domain:forecasting.substack.com
07mk
3hr ago
with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3hr ago
Why should the $25-50B go to Trump? I would think it would go towards the federal budget.
TK-421
3hr ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets.
My apologies, I wasn't trying to ignore you. I considered calling out that many people who rely on OTA for TV and analyzing their alternatives but the original post was already getting long.
The short answer is that I don't care about you and I think others shouldn't either. It's a cost benefit analysis. I acknowledge that many people will lose access to OTA TV. My expectation is that most, 90%+, will be able to substitute the entertainment they get from local TV from any of the others in our modern grab-bag of entertainment distribution. Many are elderly people who will barely notice if the TV at the nursing home is repurposed for streaming. But even if more people are affected than I think I still don't think it's enough to overcome the benefits. I am sorry grandma, your stories are using a common resource that we need for growth.
There are emergency and public notification functions that OTA TV also serves. I think in many cases that information can be disseminated through other means but if there's a very low cost way to keep that or if the buyer of the spectrum can easily provide the service then sure, but it's these kinds of little carve outs and extra requirements for tiny populations that leads to the administrative and contracting bloat we are fighting. Sometimes maintaining backwards compatibility really is too expensive and we should make the change and let market forces solve for the edge cases.
theincompetencetheorist
3hr ago
Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.
I just use it as a reference to the controversy that is in the beginning of it and from someone who is really angry about waffles. It is actually the lack of insight that is the main point of using it.
Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.
It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.
TeknOShEeP
3hr ago
only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different
Yes, 4chan is for my literal shitposting (on my employer's time of course), the motte is for when I am waiting on civilized company. One can have different voices tailored to different environments.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
As I’ll continue to say, if Joe exotic can turn men gay, it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight. This amounts to viewpoint discrimination in therapy, which is mostly garbage anyways.
...Are we suggesting therapeutic meth addiction as a youth therapy?
Its witches all the way down.
Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
Were I in one of these roles that benefit so highly, I personally wouldn't be bragging about how much of my workload is able to be automated.
This is starting to happen in consulting.
All the big consulting firms are crowing about how "AI forward" they are, as they think that is good marketing and brand positioning to clients to show how technologically advanced they are, etc.
It probably is good marketing.
But in a few client meetings now, questions like "so if you're so much more efficient with AI, why are we paying a 7% technology fee?" Or "if your using AI to automate and make your people's time more efficient, can we pay for less time?"
Some of these questions are humourous, some not. But the vibe is building and it's funny to watch. I have a feeling consulting margins are about to start experiencing some pricing pressure as the increase in productivity is turned into margin wars.
TeknOShEeP
3hr ago
These people are laboring under the misapprehension that their voice is so desired other people will follow them to wherever. In reality, no one cares, and it makes no sense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
One of the things I learned in the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco was that I actually didn't understand how the network TV system worked.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
Imagine you're planning a vacation. Your dream vacation is Hawaii; your second choice is Myrtle Beach, but that would only be about half as fun. So you call a travel agent, and find out that you unfortunately don't have enough money for a flight to Hawaii. On the other hand, you could drive to Myrtle Beach, which wouldn't be nearly as expensive. Now suppose the travel agent calls you back and offers you the following proposition: "You can't afford to fly to Hawaii, but I've found a reduced rate ticket that will get you 95% of the way there for only 20% of the full price. Granted, it doesn't quite get you to Hawaii, but isn't getting 95% of your dream vacation better than settling for Myrtle Beach, which is only worth half?"
This is obviously nuts, because getting 95% of the way to Hawaii puts you somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's pretty obvious that if you can't get all the way to Hawaii then you're better off going somewhere else entirely. 80%, or 90%, or whatever of a marketable product is no product at all. 80% autonomous cars are regular cars with fancy cruise control (which is itself only used a small percentage of the time), and 80% of whatever AI is aiming for is fancy, expensive, inefficient Google. And saying you're 80% of the way there is more or less meaningless when it comes to technology investment. It's a vague term that has no bearing on actual numbers; it certainly doesn't mean that you're 80% of the way there time-wise or that you've spent 80% of what's necessary to get to 100%, just as the last 5% of the way to Hawaii costs four times as much as the first 95%.
In 2020, The Information estimated that the AV industry had spent $16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare. OpenAI's recent projections for 2025 predict $7.8 billion in operating losses and a $13.5 billion net loss. One company in one year manages to spend half the money that the entire AV industry spent in a decade. And incidentally, the amount of money spent on AV research has actually gone up since then, yet you admit yourself that the improvements haven't exactly been dramatic.
AI companies want to spend another trillion or so in the next five years. Will it get them to that magic 100% mark where they can actually sell something for a profit? Nobody knows, but if it can't, I'm willing to guess that the industry's proposed solution will be to spend more money. The point I'm trying to make is that the amount of money they want to spend simply does not exist, and even if it did spending it is not justifiable to someone who eventually expects to turn a profit. If the amount being spent were on par with AVs I'd be more optimistic, but it's exponentially larger. There's going to be a point where the funding isn't going to be there, VC firms are going to have to eat their losses, and there will be a bear market in tech investment where AI is practically a dirty word. This isn't like AVs where the amount of money involved is small enough that companies can quietly make small gains that take years rather than months; it's significantly worse.
TeknOShEeP
3hr ago
Lol, they can of course return to twatter. Twatter (as they loudly decry at every opportunity) has virtually no standards or "safety", it basically follows the bare minimum of US law (so no CP or active calls to violence) with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff). There's literally a million people talking shit about Elon and Trump all day every day, the only difference is these comments are not being artificially boosted and have no official seal of approval, so they have to stand on their own merits (which they seldom do).
I am greatly enjoying watching BlueSky descend into a ratfuck, because it reveals the true nature of the people who populate it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3hr ago
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces?
But I already told you that I don’t believe that. It’s actually not required for me to express that belief! At least, nobody has required me to thus far. As I said, the missionaries who spearheaded the process of my baptism are aware that I don’t believe that! It was part of the very first conversation I had with them, before I even went to church with them!
Now, there are things I was asked to affirm in my baptism interview to which I could only answer “yes” given a non-literal interpretation of the question. An example would be, “Do you believe that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith? Do you believe that [current church president] is a prophet of God? What does this mean to you?” Now, the Church does have an official stance on what it means that “the gospel was restored”: because of the Great Apostasy, God revoked the keys of the Holy Priesthood from all earthly churches, until finally providing several otherworldly visions to Joseph Smith in the 1820s and then leading him to discover and translate the plates containing a historical account of Christ’s true teachings to the Nephites. This account shows humanity how to return to the pure gospel and worship practices given to Adam and promulgated among the first generations of human prophets.
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
The church’s concept of “continuing revelation” and its relative youth mean that its theology is still very much being built and codified and refined as we speak. It can respond in a more agile way to emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics, archaeology, and astronomy. It’s not beholden to millennia-old canon. To me, all of that is what I mean when I say that this church is “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ”. Whether or not the golden plates were literally written by ancient Hebrews is irrelevant to me.
When we’re assessing the value of a particular Noble Lie, we have to assess what belief in that lie actually demands of its believers in the here and now. I would argue (and have argued) that the belief in universal human cognitive homogeneity is bad not simply because it’s false, but far more importantly because of the specific object-level beliefs and political actions which it obligates. If somebody agreed with all of my political positions, but did so basically by accident as a result of false-but-useful beliefs, it would be counterproductive for me to try and reason him out of those beliefs.
Furthermore, many Noble Lies have a neutral or even unambiguously positive effect on their believers. For example, let’s say I was actually adopted at birth, but raised to believe that my adoptive parents were my biological parents. Now, we can come up with reasons why knowing the truth might be (or might at some point become) instrumentally valuable for me: perhaps I have some hereditary predispositions toward certain conditions, and knowing my true parentage may help me more effectively navigate my medical decisions; also, if there is some not-insignificant chance that my true parentage will be revealed to me later in life against my will, it would have been better for me to have been made aware of it early and in a gentle way, so as to reduce the feelings of betrayal and identity crisis. That being said, for most adopted individuals, it’s actually far more adaptive and identity-affirming to go their whole lives believing the “lie” rather than to be confronted with the truth.
So, is any given religious belief more like a lie that makes its believers stupider and more evil? Or is it more like a harmless lie that is, on average, equally as — or more adaptive than —knowing the truth? Certainly the religion to which I’m converting does demand some pretty specific object-level beliefs and actions. I happen to think that, with the exception of the prohibition on coffee and tea, the demands it makes of its members all have very clear benefits from a consequentialist perspective, and generally make its believers into better people, with better political beliefs and a better lifestyle, than the alternative. Go peruse /r/Mormon, and especially /r/ExMormon, and you’ll get an idea of the sorts of people who hate the church: the most cynical, MSNBC-brained, Reddit-poisoned people in existence. If those are the church’s enemies, I have to say that I prefer those who have figured out how to live with the Noble Lie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3hr ago
I dunno. I can't speak for every other human alive, but I think I go through my days with a negligible amount of fooling myself involved.
When I do, it's more of a "just one more turn of Civ before I go to bed" thing rather than true self-delusion. I knew I wasn't particularly likely to stick with going to the gym, but it was still positive expected value to try.
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I eat fast-food despite knowing it's bad for me. I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides. Which is all true, at least for me. I'm not crying while pigging out and then telling myself it won't happen again.
Is that really so hard to go through life without lying to yourself? I don't think so. If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me. I have meaning, I have hobbies and friends. I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Acting against one's idealized self-interest is not lying. Having moral failures and being a flawed human being is not lying. Being ignorant is not lying. To lie requires you to know the truth and then deny it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
It's amazing how when you bulk up, a cut feels so good, even if that used to be your pudgy weight.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
Seconding all of this as incredibly true to my experience. If it wasn't for the references to you job being coding, I'd wonder if this was an alt account of mine that I post on while sleep walking.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
I'm on your side. The whole thing feels like a tempest in a teapot. I understand why the NFL fined him, because you can't have that kind of thing happening, but I don't think he's like a bad person or something.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Adjust around it. Build a routine of exercises that don't irritate it, and focus on those for several months.
marinuso
3hr ago
It makes at least a bit of sense to stop supporting a commercial business if they do things you don't like.
Pynewacket
3hr ago
you know, it doesn't make you less admitting when you fucked up and didn't think things through. Torturing logic like you are doing does.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".
Honestly, this also describes most of Singal's work, which is I suspect part of why he's so hated for, as far as I can tell, things like questioning small-n studies that have been embraced broadly with shockingly few published followups now that drastically more data should be available.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
The duties remain, but the actual structure that supported and encouraged performance of those duties have atrophied.
Agreed, and I'd totally support fixing them back up (reactionary Monarchist, here).
That promise has been eroded and replaced with nothing, the duties have no real attachment to any underlying purpose whatsoever, and the previously stableish equilibrium has been wrecked by unpunished defectors.
How can you not expect rebellion at that point?
Because material comfort, electronic distractions, ersatz simulacra of success, etc. dull the rebellious spirits of the youth. Obesity, falling testosterone levels, and psychiatric drugs all suppress it further. Plus, peasant revolts have always failed outside of East Asia, and modern states have (or are gaining) various institutional and technological advantages that make them increasingly rebellion-proof.
Basically, all the same reasons Tyler Cowen gave in Average is Over for why we won't expect rebellion when 80% of the population, rendered economically superfluous by automation, are immiserated and packed into overcrowded favelas to subsist on beans.
They ain't going to fight for a civilization that doesn't at least pretend to work in their favor.
Oh yes. This is indeed a recipe for the collapse of liberal civilization, with basically two possible outcomes depending on how well memetic transmission of modern Western views can be maintained.
I strongly encourage you take a dive with the AI of your choice on the subject. Every layer has deep complexity and I now understand why networks, stations, affiliates, even the bigger entertainment conglomerates are structured the way they are. The technical implementation details are interesting for their own sake but you can really start to see how they dictate a big sector of the economy.
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