ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1yr ago
I mean, obviously there's a lot of schadenfreude to be had by conservatives and anti-wokes over demands that political beliefs be respected.
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences! If you don't like it, get your own platform!" Musk purchases Twitter. "...please don't punish us for our political speech."
Sorry, had to get my daily dose of schadenfreude.
For what it's worth, principled commitment to freedom of speech (of the thick, not thin, variety) has never really helped anyone. Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms. Those Twitter employees on the chopping block would be in no better a place even if they had advocated for a genuinely free platform.
Yeah, they're not particularly hard and not intended to be; the goal is to just see if someone is a competent coder, not a genius. I still only ended up giving a LH or higher recommendation to ~20% of people.
In some ways going for the best and brightest would be disadvantageous; they'd get bored wiring protos and updating config files all day. The main things selected for are competence, willingness to do some bare minimum of work, and compliance/desire not to rock the boat too much. Which probably makes sense.
ThenElection
4mo ago
since the level of pre-meditation and personal desire makes it qualitatively different to say, treating someone who tried to commit suicide because of mental illness.
Isn't something like nullification a pretty solid indicator of mental illness? FWIW I agree that we should give more sympathy/pity to people who attempt suicide, but I have a hard time identifying the difference.
Maybe the usually higher level of pre-meditation and planning plays a role, but I'd still sympathize more with someone who planned a suicide attempt over months than someone who planned and received a nullification over the course of a day or two.
ThenElection
8mo ago
besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing
It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.
Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.
Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).
Curious if anyone has other explanations.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan?
One of the biggest limitations China has is a dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; if those are cut off sufficiently, any invasion of Taiwan is stillborn (and Xi runs the risk of his head ending up on a pike). Russia (and areas in Central Asia in which it has a lot of influence) is a very important backstop; with Malacca closed off, land-based imports of oil would still allow China to wage a war on the scale of a couple years instead of months. Russia offering a credible promise not to export fossil fuels to China would be worth a lot, if it were possible.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Socrates was a pederast, at least as suggested by Plato. And Plato himself seems to have been ambivalent toward pederasty, at least in his earlier works. Shall we toss them out too? What about Turing, whose castration followed an inappropriate relationship with a teenager?
ThenElection
1yr ago
China's reliance on imports of food and oil are vulnerable to a tit-for-tat retaliation from the West.
True, but Taiwan is even more dependent on those things and vulnerable to economic coercion. And much of the world is dependent on Chinese trade: South Korea's and Japan's supply chains are deeply rooted in China, and a blockade of China would send them into spiraling into depression. (Making the blockade leakier helps them, but also defeats the purpose.) If it came to some kind of long-lived stalemate, there would be a lot of pressure to wrap things up, even on terms favorable to China.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Any job loss is easily negated by the creation of new, unforeseen jobs as well as more total jobs as the economy grows.
There's no reason that a destroyed job will always create one or more new jobs. Take it to the limit: suppose we invent a benevolent God AI that is capable of all the information processing that humans are and more for cheaper; there'd be no need for jobs, at least once we get embodied agents of the God AI. And we don't need that extreme a limit, so long as the marginal productivity of an additional worker is less than the additional cost (not just direct salary and benefits but also additional organizational complexity/informational bottlenecks) of hiring them.
Bullshit jobs (gotta get five human reviewers on this TPS report, even if they don't add any value) will exist for awhile, but that's just our social institutions taking a while to catch up with reality.
ThenElection
1yr ago
As another aspect, men typically have to make multiple approaches for a single success. If only 20% of women have the extreme negative reaction described, that amounts to a significant number of experiences that, to men on the sensitive side of things, are traumatic. Those experiences will play an outsized role in the mental universe of those men and make them overstate how ubiquitous they are.
Awkward approaches are bad and should be reduced as much as possible for the benefit of everyone involved, but they're also correctable and learning is possible with only a slight negative reinforcement. Rhetorically claiming they're rape-adjacent, on the other hand, drives men to extreme positions. Heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room, while heterosexual women have the obligation to respond commensurate with the offense to allow that learning to happen. The issue is that, although the large majority of people of both genders follow this, defectors on both sides make it an unsustainable system.
I watched the first episode last night to have a more informed take on it. I don't care about the deviations from lore, and the casting choices don't bother me. It's pretty.
The big issue is that... it's boring. Aside from Galadriel, all the characters are completely flat, and there's nothing that makes me want to keep watching. It's probably unfair to compare it to E1 GoT, but it's weak compared to HoD or even WoT. My GF (who has watched the Peter Jackson films half a dozen times but has no other connection to Tolkien or fantasy lit) checked out and went to bed halfway through. I persevered but won't be watching further episodes. I'd probably get more out of generating hobbit images on Stable Diffusion for hours.
ThenElection
5mo ago
If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem.
At a party last week, I was chatting with a liberal couple whose kid will be starting public high school in a couple years. The place I live uses a lottery system: you can end up with your kid assigned to any school in the city, many of which are bad. I asked, what if you end up with a bad (academically failing, unsafe) school? Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.
I can get this mindset as a cope, if you don't have resources. But they do have resources and could easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools. My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."
ThenElection
6mo ago
I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.
Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.
the ability of a society to reduce the risk of death from childbirth is precisely the type of thing that is meant by "development"
And what of the ability of society to reduce the risk from male-specific pathologies? Pregnancy is, of course, even more absolute and immutable than any other biological differences men have, and yet we can (and should!) penalize countries that have a high mother mortality during childbirth, not correct it out of the statistics by omitting women who die during childbirth from calculations of female lifespan.
And, we have some idea of how big the difference is; for example, it seems to have been about 5 years in the US for decades
As I mention elsewhere, people in the top 1% in the US have a gap of 1.5 years. Entire countries have a gap of 3 years. And gender-based discrimination hasn't been eliminated in any of those groups.
In contrast, income differences afaik have not reached a steady state for decades.
In fact, the income gap in the US has been stable for at least two decades. See https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-enduring-grip-of-the-gender-pay-gap/. So, if we really want to go with stable differences as the measure for natural state of the world, we should assume a ~20% pay gap as parity.
ThenElection
2mo ago
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
I have no idea if the particular woman in the example above actually faced unfairness or not (she probably has; at some point we all have). But I do know she'd be in a better position, financially and psychologically, if she spent less time introspecting about how mean and terrible and unjust the world is to her and more time embracing her agency.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Question for the Motte:
What are your priors for whether an accusation is true or false, particularly with regard to the status of the man? Most people in practice seem to drop the "believe all women" pretense when the male status is high enough (see the accusations against Biden and Clinton), and that makes sense. Absent strong corroborating evidence, there's a point of public renown where there's enough benefit and enough bad actors who know about your existence that unverifiable false accusations will eventually outnumber unverifiable true accusations.
How far does this extend all the way down the status pole, though? To well-known video game journalists? To line level managers at a F500? To a coworker at a Walmart? To a homeless dude? And how does this interact with the status of the woman involved?
ThenElection
1yr ago
When and where does comparative advantage break down? It's not some mathematical certainty that all interacting entities inevitably must abide by; horses used to exchange their labor for food and shelter, and as technology progressed and humans improved their capital edge, they didn't increasingly specialize into their production of horsepower. Instead they (mostly) got turned to glue, though a minority of the luckier ones shifted into entertainment for the rich.
Keeping some assets around has costs, and arranging them in productive ways also has costs, which can conceivably outrun any potential profits from arranging them even in an optimal way.
One hypothesis is that it's due to the allegations of sexual abuse from his sister. But she made them a relative aeon ago, they didn't gain traction, and this isn't the kind of departure you'd see from that. Plus, another employee/board member was removed.
My guess is fraud or IP theft.
ThenElection
7mo ago
As noted previously, the propensity to get murdered or die in accidents is part of the biology of being a young male.
The propensity to die in childbirth is part of the biology of being a female. If we make social choices that result in high murder and accident rates that disproportionately affect men, then we as a society have a gender inequitable social choices, every bit as much as if we made social choices that resulted in more deaths during pregnancy among women.
But the index can't have a different adjustment for every country, so it tries to come up with a global average.
If every country has a different "natural" gap in lifespans between men and women, why have it as part of the index at all? The only meaningful metric would be the difference between actual gap per country and natural gap per country, so you'd need an adjustment term for every country regardless. Assuming a universal, constant 5 year natural gap adds zero information over a universal, constant 0 year gap (or, for that matter, a 10 year gap, or 20 year gap, etc.); it just benefits those countries whose actual gap is close to the constant at the expense of those that happen to be far from the constant.
So, it does not seem that the income gap has been stable for 20 years.
A fair point.
There are obviously systems that would select more strongly for IQ than mile time, like test scores and GPA. But that's not our current system: people are first binned into categories based on their race, and only then do test scores and GPA come into play. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if the mile time metric would manage to better select for IQ, even without the more direct signals from GPA and test scores, because it would drop the binning step. An auxiliary hypothesis needed for this to work is the mile time would still be correlated with IQ, with the delta between it and better measures being smaller than what's introduced by the binning.
There are diligence, ability to cheat, and family income effects that would be captured by mile times, which are themselves positively correlated with IQ.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I suppose a variation of the framing would be to compare whether you'd judge a transwoman more harshly than a natal female who just took on a hotter synth female body.
You can still imagine there's just something off about someone who really didn't like their birth sex, in a way that's deeper or more problematic than someone who just wants to look hotter. But I'd want to see evidence of that (in that hypothetical world). Would gender swappers generally have worse outcomes or behavioral patterns than regular people?
ThenElection
1yr ago
What's the long run? The Manchus ruled over China for centuries, through integrating with and co-opting majority power structures. Same story with the Mughals over a Hindu-majority population.
And though they were repressive by modern standards, given the standards at the time, their repression was in line with what every government did to survive.
Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
ThenElection
3mo ago
From the original Vice article:
The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties. Ten percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google's own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document.
So, it's a bit hard to parse without the actual numbers, but it appears that of 36 security incidents, 31 (86%) were Google employees leaking confidential corporate information (ironically, including the document leaked to the Vice reporter). 4 of them were misuse of systems (which includes but is not limited to accessing user or employee data). This is actually pretty amazing, considering how many Google employees there are and the scale of data that Google collects. You might say "well, that's how many were caught," but it's very likely the majority of cases are caught (all major systems at Google have every user data access logged and audited, though I suppose some minor systems that no one uses might not have that set up).
I think it's more productive to imagine who Gavin Newsom might have appointed, given political constraints and his national ambitions.
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They have to be a solid Democrat. This is uninteresting and would apply just as much to a Republican appointing a replacement for a Republican Senator.
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They can't be someone with ambitions for the seat. This is a bit less obvious, but choosing a particular candidate for the seat gives them a substantial advantage against rivals for the seat and generates bad blood.
2a) They can't be someone who plausibly would have ambitions for the seat. Once appointed, the Senator can very well say "actually I am going to run," which they will if it's best for their political ambitions. There'd be a bloody primary, but the appointee would know that should they win, everyone will rally around them (exact calculations complicated by California's jungle primary system). Newsom, on the other hand, has to deal with the fallout of causing a nasty, bloody primary.
So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions. Within those constraints, why not choose the person who earns you the most diversity points? And that's how you land on Butler. The fact that she's an out-of-state apparatchik is a plus in that constraint context, if anything.
My personal preference, for what it's worth, would have been James Sauls, Feinstein's Chief of Staff. Satisfies all the constraints and provides continuity of service in the meantime.
What do you imagine to be the tradeoffs of your plan?
What I anticipate if it were implemented: huge numbers of men swearing off financial responsibility for the kids they father out of wedlock. Instead of them paying for the upkeep of kids, the responsibility switches to the government. Which is to say, taxpayers: people who never have sex, people who have sex responsibly and don't have kids, and people who have kids and take responsibility for them. The only people to benefit from financial abortions are men who have lots of irresponsible sex, with more irresponsible sex being better rewarded.
That's not to say family courts are great or can't be improved, but the government being involved in intimate disputes will always result in some people getting screwed, because it doesn't have the capability to get full visibility into the situation.
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