georgioz
1mo ago
Link for research: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4RgSmkm5S-k&t=1m55s
Getting rid of Biden this late in the game is simply not a winning move.
Maybe not, but Biden winning may not necessarily be a winning move either. There are people - republicans and democrats alike - who genuinely think that having a president with dementia may be severe national security threat. Presumably politicians are supposed to win for a reason, not just for the sake of it.
georgioz
2mo ago
Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.
The real world politics is not a game of civilization played from the perspective of godlike figure navigating the nation toward ultimate victory.
China is ruled by a regime for which Taiwan presents a constant threat on all sides. It is exactly because Taiwan is Han Chinese and successful, it provides a clear and visible alternative for all the subjects of CCP regime to ponder. Conquering Taiwan would be conclusion of revolution, a "dream" that even Mao could not achieve.
Taiwan has symbolical value beyond any realpoliticking about chips or even strategical issues of control of South China sea. One China policy is the cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy for a reason, any success on this front is question of legitimacy of any CCP leader.
Never ask a white nationalist or a social justice warrior the race of their partner, as they say.
I think this can be genuine source of anxiety and cognitive dissonance. Imagine that you are somebody that fully believes in CRT - white privilege, oppression and all that. You want to have a kid - are you willing to have black spouse and thus knowingly sentence your child to lifetime of racism and oppression? Or will you go for white spouse so that at least your child can benefit from that juicy colorist privilege and potentially your grandchildren even passing white like this pretty little quadroon?
There is no "reverse racism" of anti-racism, there is only racism. This also works in other areas, James Lindsay calls it as "iron law of woke projection". The idea being that if you believe something let's say that the most important thing in society is power and how it manifests in oppression/oppressed dynamics, then of course you will be obsessed by obtaining said oppressive power and use it to do good presumably. In your eyes you improved the situation, in eyes of somebody who does not share your worldview, the situation changed from normal to open oppression in the name of ideology. So similarly as you can use antiracism to fight real [AKA systemic] racism, you can use fact checking using proper context to fight against misinformation, our side does not engage in censorship, we only deplatform racists who hold all the power and so forth. In the end it all degenerates, it basically conjures all the boogiemen as soon as narcissists and sociopaths get their hand on levers of power riding the wave of current culture - not unlike cult leaders riding the wave of whatever spiritual fad pervading the society.
OPs referenced. The primary effect is benefiting the university, which is why they offer them.
I think it is primarily benefiting the university and most importantly their existing employees as a class. You know, university is special so we all have to vote to get ourselves tenures, spousal hiring, sabbaticals and all those other perks necessary to keep our demanding jobs of getting state to keep the grants flowing and all that.
Oh, I am perfectly with you on this. Corruption, tribalism, nepotism and all that is very natural way of things, it even fits with what I meant around excuses driven Moloch - you exactly nailed it. So yes, if you can have advantages accrued to you by sucking out the system - be it academia or taking advantage of diffuse corporate governance structure, people will take it. I think what is new is that we may not even have to pretend to large extent, to have any kind of noblesse oblige. People will not only take advantage of the situation, they will even develop a new moral system why what they do is okay and possibly even their duty. And thus a new caste system is born with different rules for each strata of society.
If you adopt sibling's child or even accept brother as a sperm donor, it may for sure create some awkward family gatherings with your brother literally being biological father of your child and possibly deciding to act on that role. Modern IVF especially combined with surrogacy serves as an endless source of philosophical questions/scenarios in real life - like this controversy where grieving mother paid surrogate to carry child of her dead son. So yes, if "single" mother can select a child from catalougue of sperm donors and we should be fine with that, why cannot let's say rich 70 years old man pay 20 Ukrainian surrogate mothers to deliver large family of children who will inhabit his remote compound in Nebraska?
But back to the topic again, there are no good options for infertile men who want to build relationship with younger and fertile childless woman or any woman who may decide she wants another child in the future.
georgioz
1yr ago
The author is suggesting that GPT-4 and humanities professors have similar goals and methods, and that they are both inferior to thing-manipulators who can challenge their claims with facts and data. He is implying that GPT-4 could replace humanities professors because they are both producing meaningless or misleading content.
It was about replacement of humanities professors by GPT-4 as opposed to thing-manipluators. But it also caught the tone of your thing vs symbol manipulators. And in that sense I completely agree about GIGO.
georgioz
1yr ago
I am not a Musk fanboy, but I'll say this, Elon Musk very transparently cares about the survival of humanity as humanity, and it is deeply present down to a biological drive to reproduce his own genes. Musk openly worries about things like dropping birth rates, while also personally spotlighting his own rabbit-like reproductive efforts. Musk clearly is a guy who wants and expects his own genes to spread, last and thrive in future generations. This is a rising tides approach for humans Musk has also signaled clearly against unnatural life extensions.
Then he is stupid about it. On average humans have around 20,000 - 25,000 genes. In matter of around 15 generations your family tree descendants have low chance of having even a single gene of yours. Now what works is creating bottlenecks - if you are a man then killing all men and having you and all men of your family rape all the women is a good strategy to really spread genes of your Y chromosome. Your genes will not be diluted if they are the only game in town. Now that I am thinking about it some more; I am really scared of Musk :D
Sean Carroll addressed this controversy on his podcast and I think that the best argument was that Webb name should never have been the proposed one. James Webb was just a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher leading NASA. He did not have any significant discoveries or scientific work under his belt. He was just a politician - an important one, but pencil pusher nevertheless. I think that having scientific projects named after political appointees is much more damning, it shows some level of hubris and quite frankly only shows how out of touch these people are. So yeah, fuck Webb - this controversy is well deserved even if for bad reasons.
georgioz
1yr ago
Look, in my eyes it is the same. Pickpocket gangs are basically organized as snatchers. If you detect a pickpocket suddenly 4 people around you turn aggressive and it turns to snatching/attempted snatching.
So my argument is that pickpocketing is just a developed version of snatching. But no worries, we are going to get there at least in Europe.
I agree, however there is also something to be said about arbitrary selection of the reference class. For instance in doomsday argument it is just assumed that humanity is a reference class. Why not all hominids? Why not just all accounts that are subscribed to The Motte including bots? Using the latter example both bots and human users have something in common - they are subscribed to The Motte. But there is not much else to be said for it or infer from it. It may be the case that even if two concepts are overlapping in certain category, it is erroneous to assume that there may be some meaningful knowledge gained by projecting information you have from one well researched concept (let's say in this case well known human users) onto other concept (in this case bots). Including basic information regarding how many are there to be in the future or some such.
The origin story of doomsday argument is supposed to be WW2 Allied intelligence operation, where they observed number painted on German tanks and ascertained how many of them were likely produced using statistics. But in that case the reference class was well defined and grounded. For instance intelligence agencies were interested in all German tanks already produced - they were not interested in tanks produced in WW1 or Leopard tanks produced in 2020. They probably had some hard intelligence regarding how the numbers were assigned - e.g. that they were assigned sequentially and not randomly as is the case for instance with certain countries/states vehicle license plates. They also had additional data, for instance if they observed a tank numbered 1,000,000,000 they would have known that their methodology is flawed as it was not physically possible for Germans to have one billion tanks.
georgioz
1yr ago
Infiltrators robots may posit more problems for humans then just destroying bases. They make them not trust other survivors in the wild or other cells in the resistance. It increases costs of coordination and cooperation. It is familiar concept in asymmetric warfare where even threat of IEDs planted on the road makes the other side expend resources on patrolling and sweeping them away. It may also force overreaction and all other sorts of mistakes even if only small fraction of attacks actually result in explosion and destruction of enemy vehicles.
georgioz
1yr ago
James Lindsay has a very good presentation about it. The problem is, that it requires many tangents actually explaining certain concepts and definitions. So it for sure is daunting task, but I like his definition when you have to have system of philosophy, meaning cosmology, epistemology, axiology and sociology that is then united and directed by theology which makes it a system of religion.
Orban nationalized billions and made decision for the whole population when it comes to significant portion of their income and their wellbeing in the old age. Is this serious enough to be considered just a "nudge"? Of course the nudge itself was "small": just opt-in again, it will take you only a few seconds of your life. And if you cannot be bothered reading the fine print then we just made the "choice" easy for you by default.
If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.
I can see the difference, that is the point of the analogy that it is by definition not the same thing. My main point is that nudges use psychological tricks, they take advantage of natural laziness of people who "cannot be bothered" to make the choice for them often in matters of great importance. In that sense the choice was made for them by the designer of that option. Also it has to be said that "could not be bothered" is again just another euphemism to help with self-deception. "You see, all the people are bright and free but they have so much to do in their lives. What about we the experts help them by preselecting the correct choice for them as the default. Of course if people invested energy studying the topic, they would surely have made that choice themselves. We are just helping and increasing utility for everyone." Now that is pretense, but it is not rare for many of the expert nudgers to show their elitist upbringing by privately outright admitting that they believe people are stupid and somebody has to make the correct choice for all those dimwits.
Natives could not have been "bothered" to read the fine print or to ask for the meaning of it all. So instead of explaining all the choices and consequences clearly and honestly, the Dutch just "nudged" natives to sell their lands for a few trinkets. Who knows, maybe the Dutch thought that they are going to build a thriving trading post where natives can exchange goods and learn about the God to save their immortal souls and in general make them more civilized. They were doing natives a favor, Dutch may have them considered as too savage to be able to make their own choices. And if the Dutch profited from all that as well, this is only one more argument for applying the nudge. And as for "murders" and all that, maybe it was not the original intention of the nudge. Dutch could have not known that natives are so prone to European diseases or that they are so stiff about their tribal honor culture. It was just series of honest mistakes which sadly sometimes happen even to the very best of nudgers. Who knows, maybe all of it could have been possibly corrected by a few more well placed nudges.
CCP has famously opaque structure, so it was not necessarily even about Xi "voluntarily stepping down" but maybe being forced by some players to share some power or tolerate some ideas he opposes. The power struggles inside Zhongnanhai would probably fill whole spy libraries, it is insane what is going on in there. If you follow China watchers you will see lengthy analysis of things like what can be the meaning if Xi having two cups of tea in front of him when everybody else has just one. So even if to the outsiders some things like order of seats or looks of congress members may seem innocuous, it is the only signal available given that things like "voting" are well known sham.
Also it has to be said that Xi is only seventh leader of CCP after Mao Zedong and since the reign of Deng Xiaoping the CCP established the system of collective leadership exactly to prevent one dictator to amass power similar to Mao. So in fact it happened in the past that even leaders with total political authority capable of implementing superauthoritarian ideas like one child policy were sharing the power and they were willing to hand the power over to the next chairman. In exchange they had certain level of safety, respect and comfort after they transfered the power. The result of this congress shows that collective leadership is a thing of the past.
georgioz
1yr ago
Not exactly "hip" or "rock concert-esque", but when I was believer I liked going to Latin Catholic mass. The advantage was that instead of old grannies singing hymns in their broken voices they employed local choir with organ, so the musical parts were more tasteful in my eyes. Latin rites also captured the original feeling, and it is not as if I did not know all of them by the rote anyway. The readings and preaching was in local language for convenience. Overall I think this was the best balance for me, but I like choirs so there is that. But it was definitely more solemn and not lively.
georgioz
1yr ago
I would never visit a prostitute, not as much because of morality but more because of myriads of STDs, some of which are highly infectious and very hard to get rid of such as Herpes/HPV viruses against which you cannot protect even with condoms. I sincerely believe that it was STDs that historically made prostitutes "unclean" and made them verboten in loads of cultures/religions. One prostitute infected with syphilis could wipe out half of a small town. In fact, apparently 20% of men in London caught syphilis by the age of 35 despite overall culture denouncing this behavior.
georgioz
1yr ago
Interesting, to me it seems that the conflict is now not between so called "left/right" but as Steve Bannon said years ago it is between populists (be it national or socialist) and for lack of better word the "technocrats" who want to rule through "expertise" of bureaucratic apparatus.
georgioz
5d ago
I think that you are correct but it is also a broader cultural change that is path dependent. The institution of marriage is unrecognizable to what it was in the past, shaming no longer works and family support is not there. Also in the past the situation was symmetric - being put together man who had quarrelsome wife who constantly created drama and conflict with neighbor was terrible for a man with no way out either. Even if he made all the money it is not as if he could just have a parallel life not supporting his family without massive reputational damage to the extent of destruction. Plus the wife also had family and brothers or uncles and so forth - deadbeat man could end up in a very sorry state if he overstepped his bounds and did not fulfil his family duties.
A similar phenomenon came to be after the advent of the pill. If a young men impregnated a young women, everybody knew that he was responsible to marry her shotgun wedding style. After invention of the pill and access to abortion, suddenly it was all on woman. Are you pregnant? Then it is your fault for not taking pill properly, but you can go and have abortion. You still want a baby? Okay, feel free to be a single mom while the man just leaves and does what he wants.
So yes, maybe women being "independent" and doing some clerical work for government with no husband and no kid is the next best thing in current reality where all the norms are obliterated. But it does not mean it is actually good for them or the society.
georgioz
18d ago
Sure, what they share with porn is that they are age restricted and represent health or other legal risk to customers and in general are mired with similar web of local/regional/state regulation. Similar issues exist if let's say small craft beer company wants to open webshop and searches for payment processor. Nobody wants to be on the other side of a lawsuit when kids get alcohol poisoning by buying booze with mum's credit card.
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
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