quiet_NaN
2d ago
I have no specific information.
See Scott's article on Kolmogorov complicity. Researching possible group difference in IQ is a third rail for the career in pretty much the same way as applying the scientific method to questions of religion was in 17th century Italy.
Elsevier is a relic of the print era, making tremendous profits on the back of the scientific community. They do not pay the academics who publish articles. They do not pay the academics who review articles. But they charge the institutions which wish to carry their journals (which are generally the same institutions who pay the people who work for free to make their journals work) an arm and a leg.
They basically profit from the fact that the economics of signaling and reputation are messy -- just like you will not simply build a university which is considered as prestigious as Harvard, you will also not simply build a journal as renown as Cell.
Given that the publishers are in it to extract a profit by providing a mostly redundant service, it comes at no surprise that they make publishing decisions where they try to minimize harm to their bottom line instead of pushing for academic freedom. If the eye of the twitter (now probably bluesky) mob turns to 'Intelligence' and decides it does not like their findings, the damage to Elsevier could be much larger than the money they are making from intelligence research.
So even if all the editors resign in protest and leave Intelligence the kind of empty husk that freenode has become after everyone migrated to libera chat following the takeover, it could still be in Elsevier's interests. Wokism had a surge under the first Trump administration and might make a comeback soon.
Or I could be wrong and it could all not be related to the topic of the journal at all.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If your agency will give classified briefings in the case there is something shady going on but publicly denounce mass hysteria, then the very fact that they are giving classified briefings would be an information leak. So I would fully expect the CIA to give a highly classified briefing on bigfoot (likely "to our best knowledge, it does not exist") to Congress if they demanded it.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.
This sounds implausible. As the saying goes, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead".
As an example of a rather successful government conspiracy, consider the NSA spying program. Pre-Snowden, there were certainly credible rumors that the big ISPs passed their cables through a government-controlled room. It would take an especially naive person to say "Surely the US government would not spy on its citizens." Internet veterans will remember the crypto wars, the US gov decision to classify PGP as munitions for the purpose of export restrictions and the attempts of the NSA to push broken crypto on the people. The thing which Snowden delivered was rather substantial evidence regarding the specifics -- which was admittedly a bit worse than I would have estimated. But the fact that state actors had the tech, the money and the incentive to spy on people was plain as day even before that.
Now you claim that the US government decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain (but bizarrely only after the Teller-Ulam design became public knowledge). Consider what it would imply. A cabal of Nobel laureates sitting in some smoky room in their anti-grav chairs having a meeting to decide what the exact mass of the Higgs particles which will be "discovered" at CERN should be. Of course, CERN is international, and over the decades, a lot of countries who were antagonistic to the US (i.e. the USSR or China) have had their own "fundamental physics" research programs. Unless the first secret discovery was a particle which makes it trivial to change the outcome of any physics experiment on Earth (in which case why keep pretending to have a cold war), the US would have had to have the convince at least some senior physicists in these countries to keep their mouths shut. Now if I were a senior researcher in the USSR, no amount of Nobels would convince me it would be a good idea to deceive the party leadership about the nature of reality as related to the feasibility of new weapons. Or would the Soviets have been in on it, too?
Also, there have been some areas of applied research where the US has allowed and indeed lead tremendous progress over the last few decades. Modern electronics and computers certainly seem to make physics research of all kinds so much easier. "They" must really feel secure in their absolute superiority to allow such tools in Muggle hands. If I was trying to keep fundamental physics secret, I would certainly not allow society to develop into an information society with more and more physics graduates poking at things.
I can see a state government keeping some particular design a secret (e.g. "You can ignite fusion bombs through fission bombs in precisely that way"), but not the basics ("Fusion exists. The sun is powered by fusion. Some people have been wondering if the power of fusion can somehow be harnessed by mankind.")
quiet_NaN
9d ago
It seems like the mainstream press is finally catching up with the shatter zone article about the alleged CEO shooter.
The articleseems fair enough (apart from embedding an unrelated video, which is likely an editorial decision), not the kind of hatchet job we hate the NYT for.
First, let me stress: so far, there’s little evidence that this worldview inspired Thompson's killing, at least directly. Unlike more usual suspects like neo-Nazis or Islamic jihadists, gray tribe thinkers rarely preach armed insurrection, and are more likely to advocate social change through high-quality randomized controlled studies.
Often, when the mainstream media convers the rationality/EA subculture, it is in a negative context:
- NYT: Who is this weird blogger read by some influential silicon valley people which we hate?
- What is the ideology of SBF, who gambled with the money of honest (if foolish) people?
- Who are these evil guys who tolerate HBD proponents within their midst?
Here, the context feels less negative, which is amazing given that we are talking about a homicide. From my understanding, while the life experience of rural Americans is very different from the life of Americans in the big coastal cities, getting reasonable claims denied by health insurance companies is basically a universal US experience. The victim was easily in the lowest percentile of sympathy. Murdering a drug dealer, terrorist, corrupt cop or tobacco CEO would likely have invoked a stronger average disgust reaction.
(Of course, I am in my own bubble, perhaps all the cynics with their quips about their thoughts and prayers unfortunately being out of system, only form a small minority, and the median US citizen is positively horrified that someone could put bullets into the pillar of society who runs the company which put them into medical debt.)
quiet_NaN
10d ago
While Marx thought nationalism was a ruse by the international bourgeoisie to keep the global proletariat divided.
Exactly. "Proletarians of all countries, unite" and all that. Blaming Marx for nationalism is about as sensible as blaming him for capitalism. But don't distract @TequilaMockingbird with facts while he is going on about how the evil Jews destroyed the dominant Christian world view.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Humas
Half-way between 'Humans' and 'Hamas', reminding us that the potential for cultish fanaticism resides in all of us. I like it, very resonant with your text.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
Instead of going the VC route, a creator can just go straight to twitter and create an automated agent, then make a meme coin off of that agent and potentially make millions of dollars.
Are we talking 'creator' as in 'content creator' here? Do these regularly found startups? Using crypto currencies as a way to donate to artists, seems fine. If they want to hand out some shiteCoin to show their appreciation, why not. Just don't confuse it with an investment.
The blockchain has two valid use cases, in my opinion. One is as a system to implement revision-proofness: if I pay some token amount to put a hash of some file on the bitcoin blockchain, it will be very hard to deny that I had written that file at that time.
The other use case is to (with mixes) transfer funds anonymously without regulatory oversight.
As an investment, even established cryptocurrencies seem dubious, more pyramid scheme than anything. Gold has been used to store wealth for millennia, as it is both in demand for jewelry and rare. US$ is a reasonable mean to store wealth, that is reasonable because the country with the largest military in the world firmly insists that it's residents pay taxes in that currency. Likewise, US bonds. Stocks in companies residing in countries with a working justice system can be bought in the knowledge that the CEO risks jail time if they swindle investors too blatantly.
The big coins, like bitcoin and etherium (I think) are at least not entirely unreasonable investments, even if I would not invest more than a tiny fraction of my wealth in them. At the end of the day, bitcoin has little to recommend it over its myriad competitors besides having been around longer.
Coins issued by a single company are, to first order approximation, scams. People buy them because they think there is a bigger fool around whom they can sell their coins to before the rug is pulled. Sometimes they are right, they might even make a profit from them.
"Investing" in a company through coins seems likewise wishful thinking. At the end of the day, companies are worth something because they own real world assets. The link tying a companies assets to their stock owners is enforced by laws, a CEO who decides to pocket the assets of a company and leave his shareholders with a worthless husk will generally not thrive. The link between ownership tokens of some web3 company and their physical world assets is certainly not enforced by the blockchain, nor will the investment laws of most countries provide support for blockchain-based company ownership. (Besides, 'we will sue the CEO in federal court' would go contrary to the anarcho-libertarian world view of crypto currencies where you are supposed to trust math and the self-interest of the market participants, not some government.)
All this to say that while many see crypto as nothing but scams and a waste of time, in my opinion some of the most genuinely novel and interesting projects are happening there.
I am sure that some of the scams are genuinely novel and interesting projects. I am also sure that some of the projects are not even scams, in the same way that I am sure that some of the people sitting in death row have never hurt a fly.
Sure, some combinations of cryptocurrencies and chatbot might make a million dollar, but that will basically be because a million people find it novel and cute and pay a dollar to it, not because it does useful work worth 1M$. At the end of the day, it is the difference between some kids trying to run a lemonade stand and making a few bucks because their neighbor likes them and the McDonalds down the road, which runs a scaleable business.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I was stunned watching many on social media celebrated the murder like they were celebrating the death of a terrorist. UHC is the largest provider of Medicare advantage in the country. We need better insurance, absolutely - but insurance is the only reason many can even afford basic care in the first place.
I think the principal evil is that health care providers are selected by employers, not employees. This creates a principal-agent problem. The employer is forced by law to provide health insurance, but their incentives are to go cheap without asking how they can offer health care so cheap.
As an intuition pump, suppose that federal law required employers to provide employees with a vehicle. Car makers specialize to provide cheap, shitty vehicles. Often they don't start, in any accident they become burning death traps, et cetera. The employees who can afford it pay through their nose for a solid car. Some go into debt to afford a private vehicle which meets their basic needs.
And then here you come along and say "CrapCars is the reason why many Americans are mobile in the first place." You might be technically correct, but you are missing the bigger picture.
Don't trust me, read Scott:
The Muslims claim Mohammed was the last of the prophets, and that after his death God stopped advising earthly religions. But sometimes modern faiths will make a decision so inspired that it could only have come from divine revelation. This is how I feel about the Amish belief that health insurance companies are evil, and that good Christians must have no traffic with them.
This is a medical professional who at that time was making his livelihood from health insurance. Often his world view clashes with random people on the street, who have reflected less on issues than him. Here, they happen to align.
So yes, your typical health care company is somewhere between a slum lord and a peddler of CSAM, morally speaking. All the jokes about 'unfortunately, my thoughts and prayers were not pre-authed' and system coverage are totally on point.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
Also, subsidiarity would imply that you should do charity to the once close to you first before you move to larger circles.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
A father should do what's best for his son.
You do realize how controversial this statement is?
Should a father murder to cover up the crimes of his son if he thinks that this results in a net increase of his expected utility?
Most people would grant that people have some moral obligations to their children, that it is fine and good to spend your money to feed them before you feed random strangers. But people also have other moral obligations (i.e. not to murder), and sometimes they rank higher thank family.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
If he had taken his son and defected with him to North Korea, I would respect his decision a lot on grounds of familiar ties. (Of course, that would be complete overkill. Realistically, his son could likely escape to a neutral country and continue his lifestyle there during Trump II, or he could risk having to spend some time as a VIP prisoner for his misconduct. Neither would destroy him.)
The problem with accepting that of course, people in power will use that power to help their family members is that it will result full-on nepotism.
- "Naturally the CEO gave that cushy managerial position to his nephew. Who would not put family first?"
- "The Don basically had to order a hit on the witness accusing his son in law. Should he deprive his daughter of her husband?"
- "Of course the general leaned on his adjutants to quickly promote his son."
Improperly helping your family is just as selfish as helping yourself personally. If you accept that of course elected officials will do that, then you basically end up with a banana republic.
At the end of the day, every accused is someone's son or daughter, but most fathers and mothers are not in a position to put their hand on the scale.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Ok, I ran a quick eyeball-based diff, and it looks like in the revised edition, the first two sections were cut, with references to a conworld he ran with Alicorn from which the very name Archipelago was adopted.
The revised edition is much de-nerdified, with the power grantor becoming some generic wizard.
I can see both why Scott wanted a revised edition (which is spending fewer weirdness points on a backstory ultimately not terrible relevant to the point he is making) as well as why you might believe the original version instead of the watered down version edited for mass appeal.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law.
The problem with that approach is that it will quickly become incompatible with liberal democracy when the swift and ruthless standard is applied with political motivation.
Consider how Jan 6 would have worked out in your system of ruthless efficiency: likely either Trump has Pence arrested, convicted and hanged for subverting an election before sundown, or he himself is hanged for treason. (And no, you can't separate political and non-political trials reliably. The best you might do is to have summary justice for commoners (presumed non-political) and some refined justice system for nobles.)
The stable configuration for your efficient system of punishment is some kind of autocratic regime. This is why in the legal system of western democracies, swift efficiency was not the primary design goal. There is a reason why the designers of the US constitution (and subsequently the SCOTUS) were so big on procedural checks. It is not because they were having too much sympathy for murderers.
As H.L. Mencken said:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
--
Also, you say about organized crime:
The former is almost impossible to squash totally but can be negotiated with and restrained to specific areas of life (and actually help make law enforcement more practical in some cases).
I tend to disagree. Sure, if the law prohibits something which is very popular, such as drugs, gambling or prostitution, then trying to stop can be practically impossible. But just turning a blind eye to the mob's enterprises hardly seems like an adequate solution. I mean, it works fine for the upper crust of society, who are unlikely to frequent harsh gambling dens, be sex workers or consume impure drugs.
A better approach would be to legalize and regulate the vices which society can stomach (likely prostitution), and crack down hard on the vices it can not (e.g. snuff movies).
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Perhaps an archipelago solution would be an idea.
No, not that kind. The good kind.
The US has partly outsourced running prisons to private enterprise. This is bad because the incentives of prison companies are not the same as the incentives of society.
Instead, one could outsource the rehabilitation process on a voluntary basis, as an alternative to state-run prisons which can be opted out of at any time.
Any organization could, with the prisoners consent, offer them an alternative to state run prisons. If they rehabilitate prisoners at better rates than state prison, they can pocket the costs they saved the criminal justice system. If they do worse, they pay that difference instead.
All kinds of for-profit and not-for-profit orgs could compete. Think that what the criminals really need is Jesus? Just incorporate JesusPrison. Think corporal punishments are the way to go? Fine, as long as you stay within BDSM norms, the prisoners safe word is 'state prison'. Have a shortage of plumbers in your enterprise? Invest in the education of prisoners and offer them jobs afterwards, and benefit from their limited options on the job market. Want to treat criminals for some psychiatric diagnosis? Same rules, with strict oversight. Want to teach the prisoners how this is all societies fault for being racist against them? Whatever you think, as long as you are able to pay the recidivism fine.
Of course, the organizations should be somewhat vetted (the mafia running a 'sex and drugs' based rehabilitation center for their own members is likely not what we want), and the orgs would have to have some kind of liability insurance, but otherwise something like this could work.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
This is rich. You complain about utilitarianism leading to antisocial outcomes, and then you continue:
There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract.
Did you just say that it is ok to torture two-year-olds to death? At least if they are without guardians who would care about them, they are terminally ill (so they won't grow up to be an ethics-capable person) and you keep it secret (so you won't upset the general population).
Utilitarianism certainly has its share of problems, but at least it gets "pain is universally bad, even if it is felt by some entity who could never reciprocate with you" right without having to add any epicycles.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
I think the implicit assumption that most harm society suffers from criminal action is likely untrue.
Cutting the profit incentive through magic will certainly remove some crime (and likely most of the organized crime), but plenty of crime would remain.
Tax fraud would be eliminated, but murder would likely not drop much. Clearly, we will disincentivize killing your grand-mother for the inheritance or murder-for-hire, and indirectly eliminate some murders conducted in organized crime and other for-profit crimes (such as robberies), but plenty of murders would be wholly unaffected.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
I read that as "if we could retcon reality so that someone who has received a decade of prison sentences had never been born, that would be the moral thing to do".
While we do not have the power of retroactive birth control, we likely prevent the births of some children who are most at risk of becoming criminals themselves. A violent criminal who is locked up for a decade during his 20s or 30s will likely cause fewer accidental pregnancies, which are likely (through either genetics or environment) to later end up in the criminal justice system. I have discussed that here.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
From that link:
By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.
Is that with or without an AI-caused extinction event, if we are talking hypotheticals?
89% Of women globally say they have shared or primary responsibility for daily shopping, household chores and food prep.
Wait, so daily shopping is discretionary spending?
Per wiktionary, that is defined as:
The amount or portion of a person's or group's expenditures which is used for non-essential or voluntary disbursements; the amount or portion of one's expenditures which one may make as one sees fit.
Whoever does household shopping might decide to go for beef, pork or tofu, but if they decide to spend their budget on video games and feed their family rice for a week that decision will likely be brought up in the divorce hearings.
Also, that sentence again:
By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.
Assume that women and men make roughly equal amounts, that half of each are single and that half of them are in hetero relationships where the women do most of the shopping for the pair or family. Would it not be fair to say then that women will own half of the discretionary spending, but control 75% of it, rather than that bold claim above?
quiet_NaN
24d ago
I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.
Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.
A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.
While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.
But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
The problem is that the woke-vs-Trump split is absolutely impossible to discuss dispassionatly in a classroom. My own position ('a pox on both your houses!') (which is obviously very dispassionate, neutral and objectively correct) would likely earn me fire from both of the big factions.
It has been said that Politics is the Mind-Killer.
The thing about elephants in the room is that sometimes, acknowledging them will cause them to rip your head off (metaphorical elephants, at least, I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful), so it is much safer to tiptoe around them and confine your lecture to elephants which are safely in another continent.
Of course, you want your students to engage in political discussions about stuff which actually affects them, not the politics of of the French revolution, but you also want them to have civilized disagreements and arguments, not to start killing each other.
Pick a topic which students have feelings about, but which is not partisan-politics-coded. i.e. daylight saving times -- it is safe, if slightly boring. Every student has to deal with them (or their absence), but few will pick that as their hill to die on. Local issues.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking.
My understanding of 'sex trafficking' was roughly 'to get someone through either false pretenses or outright violence into a different country with the intent of using their helplessness in that country to force them into prostitution', which seems despicable enough.
If 'paying for travel accommodations for your escort' is sex trafficking, why do we need a law against it?
Also, here is something I don't understand: why would anyone ever hire a 17 yo as a prostitute? I mean, I can understand why some pedophile might risk a lengthy and well-deserved prison sentence to fuck some kid instead of an 18 yo, but if you are into young adult women, why risk a prison sentence? Is that some jailbait fetish I don't get?
gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18,
Why I am sure that the law is written in a way that puts all the risks of the prostitute being unable to legally consent firmly on the person buying sex, this sounds like we could say that the wrong Matt Gaetz did intentionally was to pay for sex, which does not seem like a moral failing to me. (If it turns out that the prostitutes in question were foreigners who barely understood any English and were obviously physically abused and scared, then I would revise my judgement, but from the facts you mentioned that was rather not the case?)
quiet_NaN
24d ago
Tipping off someone that his son is under investigation by a secret grand jury might be against some law. Or it could be that it is only criminal if you are an official, so they could only go after the (presumably unknown) source who gave the info to McGee, and McGee was free to blab all he wants.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
Bob Levinson: Retired FBI Agent and CIA contractor who disappears in 2007 and becomes an Iranian hostage
I would argue that given from the context, this is likely a very non-central use of the word 'hostage'. If Iranian operatives had captured him in the middle of the night in his home in (say) Langley, that would be a central example of the word hostage.
Instead, what likely happened was that he voluntarily entered Iran and did spy for the US government.
Spying for a foreign government is illegal pretty much anywhere. If he had been spying in the US for the Iranian government and got caught, he would be in US prison instead. This would not make him a hostage of the US government in any meaningful sense.
Being caught and spending the rest of your life in a shitty cell (or being executed) is part of the risk profile of being a CIA asset in a hostile country. Sometimes you will get traded, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. (Also, I am sure that before going for hare-brained con jobs, they actually tried to sell their rescue plan to the CIA, and the CIA went 'nope'. I assume it was not 'we would really like to help, but all our black funds are booked out four years in advance, so we must decline.')
Hostage has a certain moral connotation. If someone pulled a con job to rescue the hostages in the 1979 crisis or the Hamas hostages of today, we could say 'their end goal was noble' (which would put them on a level with SBF, at least). The neutral word for what Levinson is is prisoner. Without knowing the details of his spook work, I have no opinion if the world would be better if he was back in the US or if he kept rotting in some Iranian jail.
quiet_NaN
28d ago
The justice system is not designed to handle prosecutors actively trying to thwart punishment of criminals. The solution here seems not to be to add epicycles and do retrials with special prosecutors, but to not re-elect prosecutors who offer sweet-heart plea deals. Oh, wait:
Foxx won a second term even after Smollett’s case became a topic of national outcry.
If her electorate is happy with her, then there is little one can do, I guess.
I disagree that race is central here. Treating fare evasion as a complex socio-economic problem where you need to understand the demographics is overkill.
Like copyright infringement and unlike shoplifting, riding a mostly empty bus without paying when you would otherwise walk seems a mostly victimless crime. The extra amount of gas the bus requires to transport you is likely a few cents. As such, you will always have a substantial amount of people who see nothing morally wrong with it, whatever their racial distribution.
Rather than trying to understand why people think that way and how they could be persuaded to change their attitudes, the way to fix this is enforcement. For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners. For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.
The point of having fares in city public transports is not to pay for running the service. The point is to price the undesirables out. I vaguely recollect Scott mentioning that once BART put up barriers, this generally improved the feeling of safety for the customers, because the homeless and drug addicts which made people detest travelling on BART were not buying tickets.
This can be totally solved in color-blind mode, no need to bring up race. Of course, sooner or later the other side will bring up race, claiming that blacks are over-represented in subway fines (due to systemic racism, surely!), but the law&order side should stick to the color-blind mode here.
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