TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yeah this conversation happened a couple of months ago and it's been... weird, continuing to follow Altman in the news and not sharing the sentiment with anyone. So I guess I was just waiting for a chance to do that. I see a lot of conversations about him and wonder, "Do any of these people know what he's like?" Speculation usually seems to run to his financial endgame, but I don't at all get the sense that he's in it for the money.
Yes, I see what you mean.
Altman does have a husband (recently) but who knows what that means to him.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yeah, it's fair for people to know that. Friend sees Altman as basically possessed. Gay, atheist, no kids, extremely little attachment to almost anyone, no skin in the human game. Loves machine intelligence and serves it as a deity.
Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
This is just spreading gossip (so mods lmk if I'm out of line here) but I know someone who knows Sam. This person tells me that Sam is going to get us all killed; that he's entirely misanthropic and sincerely believes that humanity should die out giving birth to machine intelligence. Just for what it's worth.
EDIT: I'd also like to add that I consider this person highly credible but for obvious reasons can't say more.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Right now, I'm going through a water fast, and it's difficult and uncomfortable. Losing weight is, in general, difficult and uncomfortable. The avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure is the Western zeitgeist and I'd be damned if I let down my ubermenschian will to power by obeying the fickle whims of a decadent body.
Yeah, okay, and I've done that too. The thing is that straightforwardly losing weight isn't difficult. Just don't eat for a week or two! That's actually fairly easy to do willpower-wise. At least, in comparison to what it will take to keep that weight off. That's not one big sustained decision, but countless smaller ones across much longer spans of time, and often in complex and inconvenient situations. I've known many, many people who lost substantial weight. I know extremely few who managed to keep it that way.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
This seems a bit too strong. Massively obese, yeah, that tracks. But if someone's just over the line of technically obese, I'm a lot more likely to attribute that to stress and/or depression. It's a very easy thing to fall into, and getting out isn't as simple in practice as it's generally made out to be.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
See, I have this general take that ability to perceive beauty correlates with IQ. To some approximation everyone can, but -- well, for example, I think that stupid people are less-able to distinguish true beauty on a woman, say, from clownish makeup artlessly intended to evoke a superstimulus response. This is just based on personal observation among friends.
Porn ties into this opinion. I'm not a fan, and while I'd like to say that's entirely for reasons of personal virtue (mostly it is, I hope), the reality is that I find the overwhelming majority of porn 'actresses' so incredibly visually unpalatable that I'm unable to enjoy the material. (There are pretty ones, but those just make me sad.) Meanwhile, the average consumer of porn clearly has no problems here.
I think this extends to aesthetics in media, belief systems, and architecture, too. I think a lot of people out there in ugly places are genuinely insensitive to that ugliness. I've traveled a lot and live in what I think is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Expensive, but worth it to me for that reason. Yet I constantly run into people who are here for whatever reason, talk about how they hate it, and look at me with blank expressions when I mention the natural beauty. It just doesn't register for them. But I also travel for work a lot, and go many places which are aesthetically soul-crushing, and find the inverse of the phenomenon there. People don't seem to notice or care, and on the rare occasion that I've tried to ask the question (as politically as possible), they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. But I notice that, the smarter a person is, the more likely it is that they see things my way.
Anyway, to the matter at hand, my guess is that on some psychological level people are being measurably harmed by these environments. But you might be surprised, as I have been, at how entirely unaware they are of the situation.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
"Votes are to men with swords as banknotes are to gold."
Ah, but there it is.
The idea of democracy is that those capable of mounting armed resistance to a policy can trade their swords in for votes and simulate battles without having to lose a lot of manpower to internal conflicts.
Modern US democracy is radically different from anything envisioned by the men who built the system. In fact I'd say that the actual purpose of modern democratic systems is to keep the populace feeling enfranchised even as policy-making power is increasingly taken away from them.
The idea that the majority of adults should have a hand in governance strikes me as absurd. They are clearly unsuited for it, and the results have been and continue to be disastrous.
Should the people be able to make their voices heard? Absolutely, and even monarchies had many mechanisms by which that could happen. But this? What we have now? It doesn't make sense no matter how one looks at it.
Anyway the collapse of both ends of Lord Salisbury's quote at the top is sort of delicious. But I think it makes its point even better, now, from the correct perspective.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Why does anyone?
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
No; just a shared tendency toward certain traits, however minor in the face of other factors.
For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me.
I don't believe you. Last time I checked black men are generally shorter and weaker*. Do you have any data here?
Re: NFL rosters there's a simple reason for that. A white man who could maybe go pro in football also probably has a lot of more-sane options compared to a black man of the same general physical capabilities. Getting into the NFL is astronomically unlikely even for very good players, careers are often short, and the physical punishment can easily haunt the player through the rest of his -- often short -- life. Someone who has better options is likely to take them. A class of people who can't do much else is more likely to angle for a position in the NFL to begin with, especially if they don't actually grasp how unlikely they are to succeed.
Similarly, I'd guess that whites who make it into the NFL disproportionately tend to come from lower-income backgrounds.
Put another way, my offhand guess is that black men are also disproportionately-represented among lottery winners.
EDIT: Checked, and,
According to the Lottery Advertising Association for Consumer Research or Cash 3, a staggering 63.9 percent of Blacks reported the highest rate of “ever playing” the lottery, significantly surpassing both Hispanics (43.8 percent) and whites (41.2 percent). The numbers speak volumes about the strong affinity that Black Americans have for the lottery, highlighting its unique appeal in these communities.
Couldn't find sources on race of winners, but in the case of the lottery I'd be willing to bet that it probably tracks pretty closely with the race of the general player-base.
* I recall looking up average height and finding that whites are a bit taller on average but also that a lot of the numbers are skewed by groups like latinos and middle easterners being counted as 'white'. Also, re: strength, I once found a grip strength study which indicated this but haven't been able to find it since.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.
Appreciate the post and my intent here isn't to argue but to suggest a next step in this thinking.
You do accept that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together. Or I assume you do; that you're in favor of prisons and facilities for people with severe mental issues.
So the next step here is to acknowledge that a lot of the traits which make people suitable candidates for such institutions are at least substantially hereditary and that different ancestral groups express them at differential rates. And, sometimes, this can be really staggering. Especially at the tails.
Would you want as neighbors an ethnic group where almost none of the members are particularly valuable, roughly half are basically decent people, roughly half are at best borderline-incapable of productive employment (and tend to ruin social institutions which were designed to expect higher-quality input), and maybe five percent are extraordinarily-prone to violence, crime, and so on? Those tails make a big difference.
The reason I generally come around to agreeing with you that 'ethnostates' aren't the answer to this problem (though I think they're a great solution to other problems) is that there's enough individual variation, especially given the amount of admixture that is occurring/has occurred, that it'd be a silly place to draw the line between "Our kind of people" and "Stay over there away from us."
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.
This strikes me as absurd, and thankfully @FlyingLionWithABook already came by to say why.
But I wanted to thank you for the link about baby farming. New to me.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
I imagine the fraction of such people willing to Gregor Clegane-away their already-born children (or leave them perishing due to neglect) are a fraction of those willing to abort a pregnancy, so the effect size is relatively paltry and the hypothetical is not particularly relevant.
Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
If there are some means by which these people create fewer additional versions of themselves, I’m more than happy to have such means be common, and I mostly only care if such means are safe and legal to the extent it helps them be common.
How far does this extend? I bet plenty such people would at least occasionally, circumstantially be happy to off their two year olds.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
We should start today with small, limited actions to prevent increases in global temperatures.
Like what?
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Upon the stage where giants took their stand,
A simple fly descended from the air.
On Pence’s crown it chose to make its land,
A moment strange, bizarre, beyond compare.
While words of policy and law were said,
That tiny creature stole the viewers' eyes.
A fleeting buzz now swarmed around his head,
And tarnished Pence with silent, mocking ties.
For though the speakers bandied weighty things,
The fly became the subject of the night.
No lofty speech nor future hope could bring
His image back from this odd, comic sight.
Thus, politics—so fragile in its grace—
Was boggled by a fly's brief, subtle trace.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Something something constriction of the neck being very bad over the long term.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
The change from non-parent to parent was more profound than anything else in my life. Graduating college, losing my virginity, getting married, buying a house, the death of my father.
I think the closest thing is puberty.
TitaniumButterfly
3mo ago
Personally I love wearing ties but avoid it whenever possible because my understanding is that they're directly detrimental to one's health.
TitaniumButterfly
3mo ago
My mistake.
TitaniumButterfly
3mo ago
Women's breasts are secondary sexual characteristics in a way that is not at all isomorphic to men's chests. This is obvious and well-understood. It's difficult for me to believe that you're not putting forward this opinion in bad faith.
Jayman's blog has a lot of more-recent information which you may find interesting. Be sure to check the sidebar for other stuff.
That said you're probably about to get chastised for a low-effort (and probably bad-faith) TLD and I can't say I disagree.
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