07mk
17hr ago
31 years ago was 1995. It's easy to notice how much the norms and standards of academia, journalism, and general discourse around intellectual pursuits has noticeably changed in that time. Would a Jason Arday in 1995 have made it as far into Cambridge? I think a reasonable guess is No, he would not have made it as far and, in fact, there's a high likelihood that he wouldn't even have made it to the interview step in applying for the job.
Take that trajectory and extend out another 31 years, with the rock-hard belief that you are on the Right Side of History, that the moral arc of justice will ever bend in your direction. And consider that he was hired in, IIRC, 2022, when there was a lot more optimism on the part of these true believers that their true beliefs were true. It wouldn't be surprising for someone in that mindset to believe that, whenever this does get uncovered, the intellectual environment will be such that such plagiarism and fraud for the sake of uplifting an oppressed black disabled man is actually seen as virtuous or even obligatory. And we can see by how things are playing out they wouldn't have been wrong by much, despite having been found out within 5 years, and with the skepticism to their belief system actually going up in that time.
07mk
19hr ago
Does the immorality of suicide cause the self-administered death penalty to be more justified, due to how it punishes not only your life but also your sense of self and identity compelling you into a sort of morally contradictory situation where you feel like you have no choice but to do something you consider immoral, or does it cause it to be less justified, due to how it would require you to commit yet another immoral act? I can see the argument for both.
07mk
21hr ago
Gutkin: One of the reasons people might be unwilling, in general, to make hay about these incidents is that they perceive them as feeding into a right-wing campaign against the sector. You’ve been accused of that.
I find this attitude among journalists and academics - i.e. roles in society that are purported to be about seeking and publicizing truth and facts (obviously trade secrets and whatnot being exceptions) - to be infuriating. If you actually have a belief that these things are important, one of the first things that you should be willing to ignore and marginalize are your own personal partisan biases and ideological commitments, because any amount of education should make it obvious that those are some of the most powerful forces that drive one's behavior into irrational and incorrect directions. As such, if some truth or fact would "feeding into" the enemies' campaign, I should embrace it and be even more gung-ho about investigating it and publicizing it. That's the only way that I can credibly claim to care about discovering and teaching truth, rather than to care about pushing forward my ideological biases while wearing academia as a skinsuit to make people believe that I'm searching for the truth.
If revealing and spreading some scientific truth would play into my enemies' hands, then I ought to play into my enemies' hands.
07mk
21hr ago
My frustrations with TLOU 2 weren't so much the gay/trans/wokeness (those were relatively minor annoyances), as the way the game spends 40 hours beating you over the head with REVENGE IS BAD as if it's some sort of revelatory message. Like, yeah Naughty Dog, I got it. Do you have anything else to say here?
I haven't played TLOU2 so I don't have opinions about it specifically, but this sort of fits into a pattern I've seen in people talking about "woke" games and other fictional media as being bad not because they're "woke" (i.e. gay/trans/etc.) but because they have other generically bad qualities like leaning on some super-simplistic message as if it's some revelation. But I think this sort of claim ignores a big part of one of the defining features of "wokeness" which is that people ought to get jobs on the basis of identity rather than on the basis of competence. As such, hiring poor writers and poor editors and poor managers who greenlight the poor writing produced by the poor writers and coming up with something that would make a 5 year old embarrassed for stating the obvious as if it's shocking, is a direct consequence of the "wokeness" of the game.
07mk
21hr ago
But I can't express that belief because of how obviously irrational it is. It's a demand for cosmic justice, not a real intellectual rebuttal. Yet I can't help it
On this meta issue, I wonder if this harmful tendency of humans to attach moral weight to empirical facts is fixable and if so, how that would work. I feel like it should be standard in schools, starting from as soon as any sort of essays or argumentation is taught, to always use examples of correct arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers extremely evil or odious (i.e. fascism, racism, murder, rape, genocide, slavery) to always use examples of incorrect arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers good (i.e. democracy, equal rights, feeding babies). Hard to implement, even harder to enforce. I'd also think that, if I were a teacher, I'd try to make sure that the most popular high status kids are assigned to make arguments in favor of the most apparently evil things and the least popular low status kids are assigned the ones in favor of the most universally beloved and apparently good things. But that's even harder to implement and enforce. But if I ever became emperor of Earth, I'd probably edit the common core to include something along these lines.
07mk
1d ago
I think you're not nearly cynical enough if you don't believe that the vast majority of them did believe him. Intentionally modifying one's own judgment faculties in order to honestly believe in things that are convenient for one's status within the ideology is basically ubiquitous among the more involved in the ideology, which is basically everyone in one of these departments. It's something Arthur Chu referenced a while ago on Slate Star Codex, that he "mindkills" himself regulary so that the tendencies in his brain that would be reluctant to SocJus claims can be appropriately suppressed
07mk
1d ago
You know the economy's going poorly when we're down to clipping parentheses, not just coins.
07mk
1d ago
The extra CW dimensions this story has taken on that it didn't need to is pretty fascinating. The core CW issue, of course, is DEI and the logical consequence of which, being Professor Jason Arday of the University of Cambridge. That would have been easily big enough to justify the huge kerfuffle that has been happening the past few weeks. But also, the story was broken by Nathan Cofnas on his personal Substack, and the first thing anyone in the mainstream talks about is Cofnas's "racial realist" views - summarized as "racist" - due to publicly holding HBD views, most famously from affirming Harvard's conclusion that affirmative action is needed for Harvard to have anything more than vanishingly few black undergrads (and extending the conclusion to cognitively-demanding industries/fields in general). Furthermore, Arday added on a layer of either suicide or drug overdose (or both, if we consider the latter is often an instantiation of the former). Which then led to this whole free speech row, with Arday's supporters openly calling for censorship of journalists if their subjects are sufficiently mentally unwell.
The part with Cofnas and HBD is the part I find most interesting right now. Almost everyone mentioning Cofnas is careful to call him a racist and mention that his racism doesn't affect the veracity of his claims, but also that it justifies the skepticism that Cambridge and Good Law Project (dunno their exact connection to Arday, but they were probably the biggest non-Cambridge defenders of Arday when the story first broke) had towards Cofnas's claims of plagiarism. This has led to a bunch of people on Twitter looking deeper into Cofnas's views and claims, researching HBD, and some of them openly defending him as having been tarred unfairly.
I doubt that this will lead to anything really big, but it would be pretty amazing if this affair of Arday led to enough more people to look into Cofnas's claims such that basic scientific facts about HBD become common knowledge or at least unforbidden knowledge. If so, it could very well have been the case that Jason Arday was a net positive for humanity in a way that he never would have been had he not been unjustly elevated to his stature thanks to DEI.
Where things become especially funny is when we consider the arguments in favor of censoring journalists who cover "vulnerable" people in light of Cofnas, rather than Arday. Of course, by the judgment of the proponents of censorship, Cofnas is too white and nerdy for it to be possible for him to be sufficiently mentally unwell as to justify censorship of negative journalism about him, and so it would never apply to him. I doubt that this principle playing out publicly in real-time will have any meaningful effect in the culture, but it's still amusing to watch.
07mk
1d ago
Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now. Most have higher female populations. Notre Dame is the only other topish school that has more males than females (guess conservatism or football draw). So the Ivies almost certainly moderately discriminate against females if anything.
You can't conclude that from that information. Perhaps it's an indication that it's worth investigating, but other elite schools having greater female proportion than Ivies doesn't indicate Ivies discriminating against females; it could be that a disproportionately high number and high quality of male students apply to Ivies compared to other elite schools.
It could also be that other elite schools discriminate in favor of females more than the Ivies do; this would at least support the notion that Ivies are relatively more discriminatory against females (by being less positively discriminatory in favor of them) compared to other elite schools. However, we would still need that applicant information to make such a conclusion.
07mk
1d ago
I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).
"Good" isn't a perfectly easily-definable term, but I'd say that anyone who truly believes that their enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous in that way is someone who can accurately be said to believe that they are on the side that is "good" in some meaningful way that their enemies aren't.
But also, believing that the "I win and you lose" ruleset is a particularly good way to guarantee forever that "I win and you lose" happens (which is very important, because if I lose and you win, then you will be particularly unscrupulous towards me) seems naive to the point of (self-)malice. A ruleset like that is just going to encourage people to circumvent the ruleset and also eventually subvert it, in a way that a ruleset that isn't just purely and obviously who/whom doesn't. And the only way to believe that such attempts to circumvent/subvert will never succeed is if one believes in some supernatural force willing it so, whether that's God or a god or the moral arc of history or whatever.
07mk
1d ago
Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.
That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out. Otherwise, that can invite alternate rulesets that are even harsher for oneself than it would have been towards others, and it can make that alternate ruleset both more likely and just in a way that the original ruleset wasn't. Thus one can genuinely believe that it's fantastic for oneself/one's party/one's ideology/etc. if one has unwavering faith that they are on the side of God right side of history, even if it is, in fact, not the case that it's fantastic for oneself. This, of course, is an obvious risk that immediately presents itself the moment you start dealing with faith, which is something that anyone who's had even a semester of higher education should find intuitive; that any college-educated people would fall for this is a tremendous condemnation of the higher education system as it exists today and certainly within the last few decades.
07mk
2d ago
I recently played thru FF7Rebirth and Mouse: PI For Hire (both around 7/10 experiences; former is not worth the hours, latter is barely worth the few hours which were needlessly extended with boring writing) each of which limited one only to 30 or 50 saves, so I had to juggle jumping to different save slots by the last ~1/3 of the game. I just started MGS: Delta (played 3 on PS2 back when it came out, 2x), and I'm already 10 saves in thru the prologue, and I'm dreading this one having a limit as well. It's maddening that any game made these days doesn't have the save limit as "as many as the drive will store" and decides to put in some artificial limiter, as if it were a live service game that depends on arbitrary limitations for monetization.
07mk
2d ago
This is why I included a parenthetical in a bracket in the other comment, to clarify the type of perception of lack of agency is involved. Eg slaves in USA in 1850 were known to lack agency, but that didn't confer any particular social or political capital. But that has only a little in common with how Arday was perceived or treated.
07mk
2d ago
That's fair; "definitionally" is wrong in my previous comment. But I do think that people subconsciously seeing you as lacking agency is sufficient for having social and political capital, just not necessary. There are other ways to accrue social and political capital such as by being a charismatic politician with a popular message, but in this case, going towards people who bought into a popular ideology that mandated to them that they perceive people like Arday as lacking agency seems to have been the method.
07mk
2d ago
Is it their social and political capital? Or is it that people subconsciously see them as lacking agency?
I'm not sure how "people subconsciously see you as lacking agency [(in a way that makes it morally obligatory for them to appease you)]" isn't basically definitionally "having social and political capital."
07mk
2d ago
i assume whoever has reported this has confirmed with the police/coroner/hospital
One of the many very depressing parts of the story is that, even if this assumption were correct (I believe it's more likely than not to be correct, but also depressingly, not by that much), it wouldn't allow us to gain much extra confidence in the claim that Jason Arday was found unresponsive and then declared dead.
07mk
2d ago
I’m 100% reading the biography about this.
I'm holding out hope that we'll see a Forrest Gump-style biopic about his life that takes all of his claims credulously, even ones that are mutually contradictory. Ending needs to be completely unironic in presenting him as an innocent victim of online bullying which was made up completely whole cloth by a racist racist who racistly targeted Arday for his race. I hope AI will be good enough that some random shitposter (e.g. me) make a truly Hollywood-level version of this using a few $20/month subscriptions within a few years, since I don't think Hollywood itself is likely to take the mantle (though a hilarious result that would make no one happy is if Uwe Boll decided to ride his right-wing wave from that vigilante film to create his Arday biopic).
I also wonder, though, if there would be copyright issues around Arday's claims about his life; these obviously aren't factual, but are they "statement of fact (which are false)" that can't be copyrighted, or are they copyrighted fiction that Arday's wife and kids now have a right to? If and when the donations from their adoring fans run out, perhaps they could get by on royalties from such a biopic (I'm presuming that he was supporting them financially)?
One big elephant in the room that some have already mentioned but which I think isn't being mentioned enough is the possibility of a post-credits sequence or sequel revealing Arday drinking margaritas with Epstein and Kenneth Lay at some fictional country that only rich people or those with connections know about. Given the lack of visual evidence (questionable even in the best of situations today due to AI and CG, and Arday's situation isn't the best) or reports detailing his death or body, I'm putting off my judgment. Blindly trusting people who go, "This is totally legit, believe me" is how this whole affair got rolling, after all.
07mk
2d ago
A little bit of a generational gap I feel sometimes is when I watch streamers/YouTubers playing singleplayer games with multiple save slots using one and exactly one slot for one playthrough, overwriting the previous save each time, without consideration for how they might want to re-load a previous save to get to a better state or that that one save file might corrupt itself and force a complete restart. Then I remember that modern games are overwhelmingly made such that it's impossible to lock yourself out of significant content or to soft-lock yourself by having too low-HP or something, and that corruption on modern SSDs/HDDs is so unlikely that the expected value of using staggered/rotating saves is negative from just the extra time wasted for no gain.
But I can't break myself out of such habits. Even today, the risk of such things in modern games on modern hardware aren't zero.
07mk
2d ago
I recall reading some short story either by Scott Alexander or linked from his site that had this sort of thing as a premise, except it was present/near-future with anthropogenic global warming as the rationale; in order to reduce carbon emissions, people were being sent the message from pop culture and educators and mainstream media of how responsible and cool it was to go into suicide booths, which exist all over the place, at least in the city in which the protagonist resided. IIRC, it ended, 1984-style, with the protagonist deciding that walking into one of those suicide booths was the really cool thing to do and doing so.
07mk
2d ago
The analogy to a tech worker prompting Claude, I suppose, is that the worker should not be praised for his coding skills. That part was outsourced to Claude, in the same way that the construction worker outsourced his muscles to the earthmover. But the worker is nonetheless doing some kind of work.
I'm not sure how else to think about it. Claude is essentially just a crane, but instead of digging dirt or moving rocks better/faster/more safely/etc. than a human can by hand like a crane, it produces useful text better/faster/etc. than a human can when typing out each word letter-by-letter. The human doesn't get credit or compensation for their biological strength to move those rocks, he gets them for manipulating the crane - the tool - that does the physical moving. And so the human doesn't get credit for choosing the individual words or the sentence structure of Claude's output, but rather gets them for manipulating Claude - the tool - that generates the useful text, by his choice of prompt.
So in a case where someone's being judged for their ability to order words in a way that's useful to humans, then they ought not be praised at all for using Claude. But if they're being judged for their ability to produce text that's useful for some goal, then they ought to be praised if they type in the proper terms into Claude that generate the text that is sufficiently useful.
The trouble I see here is that lots of people are looking at Claude (and genAI in general) and deciding, "Wow, I can generate useful text/images/video/etc. so well with it" and a bunch of other people are hearing, "Wow, I can take credit for having skills to manually put together useful text/image/video/etc. so well with it" despite them not sounding like each other.
07mk
2d ago
Human groups are unequal for a million different reasons. Expecting outcome equality between two groups should not intellectually be expected. Even without HBD, Thomas Sowell made a great argument for this with tons of examples.
The problem here is that we have a very strong, very powerful movement that is committed to equalizing all those million different reasons. And they're, IMHO, morally correct to do so - but even those who disagree could probably at least understand why someone would believe that equalizing those things is more fair and that we ought to make the world more fair. And if we were to equalize all those other non-HBD reasons, then only the HBD results will stand out - this is observed in countries where there is more equality in opportunity between men and women, which tend to have greater skew in males preferring "things-"oriented work and females preferring "people-"oriented work. Which will demand non-HBD explanation, thus leading to more and more "bigotry of the gaps" to battle via overt identity-based discrimination. This is where we are now.
So, from what I can tell, the "we don't need HBD to stop ridiculous DEI cases (like Arday)" experiment has been run, and it has failed.
07mk
7d ago
Wokeism = Secular Christianity. Scoop out the Holy trinity and you get the logical conclusion of championing the meek, the downtrodden, the oppressed.
This isn't true, though. Wokeism has a lot of similar principles, but it also attaches to it its own set of faith-based claims about reality. That's what makes so many people call it a religion (including myself, as far back as 2015 back when it was just called "social justice" - though, quite honestly, this should have been obvious even as far back as the late 00s, by my estimation), rather than merely an ideology. Its core tenets rely irreducibly on faith to support claims about how certain individuals are oppressed by other individuals in society.
07mk
7d ago
“Alternative ways of knowing” have next to zero impact on the vast majority of progressive politics.
I'm not sure how one could even quantify this to enough of an extent to support such a statement. Perhaps you could come up with a way of measuring things such that this is true, but you'd have to be counting the stuff they have in common with virtually every other movement - akin to how humans, chimps, and mice share like 90%+ of the same DNA or something - because whatever sets apart progressive policies pushed by the typical/powerful modern progressive from bog-standard liberal is certainly mostly a consequence of "alternative ways of knowing." I.e. personal revelation, which is never called that but rather often "lived experience," based on the idea that we can judge the veracity of someone's claims about reality based purely on their identity, which is what holds up all of the stuff about "white/male/cis/etc. privilege," which itself holds up almost all of the specific policies that the typical/powerful modern progressive pushes for.
People can and do argue any number of progressive policies—police, borders, reparations—on the boring ol’ grounds of facts and logic. That doesn’t change when some jackass decides to mock mathematics for being too white.
Correct. I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment, though. Some progressives still exist who are still committed to facts and logic. Sadly, they have about a homeopathic level of impact and influence in modern progressive politics. I fantasize that many of us exist, and that we're just cowards who try not to be noticed lest we be cut down, but that's probably just typical mind fallacy + wishful thinking.
07mk
7d ago
I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it.
I haven't lived in Korea for too long for my experience to matter, but my experience with Korean relatives who live (and only ever lived) in Korea is that this is a lie we like to spread out to the rest of the world because it makes us feel superior. We have less issue, but it's a stretch to say that the issue is little.
Guardianship is different from enslaving, though. It's perhaps adjacent, but for mentally disabled people, it's based on the individual actually being mentally disabled rather than group-based identity (though obviously the subset of mentally disabled people do end up forming an identity group). For children, there's more than just lower intelligence, including relative inexperience, weakness, smaller size, and maturity (associated with intelligence, but arguably different), as well as the fact that it's definitionally a stage of life that literally everyone has to have passed through to become not-children (or baby or infant or etc.), so it's got a set per-individual expiration date.
If, by some miracle, the current state of scientific literature on IQ and intelligence and correlations between races and other genetic groups became common knowledge tomorrow, I'm skeptical that a movement to bring US race relations back to pre-Civil War times would be successful. We've gone several generations now since not just the Civil War, but also the Civil Rights movement. "Equality" as a virtue has become so engrained in this society that the most effective anti-equality forces right now are succeeding because they're pushing it under the spoken justification of equalizing old inequality. In that setting, this becoming common knowledge isn't going to somehow be the tipping point to a neo-Confederate takeover. In a way, it's cosmic justice for slavery that fear of bringing it back has so mind-killed so many people at so many places of power that it has gone to cause real harm in our ability to understand the world, which in turn has caused real harm to lots and lots of undeserving individuals.
Given the prevailing desire for equality (with a rather unhealthy dose of desire for equity) in America, I'd be more concerned about some mandatory reparations program justified not based on history but rather based on group IQ, where I, as an immigrant, no longer have an excuse to disqualify myself. And I'm pretty sure if we do go full Harrison Bergeron, whatever comes out in reality is guaranteed to be a thousand times stupider than what was in fiction. What would be interesting is if it compels some serious investment into genetic engineering and gene therapy research especially in relation to intelligence and race, in order to equalize the averages over generations, Bene Gesserit-style.
If AGI/ASI really does arrive and make our own human intelligence obsolete anyway, this would also complicate things somewhat, as financial status could become decoupled from intelligence. Or if not, everyone belonging to certain races could be given earrings with a free Claude subscription for life, in an effort to achieve equity between races which, depending on how things go, could be counterproductive or work too well or both.
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