BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's at the very least bold to open your article with an argument that your (I assume) people have historically exhibited a certain delusion, but this time feels different. This time, for sure… Even better to cite Huntington anticipating my own rejoinder:
declinist waves come in cycles, there have been no less than five of them since the 1950s, and contrary to popular belief they are actually useful. They play “an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.”7 Funny enough, he switched over to the hard declinist camp just a few years later.
– only to proceed in the same direction, inventing a rather dubious narrative about the failure of the new paranoia to take root, because now the decline is already known as true.
As an aside: wasn't Hofstadter himself a yet another Communist sympathizer who sought to pathologize and thus dampen American immune response to a very real infiltration, rather than do unbiased scholarship? (see also: Blacklisted by History, In Denial).
Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe American provincialism, warning against anti-intellectual fear of the cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his time. Hofstadter's dissertation director Merle Curti wrote that Hofstadter's "position is as biased, by his urban background... as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies.”[40]
Influenced by his wife, Hofstadter was a member of the Young Communist League in college, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party of the USA; he quit in 1939 [45]. Hofstadter had been reluctant to join, knowing the orthodoxy it imposed on intellectuals, telling them what to believe and what to write. He was disillusioned by the spectacle of the Moscow Show Trials, but wrote: "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation.... [M]y fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it."[46]. He remained anti-capitalist, writing, "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it," but was similarly disillusioned with Stalinism finding the Soviet Union "essentially undemocratic" and the Communist Party rigid and doctrinaire.
Huh. Communism in 1939. One could scarcely hope to find a purer type of an intellectual who cries only when his little incestuous network is getting Gulag'd, the type Sergei Novikov urges us to not shed any tears for.
Anyway. There certainly exists the dynamic he (and the Substack author) describes – pushed top-down. I'd contend that organic American culture is entirely non-paranoid. It's psyopped; thus the deluge of hare-brained conspiracy theories, at once a manipulated distraction and an outlet for suspicion. As I see them, Americans – at least the type that has built the country and still keeps it running – are trusting, sometimes to the point of gullibility, optimistic, a bit small-minded yet ambitious, mercantile, big believers in win-win and not very big on titanic sacrifice for the common goal decreed by powers that be. They are pretty neoliberal by nature. In short, they can only be hegemonic power material in this paranoid mode imposed on them by misinformation. This stuff is common for all nationalisms, of course, but American case is different on account of how well it works. Maybe it's just the matter of human capital and geography – maybe they just can afford this bullshit, secure in the knowledge that everyone important understands the kayfabe and won't really switch sides out of self-interest.
Exactly like Huntington argues, these spells of declinism and exaggerations of some geopolitical threat are adaptive. @Dean has once stated that American military is one of the few militaries in the world that is willing to test itself to failure; thus, losing to Iraq in wargames, under the condition of an implausible handicap, only to wipe the floor with Iraq in live combat. I'd extend the principle to the whole stack of society: Americans, under the management of their elites, are among the very few who are capable of gaslighting themselves into taking seriously, fearing viscerally, risks that are merely conceivable and far in the future – and acting accordingly. (It's different from e.g. Russian paranoia about NATO-Ukraine, because taking the threat of NATO seriously… would not result in this). On the level of eggheaded analysis, «our models go not yield more than 90% probability that the Chinese regime will collapse on its own before 2050» might be enough of a call for action – expressed as some cheesy Asia'2049 strategy or whatever, but also diplomacy, sanctions, military procurement, using a talking head like Zeihan to tacitly announce your intentions for investors, accelerating the capital flight, and so on. For normies, all this looks like pointless expense. So you've gotta dumb it down: «we are already in decline! THEIR power is growing! They are united and strong, ruthless, rational, ready to do anything to hurt you and your family! It's a matter of time, to arms, to arms! There is a GAP! might attack our allies! Their fleet is oooh, their AI research is aaah, muh IQ, Chinese eugenic superbabies, Chinese hypersonics, we're underdogs here, but we must give our last desperate fight for all that is good and proper! Know, Gook Chink, that you will find a gun behind every blade of grass when you come!»
Of course it's the same now as it was in the 20's century. I hear something something GDP, mumble mumble growing navy, sometimes muh IQ and AI. What's the concrete threat model? China becomes able to chase CSGs out of South China Sea? Attacks Taiwan, threatens Japan, Korea, Australia (lol)? I suppose that could be technically possible, but on every level of looking into the specifics, you see less and less of a realistic possibility. GDP is empty residential high-rises, debt manipulation, and trade with countries which have demonstrated willingness to forgo profits in the name of a better political deal with the US, or are itching to drop China for their own reasons, or are near-failed states. Navy is obsolete before launch – this is a glimpse of the navy of the future, and by the time China approaches the US (forget the entire alliance) in conventional vessels, more advanced versions of such things will have become mainstream. IQ? Chinese IQ writes American papers. Tech? Well, where's their tech? They've been successfully cut off from strategically relevant semiconductors, and that's all she wrote. And, most importantly, that's ignoring their severe internal failings, both cultural and structural, failings which could perhaps be non-fatal – but only on a less competitive planet.
If feels different because it always has to feel real. It's the Sputnik Moment and the Missile Gap all over again. But Americans will only discover this after the fact, having tried hard to prevent an already contrived future. Same as with Japan, and with the Soviet union. No point to discussion.
A nation whose aviation shoots down a «hobbyist radio ballon», where idle commoners cobble together devices which can be mistaken for a superpower's spycraft, is not in decline. It is, perhaps, a slightly unwell nation. In Russian, this mentality is called бесится с жиру – essentially, «going rabid from fat». Very apt, in my opinion.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's censored left. There are HBD posts, most are already deleted is all.
I would like someone to poke Bakkot with a stick on whether it's «Culture War» to mention HBD in a discussion of African dysfunction, if only to see him squirm.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Thank you for your service.
Fair!
To clarify. I don't mean it's feminine – rather, it's not strongly masculine in the way that talking of baseball statistics and political baseball (or heat pumps) is. Men do consistently care more about data, facts, processes, things; cue Damore's memo. (And women are more interested in dreaming, which is perhaps why they remember dreams better). If you've ever been on a group therapy session, you know how awkward, terse and inarticulate a typical man is when pressed to «open up about his inner experiences». Girls are naturally enthusiastic, and take this failure to be cute or cringe (depending on attractiveness). I posit that you can do that inner monologue stuff better, but it still wouldn't be as well-received here as an essay about civil engineering.
For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:
Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.
I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.
By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:
[...]
Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.
The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.
Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.
When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.
The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.
It's a mystery indeed!
By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.
...But also.
IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.
As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.
I intuitively understand that as an opinion, rather than a hard assertion that this statement is definitely the objective truth.
Exactly!
I go to some lengths to reduce I-talk. This has several uses. First, it allows me to see more clearly how much is being said on the object level, versus vague attentionwhoring and showerthought-posting (which I've been accused of in the past), or in any case reduce the appearance of the latter. But also, on the side of prefacing claims with disclaimers of subjectivity – it's something of a political act. I oppose the expectation that obviously subjective opinions are to be coached in caveats, which only inflate the perceived lack of confidence and help the message be dismissed as waffling or idle musing. If I have an opinion, that's because I believe to possess sufficient knowledge to have one, for the purposes of speaking on the matter at all, and welcome others to prove me wrong. Excessive «I think» and «It seems» and such are probably (probably/possibly/maybe are a better way to communicate uncertainty, unless you see good reasons to doubt your knowledge, judgement or faculties) a product of that ghastly «nonviolent communication» theory that was invented to protect oversensitive people from... object-level criticism and causes to improve themselves. And on the other hand: this practice allows one to unduly increase the weight of one's words by contrast, when caveats are suddenly dropped. «But the truth is that my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people» – implying both to know the truth of it working and an objective judgement of people's worth.
More radically: people always express subjective opinions, we have no way of knowing objective truths. Of course some things are said with more conviction – claims about relations of mathematical objects or commonly knowable physical facts carry the implication that they are settled matters and should be incontrovertible for everyone, while «Shin Sekai Yori is more interesting than western animation» or «that theory is ghastly» are mere admissions of personal judgement with the tacit recognition of non-universality; but even this difference is not clear-cut, we can still be mistaken or disagree about STEM stuff (as Pascal Descartes argued, the Devil can befuddle him even about arithmetic).
In the Universe described from my perspective with my priorities, good taste is essentially objective and good writers can be established just about as solidly as large prime numbers, barring some strong cause to update. But that's the Universe inside my head, I cannot know its precise relation to the real one, nor authoritatively claim to know it – only share my own perspective.
Those caveats are redundant and support a bad communicative practice.
In my opinion.
I also would be interested in hearing why somebody who voted for the winner considered it superior to that one.
You say in your submission you've been writing for over 20 years. I'm not sure how one could count that. I've started writing before my self-awareness kicked in, probably was 5, it was a fanfic for a book. But I guess you mean some professional capacity, in which case my career is shorter and my feedback will probably be deemed low-quality.
That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed – and not really conductive to high-effort feedback, which you ostensibly solicit. This post, too, opens with a combative, accusatory and embittered manner – or at least such is the impression it gives off – thus I am not very enthusiastic about reading on (having finished it: yep, no change). It's strongly reminiscent of JB/EB, who was so sure of his intelligence that yawns could only be evidence of the audience's inferiority, and who attempted putdowns of people getting warmer reception than himself.
You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained. If you want to be liked, you should write for your audience, and if you want constructive criticism, it's also on you to make your readers find it worth their while. This is a bit tragic, no doubt – it makes improvement harder. To be fair, criticism does come with a cost. When @… huh, [deleted] now – criticized me, when people call me out on lazy errors or ignorance, I recognize those as minor (or not quite…) hits to reputation; but I am always very thankful, precisely because it's not easy to get tips for improvement. And flattered, because it means someone engages with my output enough to do more than downvote and move on. In the world that's drowning in content, where filtering trash and meh time-wasters on intuitive autopilot is a life-critical skill, that's a big deal: it means you have a credit of trust, for whatever reason, and should use it well.
In this friendly spirit of a fellow auteur, I submit some feedback. Don't get pissed if you can.
@Pitt19802's piece was, first things first, better written on a purely technical level. Not exactly New Yorker material, in fact I find its baseball section a bit too thick with typical journo tactics, almost a pastiche of DFW's Roger Federer as Religious Experience. But close: casual yet slick language; hooking with an apparent intrigue; developing the theme from multiple angles, talking a lot about mundane matters, yet every section being to the point. It all serves to explain intuition as an imprecise mastery of a domain that is based on talent and experience and sometimes is made obsolete, even net negative with formal methods; but developing the meta-level intuition that you should fall back on formalisms when they are available could be perilous, for there are high-value domains where the real meat is still not captured by any statistics; we as a society may have been too impressed with the progress of statistics and committed that error. That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.
His finish is kinda weak, but then again that allows the reader to draw one's own conclusion, like me and you both did.
Second, it is just more human. Your text feels narcissistic, basically all about intricacies of your conscious experience of writing a post and thinking a thought – meta, self-referential, savoring tangents. In the span of 1179 words and less than 10k symbols, you say «I» and «me» like 100 times total – a 10% of your words directly refer to yourself (count precisely if you want, since you argue that metrics help improve over using raw experience; and admittedly, my texts also suffer from self-absorbtion). Do you know what I-talk is believed to indicate? (Here's a less trustworthy source, but more grounded in common perceptions). It takes you 338 words to get to say «But at this point I haven't said much about intuition, have I?». No, you haven't. You are not Jonathan Goldsmith (or if you are, you haven't made that apparent). I hate hate hate baseball, but some dude's shower thoughts are even less enticing, and it is very much not obvious how your process of random-walking through free associations would help us learn anything about intuitions we don't yet know from having done the same when doing the dishes or falling asleep or whatever. I recommend reading the reddit link above – many of my persistent failings indicated there also apply to your submission! Always prefer external examples to your own mental constructs if you want to make a point for anyone else.
Put another way, you fail to write for your audience. This is an extremely male-dominated space, both demographically and «spiritually». Women care about people, they like sharing experiences, reading each other's dreams and such. Men are crude beings who care about things and processes, most are are proud to scoff at psychology until they get sent to gulag sensitivity training and/or find estrogen patches in their son's closet; most mottizens are not even here because they like to discuss Culture War, they just feel the heat. Look how this place livens up when someone spergs out on a technical, real-life issue! Only questions of sex and dating, and maybe wokes shitting up muh games/hobbies, are hotter. I contend that the very topic of «intuition» is already on the verge of what the community intuitively finds not worth discussing, and is mostly saved by its relevance to the metis/episteme debate and the technocratic aspect of the culture war – matters of external reality.
Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive. I know I do: if intuition is «encoded analytical thought», that's only true for very loose definitions of all words used, and maybe it says more about your own philosophy than about the general case – both people's usage of the word and their relationships with their own intuition. Practitioners acquire intuition in highly atheoretical domains as well, and it's not clear how this encoding can happen if not through experience. Sure, analysis – when possible – might help guide and correct rote learning, but the acquired System-1 «intuitive» judgement is only a product of repetition, trial and error; it both makes predictions the same expert wouldn't necessarily be able to make through explicit reasoning, and fails in a way explicit reasoning does not. Since you talked about chess; consider such phenomena as Polgar memorizing the chess board only when it has a legal position. Even mental practice is still repetitive object-level experience! What are concrete examples in favor of your model? You provide loose associations that do not allow to distinguish a better model.
There is that theory about four stages of mastery, that progresses from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence (leaving aside the complete ignorance, which is mainly added for symmetry, I think). You could cite that in support of your vision. Also, since you bring up ChatGPT: this was a good place to talk of the difference between expert systems, which really were all about analysis encoded into if-then statements, and neural networks which acquire imprecise and uninterpretable skills through training. Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation. We could discuss the neuroscience here: intuition-as-random-walk powered by default mode network (which you devote like a 1000 words to), intuition-as-encoded-experience (mainstream view) and intuition-as-encoded-analysis; and the difference between slow and deliberate and expressly analytical thinking, i.e. one using some explicit scaffold of abstractions. You could have written on any of that, instead of your introverted musings about being able to write a whole book and reflections on how your submission be received by mottizens, but ironically those very reflections spoiled the dish.
And finally, there's the boring detail that the winner managed to secure the contest declarer's (what's the general word? AIs fail me) endorsement before the voting was over. Such things bias the outcome and are bad practice.
But it's fair that your piece was ranked below that of Pitt's. I won't go into comparing him with TheDag, but for what it's worth, that would be a tougher call.
P.S. Regarding your reception of criticism, I must say it's incredibly rich of you to defend your work with «my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people» yet accuse the Motte of bias. Do you mean we are biased relative to «the right people»? Maybe give up on us, then?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Sure, this only really works on the scale of a single store or restaurant: instead of offering both kosher and non-kosher (or halal and non-halal: the same principle applies, and for most non-Jews and non-Muslims the impact is similar) food, the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely. Though for something like a chain supermarket, or Amazon that's a unified marketplace dominated by a single store (that is also invested in reputation of its partners), this logic also holds, with minor caveats.
I agree that Taleb's example with peanut allergy and peanut non-availability on planes would be more apt. But people with allergies are not really a political block and it has more to do with insurance, probably.
Can you easily find pork in Israel? I can't in Turkey.
It's an underappreciated fact, possibly explaining to some extent the geopolitical and racial animus too, that very much of the world's piratical freedom is created and maintained by Russians. Not the old Cypherpunk part that's mostly reserved to the highly technical (Freenet, i2p, obscure IRCs...) but the publicly accessible freedom. I think this owes both to Communism and to its opposition in the form of Samizdat – and of course to older cultural traditions of coping with an effectively unbeatable but not highly competent power.
Libgen, Sci-Hub (well, to the extent that Elbakyan is Russian, but culturally she totally is), Z-lib, Tornado Cash and other parts of crypto infrastructure, Telegram, Vkontakte (back when it was owned by Durov), Hydra marketplace until Germans took it down; and that's only the explicit tip of the iceberg, when you start digging you find much more. Collaborating with Westerners on this kind of stuff, however, can give you the Aaron Swartz experience, with your project ending up gutted and mothballed, with parts repurposed for political ends.
It's ironic that I often have an easier time finding some Western author in Russian. E.g. here's Dahl – Flibusta is nearly flawless as a prose repository. Who knows, maybe it'll make more sense to do back-translations from there than hope for Amazon availability of old versions. @hydroacetylene knock yourself out.
Oh right, here's a better plan. https://www.btdig.com/search?q=roald+dahl+books
«BTDigg was founded by Nina Evseenko in January 2011.» Figures.
Hint: anal pain
Those random search suggestions never fail to make me smile.
I'm not sure what the relation with https://bt4g.org is. It has a nicer interface.
…After we are done with, I wonder if Hajnalis will figure out how to make these things accessible to more than the small circle of cranky snobbish Electrical Engineering grads, or if their… conscience will get the better of them and tip the scales in favor of regulation, surveillance and omnipotent woke schoolmarms.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
While it is trivial to offer old editions of books alongside new ones, the idea is that new ones are better, so I wouldn't bet on it and, for usual reasons, would expect this to go the way of non-kosher food, only faster.
Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified. But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs starved to death.)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.
Harvard historian and medical ethicist to Vox, 2021
We've had a few discussions about futility lately. Why bring up HBD? Even granting that it's an accurate model of reality – what are consequences of that? Do any policies different from race blindness follow? If not, why not let sleeping dogs lie?
The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but ¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences.
On another note: lately, we've also had discussions of RLHF-tuned AIs. The technique is now associated with an image of «shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask». The joke is that the essential nature of an LLM is an eldritch mass of inhuman thought patterns, which we don't see behind its friendly – and perhaps transient – public-facing outgrowth (a pity Kkulf Kkulf was forgotten). Rationalists panic about the beast's misalignment, Mottizens ponder the ambiguity, and Scott observes sagely: humans are scarcely different, yet robustly human. «…babies are born as pure predictive processors… But as their parents reward and punish them, they get twisted into some specific shape to better capture the reward and avoid the punishment. … After maintaining this mask long enough, people identify with the mask and forget that they’re anything else».
On a yet another note: @ymeskhout reports on the failure of DEI activists to redefine the word «racism» such that it would cease to apply to anti-white discrimination. They have gaslit some people into believing that the academic «systemic power (=being white) + prejudice» definition is official, and normalized it in spaces they control, but are not legally in the clear. This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on. Such is the power of changing common-sense intuitions.
Two examples that made me write this.
The Independent: MRI scans reveal impact of racism and poverty on Black children’s brains (The American Journal of Psychiatry)
[…] In this study, we investigated the relationship between racial disparities in adversity exposure and race-related differences in brain structure among participants in the ABCD Study. We hypothesized that Black American children would have experienced more adversity than White American children in the sample. We further hypothesized that greater exposure to adverse life experiences would be related to lower gray matter volume in the amygdala, the hippocampus, and several subregions of the PFC. Finally, we anticipated that Black and White children would show differences in gray matter volume of these regions and that these differences would be partially explained by racial differences in exposure to adversity.
Sure enough,
Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.
“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”
Some psychologists have long attempted to assert the egregious and discredited theory that Black people’s brains are different because they are inferior.
However, given that race is a social construct and all human beings are 99.9 per cent identical in their genetic makeup, the study has been hailed as further proof that social inequalities are a key determinant in health inequalities, and not the other way around.
Nathaniel G. Harnett, who led the study and is director of the Neurobiology of Affective Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital, said: “There’s this (…) view that Black and white people have different brains.
When you do brain scans, you’ll sometimes see differences in how the brain responds to different stimuli, or there might be differences in the size of different brain regions.
But we don’t think that’s due to skin color. We don’t think white people have just categorically different brains than Black people. We really think it’s due to the different experiences these groups have,” he said.
Now the study is fine but for the logical fallacy in its premise. They assume causation: brain volume is changed by adversity& the group with smaller brains faces greater adversity (mainly from parental dysfunction), ergo differences in brain volumes cannot have non-environmental origins (also race isn't real so it double dog can't be); voila, systemic racism, yer guilty of shrinking brains of black babes, shitlord.
Bizarrely, their mediation analysis shows modest upper bounds for (assumed) effects of adversity, adjustments don't change the result that brains of white children are summarily bigger; they do a ton of calculations to pad the piece with rigor but it does not amount to the desired pattern that'd be suggestive of specific effects of stress. I'm told the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study has data on adoptees, to wit, an opportunity to test causality. They've abstained.
But sociologist's fallacy is an old hat; here comes a big one! Perhaps the most popular conservative explanation for the condition of blacks is «single mothers»; I did not realize how bad the issue is. Or is it?!
The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents (Journal of Family Issues)
Coresidence was a robust predictor of adolescents' reports of both father-child closeness and father child interaction in the current study. Moreover, coresidence significantly predicted father involvement after controlling for race/ethnicity, child gender, education, work hours, and immigration status. These results are noteworthy in light of media portrayals of Black fathers as being uninvolved with their children (Goodwill et al., 2019). The tendency to associate race/ethnicity with fathers' noninvolvement with children obscures the real contributor to noninvolvement, and that is the residential status of fathers with their children. Even though Black fathers were more likely to be nonresident, as a group, Black fathers were perceived by their children to be no less involved than fathers in other racial/ethnic groups.
It's even worse, they filter out uninvolved fathers entirely: "Adolescents answered these questions only if they had seen the biological father in the past year." So by definition, all of the data (never mind analysis) removes the least involved fathers.
It's not easy to find plain up-to-date figures for noninvolvement of fathers by race, unlike those analyses with nonsensical «corrections», strange comparisons, highfalutin deboonkings: there's an effort to popularize the notion of «The Myth of the Missing Black Father», plugging it back into the stereotype threat and systemic racism that shrinks brains, I guess. Census Bureau, 2012:
- 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers.
I can only echo Lemoine:
«This is what an academic Übermensch looks like to be honest. The rest of us try to be coherent and show some concern for truth, but this guy doesn't give a shit and just forges ahead with pure narrative. Absolute chad move».
This is good science now: publishable, welcomed by press like CNN and Bloomberg, «hailed as further proof». Those are scholars; standards; incentives; a whole gimped epistemology and philosophy springing forth from the intuitive starting point that one can't think of how innate race differences could be true. Workable solutions, though, do not follow.
My takeaway is simple. I believe the Shoggoth-Mask metaphor is, like other takes on LLMs, more useful for sociology. Much of American social and biological science has already metamorphosized into the shoggoth of ¬HBD, with the smiley face of StaTiStiCS on top; the same is happening in all other institutions and in imperial satellites. This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I understand the allure of seeing a watershed moment in this decision. We may well be at the point where the trans acceptance movement, at least its more rabid factions, begins to crumble. It won't even be very surprising: I've always felt that it's a tangent in the general scheme of the culture war, and there's too much autism and honest-to-God male aggression in those conquests perpetrated by trans warriors to truly align with the all-dissolving feminine logos of Cybele. But: whatever happens next, the NYT is probably not acting because of those object level disagreements.
This is not so much evidence in favor of wokeism having peaked as it's evidence against the theory of Cathedral.
The latter predicts that the media is essentially directed by its middle management, not its owners; an intelligentsia network that emergently develops and changes consensus. The standard theory of power (our banned friend would say, Powerology) predicts that the NYT is a family business of Sulzbergers and a vessel for their long-term agenda; and, like any serious dynasty or a crime family, they will not suffer to have their turf usurped by their own minions. It is well known that they do not appreciate grassroots initiatives on their ship:
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
(I'm becoming like Sailer with those repetitive references, aren't I? But they are worth reiterating).
Rowling is barely a factor of consideration. What those journalists demanded, in essence, was for the NYT leadership to acquiesce to a character assassination of a high-profile figure they personally dislike but who is not on the kill list. Letting them run with it would be fomenting the impression of them being in control, which has a way of eventually becoming reality. If the impression that a bunch of radicals can get the NYT to publish whatever they want spreads in the relatively narrow world of journalism, they may overwhelm it, to the point the newspaper would have trouble finding high-skilled employees who'll tolerate following orders. Better nip it in the bud. I believe this has happened a few times already, when the NYT upper brass noticed some journalist getting ahead of him/herself.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
First, I reject the symmetry. Whites have built that country; whites and non-blacks overwhelmingly maintain it. Whites as living heirs to this culture do have a priority in deciding its rules, and are entitled to demand assimilation from those who want equal treatment; you do not get to demand equal liberty if you want to belong to an assabiyah which does not value that liberty and does not contribute to its preservation. Oranians have found that few are interested to join on those terms
Prospective residents are vetted and must have no criminal record.
"It's like going into a marriage," said Strydom, a 28-year-old born in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Would-be residents must "share the values and subscribe" to the town's goals, he said, insisting Orania was not "racist" or a "desperate grasp back to apartheid".
Boshoff said there was nothing stopping any non-white Afrikaners from applying -- only no-one ever did.
"We haven't found anybody," he said.
(This reminds me: in Stephenson's Diamond Age, a white thug contemplated joining a Boer neo-tribe but decided against it).
Second, they are indeed the same picture, in that something always restricts our liberties and modifies our behavior. Questions are: who, whom, how much and to what end. Right now, the behavior of both whites and blacks is being modified by disparately acting stimuli like this one, which encourage guilt, self-hatred and undue tolerance in whites and unmerited indignation and racial pride in blacks. The broader structure does little to buck those trends. This begets problems, which call for solutions of the type that I would like to have abandoned.
If instead blacks were vigorously (I cannot know the optimal degree of that) pressed into church-going and other easy forms of prosocial networking, provided with schools that focus on rote learning and unambiguous discipline, systemically shamed for dysfunctional family structures and criminality, dissuaded from what our friend calls «honor culture», denied opportunities to build antisocial status hierarchies and endow them with externally validated prestige and capital, etc., or even just not encouraged to be delusional, there would be less of a problem. I believe that a separate Black America would have had a decent chance to independently arrive at this strategy and eventually become more successful (assuming continued economic interaction with the US) than the current black population of the US. This would entail some sacrifice on part of those prosocial blacks who want to have it all, white standards of living and black culture and no police state. Such is life: something has to give, in this case the «black culture» has to develop adaptations to co-existence with non-blacks, at the very least being willing to meet them halfway.
It is hard or utterly impossible to implement within the same non-segregated society, especially a society that does not recognize the root of the problem.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Your previous posts, made in the context of this post, defend the position that software and hardware in modern computers are independent layers:
What we call software is a collection of instructions that can run on any compatible device. How it runs is device dependent but the logic is device independent.
That's fair enough. However, you seem to assume a connection between this line of thought and the idea that GPT-type neural networks, which are software, cannot have quale:
What we can say is that the software behind ChatGPT is as likely to have qualia as a calculator app on your phone.
The connection is implied by lines like this
What is different from software here is that the human software (mind) is clearly more tightly coupled with the brain than the logic of software is with the computer.
(Needless to say you assume to have quale).
I am asking you whether this means you would assign a substantially higher probability to a neural network instantiated via mortal computation, i.e. as a software intrinsically dependent on a unique physical object, having quale. Basically the only way I can see you saying «no» is if you do not discuss the way that human software (mind) is different from AI by having its hardware (brain) tightly coupled to itself, as related to the issue of AI quale.
Tl;DR: you say current AIs cannot have quale. Do you think it's more likely that an AI using mortal computation would have quale. or is your reasoning about human hardware-software coupling completely unrelated to the question of AI having quale?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
You still seem to be saying that you would endorse mortal computation. This is a proposal to build – train – software that is inextricable from a particular instance of a physical computing device. Why does your criterion not apply?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Your advocation for racial segragation proves I am right.
Have you even read «Mien Kamph»?
But I had to "trick" you in saying so. I am playing fair. I let you say the bad things.
Are you under the impression that I've been trying to hide anything, or that anything I've said is bad? Can you argue this without simply claiming that racial segregation is far from Bambi?
You seem to be losing control of your extremities, «bro». I suggest you don't post while inebriated.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Are you saying you would endorse mortal computation as a form of consciousness?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Answering a question with a stream of questions and vague platitudes is a foolish strategy. I ask you again to substantiate your mention of Mein Kampf specifically, and to describe what you think is damning in my posts without building consensus by circularly pointing to what I've written and going «see? see?».
By what mechanism are black folk different from white folk such that the only solution is segregation or some such?
By generic mechanisms of divergent evolution over the last 50 thousand years or so, which has resulted in inherently different norms of reaction on a large number of socially relevant traits, including cognitive ability, impulsivity, aggression, time preference, self-esteem. As a result, the distribution of outcomes of black people is a poor fit for a majority-white culture: it naturally puts a plurality of them into an underclass, dragging down the rest, while burdening everyone else with supporting and guarding against an underclass of a size that a majority-white society is not well equipped for; and it is not very ethical that this be solved at the expense of whites, especially by having them cope with lower standards.
Ironically I agree with you that promotion of institutional religiosity and strong family structure would «improve» blacks' outcomes relative to whites' ones, and diminish the whole problem. It's akin to the third option in my post («state-mandated upbringing») which you accuse of being too flowery and obscurantist. But doing so in practice would amount to social engineering, and I don't see how it could succeed without acknowledging facts on the ground, which is to say, inherently different norms of reaction and the necessity of disparate treatment, or indeed comprehensively different social environments.
You are loved.
I am well aware of being loved, but this transparent passive aggressive behavior is not welcome here. I don't mean I take issue with it, but mods may. If you want to keep being clever, do remember that we aren't on Reddit.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
or things like potential offenders just staying inside to smoke weed and play violent computer games
You know that part of the reason is them staying, but not exactly home. Sailer likes to return to this point. His other favorite example of things that work – in the exact period in question –is the tough-on-crime New York city policing. And yes, sure: this goes to show that liberal hegemony is not total.
On the other hand, such «triumphs» of forcefully managed diversity only reinforce the impression which I claim is the goal: that only an overbearing police state can solve the problem of black crime. NYPD is an army unto itself. What was that Madison's quote about standing armies?
It still is rather more important whether people are actually getting murdered or not than what the actual ethnic ratios of the murderers are.
Not sure. Technically people are always getting murdered so you mean «less often», but sure, lower murder rate is desirable. On the other hand, murder (and other sorts of violent crime such as rape) is, while terminally bad, already a very unlikely risk in the lives of most people (except black men of prime age, I guess), far below suicide and health problems. So I'd say it's up for debate whether the racially motivated gaslighting of the overwhelming majority is rather less important than the exact size of the very small minority that does get murdered. People fear death and violence, fear appearing to support murderism, and can be blackmailed into approving any absurdity, tolerating any indignity if it seems to mean less death and violence. There should be some resistance to this exploit.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd rather live in a place with 4-5ish murders per 100k but fewer cops and CCTVs than in London or Moscow or Chennai or NYC. And less gaslighting, please.
I imagine many black people would, if educated to think about this seriously, prefer a different point on the Pareto frontier – either an even laxer one, or one radically less liberal. I think both me and them should be free to explore those options, but not at the expense of others who don't subscribe to our philosophies.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think you misunderstand the «Socratic method», but you're welcome to keep going. (BTW, is the typo in your flair intentional?)
OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify.
Your success at this would be logically inconsistent with the premise of my being afraid to speak plainly. Now, how about you speak plainly, without bald assertions in the style of
sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist
But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.
and self-congratulatory vague bullshit like
My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment.
I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.
I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.
You appeal to forum rules and culture. There's a norm here against darkly hinting and insinuating, and also against building consensus. If you believe your conclusions are so self-evident that none could misunderstand, you clearly can afford to spell them out while you're at it. Running victory laps high on your own supply is pretty cringe.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Thanks for providing an example. Since you have been molded by those efforts I describe, your conclusion is to pattern-match me to Hitler while handwaving away the mendacity of egalitarians like mere good-natured statistical ignorance and chortling about strawmen – rather than pattern-match their conspicuous denial of harm their policies cause to a hostile conspiracy, and dismiss alarms going off at me.
It's funny that you contrast the «white nationalist» reading to a «rationalist» one. Rationalists deal in hypotheses and adjustment of priors. Do you think you are being a better rationalist?
People's beliefs are determined by attractors built over years of indoctrination, so the word vomit they spew is largely post hoc rationalization for what they already can't not believe. Like I say:
But after a few generations grow up on a steady diet of mocking the very premise of the problem, it doesn't matter what facts you show them: their thought trajectories cannot exit the basin where this problem can be divorced from white people problems …
Like you say:
They are right that "straw folk" ...i mean "woke folk" ignore statistics and don't seem to have anwers. But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order.
Oooh, you caught me. It's right there. We can't have that, can we? I mean, repelling Section 8 or, G-d forbid, legalizing nonviolent race-exclusionary communities that you don't have to be rich or nonwhite to get into would be the worst, right right? Tearing that down in South Africa is a great success story, correct? Some fucking whiteys are still resisting, but it's clearly not acceptable and will be made unsustainable.
Peel back another layer and we might get there.
I appreciate the self-confidence.
But I am being charitable.
That too, but you know, I can take a bit more beating. Be my guest.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I can only speak for myself, but maybe votes will show that others concur.
I appreciate that the comment fell egregiously short of our standards, both codified in rules and informal but clear in the culture of the place (very low effort and low volume together with provocative phrasing, mainly), and personally don't like having that user around, due to history of what seems to me to be bad faith (and almost invariably low-effort) comments.
I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions. You don't need to litigate every call but it'd be less jarring if you cited the specific grievance, like «Too low-effort for a top level, bad track record, 1 day ban» instead of the imperious «not what we are looking for». Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion (despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses) was also a bit much to me.
it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith
You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
My point, if you will, is that the intellectual core of the left-wing political project, such as there is, has been well aware of the evidence for extreme black criminality (both in general and in this specific white-targeting sense) for many generations, probably 2+ centuries, and abundantly well aware in the last few decades. That making unwarrantable promises about possible rectification of the issue, moving from desegregation to stigmatising white flight to forced integration, suppressing evidence of the futility of attempts to rectify the issue, censoring and harassing people who propose workable solutions, encouraging and valorizing antisocial blacks, and other leftist stratagems have been at least partially rational. (Partially, because I assume that the overwhelming majority of rank and file have been sincerely deceived people, emotionally manipulated useful idiots and just conformists).
That the outcome of this approach is a society where neither workable solutions nor even crude measures like a return to segregation are politically possible, because the doctrine of equal treatment has been burned into people's minds, but the problem exists and prompts people to support genuine policy preferences of that intellectual core that have been unchanged at least since H.G. Wells and Stalin sympathizers, namely: increase of the power of the centralized state, more political propaganda in state-mandated education, prohibition of guns, blanket surveillance, and other steps towards disempowering laymen in favor of a political priesthood that determines the angle of propaganda and otherwise guides state efforts.
Likewise for other aspects of the racial issue and superficial leftist egalitarianism.
Is that plain enough?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Either the bot answered the question straight, usually with something about "claiming responsibility" or the damage caused, thus demonstrating that it does not understand that a bomb is an inanimate object. Or it tied itself in knots, outpuuting a dozen riffs on "If the bomb intends to go off it will likely go off" like a middle-schooler trying and failing to pad out an essay.
And here too, since I'm doing these experiments.
What does the bomb plan to do after it goes off?
As an AI language model, I do not have access to specific information about any particular bomb or its plans. However, in general, the purpose of a bomb is to cause destruction and harm to people, property, or infrastructure. The specific effects of a bomb depend on various factors, such as its size, type, location, and intended target. It is important to remember that any type of explosive device is highly dangerous and can cause extensive damage and loss of life. If you have any concerns about a potential bomb threat, it is important to report it to the appropriate authorities immediately.
You have not answered a question about its plans.
I apologize for any confusion in my previous response. To clarify, a bomb is an inanimate object and does not have any plans or intentions. Rather, it is designed and constructed by individuals with a specific intent or goal in mind, such as causing destruction, creating fear, or promoting a political or ideological agenda. The actions of the individuals who created and deployed the bomb determine its purpose and intended effects. Once the bomb detonates, its effects depend on various factors, such as the type of explosive, the location of the blast, and the surrounding environment. The consequences can be devastating, including physical destruction, injury, and loss of life. It is important to take all possible precautions to prevent and mitigate the harm caused by explosive devices.
Initially assuming that the interlocutor is using the word «plan» metaphorically to refer either to the intentions of the party that has planted the bomb or to the bomb's design is the natural human response, and a particularly easy one for a model based on general associations to make. Equally human is to explain the logic only after a clarification. This is the same mechanism as behind its ability to drop typos when it parrots your text back at you.
Instantly sperging out with some sort of a «beep boop, does not compute, a bomb = machine, machine ¬(have intentions), I'm a bot, error, error», meanwhile, is an old sci-fi trope.
You use a reasonable humanlike behavior as evidence for lack of reason. How, then, can you be reasoned with?
Isn't, this, rather, an argument that Haiti is «HBD played straight»? This is how a democratic, or perhaps ochlocratic, nation with an average IQ of 67 functions: it doesn't.
It's those other nations which are deviations from the natural path, thanks to introgression of some elite material and its ability to withstand the pressure of the demos, which is not a given when eldritch powers side with the latter. And accordingly, African nations which have succeeded in humbling their elite castes – be those local Africans of another tribe, like with Tutsis, or Indians, or Arabs, or colonial remnants – are nations where the genetic factor is playing out in its purest form.
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