faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4hr ago
Rumors of the death of the marketplace of ideas are greatly exaggerated. Exhibit 1: we are posting on a site where holocaust revisionists speak freely (and incessantly). Free speech norms aren't as strong now as they were in the late 90s, but they are not entirely dead, and (up until the Charlie Kirk murder) were moving in a mostly good direction. A lot of right wing ideas have been winning in the marketplace of ideas recently (e.g. around immigration, trans, parental rights). In many cases, I am not happy that those particular ideas are winning - but I am very happy that the marketplace of ideas seems to be recovering. Let's maybe not throw that away.
I get that you feel personally wronged, and that you want revenge for that. You likely genuinely were wronged. The people you are trying to take revenge on, though, are not the same people who wronged you, even if both sets share a broad ideological tent.
You want the cultural revolution that has zero chance to happen or the one that is already picking up steam?
Which one is picking up steam, in your view? Are you sure you're not living in 2021 still?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5hr ago
Now the federal government is going to come in and try and bus in right leaning stuff into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint. Some stalls are going to get kicked over but the result is going to be me more free speech.
How has this worked out in the past? The most salient examples I can think of of this in the past are
- Chinese Cultural Revolution
- Franco's Spain
- 1950s America around communism
But in fairness to you, are there some specific times in history where a government came in and forced specific views into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint, and this went well? Maybe it's just a failure of historical knowledge on my part, and this is usually a strategy which leads to a free and flourishing nation.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5hr ago
What's wrong with "overton window"? Someone saying they want to shift the overton window is a very strong signal of their goals, and if they're using the term it's because they want other people to know what their goals are and how they intend to achieve them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5hr ago
"Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme in left spaces during the Biden times. Turns out "lots of our politicians were having sex with underaged girls at this guy's island, then the guy appears to have been suicided before he could provide details implicating specific politicians" is unpopular with pretty much everyone.
The right was more vocal about it pre Trump, and post-Trump some of the left does see this as an opportunity to go on the attack, but the left cared about Epstein before Trump too.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6hr ago
Murder rate in the US has been holding fairly steady at 6±2 homicides per 100,000 residents per year since the mid 90s. Any hypothesized "strange attractor" for making young men more prone to violence would have to take into account that young men don't seem to be becoming much more prone to violence over time, especially when controlling for demographics.
I can kinda see the argument for "some extremely small subset of young men are going to violently snap and do whatever their cultural script says that violent young men who snap should do, and that script is flipping from "shoot up a school" to "kill someone important in a flashy way", but that's more of a statement about the script than about the young men.
The parallel is stretched, but yes I agree that's what would have happened after 9/11. Also what would have happened after 9/11 to expressing doubt for the "WMDs in Iraq" narrative, which is rather my point. "We cancel speech which is insensitive but allow speech which goes against the narrative on factual grounds" does not seem to be a reachable policy, and so "we allow all speech that is not a direct call for violence" seems like the best achievable norm.
Cancel culture was mostly firing and oppressing people for mainstream opinions, stuff they did years ago and stuff they straight up didn't even do.
"I didn't like Charlie Kirk as a person but he shouldn't have been shot" is a pretty mainstream opinion. I agree that adding the "I didn't like Charlie Kirk as a person" bit is in poor taste after something like this, but "privately or semi-privately expresses opinions which are in poor taste" should IMO not result in a mob contacting your workplace.
Likewise, in terms of "stuff they straight up didn't even do", I give you Elkhorn Area School District principal falsely accused of making inappropriate Charlie Kirk comments: The district said they have received 800 voicemails, some including death threats
It started Friday when the Associate Principal Cynthia Rehberg was included in a post on X by conservative influencer Ryan Fournier.
In the post, Fournier said Rehberg "celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk's assassination."
The post, which was later deleted, included a photo that showed Rehberg's school employee photo underneath a Facebook post made by Cynthia Irene.
So yes, this does seem to be the same sort of righteous mob mentality that drove the post 9/11 insanity and the post-Floyd insanity. I don't think it's categorically different just because different people are doing it this time.
Edit: and I just noticed I'm arguing with a burner account :/
OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma’s top education official has threatened to ban from the classroom any teacher who “attempts to glorify” the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. [...] “Let me be clear: any teacher or employee who attempts to glorify this disgusting act of violence will have their teaching license taken from them and will never step foot in an Oklahoma school again,” Walters wrote in an announcement posted to social media on Thursday. [...] A Sand Springs Public Schools teacher also is under investigation for a Facebook post about Kirk, Walters wrote on social media. The Sand Springs middle school teacher had written, “Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people,” according to screenshots posted on social media by Rep. Gabe Woolley, R-Broken Arrow, who alerted Walters to the teacher’s post.
So apparently saying "Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people" is now "attempting to glorify" the Charlie Kirk assassination. Obviously it's in poor taste. But firing teachers for saying, on their own time and not even to their students, things which are in poor taste is a bad idea. We just went down this road. It's not a good road. The right saw that it was a bad road when it was their people losing their jobs over saying things that were true but unpopular and tactlessly stated, but apparently forgot what they learned the moment they had the ability to do unto others instead of having others do unto them.
In any case, I'm not super interested in getting in a pissing contest over whose cancel culture was worse. The Floyd era cancel culture from the left was clearly worse. But the trend is in a bad direction.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
20hr ago
I don't think the situations are perfectly symmetrical, I'm just hoping that pointing out the symmetries will at least induce the mental motion of going "huh, that's funny, a lot of people on the right really are advocating for the same actions they found abhorrent in their political adversaries 3 years ago".
I don't expect that a single comment will convince someone who has been seething for years. I do expect that without people willing to speak up for free speech, even bad free speech, this place will turn into just another unremarkable right wing hivemind by evaporative cooling. That would be a shame. I like this place, and I also like what it stands for.
And I do expect that vocally existing as someone who supports free speech will make it easier for others who also care about it to say that rather than just leaving.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
21hr ago
· Edited 21hr ago
Speak plainly.
My claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it. Our norms are fragile, and are worth protecting. Allowing people to speak freely means that there will be some people who say horrible things. Some of those horrible things will be false. Some of those people who say those horrible false things will even mean it.
And yet, the societies that try to silence the people who say horrible false things seem to invariably also start trying to silence the people who say inconvenient-to-power true things. As we witnessed just a couple of years ago.
At that time, many on the right seemed to understand the value of free speech, actual free speech and not "you're free to speak and I'm free to blackmail your employer into firing you with threats of a media shitstorm". And last year, there was a shift, and people started to recognize (out loud) the excesses of the "woke" era. Norms turned against people trying to "cancel" each other for insufficient wokeness.
I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.
I mean go look at the discourse about "alligator alcatraz", the people saying "I voted for this, self-deport" whenever there's a report of ICE illegally detaining legal US residents in atrocious conditions or trying to sidestep court orders, this very forum with the dark hinting about how the left has made the right angry and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.
To be clear, I support the right of people on the right to say these things. I oppose any attempts to try to be cute and get their employers to go after them.
But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture. And so, in opposition to that, I claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
22hr ago
These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.
Now where have I heard this line before? I feel like I heard it a lot about 5 years ago, but I just can't seem to remember who was saying it.
Probably some fine upstanding people pushing a culture we want to see more of in this country.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
Moore's law, strictly interpreted as "number of transistors you can fit on a 2d die doubles every two years", will be running into physical limitations soon. Moore's law, loosely interpreted as "amount of compute you get for a given monetary or energy budget doubles every two years" is still relatively far from physical limits - Landauer is still about 6 OOMs away, so there's some headroom even without reversible computing. 6 OOMs of continuing halving of energy cost every two years would take us to 2065.
I'd expect further architectural changes to be required before then, because I don't expect the compute to be shaped optimally for the ML techniques of 2025, but "the SOTA ML algos are the ones that are able to take advantage of the hardware available at the time" is nothing new.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters
Never is a long time. It still seems plausible that even if continual learning is the most important bottleneck, and even if algorithmic improvements fail to crack it cleverly, brute force will still work eventually. Maybe not until 2050 instead of the 2030 the more breathless people are predicting if we have to wait on Moore's Law, but it seems fairly inevitable unless some catastrophe kicks industrial civilization significantly back before then.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4d ago
... if the shooter was pushed into this by feds who were trying to sell a particular image of a danger the country faces that only they are able to address, does that count as a "false flag"?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5d ago
Are there any places you would want to live where violence along partisan lines is commonplace? If not, why do you think that is?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5d ago
Practically every commenter where? If you're looking at your Twitter FYP that's specifically tailored to you personally to maximize your engagement, which in practice tends to cash out as "that which makes you personally angry or afraid".
Do we even know yet that the shooter was a leftist rather than a random crazy person with no coherent ideology?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5d ago
the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight
That is in exceptionally poor taste.
At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community?
You're glowing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas,
Which is a problem why exactly? Most of the people who object to immigration are living outside of those extremely HCOL areas anyway, seems like it would do a good job of ensuring that the areas that wanted lots of immigrants had lots of immigrants and the places that don't like immigrants don't get them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
... man, it would be nice if the US could just have some areas that are primarily there as economic zones, and some areas that were reserved for protectionism and preservation of American culture. SF / NY / Boston / Seattle could host the global megacorporations that want to bring in the world's best no matter the cost, while much of the rest of the country could be reserved for cultural preservation.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research.
I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.
If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.
Yeah this seems like a good policy decision and I expect it doesn't happen because of specific lobbying to prevent it, not because it's unpopular with voters.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
The general pool of foreign workers does not have to be identical to the pool of foreign workers we bring in. We can and should be selective.
The top 10% of people who would come to the US if they had a chance are genuinely more skilled than the median American, and there are enough people who want to come to the US that we could pull from that top 10% for a long, long time. We're a country of immigrants, and we should be strategic about that.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
Or the idea that perhaps we should have functional immigration pipelines specifically for high-skill workers, rather than almost ignoring human capital in our immigration process.
B-1 visas do allow some types of work - I bet LGES argues that the workers were there "to install, service, or repair equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company", or "to train U.S. workers to perform these services", both of which are permissible activities under a B-1 visa per CBP's own documentation provided that the workers do not receive compensation from a US source.
If the workers did receive compensation from a US source, that means someone fucked up somewhere, but my guess is what actually happened is that CBP disagrees with LGES about whether the activities these workers engaged in qualify as installing, servicing, or repairing equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company, and decided that the appropriate course of action was to chain these workers up and make a self-congratulatory press release about it, and that we will hear any follow-ups about the outcomes of this raid in terms of findings of actual wrongdoing.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
I don’t think you need step 2. A theory that passes the gates of "makes novel, interesting, and falsifiable predictions" and "and those predictions end up panning out" is already rare enough that the volume will remain manageable even with the deluge of AI slop. Most AI slop frameworks won't even pass the first of those two gates, and that's the easy one.
Yes. And we moved here, and nobody stopped us, and now there are multiple more mainstream places on the internet (e.g. twitter) where people can say stuff that at one point would have been pushed to fringe places like here.
No, I can tell you the marketplace of ideas has recovered at that point. The place it's in is still bad, the direction it's moving (or at least was moving) is good. The difference between 2021 and now is the difference between having $15,000 of credit card debt that's going up by $1000 / month and having $15,000 of credit card debt that's going down by $1000 / month. Obviously it'd be better not to have the debt at all, but the latter situation is much much better than the former, and I am suspicious of anyone in the latter situation saying they need to blow up their financial plan and replace it with something reckless because they are still in debt.
(Although on a concrete object level, if you're in a left-dominated profession outside of education, you likely can reveal your political affiliation at work without professional consequences, if you own your beliefs and state them in a level-headed and reasonable sounding way. The vibes really have shifted quite a lot).
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