domain:savenshine.com
Bleep
1m ago
who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors
Desantis's entire campaign which burned through hundreds of millions of dollars was a train of unforced errors
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2m ago
De Santis was not working to achieve these things prior to the rise of Trump in 2016. He fell in line behind Trump after Trump was already ascendant. If the Blues can successfully destroy Trump, I am not confident he will not simply tack back to the center.
Blues have made destruction of Trump an overriding priority, and therefore a legible proxy for their control. Reds, it seems to me, correctly perceive defense against such destruction as a schelling point to coordinate around. We believe that our own party has been grifting us for decades, and we are attempting to weed out the grifters, to align the party with our values in fact rather than only in appearance. Part of that is rejecting the sort of "compromises" that have been used for decades to sell those values out. A good way to avoid those compromises with our enemies is to force them to compromise with us instead. Trump is excellent at accomplishing this, and the "never Trump" movement has successfully removed a large proportion of these people from our party.
Tanista
12m ago
Where it gets complicated is that at least some of these things could theoretically be achieved by other Republicans like DeSantis who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors (with an idiot-savant ability to tell how much his party is willing to tolerate).
And yet, Trump blew them all out in the primary.
Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters.
He literally just ran a campaign wherein he successfully appealed to voters. Have you tried looking at his literal appeals to voters, and what voters say they found persuasive about them?
The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration.
What about the wars? What about cost disease? What about culture war? What about Institutional trust and social cohesion?
This all seems quite straightforward to me, and I'm at a loss where the confusion is coming from. Blue Tribe achieved a high degree of social and political dominance. They became The System. They then failed to deliver appreciable progress, and their failed efforts burned institutional trust and social cohesion. Because of that loss, the public is now rebelling against them en-masse.
I wanted to vote against the dominant foreign policy consensus, typified by endless, pointless foreign wars. Trump seems like the best candidate available to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant economic consensus, typified by offshoring and free trade, the service economy and the decline of industrialization. Trump seems like at least one of the best candidates possible to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant social consensus, and particularly against the repeated and coordinated attempts at forcing epistemic closure on the part of major political, media and corporate institutions. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against rule by an unelected, unresponsive and uncontrollable federal bureaucracy. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against crime and unaccountable political violence. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against entrenched corruption on the part of government officials. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against censorship and propaganda coordination between the government and major media corporations. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against the disastrous educational policies that have been shambling forward like a zombie for the last fifty years or so. Again, Trump.
None of this even seems to require "multicausal" explanations. I want to break the social and political dominance of Blue Tribe. All of these are just expressions of that dominance, and the insulation from consequence or accountability that has resulted from that dominance. And sure, there's a lot of Trump voters who probably wouldn't describe their view in the way I have above: they'd say something like "everything's gone to shit" or "I don't trust the democrats or the media" or something along those lines. Tomato, tomahto.
Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Trump had many failures last time. But given the record of how his last administration went, it's hard for me to grasp an argument that the problem was Trump, and not the entrenched elites working to foil and destroy him from the second the 2016 election ended. This goes well beyond immigration, into a whole variety of very serious illegalities and norm violations taken in an effort to end or at least stonewall his presidency and to protect his opponents.
A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability. They want that system removed, because its continued existence forecloses their ability to hope for a better future.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30m ago
I just can’t get excited for AI therapy because honestly, unless you have literally nobody in your life to talk through things with, there’s no value to therapy. I just don’t see people with long-standing issues get better because they had therapy. In fact, some people have therapy for multiple years without ever getting to the point of not needing therapy anymore.
I’m very much of the Stoic/CBT/Jordan Peterson school of therapy. Over focus on feelings and overthinking problems not only does not work, but quite often makes your original issues much worse. The key to getting better (barring something organically wrong with your brain — and that’s fairly rare) is to get out of your own head and get into taking productive actions to make your life better. Feeling bad about yourself is much better treated by becoming a better person than by sitting around trying to convince yourself that just because you haven’t ever done anything useful doesn’t mean that you’re useless. Get out there and start building, fixing or cleaning things. You’ll get over feeling worthless because you’ll know you did something useful.
doglatine
36m ago
For what it’s worth I’ve been really impressed with Ezra Klein, Pod Save America, Matthew Yglesias, and others in the wake of the election. Lots of pretty brutal criticism of stupid things that the Democratic Party has been doing, and quite sophisticated analysis of voting patterns etc.. I get the feeling that a lot of these people wanted to speak up more loudly sooner, but it was only once progressives were properly on the back foot that they felt empowered to do so. I hope this is a general trend for the left going forward, and that they’re able to become a big-tent intellectual hothouse of a movement again.
I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist,
Have the Therapist-LLM write post-interview notes like a psychiatrist would. You could even come up with a code to signal a red-flag status to the IRL therapist in a way that would be invisible to the patient reading their own note. (e.g. it being written in italics or all-caps could mean that the red-flag detector was triggered during this session)
NickRiviera
49m ago
They also tend to always say that everything will be ok; turns out everything did not turn out ok. I could have bought an awesome drone for the money I spent getting lied to and it would have brought me more happiness long-term.
VecGS
Chaotic good
58m ago
The differences between 3.5, 4o, 4o-mini, and o1-preview are pretty amazing. The "poisoned" state is pretty much still there -- the "draw a picture, but make sure there isn't an elephant" problem.
That said, there are ways of getting around this from an API perspective. I was toying with the idea of doing an RPG just for fun. The thing is that you can't have all of this in one giant chat because it will, as you've experienced, go off the rails eventually.
If I got off my butt and did this, the way I perceive as the most likely to succeed is to use it in conjunction with a wrapper to keep memory and a better sense of history. The reason I think this is because the number of tokens used for input (which is the entirety of the chat) is a really inefficient way to capture the state of the game. I think it's similar to running a game yourself. You have the adventure you're playing, and have a couple of pages of notes to keep track of what the players are doing.
The prompt per turn needs to take into account recent history (so things don't seem really disjointed), roughly where you are in the adventure (likely needing some preprocessing to be more efficient), and the equivalent of your pages of high level notes.
Running this with 4o-mini might actually work and be reasonably cheap.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
There's a qualitative difference between the RP ChatGPT 3.5 and later models can do. The latter are much better, in terms of comprehension and ability to faithfully play a role.
I'd recommend Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the very best in that regard. I expect your attempts would be much more successful if you gave it a shot. I can at least attest that it's the only LLM whose creative literary output I genuinely don't mind reading.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).
I'm afraid at least this particular example is wrong, and popular media grossly misrepresented what happened:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3AcK7Pcp9D2LPoyR2/ai-87-staying-in-character
An 14 year old user of character.ai commits suicide after becoming emotionally invested. The bot clearly tried to talk him out of doing it. Their last interaction was metaphorical, and the bot misunderstood, but it was a very easy mistake to make, and at least somewhat engineered by what was sort of a jailbreak.
Here’s how it ended:
New York Times: On the night of February 28, in the bathroom of his mother’s house, Sewell told Dany that he loved her, and that he would soon come home to her.
“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” Dany replied.
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Swell asked.
“…please do, my sweet king,” Dany replied.
He put down the phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.
Yes, we now know what he meant. But I can’t fault the bot for that.
(Note that one of links has rotted, but I recall viewing it myself and it supported Zvi's claims)
And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.
Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.
Anyway, I have a more cynical view of the benefits of therapy than you, seeing it rather well described as a Dodo Bird Verdict. Even relatively empirical/non-woo frameworks like CBT/DBT do rough as well as the insanity underpinning Internal Family Systems:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
Even I have to admit that Freudian nonsense grudgingly beats placebo.
You seem to agree that good therapists are few and far between, but I'd go as far as to say that I'm agnostic between therapy as practiced by a good LLM and the modal human therapist.
Makes me wonder if you're the Scott Alexander alt because this is clearly a mental health practitioner's opinion. All LLMs go off the rails if you keep talking to them long enough, that's a technical problem to be solved in the next year or two, not a reason that human therapists should have jobs ten years from now. OpenAI has already made it a non-issue by just limiting ChatGPT's context window, you'll see this issue more on models that let you flood the context window until the output quality drops to nothing.
Just FYI, a lot of people would much rather spill their guts to an AI than to another human. Also, one of the most common kinds of stress people face is financial stress, and for these people paying for a therapist will cause more stress than it will ever resolve. Mental health professionals are much more useful to the people that need them most when they are free. Far more people will kill themselves due to not getting expensive human attention than will ever kill themselves because their cybertherapist told them to.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
I’ve been struggling quite a bit to understand the whole Trump phenomenon. Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters. A complex multicausal explanation involving loss of institutional prestige, social media, economic changes, and the like seems attractive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of such explanations.
Maybe it’s just immigration. The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration. The UK is the prime example of this. The people voted to leave the European Union, causing easily foreseeable economic damage, because they were tired of immigration. Then the Conservative government in power proceeds to not actually lower immigration.
If you live in a Western Democracy and you want a secure border and less immigration, you can’t just vote for someone who says they want a secure border and less immigration. You have to vote for someone who viscerally hates immigrants. Someone who hates them personally, and who hates the very idea of what immigration represents. If their heart isn’t in it, they will predictably fold. Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Magusoflight
1hr ago
Apparently just reading a David Burns CBT book is enough to cure most peoples depression, so I would guess if it copy that experience it should be pretty revolutionary for anyone willing to use a chatbot as a therapist (this is the biggest obstacle)
TheFooder
1hr ago
https://glog.glennf.com/hcwm-store/how-comics-were-made
Deep dive into how printing works/evolved
Yeah. There used to exist forums with competent moderation that allowed quality, technical, high level discussion among members and yet random onlookers could view the discussion, and many of them were indexed by search engines so you could find them when needed as well.
Reddit sort of replaced this but shit the bed because
A) Useful subs get overwhelmed by casuals and Eternal September kicks in
B) Useful subs go private to avoid the above and can't be accessed or indexed or searched OR
C) Powermods capture the useful sub and turn it into an ideological echo chamber.
Wikipedia could probably step up and fill a massive gap here, but there's signs it is ideologically captured a swell.
I am not satisified with AI 'replacing' the open internet that we had, even if it manages to match the general quality.
HaveAtThee
2hr ago
I also learned it from Civ IV when I was a kid. The game has a lot of interesting quotes read by Leonard Nimoy when you unlock new techs and I still have many of them memorized. However, the Ozymandias quote was one that I instantly loved even as a 9 year old and I still have the poem memorized nearly 20 years later.
We also "analyzed" the poem in high school AP lit (I'm sure I went overboard being a know-it-all about it).
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
With a nod to the humor in your post, the answer seems obvious: Lack of judgment. This phrase can be read as a double entendre of course but I mean the lack of feeling as if your interlocutor is holding gavel and ready to bang it the moment you unburden yourself. That feeling diminishes basically as you move from left to right in your scale there.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
More now than when? I agree with you on some level (what you say seems undoubtedly true at least in terms of real-world interactions as opposed to say, MMPORPG or whatever) but as someone who was a kid in the 70s and teen in the 80s there was a lot of therapy talk even then. Maybe just in Hollywood? Because I have some pathology where I remember things, I recall clearly the lines from the 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape:
"My therapist says--"
"--You're in therapy?"
"Aren't you?"
The talk therapy boom, at least in the US, arguably seems to have started from the mid 20th century (when "shellshock"morphed into PTSD) and has just ballooned since then. I'll be the first to say I'm out of touch with current US norms, but I certainly remember the ethos of "Talk it out" even from childhood.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).
Purpose built ones will have more safeguards but the problem remains that they are hard to control and can easily go off book.
Even if they work perfectly some of the incentives are poor - people may overuse the product and avoid actual socialization, leaning on fake people instead.
And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.
Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.
charles
2hr ago
A group chat that has competent people who are tied in with various industries and specialties in various fields.
These are mostly in private Discords now. Its been one of the worst things to happen to the internet in the last decade, as much as I like Discord personally. Trying to find the answer to even a simple question on anything on the open internet is 90% scammers, click bait, and people that make you scroll past 10+ ads for the answer to a yes-or-no question.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
I was joking couple of months ago that when guys need therapy they need to do with their best friend two hours of hiking, two hours of lifting, two porterhouse steaks and two bottles of bourbon.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Therapy is probably worse than talking to a parent/pastor/friend, because therapists are paid strangers who’ve been trained to see every problem primarily in terms of feelings.
Shikoku should also satisfy @jeroboam - I'd hazard a guess that it's probably the main Japanese island that sees least tourists. In terms of places to see, there's quite a bit - perhaps visiting a handful out of the 88 temples on the Shikoku Henry pilgrimage route might appeal. There's also Dogo Onsen, the oldest operating onsen in Japan, and Kochi Castle, an actually non-tourist-trap Japanese castle - many of the extant structures were built in the 17th century and is considered one of the last twelve original castles in Japan.
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