I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.
I don’t know, if you talk to a lot of modern academic philosophers (and I think we have a couple here anyway) they often seem to acknowledge that almost everything has been said before in some way, and a lot of modern philosophy is kind of opinion journalism discussing these ideas in slightly different ways, their relationships with each other, and their application to modern technologies, ideas, and political and social developments.
There are a lot of ‘original’ ideas in Enlightenment philosophy that have strong similarities to ideas in eg buddhist philosophy from a thousand (or thousands) of years earlier, it’s not even a ‘new’ problem.
2rafa
11hr ago
This is just a difference in the way status works in same-sex groups between men and women. As is often said, women like complaining without advice more than men do, because masculinity has more emphasis on agency. A man who complains that he settled is low status even if he’s only voicing how many men feel, a woman who does is sharing in a kind of same-gender camaraderie.
The criticism of prediction markets is mostly valid but also largely applies to existing derivatives markets. The platform held bets about whether Israel would bomb Gaza? Commodities traders make those bets every day in far larger and more liquid markets.
Ban prediction markets from sports-related contracts (and ban fanduel and sports betting apps too) because making it too easy for working class men to gamble away their income and savings is probably bad for society and call it a day.
Society has to protect most people from taking extreme risks at least some of the time. Unlike, say, limiting all credit for poor people by capping rates, making gambling harder has few downsides.
2rafa
1d ago
The problem is that while this is very true, and while they may eventually realize their mistakes (emphasis on may; there are plenty of upper middle class white libs in places like Brazil and South Africa), by that point it will be far too late to fix anything - see Lebanon. So “I told you so” is at most a brief, meaningless future catharsis in a worse world. These people need to be removed from any power now.
2rafa
2d ago
So, Jeff is public enough that he names his Fortnite account after his island and himself, but privacy conscious enough that he immediately goes private as soon as he’s “discovered” (and not when the files were released, by the way, but when gamers online start talking about it)?
If they were going to kill him, they’d have done so before he made it back to New York to be arrested by the FBI.
If they were going to fake his death, they’d have had his plane ‘crash’ or have him die quietly of a heart attack three months before the FBI was ready to arrest him.
If your response to this is “yeah but doing it in a Manhattan jail makes it less suspicious”, clearly that isn’t the case, a locked-room mystery is so much more exciting. If Epstein had died (or “died”) in January 2019 in his Paris mansion of a heart attack none of this global scandal would ever have happened. You really can’t overstate this; the powers that be are powerful enough to perform a perfect exfiltration from a high rise high security Manhattan jail, pay off or threaten everyone involved, find a body double, hack every camera or disable them etc etc, but they can’t get a heads up on an FBI investigation, despite them being so leaky that even mid level mafiosos usually know they’re coming? Nah.
As an aside, old people have vastly poorer reaction times. Epstein would be in his 70s; gamers in that age range don’t really play shooters anymore, they play MMOs, RPGs, strategy games.
2rafa
2d ago
So you guys have all these separate accounts and then reconcile your credit card spending at the end of the month by carefully transferring the appropriate funds from one to the other? Sounds like a lot of work.
2rafa
4d ago
This is true and succinctly put in a way it often isn’t, but I agree with the others that it’s more a temporary feature than a permanent one.
The right got so tired of losing that to some extent it redefined winning to mean “a Republican president doing anything”. Fuentes was cheering on the US regime change op in Venezuela, relative economic libcons were begrudgingly saying well tariffs on China are probably necessary etc.
The left is still in the wilderness. Part of it is that Trump hasn’t actually done anything to hurt upper-middle class progressives yet. The Roe reversal doesn’t affect them because they live in blue states. Tariffs were limited / chickened out of pretty quickly, at least the ones with the potential for the most serious impact. Few illegal maids and housekeepers and gardeners have been deported yet. The economy is fine, markets are strong. What is the message from the left? ICE shot someone in Minnesota? Most Americans don’t care.
While I agree with most of what you write:
Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart
This isn’t true. Until last year the freshman classes in the Ivy League were like 12-15% black, those students (especially in that class and that environment) weren’t only dating other black people.
Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?
‘Elite’ or niche subcultures never become common in the same form. So the libertine sensibilities of the Greenwich Village beatniks in the ‘50s became free love for college students (a much smaller proportion of high school graduates back then) in the late ‘60s and then became John Hughes / suburban teenage picket fence Americana for the wider middle class in the very late ‘70s and ‘80s. Teenagers who had casual sex in 1985 didn’t typically share the leftist, third worldist politics of many of the hippies on communes eighteen or twenty years earlier.
2rafa
6d ago
China wanted its bubble to pop because BYD's engineers can rent condos for far less per square meter than what GM engineers can.
China didn’t want its bubble to pop and the state took extreme action to (1) prevent the housing bubble from popping and (2) once it partially did, prevent on-paper values from collapsing to prevent extreme public anger. To illustrate, while data is scarce, since the bubble burst in 2022/3 Chinese house prices have fallen by about 2.5% per year. The worst affected cities maybe 5%.
By contrast, after the US housing bubble burst in 2007, property prices in the worst affected cities (like Phoenix) fell by over 50%.
In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.
It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.
I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.
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