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2rafa


				

				

				
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2rafa


				
				
				

				
15 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 06 11:20:51 UTC

					

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User ID: 841

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I don't necessarily believe in "if this happens, it's definitely a blowout" with regards to the NY governor race. I agree Hochul is likely to win but NY, like the rest of New England in a more exaggerated way, has interesting local political dynamics and because of the distribution of the city/suburbs/upstate split a relatively modest discontentment with the (perceived) weak-on-crime policies of the Democrats in the city and even moreso the suburbs could put a Republican in the governor's mansion.

Sure, there's a decades-long history of forensic gait analysis (long predating AI of course) in criminology. A nice overview is here. It's actively employed in China integrated with AI, although not widely in the West. In the West, gait analysis by experts has been a feature of trials for a long time - even before CCTV, it was used (and still is) on footprints left at crime scenes to identify suspects.

The challenge, of course, is that for now the applications of current forensic gait analysis are highly limited. The lack of comprehensive gait libraries for the wider population means that, unlike DNA (at least in recent memory) it's generally only used to support attempts to prove a suspect on trial was or was not someone in video footage. The real benefit is in scanning a library of millions or billions of hours of video taken from a network of surveillance cameras (which have ideally already been used to build up a 'library' of the entire population) to find possible 'matches' (the search space can be narrowed by geography and other quantitative or qualitative information recorded by police) in the general public, just like police DNA databases and Ancestry.com data are today.

In the West, research has been slow for a while. It's generally focused on identifying diseases like Parkinsons, the racing industry uses it for analysing horses etc, so a lot of Western research uses Lidar and multiple cameras; these achieve extremely high accuracy (often over 90%), but obviously aren't hugely helpful when the footage is actually blurry black-and-white CCTV at night.

US cities are already reversing facial recognition bans, New Orleans did just a few months ago iirc. If it works, it will happen.

Don’t hang the Turkish flag out of your car if you can avoid it?

Although, to be fair, this doesn't explain why French wealth inequality appears to be low

France created a parallel bureaucratic elite of people who don't make a lot of money but who have a huge amount of 'status' in French society (and who monopolize places on the prep school - grandes ecoles - senior bureaucrat pipeline (funded by the state)). They might not technically be 'rich', but pure wealth in France means less than it does in the Anglosphere. Everything runs on patronage, money is often less important than power, things like the Academie Francaise and certain senior intellectual positions are arguably more coveted than senior jobs in finance or in the management of large corporations. It's the last Western culture that has preserved a major tradition of 'public intellectuals' with actual influence.

The article that @George_E_Hale linked suggests that scientists think it’s only a handful of individual orcas that are responsible for all the attacks, and that they might be motivated by revenge after a sailing boat caused injury to one. It’s pretty interesting. I doubt it’s a ‘humans are bad’ meme, as yet they don’t seem interested in killing humans themselves even though they easily could.

There’s a lot of research into studying the way other intelligent animals communicate, but much less on actually attempting to communicate with them. Many scientists consider it unethical even to try. There should be a far greater public investment into seeing whether complex communication with cognitively advanced animals like dolphins/orcas, elephants and octopuses is possible. Primatologists do this, but only because with great apes the similarities with us are so undeniable.

Now that LLMs have shown how banal a lot of human cognition is, there is a strong case that a ‘strong dividing line’ between us and other smart animals might be more of a blur, and lesser but still intelligent species could well be capable of reasoning about the world in ways we’ve largely dismissed or ignored.

In big cities having three or four kids is a sign of either wealth or poverty. Maintaining a semi-affluent PMC existence becomes impossible on all but the highest doctor/lawyer/banker incomes with four children. Unless the kids are very close together they need multiple nannies, at least 2-3 rooms at hotels when you travel, a full-time housekeeper to clean up (or stay at home parent), a much larger apartment or a house and so on.

People struggle to either get used to a lifestyle well below their means (often little better than people on much more modest incomes who live in welfare states that provide generous per-child benefits, free childcare etc) or are in a constant financial struggle even if they make a nominally very comfortable income. You have to really want it.

That said, I grew up with two siblings and my parents always say they wished they had a fourth child. In their case it’s at least partially because they eventually had more money than they expected to, though.

There’s a very amusing irony to internet socialists claiming patriarchy is the result of capitalism.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels discuss ‘patriarchy’ in an interesting and sometimes under-remarked upon way. They don’t support or criticize it, necessarily, but they analyze it. As most know, they say that patriarchy or the general form of family relations is essentially a form of property relationship that, in securing paternity, allows for the inheritance of private property (principally land).

Interestingly, Marx and Engels also argued that patriarchy was in terminal decline by the mid 19th century, because capitalism (a) made conditions so poor for proletarians that most had no property to pass on, reducing the power of the patriarch and (b) women increasingly had their own wealth because capitalism pressed them (and children) into the labor market, also reducing the power of the patriarch.

So the great irony is that while, yes, Marx and Engels weren’t ‘defenders’ of patriarchy and did indeed criticize the effect on women of socially conservative societal norms (especially in bourgeois society, where they were personally more comfortable), they actually considered many aspects of patriarchy to be in severe decline under capitalism due to the profit incentive and desire of capitalists to erode the traditional family to grow their workforce.

In other words, Karl Marx himself thought capitalism eroded patriarchy.

I don’t think there’s anything necessarily appealing for poor whites about the ‘Democrats’ vision’ but it seems straightforwardly likely that a Democratic supermajority and subsequent huge expansion of the federal government’s welfare programs, tax credits, housing support, childcare and so on would probably benefit those below the net-contributor threshold.

They don’t lose much either, and the US largely allows Turkey to conduct its own foreign policy in the region that while not mostly hostile to the U.S. is more ‘adjacent’ than fully-aligned. The large military is a reality of the neighborhood. Refugees are a choice and, as the OP said, Erdogan doesn’t particularly want them to go home. US and Israeli support for Kurds is relatively timid and largely limited to support (in America’s case) for Iraqi Kurdistan, which Erdogan himself appears to have mixed feelings about and which Turkey has long attempted to improve relations with.

The main hostility from the West is from the usual civil liberties groups who whine about every conservative leader from Budapest to Jerusalem. Inside Europe it’s from Germans and Austrians who host large populations of Anatolian peasants that have in many cases become the backbone (along with Albanians) of their countries’ criminal underworlds. It’s unclear whether this means much to Erdogan.

It’s trivial to attach LLMs to a database of known information (eg. Wikipedia combined with case law data, government data, Google books’ library, whatever) and have them ‘verify’ factual claims. The lawyers in this case could have asked ChatGPT if it made up what it just said and there’s a 99% chance it would have replied “I’m sorry, it appears I can find no evidence of those cases” even without access to that data. GPT-4 already hallucinates less. As Dase said, it is literally just a matter of attaching retrieval and search capability to the model to mimic our own discrete memory pool, which LLMs by themselves do not possess.

People latching onto this with the notion that it “proves” LLMs aren’t that smart are like an artisan weaver pointing to a fault with an early version of the Spinning Jenny or whatever and claiming that it proves the technology is garbage and will never work. We already know how to solve these errors.

Is it me or does $6000 a year for a ‘catastrophic plan’ with a $10,000 deductible for someone under 30 seem extremely expensive?

It’s unfortunately very difficult for foreign doctors to get residency in the US, part of a very deliberate effort to ensure high labor prices for doctors. Glad that your wife seems happy now though.

None of those prompts ask explicitly if the previous output was fictional, which is what generally triggers a higher-quality evaluation.

The point is that a banal statement about animal interaction doesn't necessarily allow you to deduce every human moral precept, many of which run directly contrary to the 'laws of nature'.

Thanks for this great link. I'm often skeptical of arguments that people in previous generations were better orators and rhetoricians; many modern speechwriters would be capable of a Lincoln or a Churchill speech, their style is just considered 'cringe' now. Still, there is much good content here.

Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented

Very prescient. The entire American opioid epidemic exists not because of the Sacklers, or "muh Purdue", but because of a cult of pain-avoidance that spread through American society from the mid-20th century onwards. Certainly this was exploited by opioid manufacturers, but really 'pain is the fifth vital sign' was only the outcome of a broader societal shift toward the amelioration of pain at all costs. Older people (especially those who have done much manual labor) have suffered from back pain, joint pain etc. for millions of years (obviously). Only in late 20th century America did this necessitate 'treatment' with powerful narcotics.

Jewish criticism of the ADL is hardly uncommon. In any case, I highly doubt that a lack of antisemitism is why the Democrats aren’t doing well with the white working class.

Is not one of the longstanding criticisms of common law that, unlike in inquisitorial legal systems, common law sees the courts as ‘referee’ rather than ‘assessor’, allowing guilty pleas as a kind of surrender to the law as charged, rather than as written?

I think this is probably unconstitutional, but pleading guilty makes it much less likely the law is ultimately ruled as such.

Do Trump Supporters Actually Want To Win?

Prompted by this sanctimonious, if interesting, FT column. Emphasis mine:

Just because liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue doesn’t mean populist voters have yearned for it to the same degree. How much of his base did Trump lose after failing to build that wall on the Mexican border?

DeSantis believes that politics is downstream of culture, that culture is shaped in institutions, that conservatives have ceded those institutions to the organised left. The Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn’t just diagnose the problem. He is creative and dogged in installing a rightwing counter-hegemony. Ask Disney. Ask the educational bureaucracies of Florida. This is more thought and work than Trump has ever put in to the cause. It is also perfectly beside the point. I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war.

For a long time, a certain pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump, if you want) narrative on the 'intellectual right' was that there was no real alternative to Trump. Sure, they conceded that most criticisms of Trump-the-man were correct, but this was the Flight 93 Election. The alternatives were all versions of Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio, who didn't say the things Trump occasionally did. We can restate the Flight 93 theory like this:

"Trump is vulgar, he's a liar, he's a cheat, he violates conservative or even general principles of decorum and morality. However, he's the only person even discussing the things we care about with a large public audience, and therefore it is a conservative responsibility to vote for him even if this amounts, merely, to a roll of the dice. If he wins, there's a chance he might do some of what he promises. The only alternative to Trump is certain defeat."

DeSantis' presence complicates the Flight 93 theory. DeSantis has a record of some competence on conservative issues. Certainly not enough for the very online dissident right, but they had soured on Trump by late 2017 themselves, and so have no horse in this race. Whether DeSantis of Yale and Harvard is a 'true believer' is a complicated question, but then again the same could be said about Trump of New York via Wharton; the former certainly seems a much more capable administrator.

The column posits that Trump's success against DeSantis in this phony war stage of the 2024 primary campaign is a case of "vibes based politics" winning over 'substance based politics'. In 2016, intellectual conservatives could defend Trump because - whatever the vibes were - he was the only candidate on substance, too. In 2023, the banality of Trump's support is more clear. Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won? Was it less 'build the wall' and more who the frontman for building the wall was? The smart case for Trump would seem to be reducible to:

  1. DeSantis is a "phony" or establishment conservative who will turn in office and resign himself to implementing the Mitch McConnell checklist of tax cuts, deregulation, more money for the military and cutting some welfare spending. The problem with this is that Trump was in office and accomplished little but (some of) the above, and hardly has a lifelong history of staunch conservative politics himself. If the problem is associating with elite circles, Trump has a long history of the same.

  2. DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can. This argument is more persuasive, if only because Trump's record shows he has technically convinced enough people in the right places to vote for him to show he can win. But Trump also lost a presidential election, never hit a 50% approval rating (even once, something Biden has apparently managed) and seems not to be experiencing any great groundswell of public support from swing voters. The promise of Trump is now tainted by the reality of Trump, so MAGA might ring slightly more hollow to those who aren't true believers.


liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue

I love this line because thinking about what your enemies fear is often an interesting thought experiment. Republicans are being presented with a choice between Trump and an American Viktor Orban. Nothing is settled, but they appear to strongly prefer the former.

Wanting certain ideas in Israel: The only acceptable idea, and opposing them is extremism.

Is George Soros an extremist anti-Israeli?

Soros, who is Jewish, echoed arguments that have fueled a passionate debate conducted largely in the rarefied world of academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the U.S. Jewish community.

“The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism,” wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.

The truth is that while Michelle Goldberg types exist, for the most part Jewish progressives who oppose rightist white identitarianism in America also oppose rightist Jewish identitarianism in Israel. They may indulge discussion about an 'ancestral homeland', but they're not protesting against Israeli immigration law or for the removal of migrants in South Tel Aviv either. George Soros is the primary financier of a long legal campaign to limit the deportation of African migrants to Israel, is the primary backer of the Israeli Arab lobby etc. The ADL is torn between being a progressive organization and being a Zionist organization, its own (Jewish) staffers are now openly more and more anti-Zionist.

Is there some hypocrisy? Sure. That's not limited to Jews. Rightist ethnats often think whites should remain in South Africa even though it's actually the ancestral homeland of the Khoisan. They're unsympathetic to arguments that Australia should be ceded back to the natives there. Hypocrisy is hardly uncommon in politics. 'This for me but not for thee' is perennial. What's your point?

I enjoy corporate biopics because I don't read (almost) any long-form non-fiction. That said, there has been - like you say - a huge glut of these over the past decade, and most are overlong, uninteresting and kind of pointless, in that the stories they cover just aren't very interesting and the drama feels fake because the characters have to become caricatures, almost like they're acting in Silicon Valley (the show), in order to create tension or excitement.

The Social Network was elevated by Sorkin's writing and Eisenberg's acting, but it was also good because the story itself was great, lots of stuff happened, there was drama, and the personal journeys of the characters were compelling reflected in the 'business' storyline. It also had one of the best taglines in the history of cinema.

Thanks for the review, I'm excited to see the movie. Unfortunately it's not available to stream and there seems to be no UK release date, so I'll be waiting.

Trump is absolutely despised by everybody who sees The United States as a resource to be mined, packaged, and sold, and those same people seem to like DeSantis.

Those same people did very well under Trump though, nearly across the board. If you want to punish generic "people in power", the evidence suggests that electing Trump seems like a bad idea. Not only did they lose no power, asset prices boomed alongside New York Times subscriptions. Nobody was better for Trump's enemies than him.

So it goes with Trump. Through Trump's eyes, it's not a policy issue, it's a good versus evil issue. The swamp is destroying America and selling the remains to globalist.

Trump can’t even describe how the swamp is destroying America. That’s exactly what Hanania says. Trump is probably the most pro-vaccine prominent politician in the GOP because he couldn’t let go of his personal belief that it’s a great achievement even as the base radicalized beyond him. Trump can’t explain why he isn’t a ‘globalist’.

I agree that Trump is the original, the real deal. But the real deal is a consummate showman, not a serious person. Some call it catharsis but it’s not really that, it’s entertainment. Trump is an entertaining guy, personally. He’s very funny. You can laugh at and with him, which is rare. He’s a great American character, not a demagogue, and that’s why Hanania thinks he’ll win (the primary).

Planning to riot if you lose isn’t cheating, it’s one of the oldest democratic traditions.

In reality the only people competing for rental apartments with American expats in Mexico City are the Mexican upper-middle class, who for the most part are indistinguishable in politics (and complexion) from the PMC of the rest of North America.