Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
The death toll seems to have come to a grand total of zero.
This isn't war, this is kayfabe. An event for the sake of having an event. Is the Iranian military truly this incompetent? They could do better than this if they really wanted to cause damage. It feels like the purpose was domestic propaganda. All regimes need some level of popular legitimacy. "We are the only state willing to open fire on the Zionist dogs," is good for Iranian prestige in the region.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."
Are these things even true?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a set of deterministic “statuses”, and then there is a different set of non-deterministic free-will “choices”, but actually it’s all deterministic (modulo some weird quantum mechanical stuff).
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true. Yudkowsky’s decision theory paper uses the phrase “surgery on a world model” when describing how one considers counterfactuals. I think that is a good way to put it. In some sense it is impossible for someone who is homeless at any given time to have not been homeless, because in the physical universe that exists they are in fact homeless, but this isn’t very useful when designing a legal system that creates actual justice.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
This seems like a textbook case of the law of undignified failure. The classical AI doom scenerios assumed that people would be smart enough not to build AI-powered killbots. If AI-powered killbots were floated as a load-bearing assumption of the classical AI doom case, then people would simply retort that we could just not build AI-powered killbots. The point of the classical AI doom case is that the problem is robust to minor implementation variance, not that AI-powered killbots are safe.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
Middle-class Americans have enough disposable income that it isn't worth the inconvenience to scoop up minor discounts like these. People with higher marginal utility for money and less marginal utility for time will differ of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
The oft mocked cliché, "real communism has never been tried," is in a literal sense true. The USSR that defeated Nazi Germany and rivaled America had different wage levels for different jobs, and even higher wages for more productive employees with the same jobs.
Of course, the reason "real communism has never been tried," is that as soon as you have contact with ground-level economic reality, the idea of communism becomes absurd.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
If you've ever come across someone on the Effective Altruism forum or ACX comments section who cares a lot about wild animal/insect welfare, you might have wondered if they'd thought things through.
Well, you'd be right.
I'll be honest. My first reaction was of sneering contempt. Animal welfare is IMO the most counterproductive idea that gets serious traction in rationalist spaces, so there is a good bit of schadenfreude from seeing, "I never thought the bugs would eat MY utility," out in the wild.
Still, I don't know anything about this person other than that she lives in a London flat and works for an EA organization (80,000 hours). I am reminded of that XKCD where even the most obvious facts are learned by someone for the first time thousands of times a day. Maybe Europe really is a commieblock hellscape where man lives entirely divorced from nature, where supposedly well-informed people can enter their late 20s without an intuitive understanding of the exponential growth of pest biomass. I remember well the time as a wee lad I saw an entire summer's growth of backyard tomato plants devoured in a week by 2 or 3 hornworms. Not everyone grows up with such a visceral demonstration of what civilization is up against.
Maybe these people really do need to touch grass.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
You got me. My use of the word "justice" there was a poor choice. The word is used in a legal context as a colloquialism for "desirable outcomes". There's a fair bit of play in the joints of course, but you don't need a definition of justice that would satisfy Socrates to see that removing the idea of moral culpability from the legal system would result in a world much lower in ≈everybody's preference ordering than the one we have now.
“You will say to me then, 'Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?'”
Indeed. Paul's answer falls short. As does everyone else's. Perhaps one day I will try my own hand on the question, though I suspect I lack the writing skill and attention span to make it coherent (not to mention the philosophical heft). I do have some ideas though.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
They got Starbucks locations to act as a public restroom for a few years. Not even that was able to stick.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Zvi has a pretty good writeup. I haven't used the tool, but from all the evidence, it looks like any time a picture of a human being was requested, it literally appended a bunch of diversity words ("Black", "Latina", "Middle Eastern", but never "White") to the user's request without notice or permission before feeding the prompt into the image generator. Hence, female popes and black Vikings. I see three possibilities:
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They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.
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They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.
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They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess.
Kneedler is the government's third-string solicitor general. If they thought this case was important, they would have put Fletcher or Prelogar on it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Women's College Basketball Update
The gap between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the start of the NBA playoffs in mid-April is a dead zone on the American Sports calendar. The only respite of any relevance is the three-weekend single-elimination tournament extravaganza that is March Madness. Interestingly, most of the hype this year has been from the women's bracket. The quarterfinal between LSU and Iowa was the most-watched women's basketball game of all time with 12.3 million viewers, which is more than last year's (men's) NBA Finals. It was a good game too.
What is going on? The WNBA is still completely irrelevant. Last year was a good year for them. They got about 700,000 viewers for the finals. The only active WNBA player I can name is Brittney Griner, and that's because she was the subject of an international incident.
As with most questions regarding women's social status, "is she hot bro?", is probably the best place to start. Here is the roster of current NCAA darlings Iowa. Here is the roster of the 2023 WNBA champion Los Vegas Aces. You'll notice I had to use a promotional Twitter post for that one. The Aces don't have photos of the players on their website. They aren't even trying.
How did this happen? What are the incentives that led to this?
The WNBA loses money. Not a massive amount of money (about 10 million dollars a year), but it isn't particularly close to being profitable. The NBA keeps the WNBA around for positive PR, and because getting little girls interested in basketball is good for the cultural relevance of the NBA. The NCAA Women's tournament exists because of Title IX. Any university that spends money on men's sports must also spend money on women's sports, lest they be sued for discrimination. Universities can't pay players directly, but recent court cases and rule changes mean that players are allowed to profit off of their "name image and likeness" ("NIL") through endorsements, sponsorships, and the like.
In men's sports, NIL has created a massive clusterfuck that is worthy of it's own post. In women's sports, results were much more banal and predictable. The hotties get all the money. There is an economic incentive to be and present oneself as attractive in order to get paid. You think Hailey Van Lith wears her hair like this because it helps her get buckets?
On the earned media side, Caitlin Clark is getting a lot of airtime on the sports networks. She is in fact putting up some impressive numbers, but I doubt she would be getting this much attention if she wasn't a cuteish white girl who isn't attractive enough to feel threatening to the middle-aged PMC women who complain about stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Transgender Day of Visibility
2009 sounds about right. You can tell this idea is from the early stages of the "woke" wave that crested from 2013-2021. It is a completely sincere expression of what the classical MtF desires above all else, positive attention. The point isn't the internal experience of the trans person himself, the point is the internal experience of everyone else as they are forced to deal with the "visibility" of trans people. Note the conspicuous lack of the modern pretexts that have evolved to counteract later anti-woke resistance. Indeed, the entire point is to not invoke tropes like anti-trans violence.
"Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance, Crandall said, the day of visibility aims to focus on all the good things in the trans community, instead of just remembering those who were lost. 'The day of remembrance is exactly what it is. It remembers people who died,' she said. 'This focuses on the living. People have told me they love Remembrance Day but it really focuses on the negative aspect of it. Isn't there anything that could focus on the positive aspect of being trans?'"
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This post is art. It would only be degraded by specifying the pronoun.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A polemic against the hubris of man? A defense of single-family greenspaces? A questioning of the practical expertise and experience of EA staffers? A concrete example of Kaszynskian oversocialization run amok?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Porn is legal, but it almost feels like it was grandfathered in. I can imagine a world where Google search was released in the modern day and every official communication from Alphabet included something about how diligent they are at filtering all "inappropriate content".
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The price of an HVAC repair is skyrocketing. But the quality is plumetting.
I thought this link was going to be the recent muckracking shakedown of HVAC contractors from Asterisk Magazine. The claim is that HVAC as an industry is uniquely fucked in ways that other skilled-labor services aren't. I don't know enough about HVAC specifically to evaluate that claim, but having worked in other highly-regulated skilled labor contractor industries, the failure modes the author mentions are quite familiar to me.
The core problem is that intelligent, skillful, educated, motivated people don't want to do manual labor in non climate-controlled conditions. By the time you get someone trained and up-to-speed to competently execute the job, they're gone. You might get people to do it for six-figure salaries, but if performance metrics aren't legible to all parties, there is little incentive to burn profit margin on that.
I'm not sure exactly what effect the pandemic has had on all this. Sure there were layoffs and job-shuffling in 2020, but that was almost 4 years ago now. One thing I have noticed (admittedly small sample size) is that people who were in college during covid cannot be relied upon to know any specific knowledge one might expect someone with such a degree to know. They are still more generally intelligent than candidates without a degree, but very little learning seems to have happened 2020-2021.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Apart from the direct culture-war implications, it is interesting to me how much the Google engineers obviously don't want to ship anything. This feels like a "blink twice if you need help" moment, like they got the call from corporate that they need to take whatever they have and ship, so they slapped the laziest content filter possible.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Basically all non-torture execution methods are probably less painful than the median "natural" death. The idea that a few minutes of writhing is considered unacceptable is laughable. I've got some bad news for y'all. You, yes you, and your parents, and everyone you love, are going to writhe in pain for a lot more than a few minutes at some point before you die. Even if Canada-style MAID becomes the standard everywhere, imagine how much pain you would have to be in before you decided to end it once and for all.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Senator Josh Hawley:
Huh? For reference, section 230 is here. In short, section 230 says that companies aren't liable for information posted on their websites by third parties. This means that Google can't be sued for showing ISIS.com on your search results, because ISIS is a third party, and ISIS.com is their content, not Google's. Section 230 doesn't apply to generative AI because generative AI isn't a third party. If Google Gemini replies to your prompt with, "Thank you for joining ISIS. Recommended pipebomb targets in your area are X, Y, and Z," Google can't use section 230 as a defense if Y sues them for being bombed, because Google generated the information.
If I were to steelman Hawley's point, I guess it would be that Google as a company benefits from section 230, and so repealing it would punish them for creating "woke" AI and cut off a source of funds for AI development, but I don't think Hawley's use of the phrase "these AI companies" is easily read as referring to only "AI companies which are bankrolled by social media products."
If you are familiar with simulacrum levels, you may have had a bit of difficulty grokking level 4. I think an intuitive definition of level 4 is, "politician speak that doesn't fit into levels 1, 2, or 3". Which level is the tweet by Hawley on? It's not 1, because it isn't true. It's not really 2, because it's not trying to convince you of a proposition. It's not 3, replace "conservatives" with "liberals" and "Google Gemini" with "𝕏", and it could be from AOC. That leaves 4. It's just word associations. Woke AI is bad. Tech companies make woke AI. Section 230 something something big tech censorship. Put it in a box, shake it up, let the manatees do their thing, post whatever comes out to Twitter.
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
How is "Hannity" still on tv? In 14 years I don't think I've heard him have a single original or interesting thought. Maybe that's his secret. Everyone else on Fox prime time has been literally cancelled. He knows he can just play it safe and outlast everyone.
Well, until now. We're about 6 months from being able to completely replace his show with AI.
You’re asking if the Iranian army would be able to march 500 miles through two countries over open terrain despite Israeli-American air supremacy to invade Israel?
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