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MotteAnon12345


				

				

				
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joined 2022 October 11 01:26:35 UTC

				

User ID: 1551

MotteAnon12345


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 11 01:26:35 UTC

					

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User ID: 1551

That is the fundamental problem with Democracy. People love to bring up the list you crazy/awful/incompetent dictators but The People can also be just as crazy/awful/incompetent and often are.

To be clear, as part of MS's initial investment, they got access to all the source code and all the model weights. They aren't losing anything. See https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/.

The rot runs deep.

Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:

It is incorrect to consider tidal power as renewable energy. Harnessing tidal energy will pose more severe problems than using fossil fuels. This study provides quantitative estimates to show how using tidal energy can destroy the environment in a short amount of time. Tides are induced by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the gravity of the Moon and Sun. The rotational energy of the Earth is naturally dissipated by tides slowly. Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth. Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years. As a consequence, one side of the Earth would be exposed to the Sun for a much longer period of time than it is today. The temperature would rise extremely high on that side and drop extremely low on the other side. The environment would become intolerable, and most life on Earth could be wiped out.

Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient: the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.

The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:

  • If the NYT picked up this story, do you think they'd have the nuance to highlight the shall we say questionable assumptions in this paper? Or would they just blare a giant headline stating "TIDAL POWER WILL KILL US ALL!" (Sub-heading: solar and wind the only way forward...)? Would they even link to the original paper? I think the world's complexity has surpassed the abilities of the average MSM reporter/editor/reader. Even if journalists are perfectly honest and impartial, they are too susceptible to manipulation to be trusted. Barring a drastic change in our media, the information content of the typical news article is now capped at zero.
  • How far can we extrapolate from this example? This guy's apparently a professor at Stanford and apparently he's been teaching there for some time (the paper refers to a grad-level class in 1993). And it's... pretty easy to find garbage papers. Here's another one. For a broader perspective, consider the replication crisis, accounts like this one, and digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate. This is why for example I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense. That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim (it's a complex dynamical system the size of the planet with billions of poorly understood interactions!). That we can project this model forward a hundred years (with all of its many intrinsic dependencies on other complex systems like human civilization) is another outlandish claim. And that we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests). And at the bottom of it all are people like our dear Dr. Jerry.

1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...

Fair point. Thanks.

Good catch on white women vs. white men. I wonder what causes the difference. I do think your comment on Asians is a bit of a non-sequitur.

It's not a decision by SCOTUS.

You're right. Thanks for the correction. s/SCOTUS/courts.

Thank you Joe Goebbels.

Ad Hominem? Or not even...? Guilt by association? I'm not even sure which logical fallacy this falls under.

That's the theory. But so often, particularly in the United States, we find that when it appears this is happening, the actual government has really put its thumb in. That's what was happening here.

That's... not even a counter-argument? It's little surprise the government wants to... govern!

I suppose this is a good time to bring up a comment I made a while back: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/pitqan/comment/hc3utzv/?context=3.

I think this decision by SCOTUS is bad governance. I don't have any opinion on whether it's good law or consistent with the US Constitution, just that this ruling will have an overall negative effect on this country and more broadly that control of the media (and certainly social media) is an essential function of government.

I mean... at least with the traditional media, one could point to some semblance of professional ethics! I personally don't place much weight on these but it's something at least! Uncontrolled social media is a cesspool of lies, cancel mobs, and cat memes. If it isn't brought under control, it will create havoc in our society.

If social media is to be controlled, the only question is: by whom. And here, I claim that government is the only possible answer. Any non-government organization would amass so much influence that it's "non"-government status would become merely a polite fiction. The only choice here is between formal government control vs. informal government control (much like the argument I made in my last post).

To avoid repetition, please refrain from arguing for free speech as an end unto itself. I understand the argument. I just don't agree with it. In my opinion, free speech is a tool (for a more orderly and prosperous society). This is a disagreement on core values and we'll just have to agree to disagree. Now, if you want to argue about how effective a tool free speech is, have at it (spoiler alert: I don't place much faith in it).

[EDIT: it was pointed out below that this wasn't a decision by SCOTUS. Replace "SCOTUS" by "the courts" in the above. I don't think it makes a meaningful difference.]

First off, it's Chetty. Sorry! I got him confused with a paper on distributed deadlock detection.

Chetty managed to convince the IRS to give him detailed income data on... everybody. Yes, literally everybody. It's a sociologist's wet dream. Anyway, he did a bunch of analysis comparing parental vs. child incomes. The idea is that populations tend to mean-revert but they do so differently across races, etc... Whites mean-revert to a higher income level than blacks. It's a neat way of getting rid of the influence of starting conditions. The study itself is here: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. The precise graph I'm talking about is here: https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/201514598/qjz042fig5.jpg.

A lot of HBD arguments rely on the assumption* that Black underperformance is due to genes. However, there isn't much of a reason that Black women should consistently have better IQ-related genes than Black men (or at least none that I've heard yet). If outcomes between Black women and Black men diverge substantially, that implies that Black underperformance might not be related to their genetics after all.

  • An assumption with a lot of at least circumstantial evidence behind it (imo)...

The Dune series is essentially an extended argument for this position. In fact, Dune makes a stronger point: without war, humanity would go extinct. Too much order (read: good times) lead to decay and death.

The punishment fits the crime? I get that the character is sympathetic (and attractive...) but she did spy for a foreign government when she was placed in a position of trust. Sounds like espionage and treason to me.

Ask the ninth circuit.

For me it was Chandy's research with IRS data that showed that income reversion to mean was the same for Black girls as for the White population. I suspect he's just doing something stupid but I can't dismiss the results especially since they are based on the largest sample ever collected in this space.

Assertion without evidence (I don't have time to read an entire book, sorry).

Russia was only getting more corrupt under its democracy and it's hardly the only example. Egypt had a brief fling with democracy that set it back decades. And all democracy seems to have done in South America is make it easier for the cartels to buy national governments.

As for Poland and the like, you seem to be forgetting that they were highly civilized functional countries in their fairly recent (generally non-democratic) past. A better explanation seems to be that those countries were doing well due to a myriad of reasons (good genes, cultural capital, etc...) until they got hit by the communism stick. After communism was gone, they reverted to their mean.

The comments on Ukraine are pure speculation. It's democracy certainly didn't seem to be helping given the multiple color revolutions and the constant conflict between it's two halves. Of course these would have been problems anyway but what's your evidence that Democracy made any of this better?

Feels like splitting hairs. How is supporting a highly unpopular opinions not covered? Because it's outside the Overton window in this case?

No. The location is also highly valuable. If a condo building stays completely unchanged but a major city springs up around it, the building values will massively appreciate. The low density of the condo building just implies slightly higher carrying costs.

Also, demolishing condos isn't that hard outside of CA. NYC rebuilds old skyscrapers all the time.

Wait, what? So, if Saudi Arabia passed a law against Christians and then prosecuted them (after full "due process" of course!), they wouldn't be eligible for asylum in the US?

The definition of asylum can't be limited to just due process. It has to account for the laws that said due process is upholding!

I don't really give a fuck what happens to the kind of scum that joins a criminal gang, to be perfectly honest.

Then execute them. There's precedent for this, even. After all, a gang is just an insurgency writ small. Corner them, and give them severe punishment followed by lifetime monitoring (and no association with their past gang members on penalty of death). Roger Trinquier perfected this system nearly half a century ago. The Israelis also have quite a bit of prior art to draw upon.

Why use the blunt tool of mass deportations when we have a much more precise tool in criminal law?

It's more useful than you might imagine. To get from Asia to the West, one needs to pay for the trip. The cost is high enough to serve as a sort of IQ filter.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

A better comparison would be democratic Russia vs. non-democratic Russia. Do you think Yeltsin's regime was less corrupt than Putin's (or Gorbachev's)?

And of course it's easy to find countries that mostly aren't democratic and are also less corrupt than the US. Liechtenstein in Europe is an example. So is Singapore really or Hong Kong when it was still under the control of the English.

Re. Condo owners: it depends on the legal structure. Some (many?) are set up so that the condo owners have a pro-rata share in the land the condo complex is built on.

Here you go: https://gordianknotbook.com/download/why-nuclear-power-has-been-a-flop/.

The guy also runs a substack that has the same information in easier bite-sized pieces: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/.