ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
29d ago
Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite. And although journalists attempt to make hay of it occasionally (ew gross why is that nerd having orgies with recent high school graduates), most people shrug and look the other way.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Now that's a proposal I could see actually bumping the birth rate. Wish the CBO would estimate its cost, just so we have a sense of it. I'd be interesting in single-penalties that scale depending on the severity of the problem: if the birth rate is lower than target, add more single penalties; if it's higher, lower them. Otherwise the exact levels can easily under or overshoot the targets. The only cost is making tax planning more difficult for singles, which isn't even a negative with the goals of the plan.
You have a combination of direct and symbolic policies. If you wanted higher birth rates and had to choose either the direct or symbolic policies, which would you go for?
ThenElection
1mo ago
Curious about your objections. I used a low dosage to drop my BMI from 23 to 21, with minimal side effects. (Using sketchy shit imported from some UGL in China.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I'd be curious to know how much of the new funding would go to neutral research, and how much would go to particularly female-centric research. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for funding to go to making sure studies on hypertension also include women, but if it just goes to yet more breast cancer or birth control research (when men don't even have access to a birth control pill yet!), that would be biased.
Looking at how the order defines things...
The term “women’s health research” means research aimed at expanding knowledge of women’s health across their lifespans, which includes the study and analysis of conditions specific to women, conditions that disproportionately impact women, and conditions that affect women differently.
That doesn't make me optimistic, but we'll see.
ThenElection
1mo ago
If you or the other party doesn't own every inch of infra between the two of you, it's necessary. The switch to ubiquitous encryption happened right around the time Comcast was starting to MITM most connections with tracking scripts, and it was only a matter of time until they started injecting ads. (Which is one reason existing players were so gung ho on encryption--can't have someone else cutting into that income stream.)
Put the average UMC on top of a billion dollar inheritance, and most would be able to maintain it. But actually transitioning from UMC to ultra wealth always takes a combination of above average intelligence, hard work, and luck.
Should we care about the role of luck? I don't really: objectively, most members of the UMC have a lifestyle that would seem fantastical to the ultra wealthy of even a couple decades ago, and most of our attention should be on the underclass whose lives are in ruin (big screen TVs and cell phones aside).
What's interesting is that the UMC feels so deeply insecure about their position, which makes action for those truly in need much harder. They are terrified any misstep would send them tumbling into the underclass. A medical event, a recession, a unpopular posting on social media. So they self police relentlessly and do everything possible to distance themselves from that possibility, even at the cost of making escape from the underclass much harder.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Is this to imply that the corporation is effectively headless
Yep. Sundar's leadership right now is saying AI as many times as he can per minute, and this is the best he's ever done.
Google will exist in some form a decade from now, but, yeah, it will fail. The issue isn't lack of talent, money, or market position: Gemini is a solid response to ChatGPT, and Google should be able to leverage its existing weight to win. It won't be able to, because of institutional dysfunction.
ThenElection
1mo ago
There were probably a thousand men or so who took his advice to heart and improved their lives for it. So, he's almost certainly a net positive. I hope he gets his life together and can be happy with that small positive influence he's had.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's also worth noting the AFQT is not designed as an IQ test: at the upper extreme, as you might expect for a vocational test, its ability to predict IQ decreases. It's not made to measure fluid intelligence above 125 or so. See e.g. https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/2004-frey.pdf (figure 1A).
That study controls away the very thing it's supposed to be measuring.
A restatement of your point: the very reason the military uses the ASVAB is that it is highly predictive of success in career placement. It is silly to take an instrument explicitly designed to measure likelihood of success, control away success, and then claim it doesn't (as much) predict success after your controls.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Was JP ever really a TRP influencer? My sense was that, when he had his brief moment of being a Person, he was just a vaguely conservativish ersatz dad figure not really associated with the broader manosphere, let alone TRP. The media got a hate boner for him (was it the trans stuff?), and then manospherians rallied around him briefly, in a the-enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way. Then people forgot about him, because his main thing was "make your bed," and he got bored with being a Thought Leader when he realized benzos were more fun.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It all comes down to Sergey and Larry, IMO. They wanted to try lots of off the wall things with their newfound power and wealth without being subject to market discipline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (except to investors). One option would be to just start new companies, but that's a bit more complicated than just starting random projects within your existing company. So people were hired to enable those things, and the ads revenue not only continued but increased exponentially, so hiring continued.
Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Basically. EU leaders see AI as a marginal improvement instead of something transformational.
Robots will still take EU jobs. This law just makes sure they'll be Chinese (or, god willing, American) robots instead of European robots.
ThenElection
1mo ago
(I'm ever curious as to when an AI can write fiction in my style as well as I can, because then I'm going to fucking retire, but that day is not today. Best guess is 1-2 years.)
Shorter timeline than that. Playing with Gemini 1.5 a few weeks ago, I could upload an entire book (substantial ones, e.g. Perdido Street Station, Gravity's Rainbow), give it a basic plot skeleton of a new book, and prompt it to write a couple paragraphs in the style of the author, and it succeeds. There are still some prose issues, but you'd absolutely be able to tell exactly which author it's simulating (sometimes to the point of parody).
Overarching plot structure it's weaker at, though.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Last year, over 800 people died in San Francisco to overdose. Compare that to 56 homicides and 27 traffic deaths. Or, heck, the ~700 COVID deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021.
Addicts have a shockingly low lifespan. And fentanyl is the key component of their mortality: approximately nobody dies from crack or meth, the usual drugs of choice. Which isn't to say they're not damaging or that I don't want to see them off the streets, but fentanyl stands out as particularly evil.
ThenElection
1mo ago
As an alternative theory, fentanyl may be both an extremely pleasurable and extremely addictive substance that (desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.
That said, the people who are most hands-off on fentanyl proliferation do not appear to give one crap about the people suffering from addiction to it. It's decentralized MAID. Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.
A mechanism isn't really necessary, though: I'm happy to accept mysterious forces at work. But I do wonder how you would differentiate it from a "materialist" world.
I think you might be able to if you managed to successfully model a particular individual human being on some substrate where quantum effects played an even smaller role than they do in the human brain. If you could, that seems like quantum-mediated decision-making couldn't be playing a role, unless you somehow accidentally incorporated the causal influence of the soul of the person you're emulating into the model itself.
ETA: thinking about it a bit more, it would be very easy to accidentally incorporate the soul's causal influence, so you'd need to be very careful not to, even if you did a non-quantum-by-construction neuron-by-neuron emulation.
Materialism and determinism are orthogonal concepts, although popular proponents of one very often hold the other. See: quantum mechanics. Physicists are probably the single most materialist profession there is, and modern physics decidedly rejects strict determinism. (That said, there's a lingering dislike of that rejection, leading to all kinds of abstruse "interpretations" of scientific theories that try to bring something that looks like determinism, if you squint just right, back to science).
It's not clear how nondeterminism helps accounts of free will, though. Suppose you have two universes, one where quantum effects don't play a significant role in cognition and decision making (the one I would argue we live in) and another where random quantum fluctuations make me decide which coffee shop I'm going to this morning. I don't see myself as having any more free will in the latter world, and probably less.
Even unknown or unknowable things don't undermine materialism. Imagine someone designed an experiment that provided strong evidence that ESP existed, and we had no idea how to explain it. The thing is, there are countless things in the world that are mysterious, and ESP would rapidly get a ton of attention. Experimentalists would test it under different contexts (it only appears under heightened emotional states? Then figure out exactly which states. Does distance play a role in the strength of the ESP-effect? Etc), and theorists would come up with testable explanations (maybe physical models that are near isomorphic to each other somehow share causes and exchange psy-particles). Gradually we'd build a model that approximates what's really happening better than random guessing, under the constraints of economic cost and value of building that model. This is nothing new and is constantly happening.
Doesn't this indicate that materialism itself is vacuous, because it can explain everything? Yes, maybe.
ThenElection
2mo ago
It depends on if it's the presence of women that's civilizing, or competition for women. If it's the latter, less intense competition would lead to more brutish behavior.
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
2mo ago
I agree. But by the same token, too many men are falling into the same trap: "I'm mediocre because the world is biased against me, giving unfair preferences to everyone else."
Sociologically, one or neither (or both!) may be true. But if you embrace victimhood as part of your identity, you're dooming yourself.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Academia is many things, but I don't see people going for (and getting) professorships as slackers. They almost invariably are smart, hard working people who could be making well into the six figures or more in industry. (Note: this is for what I'll just call real fields.)
The big issue is that it's so astoundingly competitive to get any kind of professorship, let alone a desirable one, that intellectual conservatism reigns supreme. Going off on some tangent that has high potential but is unlikely to bear any fruit is just too risky.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?
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