username
1yr ago
Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans.
This is my view as well. I'm often accused of being conservative but there's something beautifully utopian about people just being who they want to be. It's a little messy today, but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost, who wouldn't try switching genders for a couple hours?
username
1yr ago
I worked in a central government agency and sometimes dabbled in AI policy. When race is blinded, sometimes the computer will still disproportionately target certain races because of correlated factors.
As long as the algorithm is detecting actual errors, it's okay for it to disproportionately impact certain races (although it will still make the news and people will complain). What's more controversial is when the computer is copying existing human behaviour. If human behaviour can be truly racist (e.g. in an irrational way), the computer can inherit that irrationality, even if blinded.
username
1yr ago
I think the SEO explanation is the most relevant, in addition to google's incentives to fix it being rather weak. They have monopoly status and "you are the product, not the customer". That said, I'm not sure there's any easy ways for google to fix this issue. Even if it were easy from a technical point-of-view (which isn't obvious, I'd expect more competition if this were the case), anyone who wants to change the way they prioritize search results has to deal with a lot of stakeholders and special interests.
A little off topic but I find searching reddit through google (add "site:reddit.com" to your google query) will give me the best results. Reddit has a terrible search feature but its content is still relatively low-spam.
username
1yr ago
I've come across HBD a few times in these CW threads since themotte moved off reddit, and dozens of times before that. As far as a I know this is basically the only place you can openly discuss it.
This HN discussion is similar to what you'd read here, but shifted to the left. Here HBD is basically supposed "true" and those who disagree are in the minority. We don't argue particularly better or worse than the HN comments. Often, it's just some top-level complaint about the blank-slate view and others who agree.
username
1yr ago
It's also getting harder for women to find mentors because it's riskier for men to enter that kind of relationship. I don't have any ideas, I suppose mentors can do their best to vet their mentee candidates for the risky behaviour, and mentees can find ways to signal low-risk.
username
1yr ago
Many comments are pointing out the variance between people, but considering frequent bathing is a pretty recent trend, I would think we'd get used to lower frequency bathing if we really tried (or were forced to).
Is anyone aware of evidence for some kind of feedback loop between bathing and oil/sweat/odor production? I know of many anecdotes of people who went from washing their hair everyday to much lower frequencies, they all say they got used to it and their hair doesn't get gross anymore (or as quickly). Personally I used to shower everyday and used to feel pretty disgusting starting around the 16th hour, but now I wash every 2 days and I feel fine until around the 40th hour. It could be psychological rather than physiological, but my hair really does look less oily for longer since I cut my bathing frequency. My guess is that it's a combination of psychology and physiological feedback loops (e.g. decreased sebum production).
username
1yr ago
My boring model of all this is just that there is such thing as "elites" and they have their own "elite culture". It sounds vague, but so are the effects we're trying to explain. There is no central authority at the top coordinating anything. The WEF is the non-profit think-tank version of any large progressive company. Internal signaling games are responsible for most of the sillier policy proposals (e.g. extreme covid measures, boycotting Dr. Seuss). The WEF may be more explicit in its intentions of changing policies, but it's not at all obvious that their influence is all that central in influencing elite culture. I'd be surprised if most elites had even heard of the WEF.
username
1yr ago
Are you suggesting HBD skepticism would be less prevalent if people understood basic sciences more? I don't think that's the case. HBD skepticism has more to do with social factors than people honestly considering the evidence and coming to the wrong conclusions. The same thing is true for outdoor mask mandates, the reasoning driven by politics and fear (and to be fair, your water-coloring analogy doesn't apply to droplets, only airborne transmission, presumably an outdoor mask would prevent sneezing on others)
This plays into Caplan's argument, in which he admits his economic students go on to support minimum wage hikes, rent control, etc. Presumably these students have intuitive understanding of supply and demand.
All that said, I do agree with your premise. My case against Caplan is as follows: Education is where we go to train the models in our heads. We may forget the inputs, but the models remain. I may not remember all the dates and numbers from the world wars, but learning about those events has improved my models of reality and social structures. That sounds like intuition to me.
username
1yr ago
Can anyone steelman the case for any of the non-standard pronouns? Why hasn't the LGBT community settled on he/she/they, or even just exclusively using they?
Also curious what's the point of including the subject and object forms (e.g. he and him), seems redundant to me, unless someone is combining he/her or she/him? I've heard non-binary folks are doing similar that in languages where both the verbs and pronouns inflect based on gender and there isn't any neuter form (e.g. hebrew)
username
1yr ago
I'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.
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Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.
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The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.
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There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)
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Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"
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Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.
username
1yr ago
There are different kinds of meat alternatives,
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Actual lab-grown meat from animal cells, this could theoretically taste close to meat in texture but I suspect the taste will be off for a while. Worse than the taste, we're very far off from producing this at a wide scale.
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Growing animal proteins using yeast. This does not taste like meat but can be done cheaply. I believe milk proteins is actually cheaper than dairy farming. I'm excited to see this gain popularity.
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Impossible/beyond type of meat substitutes. These usually don't have the same nutrition profile, but they probably taste the closest to meat.
I'm hoping we can combine the yeast technology with the artistic skills from beyond/impossible for something that tastes and nourishes identically. On the other hand, there's something that feels wholesome about eating natural food, even if a ton of suffering goes into it. I do have minor concerns about the level of processing that goes into the beyond/impossible tier foods. Hopefully the lab-grown stuff will one day be economically viable and feel "paleo" enough.
username
1yr ago
For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself.
Why do you believe covid's potential harm is more known or bounded than the vaccine? We have a little bit more long term data (about a year) for the virus but the vaccine's data is also of higher quality
username
1yr ago
Spending plans have been too long for anyone to read for a long time, it's kind of how they're designed.
I'm unfamiliar with the USA government, but in Canada, "spending bills" are all massive and they take weeks/months to put together. The vote is more of a rarely exercised opportunity to veto rather than actually propose changes. Although no one should technically see the full bill before it gets presented to congress, the management board of the government coordinate it with the central politicians for a long time before that.
Thinking probabilistically, I don't think trans acceptance, even encouragement, has a very big impact on your odds of having grandchildren.
Do you feel the same fears about your children being encouraged to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.
username
1yr ago
It seems to me this problem has only gotten worse since we started cracking down on paedophilia and grooming. Admittedly, paedophilia is much more reported than it was before, but it's not at all clear to me that cracking down on grooming behaviour is going to make it easier for youth to get mentorship, if anything I'd expect it less mentorship. Your strategy may optimize for least harm, but OP was looking for more mentorship.
username
1yr ago
That doesn't sound like a crazy position to me. I think the lockdowns are a proximate cause, e.g. the inflationary policies of covid-aid funds weren't necessary without lockdowns. The tech-sector wouldn't have been able to become over-valued so quickly if it weren't for everyone staying home.
On the other hand, we don't have a lot of good data for what would have happened if we hadn't done lockdowns. Places who did fewer lockdowns still have to deal with the overvaluation of tech, global supply chain issues and cost of housing increases. So we can't really blame these issues on the marginal lockdown. (Although I'd be curious to see how if places that didn't lock down have better flu/RSV situations)
I'm not even sure who we can blame for lockdowns. Places like Sweden who avoided mandated lockdowns still saw large segments of their economies "shut down". Are ordinary people to blame? There's also very little variance in the responses from different countries/institutions, which suggests 'elite culture' bears responsibility.
And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.
username
1yr ago
I wish we had more tony starks and bruce wayne characters out there. Billionaires are portrayed terribly in recent movies.
Knives out has some fun twists. The plot is a bit unbelievable, but that's how murder mysteries are supposed to go, it's a chain of extremely unlikely events. It's a shame the characters felt so cheap, it made the the murderer rather predictable, other choices wouldn't have been as morally/politically satisfying.
username
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality none of the aforementioned actions are wrong. It's not wrong to spy on someone in the locker room, and so it's not wrong to use 'x-ray glasses' to see through their clothes, or use an AI to edit a picture to do functionally the same thing.
This matches my intuition. For someone to just generate deepfakes they just keep to themselves? I've got no problem with that. For someone to distribute those deepfakes around, possibly (but not necessarily) passing them off as real has the potential for harm.
In the case of spying, I think punishment is valid even if it isn't technically wrong because spying will usually lead to information being used in harmful ways, like revealing facts or blackmail. Even if spying is done without those intentions, sometimes secrets are just too good to keep, it's playing with fire. Deepfakes don't have that same problem.
username
1yr ago
It seems to me politics are especially bad at countering inflation. People may be pissed off the "government isn't doing enough" to fix it. However, the levers the government can easily pull to fight inflation (raising taxes/interest rates, cut transfers/subsidies, lower consumption/wages) won't gain them any popularity points. Even worse, there are plenty of socially-desirable policies that'll make inflation worse: tax cuts, raises, loan forgiveness, more transfers. I'm grateful our system is even capable of doing unpopular things like raising interest rates. If monetary policy had heavier democratic influence, I'd worry high inflation would just be the long-term equilibrium.
Ontario's leader is under heavy fire for playing hardball and preventing educational workers from getting large raises. I don't know the details well, but couldn't one argue this is what fighting inflation looks like?
username
1yr ago
Elite culture and universal culture have a lot of overlap, perhaps they're even the same thing, but it's certainly more concentrated and adopted within elite circles. In a typical company, employees express this culture proportionally to their rank. The elite culture gives you status, and you have to signal you're part of the in-group.
My model of Scott's universal culture is a natural common-denominator. Elite culture is more forced and over-the-top, due to the status it gives its members. Perhaps elite culture is downstream from universal culture.
Baristas and mic-girls might express the same attitudes on some social issues like gender and the environment, but different views on economic issues.
username
1yr ago
If that actually happened, would it really be a plan of which the general populace disapproves? Seems to me that voting against someone you don't want elected is well within the spirit of democracy. I welcome republicans to do the same during democrat primaries.
Counterexample: It'd be a lot shadier if democrats purposefully won trump the nomination because they expected him to lose the general election. It's both risky and it feels more of a hack to vote for someone you don't actually want.
username
1yr ago
If factory farming is unnatural, is 19th century farming also unnatural? Where do you draw the line? Seems to me you could argue all food, being a product of agriculture, is unnatural, which kind of makes the label pointless.
At the very least, lab-grown meat is a big deviation from the status-quo. I'm not sure it would even count as raw/unprocessed food.
username
1yr ago
Lots of interesting comments are pointing out that CP, including potentially lollicon, can sway the "marginal" pedophile. Do we have any evidence true marginal pedophiles exist? I'm not talking about those who have urges but don't act because of incentives, but sleeper-agent types who would develop urges if they sufficiently engaged with the idea or pornographic content.
My impression had always been that true paedophilia was some kind of mental illness that was much more binary and that "marginal pedophiles" were rare. People who are attracted to teenagers (Ephebophiles?) would fall into a different camp, which would be a lot less binary and have many marginal members.
I'm not basing this model on any real knowledge, but if seems to me the anecdotes of people being molested are usually about younger children, not teenagers. If marginal pedophiles were a major concern, I'd expect higher frequencies of molestation in older children/teenagers.
username
1yr ago
The concern isn't that tiktok is spreading pro-CCP or even anti-western propoganda. The concern is that it is addictive and stealing our youth's attention. Yes, other social media do this too, but tiktok is particularly good at stealing attention and time.
The chinese aspect comes into play when you realize that tiktok in china is a different app. If China thinks this attention-stealing is bad, they're going to fix their app rather than the international version. Also, tiktok allows them to China on international users (this isn't the article's point, but it is the main concern you hear about in mainstream media)
So I finally installed tiktok. While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos, women winning arguments against feminists, jordan peterson interview clips, etc. I generally scroll past these videos quickly, but they got more and more frequent, I probably made it worse for liking a few bill-burr clips early on, but it certainly started very early on.
My wife is a frequent tiktok user, she likes videos you'd expect of women, crafting stuff, recipes, etc. She gets also gets ton of overtly political feminist videos. Neither of us have strong feelings towards feminism. If anything, she's to my right on the gender issues.
I hear a lot of anti-tiktok rhetoric along the lines that china is invading our privacy. I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns. I know this isn't anything new, other social media apps have similar effects, but I think the effect is much stronger with tiktok. With facebook, you inherit the political environment of your friends. With reddit and twitter you can choose your own echo-chambers. With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.
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