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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Eh, this seems very dependent on whom you include under "Reds". If the actual (historical) Commies count as Blue, then surely their Yankee rivals should count as Red - and the Cold War era was rife with missionary wars to bring Democracy and Capitalism to other countries. You can stretch the line into the past all the way to Matthew Perry forcing Japan open to international trade, and into the future at least to Iraq, which was sold by its Red cheerleaders as Operation Iraqi LibertyFreedom. Now, you could argue that all the democracy-bombing was window dressing and each instance was actually motivated by hard geopolitical and economic interest, but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies? Isn't the best ideological window dressing one that the NPCs on your side fanatically subscribe to? Also, if you are fighting a civilisational battle, is ideological conversion even distinguishable from hard geopolitical interests?
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
That is a reasonable approximation of my model of Blue Tribe.
Well, how is it not also a reasonable approximation of the Red Tribe also? The sad reality is that the quote really should go, "when I am weaker, I ask for freedom because that is according to the principles we all claim to have; when I am stronger, I take away freedom because that is according to the principles we actually all share".
The progressives, in their many years of relative weakness, had me bamboozled; I'm not inclined to repeat that mistake with the other camp now in the #resistance.
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1mo ago
Man I thought woke cancel culture was insane in their assault on academic freedom and free speech on campuses but this seems to be going up a whole nother level.
In what way is it a higher level? The other camp has actually gotten people fired for expressing political opinions that seem pretty commensurate with the pro-progressive noises Terry has made. He is not even getting fired or having his career seriously threatened, but is just being subjected to some inconvenience (much greater for his students). Even the fallout to students is not without mirror precedent: at the US university where I did my PhD, a grad student I knew was prevented from graduating even with a different nominal advisor purely to put pressure on his advisor who got #MeTooed (in an incredibly fishy case) but was fighting back.
It is understandable that Terry is complaining (and, indeed, he owes it to his students to make this effort), but he has made his bed.
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1mo ago
The fear that another Trump-esque administration will come to power and do the same thing again will surely remain.
I have a US mathematician friend who is entirely apolitical, but joined the DEI committee at his department (where he helped them implement DEI measures, screen applicants etc., not to mention the implicit lending of legitimacy) a few years ago out of the simple consideration that he was coming up for tenure review and it was a no-brainer to do this simple thing that would greatly improve his chances. There are, I figure, many cases like that. If it stops being a no-brainer career booster and starts being a gamble (will get favoured by the system, but might also get targeted for reprisal in the future if the wrong administration is in power), I imagine far fewer will go for it.
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1mo ago
They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo 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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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo 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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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo 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!)
I don't understand why you are just ignoring the question - it wasn't intended as rhetorical.
Anyhow, my answer to this question is no, but as with many other things (e.g. war crimes, military invasions...) I would rather live in a world where 2+ competing parties do it than in one where only 1 party does it, even if having 0 parties do it is best.
To make it very explicit for the situation at hand: not punishing any researchers for opinions unrelated to their work is best, but punishing researchers of all teams for opinions unrelated to their work is second best. (Not even a distant second best - as a working scientist I honestly think the science community would be much improved if all scientists trying to play at being politicians or "public intellectuals" were summarily kicked out)
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