This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school. With enough "busywork" you will be able to factorize from your head, which will enable you to solve some key problems much, much more quickly "look and see" style ,sifting through unproductive approaches before even trying them. This is cookie cutter thing in many engineering areas, basically anything that uses differential equations which is a really a lot of stuff.
Busywork is really important especially in early stages. You have to go through some shit like memorizing vocabulary when you are learning a new language, before you will be able to do some creative things like translating poetry or doing some Tolkien-like stuff with that language.
georgioz
3d ago
I absolutely agree. I had a math class at uni and the prof gave us hundreds of problems to solve with a promise, that one of them will be exact copy on the exam and that we are allowed to bring solved problems to it. This actually made me go through all the problems. Copying the one I solved from notes on exam helped, but I had perfect score on all the other problems as well. Solving them for a week or so definitely helped. I caught several deficiencies, I taught myself more efficient ways to do checks mid-problem, I even consulted theory as problem solving brought understanding that went beside me at the time, and I just rechecked the theory because it was cool to have more thorough understanding.
It was kind of grueling, but I did not regret it. It was probably better than yet another Netflix binge session.
georgioz
3d ago
You have to invest into latina wife racial skill, even early levels will manifest as decently looking wife, who will pump children in order to get welfare - which is way more than she could earn back home in the shithole she comes from. I would think that you leared this from your race clan/guild already. This strategy is used by many such players, who tunnel new players through VPN from their original servers.
In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class.
They may not be as rich, but they were genetically up there with doctors and lawyers or upper management and other elite hired white collar professionals who are considered as lower-to-middle upper class. That is my whole point. I'd say it is culturally upper class similarly to composers or musical virtuosos and other gentlemen who exhibited enough brilliance that upper-upper class wanted to be around them and even marry them. There is similar story with Henri Pointcare for math - he was born into low upper class or maybe upper middle class according to your evaluation - with his mother being daughter of minor industrialist and father being professor of Medicine. Throughout his life Pointcare was rubbing elbows with the most influential politicians and elites. Niels Bohr had almost the same situation - father was professor at university and mother was daughter of Jewish banker. Bohr was also highly influential and definitely upper class when it comes to his contacts and power.
But in the end it is besides the point, I think you got the gist of the argument. There is a difference between rich family impoverished by revolution or relocated by Hitler, Stalin or some other pogrom, or even stricken hard by string of bad luck such as health issue, gambling or other addiction - and a true low class of literal inbred morons.
That stars-and-stripes/ apple-pie Americanism is a thoroughly artificial construct
That may be so, but this thoroughly artificial construct has some pretty significant impacts. Maybe you have no interest in nationalism, but nationalism has interest in you as Jews, Armenians, Kurds and many other formerly or even currently stateless peoples can attest - including primitive tribes like american Indians who genocided each other before they adopted the wheel, not to even talk about nationalism as industrial CIV tech. As far as I can see, the situation did not change even today with wars in Ukraine, Sudan and many other places flaring up again based on ethnic and national lines. If English and French and other peoples will act with such a nonchalance in face of mass immigration, they can easily end up like Arabs in Palestine earlier in 20th century - replaced and displaced nation with no state to call as their homeland protecting their interests.
As a result, I think there's an inherently fake and cringe quality about the "nation," and it seems neither sad nor surprising that the same people who used the nation to kill the city-state would turn around and use the globe to kill the nation.
Oh, there were people like that even before. Trockyists and other lunatics believed in class division and socialist international movement - and it failed even domestically in face of Stalin's national communism. There were secular globalists who took world spanning empires such as the British Empire as given, and they saw themselves as first citizens of Earth, who were equally at home in London or Bombay or Cape Town - always having access to excellent tea, The Times and all those luxuries. Of course until they were driven out by one revolution or another.
There are things I'm not fond of about American culture, epsecially building a necessity for driving. I can see how a simmering dissatisfaction can be re-interpreted as contempt.
One argument I heard is that it is a defensive measure against lowlife criminal element, it is deliberate act of segregation by car ownership. You won't have drug addicts or roaming homeless congregating around local subway station, if there is none around. Highly connected walkable city can work in culturally homogenous Scandinavian country of yesteryear, not as much with multicultural society with all its problems. So beware what you wish for.
georgioz
4d ago
Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.
But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
Overrated. While I think that you probably cannot be literal retard and succeed, as soon as you are 100-110 IQ or some such, you can succeed. The thing is, that there are multiple different "merits" that can help you:
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Being pretty. Being 9 or 10 out of 10 will hugely improve your life and make it overall much easier. Especially if you can marry somebody who works for you. Tons of studies on this.
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Being socially apt and charismatic. You don't have to be able to navigate complex issues, if you can influence some high IQ loser to do it for you. Also ultra high IQ is correlated with being quite weird and socially dysfunctional from my personal experience, there is a colloquial term for it in form of "lonely genius syndrome".
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Being violent top dog. This is especially beneficial if you live in failed state, or you want to become local drug kingpin etc. You don't need to solve for high-complexity issues, if you can just pistol-whip your local nerd and take all of his crypto. If he protests, you can chop his finger off or some such. At minimum you should be able to defend yourself and not be bullied. Nevertheless being born as a sociopathic psycho can prove to be highly beneficial for highly successful violent career. Many such psychos became famous warlords, dictators and conquerors, and they belong to selected few most influential people in history. Some of them like prophet Muhammad were literally illiterate.
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Being tall. Famously being over 7 feet tall and without genetic defect gives you pretty good chance to get into NBA and become millionaire. Being over 6 feet tall seems to be seen as very a meritorious when it comes to ladies and reproduction. Many more such niches unrelated to IQ.
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Being healthy. Who cares if you are top IQ guy who can navigate highest levels of theoretical physics like Stephen Hawking, if you cannot navigate simple stairs. I'd rather be healthy, 100 IQ person than him living in constant pain unable to enjoy simplest joys of life.
Many more such cases. IQ is only one measure of merit - an important one, but it is not be-all-end-all.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens.
You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class. I have seen many such examples as my country transitioned from socialism to capitalism after 1989. Optically your family may have been lower class as your peers in school during socialism, but your father/grandpa was a former math professor or successful entrepreneur who's whole property was expropriated by commies, and who was forced to become janitor or stoker/boilerman (a popular punishment by the party for people with wrong pedigree for some reason). You still had access to better homeschooling style education, you probably read books since you were 4 or 5, and you were bored at school thanks to access to huge library, you probably know how to play an instrument or two, and you know how to speak multiple languages - and all that despite barely having enough to eat. Nevertheless, you are in fact genetically upper middle class, that is your potential.
I think that especially people in US have distorted view of what true class means with huge number of immigrants, who often flee political persecution completely broke, and who are such temporarily impoverished upper class people. It is different from permanently poor chav/white trash lower class of people who are there for centuries, often due to their genetic issues. And I mean it literally - some of the most fucked up populations suffer from centuries of first-cousin inbreeding with huge accumulated genetic load.
It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.
This is yet another word that is lost in translation. Like James Lindsay said, progressives/wokies share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. The words have different meanings for them, often in deliberate ways to confuse normies*. The same goes for the word culture. It is the usual grift: white and colonial culture is privileged and oppressive, and only through careful self-study and self-criticism can you awoke to these systemic power imbalances, and enrich yourself with other ways of knowing of oppressed cultures.
This is common word in these circles that masks agitation and indoctrination. This valence of the world culture is used when it comes to terms like cultural appropriation, LGBT culture, cultural competence etc. It is related to whole field of Cultural Studies pioneered by British Marxists in 50ies and 60ies, which only builds up on Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony.
*Note: some of these are on par with let's say 4Chan level of trolling. As and example of this, take the family friendly tag when it comes to trans and queer adjacent events like Drag Queen story hour etc. This is a wordplay on fact, that historically these people were estranged from their biological families and were adopted by their "community" a new queer group/family, like the ones described by Kath Weston and many others even in 80s and early 90s. So it is family friendly for queer family, not their biological family - great joke, isn't it? Other examples are now notorious ones such as Diversity and Equity or even "belonging" etc.
georgioz
6d ago
This turned the US Senate from the original deliberative body to a highly polarized mess that is just like the US House but less representative. It solved one problem, but failed us in many ways.
The classical trap of modern secularist/rationalist, who thinks that values can be gleamed from laws of nature and of course that their preferred current values are the most carefully deliberated and rational ones. What are the things that should be rationally deliberated on? How to increase GDP per capita? How to bring about communist paradise ASAP? How to maximize "human rights" as they are decided by UN councils led by countries like China?
I mean it for real. How does rational deliberation deliver on hot topics such as immigration, abortion, police violence, foreign wars, fertility crisis, second amendment, affirmative action & DEI or basically any number hot issues also discussed here? These topics are perceived as polarizing, because they are in fact hotly contested based on moral grounds not on some lack of deliberation.
The goal is to have Senators who are serious people who solve problems instead of clapping back on social media. The goal is to have a Senate comprised of people representative of the median of each State, opposed to partisans of the majority party in each state. I think people of both major parties plus people of the minor parties would prefer this to what we have going on now. So... Let's have a Constitutional Convention!
By the way we already have something like that in EU where unelected caste of bureaucrats churn out directives that are slavishly implemented by member states to extent that since Lisbon treaty over 50% of legislation of member countries is delivered by this enlightened body. EU commissars and their enlightened helpers were supposed to be these serious "experts" who use power of science, deliberation and rationality to improve the continent with their migration policy, net zero agenda, AI and social media regulation and other enlightened very serious ideas. It does not look that well so far, their legitimacy is tanking by the day and many people are actually asking why they are put into this position.
georgioz
6d ago
Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.
I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.
Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.
There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.
That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?
I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.
In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.
I think the OP had a different argument in his mind. It would be like saying that Patriot Act is about being patriotic because government website said so, or that Inflation Reduction Act is about reducing inflation by ballooning government deficit, which predictably failed to no surprise for anybody, including those who proposed it.
There are real world actions that actually show that fairness is not necessarily the primary value. For instance stocks charge exorbitant money for earlier access to their data or for co-location with their servers in order for customers to reap benefits of high frequency trading scalping regular trader joes. If fairness was their goal, they would take steps in order to reduce such practices - but then they would lose revenue on level of $60 billion a year and increasing rapidly.
This is often raised as a point (alongside the Herodotus quote that is used to back it up for evidence) but the reality is far more interesting - there doesn't seem to be compelling evidence for the existence of PTSD in the ancient and even medieval periods. PTSD is real, but it is not a simple correlation between experiencing death/danger -> PTSD, which raises some really interesting points about the nature of human trauma and experience that might tie into your argument.
When listening to Daniele Bolelli's podcast on conquest of Mexico by Cortez, he mentioned first hand description of PTSD by conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote about it in his memoirs Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Here is the relevant excerpt from page 115 of second volume:
The reader will remember above that I stated how we could see the Mexicans sacrificing our unfortunate countrymen; how they ripped open their breasts, tore out their palpitating hearts, and offered them to their abominable idols. This sight made a horrible impression on my mind, yet no one must imagine that I was wanting either in courage or determination; on the contrary, I fearlessly exposed myself in every engagement to the greatest dangers, for I felt that I had courage. It was my ambition at that time to pass for a good soldier, and I certainly bore the reputation of being one; and what any of our men ventured, I ventured also, as every one who was present can testify; yet I must confess that I felt terribly agitated in spirit when I each day saw some of my companions being put to death in the dreadful manner above mentioned, and I was seized with terror at the thought that I might have to share a similar fate! Indeed the Mexicans had on two different occasions laid hold of me, and it was only through the great mercy of God that I escaped from their grasp.
I could no longer divest myself of the thoughts of ending my life in this shocking manner, and each time, before we made an attack upon the enemy, a cold shudder ran through my body, and I felt oppressed by excessive melancholy. It was then I fell upon my knees, and commended myself to the protection of God and the blessed Virgin; and from my prayers I rushed straightway into the battle, and all fear instantly vanished. This feeling appeared the more unaccountable to me, since I had encountered so many perils at sea, fought so many sanguinary battles in the open field, been present on so many dangerous marches through forests and mountains, stormed and defended so many towns; for there were very few great battles fought by our troops in New Spain in which I was not present. In these perils of various natures I never felt the fear I did subsequent to that time when the Mexicans captured sixty-two of our men, and we were compelled to see them thus slaughtered one by one, without being able to render them assistance. I leave those cavaliers to judge who are acquainted with war, and know from experience what dangers a man is exposed to in battle, whether it was want of courage which raised this feeling in me. Certain it is that I each day pictured to myself the whole extent of the danger into which I was obliged to plunge myself; nevertheless, I fought with my accustomed bravery, and all sensation of fear fled from me as soon as I espied the enemy.
Lastly, I must acquaint the reader that the Mexicans never killed our men in battle if they could possibly avoid it, but merely wounded them, so far as to render them incapable of defending themselves, in order that they might take as many of them alive as possible, to have the satisfaction of sacrificing them to their warrior-god Huitzilopochtli, after they had amused themselves by making them dance before him, adorned with feathers.
There definitely are more PTSD-like descriptions of especially brutal fights from history, especially from prolonged fightings. I think it is related to continuous stress such as in trenches of WW1 moreso than just one battle or even series of battles. For instance Jan Sobieski describes sense of hyper-vigilance of people he liberated from Turks in Vienna, who were still on the verge of panic even after the Turks were defeated.
georgioz
11d ago
If liquid prediction markets enable insider trading and other undesirable defect actions, then their purpose becomes insider trading and other undesirable defect actions.
Defect from what? Prediction markets are about accuracy and truth, insider trading increases accuracy. It may be "defect" action when it comes to some NDAs or some sense of fairness - but again these are orthogonal to the purpose of prediction market which is accuracy of prediction.
Also the whole defect thing is stupid in my eyes. For instance apparently some analyst companies employ fleet of drones and satellites to monitor parking lots in front of Walmart to predict their sales numbers. Not every individual investor has access to these satellites. These analysts waste money and time to "outcompete" and scalp average trader Joes in this useless information gathering competition. What if I purchase data from ramps regarding number of cars from somebody inside the company or even better, purchase camera footage and employ AI algorithm to calculate how full are the carts thus showing the middle finger to drone/satellite losers. It is the same stupid information game. What is the defection here?
georgioz
12d ago
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
Yeah, the same Ivy league academia that employed literal weather underground terrorists as professors. This is borderline naive, especially as you say that the overall structure of investigation and punishment is as opaque and arbitrary as it gets. Given the current corrupt structure of Academia I think it more likely than not that this prosecution is going to make things even worse.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
I can have such a defense going for it from two angles. First one is selective punishment in corrupt organizations which Harvard arguably is with recent scandals. Everybody is fraudster and everybody knows it. In that sense I was not punished for a fraud itself, but for getting caught or even worse, I was eliminated by internal politicking. It is similar thing to when let's say Xi Jinping or Putin runs another round of anticorruption crusade that for some reason only catches people who fell from grace of existing power structures. This is particularly effective in utterly corrupt organizations, where you have to do some gang-like initiation in order to get there in the first place. Once you are inside, you are never going to betray or you will be exposed and thrown aside.
Another angle is on arbitrariness of merit. Why should it be academic results or IQ tests instead of let's say some form of holmgang, where merit is shown in duel of martial prowess? Does excel pencil pusher in Harvard have more merit than mother of 10 or a small business owner with net worth of $10 million? You say that:
The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
This is not the whole truth, the missing part is that other people value different things. Some people see "equitable racial diversity" as value to be maximized and thus DEI policy is merit based policy in that sense. Bill Ackman maybe values people who are against Hamas or maybe he really is stickler for due process and he sympathizes as he went through something similar. It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.
I am not that sure. Prediction markets were proposed specifically as an information gathering tool. In that sense insider trading should be incentivized, as benefits of increased accuracy are more important than some sense of fairness. He mentions potential negative impact of lower incentives for traders to engage, but in the linked article Scott uses the example of very limited anti-insider trading rules for commodity markets - and yet those work just fine.
Eugenics was popular much earlier than that, it was a popular ethos of secular progressives who were very much into Darwinism and espoused social Darwinism as a scientific way to rule nations. It was espoused by Sir Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics and Darwin's cousin. It is not dissimilar to current progressive or rationalist ethos: we progressives use science and rationality to improve humanity. Plebs and especially religious backward morons may see things like sterilization as morally abhorent, however they do not see the purity of our work which will diminish pain for all the future generations. The utility gains of our girm work has almost no bounds, we need to find our courage and moral firmness to go through this.
It is also unsurprising what happened after it all failed. Progressives as usual declared that eugenic progressives were not true progressives, and that in fact they were far right Nazis - the same as they washed their hands from support of Stalinism and many other crimes they came up with. But it is in fact in their DNA.
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