erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Visitor: I suppose I can imagine a hypothetical world in which one country screws things up as badly as you describe. But your planet has multiple governments, I thought. Or did I misunderstand that? Why wouldn’t patients emigrate to—or just visit—countries that made better hospitals legal?
Cecie: The forces acting on governments with high technology levels are mostly the same between countries, so all the governments of those countries tend to have their medical system screwed up in mostly the same way (not least because they’re imitating each other). Some aspects of dysfunctional insurance and payment policies are special to the US, but even the relatively functional National Health System in Britain still has failure of professional specialization. (Though they at least don’t require doctors to have philosophy degrees.)
Visitor: Is there not one government that would allow a reasonably designed hospital staffed by specialists instead of generalists?
Cecie: It wouldn’t be enough to just have one government’s okay. You’d need some way to initially train your workers, despite none of our world’s medical schools being set up to train them. A majority of legislators won’t benefit personally from deciding to let you try your new hospital in their country. Furthermore, you couldn’t just go around raising money from rich countries for a venture in a poor country, because rich countries have elaborate regulations on who’s allowed to raise money for business ventures through equity sales. The fundamental story is that everything, everywhere, is covered with varying degrees of molasses, and to do any novel thing you have to get around all of the molasses streams simultaneously.
Visitor: So it’s impossible to test a functional hospital design anywhere on the planet?
Cecie: But of course.
Visitor: I must still be missing something. I just don’t understand why all of the people with economics training on your planet can’t go off by themselves and establish their own hospitals. Do you literally have people occupying every square mile of land?
Cecie: … How do I phrase this…
All useful land is already claimed by some national government, in a way that the international order recognizes, whether or not that land is inhabited. No relevant decisionmaker has a personal incentive to allow there to be unclaimed land. Those countries will defend even a very small patch of that claimed land using all of the military force their country has available, and the international order will see you as the aggressor in that case.
Visitor: Can you buy land?
Cecie: You can’t buy the sovereignty on the land. Even if you had a lot of money, any country poor enough and desperate enough to consider your offer might just steal your stuff after you moved in.
Negotiating the right to bring in weapons to defend yourself in this kind of scenario would be even more unthinkable, and would spark international outrage that could prevent you from trading with other countries.
To be clear, it’s not that there’s a global dictator who prevents new countries from popping up; but every potentially useful part of every land is under some system’s control, and all of those systems would refuse you the chance to set up your own alternative system, for very similar reasons.
Visitor: So there’s no way for your planet to try different ways of doing things, anywhere. You literally cannot run experiments about things like this.
Cecie: Why would there be? Who would decide that, and how would they personally benefit?
Visitor: That sounds extremely alarming. I mean, difficulties of adoption are one thing, but not even being able to try new things and see what happens… Shouldn’t everyone on your planet be able to detect at a glance how horrible things have become? Can this type of disaster really stand up to universal agreement that something is wrong?
Cecie: I’m afraid that our civilization doesn’t have a sufficiently stirring and narratively satisfying conception of the valor of “testing things” that our people would be massively alarmed by its impossibility. And now, Visitor, I hope we’ve bottomed out the general concept of why people can’t do things differently—the local system’s equilibrium is broken, and the larger system’s equilibrium makes it impossible to flee the game.
The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations." Or, as Heinlein put it:
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
I literally had a guest ask me if I was pro or anti AI datacenters at my hotel, apropos of nothing.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Just upload it to The Motte.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Most of the Sequences were originally posted on the old Overcoming Bias blog (the one that was Typepad powered), then later exported to LessWrong (back when it was a reddit clone), and now live on LessWrong 2.0.
For example, here's "When None Dare Urge Restraint" on Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and LessWrong 2.0.
Yes, the wizarding world doesn't seem to have anything like the institution of college; you are considered a full adult when you graduate at 17.
Add to that that education at Hogwarts is surprisingly hands-on; there is some theory ("twelve inches of parchment on the properties of moonstone and its uses in potion-making, to be handed in on Thursday"), but students are casting spells and brewing potions from year one, and it is treated as an outrageous anomaly when Umbridge wants to remove the practical portion of her DADA class. Compare to modern real-world schools, where courses like shop class and home ec are pushed aside to make room for moar uni prep.
And, of course, Lily and James came of age during wartime, which is the best possible circumstance for young people to make a name for themselves and have a real impact. Napoleon was a lieutenant-colonel at 23; Audie Murphy become the most decorated soldier in American history at 20.
Claude Fable is back! I spent as much time on Chatbot Arena as I could to take advantage of the honeymoon phase, but that's over now (for those of you who don't know, when a new model is first added to LMArena there is a brief period of time when it shows up unusually frequently in battles, presumably to help the algorithm quickly rank it). The end result was two pages of prompts and replies.
Now that I have had more time to play around with it, I feel like maybe my original comment on the Culture War Roundup thread was a little too negative. No, Claude Fable is not superpersuasive, but it's still the strongest creative writing model in history. Some of the stories ("The Measure of Hayase", "The Grass Grows Over Everything", and "The Flying Library") actually made me tear up a little, which is a first for any model.
Interestingly, none of the comedies impressed me nearly as much; an equivalent performance would have had me crying in laughter. From which I conclude that Fable is better at writing drama than humor. I guess the old adage is true: "dying is easy, comedy is hard".
I haven't had any luck getting NSFW responses yet. When I sneak past the Arena's censors to send an obfuscated prompt, Anthropic's own censors prevent a response. When I get past Anthropic's censors by toning down the prompt, the model itself refuses to answer. And when I somehow manage to get a response out of the model to a risque prompt, it always completely avoids anything explicit. This model is locked down tighter than a nun's asshole!
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Your reddit link is broken; it only works on new reddit, but The Motte automatically changes the link to old reddit.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
I don't have insurance, but I pay $35 per visit and $30 for labs at the local community health center.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You are feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she can go and get ravaged by another man. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it has one simple result: her body is more enjoyable for other men.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random man who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who marries her. He gets to ravage her every night. He gets the benefits of her kind and sweet personality that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to raise a girl for another man to enjoy. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.
No, they wouldn't, because that would be illegal. Degrees are an unprincipled exception to disparate impact.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Most languages feature some form of T-V distinction or similar formality management, but English has lost this distinction, and in exactly the opposite direction of the stereotype: English has lost the informal form and retained only the formal form! It's not that Anglos began classifying foreigners as family: it's that they began classifying their own families as strangers.
The same thing happened with Colombian Spanish. I like to think of it as politeness inflation.
In fact, informality has been so lost that even native English speakers often perceive the T-V formality backwards: "thou" is often perceived as formal!
Well, yes. Most people these days encounter thee/thou/thy in either Shakespeare and or the King James Bible (early modern English), which makes it sound more formal.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
The East Asians are pretty much already there, and Latinos can probably make it, too. But Indians and Muslims? I don't see it. They will remain distinct, unassimilable groups, like blacks.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
As usual, it's who, whom. Leftists are totally fine with George Takei getting introduced to the wonderful world of gay sex at 14 by a camp counselor, but God forbid a man in his thirties should date a college girl!
erwgv3g34
9d ago
If your car's door must touch another car in order to let you in, there is not enough space there to park safely. Drive around until you find a better parking spot, ideally three empty ones in a row so that you can safely park in the middle. Parking spots are like urinals; you don't want to be next to anybody.
If you were already parked there and she is the one who parked her car so close to yours, then it is she who is at fault.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
erwgv3g34
9d ago
People who intrinsically dislike immigrants: I don’t appeal to, but I’m sure they’re the minority, even prominent anti-immigrant politicians have immigrant friends/family (e.g. the AfD leader’s Sri Lankan wife).
Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
I think it takes hundreds of hours, but those hours are themselves easy, unlike math. Such that, young children can complete those hours, whereas they often can't grasp algebra at all, so algebra hours have to wait.
Then why is it that so many students who spend hundreds of hours studying a foreign language in school come out the other end not knowing how to speak them?
Most kids have the capacity to learn a language really easily, because humans are designed to learn to talk. They don't have the capacity to learn two. At best, the second language overwrites the first language and they forget their native tongue (as happens to very young immigrants) or they completely forget the second language once they are no longer required to study it (as happens to millions of American students who take French or Spanish in high school). At worst, they end up speaking a shitty creole of both languages (e.g. Spanglish).
From "The Myth of 'They Weren't Ever Taught…'" by Education Realist:
All teachers working in low-ability populations go through a discovery process.
Stage One: I will describe this stage for algebra I teachers, but plug in reading, geometry, writing, science, any subject you choose, with the relevant details. This stage begins when teachers realize that easily half the class adds the numerators and denominators when adding fractions, doesn’t see the difference between 3-5 and 5-3, counts on fingers to add 8 and 6, and looks blank when asked what 7 times 3 is.
Ah, they think. The kids weren’t ever taught fractions and basic math facts! What the hell are these other teachers doing, then, taking a salary for showing the kids movies and playing Math Bingo? Insanity on the public penny. But hey, helping these kids, teaching them properly, is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So they push their schedule back, what, two weeks? Three? And go through fraction operations, reciprocals, negative numbers, the meaning of subtraction, a few properties of equality, and just wallow in the glories of basic arithmetic. Some use manipulatives, others use drills and games to increase engagement, but whatever the method, they’re basking in the glow of knowledge that they are Closing the Gap, that their kids are finally getting the attention that privileged suburban students get by virtue of their summer enrichment and more expensive teachers.
At first, it seems to work. The kids beam and say, “You explain it so much better than my last teacher did!” and the quizzes seem to show real progress. Phew! Now it’s possible to get on to teaching algebra, rather than the material the kids just hadn’t been taught.
But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes. Many students who demonstrated mastery of distributing multiplication over addition are now making a complete hash of the process in multi-step equations. And many students are still counting on their fingers.
It’s as if they weren’t taught at all.
But teachers are resilient. They redouble their efforts. They spend additional time on “warm-up” questions, they “activate prior knowledge” to reteach even the simple subjects that have apparently been forgotten, and they pull down all the kaleidoscopic, mathy posters and psychology-boosting epigrams they’d hung up in their optimistic naivete and paper the walls with colorful images formulas and algorithms.
They see progress in the areas they review—until they realize that the kids now have lost knowledge in the areas that weren’t being taught for the first time or in review, much as if the new activity caused them to overwrite the original files with the new information.
At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at best confuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.
That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.
From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:
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.
Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.
Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.
Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.
Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.
You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.
How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.
And from "The Numbers Speak: Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money" by Bryan Caplan:
The average high school graduate spends two years studying a foreign language. (Digest of Education Statistics, Table 157) What effect do these years of study have on Americans’ actual ability to speak foreign languages?
I started by looking at the Census, but it asks only about “languages spoken in the home.” Gallup has a survey finding that one-in-four Americans can speak a foreign language, but it offers no further details that would allow us to measure degree of fluency or the effect of foreign language instruction. After nosing around for better data, I turned to the General Social Survey. As usual, I was not disappointed.
...
The results showed an even smaller effect of foreign language instruction on foreign language fluency than I expected.
25.7% of respondents speak a language other than English. Within this sample, 41.5% claim to speak the other language “very well.” Within this sub-sub-sample, just 7.0% say they learned to speak this foreign language in school. If you multiply out these three percentages, you get 0.7%. The marginal product of two years of pain and suffering per high school graduate: less than one student in a hundred acquires fluency. (And that’s self-assessed fluency, which people almost surely exaggerate).
If you lower the bar from “very well” to “well” the picture remains grim: merely 2.5% of GSS respondents claimed to reach this level of foreign language competence in school.
Fans of foreign languages will probably just respond, “That’s why we have to pour more resources into foreign languages.” I say it would be far better to give fans of foreign languages a free economics lesson. Here goes:
1. Lots of stuff that sounds good isn’t worth doing. “Learning a foreign language” sounds noble, but so does “climbing Mount Everest.” The wise calmly weigh costs and benefits instead of being carried away by words. Any honest scale will tell you that the costs of foreign language instruction dwarf the benefits. Think about it: Even ignoring teachers’ salaries, we’re currently burning two years of class time per graduate. The payoff? Making less than one student in a hundred fluent.
2. Doubling an input normally less than doubles output. The world usually has what economists call “diminishing returns“: you can improve outcomes by spending more money, but the more you spend, the less efficacious each dollar becomes. The fact that two full years of instruction have almost zero effect implies that massive spending increases would be required to noticeably raise foreign language fluency. Think about all the Canadian adults who don’t speak French after a decade of required study.
3. Foreign language fluency is more common in other countries for a reason. People around the world strive to learn English. Why? Because English fluency frequently helps them get good jobs, meet interesting people, and enjoy culture. Pretty obvious, right? To understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages, simply reverse this reasoning. We don’t learn foreign languages because foreign languages rarely helps us get good jobs, meet interesting people, or enjoy culture. Americans start in an unusually abundant and diverse economic, social, and cultural pool, so we have little reason to stray. And if Americans do decide to sample other pools, we can literally travel the world without needing to learn a word of another language.
I may sound like a typical philistine economist. So let me confess that I personally got a lot of value out of my two years of college German. I’m an opera fan; knowing a bit of German enhances my experience. But this hardly means that most Americans would benefit from learning a foreign language. All romance aside, requiring Americans to learn foreign languages makes about as much sense as requiring them to hear operas. What inspires the few, torments the many. Elites who relish foreign languages and opera should show some tolerance for the rest of humanity instead of calling for government spending to correct a “problem” that’s only in our minds.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
My main contention is that straight male oriented media should be completely off-zone for any kind of woke-washing. This means blockbuster films and AAA video games should be allowed to exclusively pander to straight men without any concessions to women or LGBT.
I largely agree. But, devil's advocate: adding a romance subplot to an otherwise male-centric IP is (was?) a common way to appeal to women (e.g. Han/Leia in Star Wars). Allowed?
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.
The male sex drive is so strong because it has to be to deal with female frigidity. You can clearly see what would happen if both partners had a woman's sex drive in lesbian couples; it's called lesbian bed death.
It is only by combining male horniness and aggression with female selectivity and passiveness that you get a healthy relationship. We're complements, designed by Gnon to bring out the best of each other. Gays demonstrate the worst of mankind; male sexuality unrestrained.
erwgv3g34
15d ago
Video backups:
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2069354457117388802/vid/avc1/1280x720/5HMLCJhzDVe_P9pw.mp4
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2069136759535837184/vid/avc1/356x640/5a2XMFxz2oj710_8.mp4
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2069111662708195328/vid/avc1/528x944/7WQTnZ_PspNQhDlz.mp4
Manifesto backup:
erwgv3g34
16d ago
erwgv3g34
16d ago
"Children Believe Every Lie" and "How To Believe False Things" should be required reading for any rationalist.
erwgv3g34
16d ago
The notion that retardation is a mitigating rather than aggravating factor in regards to criminal culpability is sufficient on its own to condemn an entire legal philosophy.
... "Congenitally incapable of avoiding criminality even if he wanted to, so innocent I guess."
-- This is the kind of argument the technical term 'shitlib' was coined for.
What indeed.
My life ended 19 years ago; I simply lacked the courage to do the honorable thing.
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