domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
ResoluteRaven
43m ago
You'd be surprised how quickly this is changing. Most East Asian cities these days are full of Southeast Asian and Indian immigrants, and mixed-race children are approaching double digit percentages of the next generation. While the locals are still much more anti-immigrant than in any Western country, the path from where they are to where we are seems pretty clear and they are only a few decades behind us. The Japanese of today let in immigrants out of perceived economic necessity, just as pagan kings accepted baptism for political reasons, but their children and grandchildren will be true believers.
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
Throwaway05
46m ago
I once saw an interview with a bunch of (young) Japanese women where said women expressed they wouldn't mind if a partner went to a brothel but they'd get very upset if the partner went to a Hostess Club.
Who knows.
fartVader
48m ago
Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
This shows a shallow understanding of the US immigration system.
Here are the common ways you can get a visa -> green card -> citizenship:
- Illegal immigration -> anchor baby -> wait 25 years -> Green card (400k? closest thing to stats)
- Refugees (150k/yr) (relatively low by historic standards)
- Lottery (50k/yr) (constant number since 1995.)
- High skilled visas -> green card (Green card sponsorship is rare unless you're making 6 figures) (300k/year)
- Marriage and minor dependents (600k/yr)
So which of these do you disapprove of, how much lower should each of them be ?
No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point. The rest seem to be more so about identifying legitimate cause (actual marraige, real refugees, real need for immigrant labor) than the nature of the visa itself.
SlowBoy
56m ago
The government pays tax dollars to NGO charities that coach migrants on how to apply for asylum. The government pays tax dollars to buy plane tickets for migrants and put them up in hotel rooms or other temporary shelters. Squeeze these programs a little bit and the flow stops.
Living on welfare in the United States is a miserable experience.
It's clearly better than what they got at home!
It's written in the rules that the mods will try to respect user sentiment, so user opinion of moderation is actually useful information. Also, consensus-building is most harmful against other users; in the case of mods, it is easily offset by mod powers. The point of the rule is to prevent users from suppressing views they disagree with, and he has no power to suppress mod actions.
It would be pretty cool if people stopped trying to fight the refs and just accepted that we're trying to maintain a system that actively does not want to exist, especially given that that forks with variant moderation have in fact been tried and have not gone well. Unfortunately that is never, ever going to happen.
The bribe attempt was in fact pretty funny, though.
4doorsmorewhores
57m ago
We have correctly and broadly recognized that you can impersonate someone by using someone else's voice. This is the Siri equivalent of hiring a 55 year old teacher who just happens to be named Taylor Swift to endorse your brand of makeup
Here's when a snack company did the same thing to Tom Waits:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications/waits.html
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials.
That's the old way of thinking under how things used to be. They are no longer that way, and how people think about it will change.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1hr ago
no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials
Maybe not for their general practitioner or dermatologist or whatever. But if you get cancer or need brain surgery or something, then people care about the credentials of their oncologist or surgeon.
Borzivoj
1hr ago
I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis
SSCReader
1hr ago
Eh, if being downvoted bothered me, I'd have been gone years ago. I'm content that most people here wouldn't actually be mowing down protestors.
vpn
1hr ago
Just tested, and this works great! Thanks faul_sname and george_e_hale!
Although, just speaking for myself, I'd argue the default is too small for the average logged out reader (or someone who doesn't want to bother with custom css). I still suspect this is some kind of weird bug, because while the font sizes look standard and comparable across this site, Reddit, and Scott's blog on desktop, on mobile (at least on Android), the font for this site looks particularly tiny compared to the others.
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
Aaron Bushnell is already out of the public consciousness and his actions did not have the impact he was hoping for.
I will agree that he at least had the conviction to do something, as stupid as it was. Stupid in the sense that it did very little to push his supposed cause of freeing Palestine.
I drafted a post of around 3700 words about Bushnell the week he self-immolated looking into the history of self-immolation and its most prominent and impactful examples and how Bushnell's action relates to it but I never posted it because I never finished it as I got busy and now it's not a relevant event anymore. My prediction was that it would have little to no impact on the public discourse or opinion on Palestine and I think so far that prediction has held true. His actions, in the end, were just a minor net negative outcome to the world. Maybe we might see something happen. But probably not.
I'm actually in agreement with you that the willingness to fight for a cause is something many people lack, and if applied properly can be an admirable quality in a person. The difference between the colonists rebelling in the late 1700s versus a vegan protestor blocking the road on the streets is that the colonists were fighting for a cause a large portion of the population itself cared for, and the colonist was actually putting his life in danger by engaging in literal warfare (or standing up to actual British soldiers pointing guns in the case of the Boston massacre).
The goal of the protestors should be to get people to join your cause so you get the desired end result you want. If someone is going to be a public nuisance to protest for a cause, at least have it be a cause that people actually care about. Otherwise, all it does is make people hate the cause. It's worse than just screaming on the internet or even doing nothing, now you have people who actively go against the cause you want to advocate for. The protests over insignificant things in a manner detrimental to the public is why these discussions are happening in the first place. I think there are a lot of people who say they are against roadblocks as a form of protest but would be willing to condone or at least not be vocal in opposing it as a tactic if it was an issue of enough public importance and significance that it impacted them. But the point is that it's not, these protests in America have been about climate change, veganism, Palestine... all things that ultimately don't matter to your day-to-day American citizen.
Too many of these protests over insignificant things and society will decide it's enough and find a way to just stop them outright. I think I can agree with you that protests can serve a cause and push society in a better direction... but it needs to be used for things that people care about, and in a manner that impacts the people that can make actual decisions. Blocking roads is actively detrimental to a cause, if these people want to protest they should pick a more effective tactic.
Stellula
1hr ago
Yes. But that is not what OpenAI did. They hired a completely different real human being a trained an AI model on her voice.
I don’t care about immigrants one way or another at an emotional level and don’t have a strong opinion at a rational level. But everyone, always, everywhere, hates competition in the absence of strong countervailing factors. Some degree of hostility is virtually inevitable. Ways that tensions can be reduced, with historical examples: -receiving population is self-consciously hurting for warm bodies (steppe nomad confederations tending to accept any and all willing dwellers in felt tents, the widespread North American Indian practice of ‘adopting’ war captives as full tribe members, competing ethnonationalists courting ethnically ambiguous populations (I’m most familiar with Silesians, Masurians, and Kashubians. I’ve heard similar things about bilingual Ferghana valley dwellers (Turkic vs. Dari), Macedonian Slavs, “Catholic Serbs,” etc.) -immigrants are hard to tell apart from natives (similar physical appearance, language, etc.) -immigrants are already aligned with Ingroup and conspicuously oppressed by Outgroup (Huguenots in England/Germany, Irish in Spain and France, oligarchic/democratic exiles from competing Poleis in Archaic-Classical Greece) -immigrants are part of Outgroup but we need them to run certain machinery in the meantime (only works if they eventually assimilate) -immigrants have the same religion or readily convert -immigrants aren’t forbidden from eating with, marrying, or interacting socially with the host population (Gypsies and Jews are especially well-known offenders, but a fairly common problem - present to a certain extent with Catholics/Protestants apart from the food. Parsis would be similar if there were more than five of them left. Less of a whole problem if the whole society is like this already (India)). -immigrants are only competing with people with no voice or power (Germans/Christian sectarians/Jews in Medieval Eastern Europe, Indians in English Burma/Africa, etc.) Situation tends to rapidly degenerate during anarchy (Chmielnicki rebellion), when the central authority changes (Russian annexation of the pale of settlement), or when (which God forbid) the popular vote is introduced.
I’m sure there are others
Edit: It’s helpful to have a third, low-status group that’s already in place and against which new groups can identify themselves. This was probably helpful in integrating miscellaneous European types as Whites in the Americas.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
1hr ago
That's a fascinating sub with much wrongthink; has Reddit become more tolerant or is this sub just flying under the radar until they get the inevitable ban? I stopped browsing Reddit when they banned CCJ2, so I don't know how things go over there nowadays.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
To elaborate, you are straightforwardly wrong that either @Amadan or any of the other mods pick people we dislike and twist the rules to go after them, and you are also wrong that @Amadan is the worst mod on the site.
You are coming in with an adversarial mindset, and allowing that mindset to color every interaction you have. There's no actual need to do that, and it's hard to see the benefit even if we're lying and you're right about everything. We are actually committed to fostering communication across the tribal divide. We are actually trying to implement the rules in good faith and with the explicit goal of keeping this forum performing its intended mission. You've gotten modded by @Amadan because I've been trying to engage with you directly, and we have a policy of not modding conversations we're involved in. Some of your comments are quite good, and some of them are pretty bad, and the distinctions between the two are not subtle. I am hoping at some point you can entertain the idea that we aren't trying to game you, simmer down a bit, and just lean into the productive discussions that I think you are entirely capable of. I want this to happen because I think your perspective and receipts-heavy approach are valuable, and I want to see more of it, but that isn't going to happen if you don't actually see value in calm, rational discussion with people who disagree with you.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Arabs have a genetically low IQ today because extremely high rates of cousin marriage drive down their intelligence(a side effect of Islam). Arab Christians have IQ scores on par with north-western Europe. It’s not implausible that ancient middle easterners had IQ more similar to Europeans than to their modern descendants.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Most of the people living in the DFW suburbs had not previously been living in Dallas proper; they moved to the area.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1hr ago
No kidding. I'm guessing girls who say that with the intent of flirtation may not realize that they are filtering out guys with ethics in favor of guys who have no issue with enabling a cheater. Bonus points if they later complain about all the guys who hit on them being jerks who aren't into commitment.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
The profession has a deliberately bottlenecked profession that makes it unnecessarily selective. Even if the average black doctor has lower MCATs than other doctors, they're still going to be plenty good to do basic medical procedures. I suppose part of the reason that I think this is that I generally think big chunks of medicine are significantly overrated, with only a few classes of medicine being consistently effective, and those not generally be all that hard to do. Antibiotics and vaccines work great, but they don't really take a genius to prescribe. Trauma surgery is very effective, but you're probably not going to have much time to pick who you want to fix your shattered body when you're brought in from a car accident. Without considering race, I just generally don't think I'm going to get much out of a physician with a higher MCAT.
There are a couple areas where I would want to get the absolute best. If I had cancer, I would want top-notch pathologists and oncologists working on the problem and would seek out an elite hospital. I probably wouldn't care about race in that context because the bar for being specialists working on bone marrow transplants at MD Anderson is pretty damned high. On the opposite end, if I had something that required sports medicine, I would be insistent on people that are actually knowledgeable int he field, but on this one, the intellect level shouldn't be much of a barrier.
Relatedly, I can't believe how many people that have nothing wrong with them just go to the doctor all the time for checkups, as though a physical is going to provide you any useful information about yourself. What a silly, shamanistic ritual. I'm especially amazed that people who pretty obviously don't care much about their health go through the debasement of being told annually that yep, you're still fat and should lose weight.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Whether something is "ethnic cleansing" or not does not depend on where the removed population goes.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Weren't the Oath Keepers infiltrated by informants and under cover agents?
Of course they were. Another way the government can shut down opposition; all the right-wing groups are throughly infiltrated.
Well, if they fail in Ukraine because the West pours in more support and repels them it's not exactly guaranteed that they would stop at the borders of Ukraine 2013 is it? What's to stop them from continuing their march into Belgorod or the rest of Russia? Russia's elites can just sit around and say "eh probably not going to happen" but are they 100% certain?
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