DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
If White South Africans took power back, they'd have received enough sanctions to make Russia whistle in awe. Kind of hard to grow the economy in these conditions.
Or was there some tweaking going on there, such as "Show me 17th century British kings, but make them all black" and the AI does what it's asked, then the prompter goes on X to say "look at what happened when I asked for 17th century British kings"? The Second World War German soldiers had me rolling on the floor, but is this the pure quill, as they say?
There's a number of layers to this AI thing.
The most trivial answer is that current-gen image-generators-as-a-service use prompt preprocessing, expanding a prompt via an LLM to narrow down its possible interpretations by the diffusion model downstream. For example, if you write a cartoon cat holding a balloon, what the image generator gets as input is The image shows a cheerful cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and holding a large, round balloon. The cat has exaggerated features, including large, expressive eyes and a small, upturned nose, which give it a friendly and playful appearance. Its fur is soft and fluffy, with a natural-looking color and texture. The balloon is brightly colored and has a pattern or design on it, adding visual interest to the image. The balloon is filled with a light, airy substance and has a string or ribbon attached to it that the cat is holding onto. The cat is wearing simple clothing that is appropriate for a playful, carefree character. The background is a solid color, making the cat and balloon the main focus of the image. The overall tone of the image is cheerful and carefree. The image is well-lit and has a high level of detail, with clean lines and smooth shading.
This expansion happens according to simple natural language guidelines some girl (or at least I believe it was a girl) at Google has manually written. It so happens (guess why; here's a surprisingly charitable explanation about mode collapse) that the guidelines included aggressively injecting diversity into images with humans. Due to hallucinations we don't know the actual text, but prompt extractions yield something in this vein:
To expand the range of images, I internally adjust the prompt in a few ways: • Keywords: I might add words like "diverse," "inclusive," or specify ethnicities ("South Asian," "Black," etc.), and genders ("female," "non-binary") alongside the word "leprechaun."
Another layer is that, yeah, Google has rigged up the reinforcement learning preference dataset and/or the pretraining dataset such that Gemini-chat version is genuinely very progressively minded even without any images involved, and this might have nontrivial effect on its behind-the-scenes prompt expansions.
There's more to say of Google's deepening crisis of managerial competence, woke true believers among higher-ups (aggressive recruiting and promotion to counteract the disparity Damore had so plainly explained has yielded the desired effect, I guess), and…
All in all it doesn't matter. Gemini 1.5 is a superior product to OpenAI's, the next version will be competitive with GPT-5, Google's shipping engine has finished revving up, and we'll be getting fed more of this bullshit from now on.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Insane to think that we've been discussing this 4 years ago.
God I was funnier back then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
24d ago
I am not convinced the 19th century Westerners were any better – there was Theosophy (and eventually Jiddu Krishnamurti) after all. You do like to project your abstract sentimentalities on sleazy Indian grift, see what isn't there based on advertisement, just as you like giving money to horny, filthily materialist gurus with harems, who in turn spin their depravity into a sign of some higher Enlightenment with a few easy turns of the tongue. Even your idea of what might be disgusting to me has already been sanitized: Ganesh, rather than lingams and yonis and Kali and the repetitive psychedelic excess of temple architecture.
But I don't really care if modern Westerners, whether average or Indophilic ones, have the capacity or interest to notice the difference between the actual Indian – personality, art, taste, ethics – and the one imaginable based on some handpicked artifacts and a ton of charity and mind-projection.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
I'm not really seeing the argument here.
Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.
Why are there meritocratic admissions in the first place? How did it happen? The reason the universities were opened up in the 1950's was specifically because cases like Feynman's. It was felt unjust that he shouldn't have had entry into school of choice, etc., because of quotas (at that time capping Jewish students) and Columbia eg felt dumb for having rejected him. The feeling was that schools should be opened up to students like him, WITH THE EXPECTATION that they would do great things with their degrees. Maybe not be Feynman or make great discoveries, but at least use that opportunity to try to, or to have notable achievements in other fields, or at least to become very rich, and so on.
The concrete reward for this opening up of universities was eventually expected to be ....money. Whether legacies, or students allowed in on purely merit, alumni who were or became rich donated to these skrewls. For those who became famous or notable in their fields wihout being rich, this also added to skrewl's reputation, bringing in more money or grants or so on by other avenues. In other words, the universities got or maintained something concrete from opened-up admissions, and the easiest measure of that was donations.
Azn alumni and especially Han don't donate. Thus although they were let in initially in high % because of grades, test scores, etc., it was eventually noted they don't donate. But even worse, they become notable or famous at rates far less than others.
Whereas the expectation was ideally a Feynman, what you got in the Han case was use of the degree to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY etc.; obviously not always; just as in other groups not all came out Feynmans. But the tendency, pattern became very clear. In the vast majority of cases the degree was used for nothing but a comfortable middle class life and the feeling of status. No fame, no reputation coming to the skrewl, and no donations.
Thus you had a population that presented very good scores, grades, conscientiousness, etc., and so if allowed in purely on "merit" would make up a huge % of undergraduate class; but out the other end, they didn't deliver on the whole, and especially...didn't deliver money. [an aside about objective merits of science done by Chinese people. I think the issue of lower effective creativity and irrational lust for busywork are absolutely clear. But, arguably, we are in the regime where Galaxy Brained Ideas both comprehensible for humans and useful in practice have all been had, so East Asian mindset is in fact more valuable].
To this can be added the behavior of Han students in classrooms. It was noticed they are taciturn and in general add nothing to class discussion. In campus social and intellectual life, they seemed absent or kept to themselves etc.; again you may have personal anecdotes to the contrary, I do also. I had very good Chynese students who I was glad to talk to, who were brilliant and got all A's (deserved in their case) and I have Chynese frends, etc. etc.; it matters nothing. As a group universities noticed these very clear patterns in the majority if not vast majority of cases. [an aside about cheating]
…It was, again, a population that, if you applied simple "merit" in admissions, would end up forming maybe even a majority of the student body, but that produced nothing that was expected from holders of these degrees, most notably no donations, but also, no fame, no risk, no contributions, and during skrewltime, another lifeless parody of "study," memorization, cheating, sullen apartness.
For all these reasons universities felt justified in discriminating against azn and Chynese students for admissions--and they were probably justified. But once they started to do this, libtarded professors and admissions committees felt it was necessary to discard almost entirely whatever was left of meritocracy. "This Johnny Cheung has very good test scores and grades and I'm discriminating against him...it's only fair that I don't pay attention to the fact that Johnny Walters also has good test scores and grades. Merit doesn't matter anymore, we had to get rid of it, so...let me invite this nice POC out of feelings of social justice, etc." Thus in a move similar to what justified grade inflation, merit-based admissions was also mostly discarded. I don't know the status of things at moment exactly now after Floyd, but even by 2015 or mid second term Obama's racial demagoguery and BLM craze, it was already starting to be very bad. Even by early 2010's maybe it was accelerating. Obviously there are still very good students who can get in, but it's much harder now.
For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.
And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.
You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
Huh? I don't endorse the author's evaluation, as I do not believe Israel is entitled to even greater American support. Protesting American displeasure is pure arrogance on Israeli part.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
22d ago
Yeah the races=subspecies is a racist talking point and professional geneticists and other scholars do not consider it valid, but all it practically means is that we commit to call human populations, no matter how distinct, only that – populations, at most races, not subspecies. It's much the same construct.
Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."
No, there's no solid quantitative reason to say that eg. Australian Aborigines and Germans are that less distinct than two recognized subspecies of Canis Lupus and thus can't be called subspecies. It's simply not a matter of quantity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Navalny was in line with American goals for Russia, breaking it down into ethnic components
What?
I'm getting tired of your low-information default twitter righoid takes, could you increase the quality of your commentary?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
16d ago
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Yeah, I'd say this precludes the whole scenario, but granting that UN's ire was somehow avoided, I'd expect sanctions.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Is this how people see my more cryptic writing? Because it looks like a load of asinine and extreme logorrhea that at most can poison the theoretically fruitful topic.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Before checking the comments I've transcripted it with whisper and added paragraphs with an LLM:
Good afternoon, welcome to the Natal Conference. I'm Kevin Dolan. We're here to solve a problem that will define the next century. In our lifetime, in our children's lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on earth will pass through a bottleneck, bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question, will your children have children of their own?
It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids. If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way. The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.
Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain, which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles. Not just a temporary overheating of home construction, but a permanent oversupply, like the kind you find in cities like Detroit. Not just tech stocks, but the entire equities market. Not just a handful of cities gutted of their tax base and going bankrupt, but thousands of them, and then sovereign bankruptcies. It's an everything bubble.
Even so, you may say, well, it's a bubble. So be it. If it pops, then there's a correction and we move on. But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families. This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime. It gets worse as it gets worse.
So what does that look like? Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.
To be clear, that will take luck and meticulous planning on their part. Maybe they pull it off. But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places with beautiful people who should go on existing. That would be an orderly tragedy. And again, that's best case.
Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they work them and tax them to death. Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.
The United States will probably be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a degrowth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It's not obvious in any case why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment while their own grandmothers back home are starving. America's wealth and productive capacity give us a few more attractive options in the short run, a few ways to avoid catastrophe if we act now, but our political system and our culture is just so damaged that making that happen would be a heroic undertaking.
So those are the global stakes of this issue. And we've brought experts in demography, genetics, endocrinology, economics, and public policy to tell you about all that. I'm not an expert. The reason I'm here is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us managed to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out.
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60% of millennials will get there, and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable. You give people the freedom to choose, and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice. But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys, only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases, it's what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness. You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line, the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off, and raising kids is just broken down.
So I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn't say, wow, I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health, or they're spoiled, they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors. And we certainly wouldn't say, good, there's too many Bengal tigers, Bengal tigers are ruining everything. Instead, we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative. And it is a basic imperative. If you're built to do anything at all, you're built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there's no more punishing verdict, there's no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable than when they take a chance on that.
You can tell a kid who's afraid of rejection that it's not life and death, but it is life and death. When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you're asking them, do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk, do you want that to go on into the future, or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.
For men, it's usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to, yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on.
I don't think there's anything to gain from asking who has it worse or who's to blame. And in fact, one of my goals for the conference is to create a space totally free from that brand of Twitter blood sport. But I get why so many people are angry. We're just not built to be hurt like that over and over again with no end in sight. And a system where that's the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.
Bottom line for me is I don't want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue, and I'm excited to think through them with you, but I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters and to care intensely about what happens to them and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.
I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realize that all that was completely okay and not a big deal and it didn't make them unlovable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person. You're supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father's eyes, your mother's eyes, maybe through God's eyes. You're supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did, and you're either supposed to understand that and forgive it or you're supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right, maybe both. And these are psychological loops that don't close in any other way.
Of course, life isn't fair. Things don't always work out, but it should be normal. It should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty and just as transformative. I want that for my kids and I want it for your kids because I like your thing and I think it should go on.
To the extent that I care about the median home price or the social security trust fund, that's why I care about those things. My personal line of attack on this issue is economic. I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married, and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life. So I found that exit as a network and a fraternity to build something new on the outside, a place for like-minded talent and capital to build businesses, schools, marketplaces, and communities that can make raising a normal family normal again.
That's not for everyone. It's not a total solution. There are so many more things that could be done and that's why we launched this conference. We want to see what you're seeing to know what you know and to build things we haven't thought of yet. We've done a little homework on you, not a lot, but some, and I can tell you for certain that we don't share a common culture or political program. We even disagree in pretty stark terms about this issue, what it means and what ought to be done about it. But we're here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in making this conference happen, especially my co-founders, Drew Gorham and David Moore, our producer Barbara Williams, our sponsors, our volunteers, and all of our speakers who made the effort to get out here, prepared remarks, connected us with their friends. And of course, thanks to all of you for spending the time and travel and money to make this possible. Thank you.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
25d ago
That was a pun, but also an unfulfilled (except in very narrow personal scope) promise of engineering a Dasein, yes.
I've concluded that discussing American culture war is largely fruitless for a third worlder like myself, on the edge of Singularity to boot.
I find it very sad that the Motte never found a way to maintain activity. Guess Zorba also found things to do.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse
Can you?
By 18 December 2022, OHCHR had recorded 17,595 civilian casualties in Ukraine since February 24, 2022: 6,826 killed and 10,769 injured. This included 9,620 (4,036 killed and 5,584 injured) in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified a total of 9,614 civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine as of September, 2023. Furthermore, 17,535 people were reported to have been injured. However, OHCHR specified that the real numbers could be higher.Oct 27, 2023
Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.
How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.
Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.
It is what it is.
Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.
As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.
Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? [archive.ph link]
Quoting Forbes:
…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”
Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.
My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:
- AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
- plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
- vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
- and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)
In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.
edit: not to toot my own horn, but
Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?
I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.
edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
In conclusion, I believe that contemporary psychopathology is a case of finding a hammer and suddenly realizing we are surrounded by nails. If something can be treated as an illness it will be treated as an illness, because that is l’esprit de l’époque.
Does social dysfunction not matter at all in your paradigm? To a sufficiently disinterested observer, everything is culturally contingent, but the criterion of maintaining will to survival while not harming others without due cause seems trivially justified so long as we recognize the legitimacy of people, well, living in a society.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.
I would like to hear a journalist's perspective on this some day. Is it taught? Is the intuitive grokking of those rules – condemn the far-right mob, but don't explicitly spell out their casus belli, so the impression is that far-righters are just spontaneously violent – a job requirement? Am I too deep in a bubble and it's just common sense already to speak this way here and the other way around about George Floyd?
I suspect the tactic actually works – remember, 50% of people are below average, and the average ain't that high, and it's white people who are the target audience, so they just trust journalists to do a honest job.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
You know, there's something uniquely wrong in this popular genre of «Western» «conservative» reasoning, that goes beyond what Seldowitz or any Arab terrorist could do. You serve unashamed tribalism of another tribe, and defend it with lofty universalist rhetoric about «civilization and barbarism».
What are those «our» values that the civilized abuser Seldowitz represents and the street vendor, whose transgression is in line with transgressions of white leftists, does not? Civilization is not about being educated enough to do more than sell street food. If there is anything to the Western civilization as a proposition and not pure empirical capability, it's the belief that «values» go beyond alliances of convenience, brute kinship and right of the mighty, that there exist principles and morally sound laws. Who plays more by the rules and laws of the West, and who exploits them more in this situation? Who reciprocates goodwill, and who has defected barbarically?
And, as you say, an attack on the Israeli is an attack on you, but does this work the other way around? Say, Bari Weiss, the kind of person who generates pretraining data for your soul, argues that antisemitism is a sign that the society itself is breaking down. Was the long culture war against whites and «the West», discussed in this community for so long, seen as a dire sign for the Jews? I suppose some clever and provocative ones saw it this way – in outlets so radioactive nobody would in their right mind cite them. Most others were just content to clarify they're not white, or at least not the hate-deserving shade of white.
And, I mean, that's fair enough. Every bloodline for itself, that's how the game is played since protozoa. I'm not under the impression that the CNN and the Guardian are paragons of «The West» or advocate for equal standards either: they report on Seldowitz solely because the progressive faction they represent and pander to is currently more sympathetic to Muslims, even Hamas supporters, than to Zionist Jews. But I appreciate that they do not invoke those ideas which I think would really deserve protection.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.
No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.
BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Oh come on, this is more American whining. Muh deaths of overdoses, muh Russian election meddling, little old us assaulted on all fronts, won't somebody please spare a thought for the poor hegemon.
The CHIPS act has been about pork and the usual fighting over the spoils from the beginning, its success or failure is of no consequence. China was summarily cut off from modern semiconductor manufacturing and falls behind, new fabs in safe allied countries are being completed, Taiwan is getting reinforced, and AGI seems to be on schedule within 5 years. Yes, could have been done better. But it has gone well enough that advancing petty political agendas took precedence. If there ever is any plausible risk of the US losing control over the global high-end manufacturing chain, I am sure you'll see it going differently.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Money translating into power has always been a transient phenomenon of immature nations, and the Marxist delusion that money and power are one and the same is instrumental to other Marxist delusions (eg: "why does Israel fight Gaza? Because colonization for natural resources!" I kid you not, have seen this take in the wild, it was even popular).
Nation states, themselves puppets to special interests groups with non-monetary primary motivations, have a non-quantitative categorical advantage over billionaires, trillionaires and whatever – they can just take your shit and use it to fund users of hard power, which they have authority over, to compel you. The army cannot be meaningfully bribed, neither can the police, neither can the police robot dogs, neither can the politruk overseeing tech lord's robot dog assembly business; indeed, the very attempt to do so means you're dead meat.
The state can only reach abolition through degeneration from within and loss of relative legitimacy in the eyes of its most relevant constituents; which it will prevent at all costs.
Sorry to burst your cyberpunk bubble: Big Tech Has No Power At All. Larry Summers is and will always be more powerful than Elon Musk. He, ontologically, belongs to a caste which can have power, and Musk does not.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I liked the interview for giving a hint of just how strongly Israelis believe in the demographic dimension of history. Mainstream or not, her side will become more mainstream through their efforts at expanding their Lebensraum and effortfully breeding; and their vigor will win over tired moderates even over this purely biological growth. I'm fairly sure we will see her maximalist ambitions of a massive Israeli empire normalized in some decades. What is impossible often becomes possible when enough people believe in it.
I also think this whole war episode has strengthened my thesis that Israel doesn't depend on the US much, doesn't care for what the US thinks, and frankly isn't any sort of an «outpist of Western liberalism in the sea of barbarism» but just a powerful, autonomous civilization state on its own already.
My least favorite part is her shrill denialism here:
In a lot of these places where settlements have been developed, from 1967 to the present day, there have been Palestinian communities and Palestinian families. What is your feeling about where these people should go?
It’s the opposite. None of the communities in Judea and Samaria are founded on an Arab place or property, and whoever says this is a liar. I wonder why you said it. Why did you say that, since you have no idea about the real facts of history? That’s not true. The opposite is true. Who got this idea into your mind?
Palestinian communities have been removed from their land, kicked off their land by—
No, you never read things like that. No. There are no pictures. [According to a report by Btselem, an Israeli human-rights group, parts of Kedumim, where Weiss lives, were built on private Palestinian land; in 2006, Peace Now found that privately owned Palestinian land comprised nearly forty per cent of the territory of West Bank settlements and outposts.]
O.K. I’m a little surprised you are denying this. I thought you were going to say, “It’s O.K. to kick Palestinians off land because it belongs to the Jewish people.”
You did no homework before you interviewed me. Everything that you say is the opposite of my personality and my philosophy. You are interviewing a person, and you don’t know anything about them. It’s very strange. I’ve never encountered a situation like this.
I was trying to understand where Palestinians who live in the West Bank should go.
Why should they go? Why should they go?
etc.
This kind of DARVO-like shrieking has always rustled my jimmies, but it seems to be normal in the Eastern discourse, and will be normalized further in the future. People on the right will be begging to get the genteel progressive assimilated Jews back.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
@HlynkaCG says, true to style, that this demonstrates all-importance of Culture, rather than HBD. He's right in a sense. But first, I want to discuss how he is also wrong.
In short, HBD is misunderstood. It is an issue of culture, and has been increasingly an issue of culture for most of Anthropocene.
Forget this speculative pablum about Cold Winters rewarding long term preference and complex social order. I do believe it, of course; it explains the bulk of initial conditions of our path-dependent historical trajectory; it doesn't matter. I've lived most of my life in a place with rather fucking cold winters, in a house designed to withstand those; sometimes, the homeless took refuge from the cold in its entrance lobby equipped with centralized heating – they'd have frozen to death otherwise. A denizen of Honshu can survive in what is basically a shed made of paper and wood planks. In terms of human capital, Japan is leagues above Russia – like 10 points in IQ, and time preference gulf that translates to 6x difference in implicit interest rates. How so?
Whites came to South Africa and made it a fertile land, and in centuries they have not become any less industrious, nor have their fields turned to wastelands (until they were excised as racially alien, and the infrastructure left behind got broken). Why?
Protestant European countries have minimally dysgenic fertility, whereas Latin America and the Middle East are hit the hardest. Does all that heat kill high-brainpower sperm first, or what?
For the longest time we have been kings of the hill, we thoroughly dominate this planet, no beast and certainly no frivolity of climate decides whether we thrive or go extinct. Even the most wretched countries have carrying capacity orders of magnitude higher than what the era of Cold Winters relevance allowed. No. Society is humans' environment. Culture is humans' selection pressure. The measure of our fitness is how well we fit in. Whether you are praised by a local pastor and your children held in high esteem for your success in retail business, or your store looted and your children taken hostage for ransom determines - on average – how many grandchildren they will be able to raise; and whether, in the long run, that which grows around your grave will be a nation of thugs or genteel shopkeepers. HBD tells us how well a person of a given extraction, ceteris paribus, will be likely to perform on a batch of rigorous and meaningful tests relative to others. Deep history tells us why that is so. Culture is the mechanism by which ceteris is prevented from being paribus; both directly through environmental inputs and more importantly through what they were for your ancestors. For all practical purposes, it does not matter what came first, chicken or egg, gene alleles or the criteria by which they get effectively judged as worthy of continuation: this is a self-sustaining loop either way. It does not matter that my people could, in a society different from Russia, be more than what they actually are, more than Japanese, perhaps. They – us – demonstrably fail to build anything better than Russia. And Black South Africans, under their own power, have demonstrably failed to build anything better than what the Apartheid regime was; the best idea they could muster was to flip the table.
Of course, one can claim that the absence of indignity inherent to second-class citizenship is worth all that. But – is there really dignity to be found in brutality and corruption, chaos and fear, squalor and pathetic self-deception? Their current troubles have nothing to do with whitey, except in the sense that they cannot sustain the country that whitey has built; so the Gods of Copybook Headings come to collect their due.
HBD is downstream of culture, in a way that feeble, equitable, painless interventions and charitable self-sacrifice by the stronger party cannot negate. The less virtuous cannot rule and become more virtuous in the process. You will have to have a culture where virtue is rewarded, even if that puts some strongly self-identifying, cohesive group in a bad spot. And to have that culture, you have to have at least a seed of people who maintain it effortlessly among themselves. This can be done, for a time, in virtually any society. But let us say that is it not easy to pull oneself by the hair out of the bog. Society is not just upstream of individual biology – it is less mutable than that.
Now, as for what makes Hlynka right. It's that in this scheme there is such a thing as pure culture, the culture of governance and highest-level decisionmaking, which can rapidly change and impose that change on the whole underlying structure; and in South Africa it is terrible.
But if you squint, the culture of the US is pretty similar. Do Americans not lambast «whiteness»? Do their dignitaries not take the knee for a thug, while honest people are canceled? Do they not piss all over the legacy of the whitey, overturn his monuments, ruin education and academia he had created? Is this not what this place owes its existence to?
I exaggerate of course. The serious point is that both American and South African political culture disdains the notion of owning your mistakes, and is ignorant of the feeling of limits. The only respectable response to a failure is to double down and accuse your enemies of meddling; chutzpah is the measure of sincerity. (I've been astonished recently to see Douglas Hofstadter admit he has been wrong about AI – this is not how American Public Intellectuals are supposed to operate. «It's a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing.» Well, I'm sorry for your loss, man, try to not have smug and absurd beliefs next time.)
But this abysmal cultural regime is normal. Not doubling down, stopping digging when you find yourself in a pit, actually thinking, is anomalous; the project of rationality was premised on making this anomaly pay rent. Opinions differ as to whether it worked out. Extreme cases of nations being clearly worse than normal for pure cultural reasons are very popular – North Korea, Argentina… But that's grasping at straws.
So there not being much difference in «pure culture», the reason America is not South Africa is still HBD. To wit, there are plainly too many good people, industrious people, smart people, to let it fail; they patch the gaps with tax money, duct tape and high technology faster than new gaps show up, and fast enough to attract even more of the same sort of people, increasing the delta between America and less fortunate nations. Japan, too, does not make sense politically, and their economic system is a mess – but the Japanese have high enough human capital to bear the burden of their culture. They'd have been able to bear Kim's regime as well. After all, Koreans manage somehow, and Koreans are their peers, HBD-wise.
Some states don't have that luxury. South Africa is failing as a state, for example. Its culture is terrible on every level and it is not blessed enough by HBD to cover it up.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Tfw Karlin has no idea who Scott Alexander is.
My year-old comment:
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