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CDR in the US Navy Reserve. Former Googler. Computer programmer. I'm here mostly to read.
User ID: 2527
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9mo ago
Could you point out where in that article (or elsewhere) there is any important insight provided by the mainstream of constructvism? I do not have a positive view of constructivism as a useful way to analyze the world or predict future events, and that article further cemented my view since it mostly seems like a posthoc justification for obviously-true statements whenever it's testable: "Constructivists argue that states can have multiple identities that are socially constructed through interaction with other actors." is untestable, "500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons" is obvious without constrictivism.
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5mo ago
You could do some military jobs!
- Leave Papers, Please: Reviewing and processing leave forms (penalties for approving too many, or approving ones with errors)
- Sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour, making sure you look busy the whole time even though you've finished after 10 minutes.
- Navigating a warship at night through a busy shipping lane, trying to keep your closest point of approach (CPA) greater than 2000 yards for every ship out there so you don't have to wake the Captain, whose standing orders require you to tell him if you're ever going to have a CPA under that.
- Polishing your dress shoes
- Mess crank: like Cooking Mama, but you have to cook 10x the quantity, some of the ingredients are rotten, and you can't tell the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons.
- Leverage an LLM to determine how effective your speech is after telling your division not to get any DUIs over a holiday weekend. Additional levels could be to convince them not to buy a Dodge Charger at 26% APY, and not to send half your paycheck to the Filipino prostitute you met at the last port call.
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9mo ago
I'm not educated on these terms and this whole school of thought, and right now the gap between my understanding of how the world works and what you've linked/described about Constructivism is too great for me to understand your points. I do not see a reason why I'm not allowed to conclude that nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea should elicit a different international response than nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain without the constructivist need to claim that the nature of the nuclear weapons is different between the two. Like, I can change my opinions, reactions, and decisions between a good adult friend and the 14-year-old across the street when each asks to borrow my car. I'm allowed to do that without needing to believe that my car has changed. And there are inherent truths about nuclear weapons and cars that would be true regardless of social context: nuclear weapons make a big explosion when successfully activated, and cars have 4 wheels. A society that believes the will of a supernatural entity is the only cause of fire is unable to modify a nuclear detonation through prayer no matter how important the supernatural entity is in their society. A society that believes the number 4 to be bad luck and that refuses to allow anything to have that number of wheels is allowed to collectively say a car has 3 wheels, but that doesn't make it true.
Where are you getting your definition of "realists"? In the colloquial meaning of "realist", I don't see why they would conclude that a country whose government has committed genocide would be less likely to intervene to stop another genocide. The obvious conclusion seems like it could be reached by observing the real world, with real, testable things that really exist, regardless of social constructs. Measure: has each country committed genocide, and have they intervened to stop another genocide. Calculate: historically, what's the chance a country that has committed genocide will intervene to stop another genocide versus one that hasn't. Predict: given two countries, one that has committed genocide and one that hasn't, which is more likely to intervene to stop this particular genocide. The answer is independent of social context.
Again, I'm ignorant here. I want to understand why there is any benefit for believing that social context changes the reality of objects, or that we're not allowed to consider any actor as different than any other actor without constructivism. Because the downstream effects of constructivism I see are awful: college professors claiming that aboriginal interpretations of the world are just as valid as the scientific method, and the superweapon of unfalsifiable "lived experiences" that trump rational debate. I want to stop those things, and from my perspective shunning constructivism - making it costly and embarrassing to believe and support - seems to be a good solution. I don't see any loss, because what you're saying constructivism adds all seem like common sense that we could figure out without that structure.
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5mo ago
Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.
Are you thinking of electroshock therapy?
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14d ago
Thanks for sharing! So you're running a local version of your nitter and miniflux on your home PC or hosted somewhere, then connecting to that when you're browsing from mobile?
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8mo ago
Kids will work, or go be delinquents, or do whatever it is they want to do. Why force them into school at all? I just don't see the problem.
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9mo ago
For anyone following along, some handy Wikipedia links:
- Realism (international relations)
- Constructivism (international relations), which is apparently the type of Constructivism we're talking about here.
I do not believe that Googling Constructivism, IR, or realist would have got me there within 2 minutes, but mea culpa. I should have tried harder to figure it out from context.
I don't care about the philosophy of international relations, so I can't claim an educated opinion on whether "previous IR schools like realism were unable to predict that the responses would be different." That sounds stupid to me as a layman. Other times I have heard that an entire field has failed to notice something obvious, the error has been with the person making the claim and not with the field itself. Gdanning, I appreciate your attempts to explain it to me, but I remain unconvinced that "The mainstream of constructvism has important insights in many fields". If I need to understand the history of the philosophy of international relations in order to see the important insights of Constructivism, then I'm comfortable dismissing its insights as "not actually important in the grand scheme of things", which I will file in the Constructivism folder in my mind next to "that stupid philosophy that people are referring to when they say 'reality is a social construct'".
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3mo ago
People will certainly distinguish between the three in some ways. I agree with @FarNearEverywhere that it's far from certain whether "blasting" imagery of any of them would result in more or less support.
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3mo ago
That's a simple A or AAAA DNS record to fix. I wonder if that's a Substack problem or a Scott problem.
I was pleasantly surprised that ChatGPT was able to produce real court cases where State Courts have ruled on Constitutionality:
- People v. LaValle (NY, 2004)
The New York Court of Appeals struck down the state's death penalty law, citing the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution. The court held that the death penalty statute violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. - Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (CA, 1979)
The California Supreme Court upheld the right to free speech under the First Amendment and California Constitution, allowing individuals to gather signatures in shopping centers despite private property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision. - State v. Santiago (CT, 2015)
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment due to its arbitrary application and evolving standards of decency. - Commonwealth v. Wolfe (PA, 2016)
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed federal Eighth Amendment issues regarding sentencing juveniles to life without parole. The court applied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama to ban such sentences. - State v. Gregory (WA, 2018)
The Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated both the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution due to evidence of racial bias in its application.
Older LLMs would regularly hallucinate with this sort of question.
Edit: link updated to include follow up ChatGPT conversation, which included State courts that weren't State Supreme Courts ruling on Constitutionality:
- People v. Mann (NY, 1992): Ruled on the Fifth Amendment.
- People v. Lovelace (IL, 2002): Applied Fourth Amendment protections.
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12d ago
I do not have any experience with Linux certification programs. I do have experience with Linux, programming, sysadmin stuff, and government jobs/roles/contracts that require certifications. I also have experience with hiring, and with convincing large organizations to pay for training. With those caveats, I think something like Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate would be worth looking into.
Benefits:
- From a reputable org, so has some value on a resume
- Not too deep for a new-to-tech employee
- Covers the basics of what you've described
I would not count on the credential to be especially useful to your company unless you know of a project or customer who requires it already. The trend I see is for organizations to focus a lot more on actual ability rather than certifications until the org get really big, and often not even then. Government jobs/contracts are the exception, but if you're doing those then you would already know which certifications to work towards.
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14d ago
Nice! This seems pretty lightweight. I wonder if this would work on the free tier of some cloud hosting providers...
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16d ago
I also highly recommend this book. It's hilarious and fascinating.
You should also pretend that the movie doesn't exist.
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23d ago
Kulak, I love your stuff, but you're being a whiny bitch. Correctness is important. Quit making excuses. Proper grammar is a gift from the writer to the reader that makes the writing easier to understand.
Pay $20 for Claude or GPT-4, or get an open source one (WizardLM-2 came out today), and feed your posts through it tuned for copy editing. Not hard.
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3mo ago
Could you point me to some freely available smart contracts that would do this? Because right now I'm pretty confident that almost nobody is doing this.
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3mo ago
That sounds like regular old depression. There's plenty of info out there about how to deal with depression. For me, getting some sunlight on my skin every morning and working out 4x/week for 30+ minutes does more for my mental health than anything my psychiatrist recommended.
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3mo ago
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3mo ago
Neoreactionary internet denizen Jim has an old post where he coined the term "generational loss of hypocrisy", and I wish it was used more widely. His given example sucks, which is probably why. I'll try to convey some other examples without waging the culture war or consensus building, and feedback is welcome if I fall short:
- As described in your post, where Soviet politicians give lip service to things because they're expected to, and the newer generation of politicians believe them sincerely.
- Jim's example is people expressing shock that a female prison guard would aid the escape of male prisoners she was sleeping with. He claims "everyone knew women were like this". Personally, I find the leap from "women like bad boys" to "women will break their bad boys out of prison" too large, and that's why I'm sad that there isn't a better defense of the concept somewhere.
- Trends of work and play preferences for men and women. Boys and girls play differently (paywall bypass), but after a generation of trying to remove the stigma of boys playing with dolls, Damore got fired for his memo. Set aside the arguments of the actual culture war issues and look at the "generational loss of hypocrisy": The belief that "boys shouldn't play with dolls" is very dated, and its believers are mostly in retirement homes now. While the Baby Boomers will (broadly) approve of letting children play with whatever toy they want, they also (broadly) believe that there are gendered preferences, and going against those is abnormal. They just don't say that last part out loud. By the time we're to Generation X, there's significant support for equity as defined by the social justice movement, and expressing the unsaid beliefs of the Baby Boomers creates a hostile work environment to the point where you will be fired.
- Some climate change scientists and activists present short timelines for catastrophic destruction. There's a history of extreme claims from environmentalists since, for example, Earth getting destroyed after whales go extinct gets more donations and support than statistics, charts, and threats of "loss of biodiversity" that most people just won't internalize. People in power pay climate change lip service and make a donation, but generally don't behave as if the world actually is going to suffer these catastrophic effects any time soon. Buying houses at sea-level is an example of this hypocrisy. Greta Thunberg took the proclamations at face value and is upset that people in power aren't backing up their talk with action. Criticisms of AOC's Green New Deal include plenty in the category of "You're taking climate change too seriously": if the more catastrophic predictions are correct then it would make sense to take significant economic loss now in order to prevent it.
- Police/prison reform. Though I'm not very knowledgeable on the history of these movements, I think a lot of the older generation knows that some people are just anti-social criminals who shouldn't be free (related study), but the newer members of the movements has been pushing for the actual abolition of prisons and police.
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3mo ago
We had a similar issue with a neighbor playing loud music, which we resolved thanks to a bit of luck. This won't map perfectly onto your situation but may give you some ideas.
First we texted, and we also walked over a few times, asking them politely. We suspected the neighbors were inconsiderate but we started with polite and direct confrontation anyways. After that didn't work for a few weeks/months, we'd text once asking them to turn it down and call the police with a noise complaint when they didn't. This worked out great, because the neighbors (being inconsiderate assholes) had some friends over and decided to start revving their motorcycles in the driveway very loudly at the exact same time the police came by because of the noise complaint. That ended up getting them a court date, which we learned about after they complained to us about it.
Whatever happened in court, they no longer blast their music late at night.
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3mo ago
One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"
This calls to mind "The only Theodore Dalrymple article anyone reads", as Scott Alexander described it. It starts:
Not long ago I asked a patient of mine how he would describe his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savoring a delicious morsel.
"I take people as they come," he replied in due course. "I'm very nonjudgmental."
As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his neutrality toward human character seemed not generous but stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.
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5mo ago
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5mo ago
I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.
Your post reminds me of captchas where the user is presented a single picture, divided into squares, and asked to identify all squares with a bicycle (or whatever) in them. Sometimes there are perhaps a few pixels that are from the bicycle on the edge of one of the squares. Does that count or not? What if the pixel in the square is only partly colored by the bicycle, and the other half of its color comes from background? What about reflections? I used to get a bit stressed trying to answer correctly based on my understanding of what "correct" was. That is wrong. You are not being asked to identify all squares with a bicycle in them. You're being asked to reproduce how an average person would respond to this task, given the prompt "identify all squares with a bicycle in them". An average person doesn't think about reflections, or subpixels, or any of that. And so I am no longer stressed about captchas.
It's not reading minds exactly, but it is a combination of "not overthinking" and "enough shared culture so that they all understand those critical, unstated assumptions".
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8mo ago
My understanding is that truancy problems usually start after all those things are taught in elementary school. I disagree that basic algebra is valuable when, in a few years, someone with an 85 IQ will be able to ask the Large Language Model on their phone to solve the problem for them, and it will get it right. You say teaching numeracy is important, I think by any reasonable measure we have tried and failed to do that. It would be easier to change societies expectations to be "people aren't expected to understand things with numbers", than it would be to rely on an assumption that call center employees can understand what it means when they push buttons on a calculator.
You're right that we shouldn't abolish school entirely, and I apologize for being unclear in my comment. I propose we keep schools but make them optional, at the parent's discretion. We are forcing too much education on people who are too stupid to benefit from it, and in the process we're torturing children who would actually benefit from more schooling.
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8mo ago
Saw this song shared a few times on Twitter/X yesterday. I don't normally go for country music but this was good. Talented fellow, and I hope his career takes off.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Looking up ammunition on your cell phone is completely normal behavior, and I do so occasionally to keep an eye on prices. If I was somehow back in school, where administrators and teachers are stupid and afraid of all things firearm related, then the correct advice is absolutely "learn not to get caught". Why is everyone under the impression that this text message is damning?
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