quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I also do not think your assessment of physical status is correct. In particular, I think that in a boxing fight between pre-crucifixion Jesus and Trump, I would bet on Jesus. Take away Trump's money and fame, and he would not be the kind of person who makes other men nervous and easily picks up women.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I think your underlying claim, that there is a status part which is based on physical appearances, is correct. But where to draw the border between physical and non-physical seems contentious. Take starlet actresses, for example. Of course they are hot, but so are a lot of unsuccessful models on OnlyFans. On the other hand, their acting ability is not entirely divorced from their body in the way the ability to write physics papers is.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I get where you are coming from. Relevant ACX:
“No,” he says. “But you know that saying that’s become popular recently? ‘If there’s a Nazi at the table, and ten people sitting and willingly eating alongside him, then you have 11 Nazis.’”
“Okaaaaay,” you say. “But I’m not a Nazi.”
“You don’t think you’re a Nazi,” he corrected. “But if you take the saying literally, then anybody who’s ever sat down at a table with a Nazi is a Nazi. And anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with them is a Nazi, and anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with them is a Nazi too, and so on. It’s a six degrees of separation problem. When you actually calculate it out, then as long as the average person sits and eats with at least two people during their lifetime, there’s a 99.9998% chance everyone is a Nazi. The only way out is to refuse to ever sit and eat with anyone. Which is what I’m doing.”
This is of course absurd. Failure to adequately punish a behavior is only fractionally as bad as the primary offense. Still, I do not think that it is entirely wrong. Like, if you are posting pictures of yourself hanging out with your buddy who is sporting a swastika tattoo, then I am going to draw conclusions not only about his but also your character. Of course, specifics matter. If you also have buddies who are into Pol Pot, daesh and NAMBLA, I will be more likely to consider you terminally apolitical. If you have made a big deal out of your other buddy wearing a USSR shirt, then I you will go into my mental drawer labeled "likely Nazi-adjacent".
I apply the same heuristic for social media companies. If you only block stuff which you are required to block as a matter of law, that is fine with me. If you block everything slightly offensive to anyone, that is also fine (even though it makes your platform much less useful). If you selectively block stuff, then I will infer your own political leanings from it.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
This sounds a lot like "any snow flake is free to slide down the mountain, it is the avalanches that are the problem".
Suppose there is a baker who runs an "Aryan Bakery" with a swastika in the logo, which is something which is very permissible from a freedom of speech point of view.
A lot of potential customers would make the personal choice not to do business with him, because they find Nazis repugnant. Most of these people would probably also unfriend anyone whom they saw using a branded bag from that place, which admittedly is a more concerning indirect effect, but imho still fair.
Overton windows are a feature of basically all societies. Liberal societies generally limit the repercussions for speech acts, e.g. they will mostly not put you in jail for speech unless you are directly inciting violence. But unless you are already on the outermost edges of society, it is likely that speech acts outside the Overton window will have some repercussions for you.
This is not always ideal. I am sure that there are good ideas whose adoption took and continues to take longer because most people who had them knew that they were icky ideas, and a significant fraction of their society would consider them a bad person if they voiced them publicly. Atheism, gay rights and embryo selection would all be such examples, from where I stand.
Still, this is unavoidable. There are a lot of sellers in the marketplace of ideas, so that no person can carefully examine all the ideas every vendor has on offer. So people need some heuristics. And one such heuristic is "if someone promotes what seems to be a terrible idea, you should adjust your estimate of their average idea quality downwards."
quiet_NaN
1d ago
While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.
Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.
Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed. My feeling is that OpenAI is burning through venture capital faster than any company in history. If they are selling inference for more than what it costs them in chip deprecation and electricity, that is only because they have a moat in the form of good models. If they ever decide to stop burning through money to make more powerful models, they will quickly find that without that moat they will only be able to charge the same as any rent-a-chip company.
For the most part, the investors do not care about OpenAI being able to sell anything at a profit in 2025. They are simply purchasing stakes in the ASI race. If OpenAI wins that race and alignment just happens, they will be the nobility under god-emperor Altman. If LLM progress plateaus and the singularity fizzles out, their stock will likely crash like the internet companies in the dot-com bubble.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that one aspect is the question which performance you actually require from the model.
A fundamental difference between free / open source software and open weight models is that for software, the bottleneck is mostly developer hours, while for models, it is computing power on highly specialized machines.
For software, there have been large fields of application where the best available options are open source, and that has been the case for decades -- for example, try even finding a browser whose engine is proprietary, these days. (Of course, there are also large fields where the best options are all proprietary, because no company considered it strategically important to have open source software, nor was it a fun project for nerds to play with, e.g. ERP software or video game engines.)
For LLMs, tens of billions of dollars worth of computing power have to be sacrificed to summon more powerful shoggoths forth from the void. For the most part, the business model of the AI companies which produce the most advanced models seems to be to sell access to it. If Llama or DeepSeek had happened to be more advanced than OpenAI's models, their owners would not have published their weights but charged for access. (The one company I can imagine funding large open-weight models would be Nvidia, as part of a commodize your complement strategy. But as long as no AI company manages to dominate the market, it is likely more lucrative to sell hardware to the various competitors than to try to run it yourself in the hope of enticing people to spend more on hardware than on model access instead.)
That being said, for a lot of applications there is little gain from running a cutting edge model. I may be nerdier than most, but even I would not care too much what fraction of IMO problems an AI girlfriend could solve.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.
Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.
The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:
- A dislike for capitalism and thus industry. A company working to make a profit might be seen as at least evil-adjacent. By contrast, being funded by taxes of people who work for such companies might seem cleaner.
- Academics being somewhat of a lefty echo chamber, which they can feel at home in (and play their stupid status games).
- A genuine desire to make the world better through basic research.
- A belief that education is a bottleneck to human welfare, and a willingness to spread their knowledge to as many people as they can (especially the disadvantaged ones).
By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The thing about people using violence to defend what they perceive to be their natural rights is that absent some consensus about what these other rights are and what the ground facts are, these claims will overlap.
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is certainly a valid conception of natural rights, but also a rather trivial one: might makes right. It generally leads to long-lived feuds between clans and families which have wronged each other.
Hobbes speaks of "Judgement, and Reason", Locke of "to judge, whether they have just cause". This sounds to me like implicit prerequisites to the right to self-defense: if your judgement is obviously impaired, it seems unlikely that society will respect your right to self defense. (I still think they are overly optimistic if they believe that reasonable people will not make overlapping claims wrt their natural rights, but that is besides the point.)
Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically, all historical societies which I am aware of have avoided giving the means for effective self defense to these groups. The right not to get tortured or killed is a right which most civil societies bestow to any humans in their jurisdiction from the moment they are born. Other rights, e.g. the right to vote, or carry effective means for self defense, or consent to sex are granted conditionally. (Related potential scissor statement: "as the right to bear arms is a consequence of the natural right of self defense, illegal immigrants should be allowed to bear arms").
All societies consider trade-offs when it comes to enabling their people to practice self-defense. As @cjet79 has pointed out, guns are excellent tools for self-defense. But the kind of guns which are legal to own in the US are probably not what is always optimal for self-defense.
For example, consider tamper-resistant explosive vests as a weapon for deterring rapists. If a potential victim packing a firearm will deter 80% of the would-be rapists, wearing a well-known rape prevention vest which works by turning the wearer and anyone within five meters into bite-sized chunks whenever its sensors detect that a rape attempt is happening might deter 90% (all the ones who believe that they could startle their victim before she can draw). Yet despite offering marginal gains, wearing such a device in public would be illegal everywhere in the world, because societies will not consider the benefits in isolation but also the trade-offs. If the device blows up one subway car full of people by accident per three marginal rapes it prevents, that means that it has negative utility for broader society.
The difference between Texas, New York, and Germany is simply that the societies balance these trade-offs slightly differently.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
While I am sure that you will find some people for whom being Christian was enough to demonize him, I think the median lefty who demonized Kirk did not do so merely because he was Christian. Being Christian is not enough to become a target of the leftist cancel mob, thankfully.
A fighter on the SJ side of the CW who was also outed as being privately a Christian of some liberal church would likely not face much backslash if someone outed them.
Kirk was a fighter in the CW for the MAGA side. On virtually every CW hot topic, he vehemently argued for his side, using many of the techniques which make the CW so toxic. That was the reason why a large part of the left demonized him. Perhaps his religion was the cause of his political beliefs, or perhaps he was adopting religious as well as political beliefs for their CW expedience.
Imagine, if you will, a non-violent Muslim preacher waging the CW. Perhaps he is calling woman who do not cover their hair sinful, or calling for the legalization of polygamy, or preaching against the alcohol and pork industries, adopting Sharia law into the criminal code. He expresses the belief that America will one day be a Muslim nation, and bashes Christians and Westerners every chance that he gets. Probably MAGA would rather hate such a guy, if he was big enough to notice. Would it be fair to say that he is demonized by MAGA because he is Muslim?
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Certain rights are (imho) inherent and inalienable. For example, no matter if your IQ is 150 or 50, if you are age 1 or 120, you have (imho) a right not to be tortured.
Other rights are more conditional, some to the point where they might be considered privileges. Often these are rights which come with responsibilities. Driving a car on a public road would be a prime example: because cars are vastly more dangerous to the general public than bicycles, you generally need a license to drive them. It is still kind-of a right in that you typically have a right to try to get your license, and most governments can not deny it just because they dislike your skin color or something.
Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right. Even the NRA will not arm toddlers. The absolute minimum to me seems to be that the gun owner will be generally found to be responsible for their own actions, which Hassan would fail. (Even if someone was generally of sound mind but had periodic episodes of diminished culpability, e.g. due to binge drinking, the decision to own a firearm would make me very unsympathetic towards a defendant who was accused of shooting someone under influence.)
Even if Hassan would never shoot anyone, it seems to me that he will get into situations where him being visibly armed would increase the stakes tremendously. A possibly deranged person mumbling to himself on the sidewalk is only a nuisance in many situations. Give him a gun belt, and that assessment changes completely. From my understanding, NJ does not allow any open carry, so this might be a practical issue. (Of course, NJ also requires a license for concealed carry, which he is unlikely to get. I am not sure how well "if you carry a gun bought in the Carolinas in NJ you are breaking the law" conversation would go, though.)
The cops which did the welfare check on him seem mostly chill from your description, but I would assume that they would be a lot less chill if they had a reasonable suspicion that he was packing.
Taking advantage of the gun show loophole requires considerable agency. You have to save up enough cash, find a show, find a way to travel there (presumably he is not driving a car?). Knowing how to ride a bus without conveying to the guy in the next seat that you are (1) mentally unsound and (2) on you way to buy a gun would be helpful as well.
Even sane people will sometimes voice aspirations which they will not follow through, from visiting far-away countries to quitting their jobs. "I am gonna go to NC to buy a gun there, for self-defense, youknow" could be just such a thing. Of course, if he is telling you he already found a gun show and transportation, that would seem a lot more concrete.
One flaw about modern bureaucracies is that sometimes there is nobody in the loop who has the authority (and balls) to pull the brakes and stop doing something counter-productive. If you tell the authorities that he has ideations about gun ownership, the default response would be him getting visited by cops who give him another talk. Given that this will be perceived as "gay cops are oogling me again", this will likely be counter-productive.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
overtly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic content
Out of genuine interest of someone who avoids most social media: how overtly antizionist and antisemitic content is trending on social media? And what kind? Classic Nazi stuff, caricatures of long-nosed Jews sitting on bags of money? Alleged IDF war crimes which may or may not be Hamas fabrications? "From the river to the sea", which denies Israel's right to exist? Narratives parallel to SecureSignals', e.g. that that most Jewish citizens are faithless towards their 'host' country and their true allegiance is to Israel?
FWIW, near-east related content I see on imgur is mostly critical of Israel, but mostly not what I would call "overtly antizionist". Mostly it emphasizes the horrors of Gaza, sometimes perhaps spreading wartime propaganda (e.g. "IDF snipers are deliberately headshotting kids in Gaza", which seems unlikely on priors). I do not recall reading memes which would advocate for Israel to be wiped of the map, or content which mentions Jews directly. But then again, imgur is a filter bubble full of elderly lefties.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So Mormons can (politically) pass as Christians and self-identify as Christians, but theologically were assigned non-Christian at birth? Good thing we do not have separate bathrooms for Christians, then.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
While I might also have made that particular mistake, I would also have looked up the LDS on WP and probably caught it before posting here. If I was an non-religious president elected by a bunch of religious people, I would filter any statements touching religion through a religious advisor.
Then again, Trump is not exactly cosplaying as an observant Christian. Approximately zero of the religious people who voted for him are under the impression that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump has lead a good Christian life. Still, he was the one who appointed the SCOTUS judges which overturned Roe v Wade, which was one of the big goals of the Christian right.
It seems that most of his voters are utilitarian enough to understand that while he may be a godless atheist, he is their godless atheist, CW-wise.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So you are saying that the people who control social media do not care about narratives? The amount of Gaza content consumed by American public directly influences how they see Israel in polls. These polls directly influence how much aid US politicians are willing to give to Israel. It also shapes the consensus reality of the viewers, who might decide to organize later.
Watching hostile narratives trend while saying this is fine, as long as nobody is trying to organize them seems the kind of rookie mistake not even a boomer tinpot dictator would make. After all, you might control some social media platforms, but not all of them. If people suddenly want to organize, they will find a way (unless you turn the internet off, which is not really an option for dealing with the US population).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
A few centuries ago, there was no German state. Instead you had a bunch of larger and smaller states, which were certainly not above rent-seeking whenever they saw a profit to be made. At small state sizes, there is some kind of force unification happening: the taxman and the highwayman merge into the robber baron.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. [...] individual cities/local governments in the U.S.
I think that Trump has mostly done away with the air of plausible deniability, as far as the federal government is concerned. Politicians were always beholden to big donors and willing to bent over backwards to make sure they got their wishes, but Trump is pimping out the US for cheap. Trouble with the DOJ? Buy some of his shitcoins to signal that you are on Team Trump, and your troubles will disappear, after all, his DOJ is meant for going after his enemies, not random criminals.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Yes. Groceries have a low elasticity of demand -- if food prices double, I might replace some brand items with knock-offs, but I still need to buy something to eat.
By contrast, restaurants have a high elasticity of demand. If restaurant prices double, people will just buy more microwave food instead.
In a way, a la carte restaurants a luxurious service: you order and someone needs to prepare your dish on demand, just for you. Sure, the specifics differ, adding toppings to a pizza or a crepe is much less labor-intensive than preparing a steak, but at the end of the day you do not benefit from the effects of scale which most industrial processes (including pre-cooked food) have.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States.
Revisiting Scott's review of Albion Seed, I agree that homogeneous Puritan and Quaker settlements were probably very high trust. But that was only two of the four groups. The Borderers were always low trust, and the Cavaliers were nominally Anglicans, which is what you get when you take Catholicism and substitute the pope with the king of England.
The Quakers were already not the dominant religion in Pennsylvania by 1750, hard to blame Irish Catholic immigrants for that. I assume that it was kinda similar for the Puritans? First you have the Mayflower generation from 1620 on: people who were willing to life a life of hardship for their religious beliefs. It is basically impossible not to get a high-trust society from that (apart from these unfortunate witch trials). But I would imagine that there is some regression to the mean over time, which is of course accelerated by religious heterogeneity, with John Adams seeming a lot less hardcore Puritan than his earlier ancestors.
I am not saying that Irish or Scottish Catholics arriving in 1860 did not lower the trust level, but simply that it would not have been so different if the US had only let in Protestant Germans of various sects. Once your neighbor goes to a different church than you, the common knowledge that you have identical moral beliefs pitilessly enforced by your community will disappear.
The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. [...] old WASP San Francisco,
Reading up on the history of SF, SF basically before the gold rush of 1849 was basically a village. Early SF was basically a hive of scum and villainy, not surprising if you select for "people who want to get rich finding gold" instead of "people who go to the New World to escape the godlessness of the Old World". Sure, things calmed down a bit, but I think SF was never high trust.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.
Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.
Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.
Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.
As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.
Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
This would only matter if he was arrested on school property or on his way to/from school.
Also, while it might technically violate the policy, it seems like it is also utterly unenforceable at scale. Letting everyone walk through a metal detector is feasible if expensive. Searching every car which enters the school parking lot is just not feasible. From a safety point of view, people keeping their guns in their cars seems closer to them keeping their gun at home than them keeping their gun on their person or in their bag or briefcase.
I would also estimate that people who keep a handgun in their glove compartment are feeding the illegal gun market, which seems bad.
From a CW perspective, this also pretty much destroys his woke credentials, I would say. Being a school official who hunts is one thing. But while hunters carry pistols for defense against boars and the like, my priors for anyone who keeps a gun in their glove compartment is that the gun serves for self-defense against fellow humans. OTOH, if his area is rural and has a severe coyote problem, that would make things look different.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think @anti_dan is reflecting a broader ratsphere view which sees schools as child prisons. Personally, I would agree that the public school system is far from optimal.
On the other hand, I also do not have a solution ready to replace the US public school system at scale. If one simply gets rid of the schools and hopes that kids will learn how to read from their smartphones, that will likely backfire spectacularly for most kids.
If we fired all the teachers tomorrow and spend their salaries on licensing LLM-powered learning apps, that would be unlikely to be an improvement over the status quo.
I think it would be a great idea to keep any discussion of AI safety out of LLM training data. The expectations set by SF stories are bad enough, little good will come out of training LLMs on Roko's basilisk.
Instead, researchers publish papers about how they gaslighted o3 into believing its scratchpad notes were private when they really using them to publish their paper, thereby confirming that when alignment is concerned, humans are defect-bots.
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