self_made_human
C'est la vie
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
- REDACTED: I got banned for saying this in fewer words
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: Violates the rule of speaking plainly
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: Boo-outgroup bait post dressed up with lots of words and feigned indignation/concern.
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: A level and a half of irony, maximized flamebait, more exhausting to read than honest racism
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: High effort and well made slop skirting 'teehee ain't I a troll' and 'I am stating my belief openly'
- REDACTED: Incredibly based consensus bashing
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: antagonistic
This is.. impressive. Hats off for a scissor statement with atomically sharp edges. I've had real life get in the way for the past few weeks, and I certainly don't envy the other mods when they saw this glowing a bright shade of green in the report queues.
I suppose your viewpoint is common enough among the elite, especially upper class immigrants, but considered too uncouth to state quite so baldly. Are they/you almost certainly richer and smarter than the average native denizen of a nation? Yes, but I'm filled with perplexity that it can give anyone such a superiority complex.
As far as I'm concerned, my presence in the UK is a privilege. For me.
It's a mutually positive sum exchange, where my talent and hard work is rewarded with a ticket to a country that treats me better, in exchange for which said country gets a law-abiding citizen providing a valuable service. I certainly don't feel any sense of entitlement, or that the average person or the underclass here needs further stomping of boots on faces.
Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
Let's grant the premise. Even then, the way the UK has gone about accepting migrants has been rather farcical. As far as I'm concerned, the only migrants a country should allow in are those who will be a net-positive. Asylum seekers are an altruistic luxury, and no country should feel beholden or forced to take in people who won't contribute.
And the UK has chosen poorly. There are no end of migrants who are of questionable or even negative value. Indolent, criminal, unable to assimilate and then further demanding that the rest of the country bend over backwards to accommodate them. Do native Britons have a large underclass about which the exact same things can be said, barring the assimilation? Yes, but the problem is only worsened by accepting terrible immigrants.
Propping up a welfare state with people who are likely to end up consuming more of that welfare than they pay back in taxes, is, to put it simply, a wretched idea.
Further, I fail to see how the blame can be dumped on the shoulders of the British working class. Declining birth rates seem to be nigh universal in any nation with a modicum of wealth, and even poorer nations like India and Nigeria have seen birth rates plummet even if they're still above replacement. It's very far from fair to decry them for it, and worthy of being replaced wholesale by immigrants, who inevitably fall to the same issues.
The biggest downfall of your ideology is that it's toxic. It's one thing for an average native to see skilled immigrants come in and compete for jobs, or at least hardworking immigrants who do jobs that the natives can't be arsed to. It's another for said immigrants to immediately clamor for more of their compatriots, who clearly don't pull their weight, with the implicit undertone that this is their punishment for being ill-behaved proles. Well, in your case, it's rather explicit. And eventually, the locals cotton on, and we end up with the events at hand.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another.
If that's the case, then they're voting for a questionable voter base. The kind of people doing the counter-protesting strike me as worse than the protesters, and the latter only exist because the former have been doing their darnedest to turn the country into something it wasn't.
I'm lucky to have been let into the UK. Is it a perfect place, or even where I'd love to live in a perfect world? No. But it's a step up from the subcontinent we hail from, and I think it's incredibly poor form to go about clamoring to get rid of the locals or dilute them into insignificance. Terrible taste at the least, and you say you pride yourself on yours. And your proposed cure, which seems to be bringing in even more MENA migrants, is a cure worse than the disease as far as I'm concerned. There's only so much you can change the demographics of a country in short order before it becomes unrecognizable as the same.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
You've been deleting all your top-level posts.
The posts themselves were fine. Deleting them is not. The delete button has legitimate uses, we understand some people are privacy conscious, or wish to withdraw their claims. But if you're deleting a top-level post that has active discussion underneath it, and doing so consistently, you're undermining the community and acting in bad faith.
I hope you have a good explanation for why you've been doing so, because if you keep this up, you're eventually going to be banned.
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
- 32% tariffs on Taiwan, though I'm told that they thankfully exclude semiconductors.
- 46% on Vietnam and 49% on Cambodia, so gg to companies encouraged to diversify outside of China.
- 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.
- Some quite seriously speculating that the entire policy was AI generated. https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292 :
This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.
- Others note the resemblance to the common ReLU function in ML, but the gist of it is a hamfisted approach that is setting tariffs off the equation trade deficits/imports, despite denial by the administration (or at least the Deputy White House Press Secretary), who presented an equation that literally says that but prettied up.
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3d ago
You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.
They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.
What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?
I think Kulak had posted that here on the Motte too, and given that I have a rather high threshold for discomfort, I sat and watched through most of it. I'm going off memory, because it's definitely not worth watching a second time.
The short answer is: It's full of shit. Pun perhaps intended.
You're being treated to a lowlight reel lovingly amassed by 4chan of all the wretchedness and misery a poor nation of 1.4 billion people has to offer. Did the incidents depicted happen? I expect so, it's not trivial at all to deepfake all of that. I expect that budget was blown on free ElevenLabs credit.
It is however, not remotely representative of a single human's existence in the subcontinent. Or what you might observe passing through. It's as honest as compiling reels of SF fent addicts drowning in their own feces and triumphantly depicting it as an accurate representation of Americana as a whole.
For fuck's sake. I am often the first to criticize India, and am bearish on its future. That doesn't mean the country is a literal cesspit. It's a highly diverse, unequal nation where billion dollar privately owned skyscrapers tower over slums. The majority of Indians lead a difficult, but reasonably optimistic life, one that wouldn't strike a Westerner as being devoid of experiences worth living. We're poorer, we live in a corrupt and polluted land, we've got funny accents and an Eternal September to end all the rest when internet access became cheaper than bottled water. We're not savages, not en-mass.
Is it true? Can a feature-film length series of horrible phone videos give us an accurate view of what India is really like?
No.
No when it's 4chan writing the script.
I can assure you that I have spent the majority of my life in the country having seen precisely zero gang rapes or public sexual assault (if someone got their ass pinched in front of me, I've yet to notice). The number of times I've seen someone defecate in public is a number between 1 and 3, and that's a conservative number because I can't rule out never having seen it. Let he in the West who has never seen evidence of human feces on the street cast the first stone.
The majority of Indians, even Hindus, have no truck with the consumption of cow feces and urine. They're fucking weirdos to the rest of us.
Bad people can have high signal-to-noise ratio content even if I don't like it.
Let us be thankful that this particular example certainly doesn't.
Is it really that bad? The horrible deaths and mutilation parts I might be able to stomach, but the accounts of the varieties of rape and abuse had me squirming just in their retelling. The scenes of ecological devastation and anti-sanitation sound almost as bad. Is India truly this decrepit and insane or is it just a white-power-washing of a place I'm meant to develop a revulsion towards so I have the correct opinon of H-1B visas? would watching the film bring me closer to understanding or just turn me into a gibbering racist? Should I go to India and see for myself? People I know who have gone there tell no happy tales so I'm biased toward believing it's as bad as they say
If it's not obvious, it isn't that bad. I might be upper middle-class, but I'm not blind, and have used my fair share of public transport and gone out into the boonies and slums on many an occasion. It's not a post-apocalyptic movie out there, it's just dirty and congested.
Leave aside power-washing, unless you're using a backed up septic tank as your water source, you can't ridicule the country this badly.
Is it important? Will this film actually pin itself to history?
I'm reasonably certain that even the terminally online would forget its existence in a week.
"Only a fool would take anything posted on 4chan as a fact".
Is it possible that even as pure culture-war propaganda, it's message might actually help people, either by protecting themselves when they're in India or forcing the country/global community to force some changes on the culture?
Eh, probably not? What's the West supposed to do, tactical airstrike us with bunker-buster portapotties? India is dysfunctional in a rather coup-complete way, or perhaps AGI-complete.
Foreign aid is unlikely to fix our actual issues. Political pressure is of dubious utility, though like SF miraculously divesting itself of the homeless when Xi paid a visit, some foreign scrutiny can't hurt. Unless the West is willing to invade and annex a country where the average person doesn't have an utterly miserable life, what's to be done? We're not North Korea.
In a slower world, we would slowly keep rising up the ranks till we were comfortably middle-income. It seems unlikely events will play out that way.
Call me self-serving and biased if you will, but the kindest thing the more fortunate denizens of the West can do is let some of us on the raft. Selectively, with skilled immigrants first and foremost, I don't ask for charity. Indians Not In India are much luckier Indians on the whole. Fuck brain-drain, if the country wants to keep us, it better make it worth our time to stay. And a non-negligible proportion of those who could trivially leave, don't.
At the very least, I attempt to be a decent denizen of where I'm at. No street-shitting for me, though I can cop guilty to taking a leak on someone's fence at the dead of night after dragging myself home, subsequent to crawling more pubs than was good for me. An honest Scottish pastime, someone gift me a kilt already.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
I was rather suspicious about Manus when I saw a bunch of Twitter accounts who were this close to being unfollowed or muted on account of being breathless hypemen lauding it as revolutionary. A relatively unknown company? No previous releases? Little to no information about the system?
Then it turned out that Manus is a thin-wrapper over Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Anything good about is almost entirely down to Sonnet. Which is a great model!
Well, at least it isn't a ChatGPT wrapper. This demonstrates slightly better taste, albeit execution that's a joke.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
I've heard plenty of people, including over here, condemn Altman for not having a stake in the future, for being a disinterested devotee of Techno Capital without any real skin in the game. Him being gay and childless was pointed at to shore up their claim.
Now, I still think Altman is an untrustworthy snake, but that particular line of argument seems hollow.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
12d ago
Despite being an interesting and well-written essay, I have absolutely no sympathy for the author or her views.
All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market.
Right. As if the average man is doing so hot.
Dating apps suck for the majority of people. I'd say they'd suck less for the average woman, if they were capable of setting up boundaries.
Moderately interesting news in AI image gen:
It's been a good while since we've had AI chat assistants able to generate images on user request. Unfortunately, for about as long, we've had people being peeved at the disconnect between what they asked for, and what they actually got. Particularly annoying was the tendency for the assistants to often claim to have generated what you desired, or that they edited an image to change it, without actually doing that.
This was an unfortunate consequence of the LLM, being the assistant persona you speak to, and the actual image generator that spits out images from prompts, actually being two entirely separate entities. The LLM doesn't have any more control over the image model than you do when running something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. It's sending a prompt through a function call, getting an image in response, and then trying to modify prompts to meet user needs. Depending on how lazy the devs are, it might not even be 'looking' at the final output at all.
The image models, on the other hand, are a fundamentally different architecture, usually being diffusion-based (Google a better explanation, but the gist of it is that they hallucinate iteratively from a sample of random noise till it resembles the desired image) whereas LLMs use the Transformer architecture. The image models do have some understanding of semantics, but they're far stupider than LLMs when it comes to understanding finer meaning in prompts.
This has now changed.
Almost half a year back, OpenAI teased the ability of their then unreleased GPT-4o to generate images natively. It was the LLM (more of a misnomer now than ever) actually making the image, in the same manner it could output text or audio.
The LLM doesn’t just “talk” to the image generator - it is the image generator, processing everything as tokens, much like it handles text or audio.
Unfortunately, we had nothing but radio silence since then, barring a few leaks of front-end code suggesting OAI would finally switch from DALLE-3 for image generation to using GPT-4o, as well as Altman's assurances that they hadn't canned the project on the grounds of safety.
Unfortunately for him, Google has beaten them to the punch . Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (don't ask) has now been blessed with the ability to directly generate images. I'm not sure if this has rolled out to the consumer Gemini app, but it's readily accessible on their developer preview.
First impressions: It's good.
You can generate an image, and then ask it to edit a feature. It will then edit the original image and present the version modified to your taste, unlike all other competitors, who would basically just re-prompt and hope for better luck on the second roll.
Image generation just got way better, at least in the realm of semantic understanding. Most of the usual give-aways of AI generated imagery, such as butchered text, are largely solved. It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.
You can imagine the scope for chicanery, especially if you're looking to generate images with large amounts of verbiage or numbers involved. I'd expect the usual censoring in consumer applications, especially since the LLM has finer control over things. But it certainly massively expands the mundane utility of image generation, and is something I've been looking forward to ever since I saw the capabilities demoed.
Flash 2.0 Experimental is also a model that's dirt cheap on the API, and while image gen definitely burns more tokens, it's a trivial expense. I'd strongly expect Google to make this free just to steal OAI's thunder.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
6mo ago
An uncle of mine married a lady while they were both finishing up their engineering PhDs.
She was chronically depressed, and had even been started by my (gyno) parents on SSRIs for postpartum depression. When their kid was about 6 months old, she was alone at home and hanged herself. No note, it was a spur of the moment decision while their daughter slept next door.
I have absolutely no reason to think my uncle or his immediate family had anything to do with it. They were a happy couple, even while grappling with her mental health issues. As you've mentioned, the death of a wife within 7 years of marriage automatically warrants investigation*, and in this case, her side of the family were disgruntled and lodged charges, accusing him of instigating her suicide, while also asking for the custody of his daughter.
The legal system here is automatically, and intentionally, biased against men in such affairs. He was imprisoned while standing trial, a protracted affair, and a ruinous one for someone who had just started their own company and acquired a few sizable contracts. It took about a year for the charges to be dismissed and for him to see the light of day, but by then he was a broken man, and half a decade of work he'd put his blood and sweat into was gone with nothing to show for it.
This was all despite literally no evidence beyond the unfounded claims made by his in-laws, while he was able to show evidence of his wife's struggle with depression and get her doctors (including psychiatrists not in the family she was referred to) to testify.
Last time I saw him, he told me to:
A) Never get married B) Get out of this country while I still could
I'm not inclined to follow the first bit of advice, it was an unfortunate accident but he still had his life ruined because he was a man, and men are never above suspicion. The latter? You know where I am.
*A perennial headache when I was an intern at a government hospital. You had women dying shortly after childbirth, or because they got run over by a car, and yet it was automatically a case with medicolegal implications and a dozen times the paperwork for my sorry ass to handle.
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Uh.. Yes? I mean, is this a question worth asking really?
I mean, I wasn't born believing in HBD, I was won over. I used to think that terraforming Mars was a great idea, and now I think it's a rather suboptimal choice when it comes to establishing robust space colonies. I used to think that AI would more inhuman, and very much didn't expect them to speak like us before they thought as well as they do.
I'm sure there are plenty of cases where I've been wrong and thus changed my mind. I don't think I've had any drastic collapses of my cognitive framework that forced me to re-evaluate everything.
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened
This gentleman is autistic. I'm sure we have more than our fair share, but that's a condition that predisposes a tendency to take things at face value without considering how much of it is virtue-signalling or social fiction.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
I think you're engaging in the hobby of making up people to be mad at. There are worse hobbies, I'm sure. I'm quite certain that there isn't anyone here who will claim identification with this, unless someone spins up an alt. If there are, I offer my psychiatric services, first interview free.
At any rate, I find singling out Rats and rat-adjacents like the Motte's users as examples of bad epistemics or miscalibration is somewhere between laughable and preaching to the choir. Name a group more obsessed with evaluating the rigor of their beliefs about the world. If someone listened to Yud or Scott and came away with the belief that they themselves were therefore unimpeachable, then they can read an IKEA manual and assemble a mouse-trap that takes their finger off.
If you think we're bad, have you seen the rest of the internet?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11mo ago
Oh hi, I was just looking at this absolute clusterfuck of a situation after arriving in Scotland and wondering whether it was worth wading in while jet-lagged
You're right. I've written many a word about my desire to emigrate from India, and I would say that almost 95% of the feedback I've gotten was supportive. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the support of pseudonymous strangers on this niche internet forum made a great deal of difference, especially when I was at my lowest.
I would say that people are more inclined to be nice and welcoming to me than the modal immigrant. I'm well spoken, clearly preferring the way most of the Anglosphere or the West works to the point I decry most aspects of my own country and, as @Forgotpassword points out, a medical professional is a rather sympathetic figure. How many people want fewer doctors around? (The answer is existing doctors, but their power only goes so far).
I hardly think the West or its denizens are literally perfect, but they're still a gross improvement over how I've spent most of my life, and a very important difference between me and the Count is that I don't bite the hand that feeds.
I have absolutely no desire to see the West become more like like the Subcontinent. I'd rather not see a flood of unskilled immigrants bring the welfare system to its knees, or cause a breakdown of the religious tolerance and high trust a place is known for. I'm perfectly content with the existing British elite, and were they to gradually admit foreigners into their ranks, I'd much rather they be westernized by the time they hold power rather than nakedly bringing in the mores and behaviors of their home nations.
All I can really say is that people are a great deal more welcoming to a would-be immigrant when they're not actively sneering at them. Of course, Count makes a great deal more money than I do and is effectively unimpeachable thanks to Western norms of freedom of speech, so the reader is welcome to decide who's in the right here, or who is being rewarded for it. I just consider it an immense privilege to be let in here in the first place, and I'd rather not make people regret that decision.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
This is not what we're looking for when it comes to a top level post in the CWR thread.
We ask that such posts be substantive and have a semblance of effort put into them, and if you're going to link to something, we except you to provide your own commentary. Pointing and laughing doesn't count.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
I had a very eventful night in one of the local pubs in my small Scottish town.
Highlights include finding out that my landlord and landladies are swingers, and that they're charging me about 3 times the market rate for the room I'm renting, the sum I pay would be the typical asking price for a whole house in these parts. For the former, I had no real inkling. For the latter, the price I paid seemed rather steep, and I was a bit confused when looking at flats in the nearby city for an upcoming move and noticing that they seemed to be less expensive than what I was paying.
Oh, a middle-aged lady propositioned me and wanted me to move into her house for the price of free. About 2 others also expressed outrage that I was being ripped off in this manner, and offered to take me in for less than half of what I was currently paying.
Hopefully I'll get around to writing a proper post about all of this, with an appropriate level of local color, but I'm still getting over the hangover and sheer surprise.
The main difference between the two is power-scaling. Wuxia only strays to a limited extent from feats that a "peak human" could perform, though there's supernatural bullshit that has roots in Chinese herbalism, alchemy, traditional medicine and the like. Xianxia takes that and dials that to 9000, then keeps on cranking.
Wuxia: The protagonist punches someone and they break through a door or wall.
Xianxia: The protagonist punches someone and they break through a mountain.
Wuxia: The protagonist finds a pill that extends their lifespan by 20 years.
Xianxia: The protagonist finds a pill that lets them live for a length of time that requires scientific notation.
Wuxia: A sword-master who spent their life meditating on the Great Dao might be able to fight a hundred opponents and win.
Xianxia: Someone's 'sword-intent' chops your dick off from a parallel dimension away.
Wuxia: You've reached the peak. True immortality is probably out of your grasp, but now all of China will remember your name.
Xianxia: You've reached the peak of the mortal realm. Yet your tired eyes spot the hints of an even taller range beyond, and you rub them while muttering something about Mt. Tai. None dare challenge you, but you're not content, not yet. After years of preparation, you go all out and barely survive after facing the wrath of Heaven for your impudence. You've managed to breakthrough and become worthy of the next realm. Congratulations, your previous powers mean fuck-all, and you're barely worthy of joining a sect in the upper realm as a janitor. Time to start from the bottom now that you're here.
This cyclic nature is one of the hallmarks of Xianxia, though it's not always a given. The usual goal for any self-respecting protagonist is to first achieve immortality, then get bored and go for omnipotence. If you're not defying the Heavens and overturning the laws that restrict you, why even bother?
Batman might be a a typical Wuxia character. Superman would be a weak character in a Xianxia setting, especially in a novel that's managed to steadily creep up in both power and page count. There are of course novels that don't indulge in the power fantasy to the extent that universes are being blown up with every punch, but that's something that people familiar with the genre wouldn't be surprised by haha.
Doesn't pass the sniff test.
I expect the largest and most significant divergence between human cortical homunculi and that of other mammals (animalculi?) would have occurred when we began speccing into bipedal locomotion. That is much later than the period suggested here. Look at that damn thing and tell me that it has much relevance to proto-lemurs.
Furries are rare enough, in absolute terms, that they're far more likely a culture-bound idiosyncratic misfiring rather than some kind of primitive atavism brought to life. Somewhere between 4 to 11% of furries have formal diagnoses of ASD. About 1% of the wider population are autistic.
Not to mention that in many cultures, furries are nigh-unheard of. I can't imagine most Indians, Africans or Chinese people would know what the hell a furry is, and there's no seething undercurrent of furry-desire that gets liberated when they move to the West. Even within the West, Americans probably have the highest furry-per-capita. Within America, cities that are liberal enclaves.
I agree with Duplex below that autism and its concommitant body dysphoria and facial agnosia are far more likely to be relevant explanations. And I think connecting the dots between human and canine co-evolution is genius. It may or may not be correct, but it's better than this.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5mo ago
You have a fair point, but I do think there's a difference between candidly and affirmative Lu endorsing the controversial position that there are IQ differences between countries/races and his tone of "I'm confronted by large amounts of evidence in favor of that hypothesis, and I would love to have it debunked but, alas, that's not the case":
Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away".
Not to mention:
(Feel free to talk about the rest of the review, or about what DeBoer is doing here, but I will ban anyone who uses the comment section here to explicitly discuss the object-level question of race and IQ.)
I take this as Scott desperately contorting himself so as to not lie, while also doing the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears in case people want to talk about it.
Contrast that to his current comment section, where he happily engages in debate on the same topic.
He was, in fact, cowardly, not that I can judge him too hard. This is far more of a flag planted in the sand.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
12d ago
This is all hopelessly confounded by the fact that, on the author's own admission, they were doing significant amounts of ketamine at the same time.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2mo ago
It's a shame that Papal candidates are renamed when entering office. I'd pay money for a Pope Pizzaballa just for the meme value alone.
I'm not an American (would that I were), but it seems to me that recent American geopolitics reflects a few things:
-
America and Europe are no longer peers. They might have had a passably equitable partnership till the 90s, but only the blind deny the former has raced ahead economically while the latter stagnates and sniffs its own farts.
-
The Soviet Union was a far more compelling adversary to both parties than its descendant, Russia, or the new upstart, China. It was a nuclear superpower with large land borders and a hostile ideology. Russia might retain the nukes, and is a great power if you squint, but it no longer has any meaningful ideological drive or desire to spread it beyond "if you trade with us and speak favorably of us, we'll back you". Even China has strong trade relations with Europe, and is not culturally hegemonising to the same degree.
-
Europe grew complacent, too accustomed to US security guarantees to uphold its own military and budgetary commitments to a mutual defense pact. Why bother? Uncle Sam would pick up the bill, and there's always more welfare to be funded.
-
The US was too polite to notice, and for the period of the 90s to the early 2010s, not threatened to the degree that it asked for more than lip-service from its allies and subsidiaries. As long as they sent a token force to muck about in American Forever Wars, and made the right sounds in global forums, why demand more?
-
The former no longer holds. Lines in the sand are being drawn, and the US has realised that the restrictions of international law do not matter. You can tell nearby nations that they better toe the party line or you'll screw them with sanctions or military action, and the world doesn't end. Panama, Mexico, Greenland, all will come to realise that if America wants what you have, there's little saving you. Europe decided to kick back and relax instead of staying peers. They're finding out, to their shock, that what you give and what you get from a superpower are strongly correlated. Especially an insecure super power, one that is belatedly realizing that a legitimate challenger has arisen, and that demanding tribute from its vassals finally makes sense.
The sleeping bull has woken up, and remembered it has horns. Blunted horns, wreathed in garlands and unwieldy from lack of use. But still horns on a very big bull. Speaking softly is slowly being discarded in favor of wielding a very big stick.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5mo ago
My perplexity about what the universe holds in store for 2025 is off the charts. No wonder that LLMs with knowledge cutoffs in early 2024 straight up think users are pulling their legs when discussing recent events.
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc.
The computer analogy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it's carrying more weight than it can bear. Yes, if you take a soldering iron to your CPU, you'll break it. But the reason we know computers are deterministic isn't because we can point to individual transistors and say "this one controls the mouse cursor." It's because we built them from the ground up with deterministic principles, and we can trace the logical flow from input to output through layers of abstraction.
Compare that to any more tangled, yet mechanistic naturally occurring phenomena, and you can see that just knowing the fundamental or even statistical laws governing a complex process doesn't give us the ability to make surgical changes. We can predict the weather several days out with significant accuracy, yet our ability to change it to our benefit is limited.
The brain is not a tool we built. The brain is a three-pound lump of evolved, self-organizing, wet, squishy, recursively layered technology that we woke up inside of. We are not engineers with a schematic, I'd say we're closer to archaeologists who have discovered an alien supercomputer of terrifying complexity, with no instruction manual and no "off" switch.
The universe, biology, or natural selection, was under no selection pressure to make the brain legible to itself. You can look at our attempts at making evolutionary algorithms, and see how the outputs often appear chaotic, but still work.
Consider even LLMs. The basic units, neurons? Not a big deal. Simple linear algebra. Even the attention mechanism isn't too complicated. Yet run the whole ensemble through enormous amounts of data, and we find ourselves consistently befuddled by how the fuck the whole thing works. And yet we understand it perfectly fine on a micro level! Or consider the inevitable buildup of spaghetti code, turning something as deterministic (let's not get into race-conditions and all that, but in general) as code into something headache inducing at best.
And LLMs were built by humans. To be legible to humans. Neuroscience has a far more uphill struggle.
And yet we've made considerable progress. We're well past the sheer crudeness of lobotomies or hits on the head.
fMRI studies can predict with reasonable accuracy which of several choices a person will make seconds before they're consciously aware of the decision. We've got functional BCIs. We can interpret dreams, we can take a literal snapshot of your mind's eye. We can use deep brain stimulation or optogentics to flip individual neurons or neural circuits with reproducible and consistent effects.
As for "determinism of the gaps". What?
Two hundred years ago, the "gap" was the entire brain. The mind was a total mystery. Now, we can point to specific neural circuits involved in decision-making, emotion, and perception. We've moved from "an imbalance of humors causes melancholy" to "stimulating the subgenual cingulate can alleviate depressive symptoms." We've gone from believing seizures were demonic possession to understanding them as uncontrolled electrical storms in the cortex. The gaps where a non-material explanation can hide are shrinking daily. The vector of scientific progress seems to be pointing firmly in one direction. At this point, there's little but wishful thinking behind vain hopes that just maybe, mechanistic interpretation might fail on the next rung of the ladder.
I am frankly flabbergasted that anyone could come away with the opposite takeaway. It's akin to claiming that progress from Newton's laws to the Standard Model has somehow left us in more ontological and epistemic confusion. It has the same chutzpah as a homeopath telling me that modern medicine is a failure because we were wrong about the aetiogenesis of gastric ulcers.
This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.
Citation needed? I mean, what's so non-deterministic about the advances I mentioned? What exactly do you think are the "non-deterministic" techniques that work?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1mo ago
Please don't kill manned spaceflight. Please don't kill manned spaceflight.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
Have you seen the other piles of skulls? This argument always strikes me as curiously ahistorical. The notion that large scale human suffering began with the Enlightenment or its technocratic offspring ignores vast swathes of history. Pre Enlightenment societies were hardly bastions of peace and stability. Quite a few historical and pre Enlightenment massacres were constrained only by the fact that global and local populations were lower, and thus there were fewer people to kill. Caesar boasted of killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million, figures that were likely exaggerated but still indicative of the scale of brutality considered acceptable, even laudable. Genghis Khan's conquests resulted in demographic shifts so large they might have cooled the planet. The Thirty Years' War, fueled by religious certainty rather than technocratic rationalism, devastated Central Europe. The list goes on. Attributing mass death primarily to flawed Enlightenment ideals seems to give earlier modes of thought a pass they don't deserve. The tools got sharper and the potential victims more numerous in the 20th century, but the capacity for atrocity was always there.
At its most common denominator, the Enlightenment presumed that good thinking would lead to good results... [This was discredited by 20th century events]
The answer that seems entirely obvious to me is that if "good thoughts" lead to "bad outcomes," then it is probably worth interrogating what led you to think they were good in the first place. That is the only reasonable approach, as we lack a magical machine that can reason from first principles and guarantee that your ideas are sound in reality. Blaming the process of reason or the aspiration towards progress for the failures of specific, flawed ideologies seems like a fundamental error.
Furthermore, focusing solely on the failures conveniently ignores the overwhelming net positive impact. Yes, the application of science and reason gave us more efficient ways to kill, culminating in the horror of nuclear weapons. But you cannot have the promise of clean nuclear power without first understanding the atom, which I'm told makes you wonder what happens when a whole bunch of them blow up. More significantly, the same drive for understanding and systematic improvement gave us unprecedented advances in medicine, sanitation, agriculture, and communication. The Green Revolution, a direct result of applied scientific research, averted predicted Malthusian catastrophes and saved vastly more lives, likely numbering in the billions, than were lost in all the 20th century's ideologically driven genocides and famines combined. Global poverty has plummeted, lifespans have doubled, and literacy is nearing universality, largely thanks to the diffusion of technologies and modes of thinking traceable back to the Enlightenment's core tenets. To lament the downsides without acknowledging the staggering upsides is to present a skewed and ungrateful picture of the last few centuries. Myopic is the least I could call it.
It is also worth noting that virtually every major ideology that gained traction after the 1800s, whether liberal, socialist, communist, nationalist, or even reactionary, has been profoundly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. They might reject specific conclusions, but they often argue using frameworks of reason, historical progress (or regress), systematic analysis, and the potential for deliberate societal change that are themselves Enlightenment inheritances. This pervasiveness suggests the real differentiator isn't whether one uses reason, but how well and toward what ends it is applied.
Regarding the idea that the American founders might have changed course had they foreseen the 20th century, it's relevant that they did witness the early, and then increasingly radical, stages of the French Revolution firsthand. While the US Constitution was largely framed before the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the escalating violence and chaos in France deeply affected American political discourse in the 1790s. It served as a potent, real time cautionary tale. For Federalists like Hamilton and Adams, it confirmed their fears about unchecked democracy and mob rule, reinforcing their commitment to the checks and balances, and stronger central authority, already built into the US system. While Democratic Republicans like Jefferson initially sympathized more with the French cause, even they grew wary of the excesses. The French example didn't lead to fundamental structural changes in the established American government, but it certainly fueled partisan divisions and underscored, for many Founders, the importance of the safeguards they had already put in place against the very kind of revolutionary fervor that consumed France. They didn't need to wait for the 20th century to see how "good ideas" about liberty could curdle into tyranny and bloodshed; they had a disturbing preview next door. If they magically acquired a time machine, there's plenty about modernity that they would seek to transplant post-haste.
If a supposedly rational, technocratic plan leads to famine, the failure isn't proof that rationality itself is bankrupt. It's far more likely proof that the plan was based on faulty premises, ignored crucial variables (like human incentives or ecological realities), relied on bad data, or was perhaps merely a convenient rationalization for achieving power or pursuing inhumane goals. The catastrophic failures of Soviet central planning, for instance, stemmed not from an excess of good thinking, but from dogma overriding empirical feedback, suppression of dissent, and a profound disregard for individual human lives and motivations.
The lesson from the 20th century, and indeed from the French Revolution itself, isn't that we should abandon reason, progress, or trying to improve the human condition through thoughtful intervention. The lesson is that reason must be coupled with humility, empiricism, a willingness to course correct based on real world results, and a strong ethical framework that respects individual rights and well being. Pointing to the failures of totalitarian regimes that merely claimed the mantle of rationality and progress doesn't invalidate the core Enlightenment project. It merely highlights the dangers of dogmatic, unchecked power and the absolute necessity of subjecting our "good ideas" to constant scrutiny and real world testing. Throwing out the entire toolkit of reason because some people used hammers to smash skulls seems profoundly counterproductive. You can use hammers to put up houses, and we do.
I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.
Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.
I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.
More options
Context Copy link