domain:abc.net.au
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
23hr ago
Wow, that’s… massive. Is it just party coalitions reshuffling? But such a massive drop in such a short amount of time makes me want to assume the null hypothesis, measurement error.
phailyoor
23hr ago
Certainly this can be argued for certain aspects of behavior. For example, educated professional blacks are more likely to commit violent crime than the most impoverished White trash in Appalachia. It all depends on exactly what you're trying to disposit. This can be extended to argue that such White trash is somehow "superior" to more economically advantaged individuals of other races, though I would not personally agree with this conclusion. Anyways this still only applies to groups and even the most hardcore HBD believers would also accept the existence of individual freak exceptions to the rule.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
I have no idea what advice I'm looking for, so I appreciate you.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23hr ago
It can be true that Microsoft is replacing workers with AI, slimming down a bloated management apparatus and that they're also hiring more cheap H1Bs to watch over the AIs or for internal factional reasons.
I may be in the minority here but I still believe that AI is a big, big thing and advancing fast. No plateau, just steady growth and new avenues to advance down. Two recent papers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24119
Using SPIRAL, self-play on zero-sum games produces reasoning capabilities that transfer broadly. Training Qwen3-4B-Base on Kuhn Poker alone achieves 8.6% improvement on math and 8.4% on general reasoning, outperforming SFT on 25,000 expert game trajectories. Analysis reveals that this transfer occurs through three cognitive patterns: systematic decomposition, expected value calculation, and case-by-case analysis. Multi-game training (TicTacToe, Kuhn Poker, Simple Negotiation) further enhances performance as each game develops distinct reasoning strengths. Applying SPIRAL to a strong reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B) can still lead to 2.0% average improvement. These results demonstrate that zero-sum games naturally develop transferable reasoning capabilities, highlighting a promising direction for autonomous reasoning development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03335
we propose a new RLVR paradigm called Absolute Zero, in which a single model learns to propose tasks that maximize its own learning progress and improves reasoning by solving them, without relying on any external data. Under this paradigm, we introduce the Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR), a system that self-evolves its training curriculum and reasoning ability by using a code executor to both validate proposed code reasoning tasks and verify answers, serving as an unified source of verifiable reward to guide open-ended yet grounded learning. Despite being trained entirely without external data, AZR achieves overall SOTA performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks, outperforming existing zero-setting models that rely on tens of thousands of in-domain human-curated examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that AZR can be effectively applied across different model scales and is compatible with various model classes.
Two major papers on fully autonomous learning, in coding and reasoning via playing simple games respectively. Admittedly both are on a small scale, using small models and little compute. The former used maybe $1000 worth of compute when the big boys have billions to spend. However, recursive AI self-improvement isn't science fiction, it's eminently possible, presumably it's being done right now on a large scale.
Are people really going to be better at programming than a machine that has thousands, millions of years of experience? Surely not, just like they're not going to be better at chess or go or starcraft.
Your metaphor is subtly broken, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Using a gun for a reason other than to shoot ballistic missiles is suspect, because that's not what it's there for.
No, by that logic, it's "using/having a gun for a reason other than shooting to kill [its primary purpose] is suspect" (so 'I'm just here to shoot targets because it's fun' is immoral and weird).
Thus, by that same logic,
Sexual intercourse can be done for making babies and for pair bonding and pleasure (for example, post menopause or when the woman is already pregnant.)
"having sex for pair bonding and pleasure" is suspect.
Which is the Catholic position on sex.
It appeals to people who are given to being addicted to seeking sex, and Catholic Christianity treats everyone (both men and women, but the emphasis is traditionally more on men) as being in this condition by default. It makes sense that Catholicism draws in people that are aware they have problems with sex in this way, hence the assertion everyone does and that it's Godly for you to behave as if you were addicted to sex at all times[2].
Other denominations of Christianity, in particular the more Charismatic strains, treat dancing and alcohol/other drugs this way as well. Catholicism has a more measured response to the latter, but not for sex.
[1] Which forms one of the two prongs of the stereotypical Blue viewpoint on guns. They can't just be telling the truth, it has to be for some nefarious purpose. You'll recognize that rejecting that's true is also the [classical] liberal refutation of the Christian party line on the gays (and on those readings of 'fornication' and 'sexual morality' more generally).
It's more like a kind of mutual masturbation
[2] And if you're one of those men who tends to treat their partners like a human fleshlight during sex, then the smuggled assumption of "and that's bad" becomes trivially correct. Some (many?) men legitimately do have problems with this [source: I read the posts here], and when they do, following that rule is probably better for both them and their wives (and it forces them to have buy-in to the relationship through childbirth).
Of course, there's another answer in "well, just don't do sex that way lol" (and this approach is hinted at in a few other Pauline letters), but having "don't be fucking stupid lol" as the rule is about as effective as abstinence-based sex ed is at avoiding pregnancy for most people who [spiritually] require the structure of Catholicism in the first place, so...
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
Thank you for the contribution. I probably do need to set the saddle higher.
I'm pretty sure it was a cheap bike, and I came into it second hand, but how bad can it really be? I figure it will, you know, roll and stuff, and I don't plan to enter any races any time soon.
What do you mean by putting in more hours compared to other modalities?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
I want to hear about your comeback!
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.
Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
I still believe in you, progress often comes in chunks.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23hr ago
Toxic empathy
That's a good one.
ulyssessword
23hr ago
I've also seen arguments that a particular distribution of values for IQ, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, etc (including many factors that psychologists don't measure) is the best for a nation, and the only way to get spread is to select based on race.
Even though the "good" numbers might be higher on other people, naive number-maxxing would lead to a failure mode of some kind. It's often unspecified, but the ones I can remember involve out-of-touch highly [good trait] people making norms that are legible and achievable to them, but disastrous to everyone else. Liberalization of sex and drugs are the main culprits.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
23hr ago
No, by that logic, it's "using/having a gun for a reason other than shooting to kill [its primary purpose] is suspect" (so 'I'm just here to shoot targets because it's fun' is immoral and weird).
Where is this coming from? I really don't know what you are arguing against.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
23hr ago
(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)
To give the traditionalists their due, Cain WAS the bad guy in that story.
YE_GUILTY
23hr ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people.
Hm. Just today, I passed a swimming pool and noticed an insect struggling in the water. It was a bee. Did I have a Singerian obligation to hop the fence and rescue the 7-15% of a drowning child?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22hr ago
Wash it? Pretty much never. It's a light color that doesn't show dirt much, the paint job is roasted, and there's a bit of body damage so washing it doesn't really make it look much better. I keep the interior reasonably clean, though, and my tools are organized in the trunk.
I find anything to do with cleaning cars to be a chore, but worth it when I have a car where the effort actually pays off.
I felt what I consider an appropriate level of bad one particular time I found a rat in a traditional trap. It was gravely maimed, and as I went to put it out of its misery I saw, as it had lain incapacitated, its friends or children had taken the opportunity to feast on its guts. If I had chosen to not put it out of its misery, then I would have thought less of myself. The experience did not make me think more highly of rats, but it's not as if I am above considering the suffering of other animals.
Targeting an animal one already hopes to exterminate for pest control is not outlandishly cruel. To argue against that one needs to argue against effective rodent control more generally.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me. Except, in this case, instead of one weird kid you make sure your child stays away from, it's all of society that is going out of their way to torture rats. That what I imagine and have been told the emotional prism is like for dedicated vegans. As a personal choice it is common and well enough. The personal choice I don't have much objection to. The more foreign value impositions, especially done in a way that where they only logically hint at the most moral ends, are where I find objection.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
22hr ago
How many examples with how many upvotes would i have to provide to convince you that it's not a fluke? How explict do they have to be? Will you accept plain language at its meaning, or should i expect you to play the old "defund the police doesn't literally mean defunding the police" card?
The correlation is weak at best and even if it was strong, the same source in 2024 tells a different story.
In the meantime, being in a heterosexual marriage appears a more reliable predictor of voting preference than either racial or party affiliation.
GBRK
22hr ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
GBRK
22hr ago
"States issue citizenship" is a good enough framing that I won't dispute it. But there a particular bullet I'm interested to see if you're willing to bite: "children could only inherit citizenship from their parents" does not imply "children should inherit citizenship from their parents." You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship. Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis, presumably to reward pro-social behavior, there are plenty of reasons why it should also exclude a particular citizen's baby from also having citizenship? That doesn't violate the citizen's rights-- nowhere in the constitution is it enumerated that citizens have a right to have citizen babies. All the relevant text is about the born or naturalized individual's rights.
anti_dan
22hr ago
His tone is annoying, but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.
The point of HBD discourse is to show the progressives are being done when they are campaigning for whatever in vogue racial justice program they are currently pursuing. The left is, instead, currently caught up in a fervor for Hamas and Iran, which while low IQ nations compared to their foe Israel, the left isn't really pursuing their fight along that line. So its not really relevant to parrying the set of attacks currently being deployed. If anything it could be used for dunking on Dems, in the "haha dummies thought a bunch of 90 IQ cousin-f*ckers could win a war with 110 IQ Jews" but that is probably not what the smart people (and that is who ever engages in HBD discourse) are interested in doing.
ulyssessword
22hr ago
Where are you finding that?
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?
That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.
Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.
But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.
I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.
Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.
Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
GBRK
22hr ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
We may take your "genocide" observation and ask: why discomfort with white solidarity manifests in calling its repugnant feuds "genocide."
I wonder if the focus on white solidarity truly is misguided. Indeed, as we have seen this year, accusations of genocide are not exclusive to white people. (Depending on if you think Jews are racial shapeshifters, I guess)
I still haven't a clue why specifically the discomfort some of the time. It probably is different for different people. For many, I imagine the colonialism and power imbalance really is a big deal. For someone like Toruk, obviously it isn't. Others still are surely just reciting tribal deepities.
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