Gimble vice and a fleshlight?

I’m in that bin and I’d say that a significant portion of my symptoms could be alleviated by making the world less of a horror show.

We’ve made society inequitable to the extent that if you go outside you will see heartbreaking tragedy, you have to pay to exist basically anywhere and consequently you have zero freedom, basically all of life is dictatorial, your mind is constantly under assault by ads/propaganda, family and friends are destroyed by forcing everyone to move around to find work/shelter, and you’re constantly like 3 bad months from losing it all.

TBH I’m shocked at how few people are depressed.

fair fair. I assume the group is probably planning to run a more interventionist study to see if the results hold when you run time forward.

It’ll be good news if it works (maybe, I do worry we’re going towards a brave new world style future where disquiet with the status quo is pathologised and medicated away. stunting criticism) but I won’t go bat for it yet.

I never actually got through my PhD and it was in physics anyway but yeah. It always seemed to me that the messier fields had these New Exciting Techniques ™ where you could vacuum up absolutely insane amounts of data and then play with stats till it showed what you wanted.

I don’t want to be like “Hur der they’re doing it wrong”. Studying anything to do with biology necessarily means you’re stuck with systems with trillions of variables and you have the awful problem of trying to design experiments where they hopefully average into background. I just thing that, consequently, until stuff replicates a few times (which, unfortunately, is almost never done because it’s not sexy. Anyway often papers are written so badly, and the universe so gloriously subtle, even mechanistic stuff like synthesis is a struggle to replicate) big headlines are irresponsible.

Is it though? Isn’t that more vulnerable to p-hacking and it’s kindred. I lack the expertise to make much of the paper, I’m just pretty disappointed with neuropsych as a field :P Data on depression treatment success are already noisy as fuck and in replication hell, classifying noisy as fuck data from fmri into broad patterns seems challenging in a repeatable fashion.

I guess we’ll find out in time if this replicates, if anyone even tries to do that.

Unless there has been serious effort in addressing the poor quality of fmri studies since the dead fish paper I would recommend cautious outlook.

article and link to fish study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-reminds-us-about-fmri-analysis/

pregnantgoku

https://medium.com/@drewkaufman/anyone-can-write-anything-on-medium-com-so-please-consider-my-opinion-60f33d017476

The algorithm assigns weights to nodes in a neural network. These weights are derived by statistical association of tokens in the training data after they have been cleaned.

That is so enormously far from how we think humans learn (you don’t teach a kid to understand theory of mind by plopping them in front of the Gutenberg project and saying good luck, and yet they learn to explain theory of mind problems all the same) that it is just comically farcial to assume something similar is happening underneath.

It is very interesting that llms are able to appear to be conversational but claiming they have some sort of mind with an understanding of maths is as ridiculous as suggesting a chess bot understands the Pauli exclusion principle because it never moves two pieces into the same physical space.

I’m a curmudgeonly physics nerd, it’s very strange being on the side of a debate going “No now come on, that’s way too reductive”

You’re arguing against a position I didn’t put forward. Also

Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can’t we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You’re both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true

This is what excessive reduction does to a mfer. That is just such a hysterically absurd take.

Yep. You’re smarter than everyone who found it insightful.

By grabthar’s hammer, what a put down!

Yeah this is the exact criticism. They recombine language pieces without really doing language. The end result looks like language, but it lacks any of the important characteristics of language such as meaning and intention.

If I say “Two plus two is four” I am communicating my belief about mathematics.

If an llm emits “two plus two is four” it is outputting a stochastically selected series of tokens linked by probabilities derived from training data. If the statement is true or false then that is accidental.

Hence, stochastic parrot.

Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.

My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I’ve lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.

From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk… I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.

Most humans enjoy positions of blithe supremacy. It’s much harder to kill/farm/displace etc creatures if they’re like us and so they are not as we wish to do that.

Scientists are exactly as biased and politically motivated as everyone else, the process is just a bit more self correcting over time. If interpretations are not reenforcing popular ideas they tend not to be taken seriously until evidence is overwhelming.

Roll in the open, fuck narrative first gameplay, it’s a game.

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.