domain:putanumonit.com
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
I mean, the preferred solution to "the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running" is generally "whip out a pistol and shoot them", although the numbers you've given are on the edges of that solution's range of optimality.
I will note that in reality, the CPC appears fairly cognisant of the risks, probably would enforce stricter controls than "Openly Evil AI" and "lol we're Meta" (Google and Anthropic are less clear), and might be amenable to an agreed slowdown (there are other nations that won't be and will need to be knocked over, but it's much easier to invade a UAE or a Cayman Islands than it is the PRC).
Also, my P(Doom|no slowdown) is like 0.95-0.97, although there will likely be a fair number of warning shots first (i.e. the "no slowdown" condition implies ignoring those warning shots); to align a neural net you need to be able to solve "what does this code do when run" (because you're checking whether a neural net has properties you want in order to procedurally mess with it, rather than explicitly writing it, and hence to train "doesn't kill me when run" you need to be able to identify "kills me when run" in a way other than "run it and see whether it kills me"), and that's the halting problem (proven unsolvable in the general case, and neural nets don't look to me like enough of a special case).
Schelling points of the online right and occasionaly irrational rationalists.
In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
- Mencius Moldbug
You go online today and you see quite a bit of absurd garbage that is supported by the online right, while they call their left-leaning counterparts out. The catalyst for me was the backlash finasteride got yesterday upon my reactivation of Twitter.
Finasteride is usually taken as a 1 mg oral pill. It is a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor used to successfully treat male pattern baldness in men. Your body's DHT levels change, which is fine if you have gone through puberty successfully. The drug was originally used for men with prostate issues and accidentally ended up being the single most effective intervention for male pattern baldness, even more so than its more potent cousin, dutasteride. The side effects can be quite strong: lower libido, extreme cases of ED, and mood swings; many men need what is called post-finasteride therapy. Right-wing faux masculine bros call for the companies making it to be charged for crimes against humanity. The funny thing is that the number of people who get side effects is close to 2 percent or less, depending on what study you choose. In fact, it is safer and has fewer reported side effects than many medications people take daily. So why are people lining up against a drug that is not just safe but is a damn near modern-day miracle? Nothing can stop male pattern baldness the way it can, so much so that minoxidil, a medication used for promoting regrowth, is useless without it, as you will keep losing more hair than you gain. Hair transplants, by the way, mandate you hop on the same two drugs, if not more, so that you save your remaining hair.
Seed oils are oils extracted from seeds of various plants. They are very cheap, and the fast-food industry uses them a lot because of that. Anyone not living under a rock must have heard reasons not to use them. Butter, ghee, lard, olive oils—all oils with higher amounts of saturated fats—are much better by all accounts; even "stats bro" and "IQ-denying" online bully Nassim Taleb swears by them. Yet the data on this is pretty unfavorable. Now, I am a twig compared to what I wish to be, so I will share what the people over at Barbell Medicine feel, doctors who have really high totals in drug tested powerlifting. They state that every single paper they came across showed that replacing these "better" oils with seed oils produced much better health outcomes.
I use both. I hopped on finasteride three years ago, and my family has been using seed oils since my grandfather's heart attack. I am willing to ditch both if that is the way. Yet, if you press someone on the online right who swears by the benefits of "sun and steel," they would probably state that both might be fine but some have had terrible experiences with both. Hence, the crusade against them at least allows people to not feel alone when they question the validity of what "science" has to say. Plenty of studies, papers, and people are simply incorrect. You will never see a large-scale study that gets public eyeballs which presents group differences as being innate. Hell, the good folks over at ScienceBasedMedicine go out of their way to lie about "science" when it comes to any leftist values. ScienceBasedMedicine is a popular skeptic blog that did its best to be as neutral and was fairly rigorous. Their contributor, Harriet Hall, another person who is not a rabid reactionary, faced scorn for a milktoast review of a milktoast book that states very obvious things about transgenderism. The entire blog went into a lefty purity spiral and has pushed out the kind of stuff you would expect from Jezebel on the issue.
So, the authorities are wrong on a lot of things. The world is indeed run mostly by leftists, and science is just a thing for them to justify their holy cows and why they must not be questioned. People here already know this part, but I try to provide more context for newer "mottizens." This goes deeper, which is why I brought up faux masculinity. War is the ultimate masculine experience, with the ability to exert power being a near equivalent or might even be something that surpasses that. The online right (including me) lacks both. Man wants people with whom he cooperates, to feel like he is a part of a clan, and these memes like seed oil hatred and finasteride fear-mongering are no different from the conservative ones (like living in some ranch with a podcast setup where you talk about guns and Black Rifle Coffee whilst shilling for Israel) or the lefty ones where you deny basic human nature in varying degrees.
You also have a rationalist counterpart for this, which is AI hype, wherein people write literal sci-fi pieces and have a view of AI that people who worked on it mostly did not, and many still don't. Scott Alexander is a great guy; his work is responsible for what we are here. Reading his 2027 piece made me feel a bit odd; the man who posted the most well-thought-out takes on medicine and personally helped many wrote something that is flimsy at best. Gary Marcus wrote a decent critique of it (he can be an asshat but is right here), and 4chan's /g/ largely agreed with it. After all, LLMs have in fact slowed down in terms of progress. Anthropic's CEO has been warning us about AI taking away all jobs in 2 years since 2023 at least, much like self-driving cars. The progress has been remarkable, yet the hype around it is has not paid off till now. Jeremy Howard, who wrote ULMFiT (one of the most important papers in NLP according to many, so much so that transfer learning for ChatGPT was inspired by it), simply laughs at statements about AI taking away all jobs, publicly claiming that we are as far away from ASI or AGI now as we were 20 years ago. I am a novice coder; my friends who do write code usually come out feeling angry when they use LLMs for their coding work, despite being proficient at using DSPy and prompts in general. The average person on this place, or ASC, or LessWrong, has a late 130 IQ, with people who write code making up a big part of the reader base, yet many seem to not want to change their beliefs about what I just listed.
Schelling points are clear to see for an outsider; the weirder they are, the more visible they are to them. Though once you are in a group, your worldview indirectly changes a little to match your clan's. Many hackers in 5-10 years' time would probably admit that the podcasts that host people running firms that make them money would in fact want more hype as they make money from their product. People want to be a part of something; humanity is not an island. I bought plenty of stupid, outright lies during my time working with a co-founder who is clearly in need of psychiatric intervention. I would buy it fully, like I bought the lies of a religious sect before it. The rationalists or the online right are not bad people; these Schelling points are kind of benign. In the case of rationalists, it's not even a point as major as seed oil disrespect among the "bronze age warriors," yet as a person on the fringes of both, it was funny that they would both go to great lengths to keep their holy cows alive. 4chan's /g/ is a toxic place full of bitterness, but their dismissal of the 2027 AI predictions and the amount of belief in our ability to produce synthetic intelligence many on LessWrong believe was not off the mark. I really do like LessWrong's stuff; their pieces on things beyond AI and many on AI are worth reading, and SSC inspired the one place I like visiting on the internet and have benefited a lot from. Yet, I am willing to eat downvotes and get blocked by people for pointing out things that I know are likely false. LLMs may take away all jobs, fin and seed oils might make me a beta soyboy and we may need to accept that singlualrity is upon us, yet I will bet against all of that for now, not because I am a contrarian but because I dont want to blindly accept memes that are probably wrong.
edit - will add links in 20 mminutes
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8hr ago
He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!
Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America, it's not like they'll allow Chinese competition in America. They have one of the world's biggest markets locked down. Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.
The issue with this analysis is that a lot of it is factually incorrect. College grads make more than ever, easily pay back student loans and unemployment is at historic lows.
AI might take jobs in the future that aren't replaced by other jobs, but that is hardly certain and similar worries have existed in the past.
The only thing real here is the housing crisis and fertility decline. I would add mass immigration to that, which doesn't really seem to create much problems in the US in the sense of unemployment, crime, integration and burdening the welfare systems; but regardless causes much contention, while in Europe it seems more of broader and bigger issue.
Finally, solutions have been proposed to all of these issues and they aren't even hard to implement, it's just that the majority doesn't want to. Its like balancing the American budget, it's super easy but people don't want to (raise taxes, cut (mostly elderly) entitlements). Not even populists who say they want to do it want to do it.
The only thing neo-liberalism is actively opposed to fixing and what seems to be it's downfall is immigration.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
8hr ago
@Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
If it works for you, it works. I won't argue.
It's just in my immediate experience that parents trying to get screen-time in while parenting set themselves up for misery. First by conditioning themselves to seek and expect superstimuli when they should be performing their daily duties (I strongly believe that you should be able to get through a day - at least as long as the child is awake - without needing to feed your addictions), secondly by being an example to their children that will teach them to habitually stare at screens, and thirdly by getting their priorities in a jumble: Do you actually need to read that article in the middle of the day? Can it really not wait until the little ones are asleep? Or are you just going easy on yourself? Be honest with yourself on that one.
But still. If it works it works.
JarJarJedi
8hr ago
Hunter was obviously corrupt, but there wasn't a link to Joe.
Right. Joe Biden knew his son is a corrupt degenerate who is selling access to him, and let his business partners, who Joe knew expect benefits from him and pay his son for this, to meet him, but he totally wasn't in on the deal. And this kept repeating for years on and he wasn't even curious about what's up with that. And for some reason Hunter, in private communications, felt the need to falsely complain about having to pay Joe off because he foresaw all of it being published one day and wanted to create a false impression in advance. And also he somehow convinced other people to lie about it, for absolutely no benefit to them. And the partners, getting absolutely no benefits from Joe and actually nothing at all as a return for their money, kept coming back to Hunter for years, and paying him enormous sums, because he was just that good. Because that's how bribes usually work - you give somebody a bribe, he does absolutely nothing for you, you give another one, same thing, and then more and more people come and give you millions of dollars, for nothing at all. Just how dumb do you think one should be to buy it? I'm afraid I can't.
but far worse was the pardon he gave his son
Dated from the date he started dealing with Burisma (and Romanians, and Kazakhs, and Russians, and...). Come on, man. I mean, you can in as deep denial as you want but I feel very uncomfortable being expected to seriously address stuff like this. It's like trying to prove the Nigerian prince doesn't really wants to share his wealth with you. By this point, if you want to believe he is, I really shouldn't.
For the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone were all engaged in a bunch of shady stuff.
That's not what the claim was. The claim wasn't "certain people in Trump campaign did some ''shady stuff''". The claim was Trump personally is a Russian asset, who was in direct and active cooperation with Russia, or as members of Party of Civility and Decency pungently expressed it, "Putin's cock holster". And multiple prominent Democrat figures swore they personally saw ample proof of that, with their own eye. They all brazenly lied of course, there was no such proof in existence (and none of them by the way suffered any consequences for it). Manafort et all may have been a bunch of shady assholes, but the claim wasn't "Trump sometimes hires assholes". That claim would never fly because everybody in politics sometimes hires assholes. Democrat operatives ranks are full of ginormous assholes, as are Republican ones. But the claim was Trump campaign and he personally has been directly collaborating with Russian government - and that was a very specific claim, not some vague ill-defined "shady stuff". And that claim has been completely false, and literally every single person involved in its creation knew it was false from the very start - we now have evidence that describe how this idea to create this claim was originated and who and how produced the whole show. It wasn't some honest mistake that they thought Trump is bad but they got carried away. They created the whole thing on purpose. So please do not motte-and-bailey me here - it wasn't about Manafort's "shady stuff".
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
9hr ago
It might be, but I feel like this theme of naked violence superseding all other concerns is rather universal. It pops up pretty much regardless of time and place. It's in the Iliad and it's in Roman history and it's in Mein Kampf and it's in The Wild Bunch. There may be situations in which it seems out of place, but none in which it truly is out of place. Like the good book says:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
JarJarJedi
9hr ago
Moderna profits from COVID vaccines alone is estimated to be over $20-30 Billion. If their research is as promising as they claim it to be, why they need governmental funding? They have more than enough cash to fund, and I am sure there would be a lot of banks willing to extend them a loan. Why everything in the world must be financed by the US taxpayers?
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
9hr ago
Well crap. It was meant as a reply to https://www.themotte.org/post/2013/smallscale-question-sunday-for-june-1/331790?context=8#context, but I fumbled. I have corrected my error, in so far as any error can ever be corrected.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
9hr ago
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.
TitaniumButterfly
9hr ago
12 Miles Below
Most of the way through book one and yeah it's pretty great. Thanks for the rec.
Oh and wanted to mention that Worth the Candle is in many ways a deconstruction of the genre, so if you're dealing with fatigue it may actually help.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
How was it empirically disproven?
I don't put much trust in brain scan studies so I never bookmarked it, but there's a regular conversation between trans/anti-trans that goes something like:
- Here's a study that shows trans people's brains are literally more similar to the average of the gender they identify with.
- That study has failed to account for sexuality. A follow up that included it as a variable found that cis gay people also have brains more similar to the opposite sex, and that "trans brains" are indistinguishable from "cis gay brains".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
Hunter wanted to make it seem like Joe was in on it so Hunter could plausibly "sell access",
From what I remember he was claiming that to other members of his family (his kids?).
but no money ever made it to Joe.
Was Joe audited?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10hr ago
Hunter wanted to make it seem like Joe was in on it so Hunter could plausibly "sell access", but no money ever made it to Joe. Hunter was obviously corrupt, but there wasn't a link to Joe. Joe even agreeing to make small talk with Hunter's associates was bad no matter how Hunter lied and said they were just his "friends", but far worse was the pardon he gave his son. That's a clear example of corruption. Basically all Presidents have abused the pardon power and it would be better if it was simply abolished outright.
For the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone were all engaged in a bunch of shady stuff. What they were doing was by no means a "pile of pure shit". The issue for Dems is what those individuals did didn't really reach up to Trump.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
1979 is pretty late in the game. If you want a historical case, I'd go with Christine Jorgensen, which was nearly 30 years prior. The thing is even that story contains a significant element of social contafion, as Jorgensen was widely profiled in the media, putting the idea in the American public's awareness, and leading Harry Benjamin (the prior namesake of WPATH) to say "Indeed, Christine, without you, probably none of this would have happened; the grant, my publications, lectures, etc."
but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?
I'm not sure there's anything to explain. There must have been "genuine" cases of Morgellons disease, in that the affected person formed the idea relatively independently, rather than copy-pasting a ready made one from the media, but I don't think it implies they had actual skin parasites.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
and several people under the President were up to no good
Come on. Literally his son met with his business partners in his presence. He also complained privately about having to share with Joe. Sure, there's no fire. The whole family lived off this grift for years, and it's obvious to any non-partisan observer. I mean, why the heck did Burisma paid Hunter, for his artistic talents? What could he deliver to them but the link to his father? Please, live in denial as long as you want, this is really not the case I'm willing to spend any time on, it's just ridiculous by now.
analogous to the Trump-Russia investigation, i.e. there was plenty of smoke,
Nope, in that investigation there was no "smoke" beyond the infamous Steele dossier, which as we know now was wholly manufactured and paid for by Clinton campaign and promoted by the same campaign operatives, either official or de-facto. Trump has some dirt on him (like Trump University, or $TRUMP, or some of other deals which can reasonably raise some eyebrows) but the whole Russia thing is a pile of pure shit. And, as I said, these things eventually come out - we now know who invented this shit, who paid to whom for this shit, who promoted this shit and who operated the whole shit farm. We will, eventually, also know who operated the shit farm and who paid to whom and how much for the Biden RICO family too. Until then, feel free to deny it.
TIRM
11hr ago
send the landlord’s bailiff around to collect taxes with a bullwhip to handle the delinquent serfs
That or a pack of dogs bred to ensure complaince from reluctant taxpayers.
roystgnr
11hr ago
Yeah, that's good consolation. I'm likewise pretty sure that even if I'd cleverly scooped up a thousand bitcoin at $1 I'd just have sold almost all of them at $25.
FarmReadyElephants
11hr ago
I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings.
I definitely wanted to be a girl in some capacity as a child. But that's a desire, not an identity. I didn't "feel like a girl". That would be an incorrect interpretation of the feeling. I agree, someone of one sex cannot have any idea of what it feels like to be the other one.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
11hr ago
This isn't an unreasonable take, but it goes against what Musk is doing now. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill has had a rocky road that has required Trump to help it along, something Trump generally doesn't like doing for legislation. Musk is giving ammo and support to opponents of the bill, and if it fails then Trump will have a lot of egg on his face.
How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.
After more than a decade of masturbating to exclusively trans-porn, I did sometimes experience a "phantom vulva" sensation while masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets. But the power of repeated fantasy is probably enough to do the job on its own for a number of people. Autosuggestion is a hell of a drug.
Personally, I view the trans phenomenon as more of a disorder of desire than identity. The dominant social script confuses desire for identity
Nowadays I don't even masturbate. I just have sex with my wife and I never get any sensations or desires anywhere in the ballpark of this.
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
Okay, here's my prediction: Of the ire Musk directs at the GOP, he focuses it primarily on the MAGA-reluctant or unreliable elements, which will likely be a benefit to the MAGA wing. Likewise, Trump does not use government power to retaliate against Musk, and in fact Musk's companies continue to enjoy government protection and largesse.
The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.
Where sales are also declining, and there's no product on the horizon to reverse the trend. The money was thrown into gimmicks that are either proven abortions like the CyberTruck, or ones that are likely to follow it's fate, like Semi, Robotaxi/Cybercab, or Optimus. No sign of Roadster, that a bunch of people are actually waiting for.
Having the market locked down means nothing. Blues will sooner return to gasoline cars before supporting Musk, and Reds weren't ever that hot on EVs to begin with. He Budweiser'd himself.
This wasn't the case until very recently. Most EV's I see on the road that I see are still Teslas.
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