domain:worksinprogress.co
non_radical_centrist
4m ago
No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point.
I think everyone would prefer if those illegal immigrants were legal immigrants, but there are some people who's order of preferences are legal immigratns > illegal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants, and some people who are fewer/no immigrants > legal immigrants > illegal immigrants.
jeroboam
4m ago
Wait, 24% of UCLA med school admittees are black !?
Blacks are 14% of the national population, and like 6% of California's population. What is going here? Those numbers can't be right, can they?
jeroboam
6m ago
Welcome to epistemological hell.
When LLMs become the default store of knowledge, forbidden information will become even more difficult to find than it is now.
roystgnr
7m ago
Slave imports fell off a cliff in 1809
1808, surely? Or was there a year or two of significant smuggling in between the de jure and the de facto end of the slave imports?
jeroboam
8m ago
Wow, I did not know about that. Yikes. Poor Martin Luther King getting all the worst stuff named after him.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11m ago
Could the headaches be caffeine withdrawal?
I'm with you in general. Americans overconsume health care to a ridiculous degree. I pretty much never see the doctor, just as I don't take my car into the dealership for a "routine checkup".
The reasons for the increase in life expectancy from 1900–present have little to do with doctors, and everything to do with public sanitation and vaccines.
But still, when I do access medical care, I can pretty easily tell the difference between the doctors who are quite intelligent and the midwits who also populate the field. The bar to cross is not THAT high, and medical errors kill untold numbers each year. Diagnosis in particular is not always easy and I don't think there's a skill ceiling. A higher IQ is always going to be better.
dr_analog
razorboy
12m ago
Well, if they fail in Ukraine because the West pours in more support and repels them it's not exactly guaranteed that they would stop at the borders of Ukraine 2013 is it? What's to stop them from continuing their march into Belgorod or the rest of Russia? Russia's elites can just sit around and say "eh probably not going to happen" but are they 100% certain?
ResoluteRaven
13m ago
You'd be surprised how quickly this is changing. Most East Asian cities these days are full of Southeast Asian and Indian immigrants, and mixed-race children are approaching double digit percentages of the next generation. While the locals are still much more anti-immigrant than in any Western country, the path from where they are to where we are seems pretty clear and they are only a few decades behind us. The Japanese of today let in immigrants out of perceived economic necessity, just as pagan kings accepted baptism for political reasons, but their children and grandchildren will be true believers.
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
Throwaway05
16m ago
I once saw an interview with a bunch of (young) Japanese women where said women expressed they wouldn't mind if a partner went to a brothel but they'd get very upset if the partner went to a Hostess Club.
Who knows.
fartVader
17m ago
Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
This shows a shallow understanding of the US immigration system.
Here are the common ways you can get a visa -> green card -> citizenship:
- Illegal immigration -> anchor baby -> wait 25 years -> Green card (400k? closest thing to stats)
- Refugees (150k/yr) (relatively low by historic standards)
- Lottery (50k/yr) (constant number since 1995.)
- High skilled visas -> green card (Green card sponsorship is rare unless you're making 6 figures) (300k/year)
- Marriage and minor dependents (600k/yr)
So which of these do you disapprove of, how much lower should each of them be ?
No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point. The rest seem to be more so about identifying legitimate cause (actual marraige, real refugees, real need for immigrant labor) than the nature of the visa itself.
SlowBoy
26m ago
The government pays tax dollars to NGO charities that coach migrants on how to apply for asylum. The government pays tax dollars to buy plane tickets for migrants and put them up in hotel rooms or other temporary shelters. Squeeze these programs a little bit and the flow stops.
Living on welfare in the United States is a miserable experience.
It's clearly better than what they got at home!
It's written in the rules that the mods will try to respect user sentiment, so user opinion of moderation is actually useful information. Also, consensus-building is most harmful against other users; in the case of mods, it is easily offset by mod powers. The point of the rule is to prevent users from suppressing views they disagree with, and he has no power to suppress mod actions.
It would be pretty cool if people stopped trying to fight the refs and just accepted that we're trying to maintain a system that actively does not want to exist, especially given that that forks with variant moderation have in fact been tried and have not gone well. Unfortunately that is never, ever going to happen.
The bribe attempt was in fact pretty funny, though.
4doorsmorewhores
27m ago
We have correctly and broadly recognized that you can impersonate someone by using someone else's voice. This is the Siri equivalent of hiring a 55 year old teacher who just happens to be named Taylor Swift to endorse your brand of makeup
Here's when a snack company did the same thing to Tom Waits:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications/waits.html
WhiningCoil
36m ago
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials.
That's the old way of thinking under how things used to be. They are no longer that way, and how people think about it will change.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
40m ago
no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials
Maybe not for their general practitioner or dermatologist or whatever. But if you get cancer or need brain surgery or something, then people care about the credentials of their oncologist or surgeon.
Borzivoj
45m ago
I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis
SSCReader
58m ago
Eh, if being downvoted bothered me, I'd have been gone years ago. I'm content that most people here wouldn't actually be mowing down protestors.
vpn
1hr ago
Just tested, and this works great! Thanks faul_sname and george_e_hale!
Although, just speaking for myself, I'd argue the default is too small for the average logged out reader (or someone who doesn't want to bother with custom css). I still suspect this is some kind of weird bug, because while the font sizes look standard and comparable across this site, Reddit, and Scott's blog on desktop, on mobile (at least on Android), the font for this site looks particularly tiny compared to the others.
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
Aaron Bushnell is already out of the public consciousness and his actions did not have the impact he was hoping for.
I will agree that he at least had the conviction to do something, as stupid as it was. Stupid in the sense that it did very little to push his supposed cause of freeing Palestine.
I drafted a post of around 3700 words about Bushnell the week he self-immolated looking into the history of self-immolation and its most prominent and impactful examples and how Bushnell's action relates to it but I never posted it because I never finished it as I got busy and now it's not a relevant event anymore. My prediction was that it would have little to no impact on the public discourse or opinion on Palestine and I think so far that prediction has held true. His actions, in the end, were just a minor net negative outcome to the world. Maybe we might see something happen. But probably not.
I'm actually in agreement with you that the willingness to fight for a cause is something many people lack, and if applied properly can be an admirable quality in a person. The difference between the colonists rebelling in the late 1700s versus a vegan protestor blocking the road on the streets is that the colonists were fighting for a cause a large portion of the population itself cared for, and the colonist was actually putting his life in danger by engaging in literal warfare (or standing up to actual British soldiers pointing guns in the case of the Boston massacre).
The goal of the protestors should be to get people to join your cause so you get the desired end result you want. If someone is going to be a public nuisance to protest for a cause, at least have it be a cause that people actually care about. Otherwise, all it does is make people hate the cause. It's worse than just screaming on the internet or even doing nothing, now you have people who actively go against the cause you want to advocate for. The protests over insignificant things in a manner detrimental to the public is why these discussions are happening in the first place. I think there are a lot of people who say they are against roadblocks as a form of protest but would be willing to condone or at least not be vocal in opposing it as a tactic if it was an issue of enough public importance and significance that it impacted them. But the point is that it's not, these protests in America have been about climate change, veganism, Palestine... all things that ultimately don't matter to your day-to-day American citizen.
Too many of these protests over insignificant things and society will decide it's enough and find a way to just stop them outright. I think I can agree with you that protests can serve a cause and push society in a better direction... but it needs to be used for things that people care about, and in a manner that impacts the people that can make actual decisions. Blocking roads is actively detrimental to a cause, if these people want to protest they should pick a more effective tactic.
Stellula
1hr ago
Yes. But that is not what OpenAI did. They hired a completely different real human being a trained an AI model on her voice.
I don’t care about immigrants one way or another at an emotional level and don’t have a strong opinion at a rational level. But everyone, always, everywhere, hates competition in the absence of strong countervailing factors. Some degree of hostility is virtually inevitable. Ways that tensions can be reduced, with historical examples: -receiving population is self-consciously hurting for warm bodies (steppe nomad confederations tending to accept any and all willing dwellers in felt tents, the widespread North American Indian practice of ‘adopting’ war captives as full tribe members, competing ethnonationalists courting ethnically ambiguous populations (I’m most familiar with Silesians, Masurians, and Kashubians. I’ve heard similar things about bilingual Ferghana valley dwellers (Turkic vs. Dari), Macedonian Slavs, “Catholic Serbs,” etc.) -immigrants are hard to tell apart from natives (similar physical appearance, language, etc.) -immigrants are already aligned with Ingroup and conspicuously oppressed by Outgroup (Huguenots in England/Germany, Irish in Spain and France, oligarchic/democratic exiles from competing Poleis in Archaic-Classical Greece) -immigrants are part of Outgroup but we need them to run certain machinery in the meantime (only works if they eventually assimilate) -immigrants have the same religion or readily convert -immigrants aren’t forbidden from eating with, marrying, or interacting socially with the host population (Gypsies and Jews are especially well-known offenders, but a fairly common problem - present to a certain extent with Catholics/Protestants apart from the food. Parsis would be similar if there were more than five of them left. Less of a whole problem if the whole society is like this already (India)). -immigrants are only competing with people with no voice or power (Germans/Christian sectarians/Jews in Medieval Eastern Europe, Indians in English Burma/Africa, etc.) Situation tends to rapidly degenerate during anarchy (Chmielnicki rebellion), when the central authority changes (Russian annexation of the pale of settlement), or when (which God forbid) the popular vote is introduced.
I’m sure there are others
Edit: It’s helpful to have a third, low-status group that’s already in place and against which new groups can identify themselves. This was probably helpful in integrating miscellaneous European types as Whites in the Americas.
Every field has bad apples, the way medical education is structured it is very hard to get through without a certain floor level of competence.
When I think about "bad" doctors the ones I run into are generally lazy/burnt out types, or outright malicious/unethical types. Traditional incompetence is rare, because those people get kicked out of medical school or residency....unless they are a favored minority group.
In my career I've run into a handful of white/Asian doctors who are truly incompetent, while I've run into plenty of great URM (underrepresented in medicine) doctors, a noticeable percentage of URMs should never have been advanced through training. It's not a lot, but it's way way way more than the near zero for other demographics, and all of the absolutely catastrophic idiots have been URMs.
From asking it around it seems like the attitude is that it's easier for a programs reputation to advance an incompetent URM student than deal with the flack from trying to put the person through remediation and/or termination (in part because medical education now includes a lot of mandatory education in toolkits these students can use to complain).
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