Ecgtheow
1yr ago
LGBT Twitter people usually equate "wanting to kill gay or trans people" with anything that might increase the probability of suicide, i.e. social exclusion. Exterminating trans people is used in all sorts of contexts where the meaning isn't rounding up and killing them but preventing them from transitioning socially or medically. To be exceedingly generous; if a country legally banned a body modification ritual like circumcision you can see how that might be
(hyperbolically) equated with the extermination of the Jewish faith since future generations would not be able to participate in a central ritual of membership but it would be pretty different from literally rounding up and killing Jewish people.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If "The SFPD is so totally owned by the Pelosi's that they either fabricated DePape's confession or coerced him into a false confession" seems more plausible to you then "an 82 year old had a shitty security system, wore a button up shirt to bed, and had a funny expression on his face in a highly stressful situation" then you have some wild priors.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If I were an unarmed elderly man alone with a crazy guy with a hammer my strategy would be to de-escalate the situation as much as possible. Act calm, and normal, keep the crazy guy (who said his plan was not to assassinate Pelosi but to interrogate her) talking until the police show up. Maybe offer him a drink, or have a drink myself to give the impression that the situation is normal.
Is that the modal outcome when a potential assailant breaks into an elderly person's home? Probably not, but it seems more likely than a major police department being so bought off it would coerce a lengthy false confession and continued silence from DePape in an extremely high-profile case. "Elderly guy has a drink in his hand during home invasion" also seems much more plausible to me than "extremely rich man hires a chubby neckbeard guy who posts right-wing manifestos as a gay prostitute in the #1 city for gay prostitutes, then pays him so little the guy comes back and murders him with a hammer"? When I saw these memes I assumed the guy was hot or something but good lord.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
But you don't have to trust "the left" you have to trust that the SFPD didn't coerce an elaborate confession and continued silence from this guy.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
There's a huge gap between "the politically appointed leadership of the SFPD is probably left-leaning" and "rank and file members of the SFPD are so thoroughly corrupt that everyone involved in this case is willing to fabricate/coerce a confession". And there's a huge difference between, lying about the details of an altercation in order to paint the department in a favorable light and fabricating/coercing the confession of a still living witness who could at any time just come out and say "no I was actually a gay prostitute".
You don't have to knee-jerk trust the narrative, but if you also just reflexively assume the opposite of the narrative you're gonna end up making some wildly implausible claims.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes that seems like the optimal strategy available to an unarmed elderly man confronted with a young male intruder armed with a hammer. What was Paul supposed to do, freak out scream for help and try to fight the guy? He would have been bludgeoned thirty minutes sooner than he did!
These are the easiest to explain possible "strange details" a conspiracy theory has ever rested on. Honestly I think a bunch of right-wing influencers just did it as a dumb joke "huh huh Nancy Pelosi's so ugly her husband probably hires gay prostitutes lol" and the very online right is so reflexively anti-media that they bought into it.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Typically when people break into a home they're trying to rob or kill people, not interrogate them, as DePape confessed he intended to do with Nancy Pelosi. If someone's just trying to get your valuables and get out then yeah a conversation is unlikely.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It doesn't require a lot of conspiratorial coordination for members of an institution to push gray areas in order to make the institution look more competent at carrying out its mission, i.e. cops intimidating suspects into false confessions making cops look better at solving crimes. Most coerced confessions I've heard of take the form of a cop intimidating a suspect into confessing to a crime where there's some limited evidence linking them to the crime. An honest cop can easily believe that even if officer X went too far that guy who confessed definitely did it, and then recanted in order to beat the charge.
It does require a lot of conspiratorial coordination for cops to intimidate a random guy into making up a false motive for a beneficiary outside the institution itself. Nancy would have to get on the line pretty fast to the SFPD in order to make sure that whatever officers interrogate this guy are in on the conspiracy, there can't be any records or any honest cops present for the conversation where they tell him "don't say you're a gay prostitute, say you're a right winger", and the SFPD would have to intimidate him into silence for the rest of his life. That requires a lot of people throughout the SFPD to be controlled by Pelosi, or someone linked to her, and the more people involved in a conspiracy the less likely it is to stay secret.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah if some guy breaks into my house with a hammer wanting the truth about the one world government my wife runs I'd call the cops, crack a beer, and make up some wild stories for him.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think the deciding factor was widespread availability of smart phone cameras and social media sites to make incidents of police violence go viral. One of the biggest pre BLM riots was in response to a video recording of Rodney King being beaten. If camcorder footage of one guy getting beaten up causes LA to burn what is constant high res footage of police shootings going to do?
I'm not saying the traditional media is blameless, but my guess is black teenagers are much more influenced by their peers sharing viral videos of police brutality and leaving "ACAB" style comments than by NPR/MSNBC talking heads.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
To switch to a sort of meta-discussion of media fairness and lying: I see this genre of post a lot where someone reads an article and "debunks" the framing/implied conclusion of the article with facts from the article and whether that is an indication of honesty or not. On one hand, the piece is clearly biased and wants you to take seriously the idea that this audit rate is a problem that reflects poorly on IRS practices, but it accurately reports that the system is totally race-blind and the obvious socioeconomic factor (EITC use) doesn't explain the disparity which allows you to draw the opposite conclusion.
This sort of biased headline and framing but with enough true facts critically thinking people can draw opposite conclusions is how a lot of media bias ends up. My favorite example of this was when Fox News published "BREAKING NEWS: Roy Moore accuser admits she forged part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama senate candidate" based on an ABC interview where the accuser stated that the date and location underneath Roy Moore's message was something she added. To me, that seems like an irrelevant detail, it's obvious from an image of the yearbook that the handwriting is different, Moore's message also contains the year, and she never explicitly stated before that he had written that part. Though once she read his message aloud and also read the part she added which may have implied he di. The purpose of characterizing this minor clarification as an admission of partial forgery the day before the election was obviously to cast her story in doubt so as to rally Republicans to Roy Moore and seems a clear-cut instance of bias. Yet, I cannot get too frustrated with Fox because I was able to read the article and find the same set of facts that lead me to believe it was an irrelevant clarification and not blatant forgery in the body of the article.
These biased articles with accurate facts that undermine the conclusion the author is pushing with the framing and headline seem fundamentally dishonest in some way, but it's not lying or information being withheld. If you read these articles closely and critically you end up with a lot of good information about the subjects at hand, but if you just skim the headlines you end up pretty misinformed.
P.S. I really don't want to relitigate Roy Moore.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Russia has no reasonable fear that NATO would launch some sort of land invasion of their internationally recognized territory because they have nuclear deterrent. America theoretically being able to put nuclear missiles closer to Russia doesn't erase that deterrent. Proximity of missiles mattered way more in 1962 when nuclear armed submarines and ICBMs we're just getting started. Also in the post WWII era there was this thought that winning a nuclear exchange was a thing that mattered, where now I don't think there's any Foreign Policy goal the American public would be willing to tolerate once city getting nuked in order to accomplish, so as long as you can credibly threaten that you're safe.
Russia has a totally reasonable fear that NATO is in the process of turning them from a global super power into an impotent commodities provider. But I also think it's totally unreasonable for Russia to expect to remain a regional hegemon in light of it's economic weakness. If you insist on trying to dominate part of Europe with an economy smaller than Italy's or Brazil's you have to use force or skulduggery because you're not outcompeting the EU on trade deals. If you could frame America & NATO as foreign colonizers to unite against maybe you could do it, but former SSR's are the strongest supporters of Ukraine precisely because they see Russia as a threat to dominate them not as a force to protect them from outside powers.
If Russia is determined to dominate it's neighbors internal politics without the soft power to compete with America or the EU then it is resolving to use force eventually.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I just find it hard to take fear over self preservation seriously when the guy has a fleet of nuclear armed submarines. The fear is not that NATO tanks will roll through Ukraine and try to partition Russia, that would obviously end in global Armageddon and so will never happen. The fear is that Russia will not be able to determine the internal politics of neighbor former SSR's.
This is a predictable fear, states would rather be stronger than weaker, if Russia can boss around their neighbors they would like to continue doing that. NATO is a threat to reduce Russia from regional hegemon to irrelevancy and the EU/NATO bears responsibility in the sense that Russian aggression against it's neighbors was a predictable outcome of offering Ukraine self determination. But Russia bears responsibility in the moral sense because resolving to control your neighbors trade policies when you have less GDP than Brazil or Italy means you're going to have to resort to force or skullduggery because you can't compete economically.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Didn't Zelensky make a joke like:
Russian 1: We're at war with NATO!
Russian 2: A war? How many troops have we lost?
Russian 1: 100,00 men, 100s of tanks and a battleship
Russian 2: That's a lot, how many casualties has NATO taken?
Russian 1: None.
It does seem a little absurd to say NATO is at war when the Russians aren't shooting at any NATO member states or their armed forces.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
There's a general effect where the people who consume or practice an art want more experimental or self referential art then people who casually consume it. Men seem to prefer more naturalistic makeup looks on women where the goal is a flawless slightly exaggerated version of natural beauty that doesn't call attention to its artificiality. But people who are really good at makeup probably get bored with more minimalistic looks and can do more complex expressive artificial techniques that exist less to emulate flawless natural beauty and more to impress other makeup users with your skill. Then you get to some of the high end drag stuff where the makeup demonstrates flawless technical ability but is trying to produce a pointedly artificial version, or in some cases almost cubist parody, of female beauty.
My guess is a lot of beauty stuff goes like that. Women might be cultured to gain skill at various forms of self presentation to appeal to the male gaze but once you develop knowledge and skill and are good at something it becomes pleasurable to do that thing (dancing, fashion) in forms that are exhibitions of skill and not purely catering to the male gaze.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Chat GPT is a machine for completing text prompts not disarming bombs, ethical reasoning, or maintaining safety. It has to be trained to avoid saying racist things because it has to complete lots of random text prompts from the public, it would be bad PR if it said racist stuff and there's no particularly important function gained by allowing it to say racist stuff. The bomb-disarming AI doesn't have to complete random text prompts from the public so there's no need to excessively shackle its ability to say racist stuff.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Chat GPT will never actually be in a position to prevent or destroy a city, but it is in a position to generate a lot of text. It's not a problem for Open AI if chat GPT answers thought experiments in absurd ways, it is if someone can use it to make a bot that spews racist harassment at people on social media.
I'm not saying it's good that they trained it to maximize defference to 2023 American blue tribe speech norms over correct moral reasoning. I'm saying that the incentives that led them to do that probably don't apply uniformly to all AI's since all AI's don't exist to generate speech in response to inputs from the public.
No one cares if it's possible to get a bomb squads robot to play a TTS clip of the N-word (or heresy against Catholic doctrine) if you feed it some absurd hypothetical, people do care if your open source text generation system can generate racist harassment at scale.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Maybe. But I think a company making a speech generation AI has strong incentives to limit its ability to generate racist speech and no incentive to make it good at solving hypothetical bomb disarmament problems. I'm not sure that Open AI acting accordingly is predictive of the tradeoffs a future bomb disarming AI company will make.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
People training a chatbot have a very good reason to get the AI to value language taboos over the lives of millions, it will never actually makes life-saving decisions but it will generate a lot of speech. A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place, but a chatbot that would rather kill a million people than say the N-word just produces absurd responses to hypothetical scenarios.
Whatever AI is actually in charge of disarming bombs or flying planes won't be producing speech at scale and so the incentives to train it to be so overly deferential to speech norms won't exist.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The main argument I can think of is from the "Jewish Lawyer" scene from Atlanta. The extent to which the talent is undervalued may not compensate for the extent to which they're excluded from/lack connections within important professional networks. Particularly when it comes to starting a business connections are really important and even if you're top tier at trading stocks that doesn't mean you're really good at organizing a firm.
Also, it's a big leap from, "x demographic is systematically undervalued" to "a firm composed entirely of x demographic would outcompete the field". Say you figured out that the NBA systematically undervalues players from Europe, should you attempt to compose a team entirely of European players?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think you're too focused on trying to win obvious rhetorical concessions against very online urbanist YIMBYs and not really dealing with the issues at hand. Except for some urbanists and WEIRD people, I think most people would love to live in a suburban neighborhood in a beautiful location with people of only their socioeconomic class and culture and a short commute to work with easily available parking. I'm on the YIMBY side, but I have no issue admitting I would absolutely love that living situation, but the issue is that maintaining such environments in the face of economic headwinds isn't done through Coasean negotiations but through government restrictions on property rights that create deadweight economic loss.
YIMBY's are mostly progressives trying to convince blue city governments so they make arguments about egalitarianism and diversity but I don't think economic development is inherently progressive or egalitarian. Logically as a city increases in population some part of it will have to increase in density or it will sprawl infinitely. The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.
Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits
For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.
Economic geography changes all the time; the places where young talented people want to move changes as different innovative fields develop new industry clusters, the places where hardworking blue-collar people migrate from or to changes as different extractive or manufacturing industries rise and fall. If we want a dynamic economy we have to accept there will be large population transfers and we need a system of housing production that facilitates such transfers. The people who live in a place affected by such a transfer will resist the change to the place they live, they'll want subsidies for public services in half-empty cities, or to ban housing to be built for newcomers where the market determines it should be built. If everyone is allowed to impose regulation or appropriate public funds in order to preserve the character of the place they live in the way it was when they got there we get sclerosis and massive deadweight loss. You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's not the ability to generate hate speech that would make a racist harassment chatbot-GPT effective, it's the ability to generate normal use of whatever platform reliably enough to avoid detection as a bot combined with the ability to also do racist harassment on cue. Copy-paste spambot gets banned, GPT-bot can pass as a normal commenter then harass whoever its creator wants.
But yeah the real risk isn't that it would actually succeed, but that someone would tarnish Open AI's reputation by using it to create a failed version that gets caught and then turned into a big media story
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They'd be coming from other places reducing labor supply and raising wages there. Even if migration lowers the urban wage by introducing more people as long as it's a higher wage than where they were migrating from it's possible for the average to still increase. Also the mechanism by which you restrict or increase the urban labor supply is by raising or lowering housing supply which effects rents. So if there's a ton of new houses built and a whole bunch of people can move to the city and flip burgers even if that depresses the wages of existing burger flippers they benefit from lowered rent, or the absence of a rent increase, since new housing was built.
But the main argument is that agglomeration allows specialization which increases productivity, and wages are downstream of productivity. If a bunch more skilled people move to the city they can specialize in their most productive niche due to economies of scale. Because they're incredibly specialized and productive unskilled people can earn higher wages selling services to them. You could draw in so many unskilled people that there's no longer an urban rural unskilled wage difference once you adjust for rent, but it would still be a lower average wage then if the unskilled people were selling services to less specialized skilled people.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes. Black Female Caribbean traders are such a small percentage of total traders that it's completely plausible that they're systematically underrated and that there's still not enough of them in the right tail of the distribution of traders for a firm composed entirely of them to succeed. What could succeed would be a 2010s Spurs type arrangement where a player from right tail of the properly valued majority demographic (Tim Duncan) is bolstered by a bunch of players from the systematically underrated demographic the team picked up cheap (Ginobli, Parker, Diaw).
I don't think it's a mystery whey there isn't some firm of all Afro-Carribean gay disabled stock traders blowing away the competition. Even if systematically undervalued why would we expect enough of this subset of traders to be in the right tail to succeed on their own. The question is: is there some majority white male/Asian firms that happen to have figured out that x demographic is systematically undervalued and hires them and promotes them at a higher rate then everyone else and enjoys a small advantage from doing that. There could be, and there could still be a lag before everyone else catches on. It took the NBA a while to catch on to what Popovich figured out about European players and the kings still took Bagley over Luca.
I used to have chronic gas and then I eliminated garlic and onions from my diet and have no issues. It's not something I would request anyone cater to at a 100 person gathering but when I'm with close family we saute garlic and onions separately and then everyone else adds them to their portion. I have an uncle with similar stomach issues who can only eat extremely bland foods and just caries his own packed lunches to most things and my sister can't handle dairy.
My guess is that a sizable minority of the population would be better off if they identified certain foods that gave them issues and then removed them from their diets. The recent culture war on this issue seems more like classic left-right divide over whether the community at large should bear the responsibility of providing for people with specific dietary needs or if the people with those needs should be responsible themselves for bringing their own food or only eating from a very small selection of dishes at large gatherings.
At very large scales and very small scales this isn't an issue. The grocery store can carry non-dairy ice cream for my sister, my family won't put onions in because they care about me and are willing to cater to my preferences. The issue is the norm for midsize gatherings where you have too many specific dietary requirements to justify preparing separate dishes in each course for each requirement.
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