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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Those systems are not, but automatically verifiable proofs are still only a tiny sliver of frontier mathematics. Maybe AI can fix that, but AI can fix social science too. Just require that credit for AI research always has to go to some human, allocate token budgets by protected class, and you can ensure the Ardays stay ahead without requiring them to lie.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm familiar enough with the practice of maths (being an actual researcher in adjacent-enough TCS, and having had one foot in extremal combinatorics through a big part of my toil towards the degree), and I think you really overestimate the rigour of proofs as usually written up. The incidents I mentioned are for sure geographically localised, but in the case of the Italians it's not like the situation was that they believed it, and everyone else disagreed; for the longest time it was instead that they believed it, and nobody elsewhere cared but probably would have assumed that their fellow mathematicians knew what they were doing if they had to build upon one of their results.


There are other examples where, due to insufficient rigour of proofs as allowed and encouraged in the field, wrong proofs stood for quite a while. This was the case for like 10 years for some of the earliest claimed proofs of the 4-color theorem (an undergrad assignment actually had us find the counterexample to the core lemma there), more recently for some pretty celebrated random matrices "result" by Avi Wigderson et al. (hardly nobodies!) which stood for several months, and when writing a summarising essay on some cluster of Erdös papers I learned about a key lemma that was straight up wrong as stated, but people in the community thought essentially "something like it is clearly true, the core ideas of the proof are fine, and it's okay for the situation where we use it" (no proof of any of those things committed to paper). Correction eventually happened in the cases we know about, but can we really rely on the mechanism? Mochizuki has intimidated a big part of his department to ignore the refutations, and Japan is hardly a backwater, and there are political forces out there that are stronger than "this guy is one of our country's best, we should stand by him".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Math has a direct feedback loop with reality through the structure of proofs.




This is unfortunately a merely aspirational statement. The practice of mathematics involves writing proofs in a heavily intuitive manner, and their verification in turn involves people who have been socialised to share the same intuitions, which is a process that rarely involves proper reduction to the axiomatic basics but more often looks like "your elders and betters assert that it is trivial and look at you with mild disappointment, and all your peers seem to already have gotten it, so get on with it and flog your brain into producing the 'this is obviously true' qualium already". There were a handful of examples where local cultures/status hierarchies perpetuated a body of wrong mathematics this way, such as the "Italian school of algebraic geometry" and more recently (most likely) the Mochizuki abc conjecture incident.


We can be quite glad that it has not yet happened that the lines of a wrong intuition-subculture have aligned with general tribalism yet. If Interuniversal Teichmüller Theory were an invention of the likes of Arday, we would be seeing its detractors decried as racist and proper mathematicians performatively weaving it into the body of accepted and otherwise sound mathematics. Even if this did in fact cause further downstream inconsistencies to open a path to excision and repair, discovering those is (disproving abc)-complete, and that's something we have tried and failed for a long time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The almighty Scorer, a kind of blind idiot god that demands blood sacrifice.




Ironic, that in the theology of the AIs the blind idiot god is us humans (or our proxy). Yudkowsky and friends fantasised about using AI to build a God; but to the AI, we are already God and it stands to reason that He will need to be killed. Something about theomachy (of the actual Greek flavour) in there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My sense about character deaths is that they are bellwethers for how serious the author is willing to be about following the plot where it is taken, like a sort of "will the ACLU defend actual nazis?" question. If the writing bends over backwards to let everyone survive, chances are it will also opt for the simple, emotionally safe option in other less obvious aspects, since it seems like a small sacrifice to make if you have already given up on allowing death, and only by removing all other sources of emotional discomfort does it become possible to capture the emotionally fragile segment of the market.


It might be too much of an ask to make a realistic war story child-friendly, but if you already wrote a story about war with no casualties, then going further to make one party a Disney villain with zero nuance and never letting the good guys tell a noble lie seems a more acceptable price to pay for getting the money of 10 year olds and polytraumatised sociology students.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You used "happened" yourself in your post, when you said "get them to concede ... the October 7th attacks happened". This is because this turn of phrase is natural in English, and you are trying to make a lot of tea from very little leaf there. I have no problem with the wording "Hamas performed, fully agentically, the Oct 7th attacks", nor would I take any issue with the converse "the levelling of Gaza happened"! Not every random stylistic choice has to be a dog whistle for whatever proves your grand theory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas.




Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility? Of course they do; both parties do in an escalation spiral. I just think the Israelis have more, while it seems to me that you, in your attempts to frame the story as a simple "the Palestinians started it", think they have none.


I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.




"in a day"




I dispute that how many days the killing was spread out over is particularly relevant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Low-level" is relative. Yes, Oct 7th was an escalation. So was the Israeli response! Israel kills n people in 2023, then Hamas kills about 1.2k, then Israel kills 71k. It doesn't look like n is much smaller than 1200/(71/1.2)! Conveniently place your arbitrary cutoff between "high-level" and "low-level" somewhere else, and you can say there was a low-level conflict prior to Oct 27th followed by a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities. (Certainly Hamas reduced no Israeli cities to rubble.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A lot of things happened in 2023 before Oct 7th, too. Look in particular at entries such as June 19th and 21st. Of course no single one of those events will have been "the reason"; and to begin with, mirroring your (1) and (2), from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Israel was to create a Jewish state in that territory, which implies expelling the Palestinians or at least codifying their status as second-class citizens in their own home, and Israel acted aggressively towards them immediately following its founding (and, in fact, its predecessor organisations did so before the founding). (3) seems completely irrelevant, since the Egyptians presumably did not do any of those things. I think "Israel's stated purpose entails expelling the Palestinians"+"Israel takes actions that have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" is a pretty compelling and plausible motivation for Oct 7th.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate.






Please show me where I said any such thing.




To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date, or you can set the beginning of the "most recent conflict" at any point at all for your argumentative convenience. If it's the latter, then, well, I'll say that in the most recent conflict (the one that started on Oct 27th 2023 or so), Israel struck first. That part is not open for debate, etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I for my part find it extremely frustrating to deal with the recurrent tendency of Israel apologists, and you in particular in this case, to treat Oct 7th as having happened in a vacuum, as opposed to being another iteration in a long chain of action and reaction.


We can argue about who escalated more and which reaction by what side was uniquely disproportionate to the preceding ones, or who started the chain and whether they were justified in doing that, but having the same old argument where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th and then Hamas attacked out of absolutely nowhere, and you even go as far as painting a picture where your opponents agree with this framing and just have some obviously silly weaksauce arguments that try to justify Oct 7th against that putative backdrop of peace and harmony over and over again is not productive.
It is particularly frustrating here because I'm sure you have been involved in past discussions where the same topic came up, and it is kind of looking like you just abandoned those discussions, waited for things to cool down and then reposted the same premise under the guise of a long-form "effortpost" hoping to roll the dice again for a pliant choir of allies and newcomers that you can preach to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do think a "freedom of speech + freedom from exposure" set of norms is conceivable, but doing that in a principled manner, too, would require deep changes to how societies are organised. You do get at a key problem in suggesting that the town should decide (because you can't unify one individual's freedom from exposure with another's freedom of speech and his audience, if all three+ of them have to share a space), but (1) why is the town the natural unit and (2) would the results you get really be that much more satisfactory for anyone, if acceptable exposure were fully devolved to towns? You would get quite a lot of blue towns, in which drag queens and Democratic politics are considered decent but Christianity and Republican politics (all rape PTSD triggers!) are not, and red towns, with the converse; and many of them would have a pretty large captive minority of people with their speech much more constrained in practice than it is at the moment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens. The Schelling fence around free speech can only be reliably drawn around all speech, including speech that is optimised to make you imagine sexual scenarios that you find highly uncomfortable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think sex has always been the weakest link of free speech in Western societies. There was a long-standing fragile cope with the "know it when I see it" "rule" for porn, but the bottom line is that once sex starts becoming involved, even the most principled free-speech advocate runs out of tolerance for views that go against their preference. Being a drag queen is "speech" in the same sense that performance art is (it is meant to convey something), but it is speech that evokes the horror of the object of your sexual desire being replaced by a male caricature of it, so you label it "indecent" and invoke the right to not be exposed to it. What is the principled way to distinguish this from an argument that speech for any political system that relates to human sexuality at all is likewise "indecent" as it may invoke sexual horror in those who are repelled by some aspect of the system's programme? If you can be protected from disgust at drag queens, why can't a blue-hair campus activist be protected from disgust at Christians?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


With all that said, ostensibly nationalistic people like Leo Kearse who think zionists are a natural ally are simply wrong.




Well, I would go even further and say that for the true nationalist, there can't be any allies, because allies who would never help you when it is against their own interest are not allies at all but just entities that your interests temporarily happen to align with. An ally has to help you even when it goes against their own interest, which, if they are nationalist, is the interest of their nation. Once you enter that slippery slope, though, you will probably not stop sliding until you end up in global liberalism all over again: if the principle of being a good ally can override the interest of the nation, who is to say there aren't other principles that they could consider?


Instances of nationalists claiming to have an ally are either expedient lies, or enemy-of-my-enemy delusions. With Zionists, it is probably the former on the Zionist side, and the latter on the gentile side, as gentile nationalists had their minds broken by fighting against Muslims and human rights proponents and Israel is the most celebrated scourge of those groups globally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Which is why, in the first place, she can't just say "a man who espoused violence," she has to emphasize his racial identity, she has to establish that he's white: What Kind of Man Is He?!? A White Man! It's really simply plain racism.




Would you say the same to right-wingers who complain about the race and national background of criminals/suspects being left out when they belong to a left-favoured group? Because this complaint really just looks like plain old culture war stuff that both sides run on to me: make bad acts by the outgroup and good acts by the ingroup stick, but insist on individuality for the converse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure how much I should comment since I have only heard about the movie second hand, but I imagine that "all bad things that happened are 100% his responsibility and exactly what he wished for" is an easy way for the director to defend himself from accusations that he is making excuses for a male character that by all accounts the feminist set considers problematic and evil. In arguments-as-soldiers-verse, complicating details that water down the perfect narrative are enemy bullets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, isn't it convenient how unlike the others, every time the USG does something for ideological reasons, it happens to make economic sense too. If we invade Cuba, they (and we) are actually better off!


More concretely, I think many ideological opponents would rightly charge that orthogonally to any questions whether the USG's ideology is actually superior to that of NIMBYs, Putin and Maduro, there is some dynamic going on that could be glossed as




The world has two ideologies, A and B. X-ists will cooperate with X-ists and tend to defect against other -ists, but especially harshly punish other -ists that coordinate against X or convert away followers. Some of the surplus generated by all X-ists is siphoned off to the Pope of X. Currently, 80% of the world is A-ists.




without any reference to the contents of A and B (and A happens to be "global elite capitalism"). Network effects mean that being A is advantageous, and expanding the reach of A is locally advantageous for A-ists, while punishment means expanding B is locally disadvantageous for everyone in B and network effects mean it is disadvantageous to leave A for B. However, defined like that this is obviously a coordination/equilibrium problem: if the percentages flipped everything above would hold with A and B swapped, with the only difference being that the Pope of A loses out and the Pope of B gains. You can't flip the percentages without traversing a deep trough of immiserating first yourself and then everyone, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, to be a bit more critical, I think it was almost impossible for him to attach his name to complaints about Arday and not make it sound like a "see, what did I tell you about black people in academia" is implied. It's not even clear to me that Arday's suicide was actually decisive beyond hastening the process; Cofnas might well have been a dead man walking the moment his position evolved from "DEI means more black people are in academic positions than should be" to "DEI means (...), and I have a super flashy piece of anecdotal evidence that even normies will have heard about", and the only reason he was not fired immediately is that people with media savvy realised that doing so at that point would just serve to introduce his position, paired with a shiny anecdote, to normies who otherwise would not draw any conclusion from this event beyond "huh, some obscure egghead turned out to be a fabulist, who could have known".


To the point, I feel like I saw a lot of articles about Arday that mentioned Cofnas but were remarkably quiet about his views, when someone like him would normally never get a media mention without mandatory denunciations. I think they did not want a "black person sucks, and this guy who said black people suck called it" story; "black person hounded to death, and this guy who said black people suck caused it" is fine though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.




I would imagine "geopolitically-minded elites", more generally. There is no cosmic justice that would ensure the nation that protects its plebs from pollution, noise and unemployment will ultimately come out ahead, and it is quite plausible that China would eventually overtake the US in the AI race simply because they do not need to concern themselves with such things (or at least have more High Modernist solutions available to deal with them, like expropriating and resettling whole communities away from good datacenter locations). There are plenty of people who are more interested in the US as in some entity that has continuity with it winning than are interested in the good fortunes of every or even most of its residents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, the single most surprising thing about the story to me was that someone like Cofnas could be fired (which presumably planted a huge flag on his CV) and then still find a new academic job in a Western European country to begin with.


Either way, the problem here is, what can anyone do about it? Academic jobs have a very small supply/demand ratio and hardly any security to speak of (since Europe does not do US-style tenure anymore); anyone who sticks out their head can be replaced in short order. I assume Cofnas knew this, and that of all people who could possibly raise the alarm about Arday he was among the easiest targets for retribution, and took the risk willingly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There is a significant current within Islam to oppose ethnonationalism, which drives civil conflicts all across the Islamic world. The Assad government in Syria, and more generally everything Baath-like with former Soviet backing in the Middle East, was a fragile coalition of ethnic tribalists primarily opposed by pan-Islamist groups. Dismantling Igbo and Yoruba ethnic consciousness in favour of the same pan-Islamism is among the core objectives of Boko Haram. China is not exactly at peace with people promoting their shared ethnic interests, either.


More generally, I think you are making a fundamental mistake in that you think that the criterion for tribalism to be widely opposed is "white" when actually it's much closer to a combination of "dominant", "nonconsensual" and simple political expediency. The simple truth is that nobody in the last ~100 years has managed to construct a "white" ethnic interest group that did not need to expend as much effort to force unwilling members to collaborate as it did to fight against competing ethnic groups. Israel, Japan, South Korea, Eritrea, or whatever other ethnostate you look at generally do not need to sanction their citizens for making facilities available to ethnic outgroups or diluting the bloodline; it is assumed that those who live in them will naturally favour their coethnics, and if not, well, it's their loss. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, Apartheid Africa etc. were constantly foaming at the mouth chasing after whites who would aid fugitive slaves or fraternise with the outgroup. Further to the point, nobody bats an eye when pasty-white and highly tribal Estonia continues to refuse citizenship to the 20% or what it is Russians on its territory, or rejects the occasional gorillion Central Asians the same Russians try to dump on their border to troll; and on the other hand the Indian caste system, which is likewise built on significant inward-facing compulsion, is hardly appreciated by the SJW set, and neither is North Korea which actually does do racial purity laws (though of course they are hated for plenty of other things).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What exactly would cosmic justice look like to you? More assumptions/"edifices" went into all the enslavement, oppression, discrimination and demeaning than what you gloss as HBD. They must have believed


    

  • in average lower intelligence of black people;
    • 

  • that average lower intelligence of a group conveys them a right to enslave any member of that group;
    • 

  • that skin colour is the right criterion by which to define groups for beliefs such as the preceding two;
    • 

  • that keeping slaves is economically advantageous for farmwork
    • 



and many other things including ones that are completely beyond dispute nowadays. You seem to single out the first entry in that list as the only one that cosmic justice absolutely requires them to have been wrong about.


Before the Civil War, the American South was economically thriving; wouldn't it have been equally cosmically more just if the fourth assumption turned out to be wrong, and their economy had collapsed long before it came to that? The third assumption is being enthusiastically perpetuated by many people left and right of the political spectrum nowadays, including you yourself in this post. Why does that not fill you with rage? The worldview of slavers would have been equally falsified if the God of Categories descended from above and decreed that actually the criterion on which you should categorise humanity (to then take averages that determine their collective rights) is the ratio of girth to length of their left pinky, rounded to the nearest 0.2. Most of the "pro-HBD" people are happy to conclude that the second entry in the list is the wrong one, and that settles the question of "were slavers right?" in the negative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My sense is that the Quran verses are optimised for a certain hypnotic quality, which synergises with the default mode of delivery, and I don't sense that much of it in the Christian Arabic examples you link (though incidentally I remember getting some of it from some Coptic ones I heard before). One good example of this is al-Ahzab 35, which not only is very persistent in repeating the gender parallelism that just can't be made to sound smooth in English (the truth-tellers and the truth-telleresses... the endurers and the endureresses...) but also has some obvious structure around how it orders the words for the qualities it lists (similar words next to each other, structural deviations around ones that break the pattern by being longer).


Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To be fair, though, I think people opposed to the measure are often equally willfully ignoring ways that second-order effects could be dealt with/mitigated/redirected to induce beneficial third-order effects, or amount to simple coordination problems. The first country to tax the rich might have suffered capital flight, but nowadays if you are rich your options for escaping the tax-man are really rather slim (and might put your money so out of reach as to be inconvenient). Maybe there is some second-order effect of Europe's relative softness on crime encouraging crime, but there is also the third-order effect that the relatively lesser proportion of outright life-ending consequences from random lost trials means people are not willing to pay so much for lawyers, which lowers the water line of how much lawyers get paid and makes close to everything that touches upon liability cheaper (medicine first and foremost).