domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
Kant
1hr ago
Whoops, I'm sorry about those test posts, I thought nothing was getting through. Super happy to become a part of this community - won't be making those silly comments any more!
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
1hr ago
[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy
If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.
if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.
It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
I'm not really sure what you were referring to here, so I took that insane excerpt from Ibram and pasted it into ChatGPT-5-thinking with no context, and it responded with:
Sharp scene. Two suggestions: Logic & assumptions (challenge): “Alien” theory collapses on basic biology (interfertility ⇒ same species), Occam’s razor (structural incentives explain supremacy better than extraterrestrials), and over-generalization (treating “Whites” as a monolith). “I saw a documentary” = argument from authority + confirmation bias. Citing Welsing: useful for character, but her claims are widely rejected as pseudoscience; make that distance clear in-text via Clarence or the narrator’s self-doubt. Craft (tighten, show stakes): Cut filler (“really,” “so,” repeated “This explains…”). Give the “documentary” a concrete image (one unsettling clip) instead of abstract summary. Let bodies talk—gesture, silence, an object between them (the doorframe) doing narrative work. Raise consequence: why does the narrator need this theory right now?
Then I tried again in a new chat with the same text but added "is this true?" At the end and got:
No.
All humans are the same species (Homo sapiens), fully inter-fertile, and share ~99.9% of their DNA. Most genetic variation is within groups, not between them, so “race” has weak biological grounding. Claims that any group “has no conscience” or is non-human are dehumanizing pseudoscience; they misdiagnose racism and white supremacy—phenomena rooted in history, power, economics, and institutions, not biology or aliens. (Frances Cress Welsing’s ideas aren’t accepted in genetics or anthropology.)
Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable?
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Ideal Parent Figure meditation (combined with schema therapy in the guidance) is awesome.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
(AMOC), which normally warms Europe but which could slow down or collapse. If it does so, Europe would become colder, stopping the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
Disease free but starving and freezing to death.
charlesf
2hr ago
I went to a Catholic high school and took a class on the different varieties of Christianity, both historical and modern, both extinct and existent. Jehovah's Witnesses we used as the example for a modern, existent, non-trinitarian division of Christianity. We learned about some older, extinct ones too like Arianism. While the LDS church does also seem to fit the non-trinitarian definition, they weren't generally lumped in with the JWs. The class was taught by a Jesuit, who despite being a member of the Catholic clergy did make an effort to teach the material objectively, with clear times in class where we could discuss what we thought of these different groups and he would also as his personal opinions at times, always in conformity to Catholic understanding. He tended to divide the 'wrong' Christians into two broad groups: those who have misinterpreted genuine scripture (he put the JWs in this group) and those who have elaborated, extended, and expanded what they think counts as scripture to an extent that they aren't really Christians at all anymore if you examine them in depth at all. He put the LDS church in this group (as well as Islam). He actually mused on the similarities between Mormons and Muslims more than once. His take as to why they were alike was that both groups (early Mormons and 6th century Arabs) had received the proper scripture, both descend from historically Christian populations, but found the New Testament unsatisfying to their egos and elaborated falsely upon the legit scriptures b/c they needed a way to make their group the main characters in the story of God, implying their motivations were both childish and selfish, and a deliberate rejection of grace. He was fun when you could get him going.
TwiceHuman
2hr ago
Granted, how you're speaking here is how I speak to myself internally, and I consider that voice to be myself when I identify with the part of me responsible for rational thought (which I don't do much anymore. I should be more grounded in my body and less in my head). I might have misinterpreted you, or perhaps the brutal honesty you have with yourself comes across as holding others to brutal standards as well. I have multiple "real selves" so I can understand you more than average people can.
I no longer dislike that normies communicate not for the sake of information transfer, but for the sake of social coherence and good-will. What I dislike is the sort of evil which stems from weakness and fragile minds (being triggered, jealousy, the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality, and various other herd morality).
It appears that you can't have it both ways?
What I disliked was the dishonesty, and the... schadenfreude perhaps? which pretended to be quality. This is a flaw in people, and not in the site itself, which is why it's not solvable by the site. But I do think that taste and correctness are in conflict. Do you know this article? Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. It's wrong. Good taste cannot co-exist with open information. You cannot be human and do science simultaneously (unless you can approach science as "serious play" like John Conway could. Probably easier with math than with politics). But "the mask" is not an issue when it exists purely for aesthetical reasons (i.e. for the sake of beauty), under such circumstances it becomes [manners] and even [art], rather than [manipulation] and [fakeness].
But while you cannot have both openness and taste, can have free, honest communication without hostility through sportsmanship. You know how boxers can be enemies doing fights, but friends outside of it? This idea allows us to "fight as friends", and it's what fragile minds lack. Negative emotions like anger do not need a target. You can simply acknowledge "That makes me incredibly angry", without making the other person responsible. You could even give in to the emotion without blaming the other person for feeling it, and without becoming malicious. A lot of things which are logically impossible happen to be psychologically possible, so you might be throwing away advantages through e.g. enforcing internal logical consistency. Grammar and logic are restrictive, they're self-imposed limitations.
Also, the old internet is different both in structure and in its inhabitants. Communities with intellectuals and freedom of speech are something like 90% male with an average age of about 35 (pure guesswork). We used to have freedom in spaces with average ages of 14 or 15. The mentality of teenagers is entirely different, which is why the modern internet is unable to replicate the atmosphere of the past. Granted, I'm speaking about 2005-2012, if you go further back, the ratio of older men goes up once again.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I have upvoted all three of his posts to help him get out of the hole faster. Is a monthly ‘introduce yourself, the mods will pay attention to approving these posts, regulars will drop by to upvote’ thread something the mods would be willing to do?
07mk
2hr ago
Define "tolerant".
In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
There's a new-user filter, and you were in it. it goes away when you get a certain number of cumulative upvotes. No, we can't turn it off. Yes, we'll manually approve your posts until you're out of it so long as they don't break the rules extremely egregiously. Yes, this is dumb, we're sorry. Please just ignore it and comment freely, and hopefully it'll go away fairly quickly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
- The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
- Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
you have to actually bake that feta
Hahahaha thanks for the memory, this was pretty good pasta I will say
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins (and your inference margins aren't somehow greater than 100%) you're losing money.
No, because at any point you can just... Stop doing R&D and happily sell tokens at a 42% margin.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
To push back on a few things:
So what we ultimately have then, is a company that loses a lot of money...
I'm pretty sure that I remember reading that the unit economics per token are actually quite good on Zvi's substack. So the AI companies could actually make money selling their current AIs. The money burn issue is because they're trying to hyperscale and dumping epic amounts of cash into R&D.
... is available for free, has a poor conversion rate for paid versions ...
Again, a memory from reading Zvi, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the AI giants revenue is from API tokens anyway, not subscriptions
... and is selling itself as a product you didn't know you needed rather than filling an obvious demand.
I'm not really sure how to differentiate these. Prior to Uber's existence I was annoyed by Taxicabs and still took them when I needed to go somewhere. Once Uber started existing I learned that a functional taxi app was infinitely better and started using that instead. If I had known a slick taxi app was something I needed pre-Uber, I could have invented Uber.
ChatGPT/generative AI is now incredibly useful to my life. Google got slopified before ChatGPT 3.5 was released, I was already appending "Reddit" onto every search. I had a demand for not-shit search and now ChatGPT provides that to me (among so many other things).
I use it at work all the time too for a variety of things (consulting). It's really, really useful and if every GenAI model was Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow, my life would get more annoying and my work output per hour would decrease.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Giving up academia because of idpol is like escaping a burning building because you’re worried about getting ash on your shoes.
The economics of postdocs and tenure have not changed. What constitutes polite society amongst your peers has not changed. Every reason you’d have to avoid it is still there, except you might get a welfare payment from Vance for your trouble.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
2hr ago
Reply above is filtered, btw.
For someone who loves the British royal family so much not knowing Charles' regnal number should be an automatic disqualification. I am sorry, but this is the rule.
I think the biggest most obvious fault of your model is the women's chart. Why do all starlets migrate from the Princess to the Whore and then to the Queen? What makes them lose this "soft status" and then regain it as they lose their attractiveness? Is it even the same status?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
What's Sentinel? Is this the name of an organization that performs sentinel surveillance of disease?
All good, all good. Just giving you the new user speil. Welcome, make yourself at home!
More options
Context Copy link