2rafa
19hr ago
The position on Israel predates the Islamic Revolution in that it was a central pillar of Khomeini’s ministry even when he was in Paris, it’s not derived from any analysis borne of the realities of governing Iran.
It might turn out that there are just many ways to do the same thing. It might also be true that all language models, being essentially ‘distillation’ (via training sets which are the sum of human art, writing, knowledge, etc) of our wisdom, can replicate and build on our achievements but also required, in that fundamental sense, the ramshackle evolutionarily derived networks we have in our own heads that were built for the multimodal real world environment biological life inhabits. We’ll know once we have recursive self-improvement and can attempt initial training with extremely primitive datasets.
2rafa
21hr ago
FWIW I agree on the core point that statistical analysis is batting much stronger than formal logic
Yeah, and this is mostly what people mean when they say this:
Every time we make a new mechanical process, people decide that's how the brain works on some fundamental level. Switchboards, electrical fields, computer logic.
Victorians or Edwardians who imagined the mind as comprised of millions of tiny gears and levers like Babbage’s computer had obviously dissected brains, they mostly recognized it wasn’t literally like that, it was always more about the kind of operation than the exact physical mechanism.
Is it settled science that the human mind is a specific kind of ML model that maps to a category computer scientists would recognize? Obviously not, it’s unlikely something that evolved by circumstance on a completely different kind of computer we don’t understand would be comparable in that way. But it probably is a neural network or something comparable to a neural network of some kind.
2rafa
1d ago
Ok, so if I ask one hundred of the top card industry people, auctioneers, collectors in the business if they’ve worked with you for the last 20 years, many of them will have done business with you, right? You’ll have newspaper clippings and online articles about playing in Pokémon card competitions when you were 12 years old, right? You can show me eBay accounts you control that show you purchasing the cards you just resold a decade ago in competitive auctions?
2rafa
1d ago
Sometimes when you are in a conversation you are bored in and your mind is elsewhere you start responding to only the last few words in the previous sentence from the other person that represent the only part of their last three minutes of monologuing that you actually remember. You extrapolate theme, topic, tone, narrative from them and then immediately respond. At least I do this. This is pretty simply next token prediction.
And again, not to call Hanson unoriginal, but various people - albeit a minority - predicted for decades or even centuries that the brain was essentially just a complex statistical modelling tool and that intelligence, language, consciousness etc were really all pretty basic probability/statistics functions. It’s not a new thought, it’s just one that’s been proven correct.
The counterargument is not that crypto or collectible cards or contemporary art aren’t used to launder money. Clearly they have been and are. It’s that anti money laundering work isn’t really about preventing any transfer / ‘laundering’ of ill gotten funds, which while ideal is very difficult when dealing with competent criminal organizations.
Modern anti money laundering legislation is more about the IRS or FBI arbitrarily showing up at the newly purchased $10m house where a foreign government official or minor boxing promoter lives (whoever happens to legally own it) and saying or implying “we’re essentially going to take this from you, freeze all your accounts and stop you from travelling unless you can explain exactly how you or your associates legitimately made every single cent of the money used to buy this property”. The specific mechanism of the laundering isn’t relevant here, what is relevant is being able to satisfy whatever test the tax collectors or police demand.
2rafa
3d ago
Yeah I feel like for at least a decade the universal advice has been to slow walk fillings like this. I remember someone joking about this with Subway in high school.
2rafa
3d ago
I think marriage / spousal visas are such a scam in most cases. Just because an 85 IQ citizen decides they want to invite another random person from anywhere in the world into my country, their descendants get to be citizens forever and they can leech off the state for the rest of their lives consequence free (any thresholds for sponsorship are laughably low)? Seems dumb.
I would favor a blanket $200,000 cash charge for sponsoring a fiancée or spouse. Either you have the money or can borrow it, or they’re not coming.
2rafa
7d ago
I think there’s a real case to be made that the new ubiquity of TRT among men of a certain age and class has changed the vibe for 45-65 year old men over the last decade. To psychologize, these are largely who is writing, producing and starring in these kinds of shows.
2rafa
10d ago
He gambled and lost which men do all the time. How many young men get drawn into bodybuilding circles and end up turning into bloated, bald, acne-ridden losers who get heart attacks by their early 30s? Not a huge number, but then again, not a huge proportion of soldiers died in the GWOT.
2rafa
10d ago
Tyler gambled and lost. Countless young men went to Iraq. Very few of them died or were disfigured. Of those who returned, many benefited from a luxury welfare state most Americans could only dream of - mortgages at rock bottom rates guaranteed by the federal government, free premium medical care for life in a place the middle class often have to spend thousands per year on premiums and deductibles, free college tuition, a lifetime of freebies and benefits afforded to veterans in modern America even though most of them spent a few years on comfortable Iraqi and Afghan bases with Taco Bells and movie theaters. Those who stayed in the military got to (or get to) retire after as little as 20 years of active duty, which means they could be out by what - 40? - on a full pension, when most Americans have 25-30 years of hard work ahead of them.
It would be inhuman not to feel immense sympathy for Tyler. But most who chose to enlist for the GWOT got a good deal. Or at least a decent one. And they did choose.
2rafa
10d ago
Isn’t military school literally for delinquents, degenerates, and other wastrels whose parents have enough money to attempt it as a last-ditch solution?
And yes, I agree with your point. The levels of even modern day violence and abuse (physical, sexual, psychological) in eg Russian jails, the Russian military etc are astonishing, and their country hardly seems a better place for it.
2rafa
12d ago
At some point, surely this year, the first really big “happening” is going to happen to do with this. Then things get interesting. Still, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do. This isn’t like nuclear proliferation, where really anybody except state level or wannabe-state-level (ISIS, etc) has much reason to go for it - oh you’re going to threaten to just nuke all your enemies? Come on - essentially everybody doing anything benefits from AI at some point, to some degree.
2rafa
12d ago
It’s different. The homeless psycho monster problem in America is visible even in the richest parts of rich cities like NYC and Miami. Even in LA you’ll see it when you drive to work, to many stores, or if you live in neighborhoods plagued by it that are still very expensive like Venice beach, Santa Monica, much of Hollywood. There is an idyllic, peaceful, rich and safe American suburbia and unless you have American family you’ll probably never see it as a median foreign tourist from a rich country. Why would you?
I hear this all the time from rich Europeans I work with and know socially. I’ve heard it from wealthy Australians. You go to America on business or for tourism, stay in a $800 a night hotel in San Francisco or NYC or LA, and outside feels like the worst train station neighborhood ghettos of European countries. Sure, some corner of the Paris or Malmo banlieues might be worse, but no tourist or wealthy local is ever going there.
You need distance for this but the vibe in DTLA like 2 years ago was closer to like, Cape Town or Rio, than it was to big cities in other countries in the rich world. Constantly checking the streets, are there enough people walking around, can I dodge that group of addicts in tents, is this block still safe or is it the next one where things get real bad? Even NYC, while slightly improved from Covid nadir, is still very bad, and totally different from when I was a kid and teenager.
In Australia (kind of like Canada) the really dysfunctional poor are the small aboriginal minority who largely live deep in the bush and outback in towns that are like 30-90% indigenous and have huge issues, but your average rich person there will literally never encounter them unless they go out of their way to.
Don’t people say this about ayahuasca (getting “one-shotted”). I have a friend with some mental health issues who claims she was destroyed and turned into a wreck with anxiety issues by weed (which she smoked, on a few occasions, in college), which has always seemed ridiculous to me as someone for whom it has a mildly relaxing effect at best - like a couple large glasses of wine but without the calories or the slight headache in the morning. The worst thing about weed, in my opinion, is that it tempers dissatisfaction with one’s life. I think I’m happier not doing the salvia thing.
2rafa
16d ago
Sometimes I just really want Cold Brew and while some parts of Europe have new wave coffee places that have it, in much of Europe only Starbucks does (and even then only in the summer).
2rafa
17d ago
I thought it was a pretty OK movie. A lot of the dialogue was very clunky and heavy handed, especially the last line “the story will be sung to remember those of us who could read” or whatever it was, and Nolan clearly skimmed the Wikipedia on the Bronze Age collapse and decided the story was going to be a Lesson about Trump Tariffs (yes, really), which is poor form. But I liked a lot of the cinematography, I liked the sense of an adventure at a time when the world was a much larger place than it is today, and I liked the extremely ahistorical but very pleasing architecture, quasi-brutalist, of the exteriors of the palaces and buildings, especially in Troy. The plot also avoided the usual tryhard “mindfuck” quality of many of Nolan’s worst movies (Insterstellar, Inception, Tenet) where he can’t resist trying to paper over absurd plot holes with a combination of bullshit, misdirection and well akshuallies.
2rafa
18d ago
I’m not saying it’s derived from pragmatic analysis, politics is always emotional. I’m saying that “we must have mass immigration to European countries even if it makes them much, much worse” is a poor way to frame the liberal position because broadly speaking mainstream liberals like Smith do not believe it is going to make these countries much worse. Elite American liberals are not unaware of tribal conflicts. They created Kosovo, they beat themselves up about not intervening more in Rwanda, they deal with countless tribal and religious conflicts in the State Department that they attempt to varying degrees of success to influence and where they regularly pick winners. They just believe in American exceptionalism. That it couldn’t happen here, in part because they’re in charge.
The people who believe we must accept the whole third world no matter what out of power and privilege even if it makes everyone’s life much more difficult tend to be on the radical left, de-growth types, ban new construction types, the oppressed are always right types, black and brown bodies types, Palestine flag / watermelon emoji types, people who hate Matt Yglesias (who again supports mass immigration out of a misguided belief in assimilation) as much as the right types. They are also almost always anti-zionist leftists of the kind you discuss, too.
2rafa
18d ago
Smith realizes that an Palestinian majority in Israel would turn the country into a failed state and result in a genocide, but does not believe a third world majority in America will turn American into a failed state and/or result in a genocide.
He is wrong about the latter (on the first count if not the second, though it doesn’t really matter), but is this hypocrisy? If anything, it is the bigotry of unreasonably high expectations for the migrants, and for their countries’ assimilation of them, for the supremacy of their culture and political system.
This is underappreciated in analysis of the liberal defense of mass immigration, so often painted as simply self hatred, an unlikely thing because many progressives are the standard type of arrogant narcissist politician and they usually don’t hate themselves, not even deep down.
Most people like Smith do not actually believe that the immigrants will make the country worse, they think everything will be fine. They are convinced of their ideology. They are smart enough to know that ethnic and tribal conflicts exist in the world, but they don’t think it could happen where they live. It is not that they believe they deserve worse, but that they think they are better.
2rafa
19d ago
People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?
2rafa
20d ago
Even if you believe this is all going to work out and semiconductor, memory etc demand is going to continue to skyrocket, eventually the Chinese are going to get good at making SSDs and RAM (if not the most advanced GPUs, although I suspect they’ll get there too) and margins will fall through the floor. Involution is the way they do business. They’re selling cars and solar panels at -20% margins to compete with each other for market share.
When Apple and Dell and Microsoft and all the data center and hardware companies are lobbying the US to let them buy cheap Chinese parts that are getting better by the month, the US isn’t going to restrict them so that Korean billionaires get richer. What do you think will happen?
2rafa
20d ago
Hard to really know what the situation is like in North Korea. There is a very developed black market that is in many cases broadly tolerated, but the same has also been true in similarly unrepentant Cuba since the early 1990s and they also resisted most liberalization (seemingly until at least this year).
I’ll leave aside most of this, but I’m curious. You describe gay sex almost like the top/bottom role is something that varies through life - so like, as a young twink, you were a bottom, then you became a top, then maybe in old age, you become a bottom again if you can get some younger, stronger man to fuck you? I suppose this maps to a kind of Ancient Greek or Russian military understanding of homosexuality among predominantly bisexual men in strict hierarchical male environments, but that isn’t a universal thing.
But most gay men aren’t vers, many stick with a sexual role through their lives. Take some very wealthy old gay man who has topped through his life, is he really suddenly going to get his hired men to fuck him in his twilight years? That seems…unlikely? Maybe not! I don’t know. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for aging twinks to hit the gym, get ripped, whatever to remain sexually attractive, but do they stop being bottoms? Again, I’m not sure. I doubt it, at least for many of them. If anything, a lot of the anguish for aging twinks seems to be precisely about the fact that they don’t want to top, if they did then being a hot 40 year old masculine male would be just fine.
More generally, you seem to have that very wistful, romantic view of male sexuality, camaraderie and competition which is common to almost all intelligent gay men on the right (Mishima etc). But is this a unique insight, or motivated reasoning?
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