domain:jessesingal.substack.com
TequilaMockingbird
3m ago
Me from a couple months ago...
Speaking from inside the industry OpenAI hasn't been pushing the bar forward so much as they have been expanding access. To be fair this can be a lucrative buisiness model, Apple became the powerhouse that it is today by making "tech" accessible to non-techies. But Apple was also pretty open about this being thier model. Nobody expected thier Mac to represent the bleeding edge of computing, they expected it to "just work". Contrast this with openAI where they and thier boosters are promising
the moonimminent fully agentic super-intelligence but when you start peeling back the skin you find that the whole thing is a kludgy mess of nested regression engines with serious structural limitations.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4m ago
"The optimal number of in society is not 0" is about tradeoffs; it's not supposed to indicate you make no attempt to reduce X even when there's no cost to doing so.
The "all of them" response is not saying there's a tradeoff, it's not saying the optimal number of dead kids is non-zero; it's rejecting the tradeoff entirely, saying that no number of dead children is worth any gun control. Or would, if you took it literally. What it's actually saying is more like "we reject your framing, and fuck you". Which is much the same as what Fuentes is saying, except that women as a class are more sympathetic than gun grabbers.
twodigits
12m ago
I've been missing sleep and household responsibilities since this was posted trying to find the right words to respond to it, but I think it's time to cut my losses. I appreciate your following up and clarifying your position in the face of the downvotes and dogpiling.
jkf
13m ago
That's not what I'm talking about -- his inputs to the model are an aggregation of polls; he shows you them (for swing states) on the "Silver Bulletin Election Forecast" page.
Since each these is an aggregation of 5-6 polls with a sampling error in the area of +/-3%, the statistical error on Silver's aggregation should be well less than +/- 1% -- the fact that they all ended up more like +3D means that these polls are bad, and if he can't make the correction (due to lack of information, or lack of willingness to call out political bias) he shouldn't be using them.
He even had a framework for this! There was a whole post where he identified the worst herders -- removing these ones from his model would have been trivial, but he didn't do it. Leading to model inputs that were biased ~+3D -- which is the strongest argument that his 'coin flip' EC forecast was in fact a bad prediction -- how could it be a good prediction with such inaccurate input data?
most will just divert the conversation ("that never happens!") instead of biting the bullet
Or in other words, it's just the distaff/Blue counterpart to this.
The optimal number of murdered children in any society is still not 0 (and literally everyone accepts this- abortion is just more direct about it than others); what you're fighting over if you don't accept the argument works the exact same way from "the other" side is merely a question of how high that balance is, which causes are allowed to spend that balance, and for what reason. The pro-gun side's argument is that "complete disarmament would, counterintuitively, lead to more murder"; the pro-abortion side's argument is similarly utilitarian, so is the pro-trans one.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17m ago
I think the next 20 years is going to give us hard evidence on:
- Is civil marriage necessary for society to function / is long term civil marriage actually a huge benefit to spouses and children?
- Is sexual discipline far more valuable (maybe even necessary) than the whole of society has assumed since the late 1960s.
My prediction (which is heavily biased due to my value system): Couples that get married and stay married will become something like a new aristocracy. Generational wealth will literally be as easy as not cheating on your wife. Children with stable two parent households will not only outcompete their peers, but will have a compounding advantage by their age of majority.
Unwed single mothers, especially those who give birth before about 25, will become wards of the state to an even more extreme degree. Sadly, I think that state provided support will become so egregious that a single mother looking to get married would be committing economic suicide outside of finding a literal prince charming who already has the financial resources to subsume paying for everything.
Another way of summing this up; Some part of society will self-select to sexual and mating habits that look like the 1950s, while another, probably larger part will accelerate to poly-orgy levels of libertinism. My assumption is that the former will control an incredibly disproportionate level of wealth and political control. This is all very Matrix-y; The lowerclass in 2045 in America will be face tattooed Zi/Zirs wired into machines 24/7 with a host of pharmacological cocktails coursing through their veins. Sexual gratification options will be nonstop both in advertisement and usage. The upperclass will simply be everyone who can say "No" for a while and unplug.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28m ago
The above is a link to Saving Congress from Itself which is a wonderful book by William F. Buckely's brother. In many ways, he was far more accomplished than his more famous brother.
Anyway, the TLDR is that Congress has to start doing top level only block grants to the state. State's bundle together all of the federal funding requests they have and send it to Washington. Congress votes on a straight YES or NO to providing that funding. If they want to adjust the number, they only adjust the top line number (say from $10bn to $9.5 bn or what have you). There's no ability to say "This $5m slice has to go towards the LGBTQ bike lane in downtown San Antoino." Nope, it's just one, big number.
The result is that states get A LOT more leeway in what and how they spend their money. Also, there would be less bureaucracy as the endless "reports" on the use of funds would vanish. The result of this result is you'd start to see states that are fundamentally run better probably attract citizens from other states. The results of that result (result depth level: 3) is that we'd probably end up seeing even more stark disparities in outcomes. For instance, most of the states with the worst obesity, illiteracy, and high school graduation rates are in the Deep South or are those with sparse populations generally (WV and one of the Dakotas, IIRC). I'd expect this to continue and accelerate with a "Block Grants Only" approach.
But the result of that result (!), I think, would be that some states effectively become giant national parks with almost zero population. West Virginia, for instance, is now a net mortality state, meaning that more people die and leave the state than are born / move into it. Eastern West Virginia, south of the panhandle that includes Martinsburg and Charles Town, is one of the least densely populated places in the country - it's literally up there with Montana and Wyoming in the lower 48.
Would this be a good or bad thing? That's up to you to decide.
marinuso
43m ago
If you really want federalism, the federal government should be made to raise less taxes. Ideally the federal government shouldn't be able to tax citizens directly and should tax only the states. States would raise their own money to e.g. build roads.
Of course that's not really feasible either, not even if everybody really wanted it, because the federal government can print money or get loans from abroad, whereas the states cannot.
wraelk
44m ago
Like everything else unpleasant in society, this is downstream of modern gaming matchmaking.
When you're spending hours in a specific server going back and forth with someone, or playing with your own friends, the behavior isn't bad because you've built up a relationship. It's not a big deal to insult someone because somewhere in the next hour they'll land a good shot on you and can have any bad feeling erased with catharsis at your outraged stream of profanity. And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.
When you're in a skill-based zero-player-choice matchmaking world where you interact with any given person for 20 minutes tops before they disappear into the endless sea of players, there's no time to develop that relationship and it's just a stream of unrelated people yelling awful things at you.
ABigGuy4U
46m ago
For me it was very early, in mid-2022 with the laughable NAFO/Sarah Cirillo/Private Lujan propaganda drive that absolutely failed to get most Americans on board with the Ukraine War.
ABigGuy4U
49m ago
Those types of memes were more popular with the far left, not liberals. The far left has gotten burnt out by the Gaza genocide (as they call it) and the increasingly neoliberal corporate bent of the Democratic Party. The far left is disgusted enough with Democrats that they are no longer willing to take up arms on its behalf, even rhetorically.
benmmurphy
51m ago
don't the pollers have some degree of freedom because they sample based on demographics and not purely random. presumably they use this to perform adjustments. i also assume they poll the chance of the person voting as well and don't just make that number up.
Anecdotally, getting a water flosser device has greatly improved how my mouth and gums feel. I’ve never been a big flosser, have never had a cavity either. But that water pick thing is really nice.
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