GBRK
1d ago
Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less?
They do. But mostly those cheaper movies end up going straight to streaming, because nothing short of a blockbuster puts butts in theater seats.
GBRK
2d ago
Fast crud, not fast blockbusters. Even committees can take artistic risks when movies are cheap. The 1959 Ben Hur only cost about 150 million dollars in today's money. Back that, that was an absurd amount of money. Today, any given marvel movie will hit that figure.
GBRK
2d ago
Specific to this topic, the US even has a strategic cheese reserve hidden inside a network of caves, to guard against the eventuality of having to pacify a wisconsinite rebellion or something.
GBRK
2d ago
There are two broad models for film production: the auteur model, where a genius director is granted full control; and the committee model, where a variety of people belonging negotiate for their own interests.
Well, that's a lie. There's a whole spectrum of production models, including genius-director-plus-meddling-executive-directors and committee-headed-by-strong-mayor and collaborators-work-to their strengths. But it's useful to think about every movie as falling (relative to some imaginary baseline) into either camp. Auteur films lie and die on whether their director is actually a genius-- and a genius not just at directing, but at every layer of personnel selection and delegation. That makes them risky, because a director's genius is often relative to the nature of the specific project they're working on. Pretty much every "great" film has been an auteur film, but a disproportionate number of terrible films are auteur films too. In the meantime, committee films pretty invariably fall into a "mediocre but enjoyable" middle zone. When entertainment companies fund a movie, they can afford to take risks on auteurs if the movies being funded are relatively cheap. If 9 of your 10 million dollar movies flop but the last one makes 200 million you're in the black. But blockbusters have to make a return. Netflix Originals can afford to vary in quality, but Marvel movies have to put butts in seats every single time.
Now, all of the above is probably just review-- I'm sure you've heard arguments to that effect before. And it might seem a bit misaimed with your criticism is with writing specifically. Why not just hire a known-genius director, and force them to work with a known-genius writer, and otherwise keep your hands off? The problem is is that the auteur-versus committee problem is fractal. We can say that a genius director should have all the power relative to their production committee, but what about relative to a genius actor, or a genius writer? Compared to novels, scripts are filtered through three extra layers of interpretation: first, the collaborative interpretation between the actor and their director. Then, the interpretation of the camera operator, then the interpetation of the editor. Each layer subtracts some of what the writer's initial intention was, and adds a little of what all the other collaborators are thinking of. That means every layer of production needs to be careful about not spoiling the soup. If they add too much of their own personal flavor, it'll clash with what everyone else is doing. If they add too little, they're create the movie equivalent of that one meme about the horse drawing. So you can't just add a top-tier writer to a project and let them have free reign, because that brings the whole thing out of whack. You can't just lock a bunch of geniuses together in a film studio with an unlimited supply of cocaine, you need genuine collaboration, the entire way up and down the chain. If movies routinely used the exact same crew working together they could be consistently good, but as-is there's no way a production committee can just hope for the best. Thus, executive meddling. Thus, poorly written blockbusters.
GBRK
2d ago
The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal.
And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.
Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems
Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.
GBRK
5d ago
Are you seriously blind to the idea that paying people makes them more loyal to you? I guess i shouldn't have brought up the "roman" thing because everyone wants to focus on the specifics of that example instead of looking for broader commonalities throughout history. Like-- do you seriously think the democratic expansion of the administrative state wasn't buying the loyalty of the permanent bureaucracy? This is the exact same thing, except ICE is a literal army instead of a figurative one.
I know a little bit about medical billing and data standards since I work in the industry. More and more, I'm pulled toward the idea that healthcare is so irreducibly complex the only way to cut the red knot is either with completely privatized and unregulated healthcare mixed with trustbusting to break local emergency room monopolies, or by creating a single payer system empowered to ruthlessly negotiate for its own interests. Trying to have a system where a government pays for only the statistically sickest individuals (the poor and old) is just the worst of all possible worlds. (My preference is for single payer, but I have a certain sympathy for the idea of completely obliterating the pharmaceutical patent system, making EVERYTHING legal OTC, and letting God sort it out.)
GBRK
7d ago
I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.
The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.
GBRK
7d ago
Haha fair enough. I used to have a tv with a ui language set to french and never got around to changing it because i thought it was funny.
- ICE is not personally loyal to Trump
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
GBRK
8d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
GBRK
8d ago
I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
GBRK
8d ago
cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
GBRK
8d ago
Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?
GBRK
8d ago
I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.
GBRK
8d ago
No I haven't.
You explicitly said that the right to citizenship is a quality issued by a state. That excludes it from being a quality intrinsic to any individual.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation
There are self-consistent worldviews that include this statement and the idea that citizenship is wholly the province of the state to administer, but you can't then also imply "citizen children have a right to citizenship" without introducing new ideas that break self-consistently. For example, you said "and they need to have citizenship somewhere" but this is only true in the practical sense-- we've signed international agreements that in effect guarantee this, but if we're talking about changing how things are done in the first place, why not re-examine all the assumptions? If we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of noncitizens, we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of citizens. In the vast majority of cases we would, obviously but why take that for granted? With respect to your position about "reflecting the nation", we-- we are in effect deciding what the nation should look like. Why not decide that it shouldn't include this "indigenous underclass?"
and do what the rest of the world does.
The rest of the world is obviously terrible though. This should be self-evident from the fact that they're not america. Why would anyone want to make america less like america and more like... saudi arabia???
GBRK
8d ago
Maybe that's how the fight looks like in the next 5-10 years, but again, I think you're being insufficiently imaginative. Imagine instead a realignment so that the feuding sides are, "people should keep the sexual orientation and felt gender identity they're naturally predispositioned to" versus "we should precisely schedule changes in sexual and gender organization across several developmental thresholds to create well-behaved citizens." Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.
Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Any system that responds to external stimuli by altering itself to avoid repeating past behavior can suffer. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.
That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except a few near-human species (apes, elephants, cetaceans, etc), pets I irrationally love, and of course humans themselves. AI could be smarter than me but I'm still not going to give a shit if it suffers except insofar as it experiences specifically human suffering.
GBRK
9d ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
GBRK
9d ago
"States issue citizenship" is a good enough framing that I won't dispute it. But there a particular bullet I'm interested to see if you're willing to bite: "children could only inherit citizenship from their parents" does not imply "children should inherit citizenship from their parents." You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship. Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis, presumably to reward pro-social behavior, there are plenty of reasons why it should also exclude a particular citizen's baby from also having citizenship? That doesn't violate the citizen's rights-- nowhere in the constitution is it enumerated that citizens have a right to have citizen babies. All the relevant text is about the born or naturalized individual's rights.
GBRK
9d ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
GBRK
10d ago
Surely then you would need to assign first world citizenship to the entire planet?
In point of fact I do support open borders, so I wouldn't strictly rule out everyone else eventually getting citizenship. But citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Anyone who wants to come to America should. Anyone who wants to stay in America should contribute. The only reason to give any baby citizenship is because we assume that they will contribute to the common project of our nation. Now, I'm pretty darn sure that the median baby-- including the median immigrant baby-- is eventually a net-positive to america. But if I wasn't, I would advocate for increasing the responsibilities of citizenship until we could be confident that they eventually will be.
GBRK
10d ago
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."
We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.
thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are
Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"
That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...
A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor
A + B ⇒ C
So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)
Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.
I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:
It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,
But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.
You're arguing against a strawman. I agree that blank slatism is false. But the specific conclusions drawn by HBD about racial intelligence have dramatically insufficient evidence. You've flipped a coin three times, seen HHH, and assumed the coin is biased toward heads. Sure, that's technically more accurate than the people claiming the coin is exactly, perfectly balanced, but not more accurate than the viewpoint that we have insufficient coin-flipping data to figure out its true bias.
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