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faul_sname

Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.

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faul_sname


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." ... Apparently it works




It "works" but:


    

  • The pay is bad. You will be making something on the order of 10-20% of what an actual professional with similar skill levels makes, and on top of that you will experience massive swings in your net worth even if you do everything right. The rule of thumb is that you can calculate your maximum expected hourly earnings by considering the largest sustained loss where you would continue playing, and dividing that by 1000. So if you would keep playing through a $20,000 loss, that means you can expect to earn $20 / hour if your play is impeccable.
    • 

  • The competition is brutal. Poker serves as sort of a "job of last resort" to people who, for whatever reason, cannot function in a "real job". This may be because they lack executive function, or because they don't do well in situations where the rules are ambiguous, or because they can't stand the idea of working for someone else but also can't or won't start their own business. The things that all these groups have in common, though, is that they're generally frighteningly intelligent, that they're functional enough to do deliberate practice (those who don't lose their bankroll and stop playing), and that they've generally been at this for years. At 1/2 you can expect to make about $10 / hour, and it goes up from there in a way that is slower than linear as the stakes increase, because the players get better. At 50/100, an amazing player with a $500k bankroll might make about $50 / hour. I do hear that this stops being true at  extremely high stakes, like $4000/$8000, where compulsive gamblers become more frequent again (relative to 50/100, the players are still far better than you'd see at a 1/2 or even a 10/20 table). But if you want to play 4000/8000 games you need a bankroll in the ballpark of $10-20M, and also there aren't that many such games. For reference, I capped out playing 2/5 NL, where I made an average of about $12 / hour. Every time I tried to move up to 5/10 I got eaten alive.
    • 

  • The hours are weird. Say goodbye to leisure time on your evening, weekends, and holidays. Expect pretty regular all-nighters, because most of your profit will come from those times when you manage to find a good table and just extract money from it for 16 hours straight.
    • 

  • It's bad for your mental health. When I was getting started, I imagined that it would be a lifestyle of pitting my mind against others, of earning money by being objectively better at poker than the other professional players. It is in fact nothing like that at all. Your money does not come from other professional players, and in fact if there are more than about 3 professional players at a table of 10, you should leave and find another table, because even if you are quite good, the professional players just don't make frequent enough or large enough mistakes that exploiting their mistakes will make you much money. No, you make your money by identifying which tables contain (in the best case) drunk tourists or (in a more typical case) compulsive gamblers pissing away money that they managed to beg, borrow, or steal in a desperate attempt to "make back their losses". It is absolutely soul sucking to realize that your lifestyle is funded by exploiting gambling addicts, and that if you find yourself at a table without any people destroying their lives it means you're at the wrong table.
    • 



In summary, -2/10 do not recommend.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
New executive order just dropped.




The United States is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. The situation has become so dire that no one -– likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes.  Many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime.

[...]

The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists. [...] Criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored. [...] Strict liability offenses are 'generally disfavored.' [...] Criminal enforcement of any criminal regulatory offense not identified in the report [...] is strongly discouraged.

[...]

Within 365 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a report containing [...] a list of all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by the agency or the Department of Justice. [...] Following issuance of this order, all future notices of proposed rulemaking (NPRMs) and final rules published in the Federal Register, the violation of which may constitute criminal regulatory offenses, should include a statement identifying that the rule or proposed rule is a criminal regulatory offense and the authorizing statute.




This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.


So a couple of things


    

  1. Anyone want to blackpill me on why this is Bad Actually because strict liability regulatory crimes are actually a major load-bearing part of how our legal system works and without it the situation will devolve to anarchy in the streets?
    2. 

  2. Did an LLM cowrite this EO? I notice a mixture of em-dashes and double-n-dashes, which is not a pattern I normally see in entirely-human-written text. Not that I can complain about the outcome, if so.
    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For reddit, the answer is "looking at who the mods are, and what their political alignment seems to be".


It's commonly accepted on reddit that the same handful of moderators moderates most of the large subs. However, I did realize I haven't verified that myself, so I hacked together a quick script to do so.


For reference, reddit proudly lists what their top communities are, and how many subscribers each one has. If you navigate to that page, you can then go through and look, for each community, at who the moderators for that community are. For example, for /r/funny, the url would be /r/funny/about/moderators, or, if you want to scrape the data, /r/funny/about/moderators.json.


So by navigating to the top communities page and then running this janky little snippet in the javascript console, you can reproduce these results.


Looking at the top 10 (non-bot) mods by number of subreddits modded, I see:



So that's 2 / 10 most visible mods that moderate extensively on the basis of their own personal politics.


That's actually not nearly as bad as I thought. Interesting.


I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For reference, from the link, the questions were


    

  1. Overall, how do you think each of the following affects people’s ability to be successful where you work
(Being white / Being black / Being hispanic / Being asian / Being a man / Being a woman): (Makes it a lot easier to be successful / Makes it a little easier to be successful / Makes it neither easier nor harder to be successful / Makes it a little harder to be successful / Makes it a lot harder to be successful / Not sure / No answer)
    2. 

  2. In general, do you think that focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly… (A good thing / A bad thing / Neither good nor bad)
    3. 

  3. When it comes to how much attention your company or organization pays to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion, would you say your company or organization pays… (Too much attention / Too little attention / About the right amount of attention / Not sure)
    4. 

  4. Regardless of how diverse the place where you work is, how important is it to YOU PERSONALLY to work at a place that… (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
    5. 

  5. Regardless of how accessible the place where you work is, how important is it to you personally to work at a place that is accessible for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
    6. 

  6. How well do each of the following describe the place where you currently work (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely well / Very well / Somewhat well / Not too well / Not at all well / Not sure / No answer)
    7. 

  7. How accessible is the place where you work for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely accessible / Very accessible / Somewhat accessible / Not too accessible / Not at all accessible / Not sure)
    8. 

  8. As far as you know, does the company or organization you work for have any of the following (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Yes / No / Not sure)
    9. 

  9. What type of impact do you think having each of the following has had where you work (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Very positive / Somewhat positive / Neither positive nor negative / Somewhat negative / Very negative)
    10. 

  10. Are you personally a member of an employee affinity group or Employee Resource Group (ERG) – that is, a group created by employees, based on their shared identities or interests such as gender, race, or being a parent?
    11. 

  11. In the past year, have you participated in any trainings on diversity, equity or inclusion at work?
    12. 

  12. Overall, would you say the diversity, equity or inclusion trainings you have participated in at work have been… (Very helpful / Somewhat helpful / Neither helpful nor unhelpful / Somewhat unhelpful / Very unhelpful)
    13. 



Who are these 53% of people who think that their mandatory DEI trainings through their employer are helpful? That result makes me pretty doubtful of the results of this survey as a whole.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying




Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world. By contrast, intellectual perception is a higher form of knowledge that involves recognizing the unity and interconnectedness of self-consciousness and the fundamental essence of reality. Through intellectual perception, we can understand that the absolute meaning (content) of something is the same as its absolute structure or appearance (form).






Self-consciousness can be understood in three stages:










1: As a negative relation: Someone who is self-conscious can identify the part of the world that is not themselves as "other," and then define their "self" as everything that is not "other."






2: As a positive relation: Someone who is self-conscious can recognize that they exist in relation to the outside world and understand what that relationship is.






3: As a synthesis of these positive and negative relations, called "intellectual perception": Someone who is self-conscious can see that their thoughts and self-identity are both connected to and separate from the outside world. This synthesis allows them to recognize the unity of content and form, and achieve a deeper understanding of reality.






True intellectual perception goes beyond immediate knowledge derived purely from thoughts and sensory experience. It is a type of absolute knowledge.




A possible critique might look like


    

  1. 

    Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. Before 2001, most people had never cared about airplane cockpit security.
    2. 

  2. Before 2008, most people had never cared about mortgage-backed securities.
    3. 

  3. Before 2020, most people had never cared about coronaviruses.
    4. 

  4. Before 2025, most people had never cared about tariffs.
    5. 



Why is 4 different from the others?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah. I remember there was a big thing a few years back about whether or not leather should be welcome at pride, because pride has become a family thing for some people and there are kids there now. But that's a matter of "should leather be pushed out of a space because kids are entering the space".


But bringing leather into a space that is specifically for young kids is beyond the pale. Enough so that I would expect that even the majority of the queer-and-proud population would be against it.


WTF was the school board even thinking here?


Edit: or am I just being gullible, and the books the school board pushed didn't have leather except in the literal sense that one of the characters in one of the books wore a leather jacket?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The significant intersection between programmers (and particularly the functional programming side, e.g. Haskell/OCaml/Rust) and trans people (and furries, don't forget the furries) has been noted numerous times. Examples: 1, 2/3, 4, 5/6/7


I personally have, several times, had the experience of "I start learning some math-heavy programming tool, I go through the tutorials but get stuck on a new or undocumented use case, I discover that the place to go to talk to people who know things is the discord server for the project, and I find a significant fraction (think "half") of the helpful and active people in the project are (vocally) trans." I've also observed the same thing in IRL meetups for those kinds of topics.


So yeah, pretty sure you're observing a real phenomenon. I, too, would love to know what's going on here. I've seen the explanation of "autism" floated, but if that were the case I'd expect there to be strong trans representation among railfans (people who really really like trains), and as far as I know that is not the case? I do suspect "a surprising fraction of network engineers are furries" is the same sort of phenomenon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?




There are about 25,000 GoFundMe fundraisers created per day. My best estimate from scraping GoFundMe is that about half of fundraisers earn exactly $0, and among the remaining half there's a very long tail - perhaps 2,000 fundraisers per year earning $100k+ and 300 per year earning $500k+. Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".


Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck? Because I'd estimate about 10x as many people make $100k from lotteries than from GoFundMe virality.


It's on the news because it's rare.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
53% of the people in this survey said that their employer-mandated DEI trainings were "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful". That's the baseline against which all numbers in this survey should be judged.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room




New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's worse than that. I think that if you have 99 infographics that talk about the values of western culture, and 1 infographic that talks about the values of white culture, the one about white culture will go viral and the rest will be ignored.


If there was a Coalition of Activists, and the Coalition of Activists had decided that the best way to achieve their goals was to sow racial grievances, then it would in principle be possible to convince the leadership of the Coalition of Activists not to do that. If it's "the most divisive stuff goes viral" though, you would have to convince every single activist to refrain from creating divisive stuff. There would be no single person, or small group of people, you could reason into making it stop.


I think we live in the latter world, and "can then be used to justify more activism" is attributing far more agency than actually exists to the structures that cause this sort of stuff to enter the discourse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wait, so he wasn't granted asylum, just a stay of deportation to El Salvador specifically?


If I'm understanding right:


    

  • He applied for asylum from El Salvador in 2019. The immigration judge denied his request for asylum, but granted him "withholding of removal," which specifically prohibited his deportation to El Salvador due to the risk of persecution there
    • 

  • ICE did not appeal this decision, and he was released.
    • 

  • The withholding of removal meant he was still removable from the US, just specifically not to El Salvador. The government could have legally deported him to any other country willing to accept him without violating the court order.
    • 

  • The "administrative error" was that ICE deported him specifically to El Salvador in March 2025 despite being aware of his protection from removal to that country, violating the exact limitation imposed by the court.
    • 

  • And now the Trump admin is saying "yeah we did the thing we were specifically ordered by the court not to do, but now it's done and even though we could fix it we won't and you can't make us".
    • 

  • And the Trump admin is probably correct on the "and you can't make us" part, because in the end a court order is a piece of paper and someone still has to enforce said court order.
    • 

  • This doesn't actually set any legal precedent that this method of deportation is ok though, it just adds to the growing pile of divergences between what the law says agencies must do and how government agencies actually operate in practice.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Motte Postmortem : slatestarcodex
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We are discussing the claim that the Germans murdered 6 million Jews.




I agree. Let's discuss that claim.




So Mattogno found documentation for over 11,000 prisoners from Lodz, including women and children, which were transferred from the "extermination camp" Auschwitz to the concentration camp Stutthof:








The two brothers Michael Salomonowicz... and Josef traveled with their mother Dora Salomonowicz, born 28 August 1904, number 1652 on the transport list, registered under number 83619 at Stutthof








All three of those Jews survived the war, so it's interesting to note that all three names appear in the Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names"!




Yes. The Yad Vashem “Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names" includes both people who survived and people who died. It also includes whether those people survived or died. According to said database


    

  • 

    Dora Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived.
    

    • 

  • 

    Michael Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
    

    • 

  • 

    Josef Salomonowicz is listed by Yad Vashem as having survived
    

    • 



"Three people who were listed in the database (as survivors) actually survived" is not the slam dunk you seem to think it is.


Here is a list of all of the people who were on the same transport (Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha) - there are 1020 identified names on that list. You can further filter that list by whether they survived (47 people, including your 3 examples) or were murdered (973 people).


Do you think those 973 people who were listed as murdered were fabricated? Or maybe they survived, but were listed as deceased? I personally think that most of the 973 people who are listed as murdered were actually real people, and really did die. Still, there is virtue in actually looking at the world as it is, in making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, so I chose 5 random numbers between 1 and 973. Those numbers are 258, 817, 811, 273, and 153, and correspond to the 258th, 817th, etc person in that list of 973 people in alphabetical order.



By contrast if you look at one of the survivors from the same transport, you can see that he shows up in several genealogical databases, and has a number of living descendants.


We do not live in the fucking dark ages. Genealogical records exist. Those people who survived went on to live their lives, to marry and have children and eventually die of something else at a later time, and their lives left echoes on the modern world. Since we're talking about something that happened less than a hundred years ago, those echoes are not exactly faint. There are Facebook groups for people whose parents died in the Holocaust, because the end of the Holocaust and the creation of Facebook were separated by less than 60 years.


The exact fate of the 973 people on Transport E, Train Da 20 from Praha to Lodz may be lost to time and the destruction of evidence, but we do know that there was an explicit plan to rid Europe of Jews, we know that a large number of people who survived the ghettoes and camps described the details within, we know that there was a specific effort led by Paul Blobel to destroy evidence of mass murders, and we know that Blobel's defense at the Nuremberg trials in regards to that effort to destroy evidence was "I was following orders and thus did nothing wrong", not "that did not happen".


If you take a group of people into custody, prevent them from leaving for a period of years, use them as forced labor in documented terrible conditions, and then at the end of those few years only a few people from that original group are anywhere to be found, and those few people say you murdered the remaining people, and the remaining people are never heard from again, and you say "yeah, I did it and destroyed the evidence after" - then yes, I think it's fair to conclude that you murdered the remaining people. I think it remains fair to conclude that the missing people were murdered, even if there is doubt about how specifically those murders were performed, or what specifically happened to the bodies.


I believe that


    

  • 

    If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem were largely fabricated, the effort to compile passport and other documents would have been immense, and an immense effort like that would have left marks on the world.
    

    • 

  • 

    If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had been largely duplicates, I would expect to see a lot more duplicate names and birth dates in the search for people on that particular transport.
    

    • 

  • 

    If the 4.8 million names from Yad Vashem had mostly referred to people who survived, I would expect to see genealogical records from those survivors.
    

    • 



You will note that I am making specific, concrete predictions of things I will not see. Thus, if you want to convince me, you could try to show


    

  • 

    There has been a massive effort to create millions of falsified documents from before the war. Note that this effort would have either been recent or made mistakes that are easily detectable by modern techniques.
    

    • 

  • 

    If you select 10 people at random from the Yad Vashem list, there are a substantial number of records that Yad Vashem claims are different people but in fact share the same names / birth dates / origins (if your claim is that the actual Jewish death toll was 1.4 million, you would need over 20 duplicate people from your sample of 10).
    

    • 

  • 

    If you select 10 people documented as "murdered" at random from the Yad Vashem list, a significant fraction of those actually survived, and documents showing their survival (genealogical records, obituaries, etc) will exist, because we don't live in the dark ages.
    

    • 



Note that the "at random" is doing quite a bit of work in the latter two examples - random samples are vital when operating in an environment where people want you to conclude false things.


Do you have any specific, falsifiable beliefs about the provenance of those 4.8 million names and the fate of the people those names referred to?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Lefties hate Trump for Jan 6




Lefties hated Trump long before Jan 6. Jan 6 was just an opportunity for them to say "see I told you so".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems to me like a fairly usual level of competence from a bolt-on-security-as-a-product or compliance-as-a-service company. Examples:


    

  • CVE-2016-2208: buffer overflow in Symantec Antivirus "This is a remote code execution vulnerability. Because Symantec use a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link is enough to exploit it. [...] On Windows, this results in kernel memory corruption, as the scan engine is loaded into the kernel (wtf!!!), making this a remote ring0 memory corruption vulnerability - this is about as bad as it can possibly get". Basically "send an email with an attachment to pwn someone's computer. They don’t have to open the attachment, as long as they have Norton Antivirus (or anything that uses the Symantec Antivirus Engine) installed".
    • 

  • CVE-2020-12271: "A SQL injection issue was found in SFOS 17.0, 17.1, 17.5, and 18.0 before 2020-04-25 on Sophos XG Firewall devices, as exploited in the wild in April 2020. [...] A successful attack may have caused remote code execution that exfiltrated usernames and hashed passwords for the local device admin(s), portal admins, and user accounts used for remote access"
    • 

  • Okta data breach a couple months back: "For several weeks beginning in late September 2023, intruders had access to [Okta's] customer support case management system. That access allowed the hackers to steal authentication tokens from some Okta customers, which the attackers could then use to make changes to customer accounts, such as adding or modifying authorized users."
    • 



It's not that it's amateur hour specifically at CrowdStrike. It's the whole industry.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing (like harry potter content).






How can I support my trans friends




Teach them that uBlock is not just an adblocker, and that they can use it to hide any youtube videos with specific words or phrases in the title, by adding a rule that looks like


youtube.com###dismissable:has-text(/harry\s*potter|rowling/i)



I think "trans people should be able to browse the internet without seeing content that disturbs them" is a perfectly reasonable opinion. I think the best way to achieve that is to teach them how to filter out the bits of the internet that disturb them on their end, rather than trying to change the internet as a whole so that an unfiltered stream is not disturbing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					




[Omicron]




<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.




For a random variant I'd agree. But omicron was really weird in a lot of ways though, and I'd actually put this one at more like 30% (and 80% that something weird and mouse-shaped happened).


    

  1. Omicron was really really far (as measured by mutation distance) from any other sars-cov-2 variant. Like seriously look at this phylogenetic tree (figure 1 in this paper)
    2. 

  2. The most recent common ancestor of  B.1.1.529 (omicron) and B.1.617.2 (delta,  the predominant variant at the time) dates back to approximately February 2020. It is not descended from any variant that was common at the time it started spreading.
    3. 

  3. The omicron variant spike protein exhibited unusually high binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor (source)
    4. 

  4. Demand for humanized mice was absurdly high during the pandemic - researchers were definitely attempting to study coronavirus disease and spread dynamics in mouse models.
    5. 



The astute reader will object "hey that just sounds like a researcher who couldn't get enough humanized mice decided to induce sars-cov-2 to jump to normal mice, and then study it there. Why do you assume they intentionally induced a jump back to humans rather than accidentally getting sick from their research mice". To which I say "the timing was suspicious, the level of infectiousness was enormously higher in humans which I don’t think I'd expect in the absence of passaging back through humanized mice, and also hey look over there a distraction from my weak arguments".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.


    

  • The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
    • 

  • The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
    • 

  • Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
    • 

  • Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I did the same with ChatGPT4, but as a more iterative process. The summary I was able to produce as a result of that iterative process is still a kinda disconnected jumble of unsupported ideas, but at least it's possible to see what those ideas are.


My process for disentangling that was


    

  1. 

    Find the full passage from Hegel -- the quoted bit was the 8th item in a list of 8 items.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Feed that into ChatGPT with the prompt "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the 8 bullet points]. Specifically, I am confused by point 8; please replace all all pronouns in that passage with their referent, but make no other changes".
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Verify that each of the replacements makes sense (in this case, a few of them didn't).
    

    4. 

  4. 

    In a new chat, prompt with "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the passage with pronoun replacements]. Can you explain what Hegel is referring to when he talks about (absolute form/substance|negative/positive relations to the world|immediate/intellectual perception)" (with one prompt for each).
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Using that information, write my own, non-obscurantist summary.
    

    6. 

  6. 

    In another new chat, prompt "I am trying to summarize the following passage by Hegel. [the raw passage]. I read that as saying approximately the following: [my summary]. I think my summary is basically correct, but can you confirm that?"
    

    7. 

  7. 

    Repeat a number of times until ChatGPT tells me that my summary is good (it turns out ChatGPT has _ very strong opinions_ about Hegel if you write like someone who is Wrong On The Internet about Hegel)
    

    8. 



The specific intuitions I have about GPT4, which drove this process, are


    

  1. 

    It is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task. In other words, it's better than me at taking a bunch of pronoun-heavy text and identifying what the pronouns refer to.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    The task it spent most of its training budget on was "given a bunch of text, predict the next token". As such, the next token it predicts is generally going to look like it was generated by the same process as the previous tokens. As such, if the previous tokens contain ChatGPT making a mistake or being unable to do a task, it will predict tokens that look like "ChatGPT makes mistakes / is unable to do the task", even if it could do the task with the correct prompt. As such, it is very important not to have "ChatGPT fails to do the task" in your context -- if that starts happening, reroll the failure response; if rerolling a few times fails, start a new chat.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    If you fail to do a task but ChatGPT succeeds, that is fine and good. If you flail around in the general direction of the answer you want in the chat, and then ask ChatGPT to help, and it does, and you say "thanks, that was helpful", it will be helpful in the same direction in later messages in the same chat.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    The training data can be modeled as "all text ever written". That's not literally true but it's directionally correct. As such, if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge. The internet being the internet, that context is frequently "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".
    

    5. 

  5. 

    The RLHF step did meaningfully change the distribution of output responses, but as far as I can tell the main effect is that it strongly wants to write in its specific assistant persona when it's writing in its own voice. However, it is perfectly happy to quote or edit stuff that is not in its own voice, as long as it's in a context it recognizes as "these are not the words of ChatGPT".
    

    6. 



I have heard that approximately the same is true of Bing Chat, though Bing Chat performs best if you speak Binglish to it (e.g. instead of saying "Thanks, that was helpful. Can you condense that down to a brief summary for me?", say "thanks 😊. now can you write 📝 me a summary? 🙏").


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In my experience the typical woke, progressive, or liberal has an attitude of "my opinions are so obviously at least directionally good for humanity, and my political opponents are so obviously vile reactionaries whose opinions are beneath contempt..."




This is my experience of the most vocal woke/progressive/liberal people. My experience of the typical person who puts their pronouns on their slack profile without protest when HR asks, votes for whoever has a (D) next to their name if they bother to vote, and has a vaguely positive affect towards the idea of minorities is that they want to be on the "right side of history" but they don't want to have to think about it or make any decisions.


Which, IMO, is super valid. Getting into twitter flamewars about politics is bad for the world and bad for your mental health, so people who make the decision that instead of doing that they just want to grill are making a good choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, I buy that the school board just rubber-stamped this book without much thought. That part is not surprising to me. The bit that's surprising to me is that they decided to double down, and then double down again, and continue until they're now showing up in front of the supreme court. This case (edit apr 24: as described in the top-level comment) is a giant gift to social conservatives, at a minimum in the court of public opinion and I expect also in the court of law. So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care - I just have a burning curiosity as to what their thought process was when they decided to escalate to this level.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Excellent post. One thing jumped out at me:




Look at the lead time for something like a modern fighter jet. What's the chance that the guy who originally greenlit the program is still around to be 'accountable' if/when it's actually used in a hot conflict, such that its performance can be assessed against the competition? Do you handicap that assessment at all? He made his decision a decade ago, seeing a certain set of problems that they were trying to solve. A decade or two later, your adversaries have also been developing their own systems. Should he be punished in some way for failing to completely predict how the operating environment would change over decades?




Punishment for failure seems like exactly the wrong way to handle accountability for a project that has a low probability of success. The motivation to reduce a 99% chance of being punished in 20 years to a 95% chance of being punished in 20 years just isn't going to be that large. This is especially true if the people involved are self-selecting into the position - nobody is going to self-select into a position with a near-certainty of punishment in 20 years unless the benefits now outweigh even a certainty of punishment in 20 years, so the punishment just can't be that severe.


Talk about rewarding the guy who made a prescient prediction 20 years ago, on the other hand, and I think the dynamics flip. Going from a 1% chance of collecting a $10M prize in 20 years to a 5% chance of collecting that same prize is substantial and motivational. Think of how hard scientists chasing Nobel prizes work.


Flip the probabilities (i.e. a competent person would have a 99% success rate on a project and an incompetent one would have a 95% success rate) and I think the argument for accountability in the form of punishment makes more sense than accountability in the form of reward. That's sort of how it goes with professional licensing, and it's a pretty solid strategy in that context.


But yeah, "we should abandon accountability" sounds bad and counterintuitive but I think Tyler is right to call out "accountability" in the specific form of punishment for failing to achieve highly uncertain outcomes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Man, I don't even know. Because "the stock market crashed and a bunch of retirees are mad because that's their nest egg" is, I think, a significant part of the signal Trump is looking at. But the market is considering the impact of tariffs times the probability that Trump actually sticks with them, so if the market stops believing Trump, the market impact of the tariffs stops looking so large, which makes Trump less likely to change his mind, which increases the chance they stick around... feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.