faceh
2hr ago
I don't think you were wrong to make the predictions, but try to give a confidence estimate next time for sanity checking purposes.
And props for taking the outcome with good humor.
faceh
2hr ago
I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.
I'll take that bet, but only if "Vance/Desantis 2028" yard signs and flags count as a change, since I think that would easily be 'attributable' to Donald Trump. As far as Material changes, go, I have a few Hispanic neighbors, its entirely possible some of the are here illegally, so if they get removed and housing prices in the neighborhood go down due to fewer migrants in the South Florida area generally that can probably be attributed to Trump as well.
Note: I like my neighbors so I'm not going to be the one calling ICE.
faceh
4hr ago
Days like this I kinda wish I was still on Reddit because I couldn't resist telling them how badly they screwed up for things to get this far and reminding them how utterly powerless they are to stop what is coming (whatever that is, I can't even say for sure), and if they had an ounce of self-awareness and the ability to reflect, this might cause them to change some of their beliefs about the world but no, they will be stuck in a cycle of learned helplessness because they can't even exit the echo chamber that has rendered them completely incapable of interfacing with the reality on the ground, and the beliefs 'normal' people hold anymore.
And also Sotomayor has a decent chance of dying or retiring in the next 3 years so lol enjoy having that shoe waiting to drop the entire time.
I'm not really sadistic, but that site has really become a pustulent sore on the Internet's face. I want to keep poking it until it pops. At least 4chan has the decency to stay hidden on the internet's ass.
faceh
4d ago
Yeah. I should have specified that the strong correlation is found among the young, not the older groups.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/teenagers-problematic-smartphone-use-are-twice-likely-have-anxiety
Note this study where anxiety disorders among adolescents are generally decreasing over decades in the 'developing' world (smartphones less common!) and INCREASING in developed countries:
Yeah its almost paradoxical. On one end, if there is extremely high pressure to attend/not flake then attendance seems to be more reliable (maybe there's a nonrefundable charge of some kind or some other major cost for not attending). Or its an extremely desirable event that isn't repeated often, like a popular band's concert or similar.
On the other end, if its lowkey, minimal cost, and you just invite as many as possible and don't really put much pressure on attendance then you also get pretty decent turnout (although oftentimes people will happily arrive 'late' or leave 'early.'
Its the middle zone, where you invite people to an event with a CLEAR expectation that they will show up if they agree to, and where the main 'cost' of flaking is losing social points, and you put in at least a medium amount of effort to following up with people/'securing' commitments to come where people are most likely to cancel on the day of. Probably a combination of feeling pressured to accept at the time they're being asked, and then 'deciding' later that its really not that serious and cancelling.
There's also a particular dynamic with females. I specifically try to have mixed-gender gatherings (part of my goal is to get people of opposite sex to form connections and maybe create dates and relationships), but with females in particular, they tend to only want to come if they can 'know' that other females will be there. And if they aren't coordinating directly with other females but instead through me, the organizer, there's an information asymetry. If I tell them "oh yeah plenty of women are coming" how much do they trust my word? So last minute flakes are probably the rule there.
And the end result seems to be that usually NO (single) females attend an informal event unless there is some other major enticement. Some girls will attend with their boyfriend, and sometimes a lone female shows up and ends up being the only female there and hangs around somewhat awkwardly then leaves early, unless someone manages to engage her in a friendly conversation and puts her at ease. I've gotten decent at that.
The trick I've tried lately to some success is to try to invite two females at the same time (i.e. approach both simultaneously so they can both see/hear the other accept the invitation). And likewise if I have a female friend that I'm sure is coming I ask her to follow up with/confirm other females attending. It feels like an interesting game, trying to lure a woman who is extremely skittish about going to events with unfamiliar people out long enough to gain her trust.
I'm sure there are more secrets to getting women to attend but its a very consistent pattern at this point.
While ease of communication seems like a good thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of making it easier to flake.
Yeah, I think your whole first section makes sense when you include the whole "devaluation of relationships" aspect.
THAT'S the part that makes it so easy to be flaky. If you truly value the relationship with your friends, you make an effort to be at the event as planned, because even if its easy to cancel last minute, you know that this will eventually lose you status points (you'd lose more in the older days where people would be stuck waiting for you and get pissed) and people will stop inviting you at all, eventually leaving you out of everything.
This is bad if its hard to find new friends OR there aren't many things to do by yourself. But guess what? You can make friends online! You can pay an Onlyfans girl to talk to you while you sit at home! You can watch a streamer and PRETEND he's your friend!
If you REALLY fuck up and gain a bad reputation throughout your town, its relatively easy to move to a new town and make new friends quickly.
I have to imagine that 'ghosting' dates was simply NOT a common practice before dating apps, for similar reasons. You really needed to keep your appointments because the pool of potential dates was relatively small and so if you offended too many you might be locked out of dating altogether. Instead, of course, you ghost one match because you can always go back to swiping with zero penalty.
So now it is easier to be flakey without wrecking your social status, AND its easier to move on if you do wreck the status.
And that flips over to your arguments that phones are now status symbols. Which man, I hadn't thought deeply on that and there's something to unpack there.
For me, I place an insanely high value on maintaining relationships, so I have inbuilt incentive to honor my commitments once made, and I thus hate hate hate feeling like my personal relationships have been devalued. But the world is how it is. I just put in the effort to maintain the friendships I really care about.
faceh
5d ago
Yeah, I've heard it said that the internet is, broadly, a 'pull' medium rather than a 'push' one. Contrast to, say, broadcast TV.
That is, the user gets to request the content, and then control which content is actually displayed on their device, they don't have to accept ads or videos even if the provider really wants to send them.
UNLESS they are in a phone app that doesn't allow that control. So getting people into an App where the environment is less user-controlled is a major win in the long term. I've seen so many sorts of incentives offered to try and get me to install certain apps and I am more than happy to just keep using my mobile browser with adblock because I value my sanity and avoiding malicious persuasion attempts more than whatever they're offering.
But my point there is I think even with such a mandate, companies will manage to get a LOT of people into their apps.
A good question to examine. The more marriage-minded ones would probably be selected out by getting married early to some large degree.
I can say there's an unfortunately high number I've noticed who are just horndog lotharios who know how to appeal to young women (of a certain type), and are unrepentant about that. And some who get divorced or otherwise find themselves single in middle or late life and decide to go for it.
It is more than fair to say that there's increased competition for the young, marriageable women due to older guys also jumping in the pool.
As to how they treat the women, well, there's nobody actively policing these guys so we can be pretty sure there's some significant amount of destructive behavior occurring.
faceh
5d ago
Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.
Whoah now buddy, that could turn me into some kind of... extrovert?
More seriously, the type of friends I make tend to be introverted nerds so generally speaking they don't like planning and holding events, so I do most of the heavy lifting there. But when somebody is putting in the effort to coordinate something, be it trivia or just hanging out at a park and tossing a frisbee, I want to recognize that effort and show up for it.
I'll be honest, its a good way to sort high agency people from low agency ones. The sort who actually plan events and put out the word and do the legwork to 'make things happen' are generally high functioning and reliable, which is a signal correlated with other good traits, generally. That is the signal I'm trying to send.
faceh
5d ago
Reasonable hypothesis.
It gels with my general model that scared/anxious citizens are more conformist and easier to sway by simply telling them what to be afraid of and how they can alleviate their anxiety by voting the 'right' way come election time. It failed to produce the desired outcome in 2024 but there are plenty of folks who still think we're about to collapse into a fascist dictatorship.
Phone use and anxiety and similar disorders is very strongly correlated in the research, so that's one way to 'produce' your loyal voters.
faceh
6d ago
If I can steelman an argument: If they're married, working professionals trying to build their own life, have kids, etc. its not particularly efficient for them to donate times to various causes that, while altruistic, are also burning up manhours that they could use on things that produce more value, and for which they capture more of the value.
They're married, so they don't need to meet potential partners.
If they donate a sufficient portion of their money to the church, ostensibly this should substitute for actually doing the low-value work themselves?
What does the Bible actually command about spending your own time in service of the poor?
Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community.
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
He judges a relationship with a significant age gap as ethical if Older Gay Guy leaves the Young Sexy Twink no worse or, ideally, "better off" at the end of the relationship. If you use a younger, inexperienced person for young, sexy sex, then don't leave them homeless, friendless, and drug-addicted at the end of it.
That's approximately my take on age-gap relationships. But the question of better off can be 'squishy' because its hard to really imagine the counterfactual scenario where they didn't have the relationship.
But it seems that ethically the older person should be actively trying to leave them in a better position, financially, career-wise, or at least creating a more stable life-path for them so that when the older guy exits, the woman's life isn't immediately thrown into chaos.
For heterosexual women, there's the issue of their eventually waning fertility, where a dalliance with an older man that lasts a year or more is inherently decreasing their chances of having kids. Or if they do have kids and the guy leaves, now they're really up a creek, and the kid is probably worse off too in ways that giving them financial support probably won't make up for.
So I think there is an inherent cost to a powerful man using his status to string along young, possibly naive women and making it much harder for said woman to end up in a stable, happy life situation, and those costs often are NOT internalized by that man.
If a woman wants to curry favor through sex with a powerful -- in this context -- guy that may help her career, then she has to use her judgment of his character and cross her fingers. If she wants to curry favor with a powerful guy that is known to be a womanizer that should enter into her assessment.
The objection here is that its often hard to know when a guy is a 'known' womanizer and exactly how bad his proclivities are. Sure there's an obvious baseline for most guys, but unless other women are taking down detailed notes of their experience and sharing it with other females (sometimes happens!) there's a clear information asymmetry there, and one that a woman may not even knows exist.
faceh
6d ago
I expect the rate of satisfaction from these encounters to be in excess of the base rate of satisfaction per encounter for normal sexual relationships, which for reference averages around 69%.
Now THIS is the sort of argument that keeps me coming back to The Motte.
Seriously. Asking about the base rate of 'satisfaction' with celebrity sex encounters is a 'fun' and relevant question.
I can't actually disagree with your estimate, either. I'd guess that the glow of having someone you idolize giving you the most intimate of attention and (one hopes) pleasure is a particular kind of ecstasy for the monkey brain. Like, imagine a teen boy who was fantasizing about, I dunno, young Christie Brinkley for his entire adolescence, then after he turns 18 he has a chance encounter with her where she gives him the thing he'd dreamt about and he has an incredible story to tell for the rest of his life. Hard to imagine the guy having any regrets.
But I also expect that the same idolization leads to expectations that necessarily exceed the reality of human capabilities, so there's likely to be some amount of disappointment upon realizing that well-maintained celeb is but a man and thus has finite stamina, makes awkward sounds and smells during sex, and may not administer amazing pillow talk. So the delta between expectations and reality is probably where some of the 'regret' can be found.
Yeah, its a bit hard to compare Apples to Apples with regard to marriage when the concept used to be a set of mutually reinforcing obligations/responsibilities to the other party that were considered ironclad expectations of each party under penalty of literal hellfire in some cases.
And since connubials included an expectation of regular sexual relations (although with the intent of conceiving children, I suppose), one of the parties denying that to the other was a clear breach or default of their obligations, and enforcing 'specific performance' on the party in default... rather makes sense as a solution?
I get that it's a squishy question, how much sex is it 'fair' to expect from a partner, but it is weird that we still have the general ceremonial trappings of marriage as an ironclad 'contract' ('til death do us part!) and yet have tossed away almost any 'enforcement' mechanisms and let people breach and exit them at will.
I'm glad someone did the write up on this so I didn't have to.
I have to update some previous thoughts from six months ago on this matter.
A lot of the described behavior is bad enough to absolutely deserve moral approbation.
I'd still argue that the contributions the man makes to the culture 'outweigh' the harms he's caused, so its simply not economically efficient to lock the man out of writing stories, but maybe do lock the guy in his house and don't let him leave, and any ladies who visit should be fully informed of his proclivities and signing off on a very explicit waiver so they know what they're getting into.
One thing that did jump out though, some of these women attached themselves with clear hopes of career advancement or increased fame thanks to his influence. It seems like none of them got any of that.
So here's an out-there question: Is Neil's conduct arguably worse than Harvey Weinstein's? Weinstein, at least, had the juice to make the women he abused into stars once he was done with them.
Is it worse to NOT actually do a quid pro quo when using your status to get women to sleep with you for favors? Especially with the more painful stuff he inflicted.
I guess I'd call it a bifurcation.
I read the material that suggests all the pieces are in place to achieve superintelligence.
But I'm also reading reports that the most recent training runs are seeing diminishing returns. So making the models BIGGER isn't giving the same results.
Which certainly explains why OpenAI hasn't pushed ChatGPT5 out the door, if it can't demonstrate as significant an improvement as 3-4 was.
So improvements and tweaks to existing models are giving us gains in the meantime, it isn't very clear to me where the quantum leap that will enable true AGI/Superintelligence is hiding. Which is more a me issue, I'm certainly not an insider. I'm just seeing two sides, those who think moar compute is good enough, and those who think its going to take some tricky engineering.
And Altman sure isn't telling us what he's seeing. So my question is whether he's playing cards close to the vest to avoid popping the hype bubble or because he really thinks he's going to blow us away with the next product. Possibly blow us away in the most literal meaning of the word.
Yep. I may be wrong but I seem to recall that there was a brief period of time where a lot of folks in the space did genuinely think improvements would continue to follow the exponential curve even if individual jumps between new models were a little smaller.
Or at least were willing to hype it that way. I'm prepared to be corrected if my memory is faulty there.
There was certainly a 'vibe' that we might have activated the fast takeoff scenario.
faceh
14d ago
I think it's probable that AGI/ASI is less than 10 years away. The critics increasingly resemble the critics of evolution, worshiping the "god of the gaps" for the increasingly small things that AI can't do. The progress in the last year alone has been staggering.
What's currently stopping AI from contributing to improvements in AI tech, do you think?
faceh
14d ago
Ironically, this would also describe the writing of AI/LLMs themselves when you prompt them to show any sort of character or express a "personal" opinion.
It does, but at least with some prompt engineering you can get them to distill down to the actual informational content.
At this rate Sam could get replaced by an actual AI halfway through the singularity and literally nobody would notice.
Perhaps that's the joke. This is him asking the latest GPT model to spit out his annual report and see if anybody calls him on it.
If I had to guess they feel the AGI competition, current Claude is near-strictly better already and the recent Deepseek V3 seems quite close while being orders of magnitude cheaper (epistemic status: haven't tested much yet). If I had no big-dick reveals in the pipeline I'd probably look to cut and run too.
I already got suspicious when they released SORA to the wild, which is an impressive model but is now arriving late to the table in terms of publicly-available video generation capabilities.
OpenAI had what seemed like a 'comfortable' lead for about a year there, but if progress had remained exponential or even linear from the past models they should be running away with the game. Instead the other close competitors seem to be chomping steadily away at their lunch.
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing.
I'd mostly agree.
It personally sets my teeth on edge to read something that clearly wants to inspire strong emotions in the reader or perhaps persuade them of something but doesn't actually speak of anything that is happening to be excited about.
Its the difference between saying "We've received and analyzed the test results which have provided us with an unparalleled depth of understanding regarding the intricate nuances of your overall health and physiological dynamics. The insights gained from this process are both illuminating and inspiring, offering an exciting roadmap for continued progress and optimization. We are deeply committed to partnering with you on this transformative journey, leveraging future interactions to refine our approach, enhance the granularity of our feedback, and will ensure you remain in top condition in the coming decades!"
(ironically, I used ChatGPT to generate the most corpo-speak version of that sentence possible)
vs. "The test came back negative. You're cancer free, congrats!"
The first just desperately wants you to feel good without delivering the information you actually would like to hear that would make you happy. The second actually gives you the reason to be happy because there's a tangible fact about the world that is 'good,' and you just needed to hear it said.
I also note that there are no concrete examples of how their products have improved productivity for any companies already. Either the examples they have are underwhelming or maybe they aren't allowed to discuss it? Otherwise why not talk about tangible achievements?
I'm increasingly annoyed when the AI 'insiders' will speak reverently about how they're instantiating a Godhead that will relieve us of all the miserable burdens of our mortal existence in the near future, but will get hugely cagey about how that's actually being done or why we can trust them do to his correctly. They talk about things in religious/spiritual terms when telling us what the future holds, but hew to corpo-speak and remain businesslike when asked about present status.
It reads like a particularly opaque sort of intentional hype cycle that might be mostly designed to inspire us to transfer tons of wealth to them before AI progress stalls out for a while.
I think that most people my age and younger have embraced this sense of being musically and culturally omnivorous.
This rings very true to me.
The phrase "I like everything but rap and country" had proliferated in the past 10 years, and I think now rap and country have snuck into respectability for the majority of people.
So the subcultures can survive, but maybe people prefer not to pigeonhole themselves by saying they only listen to certain genres because they damn well know they're missing out on great music elsewhere.
At the same time, I think the 'mystique' of the performers has been dissipated in the current era, and there's now a real layer of irony over 'antisocial' lyrics and 'edgy' genres because everyone knows that the vast majority of popular artists live cushy lives in gated communities and do normal people things with their families when not performing, so much like professional wrestling, we all agree to accept the kayfabe for purposes of enjoying the product. Although I'll say that Ronnie Radke might actually be living his music. Although irony of ironies his partner is a pro wrestler.
K-pop, hyperpop, synthwave/vaporwave, drill rap, rap-country, and, as you named, phonk.
Being MEGA controversial, I don't see any of those aside from Phonk as a notable 'new' genres in that they aren't forging new paths, but following ones that are rather well-trodden already. If I wanted to piss a bunch of people off, I'd argue that drill rap is a regression to a less impressive and sophisticated form of music, but then maybe that's the point; a lot of modern hip-hop is arguably 'overproduced' now. I just wonder at the fact that Two 70 year old Englishmen are arguably the best Drill rappers operating right now. Helps that they're not in prison or dead, which seems the most likely end to a Drill artist's career.
Rap-Country (I love the term "Gangstagrass" myself but alas) is a great innovation but its still two very identifiable genres mashed together rather than its own 'thing.'
Like, is Nightcore really a genre that stands on its own when its just pitch/tempo-shifted version of existing songs?
On that note however, I think there's a LOT of room to experiment with covers of existing songs and mild remixes.
I keep a playlist of metal/hard rock covers of songs that I think are arguably superior to the originals. Its gotten larger as of lately, I think artists have noticed you can get attention for skilled but surprising new takes on popular songs
When you run out of novel material, why not try mashing up existing stuff to see what comes out.
Now with AI, this is easier than ever. I managed to get Suno to produce a Spanish hard rock/metal song that incorporated the Marimba, that's something I haven't heard before ever!
This all reminds me of a time when I was in a random liquor store and the clerk sold me on "the future of brewing": Two different beers that were brewed and packaged with the intention of being combined and drank together by the customer. And after trying and enjoying what he gave me, I never saw such a concept again. I suspect they realized they can just mix beers together themselves and sell it as its own beverage rather than going with the gimmick of the beers coming in separate cans.
Huh. I just realized this conversation could relate over the issue of everyone's beer preferences converging on IPAs,, letting the various other 'genres' of beer suffer for it.
Maybe we can also analogize in how Mixed Martial Arts is no longer about actual competition between different martial arts practitioners, but has now led all fighters to cross-train muay thai, jiu jitsu, and some form of wrestling (sambo, nowadays) since that's simply optimal, so while the original disciplines still exist, its the blended/homogenized version that gets the most attention.
I think the answer to this is just 'yes.'
In that I believe that any world where Nvidia stocks are tanking, there's probably a lot of other chaos and you will be seeing large losses across the board.
The only inherent risk factor is that their product is dependent on thousands of inputs all around the world, so they're more sensitive than most to disruptions.
Yeah, was going to say the U.S. already fought a war in Panama in the modern era. It was over in a few weeks.
Obviously there are some other parties who might object to the U.S. controlling it this time. But I think there's probably a solution that falls far short of warfare here.
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