Bezzi

Karma: 627

Bezzi Sep 5, 2023, 8:50 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Dating Roundup #1: This is Why You’re Single
Maybe, but the lizardmen constant is poll-related and 4% of women answering “yes” to a question like “do you think that men asking girls out of the blue should be severely chastised?” does not seem implausible.
(on a second thought, maybe this proves too much?)

Bezzi Aug 30, 2023, 3:56 PM
7 points
−1
on: Dating Roundup #1: This is Why You’re Single
Visakan Veerasamy: love this: awkward shy rejection-sensitive pimply Asian guy asked 100 girls out on a date. 19 said yes! 10 were lesbian. Concludes that he got over his fear of rejection in a single day.
Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle, but fear of rejection seems quite well justified if the base failure rate is 81%.
Who cares, someone could argue, the maximally bad thing that can happen is a polite “no”. Wrong. The maximally bad thing that can happen is asking the Bird Sorcerer type who yells at you for even trying. How many women react like that? Certainly a minority, but I don’t think it’s an incredibly small minority (rememeber that the lizardmen constant is 4%; I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that at least 4% of women react very negatively to being asked for a date out of the blue).

Bezzi Aug 26, 2023, 5:25 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Bentham's Bulldog’s comment on: The Lopsided Lives Argument For Hedonism About Well-being
Is the naïve OLT so naïve that it always assign the same fixed amount of Value to the same bit of knowledge no matter what?
Anyway, I’m still not convinced that a person in constant pain should automatically be not well off. Who is better off, a world-famous scientist billionaire with a terrible illness causing constant pain, or a beggar without terrible illnesses living a miserable life in some third-world slum?
I’ve some trouble figuring out a similar scenario of well-off people involving literal torture, but that’s because, as I said earlier, the very concept of “torture” involves jailers deliberately inflicting harm to segregated people. You say that OTL fails just because you can’t imagine any realistic counterbalance to the torture itself. But since we are already in the realm of hypotheses, consider a fantasy setting where the demon-king routinely torture his generals, each of whom rules a whole realm anyway.

Bezzi Aug 22, 2023, 9:11 PM
1 point
0
on: The Lopsided Lives Argument For Hedonism About Well-being
I’ve no strong background in philosophy, but I am not convinced by your rebuttal of naïve objective list theory. As long as we concede that the same thing can be more or less good depending on context, I still think that the naïve vision has a point. Simple example: a billion dollars in cash usually translates to a lot of positive value, but not if you are stranded on a desert island with no way to spend the money.
Arguments of the form “super-torture trumps every positive thing” work only because we intuitively associate “extremly pain torture” with images of sadistic jailers preventing you from doing pretty much anything. Of course friendship is of no value if your jailer doesn’t let you see your friends in the first place, and of course knowledge is of no value if you suffer so much that you can’t think about anything else but your pain. I don’t intuitively consider this as a flaw in the naïve theory, it kinda feels like putting the cart before the horse. A more accurate example than literal torture would be suffering from some terrible illness while still being able to enjoy things. Suppose that the Devil offers to make you the next Stephen Hawking, inflicting some horrible permanent disease upon you in exchange from wondrous scientific achievements and planetary fame. I predict that a nonzero number of people would gladly accept such a deal. By contrast, a deal such as “you’ll get infinite knowledge but you won’t ever be able to use it because of the constant pain” sounds very stupid from the start.

Bezzi Aug 20, 2023, 6:21 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)
When some elements of a piece of Good Art are reused, does that constitute New Art?
In a certain sense, I think we are forced to answer yes. No matter what copyright law says, New Art is never created 100% from scratch by someone who can claim full intellectual property over every aspect of the work.

Bezzi Aug 20, 2023, 5:57 PM
2 points
0
on: Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)
Classical music expert here. I don’t think that classical music has been “completed” in any meaningful sense. Imagine a previously unknown piece by Beethoven being discovered tomorrow in some old German trove. I definitely don’t expect the public reaction to be “Meh, classical music is already completed, there’s no reason to perform this one”.
Of course, you could argue that Beethoven has achieved near-mythical status, and works by more obscure composers would be left in the trove. But I still don’t think that’s accurate. Obscure composers remain obscure only as long as no one care enough to publicize their work (e.g. Vivaldi, who was definitely obscure before 1920), and I can ensure you that the niche of classical performers is currently doing its best to resurrect a lot of old works. This is particularly true in the case of operas, where a lot of the work is done by the on stage representation itself, and we currently do this kind of things much better than 1700 people did. One of my favorite examples here is this excerpt from Les Indes galantes by Rameau, were they did an amazing job keeping the spirit of the original play.
What about living people writing classical music? Well, they exist too, and they usually don’t try to fully imitate the works of old masters. Classical music is just a set of (very precise) rules, that can be employed in unexpected ways. One of my favorite is the Lady Gaga fugue, which could not have been written by Bach himself for obvious reasons.

Bezzi Aug 8, 2023, 9:08 AM
7 points
4
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Perpetually Declining Population?
I agree. Note that 560M is more than the estimated world population around year 1350, and not even the Plague managed to wipe out humanity at that point (despite being a terrible disease with huge mortality rate in a world basically without real medical knowledge). I don’t understand what crazy kind of “minor disaster” they are thinking about...

Bezzi Aug 2, 2023, 1:41 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Are Guitars Obsolete?
My impression: this would totally fool the average person, and probably it would fool also me when I’m not paying close attention (not sure about my piano teacher). But you can still hear some small differences. Also, hearing a youtube video is not the same as hearing the real thing, because even the acoustic piano sounds more similar to its electric counterpart given that you’re hearing a recording anyway. I suppose that the difference would be bigger when listening to the instruments in person.

Bezzi Aug 2, 2023, 9:53 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Roman Leventov’s comment on: AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated
Maybe the young man also misses intimacy and the feeling that somebody understands him and appreciates him even more than he misses sex
Well, maybe. But this seems a stronger assumption; we are basically considering someone with an unsupportive family and no close friends at all (someone could object “I suffer because my supportive friends are not pretty girls”, but I would still consider that as a proxy for “I miss sex”). Also, “No one tells me that I’m good so I’ll set up a bot” is something that would mark this person as a total loser, and I’m skeptical that lots of people will do it despite the obvious associated social stigma. I would rather expect this kind of AI usage to follow dynamics similar to those of alcoholism (the traditional way to forget that your life sucks). I would also tentatively say that isolating yourself with an AI companion is probably less harmful than isolating yourself with a whiskey bottle.
Anyway, I’m not arguing in favor of totally unregulated AI companion apps flooding the market. I agree that optimizing LLMs for being as addictive as possible when imitating a lover sounds like a bad idea. But my model is that the kind of people who would fall in love with chatbots are the same kind of people who would fall in love with plain GPT prompted to act like a lover. I’m not sure about how much additional damage we will get from dedicated apps… especially considering that plain GPT is free but AI companion apps typically require subscription (and even our IQ 90 people should be able to recognize as “not a normal relationship” something that gets abruptly interrupted if you don’t pay 20$/month).

Bezzi Aug 1, 2023, 6:58 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Roman Leventov’s comment on: AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated
My point was that is difficult for a behavior to destroy the fabric of society if you have to hide from friends and family when indulging in that behavior. Of course that someone will totally fall in love with AI chatbots and isolate himself, but this is also true for recreational drugs, traditional porn etc. I still don’t see an immediate danger for the majority of young people.
The main problem of your hypothetical man is that he doesn’t manage to have sex. I agree that this can be a real problem for a lot of young men. On the other hand, not having sufficiently interesting conversations does not feel like something that the average teenager is likely to suffer from. If you give a super-hot AI girlfriend to a horny teenager, I think that the most likely outcome is that he will jump straight to the part where the avatar gets naked, again and again and again, and the conversational skills of the bots won’t matter that much. You have to fool yourself really hard to conflate “super-hot AI bot who does everything I ask” with “normal love relationship” rather than “porn up to eleven”.

Bezzi Aug 1, 2023, 6:45 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: MSRayne’s comment on: AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated
Because your AI partner does not exist in the physical world?
I mean, of course that an advanced chatbot could be a both better conversator and a better lover than most humans, but it is still an AI chatbot. Just to give an example, I would totally feel like an idiot should I ever find myself asking chatbots about their favorite dish.

Bezzi Aug 1, 2023, 2:47 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Are Guitars Obsolete?
By “in the same room” do you mean in a space that is small enough that people are hearing the piano entirely acoustically?
Well, yes, because the traditional setting of a piano concert does not include amplification (as I said, I come from the Old School).
I don’t question that you could probably set up a high-quality setting and fool the average person with the keyboard sound, but I would be really surprised if you managed to fool a traditional piano teacher… and those people are the people you actually need to fool if you want any chance of seeing a piano concert with traditional repertoire played on a keyboard (I mean, I’ve just spent a couple of minutes searching for videos of classical piano pieces played on a keyboard, and I can’t find anything above amateur level… I don’t think this boils down to just “pianists love tradition”).
Anyway, I wasn’t dismissing the usefulness of keyboards for study and such, but trust me if I say that conservatory professors do not consider keyboards to be worthy of actual concerts if the music was written for a piano.

Bezzi Aug 1, 2023, 2:29 PM
9 points
2
on: AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated
I think that your model severely underestimates the role of social stigma. Spending a lot of time on your screen chatting with an AI whose avatar is suspiciously supersexy would be definitely categorized as “porn” by a lot of people (including me). Will it be more addictive than simply looking at photo/videos of hot people naked? Probably yes, but it will still occupy the same mental space as “porn”. If not for the users themselves, at least for casual observers. Imagine trying to explain to your parents that the love of your life is an AI with a supersexy avatar.
My model of the near future is that these chatbots will substitute every other form of online porn, because that part is very easy even without conversational skills (and Stable Diffusion is already capable of generating photorealistic pictures of super-hot people). I am quite skeptical about a wide social acceptance of romantic love with AI chatbots, and without social acceptance I don’t think that it could go beyond being the next kind of porn.

Bezzi Jul 29, 2023, 9:46 PM
2 points
0
on: Are Guitars Obsolete?
The range of sounds and textures it’s possible to play on a keyboard is a big advance over what was possible on a piano, and they’re also far more portable, need less maintenance, are more flexible with volume, and are cheaper. And you can face other people while you play!
I could be horrendously biased given that I learned piano from Old School Professors in a conservatory, but I’ve yet to see a keyboard whose sound could be honestly mistaken for an actual fancy piano when the listener is in the same room.

Bezzi Jul 28, 2023, 3:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: AI #22: Into the Weeds
True, but I definitely don’t expect such a flawless AI to be available any soon. Even Stable Diffusion is not stable enough to consistently draw the exact same character twice, and the current state of AI-generated video is much worse. Remember the value of the long tail: if your AI-generated movie has 99% good frames and 1% wonky frames, it will still looks like a very bad product compared to traditional movies, because consumers don’t want movies where things look vaguely distorted once per minute (maybe the stunt doubles should be more concerned about being replaced by AI frames that the actor themselves?).

Bezzi Jul 24, 2023, 9:34 PM
5 points
2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: In Defense of Chatbot Romance
I’ve linked the first article I found after a 3-seconds search, since I assume basically everyone to already have a lot of anecdotal evidence about people spending insane amounts of time taking care of the pet (usually a dog). For example, in recent years I’ve already seen several times people walking their dog in a stroller, in such a way that from a distance you’d probably assume there’s a human baby inside. If that doesn’t scream “I’m using a dog as a substitute for a child”, I don’t know what does.

Bezzi Jul 24, 2023, 1:48 PM
−1 points
−6
in reply to: Roman Leventov’s comment on: In Defense of Chatbot Romance
1) people who have pets and animal companions (and even love them!) still usually seek romantic relationships with other humans
Do they?
I mean, of course that pet lovers still usually seek intimate relationships with other humans. But I think there’s a pretty strong evidence that loving your pet too much will distract you a lot from having children. Also, it’s not uncommon to break up with your partner because your partner does not love pets as much as you (don’t tell me that you’ve never heard about the “it’s me or the dog” ultimatum).

Bezzi Jul 22, 2023, 5:53 PM
6 points
1
on: Problems with predictive history classes
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that I don’t expect predictive history to be able to provide much value apart from general advice like “don’t invade Russia during the winter”. Pure chance has a larger impact on historical events than our intuition would suggest; Erik Durschmied wrote a lot about this. No one can observe the track record of Napoleon until 1815 and confidently predict that he’s definitely going to lose at Waterloo. In the counterfactual world where one tiny detail is different, he would win.

Bezzi Jul 10, 2023, 9:37 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: The Dictatorship Problem
Ok I found it. It was the 1927 Liberian election, where the president received 240,000 votes despite being around 15,000 people eligible to vote at all.

Bezzi Jun 19, 2023, 5:09 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: The Dictatorship Problem
But it makes me wonder what visible features obviously-rigged elections actually present in dictatorships?
In the old days, you could have really blatant things like an official number of pro-dictator votes significantly higher than the number of citizens in the whole country (I’m not kidding, I can’t find the reference right now but I’m pretty sure that it happened in some African dictatorship around 1920).
For a more recent example, you could look at the 2020 Belarus election, for which we have photos of literally burnt ballots (I’m just reporting the link from the Wikipedia page).