domain:drrollergator.substack.com
Mottizen
4hr ago
I've always wanted to see a detailed side-by-side analysis of life outcomes for the 'stolen generation' versus those who remained in remote communities. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the stolen generations actually benefited from the transaction
HalloweenSnarry
4hr ago
AIUI, the Civil War comics came out years before the current zeitgeist was born. Bizarre that they chose to adapt the story for the MCU, given that I was always under the impression that Civil War was one of the weakest storylines to come out of 21st-century Marvel.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
4hr ago
I think only the 5% of the population in the INTJ/INTP area really cares about having plots that make sense.
I regularly get told to stop thinking so much when I point out plot holes in movies. I'm probably not the only one here.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
5hr ago
Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
There apparently was encourage adoption by white parents back in the 60's which was later called the 60's scoop. I tried to parse the article about why the kids were taken (eg was it from abusive or neglectful families?), but the article states it was just to place indigenous kids with white families to raise them with white culture. The article also makes reference to a program in the 50's when children were taken from single mothers to place with families.
Similar policies happened in Australia until the 1970's leading to what is now referred to as the Stolen Generations. Even though anyone involved in decision making on the policy is either long since retired or dead and the federal government issued a formal apology in 2008, it keeps being brought up in media by the usual issue motivated groups as an example of modern day racism. What is ignored though is the high endemic rates of child abuse, sexual abuse and neglect that are rife in indigenous communities even to this day.
If the current topic is SD3, they lobotomized it at every level from excluding all "problematic" pictures of women from the training data, to hard-coded crimestop termination
I dont think it's "plateauing" so much as the predictions of the skeptics like Phil Koopman have been born out.
When gpt first came out there was a lot of talk within the industry about "the hallucination problem", about how unlikely it was to be solved through incremental improvement or better training data, and about how this made it unsuitable for any use-case where testability and precision were significant concerns.
However this sort of skepticism doesn't attract venture capital dollars and ars-technica clicks the way articles with headlines like "I asked gpt to write code in the style of John Carmack and it did!" do, and thus the skeptics were shouted down and ignored.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
5hr ago
I'm straight, but my understanding is that the gay community in Australia/NZ revolves around the larger cities. In Australia this is Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne (particularly inner city). If you want access to a larger dating pool (particularly to find guys that want a relationship rather than casual sex) you might want to consider moving. I've heard from friends that Grindr is a bit of a casual dating cesspool, so you might want to try out Bumble or Hinge.
FYI gay public expressions of affection can lead to harassment in country towns in the region, but cities seem to be more tolerant. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.
EverythingIsFine
5hr ago
My understanding is that current AI models aren't actually lobotomized very much. Most guardrails seem to be just very large and lengthy if-else brute force programming layered on top of the model's interaction. Things like, if bomb question, say no. If blanket topic mentioned, say generic thing. I guess there's a little bit one layer deeper, where non-PC responses are penalized in the training phase even if they are thoughtful, but I think this probably doesn't spill over into unrelated areas as easily. Maybe a good analogy is this is not affecting the brain itself, it's raising the kid different.
It's actually the newer research that's looking in to the possibility of doing lobotomies, like the golden gate bridge Claude thing, where they are trying to identify concepts, or something like them, which are (for lack of better vocabulary) highly correlated neural groups within the model. After locating undesirable concepts, they then brute-force excise or shrink the concepts. Or, they might expand something they like. That's actually almost literally lobotomization of the model, in that it's more of a brain surgery with imperfect information.
TIRM
5hr ago
Point taken. But "my personal Vietnam was dodging STDs" Trump publicly presents himself as the sort of guy who does that. Which could also be a ruse.
We don't really know, but I rather suspect that Trump has made unwise sexual decisions. As plainly stated by himself and at least one sexual partner.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
5hr ago
The woman in your example above is vomiting her emotional baggage onto random strangers and can be dismissed like other people who do the same.
I think more empathic guys will pick up on the anxiety of women in public spaces like the above. I used to feel guilty or ashamed when women would react that way when I was younger as if I did something wrong to cause them to be afraid (by neutrally just existing in a public space). Then I did some work and now I see it completely as the women's problem. I'm not responsible for their emotional response to completely predictable behaviour (eg that if women go to a public space they will encounter other people going about their business). I don't go out of my way as much as I used to to avoid close proximity to women in public spaces (although I do occasionally cross the street at night or the like to not follow women on deserted streets, but this is out of kindness rather than guilt.)
Try to look deeper into this issue so you don't feel any emotional pain when women act like the above (easier said then done I know). Give yourself permission not to change your behaviour to suit crazy strangers.
TIRM
5hr ago
I'm not planning on erecting statues or bowing to them. But they didn't spike all sorts of drugs with surprise fentanyl, so they're better than the cartel alternative.
that's magically impossible
Boo. Boo on this kind of snark. We should be better. You have an actual point here, but your need to get in cheap snarky jabs is obscuring it.
EverythingIsFine
5hr ago
Interesting because I totally interpreted the ghost thing as a rhetorical flourish rather than a literal statement about fear of being actually haunted, though I'm well aware those people exist, and those are after all the kind of people I would expect to send unsolicited emails.... wait...
I joke but I do think "rhetorical flourish" still has like a 40% chance of being the case vs 60% crazy, so with these odds charity means I select rhetorical flourish from a well-meaning person as the default unless demonstrated otherwise.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Not to burst your bubble, but the problem with Civil War actually originates with the source material. One might watch Civil War and ask why Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is on the side of the government despite being a tech entrepreneur who refused to share his suit tech with the government for years and Captain America, an FDR Democrat (aka the closest thing we have had to a dictator since George Washington) is on the side of the libertarians. The answer is the original writer wrote it that way for nonsensical reasons.
As a result, the whole story is nonsensical, and the movie reflects that because it is based on an idiotic comic book that shares its incoherence.
practical_romantic
5hr ago
I started playing krunker in my free time with my co founders since I am living with them now in the capital. Really fun game, I am worse than both so win like 1/10 games we play. It helps remove the anxiety people feel when trying to raise seed money for their startup. This is really stressful so some arena shooter stuff helps calm ones nerves!
EverythingIsFine
5hr ago
I mean, I can kind of get that there might be a sort of disconnect about reading what to one might be a traumatic family event and see others discussing it in a kind of blasé, "hey this is kinda neat" way. Personally I'm fairly interested in family history, but some people think it's a strange hobby. While I don't really understand the person being so bothered as to write this email (perhaps your org got conflated with another history org like a few that do operate in bad faith? I wouldn't say they are the majority at all, but I think they DO exist) I also don't really understand you being so bothered so as to think this person should not be voting? Is it simply because of their iffy (stilted but overall good, I'd say) English skills? Their easily-offended nature? Or something else? Because as I said, I wouldn't interpret this in a hate-filled lens. I'd say, oh, misunderstanding, wish we could have had a discussion instead.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
A sentiment that never made sense to me. Aren't juries prevented from independent investigation, aren't allowed to directly interrogate anyone or anything, and commonly have arguments excluded from consideration, when a judge doesn't like them?
EverythingIsFine
6hr ago
AFAIK as IQ is deliberately intended to be normalized, the gap is exactly the same 85 to 100 as 100 to 115, and if you think that those two aren't the same, you are also inherently saying that IQ is the wrong tool for the job. That's not even getting into the whole "what benchmark do we set 100 at", do we update it year to year or try to peg it to some historical benchmark (though this is not necessarily fatal to IQ as a metric in the same way the first is, it does present a question that must be addressed when using IQ).
I mean I think near zero on the z-axis? While my x and y answers are probably non-zero, and I do think maybe a rough 60% genetic contribution to individual heritability of g, for lack of a better term (I don't know how exactly to mathematically adapt this to populations in a fair way) but I appreciate z being its own axis. In essence, I don't think it's of any worth to spend a ton of work to evaluate x at all. Like, let's say there are in fact large but not enormous population differences. What am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to be aware that I treat some populations differently than others, and do nothing about that? That's just stereotyping, which I think is morally wrong. Even if say 2/10 of Green candidates for a job are suitable vs 8/10 Blue people, individual respect and concepts of fairness matter more. I'm not gonna toss all 10 Green candidates to save time. Even if the job is important.
It's just stereotyping with extra steps, and is frequently the case. In practice many racists I see are using correlated but generally only semi-accurate indicators to judge group affiliation, and then do little follow-up. Like name, dress, skin tone, things like that. Sure, maybe they make sense on average, but on an individual level? Forget about it. I lived in Miami for a while, and I can tell you first-hand that a lot of people are far more than their upbringing, but more to the point, there's a huge difference in someone from Argentina vs Brazil vs other part of Brazil vs Peru vs Colombia vs Puerto Rico vs Mexico vs Cuba and somehow I'm supposed to believe that either they are all the same, or that other groups happen to be special and uniquely stupid, or something like that? Or that the only thing that matters is the exact percentage of some vague notion of "whiteness"?
And then even going along that note, genetic groups do NOT correlate 1-to-1 with skin color, for example, not as neatly as many would have you think. It brings to mind the craziness of one-drop policies in the antebellum South. What if someone is half-Blue half-Green? Their skin doesn't always average out or something. Africa is a big continent and not all of them are Black and not all Blacks are from Africa and again for the love of God genetics literally doesn't have a notion of race as these neat, immutable boxes, and history doesn't either. (Ancient) Egypt is a great example of how modern looks at racial groups and skin tone are often anachronistic. Maybe the whole white vs Black as a dichotomy or single slider is a straw man, but that tends to be the actual end result of a lot of this discussion.
In fact, someone just last week said on this very forum and I quote word for word:
White children that come from homogenous environments are some of the happiest, healthiest and smartest in the world. There is nothing bad, comparatively, about them or their education to be found.
Which I don't even know where to begin. I love reading and talking about history, and this just reeks of presentism. Look it up. On top of implying some one-dimensional scale of whiteness. Like, if you're going to use it that way, at least say WASP or something. And he didn't stop there, oh no. Of course, a discrimination step comes next. We didn't mention Hispanics or Asians, but that's another often awkward conversation rarely brought up because there isn't a clean and clear answer.
Anyways the end goal of this whole (disorganized, sorry) rant is basically, the whole HBD discussion is orthogonal, almost completely, to morally permissible practical applications. I apologize if I dragged both orthogonal arguments into the same thread. The whole idea of human rights and human dignity fundamentally involves the idea that a person's worth and treatment should, within reason, not depend on instant snap judgements. Were the American Founding Fathers hypocrites for writing words about equality and God-given innate rights when they didn't want poor people to vote, or enslaved people, or non-landowners, or certain foreigners, or women? Yes, at least a little bit. But that didn't make their words and ideas wrong.
Edit: edited intro to address OP's axes more directly.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
I've even on record in this sub saying that values can be derived from other concerns and can definitely be argued.
In that post, you and Yassine are certainly not arguing that your views are in any sense reconcilable with inegalitarian/particularist views. The central argument there is that your specific set of values are the objectively and inarguably correct set of values, given everything that’s true about the world we live in. Nowhere in there is a suggestion that there’s any practical way for anyone to persuade you out of those values; quite the opposite. You’re saying that the only way someone with inegalitarian values could have any leg to stand on morally is if there were massive, fundamental structural/technological changes in the way our civilization is organized; barring that - something which will not happen in our lifetimes - your values are correct, and mine are not even worth discussing because they’re in the dustbin of (current) history. Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.
I've been bashing my head against this since my first post in this sub and basically consistently gotten replies that are unmoderated personal attacks instead of any substantive argument
I read all of the replies to that post, and I can identify not a single one that I would consider an unmoderated personal attack devoid of substantive argument. Perhaps you’re referring to replies to other posts not linked to.
Again, one of my very early interactions with this community was someone ban-evading and calling me a slithering rat just for having the temerity to try and argue value points.
First off, you’re totally misinterpreting his use of the word “rats” in that post. He is using it as a shortening of “rationalists” - a group with which he himself identified at the time, and presumably still does. It was a very common term of self-identification at the time; there was an entire constellation of Tumblr users, for example, who proudly called themselves “Rat Tumblr” (or Rattumb for short), meaning just “Rationalist Tumblr”.
In that post, Ilforte is accusing you of aping the shibboleths of that subculture while working directly and intentionally to sabotage its aims and core values. In the segments of your post that he quotes, you very clearly do appear to be advocating using social shame to rigidly enforce speech taboos around certain topics - to not only ridicule and socially bully racialists, but to actually actively ruin their lives in a professional sense, or at least to celebrate those who do so. This is, indeed, a very serious violation of one of the core values of that subculture at the time, which was strongly opposed to that type of social shaming and speech tabooing.
I’m also unsure what you mean by accusing him of “ban evading”. That post is in /r/CultureWarRoundup, a totally separate splinter subreddit from /r/TheMotte, and not a sub from which I believe Ilforte was ever banned at any point. If you mean he’s ban evading by cross-posting a post of yours from The Motte and criticizing it… that’s not what ban evading is.
I guess a lot of racialism is just motivated by idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences that are too strong to be overwhelmed by any other consideration---how is this anything but not irreconcilable?
I’m sure that in some cases this is probably true! However, again, many of us racialists once shared your liberal priors, instincts, and aesthetics. Yet this was not enough to stop us from eventually adopting these views. Why do you think that is? Clearly in that case it can’t just be due to some ineffable, inarticulable, subconscious psychological difference between us and you, right? If I was progressive once, I must contain the capability to inhabit the brain states compatible with progressivism. And yet obviously I also simultaneously contain the capacity to inhabit the brain states compatible with rightism. Are you so certain that you lack that capacity?
This experience has not meaningfully changed in the last three years, although I will say that you have been much more reasonable. So trying again, do you mind explaining/linking to some place where you've explained these specific facts?
That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so. I don’t have time to pull those right now, but I’ll see what I can do at some point in the future. However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.
EverythingIsFine
6hr ago
Clearly a jury who heard the facts more directly than you and I felt differently, and I'm inclined to trust them.
EverythingIsFine
6hr ago
I'd suggest that second option: a) more talk than action when it comes to how much sex he's had, no surprise there; but also want to consider the related but separate reason b) the people with whom he does have sex have some mixture of strong NDAs, financial relationships, and aversion to publicity. For example his ex-wives were much more silent than you'd expect two ex-wives of a president to be (and Ivana passed away two years ago, before Dobbs). As a point of fact, Marla Maples has hinted at exactly what you'd expect: She has a strong NDA and a kid who is Trump's daughter.
In fact Marla Maples stated very clearly she personally was very pro-choice. I'd say strong odds she had an abortion but is not speaking about it for the aforementioned reasons.
TequilaMockingbird
6hr ago
I considered putting this in the Culture War thread but decided it fit better here. US Saudi "petrodollar" pact ends after 50 years.
One of the reasons, if not the main reason, the US Dollar is the world's reserve currency is that OPEC agreed to index the value of oil in US Treasury bonds. That agreement is a big part of how the US has managed to ring up only modest national debt despite sizeable budget deficits, and has a been significant factor in maintaining "Pax-Americana". It seems to me that the State Department and the Senate both allowed the agreement to expire with little (if any) effort put into negotiating an extension or consideration for the implications.
To my lay-person's eyes this looks like it should be a big deal but it also seems to have been completely ignored by all the big name news sources outside NASDAQ and the WSJ. Are media moguls trying to bury the story or am i just being paranoid?
anti_dan
7hr ago
Right but that is kind of question begging, because its the kind of "concern-trolling to attempt to reduce voter participation among Democratic voters" is what partisans in the intelligence community have claimed Russia did, with little evidence, and none convincing, in the past.
EverythingIsFine
7hr ago
What was incredibly amusing to me on several levels was that Hitler apparently felt that, in his "tier list" of races so to speak, the British were not the top but they were pretty high up the list. So for that reason he was reluctant to bring them into the war and even apparently didn't think it was very likely they would side against him, because race reasons.
I still get a lot of clickbait thumbnail spam in recommend, but you're right it does get a lot better when you're judicious and slam clickbait channels with "do not recommend"
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