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
I feel personally called out, but in my defense I'll say that all of that is more justifiable than
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Flat-out lying and especially gaslighting to advance your political agenda
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Pretending to have amnesia about previous rounds of the discussion
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Fearmongering, sneering, concern-trolling and going for other emotionally manipulative tactics because you lost the argument and don't wanna admit it
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Manipulating procedural outcomes by doxxing, vote-brigading, reporting technicalities, attacking the infrastructure and so on, plus the whole Alinsky rulebook.
So long as rats/mottizens, generally speaking, do not commit these sins (perhaps on account of lacking the psychopathic aptitude), whereas their opponents stick to them religiously, I'll say a sperging-out chud is more deserving of attention than a person endowed with such common decency.
Well, I think Muse-3B won't run locally either.
How do you suppose T5-XXL's encoder is to be used, in practice? It's 5.5B, so 11GB in bf16. And StableDiffusion is 860M, but in practice it takes multiple GBs.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
You can get very close in subjective comfort by going overboard with very good LEDs (and I think that, if assisted by like 100W of halogen, it'll be perfect). Last time I was in a position to bother, I bought these bad boys. CRI of 97, 5753K color temp (so, daylight but not yet annoyingly bluish), 4128 Lumen per 38.6W. The problem is they're humongous and won't fit into normal chandeliers, so you'll need to hack together some diffusor because those spot LEDs are annoying and bad for the eyes (and you'll lose some performance with the diffusor absorbing light, naturally). But it's nothing a visit to a hardware store and half an hour of tinkering won't solve. If I owned a home office, I'd have installed such a lamp on every square meter of the ceiling (or, actually, I'd have substituted some for low-temp equivalents). You can get a great deal of light from ~300W of power with these things. 33K Lumen, in fact. Allowing for 20% losses, that's 26K... in a modest 15 sq m room it'd get you close to a normal overcast day.
LED strips can be even better, but they're even more fiddly. This "DIY" corn lamp, too, is obviously assembled from normal Aliexpress components and strips.
I surmise there must be Youtube guides to do much better than that.
Thanks for sharing it – I'd probably never have bothered to check it myself, due to my (low )prior for value for such literature. This is of course ironic.
The generally applicable logic of his parable, I take it, is that the target of one's proselytism can have arbitrarily strong resistance to your message, either because it relies on extra elements absent in the target's knowledge, or because (more problematically) s/he has received inoculation, to the point of becoming cognitively closed to the message, elements required to parse it, or both.
When inoculated, the target's prior for messengers of your kind, or messages of this type, or both, is such that critical bits (in the clown's case, the truth value of fire, perhaps its early signs) will not be inspected with the scrutiny they deserve, and the rest (desperate gestures, repeating the same thing over and over, enumerating reasons not to doubt a clown, prophesying increasingly extreme costs of disbelief) will be shoehorned into a pattern that allows to react as usual – as if it's a clown show.
I believe the Pope was being too charitable to his side, but certainly I know that feel. There's nuance, of course. Believers complain they aren't taken seriously, because atheists are very sure of being above the clown's game. In the case of hot button topics in the realm of purely secular politics, one can encounter the exact opposite. Perhaps the most frustrating pattern, and one that seems monopolized by the Left, is to assume that the opponent is a rhetorical superintelligence. Sometimes it's phrased the way @2rafa does with regard to Holocaust revisionists, with the focus on experience and cherrypicked trivia (to be clear: sometimes this pattern is valid, which gives it plausibility in the general case, and I think it is valid on this issue; although this still wouldn't justify having strong opinions without object-level knowledge).
Sometimes, the alleged rhetorical superiority of a right-winger is explained by him just being unscrupulous plus very skillful. Therefore, him being persuasive and dissecting your every counterpoint is no more evidence for him being correct than a grizzly bear's ability to rip your head off is evidence of bears being morally above humans; no more than the fact of evil AI being good at pleading to let it out of the box is a cause to oblige.
Oh, speaking of Contrapoints. Here's something from December 2019:
First stop – an interview where Wynn explains her tactics:
...to see her smiling and nodding at Richard Spencer I kind of went crazy on Twitter, saying, What are you doing? This is unconscionable to give him this kind of platform ... In general, I do think having a debate is good. But when you have very disingenuous opponents and when they are rhetorically skilled, to show up to that debate is potentially to lose a debate to a Nazi, which is very bad, so it’s something I’m afraid of....
«If Cockbane debated Fritz nothing productive would happen but at least she wouldn't be bullied. She'd interrupt, accuse, get real ugly. ... So if there's a "lesson" I guess it's that we have to work on not being Saul. Maybe that means walking out of rooms like that. Or maybe it means developing anti-Fritz rhetorical strategies. But I honestly don't yet know what those are. I can't say I've ever seen someone in debate with a Pepe-grinning fascist come out on top. But if it could be done it'd be worth doing.»
.. Second, you'll never pin them down on the issues, but you can try to get them off their game... If they make a mistake point it out don't let it go. Derail the conversation and keep them on the defensive. Finally, interrupt and filibuster. Whenever they pause, interject. Talk as much as possible. The less they say, the less effective they are.
It's a closed memetic surface.
Digging through «The Motte postmortem», I've found a good example of its topology on TheSchism:
... Among leftists, there are many patterns of behavior that have been observed repeatedly in alt-right spaces - mostly used because they, on some level, work. Things like controlling the conversation or never playing defense. When lefty folks tend to see something that they pattern-match onto that, alarm bells start ringing.
One such commonly-noted pattern is this: "never, ever, ever let a claim go unchallenged, no matter how trivial or generally agreed upon".
[...] Hey, maybe you don't know why people would see this as kinda suspicious. Well, here's the thing: this is exactly the pitch that cryptofascists make. It should be discussed. Debated. There's no harm in hearing an argument out, right? Never mind that, for the most part, these are ideas that were consigned to the dustbin of history quite rightfully for being badly wrong and extremely dangerous. Never mind that "debate" is a format that favors flair over fact much of the time.
I am not interested in racist arguments for the same reason I am not interested in patent submissions for perpetual motion machines or the weekly Flat Earth Society newsletter - there's nothing there. It's always been a long list of horrific made-up justifications for cruelty and exploitation, and it's always been downright awful science. [...] Look, pal, there may be a gray area on "is X racist", but when someone disingenuously argues that statistics showing the average IQ of an entire country as 70 or lower, we're several miles on the wrong side of that line.
And of course our dearly departed Impassionata:
You haven't seen me wrangle with fact-based argument because fact-based argument only works when people actually want to hear what you have to say. HBD fuckers only wanted to spread HBD because the argument is the point.
Playing with facts is easy mode: it's high school essays and if you write a good fact-based essay you get a good grade and people like you and you are Obviously GoodRight.
[...] TheMotte is truly an evaporative cooling rocket that has placed it in true lunacy: a bunch of people have convinced themselves that what they say is discourse when in fact it is outright madness.
I mean look at what this Ilforte has to say.
Can you see the ridiculous self delusion!? 'It's not our fault if a great historian decides we aren't worth the time! It's _his_fault!'
Playing with facts is easy mode so it doesn't matter if you get rekt; appeal to authority is hard and disagreeing with it is the sign of madness.
(So I guess that's what Sartre meant about Anti-Semites assuming the privilege to «play with discourse» while the polite folk are restricted to serious facts and are thus at a disadvantage. Can't say I'm convinced, but then again, they're trying to convince «the audience», and if it's inoculated enough, that'll work. By the way. 895158 also has attributed his condemnation of The Motte to activities of yours truly. Sorry guys for ruining your community.)
A well-formed conflict theory absorbs unlimited epistemic and moral double standard, because there's no standard sans power. It develops scholarship on how the other side allegedly does attack of some type A, to delegitimize arguments that can be shoehorned into A, and check A if it actually takes place, and it teaches on how to do A yourself, and it separately teaches the subtle art of denying friendly As. It's pretty much the same thing as normal military theory.
The question is what is left to the losing side, except surrender.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Note how they aren't suing OpenAI (and by extension, Microsoft). It's not just a matter of training data but also of tactical savviness; of course Dall-E 2 (and the next model that's allegedly called Flow and will be integrated with GPT-4) can be artistic enough to compete with human artists, even if it won't be mimicking their particular styles. Indeed, it'd be more interesting to push those models to develop novel styles of their own. I also suspect some LW inspiration in this attack on minor players: Stability, for example, doesn't plan to restrict itself to the pretty picture generator business, and is therefore a problem in the paranoid world model where the fewer actors there are, the less risk.
The question is how hard it'll be to train new foundation models in the case of these people succeeding and legitimate centralized business entities like Stability going under.
The coolest new text to image model, seemingly far superior to Stable Diffusion, Midjourney V4 and even Imagen/Parti in comprehension, is Google's Muse, a pure Transformer (with T5-XXL text encoder, but that's par for the course). It's much faster at inference than its predecessors (Imagen, Parti, even non-distilled SD if you have enough VRAM) and more naturally lends itself to image modification.
We train a number of base Transformer models at different parameter sizes, ranging from 600M to 3B parameters. Each of these models is fed in the output embeddings from a T5-XXL model, which is pre-trained and frozen and consists of 4.6B parameters.
We train on the Imagen dataset consisting of 460M text-image pairs (Saharia et al., 2022). Training is performed for 1M steps, with a batch size of 512 on 512-core TPU-v4 chips (Jouppi et al., 2020). This takes about 1 week of training time.
So that's ~86000 TPU-v4-hours, which given the track record of optimizations for SD I'll consider the budget for getting a good-enough image generator we'd be able to use in perpetuity. Naively, that's something like $120K in compute using A100, maybe less depending on provider's terms. Of course if the hostility towards independent AI becomes prevalent and supported by law, it'll be hard to rent a node of 512 A100s (and harder to buy: that's like $10M in hardware if you're lucky) for such a purpose. On the other hand, if you're working in the shadows, training time and efficiency don't matter as much, and you can try to shard the workload, and use cheaper hardware (as in: 3090s from bankrupt Ethereum miners connected by Infiniband cards from the same Ebay, or rather darknet vendor)...
But before the censors even get to enforce such regulations, we'll get DeepFloyd IF, which already seems to be on par with Google's top models. It's a model developed by Alex Shonenkov, ex-head of image generation AI at Sberbank (yes, Sberbank was in the business of AI art); they are backed by Stability. It isn't trained on contemporary digital art, but, in the tradition of StableDiffusion, will trivially allow finetuning. In all likelihood, you'd need something like 8x3090, but that's about as hard to trace as a stealth weed growbox in a basement. Inference, I expect, also won't be feasible on normal consumer machines, so it'll incentivize some stealthy cloud computing, maybe very small-scale. Would be nice if the powers that be didn't succeed in crashing crypto, so we could build a p2p on-demand opensource AI inference and training economy.
All of the arithmetic above is only relevant to static images, and is therefore of limited use. What is more interesting is video+audio. What is vital is text, especially code; the best opensourced LLMs are gimmicks in comparison to GPT 3.5, and GPT 3.5 is still only barely useful in a professional context; we need something better to achieve escape velocity. There are lawsuits brewing in this domain too; the noose is tightening, the surveillance escape velocity approaches as well. I do hope that enough competent people realize the end result of the ongoing multipronged attack on ML-oriented hardware availability, unsupervised internet connectivity, gratuitous electricity expenditure, AI legality, and distributed secure ledgers before the timeline's stable state is determined. For now, it feels like pretty much everyone tech-savvy is still deriving status points from mocking cryptobros and pooh-poohing ChatGPT over its inability to write decent poetry or count to 10.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
LEDs aren't strictly superior to good incandescent light sources. At their peak, in the last few years, they are competitive. I don't mean longevity or efficiency or safety, they certainly beat the hell out of previous technologies in these terms. I mean color rendering index, smoothness of the emission spectrum (most importantly the prominence of blue peak) and flicker-free luminance – properties that make for comfortable, natural light. CRI is defined as a fraction of color rendering that an incandescent gives. There's a nice Russian website with a database of those and other measurements, creatively called lamptest.ru. The best LEDs have CRI=99. Cheap ones are more like 93 now, and 80 yesterday.
Incidentally, office-tier fluorescents could go as low as 60-something.
There are alternative measures and some debate, of course, but the gist is this: sometimes you walk into a store or an exhibition or some other venue where electricity cost is an afterthought, or just a bitter clinger old-timer's home, and you notice that it's easy to see things, even though the nominal luminous power is weak and tinged with yellow. That's because there are powerful incandescent and probably halogen lights installed, and your retina is hit with continuous color gradients it had evolved for. It's almost as pleasant as sunlight, and as bittersweet as a scent bringing back childhood memories.
It's like wireless earbuds or earphones. Sure, after trying out a decent pair, you wouldn't want to get back to tangled cables and the microphone effect and the need to lug the audio source around. But every once in a while you plug in your electrostatic planars into an amp, or just 4BA+DD buds into an old laptop –and remember what it was like before convenience outweighed the taste for fidelity one could mistake for snobbish pretense.
Or one could think about our computers, and their embarrassing latency despite undeniable improvement in computing power.
Grandpa might still remember the thing with transistor radios and what they had superseded.
And so it goes all the way to Socrates and his warning against committing knowledge to written medium, that gets in the way of learning by heart – which in his mind was identical with true understanding, and it's frankly pretty compelling once you think about the compromise inherent in retrieval transformers.
I'm not sure if people had voiced the same opposition to speech.
But I digress. In exchange for convenience, we grow used to a slightly inferior experience at the core of the activity, some accidental detail that made it wonderful, and stop noticing it, and begin to find it amusing that some eccentrics still fiddle with the obsolete. The experience of few such transitions may be what makes people so averse to accept the next new thing, even when it is plainly superior across the board.
I'd wager Australia as a whole is more racist (or at least less anti-racist) than... Portland, probably? Seattle? Failing that, Vermont? Uh, Martha’s Vineyard?
We aren't denying that this place runs circles around any regular forum; this is why we waste time here. It's expected that even higher-tier forums will be oddly specific, small-scale and hard to find or get into. What is interesting is exactly the link after which it'll be possible to say «...But that's about it» – and preferably that it be accessible to outsiders. I know a few, but they're of a type that I'm not at liberty to make publicly known.
Moreover I maintain that TheMotte isn't exceptional due to being very smart. IMO it's more that we frown down on intransigence, irrational refusal to respect valid counterarguments. Smartypants on Reddit or HN can be very smart, but they tend to be obstinate and irrational like a combative teenager; and many rationalists on ACX/LW are quokkas who have given up on generality to maintain civility.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Well, I suspect open doors generalist forums do end around this level; and that even we are viable only because we're obscure and pretty much nobody comes in.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
A world without western hegemony isn't a many polar world where poor countries take an equal place at the top, it's one where the US no longer protects oil shipments from the middle east along the somali coast if they aren't bound for US controlled markets
I have never understood if Zeihan seriously thinks this is a hard problem or merely uses it as a way to gesture at an entire class of unclear novel threats.
Poor countries could hire Wagner or something to hunt pirates. In a world without Western hegemony these challenges would be possible to solve on a functional safety market.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Isn't the "Global South" project a rebranding of Third Worldism, which had obvious ties to the Communist International and Maoist Movement?
Anyway. The developed nations have had a couple of centuries of capitalism. As a result, they have become forever-rich, irrevocably prosperous; they can even drop capitalism if they feel that way, the accumulated resource and technological base allows for implementing planned economy in all but name ("stakeholder capitalism" and "advance market commitments" and "carbon credits" it's called now). As is the established practice, they kneecap other nations with the extremist vomit of their intellectuals, inciting premature and unsustainable transitions with unreasonable theories and promises of fixing consequences of the previous step. Before, it was mainly Communism, where the free lunch of a new social order was dangled in front of backwards peoples; then it was Neoliberalism, when they were allowed to poison their ecosystems, capture lowest-margin markets like raw materials and textiles, and inflate the valuation of a bunch of oligarchs with poor taste. Now it's the ecological and social-progressive stuff – the worst offer of all, for it's all stick and no carrot. That is how the gap is maintained; and to narrow that gap, to gain the ability to meaningfully resist Western goading and stand as its equal, a common identity and antagonistic posture are needed.
Or so the thinking goes, I guess. Realistically, integrating with the West is the best they could do.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Nah, I viscerally dislike the image of either maga or wokes (or their unholy union) asserting dominance over humanity. But more importantly I reject your claim to stewardship of the West – and the self-serving belief in this stewardship being beneficial for the West or for the rest. You're going to hell in a handbasket, taking us with you, and not letting anyone leave.
The latest drama is a case in point. Bostrom is part of the best that the West has to offer. He has developed his views in Sweden and in England. It takes the black-obsessed, anti-intellectual American purity spiral to drag him through the mud. You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West, you're something new and simultaneously ancient – simpler, stronger, cruder, driven by primitive taboos and collective hysterias, and unlike similar archaic resurgencies in other places, entirely invulnerable to reality checks. Carl Jung would attribute this to «spiritual negrification», and Hlynka would boast (perhaps misleadingly) of being an «inbred degenerate» and Scott would speak of Moloch, but there's little point: might as well blame Tezcatlipoca. Drag Queen Story Hour isn't a Western thing, and Megachurches are even less so, and you're right they do have more in common than they have with Western debauchery and religion, respectively. To the extent that you define the West with your gimmicky fascinations, you brutalize it. And you take pride in your dominant brutality. This, too, is ancient.
You should have had a few more centuries of isolationism to figure out some bearable attitude. It's too bad that history is ending in this generation, under your yoke.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
As @Lykurg points out, Yud's assertion is that one cannot accurately rank people much smarter than oneself – not that they cannot be recognized to be smarter. I can only take Fermi's word that von Neumann was way smarter than himself whereas Fermi's top student was dumber, but in physics all of them would be able to pass any reasonable exam I could devise with perfect marks; and the same logic can apply to holistic subjective estimation that doesn't rely, again, on ranking metrics devised by the superior group.
As for forums, my impression is that TheMotte is near the top of open doors generalist pique waistcoat lounges and has a nice epistemic culture, but it's not supremely smart. Extropians were apparently a lot smarter. Lesswrong is still smarter (if misguided). CredibleDefense or WarCollege or something, last I checked, were smarter in high-tier threads (if less effortful), and their domain-specific discussions were not marked by rationalist first-principles overconfidence we still suffer from (although it's way better than generic internet honor culture of always-doubling-down). Same, but even more unfit for generalist discussions, in professional spaces or in competitive game communities; and there happen to be high-trust smoking rooms adjacent to those spaces, but you'll need a pass. Rdrama is too smart/too frenetic/not autistic enough for me so I can't say much, but I can tell they have Yud's ancient vampires.
I'd say even sneerclub is smarter than us – because it takes some brainpower to convince oneself of a contradictory world model when you already have a better one and can comprehend it. Twitter subnetworks can be frighteningly smart, even if prone to clowning.
The smartest people I knew only bother with online discussion once in a blue moon, in ever.
I suppose +5SD freaks who aren't content/able to fuck bitches and dominate their profession or rock international politics or something discover each other through Cicada 3301 tier mind-fuckery, steganography and darknet webrings.
This reminds me:
A group of French mathematicians, known by the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, has invented a procedure of cocotization (the name apparently comes from an ancient custom of Polynesian tribes to test old men to see if they are still useful to the tribe: the old man has to get a coconut from the top of a coconut palm, which the whole tribe shakes while doing so...) for the purpose of getting rid of people suffering cognitive decline. A mathematician whose youth is in doubt is made to listen, in the presence of colleagues who are in on the joke, to a long definition of a new mathematical concept, drawn up in such a way that nothing but zero satisfies this definition. If he cries out: "But that's just zero! " he is saved; if not, he is cocotized.
A community without such rituals cannot be truly big-brained.
We really would benefit from having LW-style separate upvotes for liking and agreeing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
That's cool! Privilege spoils, and also makes one a target of contempt.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
That's fine, it's about time I improve my technique; it may be interesting to substitute ad hominem with some obvious fallacy that cannot offend (and is immaterial to the broader argument).
Your characterization isn't very fair – «just to troll your opponents into losing it» suggests that there's mendacity and some trolling effort to push them over the edge, whereas what's really happening, IMO, is they're given a good-faith response plus an opportunity to cheaply dismiss it on legalistic grounds. Their emotions don't really concern me, and for all I know they feel very smug and content when calling out a fallacy. Win-win, really!
But okay.
Consider, though, that if you start discriminating against my lines that are otherwise allowed, you'll have failed in about the same way this guy did.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This seems like a clear violation of the "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" rule, and yet this comment is the most upvoted in the thread.
Oh well! One option would be to report it, block me and move on. Complaining about votes is the epitome of futility.
But if you're so inclined. Do you think I'm upvoted because of that last sentence, irrespective of it, or in spite of it? No doubt your ego must press you to feel it's not the latter – which would discredit me, my argument and the apparent community consensus, validating you both morally and intellectually. Indeed, this is basically what you proceed to say; btw, I've written this entire response before finishing reading yours.
I have an admission to make. I like to insert a mild ad hominem jab into a beatdown which is otherwise designed to be empirically, logically and rhetorically nigh-unassailable (yes, yes, cringe, tips fedora, whatever, it's nothing special but I do like having this skill) so that my opponent sees confirmation of his suspicions, pounces on it, exiting the topic into meta discussion, and therefore demonstrates he has no remaining object level counterarguments – effectively conceding the point.
And when an opponent does have both an object-level case to make and enough restraint/self-confidence to stay on the supposedly important topic, ignoring the low-hanging fruit of a legalistic call-out that'd score him a win in a school debate club – this creates an opportunity for authentic human communication where both sides may learn something new and true, instead of wading through the mirror labyrinth of ego defenses.
It is my sincere belief that such opt-out baiting should be a widely used practice for filtering out epistemic terrorists and building a high-trust environment – something we can observe EAs suffer from lacking.
Mods won't endorse it, sadly.
(Still haven't read the rest of your post).
Ok, done. It's not quite what I've predicted but close enough. We are an echo chamber so that's why my post gets upvotes.
I will keep making these arguments and pushing them into the mainstream. If you truly believe they constitute an X-risk factor, and ever feel like addressing their «numerous weaknesses», please don't feel limited by the need to retaliate at me for my rudeness by «not humoring» them or something. The future of humanity is at stake, you know!
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Look, I'm not saying that blank slatism/IQ equality is an undisputed consensus. But you point to old hands, people who are aware of what I call common knowledge. This is the new school of EA.
The situation is developing quickly. I wonder what the equilibrium willl be. Probably the same one we had on /r/slatestarcodex post HBD and CW ban, mutatis mutandis.
The premise of alt-right is that the non-alt Right, with its dictums of sovereign individual, race-blindness, low taxes and such, does not represent them and has no incentive to, and is particularly disinterested in addressing their collective existential concerns – chiefly anti-white racism spanning the spectrum from zoological prejudice to nuanced denunciation of white-coded but not clearly ethnically contingent cultural traits and value systems, pro-immigration policy driven by this same anti-white and anti-Republican sentiment, and «Weimar-style» social decay aggressively promoted by mainstream Democrats mainly due to nudging from ever-changing, hard to pin down ideological movements on leftist fringes labeled as Frankfurt school, something something Marxism, CRT, whatever. In a sense, alt-right was an intuitive attempt to emulate such dynamics on the right, only starting with grassroots.
The overwhelming majority of those who got dragged by the alt-right/dissident right wave around 2016 were not edgelords by their nature, and did not wish to go to the extremes: they were disaffected Republicans. Their inchoate sympathy for designated enemies of the liberal West (Putin, Kim, Orban) was also informed by this disaffection. The edginess of firebrands, too, is nothing unusual historically: new European Right is the same, as have been dozens of radical movements in Israel, where the preoccupation with existential threats and liberal traitors carrying water for committed enemies is embedded deep into the collective psyche. In Europe and more so in Israel, however, there exists an explicit way of negotiating a compromise. It's called parliamentarian democracy.
In the US, these people were offered a cope-out in the form of Trumpism and, seeing as he was recognized by both wings of the Establishment as a threat, gladly accepted. Now that this attempt has failed and Trumpism is discredited, they're being sold on DeSantis.
Bird, for all his faults, is working in genetics, and is better-acquainted with the relevant literature than 95-99% of people pontificating on race and IQ. This isn't about domain experts: this is about the popular sentiment of EAs. IQ differences were common knowledge. I observe this changing.
People may feel arbitrarily strongly about racism, but Bostrom's claim was and is factual, and he is called out for not repudiating it. He maintains that Black people have lower IQs, and is not saved by couching it in polite, defensive and academic verbiage. They're not merely arguing that the attitude of his original text is inexcusable – they're saying he has not budged on the substance of that «racism».
Edit: here's a good example.
These views are widely repudiated, are based on a long history of racist pseudoscience and must be rejected, especially given their recent rise in popularity. By contrast, we will see in our examination of Bostrom’s apology that Bostrom not only endorses these views, but also leaves room for exactly the sort of pseudoscientific explanation that the rest of us have learned to condemn for what it is: scientific racism.
The view that racial differences in intelligence exist, have a genetic basis, and in fact explain racism was openly expressed by at least one other commentator, who was defended rather than attacked for expressing it.
As we have seen, that is not a fair characterization of the Extropians’ activities. Extropians at the time were actively involved in expressing and disseminating a range of offensive, racist and bigoted views. Bostrom’s email from 1996 should be read in the same context as any of these other expressions, as part of a movement suffused with bigotry that took its activities from the internet onto college campuses with a direct intention to intimidate almost half of the incoming MIT freshman class and cause them to feel unwelcome and undeserving of their status on campus.
A user recently submitted a comment which drew on the racist and scientifically dubious writings of Dr. Philippe Rushton and Dr. Arthur Jensen to argue that we should leave open the possibility of a significant IQ gap between racial groups grounded in underlying genetic causes.
Rushton’s own department issued the following statement characterizing his work:
[some goobledygook]
The article by Rushton and Jensen cited by this commentator (to which I will not link) was immediately repudiated by the scientific community. A response by the eminent psychologist Richard Nisbett showed:
J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black–White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black–White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black–White IQ gap is nil.
Nisbett, “Heredity, environment, and race differences in IQ: A commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005)“
This blog is not, and will never become a forum for airing discredited scientific theories in the support of racist ideology.
It looks like the time has come for me to introduce a comments policy to prevent future misbehavior. Comments are closed on this thread. If you want to discuss the content of this post, email me at ineffectivealtruismeditor@gmail.com.
Note how he cleverly (not really) shifts from IQ difference to genetics.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
@Amadan is moderating you for tone, not content. Please let's not get into the «but this particular idiot is such an idiot I deserve lenience for my tone» once again. Sure, bureaucracy is not without its pitfalls, but legible and respected laws are valuable. Normalizing ad hominems at such fringes is only the first step to the collapse of decency across the board.
You can easily express your distaste and condemnation for his entire attitude without setting yourself up by using a direct insult.
Moreover he's clearly not an idiot in terms of raw intellect. This really isn't the problem here.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
We seem to have undergone some phase change overnight, the consensus moving from «IQ gap exists, but is very likely not genetic in origin» to «IQ gap is meaningless» to «there is no IQ gap, shut up you Nazi». And it's not a few extreme crazies. This guy from OpenAI says:
Look, I don't know what to tell you. I'm no woke leftist. But when a lot of people line up to defend "Black people are stupider than white people" as merely offensive but basically true and an excusable thing to say, that's just racism.
It reminds me of the days before the war, with rushed, cowardly final preparations, ass-covering formalities. At the time it wasn't obvious where this was going.
The king is as naked /the deer is as unhorselike as ever; but the king's guard are sufficiently powerful now for that detail to be inconsequential. Databases are being closed off, papers retracted without justification, tenures canceled, and reasonable folks are falling over themselves to demonstrate their outrage at the very idea that Bostrom's factual claim is conceivably true or «excusable» – as if this claim weren't common knowledge just a few years ago, with them perfectly positioned to know this. They deny their Kolmogorov complicity, hoping others won't call them out on this bullshit, for the same ass-covering reasons.
I wonder if our resident anti-HBD folks like @Amadan will follow suit? Had Oceania always been at war with Eurasia? Was there ever any IQ gap? Is this just some Mandela effect, or was this about «chuds» posting fake graphs?
I have always expected something like this to happen in case of the disappearance of plausible alternatives to the American project. There's nowhere to run to, no sovereigns which aren't existential enemies, so the freedom circus can just be turned off, bit by bit. This is mostly a blip, and not the most significant issue anyway. We'll see more of such turnkey consensus events. And of course the wave of AI misinformation will cover the tracks just fine.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I realize @Dean is just having fun with his usual nitpicking here. But in any case – the odds are overwhelming that the Ukrainian guy isn't a lawyer, speaking with the precision of formal logic, and didn't mean to affirm some sort of generalized 'globohomo' ideal. He merely continued his logic of tolerance for ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers – provided they're loyal citizens of Ukraine (or his comrades-in-arms). His 'everyone' clearly isn't an unconditional, open-borders, refugees-welcome pitch, but a protest against the specific form of bigotry that Farion advocates, and perhaps its (less pressing in the current situation, but historically disastrous in Ukraine) sibling forms.
Ukraine's future, of course, is not defined by Sgt. Makhno's wishes, whether real or misconstrued. But that only makes your gotcha even less reasonable.
So from a consequentialist perspective, spreading race/IQ discussions could be incredibly damaging.
it's possibility that causality flows in the other direction as well. We can't rule it out, and the chance it is true should be a major update for how we discuss race & IQ.
You commit the classic mistake of safetyists: ignoring costs of prioritization of issues that have caught your attention. Put another way, you act as if the null hypothesis about risks is uncontestable, even though it may be a product of individual fascination, memetic evolution in the largely irrational environment of public discourse, or social engineering that was conducted with no concern for truth or long-term collective benefit.
Treating an idea as an X-risk factor and thus an infohazard reduces our ability to intellectually engage with its implications, which is inherently bad in any value system that prizes rational pursuit of truth. But more importantly for consequentialists, if the idea is true, this inevitably shuts off degrees of freedom for navigating the world and dealing with its challenges. Taboos on knowledge quantitatively increase true uncertainty, and qualitatively transform known unknowns into unknown unknowns. This may increase vulnerability to all sorts of risks, including X-risks. Therefore, the burden of proof is on the side purporting that an idea constitutes an X-risk. Moreover, you must prove that the risk you seek to prevent is greater than the probability-weighted sum of risks you enable. To even begin doing that, you need to treat the idea and its implications seriously yourself.
And what makes you especially qualified to bear this infohazard?
As usual, all of this has been argued before. As it happens with HBD, people arguing for censorship are already victims of censorship, so they believe their first guesses informed by mass media constitute sufficient argument to maintain the same censorship regime. The premise of negative expected value of HBD is taken axiomatically; you wrap it in rationalist lingo, while others go for more mundane theories. Their models of harm have not withstood critical inquiry; should we presume yours would?
[...] The reality of all these harms cannot, however, be taken for granted. As for the situation in the United States, it is a well-established finding that the average levels of self-esteem in ethnic groups has, contra common wisdom, a negative relationship with average IQ. At least since the 1980s, Blacks have scored significantly higher than Whites, who in turn have scored higher than Asians, on measures of self-esteem... Is the success of members of some ethnic groups impaired by hearing about research on intelligence differences? That depends on the strength of the effect of stereotype threat. According to the theory of stereotype threat, telling people that their group has a low mean score on a cognitive test (i.e., priming them with a negative stereotype) impairs their performance ... In recent years, stereotype threat has run into trouble. [...]
It is also easy to overlook the harms that have been caused by uncritical commitment to environmentalism. Kourany (2016) comments:
Finding out that blacks have lower IQ scores than whites . . . could be the beginning of educational and training programs to work with the strengths and work on the weaknesses of every group to help make them the very best they can be, and even to use the special talents of each group to help the others. Finding these things out could be the beginning of innovative programs that support rather than undermine the right to equality. That this does not happen, or seldom happens, is a function of the . . . racism of society. (pp. 783–784)
But the reason that these programs, which Kourany rightly says ought to exist, have never been created is not because of racism but because of the taboo on talking about genetic differences among policy makers. No mainstream politician can acknowledge that there are differences that might call for the creation of a program to “work with the strengths and work on the weaknesses of every [ethnic] group to help make them the very best they can be.” It is hereditarians who have advocated these programs and environmentalists who have resisted them.
Simply put: people who have hampered intelligence research and its implications, far from having a claim to some noble mission, can be held responsible for astronomical cumulative suffering, literally billions of QALYs lost. We are all short-lived, imbecilic cripples because a century ago Boaz and his ilk have decided that the only Utopia we deserver must be reached through Gulags. Do you accept this responsibility?
You discuss the risk of Nazism, or concretely some HBD-informed oppression of low-IQ minorities. Very well.
A common fear is that, if race differences were proven to have a genetic basis, this would cause people to turn to Nazism. Indeed, the study of race differences is often explicitly equated with Nazism. This fear seems to be based on a historical misunderstanding. Nazi ideology was not based on scientific discoveries. The Nazis were flagrant pseudoscientists whose research in biology and psychology was permeated with ideology. Contrary to a popular myth, both the Nazis and their ideological predecessors (such as Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain) rejected Darwinism (Richards, 2013).5 Most important for the present discussion, Nazi scientists rejected mainstream intelligence testing and the concept of IQ (i.e., general intelligence, or the g factor derived by factor analysis), preferring a mystical view of intelligence tied to race. Erich Jaensch, an influential Nazi psychologist at the University of Marburg, claimed that IQ tests advanced the “supremacy of Bourgeoisie spirit” and would be a tool “of Jewry [to] fortify its hegemony” (Rindermann, 2018, p. 61).
The fact that the Nazis rejected Darwinism and the concept of IQ does not necessarily mean that the study of race differences could never inspire a dangerous political movement. It does mean, however, that we cannot point to Nazi Germany as an illustration of what is liable to happen when people adopt a biologically informed view of the evolution of intelligence.
Had any discriminatory regime in history depended on research into cognitive differences? Does the whole of the case against HBD amount to excesses of American eugenics campaign, that was ignorant even by the standards of contemporaries? Then that's just nothing, that's incomparable in scale to even one month's worth of Soviet and Chinese egalitarianism that has resulted in Lysenko.
Further:
Denying the possible genetic cause of race differences will not stop people from being focused on race. If people believe that members of certain races are victimized or benefited by racism, this could also foster essentialist thinking. It may be more likely to lead to racial conflict, since, as discussed below, some people will invariably be blamed, and whole races are likely to be held collectively accountable.
This is precisely what is happening now in the US. Do you not believe that the worldview which holds that higher-performing demographics are engaged in what amounts to a collective conspiracy constitutes an X-risk?
Etc. I recommend reading it in full.
There is also a trivial utilitarian argument for valuing truth on this issue inherently. As Scott has demonstrated in his Parable, you cannot very well enforce lying about an isolated scientific fact. An entire regime of lies will spring forth in place of the institute of science, rewarding deceit (ergo, sociopathy) with more power; starting with Boazism, you will end up under Lysenko's heel. This is the proverbial road to Hell paved with good intentions:
The Kolmogorov option is only costless when it’s common knowledge that the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, etc. But this is never common knowledge – that’s what it means to say the orthodoxies are still orthodox. Kolmogorov’s curse is to watch slowly from his bubble as everyone less savvy than he is gets destroyed. The smartest and most honest will be destroyed first. Then any institution that reliably produces intellect or honesty. Then any philosophy that allows such institutions.
That's some recipe for a thriving future. Are you willing to endorse this? Is your case for infohazard that strong?
But all of that is small potatoes to a proper long-termist rationalist effective altruist utilitarian do-gooder.
The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse. And they have failed – thanks to meddlers like you. Now we are obviously too dumb to devise AI alignment scheme that'd satisfy Yud. The smart fraction of current humanity is too small for such endeavors, mostly preoccupied with rat races like high-frequency trading and dark pattern software engineering, and there is nowhere near enough competence in policy and education to do this without extreme measures that constitute X/S-risks themselves, like nuclear war with China and Bostrom's Panopticon option. Finally, our social engineering institutions are largely captured by psychopaths who have passed through the anti-honesty filter of blank slatism. We are plunging into the singularity as terrified apes with an average g that's not enough to multiply 15 by 7 or parse a 4-column table, manipulated by bad actors.
And you want to keep digging. Because something something «we can't rule out the possibility that something something Hitler».
Are you okay?
Well okay, let's check his «apology» one more time. First of all I think his original text does not merit any apologies because it already included necessary caveats for its context, and only dishonest actors would insist on demanding things be justified outside of their original context. Moreover, affirming the taboo power of the «n-word», as if it were some automatically acting evil spell that harms Blacks, is both sadly hilarious and constitutes a social harm by infantilizing the body politic – akin to lead emissions. But that's an edgy aside.
Original: Blacks are more stupid than whites. ... It's just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by "smart" and stupid".
Apology: I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. [A ton of contemptible handwringing. Cringe!].
...I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity. ... Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others
The fuck? It's the same picture. Maybe it's him who's in a bubble. Is he actually under the impression that his attackers are misinformed but well-meaning peasants with pitchforks, or maybe dumb niggers who can be hypnotized with a string of multisyllabic words and thus miss the implication? They aren't. This was bound to only make them more bloodthirsty. Does he, truly, «repudiate» it completely, or simply regret its presentation and some fluff? Clearly the following. So he has lied. He does what a Mottizen with a particularly spicy and poorly-supported take can do when backed into a corner: erect a Motte that the charity rule prohibits dismissing out of hand, and keep both the dignity of standing for one's truth and the appearance of being a reasonable interlocutor. Only he's not on the Motte (could someone invite him?), he's exposed to Twitter where this waffling is instantly called out. I agree with wokes that he's insincere. This is worse than saying nothing: he's scared out of his wits, so he simultaneously affirms their moral superiority and his guilt, but does not let go of the issue of his alleged guilt.
What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood. ... I would be in favor of some uses and against others. Broadly speaking, I’m favorable to wide parental choice in these matters, including for some applications that would qualify as “enhancements” rather than “therapies”—to the extent that this distinction makes sense.
Bruh. So he supports eugenics in the sense currently wielded – and loathed – by progressives. Reminder, he wrote the apology in advance, knowing that somebody was rummaging through his trash:
I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people. ... But I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.
Why did he bring up eugenics on his own?
He should have let them make the first move. Scott near-painlessly shook off Topher Brennan publicizing his old emails (also affirming HBD, and even giving some credit to neoreactionaries!) precisely because he didn't bend over backwards to apologize, and certainly didn't try to anticipate what to defend from.
But I feel like you're all just anonymous internet guys who don't have realistic standards for people who are trying to actually be effective and powerful
I admit I'm more of a fighting-with-a-waiter guy than a power-maximizing guy. Sorry that my limited experience suggests he's not going to become more powerful as a result of this whimpering. Let's wait and see, shall we?
It's not very fair if it's taken as a generalization about what we're doing here. It's absolutely on point as a description of how we do it wrong – not the only failure mode of this community, especially after the move, when we've gained some cocksure low-effort right-wingers, but the most prevalent one among the old guard. I agree 100% with @FCfromSSC that this list is a self-improvement opportunity for me.
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