quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Phosgene works best if your victim is hiding in a trench, which went out of style 100 years ago. And the synthesis of organophosphates is so impractical for murder and terror that only one group of crazies have done so. Homebrewed explosives are not that common either but definitely more practical than chemical weapons.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
I grew up in a world where we believed everyone was supposed to strive for the goals of that Martin Luther King speech. We were all supposed to become "colorblind." We wanted racial harmony and believed it was possible. We believed in racial equality and thought all we had to do was stop being racist and it would happen.
[...] Not just because I have come to the sad realization that HBD is real and that, in fact, there are racial differences in behavior and IQ. [...] and then we're told that Noticing such things makes us racist.
I am strongly in favor of institutional color- and gender-blindness. Give everyone the same admission test, and if half of the people with the top scores are Ashkenazim, that should be of little interest to the university.
I think that this is what MLK argued for -- let everyone compete on equal footing, and let the outcome be what it may. Racial equality before the law seems an excellent idea, but does not imply racial equality of outcomes. Nor is the latter required for peaceful coexistence.
When it became apparent that equal(ish) opportunity does not lead to equal outcomes, it was the SJ left who defected from colorblindness, and pushed for racial discrimination. This creates perverse incentives. If medical school was colorblind, then I as a not overtly racist patient would have no reason to care about the skin color of my doctor -- after all, they all competed on merit. If the schools practice affirmative action, then as a rational patient I would prefer a doctor whose racial group would be overrepresented in a meritocratic system, e.g. someone White or Asian. It is hard to overstate how fucked up this is. We have the tools to measure individual merit much better than what racial stereotyping -- even if backed up with decades of HBD research -- could ever accomplish. And then we forgo these tools, so crude racial stereotyping will be the most effective tool for the individual. (I think the reason is that SJ does not really believe in individual qualifications. High-earning careers are simply deserved.)
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
(Side notice: why is parent modded to -14? Are there so many lurkers who disagree with him? I see this as evidence that the voting does not confer useful information beyond the alignedness with the local groupthink. Some sites (LW) do manage a culture where contrarian-but-interesting takes are upvoted. If anyone has css ready to hide post votes, I would be interested.)
The poster child for HBD is the intelligence advantage of the Ashkenazi Jews, to the point where Scott himself used them to tentatively advance that idea. Yet for some reason, I do not recall anyone here suggesting that only that group should have the franchise. Instead, HBD is used to argue for propositions which for some strange reason happen to rhyme with racism of old.
Personally, I am in favor of colorblind meritocracy all the way. We do not need to use ethnicity as a proxy for intelligence or whatever, we can simply select directly for it. Picking people who are known to be intelligent is much more effective than picking Ashkenazi in the hope that the individual variation is in your favor. Ideally, we could do this regardless of HBD.
The only reason to bring up the HBD hypothesis at all is if the SJ whines about disparate impact and unequal outcomes, which for them imply that the system is racist and unfair, and needs to be changed. And sometimes they might be right, in that our systems (e.g. criminal justice) are less colorblind than we would like them to be. But sometimes the answer may well be that genetic or cultural group differences are to blame for the unequal outcome, and we should just shrug and move on.
I have another, less savory reason to insist that people are treated equally before the law. Good old Niemoeller. If I were to grant that small racial differences in genetic inclination to violent crime are a reason to disenfranchise one ethnicity, I will have no reason why I should not lose the franchise for being a man -- after all, the crime sex gap is rather impressive.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Zero sympathy. Just because the Trump administration gets away with similar behavior (for now), this does not mean that anyone should.
If anything, the indictment is tame. "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain".
Personally, I would treat it as secret-bearer attempts to make classified information available to a foreign government in a way which threatened US security interests for gain. The indictment does not even mention the classification level, just that it was SCI, but anything below top secret would be surprising.
And how is this a matter for civilian courts? He was a soldier, and I am sure there is something in the UCMJ about how to use secret information. Not that USC chapter 37 is very lenient, either.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
The risk of overdiagnosis is great enough, that even if you were a billionaire with ample money to spare, a good doctor would still recommend against screening for illnesses when you show no significant symptoms.
This seems stupid. If I was a billionaire intent on living a long and healthy life, I would probably get a full MRI scan once per quarter year. "Oh, we could have detected that tumor three years ago but the scan might have made you anxious" seems like a stupid way to die. If you care about anxiety, simply tell your medical staff not to tell you everything.
--
Regarding the topic of men being dangerous, the elephant in the room is that bad boys and dark triad traits are broadly considered attractive by (some) women. There is certainly the trope of a woman falling for a guy who did time for some violent crime, and then becoming his next victim.
Some might call this victim-blaming, but I would argue that it is not. If I go into a bar full of bikers and loudly declare that their favorite brand of motorbikes is garbage, then I might find myself get assaulted. The one responsible for the assault would be whoever decides to punch me in the face, not me. However, far apart from the fact that people are morally and legally responsible for whom they assault, there exists the wisdom that my own behavior can have a bearing on the probability of me becoming victimized.
The main difference is that I am not naturally inclined to educate rockers on the technical superiority of Japanese bikes (or whatever). People can however not freely pick whom they are attracted to, telling women have you tried to be into low-T accountant types? is no more actionable than telling me if you were into guys, you could get laid with little effort.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
I think dogs, like guns, are not all created equally. A pitbull is orders of magnitude more likely to maul a kid than a golden retriever.
And there is certainly a legislative push to restrict ownership of the more dangerous breeds, at least in Europe.
Personally, I would push for a license requirement to keep any kind of mammals (including kids) for animal welfare reasons alone, and ways to mitigate danger to third parties could be easily added to such a process.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million
WP says it is more like about a classroom of dead kids per year, though not all of them might are part of mass shootings. Sadly, kids are also vulnerable to guns outside classrooms, with a couple of thousands dying every year. The most common way a minor is shot is because his fuckwit parents owned guns and did not secure them adequately.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This seems to be specific to the US. In Europe, most people are just not allowed to own guns, with very few exceptions (e.g. hunting, security, sport shooting), and of the exceptions most are not allowed to carry in public.
The 3d printed guns thing is a stupid moral panic, the correct point to consider legislation would be if murdered with printed weapons become common. Assault weapon bans, magazine limits and so all target mass shootings, which are simply the flashiest events of gun violence. I don't think that this is entirely unreasonable. The median victim of gun violence is probably some gang member, and the public does not care very much about them. By contrast, they care a lot about school shootings, and banning AR-15s (which some cops find too scary to face) or large magazines (which allow attackers to shoot more people without becoming vulnerable while reloading) can help lower the casualties there.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
A handgun is a very convenient tool for the casual homicide. You don't have to be smart to use it, and it is a minimal inconvenience to carry it around while you go about your daily business until one day, you decide that someone needs to die (or be stopped from whatever he is doing) and can enact your decision within a few seconds.
There are plenty of other tools which can be used for murder in a pinch, you can use screwdrivers to stab someone, or hit them with a blunt object, or run them over with your car, or pierce them with sharpened Hufflepuff students' bones.
If a reasonably smart person wants to off her neighbor and does not care about the consequences to herself, she will probably find a way to do so. Most likely, it will not involve any flashy homebrewed chemicals. (H2S is a terrible choice in particular because humans can detect it in trace amounts and find it deeply unpleasant, and having your victim inhale HCN is difficult unless you have trapped them in a gas chamber.)
Of course, if she cares about not getting caught, she will most likely use a method which is already common (such as handguns), because anything clever and original will exclude 95% of the suspects immediately.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
There are a quite a few nuclear powers, and quite a few have been fighting conventional wars which were very frustrating for them.
If Putin could have won Ukraine in his original timeframe by launching a few small tactical nukes, or Nethanyahu could have installed the Shah by dropping a few tactical warheads on the IRGC, or if the Soviets could have won Afghanistan in a similar way, it seems strange why nobody did so.
I view tactical nukes as similar to chemical and biological weapons. If they were 'I win' buttons, similar to what gunpowder became in Europe, their use would be widespread. Instead, they are long on horror but short on effectiveness.
There is some overlap between the smallest nukes and the largest conventional bombs, and the MOAB and friends are very much niche. If a few tens of kilotons TNT would have changed the Iran war, the US air force could have just delivered that using conventional explosives.
The other thing is that on the scale of hand grenades to city-glassers, chemical vs nuclear energy storage is the Schelling fence. Normalizing the use of tactical nukes will also normalize the use of larger nukes.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.
Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.
Cynically, there is already a good chance that a distressed woman texting her boyfriend late at night getting emphatic, engaging answers will be reading LLM responses. If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Straw-man much? "Oh, you are against Trump, so you must love the Ayatollah".
FWIW, I do not think that Iran gaining nukes would cause a catastrophe. I honestly think it is likely (90%) that they and Israel can successfully play cold war.
If Iran getting tolls from Hormuz is the price to pay for Trump getting removed or defanged and the US returning to a more cooperative foreign policy, that is a price I am willing to pay.
A subset would also like to see the US/Israel relationship broken, but I think anti-Trumpism is a far bigger factor than anti-Semitism.
"Oh, you do not approve of the US fighting wars for Israel. You are an anti-Semite."
The current Israel government has very little overlap with my values, nor are they strategically important. The West has little to gain by covering them while they find new Lebensraum in the West Bank or Lebanon. I would very much prefer if they elected a leader who championed peaceful coexistence, but while they let Nethanyahu and his allies run the show I have little sympathy for them -- unlike the Iranians, they could have simply voted for someone different.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Well, Putin could have nuked Kiev and announced that he would continue to nuke one city every 24 hours until unconditional surrender. The destruction might not have been so different from a few years of conventional warfare. He did not do so because otherwise every one of his neighbors would have started nuclear programs asap, and because it seems entirely possible that the Ukrainian army would have been willing to fight him in the ruins of their cities.
Likewise, for the US, the Iran problem would be over. Instead they would have the problem that every other country in the world (excepting Israel, perhaps) would consider them genocidal maniacs on a scale dwarfing Hitler, Stalin and Mao together. Every non-nuclear country would either try to get nukes or enter defensive alliances with saner countries.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I do not think nuking them will be cheaper than compensating them.
Wiping out Tehran will not significantly reduce Iranian capabilities to attack ships to in the strait. Rural Afghanistan could interdict passage on the strait if they had the coasts. So you would need to make a few hundred kilometers of coastline uninhabitable up to a few dozen kilometers inland. That does not sound cheap even in direct costs.
And the long term consequences would make W's adventures look like a walk in the park. Consider Denmark. As far as I know, they do not have nukes not because nukes are beyond their reach (their GDP is larger than Iran's), but because for them nukes would be a solution looking for a problem, so far. In a world where Trump has just glassed Iran, they would feel that they would get the same choice really soon. Countries are very willing to spend more than ten percent of their GDP on their own Trident program if they feel that the alternative is their capital getting nuked by Trump.
North Korea has some kinds of nukes and is the world's rank #139 by GDP. Within a decade, every country from Albania to Zambia might start nuclear tests. Or they form defensive pacts with saner countries against US attacks. Probably North Korea could make a killing just by selling their tech.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Ouch. Someone hand them an ice pack. Seriously, funniest comment I have read on the internet in days.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If Trump's DoJ (he did not get around to rename that one yet, did he?) had any hard evidence that made the SPLC an accessory to some crime of a far right org they were infiltrating, they would not go after them for donation fraud.
FBI informers can get promises of immunity which may be dependable to a non-zero degree. The SPLC can make no such promises. So a rational informer will not feed the SPLC information which incriminate himself.
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence. "Hi Joe, bad news. No payments this month, donations have plummeted, people simply do not care about Neonazis. Oh, you are planning to shoot up a synagogue? That is excellent news, I will have an intern prepare a list of impactful targets immediately. Do you need funds or should we rather ship AR-15's to you." <-- not happening.
In the US, you rarely go to prison just for being a member of an organization, liberty and all that. Nor do you go to prison for infiltrating an organization under false pretenses. I do not see anything stopping the right from infiltrating violent left wing organizations. I hear Antifa is a really big domestic terrorist threat. If some MAGA org wants to infiltrate Antifa and figure out their structure, they are certainly allowed to do so, as long as they do not fund serious crimes in the process (which they would not, because they do not want to see ICE agents murdered any more than the SPLC wants to see Jews murdered).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Thé SPLC is my enemy, and driving them out of the face of the earth is a good thing.
I have two objections. One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility. Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair. But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other. Heck, even Iran and Israel are not in that stage. Unlike chess, neither war nor the culture war are zero sum games where hurting your enemy and helping your side are identical.
Every move in the culture war has two separate properties, one how much it brings your side closer to their objectives and one how much it escalates the conflict. Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump. My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
Organizations like the SPLC, the Proud Boys and so forth exist because what they do is mostly legal and significant fractions of the population support them. Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I am sure that if we give the administration long enough, they will eventually open a criminal prosecution against a political opponent which is based on rock solid evidence, but I am less sure that it will happen in this century. Getting someone indicted is easy, but Trump's feds getting someone indicted is not evidence of anything besides the fact that he does not like the defendant, which is hardly news. Basically, if Trump manages to get a jury to convict the SPLC for fraud, that would be new information to integrate into my world view, but so far this seems unlikely.
Not that I am a fan of the SPLC or anything. I have not studied their work or designations in detail, but on priors I would assume that a left-leaning organization which designates hate groups will obviously get taken over by SJ and lose any epistemic standard it might have had. Like, if they designated ACX as a hate group for HBD that would also only mildly surprise me.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Importantly: we are not claiming that climate change is economically harmless. We're arguing that the magnitude of damages is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and trillion-dollar decisions need to stop being made as if it isn't.
Is anyone actually doing this? Are the evil UN bureaucrats taking the first derivative of their GDP(GHG) model to determine how much CO2 the world gets to emit? Have they invented psycho-history?
Only the stupid and partisans claim that climate change is either non-existent/harmless or will wipe out humanity. Only very stupid, partisan economists claim that they can predict the effect of a certain mean temperature change on the global GDP within a percent.
I can do the same:
In this paper, we study the risk assessment and behavior of gas station attendants being robbed at gunpoint. We find that their predictions in the case of noncompliance vary widely. Some expect the robber to shot them in the head, others to shoot them in a knee, others to fire a warning shot first or attack customers. In many cases, the clerks were not even aware of the type of ammo being in the gun and still making assumptions about the type of injuries it could afflict.The magnitude of damages an armed addict might cause when you refuse him is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and they should not make a decision affecting the contents of their cash register as if it isn't.
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time. Sure, it would help to know "if I hesitate, the robber will shoot a 9mm JHP through my left eye" for certain instead of being unsure if the gun is even loaded, if the robber has the willingness to kill and so on. But even a rough estimate of the damages (he will probably shoot someone, but is unlikely to reach a double digit body count) is usually enough to narrow down courses of action.
There are some risks which seem far-fetched. "By 2030, OnlyFans will have amassed enough porn to cause Slaneesh to manifest on Earth and destroy the future of humanity" seems not something I would even dignify with a probability. By contrast, "Climate change in the next 100 years will significantly contribute to the early deaths of at least 100M people" seems likely. "If LLMs can be scaled up to ASI, they will be unaligned" seems also very plausible.
Of course, Donald Trump has made an excellent case for reducing our dependency on fossil fuel which is entirely orthogonal to climate change. Yes, sure, most alternative forms of mobility also depend on global supply chains, e.g. for lithium batteries. I would claim that this is a higher order effect, though. If the price of oil explodes, an ICE car is just a dwelling which is too small for comfort. An electric car will still work for years before the lack of replacement batteries would immobilize it.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue
Not true for Germany. The left is red, the center-left is red, the Greens are green, but the center right is black (with some tiny sparks of yellow disappearing rapidly). The extreme right is classically brown, but the main far-right party is using blue.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.
I literally do not see the problem. It is not like Fidesz wanted to help them when they set up the system. It would be like an absolute monarch who inherited the throne to birth deciding that absolute monarchy is bad and decreeing that power should be transferred to a democratically elected government. Only the terminally pedantic would whine that he only has the power to do so due to the present system being rigged, and expect him to renounce the throne and become a revolutionary instead.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Yes, I was understating the situation. In my defense, while I could google the NC without trouble, I did not find grade distributions within two minutes. Anecdotally, I would say that there is more than one person per class with the required grade, though.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is your obligatory reminder that gerrymandering is only so effective because you have a terrible FPTP voting system.
Proportional representation actually works quite well for legislative bodies, and mostly removes the incentives for gerrymandering. (But I am sure that every voting nerd has their pet proposal which is better than FPTP.)
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think that this can not be reasonably discussed without mentioning student debt and artificial constraints on education supply.
In Germany, medicine are among the most favorite subjects to study. To be able to start to study directly after the 12th grade in school, you need to be in the top 10% of students or so, because there are not enough places in the university programs for everyone who is interested. Obviously there are people who will make fine physicians who were not in the top 10% of students (and indeed some of them are admitted after a waiting period). If instead you admitted anyone who you thought had a reasonable chance to pass the final exam, you would have tremendously increase the supply of physicians in half a decade, decreasing wages. I think this is exactly why this is not done.
In the US, I feel that it is linked to student debt. Doctors are expensive because studying medicine is expensive, because universities mostly do not compete on price but on amenities.
I would argue that it is somewhat harder in Germany to buy an illegal handgun than in the US, not that I have tried either, personally.
A lot of legal guns being in circulation makes it easy to steal them. I expect you need to break perhaps into 10 cars and search the glove compartments until you find a gun in the US. In Germany, you might have to break into 1000 cars instead because not only is gun ownership rare, legal owners are also required to keep their guns locked up. Not that this helps too much, you can probably still source illegal weapons from Eastern Europe. (I would expect most smugglers not to deal in illegal guns, because the risk-to-profit ratio is much worse than for drugs. If you sell 10k$ worth of cocaine, you can reasonably expect that the authorities will never find out, and if they do, they might have resigned to the fact that there will always be someone selling cocaine. If you sell 10k$ worth of handguns, your average customer will be someone who just likes to own a gun to feel manly or a drug dealer who wants a backup plan (but has no plans to shoot anyone), but chances are much higher that someone will use them in some flashy crime, and the eye of Sauron will fall on you.)
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