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curious_straight_ca


				

				

				
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joined 2022 November 13 09:38:42 UTC

				

User ID: 1845

curious_straight_ca


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 13 09:38:42 UTC

					

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User ID: 1845

SMTM's 'a chemical hunger' posts were quite bad, see here for more. I haven't followed their later posts but I doubt it was much better.

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?

(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.

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.

If you're gonna reppost your substack piece here, please at least put in the effort to copy the whole contents of the post into your toplevel. If Ymeskhout can do it, you can too. And maybe less of "Remember to subscribe"?

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.

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.

I do think black people have a significantly lower average IQ than whites, that this has a genetic component, and this means that disparate impact civil rights law and affirmative action should not exist.

I don't think this comes from a believe in 'fuck everyone not like me' - I'm happy to work with smart Indians, Chinese, etc. And if I see a black person who's in fact contributing at the same level as a non-black person, I'm happy to work with that person too! (Clarence Thomas, for instance, doesn't seem to be any worse of a justice than the others).

I think most pro-HBD commenters here have beliefs like that?

I don't think most trans people are pedophiles though, or that they're transing our kids in the schools or w/e. I don't think transitioning is a good choice for anyone, but there's not really any concrete relationship between the way it's bad and pedophilia or schools.

One way to understand how I'm not trying to censor is that I invited OP to make a more detailed and direct defense of whatever the nazis were doing.

I don't think this is a good comment. It just gestures at a bunch of vague right-wing ideas without providing any detail, evidence, or new information. An equivalent left-wing comment would be "America is occupied by the entrenched forces of conservatism and racism. They know what they are doing, they see our pain, yet they refuse to even let us speak. They hold all the levers of power and are not afraid to use them against us."

It probably violates the "speak plainly" rule too. Who are the occupiers? How are they keeping Germany in line with the new ideology? What would happen? Which german thinkers? Which direction? Yeah, obviously it's the nazis, but I'd be happy to read an open and evidenced defense of Nazi ideology or historical actions, but this isn't that.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now

This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?

No! I'm happy that we allow Holocaust deniers or the (iirc) nazi pedophile from a while ago to post if they follow the rules. But that's the kind of comment I'd expect to see as a reply to iamyesyouareno on twitter, not one I want to see here.

Although this is arguably less about punishing musk and more the sort of silly thing that environmental rules require of many large projects.

FWIW I do hope you come back after the ban and keep posting here, even though we disagree you clearly have things to say.

On the particular topic of plurals: It's not even a new thing. There have been waves of multiple personality disorder diagnosis before the internet was a thing, and in the resulting controversy a consensus emerged that the diagnosis was actually helping to cause and perpetuate the supposed disorder. here's a very nice article about that.

MPD was an extremely popular diagnosis when hypnosis was in vogue 130 years ago; then emerged again 60 years ago when The Three Faces of Eve became a best-selling book and hit movie; was revived 40 years ago following the vogue of the movie Sybil, and its many imitators; and reached a peak 30 years ago when several people started conducting weekend workshops all over the country minting an army of poorly trained MPD therapists who suddenly diagnosed and treated it in all their patients.

Having seen hundreds of patients who claimed to house multiple personalities, I have concluded that the diagnosis is always (or at least almost always) a fake, even though the patients claiming it are usually (but not always) sincere.

In every single instance, I discovered that the alternate personalities had been born under the tutelage of an enthusiastic and naive therapist, or in imitation of a friend, or after seeing a movie, or upon joining a multiples' chat group—or some combination. It was most commonly a case of a suggestible and gullible therapist and a suggestible and gullible patient influencing each other in the creation of new personalities. None of the purported cases had had a spontaneous onset and none was the least bit convincing.

There's an interesting parallel here to claims I've seen here about how teachers "find" transgenderism in kids, it fits really nicely. However: I think in your discord explorations, most of the kids weren't diagnosed by a psychologist, but "discovered" it themselves on the internet. I think the same thing happens with the trans kids.

I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.

I don't think so! I'd read it.

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.

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.

I mean, men are more aggressive and independently courageous than women, generally, and I'm pretty sure that's genetic, although I don't think I've ever seen a good study on that. Not that that's connected to the above argument, which is kinda weird.

Why wouldn't you? It's much more fun to speak to people you disagree with - you make contact with their ideas, sharpen your rhetorical tactics and understanding of the subject matter, and maybe you'll learn something or maybe they'll learn something. And those people having moral flaws like "I hate everyone who isn't me" doesn't make the conversations any less interesting! They still have object level claims and complicated reasons for believing them.

Whereas being surrounded by people you agree with is (relatively) more like talking to a mirror. You know what it's going to say, so why bother?

I don't liking making old arguments that didn't stick the last time I made them, but progressivism, trans 'ideology', being 'anti-white', all spread much more potently over the internet or through peers and popular media than through teachers. When you say that schools tell kids they're privileged or that they secretly transition kids, this gives off an extremely strong impression that the school's physical custody of or social power over the children is a significant force in actually causing the children to be trans. I am really confident this isn't true, just by observing the trans people (including kids) around me, and talking to trans adults and "might've decided to transition if my life had gone another way" types. The problem isn't that The State is using it's power to oppress you, the actual problem is that a lot of smart people are, without any particular malice or plotting, coming to severely incorrect conclusions and spreading them to others.

I often reflect how I could possibly explain to my child all the freedom we used to have. How easy air travel used to be. Or how fun it was to wait in the terminal to greet family as they stepped off the plane. How there didn't used to be security guards and metal detectors at theatres.

This does suck, but I think it's minor.

How there weren't transients destroying every public work constantly

This is less minor. Not civilization-destroying, but not minor either. I don't think this one is inevitable though. I don't know much about eg the "sf dems for change" and the recent win in SF, but that seems very positive for fixing the worst excesses within the progressive framework.

That isn't what that post is about. The title of that post is "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". (In anticipated experiences). HBD pays rent, depending on how you interpret it, in anticipated experiences by predicting a lot of anticipated experiences, such as future differences in behavior of various races, future test scores of various races, future successes of countries populated almost entirely by various races, how effective interventions in schooling or income vs interventions in genes will be to modify such outcomes, etc. Yudkowsky is definitely not claiming that if something isn't politically useful, it isn't worth knowing.

But you can also still have widespread knowledge of HBD and also colorblind meritocracy. That we've been moving away from that a bit doesn't actually make it too unstable to maintain, most aspects of social organization ebb and flow with time. To make a larger scale comparison, if you think free-market capitalism and democracy are inevitable - consider communism, fascism, and the significant appeal that the two had within many liberal democracies around a century ago. They ended up being stable because they weathered tough storms, not because the water was calm. Similarly, 'colorblind meritocracy' is having a bit of a tough few decades, but that itself is very weak evidence against the thing's ability to persist.

Because righteousness requires total devotion to altruism, yes. If one is, say, 90% of the way to altruism, but still charges a bit more than they could to buy themselves some luxuries, that isn't 'righteous' in this sense. But

You know the option where a guy is altruistically helping others? That doesn't happen. Go with the other one.

There's no reason you can't be experiencing part of the 90% and not part of the 10%. You can be 'most of the way' there.

Wow ... . You're just <negative outgroup stereotype 1> and <negative outgroup stereotype 2>. There are a hundred thousand comments like this every day on twitter, and I like that this forum is a break from that.

I think this is basically true. If you have today's American or modern values, most any particular thing cited in this thread has something 3x worse even 50 years ago, and worse farther back. If you value things like religion, chastity, the TFR, national pride, or even go further back and value conquest and racial purity (this is not intended to be snide) things are clearly going wrong. But dumb regulations, endorsing foreign violence, corruption ... all are actually better now than eg 100 years ago.

edit: Moldbug would claim this is technology masking political/civilizational decline. This is significantly true in many of the areas Moldbug claims it in (although I don't think we're going to descend into something like South America like moldbug claims), but the political 'progress' in the last century more than compensates for it for most peoples' values. If you're philosophically willing to 'die for your freedom' and conceive of freedom the way most to today, then (purely as a comparison, this is in no way a real tradeoff) being mugged a few times is more than worth homosexuality and free love being legal.

There are definitely exceptions, like "private actors being able to build things" or "government competence at large-scale projects" or "homeless people everywhere", but liberals are in fact noticing those. Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains.

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.