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disposablehead

Hipster eugenicist

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joined 2022 September 05 03:50:16 UTC
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disposablehead


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Hipster eugenicist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 03:50:16 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Culture should definitely be on your list. Player of Games and Excession are total bops


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 30, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What are y’all listening to?


I just discovered Lunar Society and I was blown away. The guest list is great but I’m most impressed by Dwarkesh’s ability to think through a statement and find something to push back. Very highly recommended.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 30, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Roller mobster goes way too hard


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for October 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bummer. The ‘correct’ orientation seems noticeably more appealing to me, the vibe from looking up and left rather than down is better somehow.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				GWAS in 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				GWAS in 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Biologics are a big category, of which the -mabs are the early success story. The next evolution would be exactly what you described, where we can construct a protein to block targets by way of a fancy ml chemistry algorithm instead of trial and error. Beyond that, we get into de novo synthetic proteins that have more in common with sci-fi nanomachines than penicillin. Then, ???.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sounds like a market opportunity to me. Why aren’t there Bond-villain type organizations that kill for profit alone? Was RICO that effective?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t know, 1 train line to nowhere seems more cost effective than 0, especially when people can build around the new infrastructure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you feel like regular use of Tylenol is wrong?


I suspect that people transpose a dislike for the medical system onto the things the system controls. If you had to cajole an ethanol prescription from your PCP every 3 months your relationship to booze would seem craven and desperate, even holding the quantity and quality constant. If you could pick up amphetamines at your local gas station, would it still feel so gross?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bronze Age Pervert and his associated tribe love the word n*****. Amongst other things, it means that any engaged member cannot cash out their ingroup following for mainstream success. Much can be forgiven, but the sacred cows remain sacred. Yet their fondness for hate crimes is constitutively distinct from performing said hate crimes IRL. It’s an affectation, albeit an expensive one, and it help keep the clique weird and interesting and marginal.


If you’re a cool staffer in DC, pedophilia memes are a great way to distinguish between the back and front of house, like the cultural demarcation between chefs and waiters. If you’re a center left dem policy wonk, you spend most days providing obedient assistance to a public official who wields real power. But you are free from the scrutiny pointed at your boss, by and large, and you can engage in taboo violations that would utterly outrage your enemies and discomfort your boss’s base. Those taboo violations aren’t necessarily child abuse, just child abuse memes; art, fashion, jokes. You might get in trouble whenever the peasants kick up a stir, but that’s just proof that you are a debonair cosmopolitan with refined taste.


It’s quite possible that this encourages or facilitates the evils it’s poking fun at. But I’m not sure this explains more of Epstein et. al. than the simpler Mossad blackmail thesis. Powerful people are great targets to exploit, and so there are lots of people who would like favors. On the other side staffers direct a lot of attention towards deniability and message control. Bill Clinton had tons of affairs and is likely a rapist, but he’s known for one event, which occurred in the middle of his presidency. Who cares if John Podesta buys sketchy art, or Hunter Biden smokes crack? Maybe these pedo memers are terrible people, but morality is a pretty weak indicator of job competence; compare LBJ to Jimmy Carter. These days, it all boils down to sides. ‘MAGA’ was a meme aimed straight at the liberal icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the First Black President, or maybe the before all liberalism downstream of the Civil Rights act. This is a heresy, and so we get Trump derangement syndrome. Protecting Children is a similar idol to the right, and so this too triggers an auto-immune type disorder that appeals to the craziest and most engaged audience, sucking up all the oxygen from normie-type political concerns.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.