curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Scott Adams has a history of dramatic claims. From wiki:
Adams received further attention in 2021 based on the anniversary of his 2020 prediction that if Biden were to win the 2020 presidential election, then Republicans would be hunted and there's a "good chance" they'll be "dead within a year" and "Police will stand down" — none of which ultimately occurred
He also wrote a book entitled "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter", praising Trump's persuasion skills and ability to get attention by making and repeating outrageous claims, even if they aren't backed up by facts. He also claims to be a skilled hypnotist who uses the same techniques on his fans (for good, of course)! So I wouldn't take it all particularly seriously.
[unnecessarily long, unoriginal, we've discussed this many times before, tldr jews good genes why so hard to notice this]
It is - in a literal sense - true that many minority groups are, sometimes, overrepresented. Again in a literal sense - it's true that having an unusual upbringing sometimes pushes someone towards success.
Say I have $200k in gold bars stashed under my mattress. I'm suspected for corruption, the cops raid my house and find it. Have I done anything wrong? Well, there's nothing wrong with keeping private property in your house. And it's a gift from a friend. Who doesn't get gifts from friends, a bit of money here and there? Again, both - literally - true. You can squint and imagine there's a syllogism there - taking gifts from friends is fine, the gold bars were gifts from friends, so...
The dose makes the poison. If the laundromat's getting a few thousand extra bucks every year, that's usual variation, maybe he's good at advertising. A few million extra bucks ... something needs explaining.
How overrepresented are Jews, exactly? Are they represented about as much as Muslims? What about Hispanics, Blacks, or Native Americans? There's a lot of diversity and unique life experience to go around. Does this help all of them?
But, like, Jews make up 25%-50% of all Nobel prizes, aside from Peace, awarded to US citizens. (note that some of those are half-jewish, but this isn't that important.) They're also 2% of the US population. That's quite the difference! What about Hispanics, Muslims, Indians?
It's not just Nobels. I, like everyone, just click links around Wikipedia sometimes. Especially in math, science, technology. And enough of the names are jewish that you can't help but to notice! In the arts, journalism, or politics - there are fewer jews than in math, but still a lot more than you'd naively expect.
I also spend a lot of the time on the internet, in various places. I'm quite intelligent, as other people are here, so I select for communities of smart and driven people. And in each community, there's an obvious hierarchy of competence and smarts. And, as I spend more time in a community and get to know the smarter people - a lot of them end up being Jewish. Even here, the person whose writing I (currently) appreciate the most happens to be Jewish... This happens in real life too!
But my impression is that this is surprisingly true of many minority ethnicities and religious groups--almost as though having a mainstream upbringing results in a milquetoast adulthood. Or, alternatively, that being heterogeneous to the modal citizen of your country is quite naturally going to result in placement at one of the bell's tails
Does this really, when we take another look at it, even come close to explaining overrepresentation? A lot of Hispanic immigrants, and Muslims, have fascinating cultures and home lives. And gives them a boost in niche, well-known fields. I guess that's why our community sprung from the blog of Scott al-Iskandar, in turn inspired by the rationality writings of E. Y. Khowsjee, and don't forget the reactionary critic Carlos Yarvin.
There is something to explain here. Looking away isn't virtuous, and telling the 100k who liked that tweet to pretend this is just like every other ethnic minority won't help. The usual rationalist explanation is just 'jews have high IQ because genes'. Which seems to fit fine, here, although our friend SS would disagree.
The claim that jewish achievement isn't remarkable, or isn't unique, or something, is something I hear sometimes. Or, it's claimed that said achievement is remarkable, but is, like, cultural, because of the Torah or just trying really hard at school. I don't think these are plausible, when compared to the average non-Jewish example of a white family that really pushes for success at school, or immigrant family with some niche ethnic tradition.
Sometimes one makes an intellectual mistake and it's just - okay, I forgot something important, I did the math wrong - but other times you're just not looking. I think to explain away Jewish achievement in politics or elsewhere with 'every minority is like this' can only explained by not looking.
In the case of politics specifically, that infographic seems to be about the cabinet. So, how Jewish is the Biden cabinet? Let's completely ignore the 4chan graphic, which ... even if it's accurate, it's still not worth looking at as a source of real information, because it's a 4chan graphic. Let's go with Wikipedia. Jews: Blinken Yellen Garland Mayorkas Hanes (half) Bernstein Lander Klain Zients. And then twenty more of other backgrounds. So a little under third are jewish, which is a ton relative to 2%. And then two Asians, two Indians, one Hispanic. (Also five Black) I don't see muslims. Non-jewish whites are are about where they should be by % of population. *1
This is ... significant. And a lot more so than Asians and Indians, or even Hispanics. It's reasonable to notice, and wonder why. It's reasonable to notice that people don't want you to notice that. It's especially reasonable to notice that if White people were 2% of the population and 30% of appointments, the standards that you'd expect to be applied would declare this to be an extreme case of racism. And then it's ... of less obvious reasonableness to start Heiling the Furher, but it clearly does lead there.
Cardiologists aren't worse people than the average doctor. But people think they are if they aren't subtle thinkers and are disproportionately exposed to anecdotes of them acting poorly, leading them to create and share those anecdotes in a cycle. But before you accuse someone of Chinese Robbering, you should check to make sure the claimed pattern isn't there! Before explaining a claim away as motivated reasoning, it's good to check if it's actually true!
And when you miss something like this, as I did in the not-so-recent past - it's worth asking, why? When I think about something, I'm trying to understand it, not just rationalize whatever the common beliefs and taboos are. And that was as true in the past as it is today. But the explanation that Jews just have good culture, or it's just pattern recognition out of control, came easily to past-me too. Just as easily as the 'rational arguments for God' came to Christian apologists. It's unpleasant to realize you are (ie past-me was) just lazily making up arguments for an assumption you aren't questioning because it's just, like, true, and also it's be terrible if it wasn't true. But it's true! And I got into many arguments about this, and made several very competent defenses of "there's nothing going on here" before, after I bumped into the wall for the fifth time, I noticed the wall.
And if you're bumping around the intellectual plain, guided by invisible walls you aren't even aware of, you might be led to the wrong places.
Now, you're right that minorities often specialize in specific occupations. Patel Hotels, etc. But market-dominant minorities are, usually, high IQ minorities. Indians are well-represented as tech company CEOs. But we've also had a billion of them to pick from by immigration.
And, yeah, when you relate to the elite jews by seeing them on TV and in the news, rather than being in their social circles, that easily leads to conspiracies based on resentment. And the Anna-Marie Loupis from the tweet is a well known covid conspiracist, with claims like lasers caused the hawaii fire because blue color didnt burn. I'm not sure what the right rhetorical move here is if you want to fight antisemitism, but being honest about the cause of elite jews might be better than keeping up the current incorrect norms and creating conditions where people on the alt-right notice the lies!
*1 I'm just including everyone the page lists, not bothering about some people joining late and others leaving early, I don't think that matters here.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
We've all seen "man arrested for having his dog give hitler salute" or "man arrested for calling a player on his football team a slur after they miss a kick" coming out of MiniTrue in Oceania. The pattern is clear, but I wonder what led to this? How common are these arrests (obviously they're much less frequent than slur use or offensive speech generally), what classes of people support and oppose them, what social or intellectual trends led to the implementation of these laws there while America retains support for and enforcement of the first amendment? Any insight from locals?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The inevitable winner of a war still loses a third of the battles, and the tide going out doesn't mean it'll stay out. The center has fought back against the farther-left many times over the past centuries - yet both move left.
And what has the NYT won, exactly? A commitment to allowing opinion pieces investigating harm to a small subset (youth) of trans people by overzealous medical approvals. This isn't an end to trans. Trans acceptance, generally, continues to grow, and the reaction to it by the NYT is much less harsh than it would've been in 2000. Gay marriage used to be a bridge too far, too!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
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?
The last time we discussed UFOs was here in response to Tucker positively mentioning UFO speculation, and my critical response was here and in subthreads.
What's happening here is, essentially - there are several million people employed in, or as contractors for, the US military and intelligence community. The number who hold positions like 'generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center' are smaller, but (if we're allowed to lump together all kinds of quackery, instead of just aliens) at least 1 in 100. And any time you have ten thousand people, a few dozen of them are going to be, variously - gullible, insane, stupid, have committed to several important intellectual mistakes, intentionally lying for media attention, or are just of average intelligence when actually understanding whether a radar signature shows aliens or noise requires being above average + got sucked into 'exposing aliens' because they genuinely believe it's important. This is how you get things like "the CIA investigated astral projection" or "nobel prize-winning scientist believes in homeopathy" or the fake "bomb detector" that was just a dowsing rod used by 20 different countries' militaries (but, again, that doesn't mean their whole militaries endorsed/used them, just some people in them). It's not surprising that one in a thousand military people believes in aliens if one in a hundred 'normal' people believe in aliens. Yet 999 in 1000 don't believe in aliens. (edit: it's probably significantly above 1 in 1k even among those who are high iq / work in technical fields)
Additionally - there have been dozens of supposed firsthand accounts of interactions with aliens like this one, and all of their details are both incompatible with verifiable history and incompatible with each other. E.g. "arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally" - which technologies? All of the biggest scientific and engineering discoveries have very legible and sensible histories. The progress of science and engineering over the past hundred years hasn't been a secret thing, it occurs in public. Maybe everyone's been tricked, but that should require more evidence than one guy asserting it.
That's not what's happening here. "Bussy", in the literal sense, refers to a man's ass/asshole in the context of gay men. It then became a queer meme, and then ussy became a broader quirky teenger-taboo sex meme. It's not anti-trans in any way.
Your posts often have an effect where they play fast and loose with facts in service to some vibe or message. The message is often good, but there's a sense of being intentionally averse to things like 'analysis of opposing viewpoints' or 'ways in which I might be wrong' because that's not with the vibe. That, generally, weakens your position, because the vibe you're trying to give off may be wrong, or confused, in meaningful ways, and contradictory facts illuminate those.
It's arguable that oratory has declined not due to a loss of "vital spirits", but due to ... modern media. The speech connects the politician's visceral voice and, often, appearance to his constituents, which is very appealing when the alternative is the telephone game or pamphlets. But when one can produce videos splicing your words with weak moments of your opponents, animations, videos of real-world events, the medium of a clearly-delineated 'oration' will declin simply because it has competition.
Politicians today still give speeches - some people even cried at ... Adam Kinzinger's ... moving words. Obama's "well spoken" and, i guess, reasonably competent speeches were often praised as moving, compelling, causing goosebumps or tears! obama speeches.
There's also the obvious - you're comparing the best of the past to the mediocrity of the present. You note how most politicians are unsurprising, and stick to common themes, ... while Hitler and Napoleon broke new ground? Did Hitler and Napoleon's thousands of political contemporaries, a few decades past and future, all do the same? Is mathematics in decline because professors at community colleges aren't as accomplished as Einstein or Erdos?
It makes sense the American education system, state and media have set about trying to destroy oratory
And here's the usual equivocation between 'complex dynamics and confusions lead to bad things, in ways entangled with existing power structures and media' and 'the all-powerful enemy is intentionally destroying truth, beauty, and love because they hate you'.
I think there's something significant to the decline of oration - both the text, and vocal intonation. I'm not sure your post really gets at what, or why, it did though.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The trouble is, impressing people with no skin in the game is easy. Convincing people to rely on it is a whole different animal
Beating a dead horse, but people already get tremendous value out of GPT-3.5/4. Random examples include 2rafa's post a while back, or terry tao, but it's everywhere, across all disciplines. It's not just impressive, it's incredibly useful. I don't think there's a parallel here - a lot of human activity isn't in realms where minor mistakes 1 in 10k times means running over preschoolers. And self-driving cars would probably be a lot better if they could use massive LLMs in cloud GPU clusters, but safety (connection goes out?) and latency requirements prevent that.
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.
It's clearly a real pattern in open source. It's not just Rust and Go. And it's a stronger pattern than even being a FAANG engineer. I think it's because women are much less likely to take independent action solely on their own ideas and interests than men, and more likely to go with a socially-endorsed role. 'Spend a year making something that's open source, anonymously, just because you think the idea is good' isn't something there's a clear path you can 'follow a social gradient' towards to like 'having X job' does, and most open source projects just don't get interest. And (of course) explicit discrimination of any sort is a poor explanation, seeing as open source projects are anonymous - and both the overrepresentation of males and transes remains when you only look at 'open source projects made by people without employment or formal training in programming'
Said more clearly: The rate of being trans among techies (pretty high, but still <10%) isn't low enough that it outweighs the 'women don't do entirely independent self-driven activity' effect.
These measures would be extremely, two orders of magnitude, too harsh for a well-run social media site responding to scraping. Twitter doesn't have it any worse than every other site, and they accept some scraping and can identify bots and ratelimit excessive load. Limiting most of twitter's real users to just half an hour of use per day is absurd, I can't think of any situation that would call for it.
(roughly) For scraping to really harm twitter this much, it'd have to be significantly higher-load than twitter's real users as a whole. And requests = (requests/users) * users, so if all requests are from authenticated users (after login wall but before this) and scrape_requests >> real_requests, either the scrapers are making many more requests than real users per user (in which case a much less strict limit works), or there are many more scraping users than real users - very unlikely because creating accounts is hard (maybe requiring unique phone numbers), because it wasn't 'no ratelimit for accounts created before 2020', and because that many bot accounts would be noticed and could be distinguished from real users.
If it's just covering for an outage ... that'd be a 12-hour long outage at this point. When Facebook has an outage, let alone a 12-hour long one, they don't lie about the cause and only communicate it via the totally-not-CEO's personal account on the site with the outage. Twitter's status page is still green.
What must Tucker on Twitter be thinking now, or anyone else in or contemplating a professional relationship with twitter? The advertisers they're trying to court? The $1000/mo gold checkmark holders?
I have no good explanation for this decision. (edit: to be clear - if the real reason is scraping, the poor technical decisionmaking - otherwise, the decision to cover for an internal issue by pretending the issue is scraping). Maybe Elon's really on drugs? He put someone incompetent in charge who's feeding him bad information? The deadline for the Google Cloud bill they weren't paying was June 30, i.e. yesterday - supposedly they restarted payments, but maybe they didn't really? Maybe firing so much of Twitter plus all the changes he's made led to a buildup of problems, and this is what he had to do to keep twitter up for now? Idk. Either way, this is a much more significant failure than any of Twitter 2's previous missteps, which still could be explained as part of a high-variance strategy. Burning the credibility of verified, boosting shitty paid replies ... eh, it's bringing in money. Not paying bills ... aggressive approach dealmaking. This is just gross incompetence no matter the explanation.
And, "put any Fortune 500 CEO in charge of America and it'll immediately improve" ... feeling even worse than it did a year ago
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
... haven't traditional societies been "shaming male promiscuity" in various forms for millennia, successfully? Not eliminating, but significantly reducing. Mormon men aren't fucking every modern woman they come across.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).
You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.
David Friedman (son of Milton and ACX commenter) has several blog posts (second) on the topic.
He claims that climate change makes yields lower in some areas, and higher in other areas, as there are many areas that are colder than optimal for agriculture, and climate change helps those areas as much as it hurts optimal or warm areas. This would require human adaptation - moving farming to different parts of the world - to respond to - but the modern economy adapts to new situations or technologies rather well. There's also the direct effect of CO2 - increased concentrations increases the efficiency of photosynthesis, increasing crop yields. There's a negative effect on nutrition per gram because the extra carbon bulks up a more fixed amount of minerals, but this is smaller than the yield effect and probably doesn't matter. All of this means the sign of the effect on the food supply isn't obvious.
"Emotions" aren't fundamental, independent causes of human action, they're contingent, useful adaptations that coexist with the rest of thought. If I see homeless and drug addicts on a subway, and "feel scared and vulnerable", and then stop using the subway, am I being irrational? What if instead, I see homeless and drug addicts on the subway, know from personal experience that homeless drug addicts have a significantly increased risk of violence, theft, and unsanitary conditions, and rationally decide to stop taking the subway? Yet the 'feeling scared and vulnerable' from the first example is entirely informed by the judgements in the second example - the reason you're "afraid" of homeless and not normal people is observations of the way homeless act that indicate they're a risk to life or health, for the same reason your fear of 'a gun being pointed at you' comes from knowledge that 'guns shoot bullets, which can hurt you'. But aren't all 'emotions' like this, being evolutionary adaptations to survival?
The same thing applies to large-scale policy. If a small group of people causes significant harm to everyone else in a nation, and I emotionally feel for the plight of my countrymen, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... or I rationally observe that my countrymen are being harmed, and add up all the expected utilities, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... what's different here?
Also, consider "lock the murderers up, slaughter permanently imprison mass murderers, forget about the problem" or "lock the fraudsters up, forget about the problem". We already do this to large groups of malign or harmful people, and it works! It's bad for 'free thinkers' because free thinkers are (sometimes) good/useful, not because hurting people is, in every context, bad.
You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to
The government uses force to prevent all sorts of consensual activity. You want to buy food from a restaurant with poor hygiene? Want to do unlicensed, shoddy maintenance on other peoples' cars? Sell unlicensed pharmaceuticals? Take out large, predatory loans? These aren't edge cases, these are large potential areas of economic activity that are prevented.
For a story based on a single source, it's weirdly detailed - technical aspects of the bomb, with informative anecdotes about the White House, Navy, the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, CIA, State Department, NSA, Air Force ... for such a secret operation, all known to one person?
Hersh is a well-known investigative journalist, "exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting", "covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia". But more recently "Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War", and "U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources." ... Slate magazine's James Kirchick wrote, "Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant ‘fairy tale’ on the word of a single, unnamed source... Hersh's problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy."[26][76]". The wiki article has detail on many questionable claims.
Maybe if he'd managed to confirm parts of the source's story, but eh. The piece could've anticipated objections like 'one anonymous source with no other evidence', or more generally tried to convince instead of just providing novel-style narrative, but didn't. There's plenty of information in the article not from the source, but removed from the narrative it's just 'regular military exercises', 'military bases existing', 'media is unsure why explosions happened'. It's not implausible the US blew it up IMO, but this isn't convincing.
It's probably real, but luck. He just does this constantly, right? If he does this for an hour a day every day for two years, and each round takes a minute, that's 40k rounds, and one in 40k seems like enough room for luck if he's already a bit accurate. And if he was this accurate with any consistency, he wouldn't have acted so shocked about it!
And you can get a lot of detail from a .1 second flash of an image. Some internet video memes flash various images by at ten per second, and if you pay attention you can get a lot of detail. Various studies find that even with <100ms people can still identify things. And that'd only improve if you practiced a lot, so I could see him narrowing it down to a general region from that, and then getting lucky.
no clear tells
I think if you're smart and you look at a hundred different (location, image) pairs, you'd pick up on a lot of associations between "how things look" and the location. Types of plants, style of buildings/roads, etc. If you've only seen a few hundred pairs signage style might be your only option.
This isn't a piece of modern architecture that intentionally disrupts mainstream understandings of aesthetics or w/e. It's a functional building. The couches, tables, and shades aren't nice and wooden, but they're good for outdoor conversation. The solar panels are probably there for green reasons, but even purely on economics they're a reasonable choice. And the roof isn't an ugly metal slope or anything, just normal tiles.
I don't think anyone finds it beautiful, but it seems fine. Even if you want marble columns in your $5M mansion, that's still secondary to the material function of the house - spending your day there, having people over, etc.
Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?
Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?
The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.
Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who
When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.
Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.
Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.
You know how every week there's a new "racist, homophobic hate crime", or "beloved tv star Guy Dickinson accused of disgusting sex crimes", or "latest: republicans literally genociding poor refugees to own the libs", but if you look into it for a few hours, or just wait a month, it was just not true - that hydra head crumbles to dust, only to be replaced by five more when you turn around?
The same is true of "vaccine sterilizing your ovaries with lipid nanoparticles", "blood clots killing millions", or "covid destroying the immune system", or a thousand others. The first dozen times I saw something, I looked into it, but that was two years ago. And it's from both sides! Unvaxxed sperm's left-wing mirror is amateur virologists on twitter speculating about virus-induced organ-failure because the hateful neoliberal right-wing won't let us enter our third year of lockdowns.
Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?
The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you
"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!
what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say
scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Epigenetics - as a mechanism for inheriting traits, across generations - is severely exaggerated by media, pop science, etc. A number of reasons for this: it's an easy way to escape HBD / blame racism / avoid the impact of genetics, and it just sounds cool. The number of proven cases where 'epigenetic mechanisms' contribute to heritable phenotypic differences in humans is small - especially compared to how "normal" genetics creates every aspect of human biology. On the other hand, epigenetic changes like DNA methylation and histone modification, as well as others, have many, many important effects in biology, just not ones that involve a child inheriting trait from a parent.
Here's a criticism, found in a gwern newsletter, of epigenetic inheritance of trauma
(note: this post has an aggressive tone, because, well, your posts do too! I'd still love to be corrected if I get any, or especially many, details wrong)
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand
The actual books you list later 'go for hundreds of dollars' because there's very little volume, demand, or supply, so the 'spread' is extraordinarily wide and the market is very illiquid. Hundreds of dollars is the ask, not the bid. If there were hundreds of bids at hundreds of dollars, independent reprinters - think people like dropshippers - would just print a run of low-quality copies and sell them. The modern economy is quite decentralized for low and medium volume items, anyone can start selling these 'banned books' if there's demand. And, indeed, various far-right individuals have started selling old right-wing books on the internet as that movement has grown! I think it is extremely unreasonable to use 'this book costs hundreds of dollars on amazon' as evidence for a ban, when it's also evidence for 'not many people want to buy this. There are so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
As far as I can tell, this straightforwardly does not happen in the present day. Can you please provie a single example of this? I feel like you're just making that up because it fits a narrative. Wikipedia loves talking about things like the Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf (and, yeah, how bad they are). Various leftist academics I follow on twitter just love digging up an old and forgotten far-right thinker to discuss.
and for an even rarer subset, mere possession can result in years if not decades in prison even in countries all the indexes and US diplomats proudly label “Full Liberal Democracies”.
... Yeah, some non-Ameican countries are terrible about free speech. I think these books are the ones it's reasonable to describe is banned. As you say, though that's "an even rarer subset".
If the book is truly effectively banned, if the post-totalitarian state has truly effected its disappearance, it will not appear anywhere one might search for a forbidden work, even in mention. It will have merely disappeared… as if it were never written
I don't think this is slightly true for any of the books you mention!
I remember digging a copy of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians
... . James Burnham "chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy" and "was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics". The Machiavellians is in his wikipedia infobox under 'notable works'.
(you said on twitter) Burnham was $700 on Amazon 8 years ago… the fact he’s back in print now after a major effort does not change the fact he was disapeared
He was not disappeared! People became less interested in him, so his work was printed less. Then people became more interested, so it was printed again.
I glanced at the "full list" image, and the first thing that I spotted was a book by Jimmy Carter - Palestine, Peace not Aparthied. A US President? ... Really? I found some controversy over the book, but was unable to find something that seems to be a "ban" as you'd describe above.
So ya, I’m already trapped like Johnny Depp in this oldest and most dangerous of obsessions
On War, Mein Kampf, Various books by nazis
Not currently banned, widely available for purchase, on reading lists for university history courses, etc. Less popular ones than Mein Kampf are harder to find because they're ... less popular, not becuase they're bannd. It feels like you're mixing "currently banned by our post-totalitarian regime" and "banned in the past right after a war by a state significantly less liberal by current standards than we are" into the same "vibe".
David Irving’s Hitler’s War
When was this banned or suppressed? Note that it has an incredibly long wikipedia article dedicated to it, discussing it and subsequent rebuttals. Remember what you claimed:
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
This is not happening.
... In general, this seems like a quite decent list of "divisive, controversial, taboo, and sometimes banned" books. It is just not a list of banned books. You don't even attempt to justify the "banned" status of most books on the list. I get that wildly exaggerating your claims is your whole "thing", but I think in the very long run it hurts you and your positions more than it helps, by fractionating your potential audience such that the exact people you want to reach - people who are extremely smart and mostly disagree with you but are interested in hearing you out - are put off by your work. And in the 'barberpole model' of culture, this means you're missing out on converting people at the top of the pole, and everything flows down from them. Also, it means you'll end up believing a bunch of incorrect things and developing ideas carelessly, which might end up meaning you focus on things like the aesthetics of historical warfare and romanticizing the idea of looking sexy as a moral value while your progressive enemies keep their eye on the ball and obsess over and gain increasing control over the most powerful technology of the century and maybe all of history. Hypothetically.
I will say, this post is a great window into how those unreliable, huge 4chan political image collage memes are made.
Our immigrant pool is ... fine, certainly not awesome. It could be so much better than it already is if US immigration was intentionally administered in the interest of good immigrants. IQ tests, demonstrations of technical skill, unlimited in number but very expensive paid sponsorships, maybe with a culture exam or something if you care about that. Instead, there's generic administrative stasis and a political tug of war between 'poor mexican immigrants :(' and 'And Some, I Assume, Are Good People', and only minor improvements get done by pro skilled immigration interest groups.
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