A Troll on Karl Johan Street

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
sungodsevenoclock
sungodsevenoclock

There's a class of skills where I am decent-but-not great at the skill, and it seems if I want a better result, there is a clear way for me, personally, to achieve it, and that's being more meticulous and paying attention to detail.

But there are skills within this set — portrait drawing, making predictions — where I usually care less about being able to achieve a better result with increased effort, and more about improving the low-effort version of the skill.

And it's frustrating to me that I can't figure out a clear way to do that.

sungodsevenoclock

@winged-light wrote:

90% of the time the answer is to repeatedly do it slowly until your body learns the detailed way, and then you’ll be able to do the fast low-effort version and have it come out better

@youzicha wrote:

I think if you do the laborious high-effort portraits a bunch, done of the skills will transfer to the fast version

@kata4a wrote:

agreed with those two. slow is smooth, smooth is fast

In my hreart of hearts, I know this is the correct answer. But my limited experience suggests that in order to develop enough proficiency that those skills become second nature and transfer, you actually have to do the meticulous version of the task *a lot* and *often*. Like much more so than the amount it takes to get better at the meticulous version of the task. It feels like you’re spending a lot of time and effort getting good at something you don’t particularly even care to be good at just to get better at something else in a bankshot effect. Hence the frustration.

personal

Like with portraits, I know the “solution” to get a better portrait is to make a value scale, to measure out proportions, etc. With predictions, the “solution” to be better at predictions about the future is to resist going with your intuition, to look up information about the topic and try to subdivide every big prediction into a series of small ones.

But useful as “being able to draw a good portrait given lots of time and effort” and “predicting things where you can look up information” are as skills, these are not the skills I want to be better at. I want better off-the-cuff drawing skills and better intuition for predictions.

navel gazing

There’s a class of skills where I am decent-but-not great at the skill, and it seems if I want a better result, there is a clear way for me, personally, to achieve it, and that’s being more meticulous and paying attention to detail.

But there are skills within this set — portrait drawing, making predictions — where I usually care less about being able to achieve a better result with increased effort, and more about improving the low-effort version of the skill.

And it’s frustrating to me that I can’t figure out a clear way to do that.

navel gazing pontificatin' personal
galacticwiseguy
argumate

a lot of people don't like AI and that leads them to claim that it can't possibly work, which is silly as they don't have any good reason to believe that and we know for a fact that human-level intelligence is possible because we've seen humans do it.

technically we don't know that superhuman intelligence is possible as we've never seen that before (although we have seen it in specialised domains, like chess, go, general recall and so on), but I have a hunch that there are machines that can think better than humans can as they aren't subject to the same design constraints, can be built from alternative materials, don't need to eat, their brain doesn't need to fit through a human pelvis, etc.

however even if we can only make a machine as smart as Einstein then that would still be pretty cool, I mean Einstein couldn't figure out quantum mechanics but it would be neat to have an Einstein available on demand to tutor you at school or handle your customer service requests or whatever it is you needed.

people who don't like AI also claim that it will destroy the environment, which is unlikely, not least because we know that AI doesn't need to consume more resources than people do and probably a lot less: you should be able to run a couple of Einsteins on your laptop and you're already using that now for sillier things.

another claim is that the companies currently pushing AI will lose money, and that's more plausible as companies lose money on big projects all the time; but it seems like a good outcome for everyone else? let overly optimistic investors fund the research and development of AI while we all get the benefit, that's great!

of course the ultimate fear is that AI works too well and the people who own it now end up owning everything else too, the smug bastards, but wealth disparity is a problem unrelated to AI and one that we should already be trying to fix right now.

it's important not to base your political activism on false claims as they can discredit your platform; the best reason for doing something is ideally true.

we have had ample warning that human-level machine intelligence is coming -- it was inevitable as soon as electronic switches were developed, and Turing's famous paper on the subject turns 75 this year -- but people have resisted the idea in the same way that they resist the implications of humans being assemblages of molecules that can be analysed mechanistically, a resistance that compromises their comprehension of the world and their ability to shape it.

sungodsevenoclock

This is one of those surprisingly common cases where I read an argumate post and go “why would someone write this, it’s entirely true of course, but I don’t see why you’d need to say it, it can’t possibly be controversial” and then look in the notes and see “what the fuck are you talking about” and “this is one of the stupidest takes ever”

nostalgebraist
nostalgebraist

Nabokov tier list

  • S: Ada
  • A: Lolita
  • B: The Luzhin Defense, Pale Fire
  • C: Bend Sinister, The Gift
  • D: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading
  • E: Pnin, Transparent Things
  • F: The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!
sungodsevenoclock

S: Ada, stories (Spring in Fialta)
A: Mary, The Gift, Lolita
B: The Luzhin Defence, Pnin
C: Pale Fire
D: Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister
F: King Queen Knave, Camera Obscura

russian poetry somewhere in E tier haven't read English stories book pontificatin' vladimir nabokov
rustingbridges
st-just

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

sungodsevenoclock

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?

rustingbridges

the other half of the standard explanation is that reduced labor availability massively increased the bargaining position of the bottom half of society, and so wages shot up and conditions generally improved

which I do think was reflected somewhat in the economy of '22-'23, but given the other various economic woes of that time I'm not sure I'd call it amazing

sungodsevenoclock

The Black Death reduced labour availability in the mechanical sense that there were fewer people to do work.

In what sense was reduced labour availability what happened under Biden? As far as I understand, the low unemployment was not from working age people dying or dropping out of the work force. It was in part due to government stimulus, and in part due to people spending down savings accrued during covid, both things that increased demand.

Seem entirely different phenomena to me, except in the sense that in both cases people who remain in the labour force stand to benefit, but saying "both situations where the relative power of workers increased were good for the workers" is not a very strong claim about anything.

Again, I freely admit I'm talking out of my ass here, but so far not being persuaded.

rustingbridges

I can't speak for what OP meant, but how I would interpret a structural similarity is that a short term imbalance in labor power has potentially led to a durable change in norms, the customary bargain has changed and a return to earlier levels of labor competition is not going to roll that back.

As far as I understand, the low unemployment was not from working age people dying or dropping out of the work force.

then at least in the case of the US, you misunderstand. the beginning of the covid period saw more people lose or leave their jobs faster than any other time in recorded history. ~20,000,000 people, or ~13% of the labor force, stopped working:

image

employment then rebounds at record speed, but it would not shock me if the fastest hiring spree in history gave applicants more choice! something like 20% of the labor force moved in a handful of months.

it is true that this shows up as high unemployment, which then reverses as people get hired back on, but I don't think this can be ignored as a factor, and total employment does not recover for, it looks like, about a year or so.

anyway, do I think covid had as big of an impact as the black death? no. similar dynamics to a lesser degree? plausible. certainly staffing and norms at many places do not seem to have gone back to their prepandemic norm, some of the changes do seem sticky even as teh labor market becomes more normal.

sungodsevenoclock

Huh? You’re showing me that there’s a huge drop in jobs right as covid hits, but as you say, this also shows up as a huge rise in unemployment. That’s the exact opposite of a labour supply crunch, no?

The getting re-hired part is not at all automatic — see the aftermath of 2008. Surely you also remember the worry during the start of covid that we’d get a repeat of 2008: businesses would not survive the exigencies of the pandemic, there wouldn’t be jobs to get back to, and we’d end up with long term high unemployment.

The Trump I and Biden administrations deserve tons of credit for navigating this — with stimulus checks and investment — in a way that caused a demand surge and avoided this outcome. I don’t see that as something that happened automatically as a result of covid or as a result of a labour supply shock at all.

pontificatin' low confidence assertions least of all I want to be the blog that prints charts from FRED or whatever but I'm just surprised at this viewpoint