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Imaginary_Knowledge


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 19 02:59:12 UTC

				

User ID: 1255

Imaginary_Knowledge


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 19 02:59:12 UTC

					

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User ID: 1255

Losers in conventional warfare often resort to unconventional warfare

I don't think undercounting can explain the prevalence in older media of fit people. Look at those old Victorian street scenes: everyone is good looking. The historical existence of this or that obese person shouldn't counter the overwhelming evidence that we've become a fat society.

What do you do if you're managing incompetents and you know that if you let them do something, they're going to screw it up and that you'll have to clean up the mess?

What was her motive?

Roko's Basilisk, yes?

What if I want to wipe the record clean, erase any potential wrong think, and delete my account?

I think it tastes great by itself.

once [an obesity cure] exists adoption will be near-instant and universal

How can you think that to the case when we have existing obesity cures that don't see broad adoption? Nicotine works. Cocaine works. Stimulants in general reduce BMI. You can claim that an obesity cure would be near-instantly and universally adopted, but public policy reveals a preference for things other than thinness. I think that's a shame, personally.

What about DSL?

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Eugenics? The best way to stop people noticing group differences in IQ is to eradicate those differences. There's no reason that in principle we couldn't uplift all races to the same level.

Why would you do this thing?

nicotine and cocaine are horribly addictive

So what if they're addictive? Caffeine is addictive too, and there's zero stigma associated with drinking coffee. Why is addiction to a plentiful and salutary substance a bad thing?

You know damn well why people aren't using the "cures" you propose.

I do: state meddling. The government should stop trying to regulate what people do with their own bodies. Various amphetamines and other stimulants ought to be 100% legal.

You know damn well why people aren't using those things to fix obesity

Why not? "Smoke yourself thin" was an idea with real currency for a long time. And how many fat coke users do you know?

You know damn well why people aren't using those things to fix obesity

It's mostly because everything that cures obesity is either illegal or low status. Do you really think the harms of cigarette smoking outweighed the problems of widespread obesity? We made a terrible mistake by ostracizing smokers. I'm also not convinced that stimulant drugs are bad and that government bans on their sale and use are justified on utilitarian or public policy grounds. These drugs are ruinous to individuals only to the extent that state meddling increases prices and decreases safety.

Why do generative diffusion models have so much trouble with fingers in particular?

Even anonymously?

And nukes make a world war very likely.

Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?

GPT-N can speak Chinese. Why couldn't ERNIE speak English?

Can you compare Obsidian to org mode specifically? Org seems to have a lot of the advantages you highlight, and IME, the Org people aren't nearly as insane as, say, the OpenBSD people when it comes to egoistical free software BS. What specifically would I miss by sticking with Org?

He's right though.

Good. I can't properly express my contempt for deceleration proponents. With Sam as CEO of the new group, and with all the doomers left behind at a now-irrelevant, we're going to see a level of acceleration we've never seen before.

I don't think it's possible to stop this work. The cat is out of the bag. Biotech gear isn't like Uranium centrifuges: it's cheap, stealthy, and easy to get up and running. Were never going to be secure as a species by relying on research suppression. Only effective defenses against these things will save us.

Why shouldn't I discriminate in housing against groups less likely to pay rent?

One of the aspects of the COVID situation I find most disturbing was the way decision makers as a class professed to reject the concept of a cost benefit analysis as a way to weigh potential actions. However, looking at their behavior, it's clear that almost nobody actually eschewed cost benefit analysis. (Almost: there's a famous Seattle bartender who drove his formerly renowned Wallingford bar out of business because he refused to give up COVID mask protocols after everyone else had moved on.) It was illuminating to see mass confabulation of reasoning processes and ret-conning of decision making procedures.

Ever spend time with someone who doesn't have a sense of inter-temporal consistency in analyzing his own behavior? One day, he'll be in favor of X, the next ~X, and then X again, all enthusiastically, and usually in absolute denial of having ever felt differently. If you present them with incontrovertible evidence of their having changed positions, they'll change the subject, talk over you, leave the room, and so literally anything except address the substance of what you've said. These people always have some kind of narrative that justifies (if only to themselves) their current feelings. That their narrative might make no scientific or factual or tactical sense doesn't faze them: they have a narrative, and it's enough to quell the background anxiety they must otherwise feel all the time about the wisdom of their actions.

I don't think these people are lying --- not exactly: their brains are merely censoring anything anything that interferes with weaving a story in which their present situation is consistent with their self image. They literally can't sense contrary data: their neural "operating system" filters it out at a low level and reacts to it with a fight or flight response. Imagine Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Everyone has some element of this duplicity in them. When low IQ people behave this way, it's annoying. When high IQ people behave this way, it's dangerous. What's fascinating about COVID is that the situation elicited this behavior from essentially the entire leadership structure of society. What prompted it was of course fear --- first of the virus, then of ostracism. It makes me wonder whether the people who behave the way I describe above do so because deep down they're deathly afraid of something they can't articulate. It's sad.

I prefer to view Trump's reinstatement as evidence that he's a spent force and no longer a threat. The cathedral wouldn't be letting him back on respectable platforms if he still had serious disruption potential.