07mk
2hr ago
I didn't think that was the point of the dog analogy, but if that were, then indeed, you're right it's a poor analogy for this.
07mk
7hr ago
The joke isn't a scenario where the dog plays chess under such unusual circumstances that it doesn't mean the dog is smart.
I don't think it would make sense for a dog to be able to play chess at all while also that not meaning that the dog is "smart" in some real sense. Perhaps it doesn't understand the rules of chess or the very concept of a competitive board game, but if it's able to push around the pieces on the board in a way that conforms to the game's rules in a manner that allows it to defeat humans (who are presumably competent at chess and genuinely attempting to win) some non-trivial percentage of the time through its own volition without some marionette strings or external commands or something, I would characterize that dog as "smart." Perhaps the dog had an extra smart trainer, but I doubt that even an ASI-level smart trainer could train the smartest real-life dog in the real world to that level.
And imagine that it's 1981 and someone is showing you their brand new ZX81. The exact same thing happens that happens with the dog, down to you saying that the chess program can be beaten nine times out of ten. Should you conclude that actually, ZX81s are really really smart because playing chess at all is impressive? Or should you conclude that even though humans use general intelligence to play chess, the ZX81 instead uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and the ZX81 isn't very smart despite how impressive playing chess is?
This last sentence doesn't make sense to me either. Yes, I would conclude that the ZX81 uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and I'd characterize its "ability" (obviously unlike a dog, it has no agency) to play chess in this way as "smart" in some real, meaningful sense. Obviously it's not any sort of generalized "smartness" that can apply to any other situation. If we were living at a time when a computer that could play chess wasn't even a thing, and someone introduced me to a chess bot that he could defeat only 9 times out of 10, I would find it funny if he downplayed that, as in the dog joke.
If a few years later the ZX81 was replaced with a Commodore 64, and you couldn't beat the Commodore 64 in chess, would you decide that the ZX81 is dumb, but the Commodore 64 is smart?
I'd conclude that the Commodore 64 is "smarter than" the ZX81 (I'm assuming we're using the computer names as shorthand for the software that they actually run on the hardware, here). Again, not in some sort of generalized sense, but certainly in a real, meaningful sense in the realm of chess playing.
When it comes to actual modern AI, we're, of course, talking primarily about LLMs, which generate text really really well, so it could be considered "smart" in that one realm. I'm on the fence about and mostly skeptical that LLMs will or can be the basis for an AGI in the future. But I think it's a decent argument that strings of text can be translated to almost any form of applied intelligence, and so by becoming really, really good at putting together strings of text, LLMs could be used as that basis for AGI. I think modern LLMs are clearly nowhere near there, with Claude Plays Pokemon the latest really major example of its failures, from what I understand. We might have to get to a point where the gap between the latest LLM and ChatGPT4.5 is greater than the gap between ChatGPT4.5 and ELIZA before that happens, but I could see it happening.
07mk
10hr ago
Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach.
If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody that's making the antibodies less effective while also taking up the resources that the original infection would've taken up. Like, the principles that make the antibodies effective against the religious memeplex are being actively destroyed by wokeness, and though it's also attacking traditional religious memes, it's doing so by replacing it with progressive religious memes. It's clearly not the antibodies, but STRONGER, it's something else entirely that looks very similar to the original infection that the antibodies are attacking, but with the right signal proteins or whatever that causes the original antibodies to welcome them.
07mk
10hr ago
As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?
I always used to be confused why people considered this a gotcha or a particularly interesting question, cuz I thought it was obvious that there was absolutely no moral impropriety in either case, that only people who held on to silly superstitions would think otherwise, and I thought that this was basically the the position of most Democrats/liberals.
Now I understand that I was the weird/foolish one for actually believing people when they said that they were liberal.
It's still silly superstition, though.
07mk
14hr ago
I suppose there's an untapped market for specific fan fiction/ slashfics for niche fandoms, but archive of our own and fan fiction.net are chock full of almost anything you would want to read in this regard.
This is where I disagree, at least in the realm of weeb fanart (I don't read/write fanfiction, but I imagine it's not dissimilar). There are orders of magnitude more possible niches and tastes than there are artists to fill them, such that I regularly run into concepts that I want to see that I simply cannot find that even one amateur illustrator has created and posted online.
For a concrete example, one common "genre" of fanart is having two characters voiced by the same voice actor cosplaying each other, sometimes in a way that directly copies official art of the character. I wanted to see fanart of Jean from Genshin Impact cosplaying Hitagi from Bakemonogatari (both voiced by Chiwa Saito), and done in a way that copies official promotional Bakemonogatari art, in a style as if drawn by Akio Watanabe (the actual artist who drew the actual official promotional art and did the character designs for the anime). Searching the usual places like Danbooru or Gelbooru or Pixiv, I found that not even a single example of such a cosplay fanart existed, much less one that directly copied official art and in the same style as the official artist. So I made some using Stable Diffusion. I've done similar things with other bits of fanart, based around scenarios I like to imagine they encounter in their fictional everyday lives, or in an alternate universe or whatever; unpopular characters don't get much fanart to begin with, and them doing niche activities is even rarer. Combine that with desire to see it in certain artists' styles, and you get a combinatoric explosion of possibilities that the rather limited number of skilled human illustrators simply can't fill.
I imagine fanfiction could have even more possibilities that go unfulfilled if not for generative AI, due to how many different combinations of character interactions and plot events there are. There's probably a million different Harry Potter/Ron Weasley slashfics on AO3, but does it have one that also sets it in the backdrop of a specific plot that some particular fujoshi wants, with the particular style of writing she wants to read, and with the specific sequence of relationship escalations and speedbumps that she wants to see? Maybe for some fujoshi, but probably not for most.
07mk
16hr ago
They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall. They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do.
This just seems like describing the how, rather than contradicting the notion that they metaphorically put up walls and man the gates against conservatives so firmly: they do so by genuinely believing that being anti-racist (by their conception of anti-racism) is something any decent person should do and rejecting the contention that this belief is due to their partisanship rather than due to it being true. It's particularly a severe failure for academia, where one of the ostensible main themes is the inescapability of individual bias and the need to correct for it through multiple contrasting perspectives.
07mk
1d ago
If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny.
Humor is subjective and all that, but I don't understand this perspective. I'd find the joke exactly as funny no matter what way the dog was playing chess, whether it was thinking through its moves like a human theoretically is, or, I dunno, moving pieces by following scents that happened to cause its nose to push pieces in ways that followed the rules and was good enough to defeat a human player at some rate greater than chance. The humor in the joke to me comes from the player downplaying this completely absurd super-canine ability the dog has, and that ability remains the same no matter how the dog was accomplishing this, and no matter if it wouldn't imply any sort of general ability for the dog to become better at chess. Simply moving the pieces in a way that follows the rules most of the time would already be mindblowingly impressive for a dog, to the extent that the joke would still be funny.
07mk
2d ago
In this specific sort of example, the cheat code that people discovered was claiming that due process that includes things like trying to figure out the facts of the matter based on evidence was misogynistic when applied to women accusing men of bad sexual behavior. This, I think, was an instantiation of the larger principle that "lived experiences" described by people who were categorized as "oppressed" were incontrovertible. It seems to me that more and more people are growing wise to this vulnerability, which makes me wonder what the next cheat code will be, to circumvent inconvenient things like the sort of due process you're talking about.
07mk
2d ago
Ultimate is a team field sport with a lot of running and jumping, so I'd guess the male advantage in ultimate is even more pronounced. In mixed leagues, person-to-person defense is almost 100% on a same-sex basis, with very few exceptions when there's a woman who's particularly tall and/or athletic (this never happens in the top levels of the sport, but at the levels that I play, it's been known to happen).
I imagine the sex differences in disc golf have primarily to do with distance in throwing, which is very easily observed in ultimate as well. Each point begins with a "pull," which is like a kickoff in American football, where one player on the defensive team throws the disc from behind their own end zone line (running start allowed, but disc must be released before they cross the line). At even medium levels, men regularly throw the full 70 yards of the field, and at top levels, they regularly throw the full 90 yards that includes the 20 yard end zone. At the top levels, it's the rare woman who's able to cover the full 70 yards of the field. This difference is present and quite noticeable in long throws during the point as well, where, at the top levels, men's games tend to be more huck-heavy, since they can score with one throw from anywhere on the field, while women's games tend to be more based around shorter throws. This isn't universal, though.
07mk
2d ago
Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost?
I think this is a major part of it. There has been plenty written about how the purity-spiraling progressive left, i.e. the woke/idpol/crt/dei/sjw crowd, are following a religion that fills a vacuum left by the rejection of traditional religions, so I won't reiterate it here. The thing about religions is that you don't need to win in any way that makes sense in the real world to win according to the tenets of your religion. In the case of this religion, being more pure than thou is one way of winning.
And likely there's a major self-validation component to it as well, in that this group of people tend to be far more individualistic than most people, valuing freedom and self-expression far greater than most people. This is evident in many things, including their hair/tattoo/piercing/fashion choices and their support for transing children. Thus it would make sense that they put greater value in the individual feeling of righteousness they get from putting down someone less pure than them than in their movement winning more supporters and becoming more capable of affecting change in this world.
07mk
2d ago
Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.
This reminds me of a serious argument I've seen someone make in the ultimate Frisbee community, for why transwomen ought to play with women despite admitting that transwomen, especially ones who haven't done any sort of medical transitioning, have a physical advantage: that transwomen suffer so much bigotry in their everyday lives that we just ought to accommodate them in this one thing. It doesn't make sense from a fair sports play perspective, but from the perspective of just seeing this as a question of status, it kinda does.
All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.
It's probably an extreme way to describe it, but "remaining forever a child" seems to describe pretty accurately the kind of behavior that's encouraged in the type of nerdy/blue tribe/white collar culture this person likely grew up in. There's a reason why the term "adulting" was invented (or at least popularized) by and for people in such a culture, after all. A major part of the culture is trusting authority figures as experts who are able to guide you to the truth in a way that's superior and counterintuitive to the rubes who use their intuition and personal anecdotes to jump to conclusions. This, of course, makes sense as a child; you aren't yet equipped with the maturity with which to make judgment calls on most important things, and that's why most important decisions about your life are made by adults who theoretically have your best interests in mind. But children don't become mature adults with good judgment merely through time; it requires practice and training, which are highly constrained in these environments.
So when they're taught about the inaccuracies of stereotypes as a child and how all of society was sexist and misogynistic against women for entirely arbitrary reasons because men and women are same in every way that matters, many of them believe it and many of them refuse to believe their lying eyes. After all, their own judgment is inherently suspect for having been raised in this oppressive patriarchy which has forever sullied it with bias that they will never escape from even if they dedicate their entire lives to doing so, which is nonetheless the duty of any human being who wants to be a Decent Person.
Now, someone still holding onto this belief by the age of 38... this means that this person grew up in the 90s-00s at the latest, during which time this stuff wasn't nearly as extreme as it was in the 00s-10s, so this person is an extreme case. I'd wager the neurodivergence played a significant factor. I grew up in the 90s-00s in some of the more extreme areas of the country where this culture was dominant, and most people understood that there were significant sex differences in athletic ability (though it was nowhere near universal, especially among younger people!), so either this person was raised in one of the few even more extreme areas, or was particularly extreme in his way of thinking or both.
Edit: As an anecdote, one of my major hobbies is ultimate Frisbee, which is one of the bluest of blue sports due in large part to how it's primarily introduced to people in college. Right now in our local leagues, it's just taken for granted that transwomen should compete with women in single-gender leagues and as women when they want to in mixed-gender leagues (teams of 7 with either 4m-3f or 3m-4f at a time, usually). (We also don't use terms like male or female because that's offensive, but rather Defender of Men and Defender of Women and Defender of Choice for transwomen who want to choose depending on the point - the fact that this means we call men DOMs has been a source of amusement). Playing pickup, I've heard people seriously argue that a particularly good female player there, who outplays most of the males in pickup, could make it to the local elite-level men's team (has won the national championship recently and has gotten to the top 8 regularly) if she chose to try out.
07mk
2d ago
But the homosexual community is still struggling with the issue: Turns out they can't ignore those people and instead seem compelled to eradicate them from all public fora. And I think trans advocates are cut of this same cloth. Dissent and debate are lethal to these movements, seemingly, in very similar ways for very similar reasons.
This struggle seems like an entirely voluntary decision and the source of entirely self-inflicted suffering. Unfortunately, that's often not easy to pull someone out of. My hope is that enough people just walk away from this that the people who choose to inflict this unnecessary suffering on themselves (and others) are sufficiently few as not to be a major issue.
Funnily enough, your choice of the word "struggle" actually reminds me of another rather famous Struggle that also seemed entirely voluntary and led to a ton of self-inflicted unnecessary suffering both to himself and his compatriots. Hopefully it doesn't come to anything like that.
07mk
3d ago
It seems like this would require defining what it means to be trans... any suggestions?
Personally, no. I agree that it'd be incumbent upon anyone who wants society to be accepting of giving puberty blockers to trans children in order to transition them to provide a definition of "trans" that society in general would accept. For the past couple decades, I think we've seen them push the idea of "really really feels like they're the opposite sex," along the same lines as homosexuality being defined as something like "really really feels like they're sexually attracted to the same sex," but that clearly hasn't stuck. Given that we're talking about actual medical intervention, the definition would probably have to be a lot more objective.
Seems like you're begging the question here. If people think something is wrong in principle, then it won't be "fine" by their lights even if it doesn't cause secondary problems.
Sure, just like how homosexuals still aren't "fine" by the lights of plenty of people today. But, again, we can just ignore those people and win over the people who can be won over based on the (lack of) those secondary problems.
07mk
3d ago
For political news, I recently started watching Straight Arrow News on YouTube. Their whole deal is that they follow each news item with information on how the left and the right are spinning it. This is, of course, just as susceptible to partisan bias as any other news source, but generally the bias they present each side as having does seem to reflect what I notice about the bias each side is having (this, itself, is susceptible to confirmation bias on my part), and I think, at the very least, learning of the partisan biases along with the actual news information is helpful.
For similar reasons, I recently started watching the show Rising from The Hill, which follows news items with commentary by 2 commentators, one leftwing and one rightwing (the former seems to change often, while the latter is almost always Robby Soave, a libertarian from Reason magazine).
07mk
3d ago
There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.
There is no simple choice here, and any method is going to inevitably have both false positives and false negatives. I think there are a couple of good reasons to err on the side of more false negatives, though. One is the basic principle that's often summed up as "first, do no harm." This isn't some iron-clad rule even within the medical community, much less reality itself, but it's a general call for epistemic humility in medicine such that, unless we can be really really sure that some intervention won't be a net harm, we ought to allow human biology to take its course. The other reason is the base rates: the odds that any given child is trans is minuscule, likely less than 1%, from what I recall about the stats. Now, we aren't sure what the odds are, conditional on the child believing that they're trans, but it's not clear that that conditional shifts the odds significantly, much less that it shifts the odds to 50.00001%, which would be the threshold at which it would make sense to even consider any sort of irreversible interventions.
What I think any sort of people who are for use of puberty blockers in trans children ought to do at this point is to generate credible scientific knowledge on how to accurately determine if a child is trans, as well as create credible mechanisms by which children are properly filtered out. At a bare minimum, it would have to include metaphorically tarring and feathering anyone who would refuse to publicize research on this topic based on the fear that it would be politically inconvenient, as well as encouraging criticisms of any research from people who are ideologically opposed to them. It's only through building such a credible mechanism of accurately identifying trans children and minimizing false positives that I think society in general would be on board with the program. Even then, there will always be people who oppose it entirely on principle, much like, even in 2025, there are people who believe homosexuality is a sin or are against miscegenation. Those people ought to just be ignored and will simply lose their credibility over time if giving puberty blockers to kids proves itself to be fine.
07mk
7d ago
The dems offer a lot: student loan forgiveness, healthcare reform, housing reform, etc.
Do they? One of my major disappointments with the Democratic party since Obama's election is that there has been very little talk about implementing nationalized healthcare beyond what the ACA accomplished. Pre-ACA, the thought among much of the left was that it was to be a wedge in an effort to keep the door to just full on nationalized healthcare. At the very least, it seems that that step was indeed effectively irreversible so far, with not a whole lot effort that I can see from Republicans trying to roll it back. But neither have Democrats been trying to push that ratchet further. If Kamala ran on socialized healthcare or other forms of significant healthcare reform, she didn't do a good job of advertising it.
I'm also not really aware of Democrats making much noise in terms of housing reform. Given how locally Democrat-controlled areas tend not to have the best reputation in terms of accomplishing lower housing costs, I'm not sure they have much credibility for it, either.
07mk
7d ago
I haven't read the Hanania article and thus can't speak to his arguments, but if more economically libertarian states tend to have more abundant housing, then that seems to be the mechanism by which Americans come to preferring to live in such states. Revealed preference for economically libertarian states doesn't mean that someone is judging states on the basis of their economic policies and preferring to move to one that's more economically libertarian. Revealed preference means that states that are more economically libertarian tend to create conditions that cause more people to decide that moving there is a better decision than moving elsewhere. The abundance of housing could be one of them. So I wouldn't say that that's misleading.
07mk
8d ago
Well, there's that Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” People who make money off of education will tend to genuinely believe that education is good/effective/virtuous/etc., and the causality seems likely to go in both directions. And if we expand it not just to money but status, people with more degrees will tend to genuinely believe it as well, especially the more their use of the degree is insulated from real, concrete, undeniable consequences.
I used to be confused at why the benefits of education was taken as an article of faith by the educated, since education should theoretically make someone more appreciative of the importance of empirical evidence, and as best as I can tell, the empirical evidence that the apparent better outcomes for educated people come almost entirely from the education with almost none from the filtering mechanism seems rather lacking. Which is how you get to supporting the idea that it's better to let poor performing kids go up grades and graduate high school, so that they get the opportunity to go to colleges where they can accrue the benefits of higher education. I'm not so confused anymore.
07mk
11d ago
Assuming that Biden truly was unaware of the pardons when they were signed - something that seems depressingly likely to be true - to what extent could the pardons still be valid if Biden was briefed on the pardons after-the-fact and gave a verbal or written OK as having his approval? I'm not a lawyer or constitutional scholar, and I wonder if there's anything even similar to a precedent for something like this.
I agree that this is the most parsimonious explanation. Even someone as public as Musk spends a majority of his time outside the spotlight, so few people, if any, have enough contact with him to make a call like his mind breaking. Sometimes it's obvious, as in the case of people like Kanye or Biden, but in those cases, generally even the people who support them can't deny it, not without massive help from powerful media companies, anyway. This criticism of Musk appears to come almost entirely from people who already disliked Musk and Trump, and the people who currently like Musk don't seem to have noticed this, so my conclusion is that people claiming that evidence points to Musk's mind breaking are characterizing his apparent shift in politics away from them as that, and then honestly believing it (well, I wonder if Hanania believes it, if he's as smart as I think he is; from my following his Twitter account, he seems to optimize around heat and not light, in a way that presents himself as a wise right-wing contrarian, so I'm not sure if he believes in anything these days). If there were some significant population of people who are cheering on what Musk is doing these days who think his mind is broken, that would lend credence to the theory, but outside of that, it's hard to conclude anything other than partisan bias. Which is the correct explanation for roughly 99.9% of all questions in the realm of politics, by my estimation.
07mk
13d ago
If there's a good chance you'll never get to all of them, I'd recommend just skipping DmC altogether. Again, not a terrible game, but it's such a huge step down compared to the actual DMC games that it's not even in the same class. And the gameplay is so different that it'll just feel like going to a whole different game rather than an upgrade.
Otoh, DMC1 and 3 have very similar combat systems, but 3 is clearly superior to 1's, so you might want to play 1 before 3, to feel the improvement. 4 and 5 are also upgrades in gameplay compared to 3, but not by nearly as much as from 1 to 3.
And yes, DMC games are far more fun than God of War games. I will forever have bitterness towards David Jaffe for creating GOW that not only overahadowed DMC and Ninja Gaiden, but also helped to popularize quick-time-events in mainstream AAA games. Having flashing icons of the button you need to press above the enemy's head in order to pull off special moves doesn't make it more fun or immersive, it just reminds me that I'm playing a video game, not beating up minotaurs! DMC4 and Ninja Gaiden 2 both implemented similar systems far better without having to have flashing icons, but rather by integrating them seamlessly into the core gameplay controls.
07mk
13d ago
I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
07mk
13d ago
Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.
Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.
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