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13 dagen geledendiscuss

I think I agree, but I hedged because I thought one could argue that it's not 'cheating' in the same way as, say, sneaking into the scorer's shed and writing in an extra goal would be. A deliberate handball is 'just' an in-game action that should have been penalised but wasn't (due to referee error), and deliberately breaking the rules isn't always considered cheating. For example, basketball and soccer both have their own version of the 'professional foul', and even in soccer where this earns the player a card, it seems to be considered an accepted tactical trade rather than cheating. I don't think this argument really holds up, though, because the hand of god goal depended entirely on getting away with the rule breach, whereas professional fouls involve getting caught and accepting the consequences.

13 dagen geledendiscuss

Yeah I totally agree. Perhaps pedantically, though, I'd say this isn't a counterexample to 'playing to win':

> During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!

I think this is actually a good example of setting up the game appropriately (in this case the teams as well as the rules) and then playing to win within those constraints. The end result is more fun and better training than you would get by departing from the 'playing to win' philosophy by, for example, having a tacit agreement that the faster swimmers will take it easy so as not to embarrass the others.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

I'm reading a book at the moment (https://academic.oup.com/book/32137) in which the author makes a point of the distinction between "the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game". My purpose in playing games is never winning for winning's sake, let alone winning at the cost of violating basic decency. But sometimes the purpose is best served by pursuing the goals quite single-mindedly. Competition can be fun, and some games become much more interesting when both players are really trying to win, even when this means using 'cheap' moves, learning to counter the cheap moves, etc. There's no reason this approach has to carry over into the rest of our lives; we can 'play to win' in the appropriate arenas while caring deeply about courtesy and ethics.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

I understand this attitude, but I think the line between tactical progress and (the bad kind of) exploiting the rules can get very fuzzy. It's arguably more interesting to do whatever the game allows, even if it seems cheap, and find out the hard way whether there are ways to counter it. Sometimes there aren't, or the counter-tactics just leave you with a more boring game (usually fixable with rule changes). But sometimes you can uncover hidden depths this way, and the opposite approach can leave a game very tactically stagnant.

(I'm of course not suggesting this was the Chappells' direct motive, or even that this incident realistically could have uncovered hidden depths in the game of cricket. But as a general philosophy I think 'playing to win' has some merit, even from a perspective that ultimately cares about the health of the game and not just about winning as a terminal goal.)

14 dagen geledendiscuss

I think that's too strong. The underarm ball was a case of playing within the rules, but against most people's notion of fair play. The hand of god would fit most people's definition of actual cheating.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed. (A la https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub .) Cricket saw itself unironically as "the gentlemen's game", though, so this didn't really fit the culture.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

Underarm bowling was nothing new, but I reckon some had never even thought about literally just rolling the thing.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

In context, it was a bit like taking advantage of a videogame exploit that others variously hadn't discovered, thought was forbidden, or assumed would not be used by tacit agreement.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

The Aussies were simply adhering to the TLC-Sirlin credo.

14 dagen geledendiscuss

If you can't actually say explicitly what your argument is, that is a very strong signal that you don't know what you're talking about and are likely to be wrong.

If you claim you don't have time, or it's not your job to educate us... that is an obvious copout, as you have already written hundreds of words and were the one to introduce this topic.

24 dagen geledendiscuss

I'm not in the US, so maybe things are very different here, but I still wonder if the absolutist advice is helpful in situations like this:

One night, while walking, I was stopped by police because I roughly matched the description of someone who had burgled a house nearby. They didn't tell me this straight away; they just asked who I was, where I lived, and what I was doing. I didn't have ID on me, but I answered their questions honestly. They went to their car for a bit (presumably checking that my name matched my address and/or that I didn't have a record), then came back, explained the situation, and let me go as they had no strong reason to suspect me. The whole interaction was pretty relaxed and cordial, and they didn't contact me again.

Things definitely wouldn't have gone better for me had I made a point of refusing to engage beyond the legally required minimum, and it's easy to imagine how they could have gone significantly worse.

27 dagen geledendiscuss

"There is nothing worse than very highly intellectual people thinking they are entitled to make decisions for the rest of us."

Very powerful people are making decisions for the rest of us! If you have a plan to change that, I'm listening; in the meantime, I much prefer when they have some desire to do good, and a willingness to discuss and think about what that entails, than when they quietly act amorally (or, worse and not exactly uncommon, unashamedly act maliciously).

27 dagen geledendiscuss

> or why the narrative here is all about this being payback

The 'narrative' is focused on the corruption because government corruption is a big deal! Even when it's not truly surprising, and even when you have no sympathy for the (immediate) losers, it should be somewhat shocking, or else what are we even doing here.

You talk about Anthropic giving the government 'enough rope' and getting 'owned', which seems like a tacit acknowledgement that the government does not give a shit about whatever the surface-level justification for this ban is. And you even explicitly acknowledge "the possiblility of insider plays by the current administration w/ OpenAI or SpaceX". What level of cynicism/tribalism are you on, that you don't see this as obviously the main story here?

29 dagen geledendiscuss

Is your primary goal to punish/incentivise the teacher, or to accurately determine how smart the children are?

If the latter, you would ignore the 'cheated' answers and judge them on everything else; you wouldn't mark the 'cheated' answers as incorrect.

vorige maanddiscuss

Yeah it seems harmless in isolation, but I'm pretty sure that lacking a norm against it it is one of the ways you end up with Reddit. And because HN doesn't have an actual anti-humour rule, in the best case it lets the funnier and more creative stuff through while punishing the obvious one-liners and boilerplate jokes that everyone would be clamouring to make first on a Reddit thread. (I don't want to be rude, but the thing where someone writes stereotypical AI speak in an ironic context has been done a billion times and doesn't need to be done again, unless it comes with an interesting twist or unusually sharp execution.)

vorige maanddiscuss

> Before you did this, was literally every hour of your waking time spend thinking about LLMs?

They said "writing and thinking without LLMs", not "not thinking about LLMs". I think they're talking about setting aside time for fairly focused thought/work.

vorige maanddiscuss

> If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.

I'm not just trying to be snarky, but I have no idea how to read this without taking the implication that humans are advanced, yet dumb, search algorithms.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.

When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

> So no, ”very often works on depression” is not a characterization I would use.

I'm (genuinely) sorry about your friend, and I don't deny that it's worth sharing these anecdotes. But a single anecdote comes nowhere near refuting the claim that ECT very often works on depression.

The current state of scientific knowledge seems to be that it does very often "work", at least as a fast-acting short-term treatment for very severe depression.