slatestarcodex

Probably what *this* should be called.
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Doug
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Doug » Tue Oct 12, 2021 4:24 am

Crunchums wrote: Thu Sep 30, 2021 7:07 am i don't get that one
it's like beetles, but they spelled it "beat" instead (like a drum beat) - is there more to it than that?
You get it perfectly
It's your turn in Cthulhu Wars
It's your turn in Squirrel Wars
It's your turn in Demon Wars
It's your turn in Wall Street Wars

http://devilsbiscuit.com/

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Luna » Tue Oct 12, 2021 4:27 am

it's actually the beat les
the beat the

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Khaos » Wed Oct 13, 2021 12:55 am

the bart the

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Crunchums » Thu Oct 14, 2021 5:45 pm

u gotta skate

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:28 pm

Sure, sure, alright.

I don't think there was anything wrong with the original article, I felt it was a push back in the correct direction (climate anxiety is unhelpful). I thought (and still do think) that it was naive about people's motivations. That's not a critical mistake.

That said,
All this cynical stuff about bias and signaling and mood affiliation is good to know, but at some point you have to drop it and admit that occasionally some people do things for the reasons they say that they’re doing them, or else it’s impossible to have a conversation or think in a straight line.
Well no, actually. No, you don't have to drop it at some point. And certainly not because it makes it harder to "think in a straight line". Thinking in a straight line is not helpful if you've plotted the line in the wrong direction because you chose to ignore some of the evidence available.

Imagine if I said "well fancy polynomials are all well and good, but at some point you have to drop it and go with good old f(x)=nx, otherwise it's impossible to think in a straight line" (See what I did there?) Yeah f(x)=nx sure is a simpler and more straightforward function, unfortunately it isn't always the correct one.

People lie and obfuscate their motivations, quite often. That's not something you should ever "drop", that's something you always remain aware of and try to include in your models of human behavior, to the best of your abilities.

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Rylinks » Thu Oct 14, 2021 9:04 pm

i don’t think that’s meant in the individual way really. I read it as more of a social statement: the """rationalist community""" doesn’t function without sometimes taking things at face value

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Khaos » Thu Oct 14, 2021 9:29 pm

Rylinks wrote:i don’t think that’s meant in the individual way really. I read it as more of a social statement: the """rationalist community""" doesn’t function without sometimes taking things at face value

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Jeb Bush 2012 » Fri Oct 15, 2021 4:33 am

Ashenai wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:28 pm Imagine if I said "well fancy polynomials are all well and good, but at some point you have to drop it and go with good old f(x)=nx, otherwise it's impossible to think in a straight line"
I can imagine you teaching a physics course, sure

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Fri Oct 15, 2021 10:46 am

lol nice

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Crunchums » Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:27 pm

u gotta skate

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Mon Nov 08, 2021 10:20 pm

Crunchums wrote: Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:27 pm https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/d ... club-orban hey Ashenai what are your thoughts
Probably not what you were asking about but
Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.
literally laughed out loud at this sentence, "completely normal white people" is such a quintessentially Bay Area American thing to say.

Okay, so:

Hungarian genetics: correct, we're basically Eastern European stock, like Romanians, Ukrainians etc.

Hungarian psychology (an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans): mostly no. He doesn't really get the Hungarian psyche. There's certainly xenophobia here, but it's less about exceptionalism and contempt (again, an American trying to extrapolate from his own cultural environment) and more about a sense of envy and unfairness (Hungary was very badly damaged in the two World Wars and the Soviet occupation, and our national psyche still carries those scars, especially for older people).

Orbán's strategy and politics (the meat of the article): yeah, pretty much correct! He kind of glosses over and doesn't give enough weight to the most important point, though, which is that Orbán is extremely popular here. Not so much in Budapest, the capital, but in rural areas, yeah absolutely. Our elections aren't fair and are manipulated all to fuck, but he would currently also win in a fair election. People love the narrative of Orbán standing up for Hungarians against the EU's meddling.

I don't like him either. I don't know if he's a psychopath (and I don't think the article writer knows either, that just seems like ascribing a mental condition to a politician you don't like, which, again, standard American playbook lol). But I definitely think he's a corrupt politician who is more interested in power than anything else.

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Crunchums » Mon Nov 08, 2021 11:16 pm

i was just curious about your thoughts in general because hey, Hungary
(thank you for your thoughts)

i don't think he was calling him a psychopath there, i think he was just saying that in service of making the point that he plays to win harder than normal people
If you’re evil enough, it you have more possibilities in your solution set than normal people. This is what I think of when I look at Orban. He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them.
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Mon Nov 08, 2021 11:47 pm

I checked the comments, and there's a guy called Nemo who's obviously a Hungarian living in Hungary, and I agree with almost everything he wrote, so I'll just quote him here:
Nemo wrote:I want to join the previous Hungarian posters who were having feelings of Gell-Mann amnesia: I can't stand Orban, and the stories of endemic corruption and taking over newspapers are true, yet I don't recognize the country I'm reading about here. Maybe learning about a foreign country's politics from books simply can't replace following the local news as they happen - try to imagine what kind of picture you would get about US politics if you tried learning about it from books instead of following it in the news and on social media.

Putting Orban in the same club as dictators like Erdogan or Putin, whose political opponents or journalists that criticize them actually end up jailed or murdered, is simply ridiculous. The closest equivalent to Orban might instead be Netanyahu, and just as the opposition united to unseat him not long ago, there is a very real chance that Orban will lose the next election against the united opposition in 2022 where everyone from the far-right Jobbik to the inner city liberals will be running on a shared ticket against him.

Orban's shift from liberal to the hard right was much more gradual than described here, and it played out over decades, it wasn't some sudden decision one day.

About the descent from steppe nomads thing: there is a considerable right-wing subculture that takes this thing very seriously, but the way the article presents this as a general property of Hungarian society comes across as strange.

The "charitable reading of Gyurcsany's speech", that it was describing his predecessor's administration, is complete nonsense: the "last one and a half years" he is talking about in the quoted text was his own administration, and no one ever believed otherwise.

The metrics about the voting system like "1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes" are obvious exaggerations.

Electoral tricks like gerrymandering, giving voting rights to foreign residents, or taking over much of legacy media, are not what's keeping Orban in power - they might be enough to add a few % points that push him over the 2/3 majority needed for rewriting the constitution, but he would still have the strongest party without any of these.

Because the Left's collapse in Hungary, which started with Gyurcsany's infamous speech in 2006 and was made much worse by the 2008 economic crisis, was largely self-imposed. After discrediting themselves so spectacularly, they started splintering into ever-smaller new parties because of petty infighting. They also lost touch with the average voter, while Orban doubled down on his new messaging strategy that was the exact opposite of how the liberal intellectuals talked and thought. The leftist parties, for example, had nothing to say about the migration crisis: they were afraid of opposing things like the border fence that had >80% popularity among voters, even though it went against the sensibilities of the liberal intellectual class, so they just sat out the biggest political event of the decade, without saying much about it (except for the previously mentioned Gyurcsany, who alone among the opposition, campaigned against the border fence, gaining him even more notoriety). Another symbolic issue is the question of the Roma (gypsy) minority: Fidesz politicians regularly make racist comments about them, while the Left is constantly talking about how their social programs are going to lift them out of poverty: yet almost all gypsies vote for Fidesz, not the Leftist parties - the world of liberal intellectuals is simply too alien for them, while Fidesz is offering them money or other tangible goods in exchange for support.

In fact, the only message the opposition has left is that it wants to undo Orbán's system, this is the only thing they campaign on, and they can't put forward any other political vision. It's as if the Left had nothing left to say to the average Hungarian voter, nothing to say about global events, while the right can always fall back to invoking family, nation, identity etc.

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by pterrus » Wed Nov 17, 2021 11:05 am

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i ... you-wanted

This is really good. I know there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on here because the literal last thing I read from Scott was the questionable article on Orban, but I trust him more about medicine than I do about Hungarians.

So assuming his conclusions are correct, here's my personal ivermectin scorecard:

1) I correctly distrusted all the people touting ivermectin as a wonder cure, but I get no points for this because it was the overwhelming consensus of my tribe.

2) I correctly pointed out that the people gleefully meming "horse dewormer" were also probably idiots and that there was probably some nuance here. I get points for this.

3) I failed to consider that maybe the reason for the effect sizes in these studies was actual fucking worms. In retrospect this seems obvious, so negative points. A lot of my skepticism was rooted in the fact that nobody seemed to know what the mechanism for action was (i.e. if it works, why does it work), so I should have made the leap that maybe the mechanism was in fact the thing we already know for sure the drug does, get rid of worms.

4) Negative points to my doctor brother-in-law who basically never made it past number 1. Reminder to myself that smart doctors aren't necessarily good rationalists and might in fact all be full of shit except for Khaos's sister.

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Khaos » Wed Nov 17, 2021 4:39 pm

always appreciated

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Khaos » Wed Nov 17, 2021 5:48 pm

cool article also

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Crunchums » Thu Jan 13, 2022 1:54 am

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/t ... r-everyone
i am happy for him; congrats
but the photo at the end is like, did you pick a photo with the goal of making me think that you suck at kissing?
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Thu Jan 13, 2022 2:29 am

Wedding kissing photographs look like that a lot, because you're doing it for the camera

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Blissful » Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:50 am

exactly one million micromarriages later
a million instances of 1/1,000,000 don't add up to 1 you little shit

rylinks hold me back im gonna beat this guy's fuckin ass
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Luna » Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:52 am

look out guys we got a new grakthis

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Luna » Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:52 am

i guess there always had to be one

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Blissful » Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:14 pm

:robert: The weight of such a burden... it must be mine. For there can be no other-

:skink: You hold a grim destiny in your hands brother, but it is not your own!
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Skeletor » Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:52 pm

Blissful wrote: Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:50 am
exactly one million micromarriages later
a million instances of 1/1,000,000 don't add up to 1 you little shit

rylinks hold me back im gonna beat this guy's fuckin ass
rylinks don't hold her back
wow, [you]. that all sounds terrible. i hope it gets better for you

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by pterrus » Thu Jan 13, 2022 7:22 pm

For some reason neither Ozy nor I ever wondered about the opposite phenomenon. Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction, until it’s one of those blue supergiant stars in the galactic core?
Haha look at this marriage noob.

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Blissful » Sun Jan 16, 2022 12:28 pm

Skeletor wrote: Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:52 pm
Blissful wrote: Thu Jan 13, 2022 10:50 am
exactly one million micromarriages later
a million instances of 1/1,000,000 don't add up to 1 you little shit

rylinks hold me back im gonna beat this guy's fuckin ass
rylinks don't hold her back
i was going to make some crack about marriage ruining one's ability to post then i remembered that half teh damn forum is dads now and the postings just fine

he's out of excuses! im coming for him!
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Crunchums » Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:44 am

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/p ... -yudkowsky
more stuff in the vein of tools AIs vs agent AIs
Tool AIs have had a good few decades. It’s easy to forget that back in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter speculated that any AI smart enough to beat top humans at chess would also be smart enough to swear off chess and study philosophy instead. So the hypothesis “tool AIs can just keep getting arbitrarily more powerful without ever becoming generally intelligent agents” has a lot of historical support.

The meat of the discussion involves whether this winning streak for tools can continue forever. Richard is hopeful it might. Eliezer is pretty sure it won't.
ok so good to know that someone who thinks about these things agrees with my intuition
am i understanding correctly that Eliezer's position is basically "if you keep making better and better tool-AIs then eventually they start being agent-y"?
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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Khaos » Wed Jan 19, 2022 4:51 pm

without reading the article that sounds dumb

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Skeletor » Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:40 pm

i don't know if that sounds dumb. we already have AI tools that do a bunch of things they don't need to do as a side effect, like this one that's meant to autocomplete code but is also a chatbot on accident and can almost play chess

https://dagshub.com/blog/github-copilot-not-code/

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wow, [you]. that all sounds terrible. i hope it gets better for you

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Blissful » Thu Jan 20, 2022 1:36 am

Skeletor wrote: Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:40 pmImage
Image

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Re: slatestarcodex

Post by Ashenai » Fri Jan 28, 2022 12:05 pm


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