ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
5hr ago
One difference is that the government intermediates the creation of value and the distribution of value. Humans evolved for personalist politics; tracking where the revenues come from that the government redistributes is beyond the majority of people. Instead, if something the government is doing helps you out, it's because of the Big Man (be it Obama or Trump), not the material organization of the economy.
ThenElection
6hr ago
Is the fix, then, to replace government spending $100k/year per person on homeless services with soup kitchens personally funded by AI oligarchs serving slop costing $100/year, with a big statue of Altman up front?
There is no one in San Francisco starving to death for lack of resources.
ThenElection
7hr ago
AI will be more meritorious than any human, though.
ThenElection
7hr ago
What exactly would the noblesse oblige be that the elite could exhibit that would satisfy the the hoi polloi? Massive public works projects? Donating ever increasing shares of their wealth to broken nonprofits that do nothing of value? Art museums? Wives who volunteer in soup kitchens?
ThenElection
7hr ago
Yeah, it's kinda depressing to realize that some of the most optimistic scenarios for AI will still result in a lot of human misery.
At some point, a Matrix style world where everyone is just dumped in a virtual reality simulator where they can each become a hero of their own tale switched from one of the most dystopian outcomes imaginable to one of the better ones.
ThenElection
8hr ago
I'm curious to know more about the shooter/would be arsonist, but this strikes me less as "I have a coherent theory of change" and more as "I am angry about my life and want to get vengeance on Sam Altman."
Sam is by far the highest profile leader of a frontier lab. He also unfortunately also has a bit of that Zuckerberg style alienating personality type; if someone starts waxing philosophical about dominating the light cone, it's going to be Altman. This draws all anti-AI activism toward him, even if it was Claude that took your job, not ChatGPT.
He also lives in a large, nice home in a relatively tony area; Amodei lives in a nondescript house in a shitty neighborhood. Someone fire bombing the latter would create more cognitive dissonance.
ThenElection
2d ago
Worth noting that more of your tax dollars are going to buy diapers and nursing for old people than those Tomahawks. You'd get more plaques for each bed year in a hospital you pay for.
ThenElection
4d ago
Iran will not charge some kind of unilateral toll on the Strait of Hormuz
(And don't think I don't notice how much weasel-room "unilateral" gives you.)
I was so flabbergasted after the first three certain predictions that I missed that. Truly, wow.
!remind me 1-3-5 years
It's probably on the order of weeks until Iran starts funding Hamas/Hezbollah again, if it ever stopped.
ThenElection
4d ago
I don't disagree with what you say of the public, but you're giving politicians/elites far too much credit: they don't secretly know what they are promising is stupid or incoherent. Democracy isn't rival philosopher kings competing with each other trying to modulate the public's dumber passions: it's just stupid all the way up.
ThenElection
4d ago
No one, not even Xi Jinping himself, knows what the military capabilities of China are. They're completely untested, but it'd be a serious miscalculation to assume that that means they're a buffed up Iran.
ThenElection
5d ago
So, the key outcome of the war is that the laws of physics will continue to apply to Iran?
ThenElection
5d ago
Where in this scenario does Iran get nuclear weapons?
I remind you of your prediction:
Iran will not be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapons program
If we agree that Iran will continue to have a nuclear weapons program, except you think that's a massive, total victory that obliterated Iran and made it into a complete cucked loser, and I think it's a loss, we don't disagree on anything concrete, just different perspectives on what victory and loss mean.
ThenElection
5d ago
So, suppose Iran does agree to let US soldiers do exactly that. However, they renege shortly after: various observers accuse them of not honoring that commitment and of continuing clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons. And, critically, the US does not respond with massive bombing but only strongly worded letters.
Would your prediction be falsified? And would that be enough to make you score this war as a loss?
ThenElection
5d ago
What, concretely, does Iran not being allowed to do those things look like?
Or are you merely predicting that Iran will publicly pinky promise not to do those things?
ThenElection
5d ago
- Iran will not be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapons program
- Iran will not be allowed to continue manufacturing missiles to bomb its neighbors
- Iran will not be allowed to continue funding paramilitaries to harass and terrorize its neighbors
Can I take this as a concrete prediction that, henceforth, we will never hear an American or Israeli leader accusing Iran of doing any of those things?
See, the SoH toll is a good thing!
You leave off another Trump victory: for years Iran has sanctioned the global economy, refusing to trade with it or accept investments from it. Trump has forced them to drop those sanctions and open themselves up to the world.
ThenElection
5d ago
I don't understand how anyone, regardless of his position on the war, can defend Trump right now.
Main defenses I'm seeing:
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This was actually a win, the biggliest win in the history of warfare. Trump utterly destroyed Iran and they came to the table begging for forgiveness.
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We were tricked by the Jews.
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The ceasefire and horrible terms are just part of Trump's 5D chess; he'll renege when the time is right and bring us to a true victory.
Comparatively little "we could have won if we were willing to man up and roll in the dirt with the cheating Iranians, but the backstabbing liberal media and pencil necks in the DoD prevented us" so far.
ThenElection
5d ago
I'm grateful that the terms Iran delivered were fair and not too onerous. Hopefully we can all move on quickly from this disaster.
ThenElection
6d ago
I mean I followed powerlifting and streetlifting spaces for a while and there were strong women who could do shit like bench 200, squat 400-500, etc while being pretty lean.
When people say men are generally much stronger than women, there's usually the implicit caveat that it's women without exogenous testosterone.
That said, holding height constant, and comparing a natural woman who regularly lifts heavy to an average man who doesn't work out at all, I think the woman would be able to come out on top, at least sometimes. But with those restrictions, you've limited the population to something like the top 1% of women. And if the man works out at all, she's never coming out on top in a purely physical conflict.
ThenElection
6d ago
it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.
We are in agreement. I might gesture at "let's hand power to people who would do better than either," but unfortunately I don't see a way from here to there.
ThenElection
6d ago
If a life is worth $10M, that's $100B in damages over a couple years. Not small, but by the end will likely be dwarfed by the Iran War.
Though, your example does bring to mind another that probably will be comparable: COVID and the response to it. I'm not sure what proportion of the blame to place on progressive litmus tests for that, but it's certainly substantial.
ThenElection
6d ago
The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless, though; worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports, which no one actually cares about anyway. The Trumpist version has given us the highly escalated Iranian situation, which is much more costly.
ThenElection
8d ago
I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).
The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.
Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.
Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.
A formula that I've seen says LSAT = (0.048 * SAT) + 100, which would suggest a 1400 SAT corresponds to roughly a 167 LSAT. Probably not enough AFAIK to get you into a top 20 program, but I think you could find a law school willing to take you.
Though I'd guess you're likely to end up on the unfortunate end of the bimodal distribution.
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