Lost
1yr ago
You'd think after years of exposure to Ivy League professors and other professional intellectuals like Krugman occasionally or, depending on your viewpoint, frequently beclowning themselves online that everyone would've had an Emperor Has No Clothes moment (mine was discovering Peter Thiel rips off Salena Zito tidbits to come off as smart) but perhaps Gell-Mann is even stronger a phenomenon than we think.
More likely, the most intelligent hyper focus on being the most right about their niche area of expertise and that is where their intelligence should be judged. Generalists will always be wrong on something and the best of their lot will just be the least (or least impactfully) wrong. Perhaps the area that needs attention now is the connectors between those two.
Lost
1yr ago
Prior to going independent, he was one of the first and best journalists covering US Soccer. He was fired from Sports Illustrated during COVID after criticizing cuts during the pandemic (SI had already been carved out a few years earlier IIRC, and this was likely more of an excuse to accelerate cuts than anything else).
I believe his last notably good piece of journalism was a telling of his excursion to Transnistria to cover an underdog team in the Champions League - think one of those motley crew underdogs in the NCAA Basketball Tournament - although there were some odd spots in there that made you wonder about his presence there as an independent journalist with no corporate backing.
Lost
1yr ago
A prominent American Soccer journalist, Grant Wahl, passed away during this afternoon's World Cup game.
He's been critical of the Qatari government, for their treatment of the migrant workers who helped build the stadiums on his website, and for
protesting with a rainbow shirt.
Grant commented he had been dealing with symptoms diagnosed as Bronchitis and a translated report from the game suggests he collapsed while at the stadium and hit his head. I will step in here without sources and state third hand I've heard a pretty nasty flu/bronchitis illness has passed around the WC area in Qatar, which is being hosted in a much smaller, more connected base than is typical for this type of event. You can probably find news reports of a few teams dealing with the flu.
His brother has already suggested foul play, and if that isn't enough conspiracy for you, his wife is on the COVID Task Force for Joe Biden. This is likely to cross Biden's desk and receive attention quickly. Could develop into a major international incident.
Lost
1yr ago
It's more of a hit to EA than to rationalism but it's still a hit to rationalism because a fair number of rats glommed themselves onto EA's glow up and it's a somewhat reciprocal relationship (the EAs are fine with rats lending their hand as long as they don't provide bad press, in which case disavow - that's the +EV move after all)
I can only offer advice as I will not profess to be a devoted adherent to rationalism. I enjoy the commitment to spirited debate their communities foster and Scott in particular is (was?) a good welcome mat for the community.
Bankman-Fried and the EA crew are the reverse. This is preaching to the choir here but the Carrick Flynn fundraising campaign exposed the movement as a pretty naked political project of more or less basic Democrats with a slightly refocused issue set. The engorgement of donations, including those late enough in the campaign they likely had minimal impact, to a low importance primary demonstrated none of their professed values and was instead a rather desperate grasp for power.
Bankman-Fried embodied this more explicitly, as an institutional insider following the steps of "EA" outsiders trying to ledge their foot in the door. He leveraged his connections to create this fraud, and would have continued to get away with it as long as his laundered reputation of EA work kept him Cathedral-approved to the institutional actors he partnered with.
Apply your normal caveats to anecdata here, but as a once decently involved crypto user/trader precisely zero people I am in touch with kept money on FTX. Why? To people in the space, myself included, the guy radiated inauthentic. This is a world full of scammers, hackers and overall shady individuals. Anyone selling you that they're anything but nakedly self-interested in making a buck is probably lying to you and untrustworthy. That's where mantras like "the code is the law" come in. This is poison to retail investors but the idea is that you're buying exactly what you can see whether it's a smart contract, an app or a wallet. The libertarians in this space are not Scott's "grays" who we now know were just a shallower shade of blue that wish the rest would slow down the swimming leftward into the deep blue of the Pacific (note those guys were all from California) - they're hardline libertarian econ types with a side of some gun nuttery and no snake stepping
Bankman-Fried's ultimate goal was to buy enough government and institutional power to legislate a favorable environment for himself and a poor one for his main competition, an exchange run by a Chinese-Canadian that's had to dodge his own government a couple times that the hardline libertarians will still tell you not to trust (their hardline is Bitcoin-only with your own keys) but one where I actually know people with money on it because their motives are less vague.
Now, you're going to ask me who actually lost the $10 billion here if I'm Pauline Kael-ing away all these people and the Bitcoin libertarians were never on board to begin with? Well, some long-time crypto whales did trust them as did a lot of those institutional investors (VC types, or as a short-hand basically anyone who owned Solana) and celebrities they got in bed with it seems, and probably a wave of retail that came after me. All of them are fucked, which means they're gone from the space for quite some time if not permanently. Does Sam care? Nah, you can read his takes on betting it all for a bigger win down the thread. And he could have gotten away with it too if his grift kept going just long enough to legislate away his meddling competition before they could catch him with his pants down!
Is this an Effective Altruism or rationalist mindset? No, it's just what every other corporate oligopoly/monopoly in the United States tries to do. Maybe he could justify it with some ends justify the means consequentialism that once he dominated the industry he could gather all these resources and better utilize them but that just lays bare my issue with EA in general. If all you want is power to effect political action to reshape the world to best fit your interest, you don't have a new or unique movement. Lots of people now and throughout history have wanted that!
Lost
1yr ago
In fairness to Yglesias, he at least sidesteps this stuff or will vaguepost some of the stuff he agrees with while ignoring the stuff he disagrees with. I find this a lot less annoying than the ones who know the score and will obfuscate or outright lie about it. Sticking with prolific twitters, I'd say the one who most typifies this is the one with a robot profile pic.
Lost
1yr ago
Regardless of Vaush's principles, I think he is getting at something core to leftists here. Like, if he doesn't believe AI art is fundamentally unnerving, this grift of this video would be him representing what he thinks his fellow travelers and audience believe.
Remember when NFTs were at their peak and pretty much everyone who wasn't buying or selling them thought they were idiotic? Their general dismissal was just that they were dumb and looked terrible. But the criticism from leftists was much more severe and in some regards deranged. They wheeled out the climate arguments, started talking about stuff they didn't understand and massively overclaimed the argument. It was approaching levels of the Keffals/KF debacle where the facts didn't matter, only achieving their result and I think would have gotten worse if the public hadn't rejected the Apes.
I am not sure where this core distaste is coming from but I am sure it exists. My best theory at the moment would be Minotaur's, that they believe they "own" art and cringey libertarians with doofus monkeys and robots can't be allowed to have it.
Lost
1yr ago
In general racial groups express ingroup preference, with one major exception.
I can give you an uncharitable reading of that chart where there's a straightforward connection to how they react to any casting decision that is "whitewashed" compared to any casting decision that removes white people. Even comes complete with the requisite "good ones" who are okay as long as they don't step out of line a la Gina Carano or Chris Pratt, but I don't believe that is an accurate summary of the situation. We know these people and we see how they express their opinions.
Their ingroup preference is for cosmopolitanism. They genuinely loved Hamilton. It's not that they think a black actress playing Anne Boleyn was a sensible casting decision. They cheer it because they want to live in a world where Meghan Markle can be the Queen of England and where the Obama's being King and Queen of America was very important. This is where they depart from the agnostics and the people who used to argue for colorblind casting decisions and why enjoying Bollywood or Korean media or anime doesn't track the same - those latter examples can be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't rate extremely in the negative in openness to experience. Those are expressions and a product of a different society, not ours.
This is explicitly about seeing the world they want ours to be, which is why it doesn't actually track America's current demographics and even why that link has "Latinx" in it. The political discourse in America is very black and white and as a reflection of their values they want an overrepresentation of black people in casting for the same reason I want Ana de Armas in casting.
I think this is where you see the overreaches that are causing this friction, too. Most of these shows are bad and the existence of this type of casting is almost like a shit test that people, myself included, will use to tell us if the showrunner respects the work. Was Wheel of Time bad because they rainbow casted a remote village in the countryside? Not exclusively, even if I thought the actor for Perrin was terrible. It was bad because they made a bunch of nonsensical choices and that one was the most obvious tell before watching it. But The Witcher Season 1 wasn't bad, it was mediocre. How did it achieve this with the casting of Triss being much worse than Perrin? Henry Cavill actually cared about it.
And that's where it's awry. These shows would work if the people making them cared about the artwork more than the art as a representation of their politics. The people making whatever Gina Carano is doing now have the same problem.
You can go back and see how this worked before. Here's Killswitch Engage covering Dio's fantasy setting video of Holy Diver where they added a dude in a dress and some diversity. Why did this work? Because it was reflective of the people making it who clearly loved and respected the source material and had joy in what they were doing. The big new anime in Japan right baits a lesbian relationship between its two main characters and an important story element involves one of their gay dads' interracial relationship. This sounds like an enormous red flag of a descriptor for something new out of Hollywood but no one really cares even in the places on the English side of the internet where you might expect they would because that's not the entire point of the show.
Lost
1yr ago
The post linked from three days ago kind of swims up against this without explicitly stating it but - the supposedly charitable reading of this is that the volleyball player making the claim "misheard" the word being used (suggested as "Cougar" or people shouting "Nikki" at one of her teammates). Of course, the additional context here has this player talking about the environment she was in, suggesting instead she was the prejudiced one.
Lost
1yr ago
Ok fair enough, I cannot read the original post that started the topic but can guess based on that comment and the click through to a forum where he appears to be shouting into the void that there isn't much to work with there. The specifics suggested aside, I don't have much time for infeasible thought experiments when achieving the feasible but productive already appears akin to mountain moving.
Lost
1yr ago
I read a message on the departure thread about a (quickly moderated) pasta here being the most disgusting thing that user had read since a post some time ago about "There needing to be more teenage pregnancies."
I do not recall reading that post, I am an infrequent lurker and an even more infrequent poster, but I generally agree with the premise as it is stated. The reason is rather straight forward, the age of birth follows a fairly normal distribution (a quick search shows the average age of first birth shifting from 20-24 in 1960 to 25-29 in 2018) and I would rather live in a pro-procreation society that has to deal with outlier pregnancies tilted too young on the aging curve than too old. I am also just generally in favor of the structure and aesthetics of young people with more energy raising kids, empty nesting earlier in life and seeing their grandchildren grow up than the alternative.
It would be simple to grant a concession preferring society to tilt its incentives toward coupling earlier in life with reproduction beginning in the early 20s while maintaining a strong preference against teen pregnancy but I do not believe that is realistic. A popular folklore told regarding this topic is the proliferation of "Teen Mom" type shows scaring off young girls who grow up watching them. I am skeptical the degree to which this isn't just one small part of the larger societal and cultural shift, but let's accept the premise. Let's say a young girl watched "16 and Pregnant" while she was in middle school and decided she did not want a baby while she was still completing her education. Do you think that attitude even begins to attenuate once she turns 20? Of course not. She may still be in college, for one. But even once out of education, society is currently structured to have people believe they are 'young' as long as possible to milk money out of them on frivolous consumerism, while also persuading them any large life endeavor is impossible because of money and the forbearance of youth (i.e. "can't travel anymore"; the phrase "settle down"). Some of those concerns may be real - student loans, asymmetrical inflation in healthcare and housing, etc. - but I do wonder how much is the tail of the former wagging the latter.
The 1960 curve appears to show about 15% of women's age of first birth between 15 and 17. 2018 is above 20% for 30-34 and around 10% for 35-39. My peer group (educated UMC but not excessive wealth) is much higher than this and the numbers I've seen support that and suggest the trend will only continue accelerating. What is a greater tragedy, an 18 year old couple with no plan dealing with an accidental pregnancy or a 38 year old being told by her IVF doctor she is unlikely to ever conceive? The answer is clear to me and once you factor in the increase of birth defects after the age of 30 in the mother (from what I recall it becomes significant a bit older but still a factor for the father) I cannot more strongly support "There needing to be more teenage pregnancies."
I don't believe or would suggest we start turning teens into baby factories shortly after menarche or anything of that sort. Simply that the age of births is currently headed in the wrong direction, it needs to be reversed and a result of moving us back to the ideal average age of first birth (IMO, 22) would result in more teenage pregnancies. My mother was 20 when I was conceived, both her and my father came from large families still busy raising their younger siblings and neither had any money at the time. They figured things out, it took her until 25 to graduate and we weren't rich while I was growing up but they're still happily married and many years later are doing quite well financially after raising a couple kids. I believe this should be a goal to strive for and accept the consequences that come with it.
I understand the initial premise sounds a bit like one of Robin Hanson's off-putting thought experiments but what are the arguments against? I reject revealed preferences as one, at least until we have "35 and Infertile" or "30 and Miscarrying" as counterbalances to current societal pressures.
I believe there is fairly good evidence demonstrating T participation in the military is well above T population representation. Speculation for the cause was some combination of dysphoria causing some Ts to reach to the extremes of their current gender expression before about facing and turning to the extreme of another along with a jobs program that was viewed as relatively safe for an extreme minority. Now that dysphoria as a necessity for representation has fallen out of favor and the job protection extends to most white collar professions I would say neither currently apply but there's an established historical precedence similar to IBM's black jobs programs and Universities preparing for a post-Affirmative Action world where there is a small slice of pie available to be eaten for a motivated sect.
Of course, Ts and drag queens are not the same thing but in the current cultural moment they've been bundled together. The cause of this campaign is no different from any other T-catering cultural campaign of the past few years - they are exceptionally good at entryism and influence peddling with decision makers. Why did Bud Light hire Dylan Mulvaney? Because the people in charge of Bud Light's Marketing Department are the type of people who would hire Dylan Mulvaney. The military is no different
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