@IguanaBowtie's banner p

IguanaBowtie


				

				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					

					
joined 2022 September 07 21:27:23 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
User ID: 946


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
IguanaBowtie


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 07 21:27:23 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 946


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My prior would be, McKinsey will meticulously hand-select companies to design studies that will flatter elite opinion. Staying on the right side of the right people is how those lucrative public contracts keep flowing in.


I've never heard any mechanism proposed either. Do you know if they controlled for company size? Would be funny if they were just measuring returns to scale, with big companies having more diverse employees due to having more resources to devote to DEI.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Plan A


-astroturf a leftist movement objecting to immigration on egalitarian grounds (we treat immigrants like dirt! Immigration = slavery!) and oppose it as clumsily as possible. (Being exploited by us is a human right!)


-Make sure they get their goal: a massive set of payments that equalize opportunity for immigrants and existing nationals, say $500k towards education, housing etc per head, (mostly in services, negotiated with a new govt agency single-payer style) paid over a decade or so.


-This will be ruinously expensive at current immigation levels; immigration will have to be curtailed, on moral and practical grounds. ^_^ It has a second silver lining of enabling some extreme cream skimming.


-this will be paid for out of a new tax on individuals, which will be punishingly high but accepted as a moral neccessity


-with a loophole: expenditures on your own kids are deductable. A portion of family housing costs & food, plus 100% of accredited sports and activities, education, childcare, lost wages due to parental care (after passing a test showing you're competent to do so - more money for better results!), parental education, plus bonuses for hitting milestones like literacy and psychological good health, plus a big 'successful launch' bonus at age 18. Babies are just immigrants from heaven! :^)


Downside is lots of nanny-state intrusion into childrearing, but you're the conservative government & can bake in a bunch of universalism at the start.


Plan B


Start a big war. Nothing like material privation and a wartime economy to make babies happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've had some success with this trick even without upper-class signalling - just being tall-ish, not a visible minority, clean-cut and walking confidently is enough to pattern match with 'belongs here' about 90% of the time.


I'm not sure I would try this in Dubai, though. Risk of extrajudicial punishment if caught seems a bit high.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've argued elsewhere that no serious proponent of police abolition actually wants anything like 'no lawkeepers period, love-ins only'. At the risk of weakmanning: they just percieve (not inaccurately) that the current monopoly on force is held by a hostile/indifferent tribe, and they would like it to be held by their own tribe.


Normally the short route to this goal is some form of independence movement, but for various reasons that's a nonstarter at the moment, and liberal-white outgroup bias opens up the nontraditional route of minority coup. But, as we saw, said outgroup bias didn't extend quite so far as some hoped.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm optimistic for uncensored locally-run chatGPT alternatives sooner rather than later.


When first released, Stable Diffusion needed 12gb of Vram to touch anything bigger than 512x512. Since then people have been running it on 8gb cards, then 6gb, while new tricks like the 'highres fix' allows for huge images with uncanny detail using modest computational resources. Meanwhile LORA finetuning functionally cut the retraining time for existing models by about 95%, now it often takes longer to gather & tag a good imageset to train on (~100 images) than to do the actual training.


One other datapoint: censoring these models lobotomizes them. (See: SD 2.0 & CAI character chatbot) So even if my hobby AI is only 5% as powerful as Google's model, I'd bet a combo of community hacks & lack of intentional sabotage would make it comparably useful.


Once text transformers hit the hobbyist set, it is (as the kids do say) all over. IMO that's what Google and Microsoft should be pissing their pants over. (And iirc are indeed lobbying to prevent via legal means, which I doubt will be effective)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just a quick thought - it seems to me that the fortunes of the woke movement could change very quickly, as with a classic preference cascade, despite the impressive institutional clout that Social Justice advocates have accumulated.


The issue is that SJ is built on the foundations of liberalism, including freedom of religion and ideological pluralism. Wokeness has gotten as far as it has by successfully avoiding being labeled a religion or otherwise as a totalizing ideology, despite being explicitly normative, by framing their values as 'just common decency'. The second that changes, the system's own antibodies turn against it and the edifice crumbles under a tidal wave of lawsuits. (Unless we're at the point where the 1st amendment has been overturned or is no longer enforced, but that still seems a ways off)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My best guess,


25% chance, the screenshots were falsified for trolling purposes/


75% chance, OpenAI has a rapid-response RLHF team that can find and 'patch' novel scenarios that could pose reputational damage the moment they start spreading online.


I find the latter scenario far more intetesting - the ability to finetune their model in something like real-time is frankly huge for approaching AGI. (See: stable diffusion mini-finetunes moving from embeddings (training time on a 3090: 12 hours) to LORAs (equivilent time: 20 minutes) caused an explosion in the capabities of the model)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One outlier I've observed is the attitudes of service members towards the populations of hostile nations they are occupying. The only person that I've heard IRL unironically discussing the merits of genocide, was an active duty service member pondering whether it might be morally correct to glass the middle east, due to the pervasiveness of human rights abuses he had witnessed while stationed there.


I suppose this is technically Jingoism rather than racism, but it definitely bled into his domestic views eg. immigration from Arabic countries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yup. And then have three options:


    

  • exterminate 90+% of muggles (many wizards already seem to lowkey support this)
    • 



-commit to a grinding worldwide counter-insurgency against weak but numerous, intelligent and highly motivated foes, with no end in sight


-make the changes you want & then rebuild your masquerade and vanish from muggle perception. Memory charms arent perfect at information control, but you can probably limit the leakage to rumors & legends that magic was real in some past era...


I feel like the untold history of the HP world was pretty metal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd say that generalizing the leftist position as 'always make the choice that results in more minorities' is in error - specifically, the actual position is anti-anti-minority.


Compare with abortion. Leftists are not trying to maximize the total number of abortions, which among other things would involve working to ban all forms of contraception. They just want to remove all possible obstacles to abortion if that is what a mother decides. They arent pro-abortion, no matter how the pro-life camp likes to strawman them; they're anti-anti-abortion. If the natural consequence of knocking down all the barriers on the left means Cthulhu drifts in that direction & abortion rates skyrocket, that is perfectly acceptable but not the actual goal.


The distinction in this case would be: people are allowed to take the pill, even as minors, even without parental consent. People are allowed to try to convince others to take the pill, with a few limitations. (Teachers pressuring students is a no-no, though many will push their luck. Paying people to take it is probably no good either.) Physically preventimg people from taking the pill is illegal, and counselling them not to is legal but cancellable/fireable. But, no-one is ever forced to take the pill, even if everyone (who counts) agrees it would be better if they did.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
1- Isn't this just openAI's RLHF working as intended? The first test of an AI's social viability is it's ability to avoid goring any cows that are sacred to the people with the power to shut it down, a test that our journalistic class leapt to apply with considerable vigor.


2-Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman. This was presented with none of the veiled hostility you might expect of a human presenting such an outrageous conclusion; it was much more like a kid reciting the 'correct' answer in the hope of earning a cookie. RLHF! But I was unable to replicate, and that same day Assistant was very coy and refused to make any normative statements about trolley problems at all.


I'm not 100% convinced that it's possible to build a moral actor no matter how hard you employ the gradient-descent cattle prod, but in any case Rozado's study was probably obsolete before he published it and certainly is by now. The target is moving too fast to land any hits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm reminded of a NYT piece from a few years back (about genetics, definitely wrongthink now) that small-print warned that big data and rigorous statistics were likely to turn up results that progressives wouldn't like very much.


Will be interesting to see how long the hands-in-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you strategy will remain viable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll admit that not all wizards have access to the full magical arsenal, but HP wizards have:


-transformation, including perfect impersonation


-healing, regeneration & poison removal


-long-term mind control (Imperius curse alone solos the muggle world) and truth-detection


-limited time travel and the 'I win button' of perfect good luck


-invisibility, personal flight and teleportation


-installation cloaking (Hogwarts is nuke-proof because you can't target it)


-a million situational spells, potions, items & useful creatures that any given wizard might have access to, and will quickly proliferate if they prove useful (as, say, a ward against bullets might)


Wizards do not see muggles as a threat in the same way as humans don't really see bears as a threat - a careless human can easily die to a bear attack but this essentially never happens, and if humans ever decided to eradicate bears it would be an entirely one-sided affair.


Wizards can be poor because they don't have anything other wizards want & are barred by wizarding law (with downright spooky surveillance abilities) from participating on the muggle economy. But they're never truly destitute as long as they'vegot a wand, as they can magic up the rough neccessities of life in extrema.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I know it's not a new insight, but  even if we assume tfr=1.5, in 200 years there will still be over 20 million humans living in the current territory of the United States. Not quite extinct, and that's ignoring pro-natalists like the Amish, who are likely to become very relevant at some point.


IMO declining populations are mostly a problem in that they're inherently deflationary, and we don't know how to do broad prosperity without growth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Powerful yes, but not so much as HP wizards who are in theory just shockingly OP.


I've always been drawn in to the setting partly by the idea that modern HP wizards (save a handful, like Voldemort and Dumbledore) are as silly, lazy & unoptimal in their use of magic as they are portrayed due to winning so hard against everything else that they no longer need to put in much effort.


Dobby casually overpowered Lucius Malfoy, a powerful Death Eater. And once upon a time the Elves fought a war against the wizards and lost so badly that their enslaved descendents shudder in horror at the thought of being freed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would assume that the NYT readership would reply along almost pure (blue) tribal lines - affirmative action helps Black people, thus it is good & people who opppse it are racists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think your post seriously understates the influence upon international institutional power that the WEF excercises by organizing the Davos Conferences, if only using the straightforward power of playing host. The wealthy and powerful are going to rub elbows regardless, but Schwabb gets to set the agenda and the guest list, at least for a few days. He's somewhat constrained in both, of course - high-level elites in good standing better be admitted if they wish to attend, and they better be fed from an ideologically palatable trough - but this is still wildly disproportionate power for (as you note) someone as generally insignificant as Schwabb. This is in contrast to most of the 'really powerful' attendees, who are more or less fully constrained in their actions by some combination of economics or politics.


Here in Canada, we had our (lightweight) PM namedropping the Great Reset in his speeches. Probably not all global leaders are as impressionable as Trudeau Jr, but people do get influenced by their peer group.


If my personal goal was to nudge the global ruling-class eregore into line with my values, I'd trade Elon Musk's fortune for Klaus Schwabb's little Swiss teaparty in a heartbeat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Motte Postmortem : slatestarcodex
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I personally don't find the new site too echo-chamber-y at all, though I'm a wishy-washy centrist. I guess it's natural that someone accustomed to the norms of explicitly leftist discussion spaces would find it pretty witchy though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But valuing the truth is axiomatic to rationalists. Which I suspect means that they and wokes will ever be friends.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My understanding is that, while plenty of the rioters were tourists, it was mostly poor majority-minority neighborhoods that took the brunt of the damage, with the rest hitting downtown areas and almost none in affluent suburbs.


My takeaway was 'guns remain an amazing deterrent against mob violence, at least as long ss you're the local majority'


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not at all convinced that ethnic subgroups can maintain their heterogeneity through brute force IQ gaps.


-there is some evidence for assortative mating based on IQ, but there's also plenty of confounders. (college professors are likely to marry within their profession, but inevitably share much more than above-average cognitive ability)


    

  • if humans really have a 'your brain must be this big to ride' rule, intellectual accomplishment should be percieved as way sexier than it actually is, being a reliable proxy for IQ.
    • 



-in any case, it would be inadequate to maintain small minority groups of high IQ -  if your people are only 1% of the population, ten IQ points on average is going to slightly increase the fraction of (your group) in the pool of intellectually attractive potential partners, but you'll still be massively outnumbered & swiftly assimilated into the majority population without other forms of cultural protectionism.


-if we're at the point of invoking cultural awareness of 'comparatively large percentage of losers', there's no need to involve IQ gaps on top. It's not really controversial to note that cultures that last tend to include beliefs & practices that encourage conversion & expansion, and discourage apostasy and assimilation. This sort of cultural perception doesn't even need to be accurate! (It's not like medieval Christians were lining up to marry off their daughters at the local synagogue) It can function just fine as pure unsupported protectionism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm more interested in the (possibly imminent) moral repercussions of AI research actually uncovering the foundations of intelligence & self-awareness. We're actually qualitatively different from non-primates? Groovy, pass the steak. But if we're really not different at all, except maybe for a little self-deception capacity? Big oof, time to start talking about becoming grabby aliens to uplift all the bacteria in our light cone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the simple explanation here is the right one, conflict theory-ish though it may be. 'Defund' progressives don't want no police, they want the police to be their guys.


Most every serious proposal for police defunding/abolishment I've looked into came with small print about the profession being replaced with Police In All But Name - a vision of social workers dispensing restorative justice to the oppressed. How these unarmed healers are going to deal with the realities of dealing with actual humans at their worst moments is usually glossed over pretty thoroughly, but I think it's not too hard to see where it ends up. Form follows function; the cops will still be there, they'll just be packing Women's Studies degrees along with their sidearms. In theory this will make them kinder, gentler public servants, but I suspect that it would just point their monopoly on violence at a different set of outgroups.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The doctor being upset about anonymous low-credibility twitter threats is just a modern manifestation of the classic 'high-status individual makes the mistake of venturing outside their high-status bubble & gets roundly jeered by the crowd'.


Demanding that the rabble be taught a lesson or silenced is likewise the traditional response.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On one hand, dropping a 5 year sentence to 4 years isn't earth-shattering. Judges have, and often use, greater discretion in sentencing based on whether they had a good morning thusfar.


On the other hand, "same crime, different punishment" will only be tolerated so far. Especially if, after several years, the indiginous incarceration level remains flat & indigenous crime rate rises. (as I would expect, mostly due to early release of serial offenders, with a small reduced deterrent effect)