bonsaii
6d ago
Do you think most C-suite executives are over, under, or appropriately paid relative to the market value of their labor?
Japan had a 20 year modernization head-start over South Korea, which in turn had a 20 year head-start over mainland China. Korea only very recently entered mainstream Western consciousness (only 2 decades ago Hank Hill's "so are you Chinese or Japanese?" was a pretty accurate depiction of the median American conception of East Asia) and mainland China is widely considered an authoritarian enemy-state.
Japan's hold is largely a function of it having been the first, and for a long period of time only, "developed" but "non-Western" place in the world. So it planted its flag as the premiere "exotic" destination that still had all of the first world comforts.
I'd agree that today Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and certain parts of mainland China all have comparable tourist options to offer Western visitors with incredible safety, transportation, and other conveniences to boot. I often work with videos like this in the background on a second screen and it makes me want to quit my job and spend a year or two just traveling China in particular. But the power of having been the first is a lot to overcome, so I doubt we'll see a "place, China" effect take anywhere as deep of a root.
It's commonly believed that music tastes crystallize around age 13-18. Whatever music you listened to then determines what you'll like for the rest of your life. "Not old" can mean a lot of things, but unless you were born after around 2005 your experience tracks with my own and many others.
Side note: I still have that teenager somewhere in me who wants to act too cool for anything made by a pop artist, but Anti-Hero (both original and its variants) is one I can't help but find genuinely enjoyable.
bonsaii
15d ago
Google summary is the most hallucinatory AI I've ever used. For topics on which I have any familiarity, it seems wrong more often than it is right. It sets off sanity check alarms way too often. I'm frankly shocked they thought it was in a state to put front and center on their primary product.
bonsaii
17d ago
Somewhere out there is an Obama-Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter and I genuinely want to know what guided that person's voting pattern.
bonsaii
17d ago
As someone who has watched their youtube uploads since their start, I mostly just look forward to Saagar/Ryan shows these days. Both seem like genuine political obsessives who read a ton and frequently draw connections to political/historical context. Krystal just seems to react without any research as far as I can tell. Of the four, she's the only one where I feel like I can already predict her take on a segment before she speaks. I'm hoping they start having some Saagar/Ryan debates, since the Saagar/Krystal debates feel rather unproductive.
bonsaii
21d ago
as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites
I've heard this phrased as something like "merit laundering". Harvard et al. reserve part of the class for their primary clientele (uber-elites) and part of the class for the actual best students (IMO medalists, etc.) to maintain their legitimacy. They grade inflate and then everyone's resume line looks roughly the same coming out.
In this context, their aversion to non-holistic admissions makes sense. The intelligent, motivated, but not particularly exceptional kid with perfect SAT/GPA and a list of strategically selected, exaggerated extracurriculars who goes to Harvard only to eventually settle down as a private practice dermatologist in the suburbs contributes minimally to their true goal.
Then doesn't this turn into what is essentially an effective consumption tax, which is generally considered one of the most regressive forms of taxation, since percentage of income that goes to consumption is negatively correlated with income? Even worse, imported goods are more likely to be the kinds of goods that the average family spends most of their money on: appliances, groceries, cars, electronics, etc. The excess consumption of the wealthy is largely in the form of luxury services (personal cleaners, drivers, chefs, accountants, lawyers, etc.) or housing, which would be far less affected by tariffs, if at all.
My other concern is that the floor due to higher American wages may in fact be higher that the ceiling you talk about, where most people are just unwilling/unable to buy that good any more.
Aren't a huge percentage of greenhouse gases due to shipping? If you make more things closer to where they're meant to end up, there's likely an environmentalist appeal somewhere there as well.
bonsaii
27d ago
(2) attempt to raise the cost of their items. If they do (2), then things made in America can compete against them, which is great for all Americans but the super-wealthy, because your job’s wages are set according to the number of wage-competitive jobs available to you and your peers.
But there is a floor on the price of American-made competitor goods due to the much higher cost of labor. Therefore, at least up to that floor, aren't American consumers (largely the middle class) just paying more for goods?
bonsaii
29d ago
Let's say you wake up tomorrow and you're 400 IQ. For purposes of this question, suppose this means in slightly more concrete terms that you have a near instantaneous ability to process or recall information, as well as a near infinite capacity for information storage and drawing connections across that information.
What do you do with your newfound ability, if anything at all?
One could certainly compare to other developed countries, as this issue seems largely a US-specific phenomenon. As far as I can tell, third spaces are alive and well in much of Europe and East Asia, where the denser urbanization with proper public transit, among other factors, don't keep kids completely dependent on their parents to get anywhere at all. I remember watching anime as a young teenager. The thing that always stood out as most alien to me, more than the monsters or magic or whatever, was the way that kids in Japan could apparently just go out, alone, and see friends without needing parents to give them a ride every time. As a 14 year old who only ever knew life in my typical American suburb, walking distance from almost nowhere (the nearest non-residential building was a single gas station a 40 minute walk through rows of copy-pasted single family houses belonging to complete strangers), I couldn't help but feel envious. As an adult, I get the appeal of suburbs, and there aren't many great choices for walkable cities in the US (maybe someone from NYC or Chicago, etc. can chime in on if their experiences differed), but I don't know if I would ever want to force that kind of isolation on kids of my own.
bonsaii
1mo ago
My position is a rather unsatisfying "there are enough unknowns that I have no idea what the best option is", but I was curious to discuss others' thoughts.
If I were to refine my thoughts, I would say I believe not in an absolute, universal no free lunch, but rather a weaker, "not much free lunch beyond a particular threshold". As you put it, where the tails might tend to come apart.
My concern lies there, at least to the extent that human progress depends on the abilities of the individuals at those tails.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I'm imagining a hypothetical scenario where we can raise the average but reduce the variance. In such a case, it comes down to whether you think it's more important to have smarter mid-level engineers, doctors, etc. vs having more and smarter geniuses. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another, but was curious what others thought.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I don't think they would be negatively correlated, I just think there are enough unknowns that the possibility is far from negligible. My priors are that the "no free lunch" theorem applies to intelligence, so if I had to guess I would expect some degree of tradeoff, particularly at the upper ends of performance (whether in intelligence or athleticism). Hence why we never see people elite in both running and swimming events despite both being strongly, positively correlated with "general athleticism".
My point was less about the specifics of measuring intelligence or athleticism and more about asking if given the degree of uncertainty, is it really a good idea to run headfirst into embryo IQ selection. There are almost certainly aspects of intelligence not captured by IQ tests that help with mathematics, physics, music, writing, etc. By optimizing so narrowly for IQ we don't know if we could be excluding the regions of gene space that might generate a brain that performs best at those tasks, much like focusing only on triathlon (or vertical leap or sprint) performance would exclude the musculoskeletal parameters that make Messi or Phelps so perfect for their chosen tasks.
Building off the embryo selection discussion below:
What do you think IQ is exactly?
I’ve always thought about a general factor of intelligence as very similar to a general factor of athleticism. In this context, IQ is a measure of the former much like a triathlon time can be a measure of the latter.
In every sport, triathlon time is going to be positively correlated with ability across the whole population. However, the absolute best performers on specific tasks will not be the ones that do the best in triathlon, because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch"). If you single-mindedly select for triathlon performance, you’ll get a generally more athletic population. On the other hand, you’ll funnel away from getting a Bolt, a Phelps, a Messi, a Jordan, a Federer, etc. Contributions to athleticism aren’t necessarily linear. Individually sub-optimal parameters can align just right to produce optimal results.
There are potential unforeseen consequences of restricting available gene-space by widespread adoption of IQ optimization. Traits are notoriously polygenic (each trait is affected by many genes), and virtually every gene is pleiotropic (each gene affects many traits). Our understanding of both intelligence and genetics is rife with unknown unknowns. Would we still get von Neumann, Einstein, etc.? Supposing the technology became widely available and affordable, is that a fence you’d be willing to tear down?
Edit: It seems I didn't communicate my main concern particularly well. There are two issues with a myopic optimization on IQ: one is negative health effects due to pleiotropy of the associated genes. The other, which I am more concerned with here, is the potential for "lost opportunities". This is what I was trying to illustrate with the triathlon analogy. You can get a narrowing of the variations in intelligence types and a potential restriction on the very upper end of ability. We don't know if Newton, Gauss, Einstein, von Neumann, Ramanujan, and Tao all had a similar combination of traits that led to their exceptional abilities, or if they all had different pieces that fit together in unique ways to produce a unique form of genius (what I meant by "not summing linearly"). Analogous to the way that Phelps, Bolt, and Messi have very different body compositions that produce their unique athletic excellence. A population of excellent triathletes would be more athletic, much like a population of people with 115 IQ would be more intelligent, but that kind of optimization may come at the expense of the variation needed to produce those truly exceptional at related but slightly orthogonal tasks.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I think the modal introvert is
1.) high activation energy (in the chemistry sense) for social environments
2.) totally fine with familiar people; utterly exhausted by strangers and loose acquaintances
The popular use of "introvert" seems to be "people who are categorically averse to social interaction" but in my experience such people are quite rare (insert sampling bias disclaimer here).
bonsaii
1mo ago
These traits are notoriously polygenic, and virtually every gene is pleiotropic. It's not hard to imagine that optimizing for IQ specifically can have unforeseen deleterious downstream effects. Genetics as a field is rife with unknown unknowns.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I think it was meant to be a joke on the butterfly effect (I'm pretty weak on history but I vaguely remember lots of causal links between WWI and WWII). It could also just have been someone (and me) mixing up the World Wars.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I can't compare India and Canada, but there are certainly many aspects of living in the US that are noticeably worse than major Chinese cities (where most immigrants will come from).
US food quality is garbage tier for anyone who didn't exclusively grow up on it (on taste, not on safety), our crime rates are high, our public transit is grimy and unreliable. There are many little things about day to day life in the US that grate on those who (perhaps justifiably) expect better. It's easier to notice these major and minor inconveniences than to account for all of the things that are improved.
I have many friends in medicine with whom I talk about these issues fairly often. My understanding based on these conversations is that you can't just go out and increase residency positions because the whole point of residency is to get sufficient exposure to cases. A surgical resident needs to do X gallbladder surgeries, Y appendix surgeries, etc. to reach competence and be able to perform independently. There are only so many patients who actually need those surgeries per year. Also, there are only so many teaching surgeons willing to supervise residents (teaching is almost universally a pay cut in medicine). Freeing the cap on residencies would mean a lot of doctors-in-training who waste time sitting on their hands and come out underprepared.
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