domain:felipec.substack.com
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
He's a sneering anti-Trump libertarian who has a history of some politically incorrect racial views but now claims to oppose political correctness on the basis of colorblindness. That's not a totally inaccurate representation of his schtick but he also has unkind things to say about rural people, women, etc. He's very very pro-abortion and thinks the winning formula is 'aesthetics and rhetoric of Bush era democrats, but without the concern about race, hyper-neoliberal economics'. As a political formula this is, regardless of how well it would work as a governing formula, almost actively delusional; he combines most of the least popular positions in the modern US. He's also aggressively anti-Trump.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
The largest single non-British ethnic group in the UK is Indians at 2.9%, and they are fairly well-behaved. The largest problematic group is Pakistanis at 2.5%. The idea that there is a single "Islamic" ethnic group that have any shared interest other than pretending to care about Palestine is obviously false if you are familiar with the politics of either the Islamic world or ethnic-minority communities in the UK.
If the UK had the political will to deal with difficult ethnic minorities, they would be easy to defeat in detail. The only people who lump non-whites together are establishment lefties, who while not all-white are noticeably whiter than the census.
zeke5123a
2hr ago
And? Maybe violin is different (practically kids don’t have big enough hands to play guitar) but maybe starting insanely young isn’t actually necessary to be a virtuoso as demonstrated by two of the best guitarists of all time.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
I find this perspective a bit baffling. Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one. It's how you get people making convoluted theories about code-names and plastic surgery to explain how James Bond turns into a different guy in-between movies. It's just a recast, bro. The 'real' James Bond looks neither exactly like Sean Connery nor exactly like George Lazenby. They're actors. Stand-ins. Race-blind casting in historical dramas work in the same way. A black actor is playing a character who, "in-universe", the audience is expected to understand wasn't actually black.
If you find this sort of thing immersion-breaking, fair enough. I certainly understand the appeal of television which leans really hard into hyper-researched realism; Rings of Power must particularly rankle because the Jackson films were built on this sort of thing. But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
It's not "ego death". That's a bullshit term used by people who don't understand anything about awakening.
I've attained anatta (not-self) insight and I didn't lose anything I would have wanted to keep. You lose a delusion. You see that the "self" was just a peculiar form of content in your consciousness, consisting of a combination of physical sensations, feelings, images, and a very strong and convincing belief/concept. You see it as being a mirage and a process, a verb, rather than a noun. I'm still a human being with a body, mind, consciousness, feelings, perceptions. I just don't get fooled by combinations of phenomena in those aspects of human experience making up a "self". I still have an ego, I know who I am and the difference between me and other persons. It's kind of like, after having played an MMO with an avatar every day of your life thus far, you see it for an avatar, rather than a real physical thing that could somehow ever have inherent existence.
So when you realise that you don't exist, that's just about dropping a false belief and seeing the truth: that feeling of being a self was never born except as a mirage-like construct of the mind, and cannot die because it never truly existed. That's a relief. You still take care of your body and mind. Chop wood, carry water.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
St. Elsewhere and its copy, ER (or was it ER that copied St. Elsewhere? I can't remember) were preachy at times and full of Very Special Episodes, but in the 80s and 90s conservatives could sometimes be depicted as sympathetic characters. (If they remade Family Ties, Alex Keaton would have to be a Never Trumper with a trans best friend, and West Wing would have to make all the Republican characters except the outright villains members of the Lincoln Project.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
An interesting idea. I think it's not being actively pursued because, companies like OAI don't see the economic value in such niche specialization unless it's for something as lucrative as say, producing a superhuman programmer. There's not much money in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
They also seem to me to be hoping that it's better to have general capabilities, and then let the user elicit what they need through prompting. If you want high-brow literary criticism, ask for it specifically, but by default, they know that mid-brow LM Arena slop and fancy formatting wins over the majority of users. Notice how companies no longer make a big deal out of the potential to make private finetunes of their models, instead claiming that RAG or search is sufficient given their flexibility and large context lengths. Which is true, IMO.
OAI did kinda-sorta half-arse personalization with their custom GPTs, but found no traction. Just the standard model becoming better made them obsolete.
I am skeptical that optimising for maths and engineering ability will produce intuitive social machines because, well…
Heh. Good one. However, look at Elon Musk or Zuck for examples of people who definitely lean more on technical abilities instead of people skills.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
What's the moral of the tale, to you?
Be sure to pay the piper if you want to call the tune.
Corvos
3hr ago
Broadly, the Hanania perspective is:
- Woke identity politics and the takeover of important positions by unqualified tokenism has been a disaster. Running the world’s premier empire and scientific machine requires strong competition to acquire and promote very intelligent, very knowledgeable people.
- Therefore we need a correction.
- Trump and his voters are not that correction. They don’t like woke identity politics and minority tokenism, but they want to replace it with rural white identity politics and affirmative action for the deluded. This is even worse than wokeness.
- Woke correction will not come from the left. Therefore attempt to destroy the MAGA right so that a smarter right can rise in its place. This right should encourage coloyrblindness, high immigration, low taxes, eugenics and globalism, and discourage white identity politics, conspiracy theories, religion and nationalism.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
Can you point to the post where we said "being abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things, so see, darwin didn't admit to anything banworthy"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
Okay, come on, this is just pure reddit-tier boo-outgroup.
You are better than this.
Corvos
3hr ago
Oh, I agree. I spent a big part of last year trying to create a personal assistant and the biggest reason for its failure was that I had no real way to judge its output.
What annoys me is that they seem to have ignored all of the ways you might optimise for this, let alone produced different products that you could trade off against each other. I would love to have one AI optimised for being lauded by literary critics, one for maximum mid-wit upvotes, etc. And you could always mix and match weights afterwards.
I am skeptical that optimising for maths and engineering ability will produce intuitive social machines because, well…
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
doesn't involve continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies.
Did our war in Afghanistan involve "continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies"? For that matter, how about the Yugoslav wars?
GBRK
3hr ago
You're requiring undue burden of proof.
"Undue" relative to what? Again, I'm not arguing that intelligence isn't mediated by genetics, I'm just arguing that we laack sufficient evidence about specifically race-based genetics. And as per your other comment, while larger sample sized would be nice the problem remain the potential for confounders. At the root of the problem is the fact that races are essentialy pre-confounded; we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons; any of those things will interfere with any attempt to say a particular trait is caused by genetics. Hell, take skin tone for example. We know unambiguously that genes mediate skin tone, but we also know for a fact that any attempt to survey ethnicities by skin tone and attempt to precisely predict the genetic effect would be confounded by the effect of distribution over latitude and likelyhood to tan.
But it looks like most of in-population variation is just slightly broken gene variants of ideal brain devised by evolution for current moment.
If you actually believe this, you should be more skeptical of hbd, not less. if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed. That looks like the exact opposite of the smart-jews HBD hypothesis.
think that if you were posting this from pro-HBD pespective, someone could write: A Racist Poster Compares Africans To Wolves By Implication.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
It would make sense to compare teams made of people with similar IQ than than loners.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with. Even most nuclear families have significant IQ variation. In particular, I think that when resources (food, parental investment, status) are scarce, groups end up adopting tactics that concentrate iq gains in a few individuals (like by feeding the chief's firstborn son better food and working hard to educate him) while the rest are allowed to be dumber. Also, the "smartest" genes are probably relative to body dimensions... Maybe a gene that causes you to grow more neurons on average is best when combined with genes that predispose you to have a big skull, but actually gives you iq reducing mental illness if poor nutrition or being born female gives you a small head.
2rafa
3hr ago
Right, LLM writing is all about preference, but I find the Chinese models relatively witty.
birb_cromble
3hr ago
I don't have a Twitter account, and I don't go out of my way to follow twitter e-celbrities.
Maybe you can help me out here. What's this "Hanania" guy's deal?
Everything I see about him here on the motte seems to suggest that his entire schtick can be reduced to "poor people are gross moral failures and I'm clearly not poor. Are you poor? Are you a gross moral failure?"
Am I missing something here?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
Gary Marcus failing to beat the stopped clock benchmark of being right at least twice in a day:
Regarding @WhiningCoil and why I didn't mod him: first, sometimes a mod doesn't want to mod a particular comment for any number of reasons. It might be because they have a history with that user and are afraid they might be too biased. It might be because they are uncertain how "bad" it is and whether it merits modding (and honestly, they want some other mod to make the call). It might be because it's ambiguous enough we actually need to have a discussion in the mod channel about it. It might be because they just don't feel like taking the effort to write a justification statement for the banning, which especially in borderline cases, where the user is popular, and/or when we expect pushback, needs to be written with some effort to explain our reasoning, rather than just "Bad post, 3-day ban." Regardless of the actual length of the mod message, they do require more effort and thought than a regular post, because I assure you, we all take the responsibility seriously, we don't just react on impulse and ban people when they sufficiently annoy us.
In this case it was a little of all of those. I thought @WhiningCoil's comment was bad, but... eh, assuming you take his story at face value (which generally one should not, you might have noticed how very, very "on the nose" most of his stories are, with anecdotes stocked with horrible NPC caricatures from Central Casting), yes, he was very clearly making an intentional, racialized comment, but he was also (allegedly) describing a real situation. I expected a modding would result in people complaining that we're trying to forbid Noticing (tm). I didn't want to make the call because I am well aware of his animosity and I felt like a mod warning would be better from someone else he can't scream is persecuting him (and whose mod message he would actually read). I knew modding him would require me writing a detailed response justifying it (the sort that @naraburns is much better at), for the benefit of other posters, if not WC. And also, ironically, I like WC (as a poster, though not so much as a person) and he writes quite a few AAQCs. I would prefer he just tone it down rather than getting banned or rage-quitting, but unfortunately his cumulative record is bad enough that he's getting close to a permaban, and I just didn't want to add another stone to that pile, even if he deserves it.
As for the stated principles of the Motte: those are principals. They are aspirational. Do we always achieve those lofty goals? I am certainly not going to say every thread here is high quality discussion full of smart people saying intelligent things. We definitely do not see everyone acting with "charity and kindness." Still, I do think this place is not quite like anywhere else. There are reddit communities that are still good (for some value of "good") but only if the discussion stays away from certain topics. There are places where people can talk about "forbidden" topics (HBD, Holocaust denial, trans-critical views, etc.) but those places are full of people who outright hate the people they are talking about, and no matter how lofty and intellectual they try to be, the seething hate is always evident (and they are not much better than reddit about dealing with contrary opinions).
So is the Motte "converging" on an accepted range of opinions? Maybe, kind of, but we still have some leftists here, there is anything but a unanimous consensus on HBD and trans people and Jews, and the current events topics, the AI topics, the history topics, do often have genuinely high quality and interesting discussions from knowledgeable people with very different perspectives. We get accused of various things from being a "right-wing" site to being a den of seven zillion witches, but I think our principles are still intact if imperfectly enforced. I see the Motte kind of like America: it's never really lived up to its ideals nor fulfilled its promises, the "community" and sense of shared goals is often a polite fiction, and we flounder and sometimes fail, but damned if it doesn't still beat the alternatives.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to and I think they’ll at least downplay the Message. Have a pro-American, pro-Western Oikophillic Space Opera (maybe a revived Flash Gordon) release at the same time as Star Wars Old Republic, and when Star Wars flops, they might get the message.
Which is why nobody in the movie biz is going to let that happen. I've read some stuff about how Hollywood works — and particularly the stranglehold of the Big Five - that make it clear the industry functions in many ways like a cartel (particularly in regards to distribution), making it incredibly difficult for "outsiders" to compete. To quote:
Since the dawn of filmmaking, the major American film studios have dominated both American cinema and the global film industry.[5][6] American studios have benefited from a strong first-mover advantage in that they were the first to industrialize filmmaking and master the art of mass-producing and distributing high-quality films with broad cross-cultural appeal.[7] Today, the Big Five majors – Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures – routinely distribute hundreds of films every year into all significant international markets (that is, where discretionary income is high enough for consumers to afford to watch films). The majors enjoy "significant internal economies of scale" from their "extensive and efficient [distribution] infrastructure,"[8] while it is "nearly impossible" for a film to reach a broad international theatrical audience without being first picked up by one of the majors for distribution.[4] Today, all the Big Five major studios are also members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
Jiro
3hr ago
There's also the opposite situation where the author launders his beliefs through his characters. If the characters never have any flaws in their beliefs shown by the story progress (or if the only flaw is "he's too extreme, but it isn't otherwise a bad idea"), there's a good chance the author does believe them. If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident. If the character makes a 3 hour speech and the story quotes 2 hours of it, the character's probably an author mouthpiece.
Don't overcorrect on this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
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.
I think "Don't compare people to non-human animals in a derogatory way" is a de facto rule here (I have certainly been warned for violating it) and I think it is a good one given the goals of this community.
Corvos
3hr ago
I find meditation really cool and its promises really interesting, and then every time I look further into it I’m reminded that the end goal is, essentially, voluntary ego death.
You talk about meditation a lot, so please forgive me for asking directly: does it not creep you out that this practice is supposed to end in you realising that you don’t really exist? Am I mistaken about the end result? Not the rhetoric, but the actual purpose of realising that theee isn’t a real you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
In so far as it was about specific things you were not allowed to say on Reddit, I think race was secondary to transgender issues. The trannyjanny situation was out of hand. (Not sure if it still is - I only use mostly politics free subreddits nowadays).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
To an extent, they're forced to be! In a lot of mushy-mushy realms like literature, if you ask ten people to choose the "best", you'll get eleven different and mutually exclusive answers. And there's no objective way to grade between them. The closest would be RLHF, which has obvious weaknesses.
(Is JK Rowling the best living writer because she made the most money off her books? That would be a rather contentious claim. So we don't even know what to optimize for there)
I believe the hope is that there's strong expectation that there's some degree of cross-pollination, that making these models great at code, maths or physics will pay dividends elsewhere. Seems true to me, but I'm no expert.
I have to wonder if this is a part of the success formula for Big Bang Theory- Sheldon's mother may not be everyone's favorite, but she definitely has redeeming qualities and listening to her is usually a solution for the character's problems.
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