ll end up being a somewhat wiser or at least more mature culture which might naturally temper subsequent bouts of mania.
Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it
Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.
We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.
But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.
I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.
We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.
I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.
There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.
We did. Then we stationed American soldiers in Afghanistan, gave them rules of engagement that prevented them from killing anybody, and spent billions of dollars on liberal NGO projects that did things like feminist opera in Kabul. We're not doing that anymore.
The taliban reconstituted itself and asserted control immediately after the US left 20 years later. They would have done the same if the US had left after one. We didn’t win, we just went and fought an entrenched enemy until deciding to leave, and they just endured another empire dicking around before going right back to the pre-war status quo.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I am no expert but if there are some committed fanatics for Shia Islam the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is exactly where I’d expect to find them.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I think all Iran needs to do is slip enough attacks on boats through to meaningfully disrupt the calculus of getting an oil tanker through.
Maybe the US has advanced enough operations to be able to take away that threat, I don’t know.
In the end who ‘wins’ will be decided by who is better at that asymmetric cat and mouse game over the next weeks to months.
By mountain fortress, I mean Iran itself, not actually going out to the hills. The cities might actually be the best cover. Either way it’s probably quite hard to figure out where key people are after the initial round or two of bombardment.
Also I’m not sure being a very functional state matters all that much to them while at war. A dictatorship should just need to knuckle down and keep up supply of weapons to its soldiers.
What matters is likely just simply continuing to broadcast that we’re still here while mustering enough attacks on the shipping lane to keep the snake more or less coiled around the neck of the global economy.
Good question about funding, I don’t know enough to answer it. That might become relevant but a war of attrition to see whose finances break down first isn’t ideal for Trump et al. If I were Russia I’d for sure funnel some cash in in that scenario.
Jesweez
2mo ago
After decades and trillions of dollars with a country that doesn’t pose any real risks to the global economy while the turmoil goes on.
Nobody creates a quagmire consciously, every war is conceptualized at the outset as a quick in and out affair.
Just like the Iranian regime can never just ease up about being the vanguard of Shia islam dedicated to thwarting Israel, it’s in the very DNA of the US’s position that we must dedicate our military to ensuring safe passage on global shipping lane choke points.
Thus we are now fundamentally committed to ensuring the total destruction of Iran’s capacity to choke off shopping in Hormuz, in a similar way that Israel is completely committed to wiping out the ability of Hamas to launch rockets from Gaza. But on a vastly larger scale.
The Iran before the full scale attack may have been an entity that could be negotiated with, and perhaps I’m wrong, but I think this headless group of martyrdom and honor culture infused bomb survivors is now going to hole up in the mountain fortress and commit to fighting until they cannot any longer.
As long as they continue to fight, the US cannot decide to back down. The ball is simply not fully in our court anymore.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Trump was the one who decided to do this, not some faceless artifice you can conveniently point to. He’s been very publicly suffering from some sort of war mania for quite some time now.
I’m sure some deeper figures in the war and Israel lobby apparatus talked him up a great game of how easy and great it was going to be. But the one who has been obviously giddy about blowing things up in foreign lands is the guy at the top as well as all of his top advisors.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Good article exploring how Iran is a key geopolitical chess piece regarding China: https://open.substack.com/pub/zinebriboua/p/the-iran-question-is-all-about-china
Jesweez
2mo ago
It isn’t clear why negotiations failed with Iran.
Who can say for sure, but I’m sure Israel smelled the abundance of blood in the water and after having laid the ground work of dismantling the proxy network and showcasing the lack of relevant defenses over Iran, they knew a joint hit with the US could deal a near deadly blow. The negotiations might have just been for show in the end.
Israel is also the reason that this isn’t likely to be another Venezuela situation. While that was the Trump admin acting on whims and under constraints of how much engagement the US populace will allow, there’s no doubt that the whole of Israeli intelligence and military assets are going to be dedicated that this biggest break they’ve had yet is going to go their way.
Jesweez
3mo ago
Oh hey! It’s the signs of snowflakery:
- Perpetually offended
- In need of safe spaces
- Apt to shut down free speech
- Embrace culture of victimhood
Can someone provide some context for this phrasing?
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