Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
One of the themes of Patrick McKenzie's legendary essay The Story of VaccinateCA is that the government is perfectly willing to let private citizens assist with emergency relief efforts if the government is allowed to take credit for it. Tweets like this are a declaration of war in that context. If you go into a disaster area with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the official response, you are going to have a bad time.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
Grok will let you make anything right now.
Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.
I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.
Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr 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
1yr ago
It's the 17th result right now on DuckDuckGo. I doubt that Google did anything Hanania-specific here, they just like to signal boost "authoritative" outlets. Try finding primary sources for anything vaguely controversial with Google. It's impossible. Just page after page of NBC News, CNN, CBS News, NPR, NBC News Boston, Fox News Milwaukee, NYT Opinion, HuffPost, etc.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
I kind of think the higher-ups are in the dark about what workplace culture on the ground is. A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview. I got into a discussion in the /r/nba thread with a corporate employment lawyer from Los Angeles who told me that you’d be in deep shit if you said that at any company. I tried to get through to him that no, those corporate HR policies he’s setting aren’t getting implemented in places like Texas and that middle management is simply lying because they don’t want to look bad. No one has the guts to tell these people to fuck off, so they think that they have the respect of their underlings.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Zelenskyy fucked up. He needed to take the deal and negotiate a cease-fire, not because Russia can be trusted, but because he needed the time to let Europe ramp up defense production to make up for the impending US pullout.
I feel bad for the Ukrainians who are going to get rekt because of this, but Europe really doesn't seem to understand the American mindset. No, we aren't going to fund wars in perpetuity with no exit strategy purely because of the moral fortitude of the cause. Did we not telegraph this enough?
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Oceania was not after all at war with Eric Adams. Oceania was at war with The Federalist Society. Eric Adams was an ally.
A few days ago, news broke that the DOJ ordered the federal corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams dismissed. As of this writing, the charges have still not been formally dismissed. Apparently, the Attorney General's office can't find anyone willing to sign their name on the dismissal paperwork. The acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned yesterday after refusing to carry out the order. If the name sounds familiar, she was the lead prosecuter in the SBF case. She must be some typical big-city liberal lawyer right? Well, apparently not.
The Federalist Society: "She was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III."
The gorgeous Miss Sassoon wasn't the only casualty. Reports are at least six people have resigned rather than sign-off on this.
It's worth taking a step back here. Six months ago, anyone would have expected that a big-city Democrat mayor getting indicted on federal corruption charges would have been the reddest of red meat to the online right. How did we get to the point that right-wing law influencers are denouncing the Federalist Society for prosecuting Democrats for corruption? The monkey wrench thrown in the gears is Trump's decision to use the charges as leverage to extract concessions on immigration. A few offhand comments by Adams critical of mass immigration are retroactively cast as the Casus Belli for the initial investigation by Biden's DOJ. Am I missing something here? Why is this not an obvious quid pro quo? I can't tell whether the MAGA claim is that, "yes, this is a quid pro quo, and that's fine", or if the claim is that, "no, actually the corruption charges were themselves corruption. Dismissing the corruption charges is actually fighting corruption".
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
I consider this the equivilent of blaming global warming whenever a hurricane or wildfire hits. You can tell a convincing story about how these processes increase the risk from their associated disasters, but it's still pretty nebulous whether any given event can be attributed to them.
The takeaway for me is to avoid operating helicopters in crowded airspace. I think this should retroactively update our assesment of the FAA's airspace restrictions in response to Hurricane Helene.
In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool. There are major shooting incidents to which I don't even remember the perpetrator's name. It finally sank in that this kind of attention was counterproductive.
Which is why I am fascinated by the Luigi Mangione story. He cracked the code. News outlets are showing his face 24-7. Everyone is talking about the issues that he wants us to be talking about. This guy is the most famous, most popular, and, if the ladies are to be believed, sexiest criminal of the 21st century. Why? Basic competence at not being immediately apprehended? Selecting an unpopular target? Being attractive? Not being unattractive?
The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker. Full mask-off glorification of murder, but it's gleeful -- giddy even. Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Fired Superalignment Researcher Drops Four-and-a-Half Hour Podcast With Dwarkesh Patel, 165-Page Manifesto.
Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian at Columbia in 2021 at the age of 19. He then worked for the FTX Future Fund before the fiasco, then wound up at OpenAI on the Superalignment team. In April of this year, he was fired, ostensibly for "leaking". In Leopold's telling, he was fired for voicing security concerns (not to be confused with safety concerns) directly to the board. At post-coup OpenAI, being the kind of guy who would write a manifesto is a massive liability. Private interpretation of the Charter is forbidden.
Leopold's thesis is that AGI is coming soon, but that national security concerns, not alignment, are the main threat. A major theme is how easy it would be for the CCP to gain access to critical AI-related capabilities secrets via espionage given the current state of security at frontier AI labs. I was a bit confused at the time of the firing as to what Eliezer meant by calling Leopold a "political opponent", but it is very clear in retrospect. Leopold wants to accelerate AI progress in the name of Western dominance, making America the "compute cluster of democracy". He is very concerned that lax security or a failure to keep our eyes on the prize could cost us our lead in the AI arms race.
What comes through in the podcast in a way that doesn't from the manifesto is how intellectually formidable Leopold seems. He is thoughtful and sharp at all times and for all questions. Admittedly I may be biased. Leopold is thoroughly Gray Tribe ingroup. He has been on Richard Hanania's podcast, and mentions Tyler Cowen as one of his influences. It is tempting to simply nod along as the broad outline of the next 5 years is sketched out, as if the implications of approaching AGI are straightforward and incontrovertible.
The one thing that is notably missing is are-we-the-baddies? style self-reflection. The phrase, "millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones", is uttered at one point. It makes sense in the military context of the conversation, but I really think more time should have been spent on the political, social, and ethical implications. He seems to think that we will still be using something like the US Constitution as the operating system of the post-AGI global order, which seems... unlikely. Maybe disillusionment with the political system is one of those things that can't be learned from a book, and can only come with age and experience.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The mainstream media tends to avoid signal-boosting intelligent dissident voices. They want controlled opposition and/or clownish opposition. Much easier to write about Alex Jones or @420MAGAPepe1488 on X.
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
2yr ago
No, my point is that if you see someone who is otherwise intelligent and clear-thinking make uncharacteristic fallacies and bad arguments on a specific topic, and that topic is something that they have a strong vested interest in, and they did not argue themselves into that vested interest, then you should have a strong prior that their vested interest is causing their bad arguments.
I will note that the best religious apologists tend to be converts. This is not a coincidence.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.
Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).
Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.
I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?
Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.
Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?
”If you don’t hear back in two weeks, feel free to try again, or try other means.”
Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
What the fuck is happening?
Elon isn't an idiot. He knows how math works. He successfully gutted foreign aid. Congradulations, DOGE shaved 0.5% off of the federal budget, maybe, who really knows?
Anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds investigating the federal budget already knows that the bulk of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. I suspect that Elon has finally discovered the haunting truth that the rural white underclass loves gibs almost as much as the urban black underclass. Arguably, it is insulting to human dignity to be tasked with cutting waste while at the same time being barred from touching the giant money pit.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Even if all trade barriers (including the nonsensical things he includes as trade barriers) are completely gone, there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products.
Think outside the box. Zero is not the lowest number. Australia could put a negative 20% tariff on all American imports, directly paying American manufacturers to ship their products to Australia.
Is this flat-out extortion? Yes. But the mechanisms for enforcement are already in place. Just change the sign in the relevant Excel templates.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Let’s say you’re walking down the street and a black guy steals your phone. Later that day, this same black guy is minding his own business when he is attacked, arrested, and beaten within an inch of his life by an unabashedly racist police officer who is an open member of the KKK. The police officer notices the cell phone, which he finds out later was reported missing by you, and returns it to you. Further investigation reveals that the police officer had no probable cause, and simply assaulted the man because he was black. Do you have to give him your cell phone back?
The answer is obviously no, right? Just because the black man has a clearly justified claim against the government, doesn’t mean that we have to recommit all of the crimes that the unlawful state action righted. Compensation should be made in a different way.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
An uncomfortably large amount of human behavior, even at the very top, is just blindly following the herd. YouTube and Twitter banned Fuentes? Guess Facebook will too. They banned the president of the United States? Right behind you. Zuck’s heart was never in it. I don’t think he sees himself as a particularly ethics-driven person to begin with. Onlyfans-shilling thots are considered spam on the other platforms; on Instagram, they’re the content.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
The hi-vis vest seals the deal. Blue-collar workers will always side with the manager who isn't above putting on the same PPE that they do.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
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
1yr ago
This is the fruit of the Elon-Twitter tree. "Claudine Gay" has been trending on X every other day for the last month. It helped a lot that it was a slow news cycle, but this sort of cultural momentum would have been impossible a few years ago.
When I first read this I thought it was a reasonably well thought-out post. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Scott didn’t mention immigration once in the entire essay. There’s a Straussian reading here where Scott personally cares more about his own social standing than HDB civilizational risks, but understands why others would not, leaving the objection open and unrefuted.
I think all the arguments that Scott is being unfair in his specific recounting of Trumps flaws are cope. I’m voting for him anyway because stopping uncontrolled immigration and keeping Rawlsians off the court really are that important.
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