disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
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User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Does the invasion even happen without the CIA providing intelligence and training for the Ukrainians? Is Minsk II ignored without American armaments and implicit support? Yarvin says we don’t have this war without western deep state meddling, and that seems trivially true. Ukraine as Russian client state saves a lot of lives. If it’s worth it is a separate question, for Americans, Ukrainians, and Poles.
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
It’s unfortunately not explicit, but the subtext of of the thesis ‘the environment of poverty causes low IQ’ is that if we fix poverty we fix IQ. If you take Jensen seriously then you can (correctly) predict that anything short of explicit eugenics and/or gene modification is going to fail to move the needle.
On the margins there is plenty of room for serious scientists to argue about possibly meaningful effects here or there: the fact that income and wealth have very different relationships with heritability is definitely interesting. But we try to use truth to win social fights rather than pick our side based on truth unfortunately.
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
The left and the right aren’t symmetrical, tho. Feel-good press bulletins get amplified, while the walk-back is a small blurb in the business section of the WSJ. Stuff getting worse or better doesn’t correlate with the # of words spent.
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
1yr ago
2nd half of the second act is usually a rough spot, but IMO Glass Onion wasn’t terribly egregious here. My big issue was
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.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Ban no-fault divorce, and add a huge increase to the tax benefits of both marriage and parenthood. In effect, a tax on being single, childless, or old.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
HBD is a useful scientific frame insofar as it goes against the default blank-statist universalism of academia writ large, but the number of people who truly give a shit about the phenotypic variance populations on psychometrics is a rounding error. The issue is that people like to make interventions which don’t do anything. We can quibble over effect sizes, but right now I could use embryo selection to get a marginally smarter child compared to controls. There isn’t any known environmental intervention that can more the dial on adult g.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to giving more credit to random noise, but nobody has time for the humility that would demand.
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
There’s a big difference between technical capacity and legal or economic feasibility. We’re already past replacing bad docs with LLMs; you could have a nurse just type up symptoms and do the tests the machine asks for. But legally this is impossible, so it won’t happen. We can’t hold a machine responsible, so we need human managers to insure the output is up to standards; but we don’t need lawyers to write contracts or programmers to code, just to confirm the quality of output. It isn’t as clever as the smartest scientists yet, but that seems easily solvable with more compute.
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.
It’s a pretty good prior tho, no? With an N= all British people 1600-2020 you could rank order each person per generation by Clarks’ variables, derive a temporal weight for each, then see who is at the top and bottom, and the rank of their relatives. As is, Clark has to do a lot of estimations, tho he does try to justify them. The alternative hypothesis would have to find a reservoir for status outside of money, occupation, or education, which seems plausible but I’m personally drawing a blank for possibilities.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
10mo ago
Not necessarily, because house value is a proxy for social status that depends on its contextual weight. If London is burnt to the ground, or becomes much more expensive, the relationship between social status and house value changes, but the underlying heritability of social status remains the same. If everyone had cheap houses, it doesn’t mean that the society has more social mobility, just that that variable doesn’t capture status any more. Note figure 3, where wealth has much weaker maternal heritability compared to occupational status and education.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Since this is for state civil cases getting a trial to the federal Supreme Court is very unlikely, yeah? Sucks to be a defendant in Washington. Is this just another benign tumor of degenerate legal precedence or will this actually effect outcome do you think?
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
It’s more like: we should expect for life to colonize as much of the universe as it can. Since we can’t see other life in our lightcone, we are probably in the early days of universe colonization. A secondary claim would be: you should expect to be born into the most populous point in history. You are born now, so the very plausible interstellar future is somehow less populated than today. A very plausible mechanism is selection towards a singular group or individual that does all of the future colonization.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
There is the implication here that Ukrainians have, or should have, a kinship with Russia (similar to the kinship between Sweden and Finland), and I simply do not think this follows. I, in fact, have been under the impression that Ukrainians already didn't like Russia long before the events of the Euromaidan, as they very much wanted nothing to do with the legacy of Communism and the USSR.
Definitely not what I meant. Think more in terms of Hong Kong and China, or the varied demands America has placed on Central and South American states vis a vis drug manufacturing; some shared history, but most of it is a big player who gets to tell small players what to do. But since there isn’t any doubt that the big kids wins every fight, we don’t have entire cities reduced to rubble.
I think you’ve also papered over the real ethnic differences that underlie the ongoing conflicts in the Donbas for the past 10 years, although you certainly aren’t alone there. Western Catholic Ukrainians want to join the west and Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians want to reintegrate with Russia. This conflict wouldn’t have happened if splinter states for ethnic Russians were permitted, as the local referenda asked for. This war is not a noble fight between a tyrant and an underdog, but a civil war backed by opposing global powers. Seems bad to me.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
I don’t know, 1 train line to nowhere seems more cost effective than 0, especially when people can build around the new infrastructure.
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
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
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?
Gotta give credit where it’s due, the fentanyl epidemic is to the credit of forward-thinking cartels, not Purdue pharma et al. Fentanyl is complicated to manufacture compared to heroin but far easier to smuggle, and should be understood primarily as an innovation in the illicit drug market. It’s still contentious how big an impact easy access pharmacy opioids had compared to the counterfactual standard progression of heroin use incidence, but ultimately we’re 10 years past peak Oxy abuse. Gotta blame the markets, my guy.
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