All of Arjun Panickssery's Comments + Replies

I think this post is very funny (disclaimer: I wrote this post).

A number of commenters (both here and on r/slatestarcodex) think it's also profound, basically because of its reference to the anti-critical-thinking position better argued in the Michael Huemer paper that I cite about halfway through the post.

The question of when to defer to experts and when to think for yourself is important. This post is fun as satire or hyperbole, though it ultimately doesn't take any real stance on the question.

I think this post is very good (note: I am the author).

Nietzsche is brought up often in different contexts related to ethics, politics, and the best way to live. This post is the best summary on the Internet of his substantive moral theory, as opposed to vague gesturing based on selected quotes. So it's useful for people who

  • are interested in what Nietzsche's arguments, as a result of their secondhand impressions
  • have specific questions like "Why does Nietzsche think that the best people are more important"
  • want to know whether something can be well-described
... (read more)

By "calligraphy" do you mean cursive writing?

1martinkunev
They were teaching us how to make handwriting beautiful and we had to exercice. The teacher would look at the notebooks and say stuff like "you see this letter? It's tilted in the wrong direction. Write it again!". This was a compulsory part of the curriculum.
2khafra
In the late 80's, I was homeschooled, and studied caligraphy (as well as cursive); but I considered that more of a hobby than preparation for entering the workforce of 1000 years ago.  I also learned a bit about DOS and BASIC, after being impressed with the fractal-generating program that the carpenter working on our house wrote, and demonstrated on our computer. 

So why don't the four states sign a compact to assign all their electoral votes in 2028 and future presidential elections to the winner of the aggregate popular vote in those four states? Would this even be legal?

It would be legal to make an agreement like this (states are authorized to appoint electors and direct their votes however they like; see Chiafalo v. Washington) but it's not enforceable in the sense that if one of the states reneges, the outcome of the presidential election won't be reversed.

2AnthonyC
Yeah. As I understand it, state legislatures aren't really restricted in how they assign electoral votes. As in, if it wanted, the TX state legislature could probably say, "We're not holding a 2024 presidential election. Our electoral votes automatically go to whiever the R candidate is." What in the Constitution could stop them? It would most likely be political suicide for the state legislators. But within their authority.

Yeah it's for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.

2Error
Not sure of the title. The tagline was "almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken." The address was http://blog.jaibot.com. Some specific essays originating there were "500 million, but not a single one more," "Foes Without Faces", and "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics".

Brief comments on what's bad about the output:

The instruction is to write an article arguing that AI-generated posts suffer from verbosity, hedging, and unclear trains of thought. But ChatGPT makes that complaint in a single sentence in the first paragraph and then spends 6 paragraphs adding a bunch of its own arguments:

  1. that the "nature of conversation itself" draws value from "human experience, emotion, and authenticity" that AI content replaces with "a hollow imitation of dialogue"
  2. that AI content creates "an artificial sense of expertise," i.e. that a du
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5Viliam
Thank you; I wanted to write something like this, but you made the point clearly and concisely. Some people say they can clearly recognize the output of an LLM. I admit I can't see that clearly. I just get an annoying feeling, something rubs me the wrong way, but I can't quite put my finger on it. For example, while reading this article, I had a thought in mind "maybe this text was actually written by a human, and at the end the conclusion will be: haha, you failed at Turing test, now you see how biased you are". If I believed that the text was written by a human, I would probably be annoyed that the text is too verbose. But, you know, some real people are like that, too. I would also be like "I am not sure what point exactly are they trying to make... there seems to be a general topic they write about, but they just write their associations with the topic, instead of focusing on what is really important (for them). But again, actual people probably write like this all the time, ask any professional editor. Writing well is a skill that needs to be learned. I mean, the LLM was trained on human texts! The texts made by verbose people are probably over-represented in the corpus. So I would be like "dude, rewrite this shorter, make your points clearly, and remove the irrelevant parts", but I could totally believe it was written by a human. Also, the arguments introduced by the LLM are annoying, but those are arguments that actual people make. Some of them just feel out of place on LW. I care about whether a text is correct, not about whether it is authentic. If the LLM could generate a 100% reliable Theory of Everything, I wouldn't mind that it is a product of artificial thinking; I would be happy to read it! What I hate is automatically generated human-like mistakes. I can forgive the actual humans, but why should I tolerate the same thing from a machine? If you interact with a human, the next time the human might do a better job as a result. Interacting with a text
7ChristianKl
It's worth making the distinction between AI assistance and AI-generation. Using Grammarly is using AI assistance and I think it wouldn't make sense to require people to disclose Grammarly usage.

I added to your prompt the instructions

Be brief and write concise prose in the style of Paul Graham. Don't hedge or repeat yourself or go on tangents.

And the output is still bad, but now mostly for the flaw (also present in your output) that ChatGPT can't resist making the complaint about "human authenticity" and "transparency/trust" when that's not what you're talking about:

I've noticed a troubling trend on online forums: a surge in posts that clearly seem to be generated by AI. These posts are verbose, meandering, and devoid of real substance. They prese

... (read more)

Is this word long or short? Only say "long" or "short". The word is: {word}.

Code: https://github.com/ArjunPanickssery/long_short

To test out Cursor for fun I asked models whether various words of different lengths were "long" and measured the relative probability of "Yes" vs "No" answers to get a P(long) out of them. But when I use scrambled words of the same length and letter distribution, GPT 3.5 doesn't think any of them are long.

Update: I got Claude to generate many words with connotations related to long ("mile" or "anaconda" or "immeasurable") and short ("wee" or "monosyllabic" or "inconspicuous" or "infinitesimal") It looks like the models have a slight bias toward the connot... (read more)

Just flagging that for humans, a "long" word might mean a word that's long to pronounce rather than long to write (i.e. ~number of syllables instead of number of letters)

2Richard_Kennaway
What did you actually ask the models? Could it be that it says that diuhgikthiusgsrbxtb is not a long word because it is not a word?
3faul_sname
Interesting. I wonder if it's because scrambled words of the same length and letter distribution are tokenized into tokens which do not regularly appear adjacent to each other in the training data. If that's what's happening, I would expect gpt3.5 to classify words as long if they contain tokens that are generally found in long words, and not otherwise. One way to test this might be to find shortish words which have multiple tokens, reorder the tokens, and see what it thinks of your frankenword (e.g. "anozdized" -> [an/od/ized] -> [od/an/ized] -> "odanized" -> "is odanized a long word?").
4Nina Panickssery
It's interesting how llama 2 is the most linear—it's keeping track of a wider range of lengths. Whereas gpt4 immediately transitions from long to short around 5-8 characters because I guess humans will consider any word above ~8 characters "long." 

What's the actual probability of casting a decisive vote in a presidential election (by state)?

I remember the Gelman/Silver/Edlin "What is the probability your vote will make a difference?" (2012) methodology:

1. Let E be the number of electoral votes in your state. We estimate the probability that these are necessary for an electoral college win by computing the proportion of the 10,000 simulations for which the electoral vote margin based on all the other states is less than E, plus 1/2 the proportion of simulations for which the margin based on all other

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2jmh
I would assum they have the math right but not really sure why anyone cares. It's a bit like the Voter's Paradox. In and of it self it points to an interesting phenomena to investivate but really doesn't provide guidance for what someone should do.  I do find it odd that the probabilities are so low given the total votes you mention, and adding you also have 51 electoral blocks and some 530-odd electoral votes that matter. Seems like perhaps someone is missing the forest for the trees. I would make an observation on your closing thought. I think if one holds that people who are not well informed, or perhaps less intelligent and so not as good at choosing good representatives then one quickly gets to most/many people should not be making their own economic decisions on consumption (or savings or investments). Simple premise here is that capital allocation matters to growth and efficiency (vis-a-vis production possibilities frontier). But that allocation is determined by aggregate spending on final goods production -- i.e. consumer goods. Seems like people have a more direct influence on economic activity and allocation via their spending behavior than the more indirect influence via politics and public policy. 

FiveThirtyEight released their prediction today that Biden currently has a 53% of winning the election | Tweet

The other day I asked:

Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that 

  • Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
  • Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
  • either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
  • Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood

Even if gas fe

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Eric Neyman*5329

I think the FiveThirtyEight model is pretty bad this year. This makes sense to me, because it's a pretty different model: Nate Silver owns the former FiveThirtyEight model IP (and will be publishing it on his Substack later this month), so FiveThirtyEight needed to create a new model from scratch. They hired G. Elliott Morris, whose 2020 forecasts were pretty crazy in my opinion.

Here are some concrete things about FiveThirtyEight's model that don't make sense to me:

  • There's only a 30% chance that Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin will be the tipping poin
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Reply2111
1Morpheus
Feel free to write a post if you find something worthwhile. I didn't know how likely the whole Biden leaving the race thing was so 5% seemed prudent. At those odds, even if I belief the fivethirtyeight numbers I'd rather leave my money in etfs. I'd probably need something like >>1,2 multiplier in expected value before I'd bother. Last year when I was betting on Augur I was also heavily bitten by gas fees (150$ transaction costs to get my money back because gas fees exploded for eth), so would be good to know if this is a problem on polymarket also.
6sapphire
I have previously bet large sums on elections. Im not currently placing any bets on who will win the election. Seems too unclear to me (note I had a huge bet on biden in 2020, seemed clear then). However there are TONS of mispricings on polymarket and other sites. Things like 'biden will withdraw or lose the nomination @ 23%' is a good example.
5Dagon
Biden not being the democratic nominee at 13% while EITHER Biden or Trump not being their respective nominees at 14% implies a 1% chance that Trump won't be the Republican nominee.  There's clearly an arbitrage there.  Whether it merits the costs (gas, risk of polymarket default, lost opportunity of the escrowed wager) I have no clue.
1Aleksander
These predictions, of course, are obviously nonsensical. If I had to guess, it’s a combination of: many crypto users being right-wing and the media they consume has convinced them that this is more likely than it would be in reality, and climbing crypto prices discouraging betting leading to decreased accuracy. I’ll say that the climbing value of the currency as well as gas fees makes any prediction unwise, unless you believe you have massive advantage over the market. I’d personally pass on it, but other people are free to proceed with their money.
3edge_retainer
Betting against republicans and third parties on poly is a sound strategy, pretty clear they are marketing heavily towards republicans and the site has a crypto/republican bias. For anything controversial/political, if there is enough liq on manifold I generally trust it more (which sounds insane because fake money and all).  That being said, I don't like the way Polymarket is run (posting the word r*tard over and over on Twitter, allowing racism in comments + discord, rugging one side on disputed outcomes, fake decentralization), so I would strongly consider not putting your money on PM and instead supporting other prediction markets, despite the possible high EV. 

Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that 

  • Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
  • Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
  • either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
  • Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood

Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up... (read more)

2Mitchell_Porter
They all seem like reasonable estimates to me. What do you think those likelihoods should be? 
4Marcus Williams
I think part of the reason why these odds might seem more off than usual is that Ether and other cryptocurrencies have been going up recently which means there is high demand for leveraged positions. This in turn means that crypto lending services such as aave having been giving ~10% APY on stablecoins which might be more appealing than a riskier, but only a bit higher, return from prediction markets.

I like "Could you repeat that in the same words?" so that people don't try to rephrase their point for no reason.

In addition to daydreaming, sometimes you're just thinking about the first of a series of points that your interlocutor made one after the other (a lot of rationalists talk too fast).

2Garrett Baker
When someone says that, I always use different words anyway, since its boring to use the same words.

By "subscriber growth" in OP I meant both paid and free subscribers.

My thinking was that people subscribe after seeing posts they like, so if they get to see the body of a good post they're more likely to subscribe than if they only see the title and the paywall. But I guess if this effect mostly affects would-be free subscribers then the effect mostly matters insofar as free subscribers lead to (other) paid subscriptions.

(I say mostly since I think high view/subscriber counts are nice to have even without pay.)

Paid-only Substack posts get you money from people who are willing to pay for the posts, but reduce both (a) views on the paid posts themselves and (b) related subscriber growth (which could in theory drive longer-term profit).

So if two strategies are

  1. entice users with free posts but keep the best posts behind a paywall
  2. make the best posts free but put the worst posts behind the paywall

then regarding (b) above. the second strategy has less risk of prematurely stunting subscriber growth, since the best posts are still free. Regarding (a), it's much less bad to lose view counts on your worst posts.

4Dagon
Substack started off so transparent and data-oriented.  It's sad that they don't publish stats on various theories and their impact.  Presumably you don't have to be that legible with your readers/subscribers, and you can test out (probably on a monthly or quarterly basis, not post-by-post) what attributes of a post advise toward being public, and what attributes lead to a private post.  The feedback loop is distant enough that it's not a simple classifier. You're missing at least one strategy - paid for frequent short-term takes, free for delayed summaries.
2kave
I believe Sarah Constantin's self-described strategy is roughly (b). You actually pay for "squishy" stuff, but she says she thinks squishy stuff is worse (though the wrinkle is that she implies readers maybe think the opposite). Another set of strategies I've been thinking about are for mailing lists. You can either have your archives eventually become free (can't think of an example here, but I think it's fairly common for Patreon-supported writers to have an "early access" model), or you can have your newsletter be free but archives be fee-guarded (for example Money Stuff uses this model).
Elizabeth354

3. put the spiciest posts behind a paywall, because you have something to say but don't want the entire internet freaking out about it. 

1[anonymous]
Is there any actual evidence of (b) being true? You can easily make the heuristic argument that paywalling generates additional demand by incentivizing readers to subscribe in order to access otherwise unavailable posts. We would need some data to figure out what the reality on the ground is.

 [Book Review] The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru Abiko

As a kid I read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot canon. Recently I learned that there's a Japanese genre of honkaku ("orthodox") mystery novels whose gimmick is a fastidious devotion to the "fair play" principles of Golden Age detective fiction, where the author is expected to provide everything that the attentive reader would need to come up with the solution himself. It looks like a lot of these honkaku mysteries include diagrams of relevant locations, genre-savvy characters, and a... (read more)

4Nina Panickssery
What about a book review of “The Devotion of Suspect X”?

Ask LLMs for feedback on "the" rather than "my" essay/response/code, to get more critical feedback.

Seems true anecdotally, and prompting GPT-4 to give a score between 1 and 5 for ~100 poems/stories/descriptions resulted in an average score of 4.26 when prompted with "Score my ..." versus an average score of 4.0 when prompted with "Score the ..." (code).

3Chris_Leong
Perhaps it'd be even better to say that it's okay to be direct or even harsh?

https://x.com/panickssery/status/1792586407623393435

If I understand the term "double crux" correctly, to say that something is a double crux is just to say that it is "crucial to our disagreement."

Quick Take: People should not say the word "cruxy" when already there exists the word "crucial." | Twitter

Crucial sometimes just means "important" but has a primary meaning of "decisive" or "pivotal" (it also derives from the word "crux"). This is what's meant by a "crucial battle" or "crucial role" or "crucial game (in a tournament)" and so on.

So if Alice and Bob agree that Alice will work hard on her upcoming exam, but only Bob thinks that she will fail her exam—because he thinks that she will study the wrong topics (h/t @Saul Munn)—then they might have ... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Using the word 'cruxy' encourages people to use the mental model of what the cruxes in the conversation happen to be. Encouraging the use of effective mental models is a useful task for language.
2kave
"Crucial to our disagreement" is 8 syllables to "cruxy"'s 2. "Dispositive" is quite American, but has a more similar meaning to "cruxy" than plain "crucial". "Conclusive" or "decisive" are also in the neighbourhood, though these are both feel like they're about something more objective and less about what decides the issue relative to the speaker's map.
4the gears to ascension
disagree because the word crucial is being massively overused lately.
3metachirality
I think it disambiguates by saying it's specifically a crux as in "double crux"
0Garrett Baker
I agree people shouldn’t use the word cruxy. But I think they should instead just directly say whether a consideration is a crux for them. I.e. whether a proposition, if false, would change their mind. Edit: Given the confusion, what I mean is often people use “cruxy” in a more informal sense than “crux”, and label statements that are similar to statements that would be a crux but are not themselves a crux “cruxy”. I claim here people should stick to the strict meaning.

The older nickname was "Cornell of the West." Stanford was modeled after Cornell.

2Raemon
Wow the joke keeps being older.

This story is inspired by The Trouble With Being Born, a collection of aphorisms by the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (discussed more here), including the following aphorisms:

A stranger comes and tells me he has killed someone. He is not wanted by the police because no one suspects him. I am the only one who knows he is the killer. What am I to do? I lack the courage as well as the treachery (for he has entrusted me with a secret—and what a secret!) to turn him in. I feel I am his accomplice, and resign myself to being arrested and punished as such. At

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See "Large Language Models Sensitivity to The Order of Options in Multiple-Choice Questions" (Pezeshkpour and Hruschka, 2023):

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, previous works have shown these models are sensitive towards prompt wording, and few-shot demonstrations and their order, posing challenges to fair assessment of these models. As these models become more powerful, it becomes imperative to understand and address these limitations. In this paper, we focus on LLMs robustness on the tas

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1George Ingebretsen
Also "Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectors" (Zheng et al., 2023)

Do non-elite groups factor into OP's analysis. I interpreted is as inter-elite veto, e.g. between the regional factions of the U.S. or between religious factions, and less about any "people who didn't go to Oxbridge and don't live in London"-type factions.

I can't think of examples where a movement that wasn't elite-led destabilized and successfully destroyed a regime, but I might be cheating in the way I define "elites" or "led."

But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what "is constitutional" despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I'm tempted to attribute this to the "repeated game" nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other facti

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1tlevin
The "highly concentrated elite" issue seems like it makes it more, rather than less, surprising and noteworthy that a lack of structural checks and balances has resulted in a highly stable and (relatively) individual-rights-respecting set of policy outcomes. That is, it seems like there would thus be an especially strong case for various non-elite groups to have explicit veto power.

Changes my view, edited the post.

Thanks for taking the time to respond; I didn't figure the post would get so much reach.

Wow, thanks for replying.

If the model has beaten GMs at all, then it can only be so weak, right? I'm glad I didn't make stronger claims than I did.

I think my questions about what humans-who-challenge-bots are like was fair, and the point about smurfing is interesting. I'd be interested in other impressions you have about those players.

Is the model's Lichess profile/game history available?

Could refer to them in writing as "MC-effectiveness measures"

Could someone explain how Rawls's veil of ignorance justifies the kind of society he supports? (To be clear I have an SEP-level understanding and wouldn't be surprised to be misunderstanding him.)

It seems to fail at every step individually:

  1. At best, the support of people in the OP provides necessary but probably insufficient conditions for justice, unless he refutes all the other proposed conditions involving whatever rights, desert, etc.
  2. And really the conditions of the OP are actively contrary to good decision-making, e.g. you don't know your particular co
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1FlorianH
I had also for a long time trouble believing that Rawls' theory centered around "OP -> maximin" could get the traction it has. For what it's worth: A. IMHO, the OP remains a great intuition pump for 'what is just'. 'Imagine, instead of optimizing for your own personal good, you optimized for that of everyone.' I don't see anything misguided in that idea; it is an interesting way to say: Let's find rules that reflect the interest of everyone, instead of only that of a ruling elite or so. Arguably, we could just say the latter more directly, but the veil may be making the idea somewhat more tangible, or memorable. B. Rawls is not the inventor of the OP. Harsanyi has introduced the idea earlier, though Rawls seems to have failed to attribute it to Harsanyi. C. Harsanyi, in his 1975 paper Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory uses rather strong words when he explains that claiming the OP led to the maximin is a rather appalling idea. The short paper is soothing for any Rawls-skeptic; I heavily recommend it (happy to send a copy if sb is stuck at the paywall).
1utilistrutil
Here are some responses to Rawls from my debate files: A2 Rawls * Ahistorical * Violates property rights * Does not account for past injustices eg slavery, just asks what kind of society would you design from scratch. Thus not a useful guide for action in our fucked world. * Acontextual * Veil of ignorance removes contextual understanding, which makes it impossible to assess different states of the world. Eg from the original position, Rawls prohibits me from using my gender to inform my understanding of gender in different states of the world * Identity is not arbitrary! It is always contingent, yes, but morality is concerned with the interactions of real people, who have capacities, attitudes, and preferences. There are reasons for these things that are located in individual experiences and contexts, so they are not arbitrary. * But even if they were the result of pure chance, it’s unclear that these coincidences are the legitimate subject of moral scrutiny. I *am* a white man - I can’t change that. They need to explain why morality should be pretend otherwise. Only after conditioning on our particular context can we begin to reason morally. * The one place Rawls is interested in context is bad: he says the principle should only be applied within a society: but this precludes action on global poverty. * Rejects economic growth: the current generation is the one that is worst-off; saving now for future growth necessarily comes at the cost of foregone consumption, which hurts the current generation.
1utilistrutil
1. It’s pretty much a complete guide to action? Maybe there are decisions where it is silent, but that’s true of like every ethical theory like this (“but util doesn’t care about X!”). I don’t think the burden is on him to incorporate all the other concepts that we typically associate with justice. At very least not a problem for “justifying the kind of society he supports” 2. Like the two responses to this are either “Rawls tells you the true conception of the good, ignore the other ones” or “just allow for other-regarding preferences and proceed as usual” and either seems workable 3. Sure 4. Agree in general that Rawls does not account for different risk preferences but infinite risk aversion isn’t necessary for most practical decisions 5. Agree Rawls doesn’t usually account for future. But you could just use veil of ignorance over all future and current people, which collapses this argument into a specific case of “maximin is stupid because it doesn’t let us make the worst-off people epsilon worse-off in exchange for arbitrary benefits to others” I think (B) is getting at a fundamental problem
3Dagon
My objection is the dualism implied by the whole idea.  There's no consciousness that can have such a veil - every actual thinking/wanting person is ALREADY embodied and embedded in a specific context. I'm all in favor of empathy and including terms for other people's satisfaction in my own utility calculations, but that particular justification never worked for me.

Here's Resolution 2712 from a few weeks ago, on "The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question:

The Security Council,

(here I skip preambulatory clauses that altogether are as long as the rest of the text),

1. Demands that all parties comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, notably with regard to the protection of civilians, especially children;

2. Calls for urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days to enable, co

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But herd morality is not just hostile to higher men, it's hostile to all positive development in mankind in general. If you glorify everything which makes weak and weary, you trap society in a prison of its own making.

Sometimes Nietzsche will use terms like "life" in e.g. "[a] tendency hostile to life is therefore characteristic of [herd] morality." But in context this refers to the higher type (in this specific passage to the man "raised to his greatest power and splendor"). The term "anti-nature" is the same way.

This is complicated by the sense in which ... (read more)

1StartAtTheEnd
Zarathustra starts out with chapters like "despisers of the body" and "Preachers of death". In "The Will to Power", you'll find quotes like: "A kind of self-destruction; the instinct of preservation is compromised. -The weak harm themselves. -That is the type of decadence" And: "In the doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a "will to negate life"; the human beings or races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots." He also often speaks of the degeneration of the species, as if what morality is doing is a kind of eugenics which weakens the species. This is harmful to our collective health, and much in tune with "weak men create hard times" (semi-famous quote, but not by Nietzsche). I'm reading a translation here, I don't know the original German, but I'm seeing words like "destructive elements", "decay" and "rot". He also calls the evaluation of peace over war "anti-biological", criticizing Mr. Herbert Spencer as both a biologist and moralist. That he brings up biology as well as morality tells me that he's not speaking purely aesthetically. When Nietzsche speaks of biology, psychology, physics and evolution, most of what he says still holds up today. Unlike many philosophers before him, he isn't basing all his ideas on a naive misunderstanding of reality and human nature. Here's another quote from Will to Power: "In order to understand what "life" is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply as well to trees and plants as to animals". Nietzsche even traces back this "Will to Power" to the fundemental laws of physics. In either case, a society which can produce geniuses and higher men must have a certain level of quality. Nietzsche must have realized that one cannot optimize for just one thing at the cost of something else, since everything is interconnected. If great men are apples, the

The Übermensch is discussed as an ideal kind of higher man only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and disappears afterward. Zarathustra is often especially obscure and the Übermensch's importance in understanding Nietzsche is overstated in popular culture compared to the broader higher type of person exemplified by actual persons like Goethe. 

My first guess was that it's noise from the label ordering (some of the digits must be harder to learn than others). Ran it 10 times with the labels shuffled each time:

Still unsure.

4gwern
If you're able to shift the crossover by just more resampling, yeah, that suggests that the slight inversion is a minor artifact - maybe the hyperparameters are slightly better tuned at the start for MLPs compared to CNNs or you don't have enough regularization for MLPs to keep them near the CNNs as you scale which exaggerates the difference (adding in regularization is often a key ingredient in MLP papers), something boring like that...

Typo, thanks for spotting

Conditional of course

Second the recommendation for Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. His own summary here: https://davidlabaree.com/2021/07/08/pinker-why-academics-stink-at-writing/

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known and is not the same

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The prime example of this is the relation between parents and children

For what it's worth, I would not be surprised if Huemer argued that children have no general obligation to obey their parents.

In these proposals, what is to stop these security forces from simply conquering anyone and everyone that isn't under the protection of one? Nothing. Security forces have no reason to fight each other to protect your right not to belong to one. And they will conquer, since the ones that don't, won't grow to keep pace. It is thus the same as the example given of a job offer you can't refuse, except that here the deal offered likely is terrible (since they have no reason to give you a good one.).

Channeling Huemer, I'd say that the world's states are in a kind of anarchy and they don't simply gobble each other up all the time. 

1TAG
Both are half true. States do gobble each other up some of the time, and there is some sort of world order, not pure anarchy.
2deepthoughtlife
Except that is clearly not real anarchy. It is a balance of power between the states. The states themselves ARE the security forces in this proposal. I'm saying that they would conquer everyone who doesn't belong to one.