RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Like what, are you giving it your credit card number? I've had some pretty personal chats with LLMs but nothing I'm too worried about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
SpaceX is the only group capable of competing with China in space though? If it weren't for them, China would be ahead in orbital launch and cost-efficiency... If anyone's to blame for losing the Space Race it should be Lockheed and NASA who've blundered billions and billions on rockets that don't work properly. If SpaceX had been given that money they probably would've done a much better job with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I agree with the main point and am usually first to criticize cost-inefficient US military procurement, especially in the age of drones. But the F-35 is OK, it is at least better than its 1960s equivalent, you get some more bang for a lot more buck. And there are export orders. The Zumwalt is pretty terrible as a warship but it's better than it's 60s equivalent, if only it weren't so ruinously expensive and they didn't cancel the guns. The LCS is pretty useless, I think it might indeed be worse than its 1960s equivalent, the Charles F. Adams Class. I've heard some defences of the Osprey, it's not like the capabilities it brings are that useful (any serious opponent will shoot them down pretty easily) but there are some capabilities it brings to the table. These are flawed programs and show a reckless disregard for efficient and realistic procurement.
But SLS+Orion is just worse than the Saturn V. Less power, more cost, can't reach the Moon. I think this is just a whole other league of terribleness to the standard story of defence procurement fiascos, on par only with the LCS. Maybe even worse than the LCS because at least there was some kind of idea where it'd be useful, fighting in low intensity wars. Whereas SLS+Orion is supposed to go to the Moon but can't.
If the F-35 was outright worse than an F-4 Phantom then Lockheed executives should be aggressively, intensively bullied. That's the spaceflight equivalent I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I can't fathom why people would spend $20K+ getting a box of modded 4090s, all to access an open-source $0.18/$0.54 model 'for free' (still paying for all the electricity, so probably more expensive if anything). Just get an API key, save tens of thousands of dollars and a great deal of time. Microsoft, Google and Intel and AMD are probably already spying on you. It's not like running locally will greatly enhance your privacy.
And what is there even to be private about regarding AI? Yes, the people running APIs are probably sniggering at the logs of the goon sessions. I've sniggered at some logs myself, though mostly I just find the low standards of taste appalling. Maybe if you're Pewdiepie it's worth it, since journalists would find value in muckraking and log-sniggering.
But why would any normal person care? It's highly unlikely that they can even trace the logs back to a human identity, even less likely they'd care to do anything. Let the gamers buy their 4090s. Let the API providers on Openrouter get some revenue. Use an API key.
Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.
There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Thoughts on Venezuela? I hear the US is getting ready to do something beyond just blowing up some boats, though we may be waiting for the Gerald R Ford carrier group to arrive around November 12th-17th... it's literally 'another two weeks.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
It doesn't need to be cartoonish supervillainy, it's world-class, hardworking, high IQ supervillainy done by actual supervillains with decades of experience, not invented by some idiot comic writer who couldn't write a coherent plot to save his life.
They can invent and propagate whole ideologies to justify and valorise looting, perfect networks of influence and private enrichment. They can reframe looting the commons as beneficial, positive development, the source of our strength. They can reframe sabotage and wrecking as virtue struggling against evil. And people will believe it because people generally go with the flow. Plus these guys are very good at papering over the cracks because they're Very Rich or Are The Media. Maybe they believe it too themselves, it's easy to believe things if they're advancing your interests.
for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side
What do they do with international finance and global media, exactly?
Finance has busily furthered DEI, deindustrialization of the West, financialization of the economy, toxic housing bubbles and rapid development of China.
The media whips up racial hysteria, worsens relations between the sexes and spreads grossly misleading racial narratives about policing. They've spread panic about climate change that has had all kinds of horrible effects, mental illness, people refusing to have kids 'for the climate'. Not to mention popularizing energy and environmental policies that have wrecked industry. Everyone constantly complaining that enforcing borders is fascism, that's the fault of the media. The media problematizes national myths and culture, delegitimizes identities like 'white' in favour of 'Black' or 'POC'. And the media goes out of their way to insult and humiliate white men. See here: https://x.com/StupidWhiteAds
If the argument is 'American Jews control finance and media, therefore they shouldn't be upset since they're bringing in more than they cost' then the premise is wrong because finance and media are not helping out. International finance and world media have been massively toxic and aggressively unhelpful for at least the last 30 years. They've been especially opposed to Christians and conservatives. A disproportionate amount of these sectors are Jewish (Blackrock and NYT for example), much is not.
What has the 'conservative intelligentsia' actually done for conservatives? Have they brought huge victories, or did they just help implement mass immigration, Pride as civic religion, diversity quotas to achieve their real goals - tax cuts and regime change in the Middle East?
I would much rather have my financial sector run by some honest, hardworking midwit who tries to advance national interests and develop our industries, than a 160 IQ financial genius who uses his vast talents for private profit, asset-stripping, offshoring and demanding share buybacks over investment.
I would rather have patriotic journalists with tedious prose and limited abilities than charismatic, excellent writers who hate me and attack me and my ancestors, systematically pursuing my disempowerment in society.
One of the wisest things the US could do is to crack down on media and financial elites, put patriots in charge of these key institutions so that they're coordinated to further US interests. That goes for whoever's running America. But it should be 10x more important for conservatives/MAGA to recognize that these people are, (generally speaking), not their friends!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Oh so suddenly you take issue with my stance of deliberately choosing bad sources, which I explicitly explained was what the original article you chose was effectively doing and is a strategy that could without-doubt prove the whole human media was a joke... curious.
If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior.
You are constantly demanding ridiculous proofs while you offer absolutely nothing at all, while you ignore or mischaracterize evidence with these word games like 'oh its not record high (it is)' or misread the difference between primary response and primary legislative response, or suddenly introduce arbitrary standards. It's pathetic and far beneath the performance of any modern AI, which will at least try. They have some kind of relationship with the truth. They're aiming for truth and miss sometimes. You're aiming for sophistry.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
The burden is on you to produce proof that it's still running and you can't.
It is still running, since I showed that Project Pegasus is part of Opal and Opal is still running. QED.
If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior.
Your claim is that >45% of all news articles have major errors.
Shameless to complain about goalpost-moving when this is what you're doing.
OK, here are some links (which is just tedious work since 10 or 10,000 links out of a gazillion articles has no statistical meaning). But since you seem to be dead set on this and love journalists so much...
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/cracks-in-j-20s-stealth-with-no-buyers-exposure/ (this whole thing is retarded if you know anything about aviation, incredibly misleading)
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/rafale-or-f-35-why-indian-rafale-jets-are-as-dangerous-as-stealth-5th-generation-f-35s/ (same kind of stupidity)
https://www.newsweek.com/india-overtakes-china-in-world-air-force-ranking-10882624 (even more retarded, I don't know how anyone can believe this, just check the squadron numbers lmao)
Here is a whole article about Indian media organizations inventing fake news, bombings of Karachi for example: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3188
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus (this was just a fantasy)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/01/abc-news-issues-corrects-bombshell-michael-flynn-report.html
https://www.allsides.com/blog/story-week-media-misfires-covington-catholic-story (Covington kids...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20060523081219/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=398274b5-9210-43e4-ba59-fa24f4c66ad4&k=28534 (this was just made up)
The whole Washington Post Steele dossier, the legendary pissgate: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/581347-washington-post-removes-large-portions-of-two-stories-on-steele/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I'm surprised to find that there are two Project Pegasuses but I observe that the anti-theft Pegasus is a part of Opal, who are also still continuing their work.
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14920/html/
So even if my link was wrong, my point still stands. Pegasus is still a thing in practical terms. You are the one who produced the idea that it had shut down, seemingly from nowhere. What source did that come from? How can you legitimately have known this info?
Since the number is actually falling on a rolling average, the AI is quite misleading
But theft is at record levels? What, we have to wait for the nano-top or regurgitate secondary sources like wikipedia? Sonnet could easily observe 'ok I know about past historical theft levels, this is higher therefore its at record highs'.
Then pick out 10 articles of your choice in an area you know about.
When I see some bad journalism I don't add it to a big list of bad articles, same with spelling errors tbh. But you can take your pick from Russiagate, spruking the case for the invasion of Iraq or suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, or this euphemism treadmill where journalists eagerly create a racial narrative if a white does something bad to blacks, whereas they bury the reverse case, mentioning race only at the very end of the article. Those are cases of deception and misleading news from 'real journalists'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I think that the real trouble with fear and shame is not that it doesn't work in principle but that it can't be effectively wielded today.
Just imagine the amount of shaming and bullying that the 1950s guys would've been deploying against this stuff, against even the tamer /d/ threads. Metric tonnes of shaming! And that largely worked. But shaming is not something modern society is actually good at anymore. Huge resources are thrown into shaming racists yet there are a lot of racists around. Nobody cares so much anymore. In the 70's and 80's, shaming didn't stop gays from buggering eachother anonymously in bathhouses, making a human petri dish for diseases that would then kill so many of them (and others besides). If you read the infamous Salo thread, you can see the attitude of the scientists and doctors, how limpwristed and weak they felt in the face of an obvious public health emergency, like they'd be like 'please stop having sex and killing all these people' and then gays would bitch and complain that closing their sex/drugs bathhouses was like the Holocaust: 'Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens'. Ironically the would-be shamers felt more ashamed for even trying to shame than the ones who ought to be ashamed. As far as I know, the gays decisively won, Reagan is considered somehow at fault for HIV/AIDs and they continue on doing their thing now with expensive state-funded Prep drugs to hold off the consequences.
(rather confronting but since we're on the topic of confronting material) https://web.archive.org/web/20200618004225/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
After the examination, as Dugas was pulling on his stylish shirt, Conant mentioned that Dugas should stop having sex.
Dugas looked wounded, but his voice betrayed a fierce edge of bitterness. 'Of course, I'm going to have sex,' he told Conant.
'Nobody's proven to me that you can spread cancer.'
'Somebody gave this thing to me', he said. 'I'm not going to give up sex.'
And I see the same thing here. The Harpers journalist staring in at these people feels way more ashamed than the actual men involved. Total mismatch in willpower and determination.
Trying to use shame in the modern Western world today is extremely difficult.
To achieve success, you have to make a 'normal relationship' more cost-efficient than 'gooning'. Odds of success? Realistically, nil. What new relationship technologies have been developed in the last 100 years? No-fault divorce is scarcely even technology so much as relationship-sabotage.
Whereas in the techno-sexual sphere there are endless innovations! Television! Internet browsing! Photoshop! Livestreaming! Japanese weirdness! VR! AI waifus and chatbots!
If one side in a conflict is innovating while the other remains static, the former is sure to win. Even if the latter has all the good-coded stuff like 'having a normal one' and 'the power of love', then that only affects timelines, not the end result.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I thought the Saturn V was just outright cheaper and more powerful than SLS (at least the SLS in current condition)? I guess it's more complicated if you consider the Apollo project as a whole but on the other hand, there would also be cost savings from experience going to the Moon and doing all that stuff for the second time and not the first time. $35 Billion for the project and a billion per launch, inflation adjusted, for Saturn V, whereas SLS 1 has already cost just as much to develop and is more expensive to launch, while providing less lift.
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
From French's article:
The new right groans under the weight of its nostalgia for a nation that did not exist.
It's always this line of thought that leftists use against the right. They were poorer in the past, sure. But they also had more functional governance. People knew how to build things in the 1950s and 1960s, they didn't sit around in committees all day umming and ahhing about boxticking and getting permission from stakeholders. They had superheavy spacelift capability we're still struggling to replicate.
Crime was lower in the 1950s, it just was. Despite a younger, poorer population and police with less forensics and CCTV, despite doctors less capable of turning 'murder' into 'grievous bodily harm', Western countries had a more stable social system. Not all aspects of the 1950s should be copied (after all, we ended up where we are today), only the useful parts. Denying that anything was ever better in the past than today is ahistorical, literally Orwellian too.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today. The black jurors statistically favouring their own race, this ridiculous 'he deserves a thirty-second chance' de facto jurisprudence, this incredible homage going to Emmett Till while random black thugs go around shooting white kids for zero reason and never get any kind of serious scrutiny beyond a fairly small part of twitter...
Why would French need to justify it when he enjoys this huge framing advantage, where all the schools (not just in America but around the world) teach his historical narratives, assert the vibes he relies on? He can just wave the magic wand of 'Jim Crow' and that's good enough, no further logical argumentation is needed. Truly the only way to fully oppose this is to deny the whole frame, 'no French, your fantasy world does not exist and never has, it has been debunked by me and mine. The facts are mine, I have chosen them and only I get to decide what is important and relevant. The narrative is mine, the premises and vibes are mine. Your books are not reliable sources, you are spouting pseudoscience.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Shoplifting offences increased by 13% to 529,994 offences in the year ending June 2025
FAIL. Those are record levels, even before accounting for low reporting rates. Sonnet consistently gets this right btw.
There's no citation that this bill is the primary response to the problem by the government, versus other initiatives
FAIL. Claude specifically said primary legislative response, not primary response.
The link specifically says "This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government" and we have no evidence such an operation is still underway.
FAIL, the operation (which is a useful and reasonable description of what it is, in some respects better than 'project' which the British actually use, since operation conveys a sense of movement and continuous activity whereas project is more of a static construction process) is still underway, you can call them and report crime today: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/wsi/watch-schemes-initiatives/pp/project-pegasus/
Also outdated.
FAIL, since it describes Pegasus which is still ongoing so can't be considered outdated. Also how is '2 years old' outdated by any reasonable sense of the word?
Rating: FAIL - poor nitpicking attempt.
Here is my Sonnet Research on the topic, Research being something you can only get if you pay: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ef91a58b-8dfa-4529-b076-3de6ef14a40f
Now they cut out all the links for the web artifact which makes this rather unhelpful for the specific use-case. I checked a few and didn't find any errors, though I imagine there are some. I personally disagree with the methodology and argument since it takes the limp-wristed 'be really nice to the drug addicts' line of argument when I'm confident that 'lock them up' would work better, if the UK knew how to construct prisons properly. Nevertheless, there are lots of media reporting on this issue that take the limp-wristed approach. Sonnet has its biases, nevertheless I remain convinced that it and extended research is useful.
Ok if humans are so bad, pick an actual news outlet of your choice, it can be as shitty as you want, and pick 10 actual news articles of your choice, not opinion columns or other bs, and show that 45% of those have errors.
I'm not a subject matter expert in a wide range of domains, so I can't do that. That's literally what I said. I can observe it makes plenty of errors or is actively misleading in areas I know lots about but I can't show that's representative. This is why Gell-Man Amnesia is a thing.
Today's free model is still free and necessarily well below the frontier, that's why it's free. Sonnet, when you get deeper into it, is on a whole other level. It can and has seriously messed with people's heads, more discerning people, above and beyond the weakwilled who get eaten up by GPT4o.
Sonnet would not and does not make the mistakes at the rate BBC ascribes to the crap cheap models. It does make mistakes all the time but is a useful research tool, good at aggregating or finding things.
IMO their article itself is misleading since it ascribes to ChatGPT and Gemini only GPT4o and Gemini Flash. Like if I decide to pick out poor, dumb MAGA people and say 'look at these MAGA people, they're stupid, therefore MAGA is stupid' and choose not to consider the smart MAGA people on the basis that people are more likely to run into the former and not the latter... it's not good journalism. That's not to say that MAGA isn't stupid, there are stupid elements but it's more complicated than this kind of smear campaign. They then don't mention that's what they're doing, they do what you do and say 'AI is inaccurate' when they mean 'cheap AI is inaccurate.' Cheap air travel is unpleasant. Cheap food is bad for you. Cheaper is worse.
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.
But they can't be bothered to test the good AI platforms of course...
This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Free versions were chosen to replicate the default (and likely most common) experience for users. Responses were generated in late May and early June 2025.
If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior. Hell, they already are prone to mass hallucinations like the 'datacentres are using all the water' meme. Or deliberately misleading stuff such as eliding the difference between an AI chip and a pod: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/1980691878262501673
They aren't trustworthy for any AI-related topic given their proclivity to the 'big tech bad, big tech bad, pay us more money now now now now now!!!' lines of argument which they've basically applied to AI as well. There are serious issues with big tech and AI accuracy but journalists still need to be bullied much more so they lose whatever remaining undeserved prestige and reputation they still retain.
Another attempt at AI political criticism with Llama 4 Scout
Why use Llama 4 models? Even Behemoth is terrible nevermind Scout.
If you're going to be cheap, use Kimi, it is open-source but decent at writing.
"Behold, that corpulent, sour-bellied gargoyle squatting upon the federal throne—Adams, the human carbuncle whose jowls quiver with every belch of executive spite! This puffed-up, pudding-faced monarchist, bred on tainted Boston porridge and the stale crusts of Puritan hypocrisy, stalks the Republic in a wig too small for his swollen head, so that the greasy curls drip like icicles of pomatum down a brow forever furrowed with petty malice.
Mark the man: a tyrant in thread-bare dignity, a pimple on Providence’s nose, pickled in self-importance and brine of his own cant. His speeches belch forth like the crack of doom from a cracked kettle—each syllable a sour fizz of vinegar and vanity—while his piggish eyes glint with the dull, porcine joy of discovering fresh taxes to levy upon honest farmers. He is a walking thundercloud of gout and gloom, forever clutching his cane as though it were a sceptre, forever waddling after imaginary crowns like a fat spaniel sniffing for rotten sausages.
What is he, truly? A swollen tick engorged upon the public purse; a bilious monarchist stuffed into a republican coat that splits at every seam with the strain of his regal pretensions. Under his rule the eagle of liberty is plucked to a carrion crow, and the very air reeks with the sulphur of Alien decrees and Sedition fetters. He would nail your tongue to the pillory for a whispered jest, then sell your sons to French cannon for the price of a fresh periwig."
There is a notable shortage of racial hatred though and the sentences are a bit unwieldy. Grok 4 is too cringe to write well but it will add some racial hatred. Really I'd want Sonnet 4.5 for this kind of task but Sonnet refuses and generally suffers in 'meanness' unless its against people that Sonnet particularly dislikes. So it's a bit of a mess.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
AIs doing research do make errors all the time but '45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue' isn't too bad. Human researchers in published academic papers have a 25% error rate in their citations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0538
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3167934/
Substantial quotation errors were found in 9 of the 50 statements (18%). The incidence of minor errors was 14%. Although the small size of the sample allows only a rough estimation of the error rate (95% confidence interval [CI] of substantial quotation errors: 9.2% to 30.5%), this result agrees well with the rates identified in the literature.
By the way, I found both of these papers through AI, which faithfully represented them. With a simple albeit-inference-costly script I bet you could lower hallucination rates 80% or more.
AI absolutely can summarize an article and reliably answer questions, try it and see what you get. I put in a few thousands words of my own short fiction and it could understand and give useful criticism and analysis. Note when I say 'it' I mean Sonnet 4.5, not something given out for free.
If you're using the free version of Grok as your main AI then I can see why you dislike it so much! Neither particularly smart or charismatic.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.
It is rational for them to do this, because the consequences for failing to do so can be dire. Texaco, Goldman Sachs, Novartis, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that have paid nine-figure settlements in response to lawsuits alleging bias against women in hiring and promotions. No manager wants to be the person who cost his company $200 million in a gender discrimination lawsuit.
Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct. Dozens of Silicon Valley companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging “frat boy culture” or “toxic bro culture,” and a law firm specializing in these suits brags of settlements ranging from $450,000 to $8 million.
Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?
A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.
That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?
And then:
As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
I find it somewhat interesting that the male objections to Helen Andrews' thesis are something like 'hmm, what about China and Japan, does it hold there?' and the female objections seem more like 'Helen Andrews should STFU and be a secretary, how dare she be a journalist if she's not going to advocate for women' or 'if men are so great how come they are so violent and abuse alcohol so much?' or 'here's a long and open-to-interpretation section of a play'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Wouldn't we be able to tell if it was endemic though? We could estimate maybe via observing the spread of STDs in the country, or murders (hard to hide the disappearance of a dead wife or rape/murder victim), observe the behaviour of Japanese travellers overseas or just check vibes.
There may indeed be more sexual violence than is reported but it's probably still much lower than in the West, where there are also reporting problems (a big cover-up of grooming gangs in the UK for instance). If we do away with official data and go off vibes, pretty sure Japan still comes out ahead.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
I think it has a lot to do with context. China and Japan are just significantly different places with different histories and social issues express themselves differently there. Social science doesn't need to encompass the whole world. WEIRD is weird from the perspective of Japan and vis versa. On the one hand, fewer women in high office than in the West. On the other hand, less sexual violence, husbands are supposed to give their wife their wages and receive back an allowance. So is it a feminist country or a patriarchal country? Neither really, the concepts we've built up are based in a context and expectations that aren't there.
Furthermore, Helen is not even saying to ban women from the workplace so much as 'have fair tests for admittance.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Yeah I get a fair bit of traffic from china on my crappy little website, up 25% this month. It's at least half my traffic tbh and not a single actual Chinese user, at least not one who uses any mandarin... But LLMs that are trained then direct people to me, so there are swings and roundabouts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries. Yet there's been no huge surge of amazing female-founded companies as if we suddenly stopped squandering half the talent in the world. The female Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos does not exist, nor does she need to. Extremely stressful, high-risk or very high-performance roles are what men are supposed to handle, by and large. Likewise with dying for their country or getting maimed in industrial accidents.
It can't be 'all the good things about women are due to their innate superiority, all the bad things due to men being mean and oppressive'. Feminism isn't 'women keep all their old privileges and get new ones on top', that's not how it's worked out.
That makes a lot of sense and is well thought out... but are you really getting that much value for your $1.5K investment? That's sufficient to run what, a 32B model locally? I don't know if I'd trust a 32B model with anything serious. TBH I haven't used a little one for ages, I only play with the big ones, so maybe I'm out of date on this.
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