domain:alakasa.substack.com
HereAndGone
4m ago
I mean, yep to all that. It reminds me of the case I mentioned recently, where the girlfriend of the "head-to-toe tattooed drug addict samurai sword murderer with crazy eyes and a smirk on his face" guy gave a character reference to the court of how he was a loving and affectionate partner and father.
Yeah, despite all the evidence of reality, some people steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the truth.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10m ago
Are you really comparing becoming president to getting a job as a cop, teacher, or forklift operator?
It absolutely matters for people to have decent lives, but I'm not sure what that has to do with who gets access to the best million women in the country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13m ago
I mean the difference is that the standard you were looking to reach (impress girls at parties, maybe play in a rock band) is very different from the standard of virtuosity that is required to play violin at a level that an ivy league school cares about. The former can be self-taught as a teenager, the latter pretty much requires that one begin formal instruction as a child. The average concert violinist begins instruction between four and six years of age, and by 14 the wheat has been thoroughly separated from the chaff in terms of those with the talent to take it anywhere interesting.
Tiger Moms aren't pressuring their teenage success-daughters to learn guitar so they can found a local version of the Linda Lindas. Though, maybe they should.
HereAndGone
14m ago
a scandal over some adult men emailing legal porn to other adult men
When you're a government worker, you are not supposed to use work email for anything other than work. Even if the porn was legal, doing it at work, during work hours, and using work email, is a firing offence. Even outside of government work, grounds for dismissal include "gross misconduct" and that covers "bringing the organisation into disrepute":
1 Misconduct
Misconduct is conduct that is considered to be unacceptable or inappropriate in the workplace. It is behaviour that falls below acceptable standards, but which is not considered to be serious misconduct. Misconduct can be a single act, or a series of acts. What constitutes misconduct may vary depending on the particular circumstances of the Department/Office and the work that the civil servant is carrying out.
Misconduct can include inappropriate behaviour outside the workplace which has an impact or could reasonably be likely to have an impact within the workplace.
2 Serious Misconduct
Serious misconduct is misconduct which is sufficiently serious to warrant dismissal or other serious sanction. It is a serious breach of the Civil Service rules and procedures, or of recognised and accepted standards and behaviour which results in a breakdown of the relationship of trust and confidence between the Department or Office and the civil servant.
Serious misconduct can also include inappropriate behaviour outside the workplace which has an impact or could reasonably be likely to have an impact within the workplace.
fmaa
19m ago
If your point was that rationalists are deontoligical in practice, why did your first post in this thread express confusion as to why rationalists like the pithy phrase expressing this rule, not a useless utilitarian tautology? 07mk gave the rationalist answer to why prefer the shorter version. I do agree that you shouldn't mistake a moral rule for an argument, though. But it's going to be a popular rule in rationalist and ex-rationalist communities, as they do select for people who highly value epistemic rationality.
___
22m ago
Latinos are largely deracinated
This is not true. Latinos express their race through their nationalities, the same way Europeans did in older times. You don't see a coherent concept of an overarching Race from them for similar reasons that a White European Identity would have been strange to a European commoner in 1600 - "I am French, what do you mean?"
The Latinx and La Raza stuff is a failed effort to force a singular Hispanic Identity by woke types, but that doesn't mean they don't share a common identity or that one won't form more naturally on it's own as they become a larger and larger cultural block. Younger hispanic kids, IME, do see themselves an being in an ingroup opposed to everyone else, despite longstanding hostilities between some of their origin countries.
WhiningCoil
22m ago
Man, somebody's fucking phone was listening in on my conversations, because Facebook has been shoving balance bike ads into my feed up the wazoo. Jokes on them, my daughter doesn't need one anymore!
HereAndGone
22m ago
Reading the link, it looks like McCaffery wasn't dinged just over the inappropriate emails, but there were accusations of corruption as well. Maybe they couldn't prove the corruption stuff, so the emails were their version of "Al Capone was convicted for tax evasion".
thejdizzler
24m ago
I used the I Ching a lot in college. I didn't really use either of them for straight up prediction very much but I've found that Tarot seems to help me psychoanalyze a lot more because it has greater symbolic resonance for whatever reason.
Not American myself and often I find myself thinking 'Americans should try living with real incomes actually declining for a few years before doomposting online.' Despite many problems, the US has been able to sustain productivity growth where Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia have failed. Productivity is everything in the long run. You can buy or build your way out of just about any problem.
See the chart here. All the rich countries have been self-sabotaging much worse than the US: https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1945588810898620786
But also there's a certain level of dopeyness in US leadership: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers
Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.
The other democracies also are slack to a certain extent, often a greater level, there's malaise and pointless bungling. But this still seems pretty bad. How do you plan on beating (or even deterring) China, a vastly larger country with enormous depths of talent and ludicrous levels of industrialization? You have to fight smart, you have to be wise and judicious.
"We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell."
US govt doesn't seem that smart. Plenty of smart people in America but perhaps not enough and surely not enough in the right places. There is or perhaps was an entire Discourse about the need to keep the all-important AI weights secret from Chinese spies. The concern was that private companies like OpenAI or Google were nowhere near the level of cybersecurity needed to combat state actors, they needed urgent government assistance and targeted industrial policy to support them. But this idea assumes the US is capable of keeping secrets, or of maintaining a major lead in AI, or actually implementing good plans correctly. But this 'doing things correctly' skill just doesn't seem to be there - military procurement, infrastructure buildout, fighting drugs, countering crime, tariffs, industrial policy...
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
28m ago
Have you compared it against I Ching? Which one has better predictive power?
georgioz
28m ago
But the indirect epistemic consequences are devastating
The consequences are devastating for what? Some cosmic sense of justice and rightness? As long as consequences are beneficial for utility, then lies are absolutely okay for utilitarians. Are they not? Of course you may argue that a specific lie is detrimental to utility, but then it is not my argument. Go and find some utility improving lie as an example, and defend destroying that one from utilitarian standpoint.
georgioz
32m ago
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
Or lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly, especially if they have some sort of bias. Is it not the whole point of rationalist thinking - Overcomening Bias? If a white lie can do that, then it will increase utility and general good.
Truth and utility are different concepts that are independent of each other - rationalist could say that they if they are not exactly orthogonal, they are at least at some steep angle to each other. I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument - are they not supposed to be impersonal calculators? If Yudkowsky calculated that spewing lie after lie for the rest of his life will enable humanity to align the AI, he would 100% do it to usher his utopia. Would he not?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
34m ago
Plenty of Indians and Pakistanis own and/or run the convenience stores here too, hence the Apu character on the Simpsons; Koreans doing it are a local thing in some areas.
WhiningCoil
34m ago
governed like a radical
Well... somebody governed like a radical. Jury is still out on who.
HereAndGone
35m ago
It wasn’t normal that he rigged his rooms with videographic equipment.
Quite apart from the crimes, it seems that Epstein was himself a pervert. Getting sex tapes of celebs seems exactly like something he'd do. And then we factor in the blackmail angle, which every pimp and madam (it seems) uses as insurance policy, save for the very few who maintain discretion even after arrest. Isn't this what the entire furore over the "Epstein list" and whether it exists or not is about?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
37m ago
You're mixing things up a bit; the depressed places don't have the high housing prices and until the next advance of the progressives, we're still America where even (or especially!) the poor eat meat.
But you see the difference between:
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Gender: F.
and
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Auxiliary Note: Transexual / Female-identifying
right? Regardless of whether you agree with the latter.
In short, there is a difference between 'female' and 'female-identifying'. One is a reified claim about what someone is, one is a note about their beliefs.
HereAndGone
43m ago
more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything
I think that is the way for the economy to survive, instead of emulating Japan which in the 80s was the Coming Economic Global Superpower (remember the movies about Japanese companies buying up America?) but look at where it is today.
zeke5123a
45m ago
There are literally professional athletes who only started their sports a few years before they went pro. Of course, they are largely massive physical specimens.
Similarly, there can be some degree of cross training due to playing multiple sports. For example, soccer (barely a sport) does teach foot eye coordination. This is helpful for hockey (a real sport) since you sometimes need the puck to go skate to stick.
Sure, I agree. Which is exactly my point. Rationalists are deontological cult of reason with a lot of let's say idiosyncracies. I just noted that they love this Sagan's quip and cite it quite often as some kind of mantra. I do not deny its utility for their ideology, but it is still a little bit cringey in many contexts. It is equivalent to some religious believer just writing that Jesus the way, the truth, and the life randomly in the middle of some argument about healthcare or whatnot - exactly like the OP of this thread felt the need to write the sentence as part of his argument.
Actually I think it is even worse for rationalists. The religious believers are mostly self aware to the extent, that they do understand that it is a religious statement and that nonbelievers or Muslims etc. will disagree. Rationalists can sometimes forget that it is just a mantra with symbolic meaning, and they may take it too literally - as if it is actually a good argument to present in a debate.
zeke5123a
47m ago
Maybe there’s a difference but I learned guitar after 12 (largely because I noticed girls liked the guy who played guitar).
"Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc
That's basically easy, if you're seeing her every few days at communal social events and you've known each other all your lives and everyone of both genders agree that men are supposed to be persistent. Embarrassing, yes, but not that embarrassing.
Today, lots of men know few or no women, and are taught from birth that anything more than a very indirect one-time-only approach is sexual harassment. I am a perfectly well-adjusted adult and yet I haven't spoken to a women who wasn't a friend's wife for months. When the bar is so very much higher, it's no surprise that people seek easy alternatives.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.
Yeah, but despite the best efforts of the government, there is not going to be "100% of this year's graduating student body from high school are going to an Ivy". For the vast majority, having a summer job of some sort is beneficial, and for a lot of kids, a 'manual labour' job that Alexander is sneering at is the kind of work they will eventually, in some form, end up doing; if you're going to do a pink collar/lower level white collar job that deals with the public, for instance. If you end up working a lower level government job taking in and processing application forms from 'clients/customers' as the new terminology favours, then by God having worked in retail or some other public-facing job will be a great preparation for how dumb/frustrating/'how on earth did they not fill this in right?' that work can be. It'll also give you an opportunity to learn how to fake the Customer Service Smile when dealing with unreasonable demands from the public and your superiors.
From the little I've seen of stories like this, it seems to go: "hospital hits you with incredibly huge bill, you go "nope", the insurance company goes "nope" and you get on to the special department the hospital has to negotiate "okay let's pay something reasonable", and only the honest and bewildered try to pay the incredibly huge bill" as hospitals will try and charge you for everything with the expectation that "nobody will really pay this, it's haggling time".
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