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.
16hr ago
Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.
It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.
If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.
But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism
That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.
You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Yeah, actually, this does make more sense. I think you're right.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.
A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.
The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.
Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.
So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Testable predictions if my theory is true: SIDS rates will be higher among lower IQ parents and higher among blacks, probably also higher among single mothers.
..... (sadly) ding, ding, ding.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
I've worked on CL HFT systems (n.b. since ~2017 the field's not looked anything like the popular world things, because of regulatory and policy changes.)
If you do an effortpost on your experience here, I'll find a way to compensate you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Women genuinely struggle to lead men, and are more indecisive, more prone to command by committee, crack more easily under stress, and blatantly favor their sisters in every situation.
Tell the group how you feel about Captain Shaina Coss
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
You're not accurately modeling the level of evil.
It's not that the government will euthanize the eldery. It's that society will encourage the elderly, gently, to kill themselves.
This is why you're seeing discourse around assisted suicide and "death with dignity" popping back up. But, you now what, it's probably not a big deal, I mean, that's only a fringe element of people who---
1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.
Oh.
So we've got a 5% "rank and yank" quota going on. Bump it up to 10%, concentrated in the elderly and "differently abled" and, all of a sudden, we've got a nice little euthanasia-eugenics garbage collection app for society. Go Team!
If there is not a fundamental sacred respect for life in a society, then that society defaults to a pro-eugenic stance. Over time, with subtlety, that society will ruthlessly select for its preferred characteristics like a breeder surveying new born puppies.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
As other comments downthread have said, replicating the Haredi is a bad idea. First, there is definitely a high level of welfare fraud. Second, much like the Amish and FLDS groups, the Haredi essentially get away with breaking a ton of Federal laws because "lol, they wear those funny hats!" or something.
Just walk around Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.
But, again, NY/NJ and Federal prosecutors aren't going to destroy their careers by hauling a bunch of literal grey bearded Rabbis into court.
Replicating them secularly would not work at all -- any group trying to do all of this would get sued into oblivion. In a religious context, FLDS do this out west to an extent. The problem is that any Christian group who would be willing to live like the Haredi usually have a "imminent end of days" bent to them and so generally like to be off grid / separate from the modern world instead of .... embedded in Brooklyn.
It takes a special kind of cognitive athleticism to think "I despise this modern world and all of its impious distractions .... when is the darn N train going to come?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence.
The founding fathers presaged this and wrote The Federalist Papers specifically to address it.
TLDR; Far, far more power should be delegated to states and localities. This is what the tenth amendment says. Like, lit-ra-lly;
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The cascading usurpation of this began with the 14th amendment and then was wildly expanded by the Civil Rights Act. Strange how that lines up with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, ya?
You now - or, until recently - had Offices of Civil Rights in almost every executive agency who's express job was to try and find the hidden racisms in ... anything ... so that some sort of amorphous yet far reaching suit could be brought in federal court.
And, of course, any congress person who would voice a concern with the 1964 CRA, despite the fact that his metastasized multiple times in every decade since its original passage would instantly bet met with breathless cries of "the racisms!".
All of this is to repeat the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin;
When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Frankling, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."
And, slowly, over time, under the cover of "righteous intent", we've decided to abandon the republic in favor of a centralized capital-S State that reaches down to wrap it's testicles tentacles around each one of us all.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
I want to emphasize how much I like this post. It's such a compelling illustration of what small c-conservatism believes. A lot of the writing around it gets gummed up in some, frankly, high falutin' verbiage (Scruton, Kirk, Buckley) and, so, the point is obscure.
But this nails it. "You should be the one to make the choices that define your old age" and "But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything..." are particularly vivid.
I don't want guarantees from the State for anything. Because any sort of guarantee in that context is actually a pretty profound limitation of my ability to determine my own future.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.
I think we'll see some level of SRDS - Sudden Retiree Death Syndrome. Essentially "suicide by willful negligence" on the part of some boomers. "Forgetting" to take necessary meds, going for a nice little midnight walk by a bridge, getting interested in at-home amateur electrical work all of a sudden.
I don't think this will be anywhere near the majority. I expect it to be a small enough percentage that it is largely overlooked. Still, when the boomers are well into their 80s, they'll come fact to face with the fact that 1) Raisin ranch existence isn't actually fun or meaningful and 2) Their own children and grandchildren are, yet, still footing the bill for it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
"Written by AI" alarm bells going off. The paragraph structure and word choice here is telling:
What once required a machine-learning PhD can often be accomplished in a matter of days by a technically competent practitioner using cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. While humanoid robots have captured public attention and robot butlers remain unrealistic, AI is already accelerating the deployment of industrial robots and other forms of automation. Advanced driver-assistance systems are reducing the risk of traffic accidents, and AI is speeding up academic work and scientific discovery. More broadly, AI excels at uncovering patterns in massive datasets and surfacing insights and information that would otherwise remain hidden.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
It was a humorous juxtaposition. You stated "My sister reads about terrorists. She's not doing it because she has the hots for Osama Bin Lade." I then shared a link which documented an FBI translator who fell in love with an ISIS terrorist.
It's funny because it provides an example that counters your assertion, but in an over the top and outlandish way. My jocular statement "whatever you say, Fed" was a tacit confirmation that your point is valid and I agree with it, but wrapped in "Very online" verbiage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Oh, are you certain about that?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d 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.
2d 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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
4d 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.
4d 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.
5d 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?
No, I agree with you.
It's like people who write on a computer. Like, what are you even doing? If you aren't sharpening a quill and using ink you sourced locally, you're not writing you're just, I don't know, digital lettering. Ugh. As a true writer, I can't even. People these days are just not at all aware of what it means to scribe.
This is wrong. It's an infinitely better product because it's convenient, cheap, and tastes good unless you've retardmaxxed your tastebuds for no other reason that snobbish elitism.
Industrial strength coffee won WW2 and got us to the fuckin' moon before the Russians.
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