100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension.non-amazon link.
Started it today and I like that it isn't written in the typical academic philosophy structure. Which is partially why, according to the forward, Polanyi never got any real traction within that community (in a relative sense; he was lecturing at a bunch of prestigious universities for decades).
I'm reading it in the context of "lol, is AI gonna make us all permanent serfs?" and, in that context, it's quite uplifting. "We can know more than we can say" and tradition, broadly defined, being not only advantageous but necessary to the true production and development of knowledge means the clankers, as effective as they are, can't actually cover the entire area of human-level problem spaces.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
I agree with this and think it applies even more broadly to a global personality type beyond just the sub-continent.
This shares an interesting with the Elon Musk Diablo controversy. The TLDR is that Elon went on Joe Rogan and randomly mentioned how he was ranked in the Top 10 of all online Diablo players. The internet rightly immediately went "lol. whut? How does the CEO of like 5 different mega companies have time to grind Diablo?" The ONLY way to get that high of a ranking is to grind. There is no giga-brained shortcut. You have to put in the hours. The immediate conclusion was that he was paying someone to ghost-play his account to boost ratings.
Well, Elon wanted to shut up the haterz and so live-streamed himself playing. It went as well as you would expect. A bunch of actual Diablo mega-grinders immediately pointed out tactics that Elon used that were dead giveaways that he didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, Elon eventually admitted that he did pay someone to grind for him.
Why in the hell would a literal centi-billionaire care so much about online video game rankings? Isn't it just enough to be the (future) Prince of Mars, the face of American rocketry, and to have had 14 - maybe 100 kids?
Elon and this Sharma lady both suffer from a personality deficiency where they don't actually model social esteem systems well. When a value system is totally objective and external - profit and less, share value, rocket re-use cost - their Autism engines get a turbo boost. But when it's more interpersonally subjective and based on relative-social status within niches (video games or, perhaps, dancing being excellent examples) they lose all bearing. I think it literally flips the "flight or fight" level of anxiety and they reflexively react by trying to "do the thing" at the same level of all-or-nothing that the dedicate to their primary pursuits.
These people don't have a real interpersonal or social core. The "sense of self" in a very immediate flesh and blood way isn't there. This is part of the genesis of the "Musk is an alien" memes. When he was on SNL he opined he may have autism or asperger's (self-diagnosed). Perhaps, but color be doubtful. I don't think it has anything to do with "brain chemistry" (a term I loathe) or even real-deal mental health (i.e. BPD, MDD, Schizo-class disorders). Instead, it's a socially rooted character underdevelopment that never was addressed precisely because they were hyper-indexing on whatever optimization problem was in front of them.
Elon musk and Ms. Sharma know that the piles of money they make are valuable because money can be exchanged for goods and services but they fail to make the domain transition and realize that having lots and lots and lots of money also creates real social value (and, if deployed correctly, political value as well. Musk has tried to do this but keeps fucking up because he truly doesn't get politics or government. His DOGE failure should be more heavily highlighted, IMHO).
As @urquan says, gamers are never going to "vibe" with MSFT because MSFT is an evil corporation that kills all the good games. And also makes them too, or whatever. The point is that the point isn't getting gamers to "like" you but to buy your products. Musk doesn't understand that Chinese EV buyers don't actually care if you can dance so long as you can sell them fucking robot EVs. These people aren't real because they don't conceive of themselves as totally human.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.
What the hell else would you have me do with my time?
Go outside?
Talk to girls?
Improve myself?
Fuck outta here.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
My phrasing was a little ambiguous. I believe you're correct.
The distinction I was trying to make was the idea that there ever were large amounts of people who, only because of online content, were then going out and performing radical actions in the real world.
Online "radicalization" leading to perpetual online schizo-ing is absolutely a mass level (ongoing) event.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
This, plus selection bias. Outside of the nordics, there are plenty of working class Euro kids who just don't go to school after 8th - 10th grade. And for the year they do attend, it's just several hours of goofing off before they can continue to goof off in their neighborhoods.
The U.S. has all kinds of truancy and mandatory education laws that vary by state and level of enforcement.
If school attendance was actually totally optional all the way through, I believe that by 9th grade or so, the U.S. would have far and away the top median scores of all nations.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
The Karen Sleeper Cell Has Activated
A woman in Kansas City attempted to set fire to a warehouse that was alleged to be an ICE facility of some sort. Or, maybe, it was planned to be an ICE facility in the future. Or something.
I suppose there's room to quibble over this being a technical act of terrorism, insurrection, or just normal arson. Despite my tongue-in-cheek title, I also don't think this is some sort of a flashpoint for semi-organized violence on the part of lefty activists. Probably, it's just one individual who took a leave of their senses and did something dumb, pointless, and illegal.
But it is worth speculating on, on the internet, the mental processes that led to this behavior. One product of the many, many, _many, comments on the Minnesota ICE shootings was the idea that a large part of what's going on is an extreme from of LARPing. Some of these protestors see themselves literally as the inheritors of the Civil Rights Movement, the American Revolution, and The Rebels from Star Wars all in one. They are of The One Right and True Cause and, therefore, all of their actions have inherent justification.
When that line of thinking gets to compound on itself for long enough, people start to burn things.
I've always been suspicious of the "radicalized online" idea. Aside from a few already very mentally odd individuals, I don't buy the idea that you can read enough schizo posts that, one day, you decide to up end your life and do something drastic. I think it's far more likely you just spend more and more time online and indoors engaging in fantasy conflicts.
But I do believe in radicalization as a concept more broadly. Cults and mass social movements exemplify this. At a lower stakes level, simply hanging out with a certain "scene" (think metalheads, goths, punks, whatever) can meaningfully change a person's behaviors and beliefs.
I wonder to what extent the various Minnesota-like organized protesting is now seriously breaking contain for lefties - many of them female - who would, otherwise, mostly vent their aggravation by doing their own kind of schizo posting on Facebook or elsewhere. If this is the case, then we're dealing with something a lot more like a cult or, more geopolitically relevant, something similar to how ISIS spread so quickly after their initial emergence. That does concern me.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I agree that the isolated metric of TFR doesn't do a good job of explaining the problem. Your excellent post outlines how declining birthrates, much like declining homicide rates, are largely explained by better healthcare and general sanitation, much less than a shift in human behavior.
But time of first birth reveals the change with higher fidelity. And this is the real problem. People - women - are having their first child later and later. This raises the risk of complications and lowers the probability of multiple births, especially 3 or more which you need a fair amount of to get total TFR to 2.3ish or so.
The primary explanatory factors for this is probably a mixture of careerism, financial stability necessities (or perceived necessities), and a generally higher tolerance for casual relationships in the late teens to early 20s. There's a lot of culture war embedded in those factors - I'll let the Mottizens arm themselves however they like.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I think you kind of answer your own questions here.
It seems like Wexner, who was bankrolling all of these other organizations. Or, at least, helping them to get bankrolled by donors. Chucked $400m of his own money to Epstein as his grey market lead. Moving money, having the shady conversations with important folks all over the world that you want to have stay out of the press etc.
I don't think it's that shocking? "Fixers" have existed at the outskirts of legitimate organizations forever. Sure, they don't often get $400m, but, whatever, maybe Wexner just didn't care or wanted enough slush on Epstein's books in case something big came around?
The more I learn about all of this, the more and more apparent it becomes that Epstein was a charming middle man who liked to party. He eventually crossed lines for which he was convicted and then, realizing the party was over, killed himself. That's a story that's been repeated a million times. I think the difference is in scale here, not in kind.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
(Link above to OpenAI planning to release "Adult Mode" in early 2026)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
The "oh shit" moment for me in factorio as it relates to software engineering is that there is a fundamental game meta-mechanic where you have to rebuild large parts of your base. You can't not. The way the tech tree progresses, old smelters and belts can't provide the throughput as you advance. Your option is to either abandon them and make new ones or refactor the old sections. And you kind of have to do the latter because there are all of these geographic dependencies flowing into your older base (without trains and other stuff, you can't make central raw materials depots, you have to build belts straight from a coal field to a smelter).
That's literally codebase refactoring / major update / integration with new capability.
Late in the game, with robots, you can get really modular and independent. That's when you're hitting google scale and things like kubernetes actually become super valuable rather than engineer theater.
Tinfoil hat: Factorio was going to be the thing that turned every kid born after 2010 into a dev. Then AI happened and now everyone is a dev and I can build and re-build my base every 20 minutes.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Absolutely!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Fantasy football; The original social media.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
There was a lot of insight packed into a very small space.
Yep. Every section / chapter of Hoffer is like that. Dude was a philosopher in the truest sense of the word.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Category error. I didn't mean the competition between the teams is capitalist. I mean the competition between the NFL as an entertainment product and the other sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NHL, EPL etc.) as well as different entertainment products (movies, netflix) is the capitalist competition.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I'm not saying we should bring down wages. We should let the market determine the effective wage.
But we should be far, far, far more aggressive in prosecuting tax cheats and outright illegal employment. Because, right now, working a modest W-2 job (i.e. less than median household income) is literally a suckers game.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Good lord, she's built like a steakhouse but handles like a bistro.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I'll acquiesce as I am not that big of a hockey fan.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here
A great way to discern if someone understands "class" or not is if they use the term "class/classy." I always think of Goodfellas and The Sopranos when one of the goombah's without a High School education says something like "She's a real classy broad. No herpes or anything. Wears the good pantyhose."
I'll take my American crassness over the $30k and $45k per capita GDP of Puerto Rico and Italy, respectively.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
There's some nuance here.
NFL ownership doesn't select the half-time show performers. Jay-Z and his production company likely do. As the article indicates, there's some contractual language wherein the NFL, meaning the NFL front office, probably has the final say technically, but the whole operation has Jay-z's company steering it.
You're right in pointing out the low likelihood of fly-over American's not watching football for six months because of one half-time show. You're also right in that the mission for the NFL, explicitly, has been to tap into new markets. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were probably somewhat "planted" by marketing to attract young, female viewers. The recent games in Mexico and Brazil try to capture those markets.
But the culture war angle is valid. It's subtle but then not. The whole thing was in Spanish. Your "sexy dancers" of Shakira and Jennifer Lopez didn't do that. Dr. Dre, Snoop et al celebrated gangster culture, but deracinated Disney gangster culture - low riders and gold chains, not actual murder and drug running. They censored their own lyrics. Rhianna and Usher sell sex and sex sells. That's been true since, at least, the Janet Jackson fake wardrobe malfunction. The normies can deal with it - my aunts cross their arms and slap on resting bitch face when the ass shaking starts, but they don't leave the room the way Grandma may have. Kendrik Lamar was somewhat a flop because the "lore" of him and Drake was too deep for easy access during the superbowl.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
unless you get into things like strap-ons and such.
Or if they get into you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.
Correct, and I unapologetically, nostalgically miss this.
I remember how universal things like the Super Bowl, New Year's Eve Ball Drop, State of the Union Address, certain movies (Titanic), and even big T.V. show events (Friends finale) were. It didn't matter if they were high art or "actually good" or not, it was that they acted as a sort of social-cultural barometric calibration. If you weren't talking about Britney Spear's 2001 Superbowl half time show at the water cooler (or in homeroom at school) the next day, you were an out of touch loser. You could shit on it, that was fine, but strolling in and going "Did you see that the Mongolian congress had a meeting while sitting on horses?" was a hanging offense.
Again, I'll admit nostalgia. It just seemed like for these short moments a few times a year, there was a big pause on the randomness of individual hive life and a singular orientation to whatever the "thing" was. People also consumed it fully in real time. No one would watch the State of The Union via live tweets, they'd just watch the damn speech. No live blogging, streaming, or video of people watching what everyone else was watching (watch parties).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I think there used to be some level of cultural relevance for female figure skating and Ice Hockey.
The 1980 Miracle On Ice was a huge deal. My Dad can tell you what he had for breakfast that day and the day Kennedy was shot in 1963. It's that level of "seared into memory."
Figure skating, aside from the whole Tanya Harding nonsense, has been important because it holds female emotional valence and America wants to ensure that our ice dancing barbie dolls are the best ice dancing barbie dolls on earth.
I think both of these have declined in recent years because America fundamentally won hockey by having the NHL. When Aleksander Ovechkin, arguably the GOAT or Vice Goat after Gretzky, plays 20+ years in Washington and not Moscow, the jig is up. The "pro" leagues in Sweden, Finland, Czechia are all just AAAA farm leagues for the NHL.
For figuring skating, the Chinese got really fucking good and our own skaters turned, literally, fake and gay. I think the last superstar was Tara Lapinski? Or maybe that Sasha girl from like 2004 or so.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I'm not sure what your point is?
If you're saying Goodell has nothing to do with it and that the rising tide is lifting all boats, then I need you to account for why the NFL is kicking the shit out of every other major sports organization in the world in terms of valuation.
The only metric that counter this narrative is percentage (so, relative, not absolute) growth of NBA teams values over the past decade. But that counternarrative is it self countered by the fact that The NBA is seeing a decline in viewership. Tech billionaires are propping up the California Teams, but your median American sports fan is watching football, baseball, and hockey.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I watched the game and halftime show at a local watering hole. A pale skinned, red haired young woman with a name equivalent to "Erin McHibernian" was omg-ee-ing with her friend during the halftime show and giggling, "I can't be that girl who gets up and starts dancing to Bah Bunay but I want toooo"
Indeed, I have nothing in common with these people.
Knew a career Wall Street guy who once said something to the effect of "If monks didn't take a vow of poverty, they would crush all of us" (can't remember the exact quote. It was more pithy).
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