Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5hr ago
I've attached a reply from Gemini 2.5
Consider this a warning; keep posting AI slop and I'll have to put on my mod hat and punish you.
It uses patsies or useful idiots to assemble a novel pathogen with high virulence, high lethality, and minimal predromal symptoms with a lengthy incubation time. Maybe it find an existing pathogen in a Wuhan Immunology Lab closet, who knows. It arranges for this to be spread simultaneously from multiple sites...This doesn't require superhuman intelligence that's godlike. It just has to be very smart, very determined, patient, and willing to take risks. At no point does any technology that doesn't exist or plausibly can exist in the near future come into play.
Do you really think you can do that with existing technology? I'm not confident we've seriously tried to make a pathogen that can eradicate a species (mosquito gene drives? COVID expressing human prions, engineered so that they can't just drop the useless genes?) so it's difficult to estimate your odds of success. I can tell you the technology to make something 'with a lengthy incubation time and minimal predromal symptoms' does not exist today. You can't just take the 'lengthy incubation time gene' out of HIV and Frankenstein it together with the 'high virulence gene' from ebola and the 'high infectivity' gene from COVID. Ebola fatality rate is only 50%, and it's not like you can make it airborne, so...
Without spreading speculation about the best way to destroy humanity, I would guess that your odds of success with such an approach are fairly low. Your best bet is probably just releasing existing pathogens, maybe with some minimal modifications. I'm skeptical of your ability to make more than a blip in the world population. And now we're talking about something on par with what a really motivated and misanthropic terrorist could conceivably do if they were well-resourced.
I'm still voting against bombing the GPU clusters, and I'm still having children. We'll see in 20 years whether my paltry gentile IQ was a match for the big Yud, or whether he'll get to say I told you so for all eternity as the AI tortures us. I hope I at least get to be the well-endowed chimpanzee-man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9hr ago
When will the AI penny drop?
Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology. On the one hand, many clearly intelligent people with enormously more domain specific knowledge than me. On the other hand, I have a naturally skeptical nature (particularly when VCs and startups have an obvious conflict of interest in feeding said hype) and find arguments from Freddie deBoer and Tyler Cowen convincing:
That, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the AI debate – the tacit but intense desire to escape now. What both those predicting utopia and those predicting apocalypse are absolutely certain of is that the arrival of these systems, what they take to be the dawn of the AI era, means now is over. They are, above and beyond all things, millenarians. In common with all millenarians they yearn for a future in which some vast force sweeps away the ordinary and frees them from the dreadful accumulation of minutes that constitutes human life. The particular valence of whether AI will bring paradise or extermination is ultimately irrelevant; each is a species of escapism, a grasping around for a parachute. Thus the most interesting questions in the study of AI in the 21st century are not matters of technology or cognitive science or economics, but of eschatology.
The null hypothesis when someone claims the imminence of the eschaton carries a lot of weight. I dream of a utopian transhumanist future (or fear paperclipping) as much as you do, I'm just skeptical of your claims that you can build God in any meaningful way. In my domain, AI is so far away from meaningfully impacting any of the questions I care about that I despair you'll be able to do what you claim even assuming we solve alignment and manage some kind of semi-hard takeoff scenario. And, no offense, but the Gell-Mann amnesia hits pretty hard when I read shit like this:
It emails out some instructions to one of those labs that'll synthesize DNA and synthesize proteins from the DNA and get some proteins mailed to a hapless human somewhere who gets paid a bunch of money to mix together some stuff they got in the mail in a file. Like, smart people will not do this for any sum of money. Many people are not smart. Builds the ribosome, but the ribosome that builds things out of covalently bonded diamondoid instead of proteins folding up and held together by Van der Waals forces, builds tiny diamondoid bacteria. The diamondoid bacteria replicate using atmospheric carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight. And a couple of days later, everybody on earth falls over dead in the same second.
I've lost the exact podcast link, but Tyler Cowen has a schtick where he digs into what exactly 10% YOY GDP growth would mean given the breakdown by sector of US GDP. Will it boost manufacturing? Frankly, I'm not interested in consooming more stuff. I don't want more healthcare or services, and I enjoy working. Most of what I do want is effectively zero-sum; real estate (large, more land, closer to the city, good school district) and a membership at the local country club might be nice, but how can AI growing GDP move the needle on goods that are valuable because of their exclusivity?
Are there measures of progress beyond GDP that are qualitative rather than quantifying dollars flowing around? I can imagine meaningful advances in healthcare (but see above) and self-driving cars (already on the way, seems unrelated to the eschaton) would be great. Don't see how you can replicate competitive school districts - I guess the AI hype man will say AI tutors will make school obsolete? Or choice property - I'd guess the AI hype man would say that self-driving officecars will enable people to live tens of miles outside the city center and/or make commuting obsolete?
I can believe that AI will wreak changes on the order of the industrial revolution in the medium-long term. I'm skeptical that you're building God, and that either paperclipping or immortality are in the cards in our lifetimes. I'd be willing to bet you that 5 and even 10 years from now I'll still be running and/or managing people who run experiments, with the largest threat to that future coming from 996 Chinese working for slave wages at government-subsidized companies wrecking the American biotech sector rather than oracular AI.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
Obviously a bit late for your current trip, but the HelloChinese app works pretty well for picking up some basic conversational Chinese. Learning characters is a whole different story, but you can ignore them and just focus on the pinyin. Duolingo for Mandarin is terrible, imo.
I probably understand about 30% of what my in laws say, although in my defense, their pronunciation isn't great and they keep mixing in Hokkien and other dialects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15d ago
But if you hear what she's actually saying, brashly, it's that there should be no hyphenated Americans. You need to abandon your native land, your culture and your history at the door. Sam Seder needs to leave only in so far as he's incapable of dropping his distinctly Jewish identity.
It's not clear to me whether this is your view as well, or if you're just trying to correct the record. But if true, would you (or your interpretation of her views) welcome my immigration to the United States if I wholly identified as an American? Say I surrendered my previous citizenship, listened to the Hamilton soundtrack a couple times and passed the citizenship test? What if I weren't Christian? Or what if I weren't white? What if I supported trans children in choosing what to do with their body (which you see as sterilization and self-mutilation, I know, let's not get hung up on semantics)? Increased redistribution and welfare relative to what I expect you would want?
The above is more or less directionally true, even if I changed many details/positions. I am an immigrant, I do largely identify as American, I do love the history and origin story and culture of this country. But I also, broadly speaking at least, align with a set of values that clearly melt your brain. Yet those values are undeniably a valid set of cultural values in this country - have I assimilated, or not? Is 'abandon your native land, your culture, and your history' code for 'you need to adopt political positions that I like?'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population.
Hey, all these people were saying the US was following in the footsteps of Brazil and South Africa, but I never believed it until now:
In the fifth chapter of the book, titled "HIV Heresies," Kennedy writes several times that he is neutral on the whether HIV causes AIDS. "From the outset I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS," he says at the beginning of the chapter. Later on, though, Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS" and there are numerous mentions throughout the chapter of HIV infection not being the sole cause of AIDS.
Despite assertions that he is not taking sides, Kennedy spends much of the chapter on HIV presenting arguments made by Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps the most influential HIV "denier." Duesberg has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS but is a "free rider" common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures.
In "The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy sums up Duesberg’s theory as follows:
“Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signs of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrate—poppers—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.”
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
20d ago
I am but a humble biologist, and know little of warfare, politics and economics. But I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned that the majority of US aid to Ukraine was spent with US arms manufacturers. Many Trump supporters (or at least democrat-haters) bemoaned the atrophied state of US/European arms production when Russia was producing more shells than NATO per month. China can kick our ass in drone production. Setting aside all questions of morality (which I obviously find more compelling than your median Trump supporter), why not use the conflict in Ukraine as an opportunity to re-arm? So to answer your question...pretty much anything and everything that we can make that wouldn't enable Ukraine to steamroll the Russian army and march on Moscow. No NATO troops, no air support (just intel), no nuclear umbrella (for now).
As an aside, isn't domestic spending to onshore manufacturing a key goal of the Trump administration? Why the monomaniacal focus on tariffs and not industrial policy more broadly? And particularly tariffs on our allies...but I suppose that's a different discussion.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends.
Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.
The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.
May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.
Are any international future students getting the boot?
Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.
Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds.
If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.
Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.
There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.
Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.
I've been laughing at this for the last 10 minutes. WMAF couples are by far the dominant demographic in my immediate social circle.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
You should:
-
Yes. Safe space. I think we all know the failure mode of this one.
-
Double down on your commitment to free speech. Let the Jewposters have their say, and treat them like anyone else. If they're polite and they bring receipts, who are we to judge their speech any more than judge those who hate democrats or think that mandatory schooling is the greatest injustice of all time? You'd win my respect, although we probably also all know the failure mode of this option too.
-
Give me the satisfaction of admitting to ourselves that we're basically reddit with a rightward slant and that free speech maximalism is dumb. Moderation (heh) in all things.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.
Au contraire, I can promise you that we have some very elaborate explanations for the motivations of the Jewish conspiracies.
Paging @SecureSignals - What do you think?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Saying that groups are conspiring to do the thing that the group would describe themselves as doing
I had said:
'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Radical leftists is usually a stand in for anyone who voted blue in the last election cycle, and I doubt that any significant number of democrats would describe themselves as being anti-Americans trying to undermine America's power.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Unless this is someone's alt, doesn't look like they're a regular Jewposter.
Anyways, object level aside since obviously I don't like the people obsessed with Jews either, this is just a much less lofty expression of free speech ideals for a community to follow. What @self_made_human articulated was more or less reddit with a right-shifted Overton window, but not far right enough (yet) to tolerate regular Jewposting. What's the difference between 'we treat anti-semites more harshly because our userbase finds their opinions inflammatory' and 'we moderate conservative opinions much more harshly because they're just sealioning single-issue posters?' There's plenty of garbage posts here with nary a fact in them and packed chock-full of opinions I find plenty inflammatory (and even articulated in a much cruder and more inflammatory way than the Jewposter!), and the only difference between them is the opinions of the majority.
Sure, if the mods make enough unpopular decisions the community dies. Sure, nobody can reach some platonic ideal of objectivity or impartiality. But abandoning the pretense so easily is a bit of a letdown.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed.
'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'
Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I think you're wrong here. I predict DOGE will put a significant dent in the deficit.
Are you interested in attaching some numbers to your prediction? How much lower do you think the 2025 deficit will be relative to 2024?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
And then, from what little I know about Nixon, he created the EPA and the endangered species/clean air acts. He cozied up to China and brought them into the fold. And some mix of foreign interventionism without boots on the ground? What does that even code as anymore?
My broader point is that it was so far in the past (at least to me) that I wasn't interested in making a partisan point, I was just trying to gesture towards a cultural touchstone I thought most people would recognize. I didn't realize it was such a sore point.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
And you're talking about credibility because?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Why would I look to bipartisan consensus?
Because if a narrative is broadly believed by both Democrats and Republics, to me it's definitionally not rabidly partisan.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Ironically, claiming that Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon probably has less bipartisan support than the consensus view that it...wasn't.
Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
First, I believe you have conflated the budget bill with the debt ceiling. Biden authorized a temporary budget through March 14th to avoid a government shutdown. The debt ceiling is untouched, and we are right up against it. We cannot spend money we don't have anymore.
No, I understand the difference. That's why I asked whether you thought Biden should have pushed congress to raise the debt limit in the last few months of a lame duck presidency.
Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.
lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.
Anyways, the $4 billion for the world bank you linked doesn't get paid until after Trump takes office (and presumably he can, and I presume will, cancel it). Your argument is that Biden went on a spending spree over the last few months - can you explain the timing of how you see that working? The 100 billion for clean energy came from the funds appropriated by congress for the inflation reduction act. Do you think you could also explain how that fits your narrative that Biden went on a 'spending spree' to bankrupt the federal government in his last few months in office? Did you read the articles that you linked?
Your examples don't seem to make your point very well. It's just not clear to me, legally speaking, how a president can go on a spending spree in their last few months in office and bankrupt the government when funding is appropriated by congress.
Now maybe you can frame this in a way where it's all smart politics. One persons "They put party above country" is another persons "The opposition party is entirely illegitimate and we must break off all the levers of power and leave the country crippled before they use the turnkey fascism we set up." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
No, I don't think I would ever argue that harming your own country for partisan gain is a good thing. And broadly speaking, Trump won an election, so let him govern as he sees fit (within the bounds of the constitution and short of Watergate-level offenses) and the voters will decide.
All the same, given the situation he finds himself in, why shouldn't Trump close every money spigot he possibly can, regardless of the letter of the law, because we've been left completely broke? When we hit the debt ceiling, we start defaulting on our obligations. That's what this looks like. Complaining about Trump making lemonaid out of lemons, since slashing the budget was part of his agenda anyways and he can spin it as a victory, is just spin.
I'm not complaining about Trump freezing all federal spending. I'm responding to a comment that you made and asking you to explain what you meant.
I'd be making different arguments for USAID or NIH/NSF/DoE or whatever other department.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The fact the the Biden spending spree in the last months of his administration left the government completely broke and at the debt ceiling.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by a Biden spending spree? My impression was that congress and Biden signed a continuing resolution bill to fund the government through March so that Trump could enact his priorities, and that Biden can only spend money appropriated by congress. Are you arguing that Biden increased spending in some way in the last few months of his presidency? And you think that Biden should have raised the debt ceiling in the last few months of a lame duck presidency?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
No, it's for you. I'm confused what you see as sniping at Trump supporters. Make America great again, again?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
The context of the Yarvin quote is that democracies are weak and feckless so we convert to a dictatorship, not that Trump is a particularly ineffectual president. My point was that presidential elections probably won't affect any of us all that much. I would, and have, made the same point about democratic administrations. Is that what you were referring to?
Here's to hoping that the next four years do indeed make America great again, again. And we manage to dredge some unity and goodwill out of our desiccated corpse.
For all that we complain, I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go? And where would you invest? Whatever my family and friends say, they're still investing in American securities. They're mostly still working in the USA. The opportunity here in most fields is unrivaled.
And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years
I don't know mesothelioma because it's relatively rare, and I don't see patients - just lines on a graph. That being said, it seems like a pretty similar story with 2 year survival rates of 41% versus 27%. Don't get me wrong, if I get cancer I'll take the pembro, but we're laughably far from curing cancer or LEV.
If you get diagnosed with a solid tumor (i.e. not a leukemia), basically you're either lucky and we caught it early enough to remove it entirely by surgery or you're going to die from it with vanishingly rare exceptions.
One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible.
I imagine that's bad for your bottom line. Or she lived long enough for you to collect?
I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.
Yeah. That's the choice to be made. Hopefully he was of sound mind and deciding for himself.
Watch your tone or I'll ban you too.
The joke is that I'm not a mod. He is.
More options
Context Copy link