oceanofsolaris
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User ID: 1165
oceanofsolaris
5mo ago
Who are some other of the many people you noticed?
I mean all kinds of people are on Dwarkesh‘s podcast, some certainly have achieved something (Zuckerberg) others maybe less (Aschenbrenner … though he has definitely done a lot with his so far fairly short adulthood).
But I am not sure I see a strong pattern here (unless your threshold for accomplishment is very high).
But I am exactly complaining that “defending borders” refers to completely different problems in these cases.
And to insinuate that the US government uses taxpayers money to (help) solve some of these problems but not others is due to “who is in charge of the countr[ies] they are supporting” * and not to the fact that these are completely different problems … feels very dishonest to me.
* Is this referring to the fact that Zelensky (and Bibi) are Jews? If so … I don’t think that’s the most relevant fact about the US support of Ukraine
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
My understanding is that Wagenknecht is charismatic, has ideals and is also impossible to work with.
Otherwise even a party as dysfunctional as Die Linke would have gone all in on her.
I assume that her new party will flounder for the same reasons. If she was great at setting up alliances, keeping a tight ship and knowing when to make deals with whom … she would already be running Die Linke today.
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
I am sure they have more influence over US foreign policy (though Saudi-Arabia isn’t too bad at influencing the US either). Business for sure (though again … Oil is important).
But the media? If “500 killed in suspected Israel Hospital attack” * with an image of an unrelated collapsed building on the frontpage of the NYT is how Zionists control the media … these Zionist overlords are unusually inept. Especially since none of the things in this headline ended up being clearly true in the end.
I am not saying there aren’t many jewish people working in media (though you should see physics if you are looking for an area where I am almost surprised if a person of importance isn’t jewish). Just that the Zionists are clearly not in charge here.
*I don’t remember the exact headline, quoting from vague memory here.
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
Are you saying that illegal immigration through the mexican-american border is a similarly shaped problem as military/terrorist invasions?
If Mexico were to invade the US with tanks and soldiers tomorrow , I am 99.9% sure that the Biden administration wouldn’t say “sorry, we are all tied up in Ukraine and Israel, nothing we can do here”.
Similarly if Ukraine were to get swathes of uncontrolled economic migration from Belarussia … would anyone in the US government care? Probably not (they’d certainly advise Ukraine to go easy with any crimes against humanity, but they’d consider it an internal problem they don’t strictly care about).
I don’t even know why I spent two paragraphs on this (obvious) difference between these issues. Using the same word to refer to
a) economic migration
b) terrorists killing and abducting citizens of another state
c) a full blown military invasion aimed at removing the government of another nation
is pure equivocation. Calling this “noncentral fallacy” is like saying that the world trade center needed slight repairs on 9/12 after being damaged by flying debris.
What I want to say: this type of language is not used in good faith.
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
As someone living there … I think the Swiss -> German attitude is not that bad. But maybe the Swiss are just too polite to show their contempt :P
Austria though … they are certainly more open about their attitude towards Germans (though again it’s mostly just harmless ribbing, nothing that would actually get in the way of living there).
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
A reputed franchise from 20 years ago when gaming was a niche hobby enjoyed by a fraction of todays potential audience.
Not sure this would be the first franchise I‘d revive when looking for mass appeal.
That being said, it’s probably a well-known franchise within the niche of CRPG fans … which is sizeable, but still not huge (especially since it probably is still very PC-focused … while these games are released on consoles nowadays, they are still mostly created for and played with with mouse and keyboard).
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
There is a (better argued and worded) comment on the article itself that also captures this feeling:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/embryo-selection-healthy-babies-vs/comment/17761959?r=9lzgr
(though I wouldn’t call IVF exactly „new“ at this point anymore … but then there is the relatively high rate of heart defects for kids conceived that way, which AFAIK isn’t well understood. So the point stands that IVF might have under-appreciated risks.)
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
Without reading the article fully (sorry, it’s long and I already have an opinion about the topic that is mostly in line with it): What’s up with its huge focus on the Rutherford person?
Is the book he wrote so dominant in discourse? Are people angry that he is personally insulting the Collins for using US-wide available embryo selection technology?
It just reads weird that the article spends 2/3 of its length arguing at someone I never heard about (which might just be on me) and whom the authors seem to hold in such low esteem. Yeah, these twitter screenshots seem to show someone who is angry and not arguing in good faith … so why let them live rent-free in such a large part of your article?
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
According to the LessWrong writeup (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children), one of the authors of OP article can fix you up with a startup that offers intelligence scores for embryo selection (Jonathan Anomaly…not sure how trustworthy someone with that last name is!).
That being said, I this is currently a lot of hassle (read the lesswrong article … quite some steps needed), needs a lot of money and is definitely not available in most jurisdictions. I am also not sure how well it would work.
So waiting 2-5 years would probably make things easier (or harder because it’s been outlawed).
Generally, a nation that wanted to go all-in on “IVF eugenics” could probably make a lot of progress just by sequencing and cognitive-ability-testing + disease cataloguing a large part of their population. AFAIK one thing holding the technology back is that there is no good large scale database of DNA sequences with cognitive ability scores (instead,“educational attainment” is often recorded, which might not be exactly what you care about).
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
His homepage used to contain a lot of gay BDSM lifestyle related stuff….not judging, but not very “normie” either (neither the lifestyle nor advertising it on your work-related page).
Seems to have been toned down/removed though (at least a quick look didn’t find anything on his page).
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
By the time the animal is cooked, the virus should be very thoroughly killed. You should go for bat tatar or pangolin sashimi :P
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
AFAIK the learning curve for batteries doesn‘t look that rosy for the near future (for grid-scale storage).
oceanofsolaris
1yr ago
I am a great fan of Casey, but I think it's important to know about the assumptions that are underlying his analysis:
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The learning curve for solar will continue its current trajectory (aka solar keeps on getting exponentially cheaper).
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Some kind of solution for storage & the currently non-electrified industry emerges: probably hydrocarbons derived from CO2 direct air capture (Caseys startup).
Number 1. will allow to just ridiculously overbuild solar (so that even in deep winter it mostly generates enough for base-load) and 2. will allow to absorb the surplus by turning it into hydrocarbons (even if there are some losses, we barely care because electricity during sunshine hours is so cheap). IMHO, the logical conclusion in this scenario would be that we use hydrocarbons as storage as well (and use gas peaker plants in winter), though Casey really likes batteries for some reason [0].
About Caseys solar future: I think that Caseys assumptions aren't too far-fetched (the solar learning curve certainly has shown a lot of staying power so far), so maybe this will play out the way Casey describes it. But it really really hinges on storage working out in some way. If one of the two assumptions somehow fails, we will be in a big world of pain. In this case, we will probably get climate-change + whatever haphazard geo-engineering we can muster in an attempt to neutralize it.
About the nuclear future: On the other hand, even if we go all nuclear, something still needs to be done for the non-electrified part of the economy (e.g. ships, airplanes, steel production, fertilizer production etc). That part currently uses much more energy that the electrified part of the economy. So we'd either need great battery tech (+ lots of industrial process innovations) or hydrocarbons from CO2-captured as well if we want to become even nearly CO2-neutral.
[0] And I think that Caseys biases show most strongly on this front, e.g. the somewhat gloating tone of this article of his, which basically describes the gas peaker plants being driven out of business due to market manipulation by large batteries with fancy algorithms. This is obviously not optimal because these gas peaker plants are actually needed today since the batteries can only smooth over small variations and can't deal with longer-term shortages.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
I think running the exchange was kinda safe (maybe not making them tons of money though).
What wasn’t safe was the Alameda trading firm.
What made it (probably) a crime was plundering the customer deposits of the safe business to prop up the risky trading firm.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
But there are AFAIK no NS1 countries between Russia and Germany. Nord Stream 1 and 2 are -at least when looking at routes, endpoints and even capacity- virtually identical.
That’s why the “only NS2 left intact” part puzzles me so much. Maybe it was not even the intention to leave it intact and whoever did the sabotage just messed that part up.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
Pipeline "pigs"
But you need flow for moving pigs, don't you. On the other hand, it probably wouldn't be too hard to create something that moves along the inside of a pipeline even without flow.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
Not saying you are wrong about this in general, but from your two points:
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Blowing it up strengthens Putins position.
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But he can only blow it up as long as he is still firmly in power.
follows that he should blow it up well before he loses the power to do so (unless he miscalculates).
More generally: I think that Putin / the Regime looks pretty locked in with regards to this conflict (through annexation and mobilisation), so realistically the pipeline doesn't give Putin too many additional options unless Europe really comes begging for Gas.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
But apart from stupid rhetorical points, what's the difference between pumping gas through NS2 vs NS1 (after NS1 has been made unusable anyways).
The point about NS2 was AFAIK to basically double the capacity of NS1. So blowing NS1 up to force Germany to use NS2 would have the same result as just using NS1 in the first place.
I am still incredibly puzzled by this whole affair.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
But again: this was definitely done for political reasons [0] at a time when the evidence was still inconclusive.
Whatever we found out between then and now doesn’t change anything about that.
[0] There are of course more benign motivations one could assume, e.g. protecting people from what was perceived as “false cures” that would end up harming people.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
But I think it is clear what the collective knowledge about Ivermectin was at the time. Whether we later learned (or will learn) that it actually works against Covid (or not) will not change anything about how justifies these attacks were.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
Without having read all that (the Scott article was already "more than you wanted to know" and this is definitely veering into "waay more than I ever could possibly have wanted to know"), this seems to be a useful article since it mostly starts from Scotts article and gives an "overview" (albeit a long one) as to why the author thinks he was wrong.
This seems generally good. And I can imagine that Scott was too harsh in excluding some not so great studies.
But then, directionally my takeaway from Scotts article (at the time it was written) was that Ivermectin actually had a small chance of actually being mildly useful and that it might actually have been a good investment of money and time to run some more well-done studies (though there were already a lot of badly run ones to muddy the water). Mainstream news on that topic on the other hand was that Ivermectin was nothing but "horse dewormer" that only idiots would take against Covid.
So I think that railing against Scott is kinda barking up the wrong tree (especially with the slightly combative tone of the article [0]). But then, we maybe just expect a lot more from Scott (and his long article) than he provided. In any case, it seems that nowadays this matters less as a practical concern (Paxlovid is kinda good) and it boils down more to a debate about epistemic practices.
[0] I only glanced at it ... as I said it's kinda long and my interest in the topic is not huge. But the tone strikes me as somewhat accusatory of someone who IMHO did a reasonable (if not perfect) job. But then, I also really like Scott as an author, so I might be biased.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
Oh wow, the fact that Byuu/Near might actually just have committed "virtual" suicide of his handle makes me quite happy. That seemed like a really unnecessary, sad and weird way to die for someone who is so obviously talented and driven.
But it also shows to me how easy it is to get fooled by these kind of "internet truths" where nobody checks anything and everything is proven by citations of secondary sources of flimsy evidence. It's definitely something I should be a bit more wary about in the future.
Regarding KiwiFarms: I don't think I have any love for the site and even less for its users. The site and its users might sometimes do marginally positive things by accident, but on average they seem unnecessarily cruel and antagonistic towards ... mostly random autistic internet strangers.
So if the site dies, I will not shed a tear.
But of course, it's always the jerk who had it coming (other example is the daily stormer) who gets censored first. We have come a far way from the old internet where "censorship is not the answer" (this was a left-coded position not too long ago). However, the fact that you can't have a mildly hated site on the internet anymore without being at least tolerated by one big tech company is certainly discomforting.
oceanofsolaris
2yr ago
To be honest, some of the criticism also applies to that MRA thread (especially about it being weird that someone put in so much work and doesn’t even want to show it off).
Then, that MRA thread really agrees with my priors that tech companies are really chasing female applicants, since they have diversity targets that are basically not possible to meet. So any woman applying to a tech job (at big tech) will have an easier time getting a response and an interview (from there on, they probably only have a light advantage, see that study with anonymised voices for tech interviews).
But I still don’t believe that MRA post really happened.
The handfull isn‘t that small (it’s roughly 5-10 years of progress in ML).
While that isn‘t a conclusive proof the trend will continue, it definitely does give some credence to it (I would give it maybe a 50% chance).
I think it’s a good idea to map out the future of „what if obvious trends continue for ten more years“, even if there is always a chance that things go worse or better.
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