VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
No bio...
User ID: 411
I think it is clear that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have been laying the groundwork to engineer an opinion that all of the titles of the Civil Rights Act protect white and asian people from discrimination as surely as they protect black people. That was their long game in Bostock, which held that trans people are protected under the Civil Rights Act via the syllogistic logic that the CRA bans discrimination on account of sex, so (roughly) it is a violation to treat a man who wears a dress differently from how you treat a woman who wears a dress. I predicted that this was their intent in Bostock, and I think it was Gorsuch who indicated as much during the oral arguments in the affirmative action case -- I can't remember his exact phrasing but he invoked Bostock and asked why the same logic shouldn't apply to the same language in a different title of the CRA.
If SCOTUS clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally, then every tool that has been used to police covert discrimination against black people over the past century (sting operations, disparate impact theories, indications of animus, etc.) could in theory be used to police covert discrimination against white/asian people ("holistic" applicant reviews, rhetoric about "dismantling whiteness," etc.).
At that point all that is needed is a sufficiently motivated executive. Ron DeSantis in particular has proven apt at using the tools pioneered by civil rights activists to effect conservative change, and has been pretty sharp with other types of executive power to curtail liberal excesses.
So I don't know what odds I give it of coming to pass, but it does seem like the pieces are falling into place for a conservative campaign to dismantle affirmative action across the entire ambit of the Civil Rights Act, which is much broader than just higher education -- and to fight back against a slide toward ethnic spoils.
The biggest threat to this campaign is if the GOP nominates Trump instead of DeSantis. Trump can be counted on to fumble the opportunity, as he does everything. At this point I am hoping that fate intervenes to secure the nomination for DeSantis.
That's part of the bargain to be a lifestyle brand. If you want people to value your product not just for its practical utility but for what that product says about the people who consume it, then they're going to be as insulted by the unfavorable brand implications as they are flattered by the favorable. It doesn't matter that the ad wasn't "aimed" at them. Lifestyle brand advertising works by influencing what other people think of the product's customers, not just the customers themselves. The whole reason you choose to become a customer of a lifestyle brand is because of what you expect it will make other people think of you.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials
Maybe not for their general practitioner or dermatologist or whatever. But if you get cancer or need brain surgery or something, then people care about the credentials of their oncologist or surgeon.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?
Unironically, I think it's valid as their interpretation of factual truth if and only if they acknowledge that they're mentally ill. Because without that acknowledgment, then they maintain agency for their actions, and their decision to commit suicide is entirely on their own moral ledger. People who aren't mentally ill can get mad that other people are making them unhappy, but crossing the rhetorical line from unhappiness to suicide is just an abusive tactic in that context.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
My personal hypothesis is -- bear with me here -- that he is a bitter narcissist with poor impulse control.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
So their manager asks them to do something about bias, and they apply the laziest possible hack.
I actually have a different impression: most of these professional ML researchers and engineers genuinely wish they could serve up a model that provides politically correct responses, because politically correct responses are also commercially correct, and everyone wants to make money. Probably the main reason a bunch of giant and amazing Google models aren't made available to the public via API is because of the risk that they might say or display something politically incorrect, and certainly some fraction of the user base (especially tech journalists lusting after those sweet engagement metrics) will try to bait it into doing so.
So there's ample incentive to solve this problem "the right way," and the fact that so far all we see are cheap hacks and opacity is because no one knows how to solve it the right way, or even if it is solvable the right way at all, even in principle, with the technology we have today.
Part of the problem is exactly what makes these models so exciting to begin with. They can notice things, they can extrapolate from training data, they can make analogies and they can roll with out-of-sample prompts, and they develop all of these amazing abilities ex nihilo, from a largely uncontrollable black box made of inscrutable matrices gently nudged in the direction of data.
The other part of the problem is that political correctness isn't a well defined or static problem. It is a messy social problem, involving subtle adversarial factional games, sort of like fashion.
And these two halves of the problem compound with one another. It isn't enough to generate a black person one time in X -- you have to define X, you have to solve this equation for all possible identities, and you have to then translate this equation into every conceivable fact pattern that the user will (adversarially) use to challenge the model. If you want to generate a picture or story involving a policeman arresting a criminal, it is fraught whether you make the policeman white or black, whether you put him in a wheelchair or not. Should the model generate trans women? If they're visibly identifiable as trans women, are you making a minstrel caricature to further the stereotype that trans women look like men in dresses? If they aren't visibly identifiable, how is one to know they are trans at all, and that you haven't committed the deadly sin of erasure? Should black women look like white people but with a darker skin tone (and draw criticism for e.g. straightening her hair, itself a political minefield), or should you make them look recognizably phenotypically black in terms of facial features and hair (and draw criticism for reinforcing a stereotype)? If both murderers and NBA stars are disproportionately likely to be black, does the model need to recognize that murderers are bad and NBA stars are good and apply its distortion of the underlying distribution only to the bad category, i.e. return mostly white guys for criminals but mostly black guys for NBA stars? How is it to know? And when ideological opponents start to stress-test these categories and ask for a thuggish NBA player or a corrupt President, should it reverse the categories? What about middle grounds, like an "aggressive" NBA player, or a "desperate, nonviolent" criminal? We even have minor culture wars about the perceived race of robots.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"
That wasn't remotely the topic of conversation.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
11mo ago
But law professorships are worthless sinecures that do and produce nothing of value. His stint as a community organizer was unironically much more important and impactful.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
11mo ago
it would have been completely reasonable for Biden to try to negotiate a pardon for Trump a la Ford pardoning Nixon in return for a back-to-normalcy sort of proposal.
I suspect Trump would reject his overtures.
But more to the point, the President can't pardon state charges. That would have to be Governor Hochul, who does not seem so inclined.
People are obsessed with this issue for different reasons. On the right it’s a “muh based” form of copery in which Kanye’s schizophrenic views reminiscent of the average alleyway Hotep will somehow mainstream antisemitism back to the 1920s. On the left it’s that another Trumpist has been outed as a “real nazi” and must therefore be purged from public life with maximum prejudice. Some famous black people are upset because Jews in the entertainment business largely tolerate low-key black antisemitism as long as it doesn’t escalate and so they are annoyed that, in the heightened Kanye climate, they’re getting called out more than usual.
For those of us who hate the whole cultural marxism / "progressive stack" ideological edifice and want to see it torn to the ground, and who believe that the Jewish community punches above its weight both in terms of political power and in terms of specifically promoting the "progressive stack" ideology, and who are neither black nor Jewish and therefore have no dog directly in this fight, it's delightful.
As a wise man once taught, if you want to tear down an edifice, you heighten its contradictions. One towering contradiction in the progressive stack ideology is that, on the one hand, its foundation is an argument from disproportion ("Blacks Less Likely"), but on the other hand, the Jewish community (IMO its principal architect and custodian) is More Likely than anyone. Kanye and the ADL are doing hero's work right now to heighten that contradiction. It would be lovely for the Jewish community to be as explicit and vocal as possible about why they are excepted from the rules that govern this system, and I appreciate Kanye's efforts to solicit that explanation, even if there's little that I otherwise agree with him about.
I'm genuinely curious if you see a flaw ("muh ___") in my reasoning.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man."
Elections are won and lost by a percentage point or two. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that possibly one to two in a hundred American voters doesn't like Biden but won't vote for Trump after enough messaging about him now being a convicted felon. It also may not have any such effect, or have a reverse effect. Time will tell. But you're overconfident.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Sure, if you can wish into place a Palestinian leadership who would not attempt to butcher Israelis for 20 or 30 years, then the plan could work.
But you can't! Hamas is here. They aren't going quietly. And they aren't some exogenous force. By all accounts I've seen, Palestinians support Hamas, and Palestinians supported the October 7 attacks. A plan that relies on an unachievable counterfactual isn't a plan.
Consider the field of law
Consider how much less efficient the practice of corporate law was before the advent of the word processor. As a result, merger agreements used to be just a few pages long. With a modern word processor and a database of electronic precedents, a law partner could bang one of these out in no time. The legal profession's response to this efficiency windfall was not to slash law firm staff, but to increase the length and complexity of merger agreements. Now they're like 100 pages long, plus hundreds of pages of other crap, and they are expected to be drafted with full knowledge of a much vaster corpus of law and jurisprudence.
So I suspect that further efficiency gains will simply raise the complexity ceiling rather than reducing the size of the industry. We could see thousand-page merger agreements of increasing variety, vastly more intricate negotiated horse-trading over terms previously accepted as boilerplate, and increasing rigor in sourcing each provision to ever more obscure and fact-specific legal doctrines.
I think the law students' jobs are safe, or at least as safe as they ever were.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
It's not so exotic, really. If your goal is to crush your opponent, it is to your benefit for them to discredit themselves.
It isn't necessarily a good tactical move to speak that observation into the microphone, of course...
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
wouldn’t we have a twitter files of all this planning versus just have a conspiracy of similar interest groups.
We wouldn't have a Twitter Files of Twitter either if Elon Musk hadn't taken over. Unless the forum is owned or infiltrated by ideologically unaligned people, and there's public demand for news of the collaboration, then it doesn't even register as a conspiracy and never gets public play at all; it's just science, industry and regulators sharing information, which in some capacity we all agree that they should.
Climate gadfly says "regulator, pls ban", regulator says "we would never take such a step without a strong empirical justification of harm," researchers see the opportunity for impactful "scholarship" in this area and produce it, news media see the regulatory statement and the existence of "scholarship" in the area and hype it, regulator waits for the crescendo and then bans it. All of the communication can even take place in broad daylight at various climate and air quality fora.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
I get that you hate Sam Altman and believe he is a sociopath. I don't understand where that hatred or conclusion are coming from, but I also don't particularly care. What I don't like is that your "fuck that guy" attitude seems to be motivating accusations of wrongdoing on other flimsy and pretextual grounds. It diminishes us to engage in that.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
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.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
2yr ago
My point is less that the decision should rest with the parents, and more that it shouldn't rest with the child.
Sometimes we leave the decision with the parents... whether to attend a parochial school, whether to allow the child access to Instagram, etc.
Sometimes we decide for the family; children aren't allowed to have sex with adults, for example, regardless of what the children or their parents think about it.
What we never do (other than with this trans issue -- at least, I cannot think of any other examples) is leave decisions of momentous lifelong consequences fully up to the child, and attempt to disintermediate the parents in favor of the child's own judgment.
So arguments premised on a child's voluntary and insuperable consent in high-stakes decisionmaking seem rather anomalous.
Yeah, the old joke that I've heard frames it as coming from the defense: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I wasn't even there! And if I was, I didn't do it. And if I did, it was self defense. And if it wasn't, I was insane!"
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