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AI tools are making the world look weird

strat7.com

121–130 of 203 posts

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.

I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here

That is crazy.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#122
post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that. I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.

Or perhaps something that it's true even after we "debunked" it

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#123
post #89
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

You can find, maybe, three or four such recipients out of 100. And they usually did make peace, even if they previously or later made mistakes.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#124
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#125
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footno…

> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original sci…

No idea why this is getting downvoted. Everything I wrote is true and directly on topic. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#126
post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

I have to ask (and I don't mean this combatively) - given the ongoing realization of the replication crisis, how likely is it that the book you mention reflects a summation of the "too pat" studies about human behavior that, en masse, always seem pithy in an interesting headline, but years later end up being completely bunk? I've noticed over the years many chains of reasoning - made up of what I believe someone call…

The book has been recommended and discussed here before.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#127
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals. But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of chil…

> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence. Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continu…

You may be taking things from the wrong end.

Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.

The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.

I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.

There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask (and I don't mean this combatively) - given the ongoing realization of the replication crisis, how likely is it that the book you mention reflects a summation of the "too pat" studies about human behavior that, en masse, always seem pithy in an interesting headline, but years later end up being completely bunk? I've noticed over the years many chains of reasoning - made up of what I believe someone call…

[flagged]

> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries

Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.

And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).

Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.

But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#129
post #125
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original sci…

No idea why this is getting downvoted. Everything I wrote is true and directly on topic. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

I know we are not supposed to talk about karma (and therefore a downvote ironically may be appropriate on this comment), but I agree vote behaviour on HN lately shows a still-small but growing tendency toward suppressive downvoting.

This seems to happen generally for two reasons: Even a neutral comment is evaluated for what stance it most closely aligns with, and then downvoted to suppress the opposing view just in case. Or alternatively, a comment that appears low-key combative (but really isn't directly so) gets downvoted in an attempt to ensure harmony.

Both moves to me have "culture war vibes", and come from either adopting those habits or feeling very tired from strife.

I think it's increasingly easy to fall into either bracket, but let's not do that on HN! If a comment is generally polite enough, the only bar to meet is adding new information or new thought into a conversation. None of us come here to be pandered to, and getting challenged by viewpoints that force you to consider the corner cases of your own views is half the fun.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#130

“Do non-American LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Mistral, Apertus) perform better or worse here? Do they have their own cultural biases in-built?” I'm wondering the same thing, in addition to the related question of “Would an LLM perform better or worse if prompted with languages other than English?”.

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