raakaa
9mo ago
This sort of thing puts a pretty big dent in Scott’s (and Hanania’s) thesis that for all their faults, the mainstream media is the best place to find accurate factual knowledge about current events. An ex-President (and current candidate) came three inches away from assassination and CNN readers might come away with the impression that he was spooked by a little noise.
raakaa
9mo ago
Okay, that’s a great declaration of moral virtue. But how does that play out in real life? I’ll pose the same question to you that I just did to sun_the_second: how much more would you pay to live next to a bum than next to Hoffmeister? Surely, it’d be a pretty substantial portion of your income, if you believe that people like Hoff should be getting shipped to penal colonies rather than bums.
raakaa
9mo ago
Before going further, I would like to note that I am broadly on your side: in addition to any personal squeamishness regarding the idea of mass executions (which may equal morality or weakness, depending on how you view it), I deeply distrust a state of affairs in which the State has the capacity to carry out such executions, and I fear that if vigilantism is encourage instead, it would lead to a general rise in violence.
But what I am mainly skeptical of is the original claim of Outlaw that Hoff would be a bad neighbor to a similar degree as a psychotic bum (note, by the way, that “psychotic” here is a qualifier rather than a descriptor). I also remain skeptical that your Marxist-Leninist is as bad a neighbor as the psychotic bum or as good a neighbor as Hoff. Even if “exploitative landlord monopolist” reads as clear-cut to you, it doesn’t to me, when compared to a definition of “psychotic bum” along the lines of “repeatedly makes direct/immediate threats against person or property”. (I do realize now, rereading the original comment chain, that Hoff might’ve been using a more expansive definition of “bum”, in which case I recognize that I might be sanewashing here.)
Anyway, like I said, when it comes to homeless hunting season, I’m more on your side than Hoff’s. So, returning to my main disagreement, here’s a question: whom would you rather live next to? Hoff, your Marxist, a palette-swapped online Turner Diaries fanboy wignat, a non-psychotic bum who’s still intrusive (e.g. Hoff’s upthread example of a guy who blocks your entrance/exit to your home with his encampment), or a psychotic bum? If we’re engaging with this question as a serious hypothetical (e.g. you’re searching for your next apartment; how much more would you pay to live next to each group), then I would personally much rather live next to Hoff than the rest of the options. (My full ranking would be Hoff >> Marxist > wignat >> non-psychotic bum > psychotic bum.)
raakaa
9mo ago
This seems to be an unfair comparison. Unless you/Outlaw are a drug-addicted, psychotic, violent bum, you have nothing to fear living next to Hoffmeister in his ideal society. The class which Hoffmeister is describing has very sharp boundaries, which (I doubt) any of us posting here will ever fall into. In contrast, it’s pretty likely that many of us on this forum would be shitting our pants in the Marxist-Leninist’s ideal society.
The situations are not symmetrical. Using a prisoner’s dilemma analogy: Hoffmeister seems to be saying that he will cooperate with any neighbor who cooperates with him and defect against any neighbor who defects against him (where “cooperation” is being a good neighbor and “defection” is attacking one’s neighbors and their property). The Marxist-Leninist has a far more restricted set of people whom he cooperates with. And the psychotic bum is just a plain and simple defectbot.
raakaa
9mo ago
Yeah, that’s fair. For whatever reason, the words “white male” are a bit triggering to me, so sorry if my reply came off as rude.
raakaa
9mo ago
elderly white males
Would it be less fascinating or mind-boggling if the two candidates were equally senile Latinas?
raakaa
9mo ago
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the type of “risk-averseness” that you’re talking about, but to me, the relationship between the stability of one’s current situation and one’s willingness to take risks is the exact opposite of your assessment. If you’re already in a perilous situation, then you’re so close to rock bottom that the potential upsides of a risky endeavor far outweigh the potential downsides. Vice versa for a comfortable situation.
This is clearest in sports: in football, it’s usually not the team leading by 10 points with 3 minutes left in the 4th that will throw a Hail Mary or kick an onside kick. In hockey, you never see a team in the lead pulling their goalie.
raakaa
10mo ago
Man, it’s great that all these posts from back then are still around. It’s not quite as good as your example, but I’m personally partial to the one that says “Nobody’s getting arrested”. Ages like fine wine, if that wine came out from the udder of a cow.
This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that.
I remember all the “conservatives pounce” headlines from the Gray Lady and her friends making this argument, but I’ve never bought it. Consider a world where, say, the chair of the Texas RNC or whatever puts out a pro-Trump campaign video where they say “When we win the election, we’ll go stage a little putsch, / Suspend your sad democracy and voting rights and such”. You know, to make fun of liberals’ overblown fears of a Trumpian self-coup. Do you really think that progressives like the San Franciscan choir and their defenders would accept this as just a wee bit of humor poking fun at their neuroses, rather than a serious Threat to Our Democracy?
EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.
raakaa
10mo ago
But I’ve seen reports that the average age of cars on the road in the U.S. is ~13 years old. Assuming that this is referring to the median (and despite finding countless articles repeating the “13 years old” statistic, I haven’t found one that specifies if the average in question is a mean or median), then this suggests that post-COVID-lockdown effects on the distribution of colors among cars on the road can only be marginal at best. And even if the statistic refers to the mean, I doubt that outliers have too much of an effect here.
Of course, your explanation does perfectly answer the other part of your interlocutor’s question, why new cars only come in grey.
raakaa
10mo ago
The terms “modus ponens” and “modus tollens” come from formal logic. They tell you how to deduce conclusions from statements.
Modus ponens says that if you know that A is true, and that B is true whenever A is true, then you can deduce that B is true. For instance: “If someone is a hunan, then he is mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, he is mortal.”
Conversely, modus tollens says that if you know that B is true whenever A is true, and you know that B is not true, then A is not true. “If someone is a human, then he is mortal. Zeus is immortal. Therefore, Zeus is not a human.”
The full expression extends these terms to the realm of politics and morality. For a naive culture war adjacent example: “Christianity says that gay sex is bad. Christianity is good. Therefore, gay sex is bad.” This is a sort of moral equivalent to modus ponens as described above. But, if you support gay rights, then you can do this in reverse: “Christianity says that gay sex is bad. Gay sex is good. Therefore, Christianity is bad.” This id the equivalent of modus tollens.
The expression thus can be viewed as saying “if you support a consequence because a preexisting belief of yours says that it’s good, then someone else could just as easily reject that consequence and say that your preexisting belief is bad.”
raakaa
10mo ago
The confounding factor is that most of those DFC-loving perverts are probably also ped—ah, sorry, lolicons.
Go on anime-styled erotic art websites and you’ll find heaps of drawings of girls with massively oversized chests (and somewhat less universally, legs and posteriors). Of course, the dichotomy you proposed was “flat and thin versus round and fat”; if that’s the case, then flat would probably win simply because fat is so repulsive. But for reasonable values of the thickness coefficient, I wager that curviness wins out.
This assessment is largely based on my own lived experience (although does looking at 2D porn really count as living?), but I remember one guy (who roleplays as an Orientalist slave trader—weird shtick) who did a more thorough analysis of popular tags on these sites and came to a similar conclusion.
raakaa
10mo ago
[E]xpecting an artificial intelligence to converge on one very specific metric […] seems doubtful.
The framework under which the whole paperclip analogy was developed was a Yudkowskian framework in which the most powerful AIs would all be explicitly designed to maximize a certain objective function. In the original paperclip story, it’s a paperclip factory owner that has an AGI maximize the number of paperclips produced. The moral of the original story is thus most similar to the classic “be careful what you wish for” trickster genie tales.
But as we all very well know now, this framework which Yudkowsky spent over a decade elaborating upon is almost completely divergent from the current LLM-based methods that have yielded the powerful systems of today.
raakaa
10mo ago
I think he’s implying that it’s premature to start making predictions about the capabilities of frontier models when all of them have been safety-tuned and RLHF-ed (read: lobotomized) so heavily.
My personal take is that this lobotomization can surely make a model perform worse, but I don’t think that our current models would be able to e.g. prove novel mathematical theorems if they hadn’t been subjected to lobotomization. Admittedly, this is largely based on intuition, and maybe I’m a bit too optimistic about the limitations of base models. But if OpenAI’s most powerful base model were capable of theorem proving or coherent multi-step reasoning, then don’t you think we’d have heard something about it by now?
Of course, maybe there’s significant incompetence and inertia even at the tops of these world-changing organizations, such that there’s low-hanging fruit to be picked (regarding testing or eliciting capabilities from these base models) that’s nevertheless rotting away untouched. But I doubt this.
raakaa
11mo ago
I don’t know about that. I’m not sure how representative they are of the general public, but I’ve met Democrats in real life whose Civil War II fantasies would make even the standard “boogaloo”-poster blush. Expanding our scope to the general public, don’t you remember the mass celebrations on social media whenever an anti-vaxxer died during the COVID lockdowns? This leads me to believe that if the “Cathedral” (for lack of a better term) wants the US public to harden their hearts, then they’ll be able to do so just fine.
raakaa
11mo ago
rDrama seems like the best candidate, if you want a site where you can scream spicy opinions into the void. But be aware that the void will scream its own spicy opinions at you, too. (As I understand it, that’s half the fun of that site.)
raakaa
11mo ago
Could see this being of help to lonely people. But then after getting into a dependent relationship with AI they'll be even more stuck in their own bubble than before, as far as actual human contact is concerned.
The scary thing is, it’s not their own bubble. The service is wholly controlled by OpenAI. For these lonely people, the majority of their “human contact” be with the avatar of a megacorp. The implications are staggering. People will pour out their hearts and souls to this thing; don’t you think that a lot of actors, both private and governmental, would love to have access to all that data? Your deepest insecurities, sexual proclivities, problematic politics….
And it’s not just a one-way-street where the data flows from the user to the AI. The AI can then manipulate the user. I mean, it’s so easy to fall in love with one of these things, and love can change a person. So all of a sudden, your girlfriend will start subtly suggesting that you buy certain products, buy into certain ideologies….
I’m on mobile, so thankfully, this is the farthest I’ll be taking this schizo rant. But, for the record, this is why I refuse to engage with any non-open-source “AI girlfriend” initiatives, even if I’m in the target audience.
raakaa
11mo ago
I’m not Irish, so take this with a grain of salt. But as I understand it, the Irish have always analogized their situation with respect to the British to the Palestinians’ with respect to the Israelis.
raakaa
11mo ago
For convenience’s sake, here’s a direct archive.is link: https://archive.is/wIt8h.
raakaa
11mo ago
Couldn’t this stat just be explained by members of the Chair Force brave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.
I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.
It’s not terribly interesting. The fact that it was a black bear sans cubs and not too close in distance took away a good amount of the excitement. After I kept yelling “Go away, bear!” it ran back off, and I was surprised by just how fast that thing was; it felt like a marvel of biomechanics. Anyway, now I tell people “I got into a fight with a bear and won”, refraining from elaborating (until pressed) that the fight didn’t go beyond a shouting match, and I was the only one participating.
Regarding the actual thrust of your comment, I couldn’t be more in agreement. The point of the poll isn’t actually to rationally dissect the probability of bear attack versus assault by a human male; it’s to create the very soundbite “Women prefer to be alone in the wild with a bear than a man” being discussed by this comment chain in the first place.
raakaa
1yr ago
It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).
raakaa
1yr ago
The best way to sow the seeds of a casual interest in linguistics is to amble through Wikipedia articles on various languages. Read their sections on phonology and grammar, and when you don’t understand something (e.g. if you’re unfamiliar with the IPA, or you don’t know what a “dative case” is), then skim the appropriate Wikipedia article. Also, reading about Proto-Indo-European is fun: it’ll teach you a bit about comparative linguistics while instilling a sense of awe that universally-spoken modern-day languages still bear the unmistakable genes of their prehistoric ancestors.
raakaa
1yr ago
Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
It’s like a darker, grittier version of this scene… [trigger warning: anime]
Yeah, sure, the lockdowns were about saving lives — unless we’re talking about Black Lives, in which case lockdowns no longer work, since The Science said that mass gatherings in order to protest/riot (but only to do those things!) are A-okay.
I will never stop being “sore” about this.
(Edited to expand/clarify: after the shitshow of contradictory statements and lies that our experts subjected us to during 2020 (e.g. masks don’t work, until they do, oh wait only KN95s do but; mass gatherings are bad, unless you’re going to have a BLM march; the vaccine prevents transmission, until it doesn’t), many right-wingers adopted a stance of epistemic learned helplessness, and decided that they wouldn’t believe anything that comes out of these experts’ mouths. Yeah, this leads to dumb conclusions occasionally like “COVID doesn’t exist”. But it’s only a rational response to the maleficence of the adults in the room.)
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