incognitomaorach
No bio...
User ID: 1274
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Worth noting that GPT-4o (the currently available text only version that is) is less intelligent than GPT-4, it's just much faster and more efficient in terms of compute i.e. cheaper. Would be worth testing with GPT-4.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
I think you've misunderstood - I'm fully aware that most elderly people don't live like this. I'm not from the US, the whole thing was really bizarre and surreal.
This was just a specific response to this particular reaction by a specific group of elderly people, in what felt like a dying society. And I thought it raised some interesting points in a really candid way.
I also don't think it's particularly useful to call it a "shitty" documentary- I get that Vice is hardly prestige cinema but it's merely a platform for what I think is a very well shot and visually interesting film about a little known part of America.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
This is what I intended!
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
Yeah somewhere in-between one of the first and second groups of places you mentioned. I've just checked the data and it's actually around the 70th percentile for income for inner London, 90th percentile for London as a whole.
Different parts of London can be a bubble of course but I feel relatively confident talking about the demographics of the arrivals- I suspect many of them are living in zones 2-5 in North West as I see them on the tube and around baker street.
Quite possible, I live in one of the nice but not elite areas of zone 2. Demographically speaking it is probably similar to the other nicer parts of inner London, low in white British but relatively high in general white population via Americans/Europeans, more (2nd gen/upper class) Indians and Chinese than Pakistanis/Bangladeshis etc. My exposure to the recent arrivals then are mostly through service job interactions and the swathes of food delivery couriers, and the tube. I have practically 0 interaction with the NHS, so this could be correct. Nigerians I think are almost certainly more balanced demographically. Given the huge changes in HMO licensing and rental patterns, I don't think that these new mostly male Indian arrivals have wives or girlfriends at home, but rather live 8 to a flat with other single 20-something men. A lot of the time the landlords for these properties are themselves upper class and/or 2nd gen Indians who extract/exploit the maximum they can from these new tenants.
Take the recent scandal from Jas Athwal, the labour MP recently as a slum landlord in East London. Anecdotally, a property I used to rent a long time ago I saw has been converted from a 3 bed to a 5 bed (by turning everyone room except the kitchen and bathroom into bedrooms). The landlady is (unsurprisingly) a 2nd gen East African Gujarati who rotates between London/Dubai/Kenya. This is quite a common pattern that I have seen from parents of friends and colleagues.
Edit: of course the other possibility is that a similar but gender reversed situation is taking place with Indian women, where they live in large HMOs and all work in the NHS, in some kind of parallel world. But I don't think is happening, at least not on the same scale as the men.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
I actually think these statistics are relatively difficult to get access to- the 2021 Census a) missed the large numbers of people who arrived 2021-2024 and b) almost certainly vastly undercounted. Roughly 3 million people have arrived in the country Jan 2021-Dec 2023 according to migration observatory, and most of these arrivals won't feature in the Census data, plus whatever the 2024 numbers are. The census estimated 1.9m Indians living in the UK in 2021. Between 2021-2023, the official preliminary numbers estimated 670,000 Indian nationals arrived on long term visas. Adding in people overstaying short term visas, plus the 2024 numbers, and 1 million total Indian arrivals since the Census took place looks reasonable. My 95% confidence interval for Indians in the UK would be 2.75m-3.5m, as I have no idea what the potential undercount might be. This doesn't include Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis but does include 2nd and 3rd gens ticking the Indian ethnicity box.
Going just off the primary language census data (with the caveats noted above), Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil speakers have seen the largest proportional increases since 2011. So mostly South Indians/Dravidians. The established languages have all either plateaued (Punjabi, Urdu) or fallen (Bengali, Gujarati) which probably reflects the maturation of these groups as their 2nd gen offspring use English as a main language. Of course Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi speakers are probably mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin.
I repeat that, anecdotally, very recent Indian migration in particular seems to heavily skew towards men. This might be a feature of where I live rather than for the whole of the UK. I can't find any stats to back this up, especially as trying to make estimates that don't factor in the 1m post-census arrivals would be redundant.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
That's my mistake. But I still don't see how density is a reasonable cause- there's the classic Japan example, swathes of China, Singapore (any city state).
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Just to answer 3) now- this is one of the other main points on the documentary (I didn't want to get into the inequality angle on this post). In fact it was exactly that part that made me think of the idea of "off-worlding" or escaping. Those who can afford to just nope out.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
I suppose that's the inevitable response if you start from the individualist perspective. What I meant is the tragedy in comparison to leaving the money to your children, giving them a better life, rather than frittering it away. It's easy for me to say this, nowhere near retirement, and god knows I'd probably do something similar myself if I was in that position. But it's clearly a bit weird that you work all your life, and then towards the end you say "I've done enough now, for my progeny, so I'll just spend the money on eeking out an extra year or two and alcohol and other hedonist expenditure." And I know it's asking a lot and perhaps holding people up to too high standards, especially given they've put a good shift in already, but to me that feels like something which is tragic, over and above staring into the face of your own mortality in an existential way.
A massive chunk of it goes on the Villages corporation itself (I realised I forgot to mention that, but it's basically a semi-private township). And a larger chunk goes on Healthcare- but then that's an argument about accurate allocation of resources I suppose and value for money.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Very good point- I'm not up to speed with what exactly the post Brexit settlement was in terms of healthcare transferability (vaguely recall it being an issue). Maybe with enough hot summers like we just had the south coast could become a domestic equivalent.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC? Given an 80% chance of the ROW joining the war, this should work out to about 50-70% chance of a nuclear exchange by D-100 of a war. Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
The Normans and the Vikings left remarkably little genetic impact on the island. There were only around 8000 Norman conquerors, and outside of Cornwall and some parts of the North, there is very little visible genetic distance in the English population. Where phenotypic differences do exist I suspect it is largely due to intermarriage and self selection (with limited franco-german exchange into the upper classes). A caste of people who only marry themselves, wealthy semi-foreigners, or those of the lower orders who successfully rise to the top will tend to look somewhat different. Nutrition etc. also played a large part. The "white urban working class" of most UK cities, has also had huge amounts of Irish influx. Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and even London must have upwards of a 25% Irish component in their traditional working class populations.
I don't think this is a conscious (from the POV of the candidate) 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' thing with the Tories though, e.g. Zac Goldsmith had a bizarre set of views that didn't line up neatly with Hindu voters, but the PR/election gurus presumably realised that was the way to go.
I think it's generally underrated how the British class system is sort of race/ethnicity neutral- the upper crust were (and are?) MUCH more comfortable in the company of a Maharajah or a Chief of the Whatever tribe vs. Steve from Sunderland or Paul from Poplar. And related, I think it's underrated how the British imperial light-touch multicultural divide and rule system that was used in e.g. the Raj has basically been transplanted to modern multicultural Britain.
Regardless, the main point is that it is pretty circumstantial that in modern Britain we have this Islam-Labour, anti-Islam (Hindu, African Christian) Tory alignment. Go back to say 1920 and the British intellectual class was fascinated by Persianate literature, the Mughals were seen as the civilising force etc. etc. It is almost certainly down to the fact that (mostly) Gujarati East African Indians or the initial waves of upper class Nigerians are incomparable to say the Mirpuris who dominate Bradford. One is a market dominant minority, the other largely rural labourers. Of course in 2023 this isn't necessarily true- many Hindu or African Christian migrants are working class and so forth.
It isn't that far away a world where the initial Muslim migrants to the UK were Nehru/Zanzibari types and the non-Muslims were Dravidian peasants. And I imagine in that world the left-right, Islam-anti-Islam alignment may be different.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Muslim population of England and Wales 2001: 1.6m 2011: 2.7m 2021: 3.9m
Christian population of England and Wales 2001: 47.3m 2011: 33.2m 2021: 27.5m
Somewhat tongue in cheek, so 2 caveats:
- 'No religion' has seen a larger rise (although as above, 'no religion' if replaced by the secular, humanist, liberal Western milieu which seems to be commonplace can be seen as a religion in and of itself).
- Large chunks of the Muslim population growth are either new arrivals or 2nd, 3rd gen migrants. It'd have been interesting to see if Islamic adherence over time could have continued if there'd been strong pressure to convert/the legal status of the CoE had been maintained.
I imagine that the replacement of Christianity with a weak 'Western Humanist' religion is not a long term equilibrium. Something else will fill the gap- what that is remains to be seen.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
I didn't make any effort to defend the premise, but the idea is that that the family of humanist or humanist-derivative ideas in the modern Western sense are a direct result of the Biblical inversion of the weak-strong moral paradigm (Jesus died for our sins despite God, he died for all equally, Jew or Gentile etc). It isn't to say that there can be no atheism (the narrow belief in no God) unless it is Christian, but that the liberal humanist tradition which led to new atheism IS in this Christian pedigree.
I'd be surprised if a religion which has a genealogy that traces a path from Paul the Apostle through to the rights of man, and socialism, and human rights, and freedom of speech and the whole milieu we find ourselves sitting in today could possibly be seen as optimal (as a religion). I suppose if one thinks that a religion that popularises certain mostly beneficial (from the outside view) memes, and then self destructs is optimal then fair enough. I was just expressing doubt that a religion with no defence system could be considered optimal from the internal POV.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
And yet, today, if I want to know everything there is to know about the Freemason's, Scientology, or Gardnerian Wicca, I'm a few short internet searches away from it. The mantras of Transcendental Meditation, which normally set a practitioner back ~$1000, can be found on various websites, and the basic technique has been distilled and shared as Benson's Relaxation Response and free apps like 1GiantMind. There is no mystery about what goes on inside a Mormon temple.
By and large, modernity has melted away any barriers for the curious to find out everything about a tradition.
Interesting post. Not the main thrust, but the first groups that sprang to mind when thinking of traditions that have genuinely retained this secrecy are the Alawites and Druze of the Levant. For those who aren't familiar, the Alawites and Druze are kind of off shoot semi-Islamic sects in Syria/Lebanon/Israel, that have some overlap with Islam but also differ significantly. As far as I am aware many of their beliefs remain secret (presumably to retain the pretence that they are an offshoot of Ismailism?) although most Druze say that they aren't Islamic. I think the Alawites do insist that they are however.
Interested if anyone has any other examples, or for that matter, knows much about the Druze and the Alawites (and their secret practices). Are there theories that Alawites are crypto-Druze for example?
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Well if the whispers coming out recently about public sector pensions are to be believed (extensive use of incredibly highly leveraged tools to try and deliver increasingly unrealistic inflation linked expectations) then pensions do seem to be an upcoming issue. But no, it is mostly due to healthcare costs. Not unrealistically good healthcare to everyone though, at this point it is nearing basic adequate healthcare to a subset of the population. The NHS is in a really, really bad shape at this point (Emergency response times are sky-high). But that's mostly just an allocation issue like you said.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Sure, but I'm not sure the full scale of the problem has been faced up to (not as bad in the US as here in Europe, perhaps), nor the unpalatibility of it with people told all their lives "work hard, then retire".
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Yes that's a good point about Kashmir, I'd forgotten about that.
It's also worth pointing out that community relations between Indians and Muslims in some parts of the population are perfectly fine. Especially second-gen, upper/middle class, there are basically no issues beyond "I can't marry you as our parents wouldn't approve."
incognitomaorach
9mo ago
This is a bit of a myth actually. There are two main areas where "positive discrimination" comes into the admissions process. Probably most importantly, the extensive outreach and support provided to target backgrounds and demographics, schemes such as UNIQ and reserved open days/state specific mentoring mean that smart state school kids can often get their hand held throughout the admissions process. This might also include admissions test help and mock interviews, provided by current students or that way inclined profs. In practice this tends to benefit the middle class state school kids more than those right at the bottom of the pack, ignoring base rate intelligence. And you probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of this unless you did at least 2 years of state sixth form, and then they'd still likely check your prior history. On top of the long standing class based programs there are increasingly racially oriented schemes.
The other obvious way the scales have been tipped is by dropping standards. Classics admissions, for example, no longer require prior knowledge of Latin/Greek, although I think there are only a few of these places available where they fast track you up after you've arrived. If you lower the bar, then more people get over the bar, and so you can start to do a bit of selection for people who may be "diamonds in the rough".
In terms of direct discrimination in applications, officially this very much doesn't happen, or at least that was the case 10 years ago. Occasionally there was some extra leeway afforded over grades (getting AAB for example), but having seen behind the curtain a bit the only point where the thumb can actually get on the scale is the interviews/GCSEs, as future grades and entrance exam are scored identically for all.
As interviews are semi-subjective (although scored by multiple tutors), ideologically inclined tutors could happily penalise a posh Eton boy and help out the nervous inner city kid, but this would vary substantially. But the interviews make up at most 25% of the scoring process (tends to be a semi filtering and then 50% admissions test, 50% other stuff depending on subject). So in theory sending your kid to the good state sixth form probably shouldn't have that much of an impact unless you want to try and take advantage of the tutoring/open day opportunities. But if you go to a good enough private school then this shouldn't outweigh the benefits.
Having said all that, there are some particular sixth form colleges which seem to do exceptionally well (Hills Road, Peter Symonds) either through an extremely middle class catchment area, or extremely selective admissions (Harris Academy). The top 10 schools for admissions in 2024 are split 5/5 for state/private, and of those 10 there's a 37% admission for the private sector and 29% for the state. So it doesn't look like things have substantially changed in the last 5 years.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
I very much doubt it is the largest reason for racial disparities in professional sports, given we have the international Olympics where we can plainly see which (usually homogenous) countries are represented in which sports. The Caribbean overrepresentation in sprinting is due to starting sports training earlier?
Not to mention the assortment that takes places in US sports, e.g. QB vs RB demographics. I know differences in puberty onset is technically HBD (well 'HBD lite' that may plausibly be impacted by environmental factors such as diet/BMI), but I buy that other socio-economic factors definitely impact professional sports participation. Which sport played, which roles, which positions and so on. But to pretend that the number one factor isn't adult biomechanical differences I struggle with- a 6'9'' 300lb man is more likely to be a basketball player than a 6'2'' man regardless of whether they hit puberty 3 years later.
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
I doubt it'll make much difference but to try and clarify again this is an independent film that happens to have been aired on Vice (with the additional interview later, presumably as a quid pro quo for exposure) rather than a Vice production. I used to watch a lot of Vice say, 10 years ago, and it doesn't feel remotely similar to anything they usually put out. I assume you've watched it, which is how you knows it's shitty?
incognitomaorach
2yr ago
Yeah this is talked about in the doc, mostly in regards to a) water usage and b) conflict between the two sets of people. Thanks for the extra detail.
Fair enough, my mistake.
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