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.
12hr ago
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.
I think it produces locally maximally good results.
This is Hill Climbing problem and what a lot of people get right and wrong, simultaneously, about things like Private Equity and quarterly results in publicly traded companies.
The search for maximum grindy efficiency / performance for a given game or domain will result, through vicious competition, in maximally good results to the extent that the game / domain is well defined and bounded. "Get more people to click on the red button vs the blue button" is well bounded. "Figure out the best way to live life" is totally unbounded and also subjective - an optimization frontier can't really be defined let alone achieved.
The classic tech/business text on this is The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen's major point is that constantly iterating to optimize an existing product for an existing customer need opens you, the firm, up to disruption by a new product - not one that meets the current needs better, but one that creates a wholly new way of satisfying needs/meta needs. The classic example is Ford "inventing" the model-T when everyone "asked" for a better horse.
Meritocracy, especially in today's over metric'd and quantified world, is good at hitting these bounded local maxima, but not so good at plucking out the next Big Ideas. You need, sadly, a bunch of weirdos for that. The problem is that everyone loves to think of themselves as "that misunderstood genius." Most of the time, you're just fucking weird. One one millionth of the time, you're Jobs/Wozniak/Musk etc. (sorry to over index on tech, you can do this same thing with almost any field, however).
The preferable "third way" is something like N.N. Taleb's concept of anti-fragile systems; systems that acutally get stronger for less than optimal (or, more accurate, stressful) situations. In professional terms, you want the Physics department to have one or two loonies who don't shower and use words like "chinaman" if they actually help the more "professional" researchers deal with edge cases or whatever. You want a guy in the office who is a functioning alcoholic but can close to mega-deals but is also a walking cautionary tale to the rest of the sales team. Over HR-ification (of which the Gino example is probably somewhat an example of. This is why Ackman got himself involved, I think) doesn't let talented-but-awful weirdos do their thing, and we eject some of the useful "stress" from the system.
The good news is that anyone with eyes to see sees pretty early that the grindiest of grinder fields aren't worth it. It's literally a trope that BigLaw / Consulting / Banking partner are all twice divorced alcoholics who never see their kids or get to enjoy their million dollar pay packages. These are lizard people who thrive on preftige alone. For a while, BigTech was sorta-kinda the exception to the rule, but has since been revealed to be both more grindy that initially assumed and far more of a office-politics and social climber firefight.
The way to win is not to play. Let us take heed of this young bard;
I don't wanna be famous / I just wanna be rich
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12hr ago
If you totally fail at BigLaw, where do you go? Or, where is it common to go? Small biz corporate attorney? In house counsel for something very process driven? Leave law altogether?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12hr ago
Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.
And your timing has to be close to perfect.
I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.
Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12hr ago
There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited.
Can you provide examples of such fields? I am genuinely curious as one of my current interests is trying to figure out where we've actually hit hard or very large limits in scientific discovery. The problem is that simply "reading the current research" is literally impossible for someone who doesn't have a graduate understanding of math/physics/hard sciences.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Right around the 0:24 mark. It's on a lawn / driveway in the background.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump.
Gotta say this is a pretty shitty thing to hear from a mod. This is the Culture War thread. There's going to be politicized views and pre-existing bias brought in, sure. I think the Motte is one of the places were people do a pretty good job of laying their cards on the table up front. The effort-posts then do a great job of laying out various positions. To say generally, however, that they don't consider evidence is not only wrong but wronheaded - it demonstrates so mal intent.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
It's not clear whether you're being sarcastic or not. I'm somewhat compelled to report this to the mods for being low effort and probably antagonistic, but I feel like they have better things to do.
If you want to actually engage with my argument, I'm here for it, pal.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I like this theory. Thank you. The sound definitely did have something to do with it. To some extent, I've always been a little more sensitive than others to big droning sounds. I think I lack the ability to tune them out the way most folks do.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
"A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless"
Except that she knew they were ICE agents.
In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."
More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.
The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Great comment and on an original subject.
I'll share a personal anecdote as a means of homage.
I once worked, in IT, on what's called an infrastructure team. These are the hardcore, hands-on-servers guys who actually wire up all of the servers running in data centers and similar installations. I was not actually a hardcore hands-on-guy, but a dude who was empowered, via our bureaucratic overlords, to buy stuff. This meant I spent a good deal of time inside server rooms and data centers not as a technician, you know, doing stuff, but observing the technicians and logging all of the necessary purchases to complete the project. I passed the time mostly with idle chitchat and, for those Infra dudes who really were anti-social, by reading content on the old longform.org website before it 1) woke-ified and 2) closed down.
There was one particularly odd project that had a team of three (me and two other guys) in a totally windowless server room (they are mostly this way) for over a week. We had a deadline and so we were in there for 12+ hours daily. Because of the logistics and time of year, we would enter the larger site / building when it was dark and we would leave when it was dark. We'd then carpool to the hotel we were staying at, usually have dinner at the hotel restaurant, retire to our rooms, and do it all again the next day.
You can tell that this definitely put me in an odd headspace by the end of the week. I was definitely a little friend and wigged out.
On the final day of our work, the two guys were working on something when they (well, all of us actually) got an e-mail from back at our home office. The two other dudes were needed for a conference call about some other project. TollBooth, you are not (sad junior employee sounds).
The two guys can't take the conference call in the server room because it's actually pretty loud. Servers have to be aggressively cooled, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of them in close proximity to one another. This is done (well, at least it was then) by having cold air blasted up out of the floor on one side of the servers (the "cold aisle") and then, on the opposite side, the hot air is aggressively vaccummed down into the floor (the "hot aisle"). The result is a constant hum of fans and other circulation equipment that probably sits around 50 dB or so. You get used to it after a while and it doesn't cause hearing damage, but you can't have conversations more than about 10 feet apart. On a conference call, the other listeners would think you were in a wind tunnel.
So the others leave to take their conference call and I pull up longform or something. For about five minutes, I'm content. Hanging out on the company dime, more or less. Then, in an instant, I am filled with a palpable sense of dread. There is no proximate cause. Nothing was on fire or damaged. No e-mails foretelling doom had entered my inbox. But I was on the verge of legitimate panic.
I believe this was an episode of real life liminal horror. I was alone in a windowless computer cube with an omnipresent inhuman sound that actively suppressed basic human conversation. I had been in this room for a week, but only exited to darkness and yet another kind of liminal space (the hotel). Nothing in this space was human. No running water, no food, no bathrooms (not technically true as they were just down the hall outside of the server room, and we had been using them all week, but still). It was blinky lights, copper wires, the knowledge that an absolutely turbo-lethal amount of electricity was flowing over every inch of the room, and the sound, the sound, the sound.
Fortunately, I bravely endured got my fucking shit back together. I think I got up and used the bathroom and just that 20 seconds of movement shook me out of the headspace I was in. Other dudes finished their conference call, came back in with a pair of shrugs, and we finished up the day and the project.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Unnecessary antagonism aside, this is actually a pretty good scissor statement.
Because my answer is an unqualified "Yes."
If someone hit me with a car twice, I would view that as 2x assault with a deadly weapon. In terms of the next course of action, reasonable people can disagree over whether or not they would flee or try to "de-escalate" (whatever the hell that means), but the justification for self-defense - up to and including lethal force - is now, in my mind, undoubtedly present.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
self_made did share links as well.
Continuing downthread, there are actually a bunch of video links. Shame on me for not reading more before posting and the re-editing. But now, it's all a little messy, so I'm just going to send out a blanket "Great job, everyone. Terrrrrr-ific!"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
(Branching off the main debates about good shoot / bad shoot).
Viral Verbal Videography
I watched this entire video: https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/2008970977699639681.
The most relevant bits to the shooting are in the first thirty seconds. Then it is almost four additional minutes of nothing in terms of actual events, but a lot in terms of both literal and figurative background noise in the culture war context.
This is four minutes of high volume emotionalization and righteous indignation. The principal videographer here literally goes through cycles of yelling "What the fuck / what the actual fuck?", "Shame! Shame!" (I mean this literally), and "Do you have a conscience?"
Another common motif is someone, definitely male, elsewhere in the background doing a primal scream of "MURDERERS!" every so often. It's impressive in its sensationality.
I don't know just what to make of this. My immediate reaction to this was one of insufferability. When a person's vocalized response to these kind of events is "what the fuck? what the actual fuck?", it betrays a kind of chronic online-ness that I used to think was somewhat apocryphal. The origin of "what the actual fuck" is a bit obscure but we know that it definitely originated in a highly online context and was almost certainly intended to be sarcastically hilarious in its usage. I can remember videos of 9/11 where people are repeating, without full awareness, "oh my god" again and again. That kind of honest emotional reaction actually still hits me hard because, well, it's coming from somewhere genuine, isn't performative, and uses a vocabulary (religious) that really is mostly reserved - when earnest - for "big" moments. Turning "what the actual fuck" into a kind of emotional war cry cheapened the whole thing from the get go.
My nucleus of a theory is that this kind of outrage is some proportion of performativity and some proportion of a kind of programmed earnestness. The principal videographer knows that in this context she is not only permitted but expected to dial the histrionics up to 11. Maybe even 22 because she is recording everything with the foreknowledge that she'll post this to social media later. It seems to be she had a kind of emotional impact and righteous indignation checklist - shock and horror ("what the (actual) fuck"), public shaming ("shame! shame!" combined with off-screen guys "murderers!" yell), and finally moral grandstanding ("do you have a conscience?").
In the social media world, it isn't so much about you being present at an event so much as recording that you were present at an event and pre-rendering what you think should be your future reactions to that event in real time. The benign version of this is simply taking a video selfie and some concert or major sporting event with something like a caption reading "is this actually happening?" Your "disbelief" is actually a kind of self-effacing professional of modesty paired with a "highest of highs" in terms of transcendental enjoyment. But, on the dark side, you have videos like the one linked at the top of this post; Immediately turning the death of a human into an opportunity to demonstrate Right Think (at the loudest possible volume).
Part of me did think, at one point, that this is all in my own Turbo Autist head. I'm just over indexing on linguistic things because of a nerdy interest in that field. But the spell was broken just seconds before the video ends when the principal videographer says, to someone off camera;
"You okay, mami?" In a drastically different tone of voice. The spell was broken. She knew she had done her duty to The Cause and captured it on video, now, it was back to hanging out with her best girlies.
She just forgot to stop recording.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
"We should look to interactions with the mentally unwell as a gauge for our evaluation of police conduct" is a hell of an argument.
Certainly, for serious crimes like murder or even robbery, there's enough of a problem with a successful escape that the outcome preference should be capture > death > escape.
And then an explicit recommendation against due process. Huh.
So, okay. Take that situation and make me a better runner, so that I could outrun the police. Is it warranted for the police to shoot me?
No one is making this argument. Not even implicitly. This is strawman and conflation dialed up to 10.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I don't think a lot of people understand how dangerous vehicles are due to being around cars all the time. Due to their size, even at a small speed it can do significant damage to the human body.
Yep.
Although it's rough to watch, you can check out videos of things like "trailer hitch fails" to see just how dangerous a "slow moving" SUV / truck can be. Knees folding like car tables, multiple surgeries type of things.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I think that you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic less likely to shoot a person than middle-aged urban white women. Also
+1 for constant profiling by law enforcement. I am not being sarcastic.
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
Again, this falls into the trap of "why didn't the cop just have 100% perfect awareness of the entire situation, perfect emotional control, and ninja like reflexes!"
When someone fails to obey repeated police commands, police have to default to treating them as hostile. When that same person them, immediately and without hesitation, engages in dangerous behavior, lethal force is now on the table. When all of this happens within ~ 5 seconds, it's just a dice roll of who ends up injured or dead.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.
My High School driving instructor would like to respectfully disagree with you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Where gay men have deviant sex with one another, straight men are balls deep in weirdo niche porn and gooning for hours.
Degeneracy finds a way. There's still a case to be made that solo, self-destroying degeneracy is Less Wrong (lulz) than inducing others to degeneracy with you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad.
Bro.
I feel their pain.
A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?
No. The Chauvin example is actually the wildly unlikely scenario. As it always has been.
1. Can we get some links to full videos that aren't on Mass Media website? Navigating those with all of their ads and popus - even with AdBlocker - is a nightmare. The first one I saw, also, was only a clip of about the final ten seconds.
Here are good links to multiple angles of the video. @self_made_human posted them downthread:
Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)
- Hard disagree on your assessment of the culpability of the shooter. When the car starts moving (i.e. the driver doesn't kill the engine and present their hands), this is pretty much brandishing a deadly weapon. At point blank, the cop is justified 100%. I've posted before about how people really overestimate the ability to "think rationally" in situations like this. You default to a lot of training / muscle memory / self-preservation instincts. Again, go watch some police bodycam videos on YouTube to understand how quick things can turn from ho-hum traffic stop to shots fired.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
100% Agree and Simon is the kind of "lefty" that I will spend extra time and effort trying to engage with because of his own self-discipline and refusing to adopt the easy but wrong (and, worse, intentionally deceptive) sentiments of the woke / progressive sphere.
But the class lens is still a difficult circle to square because of its high dependence on chronology. In Season 2 of the Wire, we're exposed to the plight of the dying dockworker industry in Baltimore. These are quite literally the almost mythical "working class" of the 1950s and 1960s who, on one high school education level income, could buy a home, a car, raise 3 - 5 kids (the Polish are Catholic!), enjoy BBQs and little league etc. They did this through comically illegal political patronage, state sanctioned segregation, and, following that program's demise, strongly self-enforced neighborhood segregation. If ever there was something like "systemic racism" and an "oppressor class", it was boldly exemplified by just these sort.
But in the early 2000s, they're so economically displaced that a major subplot of Season 2 is how the younger generation (Nicky and Ziggy) involve themselves willingly in the drug trade in order to (again, literally) move out of their parents' basements.
So, where exactly is my sympathy supposed to lie with these classes? Sure, rich people are always generically evil in some sense or another. But where does one class begin and end? Where does one single group of the same people (i.e. Frank Sabotka) stop being oppressor and become oppressed (or vice versa?)
This is one of my macro problems with the broadest possible "left" - despite their professed hatred of hierarchy and social group demarcation, they explicitly base their worldview on a static grouping of people based on criteria that is inherently dynamic! They even build wild hacks to get around this by creating mental "concepts" like "poverty mindset" and "whiteness is a state of mind."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
This is an excellent point! If the insider doesn't have knowledge of a fait accompli already, then it still is somewhat probabilistic. Here, I guess, it depends a LOT on how the market resolution mechanism is built - i.e. "Attempt to depose Maduro" versus "Maduro actually deposed."
Still in all, broacasting insider info too early or too broadly may defeat its value!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Markets only exist if you have enough buyers are sellers. There is no one forcing people to bid into the Maduro strike market.
It's a little trite but it's also rite right; don't play in markets that have a strong "insider-ability"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Up front caveat: I love prediction markets.
First, don't think of prediction markets as roughly the same as the stock market. They are wildly different. The "stock market" - which is, more broadly and accurate, the regulated exchange of financial instruments - is far more complex and serves vastly different purposes. The stock market is not about bidding on the correct outcome of something in the future. It isn't even, necessarily, about maximizing - in all cases - return on investment. Hedging and managing risk is just as important, if not more so. Much of it is about how to finance the ongoing operations of a firm. Still other parts of it are about building a portfolio that performs to a given objective with understandable and (didn't I already say this) manageable risk.
Most critically, the stock market never "resolves." It is continuous (unless, of course, we actually have a financial meltdown).
Prediction markets are, first, continuous before they're discreet. You have a range of outcomes, though most commonly two. People are free to trade their confidence on those outcomes (via price). That's it. Can this be manipulated to work like the stock market? Yeah, kind of. Except, the bids you make on Kalshi or Polymarket don't actually represent ownership in anything. There's no preference in liquidation (a la senior debt etc.) It's just a bet on what will, eventually, happen. It's a truth discovery mechanism.
Therefore, insider trading is actually great. If someone has better information, we want to know about it, and the market ought to reflect this. That a prediction market about Maduro being deposed even kicked off the night before the op is valuable info! Would I bet into it? Probably not. Which brings me to point 2:
Don't bet on things - directly - that can have insiders. The easy example is something like weather temperatures they are natural phenomena - nobody knows, for sure, what the weather will be tomorrow. There are other examples which are more indirect -- will Mike Johnson be speaker of the house at the end of next year? That requires a vote and no one knows what that vote will be until, perhaps, the very final hours before it happens. There is no insider here until after a certain time and, even then, it isn't a "hard" insider the way this Maduro thing probably was. It isn't hard to look at a market and go "how much insidering could there be?" If you want to bet into it, that's fine, that's your decision.
The knee jerk aversion to insider trading is mostly a product of a lot of Enron era hectoring by Congress and the press. (Fun fact: Enron wasn't even really insider trading so much as straight up fraud). To me, the bigger problem is that the overregulation of the markets makes insider trading "a thing" as the kids say. If markets were open 24/7 (as they should be), companies could choose to report whatever and whenever they wanted, there would be a lot less rigidity. The game would "move faster" and so trying to cheat at it via insider moves wouldn't be as profitable. Open and free flowing information means there is less opportunity to profit from having "special" information because so little of any information can be special when it's all "out there." The government created the space for insider trading to be a problem. Prediction markets show that it isn't a problem and, in fact, gets us faster to "truth".
Hmmm interesting.
Would a minmax strategy be to get the BigLaw job, then intentionally poop your pants (figuratively not literally) and coast in an "Easy" 40 - 60 hour, but fairly high status and well compensated, corporate job?
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