@VelveteenAmbush's banner p

VelveteenAmbush

Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

3 followers   follows 1 user  
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
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 411


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom New Old Controversial
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It seems conceivable that letting him back on after the midterms might work to Republicans' ultimate advantage. It feels like the electorate has turned against insane clown shows, so Trump putting on his insane clown show might actually move the primary toward DeSantis, and render hollow further attempts by the Democrats to pin Trump to the modern GOP.


But if I had my druthers, he'd stay off -- or better yet, die peacefully in his sleep from natural causes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.




There's really no way to know this from outside of that person's perspective. Depression is often characterized by depressive delusions. I see no reason to take them at their word that they are suffering any more than we should take them at their word that the universe is a dismal joke.


I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Because DeSantis is a better politician: more capable of winning, and more capable through competence and effectiveness in office at growing his political strength and the strength of his party. He has demonstrated this during his time in Florida. Trump has demonstrated the opposite.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


voluntarily sterilize themselves




I don't want to engage with most of this analogy, but I think your view is impoverished if it doesn't account for children's questionable ability to provide informed consent, and the seeming purpose of the law in attenuating their parents' ability to act as stewards for their children's interests. The question of what is truly voluntary is the heart of the matter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying.




No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.




Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it




There's also a mechanism that makes sense. Nerves send a pain signal to the brain, and brains translate that signal into the qualia of pain. Pain that originates within the brain is much harder to understand. Dysfunctions of the brain present a malfunctioning mind, as opposed to a properly functioning mind responding to a malfunctioning body. If the mind is compromised, we have every reason to treat its claims with suspicion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and the western world united to support Ukraine in every way.




We didn't send troops.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it




Jeez, call me old fashioned but I think we should stop them, involuntarily commit them and treat their mental illness.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how Brinton is at fault for the extra attention due to their appearance & persona. But that's not Brinton's fault (unless you believe that Brinton is just making it up).




I mean... setting aside the way he dresses and his pronouns, how is it not his fault that he makes his "puppy play" fetish part of his public persona? Why can't he keep his kinks and fetishes inside the bedroom?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Apparently. And there's no doubt that weapons and intelligence were major contributions by the West, not to mention training in Western military doctrine over the past eight years, which also seems to have been really effective. But the Western world didn't unite to support Ukraine in every way. The West has carefully threaded the needle to prevent (1) arming Ukraine with weapons so long as it seemed plausible that they would surrender them to the Russians, and (2) an escalatory spiral into a hot war with NATO. The second in particular precluded Western boots on the ground and Western munitions capable of substantially longer range than HIMARS.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”




The Simulation Hypothesis has an answer for you: we were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don’t see indisputable evidence he’s morally or intellectually wrong here.




You think the Sandy Hook parents are crisis actors engaged in a literal conspiracy theory to falsely persuade the nation that their children were murdered en masse while attending elementary school? Or you think that this claim is reasonably disputable, either morally or intellectually?


Please let's not confuse Alex Jones's behavior with the comparatively bland claim that school shootings are a political opportunity to take away gun rights. The court proceedings did not concern that claim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, but most of us thought at the outset that they'd lose despite international support... so the fact that they aren't losing, and are maybe even winning, is pretty surprising and speaks to their credit.


They've received a hell of a lot less international support than Afghanistan did over the course of twenty years and look how that turned out as soon as the US boots were off the ground...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's also just good to prevent overcrowding. Highways reach a congestion inflection point where each additional car results in less throughput (fewer people-miles delivered per hour) and that's a classical tragedy of the commons. Even allocating space by lottery would be better than letting everyone on. (Which is not to deny that an auction is better than a lottery, just that preferring the wealthy is only part of the benefit.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Comparisons of crime rates between US and other Western countries need to control for racial demographics to be worth the keystrokes it takes to make them. Compare Canadians with Canadian Americans, or white Canadians with white Americans. ADOS people in America are an unusual demographic, not even obviously comparable to merit-selected African immigrants to Canada.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not. It may be that bespoke single-player experiences better fit the designs of the simulators, and grabby civilizations in their prime aren't the most useful backdrop for those experiences. Or it may be that the simulators are our own descendants trying to learn more about their pre-grabby past.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agree with all of this, seems pretty clear (as much as anything is clear at this point) that Alameda Research was deep in the hole with bad trades and SBF decided to try to help them gamble their way out of the hole with FTX customer money.


I do think there's a genuine EA angle here though. SBF did not believe in declining utility of money because he was going to use it to do good in the world. Saving ten lives in the developing world is ten times better than saving one life, in much the way that buying ten fancy cars is not ten times better than buying one fancy car. SBF was willing to take this to the extreme, even biting the bullet on St. Petersburg Paradox in his interview with Tyler Cowen:




COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?






BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.






COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.






BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.






COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?






BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.






COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?






BANKMAN-FRIED: I’m not going to quite give you a limit because my answer is somewhere between “I don’t believe them” and “if I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.” But I will give you something a little weaker than that, which is an area where I think things get really wacky and weird and hard to think about, and it’s not clear what the right framework is, which is infinity.






All this math works really nicely as long as all the numbers are finite.




So yeah -- he sees literally no moral limits to this style of gambling in our finite universe.


This is both a worldview that (a) is distinctly consistent with EA, and (b) encourages you to double or nothing (including, as in the hypothetical, with other people's stuff) until you bust. And now he took one too many double-or-nothing bets, and ended up with nothing.


I think the honest response to this disaster is to say "yeah, I gambled with customers' money, and it was the right thing to do because I had a better than even chance of pulling it off, and I would have used that money to do good in the world so there's no declining value to each dollar. Sure, I gambled with other people's money, but wouldn't you dive in the pond to save the drowning child even if your expensive suit were borrowed from an acquaintance? Well that's what I did, with a lot of people's suits, and it was the right thing to do."


Of course, utilitarians don't believe in honesty -- it's just one more principle to be fed into the fire for instrumental advantage in manufacturing paperclips malaria nets.


Now, who knows -- maybe he would have committed the same kind of fraud even if he had never heard of EA and were just a typical nerdy quant. But, when your whole ideology demands double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and when you say in interviews that you would follow your ideology and make double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and then you do make double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and one of those bets finally goes wrong... yeah, I think one can be forgiven for blaming your ideology.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't care about the rest of his argument, I care about the part that was the subject of this dispute, since this dispute is what we are discussing. Was that not the part that you think is at least disputable in its moral or intellectual wrongness? Or do you believe the courts should overlook this clear case of defamation because he separately made some other arguments that were reasonable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The threshold is defamation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can't imagine this argument being persuasive to any but the most extreme libertarian -- the type who thinks that recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal. If that's you, then yeah, you're internally consistent, and I'm not sure what better argument to make against your position other than that your theory permits such self-evidently depraved outcomes as legalizing fentanyl, incest, cannibalism, and the killing of depressed but otherwise healthy 23-year-olds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.