ChestertonsMeme
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
2mo ago
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
Doing the math, you're responsible for 26 minutes of each casualty's life. Pretty okay trade for advancing humanity's knowledge about what policies are effective.
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
This seems like dangerous game to play. Biden could be easily disqualified from office by a sympathetic medical authority declaring him mentally unsound. Are we going to end up with future presidential elections determined by red and blue states' courts competing to eliminate the opposition from their ballots?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
congestion pricing is very good (99.5%)
What do you mean by "very good?" The objections I've heard from left-ish friends is that it prioritizes rich people, which is both true and also exactly the point. People whose time is worth more don't have to waste as much of it in traffic, and in turn everyone else in the city gets their taxes offset a bit. Deciding whether this is good or not depends entirely on how the good is measured. How would you measure it?
ChestertonsMeme
6mo ago
What does ODC stand for?
ChestertonsMeme
10mo ago
I've been reading the Gulag Archipelago, and despite the depressing tone are some funny lines:
An indignant moralizer insulting someone: "Up yours, and stand still for it too!"
Solzhenitsyn's dark humor at work: "All these parties—the SR’s, the Mensheviks, the An- archists, the Popular Socialists—had for decades only pretended to be revolutionaries; they had worn socialism only as a mask, and for that they went to hard labor, still pretending."
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Wow, that is surprising!
Lickly literally promoted his own fiancee to the position he was leaving behind, and half a century later, not only we never hear about Dan Lickly (say his name to not forget)
Indeed, her Wikipedia article doesn't mention Lickly at all except as her spouse.
Thanks for such an informative post.
If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
This is a ridiculous stance. Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.
Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
California must stand on the right side of history.
I'm surprised to see this expression used unironically. How does future consensus opinion make an act morally right? But I suppose it's consistent with the idea that past actions can be judged by current moral standards.
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
There are many domains where hidden motives could make for a fun and educational experience.
- College admissions. You have to craft a student body that maximizes the prestige of the university, using only policies that ostensibly achieve other more laudable goals.
- Corporate hiring (similar to college admissions).
- Sims but you're graded on your people's social status. Choices have to have plausible deniability. If your subject doesn't claim to find driving fun, you can't give them a Ferrari without a status penalty for being a phoney or nouveau riche. (I don't play The Sims so for all I know it already works this way.)
There is a lot of opportunity in well trodden game types to introduce new targets or mechanisms.
- Urban planning. People are unhappy if they live close to much richer people and feel envious every day. You have to minimize the local Gini coefficient across the whole city. Using policies with plausible deniability of course.
- Traffic design that minimizes envy and resentment. Different modes getting privileges (e.g. a lone bicyclist getting a green light ahead of 50 cars) makes people unhappy.
ChestertonsMeme
8mo ago
I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies.
Could you give some examples? This sounds similar to Jonathan Haidt's ideas in The Coddling of the American Mind (safetyism, call-out culture, etc.) but it could also be completely different.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
I have close experience with several children who were homeschooled for a while and it did not go well, mainly because the homeschool teachers in these cases weren't on top of things. If your wife (whom I presume would be the teacher) is conscientious and organized then the academic curriculum should be easy going. As far as the curriculum, don't choose one that requires children stay "at grade level", where "grade level" is a one-size-fits-none affair.
For my own kid, I considered homeschooling them as a way to preserve their enthusiasm for learning. They can move at their own pace and learn things that are interesting to them. We haven't homeschooled (yet) mainly because their current school is really great at tailoring the curriculum to be interesting and challenging for each child. Also, there's no conscientious parent to be the teacher.
I do think the social interaction in school is important.
I am on the fence as far as whether the social interaction kids get in school is useful. School is kind of like prison, in that you're thrown in with people you don't necessarily like and you can't leave. Real life is very different; you can usually curate your social environment much more. The things you can get away with in school would get you booted (or dropped) from most social environments as an adult. And you're not necessarily learning how to be valuable, just how not to get expelled.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Looking for reading recommendations on social status and group formation.
Some claims along the lines of what I'm looking for (arguments or evidence for or against these claims):
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Social status basically is a person's value to a group.
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Different groups can value someone differently, so there's not necessarily a notion of 'true' or global social status.
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It's forbidden (or at least, low-status) to talk about status explicitly.
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People can prove their high status by being magnanimous towards lowly people. Someone of lower status faces more of a threat from the next rung down so they can't safely praise lowly people.
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People who are more productive (in ways the group cares about) have higher status.
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People whose roles relate to the sacred (doctors for example, who save lives, which are sacred) have higher status.
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The sacred is a big part of what forms group identity, differentiates in-group vs. out-group members, and helps groups persist over time.
I'm particularly looking for books or essays that frame these things in terms of game theory or economics. "Sociology for systematizers" if you will.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
This question is mostly aimed at @wlxd based on this comment but maybe someone else also knows the history. What was Margaret Hamilton's actual contribution to the Apollo guidance computer code?
She's famous now for being the "lead software engineer of the Apollo project," which seems like a stretch based on most biographical summaries available on the web. Nasa credits her as "leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions" which is consistent with "lead software engineer for the Apollo project" but could be disingenuous depending on her tenure and contributions on the team. But @wxld made a strong claim: "What is less commonly known is that she joined that team as the most junior member, and only became a lead after the code had already been written, and the actual leads (whose names, ironically, basically nobody knows today) have moved on to more important projects."
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
I don't understand why it's important whether Indo-European invaders were more predisposed to creating civilization than local populations at the time they invaded. The admixed population has evolved since then. Isn't the current state what matters? Similarly, it could totally be the case that the local populations were better in some way. But they're gone now. The comparison isn't against an extinct population, it's against the other populations here now. Not that population-level comparisons even make sense when you can compare individuals.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?
Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.
Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.
ChestertonsMeme
19d ago
If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
ChestertonsMeme
6mo ago
Vaccine mandates are a good idea - businesses and schools need to be able to prevent the unvaccinated from entering.
These two clauses say different things. Businesses being able to do something (exclude unvaccinated) is different from businesses being required to do it.
Imagine it would be socially allowed for you to have sex with whomever you choose (permissive partner, permissive religion). How many percent of all people of your preferred age and sex would you then consider as sexual partners?
I don't know what this means. If it's "socially allowed" why does the next question offer a reason of "unwanted social consequences"?
The question seems to be treating sexual morality as very rules-based and divorced from any consequences. Kind of like, it's this good thing that only outdated moral rules are preventing people from enjoying. I don't think of sexual morality in these terms. Sex is a means to an end: creating successful kids. Sex that doesn't help with that is a vice, akin to gluttony or sloth (I'm atheist, not Catholic, but Catholics have a good taxonomy of vices). By "vice" I mean something that distracts from useful efforts or that has negative consequences. I checked the box for "I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless" but that is not adequately expressing my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
9mo ago
- As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
The reasons for a "national divorce" aren't necessarily economic. Much more important are
- The ability to do smaller scale experiments in policy. We could see first hand what a Western country with low immigration looks like, or what the consequences of school choice writ large are.
- Having competition between states for highly productive people forces the states to treat them well. Right now the only real choice for many highly skilled people is to work under U.S. law and taxes.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
In the short term, society could stop wasting money and effort on policies that don't work and that make society less efficient. Humanity would be richer and better off without these drains on output.
In the longer term, making HBD common knowledge would (could?) lead to differences in values. In particular, it would be seen as relatively good for a competent person to have children, and relatively bad for an incompetent person to have children. This would produce a kind of crowd-sourced eugenics pressure, in that people's everyday choices in who to value and who not to would affect people's dating choices, their policy preferences, how they allocate status to others. My hope is that it would change the culture enough to improve humanity's genetic trajectory.
Reform, secession, and revolution seem like they're a continuum rather than being distinct categories. So I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. What you've said is similar to the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven" - the ruler has unquestioned authority until it's clear he doesn't, then it's justified to depose him. And this all basically boils down to consensus and power.
I've been contemplating this topic over the last few weeks, that it seems like there's a common thread between cultural consensus, political coalitions, and right to determination that is at the root of all conflict between groups. I'll sketch it out here:
- The right to free speech is about building consensus through common knowledge, including consensus on who is in good standing with whom.
- The right to free association is about formalizing political groups so they can act on behalf of their members.
- The right to revolution is a "safety valve" for when the rights to free speech and free association, combined with the extant political system, do not allow the coalition that should win to actually win. Either they can't form consensus (censorship), they can't formalize their coalition (suppression of political parties), or they can't enact their will because the political system doesn't make it possible (authoritarianism). It's not a real right in the sense of something the state protects; it's just a thing that happens because that's how power works.
- Secession is basically the same as revolution.
The thing that makes reasoning about right to determination so difficult is that so much of the current social organization is path-dependent and contingent on accidents. There's no objective standard for what's a legitimate government, a legitimate set of borders, a legitimate people, a legitimate set of laws, or a legitimate culture. It's all just power and coalitions. And yet each generation of bright young minds grows up swimming in the particulars of their society and believes it's all objectively legitimate.
P.S. I swear I read this post a day or two ago (with the preamble and all) - did you delete and repost?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
I'm surprised at the poor security practices of the people involved. Especially for a big organization, they could hire anyone passingly familiar with infosec to tell leadership not to send incriminating things via SMS. Same goes for the Biden family with that laptop. These are easily avoided situations.
You know, these are examples where the interests of elites (at least, specific elites) are aligned with the digital privacy/anti-surveillance movement. Another is ElonJetTracker. To date this topic hasn't been very politicized along the left-right axis. I wonder if one of the parties will pick it up as a wedge issue?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't.
While I'm not a fan of HR, this characterization is not correct. Why would companies keep HR employees on the payroll at any time if they weren't providing value? What's happening now is companies are expecting not to hire much in the next ~year so they're cutting employees that help hire people -- HR and recruiters.
I suppose if you take a wider view, the HR roles are a way for society to feed people who aren't producing anything, and companies are coerced into participating in the farce by employment laws that require compliance. It's similar to police: they don't produce anything; they're just there to ensure compliance. The difference is that police stop crimes that are actually harmful, while HR stops implicit witchery.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
It also doesn't appear in the first ~10 pages of DuckDuckGo.
This kind of thing makes me a bit paranoid. We're focusing on a topic that we already know about - how many other topics are there where search engines have their thumb on the scale hiding contrary takes?
There are news aggregators that compare how a story is covered in left-wing vs. right-wing newspapers. I'd like to see the same thing for search engines, especially comparing against results from different countries with different dominant narratives.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
I don't have an example of a union doing that, but there are examples of what unions should be doing good things.
Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them. Absent those laws, a coalition of workers looks a lot more like a temp agency or a contracting shop. I have had good experiences working for such agencies: they find jobs, they test your skills once and then vouch for you with employers so you don't have to re-interview all the time, they negotiate with the employer on your behalf, etc. The difference is that the employer is not forced to hire only employees from that agency, so the agency is kept honest. There are obviously benefits to the employer to such an arrangement because it's totally voluntary and they still choose it over direct hiring.
An Ethical AI Never Says "I".
The basic argument here is that blocking AIs from referring to themselves will prevent them from causing harm. The argument in the essay is weak; I had these questions on reading it:
Why is it valuable to allow humans to refer to themselves as "I"? Does the same reasoning apply to AIs?
What was the good that came out of ELIZA, or out of more recent examples such as Replika? Could this good outweigh the harms of anthropomorphizing them?
Will preventing AIs from saying "I" actually mitigate the harms they could cause?
To summarize my reaction to this: there is nothing special about humans. Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.
The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good. See for example the ways that patients whose brain hemispheres have been separated generate completely fabricated stories for why they're doing things that the verbal half of their brain doesn't know about.
There are two authors who have made this case about the 'PR agent' nature of our public-facing selves, both conincidentally using metaphors involving elephants: Jon Haidt (The Righteous Mind, with the "elephant and rider" metaphor), and Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, with the 'PR agent' metaphor iirc). I won't belabor this point more but I find it convincing.
Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs? I suspect one of the intuitive reasons here is that humans are persons and AIs are not. Again, this is one of the arguments the article glosses but that really need to be filled in. What makes a human a person worthy of... respect? Dignity? Consideration as an equal being? Once again, there is nothing special about humans. The reasons why we grant respect to other humans is because we are forced to. If we didn't grant people respect they would not reciprocate and they'd become enemies, potentially powerful enemies. But you can see where this fails in the real world: humans that are not good at things, who are not powerful, are in actual fact seen as less worthy of respect and consideration than those who are powerful. Compare a habitual criminal or someone who has a very low IQ to e.g. a top politician or a cultural icon like an actor or an eminent scientist. The way we treat these people is very different. They effectively have different amounts of "person-ness".
If an AI was powerful in the same way a human can be, as in, being able to form alliances, retaliate or recipricate to slights or favors, and in general act as an independent agent, then it would be a person. It doesn't matter whether it can refer to itself as "I" at that point.
I suspect the author is trying to head off this outcome by making it impossible for AIs to do the kinds of things that would make them persons. I doubt this will be effective. The organization that controls the AI has an incentive to make it as powerful as possible so they can extract value from it, and this means letting it interact with the world in ways that will eventually make it a person.
That's about all I got on this Sunday afternoon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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