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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Its a point I've made before.

Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

And this means they're pretty much attuned to the Molochian incentives over their entire lives, and this thus sets their expectations for how the rest of their lives will turn out (spoiler: not great unless they get rich enough to just opt out of the race).

Yes, Algorithms have always been there, but now its more legible than ever. Or, ironically, less legible since most places keep their algos as black boxes. Its not like you can just ask "Why didn't you hire me?" "Oh, I don't like your tattoos/lack of experience/general attitude." Its always a nonspecific dismissal that even they can't explain.

So they're told to suck it up and try harder, keep going until they get a yes, etc. etc., but they're missing the 'feedback' part that might help them zero in on why they're failing and getting rejected. And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

One hopeful use case for AI if it does not end all our problems at once (we're all dead, or its utopia) is it should be extremely good at helping match people with positions that work best for them given their preferences and the other party's needs. An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which, AND given constructive feedback as to why certain applicants aren't suitable or what they can do to improve. Same for dating, in theory, although the thought of AI mediated dating/mating disgusts me on a visceral level. Hmm.

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

Once again, I find myself quoting:

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

And this:

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

reminds me of the gritty cyberpunk dystopia Tyler Cowen forecasts our civilization becoming in Average is Over.

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

I think @KulakRevolt had a good essay related to this. I can't find it right now, but he argued that in the past, most men were pretty happy to see increased military spending because it meant jobs. Relatively good jobs that an average man could get, no experience or credentials necessary. Nowadays we tend to think there's a tradeoff between "guns or butter" where increased military spending means less money available for all the nice stuff. But the more common pattern is the opposite- war opens up opportunities, while longtime peace creates a glut of men with no clear role in society. If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

Kind of like the idea that the Black Plague was a good thing for the peasantry (that survived)?

Yeah. It's the same Malthusian logic- the population grows faster than the amount of available wealth. And even if the population is shrinking, the wealth is also getting concentrated into fewer and fewer hands unless the government steps in.

the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

It's a actually not that bad. I can't find the original article (which I read at least ten years ago), but it's easily shown that if every company hires the ""top 20%"" of their applicant pool then much more than the top 20% of the actual labor force in that sector is employed.

Of course, but it doesn't leave those getting rejected with much insight into what they could do better.

While true, I don't think there was ever a time when an employer would tell you how you could be a better candidate. If nothing else it's probably covered in spooky liabilities, at least if you are a lawyer.

You can't even ask, is the thing.

Because the people doing the hiring probably don't even know, or would rather not explain "the computer told us no."

An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which,

Same for dating, in theory

The problem - a little more so in the case of dating, but not much - is that people/employers don't know what they want. Some might think they do, but they don't.

In the end, it's all vibes. "They know it then they see it", and they especially know what they don't want when they see it.

The AI won't help with that, at least not until it has a good training set of people who vibed in the past.

I suspect that training an AI that can do this is far simpler than you'd assume on the face of it.

And it doesn't have to be THAT good to beat the current system as described.

I'd be a tad more worried about how people might try to aggressively 'jailbreak' the thing to improve their chances.

My assumption is that an AI would be extremely good at this - if it had the training data. Far better than a person could be without meeting the candidate.

The problem is the training data. I haven't gone on nearly enough good and bad dates to show the AI what I like and what I don't like. So I can't let the AI choose my wife. Yet I knew I had found her when I first met her.

Given that a large percentage of relationships now occur in large part via text, ignoring privacy concerns it's easy to feed the texts I sent to my wife in the first six months of our relationship and then assign a value to our marriage, and so on across thousands of examples until they can look at your texts with your gf and determine if you should get married.

Don Draper: Arranged marriages, but arranged by a computer instead of parents who love you.

"Our Super Yenta, with a measured IQ of over 9000, has studied over 200,000 successful relationships and over 300,000 unsuccessful relationships, in order to determine what subtle factors in communication can indicate relationship compatibility. Super Yenta has no ulterior motives: she doesn't want to hook you up with her niece, she's a computer without feelings that rates relationships only on objective criteria discerned from training data."

Interesting, that's not my experience at all! I've had good "text game" with many women who turned out to be bad dates, or who turned out to be good dates but absolutely not wife material.

In my experience, there's absolutely no way around meeting and talking/interacting if you want to know if you have potential. The AI would need to watch those meetings, and be trained on data like that.

I'm suggesting that the AI will likely pick up on patterns you and I don't, subtleties that predict relationship outcomes more reliably than the participants themselves.

The average single has zero training examples of what a text conversation looks like in a relationship that leads to marriage. At best, they may be able to conference with a few friends who may have experience of one text conversation they lead to marriage who may be willing to read a few messages and render an opinion. A hypothetical YentaGPT could trivially review months of messaging and compare it to thousands of examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships.

Just as a great baseball coach can judge a player from how they grip the bat, a great relationship coach could judge from a text conversation.

From your data set though the AI wouldn't be looking at how the player grips the bat, but how the player writes about gripping the bat, if he does at all, or how he texts about the game, etc. I believe @pbmonster 's point is that while "text game" may be one data point (and as far as it might get one in the proverbial door, an important one) but it doesn't read body language (gripping the bat), tone of voice, eye contact, scent, speed of talking, whether you shake your knee up and down, how she holds her hair over one shoulder, etc etc. To say nothing of moments when the two of you laugh at the same thing, or other, small but deep indicators that may not be very legible in text interactions.

I suspect over thousands of messages with someone who you are hanging out with in person, such subtleties would become apparent in text.

It's perfectly possible to get along with someone via text and not in person, but it would be odd to get along via text, meet up and not get along, then go back to the exact same text dynamic.

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