Prince Rogers Nelson and Michael Jackson both had personal doctors who both played a role in their deaths, with drugs that they gave. Similarly Matthew Perry.
I'd argue that a rich person has more of a reason to develop a severe addiction if the quality of their stuff is more pure and comes with less of a risk
difficulties in life and genetics are more of a reason to decelop a severe addiction. Quality is probably not so much of importance - people still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.
It feels like we forgot about the opiod epidemic, meth, crack..
Anyhow, I think this derailed enough. I just wanted to point out the weird protestant views of op.
>Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.
There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".
Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".
I'd wager it is the strongest. Most of the arguments always argue in quantities. So and so much of energy waster per hour, this many job losses and that growing trend of delusions supported by LLMs.
We've already seen it with climate change. Arguing with statistical factoids is too ethereal for anyone and leads to some kind of fatigue. There is no emotional difference between 100 mWh and 10000 mWh. But a "I had to bring my dog to the vet because chatGPT told me to give it chocolate" will convince anyone to deeply distrust technology.
FAANG and its acolytes deprived us from actual connection with our environment. Judging the argument as weak is sad proof of that.
So how about instead of using the slot-machine that chatGPT is, we go visit our grandma, hug our dad or just get a new houseplant :)
>I feel the opposite, and pretty much every metric we have shows basically linear improvement of these models over time.
Wait, what kind of metric are you talking about? When I did my masters in 2023 SOTA models where trying to push the boundaries by minuscule amounts. And sometimes blatantly changing the way they measure "success" to beat the previous SOTA
I checked the BlEU-Score and Perplexity of popular models and both have stagnated around 2021. As a disclaimer this was a cursory check and I didn't dive into the details of how individuals scores were evaluated.
I'm not sure what your comment is trying to convey. From my experience Meditations is basic and doesn't offer any substance. Popular Stoicism has a lot of legitimate criticism and is very often misused and glamorized in right-wing spaces. So the label "right-coded" seems appropriate.
All in all your comment caused some confusion. I know a handful of "extreme" left-wing, liberal arts people who are enamoured by "Fanged Noumena" whose author is the infamous nrx, 'hyper-racist' father of accelerationism Nick Land. So the politics don't seem to be the problem.
My gut instinct was that you have fallen for the meme/propaganda, as I have seen similar talking points being repeated on other sites. Maybe you can give me a more detailed explanations of what you're trying to get at.
How "subtle and insidious" is it really?
I'd say it is shifting the blame of personal responsability to a website. Me and some of my friends use(d) 4chan and we never fell into the pipeline. To the contrary there is a strong left-wing camarederie. And I'd wager that we recognize subtle right-wing views more easily. One doesn't learn about these views by looking at a twitter screenshot but by engaging them.
We should stop treating right-wing ideology as a mind-parasite. And if we do it anyways, we should accept that some people want to get "infected".
Also (and this is a pet peeve of mine), we're talking about evidence not proof. They're not the same thing. Just because there's evidence that something happened, it doesn't mean that it happened.
Evidence is a thing that you claim could be part of an valid argument that something happened ("is consistent with"). This isn't a universal definition, but there's got to be some separation between proof and evidence. When there's evidence admitted into a court case, it doesn't necessarily mean that someone is guilty. When there's a lot of evidence and still no proof, you can and should (and will) still make a probabilistic case that something did happen.
So I'd agree with and disagree with you. There's no evidence (that you know of) that Russell's Teapot is there, which is why you do not believe it is there. If somebody does believe it is there, but admits that they have no proof that it is there, it would be reasonable to ask what evidence makes them believe that it is there.
Where I obviously agree with is that "belief" can't mean just something you want to think for no particular reason. Or if it does, it's certainly not worth talking about.
4chan and I'm not ashamed of it. Even though it is anonymous you really feel a sense of community. Approach it as a creative writing exercise or as being part of a hive-mind and you'll find enjoyment in it.
The amount of authentic and inspired posts is incredible. And yes it has it's ugly parts, they don't get a lot of traction though.
I guess that part of its unattractiveness is deliberate. No advertisers want to touch it and that is probably why it survived for so long.
I beg to differ, I was interested and looked at flux pro.
The rendering is impressive and looks like the output of a larger organization or a dedicated professional. But it's just that. It feels a bit like most people don't really interact with art, except on ads, movie poster and the like. And I guess those images are good for being displayed on a screen.
Maybe this (cliche) analogy will help my point. Art is like sex. Apparently most people have only seen porn and think the machines are incredible at sex. But they are confusing one for the other
I kind of agree with your assessment, and realize you’re making it off the very limited information of the blog post. (As in, it brings to mind, not that the author is necessarily).
I wonder if the answer to why they behave like you are wondering, is that the people who aren’t very good at it, behave that way because they’re so focused on trying to get something.
There’s an interview with Jim Lawler where he touches upon those same techniques. While I do think there’s still a level of … trying to get something (I think it comes across as sociopathy to some people ), I think the people who are more skilled try to get nothing (or appear to initially) and build social connection seemingly for the sake of social connection. Where it becomes hard (even for them?) to distinguish the difference.
Good sales people simply get to know and have relationships with a lot of people.
Eg, a salesman from LPKF happily traded emails with me after a decade of not speaking and only meeting a few times about a project idea I had… and when it became clear their product wasn’t a fit, offered to connect me with someone else in his network that would be better able to help. I don’t think he seemingly was interested, but rather, LPKF chose to hire someone who is actually interested in getting to know people and helping their projects succeed.
LPKF would have easily closed a sale with me, had their product been a fit — because if you’re someone people want to do business with, good products sell themselves. And people like doing business with people who help them.
I’m not saying there aren’t manipulative and fake sales people; but I am saying there are sales people who genuinely are just trying to make friends and do good business.
When I think of the people who I know who are excellent at sales, what they’re really excellent at is relationship building, and they’re always pass on trying to sell something if they know it isn’t the right fit for the person/ business. Going so far as to recommend / build other connections.
The seemingly I had added was in my mind in the hypothetical context of someone working on behalf of a nation state actor. However, even then the seemingly might be incorrect… reading interviews from people who seem to have been top in their field, the “trick” seemed to be that there was no coercion involved with the most effective outcomes.
I'm very much bought into this framing. Deceased billionaire Jon Huntsman claimed in his book "Winners Never Cheat" that if you scam or lie as an exec you'll eventually get found out. He argues that it will always be easier for an honest person to be honest than a dishonest person to feign honesty.
But... I think it's more game-theory-esque where when you are playing many games you can't afford to defect or cooperate all the time. So the ideal strategy is to convince yourself your an honest person, focused on the customer, doing the right thing, but actually you just let your cognitive dissonance provide excuses for the handful of situations where you don't do that. If you cooperate in the majority of your interactions but defect rarely, that's likely the optimal pattern. Also, i don't really think you can train yourself into this pattern. It requires actually wanting to do the good thing, but sometimes not doing it, but still convincing yourself it is the good thing without being conscious of it.
I totally agree, it's the intent with which you engage in influence that dictates this. The best find a real reason to have a personal connection and then genuinely try to help the other person within the reasonable constraints of the relationship (example: salesperson & customer).
It can be difficult because almost everyone has an agenda, but you can choose to put it on the back burner.
Besides what is a party related disease? Something like an STD, or more akin to a manic episode
Cancer, stroke, dementia; death doesn't care about your numbers, it cares about you