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VelveteenAmbush

Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

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joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC

				

User ID: 411

VelveteenAmbush

Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

3 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC

					

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User ID: 411

On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane.

He does -- but I must say, despite sharing no cultural background with him at all, he was probably the most relatable character I have ever seen in any instance of linear video. Anyone who has ever been responsible for a project made impossible by uncooperative or incompetent collaborators (i.e. anyone who has ever worked for a big company above the entry level for any length of time) will see in this man a spiritual brother. Of course he's grumpy. It would require an exotic mind to be anything but grumpy in the circumstances.

I second your recommendation wholeheartedly. It should be required viewing for anyone who makes economic projections based on a country's population and resources without regard to the finer points of human capital.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored.

Probably right, but IMO it's because he isn't goring any sacred cows. Women aren't on top of the progressive stack anymore. They can't even keep the natal males out of their bathrooms and sports leagues. MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.

Let's come back to this when he publishes "Be a Transphope" or "Be a Racist" with excruciating data to justify all of the Trans/Blacks Less Likely hypotheses. Then we'll see if his cultural immunity persists.

that are pledging to leave for Microsoft

Read carefully. The most important word in the letter is "may." Not will.

I think most of the employees are going to stay, Shear will remain CEO, and Sam is going to end up in a small but potent research group in Microsoft. As to how long he'll stay... I can't imagine it will be long, a startup-guy billionaire like him at Microsoft would be like a tree trying to grow at the bottom of a cave.

If you truly believe children should be empowered to make all important personal decisions for themselves, without interference, then how would you argue against pedophilia? Or are prohibitions of pedophilia likewise to be excluded from the eschaton, whatever that means?

North Koreans seem worse off than South Africans (than all Southern Africans) on any metric except violent crime rate, for which little data exists but which we can probably assume is lower in the DPRK. The DRC and Liberia have higher GDP/capita by some estimates.

I don't dispute your metrics, but there is a consistent effect where North Koreans who successfully defect to South Korea end up missing their home. Naturally this is blamed on "discrimination" but the defectors I have seen interviewed in the documentaries I've watched reminisce about villages where everyone knew one another and had a defined role in a tight knit community that lasted their whole lives. Not that this excuses the starvation or state-sponsored grotesqueries, but personally I would not find it an easy decision if forced to choose whether to be born into an average life in North Korea or in South Africa.

in 2024, I expect vast swath of Democrats to coordinate in reregistering as Republicans and voting with Never-Trumpers for a particular non-Trump candidate in every state

It almost feels like you're laying the groundwork to cope with a Trump loss in the 2024 GOP primary. The Democrats would much rather run against Trump in 2024 than against DeSantis. Trump largely failed to advance his agenda in four years, he antagonized the Democrats into increased turnout, he offended everyone in the middle by trying to steal the 2020 election, and (crucially) he already demonstrated that Biden can beat him. DeSantis turned a swing state blood red, won it by twenty points in a cycle where Trump's nominees were failing left and right, demonstrated competent governance against COVID and hurricane disasters, and successfully prosecuted the culture war using the levers of executive power.

If you want further evidence that the Dems would rather run against Trump, look to their shenanigans in the 2020 cycle. They were supporting Trump's own nominees and fellow election denialists over more traditional GOP politicians. And it worked; Trump's guys generally lost.

what really deters crime

Incapacitation shouldn't be overlooked. A small percentage of people is undeterrable and will commit a hugely disproportionate share of total crime if they are able to do so. They need to be identified and locked up as long as they remain undeterrable. Roughly, this cohort is largely male, aged 16-35, and disproportionately black. The main benefit of 3 strikes laws is that it is a mechanical fallback that achieves this objective in a way that is immune to special pleading and undue sympathy from judges. It's a hard thing to give a 19-year-old a 20+ year sentence when you're faced with the tear-stained face of the kid and his sobbing family all dressed in their Sunday best and clutching the kid's old teddy bear, surrounded by earnest ACLU types unloading the best emotional weapons that the entire field of social justice has developed, but there are many cases where it is absolutely vital to do so.

I think the African slave trade largely traded on Africans who lost a political, legal or physical conflict in Africa -- they were (for the most part) prisoners of war, convicts, outcasts and misfits who were captured and sold to slavers by other native Africans. So this isn't terribly different from observing that descendants of convicted felons tend to have worse outcomes, which I also expect to be true. As is often the case in studies of intergenerational disparities, genetic heredity can provide a satisfying explanation, which is upstream both from their current status and their ancestors' enslavement.

It also seems plausible to me that slave breeding that took place in America was dysgenic, which could have long-lasting consequences. I don't know if it was, though. If that is correct, it's quite the political hot potato: the folks looking to avenge past oppression are generally not going to want to accept that genetic inferiority mediates the legacy of the oppression, and the folks looking to blame the underclass for their plight are generally not going to want to accept that their blameworthy tendencies were foisted upon them by the sins of America's forefathers.

Michel Foucault said lots of things, but I don't know that they map onto reality very well. Sometimes I think he wrote about the world that he wished we lived in as though it is the one that we do live in. And mostly it seemed like his wishes all involved fucking teenage boys.

Suppose an online fad were persuading children to have their left arms amputated, and the power of the state dedicated itself to facilitating the amputations and to retaliating against parents who tried to interfere. What argument against that public policy would you consider to be fair, if any?

My position is that they wouldn't achieve significant cost savings, because as they become more efficient in producing high quality legal documents, the quality expectations of the industry would increase by approximately the same percentage.

The legal profession is predominantly a red queen's race. It produces some objective benefit in promoting clarity and discipline within and between organizations, but everything beyond that is zero-sum -- trying to get better terms or a better dispute settlement at a counterparty's expense, trying to cover off an edge case where the default rule might favor your counterparty marginally better than your proposed customized solution -- and my suspicion is that the latter category is the bulk of the profession. Through that lens, the amount that a corporation spends on legal fees is more akin to the amount that a country spends on its military than the amount it spends on agriculture. When technology makes militaries more efficient, the result isn't less military spending on either side of a border, it's scarier militaries staring each other down across that border.

Doesn’t seem like a sign of downfall to try out new styles even if this one turned out poorly.

Maybe try these experiments in Autodesk to see if they work before you cast them in immortal bronze and erect them eternally in a place of honor in the heart of the city.

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.

Our institutions weren't polarized like this when George W. Bush was in power, and the only Republican president who has taken office since then was Donald Trump.

So basically another way of phrasing your question is: Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.

I think a sufficiently motivated prosecutor could probably make out a case that SOS Humanity are criminally conspiring with human traffickers to capsize ships and put migrants' lives in danger. Seems like an unavoidable conclusion in light of their MO that whatever maritime law compels a right of safe harbor under duress has been incorporated into SOS Humanity's standard operating procedures and they are complicit in creating those circumstances of duress.

A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. ... In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics.

In response to your comment, @DaseindustriesLtd already shared proof that Turkheimer confessed to being epistemically irrational about HBD:

And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair

You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?

I think most people who are conflicted about abortion can imagine any number of horrible situations in which an abortion feels like the lesser of two evils, or at least where one can empathize with someone for deciding that it is. And I think a lot of people recognize that horrible situations like this are best left to the people involved directly, rather than having the state interfere with a one-size-fits-all rule that cannot possibly take into account the nuances of the situation. All happy pregnancies are alike; each unhappy pregnancy is unhappy in its own way.

Reproduction is fraught and messy. There are serious risks to the mother, serious risks to the baby, potential for lifelong disability or death for either or both of them. There are babies born with severe birth defects, babies who are born already doomed to die in the days or weeks that follow, babies that leave behind a tiny corpse and a gaping hole in their parents' souls even before their mother has finished recovering from the physical trauma in the hospital. Parenting is a long-term all-consuming physical and financial commitment unlike any other, and there is raw horror at the prospect of being dragged into that kind of a commitment. Adoption is possible, but it carries all of the physical risks of childbirth plus extreme short-term and long-term emotional trauma. Horrible complications of all kinds can arise: a spontaneous twin or triplet pregnancy; one twin or triplet beginning to absorb another; the uniquely agonizing prospect of extreme pre-term birth; a late diagnosis of trisomy; preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, complications from drug or alcohol use while pregnant; developmental defects like micro-, hydro-, an-, or any other type of -encephaly. Even mid to late term miscarriages, which are a dime a dozen really, are the source of intense familial pain that never fully heals.

There's deep and raw horror to the human condition, plenty of times when the veil of abstraction breaks and biology becomes abomination, and the veil is thinnest at the start and end of life. People who are into or beyond normal parenting age will have friends who have experienced all manners of horror and speak of it reluctantly and only with those who are very close, and can only speculate how many more have experienced similar, or how bad it really was.

When I see posts like yours -- "but abortion is murder, so therefore..." -- I disagree, but my most salient emotional reaction is one of recognition... specifically, recognition of innocence, innocence of the potential horrors. The power of the message of not coming between a woman and her doctor is explained by the segment of the electorate who has had a glimpse of these horrors. It is a sizable segment, bigger than you might think.

It's kind of weird to treat an empirical question as a competition and focusing on the sportsmanship and conduct of each side. Ultimately the tactics used in various debates have no effect on the underlying reality. The earth orbits the sun with no regard to the good or bad conduct of people who profess heliocentrism or geocentrism.

A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality.

I just want to know the truth and for the truth to be known. I want policy arguments built on false factual premises to fail, and I want policies built on true factual premises to succeed. But your characterization affords no place for genuine epistemic rationalists; it assumes that everyone is a contestant in some kind of dumb zero-sum game, engaging in that game only as a means of influencing policy in their favored direction.

The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd. I'm entirely supportive of assisted suicide for the terminally ill and those with untreatable severe chronic pain, but this ain't it.

Any accusation of political hypocrisy should engender at least a ten second attempt to see if there's a parallel but opposite hypocrisy. I don't exactly see the criminal justice reform advocates lining up to release the Jan 6 crowd without cash bail or whatever.

OK, here's my effortpost. I have a few minutes, and I haven't given this topic the treatment it deserves.

Partly because I follow Andrew Sullivan and Chris Rufo on Twitter, I've seen a lot of detransitioner stories. These are usually natal women who transitioned to become boys in their adolescence, and then ended up regretting it. What strikes me about it is how many of them report having been depressed, having been introduced to the world of transgender ideology through the usual very online spaces, and then seizing onto it for three specific reasons: (1) because gender dysphoria is elastic enough to be a plausible cause of their unhappiness, (2) because it is a salient transgressive ideology and therefore permits them to scapegoat their families and culture for their misery, and (3) because transitioning is a big project that they can start one step at a time and work slowly toward along a well-lighted path, with social support and a feeling of accomplishment at each step along the way.

There has been a boom in adolescent girls transitioning, and this is a population known for booms in various sociogenic mental health illnesses: eating disorders, self harm, even sociogenic Tourettes, the last of which pretty squarely indicates its sociogenic fingerprints.

Now, many of these sociogenic illnesses are no joke. Eating disorders, self harm, and medically assisted gender transition have potential lifelong consequences. But the Tourettes thing! The reports indicate that somehow its sufferers get "stuck" in their sociogenic Tourettes -- who can fathom what that feels like "from the inside," but it is a clear case of girls suffering from some kind of delusion, where neurology conclusively rules out the usual Tourettes etiology, where they nonetheless insist they are unable to stop their tics even while they protest that they wish they could. There is no known neurological basis for their disorder, but they swear they are unable to stop their tics. Do you believe them? It's hard for me to really commit to a clear yes or no on that question. The best I can say is that there is a real disorder there, but it's hard to know where the disorder stops and the mind starts. Probably the self and the behavior, via the borrowed identity that the behavior is premised upon, have become conjoined. It isn't a meaningful question to ask whether they are capable of stopping, because doing so assumes the distinct identity of a rational mind that can observe the behavior from outside of it, in the way that someone with a broken arm can observe the source of the pain -- or even that someone with classical Tourettes can observe the source of the errant neurological signals, because they show up on the relevant diagnostic tests. I think there's an analogy to depression here, a meaningful analogy which at least requires us to raise an eyebrow to any sort of confident equivalency between depressive misery and physical pain. How unlike do we think they are, really? Is a clinically depressed person more or less able to get out of bed, shower, and have a productive day than a sufferer of sociogenic Tourettes is to stop exhibiting tics? Intuitively they seem to be in a similar category.

Anyway, imagine that we broadly accept the concept of medically assisted suicide as a treatment for severe depression. We'll put in lots of checks and balances, lots of consultations, require doctors to line up and swear on their souls that there's no alternative: pick your policy suite. What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough. Arguably the checks and balances contributed to the problem, in the sense that they engendered online spaces dedicated to guiding people through the process, and presented a neat and exciting problem for depressive people looking for social affirmation and a sense of accomplishment in breaking down a big challenge into bite sized chunks and overcoming them step by step.

So whatever procedural safeguards you set up around medically assisted suicide for mental illness, as soon as that pathway is open legally, a subculture will spring up to guide people through it. They will study the criteria and share stories about meeting or not meeting the criteria, about their experience with this doctor or that, which will cumulatively provide a series of beacons for passing through all of the checkpoints that you've established. It will become a project for exactly the population of adolescent girls who are currently transitioning.

And the worst part is that these girls, the ones who fall prey to sociogenic Tourettes, sociogenic transgenderism, sociogenic eating disorders and sociogenic self-harm behaviors -- they usually grow out if it if they can be kept safe for a few years. They are usually fine in the long run! So the result of legally assisted suicide for depressed people, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, will be a lot of dead girls who would have grown up to be healthy and well adjusted women, and a lot of bereaved families who could perhaps be forgiven for believing that society murdered their little girl.

What we need to do, IMO, is to find alternative ways for girls in this group to try on some new and transgressive identity that does not cause lasting harm. Bring back the goth subculture. Have them try out being a lesbian. Let them practice witchcraft, or voodoo, or satan-worship. Maybe try being a Christian to rebel against particularly new-age parents who can't be shocked by the old ways: have them sneak out to attend church when they're supposed to be at volleyball practice, furtively study a bunch of catechisms, discreetly get baptized, and have their shocking and tearful coming-out announcement to their parents. The trick will be in setting up the subculture and making sure that it all feels properly transgressive. Maybe these Tourettes influencers on Tiktok are the answer to all of these problems, and by boosting their signal we'll be able to crowd out all of the other avenues of harm. But for fuck's sake, don't help them kill themselves.

a bunch of retards with brain worms

I mean... if you're trying to stand up for civility in this forum, I don't think this is the right way to go about it.

In this year's primary, he endorsed Masters, Walker and Oz -- three neophyte politicians with manifest weaknesses -- over their more experienced competitors. All three prevailed in the primary, and all three seem to be headed for defeat tonight. All three races should have been eminently winnable.

In 2020, he made delusional claims that the election was stolen from him, and he publicly pressured Pence to basically abuse his power as VP to steal the election for Trump. This occurred before the two senate runoff races in Georgia, both of which should have gone GOP (based on fundamentals and based on the expectation that thermostatic turnout would favor the GOP as being energized to oppose Biden's recent win), but both of which ended up going to the Dems, giving Biden control of the Senate.

From the conservative perspective

Well, also from the jury's own unanimous perspective, and therefore from the perspective of the criminal justice system.

Less unlikely to do so. Where are the pictures of the White Christian White House staffers having developed a firm enough ethnic identity as such to gather together and take pictures of themselves celebrating their shared White Christianity?

In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.

They very much haven't.

I think it is impossible to overstate just how far outside of the bounds of thought EY style doomerism has been and remains for... well, everyone except the "rationalists." It is literally impossible to talk about "AI safety" with normal human beings without them looking at you like you have two heads. The logic doesn't matter. The world runs on inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. Because "AI safety" has never been a problem in real life so far, it is literally impossible for normal people to understand it, much less take it seriously. If you try to explain it, you will notice that they cock their heads while they listen to you, and this is from the cognitive effort of rewriting your arguments in realtime as they hear them to be about jobs and racial bias instead of AI safety.

I am not an AI doomer. I ascribe to exactly your view with respect to Erlich and Yudkowksy, and it's well said.

But I am reporting to you, from the corporate front lines, that every single person in a position of authority has a brain defect that makes it literally impossible for them to understand the concept of "AI safety." They don't disagree with AI safety concerns; they cannot disagree with the concerns, because they cannot understand them, because when you articulate a thought about AI safety, the words completely fail to engender concepts in their brain that relate to AI safety. They cannot even understand that other people have thoughts about the concept of AI safety, except perhaps as a marketing ploy to overstate the the commercial utility of various AI-powered systems.

So the PR people have not planned a response, and the policy people have not engaged with the concept, and the executives have not been briefed, and you should expect large companies to continue acting as uncomprehending about the topic of AI safety as they would about the threat of office wall art coming to life and eating their children.