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.
22hr ago
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
(The above is actually from a comment below, not the original post)
As the internet kids say, "This."
If we're actually in a "money doesn't mean much" AGI world, people don't stop having preferences and values. It will just shift from the directly tangible material ones to more abstract ones. Namely; taste. I can't remember where I saw it, but this is the "big theory" of one of the AI super thinkers (Karpathy maybe?). Taste, appreciate for aesthetics, and deeply held belief in something like "beauty" will become the way that humans organize their preferences. Instead of "how much is in your bank account? What zipcode do you live in?" we'd signal relative capability by demonstrating our ability to evaluate these abstract ideas.
There's a ton of precedent for this. Fashion, as an industry, is perhaps just a few months younger than city level agriculture. Besides finance, which is the business of money itself, and technology, which is nonlinear efficiency gains, Fashion has created more billionaires than any other business - I believe this actually includes energy (oil etc.)!
Gen Z is defined by its adherence to "vibes" - an abstract concept that combines aesthetics and trends with general emotive intuition. Trying to "flex" your bankroll with Gen Z, in fact, often "fails the vibecheck." Gen Z is, of course, the generation that will define themselves by, with, and through their relationship to AGI (the boomers can fortify themselves within their retirement castles, while Gen X and Millenials have a good old culling of the herd to see who gets to cannibalize what's left of a human economy).
So what does this mean in practice? People who can develop a taste / aesthetic / abstract values "stack" will do well in the AGI era. Pure shape rotators are going to have difficulties. But, then, I don't actually know that many 20 year+ software development veterans that don't have a kind of style to themselves or opinions on how things ought to be (not, here, in reference to moral or metaphysical values). I'd be more concerned for someone who's only ever grinded leetcode and muscle-memorized development frameworks. On the other side of the spectrum, wordcels who only ever try to track the mood (vibe?) of the audience and pander to them are also probably hosed. Contrast this to the likes of The Last Psychiatrist and even Scott himself; opinionated (even when ostensibly trying not to be), stylistic, with loose opinions strongly held.
In this way, I have a lot of hope for people not based on the title or functional nature of their job, but on the level of personal passion and opinion that they can develop.
Most people don't "care about the world" because they only ever care about themselves in the world. Although such a disposition seems and, in fact, is self-centered, it's also inherently reacive; How do I get what I want out of this given set of circumstances?. They might be playing a single player game, but it's in a world they accept as more or less immutable. Escaping AGI is the same as escaping The World; you have to minimize the ego and develop a values system that goes beyond the here and now. You have to align yourself with something infinite (the abstract) and then believe in it deeply (taste / passion / aesthetic opinion). If people do this, they'll be fine AGI or not.
I don't think 90% of people will ever do this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
I identify as a malt liquor True Crime cousin in that, I do, Truly, Crime-it-up to support my drinking problem.
The true crime wine mom phenomenon deserves an effortpost in the Sunday thread. If I make it intact through Christmas and College Football Bowl games, I might take a crack at it. One of the main themes, I think, would be that Married Woman True Crime pathology is an extreme form of the same pattern in trash romance novels; the danger is the attraction. Instead of taming the pirate captain / barbarian / whatever, True Crime Moms "solve" the case and therefore "tame" ... Ed Kemper? Yeah, it doesn't quite track and that's why I call it extreme -- these gals probably get off, to some extent, on the grisly details. This smart lady has a good, long vlog about the extreme world of female oreinted Romantasy - aka, hardcore smut.
But there's another true crime audience we're talking about. It isn't true crime, actually. It's internet real-time sleuths. The earliest big example of this that easily comes to mind was the Boston Marathon bombing. I actually stumbled across the Reddit thread where they were capturing CCTV footage, timestamps, rando schizo tweets (some of which turned out to be accurate). Anyway, these people, to me, are far more dangerous. It's an entire population of turbo-autists who have heard of "confirmation bias" exactly once, right before they discarded it as "not applicable to me because I am so smart." It's the same mode of thinking that leads down the path to "believe all women" and, yet, "trans women are women" (so, then, I guess we're believing every person?)
When these very online folks start to "work the case" for the Brown shooting, or any other event, they create a kind of epistemology-optional universe of ad hoc worldbuilding, but use real people and real data to prop up their shaky scaffolding. This is what makes it so bad. I have no problem with making up fun stories as a hobby or even professional pursuit. But when you're trying to cycle that "information" back into the real world in order to effect real world outcomes you're engaged in an enterprise that is actively hostile to basic civil liberties.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
This is really interesting, so "good" players try to avoid chaotic situations and play when they have a better gut sense of what they think the other people are actually doing?
More or less, yes. Good players try to exploit situations where they have a biased informational advantage. After learning the basics of poker, Poker 102 is learning about what's called "position play" (you can google it). A lot of professional level players pretty much follow the same first line strategy; be patient and wait for strong hands when you're in position, and then bet in a way that signal some but not crazy strength. This is sometimes referred to as "slow playing."
In poker, every action you take reveals some level of information. You can try to be coy and attempt to signal false information (i.e. bluffing) but that's hard to do well over the long term. People have tells and, moreover, eventually someone will call your bluff. Instead, you try to signal with some ambiguity, some noise, and then try to get the other player(s) in the hand to reveal too much true information. A good fold before having to bet a lot of money is just as smart a decision as calling when someone has preemptively revealed too much.
The difficult emerges when we consider scale. Professional poker players are just that - professionals. They will play poker 40+ hours per week, often exceeding 12, 14 hours in a single day. Nate Silver writes his annual guide to the world series of poker and remarks how, if you make it to the third (?) day, you should be prepared for up 20+ hours of being awake. This is where people crack. Sleep deprivation and cognitive impairment is real. Add on top of that that you need to start tracking betting habits and patterns in multiple other players and often the difference between winning and losing is just who can keep their shit together longer.
I'm oversimplifying - though not by much - to make the point. If you're interested, you should look up what changed in professional poker after Chris Moneymaker. Before, poker was still somewhat a cowboyish, colorful character world. Guys (and ladies) would play tight, but also gamble, and would have fun. Learning the game, at a deep level, was almost an apprenticeship situation. There wasn't a bunch of Game Theoretic Optimal betting guides online. After the explosion of online poker (of which Chris Monkeymaker was the poster boy), it's (de)volved to a bunch of turbo autists who crunch probability in realm time for 20+ hours. Board and people reading is still a thing, but the default, now, is to play so close to the numbers that mostly it's just a grind. The saving grace is that it's still a random deck of cards and bad beats happen. The joy of poker is that you can make all of the best possible decisions all of the time - and still lose.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.
Lol. Yeah. Those looks will happen. But any guy who's in decent shape and over 6'0" already has had to practice his "I'm not going to do a murdering!" body language. You'd be fine.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Best YouTube resource for the basics of boxing "movement." ?? I have zero boxing experience and whenever I stumble onto a bout on late night ESPN, it looks to me like they're just kind of lazily circling each other, but I know there's a lot more going on.
I've played a vanishingly small amount of poker in my life
It shows!
the people who are trying to track your strategy think of you as more volatile.
If they're actually "tracking your strategy" this will have the opposite of the intended effect. They will simply not play when you are in a hand because the variance is too high. Happens all the time with newer players playing at a casino. They come in, sit down all fast and loose, every veteran at the table can see it a mile a while. What happens on every hand? If the new guy leads a bet ... fold,fold,fold,fold,fold. You just wait them out. Eventually, they get bored (quite quickly, actually) because there is "no action at this table!"
Then the adults can get back to grown folks style poker.
Edit:
The scene in Rounders where all of them gang up on the tourists is fairly accurate. It's not that they actually conspire with gestures or what have you, it is just that they are signalling really obviously what they have, letting the tourists chase them, and using the other (pro) players as enablers. They take turns with who gets the pot - again, informally and spontaneously - so that everyone walks away with cash.
Poker is an information game. You not only have to but want to give away some information in order to effect the betting and play of other players. This gets fucked up when a drumb / new / and or drunk player stops rationally reacting to information.
The most exciting hands are when both players have strong hands, try their best to signal it just right, both do but then both have a fundamental inability to accurately model the board and it comes down to the 4th and 5th cards being turned over. This is so fun because its actually where the limits to information theory are touched.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
It'll be apparent that you're holding out for the best cards
Casual poker players are perhaps the best example of Dunning-Kruger. There will be nothing obvious or apparent about the cards he is holding.
It'll be obvious that everyone else should fold unless they hold an amazing hand.
This is ~95% of winning in poker. Position play with the nuts. Actual gambling is a very bad idea.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
hotside restaurant equipment focused job
I'm guessing this means doing HVAC work for / in restaurants and - "hotside" - venting out the, well, hot air from ovens, stoves, hoods etc?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Favorite example of this is Jack Donovan. To his credit, he doesn't call himself "gay" because he hates the modern Gay/LGBTQ culture. He calls himself "androphyllic."
That Wiki photo. God bless.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
What's your plan ... E? Maybe F. Yeah, F is better.
Whats your Plan F?
By Plan F, I mean the Plan you have for your life if everything goes to shit, but not by some horrible tragedy outside of your control. A house-fire, a weird accident -- these things you recover from with some combination of insurance, help from friends and family, and outright charity.
Plan F is closer to; "My ice cream business was going great! But then my business partner - who I knew used to deal a little coke - decided to commit insurance fraud and I'm broke."
For me, I think I'm on the periphery of a semi-hostile / hazardous area that has some sort of amazing natural resource. There's always work for a western / American "fixer" here. Logisics middle man. Plausible deniability bro. Even just a scout for hyper-aggressive capital deployment.
So, what's your Plan F?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
it's buying me time to get to 40 and just shave it all off
Did it at 28. Zero regret.
I rock a Johnny Sins Jason Statham look. "Bald + beard" is a little overplayed, I think. Plus, if you have a jawline, show it off.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.
They will think you're a poker GOD.
Most "bro basement" casual games devolve into wild risk taking within 30 minutes. Playing tight will be a contrast and you'll look amazing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Means I don't trust trans-Mississippi uplanders.
Y'all are just some hippy-dippy Horse Mormons as far as I'm concerned.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.
You stay on yours side of the Mason-Dixon IHOP-Waffle House line, and I'll stay on mine, you damn Yankee.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
If you can find the link, I'd love to watch this. 2012 is right on the edge of full on surveillance state, especially in NYC.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Mostly this falls into the category of "You can't hate journalists enough."
Jared Polis Promotes White Supremacist and Child Porn Defender as “Intellectuals”
Bruh.
There's plenty to disagree with with Hanania, but jumping straight to "literal [kid fucker] hitler!" isn't a bad faith argument, it's a ham fisted way to brute force The Narrative (TM).
Things like this blackpill me a little. I have a bunch of blogs and twitter feeds bookmarked of people and ideas I don't agree with at all, agree with somewhat but with hard barriers, or simply find the ideas wacky but interesting. This is the "drafts" section of some of my online information diet. I know some of it is Totally-Not-Ok. I also have enough confidence in my own epistemic health that I won't turn into "literally hitler" just by reading it. But can I even try to discuss and play with any of these ideas outside of a totally anonymous forum? The answer is probably no specifically because the actually intellectually bankrupt (the journalists above) would simply outright lie to cancel me -- if I was anyone of note. Which I, thankfully, am not.
It really is a new puritanism. It's the midwest mom finding a hidden KISS or Judas Priest vinyl in her son's bedroom and then calling the priest to perform an exorcism. And all it does is breed brittleness in thinking and truth seeking. They're optimizing for a system that will lead to their own demise, and taking a lot of bystanders down with them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I'll respond in more detail later
I await your thoughts, not a copypasta of a chinese forum.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Okay, so we actually agree on more than we disagree on. And we're probably 99.9999% aligned on the current state of affairs.
The difference is just in the prognosis of the outcome.
I'll combine these three things from your last post:
Yes, that's why I said it's the "training montage" part. They're not there yet, but they're fucking grinding to get there. They have a CATOBAR carrier to git gud on, they'll soon have more. Eventually they'll have nuclear powered ones so they can learn that too. There in the middle of the "decades of trial and error" part,
while the Chinese are hitting new deadlift PRs every month (still smaller than us, but growing!) and drinking a river of creatine.
They're slowly expanding their global base network. Their recent "totally not practicing to cut Taiwan off" drills continue to expand.
Time and timing are the big issues here. We've all heard the 2027 deadline / prediction for shit popping off. I don't really think it matters if that's actually 2026, 2028, 2030. But I think it's true that the CCP has a closing window of opportunity before (a) They experience something live COVID again (b) Power struggle at the top after Xi dies or (c) The demographic wave breaks and they actually HARD lose for another century. Truly, I think it's no later than 2035 (that's stretching it) before CCP has to shit or get off the planet.
Will their eye of the tiger training montage be complete in that amount of time? I'd argue no. Again, multiple decades of naval experience really are necessary. Maybe you can shave it down to 20 years starting from .... 2009? 2013? But I don't think you can just fuck around and find out how to do large scale amphibious work in 5 - 10 years.
Note to the Mods (@amadan, just tagging you off the top of my head) -- can we self-submit this as a "understanding actually developed out of some initial rounds of shouting" award?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
There's a pretty large difference between production of new combat systems and experiencing in highly complex naval operations in combat.
China hasn't done the latter since 1979. Even basic seamanship atrophies quickly without constant training and re-training. Ask the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet.
Put another way, why do you think basically every INDOPACOM leader sounds like they're shitting their pants in interviews and press releases?
Aquilino and Paparo - both aviators, by the way - mostly make noise about the issues of sustainment in the event of a crisis with taiwan. Amateurs talk about strategy, professional talk about logistics. The biggest issue is that China is like, really far away and shit. Our sealift capabilities plus ammunition, refit, maintenance, repair in theatre isn't enough to keep pace when PLAN has all of their naval industry right there. In strict force-on-force, the US is still winning, hands down. The problem, again, is when timetables stretch.
But that's just talking about a hypothetical right off the coast of mainland China. In terms of true ocean going naval fore projection, what has China done more than park a flotilla in the Gulf of Aden (after getting lost one time, lol) and then doing weird joint floats with the Russians sorta-kinda near Japan?
Running a truly global Naval force is shit crazy expensive, hyper complex, and requires a training pipeline and practice that you have to develop through decades of trial and error. Human capital, culture, and experience still matter far more than sleek new hulls and neato weapons.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
Yeah, I'm not going to bite.
"But muh state capacity!" is just another variety of cope that technocrat loving Lee Kuan Yew fanboys use to hand wave away pesky little things like civil liberties, the concept of federalism, and actual free markets. "State direct capitalism can totally work, man." There's a joke in here about how just a little, teeny bit of authoritarianism will be really good for us, like a teaspoon of arsenic to boost the immune system.
Even when the government directly orders something, it's just broadcasting goals which many smaller governments try to reach in many different ways. Once an effective method is found, the people behind the effective method are promoted to try to implement it elsewhere while new competitions are started.
I wonder if this leads to gamification of easy to quantify objectives like GDP, but fails for other things, like, I don't know, food safety.
From this article and interview:
Tension between central and local governments always exists, and there’s really never been a coherent plan to address these issues. In that sense, food safety is a bellwether for policy in China: If they can solve the coordination issues there, they’ll be able to deal with other problems like environmental protection, because they all boil down to this central/local divide and how to bridge it.
Coordination problems! Ah, so easy to fix, those.
Chinese demographics don't matter
All lives demographics matter. As does geography. My geopolitical worldview and formula is pretty much demographics + geographic determinism / naval warfighting and sustainment ability. China's prospects in all three of those are ... suboptimal.
Also from the article I linked to above:
That comes down to how food is produced in China. You have somewhere between 200 million and 300 million farmers, each operating on small farms, say half a hectare. By the time a food gets to a processing center, or by the time of its manufacture, it’s already gone through multiple levels: from farm to trader, from small trader to a larger firm with complicated logistics, up to major provincial wholesale markets, and from there across the entire country.
200 to 300 million small scale farmers who haven't leveled up meaningfully since maybe the 1950s.
Hey, but they do have cool lookin' EVs.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
An addendum:
White, appalachian young men and women date, have children, and even sometimes marry latino / black spouses with enough regularity that nobody outside of the deepest hollers really cares (although, strangely, they'll still use racial slurs).
This is not the case with Indians. Furthermore, this isn't just an availability bias. The small cities on the edges of Appalachia are starting to see Indian transplants.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
They have a much more potent economic model
Define "potent"? GDP growth? Per Capita / PPP? If we're talking economics, your terms should be defined and quantitative.
They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures
So they're more "potent" (however that is defined) by generating a negative return on investment? That doesn't make any sense. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps you mean the investments are high CAPEX and have long cycles towards net ROI benefit? If they are by definition unprofitable, they are by definition bad investments that will guarantee that the given industry fails.
While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale.
You have to mean international scale, right?
This post is so poorly written and argument by assertion that I debated even posting a reply. But, I think the spirit of the Motte is often best exemplified by being hyper charitable to the other side, steelmaning poor arguments, and then presenting the opposite view.
My argument against China is the theses in The Great Demographic Reversal combined with an obvious failure mode of the Chinese tech innovation system.
The TLDR, for brevity:
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China's demographics SUCK. They're going to have more olds than they know what to do with. The one child policy was a disaster. People aren't having children together now. And there's a semi-nomadic horde of about 50 - 100 million men who work seasonal migrant jobs from place to place. Their middle class isn't nearly large enough.
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This means that China has no choice but to rigidly control their population. But at their scale, that's incredibly expensive to do. The social credit score system is an experiment; can we pay one half of our population to spy on the other half, and then use computers to spy on the first half? In a perverse irony, China, that does not have nearly the same social security safety net that the US does, is perhaps (the budgets are secret) spending more to not have one!
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Technology wise, the Chinese model has been to find / steal western tech, reverse engineer it to the best of their ability, and re-deploy. People can quibble over if this is real innovation or not, the extent to which China has produced any new and meaningful "inventions" but it doesn't matter. This style of technological management eschews what has been the real engine of tech development over millenia; lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population. An interesting quirk of history is that from about 800 - 1200, the Muslim world of MENA was the most scientifically advanced on the planet. But they fell behind technologically; they knew how stuffed worked and were very smart, but lacked the infrastructure to actually build and disperse scientific knowledge into material things that normies could use to improve their life. Starting at about 1200, Europe starts to overtake in both science and tech because they deploy tech more broadly, and science and tech have a mutually re-inforcing feedback structure.
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Chinese GDP per capita is about $15k. Even with the CCP trying to shit out new tech as fast as it can, most of their own people can't really afford it. Secondly, most of their people don't have a cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense. When the high esteem strategy in life is to grind 996, be an excellent bureaucrat, and a cold bug person, you're not going to get weirdo genius inventors and you're especially not going to get weird genuis asshole corporate leaders --- Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates et al would've been hammered into shit in childhood in China because they're non-conformity is off the charts. Jack Ma is the only homegrown Chinese "visionary" who didn't leave, and he was either some sort of plant by the CCP or became a permanent political prisoner because he did a good job and built a compelling tech company.
The tension at the core of all Chinese history is balancing a pathological need for control of a giant population and a giant geography against the economic growth potential of ceding some control. If the CCP let their people just do their thing, I would be a lot more worried about a Chinese Century because of the sheer numbers. But the CCP has not only chosen, but accelerated toward clamping down harder and "controlling" more.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter
Whoa! Yeah. I can't exactly put it into words but it's very palpable. I feel like I'm watching something that hasn't been fully mastered or edited yet. There isn't that Cinema "filter" on it that makes my brain go "Oh, cool, movies!"
Oh, are you certain about that?
Whatever you say, Fed
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