RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
This makes me think of someone stuck on a very sticky wicket, trying to justify an argument that was fundamentally wrong. Of course there are facets of any sophisticated but wrong argument that are right. You can highlight the correct facets and minimize the wrong facets. You can pre-prepare reasons for why you might be wrong to conserve credibility.
Nate has the rhetorical skills to pull it off. But it still feels very slimy. The 90 IQ twitter pleb mocking him with '60,000 simulations and all you conclude is that it's a coin flip?' may not be that numerically literate. But he has hit on a certain kind of wisdom. The election wasn't a 50/50 or a dice-roll. It was one way or another. With superior knowledge you could've called it in Trump's favour. Maybe only Bezos and various Lords of the Algorithms, French Gamblers and Masters of Unseen Powers knew or suspected - but there was knowledge to be had.
I prefer prediction models that make money before the outcome is decided, not ones that have to be justified retroactively. Nate wasn't heralding before the election that this 6% was the modal outcome, it wasn't really useful information.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
despite signs that the Russian economy could well collapse within a year.
What signs?
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%! If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings (as opposed to negative approval ratings).
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/russia-war-income?lang=en
Even the Carnegie Endowment is struggling to find much bad to say about Russian wages growth. If Biden had delivered positive real wages growth over his term, I think he would still be in office today. Just look at the chart on page 25. Apparently the crushing impact of Western sanctions in 2022 was less harmful to the Russian worker than whatever was going on in America (or the UK, Germany, Australia...) with inflation. And in 2023 Russia left the US in the dust in real wages.
China's struggling, failing economy was massively outperforming the vibrant, dynamic US economy in 2022 and 2023, presumably it's still doing so. Real wages, real GDP per capita are rising much faster in China and Russia. They're rising from a lower basis level but are rising fast nonetheless. Yet all we see in newspapers and television is stories of disaster, stagnation and decline over there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Yeah I looked at it, looked for the telltale glitches around his lips, tried to listen into the audio pattern. And it sounded slightly off to me, just a little bit. Presumably it's because he's speaking from a teleprompter.
On balance, I'd trust community notes more than my own eyeballing at this point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Skull size is a pretty clear signal for Erectus, I'm happy with skull size variations implying intelligence difference, ceteris paribus. I'm happy with a broad trend of rising intelligence under selection pressure. I do believe in evolution and genetics. But I don't believe that we can precisely chart IQ rising and falling over thousands of years like OP's charts suggest. The level of confidence is too high.
DNA methylation is absolutely relevant to working out which genes are expressed, it's a way of determining epigenetics.
The human body is a very complex piece of machinery that we don't fully understand. This article suggests that the heart can store memories (which are transferred with transplants) which I didn't believe in at all prior to this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987719307145
When dealing with such a complex system, with many facets barely known to us, we should be cautious before reaching conclusions - especially if there's no way to test them.
Looking at the second link about subway surfing, I can't get over how dumb these kids are. We really live in completely different worlds.
Tommy G does great work, thanks for making me aware of him. I just went onto his 'Blood Money: Inside Dallas' Underground Economy' video, it's staggering how these pimps are incapable of spitting out 10 words without 'ya know what I mean?' or 'you know what I'm saying?'. They act in such disgusting ways, practicing something they unironically call 'baboon pimping'. Veteran racists couldn't make this up. This pimp starts shrieking profanities at some fat black whore wandering outside the car the journalist was in, shouting continually and unintelligibly for 30 seconds straight.
What a cultural blemish on the world. What a legal blemish, whores from Oklahomah come to Dallas because the police are too lazy to shut down this massive prostitute drive-through.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!
'Race is a social construct'
I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.
But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.
We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.
Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).
"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."
"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."
There could be 100 trends but two or three of them dominate all else. Picking out these key trends is very valuable information!
I think it's a little like investing. You can draw up a 300 page PDF on market analysis with dozens of incomprehensible graphs, throw supercomputers and humanity's top minds at the problem, only to fall well behind 'Nvidia = AI and AI is enormously powerful' or 'Iphones are great, Apple really knows what they're doing'. A simple thesis can easily beat a complicated, measured, nuanced analysis that uses all the data and considers 1000 points of information.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Dominic Cummings (actually his buddy Ben and their shared polling methods) predicted the election outcomes well in advance, before it was even known that Harris would run. They were right on the money with specificity too, it seems: https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1854275006064476410
Who else got things very right beforehand? Polymarket was obviously predictive. Elon Musk should never be underestimated, he bets big with well-deserved confidence. What other voices in future are trustworthy?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Check out some lore here (fact-checked by real American gematria-informed astrologers). It also brings in the all-important 9/11 predictions and Back to the Future: https://x.com/DonnieDarkened/status/1466212244316905474
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
It's a sea of green out here. Trump promised to help out with crypto (even launched his own shitty memecoin). Elon's influence should also be helpful here.
And stocks are green too, especially NVIDIA. Something underappreciated IMO is that someone got the Aschenbrenner Thesis into his hands and converted him, he was talking about how the US needs all this power for AI - he seemed enthusiastic about it. Elon and Thiel should definitely be in the inner circle, the e/acc Silicon Valley echelon is advancing at great speed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
There goes my 'sure thing' Polymarket bet. But at least I'll make enough in crypto to be up overall.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Nate should've kept his mouth shut then, he was the one that offered to bet in the first place. I probably should've copied out the full exchange in OP.
Nate links to a post 'should Kamala gamble on a Blue Florida' where he argues that Florida could plausibly fall to Harris
you are a buffoon. Minimum Trump win in FL is 8 points and more likely 10-14.
Dude you've gotta stop huffing the Twitter vibes. How much money are you willing to bet on a Trump +8 point spread in Florida?
$100k
Have your lawyer draw up a quick contract and it's a deal. NATE DOT SILVER DOT MEDIA AT GMAIL DOT COM. No contract, no bet, because you've been nutty lately and are a payment risk.
bet u missed Ron’s margin in election too??
Keith, we don't need to trash talk since now we've discovered a more honorable way to settle our little disagreement. Just send the contract over.
I thought Nate was the bigger man, offering a substantive bet and speaking in full capitalized sentences. But clearly he was all talk, no substance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
I'm not a Nate fanboy, I read Scott's most recent post (TLDR: Polymarket bad, Metaculus good, Nate good) with disapproval back when it was written. I am a Polymarket true believer. But I wasn't brave enough to post my thoughts beforehand since I thought Nate might have some idea about what he was doing...
Proposing a bet and then refusing to sign it (and then being proved wrong later) is very poor sportsmanship though. It shows his true beliefs are not aligned with what he says.
Did Nate Silver just get obliterated by some twitter random (Keith Rabois) for 100K? Back a month ago there was this exchange where Nate asked this dude for a binding promise to transfer 100K if Trump didn't win by 8 points in Florida. Nate seemed pretty confident and I assumed he knew what he was doing. The other guy seemed like an angry lower-caps twitter dude.
https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1842211340720504895
Florida is 91% in and it's looking pretty bad for Nate: https://www.axios.com/visuals/presidential-election-results-2024-updates-harris-trump?selectedRaces=all
Trump 5,864,014 56.1% Harris 4,491,712 43.0
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on here? It seems very bad for Mr Forecaster if he bets so confidently and gets nuked.
Edit: According to Rabois Nate Silver later withdrew his offer of a bet: https://x.com/rabois/status/1853971462744359299
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.
What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).
I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.
We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.
But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.
Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.
Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
But the alternative doesn't work at all. If we commit to green energy, that does nothing about all the CO2 already in the atmosphere, it only mildly decreases the rate at which the CO2 concentration rises. It's like taking your foot off a little bit off the accelerator and saying 'well we did our best'. We need to use the brakes.
Sulphates aren't a perfect solution. They do distort weather patterns. They do cause acid rain. But they are a solution to the temperature problem.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
The undersea SCS sensor stuff is interesting, make a lot of sense for both sides to lay sensors there. I wonder if it would make sense to just fill the whole area with them willy-nilly, dumping them out of ships and aircraft just before going in? For China, if both sides can see eachother's submarines and their missile subs are safe in the Sea of Bohai, it might even the gap.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
America can find trillions to pay for silly overseas wars but preventing the robbery of stores is too costly?
I have some experience with legal practitioners, there's a certain inherent status-quo-ism whenever they hear anyone looking for a quick fix to these absurdities. They produce all these examples of edge-cases and procedural reasons for why things can't be done or changing anything is very complicated. Or they blame badly drafted laws (which is fair and reasonable given how badly written some laws are in my country, presumably the USA too).
But I think to myself, none of this applies when people really want something. Free commerce and protection of private property? Not in war time, your property belongs to the state! You're in the army now, straight off to the front! Prices? Regulated! Speech? Restricted! Rights? Gone!
Or take COVID. There must've been a million reasons why, in theory, you can't just order everyone to stay in their houses, have businesses shut down, why it's just too impractical and hard and expensive. But they did it anyway. Were there unreasonable edge-cases and were there absurdities? Absolutely, in industrial quantities.
Law is interpreted and enforced by men. If they really want something to happen, they can make it so. If they really want to stamp out petty crime like this, it can be done.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Degrowth Greens are getting absolutely crazy, easily 10x as radical as any far-right European party. More radical than Putin too.
A (biased) source on what one German Greens thought leader wants to see, noting that it isn't all Greens but a formidable brand of Green thought: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/in-which-a-leading-green-intellectual
New construction banned, train travel rationed, 50 sqm living space per person, meat rationed, end of banking (because money is basically worthless since everything is rationed)... This from an apparently respectable political voice, editor of a newspaper, who basically wants to destroy the Western way of life. These people have influence in the real world, their fellow compatriots get into power and start shutting down nuclear plants for no good reason.
It's in the UK too. Some imbeciles passed a law mandating net zero emissions by 2050. A think tank gave serious thought as to what that would actually look like if we take the laws and climate scientists seriously:
TLDR, they conclude that technology is too unreliable, the only path to success is crushing austerity. No air travel for 30 years. No shipping for 30 years. 40% less heating. No meat.
What I find most revealing is the mindset of 'well we don't really have any known methods to get CO2 out of the atmosphere besides planting trees and there's not much space for more trees so let's take a low-risk path to absolute zero, using only known technologies'. And then the low-risk path they propose is shooting yourself in the foot with a 50 cal. No shipping and no air travel ON AN ISLAND? Famine is locked in - they add that 'fertilizer use is greatly reduced'. This mindset is absolutely toxic.
The correct solution to climate change is directly controlling the temperature by releasing sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. At a cost of $5-20 billion per year we can hold temperatures in place or reduce them, even as CO2 levels rise. These people want to destroy industrial civilization over a glorified nothingburger.
And I think Russia might be trying to assist them. These Degrowth Greens can be viewed as purely destructive agents, Stalin's mythic wreckers that were deliberately harming the economy by submitting false instructions or damaging machinery. If you want to induce chaos and dysfunction in Europe, help them out! They might shut down a nuclear plant or commit some other blunder and cause right-thinking people to panic-buy more natural gas or oil (which in a global market will increase Russian income). Russia probably doesn't have much ability to help them and doesn't spend much time doing so but I think it's part of their agenda.
Suffice to say that with no air travel and no shipping, the VDV could probably take over Britain by themselves. Inducing stupidity and self-sabotage in your rivals is usually a good move, even if it hurts you occasionally. Just because Russia exports fossil fuels, it doesn't mean they don't want division and incompetence in their targets. Nuclear power is still the primary threat to their energy exports IMO. Nuclear France produces fewer emissions than 'Green' Germany' per $ of GDP.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
It would probably be nice to have, but it's far from crucial.
Why do countries have presidents? Why do companies have CEOs? Why do armies have generals? Why do ships have captains?
One-man leadership is possibly the most tried-and-tested social structure in history, we use it everywhere. That isn't to say that it's autocratic leadership, there can be laws and votes of no confidence and so on. But we have it for a reason. There needs to be someone with final say, a clear chain of command so that people know who is to be obeyed. Someone needs to be in charge to punish incompetence and reward success.
What happens if people from different departments want different things? 'We need to bail out Ukraine, send more air defences, it's vital for freedom and liberty in the world' says the State Department. But the Pentagon says 'no, the primary danger is in Asia, we need to focus on China - let Europe pick up the slack'. Maybe the CIA and intelligence agencies want resources heading to Israel, as a third option. This is just a hypothetical.
There needs to be someone with the formal authority to set priorities and make decisions even if he has to tread on other people's toes. There needs to be a legitimate ruler, not a gaggle of eunuchs constantly plotting and horse-trading to get parts of their agenda through. Government by gaggle of eunuchs leaves little room for long-term planning or coherent strategy. Without proper leadership, officials get too comfortable and entrenched pursuing their own agendas. That's exactly what's been happening in America for years and years now, probably only a world-historical genius can fix it.
Would you invest in a company without a leader, where all the department heads just come together and do their own thing? Probably not because you know that just about every company has a CEO, a founder, a 'paramount leader' one way or another. You wouldn't take that risk.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Yeah Israel has a real problem with all these villainous live quotes. 90% of the time they manage to stick to the approved lines: 'we have a right to defend ourselves' 'counter-terrorism action' 'Iraq Iran Iran WMDs, nukes in 6 months' 'human shields'.
But 10% of the time government officials declare enthusiastic support for torturing prisoners by shoving metal rods up their anuses. Or we see the vigorous anti 'investigating soldiers for rape' protests. Or well-directed music videos where young children sing:
Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza
Planes are bombing, destruction, destruction
Look the IDF is crossing the line
to annihilate the swastika-bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plow our fields
Reminds me a bit of Teufelslied, though it was intended as a marching song and I doubt children got to sing it:
SS will never rest,
We will destroy them all
So no one will disturb Germany's good fortune
At some point Israel is going to have to take on the villainous role with the face-concealing helmet and the glowing red eyes, accept what they are, what they want and what they'll sacrifice for the path they're on. They can't have it both ways. You can't be both the defender of freedom and justice, the unprovoked righteous who deserves sympathy and aid from others - and also go around burning people's houses down for fun, shooting children in the back as they flee, gunning down unarmed protestors, obliterating your enemies and taking their land.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Maybe, who knows. Saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated are only words. We'd have to listen to nutritionists to understand what they really mean. And nutritionists have not covered themselves in glory over the last sixty years. The experts have overseen the biggest public health disaster since smoking, they don't have a clue.
Just stick to the foods our ancestors ate, back when the very fat were circus attractions. Eat Fruit. Vegetables. Meat. Fish. Milk. Grains. Olive oil has been tried and tested for thousands of years, there's no reason to use canola oil (first used for cooking the 1970s).
Not breakfast cereals, not fast-food, not these syrupy Starbucks coffees, Coca-Cola, candy bars or jelly beans. At least not very often.
If you're measuring the Russian economy in current USD, then sure there was a GDP per capita decline in 2023. But the Russian economy also apparently shrank about 40% from 2013 to 2016, an economic apocalypse comparable only to the 1990s. Exchange-rate games don't really matter for this.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locations=AU
I see 0.6% for 2023 and that's not even real growth, that's just nominal growth. We've been in per-capita recession for some time now.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/05/australias-per-capita-recession-worsens/
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