domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6hr ago
There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.
Which climate scientists have made a prediction including a date of extinction for the human race, particularly one with a date that currently counts as definitely falsified (presumably in the sense of having already passed)?
magicalkittycat
10hr ago
Throwing up a lot of words as a smokescreen doesn't change that Mamdani's claim was well out-of-bounds.
There are people who have called Elon Musk, who is much pastier in skin color an African American before!
The category "Black or African-American" isn't nearly as ambiguous as "Hispanic", and neither extends to people of Indian ethnicity born in Africa. Historical changes in the meaning of the term "white" don't matter either, because none of them would make a person of Indian ethnicity born in Africa "Black or African-American" either.
If every other category we use for ethnicity and race is fuzzy and ambiguous, how is that not relevant?
This argument still doesn't address the elephant in the room, it is patently obvious that the term "African American" for darker skinned people doesn't make sense when a light skinned person whose family has lived for generations in Africa and practices local traditions does not count when they move to the US but a dark skin person whose family has lived in France for generations and has no African cultural identity does.
If there's a major discrepancy between category and reality, what does that suggest? The problem is categories.
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
Not only is this silly in that it declares government to be the final arbiter and definer of race, it doesn't even work out well when governments themselves disagree on these types of definitions.
Check out the status of groups like the Brazilian or Portuguese Americans for instance.
For the Portuguese, whether or not they are officially Hispanic depends in part on the state they live in.
Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.
Is ethnicity really a concept that is state defined? Does a person's ethnicity really change if they move from California to Florida?
Brazilians are even more confusing, they aren't officially considered Hispanic or Latino either, and yet it seems more than two-thirds of them define their identity that way
This is more people than some traditional Hispanic groups!
In fact, enough Brazilians identified as Latino in 2020 that they would fall in the middle of rankings of U.S. Hispanic or Latino origin groups by size, if they were officially counted as one. In 2020, Brazil would have been the 14th-largest Latino origin group with 416,000 who identified as Latino, ahead of Nicaragua (395,000) and below Venezuela (619,000).
It even changes constantly in this list of racial prerequisite cases on who is determined white
Syrians, Asian Indians and Arabians are both white and not-white. Mexicans btw in the single case for them are white.
Chinese aren't white, but they do get a pass in Jim Crow Era Mississippi to attend the white only schools and join the White Citizens Council so it seems even that isn't fully clear!
magicalkittycat
14hr ago
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk.
We can not expect every single person to have been exposed to everything and culturally absorbed this in their life, especially when it is so unintuitive. Like that XKCD comic that's pretty famous, there are a lot of people out there who don't have or never experienced "everyone knows" situations.
So if your category is unclear and inconsistent, and other more intuitive interpretations clash with the culturally accepted one, then you are inevitably going to land on a bunch of people who use it "wrong".
You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
So he's an African, and he's an American, but he's not an African American? Certainly you can understand how that at face value looks incredibly stupid right?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
It's the same picture. The government won't give up until it has won.
anti_dan
1hr ago
My preferred solution would be a statute of limitations; maybe 3 years for ordinary stuff, 7 years for really bad stuff.
This is the sort of gamification that just encourages the evil doers. 7 Years is already plenty of time to spread around a few anchor babies so the judge will look favorably on you and maybe violate black letter law in your favor.
Barfknuckle
3hr ago
I'll just STFU rather than sit here doing a stupid monkey dance actually explaining how a federal agency is different than a Roman legion, thanks. I forgot the rules forbid not talking like an autistic alien.
cjet79
15hr ago
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
18hr ago
He's gone on record on videos saying he's not African American since he's Indian. We joke about identifying as a Hispanic Trans person on college admission forms and this guy actually did it, unsuccessfully. Not the Trans part.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
Most illegals have stolen SSNs? Where is the evidence for that? I did not see it in this thread.
If solving the illegal immigrant situation entails solving the SSN theft situation, that's even better. "What if all this is wrong and we create a better world for nothing?"
faceh
5hr ago
Might be.
But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.
WandererintheWilderness
9hr ago
This only holds for climate scientists trying to come up with new global models. Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.
(It's the difference between "AI risk researchers" who come up with yet more convoluted thought experiments on how to do timeless bargaining with omniscient gods, and "AI risk researchers" who are actually creating code to interpret and control what's going on inside neural networks. I can see why someone would be fed up with the former, but the latter is actual expert work that needs doing, and - so long as they sub-optimally remain a package deal - justifies the existence of the overall field.)
Barfknuckle
15hr ago
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
Ludicrous comparison. TDS.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
21hr ago
Well, they've gotten better and better over time. I've been using LLMs before they were cool, and we've probably seen between 1-2 OOM reduction in hallucination rates. The bigger they get, the lower the rate. It's not like humans are immune to mistakes, misremembering, or even plain making shit up.
In fact, some recent studies (on now outdated models like Claude 3.6) found zero hallucinations at all in tasks like medical transcription and summarization.
It's a solvable problem, be it through human oversight or the use of other parallel models to check results.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
These scientists continually produce predictions which turn out to be cartoonishly wrong. When they don't come true they just change the date for extinction of the human race and demand more power. Climate science exists for the purpose of pushing a single environmentalist narrative with a single goal(states of nature as close to pre-European colonization as possible) for which they are willing to sacrifice human achievement. I think this goal is stupid, and I'm sure not willing to entertain people wanting to sacrifice human achievement for it. Australian megacats are really cool and a valuable source of scientific knowledge, not a crisis. And if the earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis, either- maybe it'll suck for penguins and polar bears but it'll open more land for settlement and that's good, and there's plenty of animals that aren't penguins.
vorpa-glavo
12hr ago
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
12hr ago
Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
ControlsFreak
18hr ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
No_one
18hr ago
Good, didn't know about this.
Great way to promote ambiguity, though only very naive people will fall for it.
No_one
18hr ago
That's what I am saying.
But the only way to do it is thermonuclear weapons.
20*20 kilotons on Israel would be catastrophic but it'd be survivable for Israel.
It'd not be survivable for Iranian government.
100*400 kilotons would destroy Israel, possibly even partially prevent retaliation.
That's the moment when Iran would have true deterrence and MAD with Israel.
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
Come on. It would suck for far more than "penguins and polar bears". It'll suck for the current balance of worldwide agriculture, it'll suck for coastal population centers, it'll suck for vast swathes of land that are already near the threshold of unlivable, and, oh yes, it'll suck for all the currently temperate areas which will inherit the latter's status as the arid "well, you can eke out a living there, I guess" hell-holes. This is true even if you're correct about global warming opening as much hitherto-frozen land for settlement up north as it will ruin further south. We'd be looking at a major reshuffle in what countries control what kind of territory and resources, which may not favor the West much. (Indeed, odds are it wouldn't: we'd been dealt a good hand already, to the point that some view sheer luck of the draw on Europe's local climate as, if not the secret to Europeans' worldwide success, then at least a crucial prerequisite. We can really only go downhill.)
Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I spoke of "global implications" and why we need climate scientists. I agree that the Earth getting warmer isn't x-risk. But there's far more to whether a crisis is worth averting or mitigating than whether it'll literally wipe out humanity. (Particularly if we're talking about a specific country's incentives rather than Homo Sapiens's as a whole.)
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