100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
OpenAI To Become a For-Profit Company
You'll notice that the link is to a hackernews thread. I did that intentionally because I think some of the points raised there get to issues deeper than "hurr durr, Elon got burnt" or whatever.
Some points to consider:
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It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public imagine. Sam Altman spent a bunch of time on Capitol Hill last year and seemed to move with greater ease because of the whole "benefit to humanity" angle. Then, once you have acquired a bunch of market share this way, flip the money switch on. Also, there are a bunch of tax incentives for non-profits that make it easier to run in the early startup phase.
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I think this can be seen as a milestone for VC hype. The trope for VC investors is that they see every investment as "changing the world," but it's mostly a weird status-signaling mechanism. In reality, they're care about the money, but also care about looking like they're being altruistic or, at least, oriented towards vague concepts of "change for the better." OpenAI was literally pitched as addressing an existential question for humanity. I guess they fixed AI alignment in the past week or something and now it's time, again, to flip the money switch. How much of VC is now totally divorced from real business fundamentals and is only about weird idea trading? Sure, it's always been like that to some extent, but I feel like the whole VC ecosystem is turning into a battle of posts on the LessWrong forums.
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How much of this is FTX-style nonsense, but without outright fraud. Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"?
No.
What would stop them?
A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.
To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.
Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.
Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?
It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7mo ago
Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -
He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.
Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;
For me, “Trump’s even worse!” worked one last time and I voted for Harris — largely because of January 6 and because Trump, like Biden, is too old. But maybe some of my gut feeling that Trump would win was because I sympathized with voters’ instincts to punish the Democratic Party more than I did in 2016 and 2020. Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.
Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
I don't precisely know where Elon lands in the Motte's situation evaluation of the Culture War at present, but I think I've got an example than can be used as a lense beyond The MuskATeer himself.
This is a very recent (x)weet from Elon. If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101
But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits. I am convinced this is also 90% of Sam Altman's playbook.
Business-eese and consulting speaking get a lot of flak for being made up pseudo-languages that exist to further unearned vibes of authority and experience on the part of the speaker. It's fun to point and laugh that it's all either nonsense or very obvious truths dressed up in jargon.
I think the cycle is repeating itself with many different sides of the AI wars. Connor Leahy is even more egregious than Musk, and also triples down by trying (and mostly failing) to pin people down with gotcha hypotheticals that are worded to sounded apocalyptic in their profundity.
I think a good heuristic for valid expertise in a subject is the degree to which it gets a little boring. Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory. Many posts related to SCOTUS here on The Motte (of which I am thankful for, please keep them going!) often get just a little tedious - not because of jargony pablum, but because the authors generally really know what they're talking about and go multiple layers deep in reference and citation.
I'm someone who's been in the Tech industry (or, maybe more accurately, technology focused parts of several industries) for my entire career. At least at the start, "tech" was looked at as a weird subculture - the bosses knew they needed it, but it wasn't the show. In the middle 2010s, that started to change as the FAANGs became the largest and richest companies on the planet. Now that we are at peak AI hullabaloo, not only do you see people with zero technical capability presenting themselves as experts, you have an entire aesthetic-cultural superstructure. I think Musk is not only part of it, but one of those who built it. Altman as well. If you peer into their backgrounds, their techincal bonafides are questionable at best. Musk seems like a hacker level dev who brute forced his way into PayPal (and was then brute forced out). His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities. Altman seems to have zero background and is perhaps the poster boy for weird SF striver life.
I seek the opinions of the Mottizen community.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
Ross Douthat on South Korea's abysmal fertility rates.
It's a direct warning to the United Sates; Douthat concludes with "So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us." I think it's worth separating and then reintegrating a few of the items that Douthat brings up in the context of some recent Motte threads on both immigration and the sexual revolution. I'll add some of my own new comments on religion.
First, on the sexual revolution specific to the South Korean context. South Korean women enjoyed the same kind of personal "liberation" that women did and the pill, as it did everywhere, removed the very real possibility of pregnancy from sex. The conservative traditions of the South Korean monoculture, however, remained mostly in place so there was no summer of love and significantly less tolerance, even today, for loud-and-proud promiscuity. As Douthat writes, pregnancy outside of wedlock in South Korea is extremely rare. Alright, so South Koreans aren't orgy-ing it up, but they still get married and start families?
No, they don't. (Note: this article goes into more depth on everything that Douthat's op-ed covers).
In short, being married in South Korea seems like it sucks. There's such an emphasis on child success (in the purely credentialist sense; grades, prestigious school attendance etc.) paired with a brutal "work hard for the sake of working hard" career culture that South Korea parents, apparently, never have time to have fun or relax. What's more, they aren't really raising their children in any sort of tailored or individual way - there's a signal success criteria, and the mission is push the kid as far as they can go within that criteria. Child are a prestige project. Even worse, the filial culture also means that children are expected to be utterly obedient to their parents without question. It would seem that a very likely scenario playing out in many South Korean homes is parents ordering their children to do homework that they (the children) have no interest in while the parents would rather do something fun with the kids, and neither party can actually admit to that mutual preference, so they both continue with the drudgery. It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.
All of this has lead, unsurprisingly, to a fertility crisis that could be demographically more damaging than the Black Death (caveat: with straight line projections and no intervention or policy shifts. See Douthat article). The obvious option of throwing open the floodgates to immigrants is an utter non-starter in the context of South Korean monoculture and, with the live fire exercise mass immigration into Europe, probably also unlikely to receive support from "pragmatic" policy makers.
As the linked articles describe, the Government is trying to match-make its own citizens and in the South Korean culture wars you have extremist MGTOW style groups for both women and men. Oh, and the North Koreans are still a credible invasion threat and the SK military may run out of men. Super.
Douthat's article gives it only one sentence of attention, but I think a big item of importance here is that South Korea isn't a "religious" society in the Western sense. Its social and cultural mores are most heavily influenced by filial devotion and family-ethno-cultural tradition in a secular context. I wonder if that is part of the root cause of the problem.
Raising children has always been difficult. When you exist with a personal belief that having children is an order from God for most (but not all) people, you can get through much of the difficulties of child rearing, perhaps multiple times. I'm reminded of a recent interview with Jensen Huang, co-founder of nVIDIA, where he stated that, knowing what he does now, he probably wouldn't start a start-up again. This is because it's just too damn taxing. He went on to say that one of the major advantages of first time founders is that they don't know how insanely hard it's all going to be and they often operate with an insanely highly level of personal belief in their success and a lack of knowledge of the difficulty reality. I think anyone who's been around first time parents (before birth) sees a similar hyper-optimism.
That South Korean's culturally lack a transcendental, faith based backing for having children seems, to me, to be a deeper and distinctive cause of the fertility crisis there. (Distinctive in that there are also conditions present in SK that obviously correlate to low fertility, but those conditions are present in other societies with low fertility as well, not least of which is rapid economic growth and very high levels of basic education and standard of living). If you don't have "Master of the Universe says so" pressure mixed with "but Master of the Universe will help me out!" optimism, I don't see gaggles of South Korea children streaming through the streets.
Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.
I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.
Pretty sure I agree with you. May I request a reading list / articles / blogs that have helped you form this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
No comment on the permaban decision.
I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.
They're pretty common classical conservatism (FiveHourMarathon highlighted the "Hobessian" nature of it all) mixed with Gen-X / Millenial combat veteran comedic-fatalism. @JTarrou - think I've missed the mark here?
I understand that some of the drive-by insults were against the rules - and should be. I wonder how much, in Hlynka's mind, they were 40-layer deep irony / edgelord pills. Google the "November Juliet" scene from Generation Kill. Or "Whopper Junior."
Again, as this comment started out, no opinion being offered on the ban decision. I'm just pondering Hlynka's nature.
WSJ Article on Elon Musk's Reproductive Habits
(Side note: I know WSJ is paywalled. Can one of you internet heroes find an alt link?)
Thanks to @zoink:
Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
It's pretty weird. Musk, according to the article, references his children, collectively, as his "legion." He has a vision of a sort of compound in Texas for all of the women he's reproduced with along with the children. The cult vibes only get stronger until they run into cold hearted legal recourse. It appears, from the article, that drawn out family court proceedings, estrangement, and some sort of financial settlement are par for the course with Musk. Effective co-parenting or an amicable albeit non-exclusive relationship? Odds are low.
I've always been suspicious of Musk because a few reasons, but I'll decline to elaborate on those specifics in order to bring up a broader culture war point.
While "pronatalism" (loosely defined) is so hot right now on the right, there are some pretty major fractures beneath the surface. A lot of them have to do, unsurprisingly, with the centrality and importance of a stable nuclear family. Next to "the economy" (whatever that may mean), issue and topics of the family, I believe, are of paramount importance when drawing cultural and political lines. In the pronatal sphere, I see a two camp (at least) breakdown:
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Have All The Babies All The Time (HAT-BAT) - This is firmly where Musk is king. The idea is simple mathematics with a dash of eugenics; if you are a "worthy man" have as many babies as possible. Multiple women? Fine. Selecting women based on your own rubric of "genetic desirability" also fine. This is where HBDers put their rubber to the road.
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Have All The Babies And Raise Them In a Family (HAT-ARF) - This is the providence of traditional religious groups and a particular kind of secular cultural conservative (often, it's kind of hard to distinguish between these two subgroups because the latter will play-act at the religious part without really meaning it).
While it might seem that HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF might be able to leave each to their own and agree on "yay babies," I suspect that HAT-ARF will, quickly, stop to say "wait a minute, you actually have to raise your kids. A ton of data says that broken families have horrible social outcomes." And that right there is a major culture war split.
I'm a pronatalist, in the broadest sense possible, yet I do think it's too much to ask to necessarily tie that to some sort of religious requirement. Yet, I also don't see anyway to build functional societies without a nuclear family as the foundational unit. Spreading The Worthy Male Seed was the de facto method of world population for thousands of years. (Insert the stat here on how everyone in Central Asia is Genghis Khan's grandson/daughter). The result was a lot of continuation of the de facto state of man - war, strife, instability, and short lives. The formalization of monogamous marriage and all of the social and legal codes and laws that fractal out from there was a 2000+ year slow process that resulted in the stabilizing of families, of societies, and preservation of pro-social cultures. Destabilization of the family (sexual revolution etc.) has destabilized society and culture. Looking at it that way, the "Musk Mode" pronatalism is far more regressive that he - or others with similar strategies - would like to admit.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
I hate to do this, but I have to half-hijack the thread:
When is it actually "too late", for a male, to have children? Please don't give me the sunshine and rainbows "it's never too late!" nonsense. I'd like the informed and unvarnished truth that the Motte is (in)famous for.
I ask this as a mid 30s male in great shape with FAANGy levels of income in a non-FAANG job who's just a little too surly about marriage, but has accepted the moral imperative for reproducing and being a good parent.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
He is, besides, like Trump, much smarter than consevatives.
I don't understand this at all. You're saying that two people are, individually, more intelligence or cognitively capable than an intellectual movement?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
This is incorrect.
Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.
J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.
This is partly sarcasm, but I don't know how much.
The trouble with Vance is that we don't know who he is. Hillbilly Elegy is a good character origin story. But what follows? After serving with distinction as a Marine Corps ... Public Affairs ... yeah, nevermind ... he went Yale Law School and time at Thiel backed venture capital firm where he invested in ... an agribusiness?. Vance lived mostly in San Francisco before running for Senate in Ohio. He's a Catholic Convert married to a non-practicing-anything. His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.
In 2016 he's a Never Trumper. When he runs for Senate, DJT helps get him over the finish line (along with Mitch McConnell but, hey, the real one's always operate from the shadows). In the Senate, he's staunchly pro-Israel, questions support for Ukraine, and says Lina Khan has done a good job.
As a VP pick, the move is to try to lock down Pennsylvania's electoral votes. Anointed as Trump's successor? Dyed in the wool MAGA? I think not. Another commenter mentioned Palin. I think that's a good comparison.
Trump has been moving to the middle on everything this cycle besides immigration and tariffs. The true believers are already losing their primaries (Bob Good in Virginia). OG MAGA (which was Tea Party 2.0) is on the way out. MAGA 2.0 is really riding a lot of the currents that popped off with COVID and BLM riots. Throw in a bunch of Grey Tribe Tech Bros and Vance makes a ton of sense.
The real question is when Trump finalized the decision - before or after the assassination attempt?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025
Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.
Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.
None of that is particular alarming to me.
What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.
This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);
Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.
The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.
This three were particularly triggering for me:
Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.
I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."
This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.
I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.
The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7mo ago
but if the people involved were happy about it I wouldn't see any problem.
Is this your only criteria? It isn't. Because if it were, you would have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances.
Furthermore, let's get into temporal preferences and shifts in self-perspective over time. Maybe this woman can convince herself that she's "happy" with it for some amount of time. I'd argue, given the clip shared, that that amount of time was, at most, the time between the end of this sexual act and when that clip was filmed. Regret may have been forestalled, and it then arrives on camera.
(Interesting aside: this has a bizarre connection to false/not-false rape allegations. Two people are "happy about it" in the moment. The next day, one of them wakes up feeling less "happy about it" and files the allegation. A complex and high stakes legal process then ensues wherein both parties try to somehow prove how they felt about what at which times).
People are often flawed at judging what is good for them and what makes them truly happy. To combat this, we try to develop systems of normative thinking to assist. Some people call this morals, ethics, virtues etc.
Show me the moral/ethical/virtue system that says "Sex with 100 strangers in an hour" is permissible. Aside from moral relativism, out and out hedonism, or nihilism, it doesn't exist.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
I want to thank you for writing this, sincerely.
I had never considered that very logical end state.
And it makes my blood fucking boil.
This is how they actually take the wilderness away from us. Not through arbitrary laws that wouldn't survive challenges (and that people would willfully violate anyway) but by making it impossible to do on machine/electrical assisted physical level. They'll double down by making it illegal to own an "analog" machine that you can still control on your own (gas or diesel engine without any electronics). Everything will have GPS to the point that a lack of GPS will look like a "hole in the ocean" on a highway or other road and they'll send the police drones to investigate.
This is how they take it all away.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
The police in this case have that "when I say jump you say how high" mentality.
Would your mentality be different?
I've posted about this before. Watch police bodycam videos. The speed at which ho-hum traffic stops turns into "SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED!" is frightening. One of the things cops are doing is assessing how compliant you're being. If you're being compliant, they can make some assumptions about the next 15 - 30 seconds. If you're not, they're operating on the assumption of "this could go bad right now."
because he's moderately uncooperative/bitchy.
It's interesting how this "moderate" lack of compliance often precedes attempted lethal violence. The number of criminals saying, "I'm going to reach for my gun and shoot you after the count of 10" keeps declining every year.
"but just kinda unnecessary."
Funny how "unnecessary" a lot of actions become when the conditions for death are present. Again, your average patrol cop is dealing with so many unknowns where the penalty for misjudging them tends towards loss of your own life, your partners life, maiming, or endangering other bystanders. Offending the sensitives of a single individual as a rough hedge against those other outcomes seems like a pretty obvious tradeoff, no?
For everyone who thinks that police are predisposed to tyrannical behavior and/or are drunk on power, I would offer that their job description is "interact with highly emotionally activated individuals on a daily basis, often with a very real threat of violence."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1yr ago
Are The Kids Alright?
Motivated by a mainline reddit thread I saw asking teachers "what do kids today not know?"
Because of my career + age + unmarried status, I have close to zero interaction with Gen-Z and ... whatever the next one is. I am starting to get second hand reports from parents in my social circle, as well as manager types who are now hiring Gen-Z.
By most, but certainly not all, accounts, the major differences seems to be just very under-developed basic social interaction skills. Anywhere from hyper-preferences for everything to be done via text/e-mail, to literally falling silent in in-person meetings because of inability to cope with (what I think is) base-line social anxiety (what I mean here is the general sense of awkwardness we all feel the first time we meet someone new).
Is this the case for Mottizens who have these interactions? Are there other signs or common symptoms? Most of all -- why is it happening (if it is)? Will I ever be a grandpa without resorting to Greek Mythology levels of sexual "fuck it, I'll do it myself!"
Really great write-up. Thank you.
Your response is valuable because it demonstrates the mix of slippery-slope, bad faith reporting, and sleight-of-hand that poisons the abortion debate. Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion. Thus, re-framing an issue has an outsized impact on changes in opinion. I like your consistent use of alternative headlines to point that out.
There are very few pro-life folks who are zero-exception pro-life. Rape, incest, and life of the mother are the default exceptions. But the focus shouldn't be on the exceptions (which will always be a small percentage) but on the modal abortions and the contexts that produce them. The article (and your response) do a good job of highlighting that abortions are often the product of repeated bad life choices and general irresponsibility. I don't think being generally kind of a fuck-up should be a life long sentence for poverty, but there is a limit to what you can be absolved of. Denying a child from being born is far, far past that line.
Going back to the culture war angle, it gets difficult to even "hear out" pro-life arguments because they get so slippery. Obama used to take the median liberal position on abortion that was summarized as "safe, legal, and rare." That last part made the conversation at least possible. It wasn't like we were having parades for abortion or anything. The median liberal position today seems to be on-demand abortion access for any reason, potentially into the third trimester or even at birth. Point out how crazy that is and you get responses like the ProPublica article - "women are literally dying because of these anti-abortion laws." It isn't moving the goalposts, it's making up new rules as you go while also manipulating the score.
If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women. Once we linked sexual activity to the amorphous "personal expression" we let the genie out of the bottle. The argument goes: "Anything you tell me to do is oppression and potentially violence. Anything I demand from society is actually a guaranteed human right that has been withheld because of systemic oppression." Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.
Taking a look at my own history that went from casually pro-choice to rigid pro-life, I'd assert that if you draw any firm line in the sand you are setting yourself up for a slow (though possibly accelerating) drift towards a pro-life stance because the opposite end keeps getting more extreme. Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
The introductory conclusion is really quite shocking when translated from academeese:
The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy.
"People are often too dumb to recognize they're pregnant until the 3rd trimester."
The logical follow-on to that, implicit in the author's writing, is "And you can't hold somebody accountable for being a real dumbass! Let 'em kill that baby"
This actually points to a something I've never heard a great answer on. How, in a world with ubiquitous condoms and the pill are we hitting 1 million abortions a year.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
Incels won't be a threat to the system
While I agree with much of the rest of your analysis, this part is wrong.
It is not, however, a direct threat to the system. No incel army is going to rise up to start executing the girls who rejected them or handmaid's tail-ing them.
Think about this from an incentives and game theoretic perspective. Your modal incel is conformist and meek. They generally act however the "median basic guy" is supposed to act (until they hit their incel-dom initiation or whatever). If that group of males is dropping out of the social system, then the only males you have remaining are either the Andrew Tate types or the totally progressive bought-in types. I've seen the latter referred to as "cuttlefish." The problem is that both of these groups of males are anti-social and net-negatives to women. The Andrew Tates for pretty obvious reasons, but the progressive "men" too because they contribute to more unstable family structures.
A stable society has a large amount of men - perhaps most - who live very stable and predictable lives. Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior. You see some efforts towards this with the Grill Pill set, but it used to be far more front and center. Think Jimmy Stewart movies. This also presents an uncomfortable reality - a lot of the "good men" of yesteryear would probably be lumped in with the incels of today.
The danger that's emerging now is that incel-dom is moving up the chain. I had a post recently on an observation I've started to make on objectively successful, impressive, and highly competent men choosing effective celibacy (even if they don't term it that themselves nor do it for a religious reason). Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter.
It's been said on this forum a thousand times, but the primary victims of third wave to present feminism are women.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)
No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.
To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.
For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).
But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.
The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.
All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.
The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.
I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown in race relations, but in
gendersex relations. This is because of the plain fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families, communities, the nation, society as a whole.I've tried to break it out below.
The Issues
The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:
Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):
Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and interpret these issues thusly;
Now, for the Men:
How We Got Here
That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.
For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second, to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social consequences.
It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or, at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white male is the enemy of the Left."
For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights" messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life (which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."
Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team, military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently sexed styles of language exist.
The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.
Boys and Girls are Different
The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and, ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.
Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence. Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.
The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.
A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his attraction.
Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.
A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.
Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to "advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt. Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.
Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women that reveal this:
“What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”
“If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"
I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs" speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.
J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared. I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and "old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).
The above leads us too...
Are We Really Talking About Sex?
"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."
I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.
To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie reality.
Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics (literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.
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