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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.

    My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.

    If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.

    Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.



  • Yeah, we need more info to understand the results of this experiment.

    We need to know what exactly were these tasks that they claim were validated by experts. Because like you’re saying, the tasks I saw were not what I was expecting.

    We need to know how the LLMs were set up. If you tell it to act like a chat bot and then you give it a task, it will have poorer results than if you set it up specifically to perform these sorts of tasks.

    We need to see the actual prompts given to the LLMs. It may be that you simply need an expert to write prompts in order to get much better results. While that would be disappointing today, it’s not all that different from how people needed to learn to use search engines.

    We need to see the failure rate of humans performing the same tasks.



  • My biggest beef with Sweet Home Alabama is, if people are ever singing along with it, or if they’re singing it at karaoke. I should mention that I live in the South, so these people singing it are from the South, and even though the song itself isn’t racist, the way these people emphasize certain lyrics, it sure sounds like they want it to be racist.

    The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.




  • I also over analyze everything, which is why I always remove my eggs from the right side of the carton.

    The left side of the carton is always towards me in the refrigerator, and I also always have the left side towards me on the counter.

    As a result my first grab out of the fridge is always the most stable grab possible.

    The way I figure it is, the most dangerous time is pulling it out of the fridge when I don’t always remember where the eggs are and where I have to grab it from one end. I don’t want to be surprised by it being heavy away from me.

    Once I have it safely in my hand, I no longer have to consciously think about how to hold it, as that can all be done unconsciously.


  • From the headline, it almost sounds as if they’re forcing the museums to let people in without paying if they have a doctor’s note.

    But it’s actually a program funded by the city that pays for a limited number of people’s admissions if prescribed by a doctor.

    Honestly, even if museums were being forced to forego admission fees, they’d probably be okay with it if it’s not too many people. It gets new people to come in who wouldn’t typically be in a museum. It’s almost like a doctor advertising for them.






  • The reason the term “involuntary” is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word “celibate”. You’re reading too much into it.

    People often intentionally use the wrong words when describing themselves when using the correct words makes them sound bad. “pro life” “national socialism” are a couple of well-known examples.

    The first person who used the term “involuntary celibate” was using it for sympathy, not accuracy. “Involuntary” was never the correct word because “celibate” wasn’t the correct word, as “celibate” has the connotation of being a choice. They used the wrong term because something like “sexless” doesn’t get sympathy.

    Like, seriously, I’m giving you my personal lived experience, and you’re putting words in my mouth and calling me names.

    I probably shouldn’t have talked about “you” so much, but the reason I did is that you are talking not only about yourself, but about the subject, and I realized that you haven’t actually changed, and that you still need help. And I don’t remember calling you any names. And I’m not putting words in your mouth. I am literally quoting you. I am using your choice of words to expose you to yourself.


  • If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can’t get out, I am involuntarily in that hole.

    That’s not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that “involuntary” if it’s just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it’s involuntary. The way “involuntary” is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.

    If How to Win Friends isn’t a good book, then read a different one. There are even ones about relationships for autistic people now. Don’t complain that there are too many. That’s why we have ratings. When you say “the floodgates are open”, you’re just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.

    But from your description of it, I can tell that you didn’t actually try How to Win Friends. IIRC, the first lesson is “smile”. Then, there are other lessons like, “practice giving genuine compliments” and “use people’s names when talking to them.” Literally, all you have to do is follow the instructions, and you’ll have better results. But it sounds like you rejected the advice without trying it. Or in other words, no effort, blame the author and the people who recommended it. It’s really the same thing over and over.

    I never blamed women for my sex life.

    You literally described it that way in your first comment: “trying to figure out how to get women to have sex with me”. You could have said, “trying to figure out how to have sex with women,” but you didn’t. You phrased it that way because that’s how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.

    But boy howdy. You really want to compare yourself to starving subsistence farmers in Africa?

    Overall, there is a lot of dishonesty in your last comment. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s that you simply refuse to admit the truth to yourself, or if you’re doing it intentionally.


  • I was talking about effort being key, and these questions obviously come from somebody who didn’t even try. All you have to do is lift your head up and shift your eyes slightly and actually look at what other people are doing. I know this stuff doesn’t come naturally to an autistic person, and so it requires even more effort. Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It’s not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, and I doubt you’re older than that.

    Can you really say that spending 5 years overcoming social anxiety, while agonizing over your lack of a sex life is a voluntary lack of sex?

    It’s not about voluntary/involuntary at that point. In my original analogy, if you practiced basketball for 3 weeks, you might not make the team, but you wouldn’t call that “involuntary”. You just hadn’t put in the required effort. Calling it “involuntary” makes it somebody else’s fault, as if it wasn’t up to you. But it’s not the basketball coach’s fault that you didn’t make the team. And it’s not women’s fault that you were unhappy with your sex life. It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it. If you failed a math test because you didn’t study, you wouldn’t say that you “involuntarily” failed it. This is true even if you didn’t understand that you needed to study. We simply don’t use the word “involuntary” in that way.

    Seriously, the idea that there is no such thing as “involuntary” celibacy because you can just work on yourself completely misses the fact that these people have real problems.

    The truth is the truth, whether it makes people feel bad or not. Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives. Because most people realize that they need to do something themselves to achieve their goals, and they can’t simply shift the blame on to others.


  • Saying that it is voluntary assumes that the steps needed are straightforward and obvious.

    This is a social problem, so the solution is to look at what successful people do and copy that. If that’s not straightforward and obvious, then nothing is straightforward and obvious. This is exactly the same thing primitive tribes did, and every one of your ancestors did. It is a process of learning, which makes it similar to science, but it requires no knowledge that you can’t get from just personal observations, completely unlike electricity.

    You say that you couldn’t talk to anyone IRL about your problem, because of your social anxiety and autism, but that’s also a matter of effort. Rather than working on overcoming your social anxiety first, you went straight to seduction. That’s skipping all of the groundwork, and you knew it at the time. Choosing a plan that is guaranteed to fail is a voluntary choice.


  • The term “incel” doesn’t really make sense. It’s not involuntary, by any definition of the word that I’ve seen.

    Almost anyone can find a partner simply through effort. Diet, exercise, hygiene, etiquette, dressing nicely, socializing, actively seeking a partner. Notice something about that list? Pretty much everyone can do those things. It’s just a matter of effort.

    Yes, there are some exceptions, for example from people with severe disability, but those people rarely call themselves “incels.” The majority are people who are perfectly capable of doing these things.

    If you don’t practice basketball and you don’t even go to the tryouts, you don’t get to say that your not making the team was “involuntary.”


  • A character acting out of character may not technically be a plot hole, but for the consumer of the media, it is tantamount to the same thing. The character’s previous characterization is equivalent to “the existing rules of the story”.

    Not to say that characters cannot change, but you can tell when a character suddenly does something out of character simply because the author decided that some event has to happen for the plot to work, and it makes the plot seem impossible.