domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
anon_
just now
Irrespective of whether that's true, there is no explicit intent by Congress here.
There is not some kind of magic escape hatch from constitutional law that is invoked by putatively combating racism. If anything, I would have expected the Biden DOJ to put forward that kind of wonky theory (e.g. in SFFA) not the Trump one.
anon_
2m ago
Right, well, the FBI stats are not the BLS stats.
The BLS stats have been generally correct (and getting better) and, more importantly, have erred both upwards and downwards approximately equally.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22m ago
It's all unfalsifiable. You see exactly this same rejoinder to anyone who does a deep dive on JFK, or 9/11, or Elvis.
Or Imane Khelif, oh wait, they were right about that one, let's pretend it never happened. Oh, how about the Lab Leak? What, it's gaining mainstream mainstream acceptance? Quick, pretend we were only deboonking the bio-weapon people!
There's always a They with unlimited evidence-manipulating powers.
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
anti_dan
24m ago
In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?
Your post is overall good, but I think you take this part too far. There are questions, indeed including on issues you've listed here, where a genuine issue of material fact exists, and is not and likely cannot be resolved in the near term.
My example would be climate change. I have slight confidence, approximately 65%ish that the climate is warming faster than it would without human CO2 emissions. This is hardly the sort of confidence level one should have if you are deciding major issues. It gets even lower when I ask the question, "assuming it is true the climate is warming because of human CO2 emissions, is that bad?" On even that question we are at 50% max, most credible people I have looked at seem to indicate slight warming is probably good for the earth and humanity. And then there is the next question of, will the policy proposed by this politician/advocate meaningfully change the outcome, and there I estimate abysmal results in the 1-5% range.
So I am left with a confidence chart of(when being favorable to environmentalists): A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 70% B) That is bad: 50% C) The proposed policies can fix it: 5%
For a composite confidence level of 1.75% that environmentalist proposals will solve the problem they are purporting to solve.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
28m ago
Hey, I wanted to say thanks under our other Epstein conversation, but I'll do so here. I appreciate your correction on Acosta's alleged statement in particular, and taking the time for writing your response in general.
I don't know when I get the time to read through this one, but I'll try to go through the whole thing as well.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
55m ago
Excellent deep dive. Probably mostly wasted, alas. I could have predicted the weak conspiratorial rebuttals. "Well...I just don't believe it. Because we know They're lying!" It's all unfalsifiable. You see exactly this same rejoinder to anyone who does a deep dive on JFK, or 9/11, or Elvis. "Okay, yeah, that's what the 'official reports' and the 'evidence' says, but of course we can't trust it."
There's always a They with unlimited evidence-manipulating powers.
Every narrative will have holes you can poke in it with enough motivated reasoning. Some people can cast doubt on the color of the sky. Once they become attached to a theory that properly identifies a nefarious They, nothing is going to convince them that reality is actually mostly tawdry and just what the evidence says it is.
aqouta
1hr ago
I too, found this article extremely annoying. This guy is for real accusing, Scott Alexander of all people, of not laying out his opinions and justifications of ai acceleration in enough detail? Could he have maybe tried reading any of how his writing on the topic?
cjet79
1hr ago
My wife's father died of cancer. She tends to notice and react more strongly to stories about cancer in fictional shows, and real cases in people around us. Our brains are not perfect logic engines. Traumatic enough events can have an outsized impact on how we judge and notice other events around us.
I generally reserve usage of the term "racist" to refer to people that hate others because of their race. I know that is not how everyone uses the term, but I'll stick with it. If you feel no hate but you treat other races different that is what I'd call "prejudice". I do not consider it "racist" merely to notice things about the world. I might not agree with what they have noticed, but we can definitely have a discussion about it.
I try to pick my words carefully, and I prefer words that add light not heat to the discussion. The term "racist" usually just adds heat. I would almost always prefer to just write out the whole definition of what I mean rather than use "racist" as a shorthand term. I know its verbose, I don't care. whiningcoil responded to me, and didn't seem to come away with your interpretation. So you are butting you head in and trying to make it look like I picked a fight when no one actually involved seems to have felt that way.
gattsuru
1hr ago
That's a bit weird an approach -- you're drawing 20 Hermes Gambits rather than having the code recurse, and the Gemini Decomposition → Reveal → Novice's Gambit could be simplified to just Reveal -- but it does work and fulfills the requirement. Can run it in this IDE if anyone wants, though you'll have to use the simplified version since Novice's Gambit (and Bookkeeper's Gambit) isn't supported there, but the exactly-as-chatGPT'd version does work in-game (albeit an absolute pain to draw without a Focus).
That's kinda impressive. Both Rotation Gambit II and Retrospection are things I'd expect LLMs to struggle with.
"Your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished. Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand? Trump is claiming his letter to Epstein is fake, but there's tons of evidence that the birthday book is real and hes even had other birthday books done for him! It's a tradition!
Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, and his wife noted the great diversity of guests. “There is no limit to your curiosity,” they wrote in their message, which was compiled with others in January 2016. “You are like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.”
The media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman suggested ingredients for a meal that would reflect the culture of the mansion: a simple salad and whatever else “would enhance Jeffrey’s sexual performance."
And the director Woody Allen described how the dinners reminded him of Dracula’s castle, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.”
He says he never wrote a picture in his life, meanwhile he would send off an autographed doodle every year for charity.
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
They're lying and lying and lying. It seems like they're either innocent people trying to make themselves suspicious for ??? reasons, liars addicted to lying for the hell of it or there's something deeper going on.
Yeah exactly, "your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
Could it be Public Square? I don't know, I'm too square to be in the know.
I think it's referring to credit cards coming down against porn purchases on Steam. But needs more details.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
It's been a few years since I read Player of Games - that's a good point out, good quote, more overtly leftist than I remember it being.
Just read my first Pratchett last month. Look forward to reading more of his stuff totally blind to his political or philosophical views - Small Gods was... interesting, but also a really entertaining read, somewhat reminiscent of Culture novels to me.
Anyway thanks for the responses!
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself.
Unless it’s a review mandated by the HR. Then ChatGPT is the right tool as its native output is close to ridiculous HR corporate speak.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset.
What does it mean to step outside the bounds of their training set? If I have it write a fanfic about Saruman being sponsored by NordVPN for a secure Palantir browsing experience (first month is free with code ISTARI), is that beyond the training set? It knows about NordVPN and Lord of the Rings but surely there is no such combo in the training set.
Or would it be novel if I give it my python code and errors from the database logs and ask it for a fix? My code specifically has never been trained on, though it's seen a hell of a lot of python.
R1 has seen use in writing kernels which is real work for AI engineers, is that novel? Well it's seen a bunch of kernels in the past.
Or something fundamentally new like a paradigm-changer like the transformer architecture itself or a whole new genre of fiction? If it's that, then we'd only get it at the point of AGI.
I admire your willingness to deep dive. I mostly accept the government's account of the Epstein story because I'm a normalfag and also I'm not going to put in anywhere near the effort required (like you did) to form an opinion on this. There's just no alpha in trying to figure out what actually happened given the work involved, and absent that, going with the government's explanation is probably a good heuristic.
What can one learn about how to get away with serious crimes from this? Perhaps, obviously, hire extremely competent well-connected bulldog attorneys? Because actually the government kind of sucks, and leaves a lot of stones unturned, and exists in a political economy with finite resources and competing interests and you can make life extremely annoying for them?
A friend of mine, who did not have any money at all and had a public defender the whole time, eventually arranged for a work release from a county jail where he'd spend 12 hours a day at a strip club and smoked weed managing their web site for minimum wage. He was just really gregarious and met lots of people inside and outside of jail. So my assumption already is if you're not stupid and not utterly reprehensible you can make going to jail a lot more comfortable than you'd think from cop dramas.
I have observed that South Asians like this excuse a lot because their own notion of English fluency and "high-class" writing is very similar to ChatGPTese: too many words, spicy metaphors, abuse of idioms, witticisms, hyperbolic imagery, casual winking at the reader, lots of assorted verbal flourish, "it's not X – it's Y" and other… practices impress and fascinate them; ChatGPT provides a royal road to the top, to the Brahmin league, becoming like Chamath or Balaji. Maybe they played a role in RLHF.
In my view, all prose of this kind, whether organic or synthetic, is insufferable redditslop. But at least human South Asians are usually trying to express some opinion, and an LLM pass over it detracts from whatever object-level precision it had.
This is part of the general problem with taste, which is sadly even less equally distributed between branches of humanity than cognitive ability.
P.S. No, this is not a specific dig at self_made_human, I mainly mean people I see on X and Substack, it's incredibly obvious. I am also not claiming to be a better writer; pompous South Asian redditslop is apparently liked well enough by American native speakers, whereas I'm just an unknown Ruskie, regularly accused of obscurantism and overly long sentences. I do have faith in the superiority of my own taste, but it's a futile thing to debate.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
He has mentioned declining subscriptions and revenue. I wonder if he's re-running a few of his 'greatest hits' to see what still strikes a chord?
He may have suffered the sad fate of many pundits, though - he's run out of things to say. He can either re-run older points he's made in increasingly angry or provocative ways, as he is here, or he can pivot to increasingly niche content, as I think you can see in some of his other recent essays.
KingOfTheBailey
2hr ago
I've previously speculated that normalizing polyamory (and sexual liberation more generally) would have this effect, and it sucks to see those predictions borne out in the gay dating world. I'm really sorry for your friends.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Makes one wonder about the definition of mental illness. The European generals pre WW1 who still kept lancer cavalry regiments might be considered 'retarded' by an observer, even without the benefit of hindsight. WTF are lancers gonna do to bolt action riflemen, let alone machineguns? Even if you just imagine the infantry out there on a field, unentrenched and in loose order, in the best conditions for a cavalry charge, the whole thing is still a slaughter.
But this kind of 'retarded', distinct from being an actual dribbler who probably has no concept of what lancers are, isn't an actual mental illness, it's just being really really bad at your job in one specific area. Kind of like an AI hallucination in scope, an isolated lapse in otherwise reasonable performance.
But instead of a random hallucination it's more like a motivated argument where one might despise the grifters on twitter or dislike the cut of Yudkowsky's jib and then form your opinions based on that. Likewise, I imagine the cavalry officers held themselves high, cavalry is noble and aristocratic, a testament to the connection between man and horse. Infantry was ugly muddy and plebeian, so they looked for reasons why the cavalry should win when the idea is idiotic.
roystgnr
2hr ago
Yeah, I can't disagree with any of that. In the colloquial sense "no evidence" fits.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
I tried using o3, but it correctly noted that the file you mentioned isn't available, and its web browsing tool failed when trying to use the website.
I can't do anything about the missing document, but I did manually copy and paste most of the website. This is its answer:
It's only impressive if the base rate is cameras have 99.999% uptime and guards never ever sleep through shifts.
What if cameras being in a general state of disrepair and guards routinely falsifying records because "they didn't see nothing"
is safe is the norm and you generally never know because usually this huge gap in accountability never counts against the corrections officers?
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