Sadly I don't necessarily find the accusations of sexual harassment all that surprising in EA circles. IMO the attitude that your circle is particularly virtuous in some related (too rational, too holy, too woke and aware) is a risk factor. Indeed, I think one of the worst things we do regarding sexual assault and harassment is to present it (as in Epstein) as something only someone truly awful would do and thereby make it that much harder for anyone to even wonder if they or their friends might be doing it.
Having said that, I'd quibble about framing the problem in terms of our tools not being sufficient to handle predatory behavior. I mean it's only a quibble since most of what the piece says seems right and I certainly agree predatory behavior is a very hard problem. One of the things that makes it so very hard is that many 'solutions' can themselves be abused or even make things worse. For instance trying to bar relationships between TAs and students or boss and subordinate often give the predatory individual greater power (you promised to keep us a secret, I could lose my job). But framing it as our tools are inadequate presupposes we should expect them to be better. Is that right? Or is it a very hard problem and we should be surprised we are doing as well as we are?
Personally, I tend to think that the better frame is: given that sexual harassment and assault seem unfortunately common how can we help recognize and avoid doing or enabling that behavior rather than framing it as what tools do us good people need to stop those bad guys. Not to mention the risks that trying to create those tools will make things worse.
I think the problem is they're kind of stuck in a bind here:
-If they argue it can be done by less-than-awful people and/or inadvertently, it raises the possibility that (a) it's not that awful, weakening condemnation and (b) if it's inadvertent, well, then, actual predators can get a few freebies by claiming they didn't know better.
-If they argue it can only be done by monsters, well, you either start claiming there are lots of monsters out there (which tends to make people less concerned about harassment roll their eyes) or that there's a small number of bad people doing all of it (which tends to sound conspiratorial--most people didn't believe in QAnon).
For my part I figured I'd never learn the line between harassment and flirtation and just cut out flirtation entirely (outside of the apps where I knew people were there to meet romantic partners).
First, we seem to be able to do this for other crimes. At least people on the left of the political spectrum seem to be able to think: well I understand how someone was tempted to engage in that armed robbery, sell stolen cars or defraud people while still thinking it's pretty unacceptable.
I agree it's important to retain the idea that the behavior is unacceptable but I don't think that requires we assume only horrible people could be tempted to do it.
Second, if you are right then this approach creates this binary system where lots of really hurtful behavior gets treated as not a big deal. While there are good reasons we don't legally punish it the truth is cheating on someone or even just dumping them in a very humiliating way inflicts a lot more pain on average than even blatantly slapping some stranger on the ass without their consent.
So I fear that this attitude comes at the cost of not grappling with how much we can hurt people even when we don't break rules that currently allow for social punishment. And I fear because of this the system isn't stable. People will reasonably ask -- but why not this other behavior too it's also really awful. I tend to think the right answer is yes, absolutely and we shouldn't downplay how bad other things can be while still recognizing that otherwise decent people can cheat or the like (though they appropriately usually get dumped just like work harassment should threaten employment),
I think it's pretty easy to define things like armed robbery and stealing cars though. There's a threat of violence, often a weapon, and, well, car stealing involves someone driving a car they don't own without consent of the owner. (Fraud's a little more difficult and you'll notice that one is often the subject of court cases regarding advertising and so on.) It's also fairly obvious from the perpetrator's point of view they're doing something wrong. To completely avoid committing harassment the only thing the asker can do is avoid making any passes altogether. There's no longer a sort of 'approved flirtation' process that's always OK--you have to guess the person's receptivity from body language, which most spectrumy people are really, really bad at, and that's a lot of EA people (I think).
I'm not 100% sure I am right (I said 'I think' after all). I suspect as you say nobody really wants the consequences of criminally prosecuting cheating--you'd have cops trying to run stings for affairs and so on. Increasingly we do see people arguing someone is totally horrible for things like cheating--look at all the trouble Joss Whedon got in with his liberal audience for doing that, and now nobody admits Buffy the Vampire Slayer existed. (You could probably list all the problems female conservative influencers get in for straying from appropriate behavior on the other side, but I don't really follow the tradwife thing so I can't comment well.)
Neither am I sure. But if there aren't clear standards for what qualifies I guess I don't see what the benefit is here as that very vagueness means people will use the monster part to fill in the pieces. I mean, if you tell people: harassment is something vaguely like this but it's only done by monsters that creates the worst of all worlds right?
The kind of person who is liable to harass goes "I'm just having some good natured fun/flirtation" since they introspect and see they aren't a monster they assume they must be on the right side of those vague norms. At the same time the people who are least likely to harass avoid beneficial social interaction because some people are much more anxious and when the harasser gets punished they feel resentful and ill-done by because they are punished without what feels like fair warning.
Worst of all you get the victim blaming. What convinced me of this was seeing how hard they went in on that even if some English and women's studies departments. It often seems to be that the victim blaming happens because the friends of the perpetrator feel there are only two possibilities: their friend is a monster (which they are sure isn't the case) or the supposed victim is a liar so they choose the later.
---
Of course if you do make the rules pretty clear and non-vague then what is different than other rules?
I think the thing with clear rules is they can be more easily exploited by bad actors. You know, force required--> harassers use their position or alcohol; 'no means no'--> harassers push forward in ambiguous situations; 'yes means yes'--> harassers guilt the target into a yes.
My growing suspicion is that you are stuck with either the failure mode where there is lots of harassment going on or the failure mode where shy men are simply afraid to engage. From what I can tell, most women are fine with the second; if you're not brave enough to ask them out you don't deserve them. (Example: https://kayla718047.substack.com/p/dating-the-love-shy describes the woman's thinking better than I can.)
I'm interested you saw victim blaming--I had the impression in the age of 'believe women' any woman could effectively torpedo any man's reputation by making an accusation and you were never supposed to blame the victim. However, that was only from the media; I had little firsthand experience with anyone else's situations.
I have a few thoughts on whether we are actually helping but first let me note there are plenty of social norms that essentially solve both issues. You could go back to a system with very formal kinds of courtship (only acceptable way to ask someone out is to send them a formal letter) or you could adopt the model where only women are ever allowed to do the asking out. You just have to be willing to punish rather than reward breaking those rules and we aren't. In fact I think most of the real problem here is the same as that for drug use -- our tendency to use the norms we endorse to say something about ourselves not what is good for society.
As far as norms, not all harms are equal. I think we've optimized for people not having to feel a bit awkward or uncomfortable briefly at the expense of making the really bad stuff more likely. I tend to think there was a real benefit to the increased awareness of these issues but the problem was that rather than accepting that we really needed more judgement and careful thought about how to handle complex human interactions we did our best to pick rules that let us say 'not my problem'
Indeed, I don't think we are even trying to have the rules that minimize harm. Because of the conjunction of the interests of firms and schools in minimizing their risk and the ever present desire to morally condemn online what we have our rules designed to minimize the extent people are seen as accepting or even learning about uncomfortable or grey relationships.
For instance, a common policy back in the 90s and oughts at universities was anytime someone started a relationship with a TA they just reported it and got moved to another section. IMO we should have the same rule for professors.
Now sure a student TA or grad student prof relationship has certain risks but quite a few very successful marriages came from them in the prior generation. But what really maximizes the chance for something really bad is the situation we have now where those relationships absolutely still happen but also have the perfect excuse (indeed requirement) for the most red flag behavior -- you can't tell anyone about us. Not only does it mean someone who is being mistreated can't hear from their friends 'you shouldn't put up with this' but it creates the perfect setup for serious abuse. Most victims of abuse still have feelings for their abusers and when you force them into the situation of: keep silent or they lose their job etc etc.
And that's what gets me so angry about so much of the online discourse here. You can proclaim all you want about how obviously the victim shouldn't feel guilty about being part of the illicit relationship but that's just closing your eyes to the reality, if you have an affair you agree to keep secret most people feel extremely bad about violating that trust (if they believed it was a wrong promise to make they probably wouldn't have done it).
You can reasonably try to argue that the harms here are worth the benefits but what I have found in discussions is that the only thing most people are even trying to optimize for is whether they sound like they are approving of less than ideal behavior
Hence I think the drug use point is right on point. The more you moralize the issue the worse policy you get because the more people just tell you to hang anyone doing something 'bad'.
---
A bit more on the norms part. I also think the point about their being a very real desire to blur the line and call perfectly polite attempts to ask someone out gross and disgusting is real -- it lets you emphasize that someone really is beneath you. And I think that raises the question of who was happy? I agree that the loud confident and very attractive women probably like that equilibrium because it's good for them. I don't actually think we have much idea about what the shy women felt...or if they even know because they can't access what would have been the case under different rules. It's the same way that it might seem like everyone dislikes the fact that egg sellers can raise the prices but that doesn't really tell you they would prefer price controls.
He backs out from the first one, marries the second one, and writes a bunch of bad fiction. From what I got. Literary fiction isn't my specialty though. I read a bunch of genre scifi when I was a teenager and tried literary fiction recently but it didn't take. (I got through three recent novels by women and somehow developed a strange compulsion to read Batman comics; that's a statement of defeat, BTW.)
Nah, there's just a lot of pleasure to be had there. Being caught up in a story is good, and getting a new angle on your actual life is good, and for me, these kinds of novels deliver both at once, it's satisfying.
I mean, I don't know, man. Some people aren't built for it. I had zero interest in extreme sports even in my youth--my nervous system was just too sensitive to threat to find that sort of thing enjoyable. Probably the same for literature.
Sci-fi and fantasy have changed. Books aren't for me anymore. That's life.
I don't know about anyone else, but when IT HAPPENS my plan is to drive around my city with the windows down while my speakers play such assorted tracks as "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead", "Yub Nub", and other songs of SIMILAR SUBJECT MATTER. Some may call this behavior ANTI-SOCIAL, but I say that compared to instigating VARIOUS RECENT EVENTS my planned response is POSITIVELY MILD. I should probably assemble a playlist now to be ready when IT HAPPENS.
> Present-day AIs aren’t just “next-token predictors”: they can do useful work and have undergone reinforcement learning so that they answer questions usefully [The Argument]. The “AIs are just stochastic parrots” thing is highbrow misinformation
I would describe the phrase "AI are just next-token predictors" as itself neither correct or incorrect; it's more that it's at the wrong level of abstraction. The interface to our AI systems is that you feed them a bunch of tokens and they output more tokens. In some sense that means they are next-token predictors and in some sense that's a big part of how they are trained.
The main word I object to here is "just" because you're describing the algorithm that forms the basis for them, and then saying it can't account for human-like thought, because humans [??????].
We have only some vague guesses as to how human cognition really works, like variants of Hebbian learning. Would it make sense to say that humans can't learn because they're "just" neuron co-wirers?
Fundamentally we don't know what algorithms are sufficient to produce what levels of intelligence. Personally I do think LLMs are unlikely to blow past humans (mostly for lack of good training data) but I definitely would not stake my bet on the algorithm being the limiting factor.
> At such establishments, a customer could order coffee and cigarettes to be delivered, with the added feature that the courier was sometimes a woman who would provide sexual services upon arrival.
That sounds... rather more expensive than coffee and cigarettes...
> Oliver Sacks’s early books (up until The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat) were exaggerated to the point of being fraudulent
Going by the article, it sounds like this *includes* The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat? The way you phrased it, I read it as excluding it.
A question about Roblox that article didn't answer: If everything is user-made, what did it *start* with? Wikipedia seems to mostly answer this question; it launched in 2006 with some games made by Roblox themselves, the ability for users to make games (while always the idea) wasn't ready until later that year, and Roblox kept adding games of their own until 2008. I am still curious though just how many games it initially launched with and what they were.
Yeah, we've all had a lot of cases of finding our heroes fraudulent these days. I remember reading that about Oliver Sacks and thinking "what a shame". For a while I wanted to be a science writer like him or Asimov (who also had some unpleasant revelations as I recall).
I love the AI tribes explainer. What a great little piece of anthropology! I'm old enough to remember reading an article (Wired? Omni? The Utne Reader? It was a WHILE ago, back in the nineties) about the Extropians in my teenage years and thinking I wanted to join them someday. (I also remember the bit about Romana Machado holding a guy on a leash representing the taxpayer, thinking someone was obviously getting their kinks fed, and wondering if I'd ever be able to hold someone on a leash.) I am happy to say I have not really joined a tribe, though I think it's mostly because I don't think I'm capable of understanding the issues involved well enough.
The textiles thing is interesting. I wondered about that, actually--are the paths to industrialization the rich world took no longer possible, given that the rich world is already there? I also thought it was funny how Yglesias ends by talking about asking the AIs to find weak points in his arguments.
I'm not commenting about American Democracy because I'm scared to, and that itself is kind of sad.
As for Jon Stewart...you know, I've always held suspicions similar to his. Sort of like the equivalent of the medieval Catholic Church telling the peasants not to riot and kill the nobles. My thinking was that every other part of academia leaned left so having one that leaned right at least gave some balance.
The real problem I always with pronatalism (and this is going to sound funny given the other things I've said elsewhere, but I can't get away from thinking it and I'm not always right) is that a lot of it seemed to be men trying to say we should have more babies, and babymaking is something you definitely need women's buy-in on.
Scarcity politics and zero-sum: makes sense. I love this article because it doesn't fall right into left-versus-right tribalism. I have to say, over the third-of-a-century I've followed politics (1992 through now), I've seen 'we can make the pie bigger for everyone' arguments end badly. My main example is free trade--we didn't get all the displaced factory workers jobs as coders after NAFTA, and we're not really going to turn all the coders into nurse's aides after AI. I have gradually gotten more protectionist and as a result. (I've gotten more zero-sum too, but that has more to do with a long list of personal disappointments--and he even says if your life trajectory has been downward you are more likely to think that way!)
And as to the examples...yeah, there is a finite amount of blood in a person's body. *You can make more*, but that's exactly a reason we only have someone donate so much blood. I don't know if being pretty makes you weak, but there are only so many dudes into muscle mommies (even if they all hang out here). As for sexual moderation...well, I doubt any of the peasant communities the guy visited reached that point, but we've definitely heard about men spending all day gooning.
On to the housing thing: I guess you could build more houses, sure. Indeed existing homeowners aren't going to like the congestion and decrease in the value of their homes. One thing I didn't see addressed is that for a lot of middle-class people, their house is their major store of value, so having that depleted is more of a problem.
Tradwife is a fetish? Yeah, I agree. I have a whole set of theories about people trying to turn their kinks into societal norms, but I'll spare you all. (As for the influencers, I tend to think famous people are always dishonest and oversexed, and the story is very entertaining but confirms my bias. ;) )
My impression is that permitting more housing might bring down the cost per unit, but should increase the cost per acre of land, which would be good (financially) for existing homeowners.
To answer the tweet: because humans are evolved to find love stories particularly compelling. Other things being equal a love story is just going to be more interesting to most people and when you make it a competition you look for every advantage. Not to mention that it's much easier to communicate a love story within the limited range of ice skating.
I dunno; people find violent conflicts pretty compelling also. I for one would love to see a heist skate. I've seen a lot of (non-ice) dance performances that simulate other kinds of conflict and they're often pretty great.
ohh sure I agree violent conflict is good too. But the problem is that you don't have much to work with on the ice and it's hard to look like you are fighting while you engage in intimate lifts and twirls unless it's romantic conflict.
And if you do want to display violent conflict how do you convey the motives to the audience? Miming theft is hard. A great motive for violence that is easy to convey is romantic disagreement/rejection/etc
But also violence tends to make us dislike one of the participants -- even pretend violence. If you want to win a medal you want judges to be filled with positive emotional energy toward you.
I recognize the awful lawlessness of Trump!ICE and the actual neighborliness of Minnesota.
And yet I see that the Minnesotans have actually achieved what is only a theory and a aspiration for me, and at the same time their success in deciding who is permitted to be their neighbors would seem to make it more difficult for me to do the same.
And I look to the future of whether my side can use that form of solidarity when the inevitable political reversal comes.
would you be willing to say more about your expected political reversal? is there a different government agency (or outside group?) you expect to be patrolling the streets while masked, pulling people out of their cars, deploying lethal force, etc?
Sadly I don't necessarily find the accusations of sexual harassment all that surprising in EA circles. IMO the attitude that your circle is particularly virtuous in some related (too rational, too holy, too woke and aware) is a risk factor. Indeed, I think one of the worst things we do regarding sexual assault and harassment is to present it (as in Epstein) as something only someone truly awful would do and thereby make it that much harder for anyone to even wonder if they or their friends might be doing it.
Having said that, I'd quibble about framing the problem in terms of our tools not being sufficient to handle predatory behavior. I mean it's only a quibble since most of what the piece says seems right and I certainly agree predatory behavior is a very hard problem. One of the things that makes it so very hard is that many 'solutions' can themselves be abused or even make things worse. For instance trying to bar relationships between TAs and students or boss and subordinate often give the predatory individual greater power (you promised to keep us a secret, I could lose my job). But framing it as our tools are inadequate presupposes we should expect them to be better. Is that right? Or is it a very hard problem and we should be surprised we are doing as well as we are?
Personally, I tend to think that the better frame is: given that sexual harassment and assault seem unfortunately common how can we help recognize and avoid doing or enabling that behavior rather than framing it as what tools do us good people need to stop those bad guys. Not to mention the risks that trying to create those tools will make things worse.
I think the problem is they're kind of stuck in a bind here:
-If they argue it can be done by less-than-awful people and/or inadvertently, it raises the possibility that (a) it's not that awful, weakening condemnation and (b) if it's inadvertent, well, then, actual predators can get a few freebies by claiming they didn't know better.
-If they argue it can only be done by monsters, well, you either start claiming there are lots of monsters out there (which tends to make people less concerned about harassment roll their eyes) or that there's a small number of bad people doing all of it (which tends to sound conspiratorial--most people didn't believe in QAnon).
For my part I figured I'd never learn the line between harassment and flirtation and just cut out flirtation entirely (outside of the apps where I knew people were there to meet romantic partners).
I take your point but two counterpoints.
First, we seem to be able to do this for other crimes. At least people on the left of the political spectrum seem to be able to think: well I understand how someone was tempted to engage in that armed robbery, sell stolen cars or defraud people while still thinking it's pretty unacceptable.
I agree it's important to retain the idea that the behavior is unacceptable but I don't think that requires we assume only horrible people could be tempted to do it.
Second, if you are right then this approach creates this binary system where lots of really hurtful behavior gets treated as not a big deal. While there are good reasons we don't legally punish it the truth is cheating on someone or even just dumping them in a very humiliating way inflicts a lot more pain on average than even blatantly slapping some stranger on the ass without their consent.
So I fear that this attitude comes at the cost of not grappling with how much we can hurt people even when we don't break rules that currently allow for social punishment. And I fear because of this the system isn't stable. People will reasonably ask -- but why not this other behavior too it's also really awful. I tend to think the right answer is yes, absolutely and we shouldn't downplay how bad other things can be while still recognizing that otherwise decent people can cheat or the like (though they appropriately usually get dumped just like work harassment should threaten employment),
I think it's pretty easy to define things like armed robbery and stealing cars though. There's a threat of violence, often a weapon, and, well, car stealing involves someone driving a car they don't own without consent of the owner. (Fraud's a little more difficult and you'll notice that one is often the subject of court cases regarding advertising and so on.) It's also fairly obvious from the perpetrator's point of view they're doing something wrong. To completely avoid committing harassment the only thing the asker can do is avoid making any passes altogether. There's no longer a sort of 'approved flirtation' process that's always OK--you have to guess the person's receptivity from body language, which most spectrumy people are really, really bad at, and that's a lot of EA people (I think).
I'm not 100% sure I am right (I said 'I think' after all). I suspect as you say nobody really wants the consequences of criminally prosecuting cheating--you'd have cops trying to run stings for affairs and so on. Increasingly we do see people arguing someone is totally horrible for things like cheating--look at all the trouble Joss Whedon got in with his liberal audience for doing that, and now nobody admits Buffy the Vampire Slayer existed. (You could probably list all the problems female conservative influencers get in for straying from appropriate behavior on the other side, but I don't really follow the tradwife thing so I can't comment well.)
Neither am I sure. But if there aren't clear standards for what qualifies I guess I don't see what the benefit is here as that very vagueness means people will use the monster part to fill in the pieces. I mean, if you tell people: harassment is something vaguely like this but it's only done by monsters that creates the worst of all worlds right?
The kind of person who is liable to harass goes "I'm just having some good natured fun/flirtation" since they introspect and see they aren't a monster they assume they must be on the right side of those vague norms. At the same time the people who are least likely to harass avoid beneficial social interaction because some people are much more anxious and when the harasser gets punished they feel resentful and ill-done by because they are punished without what feels like fair warning.
Worst of all you get the victim blaming. What convinced me of this was seeing how hard they went in on that even if some English and women's studies departments. It often seems to be that the victim blaming happens because the friends of the perpetrator feel there are only two possibilities: their friend is a monster (which they are sure isn't the case) or the supposed victim is a liar so they choose the later.
---
Of course if you do make the rules pretty clear and non-vague then what is different than other rules?
I think the thing with clear rules is they can be more easily exploited by bad actors. You know, force required--> harassers use their position or alcohol; 'no means no'--> harassers push forward in ambiguous situations; 'yes means yes'--> harassers guilt the target into a yes.
My growing suspicion is that you are stuck with either the failure mode where there is lots of harassment going on or the failure mode where shy men are simply afraid to engage. From what I can tell, most women are fine with the second; if you're not brave enough to ask them out you don't deserve them. (Example: https://kayla718047.substack.com/p/dating-the-love-shy describes the woman's thinking better than I can.)
I'm interested you saw victim blaming--I had the impression in the age of 'believe women' any woman could effectively torpedo any man's reputation by making an accusation and you were never supposed to blame the victim. However, that was only from the media; I had little firsthand experience with anyone else's situations.
I have a few thoughts on whether we are actually helping but first let me note there are plenty of social norms that essentially solve both issues. You could go back to a system with very formal kinds of courtship (only acceptable way to ask someone out is to send them a formal letter) or you could adopt the model where only women are ever allowed to do the asking out. You just have to be willing to punish rather than reward breaking those rules and we aren't. In fact I think most of the real problem here is the same as that for drug use -- our tendency to use the norms we endorse to say something about ourselves not what is good for society.
As far as norms, not all harms are equal. I think we've optimized for people not having to feel a bit awkward or uncomfortable briefly at the expense of making the really bad stuff more likely. I tend to think there was a real benefit to the increased awareness of these issues but the problem was that rather than accepting that we really needed more judgement and careful thought about how to handle complex human interactions we did our best to pick rules that let us say 'not my problem'
Indeed, I don't think we are even trying to have the rules that minimize harm. Because of the conjunction of the interests of firms and schools in minimizing their risk and the ever present desire to morally condemn online what we have our rules designed to minimize the extent people are seen as accepting or even learning about uncomfortable or grey relationships.
For instance, a common policy back in the 90s and oughts at universities was anytime someone started a relationship with a TA they just reported it and got moved to another section. IMO we should have the same rule for professors.
Now sure a student TA or grad student prof relationship has certain risks but quite a few very successful marriages came from them in the prior generation. But what really maximizes the chance for something really bad is the situation we have now where those relationships absolutely still happen but also have the perfect excuse (indeed requirement) for the most red flag behavior -- you can't tell anyone about us. Not only does it mean someone who is being mistreated can't hear from their friends 'you shouldn't put up with this' but it creates the perfect setup for serious abuse. Most victims of abuse still have feelings for their abusers and when you force them into the situation of: keep silent or they lose their job etc etc.
And that's what gets me so angry about so much of the online discourse here. You can proclaim all you want about how obviously the victim shouldn't feel guilty about being part of the illicit relationship but that's just closing your eyes to the reality, if you have an affair you agree to keep secret most people feel extremely bad about violating that trust (if they believed it was a wrong promise to make they probably wouldn't have done it).
You can reasonably try to argue that the harms here are worth the benefits but what I have found in discussions is that the only thing most people are even trying to optimize for is whether they sound like they are approving of less than ideal behavior
Hence I think the drug use point is right on point. The more you moralize the issue the worse policy you get because the more people just tell you to hang anyone doing something 'bad'.
---
A bit more on the norms part. I also think the point about their being a very real desire to blur the line and call perfectly polite attempts to ask someone out gross and disgusting is real -- it lets you emphasize that someone really is beneath you. And I think that raises the question of who was happy? I agree that the loud confident and very attractive women probably like that equilibrium because it's good for them. I don't actually think we have much idea about what the shy women felt...or if they even know because they can't access what would have been the case under different rules. It's the same way that it might seem like everyone dislikes the fact that egg sellers can raise the prices but that doesn't really tell you they would prefer price controls.
Really struck that you see coercion and evil in the Kanakia story. Write more about it?
I would also love to hear more about this. The guy in the story doesn't sound coercive or evil to me.
He backs out from the first one, marries the second one, and writes a bunch of bad fiction. From what I got. Literary fiction isn't my specialty though. I read a bunch of genre scifi when I was a teenager and tried literary fiction recently but it didn't take. (I got through three recent novels by women and somehow developed a strange compulsion to read Batman comics; that's a statement of defeat, BTW.)
There's only one! The fiction does sound bad though.
Maybe compromise on weird-dude-aligned literary fiction? Franzen, Murakami, Magnus Mills, sort of thing.
Just 'cause I don't enjoy something doesn't make it bad.
Literature, as constructed now, doesn't need me for anything. That's fine.
Nah, there's just a lot of pleasure to be had there. Being caught up in a story is good, and getting a new angle on your actual life is good, and for me, these kinds of novels deliver both at once, it's satisfying.
I mean, I don't know, man. Some people aren't built for it. I had zero interest in extreme sports even in my youth--my nervous system was just too sensitive to threat to find that sort of thing enjoyable. Probably the same for literature.
Sci-fi and fantasy have changed. Books aren't for me anymore. That's life.
I don't know about anyone else, but when IT HAPPENS my plan is to drive around my city with the windows down while my speakers play such assorted tracks as "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead", "Yub Nub", and other songs of SIMILAR SUBJECT MATTER. Some may call this behavior ANTI-SOCIAL, but I say that compared to instigating VARIOUS RECENT EVENTS my planned response is POSITIVELY MILD. I should probably assemble a playlist now to be ready when IT HAPPENS.
> Present-day AIs aren’t just “next-token predictors”: they can do useful work and have undergone reinforcement learning so that they answer questions usefully [The Argument]. The “AIs are just stochastic parrots” thing is highbrow misinformation
I would describe the phrase "AI are just next-token predictors" as itself neither correct or incorrect; it's more that it's at the wrong level of abstraction. The interface to our AI systems is that you feed them a bunch of tokens and they output more tokens. In some sense that means they are next-token predictors and in some sense that's a big part of how they are trained.
The main word I object to here is "just" because you're describing the algorithm that forms the basis for them, and then saying it can't account for human-like thought, because humans [??????].
We have only some vague guesses as to how human cognition really works, like variants of Hebbian learning. Would it make sense to say that humans can't learn because they're "just" neuron co-wirers?
Fundamentally we don't know what algorithms are sufficient to produce what levels of intelligence. Personally I do think LLMs are unlikely to blow past humans (mostly for lack of good training data) but I definitely would not stake my bet on the algorithm being the limiting factor.
> At such establishments, a customer could order coffee and cigarettes to be delivered, with the added feature that the courier was sometimes a woman who would provide sexual services upon arrival.
That sounds... rather more expensive than coffee and cigarettes...
> Oliver Sacks’s early books (up until The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat) were exaggerated to the point of being fraudulent
Going by the article, it sounds like this *includes* The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat? The way you phrased it, I read it as excluding it.
A question about Roblox that article didn't answer: If everything is user-made, what did it *start* with? Wikipedia seems to mostly answer this question; it launched in 2006 with some games made by Roblox themselves, the ability for users to make games (while always the idea) wasn't ready until later that year, and Roblox kept adding games of their own until 2008. I am still curious though just how many games it initially launched with and what they were.
Yeah, we've all had a lot of cases of finding our heroes fraudulent these days. I remember reading that about Oliver Sacks and thinking "what a shame". For a while I wanted to be a science writer like him or Asimov (who also had some unpleasant revelations as I recall).
I love the AI tribes explainer. What a great little piece of anthropology! I'm old enough to remember reading an article (Wired? Omni? The Utne Reader? It was a WHILE ago, back in the nineties) about the Extropians in my teenage years and thinking I wanted to join them someday. (I also remember the bit about Romana Machado holding a guy on a leash representing the taxpayer, thinking someone was obviously getting their kinks fed, and wondering if I'd ever be able to hold someone on a leash.) I am happy to say I have not really joined a tribe, though I think it's mostly because I don't think I'm capable of understanding the issues involved well enough.
The textiles thing is interesting. I wondered about that, actually--are the paths to industrialization the rich world took no longer possible, given that the rich world is already there? I also thought it was funny how Yglesias ends by talking about asking the AIs to find weak points in his arguments.
I'm not commenting about American Democracy because I'm scared to, and that itself is kind of sad.
As for Jon Stewart...you know, I've always held suspicions similar to his. Sort of like the equivalent of the medieval Catholic Church telling the peasants not to riot and kill the nobles. My thinking was that every other part of academia leaned left so having one that leaned right at least gave some balance.
The real problem I always with pronatalism (and this is going to sound funny given the other things I've said elsewhere, but I can't get away from thinking it and I'm not always right) is that a lot of it seemed to be men trying to say we should have more babies, and babymaking is something you definitely need women's buy-in on.
Scarcity politics and zero-sum: makes sense. I love this article because it doesn't fall right into left-versus-right tribalism. I have to say, over the third-of-a-century I've followed politics (1992 through now), I've seen 'we can make the pie bigger for everyone' arguments end badly. My main example is free trade--we didn't get all the displaced factory workers jobs as coders after NAFTA, and we're not really going to turn all the coders into nurse's aides after AI. I have gradually gotten more protectionist and as a result. (I've gotten more zero-sum too, but that has more to do with a long list of personal disappointments--and he even says if your life trajectory has been downward you are more likely to think that way!)
And as to the examples...yeah, there is a finite amount of blood in a person's body. *You can make more*, but that's exactly a reason we only have someone donate so much blood. I don't know if being pretty makes you weak, but there are only so many dudes into muscle mommies (even if they all hang out here). As for sexual moderation...well, I doubt any of the peasant communities the guy visited reached that point, but we've definitely heard about men spending all day gooning.
On to the housing thing: I guess you could build more houses, sure. Indeed existing homeowners aren't going to like the congestion and decrease in the value of their homes. One thing I didn't see addressed is that for a lot of middle-class people, their house is their major store of value, so having that depleted is more of a problem.
Tradwife is a fetish? Yeah, I agree. I have a whole set of theories about people trying to turn their kinks into societal norms, but I'll spare you all. (As for the influencers, I tend to think famous people are always dishonest and oversexed, and the story is very entertaining but confirms my bias. ;) )
My impression is that permitting more housing might bring down the cost per unit, but should increase the cost per acre of land, which would be good (financially) for existing homeowners.
To answer the tweet: because humans are evolved to find love stories particularly compelling. Other things being equal a love story is just going to be more interesting to most people and when you make it a competition you look for every advantage. Not to mention that it's much easier to communicate a love story within the limited range of ice skating.
I dunno; people find violent conflicts pretty compelling also. I for one would love to see a heist skate. I've seen a lot of (non-ice) dance performances that simulate other kinds of conflict and they're often pretty great.
ohh sure I agree violent conflict is good too. But the problem is that you don't have much to work with on the ice and it's hard to look like you are fighting while you engage in intimate lifts and twirls unless it's romantic conflict.
And if you do want to display violent conflict how do you convey the motives to the audience? Miming theft is hard. A great motive for violence that is easy to convey is romantic disagreement/rejection/etc
But also violence tends to make us dislike one of the participants -- even pretend violence. If you want to win a medal you want judges to be filled with positive emotional energy toward you.
Fair points, certainly.
I was thinking of a routine I saw before but it fits your "romantic conflict" point: https://youtu.be/35zIQmqR_-o?si=IpKakyJDerxSrn6P
I always really liked the Legion dance/fight but I'm not sure if you could quite translate it to ice: https://youtu.be/KvdKqaiqI_U?si=IEVPa2yr6gvzFUoA
I recognize the awful lawlessness of Trump!ICE and the actual neighborliness of Minnesota.
And yet I see that the Minnesotans have actually achieved what is only a theory and a aspiration for me, and at the same time their success in deciding who is permitted to be their neighbors would seem to make it more difficult for me to do the same.
And I look to the future of whether my side can use that form of solidarity when the inevitable political reversal comes.
would you be willing to say more about your expected political reversal? is there a different government agency (or outside group?) you expect to be patrolling the streets while masked, pulling people out of their cars, deploying lethal force, etc?
I have heard enough that, while the low end is not very remarkable, the high end is very, very high.