Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2yr ago
there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.
Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.
Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to a dataset of four populations sampled evenly: the three primary colors (Red, Green, and Blue) and Black illustrate a near-ideal dimension reduction example.
Note: colours are represented as RGB, from 0 to 1 instead of 255.
Although PCA correctly positioned the primary colors at even distances from each other and Black, it distorted the distances between the primary colors and Black (from 1 in 3D space to 0.82 in 2D space).
No shit. What this means in terms of genetics is that if you have 3 source populations A B C, and A and B are relatively genetically similar, say only differ on 100 allels, and C is very different from them, differing on 1000 allels, and then you do PCA on various populations that are mixed out of those, the PCA plot wont tell you that A and B are similar. It will only tell you the relative admixtures of A B C in the sampled populations. Of course, this is often exactly what you want.
Its an especially bizzare complaint since the "allel distance" can already be calculated from the raw data, and represented easily, without doing PCA or anything of that sort.
Box 1: Studying the origin of Black using the primary colors
Same dataset as before, except they change the relative sampling frequency of the colours, and show that this can change which primary colour black is closest to.
The problem here is that the author seems to think that black "should" come out an even mixture, but it isnt. Genetic mixture is weighted averaging, and that even mixture would be (1/3, 1/3, 1/3), a darkish grey. Black cant be any kind of mixture of the others. In all these plots you see a pyramid rotated to various angles.This is not a "near-ideal dimension reduction", that would look flatter in 3D. In fact you could also make it so that black is outside the triangle of the other 3, dont know why he doesnt show that.
What this tells us genetically is that a plot of n PCs can only depict the relative admixture of n+1 source populations. If there are more, youll only see those n+1 most important to your sample (ideally, if the others dont matter very much), or rotations between that (less ideally). So you do often need to look at more than 2 PCs, but if the samples are actually admixed from a few sources, you wont need very many.
Also notice that the shift in relative sample size needed to create these changes in the example is multible orders of magnitude, and the more "reducible" the data is the more drastic they need to be.
Based on this we get:
Reich et al.44 presented further PCA-based “evidence” to the ‘out of Africa’ scenario. Applying PCA to Africans and non-Africans, they reported that non-Africans cluster together at the center of African populations when PC1 was plotted against PC4 and that this “rough cluster[ing]” of non-Africans is “about what would be expected if all non-African populations were founded by a single dispersal ‘out of Africa.’” However, observing PC1 and PC4 for Supplementary Fig. S3, we found no “rough cluster” of non-Africans at the center of Africans, contrary to Reich et al.’s44 claim... This is an example of how vital a priori knowledge is to PCA.
You could also tell a priori knowledge was used because youre shown PC1 and 4. Someone looked at more than that and chose to show you these. This is also why its dumb to show you PC1&4 from his replications with changed relative samplesizes: If you looked at more PCs (and probably not many more) youd find a combination that replicates Reichs plot or something similar, because again youre just rotating your perspective on the same shape. (Or not, see below.)
Also if you read the Reich cite (I recommend if you have access (arrr), its only 2 pages), youll see its primarily about integrating PCA with other sources of information, and that plot is an example. Also also he seems to have done the PCA on Africans only, and then plotted the others into those PCs, whereas the author is doing PC on all of them.
Box 2: Studying the origin of Black using the primary and one secondary (admixed) color populations
Following criticism on the sampling scheme used to study the origin of Black (Box 1), the redoubtable Black-is-Red group genotyped Cyan.
The RGB for Cyan is (0, 1, 1), which is again not a mixture of previous colours. Black, Blue, Green, and Cyan might be mixtures of 3 other colours that lie outside the RGB space, but thats still 4 source populations.
Pretty much the same goes as I said for Box 1.
This is where i stopped reading.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
MMT is propably not a popular position here. Your comment mostly assumes its true, and your very long quote is entirely about why the reactionaries wont see the light. The justification is essentially this:
To be economically literate, one would have to know that saying the government deficit should be cut is identical to saying the non-government surplus should be cut.
The rest is the same thing in different words. And as for that.
Government deficit & debt are good things, and the only problem is along the lines of 'too much of a good thing' (inflation, which is the self-correction mechanism)
Why is inflation correcting it? We have over the last few years heard from many left-leaning economists that inflation is actually fine, the lower classes are just irrationally afraid of it, go right ahead Mr Biden. In a mostly cashless economy like the US, even the logistical problems of hyperinflation can be handled pretty well.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
What do you think of ABSCAM? It looks like they did a sting operation, found that lots of politicians had ~0 inhibition to corruption, and the end result was... they promised not to do those operations again? So if there is actually very little corruption, why not? Just a bunch of 100$ bills on the floor?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
On the other hand, a chick who's down to lie to others for my benefit could mean she's ride-or-die for me. Similarly, a chick who's down to take from others and give to me is based and good.
Its on a second date. Unless youre a gigachad, you should assume she does this for people shes second-date-familiar with, possibly less. (A similar logic applies to early sex)
Second, while "willing to lie for you" is a benefit, its also important to be wise about it. I wouldnt go do this myself if you brought it up to me, and Im similarly not excited about her thinking its a good idea.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
I never feel like I learn something from your comments anymore. Its always just AI/China is the best, unbeatable, even better than you thought, and not even committing to anything concrete there. Like for example:
That the EU has sovereignty, that Canada has sovereignty, that… basically, that the US is not a big scary hegemonic superpower it imagines itself to be and sometimes laments the wages of being. It's just a very powerful country, with large but decidedly finite leverage, and that runs well short of getting everyone to play along with American King's unreasonable imagination.
In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas? That seems like a case where wed expect more US influence than any of this tariff debacle.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
...and now for something completely different: Lemurs and the True Human Form,
in which a Zizian uncovers the biological basis of furrydom, which actually everyone has and is in denial about.
The bodies people walk around in here on Ancient Earth do not necessarily match the sensorimotor portions of their brains, and/or other information content about what their bodies are supposed to be like.
From what I can tell by looking at stuff from the fossil record, other modern species, and my own ancestral memory, it seems that a large part of the True Human Form evolved between 30mya and 85mya, around the time of our common ancestors with lemurs.
Most of our proprioceptive body map probably was selected on during this period of time because the delta to our ancestors’ survival was strongly tied to them using their bodies very precisely and acrobatically.
An anthropomorphic mammal seems like a valid way of trying to project the human self-concept including sensorimotor body map, visual modules, and social modules into a 3D form.
I actually find this somewhat plausible. While a good bit of the bodymap is propably learned as well, we should expect remnants like this. The culturewar-relevant part is how moral conclusions are drawn from it - that this is what youre supposed to be like, your True Form. The analogy between gender and species transition is hardly new, but it always gives a bit of a distorted impression, the latter is always a bit of a cardboard figure. Here, we have someone filling in part of the discourse a transspecies movement that laid similar claim to seriousness as transgenderism would produce.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5mo ago
I kind of buy the liberal claim that, because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else.
Theres something to that, but its not everything. Cats try to steal your food, stay sitting on your legs when you want to get up, and scratch up your furniture. Do we accept this because "we all know they are selfish and incorrigable, and the way in which they are so is incredibly cute"? Again, thats part of it, but also, an adult human doing this would be a worrying sign, in a way its just not for the cat. Its not about a slice of ham, its about sending a message. In the other direction, you should be suspicious of a serious mormon who drinks like a normal person, even if normal drinking behaviour is not concerning per se.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
6mo ago
I just can't commit to calling childless people like Sir Isaac Newton or George Washington "failures" in some ultimate sense.
I think thats a strawman. Plenty of real-life bloodtopians dont even mind the far more common childless priests, and the occasional childless genius is even less of a problem. We also accept that the very fastest cars have their little knacks and tempraments - thats fine, and arguably a good sign of development, as long as normal cars actually work.
From a purely biological point of you foo and bar are propably pretty similar. Both are a person having AIDS. If this is accurate, the relevant difference between foo and bar is moral, not biological. Both involve getting infected with HIV, but in the foo case, the effected person is sexually oriented towards getting infected and participated willingly, and so its fine. In the bar case, the effected person is unwilling, so its bad.
So, should your purely apolitical taxonomy of mental physical disorders classify foo as a mental illness, or should it refuse to classify bar as a mental illness?
When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say. Now, he doesnt seem to know this. He thinks that:
There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.
But thats not how it works. If tomorrow the Ministry of Hide-tanning decides that whale skin is hairless, you might insist that it obviously has hair, I mean look at it (possibly with some magnification). But they could just as well say "Well, there are facts on each individual point - whether they hold water, whether they resist against the grain, whether theyre made of ceratin, etc. But theres no fact to the matter whether theyre hairs."
More generally, "X falls in category(set) Y" and "X has property Z" are isomorphic - everything you can express in the first form, you can also express in the second, and vice versa. If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things.
The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2yr ago
But is the broadening of the accepted reasons really a problem? Assume for a moment that puberty blockers worked as advertised (no interference with normal desistance processes). Is there something inherently wrong with offering kids who are experiencing discomfort with their gender puberty blockers? One might argue that categories like non-binary or genderqueer don’t exist and are artificially created for ideological reasons, but if they do, I’m not sure what the issue is.
Whats the scenario here? So you have kids who have some sort of gender problem but dont want to transition, and you give them puberty blockers. If nothing changes about their gender situation, what then? Do they just keep taking blockers permanently? I mean, progressivism making people literally not grow up is funny as an idea, but probably not so funny if it actually happens.
And if you dont start out with the idea that normal development is the "good outcome", why would it be a problem if they interfere with desistance? At most you can say that trans people end up less happy. But hypothetically that could change, and the interference remain the same.
The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny, so of course people who declared themselves to be pro-trans focused on touching women and female-related terms. Trans men don’t seriously threaten men in the same way, and good luck trying to start a mens-rights movement which might be threatened by them.
There are more arguments Joyce makes for the preservation of single-sex (basically only women’s) and the dangers of allowing trans women to enter those spaces, but they’re not very interesting or worth expounding on. If you understand the argument that males tend to be more violent, especially sexually, towards females, you’ve read about a dozen or so pages in this book already.
The feminism is getting in the way of the analysis here: Men dont worry about transmen because whatever they could do was already done by normal women. They demanded to be included in previously male-only spaces, and that those change to accomodate them. But this goes back to "The only allowed reason to not like someone is that hes evil", and so she has to claim this is about violence.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
7d ago
I think the idea is that Israel might want to avoid lots of its people dying, even if it wouldnt lead to ultimate defeat. Your analysis makes sense only if you think the conflict has to be to the death in the log term.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
Well yes, the strategy of farming hateclicks with deliberate offense is not especially dependent on actual opinions.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2mo ago
Why do you think it is that any right-populist politician with serious chances has these character problems? Like, I often read something like "Orban is just cynically using anti-immigration/wokeness so he can stay in power and crony it up", and I dont necessarily disagree... but why isnt there anyone using it for good or even neutral goals? Parties picking up issues and demographics for electability is pretty normal, except here anyone who does so is beyond the pale for claimed-independent issues. You can be an ultralefty and argue that borders are intrinsically anti-democratic or something, but what do the liberals making this claim actually believe?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
In Austria, we used to have political hiring very far down the chain. This worked fine because every government was a coalition of the two major parties, so we didnt constantly turn them over. It changed eventually, but more so due to the bad optics of patronage and limited meritocracy. Today of course, we do actually change our government - though theres also a good chance well settle into something again in the medium term, and maybe that bit of chaos now would be worth it.
I dont think this flipping is viable long-term. It was fine in the days of Jackson, but today the civil service is much more of a career, and thats not compatible with flipping a coin every 4 years whether youll have a job. It would sooner lead to actually obedient bureaucrats.
But I also dont think the wilder swings in governing ideology are viable. The government just does too much for that. Spending is a third of GDP (plus more effectively commandeered by regulations), redirecting even just a good portion of that every 4-8 years is very destructive, and besides, theres no value in a border closed half the time, or a pension paying out half the time. Ive said this before in the context of election fraud or electoral college discussions, but if a 2% effect can make your government not just different, but really different and unacceptably bad, then you should reconsider whether the one without that small deviation is really legitimate.
So I think this scenario youre describing will be avoided, one way or another. Boringly, by continuation of the status quo pre-Trump. Or interestingly, by a stable orthodoxy that encompasses much more than bureaucrats.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
But states like Utah, Colorado, and Nevada have relatively expensive housing despite lots of open space.
Rural development is not limited by space, but by reasons for being there. If you just want to life somewhere with nice scenery and you dont care how far the grocery store is or if youll find a job, you can already have a lot of space very cheap. Cities are space-limited because theres only so much space thats a given distance from the rest of the city, which is the reason for wanting it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5mo ago
Muslim countries wont accept Gazans because then they would be responsible for controlling them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
21d ago
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
In the case of rationalists, it's not even a point as major as seed oil disrespect among the "bronze age warriors,"
I think youre off on that. Both groups have people who are really into that thing, but those people are much more central to rationalism. I remember a compatriot who would drink pumpkin seed oil (its a thing in styria) neat as countersignalling and he never had problems.
Also, I think going bald is actually not the end of the world. I would on balance advice not messing with your hormones over it, unless youre 20 or something.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
Do the links show through the spoiler for others too?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2mo ago
A quick delve into the article text
Is the joke intended?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2mo ago
but it's mainly "hone this existing tool" work, not "discover a new fundamental kind of intelligence" work.
The main reason for LLM scepticism is this impression can be extremely deceiving. I had totally missed how little mathematical understanding my classmate actually had, even in years of helping him, until he made a very specific kind of mistake once. And it goes way further than that: It seems like most humans "know in principle" how to count, even if they only have words for the low numbers. But they dont! Counting to ~7 is done with pattern recognition. Dogs can count to 3. Higher numbers are counted with the recursive method, and you dont get any closer to that by improving pattern recognition. That might get you something that can count to 100, if you give it enough compute, but thats not actually any closer to the new kind of intelligence youd want.
This is because a lot of anti-semitism discourse is not really about the jews. Most anti-semites have never met a jew. There are some who just look for someone, anyone, to hate, but I think a lot of rightwingers are "antisemitic" because of the anti-semitism discourse. There is this line of argument, which Ill summarise as "If society could do this, it could do the holocaust if it wanted. As a jew, I feel threatened by this.", which is frequently deployed against them, where the "this" includes things they consider central to a functional society. That gets them really mad, and thats basically it. You dont even need actual jews to make this argument, the lefties will do it for them.
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