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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

    The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

    As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

    The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.




  • I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War


  • I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

    My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

    None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

    History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
    The world is watching.





  • Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 says:

    Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

    It’s a fairly narrow definition. I haven’t found any cases where the USSC defines “enemy” but, given the preceding sentence, it looks like the heavily implied definition is, “Members of a nation that is at war with the United States.”

    Officially, the US has only been at war 5 times. The last one was WW II.





  • A bunch of scientific papers are probably better data than a bunch of Reddit posts and it’s still not good enough.

    Consider the task we’re asking the AI to do. If you want a human to be able to correctly answer questions across a wide array of scientific fields you can’t just hand them all the science papers and expect them to be able to understand it. Even if we restrict it to a single narrow field of research we expect that person to have a insane levels of education. We’re talking 12 years of primary education, 4 years as an undergraduate and 4 more years doing their PhD, and that’s at the low end. During all that time the human is constantly ingesting data through their senses and they’re getting constant training in the form of feedback.

    All the scientific papers in the world don’t even come close to an education like that, when it comes to data quality.


  • Haha. Not specifically.

    It’s more a comment on how hard it is to separate truth from fiction. Adding glue to pizza is obviously dumb to any normal human. Sometimes the obviously dumb answer is actually the correct one though. Semmelweis’s contemporaries lambasted him for his stupid and obviously nonsensical claims about doctors contaminating pregnant women with “cadaveric particles” after performing autopsies.

    Those were experts in the field and they were unable to guess the correctness of the claim. Why would we expect normal people or AIs to do better?

    There may be a time when we can reasonably have such an expectation. I don’t think it will happen before we can give AIs training that’s as good as, or better, than what we give the most educated humans. Reading all of Reddit, doesn’t even come close to that.