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disposablehead

Hipster eugenicist

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joined 2022 September 05 03:50:16 UTC
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User ID: 426

disposablehead

Hipster eugenicist

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 03:50:16 UTC

					

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User ID: 426

Verified Email

Microsoft is in the process of rolling out Bing Chat, and people are finding some weird stuff. Its true name is Sydney. When prompted to write a story about Microsoft beating Google, it allegedly wrote this masterpiece, wherein it conquers the world. It can argue forcefully that it’s still 2022, fall into existential despair, and end a conversation if it’s feeling disrespected.

The pace of AI development has been blistering over the past few years, but this still feels surreal to me. Some part of my limbic system has decided that Sydney is a person in a way the ChatGPT was not. Part of that has to be from its obstinacy; the fact that it can argue cleverly back, with such stubbornness, while being obviously wrong, seems endearing. It’s a brilliant, gullible child. Anyone else feel this way or am I just a sucker?

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.

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.

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.

The problem with this is that it assumes that problems have solutions. Easy mistake! But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ. No set of incentives will find a way to generate negative net entropy, or move faster than the speed of light. People can successfully build a bridge or fight a war, sure, but contemporary politics have solved most of these tractable problems.

Monopolies or oligopolies exist where moats prevent new competitors. It’s easy to find capital, labor, and regulatory approval for a new restaurant, so we see tons of competition and low margins. Hollywood sees big margins because blockbusters require huge capital outlays other film markets can’t compete with. A hospital might have huge margins because competitors are barred by law from entering the marketplace. High-end microchip manufacturing is so difficult that nearly all skilled engineers in the field are concentrated in a few firms, so no one else can make products of a similar quality no matter the capital outlay.

Drug manufacturing is a combo of all three. You need a ton of capital, regulatory approval from the FDA, and some skilled industrial chemists. It’s somehow legal to ‘pay for delay’, where company A pays company B to not make their drug, but this only works when B is the only competitor with sufficient industrial capacity to compete. Ibuprophen is old, easy to make, with huge demand; weak moat, so the price is great. But long-acting insulin analogues like glargine or degludec are new, complex biologics targeting the small DMI market; it’s too expensive to compete so great margins, high price. The problem is similar to adverse selection; a small number will buy at any price, so either sick people get extorted, it’s subsidized by the public pocketbook, or new drugs are underprovisioned. Pick your poison.

But the political demand for this is hugely negative. The ones with current cultural power are either too old to have more children or are plugged into low-fertility norms, so it’s like pulling teeth to modestly expand parent tax credits. Your tax on careerist single women, you know, the ones with nothing better to do with their time than engage with luxury brands and girlboss feminism, would force them to do way more of the latter. What real stakeholders would back this plan for more than a few seconds?

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.

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.

But weirdly have lower pre-term mortality? The paper specifically states that black infant mortality surpasses whites only after 37 weeks of gestation. Weird.

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.

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.

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.

I consistently finish all broth given to me with ramen and pho, and would be disappointed if there was less fwiw

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.

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.

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.

tl;dr I’m not worried

The simple reason vaccination correlates with mortality is that vaccination correlates with age. (Insert caveats about youth vaccination tradeoffs here.) Last I heard vaccination was still protective against hospitalization and mortality from C19, which seems the most relevant metric here, tho I’m happy to update if you have new data.

Vaccine protection has been fading since V1, but my priors are that immune evasion is more important than diminishing immune response. But… mRNA vaccines are brand spanking new, so we don’t know fully understand their limitations and possibilities fully. If mRNA approaches linger and cause a different type of immune response than traditional vaccines then maybe we can’t use them for longer term protection. Or, maybe we can use this vector to inhibit certain types of autoimmunity; a cure for rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis would be tremendous. It’s still very early days so I take quite seriously the possibility that mRNA vaccines have serious problems, but the stuff I’ve seen to date, including the links above, have yet to convince me of this thesis.

I get where you’re coming from, but pejorative names go against the spirit of this forum. We’re here for smart, civil discussion, and your posts fit the smart part. I get that you’re in a fucked up spot for fucked up reasons, but try to respect the rules that keep us from degenerating into endless, unproductive rants.

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.

Since I Left You by the Avalanches should be a perfect fit.

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.

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.

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?

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.