confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
2mo ago
Not being able to persuade others to stop associating with a bad actor seems to be an overreach of a definition of cancel culture. Either you prohibit sharing anything negative or you end up trying to define what is a legitimate or illegitimate reason to call people out.
My opinion is that cancel culture operates at a level removed from the actual behavior you dislike and is more about interactions with third parties. To put forward my own definition: cancel culture is when you attempt to compel others who are not directly performing an objectionable behavior to disassociate from that objectionable behavior. Just trying to spread the reason you personally disengaged or persuade another party of the badness of a particular action is not cancel culture.
The type of behavior defined above is toxic because it puts people or organizations in the position of having to take sides in areas which may be completely unrelated to what they do. This is why many things are splitting towards either woke or anti-woke stances and neutral is becoming harder to find.
A real-world example of this is the idea that "if you have 10 people sitting at a table and one is a Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis." Cancel culture is the idea that some things are too awful to interact with in any way; not denouncing and disassociating from them is sufficient proof you hold objectionable ideas.
This definition doesn't require debates over sharing comments like "that reporter who you think is honest has published a bunch of lies" or "the leader of that animal welfare charity secretly kicks puppies" which I do not think any reasonable definition of cancel culture should prohibit.
As long as you can interact with someone who continues to read that reporter or support that charity despite what you consider bad behavior then you have a society where people with differing opinions can live and work productively together. While this does not prevent people from deciding as a group that they dislike a behavior, a world where people followed this rule would mitigate the worst effects where third parties are pressured into deplatforming while leaving the freedom for people to stop directly supporting things they find horrible.
From Scott's sets of examples, I think this definition would define as cancel culture A5 onwards (unsubscribing from content simply because it platformed actors you dislike), B1 (newspapers holding the university responsible for non-official behavior of an employee), and possibly C2 (holding Atlantic workers responsible could go either way for me depending on whether or not they're in an official capacity at the time). It also leaves me agreeing with P3.
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
the GOP voted against it because…?
The moment Republicans vote for the bill it will be touted as a bipartisan solution/compromise to fix the border crisis. Giving approval to the bill puts their reputation on the line and having it then fail to sufficiently fix the problem would catch them in the fallout and relieve pressure on Biden.
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
Most IoT devices are billed as, "You just plug it in, and it just works!" No one anywhere is standing at a store, looking at the baby monitors, seeing that one of the options lets them listen to it from their phone, and thinking, "Ya know, I really better not think about buying this and plugging it in unless I become an expert in network security."
Let's say you were in charge of fixing this from the advertising side of things. What warnings would you add to this device so that even tech-illiterate users understand the risks of e.g. connecting this baby monitor up to the internet? Simple stuff you can fit on a pop-up or side of the box, because the user isn't reading the 100-page manual that probably already warns about this.
A big part of why you can just hand a toaster to someone with no further explanation is that people actually do know a lot about electricity and household appliances and can avoid the biggest problems. Nobody's dumping a live toaster into the sink to clean it.
Manufacturers should probably take this lower level of knowledge into account, but it's not as easy as "just make the device idiot-proof, like toasters!"
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.
If you haven't already done so, look into paying for a domain name and email hosting. There's a bunch of companies which sell these services, and owning the domain lets you change which is providing your email while retaining the same address. It's not all the way to hosting your own email but it sounds like it could be close enough for the problems you're worried about.
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.
I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?
By disciplining him for not working during his shift, which has nothing to do with the number of stops and everything to do with him ditching work to play games on his phone.
You might object that measuring this is unreasonably hard and that measuring stops is a reasonable proxy to check for that. I disagree.
You can check electronic surveillance, which many police departments are already moving to for other reasons. Body cameras, car cameras, and car GPS systems are a lot more common and any one of these should make it trivial to check if a police officer is doing nothing all day.
If for whatever reason you don't think these tools are sufficient to identify police abandoning their jobs, there's another option that works for any job where workers have overlapping skill sets. You can switch up who does what work. Put the officer who think isn't working on a route where you know other officers regularly make many stops. Rotate a few officers who you know do good work to cover his route. If the pattern of few stops follows the officer who you're suspicious of, that's good evidence that he's not doing his job well enough.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in
Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.
While I do lean towards the skeptical side about how far AI capabilities are going to get long-term, the main goal was to deflate a bit the exaggerated OpenAI claim about current performance that seems to have been cautiously taken at face value so far. Like some others in this thread I found the claim a bit unbelievable, and I had some time to dig into where it came from.
GPT might get good enough to compete with lawyers in the future, but the study doesn't prove that it's there now. In fact, things like needing the exam adjusted to provide each question separately strongly indicate the opposite.
I seem to remember similar arguments being made when Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.
I'm not familiar with them, maybe you could give some examples?
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
GPT-4 can pass a bar exam
…after a bunch of lawyers rewrite the questions and have it repeat the test multiple times with different settings and questions.
That's what you'll find if you read the paper this claim is based on, and this significantly diminishes the impressiveness of the results. A model that only gets results when led around carefully by a skilled human is more like a fancy search engine than the rosy picture of an near-human independent operator that the press releases paint.
Having questions rewritten by another person is almost certainly not allowed in the bar exam - the idea that someone who can understand legal principles and jargon can't comprehend a three-part question is laughable. And taking multiple tries at the same exam to get a better score is definitely out.
In my opinion, a reasonable claim that GPT can pass a bar exam would require demonstration that their chosen parameters generalize to other bar exams and the model would need to be able to answer exams without needing questions to be re-formatted.
Right now this claim looks like false advertising.
P.S. Did you know that the bar exam results were marked by the study authors? Or that all four authors of the study work in one of two companies planning to deliver products applying GPT to law?
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
I know abstractly that the statistics work out, but it feels viscerally disenfranchising.
It sounds to me like your instincts are picking up the increased potential for someone to sneakily cheat under these systems. As a voter, can you tell that the coin toss you're making is fair without referring to outside expertise? If it takes an expert to make the determination that part of the system is working correctly, it gets much easier to cheat.
Would answering that question not require grappling with the "dozens of other problems" raised by gun advocates?
We can't assume that any gun would work in a situation just because shots weren't fired. The threat criminals are reacting to is based on what would happen if the gun their target has (or is likely to have, if they run before they identify the gun) is fired at them. This threat will change once you restrict the guns people are allowed to have to a less dangerous variety.
I can't think of a good way to directly measure whether criminals find a certain gun a sufficient threat to be deterred. Debating stopping power, limited capacity, and other such issues seems like the best proxy we're going to get for whether a gun is a sufficient threat to deter a would-be predator.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
then the deterrent factor is mainly because of the mere presence of the weapon and not its actual utility, because few perpetrators supposedly stick around long enough to get shot.
The problem is, that all those arguments assume that the gun is actually going to be fired, and since that's a statistically slim possibility, it's irrelevant.
If how effective the gun is doesn't matter, why not go all the way and require everyone to carry unloaded guns? Obviously this would not stop anything, showing that it is necessary for the weapon to be effective to deter criminals.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The big deal to a scammer will be the trail of identification that comes with paying money. Twitter probably won't accept a payment directly from crypto so you need a bank account to pay from and you need to get your money into that account. Customer identification laws make both of these steps difficult to perform while keeping your identity secret.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The section of my post you quoted from was my summary of naraburns' claims, not a claim I'm making.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
Absolutely, there's a big difference between the two. But I believe it's clear that naraburns was doing 1), with perhaps a side of "and not knowing this will cause them to be vulnerable to abuse is willful ignorance". I won't clutter the thread repeating it but I've put my explanation of why I think this in response to gemmaem's post below.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
If the issue is the clarity, I think it it important to note that naraburns provided details on what he means by "groomer" a post before the one with the text you quoted. And he mentions in his post that he's using the definition from upthread.
All I did to make that sentence is take the comment you quoted from
Making such materials [books containing drawings of sex] available to children is textbook grooming. Do you honestly advocate for distributing such things to children? If so, you're a groomer, too, by every definition offered in the thread thus far.
But unpacked "groomer" using the definition in his previous comment that PmMeClassicMemes had just replied to.
By contrast, "grooming" describes the act of preparing a child to be abused or exploited, and some common known approaches to grooming are: asking children explicit questions about their sex and sexuality, exposing children to sexually explicit materials, and encouraging children to keep secrets or distance themselves from their parents.
Taken together, I think these clearly get to about the same place as what I wrote does.
This is a shaming tactic: "If you disagree with me on this issue then you are a knowing accessory to child abuse." It's unworthy of this forum, and it's an example of a style of rhetoric that would not be acceptable here if it was coming from someone on the left.
As I recall, the way moderators here have handled inflammatory opinions in the past is to require them to use the minimum level of heat necessary to get their point across. So I think the first hurdle to be crossed in saying this comment was outside the normal standard of behavior here would be to describe how this could have been presented in a less inflammatory manner.
"Providing sexual material to children is preparing them for abuse, you're providing sexual material to children, therefore you are preparing children for abuse" is not a nice thing to say but I have trouble thinking of a way to make it nicer without eliding the opinion it is trying to express.
How do you think naraburns' comments could have been said in a nicer way?
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
I had a similar reaction to the above poster. I suspect you expected the following answer to cover this view:
A) gender and sex are the same thing
The issue I had with this is that it is ignoring reality. I would prefer gender to mean the same thing as sex but some people are clearly using the word differently. Given I'm not a prescriptivist a definition that doesn't match the word's use is not a good definition.
At the same time I think the concept these people are trying to convey is mostly incoherent, poorly defined, and the general concept is pointing at something that doesn't exist. This means the rest of the answers don't work either. It's like asking if Blargle is related to sex - the only right answer is to say the whole question makes no sense.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
the reason short time frames are used is that these are intervention studies and it’s difficult to tell a person to eat a new diet for years.
I'm aware of the difficulties of doing longer term studies, but that doesn't make the results any better. The proper reaction to results like these would be larger, longer, and more focused follow-up tests to ensure they're not just random noise of the kind that will inevitably occur when you apply a large number of tests on a small population.
A short time frame can induce changes in inflammatory markers and some gut changes.
And these lead to the mood improvements that are seen in the studies above? How?
I've heard suggestions that changes in gut bacteria can impact feelings of hunger and sure, being part of the digestive system that sounds plausible. Saying they make you happier is a lot harder to justify.
As for inflammation... if reducing inflammation has significant positive effects on depression shouldn't we have noticed that by now? Many of the most common household medicines are anti-inflammatory drugs.
I've had a look at the studies and I'm not impressed.
I'm not sure how the second study links to life satisfaction, since it appears to be talking about gut microbes and measurements of being in good health. A quick skim of the paper body didn't show any measurement of life satisfaction either so I've ignored it.
The first and third studies cover very short timeframes. It seems obvious that health is an area where bad diet could induce unhappiness that could be resolved by a good diet, but none of these studies cover the kind of timeframe that would be required for a dietary change to result in significant health changes. Neither even covers the "couple months" you said it takes for sugar cravings to go away - shouldn't these people still be craving sugar (and therefore be unhappier than usual) on the timeframes these studies cover?
Given it can't be a major turnaround in health, what changes are being caused by the new diet that would explain substantially improved mood over such a short timeframe? The studies don't seem to have any idea what specific changes they're looking for, since they've thrown a variety of tests that mostly just return insignificant results.
Doing this scattershot approach, especially on small study sizes, is a good way to get meaningless but "statistically significant" results.
I dispute this given the age-related increases in obesity that are higher in sugar-filled diers
I'm asking you to just look at the people around you. Unless you're in a particularly strong bubble then most of them will be eating sugar at least some of the time. Are they constantly eating more and more sugar? Do children brought up occasionally eating cookies eventually graduate to eating whole packets of cookies by adulthood? An addictiveness even a tenth of heroin's should be readily apparent.
If you need to apply statistical tools to populations over years to find see the effect then that already puts its addictiveness leagues away from heroin.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The obvious explanation for sugar consumption being negatively correlated with happiness is that your causation is backward; people whose lives suck eat more sugary food because it's a cheap and easy way to be happier. Eating ice cream to feel better after a breakup is a trope for a reason.
Okay, maybe not entirely backward. It's clearly possible for sugar consumption to reduce your life satisfaction by making you fat. But given the myriad confounding factors it's a big leap to go from correlation to "sugar caused this!"
The comparison to heroin is weird, since the main issue with heroin is that it reduces your baseline happiness and leaves you needing more and more of it to get to normal. Most people keep a stable level of sugar consumption over long periods of time rather than spiraling out of control and eating increasing amounts of it, so sugar doesn't seem to have the same problem that leads to heroin ruining lives.
In no particular order:
- I think maximizing lifespan is a bad idea that makes people unhappy.
A life lived well is measured by how filled it was with things you enjoy, not by the number of years you existed on earth. Banning unhealthy food is a step away from the former and towards the latter. Banning unhealthy food would make people's lives less worth living, to a degree not made up for by the extended lifespan they'd see.
- I think it's infantilizing and controlling to make such a decision for people.
These are adults and ostensibly ones we trust enough to vote on the direction of our country. A democratic state shouldn't be micromanaging their decisions about their own health.
Freedom is generally good and we should need a extremely strong reason and lack of alternative options to resort to having the state restrict it, especially to the degree that banning a category as wide as "unhealthy food" would entail.
- I don't trust the science around healthy vs unhealthy food
What diets are considered good and bad for you has changed immensely just in my living memory. Trying to mandate healthy eating on such a shaky foundation is foolishness and could easily make things worse. Imagine if we mandated high-carb diets based on the food pyramid. Would this have been a sensible decision or a disaster?
- I think restricting unhealthy food via ratcheting up a harm tax would be an extremely dishonest way to achieve that goal
In this particular case, I would also object to the dishonesty of arguing for a tax under grounds that it will be used to pay for the harm of unhealthy food if your goal is actually to use it as a slippery slope towards restricting or banning consumption.
I suspect the purpose of a tax on unhealthy food is not to defray the harm unhealthy food causes but instead to stop people consuming that food. I believe this because that's exactly what has happened with the similar cigarette taxes. They have escalated constantly and are now being replaced with bans on cigarettes in some countries.
I believe once the hard work of getting this tax in place has been done, it will be raised until it achieves the goal of reducing or eliminating consumption of unhealthy food.
I am against banning or restricting unhealthy food and your post does little to convince me that this is not the end point of the suggested tax. Until you have a concrete amount for these taxes and until you can signal credibly that the tax will remain at that level, I am against taxing unhealthy foods to pay for health costs.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
But in for example, the UK, we're already nearly at breaking point with our social care system, and with inflation driven declining standards of living/property bubble, I don't see us having as good a time of it.
Is the crisis in the UK due to paying out pensions, or due to trying to give unrealistically good healthcare to every single person? I've heard a bunch about funding issues with public health in the UK but not much about funding issues with their pensions.
It's possible the UK will try to gut pensions to throw yet more money into the endless pit of healthcare, but the unsustainable element here isn't the part where we pay people a pension for 15-20 years after 40 years of work.
I think the format is just inherently rigged, and in the opposite direction you'd immediately think. The implication of a 1 vs 25 is that the 1 is in the worse position (as in a physical fight), but I think when you have the real-time debate format the inverse is true.
Consider what participating from the 25-person side looks like. Unless you have a very non-real-time debate, the 25 need to share time between themselves and also need to carry on each others' arguments. They need to defend positions another person raised and follow through on a path of attack another person started. And being real time removes the main benefit of having numbers, which is being able to workshop a response and pull out the best ideas from all 25. The result is an inevitable mess.
In practice I suspect the single guy only needs to be moderately consistent with his own statements, not get stumped for a response on anything, and do a passable job of poking holes in the jumbled political positions of 25 people combined in an ad-hoc manner. These aren't trivial tasks but they're well within reach for an experienced debater.
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