Imaginary_Knowledge
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User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
Look at what happened after COVID: influential people who get things wrong don't admit they were wrong. They instead avoid the whole subject, act confused when you bring it up, and pivot to the next serious person thing.
That is --- unless the law. I imagine that thousands of white male tech workers will have good cases for suing FAANG companies for a decade of bigotry.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
I don't believe in surrendering civilizational order to thugs. If longshoremen come around and start to break kneecaps, shoot them until they are dead. It's worked in the past and will again. Violence is a deterrence to violence.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2yr ago
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.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Why don't we just auction off H1B slots and let the market find the right price?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
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.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
Fire them all. The hereditary sinecures longshoremen enjoy are intolerable. It's unskilled labor. There's an army of people who'll sign up to do it for half the pay.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
What's funny to me is that all the "splitters" magically become "lumpers" when we're talking about hominids
I always interpreted POSIWID as meaning that sustained normalized deviance is no deviance at all. If, say, a big tech OS project fails to ship year after year and company leadership fails to replace the project's management, then we have to conclude that either 1) the company-system is not under the control of agents with the ability to modify the world to achieve their goals or 2) the purpose of the OS project is not to produce an OS.
Otherwise, why wouldn't the OS project management been nuked from orbit after the fourth or fifth annual failure?
POSIWID doesn't mean, as Scott strawmans, that any side effect of a system is desirable or a failure of a system to fully achieve that goal reveals that goal as a lie. Total nonsense. If a cancer ward were curing only half its patients and despite having funding and expertise refused to install a new radiation machine that would increase the cure rate to 2/3, and if hospital administration tolerated this state of affairs, then we would be forced to conclude that THAT SPECIFIC cancer ward's purpose was not to cure cancer.
POSIWID only works in negation
Imaginary_Knowledge
8mo ago
Is her credibility shot? One thing we've learned over the past four years is that people with connections can be wrong about everything all the time and still be lauded as experts so long as they maintain the right social connections and mouth the right pieties.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
What makes you think there are huge unrealized wins in unknown algorithmic improvements. In other domains, e.g. compression, we've gotten close to the information theoretic limits we know about (e.g. Shannon limits for signal processing), so I'd guess that the sustained high effort applied to AI has gotten us close to limits we haven't quite modeled yet, leaving not much room for even superintelligence to foom. IOW, we humans aren't half bad at algorithmic cleverness and maybe AIs don't end up beating us by enough to matter even if they're arbitrarily smart.
I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?
Why not? Maybe the 17th century got it right and the 20th got it wrong. Perhaps female participation in public life really does everything the anti-suffragists (many of whom were women themselves) said it would. I believe that "longhouse" is a real phenomenon, a failure mode of societies lacking enough masculine energy. Perfectly encapsulated: https://x.com/PopBase/status/1852801265425854866
I believe the 19th amendment was a mistake. Most expansions of suffrage have been. Can't be fixed without a societal reformation, and these reformations usually involve coups, wars, and collapse. The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and bloodshed return!
Imaginary_Knowledge
10mo ago
I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British
Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Imaginary_Knowledge
8mo ago
I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:
"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:
"Intellect and Knowledge
- Angels possess pure intellect without need for sensory input
- They understand through direct intuition rather than reasoning from premises to conclusions
- Their knowledge is innate rather than learned over time
- They cannot change their minds once they've made a decision (hence the permanence of Lucifer's rebellion)
Time and Consciousness
- Angels exist outside physical time but can interact with temporal events
- Their consciousness is not sequential like human thought
- They can apprehend multiple concepts simultaneously rather than sequentially
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."
Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.
The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
I'm talk about what a well-run state would do, not predicting what ours will do. I agree with the prediction of Luddite victory. I'm just saying it doesn't necessarily have to be so.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
What an awful sign for our civilization --- Trump's reversal reflects our lack to accept short term pain to achieve long term objectives. For my purposes here, it doesn't matter whether the tariffs on phones would have actually helped: what matters is that Trump believed they would, that he was the duly elected head of state, that imposing tariffs was within his legitimate authority, and that he had a majority in the legislature as well.
He still couldn't do it. If he couldn't, nobody can. And if our societal time preference really is this high, we are fucked.
Yes. Or more specifically, he demolished the retard version of POSIWID then claimed victory over the nuanced version. That's wrong and called strawmanning
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Acceptable collateral damage. Trump's election gave us a preference cascade and stopped wokeness ascendant. I'll take that any day over optimal trade policy.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
What about a button that would disappear all murderers? Or thieves? Or whatever? I'd push the button.
Would you want more life, no matter what, at the margin? Even if adding these lives made everyone miserable? That's just the repugnant conclusion. It elevates mere breathing over quality of life and I reject it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
10mo ago
The self published book ecosystem seems to have a different culture. I vaguely recall reading an article a while ago to the effect that regular masculine military science fiction published as eBooks to Amazon can be much more profitable than going through the legacy publishers and that the Bantams of the world should "cry harder".
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
I do approve of the editor's justification for publishing the article. Free speech above all.
Infanticide is currently legal in the Netherlands. The “Groningen Protocol” allows doctors to kill neonates at the request of their parents if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.
Huh. It's... true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol
The Groningen Protocol is a medical protocol created in September 2004 by Eduard Verhagen, the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in Groningen, the Netherlands. It contains directives with criteria under which physicians can perform "active ending of life on infants" (child euthanasia) without fear of legal prosecution
Who defines "unbearable suffering"?
The final decision about "active ending of life on infants" is not in the hands of the physicians but with the parents
Well then.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
Why shouldn't I discriminate in housing against groups less likely to pay rent?
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
After the Iraq affair and 15 years of State department media psyops, I don't trust a damned thing they say anymore and don't see why I should believe that Qadaffi did these alleged atrocities
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
They're racist. Now what? They're racist in a way that's extremely common if you observe how people actually behave. Most people won't in practice date outside their race. This guy just admitted it. A healthy society is structured such that people don't have to lie all the time in public about their honest preferences.
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
Might it be possible that you don't need all that ceremony and can just do things?
A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban
$NEW_THINGto preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.
For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.
If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
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