RobertLiguori
No bio...
User ID: 165
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by a modern food environment? As far as I know, fatness isn't evenly distributed across populations, and it's not that hard to find subgroups and cultures with much less obesity than we observe as the baseline in America.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.
You are wrong here three ways, I think. First, even if we assume that only poverty, violence (which came from where, I wonder?), and average age are the only factors that predict criminality, you can't know someone's upbringing, income level, and actual age just by looking at them for a moment. You can know their race. And if it just so happens that there's so much poverty, violence, and demographic distortion in the black community that they do 60% of the murdering, then no, the stats don't lie, you should avoid black people, because when you see black skin you see an indicator of possible violence.
Second, you are simply directly wrong. Go ahead, dig up the stats of people of various races by income level. Let's look at whether the generation of Jews immediately after the holocaust jumped up to black-like levels of violence and criminality. Compare the actual cohorts by age and sex, and show me what those stats look like. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, any more than being drunk makes you get into traffic accidents. Some people can drive drunk just fine, and some people who are perfectly sober kill themselves and others, and you can absolutely find someone who is a better driver drunk that most people are sober. But just like the population of drunk people are much worse drivers overall, the population of black people is much more criminal overall.
Black people are in poverty not because they are discriminated against, but because they're black (and everything that entails on the collective level), just like Jewish people are prospering not because of the protocols of their Zionish elders, but because they're Jewish. The violence in their upbringing is because they are raised by and around other black people, who do that violence, because they are black. They are disproportionately young because they have higher death rates, due both to violence and to poor health outcomes, frequently caused by poor diet and general health maintenance, because they are black.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
So, presumably, if we, the non-leaders of Harvard and Yale believe in not being racist, we should be the ones to tear the schools to the ground, and disclaim their elite leanings as self-serving sophistry.
Also, can you elaborate on the superiority of Harvard students that you experienced? It sounds like that if you instead sampled top-academic Jews in the last century, and Asians in this century, you'd find better academics; if they weren't better than the Harvard crop, then the Harvard crop wouldn't need to change the rules.
My personal instinct is that it may be that the Harvard brand is about baffling people with bullshit over actually producing quality scholarship; I can point to the fact that they are doing bald-faced lying about the affirmative action as evidence in favor of bullshit and against good scholarship. Is there a way that you can confirm your impression? How do you know that you have not been baffled with bullshit yourself and that the amazing Harvard scholars are actually as amazing as you think?
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within?
People don't love the old IPs because of the bits that are IPable. Indy's whip is cool and distinctive, but people don't love every character that uses a whip like Indy as much as Indy, because the movies are a whole bunch of skillful performances crafted by a distinct vision, and that's what people loved; the whip and hat were just immediately-identifyable bits of that. And when a licensed IP holder puts out less effort than a blatant-ripoff hopefully-confuse-someone-on-the-Netflix-screen schlockfest as their production strategy, why would anyone want to see a movie by the IP holder?
If a pie brand that people love adds a blueberry pie to their apple and pear pie lineup, then people will probably buy the blueberry pie. But if the pie company changes and slowly begins shrinking portions and adulterating their most expensive ingredients, then the goodwill of the brand will fade. And if the company just starts selling you kale salads with the pie logo on, then not only will people who like pie and got invested with the company because they made good pie not buy them (or at least, not buy them twice), then the pie brand will quickly become worthless, as people who like pie recognize the brand as the opposite of a symbol of quality.
It just used to be the case that we could assume that most piemakers at least had on their priority list of making good pies as part of their business. We can't any more.
RobertLiguori
1yr 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
1yr ago
No it isn't. The correct response to DefectBot is to defect forever. Tit for Tat with possible forgiveness is a strategy that can interrupt mis-inputs ruining communication between otherwise-cooperative people. If you cooperate three times in a row and your enemy defects three times in a row, then they've proven who they are and you can mark them down as "Always Defect" and not a good agent allied with you that had a technical glitch.
Or, to take this out of the game layer, strike 1 was the initial campaign, strike 2 was the weak-ass 'wait for this to blow over' and not immediately and publicly firing the execs in question, and strike 3 was not immediately and clearly expressing how they had screwed up in language comprehensible to their core audience. It was revealed that Bud Lite's makers are fundamentally opposed to the values of its mean consumer; this is the result, and should be the result.
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
If the claim is "Look at this terrible thing that high-class Chinese people did to their children; they crippled their bodies for social fashion.", we can point to the whole trans-grooming brouhaha in the west as a comparison. People are social, and fucked-up societies can and will override the instincts of parents and lay their children on the offer of their particular Moloch; this does not appear to be a race-specific trait, as far as I can tell.
And we can look at a lot of other individual instances of moral atrocity in peoples who don't seem to do that sort of thing super-regularly; we've got the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War off the top of my head. And while I consider that an existence proof against people claiming that the Spanish are saints, I don't think it proves much other than that.
As for the aesthetics, I will point out the degree to which Michael Bay and James Cameron have done really well in China with their movies. I mean, I don't really like the Bayformers aesthetic, but clearly a lot of my fellow Caucasians do, and so do a lot of the Chinese, apparently.
Look, if you want to make an argument here, why not get some actual stats? What do Chinese charity rates look like, both in the mainland and across other nations? How do you see the behavior of Chinese people changing from first, second, and nth-generation immigrants? What are your thoughts on popular Chinese media? Do you have any opinions on the popularity of cultivation novels and stories?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Hey, welcome to TheMotte.
Can you elaborate on why you think that removing honors classes will be super-effective? Can you point to a similar strategy in history that worked well?
Because I think of the original affirmative action policies put in place to limit the number of Jews from higher education at elite universities around the turn of the 20th century, and I note that Jewish advantage in higher education remained durable through those policies.
I think you might want to start by proving that the difference in racial make-up in higher-education in cognitively difficult classes, like math and physics and so on, is actually based in bias, and not in accurately reflecting racial differences in intelligence. You can do this by finding a measure of capacity in these topics that isn't biased, like double-blinded standardized tests or even just lifetime achievement of a racial group in a field across history, and seeing if that measure is reflected uniformly across racial groups.
Let's get some consensus on where north actually is before we call the compass pointing not where we expected it to biased.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Thanks and much appreciated.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
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.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
This is not what the community is looking for in moderation. Do better.
For example, better moderation would look like "This is not what we are looking for in a top-level post. We are looking for comments with features X and Y, and without Z, and your comment (while having X) has not enough Y and too much Z."
Also, as the comment reads as not at all antagonistic to me, you should really specify what exactly in it you find antagonistic. As it is, the moderation looks capricious and tells me nothing at all about what I should post to avoid a similar ban.
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
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
You're essentially describing a society without sex, composed of organisms so far divorced from humanity as we understand and experience it that I have no 'issues' with it, in the same way I have no issues with the way eusocial insects reproduce.
In our world, it is fundamentally impossible to change your sex quickly, cheaply, and painlessly because sex is not a field set in a cosmic database, it's a very strongly bimodal cluster of traits. Male and Female are the names we give to two distinct ways of being, which affect your biology, mentality, and socialization, and which in turn influence how you grow up, and who you are. If I had been female in my early childhood and teen years, I'd have had vastly different experiences than I did, in addition to physically and mentally developing in the specific testosterone-driven ways I did. And even if you can pretend that you could meaningfully simulate who I would have been if an identical-to-early-me double-X-bearing gamete had been implanted, there is no way you can say what I would and would not have done differently in my life, and you absolutely can't say what everyone else would have done.
If you live in a society with gender and gender roles, you cannot change sex as easily as you change clothes, because part of gender and gender roles is the ongoing process of socialization and gender-specific experiences which further define who you are. In the above-described world, sex doesn't exist any more than "People wearing T-shirts" exists as a meaningful category. In a virtual world, where biology is cosmetic only and doesn't drive meaningful outcomes, you can swap sex with the push of a button, because sex only means what your avatar presents as.
I'd also like to bring up another question, which I agree is considerably more inflammatory than yours, but I feel shows you where some people are in terms of fighting the hypothetical. It's the year 2022. People can quickly, cheaply, and painlessly change their race. There are no long-term side effects of the paperwork. If that were the case, would you have a problem with trans-black people using the N-word (or, to be specific, would you have more of a problem with it than cis-black people using it)?
The answer to this question is not strictly relevant; what I'm trying to demonstrate here is that some hypotheticals are kind of inherently suspicious. If someone asks "If hypothetically <the reason for this thing we've agreed is bad isn't true> were different, would not be bad?", and they don't have an actual strong hypothetical other than the bad thing not being bad, then their question is vacuous, and it is likely that the asker is not asking in good faith, but instead is just trying to thinking of the bad thing as not that bad. In the specific case of gender transition, we've seen what that bad thing looks like when we put trans-female prisoners in prisons with cis-female prisoners; the reason that we sex-segregate prisons rears its head, and we see that if we want to avoid rape and pregnancy in prison, we should treat trans-female and cis-male the same way. And, in the hypothetical universe you mention, if we can look at the behaviors of the people who take the pill, and note that people who were natally male consistently act differently than people who were natally born female and both differ from the vat-born, then it makes absolute sense to discriminate based on birth sex and type, no matter how well the trans individuals in that society pass.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I think the closest thing to a justification would be a bare-faced assertion of a veritable asteroid shower of Russel's Teapots of trans individuals. If you take it on faith that there are innumerable trans people who pass without fanfare in their day to day life, then you can get to the above position.
Of course, you can only hold to that position not only by asserting the existence of the many perfectly stealth trans individuals, but by censoring both the first-hand reports of people who can clearly see that male and female are distinct clusters, and that there are several key distinctions (several of which you mention). But again, if you take it on faith that there are a horde of trans passing people, then people who say they can tell the difference can only be lying, as must be the various medical literature, and likewise any experiments anyone poses which show how poorly a sample of trans people pass in person must be poorly-constructed and malicious.
I think you can end up with similar justifications if you posit any kind of holy doctrine and any kind of powerful Satanic deceiver figure. If you have a revealed truth and a way to dismiss any claims that would challenge that truth, you can justify any excesses the revealed truth claims.
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
Can you demonstrate this? I admit, I'm not seeing how making selection criteria harder would decrease the likelihood of cheating. I mean, in the extreme case, if you make a test that only one billionth of humanity could pass fairly, then the odds that any given person passed the test fairly (when there are great reputational and financial rewards for passing the test, no deep culture of investigating and calling out cheaters, and strong incentives to have everyone passively trust the process and not assume cheating as a default possibility) are fairly low.
Again, I'm not an expert on MIT's admission methods, but if, e.g., they hold their own proctored and blind-graded exam for all students they are considering admitting, I'd definitely update in the direction of considering MIT more reliable. But given that my default assumption about colleges (which is that they will cheerfully drop admissions standards into the ground to accept those of their favored demographics, and raise the standards on the unfavored demographics to compensate), I simply do not believe that MIT is honestly selecting students according to fair criteria.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Fair; I am operating entirely off of a few article summaries which specifically mentioned that he traded crypto at Jane Street, and if there is evidence that Jane Street wasn't trading crypto at the time, I certainly don't have either any specialist knowledge of Jane Street or notable faith in the article summaries.
The point remains, however; if my (hypothetical) investment manager was bragging to me about how much money he made with Bernie Madoff, I would seek another investment manager, even if said investment manager decried buying into the Ponzi scheme specifically and even if Bernie had other legitimate investments. It doesn't matter if they came out ahead (plus, I, being a suspicious bastard, would figure that a smart investment manager would make damn sure to conceal the fact that they lost money by not doing basic due diligence on Bernie's fund if they did lose money in it); no matter the outcome, my own trust in someone who put money down on Bernie would go inexorably down.
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
Did he? I honestly don't know. Has anyone done a post-fall post-mortem deep dive on SBF's time in Jane Street?
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.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
I feel like there's a point around good toupees here; it could be that I've been bamboozled by dozens of low-IQ people and just never though to check.
As for my boiling comment, I was making a joke along the lines of room-temperature IQ, in that 212 (F) and 100 (C) are both boiling depending on your measure. And, to be clear, I don't think that SBF is significantly below average, and assume he's between 107 - 115 IQ generally just based on his heritage.
But I put no faith in his words, his presentation of himself, and any evaluation by someone who would either gain by reporting him smarter or be put at risk of retaliation by reporting him dumber as indicators of his smartness. I think that his first talent is shamelessness, and his second is creativity in exploiting trust, and his third is in presentation to limit the number of people who think to check on his first two strengths, and while he could also be quite smart at the shape-rotate-y stuff (and is probably not blisteringly incompetent at it), I see at present absolutely no reason to assume that SBF is "really really good at STEM/maths".
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.
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?"
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