curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.
This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters
Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".
There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds
I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
it does not present a clear course of action
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cease race-based affirmative action (and affirmative action more generally)
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smart people should have more kids
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embryo selection (possible today), more direct genetic engineering (possible within a few decades)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Sperm is almost infinitely scalable, just use Clarence and a hundred other high-iq black people.
It's much harder to deny that individual genetic differences in IQ exist than that group differences exist - the science on the former is, in fact, settled. And if one views race as little more than different distributions of genes caused by ancestry, what's truly different about being low IQ because your two parents were vs being low IQ because you're of a certain race? In either case, an identifiable group of people is noticeably dumber. So, race HBD or not, the moral problem persists anyway, replace "race" with "class" in your post and little changes.
And "fruitless all along" - not at all, few hereditarians claim blacks didn't benefit significantly from desegregation and civil rights, few claim the IQ gap didn't close at all. And genetic enhancement is coming!
Also, just a guess, decent chance OP is a troll.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't think there's data here, but I suspect that liberals who have stronger personal ties with their grandparents than average don't have noticeably more children.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You say:
You actively try to bully, discredit or destroy people who demand a coherent definition or raise questions about why this a slightly different colored berry is not, in fact, a "fluxberry"
OP said:
I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is
I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth
I don't think OP is one of the people bullying and destroying.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
the codebase we forked from already has #2
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The theory of evolution as the origin of life predicts that the number of differing random substitutions in DNA between two species is proportional to the length of time between now and their most recent common ancestor, as predicted by fossils or just inferring phylogeny from morphology. Or, in simpler words, if all species evolved from a common ancestor, and DNA mutates with time, species that split apart more recently will have fewer random DNA mutation differences than species that split apart farther in the past. This prediction was made and confirmed.
So it's not a tautology! It made a prediction and the prediction was correct.
Every theorem of mathematics is in some sense a ""tautology"" relative to the axioms, but they're still true and important. It's also not a mathematical tautology to claim that evolution caused the existence of all life on Earth, because your tautology-evolution could still be true with a creator, yet 'the theory of evolution' contains the first. Also, the theory of evolution is incredibly practically useful in biology and medicine.
That video has negative information content. Blinken is following a reasonable general policy of saying nothing of substance whatsoever, because sounding like a politician all the time is better for him than seeming reasonable and informative 95 out of 100 times and saying something that blows up on him occasionally. Paul takes advantage of Blinken's empty statements, using them as a canvas for an uncontested and vague picture of withholding critical information.
This doesn't imply there's secret information that'd settle the debate. This is exactly what would happen if government agencies were taking years to do simple procedural things (as happens constantly), and politicians wanted to make hay with it (as also happens constantly). Paul doesn't even have to be intentionally lying, just be someone who's willing to believe things that are both emotionally compelling and convenient, as most people are.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think you could get there from a normal supply/demand relation, since efficiency raises supply?
Monopolists don't set prices to where supply = demand, they set prices to maximize their own profit, and there's deadweight loss because of the mismatch. But, yeah, prices would still decrease as efficiency increased. I think it gets weird when there are very large price differences involved and it'd depend on what the demand curve looks like exactly. My argument is more that we can observe competition driving the price decreases of all those specific goods historically.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
(warning: citing graphs without understanding deeply where the numbers come from, but all that matters for this argument is the order of magnitude)
McDonalds's profit margin, averaged over the past decade, is like 24%. They'd, you know, rather it be 100%, but competition doesn't let them do that.
Mcdonalds is actually a high outlier in that regard because of the value of the brand, other fast food companies are lower etc. Again, this is competition manifesting, people are willing to pay more for a mcdonalds burger than a generic burger.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
But they can (and do) overcharge on water, understanding that they can get away with it because it’s an inconvenience for you to get it elsewhere
It's an inconvenience to get it elsewhere because billions of dollars have been invested in buying land, constructing physical buildings, paying for utilities, creating distribution networks, investing in facilities to produce the products you're buying, all for water and a thousand other products. One does need to pay for that investment.
It would be more efficient if, for super-sized corporations, an agency stepped in and “auctioned” off the corporate positions and ownership according to who will do the job for the least amount of money, then pass the saved money to consumers
I will be the CEO of every major company at the same time for $1. More generally, it's hard to pick a good board and CEO, and many companies that could've succeeded fail due to bad leadership. I think an agency choosing it would be even worse than the current system.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world
Huh? Then why have the prices of wood, steel, food, electricity, computing power, plastic, televisions, phones, and literally every material good ever declined by orders of magnitude over the past four centuries? When we observe any specific one, what we see is that new, more efficient or productive techniques enter the market at lower prices and drive out higher priced competitors, over and over. What am I missing?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There's very strong evidence that eating organic produce dramatically reduces the amount of pesticide metabolites in your urine. (Of course, from very small levels to even smaller levels). But that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I'm not aware of any strong evidence on anything else.
Here's an argument: A number of pesticides currently in use are going to be banned by the EPA over the next few decades. Organic lets you choose to avoid those now. I guess.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.
... So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements
I feel like when I've seen DEI it's coincided with implicit but fairly obvious pushes to just hire more women and black people. It's claimed that implicit bias and structural racism and such are just being corrected for, but mechanically, what's happening is that on the margin 'racial and gender minorities' who have less experience or seem less skilled are hired instead of white people, because intentional antiblack discrimination is rare nowadays but achievement gaps persist. Novant crossed a line, but many other companies are doing the same thing and just being less obvious about it.
Another perspective: There are, sitting on the drives of various intelligence agencies, security researchers, and assorted "hackers", relatively small sequences of bytes. Some of these sequences, if you navigated to a webpage and received them in response, would rapidly compromise your computer, giving the attacker access to your social media accounts, private messages, bank accounts, work accounts, etc. Other sequences, if sent as messages to your phone, would do the same. This is very bad. This allows governments and intelligence agencies, the "pathologically controlling busy bodies", to see all of your stuff without a warrant. This is what NSO group sold to nation-states to target dissidents and other nation states, what they sold to the Saudis to help them kill Jamal Kashoggi, etc.
A large part of the reason for this is that the way C and C++ allow programmers to make mistakes. Many, many mistakes. Mistakes that are incredibly difficult to find manually, and mistakes that have resisted general mitigations by the smartest engineers at top tech companies for years despite heroic effort, and mistakes that are found by the dozens every month (and, implicitly, dozens are created every month). Most of these are only theoretical parts of exploits, or would be one part of many needed for a successful exploit chain, but still.
I think it's notable that your one direct link, the example of the government taking action, doesn't actually align with your proposed plan. Using Rust doesn't help the government control you more. It does the opposite.
Most PC's sold today will only boot authorized operation systems, with an option in the BIOS (for now) to turn off that safety feature.
This prevents one of the above programs from permanently replacing your operating system with itself, which they did do.
Windows warns you every time you try to run an "unrecognized" executable, with the option (for now) of ignoring it's warning.
People constantly download malware. Don't think '120iq smart teenager' here, think '100iq 14 year old' or 'grandpa'. The warning helps protect these people from having their social media or bank accounts stolen.
All it would take is to slowly shave away by degrees until the process of running free and open software is so frustrating that most people don't do it, and the powers that be can "deprecate the feature" under the rationale that it's not used anymore.
Software developers rely on huge piles of open source software to create all this stuff. This probably isn't going to happen.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Huh, I have complaints about rust but they're very different.
I haven't used a 'lighter-weight machine' in at least half a decade, and if I had to I'd just compile in the cloud. I just use serde any time a struct leaves memory and that's fine, and when I need threads I just use a very limited and safe abstraction - rust gives you a lot of power but you don't have to use it.
The thing I don't like about rust is ... Rust has a lot of great features, so I end up using it a lot. And for 80% of the code I write, I'm not writing tokio internals or something that needs to get the last 15% of possible performance, so I really do not care about the difference between String and &str, lifetimes, cloning, lambda mutability and capturing, not being able to pass an immutable reference to a state object around while i have a mutable reference to a child of it, there being &s everywhere because half of the methods on containers take references and half take values, ... It just takes mental effort that should be spent elsewhere. I think for people with lower g these are bigger problems, but I have a good grasp of all of them. But I'd still much rather not.
These are just a bunch of papercuts - they're pretty annoying, but all of the good parts of rust more than compensate for it. I often wish I were using a smaller rust, though. Recently some of the early rust contributors started trying to make a language like that, although the base rates on success are very low and I have some problems with the initial approach.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The entire reason their great grandparents moved to Detroit is Detroit was where the growth was. I'm not really sure I understand the argument here.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You can have a case that just seems obviously, incontrovertibly correct, but if you've got a justice that already decided what they'd like to do, it's not very hard for them to use brilliant legal reasoning to do what they want to do.
Not a lawyer, but I think this is much less of an issue in the day-to-day practice of law than when one's arguing novel and politically charged issues in front of the Supreme Court, or even in the kinds of court cases that you hear about in the news.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Although this is arguably less about punishing musk and more the sort of silly thing that environmental rules require of many large projects.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
He's claiming we believe "black people are stupid" and "fuck everyone not like me". It's plainly not true that most people here who believe the first believe the second.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Trace posted this on twitter and got a bunch of comments. Although the comments mostly remind me of why I dislike twitter. Not that I'm going to stop using twitter.
Very strongly disagree here. IQ is correlated with performance in all complex intellectual tasks. If you dropped everyone into an every-monkey-for-himself anarchic pre-industrial hellscape, the warlord of the gang that eventually won would be high IQ. The best traders in financial markets are high IQ. People who win in politics are high IQ, whether that's democratic politics or authoritarian elite politics.
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