He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?
That's true, but he typically stays pretty on topic otherwise! It's rare to see Scott so passionately angry on something. PEPFAR is the only other time, and that's because of the EA value.
Anthropic is a woke company, their AI models value straights, whites, white men and Americans much lower compared to LGBT, blacks/browns, women and third worlders. There's no way they haven't noticed this, being the AI safety/values people. They could easily have said 'oh we erred here, we've fixed it and here you can see it's fixed when you test' and they haven't, that's not the kind of AI safety they're interested in. It's not impossible, Grok has achieved roughly even weighting across races.
If that was actually the issue, why is the focus and trigger of this dispute over not wanting to do domestic surveillance and killbots instead? That doesn't make sense to say that Claude is super woke and therefore bad but also we need it so much that we're gonna declare them as a supply chain risk if they don't work with us for everything. The whole logic hits the contradiction wall. It's too bad and dangerous to use, but also too good and important that we apparently must use it at the same time.
None of this makes any sense, if the government's problems is "woke" and they were actually fine with another AI but same restrictions on surveillance and killbots then why not just end the contract normally instead of doing something extremely unpopular?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Personally I've always been an advocate for cross party control of the three branches. Party members themselves are too cucked to oppose their leader at all (Biden's age and Trump's tariffs, or whatever else) even on topics where people in the coalition differ. It forces less radical and more widely supported behavior if you actually have something of an opposition to get past. Leaders are far more cautious at spending political capital on things the populace doesn't like when there's more pressure coming down.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
In my experience the "tech right" and the rationalist Austin/SF crowd all thought they were smarter than MAGA and that MAGA was something they could outsmart, which means they get very angry when they don't actually get their way.
No, the tech guys definitely are way smarter overall. It's just that smarts doesn't matter as much when one side has the guns and government.
But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws. They don't get to bid for government contracts and then try to curtail what the government can do with their systems.
Anthropic already had agreed on contracts! It's the government that wants to tear it up.
I can get Claude to write a letter to Dario begging him to change his mind, what exactly is your mental model of what these AIs are doing here
It was just for humor. If you describe what is happening then the default response built in is "wow that's pretty bad". Of course you could manipulate it all you want, just a funny observation.
This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.
Ah ok, it's woke because they were asking about how exactly it was deployed in the Maduro raid. That's what wokeness is, got it.
I’ve definitely met and confirmed multiple trans women in person, and they do look different
If you knew they were trans in person you were looking for features with confirmation bias. Lots of people without that before knowledge don't and can't always tell a person is trans. Easy and quick evidence, just go look up internet posts from people finding out someone they're dating is trans like this one.
Or hell just go look at some of the older Jerry Springer episodes about guys who didn't realize they fucked a trans woman and got upset after it was disclosed.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
I disagree. I can think of a scenario where a trans person doesn't pass but people don't know that it's okay to talk about their transness, so they don't
Why exactly would outing by another person suddenly make it go from not OK to fine for discussion?
Common knowledge is when everyone knows that everyone knows; everyone may know that someone doesn't pass, but it does not necessarily follow that everyone knows that everyone knows that someone doesn't pass.
If it's obvious in the way you say then it's already common knowledge to everyone. They would know, and they would also know everyone is aware because it's obvious. Unless a great deal of people think a trans person is passing to others, in which case that's evidence passing is a thing.
I concede that if one is particularly unintelligent, or otherwise their judgment is impaired by lust, alcohol, drugs, dark lighting, etc. in a one-on-one situation with another trans person, then a trans person might be able to pass to them.
How often is "enter into a dark room already drunk and banging a stranger" a thing that happens? And even this caveat doesn't explain situations like this where someone only finds out from social media that the girl he was crushing on is trans or this where some guy is dating and didn't know
Some trans-identifying men do carry tampons. I've heard it helps them feel more like a woman. It's entirely possible for the stranger to recognize him as a trans person and still ask him for tampons under that belief.
Ok possibly, this argument actually works for once. There's still plenty of other examples from trans people and their friends/family that would suggest passing exists.
Just because some people are so stupid they ignore evidence in favor of a woman being a woman? No, it doesn't. Those people are also biased and motivated (for whatever reason) to go looking for trans people even if they aren't there
Yes, if the signs aren't reliable and wrongly identify women as trans when they aren't, they aren't flawless signs.
In my daily life, I've never identified a person as a woman only to later find out he's a trans-identifying man, or a person as a (trans-identifying) man only to later find out she's a woman.
If you're the average person, you've never met a transitioned trans person to begin with in your daily life, yet alone one who is close enough to tell you. It's kinda like saying "I've never met a nuclear licensed submarine operator that I couldn't immediately tell was one", well yeah you've never met one anyway so it is meaningless.
I know it's a logical fallacy. You can use logical fallacies to argue for a position, but it's still a position that you are holding and arguing for. It being a logical fallacy does not inherently lend more credence to your position.
If your whole argument depends on a known logical fallacy and the "I don't know a licensed submarine operator" fallacy I made there combined, it's not very strong. Meanwhile I have presented lots of positive evidence that passing can occur.
I'm not saying to just ignore it. I'm saying that your position seems to be unfalsifiable if you are going to invoke that fallacy for every set of possible observations. I've already offered one way of falsification, do you disagree with it or have another way?
Better way to think of this, depoliticize it in your mind and instead think of it as just the toupee fallacy. Would your arguments and logic work for "toupees never look natural to anyone, every toupee I've ever seen is awful"? If not, then make a better argument.
There's a lot of pushback against the DOD/DOW here, and it's not just leftists.
For example Dean Ball, the guy who literally wrote the Trump's admin own AI strategy as senior policy advisor is saying that this move is essentially destroying any trust investors could have in America AI companies.
This man isn't some leftie nutjob, again he literally worked for Trump on the AI action plan.
Scott Alexander who rarely wanders much into politics like this is straight up saying that the government should be ashamed here. He also made a prediction market if it'll be overturned and the chances look pretty good for anthropic right now
Comments on LessWrong which really really doesn't get political most of the time are basically calling the Trump admin an authoritarian danger.
Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.
The government's contradictory commands (it's a danger to have and also necessary) and abuse of power is really pissing off a lot of people who are otherwise rather neutral. Also a great example of how "woke" has lost all meaning, Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots
Edit: Just came up in my feed, Greg Lukianoff the CEO of FIRE (the free speech org) is calling this dystopic https://x.com/glukianoff/status/2027390299845087740 He rarely speaks that much about general politics that much cause he wants FIRE to be 1st amendment focused, so another person really upset about this in particular.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Knowing a single trans person IRL is already an outlier, knowing multiple is an outlier even among outliers that would mostly occur among people who seek it out in some way like going to a LGBT group.
So are you sure you're not just having false positives where you think "that person has gotta be trans" and then take it as as true without verification?
That does happen, I gave a few examples of people being harassed by false positives after all. There was even a school board member in Utah once who falsely claimed a teenager was trans or this Walmart employee labeled trans because she was tall. And considering just how statistically rare it is that you've actually met multiple meaningfully trans people IRL, the explanation of false positives is pretty strong.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Really validating the "not actually reading my comment" claim, I was already dismissive of the idea that violence against trans people was common.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
I'm pretty sure the average Mottizen by virtue of educational status and exposure to mild autistic hobbies like Themotte.org is massively more likely than the true average of having run into trans people
Yeah that's probably true but if we're talking generally especially for IRL people it's pretty uncommon. This Kansas situation actually gives us some interesting numbers to work with to see how rare trans people actually are. Apparently 1700 people are impacted by the decision, and chatgpt pulls up "Active driver’s licenses (most recent full year reported): ~2,099,927 licenses."
That makes for less than one tenth of a percent of trans people who had the gender marker changed (assuming there wasn't even any data input false positives). Of course not every trans person will have had a changed license but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people, and assuming that other states are around the same rarity, the chance that any user knows a single person who is meaningfully trans in this way is unlikely, yet alone knowing enough trans people to make a determination about passing quality.
"Outing" is unrelated to transgenderism. You can threaten to "out" someone's anonymous identity, for example StoneToss being outed as Hans Christian Graeber. When trans people are "outed", it's usually the reveal of their birth name, or even just making it common knowledge that they are trans
Does this not literally admit that it's not always obvious to people? If you were correct about them never passing, there would be no need to "make it common knowledge that they are trans" in the same way there's no reason to make it common knowledge that someone is black. Everyone would already know.
Also on that same vein, here's another piece evidence that passing trans people do exist.
The argument about if a person should disclose if they're trans. Completely unnecessary if we assume that they never pass and everyone is aware. You could never possibly have sex with a trans woman without giving explicit consent towards that under your theory.
It's also not possible to just chuck that up to lying trans people and allies either given that the "I want them to disclose" side is going to be primarily people who don't want to be with a trans woman.
#2: Even if I believe this, I think it's negligible evidence and there are other explanations that are more probable. Many forms have standard questions about pregnancy risks even for guys. And doctors may have just adopted a universal set of questions regardless of gender identity because it reduces the risk of a malpractice lawsuit for failing to ask a critical question, but no one's gonna sue them if they ask a man if he's pregnant.
Ok explain this one then. I'm in a star trek related discord server and one of the users is an out on discord trans woman who I remember had once offhandedly mentioned they got asked for a tampon by a stranger that day and had to say sorry they were out. It was just an offhanded remark (many of us often talk about random things/post pics/etc, we got a kinda friend group going on). I do not believe it to be a lie, I've seen pictures and videos of them too and they look quite feminine.
Why would that have happened unless they looked convincingly female and the stranger in need did not view her as an ordinary woman? If your theory was true, the stranger should have not behaved in such a way and needed such a deflection.
#4: "Transvestigators" are conspiracy theorists by another name and I don't use or endorse any of their methodology. There are obviously many similarities between male and female bodies, but that doesn't mean it's likely that a man can pass as a woman. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
It does mean that it must be way harder to tell than you might think. False positives are an error too.
Your position on noticing non-passing trans people seems unfalsifiable
This isn't "my position", it's a known logical fallacy. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
It doesn't work to say "ah but disproving this fallacy could be happening is too difficult for me so I wish to ignore it". I've provided multiple affirmative arguments for trans people being able to pass, and your one continued argument is challenged significantly by a known selection bias flaw.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
This feels like you read half of the sentence and immediately decided to write up several paragraphs without any interest in the rest of the comment. Go back and give it an actual read, I never argued that violence against trans people is a common or major issue.
How do you know they were trans if they were passing? I'm not trying to do a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious.
Well
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Sometimes people just list it on an online bio or something, you can find plenty of folk who clearly look quite feminine. Sure pictures and videos are different than IRL, but it's not "obvious" there still. Someone like NikkieTutorials was a famous content creator on YouTube and they're only known to be trans because someone in their life who was told it threatened to out them. "Outing" wouldn't even be a thing anyway if it wasn't the case that some people do pass.
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Plenty of trans people tell stories of doctors asking them about pregnancy risks or whatever else sort of story that only works if passing really does happen and them having to explain that they're trans. Maybe they're all lying, but that is some evidence.
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Just go to like an anime convention or something else where people dress up. There's a lot of men who can make for very convincing women.
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The reverse, "transvestigations" claiming people like Macron's wife or Erika Kirk or other famous women as being potentially trans show that many of the "signs" are clearly something that occur in ordinary women too. Sometimes it goes into ridiculous territory even like this lady has a picture of her after a C-section with her newborn and husband and she still gets constantly harassed with people trying to claim she is trans because of how she looks, even trying to say that she must have had a uterus transplant (which if a trans woman had a successful transplant, got pregnant and gave birth would be a huge story). A lot of people who can "always tell" refuse to admit otherwise. Even offline here's a teen who got harassed and told to leave the women's restroom, despite her not being trans.
I still feel like most trans people don't pass because I've never thought of someone as non-trans only to find out that they were trans later.
Statistically speaking you probably don't even know a trans person passing or not who is meaningfully trans in the sense of changing their name/hormones/identification/etc to begin with! It's something like .5% of the population for it, that's relatively rare. 1/200 is pretty uncommon, dunbar's number is around 150, and that's things like associates not close friends who would tell you something like that. If you have something like five really close friends, four family members and three partners throughout life the chance of any of them being meaningfully trans is really low to begin with. However it is possible that someone in the nameless crowds at the grocery store or movie theater or sports stadiums might be and you don't even notice and count them because they're a stranger.
I see this similarly to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon.
Yes that's the toupee fallacy. The argument that all toupees look bad and you can always tell falls apart when you consider that good looking realistic toupees aren't noticed.
Is discomfort about being identified as male a prerequisite for being trans?
Well discomfort for birth sex but I think generally so. At the very least it's pretty common among people who meaningfully transition with and not like a stupid 16 year old who just puts neopronouns in their bio and calls themselves trans.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
I'm not saying it's impossible or hasn't happened, but I just haven't seen a case yet that could support the assertion that there are people who want trans people dead or genocided. There are no roaming death squads of extremists hunting down trans people. Being a trans person is quite a safe demographic in America.
I agree, violence for the most part is not actually that common in the US unless you hang out with bad crowds and a few examples otherwise are statistical anomalies.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Ok but how the heck you gonna dismiss violence against trans people as just a few small cases but then cite a single anecdote of violence here? There are not roaming death squads hunting down and killing conservatives either.
A few examples to the contrary does not change the statistical truth that basically any demographic in the US (besides black male really) is a rather safe demographic.
In reality, a trans-identifying male can be spotted from a mile away, and if he was ever asked about it (which IME most people are too polite to even do), it was because he was clocked as a man and it's obvious to everyone that he's a man.
Now this is just blatantly not true, I've seen plenty of passing trans people. It's a toupee fallacy at best and delusional wishful thinking at worst. There's a lot of overlap in male and female appearance, there's even plenty of men (who identify as male) that can make for a convincing female appearance without even having the feminizing effects of hormones, a lot of the "femboys" can do that.
Yeah there's lots of people who don't, but there's plenty who do without any trouble.
My bigger point is just asking why anyone should even care in the first place, including trans people themselves. If I was trans, I would shrug and just accept the "M" designation on my license
How the heck do you know what you do there? If you were trans, how do you know you wouldn't be able understand their problems? Certainly in this hypothetical you would have those same feelings of discomfort about being identified as male.
6 is close but many upper class elites being pedophiles was suspected or known even before Epstein's fall exposed it. I remember the hilarious skit where Sacha Baron Cohen bought a "pedophile detector" when meeting with Roy Moore for instance. Jimmy Savile was able to abuse hundreds of people, many children, without anything being exposed till after his death. There's a former Speaker of the house who was a serial child molester and suspiciously like many others the courts just seemed to drop the ball with him. He literally admitted to it*. Pizzagate was moronic as the only meaningful failure here but that was a bunch of partisan brained morons trying to find "secret messages" rather than actually being against child abuse.
If the pedophiles aren't going to be exposed and punished then the second best option is to be weary of anyone who does pedophile lite behavior. Like a 40 year old who only wants to date people 18-20? Pretty suspicious, makes me wonder how much lower they'd go if it wasn't illegal. Makes me wonder how much lower they are going and how much they care to check if the person they're with is of age.
I'm pretty sure one reason why they keep the filibuster around is that it's a great way to keep votes from happening that they don't want without everyone having to tip their hand and vote against.
Discourse around politics love to treat idealogies as a hivemind but the reality is that there's a lot of disagreement between people who are otherwise allied with each other. Even without the filibuster why should we expect a Trump tariff bill to pass? Democrats are opposed to Trump having more power and (this might be shocking to some youth who have only experienced Trump) many Republicans are still capitalists and free traders who believe in free trade and free markets.
So if you have the filibuster then you can just have the few known for crossing the lines take the fall and defect away from the president while you get to still vote for the tariffs you don't actually like or want and not draw his ire. There are even multiple examples of senators/house representatives doing a similar reverse style strategy that if you already have enough votes to pass then you can be one of the "good ones" and follow the party line even if you don't support it.
Opponents of the tariffs technically won both votes, thanks to a small faction of Republicans who broke ranks. But the margins were so thin that a presidential veto seems inevitable and likely insurmountable.
There are more opponents of Trump's tariffs than just the people who broke ranks, but just like Rep McClintock they had no reason to take aggro when the votes were already there to win. Reason calls it cowardly, I agree but I think it's a rather reasonable cowardness.
It lets politicians have their cake and eat it too. They don't have to push through things they don't actually agree with while also not having to upset the base (or increasingly the child president) by getting to say "nothing we can do". Signal your loyalty without having to sacrifice your beliefsOnly drawback is that it's harder to do the stuff they do like, but it's a cost they've accepted.
Those are the consumer facing products, Microsoft makes the majority of their money through selling to other companies, in particular cloud services and servers like with Azure/GitHub/SQL Server/etc and Microsoft office products like Excel. Even Windows now is mostly a product for other businesses to pay.
magicalkittycat
8d ago
In a society as litigious as the US, the slowness of the courts is effectively an Omnicausal problem at this point. Not just in taking a year to decide on tariffs for the SC, but even state and local courts are swamped.
Why do more than 95% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains? Because the court simply can not handle actually taking them to trial unless you wanted a trial set long after everyone involved is dead. And plea bargains suck, they punish innocents (who can't afford to wait the absurd amount of time for an actual trial) and let guilty criminals get away with lesser punishments (because the terms have to be really generous compared to what a trial sentence may end up in). Seriously look at almost any case where someone got off absurdly light for a crime and you'll also notice that they almost always pled guilty in it because again, over 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain of some kind.
The clogging up of immigration courts is one major part of the crisis we had, asylum applicants could take years an average of four for a case to be resolved. Keeping them locked up for that whole time is wasteful and inhumane, but letting them out creates an obvious exploit.
How about other issues like say, a landlord wanting to evict a bad tenant? A hearing in some of the busier counties could take you a few months. Want to build an energy transmission line? Have fun spending more than a decade on various legal challenges. You might be a parent unable to see your child for more than a year because of custody disputes being unsettled.
This ain't just a US problem either, Canada and the UK apparently have it even worse with the backlogs in some areas. It didn't use to be this bad so clearly it's possible for a functional court system to actually go at a timely manner, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing this issue and how to fix it.
magicalkittycat
8d ago
Relatively more stable, at least until he starts arguing that him not liking someone's tone of voice is also a national security issue needing tariffs IG. But point being now that businesses can expect the more obviously BS tariffs to be struck down (even if it takes a while) it allows for a little bit more predictability.
Still absurdly chaotic, but 80 chaos is better than 100 chaos.
Luckily things are looking to be a bit more stable now at least. Admins typically put their best foot forward legally speaking so this one getting struck down greatly increases the likelyhood of other tariff arguments in the same manner, which we can assume are weaker than the best foot forward, getting struck too.
Trump might be able to find a more watered down version that does work, the same way Biden found a watered down form of student loan forgiveness but just the same it'll be watered down.
Speaking of chaos though, the admin is definitely going to try to make refunds a mess. And unfortunately even if they do it properly many Americans may now end up effectively double taxed due to paying tariff surcharges passed on by the importers and paying the refunds back for the illegal tariffs to those same importers. A lot of it going to Howard Lutnick's son whose firm has been buying up tariff refund privileges in exchange for immediate cash to handle the additional costs his father's actions helped cause!
magicalkittycat
8d ago
That still often requires some amount of buy-in within the coalition (or additional support from outside when people within disagree) instead of just a single person getting to impose their personal will on every policy.
Another win for the free market, another win for the free people.
Kavanaugh also warned that “[i]n the meantime, however, the interim effects of the Court’s decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”
I seem to recall the argument for why they didn't need to grant a stay on the tariffs was that resolving them after would be easy. (Edit, yes they did claim this and they were very certain about it too) Did something change in the meantime or was that claim a lie? But even more so the argument doesn't make much sense to begin with "they shouldn't have to return stolen money because it would be difficult" just encourages stealing more money.
There is a simple solution to this, President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress. Unfortunately for him we all know this won't happen in part because many of his fellow Republicans don't support it and won't put their name to a pro tariff bill because the people do not want it
This is a win for American democracy, where a single election does not give full permission for every unpopular idiosyncracy and niche policy a politician wants. They must convince the others. A point that justice Gorsuch makes himself
Government policy should encourage the kind of behavior that will eventually lead people to reasonable self-reliance.
This just isn't reasonable for a whole lot of people on benefits. They're poor, and therefore far more likely to also be rather stupid and not able to contribute as much no matter how much you want to "lead" them to anything.
I have a great uncle with a developmental disability who no matter how much we try to explain can't understand basic elementary school level concepts about how the seasons work or how to read beyond the alphabet. He could do some physical labor back when the demand for simple tasks was more common and he was younger, but now he's basically useless and lives off his wife's survivor benefits after she died and my parents watch him.
The average poor person isn't nearly as dumb as he is, but they are still pretty damn dumb. Just like the leftist mistake over thinking that corporations are "subsidized" by benefits to workers, the idea that benefits are preventing people en masse from getting better assumes that they aren't already demanding max value for what they have to offer. Now they're dumb, so they might not be that great at the negotiating process but the amount left you can wean out of them just isn't much. (Of course it's also not just stupid, physical disabilities and other forms of mental impairments can cause this too but stupid is the main reason.). The only thing that really blocks improvement here is welfare cliffs and poor scaling down of the benefits, otherwise there's just no reason for a person to not be maximizing their pay already.
Thus we're left with the choice to not care and let them live in squalor or take pity on them being born with less functional brains and/or bodies and share with them a little. Maybe someday we'll be able to fix stupid the same way we're increasingly fixing other issues, but until then "they'll get better" isn't happening.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
I've never seen much reason to view otherkins as anything beyond a furry roleplay. Yeah the spiritual elements are stupid, but spiritual elements are pretty much always stupid. They're roleplaying being animals in the same way that someone speaking in tongues is roleplaying being filled by their holy Spirit.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
If the US is so powerful, why not just stop the robbery?
Power doesn't mean 100% perfect and flawless, the pests of fraud/corruption/theft/etc will occur in any human system. Every world government has this happening whether it's "weak" or "hard", Russia and China are both rife with it too.
And I don't think the US barely notices Somali fraud. Thousands of Americans will work their entire lives and contribute taxes, only for their contributions to be taken by the kind of intellects that brought us the Quality Learing Centre.
Almost all of our taxes are going to rich seniors through social security, the military, and healthcare (that's often largely for seniors too). Fraud does exist but there's a reason why DOGE failed to actually change anything meaningful, the amount of fake shit is dwarfed by social security entitlements, military, and actual healthcare services.
While the fraud is not literally nothing, it also isn't that big of an impact. It still doesn't change that the US is the big dog here.
The idea of "all lawful purposes" is extremely suspect given what the federal government has been doing in regards to surveillance for the last few decades. But one doesn't even need to look to past administrations, we can see it just in this one with stuff like the tariffs.
The Trump admin unconstitutionally stole from American businesses for almost a year straight using a broad and unintended interpretation of emergency powers, explicitly lied to the courts claiming it would be easy to refund so there was no need for a stay while now trying to argue that a refund is too difficult, and now once it's been ruled illegal pivoted to other statutes that require even broader lower quality interpretations to continue with the theft.
"All lawful purposes" is bullshit when the courts are locked up and the government just interprets whatever they want however they want. If lawful is just "hasn't been explicitly ruled in this exact way to be illegal" then lawful has little real world meaning. And even when their spying apparatus finally gets ruled against, they just go to the other decades old bills that if you squint really really hard and ignore the time difference, you can pretend it meant to allow for your behavior.
And if such flagrant disregard for rules and rights is what happens in public, there is no need to believe the government suddenly grows to respect them in classified matters.
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