domain:mgautreau.substack.com
RenOS
something is wrong
9hr ago
Very relevant further reading for the interested from Kirkegaard and Seb Jensen.
One thing missing from Scott's review is that Gusev and Turkheimer have publicly stated that they consider the possibility of IQ being substantially genetic abhorrent, especially for racial differences, akin to the dangerousness of the atomic bomb. Neither is a complete hack like say Kevin Bird, thankfully, but their results have to be taken with a great heaping of salt; they are not at all neutral, they don't even claim to be. If you read between the lines for Turkheimer in particular, it becomes clear that he considers hereditarian research very compelling, he just wants the bar for it to be considered true extremely high, and he wants us to by default believe in a mostly-environmental explanation not because it is scientifically compelling, but because it is the theory with more benign implications.
So, the first conclusion is that sibling-based analysis' aren't actually consistently in disagreement with twin experiments; A particular set of sibling-based analysis' chosen by people who have publicly exclaimed how much they hate the results of twin experiments is in disagreement with twin experiments. There are other studies that are in good alignment.
The second, which many here have already mentioned and which Scott also correctly calls out but you seem to have missed, is that both Gusev and Turkheimer willfully misrepresent underpowered GWAS results as disproving heritability in general, which is just silly. We know how complex genetics is, and GWAS is still missing large parts. The tan paper cited, for example, is just using genotyping! For those who don't know, there are three currently available levels of genetic informations: WGS looks - in theory - at the entire genome, but even the best available approaches are still having trouble with larger structural variants and variants in highly repetitive regions. WES looks at only the exome, which is the roughly 1% of the genome that is properly transcribed into RNA (and a subset of which is coding for proteins). Then there is genotyping, which is literally only looking at specific locations. The list is usually extended through imputation, but this has its own issues. This is akin to claiming that cartography got debunked by an approach that can only look at specific houses (not even randomly chosen ones so you could make a map through repeating the experiment - always the same few houses).
Another important part is the connection between materialism and genetic IQ determinism; First, genuine genetic IQ determinism is extremely rare, the common arguments are between people who claim genetics is negligible (excluding rare high-impact variants) on one side, and people who claim genetics is non-negligible. Even Scott AFAIK has the position of IQ being somewhere between 30-70% genetic, which is a far cry from outright determinism, especially once you consider these percentages are for inter-developed-states differences. Among the dominant materialist ideologies, the favored hypothesis is some variant of blank-slatism. It has many desirable qualities, and even I would prefer it were true; For one, it would mean that we can fix all problems just through environmental changes such as social engineering, without ever having to change anything about the fundamental building blocks of our biology. That would be awesome! But it is trivial to show how important genetics is for a long list of traits, and it is usually uncontroversial where it's considered convenient. It's always EA and IQ that get singled out for special treatment because people don't want those to be partially, let alone substantially, genetic.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9hr ago
logos means 'word'
And "Stimme" means voice, and "Pravda" means truth, and "Rta" mean order, and yet their derived terms overlap strongly with its and each other. In this case the concepts, if not the words, seem to be by shared descent, but I wouldnt be surprised if the chinese have something like it as well.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10hr ago
"Career" would surely be the common English word?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10hr ago
Tangentially related, but have you or anyone else heard the term "misyar marriage"?
Yeah, with it supposedly being a smokescreen for prostitution.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
To give without restraint does not warrant taking without restraint
That isn't what @WhiningCoil and @erwgv3g34 are saying, though. They're saying that a contract which allows one side to take without restraint but does not allow the other to do so is a pure means to extort fools rather than something that is mutually beneficial. The specifics are that one can defect on providing sex within a marriage, due to marital rape, but one can't defect on providing resources, because of alimony/child support and because of divorce splitting assets.
FtttG
10hr ago
"Sapiosexual" must be the single most self-aggrandising adjective in the English language.
FtttG
10hr ago
Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.)
Is she Japanese?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
10hr ago
You have to pay for driving lessons too with your own car and instructor and fuel, why should it be any different for guns?
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
People who really don't like conflict subconsciously change their beliefs to match those of the mainstream, so as to minimize the possibility of conflict. To have the beliefs that the average Motteizen does, even in secret, and go through the trouble of registering even a pseudonymous account to post them... does speak to a certain degree of conflict seeking, or at least contrariness.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
It is slightly more specific than that. The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
There is also a rarer reclamatory use of the term found on places like /r/neoliberal - the people using the word this way think the key neoliberal beliefs are free trade, support legal immigration at or above current levels, general scepticism of economic regulation, agnosticism about the ideal size of the welfare state.
RenOS
something is wrong
11hr ago
You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.
That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).
Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.
For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
11hr ago
People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.
Do we really? It seems that most posting on the motte is either neutral or communal bashing of the outgroup or cooperative exploration of some topic, with very few exchanges being actually adversarial.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Yes, I suppose it's possible that it's to do with the level of testosterone, and maybe higher-T men are more aggressive, and lower-T people more, for lack of a better term, intellectual or interested in abstracts.
I have no idea whether that's true, though. I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men. I would hazard that personality has to do with way more than just a single hormone, though, and while testosterone does make one more aggressive, the behavioural consequences of that seem like they would vary widely with everything else that goes into making up one's personality.
I could just as easily suggest that this forum might select for more testosterone, because I'd guess that it's unusual for people to actively seek out argument. People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.
Ultimately I just really don't know. It would be interesting to have statistical data on the hormone profiles of Motters, but that data is inaccessible to us. I suppose I will file it away as something that would be mildly interesting, but which we won't know. Oh, well. It is an ever-growing file.
fmaa
11hr ago
Which includes this quote from you:
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
Which flatly denies the existence of compatibilism. Neither materialism nor determinism say you aren't really making choices. Determinism does make the currently untestable claim that, given the exact same starting state and exact same inputs, the choice-making algorithms in your mind would produce the exact same outputs. Materialism claims that this choice-making is fully contained in physical processes in the brain, which is currently imperfectly testable, but has some good evidence for it.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
No, I assume materialism and determinism for my model of the world (Yeah, quantum uncertainty means the universe can't be perfectly predicted. There is currently no reason whatsoever to believe this has any effect on the brain or cognition.) But crucially my ability to converse does not in any way rely on these assumptions, let alone their opposite, which is your original claim that I objected to.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
The first quote sounds a lot more like "I don't feel like I'm a machine" to me. Otherwise, this comes back to your absolutist stance where the weather isn't materialistic because we can't fully control it and lobotomies aren't physically controlling your personality because they only produce a specific, not arbitrary, change to it.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
11hr ago
A further complication is the difference between brand names and generic names. I generally know the names of my prescription medications by the generic name, because that's what the pharmacy prints on the labels. However, every doctor I've ever seen refers to drugs by the brand name (which is usually easier to say).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.
I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.
It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.
If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?
The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.
A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.
The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.
Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
12hr ago
schmutz
German nouns must be capitalized. They do not exist in un-capitalized form.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
12hr ago
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
At some point, no, it just reinforces itself.
If you want the historical root cause: Because women have always been predisposed towards care work on acount of remaining at home with the young, sick and elderly while men went out and abroad.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
Well, let's try again, then.
I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.
In a very real and very important sense, standing on top of a large box does not help you get to the moon.
In this same sense, smashing a computer with a baseball bat does not demonstrate that you can code. It does not demonstrate that you can almost code, or that you are incrementing toward the ability to code. Medieval amputations had at least some appreciable chance of increased survival chances of the patient, and so are an example of very crude, very early surgery. Lobotomies are mind destruction, not mind control.
As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.
That is I/O, not read/write. It's pretty neat, and I'm all for it, but it is not actually what we are talking about here. I can type with my fingers, this would let me type with my brain, but the typing is the same. Some examples of actual read/write technology:
- a working love potion.
- a reliable lie detector.
- granular memory editing or legible playback.
When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said
Coincidentally I have not studied them.
...It is probably pretty hard to see a historical pattern in a part of history you have not and will not look at.
This appears to me to be a deflection/smear akin to "John Money who coined the term 'gender' was an icky pedo" if taken uncharitably, and if taken charitably it seems that you are arguing with dead wrong Materialists whereas I expect you to be arguing with me.
Okay, let's try a different way then.
As I understand it, you believe that science is advancing toward deterministic interaction with the human mind. Not the brain, the mind. Not Ted Chiang's microscopic gold-foil windmills, but the air currents winding between them:
Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. For many hours I scrutinized the leaves, until I realized that they themselves were playing the role of capillaries; the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.
My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.
The above is a strict improvement on the standard brain-as-a-computer/mind-as-a-program metaphor, in my view.
I am claiming that:
- Deterministic technological interaction with the human mind is isomorphic to mind reading or mind control.
- There is no evidence of working mind reading/control technology currently existing.
- There is no evidence of meaningful progress toward working mind control tech in the near future. I note that you and others disagree on this point, but I think my claim is well-founded.
- We do not know if such technology is possible even in principle. There are solid theoretical reasons to believe that it would be fundamentally or practically intractable, even under strict materialist assumptions..
- If such technology were possible, we have zero information about how far we are from it, whether ten or a thousand or a million years.
And here's the part I've been trying to get across to you above:
- There is more than a century's history of people claiming to be scientists, claiming further to have developed mind control technology, having their claims taken seriously by society at large, only to turn out to be complete frauds.
- This history demonstrates that we, collectively, are really bad at identifying fraudulent claims of mind control technology. The apparent reasons for this are illuminating to a number of interesting questions, but it is enough here to note the evident tendency.
- Inability to identify fraudulent claims of mind control technology has repeatedly led to woeful disasters.
- The above problems are not limited to mind control tech, they manifest in many other areas of tech as well, often with dire results. This is a serious problem with our entire paradigm, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
Therefore:
- I evaluate all claims of mind control technology based on strict empiricism. If you want me to believe mind control technology is possible, I want to see a rigorous demonstration of actual mind control. Until then, I think it is prudent to assume that all such claims are fraudulent.
Pointing to the march of actual technology does not answer my objection. I am pointing to the march of fake technology being treated as though it was real.
...And all of this is secondary to the point I've been trying to make through all these discussions, which is that axioms and empirical facts are different things, and that people commonly mistake or conflate the two. A lot of people believe Determinism, and think they believe it because it is empirically proven. In fact, there is zero empirical proof or even direct empirical support for Determinism. These people are believing it axiomatically, but do not recognize it as an axiom. All beliefs are chosen. Not all beliefs are chosen directly. Losing sight of how a belief was chosen is the easiest way to conclude that beliefs arrive in some other way than choice.
cjet79
12hr ago
I had the opposite reaction medication names are the fucking worst.
If you want me to remember the name of a medication name it something that makes sense like "blood pressure fixer" not something that looks like a latin vomited up a few different flower names. If there is more than one blood pressure fixer pill then start adding numbers or company names after the initial part of the name.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
12hr ago
Jones is the most overrated great fighter. He would have gotten his ass beat had he fought further, though heavyweights are probably just as bad as women's divisions.
I'm surprised to meet another fellow here who's into mma. There's a new card this week. Topuria, Payton Talbett and Joshua Van are amazing, violent, smart young prospects.
Tom Aspinall is the best heavyweight I've seen in a while. He has the potential to not lose for a decade straight like fedor.
I agree on inter-society competition favoring cultures that can actually reproduce, with a small caveat that if your low-fertility society can siphon off kids from high-fertility societies fast enough AND assimilate them properly, then it can persist even without breeding the next generation on its own. But that's a theoretical construct that the west at best imagines itself to be like.
But I'd also like to point out that
- A nitpick: Sex is no longer equal to fertility nowadays, given contraceptives exist, although I suppose a thorough-enough nullification of bodily autonomy can remedy this.
- More substantially: Women traditionally aren't just a possibly-fertile hole, they also need to provide semi-skilled labor around the house, and need to have decent social skills and personality to boot. A society in which women are available for sex and possibly child-bearing but fail at all the tasks and interactions that follow is one with marriages so miserable that men will voluntarily refuse to marry.
Reducing marriage to the provision of sex alone may not be entirely off the mark, but it ignores a large part of what makes it important.
emotional abuse
Maybe the term gets "abused", so to speak, but "emotional abuse" seems like a perfectly reasonable way to characterise a pattern in which e.g. one partner in a romantic relationship routinely insults the other, calls them names, accuses them of infidelity for no good reason, belittles them, lies to them etc.
FtttG
13hr ago
people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia
Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.
they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs
In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).
That's like saying you need to have admin access to truly read/write. Just because we can't inspect every part of the memory of a computer, doesn't mean we can't read. You can't go from 'show me even weakly possible' to 'show me a rigorously accurate lie detector'. We can't make a rigorously accurate malware detector for a computer even with admin access!
It's obvious that significant positive changes to the human mind are possible, you can prevent down's syndrome for instance. Or you can find genes that induce aggression and remove them. The Mao-a warrior gene for instance could be altered. That's not a silver bullet but it is something. Genes do things!
The simplest way to improve minds is not to be incestuous, that's a good start. If your benchmark for superior minds is 'everyone being supremely good people out of some morality fable' then sure we don't know how to do that, it would require very sophisticated understanding and practice of genetic alteration. But there's no qualitative difference between simple changes like 'make people less retarded' and 'human perfection', only quantitative differences in understanding and sophistication of approach.
You shouldn't compare technologies grounded in progressive realized development to 2000-year old Jewish schizobabble. Wait a few centuries and if there's been no progress whatsoever on the interpretability of the brain (as with the return of Christ), then it might be time to reconsider how realistic these predictions are.
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