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Gaashk
12hr ago
What is he angry about? Is there an alternative to his current setting that's feasible, and where he wouldn't be angry? Sometimes there isn't, but also sometimes there is. Anger is often meant to spur people into action, to change their circumstances. Teenage boys are often physically stronger than their teachers, and really can't express anger towards them. It will certainly get him fired quickly from many jobs. But, also, the extremely restrictive prison like environment of many schools, where they can't even leave campus for lunch, isn't inevitable.
I went to community college instead of high school -- technically I was "duel enrolled" as a homeschool student, but I wasn't really studying anything in particular other than the college classes. I was angry or shocked a couple of times, so I left, sat under a tree grumping for a while, complained to my parents, and then came back a couple of days later for the next class. As long as I did my work, nobody much cared.
I also taught at an alternative high school in a small town. The teens often just didn't come to class, probably two days a week. If they were angry that day, I wouldn't want them to come to class, they were better off going for a hike in the woods or something.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
Well, you could cut out the middleman and simply secede. Didn't work so well the first time, I'll grant you...
Outright dissolution of the union seems like a bad idea for a lot of reasons. A better plan is to deconstruct federal authority and the institutions from which it springs, such that the states can each have their way within their own borders. "sanctuary city" and "sanctuary state" ideology is an obvious strong movement in this direction, and has been developing for decades now. Flowering defiance of Federal law is a welcome and flourishing development; it cements the norm that federal law is and should be toothless, and it incentivizes those on the other side to do likewise.
If this continues and we are fortunate, the culture war might well be defused as the tribes sort themselves into mutually-exclusive borders and then more or less leave each other alone. An actual de jure breakup of the nation seems to me neither necessary nor wise; who gets the nukes?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
You could, if you were able to point out where it happened.
srf0638
13hr ago
What do you mean by bad epistemics exactly?
His truth-seeking processes are bad. In particular:
-Refuses on principle to engage with disagreement, except maybe of the "fifty Stalins" variety
-Lots of talk about intermediate outcomes but precious bloody little about actual performance
-Confident inference from naive linear regressions on heavily pre-selected populations (as in linked article)
It's not really that bad by the standards of the fitness industry, I guess, but it annoys me coming from someone whose self-presentation makes it seem like he should know better.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
I remember reading the first two books too, it was strange. Who gets misty-eyed about a red desolate wasteland? Bring forth the water!
Also I think that terraforming Mars is a red herring. Are we really short of lebensraum on Earth? Easier to build cities and extract resources in Canada, Antarctica, the deep oceans, Russia, the Sahara.
O'Neill cylinders are also a good option. You can put them anywhere.
Expansion into space should be with a definite, clear objective. What about Mercury, is there not a tonne of solar power there? Should we not put heavy industry there, or perhaps in Lagrange points closer to the sun? There are resources in the asteroids, let's get them. Let's get offworld certainly, advance as a civilization, secure Mars... but only with good reason. The costs must be outweighed by the benefits.
And why assume that we need Mars to be compatible to organic life to be there? It's probably easier to get robotic or otherwise hardened bodies than it is to make Mars a credible place for settlement.
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing. But the true vision can't be sold to the voters and politicians since it's too Nietzschean. Alas I cannot find it.
WandererintheWilderness
13hr ago
If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it.
Well, you could cut out the middleman and simply secede. Didn't work so well the first time, I'll grant you, but, like… if Trump announced some kind of federal split live on air tomorrow, do you really think that ends with a boots-on-the-grounds, millions-dead civil war? Somehow I can't picture that. If it gets anywhere, I'd expect something more like a messy, drawn-out, infrastructure-wrecking, but ultimately-bloodless Brexit-type scenario. Lawfare, not warfare. Who knows how it would end, but starting from your premises, it seems worth a shot.
WandererintheWilderness
13hr ago
Open letters signed as part of UCLA faculty are "part of the job"
No. His job is doing high-level math + teaching it. That is what he's paid for, and his career should only depend on how well and how conscientiously he does that. What he chooses to do with his reputation and credentials is up to him; as long as he is fulfilling those obligations, nothing about his non-math-related behavior should be able to dislodge him.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
Perhaps I was too flippant with the 'There are heaps more' applications for AI. I get this newsletter from alexander kruel almost daily where he gives a tonne of links about what people are using AI for. For example:
Interviewing people in the Phillipines (better than humans apparently). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395709
62% of coders in this survey are using it: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai
76% of doctors are using it: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-reports/some-doctors-are-using-public-generative-ai-tools-chatgpt-clinical-decisions-it
It's thought that the US govt might've decided what tariffs to impose via AI: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203
It goes on and on and on...
I personally used it for proofreading and indeed it can't do all of an editor's job. Editors do lots of highly visual tasks managing how words fit on the page in ways that AI isn't so good at. But it can do some of an editor's job. It can do much of a cartoonist's job (Ben Garrison is in the clear for now with his ultra-wordy cartoons?). I think it's more than fast drunk college student and more than meaningless drivel.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
Oh goodness gracious.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
14hr ago
I get a big improvement in mental state after lifting, but it's after work 3 times a week. I used to improve my mental state by running, but my legs can't handle that and squats at the same time. What could I do on off days/daily?
You could do 30 minute walks and stretching to aid 'active recovery'. You won't get the same buzz as from running, but there will be some mental benefits.
I'm not sure you can. The whole point of goverent grants is fund what the market will not, and thus be distortionary, from a libertarian point of view.
And any libertarian-lite attemot at salvaging this by saying "well, as long as we have government grants, they should be assigned neutrally" runs into the problem of them not having been neutral for decades, and said libertarian not uttering a peep about it, as well as "neutrality" being hard to define in the he context.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
"My own group"? LOL. When this all started I was an atheist libertarian. I'm still a atheist, and in some ways a libertarian -- but I demand my libertarianism pays off in liberty for me and mine, rather than simply being beliefs which require that I let others harm me. Heck, if you think Trump himself is a religious conservative you're way off base. This motley alliance of people who are seeing Trump beat on the institutions and being OK with it was put together, not by the religious right nor by Trump nor even by J.D. Vance. It was put together by the left itself, who has been throwing everyone who disagrees with them into a political pit with various derogatory labels for well over a decade now.
You've been carefully ignoring all the examples of this that have been presented, instead demanding we ignore all that and continue to give them the maximum benefit of the principles they do not hold and did not grant to us. And when that seemed a little much you retreated to the position of invincible ignorance, that we cannot know that we are right and they are wrong, so we shouldn't treat them as if they are wrong. But ignoring those things doesn't make them go away, and a universal argument against knowledge is just sophistry.
WandererintheWilderness
14hr ago
Trump has definitely spoken about cancel culture in terms that clearly pointed to the means themselves as being disgraceful, not just the ends.
We must reclaim our independence from the left’s repressive mandates. Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest list of approved words and phrases, and the ever-more restrictive political decrees. (…) The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it. The far-left wants to coerce you into saying what you know to be FALSE, and scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE. (…) We will appoint prosecutors, judges, and justices who believe in enforcing the LAW – not their own political agenda. We will ensure equal justice for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed. We will uphold your religious liberty, and defend your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
There just isn't a reasonable reading of that speech where he's saying that the "firing, expelling, shaming, humiliating"-style tactics are neutral weapons that he intends to use just as much once he wins. What he told his voters in that speech was "the Left has made a mockery of true freedom and equality; Americans are rightly exhausted by the climate of fear and hypocrisy; vote for me and I will restore true normalcy and freedom, with genuinely de-politicized institutions and true equality before the law". He was definitely not saying "vote for me and I'll fire, expel, shame, terrify, humiliate and drive out anyone who disagrees with me".
Granted, that was 2020 and I don't recall if/whether he made similar statements during the last election. If your point is that he'd already given up on those principles by 2024… I guess I can't disprove that, but that's somewhat besides the point. The point is that he was saying this stuff a few years ago, and I approved of that for all that I've always disagreed with much of his platform, and now he's falling far short of that promise. It isn't that I'm surprised, but I am disappointed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
I would hope others in a rationalist community are aware of how our own biases can impact our perception.
I would hope that others in a rationalist community would, having examined their own biases and framed their efforts in a prudent level of epistemic humility, then proceed on to engage with what evidence is available to them.
How sure are you that you're uniquely immune?
I do not claim to be uniquely immune. I know that I have been wrong in the past, and that biases have played a part in my previous errors. I aim to be less wrong in the future, and I make considerable efforts to minimize my own bias as much as I can.
On the other hand, one way to assess one's understanding of reality is to make predictions about what one thinks is likely to happen next. I think I've done tolerably well at that, and so my confidence in my model has increased over the years. On this topic in particular, I think I have a great deal of reasonably solid evidence at hand to support the conclusions I'm drawing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm entirely deluded. But I've made a considerable effort over a considerable period of time to get as good a picture as possible, and I don't think either is the case.
I've considered the possibilities you've raised, and discarded them as incompatible with my understanding of the best evidence available. I'm open to substantive arguments that I've discarded them prematurely, but that would require something with a bit more to it than you're offering so far. If you would like to see that evidence, by all means let's examine it. But if you're wedded to meta-epistemic doubt for its own sake, after more than a decade of fairly intensive conversation on this subject with a variety of opposites, that doesn't seem like a very fruitful avenue to me. I'm much more interested in trying to get the best picture possible of what happens next.
Biology begs to differ. Or indeed, economics.
Anything that had immediate military applications was specifically depoliticized in the Soviet Union, so that it may be allowed to work. And that's only after they tried the political approach with the military with disastrous results.
They literally had political prisoners do nuclear research, how less politicized can a discipline be in a totalitarian state?
But long term research in anything that did not have specific tangible military results was curtailed by Marxist dogma big time.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14hr ago
Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test
He actually is demanding a loyalty test - but for loyalty to Israel rather than the USA.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14hr ago
Dr. Tao is justified in complaining about the stick and I applaud him for it.
Actually, Dr. Tao signed a letter asking for the stick to be deployed against his classroom. He put his signature on a letter talking about how maths classrooms are actually bastions of white supremacy which need to be dismantled. If he was a principled apolitical actor who just wanted to do his research, then he would be justified in complaining about the stick - but even if we take your criticism seriously and make sure the stick is avoidable if you remain apolitical he still needs to get whacked.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
No, I mean do you think Terence Tao, personally, would endorse MAGA to get more funding?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14hr ago
I ended up coming back.
Not because my work succeeded, but because I couldn't use the time I normally spent on the motte in a terribly productive way anyway (my employer owning the copyright to my offensive motte posts written on the clock is totally fine, my employer owning the copyright to my serious attempt at fiction is not).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14hr ago
I know and see plenty of leftists online who say similar things in the way you're saying now.
If I started beating my wife to the point that she snaps and starts physically assaulting me while holding a gun, am I able to then accuse her of "underdog bias" and talk about how I'm actually the one being attacked when she strikes back? Are you sure she's not just failing to see the ways her own side holds institutional powers/firearms unfairly?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
14hr ago
Moreover, they can't care about it because the people that do care have infinite time to devote to political games
That's just the Iron law of Oligarchy. You will be ruled by people who care about politics more than other things. That's a given. That's how human society works.
But scientists wanted to rule themselves and have influence over policy. So now they get to fight in the mud with the politicians.
You should have stayed benign if you wanted the protection of that status.
Do you really want me to tell you that universities should not exist as such because they are State funded propaganda machines and thus undermine the very foundations of truth seeking by connecting it to power, and thus by their very structure can only be tools of modernist totalitarianism?
We can get into it. But it's off topic. And you don't seem to understand the difference between description and prescription anyways so it's a non starter.
"You can't understand the nature of politics and hold Liberal ideals" is a nonsense argument. Bertrand de Jouvenel exists. My commitment to liberty does not require me to hold any delusions about the necessity for the leader of a coalition to punish his enemies and reward his friends.
Recognizing the nature of the world is only supporting its tragedy in the mind of a child.
WandererintheWilderness
14hr ago
obesity was the result of food science creating hyperpalatability without thinking about whether it was a good idea
While the spread of over-engineered McDonald's-style fast food can't have helped, I don't think "food science" was more than a force multiplier here. There's enough palatable and addictive foodstuffs in nature and traditional recipes to build an obesity crisis. When economic development reaches a level where any idiot can buy as much chocolate and bacon as he can eat, it becomes the natural outcome with or without scientists to formulate ever more addictive forms of mass-produced slop. Sufficiently idle pre-modern noblemen became fat and gouty just fine, living off the most non-processed kind of food imaginable (game hunted from their lands).
But people browsing would only need to read your post once instead of 6 times.
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