curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Direct factual issues aside, a single tweet with a single chart mentioning "The narrative" is almost never correct or informative. Not for individual consumption, but certainly not for a toplevel post. "Those of us who were paying attention ... were screaming to high heaven that vaccinating humans to replicate the spike protein was a Bad Fucking Idea." Bad Fucking Idea isn't a mechanism or an argument, make it if you have one!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't understand where you get these claims. It's not like white people are just marketing while pakis are just doing research. Immigrants are getting all sorts of jobs (see all the indians in trumpland / on the right), not just technical ones. See table 8 here (you need to ctrlf table 8 then click the link) - "Asians" do all sorts of jobs. They're overrepresented in stem stuff, sure, eg (baseline: 6.4) "category - Computer and mathematical occupations" (23), "Medical scientists" (37). But they're still overrepresented in finance and marketing, if a bit less - "Market research analysts and marketing specialists" (8), "Financial and investment analysts" (21), "Gambling services workers" (25), "Business operations specialists" (11.3). And for every occupation they're specialized in, whites are still a majority - even in the most stark one, medical scientists, whites are 58.7.
So
The plan to have Americans do marketing strategies, finance, write legal documents and do sales while the foreigners do the boring technical stuff was doomed to fail
Doesn't make sense. Whites/Americans never stopped doing 'boring technical stuff', they're still doing more than half of it. (I think OP's "It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people" is exaggerated - probably not too much than half is done by non-whites, some of whom were native-born).
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
He mentions the hairdryer in quite a few posts. I just re-read them all (they're good posts) and didn't see that bit
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Convincing, sure. But what were you convinced ... of? Being 'gaslighted', over who did the laundry last or over black crime, sucks, but do invertebrates help anyone realize that? Is the abusive boyfriend or SJW trying to "violate your soft tissues"? How does that tell us anything beyond "being tricked"? If there's any sense of 'aha, this is true!' you get from the insect paragraph that you wouldn't from a description of gaslighting itself ... what did you just start believing that you didn't before?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Definitely, but that's not what I'm arguing - it's specifically about the way the insect metaphor is used. If you already know gaslighting is bad, and have some sense of why it's bad, thinking there's some disgustingness to it beyond the actual harms it has, in a way that's related to insects, doesn't seem important. 'assertive writhing mass'?
I think there's something to my objection. It's not specifically to ilforte's comment or themotte, it's a very broad and common thing, present in most fiction, poetry, etc
This case might be different from the usual 'Is it really ethical to MURDER* someone just for being poor? (*murder: n. not provide $100k worth of state of the art medical treatment to prolong someone's life by a few months)'.
If you haven't put yourself in danger or created a situation where self-defense is justified or ..., nobody else has the right to intentionally or negligently cause your death. If a homeless guy is screaming at someone or throwing hamburger wrappers at someone, you can't take out a gun and shoot them. And you can't choke the homeless guy out and 'accidentally' kill them. (And if you could, that'd be a way to get away with intentionally killing them!).
If this guy was actively physically attacking someone or something similar, restraining the person could be justified, and then the killing would - maybe still be prosecutable (as minor fights happen a lot more than killings, and escalating them to killings can still be bad), but maybe not be. But if the guy was just being disruptive or screaming, the legal system shouldn't (according to today's ethics) allow that to escalate to a killing - it's disproportionate, it takes the 'monopoly over violence' away from the state and its adversarial legal system, etc.
One response is "the state isn't dealing with this guy and he was a danger, so it's good a vigilante dealt with him". Another response is "this guy doesn't contribute to society or his own life, and shouldn't be alive anyway". I'm sympathetic, but generally allowing random killings of people you judge in the moment to be bad has spillover effects outside cleaning out undesirables.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It's about very broadly poetic analogies. When you're moved by an aesthetic or piece of writing or find it appealing, that corresponds to learning, believing something new. If I read a particularly nice passage about everyone living in harmony in a socialist utopia, or about the glory of a noble battle, that's not just some aesthetic pleasure that's disconnected from anything, that's a specific claim about the kinds of things worth doing and their effects.* If I read 'being gaslighted is like botflies erupting from the liar's foaming mouth and corkscrew-drilling through your eardrums into your neural tissue' and am like 'wow ... so compelling ...', what am I convinced of? I'm worried it's a general sense that 'gaslighting is bad' that isn't informative. Maybe if you read a few paragraphs that characterizes particular aspects of progressive gaslighting, even via analogy - it might enable you to understand better how it's bad - but when you read 'gaslighting is like a roiling mass of hairworms' ... what? Okay, I believe that now, I believe there's something to the way hairworms are viscerally disgusting that also applies to progressive gaslighting. But I don't think it does? Hairworms are viscerally disgusting because once they burrow their way into your skin, they hurt you, and absent modern antibiotics there's not much you can do to stop them. Progressive ideas, by contrast, are virtually everywhere, and the only real way to beat them is to understand why they're bad.
not sure i explained that well.
*Modern fiction still invokes this, but the way it's so disconnected from day-to-day life both hides that and, imo, causes people to come to believe, and act on, various half-baked, incoherent ideas
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Supply chain issues from covid lockdowns are (vague guess informed by a few papers) mostly gone by now. Inflation from stimulus or pandemic checks ... isn't going to go away, the money's still there.
That said ... assuming production stays constant, all the pandemic money has to go somewhere, all the extra revenue corporations get from increased prices has to go somewhere. Because "the capitalists are using inflation as an excuse to jack up profits!!" isn't true, that money will eventually translate to increased wages. But institutions are slow and transaction costs aren't zero, so wage increases will be slow and occur at uneven times. And that's already been happening. Inflation at a single time devalues your past dollars, but it can't simultaneously devalue everyone's future income -if we imagine future production is fixed and then distributed, all the 'value' is still there and will go somewhere. Intentional deflation probably isn't worth it for reasons others describe below.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
This doesn't answer your question because it's a normal culture war topic, but I think we should've had a post on the harlan crow/thomas situation, and I don't remember one
More in line with your question, an effortpost outlining the various factions of the diffuse, yet much realer than even a few years ago, cloud of individuals in and adjacent to "dissident right" and their likely futures
It's not really a time question for me, I could just comment less and effortpost more, but don't
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Or just a lower-effort CW thread/BLR lol
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
please post it <3
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I'd be interested in any or all of these, and would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous. No strong preferences on topic though, which might be surprising, but the content of a post matters more than the topic - I've enjoyed review articles about something as trivial as the chemistry of paint drying before, while the average post on any topic is dull due to lack of inspiration and competence.
Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?
I could write this, I don't really do effortposts though.
Does it make sense? Yes, content disappears very rapidly. A lot of youtube videos I wanted to revisit have disappeared, a lot of random sites, a lot of tweets lost to suspensions or history-cleans, free PDFS that aren't free a year later, hosted images on discordapp.com or imgur, ...
If you mean "archiving every video you watch and website you visit", you'd get away with it easily. Youtube is botted, and videos have lots of bytes, so it has some bot protection - but iirc isn't that strong, and the yt-dlp maintainers have consistently gotten past it, so using that on every video you visit would work. So just [visit youtube.com/* url] -> [run yt-dlp to save video]. For every other website you visit, it's mostly just html, so (ignoring a ton of relatively boring things) you can just save the html, and the images and videos within, and view it later. For discord specifically, discord dump style tools work fine. I'm pretty sure google could kill yt-dlp if they wanted to (imagine they make a backlog of browser quirks, and every day they release a new youtube patch that modifies the JS challenge to depend on that quirk, requiring yt-dlp's JS emulator to be updated daily or run a full browser emulator), but they don't for some reason, even though they have stronger anti-bot protection in other areas.
If you're imagining something larger-scale, archiving everything on a forum or tens of thousands of youtube videos - also doable! Archive team, archive.org, has done that kind of thing for a long time. In the case of youtube videos specifically, it's so easy (and videos are so large, and most of youtube content is so useless) that archive.org actively asks people to not upload random scraped videos.
While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.
but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it
I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.
what's wrong with web app deployment
This has improved a ton recently, with tons of commercial products and open source projects. Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.
A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3%
I know less here but ... 3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related
How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied?
Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it. If we imagine a psych lab doing experiments on college students, where ... any result is fine if you can publish it, and the pricing page of your SaaS, where your main source of revenue is people clicking and you really want them to click - if, in the former, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0%, you can still publish, nobody's checking. If in the latter, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0% ... you're not getting that bonus.
so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise
If it's actually per-user noise, sample sizes of 50M users x 100 interactions per day (adding together that many normals reduces your standard deviation by 70,000x!) are more than enough to wash it out for 'latency of every page load'. Even for 'converting to paid user', that's still a few million interactions total, which is more than enough. If there are ten groups of users with entirely separate behavior, that's still only 3x higher 'noise', which isn't that much.
In the particular case of latency - I definitely do notice latency and use sites less that take longer to load. Consumers being price-conscious in consumer goods, especially commonly purchased ones, is pretty well established, although idk the specifics of what you're referring to.
Suck thread was great.
Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation
I thought of "social media companies take it as seriously as they do racism", but they don't deal with that effectively either. Maybe as seriously as they do CP or ISIS (but even for CP they're not great).
Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.
Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs, /** @param1 int A Number @param2 int Another number @returns Two numbers added @desc Adds two numbers */ public int add(int param1, int param2)
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It'd be very interesting. There are a lot of mini-ethnographies of online communities on /r/hobbydrama, and a few on rdrama
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I can't tell if this is ironically comparing me to the left-wing position here or an earnest attack. If the former, good one! If the latter, consider the "i'm sympathetic to: the state should just kill the homeless black guy" part as evidence I'm not the leftist here. I'm considering the theory of law and ethics here, not the specific case, which I don't really care much about either way.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Writing quality can mean a dozen different things. Sometimes it's just 'adherence to a certain style'. Sometimes it's about 'telling a good story'. Sometimes it's about efficiently communicating what's important and cutting what's not.
Yud's "good writing" isn't 1 or 3. But he tells good stories - HPMOR's enduring popularity speaks to that. And he presents novel/interesting ideas in engaging ways. I don't think the 70th percentile nyrb writer has written, or would write if they tried, something as persistently popular as HPMOR or the sequences (but could be wrong about that)
Evidence for Yud's intelligence is less his writing, though, than the ideas within the writing. His AI risk ideas were useful and prescient, and the correct parts being mixed with nonsense (the agent foundations stuff) is par for the course for novel ideas. And the sequences cover a lot of different complicated ideas pretty well. The ways he is (or was) wrong about e.g. quantum physics or the applicability of decision theory and mathematical logic to AI are the ways a smart person is wrong, not a dumb one.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It usually takes more than a few days to set up a marketing campaign, they probably started before the shooting. Should they have delayed it to not look bad?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I'd be very interested in this!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think CW thread posts get more engagement, and kinda prefer when non-CW related posts go in there, but idk.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Honestly, I'm having trouble taking your posts seriously, this stuff is pretty out there even by rdrama lolcow standards.
Taking the not-super-plausible premise seriously: If you take whatever gear and do whatever prep is necessary to survive, you'll make it - and if you don't (e.g. no layers / warmth in cold winter), you won't. And is a woman going to sense, or be attracted to, 'you didn't freeze or starve to death'? How will they be able to tell?
That said, if you read and prepare appropriately, and don't intentionally take too little food/water/protection to 'make it risky', you'll be fine. I'd strongly recommend telling your plan, in detail, to someone who's experienced with the outdoors, and letting them tell you if it sounds too risky / you sound too inexperienced - and if they say so, don't do it. (edit: you say below you're experienced - maybe, idk, the general ridiculousness of the comments make it hard to entirely believe statements like that). I'd also recommend both doing smaller-scale excursions before the big event. But something like that could be worth doing, and it would be something interesting to talk about. It probably won't make a difference with women specifically.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Anonymity with respect to other internet users and anonymity with respect to law enforcement after you've just killed someone, who'll physically possess your electronic devices and subpoena your ISP and every internet service you've ever used are different! I doubt he, or many here, have it in the second sense.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I agree that a lot of the cases of random attacks are just stupidity (sometimes drug-induced, sometimes not) interacting with being an asshole / wanting to fight, but I don't think the 'avoiding big people' is good evidence against it. "Don't directly challenge large enemies" is a fairly old instinct that almost every living thing that moves has, if despite meth mania you have enough instincts left to perceive where other people are and fight them, you probably have enough left to avoid 6'4 270lb powerlifter bubba
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't think this is OP exactly, but you can imagine a darwinist, or a 'might makes right' person, thinking it's good if someone stronger than him commands him, or even kills him and takes his place. Maybe even as a form of altruist longtermism - if I'm replaced by someone better than me, in a non-self sense, everything's improved! Whereas if you're commanded or humiliated by an inferior, that's just generically bad.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England
His first source is moldbug quoting some text where a guy just says something like 'We are secure, without crime! You can go out at night without anything bad happening', without much attempt to back that up! Elsewhere on his blog, moldbug has cited some other old texts that say similar things, but never any data, and ... firsthand reports of the vibe of a place like this are often wrong.* Scott then goes on to cite English crime data, and he just doesn't pick a graph that goes back far enough, even back in 2013 there were studies saying pre-1900s english crime rates were high.
*This is one thing I worry about with him, especially in the areas I agree with. He's reading a bunch of old books, coming to rather unusual conclusions, and then synthesizing that across hundreds of (area, period) combinations. It's really easy to make mistakes while doing that, as ... almost every failed grand narrative historical synthesis ever attests to. And I haven't seen many attempts at criticizing his ""historical scholarship"" either - which, if many existed but were bad, would make the claims more plausible.
To your main point - it's def correct that such equilibria exist, but even in your example, the process didn't seem to discriminate too much between 'the accused did something wrong' and 'the accused did nothing wrong but we have social power and want to beat him up'.
OP claimed that "revolution and social upheaval are often worse for women than for men", which isn't really true, because 90% of the men are lost while the women aren't, for the reason you describe. Losing 90% of your men is worse for the men, and requires explanation. But the explanation is that men can reproduce more, and thus benefit from either socially outcompeting or killing other men more than women do.
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