Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Bodycount is meaningless metric.
What an interesting hypothesis. It'd be a shame if someone were to... test it.
Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?
The answer may surprise you! (Lolno, it won't surprise anyone)
He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.
This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:
if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation
...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?
We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?
I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence
When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says
...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.
"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Insane he thought he could take on the West.
But this seems to be OP's point: he didn't think he was taking on the West. He thought (very reasonably) that he was taking on a demoralised meme country ruled by kleptocrats with a giant Russian fifth column. I concur that the smart bet in Feb was that Ukraine would fall like a house of cards while it's elites flee to a cushy Swiss government in exile. The country wasn't swimming in Western materiél back then; if the three day blitzkrieg had worked, there would have been no taking on of the west at all because the special military operation would have been a fait accompli before the Javelins arrived in numbers. That it has now morphed into such a take-on-the-west conflict was probably unexpected by Putin (and, indeed, everyone).
They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth.
As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?
Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.
As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.
The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.
If Klaus Schwab and his more successful attendees don't want this future, it's only because they haven't played out their own beliefs far enough in their own heads, not because it's anathema to them. It will be their intent if it's not already; they just haven't game-planned that far. This is precisely why the rightoid memes are believed - because they're credible, because they're consistent with what we know about these people, because they're coherent with the visions of the future which they have stated publicly.
Trying to tar belief in these conspiracies as "embarrassing" is just shaming tactics, and you'll not "tut tut how gauche and low status" me out of them by making irrelevant points that Klaus Schwab himself is kind of a loser (to the extent that a man with a million dollar salary can be a loser). Yeah, he's not in the Illuminati, but his opinions are representative of the heads of government that come to his ski resort, who are.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
He was reading a book on the subway. He knew the definition of the term feminism. He moved (even with a smile) when he stood in the way of someone at the bread shelf at Kiwi. He apologized for interrupting someone.
This is a list of things that women have told you were the things that charmed them.
I hope you can agree that a person may worry she'd be thought of as superficial were she to admit (to herself or others) that her thought process was "He was jacked and dressed like he's rich".
As described by Robin Hanson in Elephant In The Brain, what we think are our motives are rarely our actual motives. Add on to this the social opprobrium that may come from admitting certain motives to others, and self-reported testimony on this topic becomes highly suspect.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
have you no shame?
Affirmative action quotas are bad so I support them being reducto ad absurdem'd.
It's only shameful if these people both make a sham of AA by their actions and support AA (the spirit if not the letter) with their words. Because then it's self-serving hypocrisy.
But, like Ayn Rand on welfare, I have no problem with lily-white people taking Abo quota spaces. Because there shouldn't have been any Abo quota spaces in the first place, so this is just taking them back de facto if not de jure.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I am extremely anti-lockdown but I also don’t see any problem with locking down the population for the right virus.
Well the failure mode of this attitude should be obvious (because we lived through it): if you say "no population level mass incarceration EXCEPT for the right virus" then that just incentives neurotic hypochondriac safetyists to hysterically propagandise that a virus barely worse than the common cold IS the right virus.
And then we go back to playing the ol' "Redefine words out from under people" shuffle, where if you lose, you get locked up in isolation for 2 years while the government folks keep on partying (see: Boris Johnson's "Partygate", Obama's birthday garden fetê, etc.)
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".
I actually agree with you that these jobs are probably chaff that owe their existence to higher-ups taking their eye off the ball during times of plenty; there's less pressure to eye the budget like a hawk and make your department a lean mean economic machine when the Line Goes Up is already firmly in the green, which allows all manner of bloat and pathology to creep in.
However, in the interest of Devil's Advocacy:
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork.
Others have pointed out something similar, and I'll add to the chorus: it might be the case that having lots of HR people really is business-optimal in times of plenty. When the market falls, your engineers are happy to just have a job at all and don't need much coddling. When the market is rising, and engineers have many options to jump ship, it could be in the company's genuine interests to have a huge HR pool managing their perks / expenses / work retreats / Casual Pizza Party Fridays / etc etc.
Alternatively, we could take a more cynical view that HR is a response to the Administrative State's bullshit legal codes and have it still make sense. Being a stickler for the letter if legal compliance is more important in a bull market than in a bear market because having legal monkey wrenches thrown at your company that slow you down, carries a higher opportunity cost during good times of high turnover than it does during bad times of low turnover. Also, people are more likely to try to sue you when your quarterly reports say "We're loaded" rather than "We've got nothing in the bank to pay settlements". A greater desire to avoid government fines and bad PR therefore incentivises a larger HR department at the zenith of the business cycle than at the nadir.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.
The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Yes, this is the argument that's most convincing to me, too: "Cars aren't in the Constitution".
Call me an autistic legal formalist if you want, but if you don't give overwhelming weight to "It's literally in the Bill of Rights" then why are you even an American?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
implies that he thinks withdrawing advertising dollars is suppressing free speech, which is a perverse concept of “free speech”, wherein a private company is compelled to put their ad dollars towards another company.
It's not what they do, it's why they do it.
If the reason for Apple's withdrawal of advertising dollars is "I'm knowingly and nefariously trying to use my money to pressure you into silence" then I'd say it would take a perverse concept of free speech to not see that as violating it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
23d ago
Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?
This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.
Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing
I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.
I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
DeSantis knows (or has legal advisors who have informed him) that there is no legal way for Florida to refuse extradition and that it's mandatory under the US Constitution. This is just baiting people with false hope.
He didn't say "refuse", he said "not assist".
The ability to slow-walk everything while still technically fulfilling legal compliance was used by the Deep State to great effect during Trump's presidency; DeSantis is just resolving to give them a taste of their own medicine.
The headline says refuse, I grant you, but, well, that's what you get for only reading the headline.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
My question is, what makes people living in Third World countries think that just because they are numerous, that means they count?
Pro-democracy memes blared all over the world by richer countries?
"You should get what you want because you're more numerous" is the raison d'etrê of the West's whole system of government. The system of government they keep forcing on other countries through both soft and hard power
Pretty much my sentiments. The only reason there's any patchwork in NY is because of the 37% foreign born there. The differences you are observing are the chunks that have only just been thrown into the homogenous soup. You are watching them as they dissolve.
Now, all these people, at least most of them, enjoy the fruits of globalization. They drink coke. Eat pizza and sushi. Browse reddit. But overall, their primary cultural identity is unaffected.
See? They're dissolving already. Their primary culture isn't unaffected: every bowl of goyslop they eat is a bowl of lutefisk they don't, becoming less distinct from you one meal at a time.
Epistemic status: rampant speculation
To an extent, transgenderism is attention-seeking behaviour. Or at least... validation-seeking behaviour. The insistence that others recognise them as the opposite sex and use their pronouns points to a people whose self-image relies on the affirmation of others. Indeed, it occurs to me that the frequent insistence in trans discourse (which I reject, but it nevertheless points towards their motivations) that "sex and gender are different, gender is a social role" bears me out on this - trans people want the social role of the other sex, to which the attitudes of others are not merely important, but definitional.
Anyway, this overriding concern for the affirmation of others, I imagine, overlaps somewhat with the urge to blog. Here one intentionally opens themselves up to outside scrutiny, curating a window into your field that other people can peer through and read your hot takes.
So it's not that cissies(?) are discriminated against in the blogosphere; it's that the cluster of personality traits associated with trans is somewhat overlapping with the cluster of personality traits that would make someone want to blog.
In conclusion: if anything could possibly be attributed to a selection effect, then it's a selection effect.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will,
I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".
"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.
Indeed, at the time I didn't understand why she failed to do exactly this.
My best guess is that Warren has pretentions of being an academic lawyer-economist as well as an Amerindian, which put her between a rock and a hard place. She couldn't rubbish "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the academy, but she couldn't accept "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the Black Hawk tribe. Faced with a stark choice between her two identities, she chose to keep the one that pays her $400,000 per teaching semester (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-warren-400k-teaching/).
How noble.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
'Women have always been the primary victims of war' was a fair statement because most war discourse draws a difference between 'victim' and 'combatant'.
This is just playing a shell game with words here, no different to redefining racism as "privilege + power, impossible to be racist to whitey". If someone who just got his arms blown off by a mortar while he was eating his campfire beans doesn't count as a victim, then I contend that you have changed the word beyond all plausible recognition.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Don't you think this will be returned with interest if the faction Trump represents gets back in power?
Having asked Blue Tribers this point blank before on the Old Place, the answer I got was Whig History: that Trump's faction will never get back into power, because the arc of history bends towards justice and no-one will vote for ReThuglicans in the enlightened future.
There's also a pinch of Machiavelli in here, that "Men should either be treated kindly or destroyed utterly". Fear that the enemy will get back into power is a reason to lawfare them MORE, not less, because if you lawfare them enough that decreases their chances of getting back into power.
As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.
Elections in Texas are rigged because:
The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"
It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show
...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
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