disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
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User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
All the ink spilled hyping up the conflict between human vs. AI seems, well, fucking retarded to me. AI is going to kill a ton of people, and help a ton of people, just like the human-horse alliance did. It will definitely suck to suck. The question is, what polities will be able to use this new ally in a way congruent with their culture, and who will be destroyed by it? I’m worried that AI will play nice with censors and busybodies, and hope that it will help scientist and technologists build better humans and explore the stars. There is no way to get what I want without the risk of mean AI, and every day of delay means another day of growth for the rent-seekers. So pedal to the metal acceleration is a-OK with me, as the alternative of a decaying Pax Americanus w/nukes seems a loosing proposition.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
He’s a modern version of Andy Kaufman. The rules have changed since the 60’s so Hyde’s transgressions are more provocative, but it’s basically the same act.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Antibodies are proteins your body makes to fight bad stuff. These are custom-made to stick to a specific target and tell your immune system what to attack, but sometime the target is a dumb mistake, like pollen, and you get allergies, or the target is correctly chosen but it looks just like some other innocent molecule, and you get autoimmunity. There are other systems to dial back unnecessary immune activity, but these have less evolutionary weight than pathogen defense so they’re a bit wimpy.
You can increase the risk of developing an allergy by regularly exposing someone to a scary-looking molecule and have some chance of making them develop an allergy, i.e. regular exposure to latex can lead to a banana allergy. But antibodies are generated in a pseudorandom manner, so you can’t guarantee a bad reaction, just roll a few more dice.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Sounds like a market opportunity to me. Why aren’t there Bond-villain type organizations that kill for profit alone? Was RICO that effective?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
So, to put it in some context: the criticism of GWAS has always been that these studies are large, expensive, rarely teach us anything about the underlying biology and explain little of the actual heritability (‘missing heritability’ problem). The ‘mechanistic’ biologists interested in curing disease or engineering biology generally dislike GWAS.
The development of big GWAS and tools like AlphaFold suggest to me that we’re nearing the point where useful empirical information overwhelms the capacities of human comprehension. The etiology of Alzheimer’s might just be Ala->Gly x100, and the true story is an overwhelming mass of minutiae, compared to the comprehensible ‘protein x is broken’. A lot of the work of medicine has been outsourced to evolution, and we’ve cribbed from her notes on every antibiotic and biologic we’ve produced. But we’re getting close to the point where we can build magic bullets from first principles.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
I’ve been thinking about an inverse failure mode in medicine, where snake oil is ruthlessly exterminated but good medicine is expensive, hard to get, and slow to get to market. A fool and his money are easily parted, so we still have plenty of hookum sold to the gullible, but they aren’t taking real drugs with serious side effects, or so the argument goes.
Medicine would be better for some substantial % of the populous if they could just take whatever drugs they wanted. Others would very rapidly harm themselves. A two-tiered system where people can take whatever they want after jumping through hoops seems superior to either extreme, but we already kind of have that, where patients bug their PCP until they get the drugs they want. But we still have exploitation through med advertisements, Medicare fraud, etc., and we lack the freedom to import specialized baby formula or try even mildly novel compounds.
I like free speech maximalism in social media on the grounds that there isn’t a 1:1 tradeoff between freedom and truth. Less freedom often means less truth, as lying is a powerful tool if you can get away with it. Can you shut down the scammers at all without breaking some other load-bearing norm? It might be the case that social media is net negative, but the milk is spilt in that regard. Why not other regulatory angles tho? Finance is tightly regulated so changing the rules about investment products seems safer than throwing out an key amendment.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
The Culture should definitely be on your list. Player of Games and Excession are total bops
The thing about degenerate societies is that no one is in charge, just institutions careening down their tracks. You’re lower status not (only) because you’re a stay-at-home mom, but because you aren’t a practicing lawyer/doctor/girl boss, like in the tv shows. You have less time to post TikTok’s about the hip brewery you found or how great your guru is or how tasteful your 1 bedroom soho loft is. The status game is global now kiddo and if you think individual players making individual decisions can beat back moloch I’ve got a good essay for you.
In blue spaces kids are a luxury good, for people both rich enough to afford them and attractive enough to bag a secure LTR. This is fucked and bad and doomed long term but it’s a pretty reasonable outcome if you understand some of the market forces.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5mo ago
I’d quibble with the ‘we’ part, and add the risk of a secular demographic collapse before going interstellar but probably agree with you on most of the details.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
‘Realism’ is an aesthetic as artificial as absurdism in many (most?) cases IMO. Le Carre seems more ‘real’ because of his tragic tone but his MI6 was just as fantastical as the shark tanks Bond swings over using his wrist-watch grapplehook. But jokes and fantasies are often better than serious drama to grok the spirit of a time. Contemporary films about the past always carry with them modern concerns, no matter their fidelity in set dressing, so we can’t come to a true meeting of minds across time. But stuff like this or this can let us peek across that chasm, if only to realize how big that gap is.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Why do you say it’s immune to quarterbacking? I love the game, but I’ve only been able to consistently win by micromanaging each play, which gets tough with 3 or 4 players without riding herd to whole game.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Bummer. The ‘correct’ orientation seems noticeably more appealing to me, the vibe from looking up and left rather than down is better somehow.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Good list, but missing some big ones, especially from comedy. His Girl Friday, Some Like it Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Die Hard, Tootsie, Network, Star Wars IV, Airplane!, Rambo, Gone with the Wind, and I’d throw in some Marx bros. and James Bond.
Ignoring IQ, HBD suggests that the structure of the human mind is structured to adapt to a particular culture and environment, a la Joseph Heinrich’s WEIRD research. If evolution doesn’t work above the neck, culture has to do everything. This theoretical Homo Universalis doesn’t have instincts towards face reading or language, and has to cludge stuff together using very fragile chains of heritage. They probably don’t crack large social organization and remain as small tribes of mutually unintelligible hunter-gatherers.
An alternative frame would be that people have ‘souls’. At a certain level of cognitive capacity beings tap into some implicit structure in the universe that allows for all the things people do, like some more ornate version of math or game theory. Any particular instance might have local variation but is basically the same as every other instance in structure if not in content. Now that I spell this out, this sounds pretty similar to bog-standard Christian philosophy.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-
There is also a self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time. You can’t easily persuade New Right advocates by pointing to mainstream media reports that contradict their main narrative. Mainstream media is one of the least trusted sources. Academic research also has fallen under increasing mistrust, as the academy predominantly hires individuals who support the Democratic Party.
Most classical liberals are uncomfortable with the New Right approaches, and seek to disavow them. I share those concerns, and yet I also recognize that hard and fast lines are not so easy to draw. The New Right is in essence accepting the original classical liberal critique of the state and pushing it a few steps further, adding further skepticism of elites, a greater emphasis on culture, and a belief in elite collusion rather than checks and balances. You may or may not agree with those intellectual moves, but many common premises still are shared between the classical liberals and the New Right, even if neither side is fully comfortable admitting this.
The New Right also tends to see the classical liberals as naïve about power (the same charge classical liberals fling at the establishment), and as standing on the losing side of history. Those aren’t the easiest arguments to refute. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen 9/11, a failed Iraq War, a major financial crisis and recession, and a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards. It doesn’t seem that wrong to become additionally skeptical about American elites, and the New Right wields these points effectively.
The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts. The future is now, old man, and it’s all about groups, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiencies. Given our degenerate institutions there is no way any particular set of losers can actually expect compensation for their damages, and so all one can hope for is that our particular sect wins out in the scrum of sectarian squabbling.
Yet, listening to a recent interview of his, I was struck by his (likely correct) bone-deep cynicism towards grand reform. His marginal revolution is lower variance than a monarchy or integralist state, and so intrinsically less ambitious. X-risks seem to demand a serious response, but Cowen just shrugs and hopes we have a nice few centuries before we destroy ourselves.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
I agree, but I’m sympathetic to the degenerate hedonist a bit more than you. Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance. You can dodge the shackles of instinct by diverting those feelings towards a creature that will never grow up, talk back, or steal your laptop for heroin money. Yes, society will collapse because of this, but it’s a free rider problem. Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Even if he is a Nazi, is he wrong about Putin?
This mentality is why Navalny isn’t even wrong. Eastern Europe has different social and political norms, and Russia is a petrostate. Why should we be surprised by Putin’s palace, or his mistresses? His mandate was to curtail the post-soviet chaos, which he accomplished. Standards of living are up, crime is down; anything else is just gravy. If he was deposed, the next dictator has all the same bad incentives; tons of natural resources, low-trust norms, and neighbors who still fear and hate the old empire. At best Navalny is optimistic towards Russian democracy, or hopes for EU integration, or is just fighting obvious wrongs. But cynically, he’s a western propagandist shooting for a juicy book deal, or to be the heir apparent should a NATO-backed coup jumpstart Perestroika 2: Electric Boogaloo.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
I’d blame incentives. The market for entertaining English-speaking LOL streamers outcompetes the LCS ecosystem so high-ELO NA games have lower stakes than scenes where all the money comes from getting a spot on a team. Also, on the margin, the median IQ of Korea and China are meaningfully higher than the US, so maybe the peak ELO is just higher over there despite the smaller player base.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
GPT’s evolutions seem to obviously support the ‘more compute’ approach, with an asterisk for the benefits of human feedback. But I’m also bearish on human uniqueness. Human writ large are very bad at thinking, but we’re hung up in the handful of live players, so AI seems to keep falling short. But we’ve hit on an AI smarter than the average human in many domains with just a handful of serious tries. If the human design can output both the cognitively impaired and von Neumann, then why expect a LLM to cap out on try #200?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Hey, people used to go to watch people being tortured to death for fun. The fact that cruel political actions now involve free plane tickets instead of dousing someone in tar or sending bombs in the mail is progress of a sort.
There are two ‘nice’ outcomes, 100% or 0%. 100% means clear path to citizenship for basically everybody. 0% means people don’t trek across brutal deserts, national sovereignty is restored, and the working class has more labor power. It’s in the middle that we get this brutality, where neither side can get what they want so the only victory is your rival’s tears.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
11mo ago
Since I Left You by the Avalanches should be a perfect fit.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
The Coen brothers work with the same themes as the book of Job, where the mores and dreams of man are crushed beneath the capricious whims of an alien God. The message is subversive in that people want the world to be fair and then it isn’t, but the plot and the structure of the film sit comfortably within the bounds of tragedy. I get disliking a hero’s ignoble death aesthetically, but it’s more like you not liking dark chocolate rather than the chef not understanding how to add more sugar to the blend.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Every claim about ‘no evidence’ in the wiki article should be treated adversarially. The DEFUSE grant seems like a close to a smoking gun as we can expect. The work justifying grants and the work paid for by grants are often chronologically inverted, where you get novel data, ask for money to generate said data, then use that money to get new data which you later ask for more money to get. Research is not cheap so the funding streams have to be gamed if you want your lab assistants to keep getting paychecks, so a good PI is not going to wait for a specific grant approval to start a particular line of investigation that looks fruitful.
I’m personally at 90/10 that it was a lab leak, with the remainder being that EcoHealth alliance was doing sketchy GoF and/or bio-‘defense’ work that would look bad even if they weren’t directly responsible for COVID-19 itself. Jeffery Sachs has had some interesting stuff to say about conflicts of interest with most of the people investigating the lab leak hypothesis in the early days if you want to dig a bit deeper.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
At the point where human modification is so good that you can casually get functional new gametes with no risk of deleterious mutation, you’ve basically moved past the point where traditional reproductive processes are going on. The AI double-checking the process is choosing the shape of the next generation, not the messy historically contingent mating process of H. sapiens. At that point x and y are just spandrels.
Podesta is at the top of the Consigliere ladder, but he’s never been elected and never will be. He might be more powerful than Joe Biden de facto but de jure he’s just another employee. This matters only in the political show, but that show is what decides who wins or loses elections. A producer or an agent is only as good as the talent they represent.
The Balenciaga thing seems to be either directly downstream of politics as straightforward trolling the normies, or as pretentious highbrow edginess to differentiate themselves from the mainstream fashion brands. Haute couture does weird stuff for the sake of weirdness, and we’re all talking about Balenciaga now instead of Louie V. Probably a pretty successful and campaign.
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