Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
47m ago
Usually when one wants a rock moved one hires a local firm. This local firm owns or rents an earthmover. At no point do you have to worry about whether Caterpillar Inc. will charge a licensing fee or have an opinion on whether or not the rock ought to be moved.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I'll say it. Jason Arday did the only truly honorable thing he could do in this situation. Western truthseeking institutions can only benefit if the socialy-expected response to being exposed as a complete academic fraud becomes to seek Canadian healthcare.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Why does making faces and doing silly walks make a conventionally attractive woman even more attractive? The effect goes beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching.
Actually it doesn't go beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching. The Instagram algorithm (I don't use TikTok) has essentially solved female attractiveness. Not that it was ever a secret what men find attractive. There's just not much alpha in taking the extra step up from low-cut shirts and flirtatious poses unless one wants to be an OnlyFans model influencer.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
What was won?
We got the marketplace of ideas back.
If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
It's not a conspiracy theory. Reddit moderators will remove posts simply because they don't like them. "AI slop" is just the newest excuse. Previously it was "bad faith", "trolling", or "we can't moderate posts this spicy". It isn't an invitation for you to remove the LLM-generated text or demonstrate your earnestness. They are telling you to shut up.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
The law that can be named is not the true law and the follow-up Against Truth give you a good feel for his style, strengths, and weaknesses (no, it is not actually good to be against truth). I'm partial to Douglas Murray, gruesome toady and The world’s first matcha labubu genocide, which is unfortunately behind a partial paywall.
Laughing my ass off at the idea of ChatGPT translating some Korean grunt's journal entry as, "you're right, today's victory not only ensures the survival of worker's communism, but ten thousand years of Kim Il Sung."
More options
Context Copy link