placid-platypus

[placid-platypus]

Yeah I remember a specific moment in my life when some switch flipped in my brain and I started parsing certain types of action scene as slapstick comedy. It's a big improvement a lot of the time.

reacher is wrong about what kind of show it is. it is slapstick masquerading as thriller.

[placid-platypus]

I'm caught between, "wait Texas has their own specific state Pledge of Allegiance? That's weird as shit" on the one hand and "of fucking course Texas has their own specific state Pledge of Allegiance" on the other.

Re: The Pledge of Allegiance. Texans have it doubly bad; not only do we do the national one every day, but we have to do the state one as well. I don't even know if all other states have their own pledges of allegiance.

gee Bill, how come your teacher lets you pledge two allegiances

[placid-platypus]

Isn't this already how Twitter and Tumblr work? Is that really a positive contribution to the culture on those sites? Or is the idea that making it more explicit by showing the upvote UI will make people more conscious of the choice?

If I was in charge of reddit, I would make it so if you reply to a comment, it's automatically and irrevocably upvoted. The fact that you replied is proof that it contributed to the conversation. If you can't stand the thought of upvoting it, learning to downvote and ignore it

[placid-platypus]

Game theory falls under the "theorizing about what ways a mind could work in principle," which has some value but I think it was never as big a part of the rationalist project as you're suggesting and has become less so over time, partly because AI has advanced so there are more specific real world examples to consider instead.

Whether LLMs as they currently exist are likely to reach AGI without a major paradigm shift is hard to predict- people who are actual experts on the subject seem to disagree with each other. At the least, I don't feel confident we can rule it out. In particular I want to note that with how fast the field is progressing it's easy for people who aren't following it closely to underestimate them based on what they saw from a dumber model a couple years ago.

I also think you might be underestimating how similar at least some of the things human brains do are to LLMs. Especially people who aren't making close attention make a lot of the same mistakes. Talking out my ass I might theorize that a human mind contains a language module extremely similar to an LLM, with some other modules that handle other situations and cover some of its mistakes.

I’m so glad so many people posting about this are pointing out that “rationalism” really doesn’t look very rational to outsiders.

Maybe I’m just selfish but I thought that myself very soon after looking into the theory and finding that what I’d assumed from the name would be discussing how to stop lapsing into logical fallacies was mostly weird riffs on particular bits of game theory specifically.

But people seemed to find my saying so weird, at least way back when. So I’m glad to not be alone in it.

[placid-platypus]

TBH I'm not very into the technical details, but as I understand it most work in the field is some mix of theorizing about what ways a mind could work in principle, and investigating how to understand, predict, and influence the behaviors of current LLMs, with an eye towards extrapolating likely developments as they continue to get smarter.

A big focus I've seen come up a lot is looking at what circumstances will lead AIs to lie to humans, since that's strongly correlated with other kinds of conflict and makes other conflicts harder to resolve.

I’m so glad so many people posting about this are pointing out that “rationalism” really doesn’t look very rational to outsiders.

Maybe I’m just selfish but I thought that myself very soon after looking into the theory and finding that what I’d assumed from the name would be discussing how to stop lapsing into logical fallacies was mostly weird riffs on particular bits of game theory specifically.

But people seemed to find my saying so weird, at least way back when. So I’m glad to not be alone in it.

[placid-platypus]

I guess if we're using the child metaphor: an AI who became conscious would, at a bare minimum, be neurodivergent in a totally unique way and probably to a greater degree than pretty much any human child. Given how much suffering can ensue when a neurodivergant child is raised by parents who don't understand them, don't you think it's worth doing as much work as possible to understand how this being will think, and how to guide it towards being able to coexist positively with humans? And try to do this work in advance, rather than dumping them unprepared into a world that's equally unprepared for them?

Human children and their parents have the advantage of thousands of years of accumulated culture, philosophy, literature, and psychology investigating how their minds work, what's mentally and emotionally healthy for them, and how they can coexist with other humans without harming each other (too much). Some of that might carry over to AIs but I expect a lot of it won't. I think it's fair to look at AI alignment research as attempting to bridge that gap as much as possible.

I’m so glad so many people posting about this are pointing out that “rationalism” really doesn’t look very rational to outsiders.

Maybe I’m just selfish but I thought that myself very soon after looking into the theory and finding that what I’d assumed from the name would be discussing how to stop lapsing into logical fallacies was mostly weird riffs on particular bits of game theory specifically.

But people seemed to find my saying so weird, at least way back when. So I’m glad to not be alone in it.

[placid-platypus]

Holy shit @staff needs to fix the begging scam spam already. If your platform is generating 12 spam emails in a month that's just unacceptable.

[placid-platypus]

Isn't the main benefit of a hybrid car that it lets you recover some of the kinetic energy every time you stop and store it in the battery? Planes don't like to stop that often so there's a lot less to gain there.

when are we going to see hybrid airliners, burning fuel to generate electricity to power electric motors?

seems like a lot of the attempts failed over the past few years.

[placid-platypus]

IDK a "movement" isn't the same thing as an "organization"; even if there's no central leadership, the people who make up the social justice movement are actively working to reshape society in a particular direction, whereas people getting married later in life are just making personal decisions based on the circumstances of their own lives.

(I guess by this standard whether superhero movies count as a movement comes down to your read on the motives of the Hollywood execs involved. )

I find it kind of weird to theorise about “the social justice movement” as if it was an organised entity and not just a memeplex like “the superhero movie movement” or “the increasing age of first marriage movement”.

[placid-platypus]

Wouldn't we already need "cuttable" for "divisible"? Not sure what other words are available to us but for "rational" maybe something in the neighborhood of carve, whittle, sculpt to give the sense of "made by cutting"?

In Anglish, it can be hard to talk about science worldken, technology workingcraft, organization bookkeeping, and government lawcraft. It can be yet-harder to talk about tongues themselves, and the workings of them. The throughline is seen: The more unworldly a thing, the harder it is about which to talk. But the hardest...

The hardest thing about which to talk, is the thing done with ones and twos and so forth. Of putting them together, and all the other doings with them. As you see, I haven't even a word (yet!) for the kind of thing that ones and twos are.

[placid-platypus]

Worth noting that for doctors specifically, at least in the US the number of doctors we train each year is a specific policy choice by the government, and the number is currently set lower than what's really required to meet needs. Depending who you ask that's either a misguided attempt to keep costs down or a racket by the medical profession to keep their pay exorbitantly high.

Not to be a communist on main but

I dont understand how a nation can have both labor needs (e.g. not enough bus drivers or homes needing building or insufficient dr's) and people seeking work. Surely you just compare the two lists and start assigning based on proximity? If it's a travel or childcare issue then provide free work travel/work travel stipend and a place in state childcare for every workers family. Or provide home parents a corresponding wage so they can care for kids. If its an issue of childcare availability they can surely train some of the works seeking to do childcare? Any skill can be trained to a reasonable level of effectiveness.

[placid-platypus]

Thank you! TBH my takeaway is "watch End of Evangelion and then call it a day" but the extra detail was an interesting read regardless.

I've been watching Evangelion for the first time since my teens- which of the sequels/spinoffs/alternate endings would you say are worthwhile beyond the original show?

Hm, this is a good question! The answer is going to be very individual because most of the Evangelion additional content is varying degrees of wildly different from the original show? So it is really a question of "what genres do you like". And your tolerance for bullshit, because most of them aren't good.

I will assume End of Eva is just default-included in "the original show"? Just in case, if not obviously watch that. Otherwise I do think Sadamoto's manga adaptation is quite good - it is of course the "same" story, but tonally different enough to be fun while not so different that any Eva fan will probably get something out of it. Those are the "core" products one can start with.

Beyond that...

Where do you even start, you know?

Okay, so I think most people will say that none of the "big" spinoffs are like good-good. Your actual answer is probably none of them. But if you do wanna dig in, I think Girlfriend of Steel is a VN with a contained, coherent story that matches the tone of the original show pretty well? Sort of an alt-universe telling with a new girl in the mix who is essentially girl-Shinji (yeah, I know, isn't Shinji girl-Shinji? Life/Sadamoto finds a way):

The game is choppy in its presentation and ofc quite tropey, but it has heart, and gets more serious as it goes on.

I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that the shonen comedy manga Shinji Ikari Raising Project is, like, worth reading? But some people like it, I am sure. Gendo does Punch An Angel which kinda fucks:

Honestly I thought Campus Apocalypse was pretty neat? Alas the scans online are dial-up tier on quality, but if the idea of "Evangelion: but it is a noir school academy thriller" appeals to you it very much is that. And there is something inevitable to their being a version of Eva where they wield the Lance of Longinus like a person-sized polearm and the angels are hot goth guys:

Okay so I really like Princess Maker? Which Gainax made by the way, that is often forgotten - pre-Eva while Gainax's animation division was burning cash their video game side hustle kept the lights on. So Gainax took advantage of the synergy and made the Ayanami Raising Project - and Asuka Supplement Project to boot! Which is an incredibly cheap knock-off where you take our two main girls and plan out their days and grow their stats and abuse your inexplicable position of power over them to date them and dress them up in adorable outfits which is all I have ever really wanted:

These images ofc are from the supplemental artbook and strategy guide, which yes I do own - you asked for my opinion, I didn't fucking ask for yours, okay?

There are one million more of these things, I haven't read/watched/played most of them - when it comes to Eva you kinda just gotta grab one at random and dive in, see what happens. Go download a PS3 emulator, grab a ROM for Misato Katsuragi's Reporting Plan, and see if listening to her voice-synth reading the actual news to you while you spin her rendered polygon model around to give yourself an upskirt shot does anything for you:

Can't be any worse than the fucking Rebuilds.

[placid-platypus]

Yeah I think drinking alcohol for the taste certainly falls on the "ghost-robot-domesticated animal" side of OP's dichotomy.

A drink or two a night is much better for your health than getting genuinely drunk once a week which is too bad cuz the former is ghost-robot-domesticated animal and the latter is living-flesh-wild beast

[placid-platypus]

For me Hanania's piece "Why I Hate Wokeness More Than Genocide" was plenty for me to conclude he's a bad person, but I don't see any reason from there that I or you or anyone else shouldn't read him. The fact that he has terrible values but is still reasonably smart and perceptive is what makes him interesting!

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

[placid-platypus]

Could be. I've been addressing the general question of how liberal/neoliberal are generally defined and what the people who get called those words most commonly believe. If that's tangential to your main point maybe you can clarify?

https://www.tumblr.com/fierceawakening/778739425198964736/so-what-is-liberal-feminism-anyway-those-of

Honestly I have no idea what people define liberal as. It has been used to hate on people who don’t think a communist uprising is just around the corner or that everything collapsing would not be a good thing.

I could be wrong but I THINK liberal started to become a bad word during the Clinton administration. He was very much a moderate, very much wanted to work with the right wing on things like welfare reform and people took to calling his policies “neoliberal,” which made liberal moderate to right, which meant if you were to the left of that you had to start calling yourself “radical” (the feminists) or “progressive” (everyone else.)

It’s a fascinating vocabulary shift for me, an Old, who was used to “liberal” being what the right derisively called ANYONE who disagreed with them, even Clinton.

(Some people have answered me asking “what exactly is neoliberalism” with “a particular economic theory,” but I can’t tell yet if that’s one definition or the accepted one. I do remember Clinton’s moderate political views being presented as a new and more effective tack for the party, not JUST an economic theory, but again I’m not sure quite how specific people are being.)

[placid-platypus]

I guess my next question is “what does ‘support capitalism’ mean?”

Well, that kinda falls back to "which liberals/neoliberals are you talking about."

If you're talking about the original intellectual movement I'm not the most well informed by my sense is they were pretty on the laissez-faire side, although for the most part not as extreme as modern libertarians.

If you're talking about the establishment consensus in Washington and its allies, circa 1970-2015, then obviously that includes multiple sides of a lot of the debates.

If you're talking about people who call themselves "neoliberals" on the internet today, then on taxation and social spending they (okay, transparently: we) are for the most part mainstream Democrats.

On regulations things are a bit more nuanced- the general consensus is that some regulation is useful and necessary, but in many cases regulations go too far or are clumsily executed in ways that hurt society. The biggest example is restrictions on land use that make it very difficult to build enough housing in a lot of places, causing skyrocketing rents and a lot of related problems.

https://www.tumblr.com/fierceawakening/778739425198964736/so-what-is-liberal-feminism-anyway-those-of

Honestly I have no idea what people define liberal as. It has been used to hate on people who don’t think a communist uprising is just around the corner or that everything collapsing would not be a good thing.

I could be wrong but I THINK liberal started to become a bad word during the Clinton administration. He was very much a moderate, very much wanted to work with the right wing on things like welfare reform and people took to calling his policies “neoliberal,” which made liberal moderate to right, which meant if you were to the left of that you had to start calling yourself “radical” (the feminists) or “progressive” (everyone else.)

It’s a fascinating vocabulary shift for me, an Old, who was used to “liberal” being what the right derisively called ANYONE who disagreed with them, even Clinton.

(Some people have answered me asking “what exactly is neoliberalism” with “a particular economic theory,” but I can’t tell yet if that’s one definition or the accepted one. I do remember Clinton’s moderate political views being presented as a new and more effective tack for the party, not JUST an economic theory, but again I’m not sure quite how specific people are being.)

[placid-platypus]

Classically, liberalism was associated with liberty: emphasizing people's rights to make their own choices both in their personal lives and economically through free market capitalism. Kind of like libertarianism but generally a lot less radical, not necessarily completely opposed to taxation and the welfare state, but the idea that "liberal" means left of center is pretty unique to the US. In Europe liberals are generally if anything a bit right of center. Generally even in the US once someone gets so far left that they don't value free speech and want to overthrow capitalism we stop calling them "liberal."

"Neoliberalism" is even more of a can of worms because it's been used at least three different ways. Originally in the mid 20th century there was a movement by certain economists and political philosophers to try to reinvigorate capitalist liberalism against the challenges from communism on the left and fascism on the right. This ended up having a lot of influence in the establishment during and after the Cold War, so parts of academia started using "neoliberalism" as shorthand for the ideology behind the economic/political status quo in the West.

From there through the game of telephone many leftists started using "neoliberal" as essentially a slur against anything they didn't like but couldn't call fascist with a straight face (which is saying something given how much leftists like calling people fascists).

Which finally leads to the third meaning, where various liberals, moderates, and less extreme progressives noticed that leftists keep calling them "neoliberals" and started to reclaim the term to mean essentially "progressive liberals who are left of center but still support capitalism."

https://www.tumblr.com/fierceawakening/778739425198964736/so-what-is-liberal-feminism-anyway-those-of

Honestly I have no idea what people define liberal as. It has been used to hate on people who don’t think a communist uprising is just around the corner or that everything collapsing would not be a good thing.

I could be wrong but I THINK liberal started to become a bad word during the Clinton administration. He was very much a moderate, very much wanted to work with the right wing on things like welfare reform and people took to calling his policies “neoliberal,” which made liberal moderate to right, which meant if you were to the left of that you had to start calling yourself “radical” (the feminists) or “progressive” (everyone else.)

It’s a fascinating vocabulary shift for me, an Old, who was used to “liberal” being what the right derisively called ANYONE who disagreed with them, even Clinton.

(Some people have answered me asking “what exactly is neoliberalism” with “a particular economic theory,” but I can’t tell yet if that’s one definition or the accepted one. I do remember Clinton’s moderate political views being presented as a new and more effective tack for the party, not JUST an economic theory, but again I’m not sure quite how specific people are being.)