All of jasperdale's Comments + Replies

Hi Jasper! Don't worry, I definitely am not looking for rapid responses. I'm always busy anyway. And I wouldn't say there are in general 'easy or strong answers in how to persuade others'. I expect not to be able to persuade the majority of people on any given subject. But I always hope (and to some extent, expect) people in the ACX/LW/EA cluster to be persuadable based on evidence (more persuadable than my best friend whom I brought to the last meetup, who is more of an average person). By the way, after writing my message I found out that I had a limited picture of Putin's demands for a peace deal―because I got that info from two mainstream media articles. When the excellent Anders Puck Neilson got around to talking about Putin's speech, he noticed other very large demands such as "denazification" (apparently meaning the Zelensky administration must be replaced with a more Kremlin-friendly government) and demilitarization (🤦‍♂️). Yeah, Oliver Stone and Steven Seagal somehow went pro-Putin, just as Dennis Rodman befriended Kim Jong Un. There's always some people who love authoritarians, totalitarians, "strong leaders" or whatever. I don't understand it, but at least the Kremlin's allies are few enough that they decided to be friends with North Korea and Iran, and to rely on a western spokesman who is a convicted underage sex offender. So they seem a bit desperate―on the other hand, China has acted like a friend to North Korea since forever. I'm not suggesting all the mainstream media got it wrong―only that enough sources repeated the Kremlin's story enough times to leave me, as someone who wasn't following the first war closely, the impression that the fight was mainly a civil war involving Kremlin-supplied weapons. (Thinking In hindsight, I'm like "wait a minute, how could a ragtag group of rebels already know how to use tanks, heavy artillery systems and Buk missile launchers in the same year the war started?") So my complaint is about what seems like the mos

ASL will always be depicted by a model like DALL-E as hands; I am sure that there are non-pictorial ways to write down ASL but I can't recall them, and I actually took ASL classes. So that query should always produce hands in it. Then because actual ASL diagrams will be rare and overwhelmed by leakage from more popular classes (keep in mind that deafness is well under 1% of the US population, even including people like me who are otherwise completely uninvolved and invisible, and basically any political fad whatsoever will rapidly produce vastly more material than even core deaf topics), and maybe some more unCLIP looseness...

It's unnatural, yes: ASL is predominantly white, and people involved in ASL are even more so (I went to NTID and the national convention, so can speak first-hand, but you can also check Google Image for that query and it'll look like what you expect, which is amusing because 'Deaf' culture is so university & liberal-centric). So it's not that ASL diagrams or photographs in the wild really do look like that - they don't. Overrepresentation of DEI material in the supersekrit licensed databases would be my guess. Stock photography sources are rapidly updated for fashions, particularly recent ones, and you can see this occasionally surfacing in weird queries. (An example going around Twitter which you can check for yourself: "happy white woman" in Google will turn up a lot of strange photos for what seems like a very easy straightforward query.) Which parts are causing it is a better question: I wouldn't expect there to be much Deaf stock photo material which had been updated, or much ASL material at all, so maybe there's bleedthrough from all of the hand-centric (eg 'Black Power salute', upraised Marxist fists, protests) iconography? There being so much of the latter and so little of the former that the latter becomes the default kind of hand imagery.