Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
You can describe almost any attempt to seize power this way. The Reichstag Fire Decree was just some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the dangers of communists. Nobody thought the 12th amendment was vague prior to 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
"Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. joebiden.com"
Obama is the one man who could have made the switch happen. If he had tweeted, "Biden must go," Biden would be gone. He has decided not to tweet that. Biden will not be removed.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?
My guess: To the extent that the United States Government needs anyone running it, it is being run by whoever is in the room with Biden at any given moment. Biden himself acts not so much as decision maker, but as a magical talisman, granting whoever is nearest to him authority over government decisions.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Nate Silver thinks it was because they wanted to leave time for Biden to recover if the debate goes bad. I will never doubt him again
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
The stupid things that Trump is saying are exactly the same things that he has been saying for the last 4-10 years. Biden did not look or sound this bad in 2020. I went back and checked. Trump looks and sounds exactly like he did in 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
The presidential debate is on right now. I was somewhat skeptical of the Biden age narrative, but wow, he sounds awful. It's literally like he walked out of a nursing home. I suppose I should say something about the substance, but it's almost superfluous fluff at this point. Tariffs won't raise prices? Come on. Biden says fewer obviously false things, but that's mainly because he doesn't make as many factual assertions that could be falsified.
I feel dirty watching this. Trump is wiping the floor with Biden simply because he can string together multiple syntactically correct sentences on a single topic without stammering. For the first time I now believe Trump will win the election.
What did y’all think oligarchy meant? vibes? papers? essays? The doctors have this power because government gave it to them. Prescription requirements, medical certifications, doctor’s notes, these are active ingredients in the regulatory scheme. Power is delegated not to government agencies, but to medical associations. The AMA, APA, and their ilk decide what counts as a medical condition, what counts as an accepted treatment, and thus which medical procedures must be funded and never denied.
You can’t fix this without a complete overhaul of medical law. Band-aids prohibiting specific practices won’t work, as we see in the Idaho emergency abortion case.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
I don't think the press even misreported it. The talking points were true. It did in fact allow unlimited money from corporations to be poured into political advertising. They just expected people to laugh at the absurdity of considering money (in the form of advertising and advocacy) to be a form of speech.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
This is the trial streamer guy right? Some people just can’t help themselves. What happened now?
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:
Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Prerat (@Prerationalist) posts multiple bangers a week. I have no idea why he hasn't gone viral yet.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
I think it's a mistake to consider the MCU to be porting in the global political situation as it actually exists. They use the same vocabulary because it is efficient from a storytelling perspective, but I thought it was clear that the "UN" in that movie was a stand-in for "political oversight, not otherwise specified".
A lot of the issues you are identifying are medium-specific. Cinema is very very effective at conveying emotional information about specific characters. It is less effective at communicating the intricacies of various philosophical viewpoints. Feature films have good guys and bad guys. That's the format that people expect to see when they pay money and walk into a theater.
To me, a much more satisfying conflict among good guys would be for good people to fight over complex issues and/or ideological divides, and do so rationally rather than emotionally.
I thought Oppenheimer did a pretty good job of this, but at the end of the day, audiences demand cinematic cues who to root for. Some people think Kitty Oppenheimer getting absolutely roasted on cross examination is an epic girlboss moment. It has to be because the music indicates that it is a heroic moment.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Lessons in attempting to value things in the absence of an active market. What is the exchange rate between units of emotional distress and dollars? What even are the units of emotional distress?
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Here’s the pickle: it seems obvious that the best way for Alex Jones to make money is to continue producing infowars content. I’m not sure that this is the closure that the plaintiffs had in mind.
The fatal premise of falsificationism is the denial that inductive reasoning can be a basis of true knowledge. A theory can never be "confirmed", it can only fail to be falsified. Falsificationism preserves the veneer that science can be based on deductive reasoning alone. A theory that has been falsified is logically impossible to be true*. So one can attempt to define science in a crude way as the set of tested falsifiable theories that have not been falsified.
The cost of this is the denial of objective scientific truth. If general relativity were falsified tomorrow, would you feel comfortable walking out of a fifth-story window? Everybody knows gravity is real. It's obvious. Inductive reasoning works. We now have stronger theoretical justifications for induction than Popper did, but the damage is done.
*Kuhn does a good job of poking holes in this assumption. It's a shame he goes even further off the deep end of denying objective truth.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists by David Stove. It's pretty crazy how everyone just sort of nodded along as Popper's falsificationism became the dominant idea in philosophy of science, but hardly any scientists act as though they actually believe in it, because it's absurd.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Women are the dark matter of history. We know that they were always there. We can assume that they must have had opinions and motivations, and that they took actions in accordance with these motivations. But they didn't write much, so it is easy to simply whitewash them out of history, or alternatively to adopt a feminist reading of history that projects modern sensibilities centuries or millennia into the past in order to fill the gaps.
Still, I can't discount the possibility that revolutionary France was unique here. Charlotte Corday was 24 when she stabbed Jean-Paul Marat to death in the bathtub. You don't see pretty young women doing that kind of thing in other times and places.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.
Let’s check 18 U.S. Code § 2256(8)
(8) “child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— (A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; (B) such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (C) such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
I think that definition is way too expansive, but that’s the definition that our elected representatives came up with. As written, it is definitely a federal crime to create deepfakes of Stacy from English class getting railed and texting them to your bros. Some of these provisions are oddly specific. I don’t have time do dig into the legislative history right now, but I suspect they were added recently in order to cover this exact thing.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
We know that it is physically possible to have mosquito-sized flying machines capable of short-range independent operations. We have an existence proof. They’re called mosquitoes.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
It's really tiring seeing people ask AI questions that are worded in a tricky way that most humans would screw up, then using this as proof that AI is way dumber than humans. I'll be honest, I had to read that question four times to understand it. It's the logic puzzle version of the Stroop Effect.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Fired Superalignment Researcher Drops Four-and-a-Half Hour Podcast With Dwarkesh Patel, 165-Page Manifesto.
Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian at Columbia in 2021 at the age of 19. He then worked for the FTX Future Fund before the fiasco, then wound up at OpenAI on the Superalignment team. In April of this year, he was fired, ostensibly for "leaking". In Leopold's telling, he was fired for voicing security concerns (not to be confused with safety concerns) directly to the board. At post-coup OpenAI, being the kind of guy who would write a manifesto is a massive liability. Private interpretation of the Charter is forbidden.
Leopold's thesis is that AGI is coming soon, but that national security concerns, not alignment, are the main threat. A major theme is how easy it would be for the CCP to gain access to critical AI-related capabilities secrets via espionage given the current state of security at frontier AI labs. I was a bit confused at the time of the firing as to what Eliezer meant by calling Leopold a "political opponent", but it is very clear in retrospect. Leopold wants to accelerate AI progress in the name of Western dominance, making America the "compute cluster of democracy". He is very concerned that lax security or a failure to keep our eyes on the prize could cost us our lead in the AI arms race.
What comes through in the podcast in a way that doesn't from the manifesto is how intellectually formidable Leopold seems. He is thoughtful and sharp at all times and for all questions. Admittedly I may be biased. Leopold is thoroughly Gray Tribe ingroup. He has been on Richard Hanania's podcast, and mentions Tyler Cowen as one of his influences. It is tempting to simply nod along as the broad outline of the next 5 years is sketched out, as if the implications of approaching AGI are straightforward and incontrovertible.
The one thing that is notably missing is are-we-the-baddies? style self-reflection. The phrase, "millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones", is uttered at one point. It makes sense in the military context of the conversation, but I really think more time should have been spent on the political, social, and ethical implications. He seems to think that we will still be using something like the US Constitution as the operating system of the post-AGI global order, which seems... unlikely. Maybe disillusionment with the political system is one of those things that can't be learned from a book, and can only come with age and experience.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
If we're going to just be giving money away, give it to the workers, not to excess elites.
It's not really going to elites. It's going to middle-class young women. They are both the beneficiaries of the loans (being the ones getting worthless humanities degrees) and the ones who's salaries are being paid with the loans (being the ones working in education and education administration).
The industries of choice for middle-class young women are 1. Education, and 2. Health Care. A few rhetorical discussion questions:
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Where does government money seem to be flowing these days?
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Which industries are being ravaged by cost disease?
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What demographic forms the base of the Democratic Party?
I am not sure at the moment which way causality flows, but I do not believe these things are unrelated.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Not impossible. The price of shares is the expected value to the shareholder of holding the shares. The assumption is that the CCP won't let that cash be paid out to Western shareholders, not necessarily that they don't have the cash.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
It is downright inhuman to listen at anything other than 1x. Audio is an inherently time-sensitive medium. We evolved to interpret and understand the subtle audio cues in human speech. This includes timing.
I find it odd how reluctant Democrats are to defend the concept of democracy. Of course they say how important democracy is, but do they ever explain why? Their rhetoric assumes the correctness of democracy, as though it is an end in itself and not simply a means to an end.
Is this cope? Crimestop? Much like other taboo topics, thinking too hard about the issue leads to the possibility that deeply-held convictions could be wrong. You can't build your argument for democracy out of the wisdom of crowds. Half of the population will demonstrably vote for Donald Trump. Either you're wrong about the wisdom of crowds, or you're wrong about Trump. You can make an argument that democracy is good. You can make an argument that Donald Trump is bad. But it is quite hard to make an argument that democracy is good and that Donald Trump is bad at the same time.
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