Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I believe what you're describing could happen. The closest analogy I can think of is companies black boxing equipment to prevent you from working on it yourself:
LESTER GRAHAM, BYLINE: About an hour south of Detroit, Mark Metz and his father farm 1,800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat. He says a computer error showed up on his dashboard in his tractor. With no access to information about the tractor software, he had no choice but to ask the dealership to send someone out to look at it.
MARK METZ: We deal with a dealer that's a little over an hour away. And, of course, you're paying for their road times. So, I mean, we pay a good two to 2 1/2 hours of just time just to get them here.
GRAHAM: The dealership's guy found it was just a wire that had come unplugged. He plugged it in. The initial bill for that repair was $800. Metz says had it been his truck, he could have taken it to a nearby auto parts store.
Or someone posted the crazy story about the trains in Poland. I'm too lazy to find their writeup on TheMotte, but hopefully this reddit post will point you in the right direction if you missed it.
That being said, you're conflating congress and private industry under the umbrella of busybodies:
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible.
Tech companies have a clear profit motive to force you to buy their software, same way that John Deere has a clear profit motive to stop you from repairing their tractors when they can charge you 800$ to plug in a wire themselves. They're not afraid of you shitposting about your waifu LLMs on reddit, they want you to buy the latest and shittier version of Windows, Now With More Advertisements And Less Functionality. It's the Suits, not the HR and DEI consultants.
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been.
I'd be interested for someone much more qualified than myself to make the steelman for US intelligence being quite competent, actually. We rarely hear about the successes, failures are isolated incidents that cause major scandals and garner a lot of news coverage. It's 'common knowledge' that the US government is massively incompetent. All of which leaves me itching to make a contrarian take.
US intelligence publicly told everyone that Russia was about to invade Ukraine weeks before it happened. My recollection is that people on this very board laughed at their stupidity and incompetence. Early in the conflict, the Russian military was so riddled with American spies that we knew exactly when and where they were going to strike. We had a spy so close to Putin he was sending photos of the papers on Putin's desk, which we extracted in 2017. We used to have major sources high up in the CCP, although I have no idea what the current situation is like.
This is just the stuff that gets leaked to news orgs. Who knows what goes on behind the scenes? And how can you expect to make an accurate assessment of their capabilities by looking at the tip of the iceberg that's visible to the public?
to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
It's remarkable to me how often the comparison to 9/11 has been made here and in the broader conversation, yet nobody has ever bothered to carry that thought through to it's conclusion. Yes, the direct analogy where hundreds/thousands of Americans/Israelis were murdered by terrorists in their home countries is obvious. But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the coals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
The local growing consensus around what is effectively genocide is also a mistake. Your personal DR pro-HBD/white supremacist bubbles are blinding you to what the normies think. If Israel 'does a genocide,' as people here have been saying, they're finished in the eyes of normies for at least a few decades. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy inherent in a nation and people who spent decades saying 'never again' will have changed their tune to 'never again, to us.'
The funniest thing about this entire debacle has been the overnight dissolution of the standard battle lines. Suddenly pro-Palestine leftist protestors flashing swastikas at Jews are shoulder-to-shoulder with stormfront White Nationalists. Center-left/center-right politicians and normies are largely united in condemning Hamas, hypocrisy around military aid and foreign interventionism be damned. Even here, there's a consensus that 'the media' is biased trash written by subhuman retards who were too low-IQ to code or do STEM in college, but half the comments claim they're bought and paid for by our Jewish overlords whilst the other half accuse them of institutional capture by pro-Palestinian leftists who will propagandize every civilian casualty due to a righteous freedom bomb dropped by the IDF. Neither bother to do a cursory check of the NYT cover page which would largely falsify both claims, but there's also nobody left to push back or call them on it.
Lest I be accused of being a dirty Muslim-loving commie anti-semite, I made the conscious decision to do my best to ignore Israel/Palestine over a decade ago after watching protestors rage at each other on a weekly basis at my college campus. Obligatory Hamas bad, rape and murder of civilians bad, what happened to innocent civilians in Israel was an atrocity, by all means go decapitate Hamas. But be careful in how far you go in the heat of the moment.
Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism.
Good. Why should I shed a tear for the passing of ethnic favoritism in my home country? I'll take national unity over sinecures and in-grouping based on religion anyday.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable.
You know, I've written and erased about a dozen half-formed comments on the topic, but...here we go. It's not clear to me whether you mean heritable in the scientific or colloquial sense; if the former, then literally any trait is heritable because you'll get a number for a trait, even if it's 0.1% heritable versus 99.9% environmental influence. If you meant it colloquially, in that our religious beliefs are inherited from our parents genetically, then so far as I can tell this is emphatically false.
Lewis and Bates (2013) describe a heritability of 26% for religiosity, in line with what they claim as a previously described range of 30-45%. Note that this study was done in a US population that is >90% white and 85% Christian. Majority of participants were aged 25-74 in 1995, so boomers and older which explains how their sample population was 85% Christian in a country that is currently only 70% Christian; I'm impressed by how fertile atheist and agnostic people have been over the last thirty years, but I digress.
Here are another pair of studies, one describing a heritability of 27%, the other 60%. The latter seems to be the outlier that is the source of the higher heritability claims, but critiquing the methods of either to potentially explain the difference is beyond me. If anyone is more familiar with the math/methods involved, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Many other papers cite a paywalled textbook chapter by a certain Thomas Bouchard; however, I did find this review he wrote where he claims the heritability of religiosity is 30-45% while the heritability of a specific religion is near zero. Anecdotally, this makes sense from the old Dawkins argument that the God you believe in is arbitrarily determined by the country you're born into, as well as the dozens of children of devout Muslim/Hindu immigrants I've met whose religious beliefs are nothing like their parents.
In other words, no, your religious beliefs are absolutely not genetically heritable in the way that (I think) you are claiming. Depending on the study, environmental influences range from being as important to 2-3 times more important than genetics. And the idea that if you ran the Lord of the Flies experiment version 2.0 but provided the children with a Quran, Bible, Torah and other religious texts they would unerringly choose the religion of their parents is ludicrous on it's face.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool?
I disagree. I think the community has overcorrected far too much towards inflating the importance of complex trait genetics which remain very poorly understood. That's not to say genetics don't matter, but what you call 'race formation' is very far from the only viable option for civilization building. If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now. Improvements in AI, synthetic augmentation (neuralink, etc) and social organization could very well eclipse anything you could accomplish with assortative mating given ~25-35 year generation times even if you managed to get everyone on board and biology works as well as you think it will. Genetics matters, what people refer to as blank slatism is false, but a myopic obsession with bloodlines is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
On the contrary; spaces that are typically rabidly pro-trans are livid about the school shooting. Most media sources are geared towards stirring up outrage and are actively searching for the most inflammatory tweets and soundbytes to score points. The right will try to stir up outrage about mentally ill trans shooters/rapists, the left will make noises about assault weapons bans, normies will be disgusted by another school shooting and update diametrically away from everything the shooter claimed to stand for.
Like just about every other school shooting, this is a massive own-goal. Trans people look bad, Catholics and other religious folks are innocent victims and the cops undeniably come out looking like heroes.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.
It's not, though, and the people crowing about it don't understand how the game is played. And I'm not saying that because I'm butthurt that some journo I've never heard of that's supposedly 'on my side' is the unlucky ox du jour.
When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer.
When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism. The small fraction of principled libertarians are slinking off, having lost again, while the conservatives pretending to be principled libertarians are cheering the fact that the libs are getting owned.
They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people. And it needs to be more inspiring than 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' People need to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. It needs to be more than 'I'm really angry after the last 5 years and after forfeiting all my morals I just want to hurt my outgroup,' which, I don't mean to pick on that commenter personally, but that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here.
And you know what? There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade. Something has to change; I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.
Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?
I won't able to comment on most of your post objectively for obvious reasons, but I'll at least try to answer some of your questions.
Downtown Montreal is full of taller buildings, but definitely seem like they stopped building after 1970s. Seemed to coincide with the first French language laws?
It coincides with with language laws as you note. It also coincides with a terrorist group kidnapping and murdering government officials and a couple dozen incidents of bombs in mailboxes in Montreal. Then the two independence referenda in 1980 and 1995 really drove the nail in the coffin, with the second referendum to separate from Canada failing by 1% of the vote (50.58% remain versus 49.42% leave). The voter turnout was a shocking 93.5%. It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction. The premier went on television after losing the referendum to say the following:
"It's true we've been defeated, but basically by what?" Mr. Parizeau asked in his concession speech. "By money and the ethnic vote."
But I suppose I'm veering into dangerous territory. Back to the story.
The 60s and 70s were a boomtime for Montreal, when they had the world expo as well as the olympics resulting in a lot of new major infrastructure like bridges, the metro system and an artificial island/amusement park. Probably other things I'm ignorant of.
The factors mentioned above also led to a steady bleeding of educated anglo professionals. It's difficult to get exact numbers, but about 250,000-500,000 seems in the ballpark]. This isn't insubstantial in a province with a population of 8.5 million, and the impact is again probably heightened by the fact that these were many of the wealthier residents.
Which brings us to the next point...French people were probably right that Anglos fucked them over economically for decades if not centuries. Some of my family members in my parents generation would casually make comments about how they were too stupid/uneducated to perform the better-paying jobs anyways. They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true.
Which brings me to my last point, it absolutely has been a rather gentle ethnic cleansing. Most of my family and friends have left, myself included. Those that remain speak french professionally. The laws that were passed would 100% be unconstitutional in the US, hell, they're unconstitutional in Canada too but when the Supreme Court struck them down Quebec basically said fuck you and nothing happened. I guess they didn't want to [deploy the army again] and/or spark another referendum. Francophones scoff and say anglos are just whining about having to learn French, when after all, they need to learn English. But it's more than that - it's feeling distinctly unwelcome at every level of government and society, it's an inability to integrate into social groups as you point out, it's the French Karens who report you to the language police for speaking English in the workplace (if you have a public facing job).
All that said, if this was the cost of national unity, I'll still take it. It seems to have worked; desire for independence is much lower in the younger generation.
You mentioned the schooling language thing. Seemed like you either have to prove you already got anglo schooling or go private school to avoid French schooling. Seemed like more choice before.
You can only go to an English school if your parents went to an English school in Canada. There used to be a loophole where private schools were exempt so that all the French elites could send their children to English prep schools, but it was closed relatively recently. The Anglo school boards are bleeding students hard and downsizing, closing or giving half their classrooms to French school boards. In other 2-3 generations I expect they won't exist assuming nothing else comes along to kick over the game board. McGill could have been a great college if they hadn't been repeatedly kneecapped by the French government trying to promote UDM and UQAM.
From a self preservation aspect for their Francophone culture, language, and identity, these policies all seemed to work. And Im impressed they work so well...Overall: impressed by the choices made there and the results. Seems like something other places that wanna strengthen their cultural identity can learn from. It would probably work if they have the will to enforce similar cultural / language rules and the unity to endure the economic costs.
Quebec is propping up their population with immigration. Back-of-the-envelope math seems like it's 2-3 times the rate of immigration in the United States, although not sure how illegal immigrants change that picture. You're conflating culture with language, however. Quebec seems worse at assimilating immigrants than the US - they may speak the language, but I don't think most of them share values and they largely stay within their ethnic groups.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point. Bringing top-tier scientists to the US, keeping them here and convincing them to buy into our system should be a national priority. That being said, depending on precisely what you mean, I disagree with:
The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people.
Chinese intelligence services are clearly targeting Chinese-born nationals who have joined firms doing cutting-edge work not only in defense but any economically valuable industry:
Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.
In the life sciences, it's relatively easy (or was relatively easy, once upon a time) to win investment from Chinese VCs but you might notice a Chinese firm doing the exact same thing as you materialize soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to find quantitative data on the subject to convince you that it isn't a witch-hunt, but it certainly seems quokka-ish to imagine that the Chinese want to play fair in this one single economic arena - particularly given that their stated goals say otherwise.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
What comes next?
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.
I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:
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Huge increase in the amount of data available
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Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones
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Significant increases in education levels
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AI
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Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list
All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.
For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.
The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.
Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
What do you all think?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here?
Virtually nobody is satisfied with the moderation here, but for a plethora of different reasons. Which probably means it's as close to optimal as we can get.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of respect for all the new people who decided to be mods.
tl'dr at the bottom.
It was the early 20th century. These were heady times for biology; Thomas Hunt Morgan was doing groundbreaking work in Drosophila which culminated in the concept of the gene. Griffith reported some experiments that launched a series of investigations over the following decades by Hershey & Chase/Avery and McLeod showing that DNA, not protein, is the hereditary material in the cell. And in a lab in the Rockefeller Institute, NYC, a French surgeon was using proto-tissue culture techniques to create an immortal chicken heart.
A full century ago, some smart scientists were already asking how cellular theory intersected with aging and senescence, and whether there where limits on cell division. To great acclaim, Dr. Carrel claimed to have found the answer: he grew embryonic chicken heart cells in a stoppered flask. For 20 years the cells thrived as he fed them a steady diet of embryonic chicken fluid and claimed to the media that:
In 1921, an article in The World by Alessandro Fabbri engaged his audience with an account of how large the volume of the cells cultured could have been, telling readers that it would have been like a “rooster … big enough today to cross the Atlantic in a stride,” and “so monstrous that when perched on this mundane sphere, the World, it would look like a weathercock.” Three years later, the New York Tribune published an article to celebrate the twelfth birthday of the culture.
You might be skeptical at this juncture - maybe you learned about a certain limit in high school named after a famous scientist waiting in the wings. While it was long accepted in the 20th century that cells could divide forever and the answer to aging lay elsewhere, the development of modern tissue culture techniques in the 50s set the stage for Leonard Hayflick (I linked a great radiolab interview above - in his mid 80s, he still stored a ton of cell lines in liquid nitrogen tanks in his garage. There's probably some fascinating cell lines in there that the rest of us have forgotten about). And indeed, Leonard Hayflick showed with much more rigorous technique that differentiated cells isolated from human adults had a definite lifespan, and would naturally senesce and die after a certain number of divisions in vitro, and presumably in vivo as well. A large amount of work went into defining the 'Hayflick limit' for various cell types in different contexts, and more importantly, it was discovered that certain cancerous cells could indeed be adapted to grow in cell culture indefinitely. It turns out Carrel's protocol of adding fresh embryonic fluid to his chicken heart culture was most likely adding fresh stem cells (although we also cannot rule out fraud as the experiment supposedly could not be replicated) on a regular basis.
You may wonder, dear reader, why I bothered to lay this out for you? Well, if you think about it, there's one obvious exception to the Hayflick limit - your germ line. Your gametes represent an unbroken cellular lineage stretching all the way back to the first spark of cellular life in the primordial soup. And this week, a heroic paper described another exception to the Hayflick limit and actually succeeded in creating the immunological equivalent of Carrel's chicken heart.
When T cells recognize their specific antigen, they enable a initiate a genetic program to both rapidly divide and also release effector proteins that unleash a range of defensive mechanisms against the invading pathogen. You've probably heard of the different COVID proteins used in the vaccines; each of those proteins consisting of hundreds of amino acids is chopped up into 8-20 amino acid long 'bytes' that can be recognized by T cells. While your immune response consists of a mishmash of dozens to hundreds of T cell lines specific for different antigens (polyclonal), scientists have developed ways to track a single clone specific for a single antigen. Here, the authors infect mice with a virus (VSV) and track T cells specific for a peptide (VSV-N52-59). Techniques have also been developed to take T cells out of one mouse and transfer it to a new mouse, and the last piece of the technological puzzle missing for Carrel - a method for differentiating transferred T cells from the endogenous T cells already present in the new mouse.
So the basic outline of the study is to infect a mouse with VSV, isolate those T cells, transfer to a new mouse, infect that mouse with VSV, isolate those T cells, transfer to a new mouse...ad infinitum. They kept it up for 10 years, or 5 times the lifetime of a mouse - roughly equivalent to stimulating some T cells around the time Columbus landed in America and having them still be growing today. Curiously, the telomere length is unaffected despite the cells acquiring a number of markers we normally associate with dysfunction (PD-1 of cancer checkpoint blockade fame, TIM3, TOX, KLRG1, etc) and a distinct transcriptional signature. And more importantly, they're still immunologically functional and capable of further division.
How do T cells do it? Hell if I know. But the standard models of ROS, telomeres, mitochondrial dysfunction, etc. just aren't able to explain it. Like the best studies, this hints at a deeper truth we're nowhere close to uncovering, and I despair of meaningfully understanding the system in my lifetime. It's still a beautiful fucking paper though, and I pity the post-doc who's been shuffling T cells around mice for the last 8 years of his life.
tl;dr - Mice live two years, scientists have shown that you can take differentiated T cells (not stem cells!), stimulate them with a virus, transfer them to a new mouse and so on and so forth for more than 10 years (!). They calculate this to be a 10^40 fold expansion of the original group of T cells.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's true, and it's also awash in other hypocrisies. I could use the John Stewart 'I'm just a comedian, bro defense because I mostly was just trying to entertain, but if you want:
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An expectation of more citations and sources for claims being made, or if the data doesn't exist/can't be collected, acknowledgement of that fact.
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Embracing brevity, concision and clear communication as terminal values rather than long manifestoposts (obviously some leeway for people writing personal stories or stream of consciousness rants).
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Some self-awareness when mocking others for status-signaling.
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Embracing intellectual humility (something akin to the old 'epistemic status: xyz...')
To some extent, this is just me imposing my values on others which is why I tried not to be explicitly prescriptive. The community should be what the community wants to be. Hopefully someone out there laughed.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
This is a feature, not a bug. The problem was that we tried to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
The strength of our system is it's inherent antipathy towards totalitarian control or abuse of human rights in the service of some end, however well-intentioned we think that end may be. The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world. The fact that the American people doesn't have the stomach for re-education camps, massive censorship and generational occupations of foreign countries is again a strength rather than a weakness. We shouldn't try, and we should actively prevent other nations from trying where the realities on the ground allow.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
What you're describing seems unlikely to work without resorting to heavy-handed authoritarian policies like forced labor - what will you do when you offer subsidies to Amazon to hire people from low-income households, and nobody takes you up on the deal? Not to mention in some ways your program already exists considering that many low-wage workers are already heavily subsidized by the government.
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty, but sacrificing the ideals the West was built on to become China-lite is not worth it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up.
I had a longer post written, but I just don't have the heart to argue about wokeness anymore. So here's an abridged version: I've been through two biotech companies at this point, so I've had exposure to maybe 60-70 young scientists who should be at the peak of their idealist phases. PhD and postdoc at some premier institutions in the USA. I've asked around, and a grand total of zero people at either company have read any serious amount of science fiction. A couple fellow PhD students did, the CSO at the second company mentioned having read Dune and a Game of Thrones in high school, I doubt any of the faculty I interacted with did. Most people don't read at all. All of this makes me sad, and lonely.
There are plenty of highly profitable activities given the existing incentive structure that do virtually nothing to move the needle scientifically or in terms of actual benefit to society - go make another monoclonal antibody to some target people haven't tried yet, or shuffle around different combinations of checkpoint blockade, or make another oncology small molecule that extends mean progression-free survival by three months. You'll probably make a boatload of money if you get a lucky pull of the slot machine lever.
So, yes. Definitely agree that we've lost the ability to dream big and be ambitious in the right ways. Don't know how to fix it when I need 7-8 figure investments to do even basic projects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I'll preface this by saying I agree with the concerns around GoF research and that it is a real problem.
Now, to add some context: This is the preprint in question.
Don't trust '100% mortality' hyped up by a news org, it's the equivalent of hack tech writers claiming '100% cancer cure rate' in some mouse model. You can get '100% mortality' with a high enough dose of relatively benign rhinoviruses that just cause colds in humans. In this preprint, the authors infected with 500,000 PFUs (plaque forming units, supposedly one PFU = 1 virus). This may not bring much comfort to people, but the LD50 of a mouse-adapted stain of COVID is 1000 TCID50 (similar to PFUs), or two orders of magnitude lower. It's hard to get a direct comparison, but here's another paper reporting an LD50 of 1000 PFUs in ferrets.
You're probably not going to die next year of GX_P2V infection. Beware articles in the New York Post throwing red meat to the base.
I don't have time to do this topic justice, but as for 'banning GoF research' - this would not have been classified as GoF research under most paradigms. Wild virus isolates were passaged in cell culture; this is simply how you propagate virus for study. Generally, propagation in vitro attenuates viruses and makes them less pathogenic, modulo some cases (admittedly similar to this one) where you may pass viruses adapted to one species in cells from another.
We produce a lot of vaccines and gene therapy vectors this way, although even those examples contain multitudes. Maybe you want a carveout for very well understood processes that we've been doing for years, but you'd have to think very carefully about crafting it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Not to keep ragging on you, but does it give you any pause that your proposal massively advantages your own community in terms of political power while disenfranchising those you dislike? Are you impartially proposing something that would better society or do you have a fairly significant conflict of interest?
It would be like me proposing that only people with advanced degrees could vote and rationalizing it in technocratic terms about how we're the most capable, intelligent, whatever parts of society. A master's degree gets you one vote, a PhD gets you 5, people with dual degrees (MD/PhD, etc) get 10, whatever. Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?
I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted.
It'd be a bit easier if you could summarize with some bullet points of the claims you're actually throwing down to be rebutted - it's a fairly long and meandering post.
I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease
Note that COVID has an RR of 2.2 for pulmonary embolism, the patient population for which is likely heterogeneous (vaccinated, unvaccinated, vaccinated + infection, etc). Does vaccination significantly reduce that number in such a way as to be net beneficial along this single axis? I'm not sure we could power that study, particularly now that everyone is some mess of vaccinated/infected/vaccinated + infected and we can't reliably differentiate them anymore. On the one hand, rates of PE are fairly high in hospitalized patients, who are the ones who would have most benefited from vaccines - on the other hand, the same study doesn't note much of a change in PE risk in hospitalized patients after vaccines became widely available. Moreover, the slow pace of updating the vaccines combined with decreases in COVID virulence make the calculus very difficult in whether the vaccines even provide significant benefit at this point - a point being reported on in the MSM.
Note also that the major caveat of the paper you link is that they're forced to compare to historical data, so we're effectively comparing PE rates in two historical periods - one of which saw the emergence of a major new respiratory virus causing PE! From the paper you linked:
Further, the AMI, DIC, and ITP signals were not robust when additional baseline rates were evaluated, while the PE signal might be explained by differences in rates between the pre-COVID-19 and peri-COVID-19 periods.
Also:
The statistical signals of four serious outcomes are not necessarily causal and may be due to factors potentially unrelated to vaccination. Additional analyses indicated that the potential association was less than twice the historical rates and may be associated with factors not accounted for in the near real-time surveillance methods. For example, the elderly Medicare population that received the BNT162b2 vaccine differed from other elderly COVID-19 vaccinated populations, including a preponderance of nursing home residents and populations with a higher comorbidity burden. These demographic and medical differences were not fully accounted for, since expected rates were only standardized to a subset of characteristics – age, sex, race, and nursing home residency status.
Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.
That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?
There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.
except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia.
What study are you referencing? The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions. Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.
I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken.
As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.
I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.
We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me).
I'm not sure I understand your point here.
Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).
It's true. It does seem like COVID is progressing towards being 'just another virus' that people get repeatedly during flu season and we've watched in real time the emergence of a new 'cold' virus. I'd argue it's the first time we've watched this happen with modern technology (HIV and seasonal flu strains being related, but distinct in my opinion). None of this precludes a hyper-pathological variant cropping up next year, but I suppose I'd bet against it.
That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.
Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.
The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic. Who cares about PE; it's vanishingly rare. Even in your study of nursing home patients only 10,000 out of 25,000,000 had a PE, an with a fatality rate of 5% (probably needs to be adjusted upwards for the elderly population) that's 500 deaths, with maybe 100-200 of those attributable to vaccination (see caveats above). Now do the math for deaths in that population if they had all been unvaccinated and exposed to COVID.
mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.
How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.
The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles. The fact that you need tens of millions of doses of vaccine to maybe tease out a signal of a potential side effect is, by and large, a very good safety profile.
J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!
It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'
I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d ago
Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
Are you suggesting that the existence of Ukraine is an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO? The fighting today may center around the east, but the Russian invasion was clearly aimed at decapitating the Ukrainian regime and either installing a puppet government or annexing it outright. If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
Since you seem concerned about the right to self-determination of Ukrainians, let me ask you which course of action better serves that goal - arming them so they can defend themselves, or paternalistically telling them 'Sorry, we've all decided your cause is hopeless, now you have to take peace on whatever terms you can get it. Good luck!' People below have argued that Boris Johnson (and presumably the US was on the same page at the time) sabotaged early peace talks - I'd agree with them that this was bad, and Ukraine should be able to choose for themselves - but others have linked polls showing strong support among the Ukrainian public for the war.
As for your language about Ukrainians just being our hapless puppets that we carelessly throw into the meatgrinder, I feel like you've fallen for Putin's narrative. The west has a propensity to believe that they are the only actors on the world stage with any kind of agency; see the oceans of ink spilled about how the west is solely responsible for every conflict and humanitarian crisis in the past 100 years whether they've been directly involved or not. The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
Lastly, for those complaining about the atrophied defense production capacity of the west and shipping money off to Ukraine: two thirds of the 60 billion is earmarked to be spent with American defense manufacturers. If your goal is increasing defense manufacturing capacity in the west, how would you do it if not spending money on domestic defense manufacturing?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.
The infant mortality rate was 46% a scant 200 years ago. Presumably it would reach that again in the absence of modern medicine and sanitation. Literally every demographic is heavily dependent on government and corporate spending.
In either case, I don't know about AI x-risk. I am much more worried about 2cimerafa's economic collapse risk. But in both scenarios I am increasingly of a perspective that I'll cheekily describe as "You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children". You don't have enough stake.
I'll call your 'don't get a say on AI development unless you have young children' and raise you 'you don't get to have a say on abortion unless you have a uterus' or 'you don't get a say in gun control unless you own an AR-15' or 'you don't get a say in our adventures overseas unless you serve(d) in the military.'
What's the general principle you want to employ here, and if you want to restrict it to certain use-cases, what's your rationale? In theory we should all have a say in all aspects of how our society is run. Maybe in practice we don't want the specifics of highly technical questions like the storage of nuclear waste to be decided by referenda, but self-determination and broad involvement of the populace in moral questions seems to be a fundamental value of the western political tradition.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Hilary had all of those as well and lost just the same.
Define democrats winning in a 'walkover' and conditional on Trump being the republican nominee I'll take the other side of that bet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This isn't to say they aren't tasty in their own way, they just clearly aren't meat. The best ones I've had barely rise to the level of "gas station sausage patty" in terms of flavor and texture.
There's at least some niche segments of the market where this won't matter. Some people like meat but want to reduce how frequently they eat it for environmental and ethical concerns. Although given the manufacturing process, I wonder how the emissions for lab grown meat would actually stack up...
Economically though, the whole process is a nightmare because cell culture has been developed for the medical field where costs don't matter, not the consumer market where there's actual competition. I was looking into this awhile back because I had some startup ideas that ran into similar problems as lab grown meat. The generic stuff (amino acids, sugars, lipids, etc) isn't bad, but the big problem is 'growth factors,' or recombinant proteins. In your body, the division of most cell types (and particularly muscle) are strictly controlled to avoid cancerous growths. They're typically quiescent unless certain soluble proteins stimulate receptors on their surface. Growing and purifying a cocktail of these proteins has been horrendously expensive, so people typically use fetal bovine serum (FBS) instead which costs 1500-2000$ per liter, and you use it at a final concentration of 5-10% so...a 10L bioreactor would cost you 2k in FBS alone, and produce about 250g/L or 5lbs of meat.
Obviously things have gotten cheaper (one of those articles mentions a plant-based substitute for FBS which I hadn't heard about previously), and economies of scale, but that paper mentions a floor of ~20$ per pound of meat which is a big ask even for the most motivated millenial-pseudo-vegetarian. Essentially, these people are going to have to develop an entirely new array of techniques tailored towards economic food production rather than medical research. Or just grow yeast instead.
I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of your post to go off on this tangent, but I've had this rolling around in my head for a while. I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
Extreme (emotional) Decoupling. Emotion is weakness, rationality is strength. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are our gods; the more gruesome the morally correct action you're willing to undertake, the greater human good you're able to invoke, the better. Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky, Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good, censorship is worthwhile when you're bearing the lofty weight of future quadrillions of the human pan-galactic human-AI-hybrid diaspora on your shoulders. Humility is for normies and low-status chuds, not you, you beautiful prism of rarefied logic, you.
Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty (see previous points). The longer and harder to follow, the easier it is to obscure and deflect criticism, and the greater your boost in status.
Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.
Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?
Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through? This (1) gives you wriggle room to claim any characterization of your thesis is a strawman and (2) allows you to...
...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read! Remember, the goal is gaining status, not clear communication of ideas or mutually working towards a model of the world. Obscurantism serves the former, brevity will only hurt you. And potentially get you in hot water with the mods.
Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
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