Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...
Where did you read that take? It's not clear to me whether you mean Marc Tessier-Lavigne or Sylvain Lesne, but in both cases it's a huge overstatement. Both were peripheral to the main story of beta-amyloid plaques which originated before either author, had strong evidence in favor of it, and (I would argue) have strong evidence in favor of the plaque hypothesis being false at this point. But the enormous research and clinical efforts on beta-amyloid plaques would have happened even in the absence of either fraud.
I'll note that of the people in the field I've spoken with, most still believe in the plaque hypothesis and think we just aren't treating patients early enough or some other excuse.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
So far as the "Read Another Book" meme goes, Harry Potter is to millenials as 1984 is to boomers.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
But you weren't comparing LoTT to the New York Times or the Washington Post, were you?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Good. There should be consequences for advocating for political violence. It has ever been thus, and some social consequences are better than being (literally) tarred and feathered.
This isn't even a problem as far as free speech is concerned. The Gestapo didn't kick down her door and drag her off to a reeducation camp, a private corporation fired her because it thought her opinion beyond the pale. Free speech doesn't guarantee that you can say whatever you want to whoever you want without consequence.
As an aside, this is hilarious considering that less than a week ago people (@Jiro et al.) were still pulling the LoTT is a powerless private citizen compared to the checks notes cathedral juggernaut that is Social Text. At some point the fig leaf of 'punching up' just isn't going to work anymore when LoTT is getting people fired like that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
You allow more crime, you get more crime, including against the politicians that allowed it.
So...is it also true that if you encourage more gun ownership, you get more shootings, including against the politicians that enable it?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Then please enlighten me
I'm skeptical of my ability to do so, and loath to try.
But firstly, I'll note that we were discussing:
Berkeley polyamory cult doing drugs in a shitted out bus in somebody’s yard.
The link between this and open-air drug markets is tenuous to non-existent (was he buying his drugs at one of your markets...?) at least as far as I'm aware of the story of David Depape, though I can see how discussing drug markets rather than sticking to the example the OP gave is much more convenient for you. As far as Democratic policies go, do you want the cops to round up and jail polyamorists for life? Anyone who uses something harder than marijuana? People living in old buses? And that failing to do so means that when David Depape reads a bunch of conspiracy theories about the Jews and pizzagate on facebook, well, the Pelosis just had it coming? As well blame Republicans for not being willing to censor obvious disinformation that sent him off the deep end, both positions are equally stupid.
Not even mentioning the fact that Democratic politicians are elected on these 'soft on crime' platforms, and are presumably executing the will of the majority - particularly in the aftermath of Floyd. It's not clear to me why they should be murdered by drug addicts because their constituencies support 'soft on crime' policies.
But whatever, you don't want to talk about that, right? You want to score points. So no, I don't support 'open-air drug markets,' you are correct, but also nobody has a pro-drug market position. I assume you mean people are 'soft on crime' or against prosecution of drug offenses, and the mess in SF/Philly is the byproduct. But the tradeoff of cracking down on crime will be more citizens incarcerated and paying those costs, more fatherless households, more Rodney Kings and George Floyds (and associated riots) which you may not care about or even see as a good thing, but most of your fellow citizens disagree with.
It's clear the pendulum has swung too far in one direction and a correction is coming/already here. But America is not Singapore, and (this is conjecture on my part) I believe that most Americans value freedom and liberty such that they're willing to allow some level of crime and homelessness. Pushing your argument to the extreme means that any politician that isn't pro-social-panopticon deserves to be murdered by the criminals for their soft-on-crime policies.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Oh, you can't tell which I'm talking about because they're equivalent?
Yeah, pretty much.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Ah, thank you for the correction.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
My righteous policy of AR-15s for self-defense versus your policy of open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains is a Straussian conjugation if I've ever heard one.
Your description of both 'policies' or platforms is massively lacking in nuance and accuracy, and in both cases ignores the tradeoffs involved. Pretending that gun ownership is an unalloyed good while being soft-on-crime is an unalloyed ill is just silly.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
If he ended up schizophrenic and convinced he was helping Donald Trump somehow, it was basically a direct result of democratic politics, and is exactly the type of thing that “MAGA” is fighting against.
Replace 'democratic politics' with 'Republicans' and 'Berkeley polyamory cult' with 'AR-15s and gun control' and you've got yourself the bog-standard (brought to you by Stephen King!) leftist argument that Trump's own pro-gun policies led to his assassination. It's stupid when they do it, and it's stupid when you do it too.
Policies at the federal/state level have such broad impacts that nearly any event can be linked back to something one of the parties did.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Absolutely disgusting. The people peddling the more extremist rhetoric about Trump should be ashamed. On the bright side, perhaps those people will shut up for a while and we can regain some level of sanity for at least a little while.
As (nearly) always happens, I expect the actual outcome here to be the complete opposite of the shooter's goals and Trump just won the election by a landslide.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
The joke was that LoTT could very well have more of them than ye olde gender studies journal, although I had difficulty finding either her net worth or the ballpark budget of a humanities journal.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Perhaps you're a man of principle, and 'thou shalt not lie on the internet to people who aren't the MSM' is the hill you're willing to die on. I laud your moral character.
I do not believe that most of the people who care enough about the culture war to know who Libs of Tiktok (regardless of their feelings about her!) is are principled observers passing judgment as opposed to partisans waging the culture war. I also maintain that Trace wouldn't have faced nearly the same level of backlash, and certainly not from the same people if he had owned some libs instead. You and Gattsuru can split hairs about whether any example I could provide is exactly comparable, but given that his complaint with the last example I gave was that Trace was not directly involved, and as far as I know Trace has only trolled one person, I've been given a bar that's literally impossible to clear.
Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.
On the contrary. You talk about the Sokal hoax elsewhere; I'm prepared to bite that bullet and say fuck those pseudoscience humanities journals that provide nothing of worth. If they can't distinguish an actual paper from technobabble, why should they exist?
Okay, let's split some hairs - scientific journal is an institution, probably has an annual budget of literally tens of thousands of dollars that it can pay ramen-eating graduate students to review papers with, whereas libsoftiktok is an influencer with 3 million subscribers (I wonder how much money she makes across substack, twitter and tiktok, but I digress). The difference is that your uncle is some innocent dude trying to (presumably) browse some memes, whereas LoTT is actively curating, creating and distributing content with a direct political goal. She's waging the culture war on a daily basis. Once you switch from consuming content to generating it, you're playing by the rules of a different game.
Before you ask whether a twitter account with 10 followers is playing by different rules, no, they aren't. And no, I don't have a line in the sand I can give you to delineate the two. But I think it's pretty clear with the audience she had that she had crossed the line.
It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.
What makes you think people aren't doing that, aside from making a believable new twitter account which takes a significant amount of effort? I assume most people here are lying some substantial amount of the time, rules against it be damned. I'm just not allowed to say so.
And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.
He should know better, not because he's wrong, but because letting the other party know that you're pissed means they win.
As for 'knowing this is a guy that wages the information war' - you should be wary of everyone on the internet, not just Trace, and in terms of trustworthiness he's probably in a pretty high percentile. Most of the people here are waging the culture war on a daily basis. Do you think people writing weekly screeds about the Jews aren't waging the information war?
I doubt we'll see eye to eye, but thank you for the reasonable and measured reply.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
As the joke goes, you can build the pub, you can build the pier, but ya go and fuck one goat...
Your sin was goring the wrong ox, not trolling in the first place. If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises. I don't recall the Texas abortion bounty hunter trolls provoking any real outrage.
At the end of the day, no matter how much investigating reporting you do to embarrass activists on the left, you'll still be the goat fucker my friend. IMO, stop apologizing and double down.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Nobody is dragging you into anything, Chris.
Clearly you haven't met my in-laws...
An open Democratic convention strategy was always doomed. The people who say that an open convention would never work, that as Klein put it on his podcast it was Aaron Sorkin fanfiction, are correct.
...and yet here I am, defending Klein and the DNC.
That's utterly beside the point.
The Pod Save America guys and the NYT editorial page and Vox and all the rest were united on the point: vote blue no matter who, Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden, if you say Biden is too old you're working for Trump. Kamala became VP largely for idpol reasons.
So you single out Klein (I'll reiterate, one of the only voices on the left who called for Biden to step down), and then give examples of three other organizations (unless 'NYT editorial page' is a stand-in for 'Ezra Klein wrote an editorial' or 'Ezra Klein works for the NYT and is guilty by association').
'Vote blue no matter who' - so what, people were supposed to abstain or vote for Trump in 2020? How is that in any way advantageous to the party?
'Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden' - so in your hypothetical, it's a given that any candidate could have beaten Trump? Not to mention you assume that a handful of news organizations could coordinate to tank Biden's candidacy after he won nearly a dozen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bernie's four. He beat Warren 48% to 7% in South Carolina! The idea that Vox and the NYT editorial section have that much power is ludicrous. You, and most everybody else here, engage in these absurd contradictions where mainstream media is failing (go woke go broke, fox news viewership compared to CNN, clearly The People hate the product the media is selling) while simultaneously crediting them with godlike powers over elections and public opinion. You take it as a given that anyone holding a ballot on the left is some moronic, sheep-NPC milling about waiting for Ezra Klein to gently shepherd them towards the Uniparty's chosen puppet.
Not to mention that even if this had happened, I guarantee you there would be a firestorm in the media (conservative, liberal and the motte) about the subversion of democracy, the people wanted Biden and the party machine intervened to foist a woman/gay/black/Jew/communist/whatever candidate on the country, because idpol.
Biden was popular because people cared about electability more than anything else in 2020, and because he crushed the black vote. Who's more electable, the Jewish communist from Vermont, or the centrist former Vice-president in a popular (on the left) administration?
Part of the argument for Biden from the beginning, in the NYT opinion section et al, was that he could always be a one term president replaced by someone younger near the 2024 election. That turned out to be impossible, for all the reasons we're seeing now, chief among them Biden's choice in the matter.
And the fact that Biden is choosing to cling to power due to ego rather than follow in the footsteps of his betters and step aside when his time has come is entirely his own fault. I am disappointed in the president and his family, not Ezra Klein.
It was their choice in putting Biden on the ticket that I'm criticizing, not endorsing Bernie as an alternative.
Whose choice, the voters? Are you even confident that Klein was shilling for Biden prior to his wins on Super Tuesday? The list of episodes of his podcast has two episodes on Biden after Super Tuesday, after which Biden already had a commanding lead of the field. Perhaps his coverage of the debate on January 16th was slanted towards Biden, I don't know, but that's a pretty deep cut to be holding him responsible for. Or do you think he should have been putting out attack pieces on Biden for being too old after he was the frontrunner?
It's easy to act smart and opine on how glaringly stupid the establishment is with the benefit of hindsight. Actually running a newspaper, or a political party, or a company is orders of magnitude harder.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
I don't particularly have an interest in getting dragged into an argument where I'm forced to defend Biden or the DNC, but:
I've been listening to Pod Save America and Ezra Klein in the same spirit in which I listen to Blogging the Boys after a devastating Cowboys playoff loss: schadenfreude watching arrogant people I hate fail.
Ezra Klein is one of the few people on the left who publicly pushed for Biden to step aside and for an open Democratic convention since at least February. Of all the people who could be said to have failed...he must be pretty far down that list?
Biden's candidacy was the result of a concerted ratfucking campaign against Sanders in 2020, as Bernie seemed bound to win the nomination the centrist Dems all agreed to drop out and endorse Biden to keep Bernie out. This despite the seemingly obvious fact that Biden was going to be 80 when he ran for a second term, which many people pointed out at the time.
Bernie is and 82 year old who had a heart attack in the last 5 years. I haven't heard him speak lately, but I doubt the dems would be in much better shape were he their candidate.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
EDIT: actually I take this back. Even some of the most mind killed democrat partisans i follow on X are saying this is really bad for Biden. I still can’t bring myself to watch but I’ll take their word for it.
People I watched it with mostly ranted about how Trump was lying, there should be fact checking, etc.
But man, Biden was bad. Democrats could have gone with literally anybody and it would have been orders of magnitude better. I don't see how anybody can watch that and come away claiming that Biden 'won' the debate.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
It's somehow better than 2020 with the changes to the structure so Trump can't interrupt Biden every 2 minutes like a five year old.
So probably second most embarrassing moment of our country...it's shameful that this is what the rest of the world will see.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
None of this is terribly hard. There's room for error so long as you work out the broad trends, take things slow and don't leverage up.
Alright, so looking at the market today, what broad trends do you see? What are you long?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
That's all really interesting! Thanks a lot for the explanation, I appreciate it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
This is not a sentence (there's no conjugated verb outside a relative clause); it's a description of a certain type of person. Did you perhaps omit something from it, such as ", are wrong" at the end?
Yes, my apologies. Not necessarily 'are wrong' on the object level, but wrong in their overconfidence.
No, precise weather prediction a year out is very much a compute problem...I think you need something like 20-30 more OOMs of compute compared to what we currently use, but the point is that there exists a finite threshold at which your weather forecasts suddenly become exceptionally accurate (though you do, of course, also need quite precise data to put into it).
Sure, but from that perspective, psychohistory and economics are also very much compute problems, no? You just have to be able to accurately simulate every atom in every person involved. Chess is a compute problem too. But waving your hands and saying ASI will be able to fab a bunch of killbot drones (presumably already possible) but also be capable of precise weather prediction years out elides the fact that the latter requires an increase in our computational resources of 20-30 OOMs. Unless you're proposing such a hard takeoff that your ASI is virtually omnipotent overnight and capable of conjuring arbitrary amounts of compute at will, shouldn't there be a distinction between 'hard' and 'easy' problems? Barring shortcuts that decrease the computational difficulty of a given problem by many OOMs, but again, presumably those don't exist in every case, right? And even discovering those shortcuts could be 'hard' problems in and of themselves, dependent on other advances.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
But now that it's pivoted to "we never said the RNA vaccines prevented infection sweaty -- we were always just trying to STOP PEOPLE FROM DYING"
This seems particularly uncharitable. There was a decent amount of evidence that the vaccines suppressed spread of the original COVID variants, and became less effective as the virus mutated away from the vaccine strain. I'm unsure whether the updated vaccines can again suppress spread.
I could as well write a post about people saying 'we never ACTUALLY meant the vaccines would make you sterile dumbass' or 'we didn't mean you would LITERALLY drop dead from the mRNA vaccines causing blood clots' or a litany of other claims that are clearly absurd given the billions of doses given.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Interesting. Somehow I follow this place pretty closely, skim the headlines most days and was nevertheless completely unaware of the full facts of this story.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Which, of course, means they have no power at all. In fact, the more seats they get (short of an absolute majority)
Ah, but you forget yourself. Even if they win a majority, there's always the bureaucracy of the deep state, the judiciary, the media and the academy ready to block any meaningful changes.
And all it would take today is Donald Trump (Jr.) saying 'Fuck China boys, they stole your jobs, grab your rifles and let's go.' If the war starts during a democratic administration, on the other hand...
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