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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
Robinson: You don't believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist?
Rufo: It's not true. It's such a lazy reduction.
Robinson: Do you want me to quote him? [...]
Rufo: So I think to go back and say, "Oh, they're all racist." It's just so lazy.
Robinson: But it's true. It's not lazy, it's just a fact. [...] Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior.
Rufo: I acknowledge that. That's a fact. That's a historical fact. I don't see how anyone would deny that. [...] But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you're taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question.
I agree this makes it obvious that Rufo is refusing to abandon something indefensible because retreating is how battles are lost. I agree it's good to point this out when it happens. At the same Rufo is being quite honest that their actual disagreement is whether Thomas Jefferson should be viewed as a shitty person, so this really doesn't seem like a case of "thinking on your feet exposes the problem with your beliefs/honesty/etc." -- Rufo seems more than willing to be honest.
Robinson's insistence on only having that argument after establishing linguistically favorable footing makes Robinson seem unreasonable here. What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?
Might as well go around insisting that Republicans admit Hitler was "right leaning" before beginning any debate. "It's just a fact" right?
This has made it obvious that the /r/slatestarcodex community behaves radically different from the community of 2014.
The top comment on /r/slatestarcodex is:
(+77) Why the f--- is he wearing a fedora? Is he intentionally trying to make his arguments seem invalid? Is this guy actually a pro-AI mole to make anti-AI positions seem stupid? Because while I have not yet listened to his arguments, I must say he's already pissed in the well as far as first impressions go.
(+72) Forget the fedora. It's his mannerisms, his convoluted way of speaking, and his bluntness. He's just about the worst spokesperson for AI safety I can imagine.
We also have the "Can Eliezer even pass a calculus test" comment (+39) and "these videos are cringe and embarrassing" (+28).
The founding ethos of the community was centered around charity, scholarship, taking ideas seriously, with a strong disdain for personal attacks.
Now personal attacks are in, Eliezer has apparently fallen from grace, and it's more popular to baselessly speculate that he can't do Calculus than to engage with his actual arguments.
"I don't think Eliezer should be the face of the AI safety movement because he comes off as weird" is a perfectly fine thing to argue, but I remember when making disparaging remarks about someone was done regretfully and respectfully, not with zeal.
Rest in peace quokkas, the world was too harsh a place.
it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder.
Why is our hypothetical anti-gun person trying to get a pro-gun person to admit something that has no practical relevance to the debate? I don’t think the pro-gun person assuming that his interloper is just sound-bite hunting is very crazy.
Saying something like “assume a magical fairy takes all guns out of private ownership in the US, would murders go down?” seems a lot fairer, because you’re making it clear “I’m saying something kind of silly to establish if you’re debating in good faith”.
But if you say “do you admit if there were no guns in the US then there would be fewer murders?”, I don’t think it’s surprising if the pro-gun guy assumes ill-intent.
Rufo literally admitted to the fact. He's just not willing to capitulate on the word, for the exact same reason Democrats don't want to call the estate tax the "death tax" despite it being factually triggered by a death -- because everyone agrees on what the estate tax is and calling it a different name changes nothing about the actual substance of the disagreement. Refusing to use your opponent's loaded terminology has nothing to do with being dishonest.
Why do I (a white person) want to inflate white people's statistics? Either I care about accurately representing reality, in which case splitting the groups seems sensible, or I care about not giving people ammunition to advocate for (e.g.) affirmative action.
For what it's worth Easter happens on a different day every year (somewhere within a ~30 day interval), while "Transgender Day of Visibility" happens on March 31st every year, was created in 2009 by activists, and was endorsed by Biden in 2021. Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).
The point being: the only "choice" Biden made in the last 3 years was to continue to proclaim his support for transpeople on a holiday he had already endorsed in the past, rather than staying conspicuously silent. "Democrat politician refuses to endorse leftwing holiday he's already endorsed three times" would certainly be something to talk about.
If "Biden endorses holiday for the 4th time (but this time it's on Easter!)" merits relitigating The Motte's favorite hobbyhorse, that says more about The Motte's desire to relitigate it's hobbyhorse than it does about any novel development in the real world.
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1mo ago
princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids
God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.
mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?
The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.
I don’t think it’s possible to create an Internet community where everyone engages charitably but people are also free to call each other or their outgroup stupid, evil, or faggots.
To the extent such a community does exist, it’s living on borrowed time as one group leaves due to asymmetry in hostility (if your community is 80% Packers fans and 20% Bears fans, then Bears fans are going to see a lot more hostility than Packer’s fans).
TheMotte itself began its existence due to a one-time infusion of quokkas. who had the miraculous ability to tolerate their outgroup. I support an increase in moderator effort to preserve this, since it is ultimately why TheMotte works at all.
If you find a place with weaker civility norms and better quality discussion I’m happy to be proven wrong. As it is, the only places I’ve seen higher quality discussions (about politics) are places with stricter civility norms, and at this point I think that’s just an unfortunate reality that stems from human nature.
While I appreciate a top-level post talking about VisionOS, you seem to be claiming that keyboard/mouse is the moat around high-income tech jobs that keeps out "the strong and physically capable", which seems crazy to me.
Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.
What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.
Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.
It’s shocking to you and me, but most people spend more time using a touch screen than using a mouse and keyboard. Modern UX prioritizes mobile experiences over mouse/keyboard.
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8mo ago
This is a good example of why bagging the whole film industry together is so lossy -- yes, there are directors who like to insert overt political messaging in their films, but Nolan (or James Cameron, Wes Anderson, etc.) do not.
As a kid I assumed that since it wasn't obvious the director of Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark were directed by the same person, then directors must not matter very much. As I get older I've begun to appreciate that this attitude was naive.
To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day
This dilutes religion into "a system that asks you to be altruistic". Is virtue ethics a religion because it asks you to sacrifice for virtue (e.g. you're not allowed to cheat on your SAT)? If you want to criticize EA for suckering people into being selfless, you've gotta extend that umbrella quite a bit! Unfortunately "EA and wokeism are really similar" looks a lot less profound when you say "and so is Kantism and Christianity and..."
I think you argue that EA/Wokeism demand a level of selflessness that makes them an outlier, but this isn't really true -- Jesus literally asks you to give up all your belongings. You might say the difference is that EA/woke people actually follow that directive to a level that is unhealthy... but then, there are plenty of other people who do the same -- where's your critique of the nuns who spend their entire lives serving the church? Or the Buddhist monks who live only off of whatever meager food is donated to them? Both are practicing their own kind of virtue at a heavy personal cost.
My main problem with Wokeism is that it really struggles to answer whether it actually delivers what it promises to. A Buddhist monk, a nun, and an EA (as far as I know) have a good sense of what they're getting into and what they'll get from it. In contrast, the effectiveness of woke policies on actually improving the wellbeing of the disadvantaged (what its adherents actually want) runs the entire gauntlet from effective to counter productive, while cultivating a culture that has no qualms about deliberately misrepresenting the empirics.
(And yes, "AI safety" arguably runs into similar problems, but (1) people in EA are very aware of this and (2) most EA is not AI safety (note that you specifically critique malaria nets, which are very transparent about "what you get")).
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3mo ago
Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.
There are many, many people who care about white people who aren't "white nationalist".
It dates to Nicholas Shackel in 2005. Scott's article mentions this (not sure if it did when it was published but I think it did).
I feel like I’ve lived a sufficiently goody two shoes life to be allowed to say that no, not everyone has been an edge lord.
That said, I don’t think people should be punished based on opinions they held years ago.
Great, now compare those European countries with the United States.
Or do it with South Africa's 2021 GDP instead of its 2004 GDP (34% higher) or its 2002 GDP (50% lower).
I'm not going to argue for or against your thesis but your argument is not compelling.
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1yr ago
In my experience, "neoliberal" is basically a sneer word among woke people to characterize more moderate social/economic positions (e.g. Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal because she loves global corporations too much, etc.), so the fact that you seem to think it means the opposite basically confirms my belief that there is no consensus on who neoliberals are, other than that they are bad and control everything.
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1yr ago
Thought you all might appreciate that I gave a Stable-Diffusion-generated photograph for Christmas. A while ago my aunt shared a story she'd been writing, and I printed and framed a picture of a character, with details that wouldn't have been possible to find organically online (someone literally commented that it must have been commissioned). She seemed genuinely touched to receive it, so I'm chalking this up as one of my better gift ideas.
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1yr ago
I pointed this out years ago: there are basically two natural philosophies when it comes to avoiding bias: either it's sufficient to (e.g.) mask race as an explicit input, or it's necessary to ensure the predictions treat all races identically. If you're against both forms but keep talking about how a system isn't "fair", you need to take a long look at what, exactly, you mean by "fairness".
Also this goes well beyond machine learning -- policing, insurance, etc. A lot of political issues aren't even at the point where productive discussion is possible, because nobody is willing to state unequivocally what they mean by "fair".
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29d ago
Regardless of whether EA is "themotte's outgroup" (for whatever sensible definition you want to use), it is really plain that animal EAs are Quantumfreakonomics's outgroup.
"Sneering at a member of the outgroup" seems like an apt description.
Most posters here think quality insights are generally self-explanatory, especially to readers who are ideologically sympathetic or at least are rational and charitable, and so there is little need to invest the time to preemptively solve for [citation needed]. A post without any citation is thus more likely to reflect the original poster's belief that the post will be ideologically well received by the community.
When we were on reddit (and I was scraping every comment anyway) I thought about writing a script to rank posts based on value, and top on my list of useful signals was links, especially links to papers (any link that ends in pdf is probably good, links to arxiv or jstor are great, links to wikipedia are better than nothing (sometimes good, but often just thrown in for no reason).
What I hate is posts that claims controversial things, while the evidence they provide is just whatever feelings the author picked up via osmosis.
I've never really cared about the length of a post, so much as whether the author did anything to rise above the lowest possible level of scholarship, because scholarship is what determines value of a post. A one-sentence comment that drops a link to a paper that answers an interesting question contributes a lot more than 1000 words claiming that it really feels like your in-group is right.
This is one reason why I like when somebody posts about some topic they're passionate about. It's a way that the author can post a comment that, from my perspective, is well-researched, even if the author did absolutely no research for that explicit comment -- they've been woodworking or Mormon-ing or chess-playing for 10 years, and even if their post is valueless drivel to another woodworker/mormon/chess player, it might as well be a well-researched thesis for the right audience.
And where I'm going with this is that variety is good specifically for of this reason (and probably others). I don't really expect random Internet people to spend their free time reading peer-reviewed meta analyses for me, but "I live in Spain and here's is a mile-high overview of current politics that I received via osmosis" is grade-A content from my perspective. Even better is "I'm a researcher who studies X, and this is what I believe" because, again, even if no research went into that specific comment, you're getting decades of research behind it.
On the other hand, the marginal comment where somebody says "I like traditional values and cancel culture is bad" provides much less intellectual value here than it would most other places on the Internet.
(Tangentially... is there an API for this site? I've tried (e.g.) "https://www.themotte.org/comment" which seems like it ought to work based on the code but I get "Method Not Allowed")
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1yr ago
For what it's worth, I remember learning about this when taking AP government -- that the ability of interest groups to coordinate people result in policies that benefit the few will diffusing the costs on the many.
Farmers care a lot more about getting farmer subsidies than you or I care about paying for our share of them, because the difference in income for the farmers is orders of magnitude larger than the difference in income to your or me. Of course having lots of nakedly rent-seeking interest groups is awful, and one of the values of economics as a field is in providing reasonable criteria for when a policy deserves to be implemented (solving negative externalities, reducing deadweight loss, etc.).
The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test
Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.
The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.
In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.
This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.
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23d ago
No, calling Biden “his excellency” definitely involves intentional spite.
Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused
The alternative hypothesis is that the homelessness in San Francisco is driven by a very brutal housing market.
For example, this paper finds that "a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5%". The median rent in SF is $3275 and $1434 in Kalispell, MT (i.e. 130% higher in SF).
It always kind of confuses me that people think treating the homeless a little bit meaner or nicer will have a meaningful effect. Being homeless really, really sucks. I don't think it is the lack-of-sucking that enables the homeless to keep being homeless.
Seriously think about it: you've homeless for 4 years, have no education, references, or work experience. 2/3 long-term homeless have mental health issues and 2/3 have drug issues, so tack on one of those.
Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?
(This isn't to say that typical "compassionate" solutions are effective either)
CNBC is reporting that
Notably
The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.
Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.
Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit
I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.
The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.
Although their tweet is more suspect
But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?
That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.
Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.
Go play Wits & Wagers.
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