disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
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User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
I don’t know, 1 train line to nowhere seems more cost effective than 0, especially when people can build around the new infrastructure.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Sounds like a market opportunity to me. Why aren’t there Bond-villain type organizations that kill for profit alone? Was RICO that effective?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Biologics are a big category, of which the -mabs are the early success story. The next evolution would be exactly what you described, where we can construct a protein to block targets by way of a fancy ml chemistry algorithm instead of trial and error. Beyond that, we get into de novo synthetic proteins that have more in common with sci-fi nanomachines than penicillin. Then, ???.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
So, to put it in some context: the criticism of GWAS has always been that these studies are large, expensive, rarely teach us anything about the underlying biology and explain little of the actual heritability (‘missing heritability’ problem). The ‘mechanistic’ biologists interested in curing disease or engineering biology generally dislike GWAS.
The development of big GWAS and tools like AlphaFold suggest to me that we’re nearing the point where useful empirical information overwhelms the capacities of human comprehension. The etiology of Alzheimer’s might just be Ala->Gly x100, and the true story is an overwhelming mass of minutiae, compared to the comprehensible ‘protein x is broken’. A lot of the work of medicine has been outsourced to evolution, and we’ve cribbed from her notes on every antibiotic and biologic we’ve produced. But we’re getting close to the point where we can build magic bullets from first principles.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
It’s unfortunately not explicit, but the subtext of of the thesis ‘the environment of poverty causes low IQ’ is that if we fix poverty we fix IQ. If you take Jensen seriously then you can (correctly) predict that anything short of explicit eugenics and/or gene modification is going to fail to move the needle.
On the margins there is plenty of room for serious scientists to argue about possibly meaningful effects here or there: the fact that income and wealth have very different relationships with heritability is definitely interesting. But we try to use truth to win social fights rather than pick our side based on truth unfortunately.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
HBD is a useful scientific frame insofar as it goes against the default blank-statist universalism of academia writ large, but the number of people who truly give a shit about the phenotypic variance populations on psychometrics is a rounding error. The issue is that people like to make interventions which don’t do anything. We can quibble over effect sizes, but right now I could use embryo selection to get a marginally smarter child compared to controls. There isn’t any known environmental intervention that can more the dial on adult g.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to giving more credit to random noise, but nobody has time for the humility that would demand.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Bummer. The ‘correct’ orientation seems noticeably more appealing to me, the vibe from looking up and left rather than down is better somehow.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Gotta give credit where it’s due, the fentanyl epidemic is to the credit of forward-thinking cartels, not Purdue pharma et al. Fentanyl is complicated to manufacture compared to heroin but far easier to smuggle, and should be understood primarily as an innovation in the illicit drug market. It’s still contentious how big an impact easy access pharmacy opioids had compared to the counterfactual standard progression of heroin use incidence, but ultimately we’re 10 years past peak Oxy abuse. Gotta blame the markets, my guy.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Since this is for state civil cases getting a trial to the federal Supreme Court is very unlikely, yeah? Sucks to be a defendant in Washington. Is this just another benign tumor of degenerate legal precedence or will this actually effect outcome do you think?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-
There is also a self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time. You can’t easily persuade New Right advocates by pointing to mainstream media reports that contradict their main narrative. Mainstream media is one of the least trusted sources. Academic research also has fallen under increasing mistrust, as the academy predominantly hires individuals who support the Democratic Party.
Most classical liberals are uncomfortable with the New Right approaches, and seek to disavow them. I share those concerns, and yet I also recognize that hard and fast lines are not so easy to draw. The New Right is in essence accepting the original classical liberal critique of the state and pushing it a few steps further, adding further skepticism of elites, a greater emphasis on culture, and a belief in elite collusion rather than checks and balances. You may or may not agree with those intellectual moves, but many common premises still are shared between the classical liberals and the New Right, even if neither side is fully comfortable admitting this.
The New Right also tends to see the classical liberals as naïve about power (the same charge classical liberals fling at the establishment), and as standing on the losing side of history. Those aren’t the easiest arguments to refute. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen 9/11, a failed Iraq War, a major financial crisis and recession, and a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards. It doesn’t seem that wrong to become additionally skeptical about American elites, and the New Right wields these points effectively.
The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts. The future is now, old man, and it’s all about groups, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiencies. Given our degenerate institutions there is no way any particular set of losers can actually expect compensation for their damages, and so all one can hope for is that our particular sect wins out in the scrum of sectarian squabbling.
Yet, listening to a recent interview of his, I was struck by his (likely correct) bone-deep cynicism towards grand reform. His marginal revolution is lower variance than a monarchy or integralist state, and so intrinsically less ambitious. X-risks seem to demand a serious response, but Cowen just shrugs and hopes we have a nice few centuries before we destroy ourselves.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Every claim about ‘no evidence’ in the wiki article should be treated adversarially. The DEFUSE grant seems like a close to a smoking gun as we can expect. The work justifying grants and the work paid for by grants are often chronologically inverted, where you get novel data, ask for money to generate said data, then use that money to get new data which you later ask for more money to get. Research is not cheap so the funding streams have to be gamed if you want your lab assistants to keep getting paychecks, so a good PI is not going to wait for a specific grant approval to start a particular line of investigation that looks fruitful.
I’m personally at 90/10 that it was a lab leak, with the remainder being that EcoHealth alliance was doing sketchy GoF and/or bio-‘defense’ work that would look bad even if they weren’t directly responsible for COVID-19 itself. Jeffery Sachs has had some interesting stuff to say about conflicts of interest with most of the people investigating the lab leak hypothesis in the early days if you want to dig a bit deeper.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
I’d blame incentives. The market for entertaining English-speaking LOL streamers outcompetes the LCS ecosystem so high-ELO NA games have lower stakes than scenes where all the money comes from getting a spot on a team. Also, on the margin, the median IQ of Korea and China are meaningfully higher than the US, so maybe the peak ELO is just higher over there despite the smaller player base.
Ignoring IQ, HBD suggests that the structure of the human mind is structured to adapt to a particular culture and environment, a la Joseph Heinrich’s WEIRD research. If evolution doesn’t work above the neck, culture has to do everything. This theoretical Homo Universalis doesn’t have instincts towards face reading or language, and has to cludge stuff together using very fragile chains of heritage. They probably don’t crack large social organization and remain as small tribes of mutually unintelligible hunter-gatherers.
An alternative frame would be that people have ‘souls’. At a certain level of cognitive capacity beings tap into some implicit structure in the universe that allows for all the things people do, like some more ornate version of math or game theory. Any particular instance might have local variation but is basically the same as every other instance in structure if not in content. Now that I spell this out, this sounds pretty similar to bog-standard Christian philosophy.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Roller mobster goes way too hard
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
What are y’all listening to?
I just discovered Lunar Society and I was blown away. The guest list is great but I’m most impressed by Dwarkesh’s ability to think through a statement and find something to push back. Very highly recommended.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
Hey, people used to go to watch people being tortured to death for fun. The fact that cruel political actions now involve free plane tickets instead of dousing someone in tar or sending bombs in the mail is progress of a sort.
There are two ‘nice’ outcomes, 100% or 0%. 100% means clear path to citizenship for basically everybody. 0% means people don’t trek across brutal deserts, national sovereignty is restored, and the working class has more labor power. It’s in the middle that we get this brutality, where neither side can get what they want so the only victory is your rival’s tears.
The thing about degenerate societies is that no one is in charge, just institutions careening down their tracks. You’re lower status not (only) because you’re a stay-at-home mom, but because you aren’t a practicing lawyer/doctor/girl boss, like in the tv shows. You have less time to post TikTok’s about the hip brewery you found or how great your guru is or how tasteful your 1 bedroom soho loft is. The status game is global now kiddo and if you think individual players making individual decisions can beat back moloch I’ve got a good essay for you.
In blue spaces kids are a luxury good, for people both rich enough to afford them and attractive enough to bag a secure LTR. This is fucked and bad and doomed long term but it’s a pretty reasonable outcome if you understand some of the market forces.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
I agree, but I’m sympathetic to the degenerate hedonist a bit more than you. Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance. You can dodge the shackles of instinct by diverting those feelings towards a creature that will never grow up, talk back, or steal your laptop for heroin money. Yes, society will collapse because of this, but it’s a free rider problem. Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
I’ve been thinking about an inverse failure mode in medicine, where snake oil is ruthlessly exterminated but good medicine is expensive, hard to get, and slow to get to market. A fool and his money are easily parted, so we still have plenty of hookum sold to the gullible, but they aren’t taking real drugs with serious side effects, or so the argument goes.
Medicine would be better for some substantial % of the populous if they could just take whatever drugs they wanted. Others would very rapidly harm themselves. A two-tiered system where people can take whatever they want after jumping through hoops seems superior to either extreme, but we already kind of have that, where patients bug their PCP until they get the drugs they want. But we still have exploitation through med advertisements, Medicare fraud, etc., and we lack the freedom to import specialized baby formula or try even mildly novel compounds.
I like free speech maximalism in social media on the grounds that there isn’t a 1:1 tradeoff between freedom and truth. Less freedom often means less truth, as lying is a powerful tool if you can get away with it. Can you shut down the scammers at all without breaking some other load-bearing norm? It might be the case that social media is net negative, but the milk is spilt in that regard. Why not other regulatory angles tho? Finance is tightly regulated so changing the rules about investment products seems safer than throwing out an key amendment.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2yr ago
The Culture should definitely be on your list. Player of Games and Excession are total bops
Do you feel like regular use of Tylenol is wrong?
I suspect that people transpose a dislike for the medical system onto the things the system controls. If you had to cajole an ethanol prescription from your PCP every 3 months your relationship to booze would seem craven and desperate, even holding the quantity and quality constant. If you could pick up amphetamines at your local gas station, would it still feel so gross?
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