raakaa
1yr ago
Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.
Here's a claim I'll put out there: men are already largely valued by how much women want to have sex with them. Or speaking more precisely, there are certain markers of social fluency / status / desirability that matter more, when it comes to making snap social judgments regarding a man's value, than his skills and abilities. This is where you get anecdotes like this one related in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, in which the nuclear scientist's girlfriend laughs at his attempt to demonstrate value through his (scientific) skills and abilities. Or alternatively, all the scoffing and schadenfreude-ing at Minecraft creator Notch for leading a life of loneliness despite creating the best-selling video game in history (although that can be argued to be driven by sour grapes ("I might not be friggin' rich like him, but at least I get poon!") and general antipathy towards his politics). Actually, it might be more apt to say in men's case that they are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them.
[ Note, by the way, that I'm talking about "value" here rather than "success" (the latter of which I'm taking to mean "success in a corporate / academic / career context", given that words like "skills and abilities" and "success" tend to be used more in that domain these days rather than, for instance "skills and abilities as a parent" or "skills and abilities as a Little League coach"), because I don't believe that career success and the like for women is all too tied to sex appeal. Here's an anecdote, but most high-achieving Women In STEM that I see are not lookers, to say the least. I've heard similar from people in other "intelligence-heavy" (so to speak) fields such as law. Now, maybe the situation is different in more public-facing or "soft-skills"-heavy roles like marketing or management - but frankly, we know that men in those areas are also selected for attractiveness. So if the claim is that women are only able to advance in their careers to the extent that they're attractive, then that's a claim that I personally don't buy. (I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.) ]
But returning to the original idea: if women value me because they all wanted to have sex with me - well, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world by me. Of course, one could note that sex is for men what commitment is for women, and say that a fairer analogy would be to say "how would you feel if women valued you to the extent that they found you emotionally useful?" In that case, I wouldn't be quite as happy; but to say that this analogy would be fairer would be to ignore a key component of what it means for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman. It's the same component that's ignored when women get mad at guys for asking them on dates after a long period of friendship: "Uggh, he only wanted to use me for sex?" No: for a man (going by my own experiences and those of other men I know), when you're attracted to a woman sexually, then everything about her becomes more attractive. Her jokes become funnier; her insights more profound. It leads to a self-reinforcing feedback loop of attraction (because when these other qualities become more attractive, then this raises the level of physical attraction as well). Take that into consideration and being valued as a woman because a guy wants to have sex with you seems pretty nice, given that it comes as a package deal with him valuing you as an intellect and a wit.
Then again, this entire post is largely a "grass is greener"-type situation, now, isn't it. I do stand by the claims that "men are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them" and "being valued as a woman for your sexual attractiveness is pretty nice", but I understand that it's not necessarily all peaches and cream.
raakaa
1yr ago
I don't have a good grasp of what would be necessary to demonstrate qualia
One key point in the definition of qualia is that there need not be any external factors that correspond to whether or not an entity possesses qualia. Hence the idea of a philosophical zombie: an entity that lacks consciousness/qualia, but acts just like any ordinary human, and cannot be distinguished as a P-zombie by an external observer. As such, the presence of qualia in an entity by definition cannot be demonstrated.
This line of thinking, originated in the parent post, seems to be misguided in a greater way. Whether or not you believe in the existence of qualia or consciousness, the important point is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness is necessarily tied to intelligence. A calculator might not have any internal sensation of color or sound, and yet it can perform division far faster than humans. Paraphrasing a half-remembered argument, this sort of "AI can't outperform humans at X because it's not conscious" talk is like saying "a forklift can't be stronger than a bodybuilder, because it isn't conscious!" First off, we can't demonstrate whether or not a forklift is conscious. And second, it doesn't matter. Solvitur levando.
Paranoid conspiracy time: there's a large push in the ML world to limit the access that the public has to powerful models. Lots of this is couched in the language of "AI safety", but this term tends to be used less in the Yudkowskian "you've been transmogrified into a paperclip!" sense and more in the "it is unsafe if your model says anything that would make your modal San Franciscan feel icky" [1]. Because we don't want people using AI to output wrongthink or insufficiently-diverse generations [2], we must have strong gatekeepers preventing tous pollous from using these models to engage in harmful and/or toxic behavior. Naturally, the journalists at Forbes are cut from the same political cloth as our AI safety guardians. They too recognize the danger that AI-powered hate speech and hate images can pose.
Enter Emad "Prometheus" Mostaque. He gives the plebs access to an image-generation model that enables them to spit out all the non-diverse, objectified pin-up bimbos that they want. This is the exact fear, finally come to pass! Therefore, is it any wonder the journalists would seek to discredit Mostaque? Failing to do so could mean that his next project, whatever it may be, succeeds, and allows an even greater torrent of unsafe content to be spewed onto the net. Given these beliefs, it's only rational to attack the man.
[1] For an example of what "safety" means in practice, check out the old LaMDA paper from Google, in which the model fine-tuned for "safety" no longer says that it is understandable why people would be opposed to same-sex marriage; it instead vocally supports it. Anthropic's RLHF paper has its further-lobotomized model make a strong denunciation against plastic straws as well. These might not seem like a lot, but it's clear which side these models are playing for. Additionally, note that "safety" is used as an explicit rationale for not releasing models; OpenAI says as much in their GPT4 paper.
[2] Recall that DALL-E 2 was found to be modifying humans' prompts in order to add characters of specific races to the image outputs. The original post in that reddit thread was, of course, deleted, but I remember the evidence being pretty compelling (Gwern ended up weighing in at one point).
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