vorpal_potato
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User ID: 782
vorpal_potato
7mo ago
If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis's arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning.
I checked the book, and that Twitter thread's summary of the final chapter, "Abolitionist Alternatives", is completely accurate. Davis complains about people asking what should happen to honest-to-god violent criminals, and then goes on to waffle for 13 pages without actually answering it. Then the book ends.
The only point in that chapter where she gets concrete is when she mentions the idea of making all or most crimes into pure torts, to maintain deterrence without incarceration. Unfortunately she balks at asking the obvious next question: what if the criminal can't or won't pay the fine? What if, for example, the guy who committed an armed robbery has no worldly possessions except for $12 and some meth? The historical answers have usually been some mixture of slavery, outlawry, and/or exile, and I doubt she'd be too keen on any of them.
vorpal_potato
8mo ago
I think it would be easy, like Chau does, to point out that of the 4 big “eugenicons” only Hanania is ostensibly libertarian and otherwise poke holes in it.
Charles Murray is also libertarian, and has explicitly described himself as such, so that makes two out of four.
vorpal_potato
8mo ago
I dunno, I think he just likes angering people.
He's said publicly (though I can't dig up a source) that a certain amount of trollishness is a deliberate PR strategy. Clickbait article titles get clicks. Viral edgy-tweeting gets people to follow him on twitter, which he can then follow up with calmer tweets pointing people at articles on his substack. Some percentage of those people will subscribe. (A fairly large percentage of them will later unsubscribe or unfollow -- this strategy tends to attract non-thoughtful angry ideologues -- but enough people stick around.)
I'm not sure to what extent he's just going with this strategy because it works, but it does seem to work.
vorpal_potato
8mo ago
[...] providing compensation without incurring tax.
In what country does this work? In the US, at least, bonuses are taxed as ordinary income. (They're included along with salary and tips in box 1 of the W-2 form that the employer files with the IRS.)
vorpal_potato
11mo ago
They do get training; and that training, however far it may fall from perfection, does make a difference. I would bet that the 20th percentile policeman is better at restraining people like Neely than the 80th percentile vigilante, even assuming that both have the same equipment and the same amount of backup.
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
Trollishness is his brand on Twitter. This is a deliberate marketing strategy, and apparently it works way better at driving engagement than I'd wish. On Substack, Mr. Hyde transforms back into Dr. Jekyll and puts out some genuinely good articles.
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
My strategy is to only listen to episodes with an interesting guest, skip any boring parts, and stop listening if it seems like the guest isn't that interesting after all. This has been working out great; for example, I really enjoyed the recent interview with Tim Dodd (of Everyday Astronaut) where the guest goes into a bunch of long and interesting monologues about rocket engineering.
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.
It wasn't meant to keep out normies; the poly stuff was there long before EA had to worry about the general public becoming aware of them. I wish it worked better at keeping the mainstream away, though. There are a lot of "effective altruists" these days who don't seem to care about effectiveness, just evaluate charities based on vibes, and don't even know what "on the margin" means. (REEE!)
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
If the Soviets didn't want to starve, why did their society work so hard to collectivize agriculture? Societies often do things with consequences that the people in those societies don't actually want.
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote,
Interesting phrasing on the part of TIME here: in the blog post they're selectively quoting, "It puts your safety at risk" was referring to "socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics" because doing so makes it "harder to give informed consent". The quote wasn't fabricated, because it didn't need to be; TIME can just come in and helpfully make it sound like it's saying something completely different.
Can anyone possibly look at this and think that the journalist was acting in good faith?
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
The formula is Carnot COP=Thot/Thot-Tcold
Your meaning is clear, but some parentheses would not go amiss: COP=Thot/(Thot-Tcold).
Also, holy shit this is a fun post, at least for those of us who have a proper appreciation for autistic infodumping. Thank you for writing it!
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
(Not trying to rebut you in particular here. This is a rant I've had building up for a while, and you provided a lead-in.)
Him proposing dubious projects like the hyperloop
It's funny: I'm having trouble remembering when he proposed something that didn't strike lots of people as highly dubious. I'm most familiar with SpaceX among his companies, so I'll use examples from there. Some of his absurd ideas:
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A private space company without lots of legacy engineering expertise, many billions of dollars of government money on cost-plus contracts, and so on. This was considered somewhere between unlikely and impossible -- Everybody Knows that space is the exclusive domain of governments and their closely-affiliated contractors. (I was online at the time, and I remember the ridicule!)
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Lots of people were dunking on the idea of propulsively landing Falcon 9 lower stages -- on tiny barges in the ocean, of all things! -- and the jeering intensified when the early landing attempts kept turning into an entertaining procession of explosion videos. Then one day they stopped exploding, and kept on not exploding at least 9 times out of 10, with reliability improving over time.
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A satellite internet constellation in low-earth orbit?! The dumber critics complained that it would have horrible ping times (because they got LEO confused with GEO), and the smarter critics thought that launching thousands of satellites that you have to replace every 5 years would be so ludicrously expensive that it would be a complete non-starter. Today there are more than 3000 mass-produced Starlink satellites in the sky; cost estimates look surprisingly good now, and are set to become much better with Starship launching. They're also trying to turn it into a military-contracting cash cow by offering the US DoD some capabilities that it badly wants, with their very-dramatically-named Starshield program.
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Speaking of Starship, it has been ridiculed quite a bit, though the specific contents of that ridicule have been forced to change over the years. At first the problem was that they were trying to make a high-performance methalox engine of a type that had never successfully been made before -- but between some fancy new alloys and GPU-aided combustion chamber modeling, they managed to make the engine work. Then people were laughing at the idea of making the body out of steel plates welded together by guys whose previous job was water tower construction -- but it turned out to work really well in practice. Now people are scoffing at the idea that the $/kg to orbit could be anywhere near as low as SpaceX is predicting... and we'll see how that goes.
Over the years one starts to notice a pattern here. Musk has proposed a lot of things that ended up changing after being found unworkable or suboptimal, but in general, I'm wary of saying that any of them are obviously not going to work. If nothing else, he employs engineers who are capable of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
Note that PC1 and PC2 in the graphs are principal components, not an individual feature.
When I read this sentence, two thoughts went through my head one after the other:
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You can't expect a professor teaching a "philosophy of race" class to understand principal component analysis or clustering or population/individual genetics. Those are math and science; totally different departments!
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... But if they don't understand the extremely relevant math and science in this case, and proceed to talk nonsense because of that ignorance, then what the hell good are they? And why should anybody take them seriously?
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
I think the growth vs. fixed mindset paradigm is bunkum .
It's a Current Hot Thing in pedagogy. Those are usually a core of wishful thinking with a thin science-flavored veneer on top, for the same reason that star basketball players are usually very tall: it's a big competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas, as long as the participants in that marketplace don't particularly care about what's actually true.
(Regarding the growth mindset stuff in particular: attempted replications keep failing to show much effect except when Carol Dweck is personally involved, which at the very least does not inspire confidence in its ability to accomplish anything real at scale.)
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
His favorite hit-piece on the talk that led to the book is surprisingly funny -- it reads like the Sokal hoax, but with less calm dignity. Perhaps this sort of thing works in his favor; I assume it's easier to weather a cancellation attempt when your foes sound like nutcases to a supermajority of the population. This suggests a strategy for kneecapping criticism of a book that you know will be controversial: send free review copies to the craziest, most frothing-at-the-mouth ideological opponents you can find, and let them inadvertently poison the well. (Bonus points if you can goad them into using the word "knowledges" in public.)
vorpal_potato
1yr ago
How the fuck did no one think to ask 'could it be that women simply do not aspire to leadership roles?' This strikes me as a real face palm moment for feminists.
Here's somebody in 2017 proposing this as one probably-significant factor:
We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
That's a quote from James Damore, who got fired for saying it. The fact that he had proposed alternate hypotheses became a huge culture-war scandal, and almost all the news coverage from "respectable" mainstream journalism just straight-up lied about what he said in order to make him sound like a cartoonish caricature ultra-sexist.
When someone is very publicly made an example of, this tends to discourage others.
The actual history here is that unions didn't do squat about unsafe work environments. The workplace safety revolution was a top-down thing, imposed by management on a grudging and resentful labor force. Why did management do it? Because the shift to no-fault worker's compensation put a price on danger, and companies responded rationally by paying people to make the workplace safer. Often the safety rules were imposed by insurance companies in exchange for lower premiums.
This is a huge success story for well-designed incentives, the sort of thing that ought to be in every history textbook as a demonstration of how meaningful change actually happens, and yet people keep attributing it to unions for some reason.
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