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samueldays · 2 months
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Contra Yishan: Google's Gemini issue is about racial obsession, not a Yudkowsky AI problem.
@yishan wrote a thoughtful thread:
Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI, and everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents. [...] If you have a woke/anti-woke axe to grind, kindly set it aside now for a few minutes so that you can hear the rest of what I’m about to say, because it’s going to hit you from out of left field. [...] The important thing is how one of the largest and most capable AI organizations in the world tried to instruct its LLM to do something, and got a totally bonkers result they couldn’t anticipate. What this means is that @ESYudkowsky has a very very strong point. It represents a very strong existence proof for the “instrumental convergence” argument and the “paperclip maximizer” argument in practice.
See full thread at link.
Gemini's code is private and Google's PR flacks tell lies in public, so it's hard to prove anything. Still I think Yishan is wrong and the Gemini issue is about the boring old thing, not the new interesting thing, regardless of how tiresome and cliched it is, and I will try to explain why.
I think Google deliberately set out to blackwash their image generator, and did anticipate the image-generation result, but didn't anticipate the degree of hostile reaction from people who objected to the blackwashing.
Steven Moffat was a summary example of a blackwashing mindset when he remarked:
"We've kind of got to tell a lie. We'll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn't have been, and we won't dwell on that. "We'll say, 'To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth'."
Moffat was the subject of some controversy when he produced a Doctor Who episode (Thin Ice) featuring a visit to 1814 Britain that looked far less white than the historical record indicates that 1814 Britain was, and he had the Doctor claim in-character that history has been whitewashed.
This is an example that serious, professional, powerful people believe that blackwashing is a moral thing to do. When someone like Moffat says that a blackwashed history is better, and Google Gemini draws a blackwashed history, I think the obvious inference is that Google Gemini is staffed by Moffat-like people who anticipated this result, wanted this result, and deliberately worked to create this result.
The result is only "bonkers" to outsiders who did not want this result.
Yishan says:
It demonstrates quite conclusively that with all our current alignment work, that even at the level of our current LLMs, we are absolutely terrible at predicting how it’s going to execute an intended set of instructions.
No. It is not at all conclusive. "Gemini is staffed by Moffats who like blackwashing" is a simple alternate hypothesis that predicts the observed results. Random AI dysfunction or disalignment does not predict the specific forms that happened at Gemini.
One tester found that when he asked Gemini for "African Kings" it consistently returned all dark-skinned-black royalty despite the existence of lightskinned Mediterranean Africans such as Copts, but when he asked Gemini for "European Kings" it mixed up with some black people, yellow and redskins in regalia.
Gemini is not randomly off-target, nor accurate in one case and wrong in the other, it is specifically thumb-on-scale weighted away from whites and towards blacks.
If there's an alignment problem here, it's the alignment of the Gemini staff. "Woke" and "DEI" and "CRT" are some of the names for this problem, but the names attract flames and disputes over definition. Rather than argue names, I hear that Jack K. at Gemini is the sort of person who asserts "America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all".
He is delusional, and I think a good step to fixing Gemini would be to fire him and everyone who agrees with him. America is one of the least racist countries in the world, with so much screaming about racism partly because of widespread agreement that racism is a bad thing, which is what makes the accusation threatening. As Moldbug put it:
The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins’ day. The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.
But part of Jack's delusion, in turn, is a deliberate linguistic subversion by the left. Here I apologize for retreading culture war territory, but as far as I can determine it is true and relevant, and it being cliche does not make it less true.
US conservatives, generally, think "racism" is when you discriminate on race, and this is bad, and this should stop. This is the well established meaning of the word, and the meaning that progressives implicitly appeal to for moral weight.
US progressives have some of the same, but have also widespread slogans like "all white people are racist" (with academic motte-and-bailey switch to some excuse like "all complicit in and benefiting from a system of racism" when challenged) and "only white people are racist" (again with motte-and-bailey to "racism is when institutional-structural privilege and power favors you" with a side of America-centrism, et cetera) which combine to "racist" means "white" among progressives.
So for many US progressives, ending racism takes the form of eliminating whiteness and disfavoring whites and erasing white history and generally behaving the way Jack and friends made Gemini behave. (Supposedly. They've shut it down now and I'm late to the party, I can't verify these secondhand screenshots.)
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Bringing in Yudkowsky's AI theories adds no predictive or explanatory power that I can see. Occam's Razor says to rule out AI alignment as a problem here. Gemini's behavior is sufficiently explained by common old-fashioned race-hate and bias, which there is evidence for on the Gemini team.
Poor Yudkowsky. I imagine he's having a really bad time now. Imagine working on "AI Safety" in the sense of not killing people, and then the Google "AI Safety" department turns out to be a race-hate department that pisses away your cause's goodwill.
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I do not have a Twitter account. I do not intend to get a Twitter account, it seems like a trap best stayed out of. I am yelling into the void on my comment section. Any readers are free to send Yishan a link, a full copy of this, or remix and edit it to tweet at him in your own words.
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seventhdoctor · 1 month
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A Trapezoid of Foils: Judai/Yubel and Amon/Echo
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I'm back on my bullshit, and my bullshit is yelling about the trashfire that is Judai Yuki and Yubel. This post is a collection of thoughts on how Amon and Echo were clearly meant to reflect Judai and Yubel in some way or other, and how it feels like it should be neater than it is. The parallels are there, but it's not fully symmetrical and some of the angles are kind of weird...so yeah, kind of like a (non-isosceles) trapezoid!
(Geometry Tumblr do not @ me, I'm doing my best with this metaphor)
Spoilers for GX season 3, naturally. I haven't said it before, but for this post as well as previous ones I'm basing all information and characterization on the sub version of GX rather than the dub (which drastically changes Yubel's backstory and motives).
Yubel and Amon
This is the most obvious one, because Yubel spends two whole episodes and honestly some of their most iconic monologues trying to tear Amon down after building him up the whole season.
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They're both antagonists willing to cause harm to the one they love for their goals. For Amon, that goal is the power to build a utopia. For Yubel, the harm is the goal - or at least, the metric by which they will have achieved their goal (showing their love for Judai).
Yubel, of course, claims that Amon is more selfish in his use of harm. Pain is love in their philosophy, but it's mutual pain - dishing out the pain without taking any back would only be mere cruelty. This of course misses the nuance that Echo wanted Amon to use her as a sacrifice, while Judai didn't welcome any of Yubel's twisted affections.
Still, from what I've seen most people agree that Yubel comes across as more "honest" one way or another. And to understand why things feel that way, it's important to look at their backstory and motivations, as well as how their motivations change.
Yubel dedicated themself to Judai's past life, tying themself to him through lifetimes, and in the present remained true to that devotion in unwanted ways. When Judai sent them to space and it ended up being Oops! All Torture, Yubel developed their sadomasochistic philosophy as a coping mechanism and an attempt to reconcile Judai's past promises and present actions.
Upon their return to Earth, they planned to return the "favor": by sending Yubel to the pain and isolation of outer space Judai made them stronger (i.e., infected by the Light of Destruction, with all that entails), so they'll give him his own painful experience (all of season 3) to make him stronger (awaken his power as Supreme King). Then they'll reunite, having both demonstrated their love for each other, and [this part is where the Light of Destruction really twists up their thinking]. Everything they do is in the name of this motive*, whether Judai really likes it or not.
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Amon dedicated himself to the Garam conglomerate with Echo by his side before being replaced by his younger brother Sid, the sole blood Garam sibling. He nearly murdered Sid before changing his mind and dedicating himself wholly to his brother instead, a decision Echo and Yubel both describe as willingly chaining himself to their service. Even when given an opportunity to become the heir (all it'd take is watching his brother die to illness, not even murder) he rejects it, and begs for a way to save him.
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And yet, when when given the opportunity he made a deal with the devil to break the chains he put on himself and abandon that same family. Then when he gets the chance to obtain power by sacrificing someone he loves, he does exactly that. Then he plans to become king of a utopia free of suffering, and always remember Echo.
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So then, what are Amon's motives? Is he somebody who got tired of being abandoned or unappreciated? An ends-justify-the-means idealist? Just a power-hungry hypocrite? It's hard to tease out a consistent character and ideology from him. And in a show where people wear their hearts in their decks, I think this part of why people hate him - and so does Yubel.
Yubel hates Johan because he's terrifyingly like Yubel in some ways, focused and protective and dear to Judai.** Yubel hates Amon because he can't be like Yubel at all, resenting the brother he dedicated himself to and sacrificing the person he loved for power in an empty world forever devoid of that same person.
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No way Yubel can be that kind of person, right? Otherwise, what was it all for?
* To be fair, you don't know all of Yubel's backstory by the time of their final duel with Amon. However, even removing the context of their past life that duel together with Yubel!Johan vs. Hell Kaiser establishes Yubel's central motivations more coherently than they do Amon's.
** Help, I know there's been other essay segments on this topic, text and video alike. But I saw a lot of them back in early 2023 when I was mindlessly going through GX material in a haze of hyperfixation and now I've forgotten all the other good sources.
Yubel and Echo
If Yubel's parallels with Amon are about their dedication, Yubel's parallels with Echo are about who they're dedicated to. Both believe in their loved one's destiny to become a king, and take actions to make them that king.
Yubel has historical basis in that Judai is quite literally the Supreme King, bearer of the gentle darkness. To help him achieve that role, Yubel enacts a plot to break Judai until he awakens his Supreme King side. It fits neatly into their schema of things: this is how they make the person they love stronger, so that they will thrive and survive. Make Judai stronger and awaken his old power, and all will be as it was meant to be.
Echo just believes that Amon is amazing enough that he would make a better king than anyone. When the chances arises to help break his chains and give him a world to rule, Echo takes it.
...And boy does she.
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Both Yubel and Echo believe their loved ones are meant to be a king. Both give their lives in support of their loved one, and become weapons wielded in their service.
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No wonder Yubel was shaken by Echo's devotion remaining within Exodia for just a moment - it's not all that far from their own.
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Unfortunately Yubel's only direct interaction with Echo is goading her attack on field-Yubel during the final Amon duel. Otherwise they only speak of Echo as someone used and abandoned by Amon - which in itself has potential, given Yubel's own feelings about Judai sending them away.
I think GX could definitely have explored this connection a bit more. There's space to fill here.
Judai and Amon
As noted above, Judai and Amon both have roles as kings - at least, in the eyes of their single most loyal people. Judai holds the title of Supreme King as the wielder of gentle darkness, and while not confirmed his past life sure looked like a prince. Amon simply has ambition, talent, and an ideal world in his mind.
And in operating with the ambition of kings, they both do terrible things to achieve power. Judai lays this out explicitly in the Edo vs. Amon duel:
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Amon lets his need for power get in the way of his other relationships and priorities, and sacrifices the ones he loves to obtain Exodia similarly to how Judai sacrificed his friends and eventually uncountable innocents for his own goals - finding Johan, and then ruling as Supreme King. Straightforward, right?
But I think there's another parallel between the two that's a lot more interesting. Or...most of a parallel. Namely, their relationship with their other halves and the responsibility of a loyal follower who would give up anything for you, be it their life or their humanity.
What do you do when the person you love most dedicates their existence to you - to the point of throwing everything else away, even their very life?
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Of course, the Judai-Yubel and Amon-Echo situations aren't exactly the same even putting aside the issue of reincarnation. (For the purposes of this essay I'm not making huge distinctions between Judai and his past life, but if you want to get into the details I've written about that previously.)
Yubel went ahead and made their sacrifice without Judai's input, and all he could do was decide how to respond. He chose to dedicate himself back to them so hard it crossed lifetimes, so hard he chose to risk his own existence for them as well in his next life.
Amon, on the other hand, is the one who proposed Echo sacrifice herself for him. Echo agreed to it, and even by the end she stood by her decision. But Amon loaded the gun and pulled the trigger.
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He tries to honor her sacrifice, of course. He's always mindful of Echo's sacrifice and what it means. But in the end, he did choose to sacrifice her, ultimately using her as a pawn. Their love never trumped his own objectives.
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And I think the example of Amon and Echo leads to the question: if Judai had the choice of letting Yubel become a dragon or stopping them, what would he do? When it was explicitly their will?
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This is another missed opportunity, one that could have solidified the parallels neatly. But GX never asks that question, so the answer is unclear. What could have been a parallel is just kind of...askew.
Judai and Echo
Okay, I admit there isn't a lot here off the top of my head. Probably the best parallels between them are in relation to their other halves, as the people "harmed" by their villainous partners, and how they respond to that harm.
Judai rejects Yubel's torments as unwanted attention, until he remembers the past and flips to understanding why Yubel did they did and makes moves to unite the two of them forever. Echo, meanwhile, understands Amon's motives from start to end and...lets herself be sacrificed, the end.
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I don't know about this one. Really, ultimately Echo is supposed to be a willing participant in her own sacrifice but in the end I still don't feel like the narrative gave her a strong sense of agency in the matter and it really weakens my attempt to write this section.
In Conclusion
Some of these connections are stronger than others for sure, but I argue that they're all there in some way or another. They're very uneven and overall I'm not entirely sure what you're meant to take from the parallels, and I wish I could give something neat and concise for this section. Instead, it's a bit messy and misshapen - hence, the trapezoid metaphor.
Still, I think there's interesting room for thought in this awkward space. I was certainly thinking about these parallels while working on the latest chapter of Need (accidental last-minute plug?) and trying to figure out exactly what the prince felt while Yubel was in the middle of dragon surgery. What must it be like, to be in these relationships of sacrificial devotion?
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deadrabbitohno · 1 year
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I have a poem in this little Paul Thek anthology. Can confirm the other work in it is ridic good. They're looking for pre-orders cos printing has become spenny this year (and she's a big boy). If anyone wants some poems and essays about Paul Thek's painting Untitled (eye with comet), then here's yr chance <3
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soracities · 2 months
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"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."
Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]
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cadaverkeys · 5 months
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You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).
Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.
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prokopetz · 2 months
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The constant rolling disaster that is Overwatch's game development aside, what really perplexes me about how Blizzard is handling the broader franchise is their continual insistence that a canon narrative exists in spite of their equally continual refusal to tell anyone what it is.
Like, okay, the events of the games aren't canon. Fair enough: the games are multiplayer-only, and you can't account for player actions.
Oh, and the animated short films aren't canon either – they're properly understood as in-universe propaganda, not depictions of actual events. That's a little high concept for you guys, but fine.
But surely the comics are canon, right? Well, no; some of the comics (we're not telling you which ones) were canon at one point, but the writing team has decided to go in a different direction.
My dudes, what is left? The weird Source Filmmaker porn? Is that canon? Well, apparently it's at least as canon as anything else!
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being a student during peak pandemic was so fucking surreal like. "it's not an excuse to fall behind" I cannot stress enough to you how much A Worldwide Plague Upending Life As We Know It is literally one of The Top Three Reasons to fall behind
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"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
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thehungrycity · 11 months
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akajustmerry · 5 months
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I feel like those of us who are longtime Video Essay Enjoyers™ have been aware something was suss about James Summerton (I remember when Lawrence called out Somerton for stealing their Hannibal essay years ago) for a while. But I think it's cynical to reduce Hbomberguy's vid to just a "dunk" when it's more of an odyssey railing against how influencer and content culture devalues the work of culture critics, academics, and activists. As Harris said, it's not a problem exclusive to Somerton, but a corrosive attitude baked into late capitalist "content" culture. The video is a clear exploration of the consequences of all media and art being flattened into "content" creates a system where the labor of marginalised creatives and storytellers are exploited and stolen by people with more privileges and resources. As someone who has witnessed rich tiktokers quote articles and posts I've written verbatim without credit to make money from their 1000s of followers, this video hit super hard for me. From James Somerton claiming the works of dead gay activists, to Charli D'Amelio building a career from stealing dances created by Black tiktokers - plagiarism is often inseparable from discrimination and exploitation of labor rights. Harris' video is about how the nature of influencer content culture has further exacerbated the exploitative systems that already existed, wrapped up as YouTuber drama analysis. But I hope people don't miss the forest for the trees and remember you should always be citing your sources, fact checking, and be very wary of people who don't. And for the love of God, please stop getting your information exclusively from video essays, tiktoks and podcasts.
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yeehawpim · 5 months
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samueldays · 13 days
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High Honesty Society
I commute to work by Norwegian public transport, which has a wide variety of people on it. A typical Norwegian train has two sorts of labeled cars: [Prior ticket only] and [Tickets sold aboard]. If you have bought a ticket, you can enter either one. A controller walks up and down the train, checking tickets for everyone and selling tickets to new passengers in the latter cars. Persons found without a ticket in the former cars will be fined.
A scene I've witnessed several times is that of the controller slacking off (standing in place, or walking past without checking, because most people have prior tickets) and then a passenger will call for the controller and say "I need to buy a ticket".
Sometimes I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of talk about "high trust society" and less about "high honesty society" to build that trust on, because trusting dishonest people is a bad idea. Some places report problems with turnstile jumpers and fare evaders putting effort into it, here's people putting effort into paying when they could have remained silent. But how does one build honesty?
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Australia has no difference between the states aside from insanely slight details, the whole island should just be called "Rupert Murdoch's British Florida" at this point. White Australia should just move to America or Britain like they're all multiple passport holders of. That island and NZ belongs to its first nations people, all nearby islander people, Indonesia, Bali, Fiji and the Philippines, and those peoples should move in and redo the whole thing to make it less British, that would be incredible.
Its wild how some Aussies can understand what a phony, abhorrent place Israel is, but cant put the pieces together that their country is identical in every way, in ways America actually is not. Yes, America is bad but its a nation that was created by multiple wars vs the First Nations peoples and then the Brits. Real countries are created via war, Canada, Aus, NZ, South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland were created when a British person snapped their fingers and gave away land that wasn't theirs to give away. 29% of 2024 white "Australians" are not born there (USA is 14%). The white supremacist/outright racism of the Australian culture has always been much worse than America, not to mention the gaudy, disgusting nationalism Australia has, "Aussie pride!" banners are literally hung everywhere, it makes no sense, pride in what? Pride in directly, first-person stealing land from First Nations people? Pride in not being born there? It's nonsense, stop doing land recognitions and instead hand the land directly over to the Aboriginals you yourself are stealing/colonizing from, right now! It's all nonsense, in typical British logic fashion. Australia and those other fake countries should be considered a humanitarian disaster and Britain is solely to blame.
Make the Commonwealth give back their stolen lands and dismantle all these satellite British "countries" today. USA is the only true melting pot country and that's why its above these British satellites. It's time to stop the British colonizer nonsense.
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soracities · 8 months
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absolutely enraptured rn
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thefantastician · 1 year
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is this relatable to everyone or just me
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swampjawn · 3 months
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Time to talk an unnecessary amount about floors!
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Episode 6 of Dungeon Meshi was produced in collaboration with a smaller studio, Enishiya - and it went way harder than I expected, for being made up of two relatively simple and self contained stories focusing on one character each.
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And you can really see how those extra resources meant the animators could give full focus to both halves of the episode. Let's take a look at one piece that stole the show.
The first half was handled primarily by episode director/storyboard artist Keita Nagahara and co-animation director Hirotoshi (or Hiroaki? [1]) Arai. It's actually kinda insane how much of this section can be attributed to these two.
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But the real star of the show is the second half, Chilchuck vs the mimic, led by co-animation director Toya Ooshima in his first animation director role for TV anime!
And the biggest aspect that knocked my dang boots off was something that's very consistent with Ooshima's style: background animation!
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By animating the backgrounds rather than using painted still images, Ooshima and the team of other similarly skilled animators are able to create these beautiful dynamic camera movements that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Like these cuts by Takeshi Maenami where the camera becomes an expressive part of the scene, zipping forward and backward, and tilting to emphasize the speed of this murderous hermit crab. (Maenami's style is also very recognizable here - snappy timing and quick camera movements)
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Or this cut by the incredible Kaito Tomioka which cleverly combines a traditional background for the walls with a fully animated floor. The level of detail in these tiles is just completely insane, and used to great effect with this wide, diagonal angle, and the way the camera tentatively drifts forward before reversing direction, and the tiles blur out as it speeds up.
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I don't think I'm the only one caught off guard by how much they full-assed this little side story, but it was a pleasant surprise!
I broke down the entire episode in this video here. A lot of research went into this one, and I think it's the best one of these videos I've made so far, so if you're at all interested in more of this type of analysis in video form, I would really appreciate it if you checked it out, or re-blogged this post! Thanks
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[1] It's listed as Hirotoshi on Anime News Network, but Hiroaki on a key frame that Studio Trigger shared on Twitter, so I'm not sure which one is wrong.
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