For me - I forgive an em-dash, but it does make me more skeptical of the other tells of AI-written text. If I start to see those other tells I do start to get a bit annoyed.
This experience is common in my circles even in the US as well as those I know in Europe. May be a bi-modal distribution where some industries are vastly underpaying while some industries are the opposite and paying well above the average. This seems to have happened in a lot of career spaces. The vast majority will be in the first group too, which is why sampling would get a result like the one in the survey?
The only issue is that it needs a good user. Just as you can work your way into good insights, you can work yourself into bad insights just as easily. Sometimes chatgpt doesn't challenge you enough unless you ask it to under specific frameworks or paradigms. It is definitely a useful tool though.
Edit: These are all problems with real therapy too though, on further reflection. It took some time to find the therapist that works well with you. That can be a form of similar bias.
I find myself being exceptionally careful when asking questions. ChatGPT is known to lean sycophantic - biased toward agreement. And rather than asking, "Is this ...?" or "Am I ...?", I'm careful to choose prompts like, "Evaluate, or analyze...".
My hope is that this results in less sycophantic responses, but overall it's a difficult thing to measure.
Also not OP, but if you open up with any mental health positive people in your life, that's a great place to start. They may even have a recommendation which will really ease a lot of your worries going in as it largely is a personality based thing in my experience.
Also - give a call to some therapists. You can choose some arbitrary screening criteria that make you comfortable - like if you only want to talk to men because you're a man and worry about that, or if you want to find an lgbtq-oriented therapist, those types of things can be filtered. There are even faith-adjacent therapists - but I personally would be uncomfortable with that - but they exist!
Once you have a list after filtering down of 3-5 therapists, call each for a consult. During the consult, if you don't like the therapist, cross them out. After calling 3-5 you can choose the one that your gut tells you. If you can't commit even then, then flip a coin on them to be honest. If your gut tells you to go with two different ones, choose one at random and try it out.
Finally one other thing that I found surprising was even if someone marks cognitive behavioral therapy on their listing (A lot of them do!) - they may not use it in a 'tool-based' fashion. Meaning, you won't get a lot of homework.
If you are someone who needs take home work to be able to function, this could be a question you ask during your calls.
Here is an example of how it could go:
You have the criteria:
1. Must be LGBTQ positive
2. Must accept my insurance
3. Must be skills-based oriented around processing emotions
With these three, if I cannot find the information on their page, I can ask them during the consultation call something like:
1. If you don't accept insurance, can you do a super-bill so I can file a claim with my insurance?
2. Do you do skills-based learning as part of your practice
They may say "no, but I do X, Y, Z" in response
Anyway, I'm not editing this down but hopefully that helps a little.
Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.
That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.
Reading that interview, it just sounds like a tax-optimized donation. It still causes him to give up wealth that he could have kept, but he's minimizing the loss. Is this not the case? If it is for pure personal financial gain, should we expect Jim Simons to pull a similar maneuver with Ren Tech at some point?
You do realize that I'm responding to someone that made the assertion, also implied in the NYT article, that this "donation" was "done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill." Right? What you're saying directly contradicts that, which was my point...
This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?
Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."
nothing wrong with benefiting yourself and your family - the problem is doing that unfairly at the expense of someone else, which it appears he has tried hard not to do here.
It's healthy to have a skepticism of "rich" people, but I think it's really uncharitable to view Chouinard's career as mere wealth accrual for wealth's sake. To not view him as a role model for how business can be ethical is, IMO, a missed opportunity.
Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.
When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.
Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship
Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.
That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.
If you are an REI member, they often have stuff in the used (Garage) site that is in excellent quality and also less expensive. Patagonia also has worn wear that does the same thing. Win-win - awesome stuff, no need to make a new one for you, and less expensive!
- The guy who now has too many nanopuff jackets, but I will die on this hill.
Kinda ironic that the good deeds of Patagonia were written about on a website that we cannot even read because there is a paywall to access the information. Talk about seeing two sides of a spectrum haha.
That's the thing. A privately owned company can keep its morals if it has them, because the owners don't answer to anyone else. But as soon as a company accepts Venture Capital funding, or goes public, morals go out the window. The original owners no longer have control, and can't decide what the goal of the company is anymore. The goal is now to make money in whatever method is possible.
Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.
Yeah. My worry with Fusion eventually being solved is it will make energy so abundant that we will find novel ways to waste it. Ideally it is used to solve things like our climate crisis - but who knows.
No, I haven’t, though I will eventually. In the meantime, some other pieces that always come to mind as being definitely on that list are Weaponised Sacredness by Sarah Perry, specifically the section on egregores (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/ ctrl-f “The Egregore”), Rene Girard’s Scapegoat, and as antagonistic reading (threatening ideas you must engage with) Spandrell’s IQ Shredder, and Nick Land’s Hell-Baked. In general the list is about coming to understand little-recognized forces that control the world.
I think something like this would be really beneficial. The tough thing with the rationalist sphere, and its dark cousins, is that critical material is spread across multiple forums and blogs, many defunct and difficult to search for. An index for this material would be valuable.
One of the issues that makes an index less valuable is that to make sense of a given rationalist idea you kinda need to have a mental virtualenv set up with most of the rationalist tools already installed (otherwise e.g. when someone says “this is a choice between Good and Evil” you will simply say “I choose Good” as in https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and the only reliable way to install all of those tools is to just read most of the rationalist literature. Likewise for the “dark cousins”, to make sense of a given neoreactionary idea you need a mental virtualenv with all the neoreactionary tools installed and to install them you need to read all of Moldbug. And don’t get me started on postrationalist ideas - despite being the most important of all, you can’t make sense of them without having all the rationalist and neoreactionary tools installed in the same environment, and have spent five years marinating in the dependency conflicts, and you also have to be so intractably contrarian that neither rationalist nor neoreactionary thought is contrarian enough to satisfy you…
I still think an index would be helpful, but it does have its issues as well.
Absolutely. The user still needs good taste right now too - if it writes you a mission statement or something else you have still have to know whether its good or not.
That itself is an order of magnitude speed up. Even if AI never improves beyond this point (and it almost certainly will improve), it's already a game changer.
I would assume that if Google is paying 10$/hour for humans to rank content, someone else is paying 11$/hour to fool it with a human generating content, clicks, etc.
Additionally, people writing bots learn just like Google learns, and start generating what appears to be legitimate interactions. Same algorithms that fit to critique between 'bot' and 'non-bot' class can be used to create bots that fall into the 'non-bot' category.
It's a losing battle - but what we get is better than we would get if they collected less data.
That’s what’s confusing in the articles that have come out about quality raters.
Quality Raters don’t actually rank websites.
Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them. Google then uses that data as a small part of their algorithm to adjust some factors about those sites.
Quality Raters don’t actually rank pages on google.
I often apply it from the beginning for creative projects. For example if I am writing a story, I will need to consider "what makes a good story". If I were to develop the benchmark for this by consulting a list of "top 10 ways to make a good story," or did my research by looking at best-sellers, then I would only be capable of writing cliches. It would be very hard to get off of the blank page without just copying a complete work and then trying to modify parts.
But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.
And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.
