astrolabia
4mo ago
taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction
You would think so, but didn't we just watch this happen to straight white men, and Europeans more generally, with basically no effective pushback? Some days it seems as simple as
- Comedians joke about it
- Thinkpieces recontextualize it
- Comedians mock the stupidest examples of pushback
- A few people get cancelled for pushing back
And soon after, countless formal and informal corporate, academic, personal, and government policies change to enforce the new policy. In a way it's impressive how liberal democracies can coordinate to change which groups they marginalize without much violence or state-directed propaganda.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.
To the extent that these different people actually have a different worldview, this must seem really subversive. Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I think the conventional wisdom is that having only one big mass firing is much better for morale and productivity than more smaller ones, provided you can convince people that there isn't another mass layoff on the horizon. The idea being that if you have rolling layoffs, everyone stays in short-term, back-stabbing, cover-your-ass mode permanently, because they never know if they're being eyed for layoff.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly. I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?
As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?
And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.
astrolabia
11mo ago
I get a lot of pleasure watching the AI Ethics folks pointedly refuse to even acknowledge that LLMs are getting more capable. Some of them have noted publicly that they're bleeding credibility because of it, but can't talk about it because of chilling effects.
It's also remarkable how the agreed-upon leading lights of the AI Ethics movement are all female (with the possible exception of Moritz Hardt, who keeps his head down). The field is playing out like you'd imagine it would in an uncharitable right-wing polemic.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.
The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.
astrolabia
13d ago
One of the scariest things from my point of view is watching some Jewish progressives I know choosing, after a period of internal struggle, to take the side of Hamas. I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side. And I would have been surprised to see them abandon pretty much their whole progressive social networks and worldview under any circumstances, even to defend themselves. But it seems like many of them chose to thread the needle by simply becoming "one of the good ones".
astrolabia
7mo ago
I love Nietzsche, and maybe I missed the point, but on dealing with the death of god it seemed like he mostly said "Wouldn't it be awesome if someone came along and gave us new values?". Kind of like "my plan is to come up with a plan".
astrolabia
4mo ago
Canada has a much larger native population than the USA, about 5% of the total population now, who have similar life outcomes to america's blacks. They also receive a huge amount of bespoke welfare. So I think that's some evidence against your theory.
astrolabia
6mo ago
I think that's why they required the defectors to bring a very expensive MiG with them.
astrolabia
1yr ago
until the public reaction is so bad it demands a crackdown
Do you think this is realistic? Why hasn't a crackdown been demanded in L.A., even though it's apparently much worse than the TTC already?
PPC-style actual law-and-order conservatism is still completely verboten amongst all of my Canadian friends and colleagues.
astrolabia
3mo ago
To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late.
What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.
Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?
astrolabia
11mo ago
I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
astrolabia
11mo ago
It's really, really hard to pin down a grown man in a way that he can't get out, hit you, kick you, bite you, etc., without hurting him.
astrolabia
1yr ago
The other thing that's already happened is that a bunch of the most talented DL researchers and engineers have already left Google + Deepmind. It's totally nuts.
astrolabia
1yr ago
As far as I understand, this has happened when George Mason University decided to hire a bunch of looked-over straight while male libertarian economists, and got a powerhouse is in the form of a single department at an otherwise unknown school with Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.
You also see extreme "over-representation" in any new, unregulated area of economic growth. E.g.
-
The founding teams of most tech startups and the first few rounds of technical employees,
-
Cryptocurrency
-
E-sports
-
Tech Venture Capital (e.g. Y combinator)
-
AI and AI safety
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Effective altruism
It takes time for the problematizers to notice a new power center and bring the eye of sauron to bear. But this is becoming quicker and more predictable, so first movers are pre-emptively playing the optics game with more effort and finesse. I just worry that someday there won't be any new growth centers to move to.
astrolabia
9mo ago
I agree with most of your post, but isn't the default "For You" tab on Twitter already the "TikTok of text"? It is also happy to show you viral posts from people you aren't following, and also to not show you boring posts from people you do subscribe to. Famously, accounts with millions of followers that people feel like they should follow, but whose posts don't get much activity, often have many fewer views per post than a hit from an unknown.
So it seems like Twitter (and to a lesser extent, facebook) is already adopting the TikTok strategy.
astrolabia
1yr ago
"If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!"
I view this as the girlfriend trying to force the boyfriend to maintain a detailed model of her emotional state, and to proactively make sure he knows what he needs to do keep her happy. Simply telling him when and what she's unhappy about is much less work for him, but more work for her, and there will inevitably be opportunities to make her happy that neither will notice unless he's paying attention.
That phrasing might sound retarded, and sometimes girlfriends massively overestimate how easy it is to guess their emotional states, but sometimes I think it's a reasonable bid for more consideration.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I think the simplest counter-argument is that, however hard it is to define, race is clearly a useful and relatively unambiguous word in many contexts. If your professor is comfortable saying anything at all about people of any race, e.g. "black people are stopped more often by police", it's not clear why it matters whether it can be defined biologically.
It's a strange bit of sophistry that people who spend all day making claims about disparate outcomes between races consider it unscientific, or somehow ontologically lacking, to make analogous claims in other contexts.
astrolabia
3mo ago
If the administration of airlines, air traffic control, pilot training and so on was ruthlessly meritocratic, then I'd agree with you that there'd be no difference in skill between black or female pilots and white male pilots, since they would all have passed the same tests and be above a certain benchmark.
Nitpick - this still won't be true as long as there is noise in the tests or variability in skill above the bar. The groups with higher average performance before the cutoff will also dominate the top percentiles after the cutoff, and be less likely to be a false positive under noisy tests.
astrolabia
6mo ago
I read the article, and was surprised to find I agreed with most of what she said. Every one of her opinions is about as manosphere/redpilled/motte-ish as you could imagine being printed in the NYT in 2023.
The new book being discussed is about how modern feminism has not just failed men, but effectively forbidden productive discussion of their problems. Bravo!
astrolabia
1yr ago
don’t treat them differently than you would a cis person of the same gender
Which we have to if we want sex-segregated sports or prisons, especially in the setting of self-ID. So this seems like a bigger pill to swallow than you are presenting it as.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree that there is bizarrely little focus on the possibility of our current institutions simply becoming worse, more powerful, and more totalizing versions of themselves. Although Andrew Critch and Paul Christiano have written detailed doom scenarios that look something like this. e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like
astrolabia
1yr ago
Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about. The NYT dismisses the possibility of different amounts of tax fraud between races for any reason. Whether or not it's genetic, or whether other factors might be more important, are separate questions, and are secondary to the question of whether the fraud detection algorithms are biased. Again, I'm saying that even acknowledging group average differences in behavior as a possible explanation for group average differences in outcome is already less mind-killed than most of my interlocutors.
Since I have you here, what do you mean when you say that a group-level difference could "outweigh" individual level variation? They're just two levels of variation, and nothing changes if one is bigger than the other - they're both still there.
I think by "ethnic spoils", OP is referring to the situation where most ethnic groups use their influence on government simply to deliver more resources to themselves. The word spoils here is used only in the sense of resources, as in "to the victor goes the spoils". India, Brazil, Iraq, Lebanon and most other multi-ethnic democracies have fairly dysfunctional governments in part because each politician is supposed to only serve their own ethnic interests.
Wokeness in Canada elevates this kind of activity to a virtue, and e.g. in job searches, it's considered a positive to have advocated for your own race's interests politically or institutionally. This is one way to show "commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion".
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