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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Europe at this point has been so thoroughly captured by US propaganda that the chances of it breaking with the US geopolitical line are basically nil; ergo, an American academic who moves to Europe will just be serving the same camp in the clash of civilisations for less money.
Ironically, though, European academia is actually less captured by US-style DEI; we can broadly still fail students for being bad with no regard to disparate impact or whatever, and I haven't seen explicit political allegiance tests in hiring. The truest of true believers in the US might therefore find Europe unsatisfactory, and get concentrated further in the US by evaporative cooling.
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5mo ago
I'm generally convinced that at least getting the vaccines was sensible (and pushing their roll-out was good policy, though the compulsion to take them was deeply illiberal), but this data doesn't seem too compelling to me considering the obvious confounders. I would assume Red America to have a significantly larger number of old and unhealthy people with inadequate access to medical care.
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5mo ago
I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
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5mo ago
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
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5mo ago
That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.
If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?
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5mo ago
Right, I think I addressed that in the longer paragraph above. At least as I remember it, the dismissal of Epstein being Israeli intel did implicitly rely on dismissing the joint probability of the entire theory. If there is in fact a positive correlation between "Israeli intel" and "pedo coverup conspiracy", the conditional evidence flow actually almost appears to reverse - rather than having "Epstein is Israeli intel & there was a pedo coverup conspiracy in his case" being especially unlikely because the two components are individually unlikely (or even more unlikely, if conspiracy theorists are posited to succumb to their usual temptation to see all conspiracy tropes the moment they catch a whiff of one), we now have P(Israeli intel | pedo coverup conspiracy) and P(pedo coverup conspiracy | Israeli intel) both greatly increased over the baseline probabilities, and evidence of either one also amounts to evidence of the other.
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.
As I understand, his reading here is that (1) this case provides evidence that the US government and criminal justice system puts higher value on Israeli intelligence interests over prosecution of pederasts, and are willing and able to engage in perversions of justice and coordinate gaslighting of any public observers to implement this preference; (2) for the "there is nothing particularly fishy about Epstein" theory, the assumption that the above conjunction is wrong is load-bearing. The argument generally is one of compounding implausibility - "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" is an extraordinary claim, as is "the USG first sabotaged any legal means to stop him, and then killed him or arranged for him to kill himself when it could no longer be delayed", as is "the USG apparatus successfully conspired to maintain official denial the aforementioned facts", so a theory that requires the three of them to hold is extraordinary indeed - unless the three statements are not in fact independent, in which case the resulting probability may in the extreme case just almost equal the probability of the single proposition of "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" alone, which looks a lot better when weighed off against the "series of unfortunate events" null hypothesis.
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
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5mo ago
the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship
What is this supposed to mean? The US allows dual citizenship explicitly, and there is no shortage of official US government material acknowledging this possibility and even outlining special rules surrounding it. How much more recognising can you get than writing "U.S. dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country (or countries, if they are nationals of more than one). " in official communication?
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5mo ago
Assuming AI use is kept up (whether by compulsion or voluntarily), 1.5-2.5 years (70% confidence interval), maybe?
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5mo ago
The popular interpretation is of course something about stupid managers following a hype train, but I imagine there is a more charitable explanation along the lines that AI adoption (/workforce replacement) can be expected to result in an increase in productivity and profits once an initial trough of decreased productivity is overcome by building experience and figuring out the best way to integrate AI. The sort of long-term planning that requires going against local incentive gradients (in this case, forcing workers to use AI even if it is detrimental to their productivity for now) is exactly what upper management is there for; if workers/subdivisions doing what is currently optimal were always a winning strategy, management could easily be replaced by a simple profit-based incentive scheme.
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5mo ago
But does the former class not also vote Republican? Folklore seems to say that they do, and are motivated by a mixture of "willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing" and spite ("we suffer either way, but at least this way we get to wipe the smug grins off the city-dwellers' faces").
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Right. I mean, I think it would be progress if the "humans > AI" camp habitually named objectively quantifiable things that they themselves can do and they assert the LLMs can't, which aren't gotchas that depend on differences that are orthogonal to intelligence as usually understood ("touch your nose 5+8 times"). We could then weigh those things against all the things the LLMs can do that the speaker can't (like, solve IMO problems), and argue about which side of the delta looks more like intelligence.
Currently, I'm really not seeing much of that; the arguments all seem to cherry-pick historical peaks of human achievement ("can AI write a symphony?"), be based on vibes ("my poems are based on true feelings, rather than slop") or involve Russell conjugation ("I cleverly inject literary references and use phrasing that reflects my education; the AI stochastically parrots").
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I mean, LLMs have solved IMO problems. If that does not count as reasoning, then I do not think 99% of living humans count as being capable of reasoning either.
Asserting AI inferiority based on the remaining 1% begins looking awfully like a caricature of a neonazi (unemployed alcoholic school dropout who holds himself superior to a white-collar immigrant because some guy of his ethnicity wrote a symphony two hundred years ago).
In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!
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5mo ago
I can't say I'm not enjoying how LLM training keeps producing hard evidence for everything we low-agreeableness people have been claiming since times immemorial.
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5mo ago
Scott talked about beliefs as tribal membership signals. If belief in the rule of law were easy, it would have no value as a signal.
(Why force the beliefs to pay double duty as underpinnings of civilisation and tribal membership signals? Well, if they are also the latter, it actually adds an incentive to profess them even when personally inconvenient.)
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5mo ago
Looking at that thread you linked, I am more leaning towards the theory that @hydroacetylene is KulakRevolt, based on politics, the particular style of deflection when they want to deflect, and most of all the curious dedication to the idea of frustrating stylometry/basilisks with artificial tics (Kulak's forwards-from-grandma punctuation, hydroacetylene's "French autocorrect").
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5mo ago
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
Assisted suicide is not morally analysed or perceived as the assistant killing the recipient by those who support it.
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns?
I think the answer many would give is "in an ideal world, no". Unarmed British police are admired all over the continent.
This seems like an important one, right?
Really, no. Germany and Austria have seen a lot of lethal bladed-weapon attacks by our dear immigrants in recent years, but sentiment to the effect of "if only a victim/bystander could have killed the assailant first" was almost never voiced as far as I could see. (Fantasies took the shape of overwhelming/tacking/disarming the attacker.) The value system is really that different. Try to not typical-mind as much.
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5mo ago
Man, don't shoot the messenger here. I'm trying to explain my understanding of an ethos here, not grandstand about it being my position. Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive. Going with my previous metaphor, you may be saying something to the effect of "but they only want to have sex with minors who are really asking for it" - the difference just does not matter to those who perceive sex with minors to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details, and a lot of people in Europe also likewise perceive killing to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details. There is really a complete disconnect of moral intuitions here, with both sides finding the other barbaric - if the story is "Texas home owner shot robber who was running away with his TV", classical Americans will be cheering, while Europeans (+Europeanised American urbanites) will be cheering to lock the home owner up. Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
I don't really see why that's bad - presumably even Europeans want their military, soldiers, spies etc. to do their jobs.
It's complicated. I think a decade or so ago the answer from a narrow majority actually would have been "no", if that job involves actual killing. Now, some of them still will say "no", many more will prefer to not think about it, and many will think something to the effect of "yes for external enemies, but this is not a principle on which you can run a civilised society internally". I'd imagine that even people who are deep in pro-UA brainrot territory in countries like Germany would more often than not balk at the idea that counterintelligence should kill Russian spies inside Germany.
It arguably wouldn't actually be a good swap for the US to get European gun violence levels if it also meant getting European attitudes and regulations towards air conditioning! And that's without getting into values-based stuff like free-speech rights.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation. Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
What makes it superior for sporting over either something like a hunting rifle, or something like a fairground gun that shoots tiny bullets of a few millimetres calibre? It's hard to believe that the knowledge that you are "sporting" with a weapon that would be a prime choice for actually killing people, and preparing/building skills for a hypothetical situation in which you would want to kill someone, is not an important factor in the choice; the circumstance that actual use of civilian firearms appears pretty strongly correlated with the belief that there should be a legal way to kill people further supports this interpretation.
is a lot like saying that the primary purpose of alcoholic drinks is to get cirrhosis of the liver.
If the development of alcoholic drinks were driven by people trying to find better ways to get cirrhosis of the liver, there still were large and massively funded organisations deliberately binge-drinking to the point of getting it and gatherings of alcoholic drink enjoyers regularly involved enthusiastic arguments which cocktail gets you more scar tissue faster, and the most popular fictional depictions of alcoholic drinks all involved flashy celebrations of how they induce cirrhosis, then maybe this comparison would work.
As it stands, the argument comes across as being more in the class of arguing that CP (AI-generated, to dispel the most obvious counterargument) should be legal and easily available, and its principal purpose is artistic edification (chosen for being a similarly nebulous term as "sporting", distinguished from its lower-status counterpart "sexual gratification"/"fantasizing about killing", resp., only by the speaker's attitude towards the act), but incidentally you also find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to have sex with minors wrong. (That's approximately an actual constellation of ideas some pre-1990 libertines over here in Europe had!)
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5mo ago
Having a purpose that in turn is mostly a means to an end that is killing is not the same as being directly, immediately, specifically only good for killing (and various activities wherein the fun is contingent on imagining them as practice for killing people under the right circumstances).
That the common European value system ignores these basic truths is not a recommendation in its favor.
I don't think it ignores any "basic truths" that there are in what you wrote, and evidently this argument is not persuasive to those that subscribe to it. As it stands, there is a negligible amount of the older American ethos making inroads in the rest of the world, but the anti-gun value system is capturing large swathes of the US population - if you care for gun rights, it would be more reasonable to try and find new arguments rather than digging in your heels about the old apologetic tradition and dismiss competing views as "divorced from reality".
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5mo ago
Eh, I think it is probably correct that かのじょ is an innovation! To begin with, it's an awkward mixed kun-on reading that just makes it look more pronominal over the natural かのおんな which is really just that woman, and there is no reason to believe かれ or あれ should originally be gendered - indeed, in the Genji quote it refers to a female character (Lady Kiritsubo), and in deliberately old-fashioned speech you still find lots of examples of あれ referring to females.
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5mo ago
#NotAllDolphins
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first), and given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
For 編集, at least, kotobank has citations from a 13th-century Zen Buddhist tractate ("Historians may 編集 this into an example of [some form of meditation]..."), and a 1656 translation that evidently uses the "compilation"-editing meaning ("Having resolved to do so in last year's spring, [I?] 編集 a 20-volume book called Shinpi Ketsudanshou").
edit: I also want to dispute the novelty of かれ as a pronoun. It's simply an older (perhaps regional? I have little intuition for what just fell out of prestige language use due to the west->east power shift) form of あれ that slots regularly into the this-that(close)-that(far)-which determiner pattern: これ・それ・あれ（かれ）・だれ, この・その・あの（かの）・どの, こなた・そなた・あなた（かなた）・どなた. If you have any exposure to period-drama or fake-oldtimesey speech, you might have heard かのもの with a very emphatically up-pitched か for "that person". It didn't take long to find an example of かれ being used as a personal pronoun all the way back in the Tale of Genji.
I'm fairly sure most top hard-science academics are in favour of meritocracy. The relevant belief they have is instead in blank-slatism: as a matter of faith, they do not accept heredity of merit, especially as correlated with visible social/ethnic group belonging. From this they conclude that apparent differences of outcome between groups must not be due to differences in merit, and a proper meritocracy would not generate them.
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