TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
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User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
I also lost a lot of respect for Scott! It sucks. I definitely have some ressentiment for him and Caplan because they're both rich famous writers, and while I don't put a TON of effort in my blog, it would be nice to be rich and famous hah.
Ultimately though I think this is the classic problem with a lot of rationalists, that we were talking about with the poly stuff earlier last week. They are extremely privileged in all sorts of ways, and go on to assume that everyone else is just as privileged or idiosyncratic. They basically just have a very poor theory of mind for even other rationalists a standard deviation closer to normal than they are, let alone an actually "normal" person.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Great counterpoints! The abuses of the medical system in the past were pretty horrific now that I think of it. The stuff we have today isn't great but could definitely be worse.
TheDag
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2mo ago
This is boo outgroup.
Conservatives are my ingroup bud. I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian, lol. I don't know about Matt Walsh but in my experience Shapiro is extremely nasty and judgmental in person, which I see as hypocritical if he actual follows Christ.
Wait isn't he Jewish anyway?
TheDag
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2mo ago
I don’t think it’s magic dirt, I just think culture has strong effects and the founding culture of a place influences future culture there quite a bit.
TheDag
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5mo ago
Update on the continuing dramatic saga of DOGE: apparently the Department of Education no longer exists.
Now this could be a sensationalist media headline, but if not I am shocked that the DOGE team and Trump's cadre et al are going this hard, this fast. They must basically be saying they're going to get a ton of legal challenges anyway, so they might as well do as much as possible and keep up the momentum, destroying everything before the dust clears. It's a bold strategy, and frankly as a spectator it's incredibly exciting, I must admit!
Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.
In other related news, FEMA send $59 Million dollars to house immigrants in luxury hotels in NYC last week, and Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.
TheDag
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2mo ago
I dont think Musk’s side has very many supporters in this theoretical breakdown.
TheDag
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5mo ago
Neuralink has caused a bit of a storm on X, taking off after claiming that three humans have what they call "Telepathy":
Today, there are three people with Telepathy: Noland, Alex, and Brad.
All three individuals are unable to move their arms and legs—Noland and Alex due to spinal cord injury (SCI) and Brad due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They each volunteered to participate in Neuralink’s PRIME Study,* a clinical trial to demonstrate that the Link is safe and useful in the daily lives of people living with paralysis.
Combined, the PRIME Study participants have now had their Links implanted for over 670 days and used Telepathy for over 4,900 hours. These hours encompass use during scheduled research sessions with the Neuralink team and independent use for everyday activities. Independent use indicates how helpful the Link is for real-world applications and our progress towards our mission of restoring autonomy. Last month, participants used the Link independently for an average of 6.5 hours per day
Assuming this is all true and the kinks will be worked out relatively soon, this is... big news. Almost terrifyingly big news.
AI tends to suck in most of the oxygen around tech discourse, but I'd say, especially if LLMs continue to plateau, Neuralink could be as big or even bigger. Many AI maximalists argue, after all, that the only way humanity will be able to compete and keep up in a post-AGI world will be to join with machines and basically become cyborgs through technology like Neuralink.
Now I have to say, from a personal aesthetic and moral standpoint, I am close to revolted by this device. It's interesting and seems quite useful for paraplegics and the like, but the idea of a normal person "upgrading" their brain via this technology disturbs me greatly.
There are a number of major concerns I have, to summarize:
- The security/trust issue of allowing a company to have direct access to your brain
- Privacy issues with other people, hacking your Link and being able to see all of your thoughts, etc
- "Normal" people without Neuralinks being outcompeted by those willing to trade their humanity for technical competence
- LLMs and other AI systems being able to directly hijack human agents, and work through them
- Emotional and moral centers in the human brain being cut off and overridden completely by left-brained, "logical" thinking
Does this ring alarm bells for anyone else? I'd imagine @self_made_human and others on here are rubbing their hands together with glee, and I have to say I'd be similar a few years back. But at the moment I am, shall we say... concerned with these developments.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Ohhh this is the January fifth riot ok. Yeah that provided the context I needed thanks.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Anyway, I think Bryan and Scott suffer from the glaring many elites/intelligentsia have and don't even notice
The glaring what?
And yes, this seems correct but is making me sad. My own mom waited until she was 42 to give birth to me, which means she's already aged out of the phase where she can easily look after any kids we have on her own. Sucks.
That being said the lady's family is a little more spry but... have their own problems. Man this whole thing is scaring me off of having kids not gonna lie.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.
Also, I'm curious for your thoughts on the polyamory debate? I actually considered tagging you but didn't want to call you out hah.
TheDag
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3mo ago
Oh absolutely. I think its the #1 reason the academy has fallen apart over the last few decades. 50% of people should not be going into academia. At most it should be 15-20%, and even that is quite high imo.
If you make something less selective, it becomes much much harder to police for good behavior.
TheDag
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4mo ago
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage
Scientists and scientific progress shouldn't have played politics so hard. At this point it is nigh-impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff given the insane ideological bent of the universities, and the fact that they are leveraging their large amount of cultural and fiscal capital against one side of the political aisle.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
This is a straw man of the right that currently exists. Fundamentalist Christianity has been gutted in the U.S. and definitely does not hold much power in the current right wing administration. Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
5mo ago
I think the general harm is more of a human capital / social capital / cultural capital issue overall.
Mass immigration risks eroding the culture and trust that built so much wealth and dominated the world. That’s a bad thing if it does happen. It’s not guaranteed, but mass immigration of low skill and low IQ people is one way to get there.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
Yeah I agree in this instance it's pretty egregiously dumb.
TheDag
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4mo ago
After January 6, the Democrats focused their self-image around the idea of “procedure” and “doing things the right way”. This calcified to such an extent that anyone in a position of leadership is now incapable of forming and executing plans which do not conform with the collective PMC understanding of what is allowed or “proper”.
I think this is part of it, but I also think there is just a lack of physical courage among most people on the left (and people on the right, to be fair.)
I am genuinely not trying to caricature or strawman the left, but they do tend to attract a more effeminate, intellectual type of person as of late. Note that this CERTAINLY isn't true of the left historically, but seems to be the tendency today. Young men are at historic lows for the Democratic party, the group who tends to have the most physical aggression and willingness to go occupy a building or storm a castle. Combine this with the fact that physical courage seems to be dropping across the board, and you have people who simply aren't willing to put themselves at risk or take bold physical action in this way.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
I highly doubt the Republican party wants to actually lock up Congressmen, seems like this would be a huge waste of political capital. Well perhaps they want to, but they know it would be a foolish move strategically.
This seems like a bit of a paranoid fantasy from my perspective. If anything the Republicans have been far less willing to use lawfare against their opponents than the last Democratic president.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Ahh ok I see. Yeah thanks for this! I like to think I'm a good fit for marriage, but the tail risks definitely keep me awake at night. It sucks.
TheDag
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9mo ago
What really pisses me off is that the head of the DoT Pete Buttigieg is calling Elon Musk a conspiracy nut for claiming this, and dozens of other articles are calling it misinformation and 'blatant lies.'
And yet if you go to the Asheville regional website it literally says that no flights may land without prior permission.
I know at this point I shouldn't be shocked anymore by the blatant lies of the media, but it continues to baffle me how blatant and idiotic they are about it.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
China has a new AI system out taking the world by storm, Manus. It's an autonomous AI agent that, according to Forbes changes everything.
I've seen a LOT of hype so far about AI agents, but the claims from this one actually seem pretty impressive, if they are true. Forbes says:
For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn’t just rank candidates; it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross-references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision—complete with an Excel sheet it generated on its own. When given a vague command like “find me an apartment in San Francisco,” it goes beyond listing search results—it considers crime statistics, rental trends, even weather patterns, and delivers a shortlist of properties tailored to the user’s unstated preferences.
Manus uses the by now common "stack" of AI models, where there's a master-slave relationship between a head model that looks at the problem, and then sub models which are more specialized to go and do specific tasks. I can't quite tell from a quick search what the key breakthrough Manus made is, as my understanding is other agent AIs already have a similar set up. There is talk about asynch cloud work, but again, I didn't think that was an entirely new thing.
Either way, similar to the DeepSeek R1 reveal, there are a lot of breathless articles coming out about China "taking the lead" i the AI race. I agree that this is a concerning development for the U.S., given that we now have two Chinese labs that have seemingly joined the leading edge out of nowhere. Of course, it remains to be seen if this press blitz actually reflects seriously impressive new ground, or is just a good hype campaign.
Anyone who has used this or looked more into the details - what are your thoughts about Manus so far?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
I think the obvious answer is that it smacks of slavery.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Yeah I’m freshly Orthodox so still integrating into the community. I think it will come with time but not sure how much we have before kids becomes a bit harder. We’ll see.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Secondly, teenagers are not allowed to have relationships with each other. This is taken seriously, and there is much more effort put into this than into getting young people married when the time comes for that. The results for local marriage rates are predictable; the shift in social roles, especially in young men, does not happen as a result of wish casting by a third party. Obviously the young women have some share of the blame here but it is fair to discuss the two things separately.
How do you try and combat this for your own kids, if you homeschool?
Can you give me some context for this? I looked at the video and I have no idea what is going on.
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