gallopingcomp

Alas, I see that we (you and I and great-grandparent) are talking past each other.

(1) You speak as if by “we” (or “society”), grandparent was exclusively referring to men. We (non-men, for example women) are a part of society, and some of us can be quite awful to each other; this, I expect, is common sense.

The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).

So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.

(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).

If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)

And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.

I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.

(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.

Not exactly a “generation”, but you are onto something here - men (broadly speaking) do appear to be more susceptible to radicalization.

No, it would mean not attributing innate value to maleness or femaleness, so to speak,, but to the relevant metrics.

One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.

And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.

Exactly - it’s still there (and still has its own semantics), but it’s also inert.

And, to address your point directly, of course mathematics detached from context can be used in practice. One can certainly create-slash-discover an abstract algebra, derives theorems about it detached from outside context, and then later on discover a context in which the abstract structure is applicable, and apply the pre-derived theorems.

Not in SF (for better or worse).

But yes. I would further suggest that sometimes people get too invested in online spaces and calibrate their worldview based on it perhaps a bit too much. (And prior to this it was traditional mass media, or their IRL local community echo chambers, etc.) It takes effort to find and evaluate truly original research.

I actually agree with you - “the symbols mean something different now” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But I was trying to point out (what I saw as) a big ambiguity in parent’s comment.

My program depends on glibc. Does glibc necessarily depend on my program?

Yup. You run into that all the time in abstract algebra. Although people usually don’t like to touch the equality sign; the usual practice (based on my limited exposure) is to invent equivalent operator notations.

1. I would object to the “similarly”, because they are not similar types of statements. And yes, the tautology aspect is the whole point of the axiomatic method (which has limitations that cannot be directly blamed on that premise).

2. You didn’t do the first two. But the symbols now mean different things than their conventional interpretations in number theory.

3. > It's derived from initial assumptions, which is how all math works

It’s exactly how _logic_ works, and is how all math works, but that would only qualify it as (il)logic, and not inherently math. Necessary but not sufficient condition.

(Sorry ;)

Wow, I guess my mental model (so to speak) is even more “radical” than yours. I don’t think mathematics is really part of the (empirical) universe, but that they are their own kind of abstract entity. They may happen to correspond to certain patterns in how things exist and interact in the “real world”, or to sentient beings’ reasoning and modeling faculties, but they are not tied to the real world either way.

For comparison: To me, for a number to exist in a “symbolic or algorithm sense” is to for it to exist, period - but in the sense of “creating”/“discovering” a new number system to contain them. The set of rational numbers isn’t really “special” to me. (Non-negative natural numbers are “special” for their association with cardinality, but I will refrain from going down that rabbit hole this time.) (I assume you meant “unbounded” in terms of expansion into elementary algebra; do correct me if I misunderstood you.)

(i.e. Existence=NaN because it’s a loaded word, Abstractness=Yes, Independence=I have some but limited sympathy for the neo-Fregean view on this, “creating” and “discovering” are the same thing to me)

(Which would make me a platonist to some people, an intuitionist to others, I guess)

It would seem that, when you try too hard at being creative, chatgpt usually just loses it completely - in my experience, it often starts falling back on even worse cliches, or it stops making sense altogether. (Or it might just time out.)

Absolutely agreeing that true “intelligence” would come from such a synthesis - it also loosely matches what we know from cognitive psychology. We won’t go anywhere without rigorously addressing knowledge representation and reasoning - unlike humans, language is the only faculty ChatGPT possesses (and the power of language has been oversold for a while).

The cynic in me would rather have the backlash (and a rude awakening for the industry), than the looming hyper-normalization of convincing-sounding bullshit/plagiarism/etc (and new, more convoluted forms of “saying the magic words to make the algorithm behave”) in the near future.

(Relatedly: Say what you will about the rationalist community, they appear to have really thought about a lot of this.)

> Creative writing

I tried to get it to write _1984_ erotic fanfiction, which it did - but everything it spewed out was a cliche. I imagine it had read all of FFN and AO3.

> gathering information

It will probably be like the Google infoboxes and “People Also Search” entries we’ve had for a while, only more superficially coherent.

It seems like the “fake it until you make it” craze has fully taken over the AI/ML scene.

As a (former) student of psychology, I personally subscribe to the view that both platonism and constructivism are true (edit: in that they both accurately depict different-but-interrelated aspects of mathematics).

It’s a false dilemma much like “is light a wave or a particle” or “free will or determinism”. (Yup, I am that “you can have it all” pollyanna type of person.)

2+2=4 is (roughly) the same kind of truth as “two groups each consisting of two elves have a total of four elves”, or “if you travel a distance of 2cm twice, you’ve traveled by 4cm”, except it isn’t tied to the real or fictional existence of centimeters or elves.

And loosely the same kind of truth as “imagine a world where elves live in Lorien… in this world, elves live in Lorien.”)

And on the second point, by assuming 0/0=1, either you have left the realm of natural numbers (or real numbers), or you have to break the distributive law of addition, or all the symbols mean completely different things. Otherwise, you are essentially declaring both 1!=2 and 1=2, which is not math.

This is a very shortsighted, historically-ignorant take that singles out M2F trans folks disingenuously - there have been plenty of calls from all over society, from cis women to trans women to trans men to gay folks to straight folks to any and all racial groups.

No, let’s just ignore all the times this has happened in history and all the times other groups had raised similar points (their possible merits aside), pretend this is a new problem, and blame MTF folks for it.

Beware isolated standards of rigor, folks.

And sometimes fined, but also sometimes having their convictions overturned - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_Unit...

Not “literally” the same as assault charges though - “public order” laws have a long sordid history of their own.

Which is not to the parent comment’s point anyway.

Classic DARVO.

“The population is mostly poor outside a few cities” seems to have been a historical norm in most of the world, for one reason or another (regulatory capture / colonialism / decline of key industries / etc).

(And I wish we had more concrete data to critique instead of vague, monolithic enemies like “administrators” or “regulations” (typo), where each side simply fills in the blanks according to their own biases.)

This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically.

Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places.

(And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)

More demographic proportionality?

The description is not a metaphor. “Lost my marbles” is a common one for psychosis, dementia and the like, though.

Are you kidding me? Mainland China has the worst virtue-signaling bureaucracy that I’ve seen anywhere by far (and the corruption that came with it).

Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here.

And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy.

And, which generals are you talking about?

Psychologists might call it controlled exposure to fear, under conditions where you know (or will soon know) that things will more or less be all right / have a safe space to retreat to. (Which is a bit subjective, but most people seem to have a few things in common that they value for their security.)

When it feels like everything is slipping away from you, it’s easier to become desperate. This could be the result of losing your sense of scale, or it could be the result of a genuine, significant threat (or anything in between).

EDIT: also think of people in general as lying along orthogonal spectrums of (1) psychological vulnerability, and (2) material and social precarity. People high on either scale suffer disproportionately; and tougher times means a wider spectrum of people that are likely to break (whether just to survive or letting the stress get to them, or more commonly both).

China has Internet mobs and flame wars too (across many of the same range of issues and sides), but this is usually suppressed by widespread censorship that simply shuts down all discourse.

I would even argue that the mentalities behind the worst performative excesses of social justice culture are even more present in China, by virtue of it being less democratic in practice but more democratic on paper. It’s just harder to accidentally form a mob, or at least that’s the perception.

(And when they do occur you don’t hear about them much. High-profile nationalistic riots and ethnic riots had taken place, offline, at least in the recent past.)

And a lot of religion, spirituality and superstitions, anything from Buddhism to Taoism to folk religion/superstitions to evangelical Christianity. And religious cults too. Yes, even among the educated elite.

It’s just that you don’t often hear about them, because image is everything, and _Jia-chou bu-neng wai yang_.

(Source: grew up there.)

Irrationality is in practice inevitable, because lack of information and motivated reasoning. Complete freedom and moral relativism won’t stop it. Cultural relativism won’t stop it. Authoritarianism won’t stop it. Humans are flawed. It’s better if we all got used to that concept, and both (1) thought more about what we know and how we know it, and (2) try to mitigate the impact of this. How this might work in practice, I do not have a clear idea, but growth driven by engagement metrics needs to die.

Exactly this, and this is a general pattern.

This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.)

At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency).

[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...

There are more cases of subtler failures that are smaller in scope, eg. in the Chicago metro[1], or on the UNC campus[2].

I do agree with part of your sentiment. Those two examples are the worst case scenarios where misfortunes happened to align, and there are periods in history, as well as other countries today, where this sort of problem was/is rampant.

This is also not (exactly) a recent problem - the groundwork, no pun intended, was often laid long ago.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/21/lead-contami...

[2] https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article268...

> Awful behavior in general comes from an absence of fear

I assume you meant _specific_ fears about the consequences of one's _specific_ actions (e.g. fear of harming someone else, or fear of receiving backlash for it; or fear of squandering scarce funds for a business).

Fear does not unconditionally bring sanity. I've found widespread, chronic, low-grade background fear to be an equally significant driver of awful behavior (and irrationality), often (but not always) co-occurring with an absence of specific consequences.

(The implication being that trying to "solve" this problem with more general terror, as opposed to specific consequences, would likely backfire.)