This exchange highlights the huge difference in experience people have w.r.t. dating. Some people get approached all the time and others never get approached and it's always been like that. I blame humanity for this unfair system rather than some stupid app.
I remember trying to date a woman in college, she would drop what appeared to me as incredible hints, but if I acted on them she would just ignore me.
We once had a 2 hour conversation about how she just could not find a mexican restaurant in town and would do /anything/ to eat at one. So I found one (willed it into existence) and then she simply wasn't interested.
Thing was, I dont really care about the rejection so much as, it was super easy for me to have relatively deep and interesting conversation with a total stranger. This wasn't even the first one, previous conversations about "Why are cities taking up valuable agricultural land" and "The best gifts to buy a woman are power tools" went down much the same way.
If people are convinced that the conversation to be rejected in cant even take place then I guess I understand concerns about the birthrate a little more.
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too.
The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
Dogs certainly do understand things. Dogs and cats have a theory of mind and can successfully manipulate and trick their owners - and each other.
Our perceptions are shaped by our cognitive limitations. A dog doesn't know what the Internet is, and completely lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it.
An ASI would almost certainly develop some analogous technology or ability, and it would be completely beyond us.
That does NOT mean we would notice we were being affected by that technology.
Advertising and manufactured addictions make people believe external manipulations are personal choices. An ASI would probably find similar manipulations trivial.
But it might well be capable of more complex covert manipulations we literally can't imagine.
Yes, dogs can think and make choices, learn from experience, solve problems (like opening doors or finding hidden treats), and adapt to new situations.
The reason I mentioned my dog is because, even though dogs have limited intelligence compared to humans, my dog thinks he's better at playing ball than me. What he doesn't know is that I let him win because it makes him feel in control.
OK, it might be a cultural thing. Do dogs probe the secrets of the world around them, with all that barking, even a little? Is it that they're in an early phase and will eventually advance to do more with stones than lick them sometimes?
What would our being baffled by a super-intelligence look like? Maybe some effect like dark matter. It would make less sense the more we found out about it, and because it's on a level beyond our comprehension, it would never add up. And the lack of apparent relevance to a super-intelligence's doings would be expected, because it's beyond our comprehension.
But this is silly and resembles apologies for God based on his being ineffable. So there's a way to avoid difficult questions like "what is his motivation" and "does he feel like he needs praise" because you can't eff him, not even a little. Then anything incomprehensible becomes evidence for God, or super-intelligence. We'd have to be pretty damn frustrated with things we don't understand before this looks true.
But that still doesn't work, because we're not supposed to be able to even suspect it exists. So even that much interaction with us is too much. In fact this "what if" question undermines itself from the start, because it represents the start of comprehension of the incomprehensible thing it posits.
> Do dogs probe the secrets of the world around them, with all that barking, even a little?
It’s a form of communication. You can learn to distinguish different kinds of barking a healthy dog is making, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to care nearly as much about a large animal showing up.
Legs are a small subset of the problem. “Where did I see that last?” involves mapping out and classifying the environment. There’s some really impressive demos of manipulating objects on a table etc, but random clutter throughout a house is still a problem.
I've reproduced this type of sentiment over several of my hobby projects and it usually hits hard toward the latter half of the project and its usually related to bugs. In the beginning it's all great and fast with LLMs, but then there's a kind of steep drop in motivation as one realizes one has to dig as deep anyway into the tedious stuff, because there are always bugs.
Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.
> The only weed induced anxiety I've ever experienced was caused by knowing I could get arrested for possession
As a Swede I can confirm. It really feels like an 1984 situation when you sneak outside around the house blocks, knowing the angles that reduce the risk of possible "witnesses", understanding wind directions and speeds. Mostly just weed-induced paranoia, but having friends got caught really puts one on edge.
Here in Norway, cannabis use is pretty much equated with being a junkie. It gets hammered down from high-school, and police will treat users like career criminals. It is completely out of proportion.
As Bill Murray put it more succinctly: "I find it quite ironic that the most dangerous thing about weed is getting caught with it." which is most definitely the case here.
Haven't read deepness. Is it similar to Fire? Read Fire and rainbows end and I think Vinge has the largest 'interesting ideas per chapter' ratio, but not too keen on the presentation (too much random weirdness).
Well there are some recurring themes:
- both have really vivid alien races
- both explore how information shapes culture (this on in sub c, which is more interesting)
The difference is that this one takes place in a more realistic universe and has a deeper focus on the role of human culture.
Thats not to say its an entirely intellectual book, it is inface much more exciting than Fire
I don’t since I really only know about what happens in the west. Here most people seem to eat meat 2-3 times a day, that seems far too frequent to be sustainable. Especially if you consider it immoral to live a lifestyle that couldn’t realistically be sustained if everyone on earth had access to it.
Even in the west it varies a lot. As a vegetarian who recently visited Florida it seems that American eat quite a lot more meat than people in the UK. Case in point - my family wanted to go to a steak house in Florida (they aren't vegetarians) but the one they wanted to go to didn't a single vegetarian item on the huge menu. Even the salads and mac & cheese had bacon added! We didn't go. My local steak house in the UK always has several vegetarian/vegan options.
Read most of Tolkien's books as audiobooks and this is certainly an area where audio is a much worse medium than paper. You just don't get any bells ringing from the looks of words.
Not solid research but I set up an account with a single scrappy black/white picture of a photo of a woman from the 1940s. Her profile drew an order of magnitude more attention than what I normally get.
I know asking for funding to do research on getting girls is probably going to be a no go. But I feel like it's necessary. It's something a lot of people think is important and bad actors like pick up artists and others with various agendas like past resentment have stepped up to fill the void. The dating pool seems posioned and I think good solid fact finding especially with regard to what works would go a long way towards helping to fix things
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