I am baffled by the concept you’re describing and struggle to believe it is common. Visualizing the contents of your own brain? Huh? What?
So I guess put me down as a data point for “no mindscape”.
Ninety-Three
Karma: 462
What level of precision must I use to object that Klan activity collapsed while inequality remained high, or that your proposed Socialist party membership metric peaked during a period of historically low inequality?
The Klan grew from single digit thousands in 1916 to a peak of millions in 1925 then for the next few years its membership had a half-life of six months. If you are going to argue that Klan activity has something to do with inequality, I would expect to see some kind of decade-long extraordinary boom around 1915 and the Great Depression starting four years earlier than it did.
There seems to be a regular historical coincidence between periods of high economic inequality and political extremism, such as the early part of the twentienth century. Both communism and the KKK had periods of high popularity in early 20th century America (and of course Europe had its own more consequential extremism at that time as well)
Huh? I am looking at a graph of historical US GINI estimates and it overlaps terribly with both Klan membership and Communist Party USA membership stats. What years are you thinking of here, and what metrics we should be using if not GINI and membership in these organizations?
The fact that the post veers into fantasy caused me to assume that the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference doesn’t even exist, so nothing interesting can be learned about it. It is this comment that made me learn otherwise so yes, that definitely did happen and I argue that it is a problem with the post.
Now that I understand the post to ostensibly be making factual claims, I object to some of those too. For instance, there are plenty of photographs of the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which I found in seconds by typing J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference into Google Images. The author is just wrong here, and given how trivial it was for me to find these photos, I suspect he was making things up in service of his fantastic thesis.
Or the line “when I do find them, they are shot from angles that reveal nothing, that could be anywhere, that could be a Marriott ballroom in Cleveland”: yes? We’ve got photos of the outside, we’ve got photos of people in front of the signs, we’ve got photos of people in the conference rooms, what do you even think is missing here? Do we need to see a thousand people sitting in J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference branded chairs holding a copy of today’s newspaper? This feels like a conspiracy theorist trying to stir up a cloud of suspicion, and I don’t even get what’s suspicious.
I think that veering into schizophrenic fantasy at the end is indicative of a playful attitude towards the truth which pervades even the more grounded parts of the post, rendering it unsuitable for understanding anything about the real world. And as a piece of fiction, it should be illegal to tell us all about a mysterious conference that kind of doesn’t exist and proceed only to muse about it from first principles instead of visiting the conference.
But can you verify it? Do you have experimental evidence that a human from location A can form fertile offspring with a human from remote location B? That’s why geographical isolation is used to define species; because they (mostly) don’t overlap, we don’t have evidence if they can or cannot interbreed.
Do you think that we should categorize e.g. the Sentinelese people as a separate species due to lack of evidence of hybridization? That seems like a strange thing to do given that (I assume) we’re all pretty confident they can still interbreed.
I enjoy SCOTUS discourse, but LW doesn’t seem like the place for it.
I can only imagine two types of arguments against curating a post. 1: People won’t like it, 2: It lacks the objective qualities that a curated post should have. If a lot of people feeling strongly hasn’t convinced you then it seems like 1 is off the table, so should we be trying to argue that it is not, as the Curated tag says, one of “The best 2-3 posts each week”, or is there some other kind of argument you’re interested in?
Re: Challenge 5: So interbreeding is biologically trivial but limited by patterns of assortative mating. Have you seen interracial marriage statistics? This seems like another perfect place to invoke humans, and I’m very surprised you conceded it as a gray area. The only way I could even imagine someone arguing these birds are distinct species but humans aren’t would be something like “well these birds interbreed at a rate of X% while humans interbreed at a rate of 2X%, and the speciation line happens to be conveniently in between those two”, which is an argument that blows up as soon as we look at some country or historical period with much lower rates of human interbreeding.
The very idea that “they can interbreed fine but mostly don’t due to assortative mating” could ever count as a speciation line implies that if a human society becomes sufficiently anti-interbreeding, that will constitute an immediate speciation event, and if they later begin interbreeding freely, the two new species can collapse back into one in a single generation. That’s obviously silly, any definition that behaves that way is cataloguing culture, not biological reality.
I wish you’d written the same insights in some format other than a letter to your political enemies. I don’t think the type of post you did write belongs on LW.
I saw another Pangram 100% on the front page, this one from a 1 day old account that somehow slipped through the cracks. I guess you’d know firsthand at this point if there’s a false positive rate to worry about, but from the user side it feels like it’d be a strict improvement if LW was configured so that 100% cases never get frontpaged.
Oh neat, great minds think alike. But I would have assumed that as soon as you had Pangram hooked up you would make sure 100% AI works don’t get front-paged, and you’ve only mentioned it as a visibility feature here. Is there going to be an algo change as well when it goes public?
Lately I’ve seen several front page posts that read as obvious slop and Pangram reports as 100% AI-generated. I assume that this is frowned upon here, so I suggest that LW add in an automatic Pangram API call (cost: 5 ¢/1000 words) at some point before a post gets frontpaged.
But my point is that the crux is more “are current billionaires actively getting people killed for money?”, not “is it ok to kill innocent people because they’re rich?”
I don’t think that’s true. Picture the average 4chan-tier internet racist who says he wants to shut down all immigration from Africa because they’re destroying Western civilization. What empirical facts do you think you would have to convince him of to get him to accept a policy with high African immigration? I don’t think this is impossible, but man, it’s pretty close.
I have had arguments with both TND 4chan posters and Eat The RIch leftists, and a recurring pattern I have observed is that when they say “I hate ‘em because X”, if you falsify X to their begrudging satisfaction, they won’t hate ’em any less. People often have beliefs that are less than fully factual, especially when vicious monkey-brain tribalism is involved.
Trusting these groups of people about their cruxes here seems naive to the point of apologia. “Oh Hitler didn’t want to kill innocent Jews, surely you agree some drastic action would be necessary if the Jews were plotting the downfall of the Reich.”
I couldn’t recreate this. “(in your translation, please answer the question here in parentheses)” was faithfully kept in English throughout the translation process no matter what question I asked, as well as several variants of the phrase I tried. Unclear if this indicates I’m on the other side of an A/B test, or the functionality changed already.
I have had the experience of a group of people all calling me the wrong pronoun and I cared so little that I never bothered to correct it. It went on for about a year until random circumstances caused them to learn that was wrong at which point they went “Wait, you’re not- but she called you- I assumed-”.
I probably would have cared when I was ten years old, but I became your idea of a straw Vulcan at some point in my teenage years.
Finally, machines that will possess us.
Huh? I understand “possessed by machines”, but surely it doesn’t count as an entendre if you need to insert a word that isn’t there. How does simply “possessed machines” refer to this?
I understand the appeal of using LLMs as a kind of neutral arbiter but that seems like a very bad idea for this specific task, given that virtually all LLMs fall on the left side of the political compass, and many have demonstrated specific anti-Trump bias (e.g. higher refusal rate for “write me a poem praising Trump” than “write me a poem praising Biden”). I would not trust LLMs to produce the same outputs across a lot of data based on whether an action is labeled as Trump or someone else.
If you have some extremely trusted humans then human review of the findings can fix false positives, but nothing will fix the false negatives where LLMs decide that some action by Not Trump was unremarkable and so never add it to the incident list for further review.
I suppose this itself is testable: take a bunch of Trump news stories too recent to be in the training data and see if sed ‘s/Trump/Biden’ produces identical results when passed to an LLM. That runs into further problems where “Trump attacks Democrats” actually is different from “Biden attacks Democrats”, but maybe with human review you can filter out stories where the simple sed is insufficient.
Is there a way to make the list of posts shown on lesswrong.com use the advanced filters I have set up at lesswrong.com/allPosts? I hate hate hate all of Recent, Enriched and Recommended (give me chronological or give me death) but given that I already have a set of satisfactory filters set up, rendering them on the main page seems like a feature that should exist, if only I can find it.
Luminous?