domain:apollomindset.substack.com
hydroacetylene
3m ago
The canon of Latin works is well translated into modern languages, you are unlikely to find new insights by reading the originals.
There are actually a number of untranslated(at least to English) Latin works out there. Moral Theology by St. Alphonsus of Ligouri is likely the most prominent.
hydroacetylene
7m ago
All human beings have equal dignity. It is no lesser tragedy for Nigerians or Congolese to be massacred than for Norwegians or Irishmen.
That being said, the distribution of natural gifts among different groups is not equal, and it must be admitted that Europeans get the better split compared to Bantus or Arabs. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose immigration from the Congo or Iraq on the basis that these people will lower the average abilities of an individual in your country, and this is not based in hatred of Congolese or Iraqis.
tricycle3778
11m ago
I don't agree with you but I appreciate this post because it perfectly summarizes the reactionary/alt-right position on immigration, which you've neatly condensed into this sentence:
he American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be. So this man ostensibly being the "model" Arab immigrant but still become inspired to commit this act is shattering the liberal illusion of assimilation, or that being German is just an idea.
I don't know if you're American or European. As an American, I think plenty of people from all over the world can assimilate and become culturally Southern, Midwestern, etc. I think this because I've met second and third generation Americans who behave much more like their white American counterparts than people in the country their parents and grandparents came from, and these differences go well beyond language. I've met Hispanic Catholics who I feel a much closer affinity to because of our shared faith than white atheist liberals who I'm genetically closer to. And so on.
But I'm interested in hearing other European perspectives on this. I know @Folamh3 is Irish, I think @Stefferi and @2rafa are European? Sorry I don't know more.
hydroacetylene
11m ago
Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.
Counter counterpoint- they're Indian. Mexican and Ukrainian and Vietnamese immigrants would have gotten away with it.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
20m ago
Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.
What's happening is the European groups, too, take the political playbook from US Conservatives. "We're not racist (that would be evil!) we just think radical Islam is bad mmkaay." But that is downstream of the political pressures of liberal hegemony, there's a practical reason it centers on a religious critique of migration rather than a racial critique of migration.
Remigration strikes a more nativist cord than it does a purely anti-Islamic cord.
2rafa
27m ago
Obviously there are different tiers of the anti-immigration position that include various forms of nativism and not-nativism.
What is likely, though, is that most Western Europeans would probably have quietly acquiesced to mass immigration and demographic change without any major drama if the migrants had been, say, all Vietnamese or Filipino. Not because the nativist position would have been ‘disproven’, but because there would be none of these extreme staccato incidents of terrorist violence, things like Rotherham, Charlie Hebdo etc that draw a great deal of public attention.
In the US the majority of the public are still relatively torn on mass immigration and the large scale deportation of most legal immigrants, let alone actually stripping naturalised migrants of citizenship, is an extreme fringe position. In Canada the public only really turned after they started importing pretty much the entirety of the Punjab at like 2% of the whole population per year.
There isn’t a huge (foreign) religion/race-neutral nativist constituency in most Western countries, meaning the population that wants everyone gone regardless of who they are, who they act and what they believe. Even in Iberia where there’s been huge legal immigration (often of people who are rather far from being of pure euro descent) from Latin America almost all anti-immigrant hostility is directed towards migrants from the Islamic world.
Magusoflight
38m ago
Best current estimates are that College student IQ is about the population average of 100
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
39m ago
Video game NPCs can't have conversations with you or go on weird schizo tangents if you leave them alone talking with eachother. They're far more reactive than dynamic. This is a pretty weird, complex output for a nonthinking machine:
https://x.com/repligate/status/1847787882896904502/photo/1
Sensation is a process in the mind. Nerves don't have sensation, sensors don't have sensation, it's the mind that feels something. You can still feel things from a chopped off limb but without the brain, there is no feeling. What about the pain people feel when they discover someone they respect has political views they find repugnant? Or the pain of the wrong guy winning the election? The pain of a sub-par media release they'd been excited about? There are plenty of kinds of purely intellectual pain, just as there are purely intellectual thrills. I see no reason why we can rule out emotions purely based on substrate. Many people who deeply and intensively investigate modern AIs find them to be deeply emotional beings.
I dispute that the Britannica is even giving me more complex or more intelligent output. It can't use its 'knowledge' of the 7 years war to create other kinds of knowledge, it can't make it into a text adventure game or a poem or a song or craft alternate-history versions of the seven year's war. The 'novel tasks' part greatly increases complexity of the output, it allows for interactivity and a vast amount of potential output beyond a single pdf.
A more accurate analogy is that anti-AI image software interferes (or tries to interfere) with AI learning, not the actual vision process. It messes with the encoding process that squeezes down the data of millions and billions of images down into a checkpoint files a couple of gigabytes in size. I bet if we knew how the human vision process worked we could do things like that to people too.
I did a quick sanity test and put an image from the Glaze website into Claude and asked for a description. It was dead on the money, telling me about the marsh, the horse and rider, the colour palette and so on. So even if these manipulations can interfere with the training process, they clearly don't interfere with the vision process, whatever is going on technical terms. So they do pass the most basic test of vision and many of the advanced ones.
Cosplaying as someone caring about federal politics is just as silly as cosplaying as a member of the rebel alliance: you will no more change the outcome of the presidential election than you will change the outcome of the galactic war. (It is a lot more bitter, though, because the cosplayers take it more seriously.)
My dad is into the South Pole in a big way, and owns dozens of books about various Antarctic expeditions. He once attended this event where all the people pretend they're on such an expedition (may have been Scott's, I can't remember) and dress for the occasion.
Sometime later I won free tickets to our city's Comic-Con. I don't have much interest in this sort of thing, but my girlfriend at the time was a big Marvel fan so we went. I was telling my dad about the cosplayers, and he sort of scoffed at what a silly way it was to spend one's time. I pointed out that, while it's certainly silly, it's not objectively more silly than cosplaying as an Antarctic expeditioner in a warm and dry restaurant.
Reading Shakespeare is unlikely to give you unique insights into the human condition you could not have gotten from other sources. Read it if you like, but don't pretend that you are doing something more useful with your time than the person who reads YA novels or smut.
Hard disagree. It's true that the insights gained from Shakespeare can be gained from other sources, because Shakespeare's insights are in the water supply. But spending hours poring over The Tempest at least has a chance of resulting in you understanding something new about the human condition (even if you could have learned the same thing in a shorter period of time from a more accessible source), whereas I think learning anything noteworthy from reading smut is more or less impossible.
While I broad-strokes agree with you that some hobbies considered high-status are no less silly than certain hobbies which are considered low-status, I'm not going to go the full cultural relativist maximally nihilistic "it's all bullshit anyway". I do actually believe that good things are good. Ceterus paribus, pastimes which actively engage the mind, the body or both are more edifying than those which do not. Of course learning Klingon is a waste of time in the scheme of things, but I would still rather someone put the effort into learning Klingon than simply passively watch TOS for the fifteenth time. Even if the only reason you're going to the gym is so that your Thor cosplay is more convincing, that's a hell of a lot better than not working out at all.
I also disagree that your life would be worse if you took up running. I mean, it could be, but I found it did wonders for my mood and energy levels, and I'm far from alone in reporting that experience.
The argument people like Keith Woods makes is that these Arab immigrants will never be German, no matter how long they are there or if they learn the language, whether they commit crime or do not commit crime, whatever they Tweet or whatever political policy they support, whatever religion they will follow, the only certainty is that they will never be German. So your rebuttal is not responsive to the issue they fundamentally have with the mass migration of non-European people to European civilization.
It's not just about crime, it's not just about religion, it's not just about terrorism, although those things can be relevant symptoms, it's about jealously guarding a European genetic and civilizational inheritance from being Africanized, replaced by Arabs or Chinese, Indians or whatever.
Your argument is most responsive to the Conservatives who just say "hey, I'm not racist I just oppose mass Arab migration because I don't want terrorist attacks in my Christmas villages." For those people you can do your well ackhually it wasn't Islamic extremism that inspired the attack, but that just doesn't work on the DR perspective.
If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America.
Why stop at 100,000? Why not 100 million? Even if mass migration of Asians, Vietnamese, Chinese to Germany caused a reduction in crime and created economic growth do you think the DR should accept these foreigners because they commit less crime or raise GDP? Why not replace all of Europe with Chinese if it lowered crime and raised IQ? It's only conservatives who say it's about those things.
This terrorist attack is pertinent to the DR perspective because it provides a symbolic counterexample to the lie that, no matter who you are, you can go to Germany, learn the language and obey the law and, congratulations you're German! No you are not. The American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be. So this man ostensibly being the "model" Arab immigrant but still become inspired to commit this act is shattering the liberal illusion of assimilation, or that being German is just an idea.
He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.”
His motivation was European immigration policy. You try to be ultra-specific about it to brush it as a one-off, but it introduces the likelihood of violence in response to Right-wing Immigration reform in Europe. We may see more of that type of violence than radical Islamic-inspired violence, although a lot of it will be blended together.
We have seen a similar pattern with Free Speech in Europe: terrorist attacks in response to offensive speech did not motivate backlash against mass migration it motivated crackdowns on "hate speech" out of fear of offending Muslims. So if we see more Arab terrorists attack Europe because of European immigration reform we will likely see pressure put against immigration reform. This is relevant especially at a time when parties are flirting with the idea of remigration.
You don't think that AfD and other European parties beginning to support remigration is likely to inspire any more of this violence? We already see race riots and organized street violence by African and Arab gangs. That already happens, and it's political, it's not driven by radical Islam. So your denial that we won't see more of this sort of political violence is absurd.
Yes, the likelihood is near 100% that this sort of violence is going to influence European policy on immigration, most likely it will cause authorities to crackdown harder on political support for remigration because authorities will plausibly be able to say that supporting this policy is likely to foment violence. Certainly if that policy were to be pursued, then violence from deportees would be a top concern of that policy. So there's simply no reality in which the prospect of violence from these African and Arab migrants is irrelevant, Muslim or otherwise.
This attack is more relevant because it was motivated by European immigration policy than if it were just radical Islam. It's proof that mass migration irrevocably influences politics and "assimilation" is fundamentally a lie.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
53m ago
My brother in Christ, up until now (can't speak for this one) LLMs frequently get things wrong (because they don't actually understand anything) and can't learn to do better (because they don't actually understand anything). That's useless. Hell, it's worse than useless - it's actively harmful.
Perhaps this new one has surpassed the limitations of prior models before it, but I have my doubts. And given that people have been completely driven by hype about LLMs and persistently do not even see the shortcomings, saying it's "the 174th best coder on earth" means very little. How do I know that people aren't just giving into hype and using bad metrics to judge the new model just as they did the old?
Shrike
59m ago
how exactly is that different from a brain? I mean the brain itself feels nothing, the sensations are interpreted from data from the nerves, the brain doesn’t experience pain
I experience pain. The qualia is what I experience. To what degree the brain does or doesn't experience pain is probably open to discussion (preferably by someone smarter than me). Obviously if you cut my head off and extract my brain it will no longer experience pain. But on the other hand if you measured its behavior during that process - assuming your executioner was at least somewhat incompetent, anyway - you would see the brain change in response to the stimuli. And again a rattlesnake (or rather the headless body of one) seems to experience pain without being conscious. I presume there's nothing experiencing anything in the sense that the rattlesnake's head is detached from the body, which is experiencing pain, but I also presume that an analysis of the body would show firing neurons just as is the case with my brain if you fumbled lopping my head off.
(Really, I think the entire idea we have where the brain is sort of separate from the human body is wrong, the brain is part of a contiguous whole, but that's an aside.)
how is what’s happening between your body and your brain different from an LLM taking in data from any sort of input
Well, it's fundamentally different because the brain is not a computer, neurons are more complex than bits, the brain is not only interfacing with electrical signals via neurons but also hormones, so the types of data it is receiving is fundamentally different in nature, probably lots of other stuff I don't know. Look at it this way: supposing we were intelligent LLMs, and an alien spacecraft manned by organic humans crashed on our planet. We wouldn't be able to look at the brain and go "ah OK this is an organic binary computer, the neurons are bits, here's the memory core." We'd need to invent neuroscience (which is still pretty unclear on how the brain works) from the ground up to understand how the brain worked.
Or, for another analogy, compare the SCR-720 with the AN/APG-85. Both of them are radars that work by providing the pilot with data based on a pulse of radar. But the SCR-720 doesn't use software and is a mechanical array, while the APG-85 is an electronically scanned array that uses software to interpret the return and provide the data to the pilot. If you were familiar with the APG-85 and someone asked you to reverse-engineer a radar, you'd want to crack open the computer to access the software. But if you started there on an SCR-720 you'd be barking up the wrong tree.
Or a human experience of embarrassment for a wrong answer and an LLM given negative feedback and avoiding that negative feedback in the future.
I mean - I deny that an LLM can flush. So while an LLM and a human may both convey messages indicating distress and embarrassment, the LLM simply cannot physically have the human experience of embarrassment. Nor does it have any sort of stress hormone. Now, we know that, for humans, emotional regulation is tied up with hormonal regulation. It seems unlikely that anything without e.g. adrenaline (or bones or muscles or mortality) can experience fear like ours, for instance. We know that if you destroy the amygdala on a human, it's possible to largely obliterate their ability to feel fear, or if you block the ability of the amygdala to bind with stress hormones, it will reduce stress. An LLM has no amygdala and no stress hormones.
Grant for the sake of argument a subjective experience to a computer - it's experience is probably one that is fundamentally alien to us.
I think it’s fundamentally important to get this right because consciousness comes with humans beginning to care about the welfare of things that experience consciousness in ways that we don’t for mere objects. At higher levels we grant them rights. I don’t know what the consequences of treating a conscious being as an object would be, but at least historical examples seem pretty negative.
"Treating like an object" is I guess open to interpretation, but I think that animals generally are conscious and humans, as I understand it, wouldn't really exist today in anything like our current form if we didn't eat copious amounts of animals. So I would suggest the historical examples are on net not only positive but necessary, if by "treating like an object" you mean "utilizing."
However, just as the analogy of the computer is dangerous, I think, when reasoning about the brain, I think it's probably also dangerous to analogize LLMs to critters. Humans and all animals were created by the hand of a perfect God and/or the long and rigorous tutelage of natural selection. LLMs are being created by man, and it seems quite likely that they'll care about [functionally] anything we want them to, or nothing, if we prefer it that way. So they'll be selected for different and possibly far sillier things, and their relationship to us will be very different than any creature we coexist with. Domesticated creatures (cows, dogs, sheep, etc.) might be the closest analogy.
Of course, you see people trying to breed back aurochs, too.
anon_
1hr ago
Opposite along a different axis.
A scissor statement is seized-upon by multiple actors with conflicting interpretations.
A statement like "atheist muslim converts hates islam" is ignored by all actors as it there are no interpretations that are convenient for their positions.
ThisIsSin
One cannot seek change to a game one cannot adequately describe
1hr ago
he gives no outward impression of being depressed at least as far as I can see
Well, let's put it this way.
Most kinds of meal and by extension every ingredient has some kind of unpleasant taste to it. Sometimes, I plan meals based on what unpleasant taste I'm OK with submitting to on that particular night, and if the only things I have in my fridge are or add up to that, I go out for a burger or tendies instead if I have the opportunity to do so. (This can also happen with scents, and maybe a more extreme pickiness is created when the two are combined- though scents usually prompt initial aversion.)
Some of these ingredients have worse tastes than others, or those tastes are stronger in some people (insert "kids hate brussel sprouts" meme here, which I've always found pretty weird- though a good chunk of this is just parents being shit at cooking and just forgetting about certain things because they haven't eaten anything truly new in 20 years: he's not resisting the food to be difficult, he's resisting the food because it smells terrible right when you open the box and you forgot that matters).
I believe most people experience this with intentionally bad-tasting things- beer's the best example, because they're all bitter and awful as an inherent property of being beer. But it's the kind of unpleasantness, or the unpleasantness you are actively tolerating for other reasons, that makes it a viable beverage. Coffee is the same way, to a point- the reason people put cream and sugar in it is because they aren't actually in it for the coffee taste, they're doing it for other reasons. It's a coffee-flavored warm milkshake at that point, and I like milkshakes because they're milkshakes, not because they're coffee-flavored. (Most specialty coffee is absurd to me for this reason: because a lot of it is made to express the coffee flavor, and that flavor is bad- otherwise you wouldn't have to add sugar and cream and chocolate to it- so why would I want to spend 5 dollars on that when I can just get the cheap drip coffee and season it to the coffee-flavored-warm-milkshake taste that I actually wanted in the first place?)
The exception to those things are so-called "hyper palatable" foods. Your burgers, your tendies, your toaster pastries. There are very few distinct or recognizable ingredients in them, and so the possible space of undesirable tastes and textures is minimized (and in the case of processed foods this is either intentional or an emergent property in their development)- except perhaps for the store-bought frozen ones. Those are all turbo-garbage and they aren't even any cheaper; I don't know why anyone buys those outside of something their kid can prepare on their own when required. The frozen pizzas are like that too.
Take Doritos, for instance: it's a corn chip with good-tasting stuff on it. Or a McDonald's cheeseburger: it's [homogenized] beef, a slice of [homogenized] cheese, mustard and ketchup (both highly consistent mass produced substances), and maybe a bit of pickle (whose method of preparation is consistent and results in a taste that dominates what the cucumber originally may have tasted like). Pizza does that, tendies do that (bonus points for being a sauce-delivery mechanism; also, the McDonald's Szechuan sauce actually was as good as the meme suggested), toaster pastries do that, PB&J does that (though this kind of sandwich is actually really unpleasant to eat).
Contrast that with, say, a fancier curry (not the Glico stuff): you have all the ingredients in the sauce (including the fish sauce, ugh), the peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. You get a larger cross-section over which taste can go wrong (and... if you don't put those things in, it's just not curry) and it stinks up your kitchen something fierce because that's just what garum-based cuisine does (actually, lots of stuff does this- roast beef in particular is fucking awful for this; I can't begin to count the number of times I'd get home from school and smell that in the oven, but because it would take time between the 'oven's on, something's cooking' signal and the 'this is roast beef, not cookies' signal it'd be a cocktease 100% of the time).
I suspect this is heritable; my folks cook the absolute shit out of everything they make (everything's gotta be well done) and don't appear to actively enjoy eating what they make, but what they do make other than that are very simple 3-ingredient casseroles (or meatballs, or what they call chili) that take the form of what I described above. Of course, that's also very vulnerable to low-quality ingredients or the mix being wrong, and if one of the ingredients is changed then you literally can't make it any more.
On the rare occasions I cook, I also depend 100% on recipes. I can't "season to taste" when I don't know what it's even supposed to taste like, or if I do that, one of the ingredients on its own tastes bad anyway/once you can taste it, it's too late to season it; it doesn't help that I'm constitutionally incapable of chopping things in a way that doesn't mash them to bits (nobody else has a problem with this).
So if you're in control of what you eat, and you can spend 10 bucks on one of those store-bought BBQ chickens or get tendies instead, I'll take the tendies every single fucking time, because those chickens tend to be dry, under-seasoned, slimy, and you have to take them apart to eat them- why the absolute fuck would I take the effort to do that, or expect anyone else to, when the tendies are strictly superior 100% of the time if I'm in the mood for chicken?
Maybe it's learned helplessness; maybe if I did meal prep for the same meal 10 times and recorded exactly what I did, I could gradient descent my way into the tastiest possible version of a dish 100% of the time (which I think is what those meals-in-a-box promise, but they don't advertise that fact- the reason I don't want to cook is because it takes a half hour to chop everything and the produce I'd have to buy is always sub-par at best, which those services do not solve). But I don't think that's worth the cost or effort because that would take me literally all day and I can just go out for a fucking burger instead- maybe when I can no longer do that I'll consider it, or I'll be making food for my [hopefully future] wife and I can at least customize or appreciate it for that reason instead.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
[...] where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed.
While I am neither much into Star Wars nor own any Lego, my take is that in the grand scheme of things, all past times are equally silly. It used to be that some sorts of silliness were seen as appropriate and proper, such as nobles going hunting (despite not being threatened by food scarcity), or people learning an instrument to signal their sophistication, or sports fans of whatever the socially approved sport was getting very excited about it.
Cosplaying as someone caring about federal politics is just as silly as cosplaying as a member of the rebel alliance: you will no more change the outcome of the presidential election than you will change the outcome of the galactic war. (It is a lot more bitter, though, because the cosplayers take it more seriously.)
Learning a dead language like Latin is just as silly as learning a fantasy language like Klingon. The canon of Latin works is well translated into modern languages, you are unlikely to find new insights by reading the originals. (Granted, the number of people who require Latin for their job is slightly higher than the number who require Klingon, but still a tiny fraction of the population.)
Reading Shakespeare is unlikely to give you unique insights into the human condition you could not have gotten from other sources. Read it if you like, but don't pretend that you are doing something more useful with your time than the person who reads YA novels or smut.
Quite frankly, I am a single man in my late thirties who (like most of my generation) is unlikely to ever earn enough to buy a house near their workplace. But my life could be much worse, e.g. if I tried on top of that to permanently cosplay as a responsible adult and forced to pick up some horrible sport (like running) instead of video gaming or to read books which are considered age-appropriate (is Scifi allowed these days?) or waste another half-hour per day into dressing myself instead of simply picking up my jeans from the floor.
Coolguy1337
1hr ago
o3 is approximately equivalent to the #175 best human in competitive programming on CodeForces.
That tweet you linked does not mean what you say it means.
My brother in Christ, the 174th best coder on Earth is literally an LLM.
Competitive programming is something that fits LLM's much better than regular programming. The problems are well defined, short and the internet is filled with examples to learn from. So to say that it equals regular programming is not accurate at all.
Are LLM's decent (and getting better) at regular programming? Yes, especially combined with an experienced programmer dealing with something novel (to the programmer, but not the programming community at large), in roughly the same way (but better) that stackoverflow helps one get up to speed with a topic. In the hands of a novice programmer chaos occurs, which might not be bad if it leads to the programmer learning. But humans are lazy.
Will LLM's replace programmers? Who knows, but given my experience working with them, they struggle with anything that is not well documented on the internet very quickly. Which is sad, because I enjoy programming with them a lot.
Another thing to add is that I think the low hanging fruit is currently being picked dry. First it was increasing training for as long as it scaled (gpt4), then it was run time improvements on the model (have it re-read it's own output and sanity check it, increasing the cost of a query by a lot). I'm sure that there are more improvements on the way but like most 'AI' stuff, the early improvements are usually the easiest. So saying that programming is dead in X amount of years because "lllllook at all this progress!!!" is way too reactive.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1hr ago
No, its not that simple. Even granting your premise arguendo, they are still human beings, made according to the Imago Dei.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1hr ago
Did he hate Germans? Or did he hate the German government? I haven’t seen any evidence of the former, although I’d be perfectly happy to be confronted with some.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
Not to be that person, but how exactly is that different from a brain? I mean the brain itself feels nothing, the sensations are interpreted from data from the nerves, the brain doesn’t experience pain. So do you have the qualia of pain, and if so, how is what’s happening between your body and your brain different from an LLM taking in data from any sort of input? If I program the thing to avoid a certain input from a peripheral, how is that different from pain?
I think this is the big question of these intelligent agents. We seem to be pretty certain that current models don’t have consciousness or experience qualia, but I’m not sure that this would always be true, nor can I think of a foolproof way to tell the difference between an intelligent robot that senses that an arm is broken and seeks help and a human child seeking help for a skinned knee. Or a human experience of embarrassment for a wrong answer and an LLM given negative feedback and avoiding that negative feedback in the future.
I think it’s fundamentally important to get this right because consciousness comes with humans beginning to care about the welfare of things that experience consciousness in ways that we don’t for mere objects. At higher levels we grant them rights. I don’t know what the consequences of treating a conscious being as an object would be, but at least historical examples seem pretty negative.
No_one
2hr ago
if your argument is that absolutely no immigration should be permitted because there exists the possibility that the immigrant will commit a crime against the native population in the future,
Arabs, blacks or are lazier and more violent. No immigration of such should be permitted. Indians lie and cheat more than whites. It's that simple.
brought with it significant violence against the "native" Anglo population,
America was underpopulated. Europe isn't.
zeke5123a
2hr ago
Says who? What’s the evidence? I see these claims but they don’t seem backed up by reality. If they are so great, why haven’t we practically fired all coders?
No_one
2hr ago
I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration?
He hated Germans and threatened them repeatedly. If it's an act it was a years long performance.
No_one
2hr ago
The likeliest scenario imo seems to be a psychotic episode.
He got reported to the police for making the same threat last year. He was convicted for threats in '13..
Shrike
2hr ago
Or at least they behave as if they're distressed.
Yes - video game NPCs and frog legs in hot skillets also do this, I don't think they are experiencing pain.
Heartbreak can cause pain in humans on a purely cognitive level, there's no need for a physical body
I am inclined not to believe this to be true. Heartbreak involves a set of experiences that are only attainable with a physical body. It is also typically at least partially physical in nature as an experience (up to and including literal heartbreak, which is a real physical condition). I'm not convinced a brain-in-a-jar would experience heartbreak, particularly if somehow divorced from sex hormones.
Past a certain level of complexity in their output, we reach this philosophical zombie problem.
Consider what this implies about the universe, if you believe that it "output" humans. (Of course you may not be a pure materialist - I certainly am not.)
The output is recycled input. Look, let's say I go to an AI and I ask it to tell me about the 7 Years War. And I go to Encyclopedia Brittanica Online and I type in Seven Year's War. And what ends up happening is that Encyclopedia Britannica gives me better, more complex, more intelligent output for less input. But Encyclopedia Britannica isn't self-aware. It's not even as "intelligent" as an LLM. (You can repeat this experiment with a calculator). The reason that LLMs seem self-aware isn't due to the complexity of the output returned per input, it's because they can hold a dynamic conversation and perform novel tasks.
Also, they barely even work at that, more modern image models are apparently immune:
Yes - because modern image models were given special intervention to overcome them, as I understand it. But while we're here, it's interesting to see what your link says about how modern image models work, and whether or not they "see" anything:
computer vision doesn't work the same way as in the brain. They way we do this in computer vision is that we hook a bunch of matrix multiplications together to transform the input into some kind of output (very simplified).
It is not time for me to make an effort post on this, so I offer instead some fragmented thoughts.
Or in general, they do not know how to ask, and we don't know how to answer.
This is how 100% of the young men I know operate (though it's not how I've seen boys operate, so naturally there's some hope left). It's universal. Where are all the women [effectively] flashing their tits at young men who take risks, anyway? (I am not a woman so I can't be part of the solution; men actually can't do this outside of very specific circumstances.)
This is a Boomer-parent-specific problem in general. We're 40 years into our society-wide 100-year Prohibition/Panic cycle on the kid-snatching thing so this is going to continue being a problem for the next 50 years.
It is society's allergy to risk that destroyed them. Scared their kids will touch a needle in the ballpit (wtf?), scared they'll get sick or hurt, scared of the inevitable lawsuit, scared of the judge that will find in the plaintiff's favor with financially ruinous results.
Yeah, but the men who really do this all converge on women's clothing these days. I prefer looser pants, and always have (there are a few things I'm not willing to compromise my otherwise high agreeableness on; this is one of them, not that I really need to do it these days), partially because of high sensitivity in relevant areas (mainly around the waist), but long skirts (and tights, when applicable; it's literally just long underwear lol) are warmer (they trap air, like a wetsuit does) and are easier to move around in than jeans are. They're softer and available in a wider variety of materials, too. If they fit better I wouldn't wear anything else. This happens with undergarments too; the male ones are bulky and relatively uncomfortable, but the female ones that still function when applied to male anatomy are actually the exact thing I want [provided I can hide that I'm doing it perfectly; this isn't actually a sex thing, but most people will take it as one, obviously]. While certain manufacturers have tried to make this for men, they put a stupid seam at the bottom length-wise, which defeats the entire purpose.
And this ultimately bleeds into their children. They stop asking. The "kids are naturally rebellious" meme is something Boomers have exposure to but not something that naturally happens if you're a half-competent parent (to the point that I believe the rebellious ones simply had incompetent parents, or ones that would fail to be consistent because 'it was convenient for my kid to take risks in childhood when they were small, now they're teen-aged and want to take larger ones and I'm big mad about that').
This is why, if they make the mistake of appearing before me, I tend to address them directly, because they aren't going to do that themselves. My goal when I meet one is, ultimately, to encourage the expression of... uh, expression in an environment of "everyone you know hates you, wishes you were dead/wishes you'd just go back to the iPad, and your co-ethnics won't help because they have internalized the exact same message, it's For Your Safety".
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out why teenagers are shunning drugs and having less sex. They have internalized "not an adult" (it's like that thing the kids do in IT, but in reverse, where not being an adult is the thing that gives you protection from the invisible clown that lives in the sewers) and they'll stay that way until they die- their kids will probably be all right, though, shame it'll cost them all their good years before they figure that out.
The first step to fixing a problem is making sure those affected are even acknowledging there's a problem with it in the first place.
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