freshhawk

Our population changed radically when we gained sentience.

I don't see how it is reasonable to assume a species will gain sentience and not alter their behaviour in a way that alters their population. That is a "big" threshold to cross in terms of ability to alter your surroundings.

It doesn't have to be controlled, it just has to change significantly because of the gain of sentience for this argument to not be valid.

It certainly uses a logical structure that requires independent variables when we have strong evidence to believe these things are not independent.

"if other sentient species exist, we should expect ours to have an unusually high population"

Except that sentience evolving is, as far as we know, extremely tied to population numbers and then afterwards sentient agents will have strong incentives to manage their population in some way (or you could say: the odds of them deciding to exactly match their pre-sentient population levels, now that they can make a choice, is small).

The underlying explanation of the principle of mediocrity and a mathematical intuition for it is pretty good.

Maybe people in 2021 are just extremely skeptical about "if we assume the most likely thing every step and pretend each choice is independent we can build a prediction that we can assume is maximally accurate, which means it is meaningfully accurate" chains of reasoning? That's how you get "Roko's Basilisk scenarios scaring people" type outcomes. It certainly is the source of my distaste and bias against it if I'm being honest with myself.

You live in a society that has some really strong stereotypes of early risers and night owls so there is a large amount of learned values involved here. There might be more to it than that for you, but the learned shame part is real and a very consistent part of our culture.

Yeah, this just obviously correct. Sure, maybe there is some other biological factor that accounts for some of the increased rates of depression.

But it's an amazingly safe bet that the main factor is the part where we treat people poorly and openly classify them as a bad person. This seems pretty simple.

Until the had too much of an effect on my health I medicated myself into a morning person sleep schedule. I felt worse physically, just low key bad all the time, but I miss it so much. Getting treated that much better, with absolute benefit of the doubt given to me regarding everything I did, instead of the complete opposite, was really great.

This isn't teenagers, it's adult men. It is situations where if they showed full understanding and said "I don't want it to show scantily clad teenagers to me as I have a lot of loud opinions about sex and sin but I can't stop looking at them so it keeps sending them" it would be just as funny.

It's not the complaint, it's the moralizing combined with the complaint about self selected content.

If they weren't moralizing then yeah, that's just a report of a bad experience with the algorithm. Those don't go viral.

My Tiktok has a lot of videos of people complaining about exactly this and being responded to by pointing out they are telling on themselves in a hilarious way.

Gotta hand it to the algorithm, it is always funny to me.

Tiktok is "addictive dopamine-f*ing time-sucker almost contentless social medias" perfected more than anything else, by a pretty good margin.

It's a good thing to avoid honestly, you miss out a few rare genuinely funny jokes and avoid the brain damage. Seems like a good trade. Wish I'd made that choice.

If you are in the business of inflicting this kind of addiction on other people then I can understand the positive attitude, Tiktok is a work of art on that front.

But that's really why everyone will always accept them, because they can pay their debts/taxes with them. It's probably a common misconception because it's so close to correct.

But how good are they going to be at laundering money? I can't imagine they're going to be in the class that contemporary art is in, so they aren't really comparable.

So the best case scenario for them is to be a part of the worst type of video games? The pay-to-win/microtransaction sector?

Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.

Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic.

It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.

They don't. They didn't like being the butt of the joke and so they spun up some bullshit in the voice they felt had the best chance of working.

You can tell because leftists aren't offended by vanilla leftism.

Why, when someone tries to take advantage of you, is your first reaction to retreat?

Trust or a monopoly position.

And in this context trust doesn't scale, you need good teachers for every [class size] students. That means profit only scales linearly with good teachers (the scarce resource).

Marketing scales though, and what matters to the consumer is how much they believe the actual value is compared to the competition for what they believe their options are.

I don't see how you expect to sell that particular story to a group of people who have likely sat in the meetings where those BS stories were crafted.

And most of whom have had more than one "oh damn, i thought we were ironically riffing but now I can't tell if they are very funny and very dry or if this person is very new and drank the kool aid and is completely earnest" moments.

I probably would think it was too. But instead of just guessing I looked it up. It's not. Not even close.

It's so far away from being risky, in fact, that having people in the field intentionally lying means I think they are lying for a specific reason and I think people should be concerned about that.

But those jobs aren't more risky, not by any measurement. What they are are positions of authority.

So it's hard to say "first class citizens" isn't the right term. Maybe "rulers"?

It was a technical question about the predictive power of language models, the biases encoded in them and the results of their use in a large system like all of Google's connected products.

But I guess to your particular faith-based ideology the mention of race makes it a "social issue"? Anyway I'm sorry I misclassified you and in the process insulted your religious beliefs. That wasn't my intention.

The cognitive dissonance is that a huge number of highly respected people in the field, and coworkers, said "yeah, this was racist bullshit", and the actual paper in question has been seen by a lot of people by now.

But if you are committed to the stance that racism doesn't exist and this is all a grand SJW conspiracy then you have to grasp at straws to ignore the overwhelming number of experts disagreeing with you.

This also seems to be labeling people as "top performers" based on how much code they get done.

And then measuring how many commits they do and wondering why those are correlated? Even besides the good reasons you point out ... this seems very obvious.

Also, my experience has shown that smaller commits are easier to work with so people with experience tend to make more smaller commits. This also seems to be fairly widely talked about.

Leaning on the predictive power of "the dismal science" isn't a strong base to argue from.

"force" or "coerce", but more "civilized", generally more related to using indirect pressure, probably based on manipulating some larger system.

Think how a mobster in a movie might use it, "we leveraged the pictures of the cop to get warning of any raids". Same meaning, just about things that are legal.

No, they are used because they are cheap, reproduce fast and are legal to experiment on.

For mice results in the top journals we're at about 1/3 applying to humans, which includes "has the effect and also starts killing you" if I remember correctly. And that's with the enormous selection bias of only counting the stuff in Cell and Nature and similar.

Yeah, wow. This is one of the more aggressive examples of "open"-but-unrunnable I've ever seen. I think your opinion is dead on.

And if this isn't intentional, then the level of effort is so low how could you trust the software with such a complex and subtle problem? It is clearly intentional, but they didn't even give themselves a plausibly deniable story.

Salesforce bought Slack today. For a lot of money. So today is the day everyone talks to their investors about how much like Slack their product is.

And by cancelled you mean people who previously couldn't/didn't critcize you now criticize you?

Like they start questioning your place in society after they questioned your beliefs/values and you re-affirmed them?

Sounds terrible, sounds like the dominant narrative is going to change during a time of economic uncertainty, massive structural failures and the exposure of that same dominant narrative to actual investigation and critique.

Can't have dominant narratives getting disrupted. Scary.

Yes, you can tell because more of this questioning is happening in the present climate.

haha ... yeah, that's kinda "the thing" you don't mention to Americans because they get mad. It's incredibly apparent from just outside the bubble (or half-in it like in Canada).

Every country with a heavily controlled media, with a people indoctrinated with a nationalistic fairy tale is having the same problems with the internet breaking down the old singular media narrative. The heavier the controls were, the larger the societal shock now.

It's ... touchy. We have all learned in the last couple years how to empathize with our American friends who just learned about Tucson or the MOVE bombing or something we learned in school that they just learned about from a superhero show or an apology. It's fine to blame it on your schools, it is definitely a bad move to mention the actual cause.

Definitely! And now a lot of the children of the people it was done too are getting all "political".

It's a bit weird from the outside, as a non-american. When I was growing up there was a very narrow window of acceptable ideas in the US, anything else was "unamerican". "The two parties are basically the same" was a cliche when I was a kid.

The reaction to a relatively tiny number of new acceptable ideas in the discourse has been pretty surprising, even to someone who thought they already had a low opinion of American culture.

And yeah, sure, the ad-generated enragement feeds don't help. But it is clearly mostly the small town kid getting exposed to more ideas thing, no question.