hbd
Spez1alEd
9hr ago
It seems obvious to me that even assuming WhiningCoil's claim is "true," in the sense that young black men commit more crime, and this is inherent to their biology, and we have countless studies to prove it, it is still perfectly valid to strongly object to describing them as an invasive species. To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests. This isn't complicated, it would be clear to everyone if he were describing Jews in a manner that compared them to vermin. So it is with blacks or any other ethnic group.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter and to turn the public against you because whatever points you may or may not have, they can clearly see that your position is rooted in seething hatred and malice.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9hr ago
That's sort of exactly my criticism of race and racism, it just doesn't serve the purpose. We should either talk about discrimination on the individual level, or talk about stereotypes on the group level (and not limit it to poor pattern-matching, open it up to more than just genetic ancestry - let's talk culture and more, directly). Racism is a bad word because it can be applied to either case! Race by itself means genetic ancestry, and quite obviously genetic ancestry is not the biggest thing that matters when talking group-wide trends, fair or unfair alike (plus as I pointed out the ancestry gets fuzzy edges way too easily in modern life, especially melting pot countries like the US). I'm not even trying to start a HBD debate or anything. I agree on the trivially true bit and maybe even a bit more FWIW. But if you think pre-industrial humans believed in HBD or something like it, you'd be wrong on at least two levels.
clo
10hr ago
Not again, let's not have the HBD discussion for the billionth time again, here's the cliffs notes:
HBD is trivially true, what decisions, policies, actions are taken as a result of that are up to you, but you need to be aware that they exist because sooner or later you will run into physical reality. You can continue to run from it, you can plan around it, you can even make giant state sponsored psyops to make sure that the hoi polloi don't notice and to prevent them from slaughtering each other. Value judgements about what heritable traits are preferable are again, up to you. Maybe evolution will decide intelligence is the Great Filter and the morons will inherit the earth, what the fuck ever.
Racism depends on how you define it, I don't like Swedish food and I dislike the French but I'd struggle with anyone calling it racism, especially since the definition of what racism is has expanded vastly over the last decade to include the default state of literally every Southeast Asian who has to live around other ethnicities
I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute.
Fair enough, I agree on that. I didn't think you were saying that talent conquers all in this but one can kind of see it reading between the lines. How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.
And it seems like export controls are diminishing, per latest news on H20s. But maybe Trump will do another backflip, who can say.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
But Grok 4 just crushes with sheer size I think.
The fact that Grok is at all comparable (or indeed inferior) to Kimi on any metric, even the most obscure one, speaks to the deep cultural advantage of Moonshot. Grok 4's training compute is estimated to be 6.4e26 FLOPs; Kimi, like R1, is likely ≈4.0e24, fully 100 times less. They probably spent on scaling experiments for Grok 3/4 more than Moonshot has spent over their lifetime on everything. It's not really a fair competition, I admit Grok is a stronger model.
It was designed for Musk's vision of AI modelling and understanding the physical universe, that's what it's for and it does excellently there.
I think it wasn't designed with any specific focus in mind, it's an all around next-generation base+RL model.
I think the arc of history still bends towards Nvidia, the biggest company in the world and by some distance. I think like you I was leaning more towards the 'talent conquers all' ethos
You distort my argument. I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute. My thesis is that the gap in applied AI possibly won't be so profound as to allow some Pivotal Action To Secure Durable Strategic Advantage, that the hawks in DC and Dario Amodei fantasize about as they rail for more export controls. Nvidia will remain dominant, so will Western AI labs.
But so far China is doing better than I anticipated, both technically and ethically.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
4d ago
He's the kind of guy who spent his life regurgitating official stats without a hint of critical thinking, because that's what a good student / smart person does, right? But when he gets pushed back, he shows the black heart of a concentration camp guard, just, you know, impotent and sad.
Like a year and a half ago, he got into it with Steve Sailer on HBD. Sailer was polite, but the pile-ons were like watching a herd of lions toy with a sickly gazelle. And Will just did not seem to have the slightest idea how to actually mount an argument when he had to think for himself instead of just repeating the NYT or government stats and he quickly devolved into Downfall, Hitler-In-The-Bunker tier scitzo-ranting about how everyone who disagreed with him were "vermin" who needed to be "expunged", mixed with plaintive cries begging to know why no one else in his tribe was helping him. Why did he argue against the hordes of darkness alone?
And the hordes just spammed him with lines like "Because they know how this ends" and "NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU, WILL".
He's just kind of the biggest, most easily riled dork on the internet, and he can't help himself but enagage every time.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills.
Sounds unpleasant. Personally, I came to believe that some HBD claims are true by reading Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. "HBD explains why there are many Jewish Nobel laureates without having to resort to conspiracies" is actually a major selling point for me. (Of course, I would also prefer if the left would give up to insist that any inequality of outcome was due to unfairness and in return people would shut up about HBD until we can CRISPR everyone.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".
Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:
A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.
(UK, dated) A racist.
Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?
On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.
I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.
The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
You might have had a point sometime before the year 2010. But since that time we've seen this principal stretched to the point of excluding all views outside the progressive standard, and not only that, typically applied selectively. It's a slippery slope with no Schelling Fence, as the rationalists put it. So the entire principle must be discarded. Hitler wasn't the first to compare various people to non-human animals in a derogatory way, he won't be the last, and that wasn't the main problem with him. Sure, if someone's out there saying "black people are vermin", I can reasonably conclude they're scumbags, but trying to suppress that is not a good idea. And if I start building fences around that such that anything even close is also verboten, I'm likely just trying to create ideological uniformity.
This principle, on the other hand, was never any good, and is even more obviously applied selectively. This is just "don't express your bad ideas because you might convince other people of them".
This principle ("stochastic terrorism") was not only not any good, it was always in bad faith (suppression of bad ideas is such an old idea I don't know about that one). Note that some Trumpists have picked it up (sometimes ironically, probably sometimes seriously) to blame the assassination attempts on Trump on their opponent's rhetoric. It's less a slippery slope than a vertical drop.
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