Hyperion
1d ago
But the Corded Ware culture, the common ancestor to all European peoples and languages, did originate from that part of Europe.
That's not true. The Greeks and Albanians are from late-Yamnaya/Catacomb culture people, the Basque still exist and there are Uralic and Turkish people as well.
Not to mention how much of the ancestry of these groups isn't from the Yamnaya or Corded-Ware culture people. Or how much of a mongrel race these Indo-Europeans groups were in the first place.
You just pick and choose what facts you want to fit your narrative.
Hyperion
5d ago
I'm not saying the current models do original meaningful reasoning. If they could the whole world would be turned upside down and we wouldn't be debating if they could.
I think GPT-20 will be able to do that kind of thing in 50 years, either because all we need is scaling; or, because, we will make some new advance in the underlying architecture.
My point is more that high schoolers don't do meaningful original reasoning either. Monkey see, Monkey do. Most human innovation is just random search that is copied by others.
The fact that this machine is dumb isn't surprising, almost all things are dumb, and most humans are. That it can do anything at all is an innovation that puts all the rest to shame.
It's like being mad the first organism that evolved a proto-neuron or proto-central nervous system can't add 2+2 correctly.
Hyperion
5d ago
The idea that GPT-4 has smart-high-schooler levels of intelligence is silly.
And if you asked some 110 IQ high-schoolers this question, half would get it wrong. Half get the original question wrong or can't even supply an answer. There are plenty of examples of this even among very intelligent people. 75% of economics PhD students and professors got this simple question about opportunity costs wrong, because it was worded strangely. Despite the fact that it's formally an easy question to answer. It's easy to trick LLMs just like it's easy to trick people. Doesn't mean either are stupid.
Hyperion
5d ago
Ireland is a very socially conservative place that still has a strong religious streak. Women in these kinds of societies are much more censorious of other women's sexuality. Men are also much more systemizing and willing to argue for the 'right' answer, even if it is socially undesirable.
Hyperion
6d ago
I’ve always like the idea that public companies are like a report card for companies. Having to constantly convince people to own your stock makes companies perform better. How many people learn calculus because they opened a book versus they had a deadline to take a test? And then public markets do provide a means of changing management if the assets get cheap but the company isn’t making appropriate profits.
Sure, but having the owners and managers be the same people also greatly increases the incentives for the managers to do a good job. Private owners have much more information about the company and a much more direct way of effecting change. The private owners can always just sell the company if they think they can't do a good job of managing it or picking managers.
The main advantage publicly owned companies have isn't better management, it's just the ability to raise capital. Something that can matter a lot in capital intensive industries with only a few large companies.
Hyperion
10d ago
She used a private email server to do government business a practice ubiquitous, but illegal, because it let's you sidestep FOIA requests. Look at the recent fury over Fauci doing the same. Hillary had the misfortune of having her sever hacked, unlike everyone else. But, the fortune of having all the emails deleted by a careless aide before they could be subpoenaed.
Hyperion
13d ago
And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years? Sachs has been burned recently, and so I don't think he's changed his stripes but he's certainly informed by experiences in the last four years.
Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. You can't just reverse the positions of your enemies and arrive at the truth.
His claim that their would be peace if Israel just acknowledged the Palestinian state is more than laughable. Hamas controls Gaza and is the mortal enemy of the PLO. They threw PLO members off the tops of buildings when they took control of Gaza. Acknowledging Palestinian statehood would do less than nothing to solve the current conflict. Hamas is going to fight to the death either way.
Sachs knows less about geopolitics than he does about economics, he's a laughing stock that gets trotted out for the public by credulous or ideologically motivated journalists like Tucker.
Hyperion
13d ago
I don't get it is Sachs claiming he was first hand knowledge of this stuff or is he just talking his ass off like all of us here? It sounds like he is just talking his ass off like he has about every other geo-political event in his lifetime. You can always expect him to be against the USA and for whatever is popular among the far-left. So his support of Palestine and Russia is no more surprising than his support of China and Venezuela.
What's somewhat interesting is the fact that these far-left and far-right voices have converged on so much, but you also saw stuff like this in the run up to WW2.
Hyperion
18d ago
Specifically, they are the descendants by the male line, because that's what it means to be a people.
That's just not true though. It was especially not true before agriculture and pastoralism, but even after that it isn't true. The Basque are more R1b then the other Iberians, but they are a separate people, because memes and genes are distinct. Scandinavians have very diverse y-chromosomes, but aren't any less a coherent people because of it. Most people's are of diverse lineages and some cultures are even matrilineal or bilineal. To say nothing of people's who just adopted an entirely new culture without much gene flow, like the Magyars or the hyphenated Americans you consider yourself above.
Hyperion
19d ago
Oh! I think I heard that even as a child for cutting in line. But, not often. It might get corrected later in life and die out. Kids often misuse language and correct later, but sometimes the mistakes get adopted as the correct usage.
Hyperion
19d ago
I'm about to give up on "cut" in the past tense,
What do you mean by this? I am genuinely confused, but I don't interact much with younger children.
Hyperion
19d ago
Do people really process language in this way? It doesn't feel like that internally to me. All these phrasings are basically equivalent and I certainly am not consciously making a distinction between them.
I, also, always got mad when my friend's mom wouldn't give me a cookie if I asked, "Can I have a cookie." No I'm not still mad, why should you ask, or is it would you ask?
Hyperion
19d ago
Sure, but if we're at that point no one is questioning the morality of shooting a man on the other side armed with a rifle.
Hyperion
19d ago
I always heard this line as a kid. That the Communists really meant well and sharing is good, but it just ran against human nature or got corrupted by bad people. Then you read what Marx and Lenin actually wrote and you realize they wanted revolution and power more than anything else. The feel good stuff was secondary to, and a justification for, the hatred and lust for power and violence.
Hyperion
19d ago
This is a 'Hamas was justified killing Israeli citizens, because some used to be IDF' tier justification.
Hyperion
21d ago
Resident Evil 5, too. That one got criticized even at the time, but these were before Obama's second term when things really escalated.
Hyperion
22d ago
What would giving native's back their land matter if the land value was all taxed away? I guess if they were their own nations that didn't have to share with white people it would be different, but you can't get to that scenario now without ethnically cleansing white people or allowing minority rule by the natives. Both things allegedly the worst crimes imaginable for the left if white people do them, but somehow righteous if 'indigenous' people do it.
Hyperion
23d ago
pushes low-value companies out of high-value land (as a pro).
If by 'value' you mean a market value people are willing to pay for, then that is true. But, this is a distributional effect. It's like how if we had let the plains Indians own all that prime farmland on the prairie, it could just be used by them to hunt buffalo, but if they had to pay a land tax, they could never afford it. Both outcomes are Pareto efficient, under certain extreme, frictionless, assumptions. However, the distributional consequences are very different, with the land owners rents being totally redistributed to the tax collecting government and these distributional consequences determine what is produced, it's just both outcomes are as economically efficient.
Hyperion
23d ago
This is.... Georgism???
No, it's just regular arbitrage. arbitrage would work the same Georgism or not. The whole point of Georgism, is that, if done perfectly, it only has distributional effects, it doesn't change the economic efficiency of the outcome. It is a pure transfer with no distortionary effects.
Hyperion
23d ago
Liberal Democracy is basically only possible if people are some sort of creedal, Reformed Christian. You can have any creed you want, Episcopalian, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist, etc. but you have to conform to the social and theological norms of Reformed Christianity. Shariah Law and Halakah just aren't compatible with Western society and can only be tolerated when they are tiny minorities.
Hyperion
23d ago
By that same argument the only thing that makes a land the ancestral homeland of someone is conquest + time. So, if the Israelis just continue on this path another couple centuries they will own their land just as much as the Scots, English, or Palestinians do now.
(P.S. Your account of the genetic and cultural history of the Jews and Palestinians is very off. I can send you some of Razib Khan's substack posts if you actually care, but I don't think you do.)
You are eliding the fact that the Nazis thought that Balts and Slavs weren't really Aryan, despite them being more CWC by ancestry than any German. Also that they were pale, blond, blue eyed people, when they were overwhelmingly far more swarthy. Nazi racial theories made no sense and they used them to justify killing millions of people most of which were fellow Aryans.
This is a common tactic of yours, to elide the terrible parts of Nazi ideology and equivocate it with the worst ultranationalist sentiments of other peoples.
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