felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Watering my grass seed every day and seeing it germinate. Newly sprouted grass is a particular shade of green (joyful green?) that lifts my spirits.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
4. Many home owners analysis the social collapse as a scam. The way that the scam is theorized to work is this: First engineer social decline. This reduces the price of office blocks. Second, buy a $300million office block for $60million. Third, reverse course on social decline. Fourth, patience, it takes a while for your "$60million" office block to be worth $300million again. Fifth, sell, and walk away with $240million profit.
The home owners don't want to be victims of this scam. They don't want to sell cheap at the bottom of the market, only to see prices recover as part of some-one else's plan. Perhaps too many people are in on the scam and they are propping up the housing market. Perhaps they are not in on the scam, they have merely noticed the avarice and evil of American political economy and feel confident in guessing what is going on. Perhaps it isn't even a scam, it is just that with American political economy being so avaricious and evil, people assume that its a scam. The realization, that social dynamics are playing out with no-one in charge and exercising agency, has yet to dawn.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
We have a rule against sarcasm. One advantage of adhering to the rule is that it imposes an intellectually interesting exercise.
Write a sarcastic comment. Remember the rule. Now what?
You can start over and write the comment directly. The story goes: err, actually I'm not touching that story, I'm all sarcasmed out
Giving up on the particulars, sarcasm generally works as a cognitive tax. Enough effort gets wasted on the inversion, writing as well as reading, that little is left over to notice dangling threads. One creates/latches-on-to the opposite meaning to become one of the in crowd that makes/gets the sarcasm, and one misses the telling details that are worth exploring.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I found the that thread very interesting. Reading between the lines and over thinking until I can see what isn't really there, I see two big issues.
First, QC sees the issues of cognitive bias and running on untrusted hardware as specificially human issues. Yudkowsky is a space alien, of a superior species, so he is unaffected by these issues. His takes on AI risk are gospel truth.
Second, I'm reminded of testimony before Congress about unconscious racial bias. The witness claims that every-one harbours unconscious racial bias. The Congress man asks: which races are you unconsciously biased against? This leads to a deer-in-headlights moment rather than an answer. I want to ask QC whether his own judgement is subject to cognitive biases and whether his mind runs on untrusted hardware. Specifically, is his judgement that Yudkowsky is telling the gospel truth from a position of superiority, also the gospel truth? QC seems to think that he too is a space alien, free from human failure modes.
The thread seems like a living-out of the Zen parable about the Dharma being a finger pointing at the moon. QC has studied hard and knows all about the finger, its joints, and its nail.
What I have written comes across as unsympathetic to QC. Or does it? The impression of a lack of sympathy comes from inferring that I see myself as a space alien, of a superior species, unlike Yudkowsky and QC, who are merely human. Actually, I think that I suffer from cognitive biases and am running on untrusted hardware. I'm writing from a position of despair. How do we know anything? Epistemology is difficult. Epistemology is harder than that, we read the sequences and still don't get it. We encounter arguments about AI risk and never stop to think: Well, that has been crafted by Moloch to suck me in, maybe I should stay away and leave it to less vulnerable people to wrestle with the issue.
My antidote to epistemological despair is reading the history of science. There are ways round biases. The double blind, randomized controlled trial is one route, available to a well funded team. There are other instructive stories. I particularly like Blaise Pascal's 1647 pamphlet on barometers. One of the experiments involved a six foot tall mercury barometer. Why six feet, when three feet tall is tall enough? So that he could fit a three foot tall mercury barometer inside it, and watch the mercury run out when the inner one was in the vacuum. The mad lad actually went the extra mile to check what was really going on.
I don't see a clever hack that lets me cross-check AI alarmism to see if it is for real. I'll wait. For me, the core of "rationality" is studying clever cross-checks. Get a feel for what we can know despite cognitive biases if we are willing and able to do the extra work. Get a feel for what we cannot know, and learn patience.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
You've got to mention Walter Lippmann and his 1922 book Public Opinion
That makes it 101 years, justifying the full century rhetoric :-)
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The ban on gain of function research in America is an important data point. Americans who wanted to do the research found ways to funnel money to China to do it there. An important question is whether the supreme leadership in China permitted this. My guess is that they didn't. Fauci just teamed up with people at a similar level in China who also wanted to do the research. If a high level Chinese researcher wants Chinese funding, they have to get into the details with their Chinese boss. What do they say? Perhaps "The Americans are scared to do this dangerous research, it gives us a chance to get ahead." My guess is that is way to lose all your funding. Getting ahead of Americans is good, but taking stupid risks, risks so stupid that even the Americans have declined, is very bad. If a high level Chinese researcher wants permission from his boss to accept American money, he can probably sell it as "Its just boring public health stuff." The level of scrutiny is lower for money being paid in than for money being paid out.
My guess is that Fauci had the money, but not permission. His Chinese counterparts had didn't have the money, so there was no point to asking for permission. But Fauci could give them the money, so they didn't have to ask for permission. Basically, big players, one level down from the top, routed around their own governments; both the American ban, and the ban the Chinese government would probably have imposed if requests for funding had pushed the issue all the way to the top.
I suspect that the Chinese over-reaction is partly a freak-out as the top Chinese officials realize that they have been by-passed, and panic at the implications of a problem caused by research that they would have vetoed if they had known the details.
My understanding of the way the world works is that if the top people in governments around the world agree to ban AI research, there is a chance that they will all do so sincerely. But that still won't work, because officials at the next level down control large sums of money and have considerable discretion delegated to them; they will just do AI research on their own authority. Another data point for this is the Iran-Contra Affair.
TLDR deep state evil mad scientists will do government backed AI research, even if Presidents and Prime Ministers are completely on board with banning it.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I struggle to intuit the tone of this comment, but even if it is facetious, I see it as a pithy portal to profundity. I believe in long term social dynamics and think that the world works something like this parable:
One day there is a religious revival and the Church of Universal Love grows big. Young people flock to its message of unconditional kindness and charity. They marry and have children. Thirty years on those children are the new crop of adults. They are unconditionally kind and full of charity; it was how they were brought up. And thirty years on a new grift culture emerges to take advantage of them.
Sixty years on from the religious revival sees another new crop of adults. They look at their parents with dismay: how can intelligent people so lack street smarts? Why do they fall for every scam and grift? I picture @RococoBasilica as one of this second generation, looking back on sixty years of history and noticing the earlier parts of the causal chain leading to the rise of grift culture.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.
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It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.
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I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!
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I like the https://www.themotte.org/rules#Disagreement rule, which the comment is breaking. That should be a warning.
I went with "bad". The instruction do say go with your gut.
I think that the disagreement rule is a good rule that we should uphold, partly for the stated reason, partly for my point 2. It might be easier for the volunteers to uphold it if there were a button with a label that was the terse version of "Brilliantly funny sarcasm, but bad, because brilliantly funny sarcasm is fentanyl for discussion."
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
If you have a thousand years of history behind you,...
I'm thinking that there is a problem right there. Jesus is supposed to come back. As the Nicene Creed puts it "and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead;". But it has been a long time, two thousand years. I don't think any-one expected having to wait that long.
Christianity got a big boost in its early days from the sense of urgency. Nobody knows when the second coming will happen. Don't dilly-dally about converting to Christianity, you might leave it too late! But there is a price to pay. It gives Christianity a soft expiry date. As the century tick by, it gets awkward.
Continuing to talk about the second coming sounds odd. People keep looking forward to it; and keep getting disappointed. When will they learn that it isn't going to happen?
But quietly dropping it also comes across as odd. It was a big deal. And the faith is a one-off, final revelation; you cannot drop bits that age badly.
Perhaps the problem is me. I am "not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought". But Ratzinger sees it as a "clown costume" kind of problem, rather than an "its been too long" kind of problem. That is missing the time dimension; the problem is getting worse as the years tick by, in a way the "clown costume" problems don't.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Err, yes, but...
In the context of COVID, we naturally compare it with the 1918 Spanish Flu. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the young and old, with a higher survival rate in-between, but this pandemic had unusually high mortality for young adults.
and also
The virus was particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm, ravaging the stronger immune system of young adults,...
When COVID started, there was much to fear. It might be a repeat of 1918 and clobber young adults, disrupting everything. But it rather quickly became clear that COVID was not that kind of pandemic.
Notice how poorly counting deaths works. Death for death, the Spanish flu cost at least ten times as many Quality Adjusted LIfe Years. Sticking with death counts, rather than estimating life years lost, exaggerated the severity of COVID by a factor of ten or more.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Consulting the 1899 edition of the Century Dictionary I find an unhelpful entry for reification
Materialization; objectivization; externalization; conversion of the abstract into the concrete; the regarding or treating of an idea as a thing, or as if a thing.
The definition of reify is simpler
To make into a thing; make real or material; consider as a thing
and the use of the word is illustrated with a long quote, referenced as J. Ward, Encyc. Brit., XX. 78.
Encyc. Brit. = The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1875-1888. It is in 24 volumes, so my guess is that XX means volume twenty. Perhaps 78 is page 78 of Volume XX. And J. Ward must be the name of the author of the entry and this man That is perhaps a lead on English usage. The quote in the Century Dictionary is
The earliest objects of thought and the earliest concepts must naturally be those of the things that live and move about us; hence, then --- to seek no deeper reason for the present --- this natural tendency, which language by providing distinct names powerfully seconds, to reify or personify not only things, but every element and relation of things which we can single out, or, in others words, to concrete our abstracts.
Going back to 1880ish a psychologist was using reify (and presumably reification) without a Marxist slant.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Seconded. I think that the words transwoman and transman are the wrong way round.
Whenever I read the word transwoman, the image that pops into my mind is Dianne Keaton playing Annie Hall. Then I have to mentally stop and engage reverse gear; the text I'm reading is almost certainly using the word transwoman to refer to a man who has gender dysphoria and picked wearing a dress as their best coping strategy.
But reading on is a struggle. I feel that I've been had. Conned into assenting to "transwomen are women" because I reflexively imagine a woman with gender dysphoria and a prescription for testosterone. And feeling that this wasn't an accident. The words were deliberately made the wrong way round to trick me into accepting that "transwomen are women" only to later reveal that I've signed up to a man in a dress being a woman.
I've seen Gender Critical folk use TIM: Trans-Identified Man instead of transwoman.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing
But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.
got the response
Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.
People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.
They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.
Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.
I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Retaining my Reddit handle (defparameter *fur-name* "felis-parenthesis" "the cat who codes in Common Lisp")
Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
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