@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Excrubulent

@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net

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Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Obviously the horses weren’t the brains behind the operation. They were used to add physical strength to the effort of… putting Humpty Dumpty… back together… who I definitely remember as an egg but am just now realising was only illustrated that way and never actually referred to as an egg in the text of the rhyme itself…

Anyway they probably pulled carts of equipment or something idk how you put an egg back together. Or a human for that matter.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Inside your brain because you memorised one of the only strong passwords that you really should never use.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh great, eugenics.

A good society protects its vulnerable members and that means people with impaired judgement, including the young & elderly.

You could say the same thing about a company that designs a system that tells people to eat glue. They have experts working for them that must have known this would be a problem and they released it anyway. Do they get yeeted from society for that, or are they still amongst the most powerful class of entities in history?

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

No he’s right that it’s unsolved. Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you’ve ever been in a highly active comment section you’ll notice certain “hallucinations” developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.

We don’t even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can’t. I don’t think you solve this problem without AGI, and that’s something AI evangelists don’t want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They’re in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead? Ultimately to determine truth you need to engage with the meaning of the words, and the process inherently involves a process of self-awareness. I would say you’re talking about treaching the AI to understand context, and there is no predefined limit to the layers of context needed to understand the truthfulness of even basic concepts.

An AI that is aware of its own behaviour and is able to explore context as far as required to answer questions about truth, which would need that exploration precached in some sort of memory to reduce the overhead of doing this from first principles every time? I think you’re talking about a mind; a person.

I think this might be a fundamental barrier, which I would call the “context barrier”.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

“Edging bets” sounds like a fun game, but I think you mean “hedging bets”, in which case you’re admitting we can’t actually do this reliably with people.

And we certainly can’t do that with an LLM, which doesn’t actually think.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The people you’re calling “morons” are orders of magnitude more sophisticated in their thinking than even the most powerful modern AI. Almost every single one of them can easily spot what’s wrong with AI hallucinations, even if you consider them “morons”. And also, by saying you have to filter out the “morons”, you’re still admitting that a lot of whole real assed people are still not reliably able to sort fact from fiction regardless of your education method.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

A big problem with that is that I’ve noticed your username.

I wouldn’t even do that with Reagan’s fresh corpse.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

And you will shatter the blade of any samurai who tests it on you.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

If San Francisco can do it then no city has an excuse.

api.trekaroo.com/photos/flickr_cache/…/75233.jpg

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Emergency vehicles are clearly mentioned in the top text, that person just misunderstood it and now can’t take the L and they’re throwing around the R-slur whilst accusing other people of resorting to base insults.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Building infrastructure is never easy. San Francisco’s experience could aid in teaching other cities how it’s done. If there’s an easier method, then it could be used, but hills obviously aren’t that big of a problem.

Also riding up hills is just a matter of having the appropriate gears: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipENw5mjjSg

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Also this video explains why riding uphill is just a matter of gearing, it doesn’t have to be physically harder: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipENw5mjjSg

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I used it as an example of how trams can work on steep hills.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

They require a good electrical grid and good bike infrastructure. They are the product of good infrastructure and obviously just mentioned to show you how people can get up hills, not as an example of infrastructure.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah, I got blasted with next door’s music randomly the other day because my sound bar has bluetooth. I use the feature extremely rarely but it doesn’t matter if you’ve selected bluetooth with the remote or not, anybody can connect and switch it away from the wired connection and there’s absolutely no confirmation before it just takes over and floods your senses. God help you if the other person has their phone volume on full.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Him with Homer’s stubble when he’s older is canon: …simpsonswiki.com/…/Down_With_Buildings_Demolitio…

The correct search term for this image is “bart simpson demolition worker”. It is NOT - repeat NOT - “bart simpson adult”. I apparently forgot I was on the internet when I searched that.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Your advice isn’t bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren’t so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381308/

Their conclusions are remarkably similar to those of Donohoe, who found that “the evidence for shaken baby syndrome appears analogous to an inverted pyramid, with a very small database (most of it poor quality original research, retrospective in nature, and without appropriate control groups) spreading to a broad body of somewhat divergent opinions.”

Reviewing the studies achieving the highest quality of evidence rating scores, Donohoe found that “there was inadequate scientific evidence to come to a firm conclusion on most aspects of causation, diagnosis, treatment, or any other matters,” and identified “serious data gaps, flaws of logic, inconsistency of case definition.”

The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn’t intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.

And obviously you can’t trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it’s clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. “Fell down the stairs” is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.

The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren’t related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don’t do well in prison.

Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.

When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn’t need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic “experts”. New parents don’t need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I understand the comment comes from a good, conscientious place, but from context it’s clearly talking about the shaken baby thing, which I think is misinformation that originated in a moral panic and has never really been demonstrated to be a thing.

And I agree that frustration absolutely isn’t an excuse but that’s really my point, I think you need to have something deeply wrong with you to shake a baby in the way that “shaken baby” actually means. Like as a new parent I remember seeing a demonstration by a nurse on this topic, and the way she shook that doll’s body was obviously intended to be shocking, but it’s not something you do just because you’re frustrated. It’s clearly violent. Like, I can confidently say I don’t think anybody in that room needed that demonstrated any more than they needed to be told, “Remember, don’t repeatedly punch your own baby in the face.” If you’re gonna do that then no amount of warning will change it I don’t think.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Okay so did you even read that? Your own link says it is a feature of “popular discourse” - ie not supported by actual evidence - and then says:

Several political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have criticized the horseshoe theory. Proponents point to a number of perceived similarities between extremes and allege that both tend to support authoritarianism or totalitarianism; political scientists do not appear to support this notion, and instances of peer-reviewed research on the subject are scarce. Existing studies and comprehensive reviews often find only limited support and only under certain conditions; they generally contradict the theory’s central premises.

That’s about as close as an impartially worded style of article can come to saying “yeah this is obviously bullshit”.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

“Tankie” is not synonymous with “socialist”. It was coined to describe a type of person who will side with the war crimes of anybody who waves a red flag regardless of whether they’ve fallen into statist counterrevolution.

“Nazi” is short for “national socialist”, because they fraudulently wore the name of socialism whilst doing horrific counterrevolutionary repression. Tankies are the left’s name for another type of person who does almost the same thing, although with more token adherence to the aesthetics and ideology of supposedly leftist thinkers and movements.

Some people call them “red fash” although there is a specific subgroup of tankies who I think that label fits better, the nazbols.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Well then horseshoe theory isn’t about leftism and it’s basically just wrong, which was the point of me quoting that person’s own link back at them. If your point is that unhinged extremists with no coherent ideology tend towards a horrifying common denominator regardless of their starting point, then that’s true, but it says nothing about principled socialists.

There are plenty of revolutionary ideologies that do not fit within horseshoe theory, as political scientists have pointed out. If you want to say they’re wrong you’ll need something more than just what you reckon.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Right, so it’s basically just bullshit, and it doesn’t apply to anyone principled anyway. Although most people who talk about horseshoe theory try to use it to discredit people on the left in general, whatever your walked-back version of it may be.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

This entire conversation started because a centrist attacked anyone not in the centre with horseshoe “theory”. Either everyone who isn’t in the dead centre - another dubious term that is actually synonymous with conservatism - is either a tankie or a nazi, or we’re right to criticise the use of the term in this context.

If you use it to mean all extreme positions, you’re still wrong because tankies aren’t leftists. I was conceding a small kernel of truth to the idea, not that the idea itself is an acceptable way to analyse politics.

Also “higher IQ”? That’s pretty much just a racist position, and I don’t agree there’s such a thing as a “principled racist” since race itself is a bullshit concept.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Okay, I don’t really want to debate the merits of the position. I could but I don’t think we’re too far apart on it. So the character flaw is the preachiness and I misunderstood that’s what you meant, but you still have said something very interesting that I want to understand. I really wanted to know about this:

As pointed out earlier, this person I responded to in this thread isn’t that person, and I do apologize for implying otherwise. But the person I’m talking about here DOES exist. That person is in this thread. And that person needs to hear this.

See, this is a mistake that people making pro-dem arguments - whether out of utilitarianism or some misguided sense of allegiance - keep running into. I have seen so many arguments that boil down to (and I’m not saying this is exactly what you did but it’s a general pattern):

A: Biden is screwing the pooch for XYZ clearly stated factual reasons.

B: You want Trump to win.

A: No, I think people should probably vote for Biden but he’s tanking it for XYZ clearly stated reasons.

B: Fuck you, MAGA/Ivan.

I was asking you about it because you are literally the first person out of dozens of these exchanges that I have ever seen admit to being wrong about this. I think that’s honestly admirable, and I was asking because I really want to understand if you have any insight as to where your misunderstanding came from.

If your answer is that it doesn’t matter because the person your argument is for is out there somewhere, then I think that’s a problem for reasons I can explain if you want to hear them. If you have another explanation I’m interested.

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