Tomato
6mo ago
It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:
- Establish "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Australia is "unique to the Aboriginal people."
- Establish Aboriginal languages as Australia's official languages and downgrade English to a "special status."
- Establish "Aboriginal settlement as a national value" and mandate that the Australian state "will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."
You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.
Tomato
1yr ago
I ask this earnestly and seriously: I’m about to have a son. What specific things should I do to protect him from what seems to me like an obviously predatory movement. I’m not really interested in hashing out whether this is predatory or how to fix it on a social level. I want to know what specific things I, as a soon to be parent, can do.
Tomato
10mo ago
I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.
People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.
Tomato
6mo ago
Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
Tomato
5mo ago
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
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There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
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It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
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Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
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US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
Tomato
6mo ago
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
Tomato
9d ago
Related, how long do I have to wait before I can start calling LLMs a nothing burger? Everything that has come out of it seems so small and near-pointless. Marginal productivity increases at best. When does the fun stuff start happening?
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
- The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
- Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
- Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
- I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
- How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
- The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
- Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
- For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Tomato
6mo ago
Can any republican supporters here or people who feel they can speak for republican supporters post their reactions to/opinions of this saga?
From the perspective of a moderate dem, basically pro-Biden guy, this really cements my view that the new crop of republicans are embarrassingly unserious clowns with no skill or interest in governing, and the people who elect them are just burn-it-to-the-ground sour grapes losers.
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
Does anybody actually like what’s going on?
You know how the evil super-intelligent AI (ESIAI) is going to manipulate us in sneaky ways that we can’t perceive? What if the ESIAI elevated an embarassing figurehead/terrible communicator to the forefront of the anti-ESIAI movement to suck up all the air and convince the normies in charge that this is all made up bullshit?
I’m sort of kidding. But isn’t part of the premise that we won’t know when the adversarial AI starts making moves, and part of its moves will be to discredit—in subtle ways so that we don’t realize it’s acting—efforts to curtail it? What might these actions actually look like?
Tomato
2mo ago
As a dirty dozen but not politically obsessed elite, I unironically believe most voters are just uninformed and not really equipped to think about certain important issues like climate change or immigration. The typical voter can’t articulate what an externality is or reliably identify one in nature. The typical voter has empirically incorrect ideas about immigration and its connection to crime and the economy. I’m not in the politically obsessed “we should cheat at elections” camp but I do firmly believe the current US government is doing an outstanding job all things considered and people who disagree either have incoherent ideas about what’s going on or are politically motivated and think that because Trump isn’t president, the economy must be bad. I think Biden is old but I don’t care because the deep state is benign and competent, so I hope he and his crew win.
People won’t accept rule from a tech techno-king and would kill someone who tried to force it. The average person thinks of Steve Jobs, the most widely respected tech person, as a weird nerd who made their phone a bit better. People would turn on him in an instant the minute he tried to be more than a friendly salesman. And the average tech person is much closer to Zuckerberg than Jobs in terms of likability and charisma, and look at how much the public respects big Z.
And no, money won’t implicitly do it. The impact that a trillionaire will have on my life is basically null except indirectly through whatever makes him a trillionaire (eg if Bezos becomes a trillionaire the biggest impact he’d have on anybody is the $1000 worth of value that Amazon brought to everyone’s life.) You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Tomato
6mo ago
What slogan do you want someone who doesn’t want the Israeli state to kill or displace Palestinians to use?
Tomato
7mo ago
Unironically this is a male skill issue thinking that communication is only literal and verbal. Men who are confused about this need to get good, not only for dating but because this is an important generalizable life skill.
Women don’t “play hard to get” by failing to make or keep plans. An interested women, shy or forward, slutty or chaste, of any culture or nationality, will make an effort to meet with you. A woman “playing hard to get” will let you in on the game. It’s mutual flirting and it will feel like that.
If she cancels once and doesn’t take the initiative to make a new plan, she’s not interested. Move on, don’t be pathetic.
Tomato
6mo ago
Why is “Israelis don’t have a right to continue to settle on Palestinian land and they should give it back” so hard to say?
Tomato
6mo ago
There are a lot of economic data conspiracy theories out there but they can never point us to what data we're actually supposed to be looking at. What do you want us to consider aside from vibes and anecdotes? Anyway for your specific points:
Not to mention that "core inflation" excludes housing and gas and food
There's a lot to discuss on why it makes sense to think about non-core or core for the purposes of various policy decisions and evaluations. Nevertheless they are both calculated and easy for people to look up, and they are usually pretty close. Incidentally non-core inflation was lower in September than core inflation. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
as if home prices reaching unaffordable highs is some sort of triviality when The Economy Is Doing Great.
Since most people own homes this is in fact a good thing
Unemployment is good because the numbers are gamed in a million ways. A typical pattern these last few years has been for employment figures to be "better than expected" when first announced, then quietly revised to much lower numbers a few months later. But it's always been a gamed figure, when people who stop looking for work are no longer counted as employed.
Propose an alternate measure and defend it. The most obvious alternative that gets at what you're worried about is the labor force participation rate, which is also high and increasing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART. There are good reasons that this isn't the default measure but obviously the data is out there.
The economy is growing?
Yes, real output increased 4.9% year over year.
Remember when they changed the definition of a recession because they didn't want to admit we were in one?
They did not, but anyway whether we're technically in a recession or not is an even coarser economic measure than GDP growth (which is doing very well) so it's not clear why people harp on this so much.
The economy must be doing well, because we've proclaimed it. And since no one believes us, we have to understand what's causing all this irrationality.
They went out and measured it, and the found out that unemployment is low, GDP growth is high, and inflation, however you measure it, is coming down. As I said you are free to come up with and defend your own measures but you should come to the table with more than vibes and anecdotes.
Are Republicans just that impervious to the truth?
Republicans are doing a weird thing where they say their own situation is good but think that other people's situations are bad. It would be helpful to understand this phenomenon.
Tomato
8mo ago
Date-me-docs or any other "long-form" online dating method is a complete meme and I honestly cannot believe that rationalists are so into these things. They're all just cheap talk, smoke, and mirrors. When you're looking for a partner, you need to filter out a ton of people, and you need hard verifiable information to do that. The only hard and verifiable information for people who are otherwise strangers on the internet are:
- Looks (verified through pictures)
- Education and work (stated, and easy to verify on google. Almost all women will do this FYI.)
The rest is just totally made up and fakeable. This is obvious because if you look at the date me docs, all the word-words-words are almost always the same for everybody. You like someone who is thoughtful? You want to have witty and deep conversations? You're into AI and futurism? Wow, truly a rare find.
You need to actually spend time with people in person to figure out the important things. Tinder/bumble/the rest are so popular because they prioritize the information that is verifiable online and get you to actually go and meet up with people. I'm married and I met my wife on hinge, but before that I was extremely active and successful with dating apps, some combination of tinder/bumble/hinge/raya. So take these observations in that context. Also, as a man who dates women these are comments about women but I'm sure something similar applies to men.
- There is almost no connection between a woman's stated preferences/dating goals and her actual behavior
(a) A few weeks ago there was an article in the NYT about date-me-docs and it featured a woman in the Bay Area who had one of these. Pretty typical Bay Area woman: Asian, tech worker, pretty cute, had her shit together. And had a super wordsy date-me-doc with a ton of detailed words-words-words. I cold emailed her to set her up with my friend, who is recently single. My email was a pic of my friend (tall and handsome) with two or three bullet points about his background (recruited athlete at very prestigious university; into outdoors stuff), and within a few minutes she responded with her number. For all that hubbub about a date-me-doc, my tinder-lite profile of my friend did the trick.
(b) I travel a lot for work and would almost always use bumble when I had a free night. Bumble lets you specify that you're looking for a relationship. You can just ignore this. I would swipe on these women, match, I'd clearly explain that I'm only there for a couple days, and they'd nevertheless be eager to meet up and hook up. Often these little meetups would lead to a nice connection and we'd keep talking/meet up again next time we were in one of each other's cities (I tend to match with high-income, fancy job, lots of traveling types), but ultimately both parties would know these were just casual flings with a limited shelf-life. That girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship is definitely, DEFINITELY fucking randos on the side. Don't forget it. And inversely, women who say they're looking for "something casual" are very often the ones to crazily show up at your office a few months later wondering why you haven't seen them again.
- You're much more likely to get personality catfished than looks catfished
It's much, much easier to fake a personality (especially through some self-promoting long-form writing) than it is to fake how you look. On my myriad dates the frequency with which someone's personality doesn't match what they seemed like online is way higher than the frequency with which someone's looks don't match their pictures (almost never). If you're getting looks catfished a lot, you really scraping the bottom of the app barrel or you need some practice in recognizing how fat women use angles or how chinese women use filters. The point is, there's only so far someone's curated self-description can get you. You just need to meet up.
- There is almost no connection between a woman's "public" personality and her "sexual" personality.
This confusion is so bafflingly common that there are entire movies and stock characters about this. When you're at work, or in a coffee shop, or generically in public, are you talking about all the weird sexual shit you're into? No? Does that mean you're not into it? Same for women. Of course women are sexual beings, and of course they are not super open about this at inappropriate times. And there's basically no way for you to connect the public to the private until the very last minute. The distance from that introverted Korean software engineer you just met showing you her favorite books to begging you to fuck her throat or cum inside her without birth control, is like, 5 minutes, tops.
Given this, why put any stock what-so-ever in some pre-planned about me document that has no predictive power?
- Everyone is on the tinder/bumble style apps, in some way
Almost all women have at least tried the apps. But even if they aren't currently on the apps, their friends are, and this impacts them both directly and indirectly. I have matched with women on the apps who set me up with their not-on-the-apps friends, which always leads to app-like behavior (hooking up). This is not to mention any of the general equilibrium impacts of the apps, which are probably huge.
The ONLY benefit I can see of long-form/date-me-docs style of online dating is that it's just another chance to put your profile in front of someone who might not have already seen it or swiped too quickly on a bumble/tinder-style app. So, like, sure, if you have fun writing about yourself and don't mind an embarrassing document being out there, go ahead and do it. But the likelihood that your manic rationalist dreamgirl is going to find you and date you from this is basically 0.
Tomato
1yr ago
A lot of the examples you mention, besides the “you hear about it and then convince yourself you have it,” mechanism, seem to go further and have communities dedicated to actively spreading the condition and making sure people who have the condition keep having it. This often seems to be exacerbated by the architecture of modern social discourse: Victims of the disease congregate online and can wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints, meanwhile there’s kind of a “recruiting” community (e.g., /r/egg_irl) which sources new members. Illnesses whose communities build these recruiting hubs are more successful in spreading. Some are even so successful that the hijack public institutions.
These are literal meme (in the old sense of a self-replicating idea) mental viruses that compete and thrive in the 21st century social lattice. Put that way it seems like no surprise whatsoever that societies with less developed communication infrastructure have a lower prevalence of these diseases.
I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment? Alternatively does the same mechanism that tends to make “real” illnesses become less severe also exist here?
I wonder if a society with much more restrictive communication like China has less of this. I would support “internet mask wearing” to combat this but at least in the west I’m pretty sure the people in control of making these decisions already have the disease.
Tomato
6mo ago
"Housing costs" as defined in that link would be housing costs for someone becoming a homeowner for the first time. I agree that it's rough if you're a first-time homeowner but that's a pretty small slice of the population. Most people already have homes (so house price increases are good) and have fixed rate mortgages (so rate increases are irrelevant).
The rent chart you showed has rental prices increasing at about a 6-7% annual rate, which I agree is annoyingly high but doesn't seem catastrophic?
Staple foods are a pretty small share of people's consumption basket. (Food at home is about 4% of people's expenditures: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/)
Ultimately you're getting at something correct, but I don't think in the way you meant it to be. There's a huge disconnect between what people think the economy is (that people mostly consume lettuce and mayonnaise and half of the economy are coal miners) and what it actually is.
Tomato
9mo ago
Aella-simping blogspam aside,
But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”
While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.
That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.
Tomato
1yr ago
I think your BAU and likely the particular department within the BAU is pretty unrepresentative. I'm a faculty member at a different BAU and it's really nothing like this at all.
Tomato
2mo ago
This comment kind of perfectly encapsulates what I’m saying. Everything you’re saying about the state of the economy, for example, is just wrong and easily disprovable from tons of independent data sources.
Tomato
6mo ago
My economic life and the lives of everyone around me is incredibly good, so it’s useful for me to look at statistics to see how far-off people in different areas with different professions and backgrounds are doing. And when I look at the data it turns out they’re doing great too!
Tomato
6mo ago
This is a weird thing to say because most people already own houses and they're financed through long-term fixed rate mortgages so when house prices go up they're happy and when interest rates increase it doesn't affect them. There is the so called mortgage lock-in effect but this is quantitatively small when compared to the former things (most people don't move that much anyway).
Anyway people who think house prices are too high should be complaining about local zoning laws that restrict supply, not Joe Biden.
From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.
?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?
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