So...the killer app for current-power GPT-style AI is bringing waifus to life, right?

Or, uh, speaking more generally, simulating humans for social and entertainment purposes. NPCs in roleplaying games, etc.

An LLM can't really know more than its training data, or come up with a better idea than the ideas in its training data, so people aren't going to use it to be wise or innovative (at least, not when anything is on the line). It can, at least in theory, act as a staggeringly-erudite jack-of-all-trades -- and there's real utility in having one of those on permanent retainer for free, don't get me wrong -- but, really, that's a job that can be done by anyone with an internet connection, if he's willing to put in the time and effort.

Its real power is just "can act convincingly like a human, more or less, without having to have an actual human there." And you don't need much wisdom or innovation to succeed at being the particular kind of fake person that people want you to be, 99%+ of the time. And there is a massive market for light-use fake people.

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

To cast the pursuit of and demand for clear, certain moral ideals as “immature” is one of the most disgustingly evil things one can do.

To pretend that seeking the good is equivalent to not questioning what is good, and fighting the evil is equivalent to failing to examine its causes and nature, is a cheap rationalization for such a monstrous assault on the good for being good.

That this comes from a wildly popular children’s author is horrifying and telling.

You are both right. Kids need structure and are desperate to learn rules. They don’t have decades of experience and an existing moral framework to work from. They will not just figure it out anymore than you would derive quantum physics all by yourself.

To deny them rules, structure and some certainty is cruel and terrible.

Adults that can’t move past the need for certainty are stunted and will struggle with life.

Adolescents (who are the earliest possible target audience for Earthsea, which I imagine is the “children’s” book being referenced) are at a time when they may start seeing the cracks in the certain moral system they grew up in. It’s monstrous to insist to a child being bullied that there is only good and evil. Which one is the child? Does that mean they are justified in shooting up the school that bullied them? Or maybe they are the evil one and that is why they are bullied?

We also want these kids to move past always questioning, learn to take the good with the bad where there isn’t a better alternative, find the best compromise, etc. Denying good and evil is worse than clinging to it if you can’t move past that stage to a greater understanding.

Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.

I'm pretty quiet about the fact I'm a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I'm going through because it's blindsiding me.

There's a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it's in very specific environments. And the fact I don't amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?

It is 4:30am and I'm mourning the loss of a privilege I didn't even know I had.

Anyway, I'm going to figure out how to navigate this. Don't know how yet, but I'm gonna.

Absolutely, because it's an extremely sticky issue.

Frankly, this is something I would've never understood without living the experience.

It's now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition. They're deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it's happening and what's causing it.

It's like they're starving, but don't know this because they've always been served 3 meals...except those meals have never been big enough.

This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.

In the case of women: When I'm out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn't run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren't just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I've experienced female socialization. If I hadn't, I would've thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I'm failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn't social rejection.

And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it's not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they're teamed up against a dire situation, and I'd bet real money it's a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.

But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.

The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.

I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they're all experiencing from Western* Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.

So sick. How sick. I want to destroy this garbage.

* EDIT: Had this written as “White Imperialism” originally, but a few people interpreted this as me blaming a group of people as opposed to a system, so I’ve changed this for clarity.

Re: coldness from women, I’m curious if you have found the ways to disarm?

As a man from birth, I am pretty accustomed to the coldness as the default. But socialisation also teaches you something equivalent to rolling over and showing your belly. e.g.,

Honestly I think I really do speak about an octave higher on average if kids or women are present. It’s signalling that you are a domesticated male. There are probably a hundred other signals you learn to project that say “I am not a threat” and “I will in fact protect you if need be” without actually saying that. Smiling and being overly friendly being a start but far from the whole thing, and of course over friendly can definitely verge in to creepy so it takes a lot of practice.

Does it kind of suck even from birth? Sure. But I’m 230lbs and have had testosterone my whole life. I’m the weight of two or more women and much stronger. I could probably overpower an average group of multiple women assuming they don’t have any weapons (but this is one of those things a domesticated man does not say IRL, and not something I even think about except for internet hypotheticals.) I do not blame women for being a little afraid of me, we are physically a different species, at least at the ends of the size distribution, but even a pound for pound matchup between a grown man and grown woman is grossly unfair due to how our bodies develop.

I am super sorry you have to navigate this and my point is not to deny what you are experiencing in any way. It’s very real and sucks and is hard. I’m only attempting to offer you some hope that it can be navigated, or at least improved upon.

The upside if you are at all introverted as I am is that just ignoring people who are not someone you must interact with is very compatible with their desires. The expectation that I perform for strangers in any way is much lower.

I think that mostly I’ve become a better person as I got older, but one case where that’s not true is that I get irrationally annoyed when I encounter people having personality types or undergoing life changes I’m already familiar with, which of course is just more and more common as I get older. I don’t endorse this obviously but I do think it reflects a sort of tension between the desire to treat everyone as individuals and the desire to collapse everyone down to one of a few Types of Guy for efficiency purposes

As that kind of guy (that you are describing yourself as) I can tell you mine comes from an unhealthy lack of self compassion, and an inner dialog that views all my past selves as pathetic. Maybe another type of guy to leave behind.

To put it more clearly: I tend to believe that almost all patterns don't hold, that almost all implications are false, and that in general the correct response to almost all propositions is to suspend judgement. I often have this feeling that most people "believe too much"—not as in "people believe things too easily", but as in "people hold too large a number of propositions to be true". Especially entailments. You talk to people and they just have all these fucking entailments that they believe! Or they just straight up conflate things that they haven't necessarily justified (or even tried to justify) conflating, which is a sort of believing in various entailments in disguise.

Anyway, I feel like I just believe abnormally few things. Not that I'm abnormally skeptical, exactly—and especially not that I am abnormally likely to reject a proposition (rejection is still a belief!). It's more like...

I think when people say the word "skepticism", they're often thinking of a very active process. The process of doubting, of searching for evidence, of "debunking" and so on. And this active skepticism is useful, for sure. But I think a lot of people, even people who are very practiced at this active skepticism, would benefit from cultivating a kind of passive skepticism. That is, just a sort of default suspension-of-judgement when presented with new propositions. Especially with regard to entailments, where suspension of judgement typically looks a lot like rejection. If you believe "all swans are white" you'll be unprepared to see a black swan. If you reject or suspend judgement on "all swans are white", you will be similarly—though not identically—prepared to see a black swan. Or something like that.

I suppose I also do think it's the case that in every day life, for any two randomly chosen propositions that a person might care about, probably neither will imply the other (maybe this is also true in general, but that's a formal logic question). This is a stronger claim, but I suspect it's also true.

Anyway, the point is, people should believe fewer things, I think. People should think that fewer things are true. Or something.

Not directed at you OP so much as just reminiscing about my own path through thinking similar thoughts for years and finally realising that I had reified not-reifying to a degree that I was in fact actively and strongly believing in the principle and virtuousness of my own non-belief.

Needless to say, I was one of those “I don’t believe in labels” types. I would have benefited from someone with an opinion putting a label on me to snap me out of it.

Again, this is only about my own experience, and not directed at OP in the slightest, I’m just narcissistically using your post as a jumping off point to have a retrospective:

What I needed to hear at that point in my life was that it’s fine to believe things and it is fine to change your mind. It is also good to recognise when some questions don’t have enough information for much if any epistemic certainty, but it is still okay to contingently believe things, and you will in fact believe something no matter how hard you push knowledge of that belief from your conscious mind.

I think I was consumed with wanting to be a person who did not believe to much. I was driven by annoyance with everyone who clearly was believing wrong things, and needing to be better than that.

I am happier now knowing I am a person who believes a lot of wrong and stupid things.

These scenes where he's trying to make it with a girl are genuinely painful to read

After he's spent a week with this girl who's in love with him, trying and failing to convince himself he's into her even the slightest bit:

😔😔😔😔

Is this Murakami? Even if it’s not, it is

Ok, here's a quick survey for you all: do you find yourself capable of directly choosing your beliefs? People often talk about belief as something you can choose, e.g. in contexts like Pascal's wager. But I've not really found this to be the case, myself. In some sense I've always found my beliefs to be essentially forced on me by my own internal reasoning: when presented with some given question and some given information, certain possibilities will immediately emerge as more likely seeming than others, and this process happens automatically (I have little direct capacity to alter it). I can of course choose whether to think about the topic in more depth or not, and I can choose to seek out more information or not, but still, if I choose to do either, the results are essentially beyond my direct control. I will come to the conclusions that seem most likely to be true, and what those conclusions are is largely a consequence of certain types of internal reasoning that happen automatically.

Like, here's a test case: if you are standing in a public place and you see a guy on a bike turn the corner and emerge into view, are you capable of choosing to believe he isn't there? Or is your belief that he's there automatic and beyond your conscious control? You may say to yourself something like "well, maybe I'm just hallucinating him!" in an attempt to direct your own belief away from the obvious. And this thought might sow genuine uncertainty in you, but would it really sow genuine disbelief? Those things are different, after all. And surely if the biker came barrelling towards you, you would still move out of his way, evincing that in some sense you continued to believe in him the whole time.

Perhaps you could genuinely try to convince yourself he wasn't there, but I suspect it would be very hard. It would require some type of intense meditation or something like that, to dissolve your sense of the external world. But people talk about "choosing their beliefs" not as something that requires intense meditation and cognitive effort (and may not work even then), but as something we can all do effortlessly. I suspect this may be because, for many people, beliefs like "belief in God" or "belief in [X] sociological claim" are not fundamentally like their belief in the biker turning the corner. They're a fundamentally different sort of thing, a sort of thing that can be chosen. But not so for me. Beliefs of that sort are indeed different in degree for me: my cosmological and sociological beliefs are far less certain than my belief in everyday objects like the biker. But they are not different in kind: I can't directly choose them, they are presented to me unavoidably and automatically like my belief in the biker is (indeed, their relative uncertainty is also unavoidable and automatic). I can shape them indirectly, by choosing what information sources to view and what to spend my time thinking about, but this is far from being able to directly pick them in the moment.

Am I unusual in this regard?

Surface level: of course I choose my beliefs

Deeper level: I wish I could choose my beliefs but these neuroses are basically me

Buddha: maybe today I’ll choose some beliefs

New malaria vaccine is world-changing, say scientists - BBC News

Serious contender for best news of the decade.

New Zealand considers changing its name to Aotearoa to confront its past : NPR

I say do it

Who knows what a zealand is anyway

It’s a place in the Netherlands. So an English name, after a Dutch place l, literally New Sea Land. Pretty dumb name. Land of the long white cloud is a banger by comparison

people will just reblog a post

You wouldn’t reblog a car

God the "socialist" NIMBYs piss me off so much.

Like you wanna go full communism? Let's do it. As housing planner I am gonna bulldoze your whole fucking 2-story cute neighborhood and replace it with enormous apartment blocks that house ten times as many people.

Oh you thought I was going to keep out the icky out-of-towners and tend to the local poor people like zoo animals in subsidized poor people housing?

No, fuck you. What's the point of seizing the means of production if you are not going to direct them towards increasing the supply of necessities like housing in urban areas?