Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Do the people who insist on separating Jews out into their own group realize how much that hurts white people in the race stats?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I mean, the twist is obvious isn’t it?
Trump wins a majority of pledged delegates in the primaries. He then gets handily convicted of multiple felonies, and is sentenced to what amounts to life in prison right before the Republican National Convention. Hilarity ensues.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
'attempting to convince women to change their boundaries and entire lifestyle in order to sleep with you'
I mean, that's kind of what dating/flirting is. Going from single to living together, having intimate emotional connections, having regular sex, starting a family together, ect. is very much a radical change in boundaries and lifestyle. There's no polite way to ask for that which is compliant with any standard HR policy. Yet it is a bedrock assumption of our social policy that you can just put men and women in the same society and they will spontaneously rearrange themselves from "single" to "married"(or whatever the PC equivalent with minor variations is).
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
At this point arguing Catholic theology feels like arguing Star Wars lore. It's fake. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't make sense. It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake. If you try to apply logic to it you will end up running in circles.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
You're forgetting the most important aspect for an entertainment company. Disney under Iger produced good content. Disney under Chapek didn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Also, what’s going on with the tattoos and piercings? Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive? It’s not just women either. Am I getting old? Why are people intentionally discoloring their skin and putting holes in their face?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
@self_made_human made the point downthread that “Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.” I think this is a good example of that. Caring about simulated copies of yourself is not a load-bearing assumption. The Basilisk could just as easily torture you, yes, you personally, the flesh and blood meatbag.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down.
At some point federal agents could arrest state national guardsmen. If they're afraid of forceful resistance, just send the arrest warrants to the guardsmen's home addresses. They can be physically handcuffed after the "crisis" is over. I doubt many people are willing to risk their freedom to defend Abbot's showmanship.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
It is quite unpleasant to argue against the core assumptions of veganism in a way that is epistemically rigorous. One has to tear down the entire concept of ethics as it is typically understood, then rebuild some sort of timeless decision theory-based normative system that reproduces the common-sense undisputed norms of "ethical" human behavior, but hopefully without the gaping security hole of giving in to utility monsters and bottomless pits of suffering.
> But QuantumFreakonomics you wise sage, I inherently care about the suffering of all sentient beings. It is part of my utility function, and I don't want to change my utility function.
You are wrong about your own utility function. You do not inherently care about the subjective experience of shrimp in the Atlantic Ocean. I don't believe you. You are confusing type I goods (goods which have intrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their own sake) with type II goods (goods which have only extrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their ability to produce/acquire type I goods). Your own pleasure and your own lack of suffering are type I goods. The pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is not a type I good, but it is often (but not always) a type II good. Assuming that the pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is a type I good is an error, as is assuming that it is always a type II good. No one wants to say this in polite company because it makes you sound like a massive asshole, but when no one has the guts to point this out you end up with people advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.
I don’t think people are fully grasping what is happening here.
The Australian government is flirting with making it illegal to ask someone on a date.
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“Pressuring the respondent to give them information about their location or their schedule.”
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“Pressuring the respondent to meet them in person when they did not want to.”
This is what asking someone on a date is. You don’t know if they want to until you ask.
Some have speculated in these very comments that destroying dating apps is good actually, because then people will start meeting each other and going on dates somewhere else (where exactly this “somewhere else” would be is left unspecified). This is a folly. The kind of government that bans dating apps for allowing and facilitating people to ask each other out is the kind of government which will ban in-person dating scenes too. Think that’s too extreme? This is Australia we’re talking about. I’m totally on Kulak’s side if the Australian government goes through with this. These inhuman totalitarians need to be taken out by any means necessary.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
At the risk of defending some really quite terrible academics, this is in fact the correct response to some texts. Here is David Stove quoting Hegel:
This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical; - substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive, - or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge, and what it perceives it does not really know, - for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.
There really is no way to say what is wrong with this passage other than to say, “all of it, it’s just bad”. It’s not much better in context either.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
SBF didn’t just show up one day at an EA event with billions of dollars. He was homegrown. He was in effective altruism before he was rich. He literally worked for The Center for Effective Altruism before leaving to start Alameda Research. Caroline Ellison ran a semi-anonymous blog jam packed with rationalist and EA references for years before she even started at Alameda or got into crypto. (Seriously, read it. This is a person who really thought they were maximizing expected utility by running an undercollateralized hedge fund into the ground. Fascinating.) These were true believers in the movement. Effective altruism was central to their identities. The fact that FTX not only failed but caused billions of dollars in collateral damage suggests that something is deeply wrong with the core philosophy.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.
Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The fertility crisis is in some sense a fake problem. It could be solved tomorrow with common-sense birth control control. Make it illegal to give hormonal BC to a woman with less than 3 children (number adjustable as needed). All the proposals to increase fertility with tax-breaks and other incentives feel like responding to the lead crisis by increasing access to chelation therapy. Just take the lead out the fucking gasoline.
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
6mo ago
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies
I didn't dig too deeply into this one, but I looked at the replies (and even *gasp* the quote tweets) on the Hanania poll. I grew up on 4chan, but I've spent enough time in sanitized spaces like Reddit that I forgot what viscerally angry uncensored people sound like; disgusting, but beautiful in a way, like a cheetah devouring a gazelle. Hanania tried to connect this reaction to the old "but I did eat breakfast this morning" failure to parse hypotheticals, and that doesn't seem quite right, but it does serve as a reminder that many (most?) people aren't like us. They are either unable or unwilling to peal back their assumptions about morality or world-models.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I don't think I've seen this discussed here yet? I have to admit, the song has grown on me. It really feels authentic in a way that say, Try That in a Small Town doesn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
It seems pretty clear to me what happened. The Florida Department of Education of thinks it’s perfectly fine to teach AP Psychology without the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff, and the college board thinks those topics are integral to the course and cannot be omitted.
Of course, a media worth a shit would actually get into the weeds of the curriculum to find out what the gender and sexuality topics really are and how inseparable they are from the rest of the course. Unfortunately you’re going to have to do your own research.
To be fair to the College Board here, I have no clue what counts as “age appropriate” content for 11th and 12th graders either.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
So like, where is the money going? If healthcare costs so much in the US, who is getting paid more? Who is getting paid to do irrelevant work? Who is getting massive returns on investment?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Don Lemon out at CNN too.
It might sound crazy, but CNN might be in the market for Tucker. If they want ratings that bad, they know what they have to do.
There is one question I still need answered: It’s pretty clear at this point that SBF does not care about other people in the sense of having normal “empathy”. He lies, cheats, and screws people over all the time. And yet, he doesn’t seem particularly selfish? The guy was working 18 hours a day, ate vegan food, and had an ugly girlfriend (okay, he was def banging hot chicks on the side, but still). What was the money for? His actions don’t make sense if he was trying to maximize his own wellbeing. Why would he go on Twitter spaces and admit to fraud while under house arrest? Why take the stand at trial and almost certainly get years added to his sentence? He wasn’t trying to get out of jail. He was trying to restart the grift. If he got the chance to do it all over again, the only thing he’d change would be not paying CZ in FTT tokens.
So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part. Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy? I can understand being an uncaring sociopath. I can understand being driven by empathetic reason. I cannot understand what base human impulses drive SBF. He is an enigma, the Joker, a man I don’t fully understand.
"When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended." - @TwitterSafety
This is every bit as dumb as those "hacked materials" rules that were used as a fig leaf for the Hunter Biden story. "An increased risk of physical harm," is this actually true? How many people have been hurt because someone saw their live location on twitter? Oh, I'm sure it's inconvenient to celebrities to have their location constantly reported on, but is this a non-negligible safety threat? Did anyone think about how many cool use-cases for Twitter a rule like this breaks? I'm sure SBF didn't consent to having his location in Bahamas court (and jail) shared live to the world, too fucking bad. Ooops, better not share that pic you took out in public for 24 hours. It might reveal someone's live location.
Twitter is done. It's over. I take no pleasure in reporting this. I had high hopes for ElonTwitter. There's no reason to trust that Twitter is committed to free and open news and discussion if basic elements of reality (the physical location of individual persons) are not allowed. It is especially concerning that this seems to be a direct reaction to Elon not liking how certain people were tweeting about him.
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