disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
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User ID: 426
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
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
2nd half of the second act is usually a rough spot, but IMO Glass Onion wasn’t terribly egregious here. My big issue was
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
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
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?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5mo ago
The above passage is IMO a very clever way of framing Jews and Jewish racial traits as foundational to not only sexual liberalism and communist worldviews but to those of the trad-cons and the alt-right itself. It’s as pro-Semitic as a race-realist speaking to an audience of Hitlerite memers could probably get without getting cancelled.
The offensiveness arguably serves to stop the process of dilution and appropriation as depicted in Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths. You can’t take the homophobic slurs into the mainstream, so arguably you get to keep your ghetto free of grifters and maintain the spirit of contrarianism necessary for original thought.
Does Nietzsche have any specific policy platform? This is a distinct culture separate from neoliberal wonkery and it doesn’t express itself in that language, in the same way utils don’t make sense outside of a consequentialist framework. Their political goal is a new regime, with the specifics TBD, because their framework boils down to good leaders with real power -> good country. Again, naive IMO, but I appreciate that they are trying to build something.
There’s a subtle variant of racism 0HP advocates for that I’m coming to agree with but doubt I can communicate clearly. Too much of an inferential gap. I can give it a shot if you’re curious, but if you don’t agree with basic race-realist stuff it probably won’t get us anywhere.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5mo ago
It’s easier to find a good critique than a good solution, and to his credit, 0HP has at least one pointed in the vague direction of a real solution in the form of his Christo-Nietzchean synthesis. The Neo-Nietzchean fake-and-gay critiques I suspect are correct, though the crassness is not quite my cup of tea. My most substantial disagreement is with his hope in high-drama politics to guide reform; I think the next election cycle or three is doomed, and the more technocratic arguments of Hanania will have to win out.
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
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
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
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
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
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
14d ago
The Jumpstart 2020 and 2022 sets are great for beginners. Each booster pack has cards from a single color and theme, and you can shuffle 2 packs together to make something that plays out like strong limited or draft decks. You can get a booster box of 24 packs for ~$100 and treat it like a cube. Highly recommend.
Card Kingdom sometimes puts out ‘Battle decks’, which are a cheap way to get playable 60 card decks that feel strong enough. Nothing too crazy, but good for kitchen table games.
Draft or limited are super fun but very very challenging and not for beginners.
Commander can actually be fun but it very much depends on the play group. If all 4 players are chill and playing decks of similar power then the format can be fun, but it’s often pretty complex and politics plays a big role. It’s definitely the most popular format and the easiest to find IRL games for, and it isn’t too hard to build a budget deck for $50-100 that plays perfectly well in low power pods. All that said, the format allows huge variation, and the experience of playing against a high-powered deck with a budget deck can be torture. If your kid wants to play with others this is eventually where you’ll probably end up but I wouldn't rush there.
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
9mo 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
My bad, posted off the cuff and should have been more granular and done a bit more research. The conflict best maps as Catholics + Ukrainian Orthodox vs Russian Orthodox. This link from 2021 has UOC-MP as the largest denomination in the country, which is now 4% according to Wikipedia. Here’s a very nice map of the Ethnic/linguistic composition of Ukraine, notably missing from the exhaustive wiki page on Ukrainian demographics. I’m sure there’s more interesting West vs. East stuff I could dig up, but it’s not worth my time. We’re pwned, and it’s only going to get worse.
(Huh. This is what it must have felt like to be a Quaker during WWII.)
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?
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