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AI tools are making the world look weird

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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#161

Post by fluoridation »

rollcat wrote: post #115
lelanthran wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males. This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression. Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.

>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.

* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.

* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?

* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#162

Post by dc10tonite »

sho_hn wrote: post #129
adwn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

This is why I have enjoyed not having downvote powers yet. It's made me check why I downvote things - and re-evaluate what I upvote. I've found myself upvoting things I don't really agree with but make interesting points that I find myself dialoguing with. Perhaps this is why I mostly lurk

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#163

Post by CaptWillard »

titanomachy wrote: post #154
CaptWillard wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse. Example: Two people with similar classically liberal values hear the same "pithy take" on a politically contentious issue. One accepts it as presented, the other digs in and finds it doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all. Almost invariably, the skeptic is ostracized, his findings met with incurious d…

This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.

This has been my experience, yes. Although dogma implies long held beliefs.

The rate of adoption has accelerated along with the news cycle.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#164

Post by fluoridation »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #160
fluoridation wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be that guy , but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog ( https://www.hillelwayne.com/ ) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.

no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.

I'll grant that, but that's not a "they don't do this as often as that, but", that's a "it's not unheard of". That was meant to be a response to a Tao of Programming-like post about why programming work has so much improvisation.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#165

Post by some_random »

balder1991 wrote: post #55
bitexploder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, has that Malcolm Gladwell knowledge porn vibe. A book that empowers its reader with secret knowledge of explanation that all fits together a little too neatly and loses nuance or is often just plain wrong.

I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole. I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Go…

That explanation sounds great until you find out that Gladwell is more than willing to misrepresent events to fit into whatever point he's trying to make. The most egregious example I know of being the Korean Air Line Flight 801 crash.

https://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell...

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#166

Post by numpad0 »

ehnto wrote: post #108
numpad0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fa…

Would they not quickly bocome divergent vectors? In the same way that apple and Apple can exist in the same vector set with totally different meanings? So all information gleaned reading a glyph in the context of japanese articles would be totally different vectors to the information gleaned from the same glyph in Chinese?

I don't know, but at least older Qwen models were a bit confused as to what words belong to which languages, and recent ones seem noticeably less sure about ja-JP in general. Maybe it vaguely relates Hanzi/Kanji character being more coarse grained than Latin alphabets so that there aren't enough character counts to tell apart or something.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#167

Post by bandie91 »

dsign wrote: post #51
smelendez wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t read it but I think that’s genuinely interesting and not obvious. And probably could change based on the roles of first and second wives and, yes, how male status plays out and how it influences the life of the wife. We don’t have legal polygamy but in many places there’s not much stopping people from living in an unmarried multi-woman household with a man (or vice versa). But it’s not a very common arrange…

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…

i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.

up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.

but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#168

Post by TheCoelacanth »

titanomachy wrote: post #151
psidium wrote: 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…

TIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.

It was part of the Holy Roman Empire for hundreds of years, but not at the end. The Holy Roman Empire started in 800 CE and Rome was part of it.

The Italian states started becoming more autonomous in the mid-1100s. It wasn't until the 1600s that they were fully independent.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#169

Post by psidium »

adwn wrote: post #116
psidium wrote: post #105

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…

But I said the book does offer replication studies in different populations in different continents, albeit from the same author
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