Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Literally translated, they just mean mister know-it-all or Little Joe...savant? Knower-of-things? Not sure there's a good translation in English.
French in France is typically viewed as more precise, uptight and grammatically correct, whereas Quebecois is (unfairly) seen almost like a pidgin or 'lower-class' French. Like how someone with a 'cut-glass' British accent might look down on Americans from Alabama or speaking AAVE.
'Monsieur je-sais-tout' sounds very proper, whereas Ti-Joe is a contraction of petit-Joe, maybe the equivalent of saying 'mister know-it-all' versus 'lil Bob smartass.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Oh, I like Peter Thiel as well. I don't really know what you mean by "all I need to know".
Ah, sorry for being unclear. We're on the same page.
I just meant that people here turn a blind eye to Peter Thiel's AI panopticon empire and buggery because he hates on woke people. Zero to One and that op-ed about flying cars and twitter also fit the aesthetic/worldview of the locals.
The Alt Man, on the other hand, has none of those things. Or at least so far as I'm aware.
In neither case is the operative quality being a childless homosexual, just the perceived political valency.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here
Do you have a link to the list? Somehow I've never come across it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less...And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous.
And the lack thereof for Peter Thiel should tell you all you need to know, particularly given the fact that he's specifically working on and enabling AI in the contexts of surveillance and defense.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
main-tanked a guild through BWL.
Orc or human, vanilla or classic, and did you loot-whore yourself DFT or give it to a rogue/DPS warrior?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
That's a good way to frame it, thank you.
(I still want to kill the rabbits on my property).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Well, apparently your neighbors will rat you out and presidential candidates will complain about immigrants like me savaging the pets and local wildlife of ($town). Especially if I'm Elmer Fudding around with a shotgun in my tiny suburban backyard, as fun as that might be.
Then there's the possibility of heavy metal contamination. I'm probably willing to risk it given that I don't like in some crazy repurposed industrial zone, but still.
Otherwise nothing wrong beyond being ostracized by my neighbors.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Meanwhile, what radicalizes a guy to try shooting Trump? It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes on ten years of media calling Trump a threat to democracy, a traitor selling the country to Russia, a violent fascist thug who needs to be executed, take him out and beat him, put his severed bloody head on TV, talk about blowing up the White House -- what, I apologized, and Trump deserved it for all his violent rhetoric, I can't believe Republicans would try shooting him like this.
In that case, do you think that Trump and/or the conservative media ecosystem are responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the El Paso walmart shooting or the Buffalo shooting in 2022?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?
Why does castle doctrine only apply to people, when my property is invaded by rabbits on a daily basis?
More seriously, sure. At the risk of having been silent in the first round of discussions and popping up now to defend a second set of goalposts, I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer. Obviously pets are a different story.
This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.
Republicans seem to have won this debate, as they largely seem to have won the debate on China. One way or another, some kind of immigration bill is likely to pass after the election.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
What, do you live in Istanbul or something? Why does your neighborhood have so many feral cats?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Why? I've been confused by this. My neighborhoods have been plagued by an overpopulation of rabbits, deer and geese with at least the former two caused by what I presume is a complete absence of natural predators. I've often wished it were socially acceptable for me to trap and eat the rabbits that are wrecking my garden or the geese who poop all over my athletic fields and bike paths.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
Why would you try to infer anything about how either Harris or Trump think based on how they present in public? They're actively trying to say the things that will win them the election rather than what they actually think. And if sound bites play well with their constituencies, well...obviously that's what they're incentivized to optimize? Being responsive to what your voters want is a feature, not a bug. If you want politicians that behave better in public, convince a large enough fraction of the population to punish their candidate for vapid sound bites or idiotic name calling.
At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work.
So do rationalists. So why do neither group win elections, particularly given that the latter is supposed to be 'systematized winning?'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Dropping a literal biblical plague of retards on your political opponents should be classified as a war crime. We need a new Hague.
I've been saying the same thing for years, but Anime Con keeps happening and nobody puts the organizers on trial for crimes against humanity.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Read On Writing. The second half of the book is a nuts and bolts description of how to write better (mostly fiction, but broadly applicable). The first half is mostly biographical but still fascinating.
Classics like The Elements of Style are also useful; perhaps more so if you're trying to trim the fat from your prose. There was a similar book that got me through grad school, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment. This genre mostly taught a style that was dry and concise, optimized for conveying information with the least amount of text possible.
Write and share it with people whose opinions you trust for feedback.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
What follows was learned over a decade ago in microbiology class and may be out of date.
HIV exclusively infects cells of the immune system through a handful of receptors, none of which are expressed on the mucosa of the anus/vaginal tissue. As a consequence, it needs to penetrate multiple layers of mucus and epithelial tissue before it can reach a cell that it can productively (use to produce more viral particles) infect. Anal sex generates microtears in the mucosa much more readily than vaginal sex and provides more opportunities for the virus to reach the bloodstream/immune tissues. There was also some speculation about 'sensor' immune cells that reach into the epithelium that may also act as a route for infection, but I'm skeptical.
What shocked me in that class was just how rare transmission was; you can see the numbers in the table morgenland linked. Made me think that you have to be either extremely unlucky, extremely promiscuous or just stupid/desperate enough to share needles to get infected.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.
Is any of this based on data?
Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.
Okay, based on your model, how rapidly do you think you can select for this trait and how low do you think the world population would drop prior to leveling out? Why would you expect selection for 'wanting children' to be more robust than 'too irresponsible to use contraception?'
And most of all, given that you blame the precipitous drop in TFR on cultural factors, why would you focus so much on genetics when cultural shifts can obviously happen much more rapidly? By the same token that:
First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk.
Your prediction relies on constant cultural conditions lasting ten? Twenty? Who knows how many generations it would take to select for fertility in the presence of contraception, modulo the kind of actual genetic engineering that today remains deep, deep science fiction.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.
In all your writing, this is the closest you give for a rationalization as to why marrying a woman with (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing, feel free to replace with terms of your choice) a 'high body count' is bad. And yet, your meaning of the word cuckold doesn't comport with any definition I've seen used before - you're suggesting that in a monogamous marriage where neither partner has slept with anyone else since the wedding, the man is nevertheless a cuckold if his wife had casual sex in college? You're just trying to use the shock/meme value of the word cuckold to smear a perfectly healthy marriage.
Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
Tell me more about my interests, though. Maybe I’ll learn something.
If you stick around TheMotte long enough, you live to become the progressive. You filthy life-long democrat, you.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
I have a general impression that college admissions matter a great deal for degrees in parents basement studies, but that outside of a small number of top schools, not so much for job tracks.
I'd disagree on a few points:
-
For anything involving research where you're specifically paired with a professor, there's a huge difference. I'd place it roughly on three tiers: i) you're learning cutting edge techniques, contributing to important research papers and networking with the best ii) you become familiar with basic techniques and look good to go to (i), or iii) you go to classes but your practical skills are absolute ass.
-
The networking and prestige from the upper schools are huge when trying to start your own venture or climb beyond a certain point. All my friends/contacts from the big schools were able to raise 7-8 figures after graduating or finishing their postdocs. Even after most of their ventures fail, they can (accurately! They learned many things I don't know) sell themselves as having management experience and land high positions in VC/consulting/tech.
Even controlling for talent, the opportunities you get coming out of these schools compound and often make you a better employee/founder.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
A few months ago, in what I think is a now-deleted comment (I can find it on google but not their profile), WhiningCoil made the joke that perfect moderation had been achieved because nobody wanted to post in the culture war thread.
I'll echo that sentiment and say that perfect moderation has indeed been achieved, regardless of your definition of perfect moderation :)
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.
How beefy? I thought I was looking into trying to run alphafold or some of the other structural bio models a year or two ago and we were talking like 20k. Is it easier to run inference on the image generation models or was I just stupid?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it.
I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
though in cases where greater policing seems clearly called for, I am also unimpressed with extant alternatives. So I probably just didn't say anything about that particular part of the unrest at the time; in general, this space has always been very bad at guessing my politics.
Perhaps this space is very bad at guessing your politics because what you choose to reveal is inevitably right-coded, modulo my perspective being skewed towards top-level posts as I rarely dig that deeply into the comments.
Long story short--if I should have been making this point five years ago, why aren't you agreeing with me now? Or if you are agreeing with me now, why dwell on some past possible disagreement that may not have even occurred?
Would you agree that the majority of opinions on this site regarding BLM and the George Floyd riots were negative? And would you agree that the majority of opinions expressed on this site are positively disposed towards the UK riots? I perceive this as hypocrisy, as I agree with you that black Americans rioting over George Floyd are conceptually similar to white UK citizens rioting over the stabbings. How else can I point out this hypocrisy? I suppose I could make my own top-level post, but I'd inevitably be forced to link to specific examples, and drag you in regardless...
Perhaps it's disseminated hypocrisy, and everyone has internally consistent views, but then...why? I know your answer is that I'm just overly sensitive to right-wing viewpoints after years of coddling, but given that you received only mild pushback to your post (and the back-pushers were immediately dogpiled by multiple people), and I can't remember the last time anyone said anything remotely charitable about BLM (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), where are all these ideologically consistent people? And why do they censor themselves so strictly along partisan lines?
I neither agree nor disagree with you on the object-level. I'm sympathetic towards the people who protest and riot after this kind of violence, but I've also been convinced that the decrease in policing over the last several years has been worse for most of these communities. I just want ideological consistency.
Not at all!
In that case, I anticipate that the median person here would make the argument that the BLM protests were illegitimate because Floyd was a criminal drug addict who died of COVID and Fentanyl, whereas the UK rioters are justified. Do you disagree?
I am reminded of something said much, much longer ago than five years:
True Republicanism and rule by philosopher kings has never been tried.
That being said, I think my prediction of boomers and millennials dying off is much more likely to come true than a plot involving the kidnapping and brainwashing of a couple thousand Mediterranean slave-children. The argument isn't that the zoomers will be wise philosopher kings, but having been raised in an age of social media and ubiquitous cell phones, will be better adapted to the current environment than we are. In the same way that my generation is much better at using Facebook in a sane way than most Boomers.
Undoubtedly there will be some other future shock involving AI and VR that gen alpha will be better positioned to weather, but one problem at a time.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
I mean, I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse. As I've already stated in this thread, I am myself pretty ambivalent about immigration, insofar as it (A) tends to benefit me, personally and (B) tends to economically benefit nations, on average. But when immigration yields a specific, horrific crime against the indigenous population and people get upset about that, telling them to weigh the overall positives against their negatives seems like a non-starter, argument-wise.
You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
Can you name a woman worth running? Hell, can you name a man worth running? Most people here would argue every president since Jefferson has been a low iq moron, which usually makes me think they either don't understand the incentives involved or drastically underestimate our politicians.
More options
Context Copy link