roystgnr
12hr ago
I agree with almost all of this, but I think the major exception is load-bearing:
The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense
If you type 60wpm, it took you 17 seconds to write this sentence and a half, over which period of time the federal government disperses an average of $2.2M in transfer payments, $250k of which are specifically for families and individuals facing economic hardship. Taking on that sort of task is something that the state already does, on such a massive scale that adding another hundred thousand kids' child support payments would literally be within rounding error on the commonly reported figures. Since our chief remaining worry is indeed
for the sake of the kid
then we want that kid's expenses to be at least backstopped by the almost-incomprehensibly rich state, which is guaranteed to pay, not by some random guy who might delay or evade payment. Once that's assured, our remaining concerns are much less pressing: justice vs deadbeat parents, and well-being for innocent taxpayers. We can fix both concerns by finding the biological father and getting him to pay, but can we improve either by squeezing a non-father?
Justice vs deadbeat parents can't be improved by punishing a non-deadbeat non-parent.
Well-being for innocent taxpayers you might think can be improved by getting some poor sucker to pay instead of them, but that poor sucker is in the set of innocent potential taxpayers, and the marginal utility of money decreases. A priori most people would probably prefer a certainty of paying a tiny amount over a tiny chance of being unjustly pushed into paying a much larger amount. And that's just considering the financial aspects; someone who's been cheated on in this way is paying to have those extracted finances managed by their victimizer, which is definitely negative-sum in well-being.
There is a more subtle problem with just letting the state pay in these cases: doing so removes all incentives the mother might have to help the state track down the biological father. That wouldn't necessarily be a new problem, though (why bother tracking down biodad if the guy you tricked is already paying?), just a still-unsolved one.
roystgnr
1d ago
Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval
I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.
In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)
But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.
So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.
roystgnr
2d ago
“I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct
And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!
roystgnr
3d ago
there's no model of a chessboard in the system, which is why it sometimes makes illegal moves.
On the one hand, yeah, this is totally true, hence the hack where you basically just tell it to use its own output as scratch paper and suddenly it performs much better.
On the other hand, it's always praising with faint damnation when I hear LLMs dismissed as subhuman based on criteria that would also exclude half the kids and a good fraction of the adults I meet. "They sometimes try to make illegal moves when playing chess! Why I never! My brain can do without scratch paper entirely, except of course for hard things like long division, or playing chess without looking at the board."
I believe it was William Poundstone who proposed the idea that consciousness means that an intelligent system has a model of the universe which is so sophisticated that the model contains a sophisticated representation of the system itself. Using this criterion, I would say that LLMs are not conscious at the moment. Their modeling is arguably too rudimentary.
This is a good attempt at definition, and I'd also agree with your conclusion ... though honestly, in this debate I'd award at least an A-minus worth of partial credit to anyone who proposes any clear definition at all. There are an astonishing number of people (on X, at least; discourse here is a little better) who seem to think that "the hard problem of consciousness" is actually so simple that nothing more explicit than "I'll know it when I see it" is necessary.
roystgnr
5d ago
Instead, we all repeat one nice little lie: "somewhere in this world there's your other half waiting for you, one day you'll understand you're made for each other".
This is definitely not in the set of "lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true". It can mislead people into:
- cutting short relationships when the "honeymoon period" / "new relationship energy" fades (if loving someone becomes less dramatic and requires more work, doesn't that mean they're not Made For You?)
- obsessing over unrequited love or love with insurmountable practical obstacles instead of moving on (fate will bring back "The One who got away", right?)
- rejecting compromise and neglecting self-improvement (why would you have to change when Your Other Half will love you exactly as you are?)
- being less understanding and helpful for their partner's self-improvement (would Your Soulmate be wrong to begin with?)
- neglecting communication (wouldn't someone Made For You already know what you need?)
- falling for Borderline Personality Disorder and/or manipulative people (with The One it'll be love
bombingat first sight, right?)
I once saw this summarized most succinctly as "every woman I know who thinks there is such a thing as a "soulmate" is still single".
The converse of this doesn't have to be some sort of heartless "Sexual Market Value is a commodity and you should upgrade whenever you find a better deal" antithesis philosophy, though. Perhaps the best way to express the synthesis here is "soul mates aren't just found, they're made".
The phrase "sexual market value" does seem to reek of commodification and oversimplification, but ... we still talk about "the housing market" despite the word "the" being something of a misnomer, right? Even if two people have exactly the same budget for housing: One person can place more value on proximity to big city amenities and another on proximity to rural open space. One can place more value on square footage and separation and another on neighborhood density and walkability. One can place more value on modernist style and another on history. Etc. etc. We still try to quantify the point where supply meets demand with a single cash value, although doing this is a full time real estate appraiser job ... and once a place is sold, it's not likely to be resold just because the local relative price goes up a few percent to pay the agents' fees, is it? When people own a home they put a lot of effort into moving everything in, redecorating and repainting and landscaping and even renovating it to suit their tastes, setting down roots in the neighborhood and the city, etc. etc. People will notoriously hang on to a specific house that might have become suboptimal for them based on their original less-individual criteria, because of the "memories it now holds" or just "to keep it in the family".
Love is kind of like a much more extreme and two-sided version of that sort of attachment. Both people do have to bring something to the table from the start, and there are a lot of romantically valuable qualities that are nearly universal, and none of that should be ignored because it seems impersonal to do so. But exactly what sort of "something" is most valuable is still somewhat personal and subjective, such that even if you can say "he's a 6" and "he's an 8" in some sort of "averaged over all partners' preferences" sense, it shouldn't be surprising to see the "6" end up with an "8" and the "8" with a "6" and all four people thrilled by the results. And despite the common phrase "end up with", that's never the end, right? Even simply dating causes attachment to grow, helps people to get better attuned to teach other, and helps people find out who they're already attuned with in less obvious ways (sometimes you really don't "just click"), ideally reaching the point where even a "10-to-average-partners" can't compete with an "11-to-me" ... and marriage and kids aren't simply an epilogue to that process, they're an accelerant. In the end you do end up with a soul mate, not because you found the one Out There Waiting For You, but because both of you made yourselves and made each other that way.
roystgnr
7d ago
AI is still at the state where it will sometimes confidently tell you something completely wrong, and yet for simple blocker issues this is still immensely helpful, because you can just try out what it told you, and 90% of the time you get to declare victory, and the other 10% you're just back where you started.
In fact, there's a bit of grey area in between - twice recently I've seen an AI come up with a solution which was definitely wrong or incomplete in some way, but which was much easier to fix than solving the problem from scratch would have been.
For complex issues and design issues, AI can easily paint you into a corner by generating reams of redundant/spaghetti/inflexible code that solves your immediate problem but is unmaintainable in the long run, but in general it's getting better so fast that I'm not sure how long this warning will be necessary.
roystgnr
7d ago
"unless"? Did Bezos leave his first wife before she kicked him out? He was cheating on her for like a year before it went public; I'd assume he would have been happy "getting the best of both worlds" indefinitely if he'd managed to keep getting away with it.
roystgnr
7d ago
Yeah, "handful" was grossly wrong. 30% for "more welfare", geographically non-uniform, means there's probably going to be somewhere you can get a plurality to vote for seizing the means of production ... grocery retail? really? ...
But my point is just that, if loud vocal support for more welfare seems to be coming disproportionally from college students, that's because of a disproportionality in "loud" and "vocal", not in "support".
roystgnr
7d ago
Yeah, but if you try denying it to the wrong guy
Yeah, that's what the Schrödinger's Rapist conversation was all about. Men who didn't understand that women inductively match "a stranger is trying to flirt with me" to frighteningly high odds of "and he might get really nasty or dangerous about it if I'm even a bit too gentle or too harsh (or both, because nasty men aren't all big on logic) about shutting it down", arguing with women who didn't understand that making the guys nice enough to listen about this problem more wary just ends up increasing the proportion of public flirtation coming from nasty men who would never have listened in the first place.
You have to be careful with your signalling.
I admit I suddenly developed a lot more sympathy and respect for women with "resting bitch face" (and even for some non-superficial negative personality traits) when I realized how useful that probably is as a defense against accidentally signaling (or being mistakenly perceived as signaling) invitations they didn't want to offer. Even if the person making a pass isn't at all nasty, more explicit rejections are much more emotionally upsetting to give! In the moment it hurts more to be rejected than to reject someone, but (unless there was a reason for rejection more substantial than "I'm not very attracted to you") IMHO the pain of being rejected goes away faster.
roystgnr
7d ago
Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?
Currently the demographic most likely to say US national spending on welfare is "too little" is people with "less than high school" education (vs high school graduates and college graduates), and this is the case far more often than not, although the correlation with education seems surprisingly weak in general - high school graduates' and college graduates' responses are pretty much neck-and-neck.
That's not an apples-to-apples question, I admit. Might there be people who think we should overthrow capitalism altogether and perfect the New Soviet Man or whatever but who also don't want any more money going to today's lumpenproles? It still seems like a good indicator.
roystgnr
7d ago
States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly
Taking this consistently, we must conclude that Russia should get to conquer Ukraine, by a vote on the order of 130M to 30M.
Recall that originally state meant, well, "state", not "prefecture".
roystgnr
7d ago
Where did you read this?
Not OP, but this off topic comment thread was interesting enough that I saved some of the best quotes (from the top reply) and was able to find it again now, a decade later.
This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
You and everybody else still single, right? (...as well as those of us who are married but would like to give our kids useful advice and have grandkids someday, honestly) It feels like the Sexual Revolution burned all the oversimplified restrictive scripts that one might have read in some stuffy old Guide to Mannerly Courting, but then instead of the result being "we're all free! we can just do what feels right!" it turned out to be "you're still screwed if you don't follow the right script, but now everybody disagrees about what the right script should be and it's too contentious to talk about or write down".
I'm not even sure if the above interpretation of proper flirting hasn't also already been obsoleted by cultural changes! (I was already married ten years ago, thankfully, and it's even harder to analyze this stuff from a distance) After ten years of "you find a guy by just swiping right", do women still know or care about the old "you can find a guy by giving plausibly-deniable signals of invitation and escalation" techniques? Ten years after this cute comic prompted the "Schrödinger's Rapist" debate, are men still eager to try carefully interpreting possible plausibly-deniable signals? Granted, the remaining alternatives are awful, but it feels like they're all that's left.
roystgnr
8d ago
75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.
Wiki claims "two-thirds of black voters", not much more than his 60.8% of voters as a whole. You have to cut down demographics more finely to get to "76 percent of Blacks in northern cities" specifically.
The charitable view is that blacks migrating to cities etc. supported the dems because they had greater support for unions and worker's rights etc. A less charitable view is that blacks supported dems because they saw it as a way to get handouts from the government.
Neither of these views is logically inconsistent with the corrected numbers, but Bayes would note that our relative credence in the view with "migrating to cities" in it should increase after we learn that the data shows an effect specifically focused on migrant-targeted cities. (you'd otherwise think "Northern" would push in the other direction; Southerners also went 76% for LBJ)
roystgnr
8d ago
What I don't see is why the solution isn't "just give him the statutory authority". At least until after midterm elections, the Republicans have a 5 seat lead in the House and a 6 seat lead in the Senate. The ballroom idea isn't super popular overall, 28-56, but among Republicans it's got supermajority support, and it's at least generally defensible enough that you'd think someone would be willing to introduce a bill and dare the Democrats to filibuster.
If Trump had difficulty whipping up support among his own party in general, that would be one thing, but the guy can get a room full of people to politely watch (or even smile and nod!) while his health secretary brags about their inability to do grade school arithmetic. I'd think "the design isn't too big or garish, not for state functions" would be an easier sell.
roystgnr
8d ago
we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.
It varies for different definitions of "we", "that", and "allowed".
Perhaps the strongest case for "not allowed" is that juries are given explicit contrary instructions. Perhaps the strongest case for "allowed" is that there's very few other good reasons to conscript a bunch of random unqualified jackasses off the street to make judgement calls about a trial when there's already a highly trained person, literally titled "judge", right there. The "of their peers" bit isn't added to "jury" because legal types hate concision, it's because that part is critical to nullification protecting against laws that seem good to upper class judges but not to the class of people affected.
(Of course, the strongest case for "shouldn't be allowed" is that often upper class people are just more correct about what's good. E.g. it's much harder to protect unpopular rights if anyone criminally retaliating against their exercise might get let off by a jury nullifying the crime, or at least might be impossible to prosecute in the face of hung juries with some members nullifying the crime.)
roystgnr
9d ago
I'd love to learn of any results that really do make full AC necessary
Okay, there's "every vector space has a Hamel basis", which may have important implications I don't realize since I just use Schauder bases in spaces where the distinction matters.
roystgnr
9d ago
opinions on computer-assisted proofs like the Four Color Theorem
I think the development of formal proof verifiers like Lean mostly quelled the practical concerns about computer-assisted proofs. Nobody's going to trust some two hundred page "proof" just because an LLM spat it out, but formalize it and properly verify the proof steps via a smaller verifier that's been itself closely manually examined, and then the remaining parts of it you have to check manually are more like definitions (when Lean verifies that "All Foos are Bars", does its definition of "Foo" and "Bar" match ours?) and much easier to understand and review. There's a real synergy here in iterating between proof verifiers (which will reliably state whether a proof is correct, but weren't very popular by themselves because they require the proof to be spelled out in tedious precise detail) and large language models (which will translate a colloquial proof into tedious precise detail, but aren't very useful by themselves because they aren't reliable enough to trust without rigorous checking).
The aesthetic concerns are still there, though. There are proofs that you can read through (the highlights of, not the every-trivial-step that you have in something formalized) and they enhance your understanding of the subject, and then there are proofs that just make it from point A to point B via some kind of hideous brute force, and there's a reasonable fear that computer-generated proofs or even just computer-assisted proofs are going to have a lot more of the latter instead of the former. There was quite a lot of excitement recently about a couple newly-AI-proven conjectures (IIRC one on primitive sets, another on Ramsey numbers, both on asymptotic behavior?) because, not only were these about questions that human mathematicians had taken more than a passing interest in, but the proofs were short and insightful. Candidates for proofs "from The Book", to use Erdös' old phrase.
Specific examples would be the Axiom of Choice (either accepting it or not leads to unintuitive results like Banach-Tarski)
Well, everybody agrees that if you accept it then you get certain nice things and certain nasty ones, and that you can have consistent models that accept it and consistent models that don't. There's still a disagreement here, but it's again a disagreement over aesthetics more than over fact.
It's a big disagreement over aesthetics, admittedly. The joke goes: "The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the Well-ordering principle obviously false, and who knows about Zorn's lemma", and the humor is that emotionally that all feels true even though logically those three things are provably equivalent.
There might even be increasing common ground in the aesthetic question. The Axiom of Dependent Choice is sufficient to prove a ton (I hesitate to say "all", since in my own field we typically just throw up our hands and assume full AC, and I'd love to learn of any results that really do make full AC necessary) of the classic real-analysis and functional-analysis theorems that Zermelo-Fraenkel alone doesn't give you, but it isn't sufficient to force the existence of ugly-seeming things like non-measurable subsets of ℝ, or of insane-seeming things like Banach-Tarski.
roystgnr
10d ago
If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened, I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.
This seems obviously correct to me, except that empirically it's just wrong. Off the top of my head I can't actually think of any other examples in which it's wrong, though; is there some meta-irony here about how there's this one unexplained anomaly in the category of narrative quality of anomalies?
roystgnr
10d ago
Isn't "fanny" the classic? A silly term for "butt" or adjective for "belt pouch slung over your butt" in the US; a vulgar term for female genitalia in the UK.
roystgnr
13d ago
Gemini with memory on seems to make reasonable guesses about the reasons why I ask a question, which so far is only a little useful for me, but which could possibly make it a better source of answers than I often am for some of the sorts of XY-Problem questions I sometimes get from others.
roystgnr
13d ago
Lowest non-COVID workforce participation rate in my lifetime, but that just means 62% down from a peak of 67%. Optimistically I'll guess there's just more and more jobs with flexible hours. If the nature of the work allows for it, a smart boss will realize that if you like to eat lunch at 2 that just means you'll be able to get back with less delay and there'll be someone around to handle any emergencies at noon.
roystgnr
13d ago
My second YouTube search came up with the same top result, and far be it from me to refuse a polite request.
But I'm not making a third search. My kids occasionally use my YouTube account on our living room computer, and at some point I'd worry about the algorithm deciding that my current math/science/art balance needs more "art" and that my "artists" need fewer clothes.
roystgnr
13d ago
I'd never call myself a "never"-Trumper, because any reading of history will tell you that things can get much worse than him, but if I lived in a swing state I'd probably have held my nose and voted for the other shameless crook in 2016, the other mentally declining old man in 2020, and the other dishonest auto-coup fan in 2024. Maybe that's close enough, practically, even if I'm still not certain that any of those votes would really have been the lesser evil?
I still loved Ron Paul. If we'd made him Emperor he could have been a sufficiently radical (reactionary?) libertarian to throw the country into anarchy, but as a mere President I bet he'd have been great. Remember back when we had the chance to work on fixing a federal debt that was "only" ten trillion dollars? Good times.
Credence is a probabilty measure, and even marginalizing it onto a single binary question gives you values on a continuum interval. Probability measures on a binary set are pairs (x,1-x), x∈[0,1], not binary values. Let's see if we can at least come to an agreement that there are more points along that interval than just the two endpoints:
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and I continue seeing no evidence to the contrary, I would believe her.
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and yet there was a suspicious death of someone she hated and circumstantial evidence pointing toward her, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me surveillance video, I would be pretty paranoid any time I saw a stranger who looked like her, but I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me video evidence and she had been weirdly missing during the time of death and her Google Maps timeline had an inexplicable gap, I would expect to believe her answers, but I would ask her a lot of questions.
If she'd said she could never kill anybody, but I had just walked in on her alone in a room standing over a dead body holding a bloody knife, I would initially believe her previous statement was most likely false, but in lieu of even more incriminating evidence I'd believe her "someone just dropped this knife and ran out the door, then I picked it up and wandered over here and found the body!" story.
If she was covered in blood too and I'd seen nobody leaving the scene as I approached, the story would have to be firmer for me to believe her, and the available evidence supporting it.
If also the room had a nannycam and its 4k recording showed her doing the stabbing, I would start looking to confirm my hopeful alternative theory that it was hacked and an AI-generated video uploaded, but until I found some evidence of that I'd believe she was probably guilty and I'd definitely be cooperating with the cops.
If I'd walked into the room just in time to witness her stabbing someone to death, I would end up asking a therapist about the possibility that I'd hallucinated the event, not just about trauma, but I'd consider the possibility that I'd gone mad too slim to say it was something I "believe".
If in the room was also a group full of people I trust who also witnessed the stabbing and who reaffirmed to me repeatedly afterwards that they all saw what I saw, I'd believe them, and it would take quite a bit later to convince me that I'd been having repeated distinct but coherent hallucinations.
So out of these 10 statements, considering my fraction of a point for statement 7 balances out the not-quite-a-full-point for 6 and almost-a-full-point for 5, my trust for her scores roughly a 6. In my defense and hers, I created a test that deserves a hell of a grading curve, and IMHO I'm pretty well calibrated at that "6". If I would believe her at even higher levels of this hypothetical I'd be too credulous; at lower levels I'd be too suspicious of her. It still seems fair to say I trust her, doesn't it?
I think some of our mutual friends and family would score a 5 here; IMHO my judgement of her character is better, but surely a 5 should be tolerable, even from family or someone very close? We shouldn't ghost or shun or disown anyone like that, right? It would still be fair to say someone trusts her, if they could watch a video that looks like her killing someone and say "we need to find the doppelganger". On this scale the cops' trust for her is only around a 1.9, and we could round that down to "don't trust her", but that's still a big step up from 0, right?
I don't think anyone should score a 10 here. They would be undeniably more trusting of her than I am, but would that make them better people than me, even to her? I wouldn't think a 7 was too gullible, but I also wouldn't think they were my moral superiors.
Trust is a prior credence. The more you have, the more contrary evidence can be survived by your posterior credence. There's no total order on probability distributions, so this is already a simplification, but even after oversimplifying: some people have a little trust, some have more, and some have a lot. Nobody who isn't utterly incapable of forgiveness (or of changing their mind) ever gets down to zero trust, and nobody who wouldn't stay in the Flavor-Aid line at a Jim Jones farewell party ever gets up to maximal trust.
I get that it's tempting to oversimplify. We don't even teach Bayes' theorem on discrete probability spaces in high school, much less how to compute or marginalize a posterior on an arbitrary probability space. So it's tempting to just reduce the options to either "I believe" or "I don't believe", and mostly that works well enough. The Pirahã mostly get by counting with "one", "two", and "many". Different strokes for different folks.
But please, don't try to turn oversimplification into relationship advice. There will be times when you or your partner are suspicious, about one thing or another. This will mean that you and they should ask and answer some questions, and ideally those answers will mean your trust for each other will increase (not from 0 to 1, but in that direction), because one of you was open enough to ask for reassurance and the other was understanding and open enough to provide it. This will not mean that your relationship is doomed.
Man, how did I forget to get "Your Soulmate will never make you feel untrusting or admit to needing help trusting you" on the list?!
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