curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Obviously this happens, but these people are incredibly fringe and have no power (although you'd be almost forgiven for believing otherwise if you spend a lot of time on twitter)
Who, uh, doesn't spend a lot of time on twitter? Matt Yglesias spends a lot of time on twitter, and often quote-tweets these fringe far-right figures. Tucker's writers breathed the twitter-far-right environment both when he was at Fox and now. Random smart people I know IRL follow all sorts of people on twitter. Even many years ago the social network for the "liberal media" was ... twitter. And a lot of relatively mainstream right-wing media figures follow various far-right people on twitter. Sure, the far-right doesn't currently have *power, but it certainly has influence. And most of the far-right does mix in the 'statistical differences in IQ' part of HBD with white identitarianism.
The reason talking about HBD is important is that so much policy is based on the false premise that not-HBD
His point is sort of that 'not-HBD' is a key part of the logic justifying affirmative action, but not actually a key part of the political resonance of affirmative action for almost everyone. The political resonance is just that people really really don't want to be racist and really really want to help the poor black people helpless in the face of structural factors. Someone who's an earnest progressive activist isn't going to be receptive to HBD, it just doesn't do anything for any of their motives.
And in terms of those motives: Scott Alexander clearly believes races have different average IQs. But he's a liberal so he doesn't make a huge deal about it - it just doesn't feel good. Whereas someone like ZHPL or Fuentes do believe races have different IQs, and they buy more into the whole far-right idea cluster so they make a huge deal about it. Hanania's significantly more liberal, so he doesn't really want people to become ZHPL or Fuentes, so he doesn't want to make a huge deal about race and IQ. Also, maybe emphasizing race and IQ puts you in a coalition with the 'nazis', and then the nazis are toxic to the public, so your cause loses.
As he says at the end:
Those who are obsessed with the idea of talking about group differences believe that they are transcending this debate. If bio-realism makes its way into public discourse, it will, like almost all empirical facts about the social world, be a handmaiden to a larger political vision. Whether you want to make its lessons more salient in the discourse ultimately depends on what you actually want to replace leftism.
(I'm not agreeing with his position here, just trying to explain it)
If you want to eliminate the injustice and (worse) inefficiency of policies based on blank slatism then you need to convince the intelligentsia. These people will not be convinced by changing the subject. I think popularizing HBD is much more likely than western elites saying "liberty is so great that it's worth racial inequality".
He'd say 'yeah, we already tried to convince the intelligentsia, see the Bell Curve, it didn't work'. But - does that mean we should stop trying? Just because it's not enough doesn't mean it isn't useful to promote HBD on the margin. Some of the intelligentsia (eg Scott and the many mainstream people who respect him) clearly are convinced, and that can't hurt the Right or Freedom or w/e.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If you know how to use a terminal, grep for anything with the string 'motte' in it and then zip those files up and upload them to the dev discord i think is the easiest. It's in a bit of a weird format
specifically 'rg -a -uuu -l motte'
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If anyone's privately archiving every mottepost, now's the time to say that!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
How does one make a copy of the browser cache
Literally take the browser cache folder that gattsuru posted below and make a copy of it to somewhere else
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If I wanted to agree with him - it's not that a welfare state and having open borders to labor and capital are incompatible, it's that having those two and a political attitude among a majority of your elite and/or voters that 'if there are poor people physically here, we need to give them welfare and doing otherwise is unjust and racist'. You could absolutely have a welfare state for citizens, allow noncitizens to work here without receiving welfare, and then have an enforced and selective path to citizenship if people wanted that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That probably reflects the chief problem; the "grey tribe" (such as it exists - I've always argued that it's actually just a subset of the "blue tribe", which is about as much as Scott said in the post that popularized the concepts) is an insignificant political force, and any successful attempt to expand the reach would mean implicitly or explicitly catering to more mainstream blues
Which is why the strategy the greys seem to be using is less "create a political party and get votes" and more "push their ideas within existing political institutions". Things like EA's policy work in global health and development, animal welfare, and AI risk. Or things like zvi's balsa research, which is explicitly targeting some of OP's bullet points.
It's analogous to the YIMBY strategy, and YIMBYism is much bigger than most of the other ideas in the OP.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
As for "oh the cute cuddly octopuses which are just as intelligent as we are, don't farm them!", I think a few videos of the intelligent cute octupuses hunting and eating their own fellows would counter all that. If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?
"Other tribs of humans naturally hunt and kill each other in war, why object to my tribe doing it to them for fun"?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I could be wrong, this is just guessing, but I strongly suspect the social benefits of banning noncompetes are much higher than the social benefits of allowing them. Thinking first in the case of high human capital occupations, no noncompetes allows employees to freely move on to better-paying (and thus more productive) occupations, take knowledge with them, and start their own companies. These are the exact things that are critical to the existence of competitive markets - being able to choose a job that pays better and start new companies in niches that would be profitable is exactly what pushes prices down to efficient levels. And 'a new startup' is such a risky thing to do that having a noncompete hanging over your head could disrupt a lot of innovation. California, notably, has banned noncompetes for a long time, and also contains Silicon Valley. Some argue that was important to SV's growth - idk.
"On the other hand - an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing". In the specific case of programmers, I don't see noncompetes significantly reducing the extent to which people are trained. In the course of doing your job, you need to learn about what you're doing and what the rest of the company is doing, and you learn by doing. "Trade secrets" - having a high quality team and existing features and customers is more than enough moat to be profitable for a while, and anything more than that (compare to, like, stronger software IP) would, intuitively, reduce surplus by reducing competition. And empirically, tech seem to innovate a ton despite the existing California noncompete bans. "Customer sharing" - for most jobs, this isn't a big issue. It is for some - and for those, you could imagine a noncompete ban that carved those out - but even then, isn't 'an employee taking customers with them' the exact kind of thing that enables those customers to switch to a better product?
At a high level, the issue is that, despite the theory that anything that two parties agree to will be beneficial to both of them and efficient, rational agents and all - in practice employers have tremendous power in negotiations with employees for a whole host of reasons, and can use this power to insert clauses like noncompetes that employees just accept because 'everyone does that'. This is (one of) the reasons why there's a lot of regulation around the employer-employee relationship.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I find myself comforted that these people are confined to their weird Bay Area poly sex cults far away from the levers of power.
Are they, though? Doesn't Effective Altruism have a big 'policy' focus? And how well did assuming weird progressive academic-ish nerds wouldn't have any influence over the levers of power go for the past few centuries?
At any rate, it shouldn't be surprising that a post or ideology with a few dozen big ideas will have a few bad ones. What doesn't? That shouldn't sink the whole concept.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
On the other site, a lot of people have successfully appealed permabans. I don't really remember anything about wording, just 'try again several times with some spacing'.
edit: that's about account permanent suspensions. If you mean on subreddits, I don't think there's much point
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
i imagine a lot of people would the feature a lot if it actually magically guaranteed anonymity against all possible threat models, but it doesn't. I feel like people here are already very resistant to the desire to not say things that'll get a negative response, but care about anonymity for other reasons like not wanting to get their racism posts linked to their real job and things like that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Sure, but that's a general brokenness to the justice system, and Trump's increasingly large legal wounds are mostly a result of him refusing to stop walking on the broken glass even when he could just step around it and only be a bit inconvenienced, not the system being biased against him.
I guess it's funny how contingent technological progress is on what ideas people have at what times, as opposed to just 'material' factors like how much compute is available (ofc, it requires more compute to train than to run).
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I've almost never seen that happen to private servers tbh. Sometimes to public ones
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Discord is more like a platform than it is a single community / vibe. Probably a majority of discord servers, unweighted by member count, are just places for small communities or groups of friends to chat about whatever they were going to chat about anyway. And for that, it's the best platform on the internet. But yeah, almost all public discord servers (and, i guess, the private ones) are terrible because, well, the people populating them are mediocre, and would make any platform they used 'like that'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Eh, I disagree. I don't think it's valuable to have a comment that says "Great post, thanks", it just takes up space, and I think they should be removed. Removed without prejudice or implication of future warnings/bans sure, but still removed.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Assuming you're not a weird EA utilitarian
I think being a 'weird EA utilitarian' is to a significant extent implied by the morality that most people hold, but it's just to difficult to actually follow so people rationalize it. Even if you aren't an EA though, I think 'you can ethically kick someone out of your house even if it will lead to them instantly dying' is something that very few people would agree with. I think the vast majority would agree you can ethically kick someone out even if it makes them homeless, but not homeless to the point where it's >50% likely they will die in the next month. (Note, though, that this is true because we have material abundance, a welfare state, etc - if tradeoffs between 'your family starving' and 'kicking out your guest and them dying' were common, the popular stance would be (and was) different, B is unconscionable precisely because there's a better option. But it's reasonable for 'which action is moral' to depend on 'which action is available')
But I think you're assuming a contradiction and using it to prove something false.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This isn't fun, more wellness, but I am going to abuse the immense power invested in me by virtue of being an admin and post here anyway.
I'm not sure it makes sense that people are much less likely to post something Fun on Tuesday or a Small Scale Question on Thursday. Maybe the current system serves a function by making people actively try to come up with things based on the prompt of fun / wellness / question and they'd post less in a 'general weekly whatever thread'? Maybe we should just stop using the reddit post system for what are essentially permanent threads? idk.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Even subtle trolls get their due here impressively quickly from what I've lurked.
I think it's been better in recent months than in the past but even in recent months (iirc, not privy to details) people who are very obviously ban evading and trolling still take weeks to get banned.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Don't think this is at all true. A lot of usecases are porn, and quite a few involve violence or 'being offensive' or racism, but the vast majority of llm usecases work almost as well as they would without censorship/safety training.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I have an intuitive sense that this isn't true - that doing BJJ won't make him work harder at being a doctor. Going through a list of people I know and whether or not they do combat sports, those that do combat sports don't seem to be much more 'agentic', 'driven', or 'accomplished' in other areas of life. Obviously there are a bunch of directions the causation could go in and selection effects or confounders, but still.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Agree with Gaashk. I'd love instead a long post about who these people are, what they're doing, how this kind of organizing ties together more mainstream and far-right spaces, positive or critical commentary on the likelihood of whatever 'movement' this is succeeding, etc.
Title is highly exaggerated too, not the kind of thing you'd want in a post here. Also, "yeah but AGI so whatever lol"
In my experience, there's not really a point at which high IQ stops having very visible benefits for anything practical. People just get ... better, more capable, at everything. Better understanding why you asked them to do something and accomplishing your actual goal instead of goodhearting, figuring out things to do themselves, in general just understanding everything better and doing better. Just in my personal experience, there's a significant correlation between IQ and being good at sports, or being funny, or being a good musician, or...
There's definitely relatively diminishing returns, - a 160 IQ restaurant manager is a better restaurant manager than someone at 120 IQ, but the relative difference is just lower than the significant difference between a 160 CEO and a 120 CEO which is in turn lower than between a 160 top-level theoretical physicist vs 120 who can't do that. I'd still definitely rather have a 160 IQ maid than a 110 IQ maid, but that's obviously a poor allocation of resources (and also very unpleasant for the maid).
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