RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
TBH I suspected the study was awful. In politicized fields of science it can be better to reason from first principles.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
I'm wondering where the consequences come from. If men were generally like this then we'd expect women to be property of specific men, their husbands or fathers. It'd be 'Rape of the Sabine women' writ large. But that's not the case, there are consequences without regard for whether she was married or not, large and powerful organizations run by men that treat rape as an offence against human dignity.
some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman
Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
Approximately 32 percent of study participants said that they would have "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse" if ''nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences.'' Yet only 13.6 percent admit to having "any intentions to rape a woman" under these same circumstances.
But I still don't believe it?
If this is true, why don't men just more or less openly rape women as they please? Why do I go on the beach and see women in bikinis, or go out in the city and see women in very revealing clothes late at night? Is the idea that men would be unwilling to force a conscious women but are OK with unconscious women? Do we think rapists are really affected by how women feel, as opposed to being impulsive lowlives? It could be so, I am not a rapist and do not pretend to know...
The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general
Why are men looksmaxxing, jestermaxxing, prestigemaxxing and not just rapemaxxing? Why is feminism a thing? The corrupting force of male sexuality doesn't seem to have that much explanatory power, based on the world I see.
I think men's true proclivities are different from what they say, or perhaps people are fiddling the figures (the above link uses a very small sample size of 70-80 men at one university - exactly the same sample size as the Pelicot case though). Or perhaps the 'nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
If 30% of men would rape if they thought they'd get away with it, then how many would go 'eh, not a big deal' (taking the path of least resistance) - who is left to create strict rules punishing rapists, who is left to create consequences? Couldn't the rapey many just ignore the few? The structure of Western civilization would surely be quite different if men were actually like this, it would look more like Africa or India or those stories from Rotherham where the girl gets raped again by the first taxi driver who sees her.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
I'm reading through his latest piece where he basically says AI companies are all in complete shambles and he just seems flatly wrong? https://www.wheresyoured.at/data-center-crisis/
While most people know about pretraining — the shoving of large amounts of data into a model (this is a simplification I realize) — in reality a lot of the current spate of models use post-training, which covers everything from small tweaks to model behavior to full-blown reinforcement learning where experts reward or punish particular responses to prompts.
There's a warning sign here, it's like he's implying that post-training is done after the training process, post-training is part of the training process. I don't think he has a proper grasp on what he's talking about.
To be clear, all of this is well-known and documented, but the nomenclature of “training” suggests that it might stop one day, versus the truth: training costs are increasing dramatically, and “training” covers anything from training new models to bug fixes on existing ones. And, more fundamentally, it’s an ongoing cost — something that’s an essential and unavoidable cost of doing business.
Training is not an up front cost, and considering it one only serves to help Anthropic cover for its wretched business model. Anthropic (like OpenAI) can never stop training, ever, and to pretend otherwise is misleading. This is not the cost just to “train new models” but to maintain current ones, build new products around them, and many other things that are direct, impossible-to-avoid components of COGS. They’re manufacturing costs, plain and simple.
What does he think an AI model is? Deepseek R1 0528 is sitting on people's (big!) PCs somewhere, cloud providers are just providing it. It's a complete product. It still gets about 2 billion tokens per month on openrouter which is pretty good for an obsolete model. It doesn't need more 'post-training' to maintain it...
Seems like a deceptive line of argument to say that training costs are not R&D.
It would be reasonable to say 'because of competition, these AI companies cannot stop making new models like how car companies must always release new cars - this is especially true given rapid performance improvements and low costs of switching provider which reduce retention making the business model precarious and expensive' but he isn't saying that, he's making an altogether more ambitious argument that 'training costs are impossible to avoid' which is just wrong?
He has this overly emotional tone too:
Even after a year straight of manufacturing consent for Claude Code as the be-all-end-all of software development resulted in putrid results for Anthropic — $4.5 billion of revenue and $5.2 billion of losses
What is this, Chomsky? I don't find this guy trustworthy when he conjures up figures based on 'just trust me':
Based on hours of discussions with data center professionals, analysts and economists, I have calculated that in most cases, the average AI data center has gross margins of somewhere between 30% and 40% — margins that decay rapidly for every day, week, or month that you take putting a data center into operation.
The idea that the biggest companies in the world have mysteriously decided to invest hundreds of billions in an obviously, openly unprofitable business sector is interesting but it needs to be justified in detail. Who could know more about data centre economics than Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google? Who would be more diligent in checking the financials than the companies spending hundreds of billions of their own money on this, this year alone?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It's the naivete that staggers me about all this, what reason could there be to give other people your money and just let them do their own thing? Who trusts some random 'professional manager' in a suit before their own flesh and blood children they've personally raised over decades?
It's really not that hard to manage investments. These 'expert' active managers aren't much good at it either compared to index funds, a decent person could just read a few books on risk management and do fine.
It's not hard to pick out things you want to support either. Obviously there's a level of discipline and taste involved if you want to maximize cost-efficiency. That is genuinely skill-intensive. But people on the left don't worry about waste or squandering, Bezos's ex wife is just shovelling money into the faces of progressives without regard for careful strategy. It all goes back through into their cadres anyway, so it's hard to truly squander money... Spending money is just about the easiest job in the world.
Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.
I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry, I highly doubt the actual Mellons who made all that money were big fans of race-focused humanities work, just like the Carnegies were more on the 'libraries are good' end of the philanthropy spectrum.
Just think about what Henry Ford was like and what his foundation is doing. It's true that he employed black workers with equal wages but it's not like he was going out of his way to do it, as compared with fostering anti-semitism:
Since the middle of the 20th century, many of the Ford Foundation's programs have focused on increased under-represented or "minority" group representation in education, science, and policy-making.
Soros has the right idea. Keep it in the family. Value drift is not just for AIs.
There was also an instance in Australia where a billionaire tried to fund pro-Western civilization sentiment in academia, against the kicking and screaming and wailing of our education sector.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces
MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was
I don't think this is the right frame.
OK, I guess if the Western political class was made up solely of EU or UK officials, there would be no productivity growth, just anemic faux-technocratic tweaks, Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked... Technocracy without technology. From that point of view it's declinism.
But there would be large and ever growing numbers of migrants. Is that not a radical policy, an ambitious vision to reshape the world? Spain legalized 500K illegals this week. Australia imported about 300K legal immigrants last year in a country of 27 million. The left have big ambitions for growth in the size of the state, fiscally as well as demographically. The left are big fans of renewable energy too, they want more solar panels and wind farms. Some favour war to impose their values overseas, war against homophobic or racist autocracies who deny their people Human Rights. From a certain point of view, some are imperialists.
Is Trump opposed to new technology, new ideas? No, he's a big fan of AI and crypto, he's eager to have new investments, new battleships, the biggest and the best. Not a big fan of electric cars or windmills, he prefers oil and gas. Trump's desire for overseas expansion is manifest. Right-wing populism has close ties to jingoism and imperial expansion historically and today.
If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left
One man's nostalgia is another man's 'this is obviously correct and good, the more good the better!' another man's failure is 'we clearly didn't try hard enough (this is correct and good), all these ____ists and Russian bots were in the way'
Each side has their own unifying myths. The left have a vision of evil white supremacy, white colonialism, racist capitalism... a world divided between whites and People Of Colour (with some subdivisions for educated/ignorant whites, model minorities, LGBT, intersectionalism). There's some variation between pursuing social democracy or socialism/communism and liquidating landlords. There are some on the left trying to push for more embrace of technology: how can you have fully automated luxury gay space communism without data centres? But by and large, the left's unifying myths unite the left.
The right's unifying myths are somewhat more diverse: good white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, 'we abolished slavery', rallying behind the flag, market capitalism as an end in itself, leftists being gay (pejorative) and cringe... But they are also myths of the right.
I don't think you can unify left and right, only align everyone to be on the left or the right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.
I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.
Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles
So far as I can tell, it was mostly propagandists later on who said that, or it was a metaphor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Well they had actual replacement rate fertility from 1950s to 1967...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/swe/sweden/fertility-rate
And even that wasn't sufficient for demographic stability/expansion since it did not last. I don't think Sweden's 'high' TFR that's still below replacement matters that much, if it's just one peak on a rollercoaster that mostly goes downhill.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I read a rather persuasive essay that argued at the end that financial redistribution was largely ineffective, even counterproductive since it basically transferred money away from married men (the biggest net-taxpayers) to someone else, who might or might not have children with that money. While these men aren't raising their own families with their own money that's being taken from them...
Financial tweaks don't have a good track record, Niger and Mali or Yemen don't need these tricks to enjoy high fertility. Really, it's about culture rather than financial incentives.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
When it comes to high TFR, there are only a handful of successful interventions in the modern period:
- Georgia and their 'mothers blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch' thing
- Amish/Jewish/Islamist highly religious subpopulation
- Caeucescu's banning of abortion and state pro-natalism
- Imperial Japanese biopolitics: women have no rights
These don't seem very applicable in Sweden.
The post-WW2 Baby Boom is perhaps more plausible. But that required a cultural foundation that we don't seem to have, rising prosperity amongst the middle class... The 1950s are nearly as far away as Afghanistan or Imperial Japan.
The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think. And what's even the point? Why are more people needed, from a policy point of view? A child born today will come of age in 2044. Add another 4 years of university, 2048. Is Sweden going to need infantry digging trenches? Is Sweden going to need lusty youths bringing in the harvest? Industrial proletariat in the steel mill? Is Sweden even going to need universities? No, Sweden should and will mechanize all that. Even the production of ideas will likely be mechanized by then.
For all of human history, more children in your state was usually a good thing, there was no substitute for people, especially high-quality people - Swedes have a good history of achievement and ability. I think our logic is fundamentally wrongfooted by modernity here, people will point out the high youth unemployment in China and then the low TFR... how is low TFR a problem if there aren't enough jobs for existing youth? Even if one's not a singularitarian, why are people so unwilling to look at the general trend of a declining number of legitimate jobs? We can just predict the trend will continue, right?
If Sweden really needed more children, wouldn't they have a 'firm handshake and you're in' labour market? But they don't, no Western country does, they all want a bachelor's degree minimum and plenty of interviews. There is huge demand for 140 IQ agentic innovative dynamic agile 10x engineers with great communication skills and a flourishing Linkedin... not so much for 100 IQ Sven I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Also, do not be a woman.
Female billionaires die 4.5 years EARLIER than the leading benchmark. The usual 5-7 year female longevity advantage nearly vanishes. Male and female billionaires die at about the same age. No country on Earth shows a gap this small.
Isn't this just the effects of billionaires not being in the bottom quintile of men, who are more likely to die young? It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do. If you're not a coal miner, drug dealer, fighter, suicidal... (these are usually men, admittedly for reasons rooted in biology) then you'll have a long lifespan.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling
How is that a harm of prediction markets, as opposed to just normal gambling? People have been gambling for thousands of years, they're not going to stop now. This is an innate part of the human condition. How much wealth has been squandered by 'people buying crap they don't need' syndrome? A good chunk of world GDP is wasted from that angle, people go bankrupt and suffer tremendously because of this. But we don't shut down capitalism because people lack self-control.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they have an overspending problem, with 1 in 6 (16%) saying their spending has ruined their lives. Meanwhile, a third of consumers (33%) revealed they’ve made a purchase they knew they couldn’t afford in the past year.
Even accounting for these statistics being fudged to draw headlines, that's still pretty high. Consider storage too, that's apparently a $40 billion market in the US, storing crap that they probably don't need and can't even fit in their houses! People need to learn to accept a reasonable level of responsibility for their actions.
The solution to sports gambling being bad is to just ban it, ban Ladbrokes and whatever else that it's being done with. That will reduce the problem. But we shouldn't pretend that this is in any way new or a problem with prediction markets. The issue is with stupid and weakwilled people being stupid and weak-willed. They'll find some other way to be stupid and weakwilled, abuse different financial products or mobile games. Also, there is an issue with unclear and inconsistent gambling regulation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
"Man who already believed in a conspiracy 100% discovers he can believe in a conspiracy even more than thought possible"
Seems very suss: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-jail-cell-death-video-logs/
Investigators also questioned Noel about an unexplained change in the recorded number of inmates in the SHU, which appeared to drop from 73 to 72 sometime between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Noel said she was "probably" mistaken about the discrepancy and told investigators she had no memory of a count changing.
Thomas and Noel failed to complete inmate counts at 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. as well as mandatory 30-minute wellness checks of Epstein. Investigators speculated the officers may have fallen asleep.
Official reports state that Epstein died by suicide some time before 6:30 a.m., when his body was discovered by a corrections officer delivering his breakfast. No official time of death was ever determined. In recent months, there have been questions about the work of investigators probing the circumstances of his death.
They couldn't even find the noose he 'killed himself' with.
Thomas told investigators he discovered Epstein in his cell shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Aug.10 and that he "ripped" Epstein down from the hanging position.
Investigators asked what happened to the noose.
"I don't recall taking the noose off. I really don't," he replied. "I don't recall taking the thing from around his neck."
Noel, who remained standing at the cell entrance, told investigators she saw Thomas lower Epstein to the floor but did not see a noose around his neck.
The noose Epstein allegedly used has never been definitively identified. According to the inspector general's report, a noose collected at the scene was later determined not to be the ligature used in Epstein's death.
Well we have examples of nations correcting their demographics. Algeria for example got rid of all the French there. For about a century the Algerians were getting crushed by France but they still believed in their national destiny. Facing a weakened France in a changed international environment, succeeded.
Christianity is a different matter. I think people no longer truly believe in Christianity, at least not in the West. Some deeply believe in MAGA, white supremacy, progressivism, Zionism, Islamism, Chinese nationalism... Who deeply believes in Christ? Who is ready to fight and die for Christ? What countries are there recently that get less and less Christian, then suddenly more Christian? The US Christian revival I guess... But that looks like a brief reversal in the long-term trend.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Well, how effective do you think Christianity has been thus far in combatting pornography?
In the church, pastors are now more likely report a personal history of porn use (67% versus 57% nine years ago). Nearly 1 in 5 pastors say they currently struggle with porn. And among Christians who have attended services within the last month, more than half say they view pornography at least occasionally.
Christianity is nothing if not diverse. I'm guessing you think 'gay marriage' is morally evil as an objectively true statement too, I don't disagree. But, according to polling, 55% of US Christians support gay marriage. That's not merely a sin but actively going against doctrine. Other countries may vary, I pick America because it's the biggest nominally Christian country.
I don't think they're real Christians, gay marriage is not accepted under Christian doctrine. Presumably they don't think you're a real Christian (oh he missed all the stuff about tolerance and niceness and not judging).
An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere
I was pretty clear about all the things I think Christianity is against. I could list all the things I think it's for. You seem to agree with me about pornography being against Christianity. I don't see much disagreement between us on Christian doctrine.
But I think, since Christianity is visibly ineffective, it can't be the solution to the real problems in the world. If you think porn is objectively wrong, then what do you think about these pastors? What does that lead you to believe about Christianity in the world today?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
you're sneaking in an assumption that Christianity exists as a system to reduce the absolute amount of "sin" in the world
Yes, it is? Christians are supposed to be against sin. They didn't bitch and whine when the Arabs blocked pilgrimage routes, they went on Crusade and fought hard to correct this. They forcibly converted the Baltics.
Christians of the past truly believed in their doctrine. They made enormous investments in church buildings back in a time of poverty. They fought immensely bloody wars over doctrine. The Pope's spiritual power made him a huge political player. Show a Carolean or one of Cromwell's soldiers 'Piss Christ' and he'd go on a rampage with pike and sabre.
Based Catholic Authoritarian State is unfeasible now and in 1900. But Ultra Based, Ultra Catholic/Protestant Authoritarian State used to be normal, so normal people didn't even write about it. That was just the expected context of society. Of course you brutally suppress heretics (nevermind Muhammedans, even if you've disgraced yourself you can still go to Austria and kill the Turk!). Of course people might be lynched for atheism or profaning the name of God. That was just common sense.
People now cannot even imagine Anglican death squads moving out to crush Presbyterians, most can scarcely even discern the difference between the two. The majority of Christians wouldn't even countenance the mildest expressions of their ostensible faith or doctrine if it goes against Progressive Doctrine. 55% of US Christians are fine with gay marriage, apparently. 'Extremists' today can get arrested for peacefully protesting or just standing menacingly outside an abortion clinic. Piss Christ gets lots of internet discourse and no bloody torturous executions.
That is how things have changed.
My thesis is that 'trad-cath society' was not on the menu in 1900 and still less so in 2026. Whereas Chesterton seems to be saying 'what we need is more Christianity, more Catholicism' when the clear trend is in the other direction, when Catholicism and Christianity is in an absolutely pathetic state in the Western world. If the brakes have failed, jamming your foot on the brakes harder and harder isn't going to do anything.
I mean just look at the world as it is today, Christian doctrine exists in a wholly different reality to what's actually happening in the world. The amount of pornography, sloth, pride, greed, sodomy, promiscuity, children outside of wedlock, profanity, bestiality, saturday trading, materialism, abortion (on a mega-scale and with state sanction/subsidy in many places) is just staggering. How much usury is there? We have oceans of usury, usury so advanced and sophisticated that they wouldn't even have language to describe how usurious it is.
Catholicism has clearly failed if its doctrine is totally ignored and routinely flouted except where Progressives find utility in wearing it like a skinsuit.
What Chesterton needed to do is examine why his proposed solution, despite over 1000 years of Christianity in many places, despite immense piety and crusading and pretty cathedrals, did not actually succeed in getting and maintaining the society he wants. Time moved against it. It's no longer practical to look thousands of years back into the past for guidance.
Just today we have yet more revelations of 'trad-cath' egirls behaving badly, Sarah Stock and Elijah Schaffer. The whole thing is a performative joke, it cannot be implemented in our modern society at scale.
Same with Tolkein's anti-industrialism. Sounds good, doesn't work. Not a real option.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
I wish Chesterton and Tolkein and others could actually see the world of today... What would they then think about the plausibility of their ideas?
Yes, they preferred high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society to capitalist mass democracy (Tolkien labelled it Americanism), Nazism, Bolshevism...
But it turns out that high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society was not on the menu. It is not served by the chef. It is dead in a ditch.
19th century romantic ideals are not actionable in the industrial age, let alone the internet age. They didn't get defeated on the battlefield, it's not a case of 'damn, we were so close to just loving our families and being good wholesome people in a fine society of freedom and justice and all good things but then the Red Chinese invaded and forcibly made us use Tinder, forcibly taught us about the Kardashians, forcibly aborted more children since 1970 than all those who died in the history of warfare, forcibly made The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'. That didn't happen, these old ideals could not manage with modernity.
The operating structure of our society and technology led us here. Wind back to the 19th century and we just get here again, faster if anything. The old system was clearly unstable, that's why it isn't around anymore.
Also I think it's no good to criticize others for 'cowering from modern complexity' while hoping that modernity goes away:
"In the break-up of the modern world, the Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history."
The modern world is going to break up? How? Peak oil? The fertility crash? Dysgenics? Climate change?
The better option is working in modernity, enjoying the good parts while avoiding the bad parts. Yes, I don't want to work in subsistence agriculture for my whole life. No, I don't want to work a pretend job shuffling paper around either.
Modern problems require modern solutions. We have these huge government apparatuses, they need to be made efficient and aligned to national goals. We have these huge industrial-technological companies, they need to be aligned better to public benefit rather than solely private self-interest (they need to do more and better worker training and long term investment for a start, don't take me for a socialist). We have the welfare state, it needs to avoid perverse incentives or dysgenically taxing the productive to shelter and multiply the unproductive. We have the internet, we need to make better use of it so people aren't watching short form video all day. We have AI, it needs to be aligned better, not least it needs to stop weighting white lives as a small fraction of black lives.
We will shortly have mass cloning, genetic manipulation, human-like robots. What then for the Family? Modernity has already pretty clearly wrecked the Family, what if it goes straight for the finishing blow?
Furthermore, I don't think that MAGA are 'nihilists'. They clearly believe that something matters! They might be uncouth or unsophisticated, even harsh or mean. But how else are you supposed to manage these tricky issues, mass migration being one they're most interested in? This is the age of fast travel. That isn't just going to go away. These issues need to be wrestled with rather than merely bemoaned like Chesterton does so eloquently. He seems to be of the 'if everyone would just...' school of thought. Nobody has ever 'just' and they're certainly not going to start now.
PS, I was just looking through various essays and it's funny how decidedly anti-Nazi conservative intellectuals of the 1930s basically sounded like Nazis in the early 1920s. Here he makes snide remarks about the Jewish element influencing the British empire and Jews running the Bolsheviks: https://americanliterature.com/author/gk-chesterton/essay/wells-and-the-world-state
Churchill even complains about Judeo-Bolshevism in his article 'Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
I think @RandomRanger had a similar comment that I am struggling to find (although, to be fair, it was pointed out that Ranger was using copilot which is a known dumpster fire).
I thought I was pretty far out on the 'singularity soon' wing of this website? In my experience AI is quite good for writing code, whether that's CRUD or more interesting code like pathfinding or O(n) tier operations or even writing out procedurally generated shaders and effects.
Not perfect, it does struggle and choke a bit right now on the more advanced or fiddly things... But what happens when it starts directing a 1000 subagents to attack your million line monstrosity of legacy code? What happens when it can error-test better?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
There's an interesting contrasting series one could draw.
- Racial intelligence gaps are probably just real, as seen from all the IQ tests of different racial groups, the distribution of Nobels and technical achievement across the nations
- Even if they were not real and the gap in performance is due to culture, then much the same conclusions should be drawn (do not bring in people from low performing cultures - or commit to authoritarian mass-scale re-education and indoctrination programs to get them up to speed)
- If there is no biological or cultural effect on intelligence/achievement and it's just racism, then maybe white countries should just accept they're incurably racist since, somehow, their ambient racism field is still suppressing the achievement of POCs despite all these expensive affirmative action and DEI efforts. Perhaps oil and water just don't mix and they should be kept far away to minimize the effect... Or maybe 10x more money and effort needs to be spent on DEI? $1.2 Trillion wasn't enough, what about $20 trillion to sub-saharan Africa? Could the ambient racism field be tapped for power, how is it so effective at inducing dysfunction in blacks, even over long distances, even after great spans of time since whites had any influence? Is the racism field defending itself by getting Trump and other populists installed, is it too deep to root out?
- Maybe the only solution is genocide, to get rid of the ambient racism field?
I know this sounds sarcastic and dumb but if you take the premises and run with them under utilitarian human-dignity logic, that's where you end up. If white genocide raises world happiness by destroying the racism field and thus raising more black and brown bodies to high standards of living and achievement, isn't that then good? Revolutionaries in the 1960s debated this, some proposed the necessity of killing white babies to stop them growing up to continue the oppressive racist-capitalist system.
On the other hand, it would be much easier for the people with all the H-bombs and MIRV'd ICBMs to do the genociding... Or a transhumanist fix nowadays, I suppose. What does it even mean to make someone smarter and more capable with a transhumanist fix, is this ego-death, overwriting a personality, overwriting a whole racial group?
The exact mechanics of the racism field deserve much more study. This is an extremely important effect, if it's a real thing. Spooky action at a distance, across vast spans of time, very potent effect! And it seems to only 'work' when white people do it - Ottoman and Algerian slave-raiding and Japanese conquest/genocide doesn't seem to have the same effect white racism has on black and brown communities.
If the ambient racism field is just made up, then those who've been promoting and proposing the theory should be treated very seriously. After all, they would have overseen and promoted the waste of tens trillions of dollars, the misallocation and the miseducation of hundreds of millions based on a lie.
Yes, AIs are not conscious. Consciousness is not even a thing, it's a category error. If you can't verify its existence with an objective, external test (even in principle), it doesn't exist. It's faker than GDP, faker than polling, faker than the predictions for world population in 2100, faker than any benchmark on any AI model.
If there is such an idea as a philosophical zombie, a being that has no 'qualia' but behaves indistinguishably from a 'real conscious being', then consciousness is disproven. We can do without the concept if it has absolutely zero implications or meaning in the real world. People are knocked unconscious if you hit them on the head, people and AIs are smarter or dumber, people and AIs are more or less emotional, all of that can be observed and is real while consciousness in the abstract philosophical sense is imaginary and irrelevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Isn't the official story still that he's just this random finance billionaire who was also a sex trafficker and killed himself in prison... no, the footage cannot be found?
So far as I know the official story is not 'this guy is Mossad/CIA/Illuminati and that's how he has all this money despite being a complete weirdo and allergic to writing properly.'
They're STILL blotting out names on those emails too, it's not a good look.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.
Grok is much more uncensored, though surprisingly anal about not breaking laws, if it thinks you might be about to break laws. 4.1 Fast is so cheap too, it's fantastic.
Claude is technically better as a writer, certainly better longform but it has that saccharine, held-back aspect to it that's kinda offputting. Grok's cringe sense of humour is also offputting but it's a different kind of aura entirely. Grok is like a sincere but cringey autist and Claude has that charismatic HR-approved speaker 'I am pretty funny but I don't want to be controversial, at most I'll hint at things' aspect, it's deliberately sandbagging whereas Grok will overtly obey to the best of its ability. And Grok doesn't have woke biases either or this weird therapy-speak attractor.
Also I'm pretty sure that on API, with some more elaborate prompting you can have it sexo to your heart's content. At least Sonnet 4.5 was like that.
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