domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
FtttG
6hr ago
They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
Myths work okayish even if most people do not believe that they are literally true. Most people who partake in the Star Wars subculture do not believe that there was a historical person named Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far away. They still can dress up as wookies and go to conventions or debate minor points of Jedi philosophy online, but they are much less likely to engage in harmful actions than a subculture which believes their myths are literally true.
FtttG
6hr ago
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
Corvos
6hr ago
modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts
Are guns banned in Massachusetts?
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Overzelous knocking down of 'perceived untruths' can produce a lot of collateral damage;
If someone says "those that are found guilty on good evidence should be punished" then that does imply some caution against not punishing the innocent on flimsy evidence. Here, the ideal is clearly not "do not hold any beliefs, for they may be false". If you kick out a true belief A and believe not-A or end up agnostic about A, then your map will match the territory less well than when you started, and this is very much contrary to the spirit of the saying. I mean, it does not even say "reject any beliefs for which on reflection you have insufficient evidence", it only asks you to abandon beliefs which have been proven false.
As a rationalist, I believe that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. A belief which can be destroyed by the truth, i.e. a false belief, will not be a reliable tenant.
Also, no beliefs exist in isolation, they form networks, and a false belief is more likely to prop up another false belief than a true one is.
Now you can carve out an exception for some personal things where the belief has other clear advantages despite being somewhat inaccurate. Believing your partner is a nine when a impartial analysis would determine that they are actually closer to a seven is probably permissible in most cases.
As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.
Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)
I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".
*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.
Shirayuki
6hr ago
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players
What's to say that a "friend" or a "wife" are any less or more a role that somebody is playing?
There's certainly sides of me that a friend of mine would never see.
Shirayuki
7hr ago
Probably true for most people, but I think it speaks to a bug in the human condition more than anything.
It's awfully depressing if the point of building a relationship is to try and fix your inferiority complex...
Tree
7hr ago
The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.
(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)
Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.
Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.
The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.
It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.
I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
I suppose I should say something about Grok.
I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
FtttG
7hr ago
not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
Based Todd.
My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder. There is a happy medium between "excessive emphasis on immutable biological traits" and "denying that immutable biological traits matter at all, in favour of self-identification above all else".
Tree
7hr ago
The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Complete non sequitur.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.
Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.
I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.
“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:
Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
A God-tier shitpost I am memetically compelled to spread due to the worms in my brain:
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning how to do any of that stuff authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this stuff is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little of that technique seems to be available through any online means. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. It's the same for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting techniques (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) aren't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these art forms are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice that most people will be exposed to effectively teaches you how to make Deviantart-level shit or stuff that would sell at a modern art gallery that's a poor front for money laundering. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
I'm not Dase, alas, but I want to say that I was profoundly surprised that Diffusion as a technique even works at all for text generation, at least text that maintains long-term coherence. I'm utterly bamboozled.
sohois
8hr ago
It did not! Impressively, not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
They were a few casualties though like the ominous dark brotherhood entrance being replaced with a boring texture, but pretty minor in the scheme of things
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
8hr ago
Does that mean the Maya were right after all?
Tree
8hr ago
That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
Excellent work as usual Dase. I was sorely tempted to write a K2 post, but I knew you could do it better.
challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here)
I haven't asked it to write something entirely novel, but I have my own shoddy vibes-benchmark. It usually involves taking a chapter from my novel and asking it to imagine it in a style from a different author I like. It's good, but Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at that targeted task, and I've done this dozens of times.
Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop.
Alas, it is fond of the ol' em-dash, but which model isn't. I agree that sycophancy is minimal, and in my opinion, the model is deeply cynical in a manner not seen in any other. I'd almost say it's Russian in outlook. I would have bet money on "this is a model Dase will like".
Meta's AI failure are past comical, and into farce. I've heard that they tried to buy-out Thinking Machines and SSI for billions, but were turned down. Murati is a questionable founder, but I suppose if any stealth startup can speed away underwater towards ASI, it's going to be one run by Ilya. Even then, I'd bet against it succeeding.
I don't know if it's intentional, but it's possible that Zuck's profligity and willingness to throw around megabucks will starve competitors of talent, but I doubt the kind of researcher and engineers at DS or Moonshot would have been a priori deemed worthy.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
pak chooie
Does it have to be a Tesla?
pak chooie
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8hr ago
I mean if you’re doing a female centric hobby and your video content is mostly watched by other women, you might be able to get by with doing that, but even “disembodied hands” videoed will read “woman! Who happens to do X hobby,” when the audience contains more men. Even their voice over the internet, or a chosen screen name in gaming and they become a Woman and thus get treated like an object of desire rather than “just another dude playing an online game.”
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
If it's the AI thread, what do you think about diffusion models for text?
I think the typical English onomatopoeia for spitting is "ptooie" or "ptoo". It has a rather childish connotation, though, and I don't think I've ever seen it used for spitting in disgust. In such a situation, a native Anglophone normally would just write "(spits in disgust)".
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