faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
No bio...
User ID: 884
So if I'm understanding correctly, your claim is that, for most things that evolutionarily psychology predicts, most people would make the same predictions?
If so, I think I buy that for a lot of things (e.g. "people intuitively value their immediate family more than their distant family, and people who look like them more than people who don't) though definitely not all of them (e.g. I expect evolutionary psychologists to have very different views on infanticide than the general population).
I imagine there's probably one particular claim that evo psych makes that you're thinking of here, but I'm actually not sure which one. Evo psych makes kind of a lot of claims and many of them are outside the Overton window.
Because "women are capable of lying about rape and domestic violence" is not actually a claim evo psych makes (except in the very general sense of "strategies that involve deception are adaptive sometimes"). Most people won't agree to that in an internet argument because they expect that "are capable of" will be treated as "mostly do" or some other similar "gotcha". But that's not a matter of not admitting it to themselves, it's a matter of not admitting it to a hostile internet rando.
which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group.
Ah, I see how what I wrote looks like that. I was gesturing more towards "bay-area rationalists are a very unusual culture with nonstandard beliefs, and she has bought deeply into those beliefs, and she occupies a fairly prominent position within that culture".
A central tenet of those beliefs is something like "fuck the natural state of things, fuck stodgy traditionalists, fuck the people who sneer on anything which seems weird to them. We can do it better because we are very smart and we are willing to do weird icky things if a cost-benefit analysis says it's worthwhile". I would not describe this strategy as "highly competent" so much as "high-variance" -- when it works it works great (see the number of bitcoin multimillionaires, calling out COVID as impactful very early) but when it fails it fails spectacularly (see SBF among quite a large number of other less prominent things).
I expect someone who buys into those beliefs to be far more willing than typical to accept something "weird and icky" like surrogacy if it gets her what she wants. And also I think it just may be a lot less universal than you think for women to crave the miracle of being pregnant and giving birth specifically, rather than craving the miracle of having her own offspring. (For reference, even outside of the rat community I've heard the topic of maybe using IVF come up a handful of times, and I think surrogacy came up in every one of those conversations).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Ah. That'd do it. Thanks.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
So literally some takes from 5 years ago and a different account, which, if I'm correct about which name you're implying guesswho used to post as, are more saying "in practice sexual assault accusations aren't being used in every political fight, so let's maybe hold off on trying drastic solutions to that problem until it's demonstrated that your proposed cure isn't worse than the disease".
Let he who has never posted a take that some people find objectionable cast the first stone.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Er. I think I may not have explained clearly enough what I was doing there.
My purpose in listing those 5 names was not "make the account more moving by providing names instead of inhuman numbers". My purpose was to determine whether it was likely that those names corresponded to (1) real people who were (2) from a plausible area to be on that transport and (3) not obviously still alive after WWII.
If those names didn't correspond to anyone I could find details about pre-1940, that would have been evidence against that list of 4.8 million names corresponding to 4.8 million people. Likewise if the names and birth dates were repeated dozens of times, or if the documents looked like forgeries, or if there was an obituary from a 1976 newspaper about one of the 5 people and another two had gone on to have children in the 1950s. Those are ways the world could have looked.
In fact I got the outcome I pretty much expected. Which rules out a whole bunch of the specific ways "those 4.8 million names do not belong to Jews who died in Nazi custody during WWII" could be true.
As a note: you should not just believe me. I could have cherry-picked my random numbers. You should instead choose your own random numbers, and then test whether those random numbers appear to you to be people who did not exist / duplicated records / people who have a suspicious obituary in 1976, by looking at the world with your own eyes, which is a thing you are allowed to do.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I too would enjoy seeing someone engage on that specific claim, though it is not going to be me since I am a bit burnt both on the topic in general[1] and also with that style of engagement in particular[2].
Honestly, I am not all that happy with how that discussion went -- I was trying to impart the mental motion of "notice that you are making claims about the physical world, and that the natural thing to do when you have a claim about the physical world is to make an advance prediction that would be surprising if your claim was false and unsurprising if it were true, and then go out and look at the world". And I don't think I succeeded in imparting that mental motion.
[1] I had heard the term "the banality of evil" before starting that thread. I had thought I understood it as being along the lines of "people will do terrible things because they were specifically ordered to do them, and they just unquestioningly went with the order". I had not counted on "people will commit atrocities that require considerable creativity and ingenuity in order to avoid having to make an awkward status report to their superiors". In retrospect it should not have surprised me so much, but consistent exposure to it is still not great for my mental health.
[2] It felt very much like the discussion was about "evidence" as in "courtroom" rather than "evidence" as in "Bayes". I enjoy arguments where someone makes a surprising (to me) statement about the world that comes from them having a very different model of the world than I do. I particularly enjoy the bit where we can figure out something that is at least in principle testable where we have radically different expectations of what the result of that test would be. And then we run the test, and one (or both) of us learns something new and surprising about the world. By contrast, I don't particularly enjoy arguments about who is or is not reputable, what secondary-source evidence is credible vs not, what arguments are admissible -- sometimes those arguments are necessary, if it's not possible to look at the physical world, but I don't enjoy them, and I particularly don't enjoy them in places where it feels like it should be possible to look at the physical world instead.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps."
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:
- There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
- There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews
- The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination."
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
-
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
-
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
-
Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I can't prove it but assuming that other minds exist sure does seem to produce better advance predictions of my experiences. Which is the core of empiricism.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
I don't want monopolies (i.e. I think that people should be prohibited by law from colluding with other providers to increase the market prices) of goods that I buy, but for I want other people selling the same thing I sell (labor) to be forced by law to collude with me to raise the market prices.
Fair markets for thee but not for me.
If their presence would make you uncomfortable independent of the factual correctness of their claims, and also your response to that discomfort is to call for them to be banned (rather than leaving yourself), I think you would fall into the "pearl clutching scold" category by the ideals of this space.
I don't think that actually describes you, but it does describe a particular type of poster that I have run into numerous times, and I worry that it would describe the friends you are hesitant to introduce to this space.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Surrogates exist.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
This does not seem like a surprising outcome, at least not starting from the mental model of
-
GPT is fundamentally a next-token predictor.
-
It will make logical and consistent decisions to exactly the extent that making logical and consistent decisions improves its ability to predict the next token, based on its training data.
-
The training data was a significant fraction of the text on the internet.
-
The text on the internet was largely written by humans.
-
Humans make different decisions about whether a comment is hateful based on what group was referenced, not just based on the adjective used.
-
Thus, GPT is able to make more accurate predictions of the next token by taking into account what group was referenced.
-
Also something something RLHF.
It might be possible to fine-tune GPT such that is has a lower propensity to "make" those kinds of "judgements" (i.e. output those kinds of tokens), but my expectation is that doing so is a fight against entropy (in an unusually literal sense of the phrase).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
You were off by a year.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
Externalities are a very valid point, and one I am sympathetic to in some cases, if the case is actually made that the externalities exist and are not being addressed. However, KMC's statement was
I don't want monopolies for the same reason I don't want foreigners: it's bad for me. No hypocrisy needed.
That does not sound to me like an argument about societal costs and benefits.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I think there's another place where blocking the communication between A and B, where both A and B want that communication to happen, where a third party C still has a legitimate interest in preventing that communication from happening. Consider the case where person A (Alice) has access to detailed instructions on how to construct nuclear weapons, and person B (Bob) wants to buy those instructions off her. Alice wants this communication to happen, because she estimates that the chance that Bob will actually build and use nuclear weapons in a way that harms her is fairly low, and Bob wants this communication to happen because he wants to gain the ability to construct nuclear weapons.
I claim that it is legitimately in the interests of person C (the rest of us humans on Earth) to prevent that communication from happening, even if Alice had never signed a nondisclosure agreement.
I think there is in fact a line. Though that line is pretty fucking far from "misgendering someone".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
One possible reason would be because you get along better with the one who is 40 and shares your values, and you personally are a late-career tech person in the bay who has made good financial decisions and probably has a net worth with 8 digits where "shell out $100,000" is just not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?
Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?
Perhaps a more direct intuition pump. Let's say we have a pair of 30 year old friends. Both are newlyweds (not to each other). One of the friends had 20 sexual partners prior to getting married, which is at the 80th percentile, and the other had 8, which is the median. We should expect the friend with the median number of partners to have around the median chance of divorce within 5 years (around 20% as far as I can tell), and the one at the 80th percentile to have a higher 5-year-divorce chance (~35% if my slightly sketchy sources are right, but the exact number isn't really important).
Now take the exact same scenario, but instead of friends they're identical twins. Do you expect that the twin who had more partners is 1.5x to 2x more likely to divorce within the next five years? I personally don't particularly expect that, just because I expect that divorce rates are quite strongly driven by heritable factors rather than environmental ones.
I don't happen to have any lean beef jerky on hand, but I do have some dried shredded squid, which has 0.5g of fat, 25g of sugar, and 16g of protein per serving (and also, according to the back of the packaging possibly some lead, mercury, and cadmium?!), and that burns quite vigorously. That's rather more sugar (and heavy metals) than I would expect my dried squid snacks to have.
I do expect that even lean jerky would burn pretty vigorously once it got going though. I'll actually run the experiment the next time I have some lean beef jerky (that is not, for some reason, full of sugar and heavy metals).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Colorblindness has never been acceptable to "woke" and was part of the liberal predecessor before racism became cool again. [...] I'm not sure of the inclusion here. Representing the brief overlap period where colorblindness was collapsing and woke was ascendent?
Yes, you're correct. I don't think "woke" is a new phenomenon, I think "woke" is the way the current young generation shows that they "get it" in a way that the older generation does not. And yes, representing how the current idea of "woke" was ascendant while the previous version of "politically correct" was collapsing. My point was at no point does "we are past peak X" mean "and that means that everything will go back to how it was before", it just means that "X" is now unfashionable and will be replaced by a new, fashionable "Y".
And yeah, the "poly / furries" thing is the classic prediction for what the new "Y" will be, but I'm pretty sure it's actually going to be "etc", because if it were the predictable "poly/furries" then the old uncool people could easily "get it", and that would be terrible.
(As a note, I'm not saying "wokeness is just fashion and therefore has no effects on the real world". I'm saying "wokeness is fashion, and therefore you can predict what will happen with it the same way you predict other fashions". Any real-world consequences of things done for fashion are still just as real as real-world consequences of things done for other reasons)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
And is the ssc discord a leftist echo chamber? Like the poster said, I kinda figured because of the general discord userbase, but still sad if true. They must have to do a lot of self-gaslighting.
I would say much more of a libertarian echo chamber -- reddit leftists would probably froth at the mouth about equally much though for different reasons. Much heavier emphasis on guns, economics, and policy, much lighter emphasis on race and sex dynamics.
It's quite a bit more strongly moderated for tone over there though - posting contentious takes and refusing to back them up tends to result in a ban, and I do think that tends to happen more for right-wing contentious takes than left-wing ones.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I mean stonetoss being stonetoss isn't exactly funnier - here's the most recent one where it's just a low-effort dunk, vs this one, which is a bit funnier (though still low effort and not that funny).
On reflection I'd endorse both "the left can't meme" and "the right can't meme". Though is also possible that it's "nobody can meme in a way that people who don't spend all their time immersed in the same culture find funny".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
You know more than 1 person, and you know of a lot more people than you know personally. A typical American knows something on the order of 500 people, and knows of probably 20x that many. If there was exactly one person on puberty blockers out of 300 million Americans, you'd expect ~10k / 300M or 0.0033% of Americans to know of them. To get to "0.1% of people know of someone on puberty blockers" you'd only have to have 30 such people in the entire country.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Elective sterilization.
Fair point. I note that birth control is allowed for minors, and has the same effect while taken as the permanent intervention has permanently. If there were something equivalent for transitioning, I would support allowing only that equivalent prior to the age of majority (if it were actually equivalent, and assuming that the way that regulation was implemented was sane and not batshit-crazy-like-the-rest-of-the-US-medical-system). I think puberty blockers are supposedly this -- I have my uninformed doubts as to their safety/efficacy but I have not actually done any research on this.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
Ah, I read it as "bad for me (personally, because it will lower my wage personally)".
if you're the person who gets to pay slave wages and ignore worker protection laws you don't really notice the costs that you're imposing on other people
And likewise if you buy products where part of the supply chain of that product involved the labor of people who do not receive the pay or worker protections that American workers receive, you don't notice those costs, but you do benefit from the reduced prices. And if the labor involved was voluntary, I think that's basically fine.
Empirically national solidarity seems to increase when there's a crisis. Unless the crisis is economic, I suppose - if lots of people moved to your country because of the promise of prosperity, and then your country started doing worse economically, those people might go seek their fortune elsewhere.
But yeah, losing the possibility of national solidarity based on centuries of common ancestry is a cost, at least for places where that was ever on the table. I expect the benefits are generally worth that cost, especially in a context where you can only control immigration and not emigration, but it is a cost.
More options
Context Copy link