quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that the incentives of the cartels are pretty unlike the incentives of jihadist Palestinians.
In particular, provoking the opposed government into a violent response is good strategy for jihadists, but a terrible strategy for the cartels.
When the cartels start firing rockets over the US border, you have my blessings to bomb their launch sites (if Mexico is unable or unwilling to put a stop to that).
When forces of the Mexico government overcome your border defenses and start massacring your citizens, you have my blessings to turn Mexico into Gaza in a futile attempt to enforce a regime change.
Neither provocation will happen. The cartels like the status quo, especially the part where they are not getting bombed. The US government (presumably) likes the part where they are not criticized for accepting tremendous civilian casualties in their military operations (for a change). This is one of the cases where military confrontation would make things worse for both sides.
I mean, if you want to task the CIA with taking out cartel bosses without killing innocent bystanders (think snipers, not hellfire missiles), I guess I would be ok with that? I am however not positive that it would work, seems like even the hellfire variant did not really defeat the Taliban.
I think that less flashy responses, like trying to limit the amount of arms smuggling from the US into Mexico, plus having law enforcement counter the cartels when they operate on US soil, are likely more effective to counter spreading cartel influence.
Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made
In a very technical sense, you could indeed argue that Excel can be viewed as programming language. It seems to be Turing-complete: I can describe the rules defining state transitions in the first cell, use the rest of the row to store the state of the band and then tell it to fill out subsequent rows, running the TM row by row. It would be up to the user to stop adding more rows once it has reached a halting state, though. Of course, the memory overhead would scale with the number of total steps.
While I am sure that there are power users (or nerds who like a new challenge after brainfuck) who implement prime factorization, array sorting or iterative solvers in Excel, my estimate is that most users only create programs which take input which can be reasonably be considered one- or two-dimensional and runs for a time which is proportional to the input size. Like, they can calculate the sum, average or minimum of a column. Ask them for anything which is above linear runtime, like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions), which even a novice programmer who has the concept of cascading for-loops can solve, and they will be stuck. (Of course, there is always VBA, but if VBA makes Excel a programming language, then it also makes Word a programming language.)
Despite this, spreadsheets have their uses (if you can stomach interleaving the code and the data). For example, I used one to catalogue my discoveries when playing Book of Hours without spoilers.
TL;DR: calling Excel "the most popular programming language ever made" is like saying that pictograms are "the most widely read script on the planet". Sure, only a 1.5 billion people can read the word "airplane", while likely more than half of the world population would recognize the ✈ symbol. However, these universal pictograms do not qualify as a script because they are not expressive enough. Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.
Edit: also, to the degree that spreadsheets empower users, letting Microsoft take credit for that seems a bit like giving Toyota the credit for providing mobility to millions of Americans. The empowering thing is the underlying invention, the fact that the customer selected Excel and Toyota instead of SuperCalc and Fiat is of much less concern.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Ok, sorry for misunderstanding you, it seems we are in agreement.
Seems like having two quotation lines will result in them being stuffed in the same paragraph, so I fixed my comment to make it seem less like I am misquoting you.
Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. [...]
Bill Gates folllowed that model.
As some of you might know, Gates made his fortune leading a company called "Microsoft" in the 80s and 90s.
It is somewhat of an understatement to say that the Microsoft of that era was not generally seen as a force for good. They were the most hated company on the net in that era. Their software (i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME) was garbage. Its security was atrocious. Their marketplace behavior was anti-competitive. Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.
Basically, I stopped hating them when I stopped using their crap for serious work. Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.
I think that Gates has reached net good with his philanthropy, but to claim that MS was his real contribution to humanity is absurd.
Edit: made misinterpreted quotation more accurate.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
This is a classic trick. You see, either one of two cases must be the case:
- There is a longest sequence of zeros in pi with length N. In that case, L={w in {0}^n | n<=N}.
- Any sequence of N zeros will eventually appear in pi. In that case, L={w in {0}^n}.
In either case, L is decidable by a rather trivial Turing machine. That we do not know which one is the case is not an obstacle, a genius might prove either one tomorrow and then any kindergardener could built the TM.
An actually undecidable problem would be L = {x is a Turing machine | x terminates}. Here, we can't neatly split the world into two cases and just profess ignorance about which world we live in.
(Original thought: it does not feel like the outcome could be independent of whatever axiomatic system you use -- pi's digits being very computable no matter if you like ZF+C or plain ZF or Peano or whatever. (Provable theorems about the digits might be more elusive, though.) However, I would not claim that this is obvious. After all, BusyBeaver(8000) eludes ZF, when my naive assumption would have been that surely, the termination of a TM should be the same under any axiomatic system which can define it.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
As a baseline, the us military budget in FY 2023 was 820G$. So projects of this size are neither trivial nor something which will take generations to pay the debts for.
However, I think your comparison is apples to oranges.
In the one case, we had a system of companies which had not had adequate risk management, instead trying to become 'too big to fail', at which point the US gov would have to bail them out or risk economic collapse.
In the other case, we have the US gov spending (wisely or foolishly, I am open to arguments) in the hope of gaining future benefits.
In short, it is the difference between giving your kid 100k$ for opioids to prevent them from going into withdrawal versus giving them 100k$ to spend towards getting an engineering degree. The amount of money might be similar, but the incentives it sets and the likely long term outcome are very different.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
Now, I get not leaving everything which has ever been used by Nazis barren. For example, there are only so many two-letter acronyms, not using SS for something useful seems a bit of a waste, so I am fine with you Americans abbreviating social security thus. Likewise, just because some Neonazis like 18 and 88, even the Germans will not go all tetraphobic (yes, I know) on these numbers.
On the other hand, if someone were to say that we should reclaim "Heil Hitler", because after all, what made the Nazis bad was not their greetings but their genocides, I would reply that this is a terrible idea. It would be like saying that glowing cigarette butts -- unlike wildfires -- are generally not dangerous to humans, and thus we can throw them away without a care.
Of course, Musk's salute is a lot more ambiguous than "Sieg Heil", but in general I think that the gesture should better stay in the cordon sanitaire for a few more centuries.
My theory is that Musk did this deliberately to troll people. I disapprove.
(Also, I re-read SSCs parable of talents from 2015 recently. Scott mentions Musk no less than nine times, as an example of someone who is clearly gifted and doing good on a scale most of us could never hope to do. With a decade of hindsight, this reads somewhat bizarre -- sure, Musk did some great stuff, like making electric cars cool and establishing reuseable first stages, but he also did quite a few things which do not seem worth emulating.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I don't get how the use-mention distinction is relevant here?
From what I can tell, Musk is giving some speech related to the inauguration, not a lecture on the symbolism of fascism or something. Not that a professor doing a Nazi salute for the purpose of demonstration would be very appropriate either, typically you would show a video of the period.
Even if you plead parody use, that is still use, not mention.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Well, it certainly looks deliberate to me. The flat hand to the breast seems a bit strange to me, I would have imagined that you make a fist first?
quiet_NaN
8d ago
If the exploited has sufficiently unreasonable expectations, and the exploiter does or should know about them, yes, it's exploitation.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement.
In my model of the world, the woman on tinder likely has a realistic estimate of how rare it is that white men marry their tinder dates. After all, she is likely in contact with other women who are applying the same strategy, and knows how many Westerners they had sex with without getting married by any of them. She likely has some mid-status life and job in her home country (it is hard to invite Westerners over if you are living in a street or in a room with ten family members, after all). She enjoys being part of the hookup culture, and preferring white dudes is simply optimizing for the unlikely case that a hookup nets her a long term boyfriend (whom she would prefer to have a Western passport).
From what I can tell, in your model, the woman on tinder is desperately looking for a ticket to the west, in the same way that someone who sinks all their disposable income and then some into lottery tickets it trying to win the lottery. Like that gambler, she is totally deluded about her chances. She despises having meaningless sex, but carries on regardless, always convinced that the next date will finally be the one, and always being heartbroken when the guy leaves in the morning.
I think that we can both agree that having sex with someone one knows to be in the latter situation so one can save the costs for a hostel would be exploitative. I also maintain that having sex with the former woman is not exploitative.
The reason I consider the latter situation somewhat unlikely is that it basically is contrary to how women traditionally try to attract high quality mates, which is making a credible effort of appearing to be hard to get. If you are 25, on tinder and willing to fuck a man you have just met, that man can likely make an educated guess at the number of partners you had before him. While I am sure that there are men who tend to fall for woman who had tons of partners, I would assume that the average man would be slightly less likely to consider a long term relationship given that information. For example, getting hired by a Westerner as a tour guide for some token amount, being a bit flirty but not having sex with him in the first week, while also spending a lot of time with your mark seems a lot more likely to net you a boyfriend than just fucking your way through tinder. But what do I know.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I had the understanding that tinder is used by people looking for sex. But perhaps I am ignorant.
I would argue that it is indeed rare that the motives of people are 100% aligned. If person A hires person B as an uber driver, the shared baseline expectation is that B will transport A in a safe manner and A will pay the pre-agreed fee. If you ask A "what would be a 99th percentile outcome?", they might reply that to meet the trip would have to be quicker than expected, and B would delight them with good conversation. If you ask B, they might say if A gives them a 50% tip. While the 99th percentile outcomes might coincide for both participants of the transaction, it likely won't.
Or take a man who buys a woman a drink in a bar. Both of them have a prior probability estimate that this will not end with a "thanks for the drink" ten minutes later. In most cases, the estimates of the nonstandard outcomes (sex, marriage, becoming the next Bonnie & Clyde, whatever) of both participants will not coincide. However, this does not make their deal unfair. Even if the woman knows beforehand that the outcome the man is hoping for is not in the cards, she is under no obligation to give him a warning that she is not in the mood for sex / would not fuck him if he was the last man on earth / has vowed never to marry again / is strictly against gun violence. This does not make her an exploiter. The line I would draw is intentional deception.
Again, this is a matter of social conventions, which are of course somewhat arbitrary. I could imagine some weird culture where the buying of a drink is equivalent to marriage vows being exchanged, et cetera. Now, if the white backpacker is in a country where 80% of tinder dates lead to marriage, and knowingly flouts this convention by planning to go on tens of tinder dates without marrying anyone, then I would say that he is taking advantage of his partners.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place? By that test, every human interaction is exploitive. (How do we determine who is the one being exploited? Easy, whoever is higher on the woke totem pole.)
I mean, if we twisted that scenario a lot, saying that the guy is happily married in an open relationship, but falsely indicates a willingness to marry some woman in the third world so that he gets to fuck her, then sure, that would be exploitive.
I find your comment deeply unethical, but I won't substantiate why. Instead, I want you to either admit that you are a nihilist who does not believe unethical behavior is a useful category or otherwise lay out in detail a coherent theory of ethics and argue why your comment is in fact ethical. See what I did there?
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Say what?
So your position is that prostitution always implies sex slavery? Someone tell Aella that she self-enslaved when she worked as an escort.
Also, some libertarians might consider taxes legalized, regulated robberies, and yet taxes are quite instrumental in discouraging the unregulated kind.
I will grant you that likely, there are two effects from legalization which work in opposite direction. The one is the one I described, where the legal goods replace the illegal ones. The other is that legalization creates additional demand, and a part of that which will be filled by illegal channels. Think weed, once you legalize medical marijuana, sorting out which joints are legal and which ones are not becomes difficult.
However, in the case of prostitution, this would be solved easily enough. Issue government IDs for prostitutes and decriminalize only sex for pay with registered prostitutes, while keeping the Johns on the hook for rape if they fuck someone without such ID who was coerced by organized crime.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
To be fair, I do not think that the Tinder plus thing is very transactional.
As far as 'bagging a blanco' is concerned, if people having sex with you for bragging rights is exploitation, then the popular girls in college are exploiting their boyfriends pretty hard.
As far as dreams of a better passport are concerned, I think that most woman have a realistic estimate of the probability of a tinder hookup leading to marriage. It is not like they think the next guy will be the one to fall for them. They have sex because they want to have sex. They also know that there is some minimal chance that the relationship will turn into something more serious, and would prefer a relationship with someone with a western passport, so they decide to optimize and prefer white dudes. Solid decision theory on their part.
As an intuition pump, consider either a gay person or a straight woman engaging in the same behavior, using the fact that they are exotic and come from a desired culture to fuck their way through a country without paying for a bed to sleep in. Would these people also be vile exploiters?
quiet_NaN
9d ago
which doesn't lead to marriage
Why stop there? Even if it leads to marriage, the fact remains that the poorer woman was likely somewhat incentivized by material gains, so the pure act of sex was profaned by base worldly considerations.
The reality is that social status has been hot since our ancestors were living in the trees. Money is one of the ways we track social status. Over millions of years, the women who were selecting mates purely on physical or emotional grounds were surely selected against compared to women who were also considering the social status of their mates. Nor was it very different for men. A young woman wearing jewelry indicates "my family is rich (or at least of appropriate social standing) and would be a useful ally to you". The fact that such displays were (from what I can tell) common seems to indicate that they worked.
And while we are criticizing one of the core tenets of mate selection in social species, why stop there? Physical attractiveness might also have solid genetic reasons, but it is hardly less worldly.
If you would not fuck your True Love (TM) even if they were a worm, then you are profaning sex with your petty worldly concerns.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I can think of three bad options for Western countries:
-
Saying "you are corrupt, therefore we embargo you". This might work when the sale of natural resources was essential to prop up the regime, but in general it will at most result in the people being exploited by slightly poorer elites. (This is great if one follows the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, though: profiting from child labor is wrong; who cares what happens to the kids without employment though.)
-
Invade with the goal of establishing a democracy. This one has a terrible track record.
-
Just shrug and buy their resources. This makes the West complicit in their exploitation.
Ideally, the West would keep trading, but also exert some pressure to make conditions for the workers less horrible. But telling the elites to industrialize so that their country will not stay poor might not be well received.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I would argue that it should be in the interest of anyone who dislikes sex slavery to have legalized (and somewhat regulated) prostitution instead. In my opinion, the goal would be to treat sex work similar to tobacco. Sure, some people might smuggle in tobacco to avoid paying taxes, and some of the smugglers might rely on slave labor to increase their margin, but the average consumer of cigarettes or vapes is not going to go to the darknet to save a few bucks.
By contrast, there will always be some demand for sex work, and someone will be ready to supply it at a premium. Sometimes, this will be escorts, but sometimes it will be organized crime, which is typically bad for the sex workers.
Also, some men looking for sex behave quite immoral (and sometimes outright criminal) to get it. I think that is jurisdictions where sex as a commodity exists, they are at least somewhat less likely to spin an elaborate web of lies to get a woman to fall in love with them. (I am less sure about rape, likely for some men violent rape or roofies are a kink in itself, and they would still do it if they could just pay for sex instead.)
Regarding coercion, I think that all wage labor is at least somewhat coercive in a world without a solid UBI. Shelter and food cost money, and the labor market exploits that fact. I don't think that giving someone the option of earning their rent fucking people they would not otherwise fuck instead of flipping burgers for eight hours a day is a-ok. Obviously, more direct coercion is not okay.
Also, I think that a lot of relationships involve both sex and the transfer of material goods and can thus be seen at least as somewhat transactional. For one thing, rich people (especially men) are often able to attract partners who are physically hotter than they are, which clearly suggests that expected future material benefits play a role in evaluating partners. Nobody is talking about criminalizing that.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
the single thing that lets him speak his mind now
While I think that the second Trump presidency is likely an important reason for Meta's change of mind regarding the culture war, I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.
Scott never had mass appeal, the average US voter was never going to read through his lengthy articles. His main mechanism to effect change was always that some of the people who read him are quite influential, causing his ideas to (sometimes) diffuse far. While for some celebrities, whom they endorse for president is their most important political decision by far, I do not think that Scott's endorsement was all that impactful.
I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong. Being able to voice his opinions about HBD without getting cancelled by twitter mobs seems certainly to be part of his utility function, but not the whole of it.
Personally, his article on the martians was what caused me to update towards HBD. He was in a unique position to even make me consider it. I had read him for some time, and he was making a careful argument. He wisely made his argument about the Ashkenazi, not the Haitians. If I had encountered HBD claims elsewhere on the internet, I would most likely have replied "just fuck off back to stormfront".
quiet_NaN
10d ago
HBD therefore socialism
Two of these three words feel like a gross misrepresentation of the article.
The most HBD thing he says in that article is that " IQ is 50% to 80% heritable". He does not talk about group differences at all.
The thing you call socialism is likely based on this paragraph:
Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.
Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.
Below that, he talks about donating a portion of your income to whatever causes you feel are important. This hardly seems to be a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Besides endorsing Trump's presidential opponents (IIRC), who were close allies to wokism, what has he done to "politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out"?
From what I remember, he has been a vocal critic of woke politics (which would be the ones most likely to attack people over HBD) for quite a few years. The distinction blue tribe v grey tribe was mentioned by him in 2014, for example.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
In 2017, Scott published this.
Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.
From me, this reads as him mostly buying into HBD as far as Ashkenazis are concerned. Of course, once you acknowledge that one ethnic group has a genetic intelligence advantage, it would be an amazing coincidence if all the other ethnics groups were exactly the same, but it is a point he did not make explicitly.
Still, placing the dots out there but not connecting them for the reader is far from "enforced the consensus".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
From the article:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong.
But you might want to read the article for the finer points he makes.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I view it as burning epistemic commons to get applause from his followers.
If he had said: "I am of the legal opinion that the ERA is in effect, but recognize that I will need to convince SCOTUS of that", that would be one thing.
It would be like Trump saying "The election was stolen from me through fraud, and the SCOTUS will recognize that and award me the presidency".
Instead, what either of these presidents said was basically on the level of "the sky is green".
People should disagree on opinions, but not on facts.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.
To be fair, for most of the history of marriage, consent covert at most the act of marriage itself, and even there it was often coerced. Once a woman was married, her husband most certainly was free to rape her. In Germany, marital rape was only criminalized in 1997 (against the vote of likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz).
You are certainly right that consent is especially hard with new sexual partners when boundaries are not yet established, but it does mean that it is all that simple for monogamous relationships. There are certainly plenty of relationships which are a total mess.
You are correct in that -- the voting public would be willing to tolerate foreign civilian collateral damage in a way they won't when the victims are US citizens.
However, foreign operations face different challenges. I gather it is harder to get good intelligence on the operations of the Taliban than on the operations of some US based drug lord. Arrests of low tier enemies give can give you insights that you can't get from just bombing people.
The common theme on the domestic 'war on drugs' and a potential war on the cartels is that the number of people who are willing to risk their freedom and lives to make a fortune selling drugs when there is an opening in the market seems near endless.
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