Jiro
4hr ago
The humor in the joke to me comes from the player downplaying this completely absurd super-canine ability the dog has...
It's the same basic idea: we already know how hard it is to play chess and it's far more than a dog can normally do. And it's this knowledge which makes the joke a joke.
The joke isn't a scenario where the dog plays chess under such unusual circumstances that it doesn't mean the dog is smart.
And imagine that it's 1981 and someone is showing you their brand new ZX81. The exact same thing happens that happens with the dog, down to you saying that the chess program can be beaten nine times out of ten. Should you conclude that actually, ZX81s are really really smart because playing chess at all is impressive? Or should you conclude that even though humans use general intelligence to play chess, the ZX81 instead uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and the ZX81 isn't very smart despite how impressive playing chess is?
If a few years later the ZX81 was replaced with a Commodore 64, and you couldn't beat the Commodore 64 in chess, would you decide that the ZX81 is dumb, but the Commodore 64 is smart?
Jiro
4hr ago
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.
I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.
Jiro
5hr ago
Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother...
Replace this with "Julie and Mark went drunk driving. Nobody was hurt and they got home safely and sooner than they would have if they had to walk".
The fact that a dangerous activity sometimes works out doesn't make it a good idea. In order for this to prove what it's supposed to prove, the hypothetical would have to be "Julie and Mark committed incest, it all worked out, and they had good reason in advance to think it would work out". This hypothetical is impossible unless 1) it's a limited cultural practice that doesn't favor incest in general or 2) Julie and Mark are not human.
Jiro
23hr ago
It was on the motte that I replied to this joke:
Beware fictional evidence.
The joke works because we have assumptions about what it means to be able to play chess, and we know that a dog playing chess with any significant chance of success implies a much greater jump in intelligence than the jump between playing poorly and playing well.
If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny. Of course there isn't such a method for chess-playing dogs. But we know that Claude doesn't play Pokemon like humans do, and this may very well not generalize to playing as well as a human.
(Notice that your assumptions are wrong for computers playing chess. My Gameboy can beat me in chess. It has no chance of taking over the world.)
Jiro
23hr ago
loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.
No, they aren't. "They say it where I can hear it" isn't the same as "they'll say it to anyone".
Jiro
1d ago
deepl/AI-translate
What's the best free translator available nowadays?
The use case is translating old Perry Rhodan from German to English. I've been using Google translate, which has some problems.
Jiro
1d ago
Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology.
If they overestimated the long term effects, then in the long term it usually turns out to be useless, which means nobody remembers it, and you get availability bias.
Jiro
1d ago
Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men
If you believe women are as strong as men, that means that any treatment of men and women that differs based on strength really differs based on discrimination. Belief in widespread discrimination is a feminist position.
Jiro
1d ago
If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free?
If Musk's "Nazi salute" was a creation of the left-wing media, this becomes completely explainable.
The thing about Nazi flags is that you don't need to be politically biased to conclude that they are Nazi flags.
Jiro
3d ago
Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.
Jiro
4d ago
Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs.
If we wanted to write a law saying "you can use a non-work visa to work, as long as the industry or the quantity of work makes it laughable that they're taking someone's job", we could have. I hope the reasons why not to have such a law are obvious.
Jiro
12d ago
I mean this girl is in her mid-twenties and has already had seven messy breakups.
Not by non-comedy standards.
Jiro
18d ago
I wouldn't accept "mom he hit me first" from my kids
This attitude leads to schools punishing kids for being bullied because it takes two to start a fight, and they dared try to fight back against the bully. Self-defense and initiation of force actually are things.
yes he did say ' in the universe' , what the hell is going on?
Unless he's claiming there are aliens, "in the universe" is the same as "in the world". It's just a rhetorical flourish, it doesn't actually mean anything different.
Jiro
18d ago
This is Bulverism.
I'd give the alternative theory that Musk moved to the right because of his son going trans. It was a socially approved thing and the left never apologized....
Jiro
19d ago
Im' pretty sure that that link you gave for Great Messianic Kingdom wasn't made up just for your analogy. You don't just get away with sneaking things like that through just because you're making an analogy about something else.
Jiro
19d ago
Using this for an analogy is like saying "imagine if it's just like the alien reptiles ruling America now, except they're ruling the world instead". The question is secondarily an analogy about South Africa, and primarily a way to preach to the unbelievers about how the alien reptiles are taking over America. You should not be violating "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" by sneaking your inflammatory claim in as "oh, this is the real world part of an analogy about something else".
Jiro
20d ago
But either way, I do not think it is too much to ask for those arguing for more support to clearly identify what results we should expect from that support, and where they're willing to draw the line if the results they predict are not, in fact, achieved.
If you are asking about falsifying results rather than falsifying factual claims such as "there was a Holocaust" or "Russia started the war", then Dean answered you: strategies are not falsified by results.
Jiro
20d ago
I would argue that if you want to align rational entities through punishment, it is crucial to establish likely causal pathways.
And if you're an ideologue who believes that companies are evil, you want to punish them, period, so punishing them for things that they didn't cause doesn't seem so bad.
Moral considerations aside, I would argue that this would be much worse for setting incentives against murder.
Your scenario makes it easier to punish suspects in some ways (no trials) but harder in others (the suspects can get away if they can last five minutes). So a cop who just wants to punish people on a whim wouldn't like it. The EPA scenario only makes it easier; if the EPA wants to be able to punish companies on a whim, it's great for them.
Jiro
21d ago
Everyone here knows examples of when the Blue Tribe does this anyway, so I'll just point out a Red version, which is squeezing of public figures over past sexual indiscretions (ex: Kavanaugh)
That's a blue version.
Jiro
21d ago
Deciding between exact amounts or types of aid is like deciding whether Burger King or McDonalds is better. Deciding between no aid and aid is like deciding whether raw sewage or McDonalds is better. You need a lot less judgment for the latter decision than for the former.
I'm no military analyst, so I couldn't tell you the exact details of what aid is appropriate. But I can safely say that "none" is not in the right ballpark even while lacking the expertise to give you those exact details.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea?
A Holocaust denier could ask the same question. Is there evidence that could convince me that the Holocaust didn't happen? Not really. You'd have to go through all of the evidence for it piece by piece and show all of it to be wrong in some manner. There's so much evidence for it that it could only be wrong in some weird scenario like being a brain in a jar who is being fed completely fake information about the outside world.
Jiro
22d ago
I think a lot depends on how likely it is that SF was causally responsible.
Determining that someone is causally responsible takes work. Far simpler to look at the pollution and say "it doesn't matter whether you're causally responsible". Yes, the government probably wouldn't levy a penalty for radiation from Fukushima, but it would be because they haven't chosen to do so, not because they aren't allowed to.
The point of the dog analogy is that the dog that plays chess poorly is impressive, because being able to play at all is the biggest and hardest step, and being able to play well is a relatively small step from that.
The LLM version would be that it's almost as impressive for an LLM to generate text poorly as it is for an LLM to generate text well.
I don't think that's true.
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