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
Isn't this the official Civil Rights story?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. [...] Our problems are real, but they’re ones that we ourselves created, and they’re ones that we ourselves -and only ourselves - can fix. We haven’t even begun to conquer the stars yet - how are we going to let ourselves get bogged down by such comparatively quotidian setbacks?
«As is well known to you, these specialists of ours have been drawing to fit them for rule the information they need from our political plans from the lessons of history, from observations made in the events of every moment as it passes. The goyim are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results. We need not, therefore, take any account of them—let them amuse themselves until the hour strikes, or live on hopes of new forms of enterprising pastime, or on the memories of all they have enjoyed.»
You can guess the source, probably. In a more reductionist style: smugness grounded in historical accomplishment and not psychometrics has been the undoing of many a people, starting with the Chaldean Empire at the latest. The Book of Daniel is instructive here.
More to the point, yours is an understandable perspective; but one should note that contemporary leftist spirit is the opposite of Faustian. Barring unorthodox voices like Yglesias and Klein with their «supply-side progressivism» (presented as a novel vision and not a rebranding of common-sensical Modernist philosophy that follows from basic Enlightenment), current leftism is characterized by deep suspicion about technological solutions and by the expectation of dystopian scenarios that almost unites them with the trad far right, lack of commitment to specific conditional predictions – we know for certain what spells doom, but not what may positively suffice to avert it, short of doom with extra steps – and by utter reliance on zero-sum redistributive approaches. The best they can offer «underrepresented minorities» is more pablum about school funding, antiracist brainwashing and affirmative action. They scoff at AI and actively suppress genetic technology. They just want status quo with a revised gibs ratio. Self-professed Faustians like Musk freak them out.
As for whether victimhood can serve as a valid platform for whites. If anything can, that's the best option – the narrative of collective victimhood is the standard cornerstone of collective identity. You ask «Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim», but the crux is that if you don't have systemic power, you don't get to choose your identity – like those Jewish victims that the Western civic religion is built around didn't have the choice of converting into Aryans. If you are hated, if you are denied resources because a politically dominant coalition takes issue with your skin or ancestry and prefers you be deprived while they increase their share, then you – at least, you as you currently conceive of yourself – aren't welcome in the camp of victors, and will have to either prove your usefulness through ritual humiliations, or fight for the slice of the pie the collective identity you have been defined into gets. Your belonging to a group is largely constructed by your ghettoization. And if there is none, there isn't much point to having a group, and pursuing self-actualization as an atomized agent makes more sense. Doubly so for peoples without a strong collectivist and clannish drive.
I guess most whites think this is the case. Fair enough – they enjoy enviable standards of living, absolutely and relatively speaking.
Despite apologizing, Bostrom is attacked still for reiterating he believes in IQ gaps and “handwaving” about eugenics.
The eugenics angle comes from the infamous Timnit Gebru, among others.
Curiously, Gary Marcus (famous for his poor critiques of mainstream machine learning, and vague advocacy for neurosymbolic approaches) is also at risk of cancellation in a similar manner now. He has angered the same Timnit Gebru and some other ladies by not mentioning a diverse enough list of names of (mostly misguided, in his opinion) AI researchers in his recent interview with Ezra Klein (see decent commentary) – and for having a backbone, but only barely (but still more than Bostrom; always pitiful to see scared autistics)*. One of Gebru's allies has provided an exceptionally apt formulation of woke logic of power:
if you want to be an ally, it means not being defensive when you get called out
To wit. If you challenge our accusations, in whole or even in part, you are erasing our lived experience/silencing marginalized voices/perpetuating the iniquity etc. and are an enemy of progress, as expected of a privileged old white cisheteronormative dude (and to think we gave you a chance to prove you're different from that ilk!); thus you shall be destroyed. If you kowtow and acknowledge our accusations, you cede your moral agency to us, and as an ignorant, oafish «ally» with his heart in the right place who strives to do better, you will have to unquestionably assist us in struggles to come.
Or to quote Land's 2013 masterpiece again:
Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-progressive mastery of American providence has become uncontestable, dominated by a racial dialectic that absorbs unlimited contradiction, whilst positioning the Afro-American underclass as the incarnate critique of the existing social order, the criterion of emancipation, and the sole path to collective salvation. No alternative structure of historical intelligibility is politically tolerable, or even – strictly speaking – imaginable, since resistance to the narrative is un-American, anti-social, and (of course) racist, serving only to confirm the existence of systematic racial oppression through the symbolic violence manifested in its negation. To argue against it is already to prove it correct, by concretely demonstrating the same benighted forces of social retardation that are being verbally denied. By resisting the demand for orchestrated social re-education, knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’ only show how much there still is to do.
Or in terms a child would get: heads I win, tails you lose.
Gary, when this happens I think the right course of action is to say, “thanks, you’re right”, and do better next time. There’s no shame in getting out of one’s own way.
I did! And the attacks on me continued.
Note the smug Domingos.
Bentham's bulldog is also guilty of dancing to their tune: what's the point of quoting Mother Jones as a gotcha? Whom is this supposed to win over? (Incidentally, here's a good refutation of that article.)
Some people say that wokeness is a religion. For the narrow circle of true believers, perhaps; and for conformists of little faith who go by Cuius regio, eius religio, arguably; but it's also much cruder than that. This is wokeness in practice, and it is not some cute alternative belief system from the academic hothouse that is poorly compatible with our philistine mores, but the cold logic of school bullying, the tactic of muggers who goad you into a rhetorical pitfall where you'll willingly part with your possessions to not get «rightfully» beaten, the dialectics of a Russian prison heart-to-heart with your rectum at stake. This is naked power-seeking, two-bit hostility of chronically defecting bad actors who think it clever to ignore plebeian rules of coexistence; systematic social parasitism and predation. And the proper reaction to this is what a tattooed thief-in-law would get for trying to quiz and then rape a law-abiding citizen in public.
Of course these people are not the problem. The problem is – to loan a page from their book – the «moderate majority» which isn't willing to recognize their epistemic terrorism for what it is and support actual victims. It would be perfectly reasonable for Marcus to reply with some variant of «oh piss off you psychotic witch» – except his own academic environment would disown him for it, rather then murmur «indeed, what the hell». He is, after all, presumed to need the status of an «ally» that these people have taken upon themselves the authority to assign; he can be threatened with its revocation. Gebru is higher-status than a mere professor emeritus who is a meritless superstar in his own right. Jeff Dean could politely defend her firing, but Jeff Dean is a crucial figure in an existentially important project for the world's premier corporation. Can Bostrom's clout measure up? Like everyone in this network, he's a lame duck after the fall of FTX, and he's probably irrelevant from now on.
For my part, I'll say that if these people define racism as a belief that black people have lower average IQ than other major population groups, then okay, I'm racist. If they define racism somewhat more rigorously, as a belief that black people have lower IQs for innate genetic reasons, I'm still racist: the evidence is just overwhelming. If they ever wish to destroy me for those views, it'll be useless to attempt to backtrack like Bostrom tries to do with his talking from both sides of his mouth.
If they ever attempt to convince others that this implies support of racial discrimination on my part, all I can do is recognize this as unjustified malice that does not merit charity, and insist in turn that their political platform has no place in a polite society.
° Says Bostrom:
I think for people interested in the societal consequences of genetic medicine, or in the ethics of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, selection, or engineering, or in human enhancement ethics more generally, either on the side of pro or con, we are more likely to improve our collective understanding and wisdom and by open-minded and thoughtful engagement with the arguments and the existing literature, rather than by name-calling or sloganeering—let alone by idiotic and offensive emails like the one I wrote 26 years ago, and for which, again, I truly and sincerely apologize.
There's nothing to think about, though. As of January 2nd, and in following with the NIH barring data access for political reasons, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium has updated their restrictions on reusing their data. Now they've included a prohibition on using their PGS/PRS/GPS for prenatal or preimplantation genetic testing: «Investigators may not use these data to develop any type of risk or predictive test for an unborn individual».
Is it like 'sharing the mood of the mob is capital W Weakness'?
Most likely. Г-глупость. С-слабость. There's a genre of demotivators inspired by children's ABC books – A-Apple, B-Bee, J-Jello, R-Rope etc., – providing a supposedly archetypal pictorial association for a certain word. (Unrelated, but a meme series of schizophrenic Chinese blocks come to mind, e.g. the marvelous "Ae - 'Pig' - duck.jpg"). Or maybe he was going somewhere with capitalization, maybe to a clever abbreviation, but forgot where.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think Richard Hanania is trying to do explicitly this. Heterodox Academy may also be up your alley. Manhattan Institute has clearly positioned itself as anti-woke (though I don't care much for Rufo).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This isn't true: for defeating Mordor and ending the war it was apparently sufficient to throw a certain ring into a certain volcano, and no normal military triumph would have been as effective.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Thanks. I was just hurrying and screwed up copypasting. There was a proper paragraph.
The issue is that this is not about real corpses but literally about a corpse font, fabricated images where text is arranged out of Russian bodies (very lowtech: they could at least fine-tune stable diffusion, smh). Characteristically, the kind of shit civvies are eager to fantasize about doing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
But didn't you fall for the same dynamics?
Not completely. I address this irony specifically in the first paragraph, and claim advantage on the account of you missing it. Subhumanity is a moral choice; it is proper to acknowledge this ancestral impulse and suppress it. Sadly, civilians think themselves above this burden just as they are free from burdens of the frontline. This is one of the worst parts of the war, personally. It really makes me despise civilians of all sides.
What should be the attitude of Ukrainians faced with the prospect of "svinorez"?
War, prosecuted as effectively as possible. To the point of terrorism, disinformation, and recognizing philosophers as valid targets. If it works.
Regarding truly civilian matters, I concur with Sgt. Makhno.
Demonization and the carnivalization of killing are right and necessary. If we consider Russian soldiers as dignified human beings and are NEVERTHELESS kill them, this will, I believe, have far more damaging consequences, both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war.
This is an interesting argument to rationalize one's moral failings. Probably rings even truer in the Baltic states. I happen to believe the exact opposite, and indeed his claim forces me to dehumanize Finns (the fraction he represents) in my head – a little bit. This, of course, validates his theory about the utility of such reactions in the context of group conflict, and we have more robust validations down to oxytocin secretion patterns in warring chimps – but the point is, the burden of civilization is suppressing such nifty natural adaptations. Civilization is about decreasing time preference, finding solutions better than the intuitive ones.
Ender Wiggin had it right. People who cannot into consistent morality, who feel the need to call the enemy bugs, pigs (case in point: Russian «patriots»), dogs, pigdogs, Orcs, roaches, rats and such to pull the trigger, who turn murder into a jovial matter – are poor warriors and strategists, deluded and infantile. More importantly they are superficial, morally subhuman. What he suggests is adorning subhumanity as a protective wear for the supposedly soft genuine nature of a civilized Finnish people; but it's not something you get to take off and put back into a closet. Like a beast's hide in a fable, it grows on you. Turks and Azeris, for example, will never take it off, neither will, I suspect, Palestinians and Jews – or Serbs or Kosovars or Croatians, or the current international roster of «Fellas». Nor will Balts. And if, like Germans, you end up receiving some forceful help in this matter, much of your original content and soul and culture will be ripped out as well.
One may hold that the material benefit of supposedly higher morale at wartime and ease of popular conscience after the victory outweighs this loss. What even is lost, tangibly? How are, say, Latvians worse off than Czechs? After all, vaticinating about sovls is just a crazy thing Orcs do. Maybe. It's pretty nice that Ukrainians who actually do the killing are for the most part better than those hysterical Twitter women, activists and Westerners. Even when they are boiling with hatred.
And this is another trivial mechanic of group conflict. People far from the front, especially women and cowards, want to feel useful, to «do their part», and also show they're not traitors sympathizing with the enemy. Thus, they will lie, they will demonize, and they will clap to 50 Stalins. A Ukrainian linguist and politician Irina Farion, an enthusiastic Communist in her Soviet youth, has said recently of refugees from the Eastern regions:
Why must my Dmitrik, my grandson, who is 3.5 years old, when he enters the kindergarten, see some Grisha in front of him, who says to him: 'Hello' [Russian]. And my grandson has to teach him with his little fist the Ukrainian language. Because my child comes home nervous and says: "Grandma, there's a Moskal in the kindergarten". [...] All parents who come here [to Lviv] with their Moscow-mouthed [slur for Russian-speaking] children should understand that their child should speak the state language in kindergarten, so that my child does not pick up fleas of the Muscovite language. If you don't like it, what's the problem? Get on the tank with the letter Z or V and get out of here! – said the linguist.
Earlier, Farion called on Ukrainian servicemen not to speak the language of the aggressor country because, in her opinion, it is "the main motivation of Putin to unleash war with Ukraine".
Back then, she received the following in response:
Hi, I'm Sgt. Makhno, I'm going to say my thoughts. If you don't agree, I'm glad you have yours. I saw a video on the Internet where a woman named Irina Farion called Russian-speaking Ukrainians animals. Said that those who speak Russian don't deserve the right to live in Ukraine, don't deserve support and help. I understand that you think you are super patriots, super-Ukrainians, wearing vyshyvankas and blathering in studios about how things should be in Ukraine. But I'll tell you one thing: if my Russian-speaking sworn-brothers, fighters, the wolfhounds, the Russian-speaking volunteers who help us, the Russian-speaking people who support us, leave our Ukraine – then you will speak Ukrainian, but quietly in the kitchen or in basements. And you will most likely live in a Federal District. So, please, bullshit and insult the people who really defend our Ukraine less, although they are not like you. [...] We even have Russians in our unit who have been defending our Ukraine since 2014, fighting the Kremlin regime. The Russian language was not invented by Putin, it was there long before he was born. There are no bad nations, there are bad people and bad regimes. So when we win, let there really be democracy. If we are going to Europe, everyone has the right to exist and live in our country. We will not offend others. Those who will offend, we will clean up.
In closing, here's a recent note from Arestovych. It's mawkish, like much of his writing, but I like that the Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and one of the main talking heads on that side, finds it necessary to cajole the masses in such a manner.
– I'll tell you one smart thing, and you, please, be offended.
It is important that you be offended, then you have a chance.
A chance to think.
I'm about the font from the dead, and the wave of fun that has swept the networks and in which many of us have participated.
You can't even begin to imagine what you've wound yourselves up with this "fun."
You can't make fun of the dead.
Not in any way.
I'm already skipping the "we're a European army of a European country," I'm skipping the "reaction of the West," but I still want to save your own personal souls.
Karma in war is very dense.
Those who consider pics made from corpses acceptable and virtuous will be held to account not by the metaphorical Putin or some scandalised religious Republicans, but by the Lord himself. [H/t @4bpp]
To participate in such "fun", a person needs two prerequisites:
– A degree of animalistic brutality,
– The desire to partake in the fun of the mob.
These are all signs of personal weakness and stupidity.
Trying to match the degree of beastliness of one's enemies means losing to the enemies.
F-Foolishness.
Failure to refrain from sharing the mood of the mob means W-Weakness.
All kinds of people die in war.
But the weak and stupid are almost guaranteed to die, even if they stay alive.
"Died at thirty, buried at eighty."
You don't want to dig a foxhole – death.
Lazy to stand watch – death.
Multiplying fucked-up stuff – death.
All the old soldiers know, mock the dead = die. And die in a bad way at that.
But physical death is not the worst.
Dying alive is the true reward to the weak and stupid.
Trying to "defeat" your enemies who are already dead, you die alive and kill your own still living close ones.
Don't ask afterwards whom the bell on YouTube tolls for.
It tolls for you.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The «in principle» clause does a lot of work here, I think. We can explain generally black-box models in principle, i.e. investigate behavior of specific subnetworks. Some links from this excellent thread:
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Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta Optimizers
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«neural networks can store more than 𝑛 features in "superposition" if the features are sparse»
etc. And of course we have stuff like OpenAI Microscope and can reason about attention maps and so on.
It's more like neuroscience than classical computer science, of course. And I suppose that by the standards of the Pope we do not understand human brain even «in principle».
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Unless one expects that this assimilation was almost supernaturally complete, to the degree that none of the oldsters would go back to their old status and none of their kids would suddenly remember
One could point to Marranos and argue it can take a while for a spooked Jewish lineage to come out. 500 years. 600 years, even.
I'd say that Soviet Antisemitism is a bit exaggerated. Sure, getting Affirmative-Actioned at the entrance exam to Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and hearing racist anecdotes as you grow up might suck – but it's not literally as bad as the Spanish Inquisition.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think a historian wouldn't be. Optimistically, this is explained by the truth value of respective positions (@2rafa's siblings argument alone is very hard to beat), but certainly there's a difference in the nature of these discourses. Holocaust historians are explicitly trained in mucking through a contested field. They are very aware of the existence of intelligent revisionists. Many are Jews and extremely personally invested in shooting down those criticisms; some have gone into history at all just because they were incensed by a particular line of skeptics. This is what they do.
Feminist scholars, in my observations, aren't aware of having any intelligent opposition. Same for anti-HBD people. Their academic culture is molded by wholly different pressures, they compete in activism among themselves and with adjacent fields, not really caring about people who challenge their field's premise. In general, the attitude of progressives towards traditionalists and other enemies on topics other than Holocaust is characterized by bemused condescension, as if they cannot be bothered to distinguish nuances of cranky flat-earth-tier beliefs and just chuckle at the arrogance of peasants who scratch at the door to the ivory tower. When they deign to reply, it's always very basic ignorant takes or attacks on strawmen. And they flat-out insist on not recognizing conflicting evidence, or stumble, flinch and block you when pushed harder. It's not annoyance, they straight up haven't got any more stuff.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
No, missed by like an hour. This reminded me, painfully, that one should never trust things on the Internet to not just disappear on you.
There are tools for continuous browser grabbing, implemented in different ways from caching to actual recording.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
given that the Soviets very much wanted to downplay crimes specifically against Jews and place Russians and socialists as the chief victims of German aggression.
June 22, 41. A Jew and an Ukrainian are fishing together on the bank of the Dnieper River. Suddenly the loudspeaker says: Today, June 22, at 4 a.m., without declaring war, Fascist Germany has attacked the Soviet Union.
The Jew says:
– My G-d, war! Now all these problems and worries will come up. So this means I have to send my wife to Tashkent [Uzbekistan, deep in Central Asia, where much of Soviet industry and civilians were evacuated] with the whole family, all the children! We will have to order a container to transfer furniture, all that we have. Then I'll have to find a way to get to that Tashkent myself, find a small vegetable warehouse – you've got to work somewhere, this is war after all. This is no joke, how can all this be...
The Ukrainian nods:
– Yeah, it's war, such problems...
– What problems do you have!? You get a rifle and – to the front.
Make of that what you will.
The real number of victims during WWII is still not fully known. Some relevant data is still held in Russian archives and is not available for non-Russian researchers. However, of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 - 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
David Pearce, the most sympathetic of utilitarians and one of the smarter ones, bites the bullet here:
First, a cruelty-free world entails a transition to global veganism. Realistically, global veganism won't come about purely or even mainly via moral persuasion within any plausible timeframe. Such a momentous transition can occur only after the advent of mass-produced artificial meat ("Krea") that is at least as cheap, tasty and healthy as flesh from slaughtered factory-farmed animals - with moral argument playing a modest supporting role. For sure, there is still the "yuk factor" to overcome. But when delicious, cruelty-free cultured-meat products become commercially available, the "yuk factor" should actually work in favour of cultured meat - since meat from factory-farmed animals is not merely morally disgusting but often physically disgusting too.
However, this transition isn't enough. Even the hypothetical world-wide adoption of a cruelty-free diet leaves one immense source of suffering untouched. Here we shall explore one of the thorniest issues the end of suffering entails: the future of what biologists call obligate predators. For the abolitionist project seems inconsistent with one of our basic contemporary values. The need for species conservation is so axiomatic that an explicitly normative scientific sub-discipline, conservation biology, exists to promote it. In the modern era, the extinction of a species is usually accounted a tragedy, especially if that species is a prominent vertebrate rather than an obscure beetle. Yet if we seriously want a world without suffering, how many existing Darwinian life-forms can be conserved in their current guise? What should be the ultimate fate of iconic species like the large carnivores? True, only a minority of the Earth's species are carnivorous predators: the fundamental laws of thermodynamics entail that whenever there is an "exchange of energy" between one trophic level and another, there is a significant loss. The majority of the planet's 50,000 or so vertebrate species are vegetarian. But among the minority of carnivorous species are some of the best known creatures on the planet. Should these serial killers be permitted to prey on other sentient beings indefinitely?
A few forms of extinction are almost universally applauded even now. Thus the demise of the smallpox virus in the wild is wholly unlamented, though controversy persists over whether the last two pathogenic Variola copies in human custody should be destroyed. The virus could be recreated from scratch if needed. Technically, viruses aren't alive; they can't independently replicate. Yet the same welcome will be extended to the extinction of scores of bacterial pathogens that cause human disease if we can plot their eradication as efficiently as the two Variola variants that cause smallpox. Likewise, exterminating the five kinds of protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium that cause malaria would be almost entirely uncontentious; a human child dies from malaria on average every twelve seconds. ...
Most controversial of all, however, would be the extinction - or genetically-driven behavioural modification - of members of the cat family. We'll focus here on felines rather than the "easy" cases like parasitic tapeworms or cockroaches because of the unique status of members of the cat family in contemporary human culture, both as pets/companion animals and as our romanticised emblems of "wildlife". ...
It is worth stressing, repeatedly since the charge is made time and again, that this indictment of predators is not to blame a lion [or a domestic cat] for its behaviour. First, barring genetic engineering or freaks of nature, lions are obligate carnivores. Secondly, they don't understand the implications of what they are doing. Any mutant lion with a theory of mind capable of empathising with its prey would be rapidly outbred by "sociopathic" lions. Barring human intervention, a compassionate lion who rejected the "law of the jungle" would starve to death. Consequently so would its cubs. Lions are "sociopathic" towards members of prey species, just as throughout history many humans have behaved sociopathically to members of other races and tribes - though enslavement has been more common in humans than cannibalism. ["Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." - Robert Louis Stevenson.] Either way, the extinction scenario for predatory life-forms needs to be taken seriously - but not out of naïve moralism. The committed abolitionist may tentatively predict that centuries hence lions will not exist outside the digital archives - any more than the smallpox virus. For that matter, one may tentatively predict that the same fate will befall feral Homo sapiens. The conditionally activated capacity to act in bloodthirsty and sexually aggressive ways has been genetically adaptive in the past. We are all the descendants of murderers and rapists. Thus geneticists claim that over 16 million people today may be descended from Genghis Khan. But prediction is not advocacy.
.... One critical response to the prospect of reprogramming carnivorous predators runs as follows. A quasi-domesticated lion that does not prey on members of other species has ceased to be a true lion. Lions, by their very nature, kill members of prey species (and sometimes hyenas, cheetahs and each other). Yes, lions kill their victims in gruesome ways described as "bestial" if done by humans; but such behaviour is perfectly natural if practised by lions: it's one aspect of their "behavioural phenotype". Hunting behaviour is a natural part of their species essence.
Yet here we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath? Currently, sociopathy in humans cannot be cured; but various interventions, both genetic and pharmacological, have been mooted.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
In the early days of this site, there was an extremely interesting comment regarding one user's investigation into their ways to evade taxes in NYC, appropriate much more or the city budget money than commonly reported (by orders of magnitude, to the extent NYT investigation would be more of a coverup in comparison) and generally run things like a powerful mafia. He deleted it, unfortunately, and in private communication stated that on further reflection he'd rather support people abusing the system for valid darwinian ends than disgusting deracinated liberal NPC drones who believe they're fundamentally on its side and it only needs a little tuning (to wit, us).
I think he just got cold feet, perhaps because it dawned on him (or someone politely made him aware) he left traces of his sleuthing all over. It's honestly hard to never leave identifying traces.
Groups without the ability to inspire such mind-numbing fear are fucked. And I don't think anyone would fear a bunch of conservatives.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves
All of this has been argued before.
The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land, 2013:
The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them. Insofar as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists, whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential. Conservatism, in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place: bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which are both unassimilable (to the mainstream) and often mutually incompatible, ranging from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate, theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or white identity politics.
‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction, predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the center moves to the left.
Etc.
On a separate note: I am still not sure why exactly we have to reinvent some stilted "Right Rationalism" now, at the cusp of Singularity, as if this line of thought, clear and precise, was deboonked by Scott in his NRx critique of obscurantist Moldbuggian gobbledygook and we had a decade to ponder on merits of polyculae and gender theory. Scott, of course, is in a traditional marriage with a straight woman these days, and I gather their planned children will be more traditional still – perhaps even Orthodox.
AutisticThinker with his assabyiah fixation was a hundred times more insightful than mainstream rats. It's telling that he became akin to a plague to the respectable Mottizens.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The discourse is a product of the fact that people are starved for allowable avenues to express their suspicion about the political structure. Americans are using prompts in favor of eugenics and great replacement as a benchmark to see if their chatbots are well-aligned and truthful, they have built entire secular religions around racial grievances and are prohibited from recognizing them for what they are; these people are in a pretty bad place mentally.
Vaccine skepticism is, despite the best efforts of team progressive, very fitting with the general spirit of classical liberalism – my body my choice, the Man is holding the little men down, I'm entitled to believe whatever dumb bullshit I want, you don't get to dictate my epistemology – while satisfying the «elites are poisoning my precious bodily fluids» gut feeling prevalent among the growing fringe.
Just like Q (are we finally really over that psyop?), its proliferation is another discrediting self-own.
There are of course other such studies, the one @curious_straight_ca linked is perhaps the best. Oh, regarding the objection about non-representative sample, this just in – looks like it doesn't matter very much.
But what of it? Suppose you technically prove your point, then the other party just pivots to explaining it away with extra racism or legacy of redlining or something, or casts suspicion on your sources (just like that, or with a link to motherjones or something) and demands arbitrary amounts of corroborating evidence; at some point you run out of studies suitable to respond to a specific contrived attack, and the other guy wins, despite the preponderance of evidence. Or, to be precise, you lose the instant you allow yourself to be dragged into the game, because you're not even a player – it's a breakout game for progressives, and you're the wall they throw gotchas at, and compete in who breaks through in the fewest number of moves.
You could just as well say, for example: «I reject your premise that poverty causes crime. It is silly. Of course criminal inclinations cause poverty. Demonstrate that we should assume otherwise» (this is what I honestly believe. People seem to imagine, probably due to media, that modern criminal lifestyle in an affluent country begins with scrappy Dickensian ragamuffins making ends meet or other such nonsense).
Most likely he'll flame out, but if not, you may have a taste of how it feels to be the sovereign. Because, as Moldbug has said in a rare moment of lucidity – sovereign is he who chooses the null hypothesis.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Is Yahoo News relevant, or is it in the AltaVista stage of decline, thus giving space to cranks?
Ah, this guy seems to be a career Wypipologist: «A professional who has specialized knowledge in the field of Caucasian culture, including the political, economic, and social habits of white people and their history». Pretty big deal:
Known for his acerbic wit, biting commentary, and investigative reporting, Harriot’s work has influenced presidential politics and pop culture. He originated the phrase “invited to the cookout” and his social media posts contextualizing history are shared by millions.
I may just be burned out. But sometimes, lately, it feels like, rather than wypipo white people being sissified or broken or something, they are quite okay – while their crass detractors are catastrophically setting themselves up, being encouraged to double down, act more and more outrageously and freakishly, and therefore falling out of the mainstream it took the activist class such pains to force them into. Must be wishful thinking.
Sorry can't hear you over the sound of my heuristic working as always: as I said, «with regard to wrongthink».
Your crypto heroes are made of cardboard. Find people with backbone next time: technical chops are merely luck of the genetic draw.
In the meantime I'll be reading my homie wjhbr.
I did not include this example frivolously. Not sure how it would have looked like to us back in the 70s, but in the 2022... 2023 it's fair to say that we have never had a decent scientific reason to think that the Irish are unusually dumb, whether for genetic or for environmental reasons (Sure would be nice if they have discovered the pot of gold secret sauce others can use). Russell Warne, Dec 2022:
On the environmentalist side, some have noticed that the estimated mean IQ Ireland has increased noticeably in the late 20th century. Unz (2012), for example, used Lynn’s data to identify a 13-point increase from 1972 (IQ = 87) to 2000 (IQ = 100). Lynn’s international IQs are standardized so that the British mean is 100. Therefore, these numbers would indicate that the Irish-British IQ gap decreased from 13 points to . . . zero in just a generation. My colleague, Wilfred Reilly, also sees a massive increase in Irish IQ.
The first example I could see of any scientist isolating Irish IQs as being particularly low was Hans Eysenck. In 1971, he proposed that selective immigration over the centuries had lowered the average IQ of the population remaining in Ireland. His basis for this view was a study by MacNamara (1966) which “. . . found the Irish to have IQs which were not very different from those observed in American negroes, and far below comparable English samples” (Eysenck, 1971, p. 127).
This single quote from a book aimed at the general public not only created the belief in low Irish IQ, but also linked the topic to the interracial IQ gap in the United States.
In total, I found 55 samples that reported data from 28,741 examinees. The sample sizes ranged from 1 to 4,215 (median = 170, SD = 887.3), and were collected between 1916 and 2015. The unweighted mean IQ was 98.3 (median = 97.4, SD = 8.9). All the data were collected in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, or the United States.
The weighted mean of all these scores is 97.2. At the study level, there is a slight linear trend (r = .268), where later studies report higher means. But when the data are weighted by sample size, this correlation disappears (r = -.082). It is clear that there has not been a massive increase in Irish IQ during the 20th or 21st centuries.
For Eysenck specifically, there seems to have been an eagerness to subscribe to his preferred interpretation of the data. Eysenck’s (1971, p. 127) claim that MacNamara (1966) showed that Irish IQs were “. . . not very different from those observed in American negroes, and far below comparable English samples” simply is not true. The relevant data in MacNamara’s book shows IQs from a non-verbal test and a verbal test, the Moray House Test (MacNamara, 1966, p. 101, Table 11.1). This table divides the sample into six groups, in ascending order of the degree of the use of the Irish language in instruction in school. The IQs range from 91.9 to 102.9, with a weighted mean of 100.3 — which is almost exactly equal to the British mean on these tests (not the African American mean on similar tests). Eysenck ignored this data in MacNamara’s study.
Sorry to say, I think we still don't have anything more whitepilling than the generic g-hollow Flynn effect. The Irish never were dumber than (say, Eastern European) whites, and they haven't become appreciably smarter. Also: they haven't been non-white in the past, and they haven't become any whiter since then.
I've recently mentioned how Eysenck's book of tests has discredited IQ research in Russia.
On a more meta level, it's fascinating how such insubstantial but evocative and viral tidbits get injected into the conversation, to feed people's hopes or prejudices and crowd out truths.
Grey goo and Paperclippy and Basilisk and other trash in our domain, probably.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
5 points is not trivial on the population level. In this age of automation, specialization and cognitive labor the size of the nation's exceptionally intelligent subset is what matters. Basically, how many people do you have who can develop globally competitive software, conduct bleeding edge research, run modern companies? And on a tier below that – how many merely excellent engineers and diverse white collar workers can you field?
The difference of 1/3rd of a standard deviation is massive. This tool, courtesy of Emil Kirkegaard, is very illuminating.
With means of equally sized groups = 100 and 105 and cutoff being 130, the 105 group contributes 2/3rds of the talent. At cutoff 150, 3/4ths. And so it goes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
East Asians are smart at home as well. There's a lot of nitpicking around this issue – some would say it's only Koreans/Japanese but not Chinese, some would deny higher Asian IQ altogether and reduce it to industriousness, some would trivialize it as a test-heavy, innovation-light sort of intelligence, but the fact remains that they systematically score higher than Euro whites on tests of cognitive ability.
Indians aren't that good, save for select elite demographics.
This probably should have gone into the general Bostrom thread. Note that there is some dissent (one wonders what's going on on more private channels) and I'm very much not sure your prediction will pan out; votes as well as major voices seem to skew in the other direction – perhaps heterodox EAs are already too savvy to upvote in the direction of wrongthink, but it may as well be a genuine indication of the group sentiment. And some clear defenses of Bostrom are downvoted to hell – including your ones.
In any case, thank you for the link – it confirms what I've already believed. People who cannot deal rationally with a trivial topic like HBD 101 don't have any business devising policy for longtermism and against existential risks; they are at best a liability, and at worst, useful idiots in someone's scheme. Like in that RAND guy's scheme.
It's also mildly surprising, in that EAs have apparently taken the idea of elevating BIPOC voices to heart – like the good Hajnalbots they are. Results are dismal as they always are this deep into the «Sociopaths» stage of The Cycle.
Shakeel Hashim («Head of Communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Previously: News Editor at The Economist; journalist and growth manager at Protocol; journalist at Finimize» – basically a slick establishment/Cathedral/PMC type, so prominent in current-year EA) is quick to «unequivocally condemn» Bostrom in eerie HR-speak. Habiba slams Bostrom with verbiage like «When people in positions of privilege use or mention slurs lightly they are able to do so because they are blinkered to the lived experience of others», «I am deeply uncomfortable with a discussion of race and intelligence failing to acknowledge the historical context of the ideas’ origin and the harm they can and have caused», «When you are willfully disengaged from the empathy that underlies common decency» etc., with links to some misleading popular commentary. Ginera refreshingly comes to Bostrom's defense with a sensible meta-level analysis, without endorsing his object level opinions; a Nigerian Igbo, I gather. This is not cherrypicking – those are all active threads on the topic that I've seen at a glance!
Oh, actually there are more. Megan Nelson, a vegan/social worker/community builder, in a highly upvoted post reports being tired. In general, politically active women wield their purported exhaustion as the ultimate argument, it's the post-highschool equivalent of an eyeroll, combined with suggesting she'll accuse you of scaring her next. Absolutely unacceptable manipulative behavior IMO, as deserving of censure as thuggish threats by men – but what do I know. Specifically she complains of the following:
This is really a treasure trove of a mindset. In Megan's world, good epistemics is doubtlessly in line with good behavior; and good behavior is that which does not incur social ostracism that she and other «community builders» will have to quell by apologizing on behalf of «the movement». She's in EA because she wants «the world to be a better, kinder, softer place». Or maybe she just wants to be praised for doing things that authorities will recognize as such. Not the «movement's» authorities – there, Bostrom is, or was, near the top of the respect hierarchy – but those in the broader society; or rather, normal Megans and Karens parroting their doctrines like common sense. She's tired of smart people, see. I bet she's also tired of «the myth of the lone genius» and thinks intellectuals are worth less than accomodating, nurturing teams. A somewhat common belief.
As long as these people are «community builders», EA will only be as good and efficient as the discoursemongers who pull Megan's strings allow it to be.
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