sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.
I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing? For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child? Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?
sodiummuffin
7hr ago
The stuff about Epstein potentially working for Israeli intelligence (or U.S. intelligence) seems fairly plausible to me, though I haven't followed the case that closely. The idea of a secret "client list" that the police retrieved from his documents but haven't released or been leaked across multiple administration (coincidentally matching the "Epstein list" meme that developed for other reasons) is much less so, especially when people respond to the continued non-release by assuming "it must incriminate high-level politicians on both sides" over "it doesn't exist". Israel is fully capable of storing their own blackmail documents. If he was a blackmail tool they probably wouldn't be "clients" anyway, it would be "turns out that girl you had a one-night-stand with was under the age of consent".
sodiummuffin
1d ago
People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
instead of leave this funding open
Because most of the time the Disaster Relief Fund doesn't need that much money and Congress can just pass a bill giving them more funding if they actually need it, like they did in 2017 and last month. Would you prefer if they were deliberately given excess money and it was up to FEMA officials to decide how to save or spend it? Because that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. If the Disaster Relief Fund got an extra $20 billion every year they could probably find a way to spend it during mild hurricane seasons to increase preparedness or something, but that doesn't mean that would actually be better than spending the money on some other part of government or lower taxes.
Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants
If you're going to allow non-citizen migrants in the first place, such as allowing refugees under humanitarian justifications, the same humanitarian justification can be used to argue for helping them in other ways so they aren't left homeless on the street. More to the point, this is fundamentally a policy question that doesn't relate to the Disaster Relief Fund any more than any other government program. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to have the Shelter and Services program, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea to provide the Disaster Relief Fund with additional funds on an as-needed basis.
sodiummuffin
1d ago
Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.
My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.
sodiummuffin
5hr ago
Today in trying to interpret survey results: 22% answered "No" to "Do you think tattoos can ever be attractive on a man?". But when asked "How do you think tattoos generally look on a man?" only 19% answered "Bad" or "Terrible". This implies at least 3% who thinks tattoos can't ever be attractive but think they generally look "OK" or better, and also a severe lack of people who think the average tattoo looks bad but that some small minority of tattoos can look good. I assume they are not answering the questions literally, but the result is sufficiently far from the questions that it is difficult to guess what they are actually trying to convey.
Skimming ahead, in the next table I check out 51% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Assume someone with tattoos is more likely to commit a crime" but only 45% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Deport immigrants based on their tattoos". So at least 6% think that if someone has a gang tattoo it's unacceptable to think he's 1% more likely to commit a crime, but acceptable to kick him out of the country for it. (Well, unless there's some sort of non-criminal-associated tattoos they want to deport people for? Like if there were a bunch of people who thought of swastika tattoos but just associated them with "political beliefs" rather than "being in a prison gang"?) I guess what's happening here is that ironically the very severity of "deport" makes people imagine worse tattoos, even when the language of "always" should make that a non-factor?
sodiummuffin
1d ago
Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.
sodiummuffin
10d ago
PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.
Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.
sodiummuffin
28d ago
I've been thinking the same thing. AI text seems so fundamentally uninteresting to me. The reasons I'm interested in humans talking is either to find out what people think or to learn actual information/insight about the rest of the world. AI doesn't do the former at all because there's nobody writing it so it doesn't let me know anyone's thoughts or feelings, and it's not reliable enough to be good at the latter. On rare occasion I've gotten use out of it as a search engine pointing me towards information I can verify myself, and I don't doubt various other uses as a tool, but beyond that? Back in the early days of GPT-2 through to GPT-4 I was interested in the samples posted by others, but that was because of what they indicated about the state of AI. Is it that some people enjoy the act of conversation itself even if they know there's nobody on the other end? I wonder which side is the majority, and by how much?
@Fruck compared it to parasociality but it's almost the opposite to me. For example I like reading other people discuss the same media I'm interested in. So do a lot of other people, that's presumably why people read Reddit or 4chan threads discussing media, read reviews for books they've already read, watch youtubers like RedLetterMedia, watch reaction-videos, etc. People want to know what other people thought, they want to empathize with their reactions to key moments, etc. AI-generated text has none of that appeal, if people are having parasocial relationships with it then their parasociality is completely different from anything I've felt. I guess the closest comparison is to parasocial feelings for fictional characters? If AI was capable of good fiction-writing I might be interested in reading it, the same way I can appreciate good-looking AI art, but currently it's not. Especially not when the character it's writing is "helpful AI assistant", hardly a font of interesting characterization or witty dialogue, yet a lot of people seem to find conversations with that character interesting.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Well, the fact that is the one quote always cited to make that argument certainly makes it seem like an outlier. And even it only says that they are not "purely white" since they are supposedly darker in complexion. That doesn't seem like a quote from a society where "French people aren't members of the white race" was a mainstream view, and indeed that wouldn't make sense with how people interpreted laws and rules explicitly referring to "White" people. It seems like him drawing a novel distinction between the different white races based on skin-tone to argue some of them are more white.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.
There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:
Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching
With Texas still reeling from Hurricane Harvey and another storm barreling toward Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of money by Friday, according to a Senate aide, putting pressure on Congress to provide more funding this week.
As of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which pays for the agency’s disaster response and recovery activity, had just $1.01 billion on hand.
sodiummuffin
9d ago
That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.
If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.
I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
I don't see how bisexuality changes that. If you're a woman with two bisexual boyfriends, how does being interested in other women affect whether you're "by definition not invited" to M/M sex? Without adding a girlfriend you're not having sex with women either way. Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
Yes
Why would morality track technological development in this way? You could already make an embryo survive by sticking it in a woman, that might even be cheaper than the hypothetical artificial womb even in the future where such technology exists, but for some reason its existence the moral relevancy of embryos?
No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed
This is based entirely on the definition of "organism", why would such a distinction have any moral relevance? Both are equally unthinking/unfeeling and both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support. (And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)
species homo sapiens
Why is species what matters? An embryo with a dozen cells has moral relevance in a post-artificial-womb world but a sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
As I said:
The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
So CEO decisions are so consequential that they can ruin a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That makes it seem very sensible to pay a couple hundred million if it increases the chances those decisions are good. Sometimes CEOs are paid those hundreds of millions and make bad decisions anyway, but generally people believe that being willing to pay more improves those odds, that's why they do it.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
He meant that, if you have 1 heterosexual and 2 bisexuals of the opposite sex, everyone can still sleep with everyone else. If there's nobody else of the same sex being heterosexual doesn't affect the number of combinations.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
After shootings there's confusion about details like this all the time, including from official sources, it's very weak evidence of anything.
If there was an organized effort involving multiple assassins, let alone any sort of infiltration of the Secret Service, how is Trump alive? It's not that hard to kill people, Crooks came incredibly close, but we're to believe that another assassin who unlike Crooks apparently wasn't immediately shot couldn't manage it? This incident should if anything illustrate that no competent organized force is trying to kill him, because if they did he would be dead. The main thing that protects U.S. presidents and candidates isn't the Secret Service, it's that politicians in democracies are replaceable so neither foreign adversaries nor political opponents have sufficiently strong incentive to risk it.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.
Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Those sorts of concerns are why I emphasized the sheep RCT more despite it being in sheep. Unfortunately this is the state of the evidence regarding puberty blockers.
Though regarding your specific suggestion the IQ test was conducted as part of the puberty-blockers study, so they would already have some symptoms of precocious puberty. The study actually speculates that the early puberty was boosting performance relative to other children the same age and the drop was the result of stopping it (which is itself a concerning idea regarding using puberty blockers to stop puberty entirely):
The results on IQ measurements in children with precocious puberty showed elevated scores, with higher verbal than performance scores, and this was interpreted as a possible effect of sex steroids, especially on the left hemisphere (4, 30). The initial total IQ score in this group was not different from normal—comparable with the data of Xhrouet-Heinrichs et al. (4)—and a decrease of about 7 points was observed during the treatment period. Although significant, doubts exist about the clinical relevance of this decrease. One hypothesis for the decrease in verbal IQ scores is that withdrawal of exposure of the brain to sex steroids brings the child back into a more age-appropriate IQ range. The lower verbal scores in this group, which was in contrast to results in girls with central precocious puberty, could be explained by the adoption status of the children; as in other children from foreign backgrounds, it is known that verbal intelligence is lower than in children born in their own country. In primary school, mathematics, which is part of verbal IQ, was problematic in adopted children, especially in boys. The authors concluded that a deficient development of visual–spatial organization and, to a lesser extent, poorer concentration, may be due to the lower achievements in mathematics rather than to intelligence or fluency.
Who knows if this is meaningful at all though, it's speculative and sounds pretty dubious to me.
By "don't believe everything you read on the internet" they were presumably referring to the false rumors not the true ones. Like the "unskippable gay sex scene" rumor started by Saudi Arabian sites based on it being rejected by the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course in reality the scene is both part of a very optional romance and is (like every cutscene) skippable even if you've chosen that romance route. I'm not sure if the "unskippable" part was from bad machine translation of the Saudi sites or something else.
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