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I think this is probably more accurate, and really of society as a whole. The dominant position seems to be “if you didn’t get college credit, it doesn’t count.” I get it for job skills, as college credits and degrees mean someone verified that you actually did the work. It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time. Instead, I’d have him write on substack or some other blogging platform and learn to communicate with an audience. Same with art. There’s enough instruction out there that you could learn the techniques of your chosen medium, and the rest is down to practice and getting feedback. But it seems like so many people want to get those kinds of degrees even when they don’t make sense.

But our society somehow bought the university marketing that told them that only learning something in a university classroom taught by a TA who has 500 students a day counts. If I pass a course on WW2 history, that counts as learning history. If I read every book I can get my hands on for that topic, read first hand accounts, looked at raw footage, etc. it doesn’t. Problem being that I’ve actually done a lot more work than the kid sleeping through their lectures in Turner Hall. And unlike him, I’ve actually done all the reading.

Depends on the Asians, I know the stereotype of Indians/Pakistanis in the British Isles is "own the corner shop" (to the point where a 90s band named themselves that, their big hit) and for Chinese people it's "run the local takeaway".

In the US I suppose it's "Indians and Chinese work in IT, Koreans own the corner shops"?

Tokens aren't everything. While you can fit an entire novel inside the theoretical token window of an LLM, that doesn't leave it much room to do detailed and coherent output, especially as your requests become more detailed.

As for epubs, yeah, one of the steps in my app is being able to read from docx and epub files and extract context from chapter headings, for example.

Most automatic epub generation tools suck. For that matter, I have seen professional published epubs that are just terrible slapped-together artifacts. I taught myself to make properly formatted ebooks using Sigil and I'd make a business of it except it wouldn't pay shit (too many people offering to do it on Fiverr for ten bucks).

The celebrities aren’t the big deal to me. If a foreign country was involved in using Epstein to gather intelligence and to blackmail, then the public should know that. If the foreign country is so influential that they can do that without ever facing repercussions, then the public should definitely know that so they can change their priorities accordingly.

As the child of two undocile people, it’s because in a two-person system with no rank or higher outside authority, such people rip each other apart the moment they have a real, serious conflict. Temperamentally neither is equipped to back down gracefully or elicit sympathy from the other, so the relationship ends up either in prolonged turf war or divorce.

That’s not to say you should be marrying a cocker-spaniel instead of a woman, just that if you find yourself a male born with an undocile temperament (many such cases!) your relationship is going to do a lot better with a laid-back girl than with a spitfire or a girlboss.

The opposite scenario is also true, but proportionally less likely for biological reasons.

On a broader case, I think this extends to a principle that we can encourage women to be assertive OR have a tradition of equal, gender-neutral gender roles, but not both.

I mean, yes you improve past age 12, but if I started violin at 6-7 and you start at 13-14, I have somewhere between 6-8 years of practice ahead of anything you could do in the time between 14-18 and I will be much better than you. It’s that way with sports. If you want to have a chance of playing high school sports, you have to be playing select sports by 8 because otherwise you’ll not get enough quality practice to compete with those who did.

I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.

Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:

the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools

I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!

there's no reason to make him work manual labor because some conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."

It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!

Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")

You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.

"it's not about ideology, the bad (incorrect) term is polluting our data" seems pretty good

The problem is not the change per se. The wokes, the medical establishment and MAGA would agree that a column which tracks sex-assigned-at-birth should rather be labeled "sex" (with the wokes probably prefering "SAAB") than "gender". This is why this is such a non-story.

But I will not pretend that the thought process of whoever was doing the change was "oh no, if the Trump administration sees this, they will get really mad, because they really care about scientific accuracy. Remember what happened when someone confused atoms and ions in a grant application?" The thought process was more like "Trump clearly sees the word gender as the language of the political enemy, better remove it asap."

we are talking about a medical database here, peoples' sex is actually a thing that matters; gender not so much

Arguably, it depends. If I want to study breast cancer, then I likely want to select "people with boobs", which might be more closely related to gender than sex-assigned-at-birth. Ideally, I would use both columns and select for cis-women (or cis-men). (If the database contains detailed info on gender related medical interventions, I guess studying trans people might be a possibility as well.)

Thé average marriage age for urban women inside the Hajnal line in Northern Europe was much younger than today; it was also not in the teens. Early-mid twenties as opposed to late twenties.

Now marriage in the teens also does not seem to have been seen as sharply negatively as it is today, either- the average age at marriage drops in American colonists, for example, and those were fine, upstanding citizens who happened to have much better economic opportunities much sooner. And while not Saudi Arabia women faced substantial legal disabilities; they worked but there was restrictions on profession, pay might be legally required to be less than male employees, they didn’t have full control of their finances, etc.

Theta gang.

If only nothing ever happened...

God is inherently interesting and doesn't need us to make Him anything. Eventually more and more people will be broken by the dopamine treadmill and will come back to God, as I have. Happens every day.

It may not necessarily happen immediately, I'd imagine this will play out over a large time scale as it often does. But the wages of sin are death, especially on a societal scale.

It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.

The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.

I am familiar, I the Jesus Prayer and occasionally prayer beads. I still think meditation in the Buddhist view is more flexible and able to look into different things, such as focusing attention on the body, or the breath, areas and objects of attention which are useful in the Christian path.

Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.

In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.

Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.

what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men?

All men can't earn above average (or whatever percentile $60k is) wage in the way that all women could have less than 5 lifetime partners. If they did, it wouldn't be above average anymore and the buying power of that money would be lower.

Man, having kids is magical. Getting to see the first time a human decides to take responsibility for their own skill and proficiency is an unmatched feeling.

I took a more passive-aggressive approach. We live in a neighborhood with a ton of kids. While pulling my oldest around in a trailer, I pointed out the 3-year-old girls pedaling on their own without training wheels (admittedly rare and Asian) and that he was older, so he should be able to do it.

A week later he was up without training wheels, and the week after he was pedaling a 12-mile round trip.

Now to get his younger sibling to do the same...

many centers of high economic and industrial development

So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap serf immigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!

I could well see that happening.

I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her.

I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.

I think that the sentence is generally more understood to express a preference for true beliefs for oneself and in cooperative settings. "Of course I told the Gestapo where the Jews were hiding, and destroyed them with the truth" is very much not a standard interpretation. Nor is there an imperative to destroy any respect your coworker might have for you by blurting "whenever I see you I fantasize about your tits". Same for consumer service.

Nor is it imperative to rub the truth into the face of an unappreciative audience. A religious person is very likely already aware of the fact that agnostic atheism is a thing. Telling them they are wrong once a day is not helpful.

A better example of a seemingly benign untruth might be homeopathy. Obviously it is bollocks. But the placebo effect is real, and larger if the patient is not aware of the fact that they are getting a placebo. So from a utilitarian perspective, it might seem beneficial to let your community believe some horseshite if it improves their health outcomes, and as long as you consider only direct effects, this might even be true (if you outlaw homeopathic "cures" for cancer and the like).

But the indirect epistemic consequences are devastating. "You know that orthodox medicine is wrong to deny homeopathy, why should you believe them if they claim that vaccines do not cause autism? Or why should you believe some adjacent ivory tower autofellating scientists that climate change is a thing?"

Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.

And yet here we are.

Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.

Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.

Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.

But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.

Here's Yudkovsky saying exactly that (but worse and with more words, as is his style). A common rationalist stance is that utilitarianism is what's correct, but deontology is what works for humans.

I would consider that they might like being dirt poor and maidenless even less than being maidenless yet having other creature comforts. Especially if/when the state catches on and removes the social safety nets that currently make being dirt poor more tolerable than it had been at olden times.

Theta gang.

Other people do predictions all wrong.

Step one: they feel a slight change in temperature . Maybe they think polarization has increased, or atomization, resource use, artificial intelligence, immigrant problems, low TFR , etc. Could just be a vague feeling of unease with the way things are going.

Step two: they extrapolate that one thing to hell. So if you want a picture want the world in a hundred years, just delta times a hundred, aaaand you’re done. So one guy predicts the earth will be boiling, the other guy predicts total wireheading, another a 1000 IQ machine god, another complete resource depletion, another constant civil wars, yet another a zero point zero fertility rate, or a 99% amish population.

Why all the doomers are wrong:

Step One: It’s a very limited, myopic view. There’s a lot of randomness in the world. Where you are likely experiences some rate of temperature rise that is not typical. Some of the delta is pure gut feeling, nothing solid. There’s a lack of absolute assessment of the situation on a larger timescale. Are we as polarized as catholics and protestants in the religious wars? No, we’re very far from that.

Two: All the predictions are mostly contradictory, they refute each other, even though they may look like a sure-thing syllogism when looked at individually. The system is full of negative feedback loops that stop the simple extrapolation of even correctly identified trends. If a thing causes problems, the thing will eventually be limited, the problems mitigated.

Some of the arguments just look like an excuse to give up: they force this binary we’re screwed/we’re not screwed which doesn’t actually tell us anything . Even some of the worst ‘we’re screwed’ future scenarios they come up with would just be comparable to situations humanity already went through (civil wars, vast migrations, losing your home, starving poverty), and those people didn’t give up either. And that’s a small likelyhood. So chill and grill. Without forgetting to participate in the negative feedback loop of stopping the problems.

I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism.

If you are the Czar and you're the only one who needs to be a utilitarian, sure. If you need there to be lots of utilitarians, then assuming some commonality of interests lies are terrible because they cause people to calculate utility incorrectly. All moral systems are somewhat sensitive to false information, of course, but utilitarianism is particularly and notoriously so.