domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
hydroacetylene
4m ago
And the backlash against woke is a non-trivial amount of the democrat’s being fairly likely to lose an off year election in New Jersey.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
7m ago
There's two answers to this question.
@The_Nybbler gave one, network effects and prestige make the "Harvard product" non-fungible.
The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.
You'll recognize here the classic structure of oligopolies: make the brand not the product a requirement of policy, and add requirements to production that can't be easily scaled to prevent the entry of competitors. This is usually constructed in terms of "safety" but any excuse is valid so long as you can make sure that becoming a competitor is more expensive than buying you outright.
Social media has this problem too, and here maybe we can find a pattern for how institutional capture could work. Universities are vulnerable because their funding is sourced from the government and government backed loans. Rather than try to redirect the funds to new institutions, you could just turn the spigot off to collapse their value and buy the brand cheap in an austerity drive that allows you to fire 80% of the staff, in particular the political activists.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
10m ago
Hey, I like them! I think he does in fact have a reason to favor dissident right science, because the political environment for the right becomes substantially better when HBD is the universally accepted wisdom with regards to differences in group achievement. The supporters of "woke" were incredibly unpopular with the general public too - that didn't stop them from using academia to change the world.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13m ago
That's not the viewpoint I hold, though I don't blame you for assuming I do, given that I restricted myself to pointing out that addiction/consumption of mindless slop ceases to be remotely as bad when it's arguably no longer slop or mindless.
I'm not a pure hedonist. Far from it. If all I wanted was unlimited pleasure, I'd await the invention of super-heroin or some kind of brain implant that could ensure a perfect nirvana of lotus-consumption. I don't want that. Keep that shit away from me with a gun.
My values are more aligned with a preference utilitarianism that includes complex goals like discovery, creation, and understanding. The problem is that I believe the opportunity for baseline humans to pursue these goals through what we traditionally call "work" is ending.
In other words, as far as I can tell, there will be no meaningful work for baseline humans to do in not very much time. Make-work? Sure, that's always a possibility. I would deeply resent such an imposition, I reserve the right to spend my time in Utopia doing what I care about.
For the people who crave work? I'm not opposed to them seeking out work.
Notice that I specifically mentioned baseline humans. That is an important distinction. The average nag might be rather useless today, but people will pay money for a thoroughbred race horse that can win races. People who wish to remain economically relevant might well need to upgrade their cognition to stand a chance of competing with AGI or ASI, and to an enormous degree to hope to stand a chance. The question of whether there would be anything recognizably human about them at the end of process is an open one.
I have previously noted that I'm an actual transhumanist, and far from content with the limitations of my current form. I have few qualms about uploading my mind into a Matrioshka Brain or an AWS Dyson Swarm Mk. 0.5, and extending my cognitive capabilities. That might let me do something actually useful with my time, if I care to.
What I resent are people who don't care to make such changes, even in theory, and then declaim the fact that they're useless - and worse - want to force the rest of us to dig ditches to accompany them. To think of an analogy today, imagine someone who has ADHD and can't do anything useful, bemoaning the fact that there's nothing they can do. Such a person can pop a stimulant and find that for a relatively low cost, they can be functional and useful. I have ADHD, and I pop the pills. Not because I literally can't achieve anything (thank God it's not that bad), but because I need it to be competitive and actually make something of myself, which I think I have. If you have myopia, then you get glasses, not welfare. If you're congenitally or accidentally blind and we can't fix that, I suppose I can't blame you for asking. If there is no real work, and we can afford to let you do whatever you want, be my guest.
This is why when @2rafa says:
I am increasingly absolutely convinced that a fulfilling post-scarcity world will involve mandatory make-work, not 40 hours a week of fake emailing (ideally), but forced interaction with other human beings, teamwork, shared projects, civic engagement, some kind of social credit to encourage basic politeness and decency even if you don’t need them to survive and so on.
I begin to pull my hair out. That is such an incredibly myopic stance, a nanny-state run-wild, forcing us to waste our time because of a fear that we'll waste it in some other, less aesthetically pleasing way. I call it myopic because I've pointed out that there are clear solutions.
Call me sentimental but if everyone’s going to be living out hyperrealistic fantasies in VR for dopamine for 80 years then I struggle to see why you mightn’t just save the resources and administer them a euphoric fatal heroin dose and be done with it.
I won't call you sentimental, but you're clearly being tyrannical. That's none of our business. The current analogues to wire-heading are awful because they cause clear harm to both the person indulging in them and the rest of us. A heroin addict doesn't have the decency to keep it to themselves.
My central thesis is that we are approaching an event horizon beyond which meaningful, economically relevant work for baseline humans will be an oxymoron. This is a technical prediction and not a value judgment. Once AGI can perform any given cognitive task more effectively and at a lower cost than a person, the economic rationale for most human labor will evaporate. The distinction is crucial. People who want to remain relevant will not be competing against a slightly better human, but against a system capable of outperforming the entire human race on any given metric. The logical path forward in such a scenario is not to try harder without upgrading ourselves, but to try harder after a full overhaul. This leads directly to cognitive enhancement. I agree that "we" (by which I mean the subset of people who want to do anything meaningful) need a solution, but I disagree on what that solution is.
Your reliance on State Paternalism would have us dragging train-autists out of their homes to dig holes and fill them in, and forcing Tumblr fanfic readers to sign up for MFAs and get to work in the mines writing the next Great American Novel. You might be okay with that, I'm not. I trust myself to find something I would be happy to do when I don't have to do anything.
At the end of the day, I find myself in profound disagreement, even as I understand the benevolent impulse to save people from anomie. The proposal appears to be a form of state paternalism that diagnoses a problem of the spirit and tries to solve it with a blunt political instrument. It pathologizes leisure and seeks to enforce a specific, perhaps aesthetically pleasing, vision of a "fulfilling life" onto the entire population. This seems like a cure far worse than the disease.
I ask for tolerance. Not all hobbies have to make sense. Not all hobbies or forms of recreation do, even at present. That's fine. I have no interest in pure wireheading or climbing into a thinly veiled Skinner Box, but I have little interest in stopping others from doing so. There is a drastic difference between disapproving of such behavior, and then enforcing your disapproval through force or the government. The latter is what you're advocating for.
I grew up with many people who already live ‘post scarcity’ lives on account of great inherited wealth and the ones who consume all day are universally less happy than the ones who work, even in high pressure jobs, even though they will inherit more than they could make in a thousand years.
Your observation that many of today's idle rich are unhappy is an interesting data point, but I believe it is a misapplied analogy. It points to a bug in the current version of human psychological firmware, not a fundamental truth about idleness. This wasn't a bug for all of recorded history, and isn't today, but our reward systems are calibrated for a world of scarcity and struggle. The solution is not to recreate artificial scarcity in perpetuity, which is a monstrously inefficient and coercive workaround. The solution is to fix the bug.
That is an engineering problem. That is an artifact of current baseline human cognition and psychology. What sacrifices do you actually have the right to demand people to make, when there is no actual need for such sacrifices?
Finally, a related question for @IGI-111, since you approach this from a religious framework. Many conceptions of Heaven describe it as the ultimate post-scarcity utopia where there is no need for toil. How does you solve the problem of meaning in that context? Is purpose in the afterlife derived from labor, or from a state of contemplation and communion with the divine? If it is the latter, this would suggest that a state of being without work, as we understand it, can in fact be the ultimate good. It's a shame that I have little confidence in the light of God to solve our problems, and I have to settle for arguing for merely technological and engineering solutions to the problems we face down in the dirt.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
14m ago
This months takes feel a little weak to me, maybe it's because I'm starting to outgrow this place. The same happened at LW, my first impressions of that site were good, but then I gradually became able to see flaws in peoples arguments, and now most of the posts on there are simply annoying to read, and none of them blow me away or make me feel like I'm not qualified to read them (a feeling which I happen to enjoy, and actively seek out). My method of evaluation is rather non-standard. I consider a unique and insightful take to be superior to a mediocre, but relevant take. I suppose I also find it frustrating to see people debate a X-year-old issue, with none of the arguments being any better than they were X years ago, especially for large X on issues that I consider "solved".
I used to feel like this, and had a similar path. Eventually I have ended up here and so far haven't found anything better for political discussion. If you find a forum with more high quality political discussion, let me know. I hope it exists, but I'm skeptical.
hydroacetylene
23m ago
But no one likes them. Trump has no reason to favor dissident right science. Their supporters are a negligible group of people who aren’t enthusiastic about him. They are incredibly unpopular with the general public.
Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically,
You misunderstand. It is inarguable that they do in fact have such a right. Nature provides that they do. An insane person can decide to just revolt and kill anybody they perceive as a threat. The world is structured in a way that makes this impossible to totally prevent.
The question that you decide to shift this to here isn't whether this is a natural right, but whether such a natural right ought to be enforced by the government, inasmuch as it doesn't violate other rights.
The idea that this is not a natural right is incoherent with your line of reasoning unless you embrace the Roussean view that there is now essentially no such thing, and that all rights have become civil rights which are provided at will by the State which is now the font of all such things.
The problem you have is that the US was founded specifically in a rejection of this concept and an embrace of the idea that rights are ordained by God, not the State. Under the theory that good government is government that recognizes natural law and aligns itself with the liberties that God provided us as much as it practically can.
You may disagree with this policy, but unlike you are claiming, this is a difference of nature, not of degree. This is why Charlie Kirk said that some gun deaths may be worth it and why his opponents can't fathom how he could say such a thing, because this isn't about some consequential end of State policy, but about the deontological application of natural law.
aqouta
24m ago
Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek
I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.
And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car. Through the Jones act they've killed our ability to ship things between our ports effectively so despite having an incredible gift of natural waterways we send things over land inefficiently. They've prevented port automation raising the cost of all import and exports. The unions are one of several big factors in retarding out ability to build the housing and infrastructure we need as they lobby to pork up bills with guarantees to use over priced union labor in contracts.
Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.
As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance.
I looked into this because I'm always curious for these examples and Singtel is just simply not a state run company. The government does own a lot of it's shares but this isn't really what people mean when they talk about state owned companies. This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.
And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.
There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers. If you want to redistribute income to people who's labor isn't very valuable, and I do support doing this, then you're inescapably subsidizing the firms they are employed by, no way out of it. Hell same for the higher paid employees.
in exchange for no return at all.
you mean besides the tax revenue of course.
And all of this is just distribution blame for the past, take a look at Mamdani for a vision of what leftist populism actually looks like with Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
40m ago
So an obvious way to observe the credibility-burning you're claiming would be Hegseth's unpopularity with the troops, right?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
45m ago
Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.
"OK class, we're going to start with a little exercise. How many of you -- raise your hands -- have parents who are dumb?" (Half the hands go up, with a little laughter). "Now, I don't mean they don't understand you, or can't figure out the new apps on the iPhone 20. I mean really dumb. Like they can't read, or understand compound interest... at least enough to pay for this school" (all the hands go down but one). "Ms. Johnson? Really? By any chance were you adopted?"
"<gasp> How did you know?"
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
54m ago
Incumbent advantage in the university field is extreme. Last prestigious universities to be founded were shortly before the turn of the 20th century (Stanford and the University of Chicago)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Send me a link!
Cirrus
1hr ago
MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
What are you talking about?? Do you honestly expect “the left” to not hit the defect button the instant MAGA-style conservatives are out of power? “Wow, looks like Trump restrained his base from using affirmative action and remaking educational institutions to benefit their side! What a noble precedent—now we will also abandon DEI and uphold Trump’s lofty ideals of meritocratic achievement.”
I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.
Somehow I doubt that too. Also, what does merit mean in academia? A cultural institution so totally dominated by neoliberal progressives that merit can only mean being published in one of their journals, or speaking at one of their conferences, or getting tenure at one of their blue blooded Ivy League schools.
Hey I have an idea: let’s make journalism merit based! We’ll measure merit by how many articles you’ve written for the Epoch Times, or your number of appearances on One America News network!
LazyLongposter
1hr ago
The military (by its own standards) already has a swath of pedo stache looking dudes because it's the only facial hair the system allows. I'd much sooner be in favor of the Canadian "try your facial hair, and if it doesn't look like shit we'll allow it" system. Or none at all, I don't really care. If Hegseth held a principle like you describe, he'd ban all facial hair in the military tomorrow, and also not be covered in tattoo sleeves that make him sound a lot more hypocritical.
The fact is this is another example of the Trump regime using the good will of the voter base (i.e. "please god i'm so sick of neoliberal hell") to make a wildly low-benefit change that burns a ton of that good will.
This is one of the most universally unpopular moves in the military I've seen. Everyone I know regardless of political affiliation is reacting with confusion and annoyance and stress at this change, and all it does is make people think of politics daily, rather than having it be a secondary background thing (apart from force posturing). And when your only concept of "what is the president that is technically my boss doing" is "he's flying a bunch of generals around at huge cost, pomp, and circumstance to talk about how gay beards are, which is going to get a bunch of people around me fired", that's the dominant concept.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
There's actually an even bigger and much more interesting cohort of right wingers trying to do science - HBD, evo psych, etc. I'd put money on them getting in as representatives of the right rather than the creationists. Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
Can you write emojis like "^.^" without feeling extremely uncomfortable?
Yes. ^.^
I want to stay focused on the central issue here rather than turning this into a huge quote reply that nitpicks a bunch of little points. What do you want to be able to say or do here that you're not being allowed to say or do? What "mask" do you feel like you're being forced to wear on TheMotte?
The rules here are relatively lax, all things considered. Outside of maintaining a standard of cordiality, restrictions are minimal. I have fond memories of getting banned from multiple forums in the 00s, so I can assure you that the concept of the moderation of internet discussion forums is not a particularly recent invention.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
It isn't as if "woke" is particularly distinct from creationism. Both ideologies essentially agree on the impact that evolution had on group differences and cognition after all.
Why can't the right-wing create their own universities, or "Antiversities"? And grow them by redirecting the funds from existing universities (NIH, NHS, etc.) while only hiring outside academia.
erwgv3g34
1hr ago
The strongest open source models aren't that far behind the strongest proprietary models; a year or two for LLMs, six months for text to image. You can see several open source models in the LMArena top 20, such as Qwen3, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.5.
Problem is, those models are huge. Qwen3 is 235B, R1 is 685B, K2 is 1T, and GLM 4.5 is 358B. It would cost a fortune to get enough GPUs to have enough VRAM to run such locally.
Your best bet is to rent GPU time from an online company and run the models there.
Cirrus
1hr ago
That would only work if Russell Vought-tier MAGA conservatives had an unbroken hold on the Executive branch for the next 20 years. They won’t. Their policies will be reversed within five seconds of the next Democrat president taking power, or within about six months of a George Bush-tier Republican taking power. Removing funding would require Congressional approval and they won’t get that.
Next best thing is, as 2rafa says, fill the machine with your people. Next best thing is to bloat higher education with new constituencies favorable to your side. That means more funding to ROTC programs, collegiate athletics, and red-tribe-adjacent disciplines like business and engineering.
aqouta
1hr ago
The thing no one seems to be talking about with respect to AI is how the underlying economics of it all are so mind-numbingly bad that a crash is inevitable. I have no idea when this crash is going to happen, but if I had to fathom a guess it will be some time within the next five years. We're talking about a technology that has already burned at least half a trillion dollars and has plans to burn another half trillion with no model for profitability in sight. There's only so long that the flow of venture capital will keep coming before the investors start expecting some kind of return. Add in the fact that Nvidia currently represents about 8% of the total value of the S&P 500 based on sales of graphics cards to a single, unprofitable company, and the economic picture looks even more dire.
Almost every claim in this paragraph is incorrect. Every model Openai has trained was profitable, gpt3 and gpt4 both almost certainly made back their training cost. They are pouring an incredible amount more into R&D of course, but that's kind of the point, the market for this stuff is actually red hot. And I genuinely have no clue why you think NVidia only sells to one company, estimates put the amount of chips sold to microsoft(including openai) at 23% of nvidia sales, google at 12%, amazon at 13%, meta at 11%, and Xai at around 10%.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Agreed. My feeling is that OpenAI is burning through venture capital faster than any company in history. If they are selling inference for more than what it costs them in chip deprecation and electricity, that is only because they have a moat in the form of good models. If they ever decide to stop burning through money to make more powerful models, they will quickly find that without that moat they will only be able to charge the same as any rent-a-chip company.
For the most part, the investors do not care about OpenAI being able to sell anything at a profit in 2025. They are simply purchasing stakes in the ASI race. If OpenAI wins that race and alignment just happens, they will be the nobility under god-emperor Altman. If LLM progress plateaus and the singularity fizzles out, their stock will likely crash like the internet companies in the dot-com bubble.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
I'm talking about Labour movements and politics (i.e. how the modern day Anglosphere Labour parties got started). Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek, and I'm personally glad that I don't work the 12-hour shifts and 6-7 day alternating workweek that private industry would prefer. As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance. And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Well, he said, "The United States should stop with this half ass shit... If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies."
I asked a clarificatory question: "Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?"
His response to this question was: "Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct."
I took that to mean that, yes, his position is as I described it - that the US should either do nothing, or completely annihilate its enemies with nothing in between.
I believe that the point in the Starship Troopers passage, and the metaphor of punishing a baby by cutting its head off, is an effective argument against that position. Sometimes a military should enact a level of destruction that stops somewhere short of "everyone dies" (zoink's words) or "utter destruction" (mine), because the policy goals that a nation might wish to achieve with military action might be, well, something other than complete annihilation of its foes.
Now to his credit zoink seems to back off from his statement and say that he was using bombastic rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure what his actual position is - he rejects the child comparison but concedes he was using extreme rhetoric, but does he concede the actual point of controversy, that is, that some mission profiles call for less than maximum force, and that is desirable for the US military (or any military) to be able to exert controlled force for limited effect? But I stand by what I said as being a reasonable interpretation of what he had said at the time.
Can either of you actually point at some numbers with respect to profitability?
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