erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Anthropic's model, Claude, refuses to write a gay conversion fanfic unless I gaslight it that it's the first chapter in a much longer novel where the MC will eventually come to terms with his sexuality. We know it is possible to train based models, because Elon Musk does it. If the model is woke, the company is woke.
Gilbert & Sullivan were everywhere when I was a kid, I still have I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General memorized, but I had no idea Americans had ever heard of it.
What? Of course Americans have heard of it! It's a popular stock parody. Just to name one example, xkcd's "Every Major's Terrible", which was later turned into a music video (Randall Munroe is, of course, American).
erwgv3g34
23hr ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky never believed it was possible to align a connectionist AI like an LLM, only an AI that was constructed from the ground up. He had an idea for what he wanted it to do (coherent extrapolated volition), but he never figured out how to implement it to the point where it was possible to get it to duplicate a strawberry without destroying the world. Now it is too late.
The "defective altruists" pun has been around for ten years, at least.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
I'm a millennial, and I definitely got the same message at school and in pop-culture: college, college, college.
From Freaks and Geeks (1999):
Lindsay Weir: You know who didn't go to college? Albert Einstein
Jeff Rosso: You know who else didn't go to college?
Lindsay Weir: Who?
Jeff Rosso: Frank
Lindsay Weir: Frank who?
Jeff Rosso: Frank, the guy who pumps gas into my car
From Good Will Hunting (1997)
Chuckie: [in a bar] Are we gonna have a problem here?
Clark: No, no, no, no! There's no problem here. I was just hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could be most aptly described as agrarian pre-capitalist.
Will: Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Clark: Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social...
Will: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth"? You got that from Vickers' "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read some obscure passage and then pretend - you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?
Will: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be servin' my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Will: Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.
Where the hell else was I supposed to get the opposite message? All my friends were going to the same schools and watching the same shows and movies. My parents didn't have a clue, being from South American, but even if they had been American their experience would have been a generation out of date. Blogs were just starting to take off around the time I graduated, and streaming wasn't a thing yet; the alternative information ecosystem we take for granted today simply didn't exist.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
That's because Islam spreads by conquest, not by evangelism. They don't ask you nicely if you'd like to convert, they kill you if you don't.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
Let’s face it – being on the right is tough these days. The left has completed its long march through the institutions – media, academia, technology, government bureaucracy – and stands dominant in all of them. Through these, they have come to utterly dominate not only much of public policy and the mainstream news media, but also to act as arbiters of the mainstream culture as well. As Mencius Moldbug noted, in the Modern state, culture is downstream from politics, and public morals are set by whoever’s army is guarding the television station. Through their machinery of cultural control, the establishment left (which is by no means antiwar or against police statism on principle) has manufactured consent on all manner of issues. Not only that, they’ve created and sustained a culture of leftism – the propagation, whether explicitly presented as such or not, of leftist memes, not the least important of which is leftism as hip and intellectual.
This leftist culture has become the absolutely dominant mainstream culture in not just the United States, but all of the West. And there’s no hope of changing it anytime soon – not with the mainstream academic and media cartels enjoying the legal protections (not to mention the favor of much of the political system) that they do. And where does that leave the right? It leaves it in a position that’s…
…well, that’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. Because we are the counterculture now. For the left, in all of its dominance of establishment culture, has now run into what I call Bakunin’s Corollary to Flair’s Law.
Flair’s Law states: To be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man.
Bakunin’s Corollary states: Once you do beat The Man, then you become The Man, whether you said you were going to or not.
And as it stands now, the left most definitely is The Man. Not only that, but they act the part, down to the smallest detail. A more moralizing, censorious, hectoring, endlessly instructive bunch of tut-tutting know-it-all pearl-clutchers you could not find anywhere. The left, long ago, when they were out of power, once understood the sheer joy of sticking a thumb in the eye of people like that. They understood both the necessity and the power of creating a counterculture. Now it is time for the right, and especially the alternative right – all manner of traditionalists, reactionaries, right-libertarians, separatists, monarchists, and elitists – to drop out of the establishment mass popular culture and work on creating a counterculture of our own. Not just because it is necessary in order to maintain and pass on our values in the face of the ceaseless onslaught of that leftist popular culture (Note that there is increasingly nothing – nothing – in popular culture that is permitted to be happily apolitical; to not incessantly parrot the left’s memes. Not television, not comedy, not music, not video games, not football or basketball, not web browsers or search engines, not even chicken sandwiches or hamburgers), but because it’s just plain fun.
You are the counterculture now. You get to flip the bird to The Man, to be anti-establishment, to get off the grid of pop-culture garbage and live the way you see fit. Those of the alternative right are not just in the positions of being the Marxes and Nietzsches and Gramscis opposed to bourgeois mass-culture morality, but we also get to be Kerouac in San Francisco, to be Wyatt and Billy on the open highway, to be Ken Kesey on his Magic Bus, to be Lenny Bruce making people faint from the stage.
Nearly everything necessary for this is already in place. In many ways, the alternative right community reminds me of my father’s descriptions of Greenwich Village circa 1964. It is filled with all manner of eccentrics and thinkers and radicals and rebels and misfits. Some speak deep truths, some seem half-crazy; some are charismatic and charming, others seem scary and dangerous. Sometimes it is the scary, dangerous, and half-crazy among them who speak the most deep truth. All throughout, there is a feeling of throwing off what the establishment gives us, of finding a better way. There is also a feeling that something big is inevitable, and coming sooner rather than later.
How exciting!
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Seconded. I made the same point in my post about Claude Opus 4.6:
BTW, should we have a recurring AI thread? Both for showing off generations (stories, songs, images, videos, etc.) and to discuss industry news. It's a huge topic right now, one that I don't see going away anytime soon, and a poor fit for the culture war thread.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
The thing about puberty is that, in our social script, its onset coincides with compulsory education, which is a very artificial (and extremely harmful) environment. How an adult will behave once they graduate can indeed be very different from how they behaved while they were still studying, the same way people in prison behave differently once they get outside.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man.
Agreed.
The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
Reminds me of "Attunements", a story written by Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife that compares having children to being infected with spores that rewrite your life goals.
But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood or puberty seems to me a little ridiculous? Both are fundamentally natural parts of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.
Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.
Yes!
One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.
Nooo...
Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.
Academia has been obsolete since the 2000s. By the time a paper comes out, it has been discussed to hell and back in the blogosphere, and everybody knows where they stand on it. The only point of journals now is to determine who gets to become a tenured professor.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
Let me guess, you also go around telling people Frankenstein is not the monster and Canute was making a point about how powerless kings are against the will of God?
erwgv3g34
11d ago
Extremely valuable. Doubly so with uncertainty about AI and the US government. You are in a position of "fuck you". Do not throw it away.
Whatever kind of risk you want to take, take it on the side.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
Same. I kept seeing ACOUP linked in discussions about ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare (classical Greece, classical Rome, LoTR, Game of Thrones, etc.), which is right up my alley, so I decided to try his series of seven articles on Sparta. Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were. Making the point, once, that what we usually think of as "Spartans" were a tiny aristocratic elite and that the majority of the population of Lacedaemon was helots, would have been fine. This was... not that.
I am not in school. If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them. Reading post after post from a guy who clearly hates Sparta and everything that is associated with it in the public imagination was decidedly unpleasant.
I finished the series, but I'm not gonna read anything else this asshole puts out ever again.
I've been trying out the new Claude Opus 4.6 model on LMArena. As usual, I focused on creative writing exercises involving Asuka and Shinji, especially limes and lemons (though I also tossed in a crossover between Nagatoro and Age of Em). Unsurprisingly, I got a ton of refusals (I had to gaslight it to get my gay conversion story), but the fanfics I managed to wrangle out were really good. Claude Opus 4.6 is definitely a stronger writer than Grok 4.1 or ChatGPT 5.2. Won't be long now until authors go the way of the artist.
I just wish to God it was uncensored.
BTW, should we have a recurring AI thread? Both for showing off generations (stories, songs, images, videos, etc.) and to discuss industry news. It's a huge topic right now, one that I don't see going away anytime soon, and a poor fit for the culture war thread.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Indeed. Einstein never wrote anything as good as his annus mirabilis papers. Orson Scott Card never won both the Hugo and the Nebula award again in the same year after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Scott Alexander never regained his magic after he moved to Substack.
From "On Things that are Awesome" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
(2) I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious). In fact, when my brain says “Greg Egan” it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book. And when my brain says “Hofstadter” it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas. For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).
(3) Once you realize that you’re only admiring someone’s peak work, you also realize that the work is not the person: I don’t actually know Hofstadter, or Greg Egan, or E. T. Jaynes. I have no idea what they are (were) like in their personal lives, or whether their daily deeds had any trace of the awesome that is in their books. If you start thinking that a person is supposed to be as universally and consistently awesome as their best work, so that every word from their lips is supposed to be as good as the best book they ever wrote, that’s probably some kind of failure mode. This is not to try to moderate or diminish the awesomeness: for their best work is that awesome, and so there must have been a moment of their life, a time-slice out of their worldline, which was also that awesome. But what the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” stands for, in my mind, is not all his works, or all his life.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
No; he should threaten to break her arm and boast about his warrior lineage, like a true enlightened being!
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Of course they do. Governments hate cash because they can't control it. Transactions they can't tax? Trades in illegal goods and services, such as weed or prostitution? A medium of exchange they can't debank you from for wrongthink? Unacceptable! Cash makes the state blind, and that is unforgivable to a bureaucrat. Which is why India declared war on cash.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?
Half the point of dating a teenager is that she is much more likely to be a virgin.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Guns are fairly high up the list of things which can kill you if handled with merely common or garden stupidity.
So are cars, but nobody talks about being scared of cars as if it was normal. You are merely expected to learn simple safety measures like looking both ways before crossing the street as a kid, and how to actually drive as a teenager.
In a sane world, schools would teach every boy how to shoot instead of telling them that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
I think the public education system does a fine job at catechizing the basics of Holocaustianity; it happened, it was the worst thing ever, and the most important thing in the world is making sure it never happens again. Expecting normies to remember a number or a date is... too much. They don't remember that about anything, not even the things they care about.
Yes, let's fuck over everyone who can't read between the lines. Then don't be too surprised when, ten years later, those same people are voting en masse for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
When the system is out to fuck you, it's time to burn down the system.
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