madeofmeat
No bio...
User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
12d ago
How much of playing with toys is some kind of evolved behavior for practicing the use of a weapon designed to maim and kill animals and people? Humans spent an awful lot of time as hunter-gatherers who have a long learning period and are expected to be very handy with some sort of primitive weapon as adults. Maybe weapons are toys because toys are weapons.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
What does it mean to hold yourself in the right way if righteousness doesn't exist?
It means that you need to work hard to come up with an idea of right that is good and that you can hold yourself to, and to keep checking how it's actually working and get back to the drawing board if it looks like something is off.
I understood your
If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself.
meaning that you feel like you have some internal sense of righteousness that's not completely outsourced to whatever is outside yourself out in the universe.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul.
Shouldn't people try to hold themselves in the way they think is right no matter what their nature is?
madeofmeat
1mo ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications.
This is definitely what it looks like in TheMotte and adjacent places. People lean hard on the coordination power and social stability aspects and steer well clear of trying to explain nature in religious terms and just shrug at the historical narratives in religious doctrine being very odd. Meanwhile religions keep losing smart and sincere people who start out taking this stuff at face value, realize it doesn't come together, and end up feeling betrayed and lied to. There doesn't seem to be much of a way back either, unless you end up fully convinced in the "it doesn't matter if it's true" mindset after a lifetime of figuring out what is true being important to you. This hasn't always been the case, the 19th century introduced the double whammy of the theory of evolution showing up and a consensus forming that the bible's historical narrative is mostly mythical. I keep wondering what this will do to the religions in the long term, since the process has really only been going for a century or two at this point. You keep losing people who are both smart and sincere, and who you're left with either isn't very smart or isn't very sincere.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
The first Steel Battalion was a cult hit. The actual disaster was the sequel from 2012 that tried to do the same thing with Kinect motion controls instead of a custom controller.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
@gemmaem has a less self-satisfied review up, Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe
Douthat wants to go beyond the fine tuning argument, however, arguing not just that there is a God, but that humans are special to God in a way that is not shared by anything else that we are aware of. Consciousness is special, he argues, because the “Copenhagen Theory [sic]” of quantum mechanics is “scientific evidence that mind somehow precedes matter.” Regrettably, Douthat’s argument here is based not on the work of any physicist, but rather on an essay in the Claremont Review of Books by Spencer Klavan, who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Yale.
Approvingly quoted by Douthat, Klavan goes so far as to claim that photons, atoms and the like “cannot exist unseen,” and hence that all of our scientific theories about things that happened before humanity are “about how things would have behaved if there was someone there to watch them.” This is then used to set up an argument for God: “The most fearsome heresy of all … is that indeed there was someone there.”
Let’s think this through. If we suppose that observation by a conscious mind is enough by itself to collapse a quantum wavefunction from probability into actuality, and if God is essentially a conscious Mind, like our minds except perfect and all-knowing and much more powerful, then every wave function must already be collapsed, since God sees all. Yet we know from physical experiments that this is not the case, because this would make the entire field of quantum mechanics unnecessary! The postulates of Klavan, which Douthat encourages us to accept, thus bring us to a startling conclusion. We would appear to have scientific proof that God cannot possibly exist.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
Roger Penrose has been beating this drum since the 1990s and hasn't managed to convince many other people, but he is a Nobel laureate now so I guess he's a pretty high-profile advocate. The way he argues for this stuff feels more like a cope for preserving some sort of transcendental, irreducible aura for human mathematical thinking rather than empirically solid neuroscience though.
madeofmeat
3mo ago
Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
madeofmeat
7mo ago
Ever tried reading old philosophy? Plenty of relatable cantankerous depressives like Schopenhauer overthinking stuff out there, but possibly ending up with some genuinely interesting viewpoints instead of just stuff you could fill in yourself starting from "guy's depressed".
madeofmeat
7mo ago
I feel like there's something tricky here. There used to be the thing where people were going "schools should teach critical thinking", that certainly sounds like a cross-domain understanding of sorts. People actually tried to do this, and it turned out that it's either very hard or impossible with the existing toolkit of teaching domain-specific stuff. Maybe it can't really be taught and some people just pick it up by themselves, maybe it needs one-on-one tutoring that doesn't scale.
It's also tricky to apply a fuzzy "might be relevant to business success" / "probably isn't" judgment to rigid curricula and socially recognized pursuits. People will want to legibilize things into clear-lined singular pursuits like "playing tennis" or "being an accountant".
madeofmeat
7mo ago
The success stories for very early hyperspecialization seem to be very "inside the box" things like playing the violin or being good at golf or chess. You know exactly what you're supposed to do, what is and isn't allowed is tightly circumscribed, and mastery generally just involves knowing as much stuff inside the allowed box and being very well trained at executing it. Things like business or science aren't like this. You are allowed to come up with completely new things for both what you're trying to accomplish and for how you're going to do it. Arguably there's still a box of physical reality and the laws of nature, but those aren't exactly easy to start getting a hang of at age five, unlike "what are the rules of chess" or "how do you hold a violin". If you want to do the sort of cross-cutting paradigm-busting that pushes things ahead, having been hyper-specialized into one of what your parents' generation thought was the set of relevant schemas for succeeding in the world might not be that helpful.
madeofmeat
10mo ago
The mods include the site administrator, so it's kind of a given they can even if it weren't stated explicitly. Sharecropping sites like Reddit where the mods are just slightly more privileged users and the people running the site aren't cooperative are a special case, not how most internet sites works.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
Maybe don't try to force yourself to be "widely cultured", but lean in on specific interests hyperfocus instead. Try to find a thing or three that are not stereotypically low status nerd culture, but also obscure enough that you're not likely to run into anyone else being into this specific thing. Like medieval Chinese painting, Roman poetry or political theology in the Byzantine Empire. Poke around anything older than 50-100 years and then when something looks interesting, just dive all in on the rabbithole of that specific thing. The plan is to come off as more of a foreigner of the same social class, you're not quite versed in the same stuff everyone else is but still giving the roughly correct vibe, rather than an easily pigeonholeable weeb pleb. If you can find some specific thing with good cultural valences you can get yourself to be genuinely interested in, that's going to be a huge force multiplier with actually getting deep enough in the thing for it to do some good.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
(I think Zorba should fix the system so that AAQCs don't get flagged the same as "Reported").
The potential Quality Contributions are the best part of janitor duty.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
It's good for some things that can be solved with ten lines of code and that only depend on commonly understood concepts like files, databases and dates and not, for example, the architectural details of a private codebase. How complex of a game are you thinking and how do you see yourself describing what you want in the game to the AI? Games have lots of trickiness going on with them, they grow up to have idiosyncratic codebases where you need to understand the local architecture, bigger ones are logically very complex and all parts need to keep making sense given the overarching design, they're by definition somewhat unique and you often need to do many rounds of iteration to get the code to correspond to the behavior you want them to have.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
The link to the "I don't see any value in the HBD hypothesis." comment is broken by the ?context parameter (because of deleted comments upstream?). This seems to be a working link.
In general, I wish TheMotte's comment linking would work more like reddit's or Hacker News' instead of trying to force the context-parameters and #context everywhere (what's this even for?). Support a permalink that's a post-url/12345 (add a 'permalink' link under the comment that gets you this) that shows only the 12345 post and it's children and an anchor link post-url#12345 (you could make the timestamp of the post clickable and give you this) that shows the whole thread but centers on the given post. Don't add extra "show context" parameters unless the user asks for it.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
It makes sense that if the mod started out as a regular participant in the conversation, they should be hesitant to switch to modhat posting. When the first thing the mod posts in the conversation is a modhat post, it doesn't make sense that they'd need a second mod to make more modhat posts.
The other problem is that even if the "because genetics" explanation brings compelling evidence (which definitely happens) it isn't actionable except to refute a "because racism" explanation that was already lacking supporting evidence.
It suggests an actionable solution of researching gene therapies that increase intelligence.
Also, setting up some sort of baseline welfare state and somewhat paternalistic social institutions instead of engineering society with the assumption that everybody could train themselves to perform a well-paid knowledge work job and consistently make rational personal decisions if it weren't for moral failings like laziness, and that the people who don't manage that deserve what's coming to them.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
The closest I've come to encountering a coherent proposal from "group average aficionados" is on immigration policy, generally taking the form of blanket/severe prohibitions against immigrants from countries with low average IQ (or whatever). But if IQ is of such vital importance, why not just test for it directly rather than relying on a crude circuitous heuristic? I took an IQ test myself and scored extremely high,[4] so what do you gain by overlooking that in favor of the purported average of ~37 million people?
I don't see why you present this part as a big gotcha. My first instinct is to say "that sounds great, let's do exactly that!" Bit of a problem with further thought though is that IQ tests mostly work because they're currently low stakes and there isn't much incentive to try to get good at gaming them. If you suddenly made them a pivotal load-bearing component on a very important and desirable thing, you'd get an overnight IQ test prep industry popping up, with all the existing tests immediately leaked to serve as practice material. You'd still get some signal, but I'm pretty sure months of practice are going to skew IQ test results. I'm probably still on the side of trying this, do it for a while and see how much of a problem the test prep ends up being.
Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview.
This last part feels like it takes a bit of a swerve with the argument and I'm not sure I see how it fits in any total thesis for the post. It feels like it maybe should've been a whole second post. Looks like you're gesturing towards a wider pattern, I guess seen in The Cult of Smart too, that depressed IQ is gonna depressed IQ, even if it's environmentally caused, with all the expected bad effects for life outcomes, but progressives are basically just equivocating accepting this into full acceptance of immutable hereditary IQ differences and denying both with equal vehemence. It's certainly a possible angle of attack, but it seems that if you want to keep talk of the possible genetic group differences off the table, we'd still be mostly in the status quo where people will just aggressively go for the "genetic group differences are impossible, actually" angle, since arguing back against this is not allowed. They can then just go back to playing the endless game of claiming structural racism and use the noise from this to draw attention away from practical problems like what you pointed out.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Ping @ZorbaTHut, the glossary looks like a valuable project, is it possible to raise the post length limit for this specific post?
Okay, how's this:
The belief that genetics cause significant individual differences in socially significant mental traits of people, such as temperament and intelligence, and these differences may be difficult or impossible to change with environmental interventions. For example, people might have an innate level of intelligence that cannot be meaningfully raised and that isn't high enough for effectively learning complex and high-status jobs for many people. Opposed to a belief held implicitly in much of mid-to-late 20th century sociology and cultural anthropology that differences in such features are culturally determined and can be fully remedied with environmental interventions like extending compulsory education and policing racist microaggressions. The thing Steven Pinker writes about in his book The Blank Slate and Charles Murray in Human Diversity.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Suggested addition: The various [color] tribes, red, blue and grey, and possibly violet.
Ingroup / outgroup / fargroup for that matter, and the weird dynamics that follow, like blue tribe turning a blind eye to Islam because they see it as the irrelevant fargroup and red tribe as the existential risk outgroup.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
The HBD entry struck me as a bit weird as well. It doesn't feel like it's difficult to define, like something like 'Moloch' might be (could also be added to the glossary btw), so it's confusing why you seem to be playing coy with this one thing all of a sudden.
Also, the "von" in von Neumann should be lower case.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
How I escaped from the Superclusters has aged well.
More options
Context Copy link