RobertLiguori
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User ID: 165
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I'll happily concur with the basic premise; it's all too easy for me to look at the whiplash people have done and are doing on, well, a whole lot of topics, but most present and obvious would probably be the complete 180 that took place between the George Floyd race riots and 1/6.
Even at the time, you had people copy-and-pasting people's cheering on of one while shrieking in pretend-fear of the other, and it was painfully obvious that there were no actual principles about when, what, and how protest should be done involved, in either case. It should not be at all hard to show that the words of most of Amercia's current set of taste-makers have less reasoning behind them then the latest from ChatGPT, just by looking for simple, recent contradictions.
I am a little curious about your S-disposition term of art. Like, if I want to fuck a vegan, so I spend a period of however long it takes of putting up a convincing front of sympathy-towards-veganism statements and minor displays of activism, but internally my mental state doesn't change, and I cheerfully drop the front once I've gotten what I wanted from her, do we need a word other than 'lie' for what I was doing?
I will say that I've personally reached a point of deep cynicism, and feel that the vast majority of people I encounter are at best moral children who have never considered the multiple and obvious contradictions in the beliefs they espouse (and have also been trained to carefully avoid any factual information or ideas that would lead to those contradictions being too widely exposed), that the expected case is that most people are moral cowards and also wildly disinterested in morality, and thus espouse whatever a surface-view of the world shows them will avoid punishment and make up reasons why those beliefs are good after the fact, and in my more grim moments, I take people at their contradictory word and feel that very many people literally are GPT3-ing their way through their interactions with their fellow humans.
Is this just a here-and-now study? I feel like you could get some really interesting data looking at communist or other totalitarian areas, and seeing what people said in public, what they did in private, and what they said about what they both said and did after the totalitarianism fell.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
How do you know there is a difference? Do you have a list of multiple peoples who were chattel slaves, and their relative performance over time during, immediately after, and generations after?
This isn't a gotcha; I myself do not have statistics ready to spring on you, and would be interested to know, e.g., how the descendants of the Roman empire's slaves did, if there is any such data (or even widely-present stereotypes).
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
If one starts from that assumption, then one would observe that there are minorities (Jews, some Asians) who are More Likely than whites, yet have suffered more discrimination than them.
This would mean that it has to be a Jewish and partially Asian conspiracy to suppress all the other races, and that any observed historic anti-black discrimination is marginal compared to the discrimination dark matter of the Jews.
Barring a very small minority, people don't start from that assumption. They use the historic treatment of blacks as a rhetorical club, and under no circumstances permit actual science or reason to touch their assumed Original Sin substitute. But it's so stupidly obvious when you add more data points than white American and black American, and look at the relationship between historic oppression and current outcomes, I tend to default to assuming that no one actually starts with that assumption.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
If the state has argued beyond reasonable doubt that one of two men has done an exclusive action, then they have also argued that there is reasonable doubt that the other hadn't.
Of course, the court system is a sham that hides its constant hypocrisies behind pomp and Latin, so neither the facts of the world nor even the facts of other court cases actually matter when judge and jury decide that precedent is optional today, but in a court system of professionals bound to their oath and juries capable of reason, convicting one person for a singular crime should exclude anyone else from being convicted of that crime.
As an aside, you can also have things like the felony murder rule, where "You did a felony and a murder happened as a direct result." is the argument, not "You murdered.", and in that paradigm, you absolutely can have multiple people convicted of the same murder, but that's not the same as lying to the court about what you think the evidence shows happened, as needs to happen to argue for two different versions of events.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.
Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.
In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I've got a small-scale question about nutrition in the ancient world. Specifically, about beer.
Given how important beer was to a bunch of cultures, it seems odd that its benefits would be purely recreational, and given that making beer involves a lot more steps than just boiling water, it also seems odd that if the main advantage of beer was its relative sterility, people would have hit on just boiling water instead of malting grain, heating it at the right temperature, etc.
So, given that there are trace nutrients that you can't easily get in a pure-agrarian focused-on-single-grains society, especially if you're poor and don't eat a varied diet (which leads to pellagra and the like), and that at least some of those nutrients can be found in yeast, my question is this; was there enough nutrients in ancient beer to serve as actual nutritional supplements, with the actual gain being gotten from the yeast, not the alcohol?
If this were the case, then you'd presumably see a selection pressure in ancient civilizations that had less access to high-quality complete animal protein to develop alcohol tolerance, and civilizations that had constant ready access to it would have much less selection pressure.
Is there any research on this that anyone knows of?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
What the heck does the fact that SBF said something (in this case, something nakedly self-serving) have to do with reality, reason, or any truth about the world?
It could be that this is the case, that SBF chooses to play a competitive ranked multiplayer game and generally bring his random teammates down, and deal with a notoriously stressful and distracting environment that (to my knowledge) no one else says is a good flow-supporting distraction like music or walking, and that he puts in zero effort because he doesn't care.
Or, alternatively, he could play the game because LoL is the kind of thing that smart, nerdy, driven people play (because it's so miserable for the casual player), wholly as part of a brand-building activity, and that he not only has no real interest in the game beyond the bare superficial needed to use it as a prop, and the reason he has not gitten gud in his hundreds of hours of play is because either he is profoundly uninterested in learning, improving, and gaining skills, or because he can't, and bronze league is his natural skill ceiling. (Also, as a note: this is entirely from second-hand absorption from one of my friends who plays MOBAs and extremely cursory research. I could be absolutely wrong about the rank of his accounts, the hours he's spent playing, and what both signify. I eagerly await any LoL-players present to chime in with first-hand information.)
My current position is that everything SBF says or has said, and that everything everyone around him who would plausibly benefit from him looking good or be punished for blowing the whistle on him, is suspect. He's a super-affirmative-action-hire, basically; he could be as competent and smart as his rep and just happened to fail horribly in these few cases (or, possibly, used to have been extremely smart and competent and then fried his brain on nootropics), just as an affirmative action hire maybe possibly good have gotten their job even if they'd been evaluated fairly, but there's no real way to know.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.
But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.
Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
As an aside, I think that you can probably do the same thing yourself for racism. I know that I've had a fair amount of conversations on whether a particular racially-motivated act of discrimination was racist or not, and when I've sensed some confusion around the term, I've gotten good responses by explicitly recognizing and disclaiming some popular alternate definitions of the word, and emphasized that I was referring to racially-motivated acts of discrimination.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
For reference, can you demonstrate how one would communicate the same idea in a less heated manner? Or is this a case where the poster should have linked to a few /ActualPublicFreakous videos or the like to provide multiple pro-active examples of the vocal phenomenon in question?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Would you care to elaborate?
I know nothing about Jane St. other than they're a finance shop that is known for brain-teasers in their interviews. If they have in-depth procedures for, e.g., double-blinding the results of applicants' written responses to their math and statistics questions, so that the person deciding "Yes, this answer shows sufficient mastery of the topic and reasoning skills." has no cues from college or name, then that's a significant data point in favor of me being wrong, and I'd welcome it being pointed out.
But I've been in IT for a while and I know exactly how much brain-teaser questions (or, for that matter, basic tests like FizzBuzz) are actually treated as hard checks when either upper management or even just the interviewer in question really wants the interviewee to pass, and it is not much at all. And I absolutely do not consider Jane Street a quasi-priesthood of intellectual integrity, and that every employee working for them cares utterly about the incorruptible truth, because (again), they hired SBF to trade crypto for them.
But again, I know no specifics, and if Jane Street has specific procedures and checks in place to stop a charismatic fraud from joining their august ranks, I'd love to hear about them in more detail.
Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:
The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.)
From [2]: (It's interactive and tabular, so you'll have to click around)
In the Homicide Offender vs. Victim demographics, we see that pernicious hate ratio again (with blacks committing 51% of all murders in the U.S. over the past 10 years, and Asians committing less than 1% of murders.) And, as our control, white people ring in 36% of the murders. The remaining 11% are done by a racially-unknown perpetrator.
With blacks being a relatively-consistent 12% of the population and Asians being 6%, we would expect to see ~12% and about 6% of murders. White people with Latinos rolled in (which, for some reason, the violent crime stats always do) get us to 76% of the population.
I will leave pulling the actual p-values as an exercise to the reader, but the numbers are clear; race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact; if you are black, you are several times more likely than average to be a murderer (with, of course, the proviso that the vast, vast majority of black people are not criminals, and 5 times a very small number is still a small number overall), and likewise, if you are Asian, you are several times more likely then average to score a 700+ on the SAT (with, again, the same proviso that only a small minority of that small minority are exemplary math students.) It is absolutely not the case that every black is a dumb violent criminal, and that every Asian is a peaceful geometer-hobbyist. But it is true that black people are wildly overrepresented in violent crime and underrepresented in mathematical achievement, and that the reverse is true for Asians.
Now, I don't have any sources I particularly trust for the dual-parent question, because I haven't examined it, but a quick perusal of sources did give me an entry from the Institute for Family Studies[3], which didn't seem to obviously contradict the other few sources. It gave the percent of Asian children from two-married-parent homes at 85%, with 74% for non-Hispanic whites and 36% for black children. This, obviously, is a much closer outcome ratio than we see in the two above outcome cases; if coming from a broken home was the primary determinant, then we'd see those 15% of 6% (0.9%) do as much crime proportionally as 63% of 12% (7.56%). And yet, the ratio of Asian super-achievement on the SAT to black is 25 to 1; when it comes to violent criminals, the ratio is well over a hundred to one.
As far as I can see, getting married and raising a family is just another outcome in which Asians do better than the average, and black Americans do significantly worse. But I would be fascinated to see if you can find any studies which specifically compare the the outcomes of children of two-parent black households to non-two-parent Jewish and Asian households, to really get into family status as a signifier on its own.
Also, to be clear; this is not a melanin thing. Asians have more melanin than whites, and do better. Blacks have more melanin than whites, and do worse. It's also a purely-statistical truth; we can absolutely drill down to the Igbo or Laotian immigrant populations and see divergent results. Black and Asian are both large, diverse groups which contain many, many, many subgroups, and of course, the individual is the smallest and most significant subgroup of all.
2: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
3: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still-live-in-two-parent-families
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Huh. So you can make a husky act like a basset hound in terms of general laid-backness and temperament with a single gene tweak?
Respectfully, I doubt this. Can you link any sources to this effect?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
How much IQ would you need to cheat your way through your entire MIT education, I wonder?
My own knowledge of MIT is rudimentary, but I remember it having a strong focus on student trust and honor from looking into the Aaron Swartz fiasco. And it appears that the story of Sam was finding and exploiting high-trust environments where not even bare due-diligence against adversarial actors was being done.
Am I wrong about this? Does MIT gleefully count coup against attempted cheaters? Is there a high-publicity case of a student turning in their roommate for cheating, or a professor being recognized for diligence in uncovering a novel cheating method and bringing it to the attention of all and sundry?
Again, I assume that he needs to have reached a basic minimum to cheat competently; I'll qualify him with "probably smart, with no verys". But nothing I've seen qualifies him as one of the STEM cognitive elite other than some certifications, and in current year, I do not trust any certifiers.
The "Sam is one of the cognitive elite" narrative appears to rest on three pillars; FTX itself (now distinctly counterevidence), his job and educational history (which I don't trust at all without a deeper dive), his accidents of dress and hobby (taking interest in math, logic, debate, and LoL). For myself, I find a missing pillar; I would expect a STEMLord to need to sharpen themselves against the unyielding whetstone of reality to achieve mastery. It certainly could be that Sam was a technical genius who focused all of his productive energies on his set-up for FTX (and then growing FTX), and that he judged a better expected return from laser-like focus on that than a model rocket hobby or a few hundred Project Euler solutions. But absent any hard evidence of such, I consider that Sam could be either a cheat, a liar, and a fraud who is also a brilliant technical mind, or simply a cheat, a liar, and a fraud, and as such do not multiple entities (or properties, I guess).
And, again, if you have evidence that it would be wildly unlikely for MIT to let a cheat, a fraud, and a liar through its programs, I'd love to hear it.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Do you have some numbers here to back this up? It would be great grounding point if you could put a dollar figure to, for instance, how much poorer your Jewish parents would need to be than a black couple for you to have the same expected educational and crime outcomes as said couple's hypothetical child.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.
I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.
Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?
Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
HBD is an answer to the question "Why do different races have persistent group outcomes?". I was asking a different question; specifically, "Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"
I mean, the answer might be "Claiming anti-black discrimination explains all group outcomes is a matter of Wokist doctrine solely, and no one ever advanced the argument in good faith, and its common presence simply indicates how far public discourse has fallen.", but I figured I should at least ask people to take stabs at the argument first.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
My own personal answer is red, for the general reasons delineated below.
For the people who choose blue: does the presence of this vigorous debate change your opinions any? I know that while my first thought was red, the fact that this has become a thing, and that there is no obvious common consensus, is more than enough to permanently cement me on Team Red. How much baseline expectation of people picking red no matter what do you need before your choice comes down to "Everyone who picks blue dies, which includes me." and "Everyone who picks blue dies, which doesn't include me?"
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I do not think that you claimed that we had factual equality in good faith. I do not think that you actually believe that hate crimes committed by black people are given the same degree of attention and seriousness as hate crimes committed against black people (despite the relative numbers and severity of these two categories), and I think that you are dismissing this claim as being in bad faith in bad faith yourself.
Can you tell us what would convince you that there is not, in fact, equal treatment of black and nonblack criminal behavior? If you were given another similar incident, or another five, or another dozen? How about if you were shown a statistical gap between the amount black people were prosecuted as a group and the amount of crimes that they committed?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
For me, it's just parsimony. I have no faith in colleges in general any more, and Sam has demonstrated his ability to manipulate elite institutions, and is also a goober. It could be that he is high-IQ and a goober, or that he's a goober all around and simply bamboozled MIT the same way he did a bunch of others - or it might be that he simply had a lucky interpersonal-connection 'in' to MIT that would have worked whether his boiling-hot IQ was measured in C or F.
I also think it's probably fairly unlikely that we'll get hard data either way, especially now, given the extended time that's passed from any potential objective-ish evaluations like AP exams or SATs. Also, nowadays, it would be trivial for someone of his resources to game a few slightly-harder-to-fake signals, like a ghostwritten StackOverflow profile and some boilerplate personal projects on a GitHub account.
But given the sheer stupidity and utter agnosticism towards the very idea of personal consequences he has displayed so far, I feel like I can safely say he's probably real dumb, in the classic sense, excepting for his ability to lie and manipulate people (which, in fairness, is a non-trivial skill, but also one not necessarily interacting with deep math, science, and programming geekery). I predict that no actual evidence of Sam doing anything difficult and valuable with anything not vulnerable to social pressure, where the results can be verified (meaning mostly math or programming, since those are things I feel I could verify myself) will be found. I am not super-invested in this theory, and I happily admit this is purely a balance-of-probabilities as I see it; I'd be delighted for someone to turn up, e.g., a deeper dive into Sam's LoL rankings, if nothing more objective can be found.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
If historical discrimination was the primary driver of group outcomes, then we could look at two groups which had suffered similarly, and confidently predict that they have similar outcomes relative to an undiscriminated-against control group. This is not the case; you can suffer historic discrimination and be either wildly above-mean in outcomes, or distinctly below-mean in outcomes. (And, of course, you can as an individual be in the above-mean group and fail hard, or in the below-mean group and succeed hugely.)
Because discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes and can in fact lead to greater outcomes, it cannot be the primary driver. At least, that's how I'm understanding the term; if you have a different understanding, please feel free to elaborate. Or alternately, if you want to claim that Jewish and Asian overperformance in the face of discrimination is a historic fluke specific to a place and time, reminiscent to a legless man winning a marathon due to a series of freak coincidences (while having functioning legs is still generally the primary driver of winning footraces) and that we should expect to see Asians and Jews with comparable outcomes to American blacks in other areas and times, feel free to make that case as well.
RobertLiguori
2mo ago
I mean, there is such a requirement for me to engage with the show. If it is the actual case that there are no more real laws any more and the only actual crime is for the system to rate you 100+ against its own internal criteria, then yeah, it's a crime oracle, and it says nothing new or interesting.
Now, with that being said, I think that we would absolutely get some horrible "We can measure X, so let's write laws against X instead of against what is actually fair and just." Goodhart bullshit if we started implementing the early phases of Sybil, but you still need an actual code of laws to compare those to. As I said above, we've got "What if it was illegal to fail a vibe check?" at home, and it's not novel to me that you can say "The Vibe of that person is white/capitalist/monarchist/>100 arbitrary bullshit number I just made up., get 'im!"
RobertLiguori
2mo ago
Funny you say this, as this was, almost word for for, the reason the director of the factory gave for obstructing the investigation. One thing to keep in mind is that crime management is not the only task of the Sybil System, it manages all of society. It's not even clear how much power politicians have, and it's heavily implied they're just a human face for the system. So if it's the system that decided it needs drones from the factory, doesn't it stand to reason that it might tolerate a bit of harrasment to keep the productivity up?
Because at that point it's not an oracular system, it's an agentic one (a tyrant with extra steps). A system that lies in pursuit of a given goal is not an oracle (or at least, not a useful oracle), and if it would lie to cover its manager (just as the manager lied to cover his subordinates), then how can you trust that it's actually measuring economic output correctly?
The law is legible. The law is codified, tested with precedent, and those precedents recorded. And it is exactly because in the real world, it is frequently the case that legal systems beclown themselves and accept justifications like the manager's (for the friends of the system) while punishing those opposed to the system for rights that are written in bare ink on paper, undeniable yet denied, that I think I have so little patience for the show as presented. It's not new, original, or thought-provoking to ask "But what if the legal system ran purely on AI and vibes?", because, well, look at what we've got. Because I could predict what someone in that position would say, to put the "It's for the greater good!" blanket over themselves, since I have heard that excuse and that story many times before...and because I'm more than a little disappointed I didn't get an author willing to actually sit down and think about what a crime (and thus, a criminal) actually was.
No, the reasoning wasn't good enough. If you want people to respond to moderation, you need to give specific feedback. "This is not what we're looking for." is not remotely specific.
Also, since it's perfectly obvious, can you tell us exactly how you were sure that this was a trollish shit-stirrer and not a terse poster asking a question in good faith? Since it's obvious, it should be no trouble, to both cjet79 or you, to say what exactly was obvious about it and how apparently-similar posts that aren't by trollish shit-stirrers are clearly so instead.
Look, you're the mods. You make judgement calls, and our continued presence on this site is evidence that we respect those judgement calls at least enough not to throw our hands up and storm off collectively. But please recognize when you are making those judgement calls and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next." If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post and, well, obviously do not find it obvious what is going on, then perhaps it is not actually obvious.
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