quiet_NaN
10hr ago
I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average)
As someone who often is voted negative but rarely gets a mod warning, I find the voting feature rather useless.
The only thing it will tell you is which way the local hive-mind of lurkers is leaning.
More complex voting systems have been tried elsewhere (e.g. slashdot's karma system where users have limited mod points, or LessWrong's separation into comment-quality and comment-agreement), but personally I find the motte well enough moderated that it is readable without additional filters (unlike reading slashdot at -1).
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
Agreed, I would have preferred one thread about the reflecting pool and one about the death count of USAID.
Obviously conversations will get derailed by comment replies, that is a feature not a bug. I am also fine with comments making a one sentence side claim that will lead to multiple replies. But loosely tying multiple separate topics into one package seems not ideal.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
They staked their own fortunes on the outcome, and the winnings are rightfully theirs and no others.
So the USA is the property of the descendants of the 13 colonies by right of conquest, in the same way the Venezuelan oil is?
And if other ethnicities want to share in that wealth, you would prefer them to do so not by emigrating to your country and adopting the local beliefs and customs, but through violent conquest and displacement of the indigenous population, so their claim will be as valid as your claim?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population? Or something metaphysical, that during the independence war God let the Holy Spirit descend on the Americans and their descendants in a way which he did not bother with for the Latin American nations?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Those who seek to diminish the United States and the ideals espoused in the Declaration versus those who seek to embody and perpetuate them.
Donald, is that you?
Personally, I think that the US was founded on both good ideals (like freedom of speech, restricted government, democracy) and bad ideals (exploitation of non-citizens, territorial expansion). Plus a few which sounded reasonable at the time but did not really work out long-term (keeping military power in the hands of the citizens, the electoral college).
I very much cherish the good ideals of the US, and I credit the US with upholding these ideals when most of Europe was plunged into darkness, and spreading them in their sphere of influence (in Europe, at least).
I think that it is fair to say that most people on both sides of the culture war cherish these ideas at least to some degree (neither side is very committed to freedom of speech, for example). Both sides are in favor of democracy, at least if we disregard Trump's claim that the SAVE act will secure the Republican dominance for a hundred years as his usual empty boasting.
Recently there was a poll going around about how 55% of self-identified Democrats would prefer to live overseas,
It might be worthwhile to examine in which states they want to live, and on what ideals these nations are built. As you said, the US is built around ideas, not bloodlines or geography.
A US citizens who decides to emigrate to the Taliban, Belarus, North Korea, Saudi Arabia is arguably betraying the ideals on which the US is built. By contrast, emigrating to Canada or Germany involves no betrayal of fundamental American values in my opinion.
Anyone loyal to the good ideals of the US can by necessity only be loyal to the US as it exists in reality if the US does a good job of upholding these ideals. If she feels that another state does a better job of upholding these ideals, the natural response is to move. Obviously what precisely are the good ideals of the US is debatable as much as the present state of affairs.
By contrast, there are many 'patriots' on the right who seem to worship the trappings of the US more than the ideals. Who did not get turned off from the stars and stripes when W tortured suspects in gitmo under that very flag.
And then you have the flag-wavers who prefer the Confederate flag, who basically signal that the founding principle which they liked most about the US is the exploitation of non-citizens. I will take any draft-dodger who decided that fighting in Vietnam is not compatible with his understanding of the ideals on which the US was founded over them any day of the week.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
But I won’t back down from noticing that Trump is infinitely more successful than any of us, across a dozen dimensions.
So are Louis XIV, Wilhelm II, Charles Manson, Harvey Weinstein, Bin Laden, Aella, Stephen Hawking, Kim Kardashian, Obama, SBF, Scott Alexander and a ton of others. Should we stop criticizing them all until we reach their level of success and fame?
And that to a man the people criticizing him are far less impressive and far less successful.
"Clearly, they simply prosecuted Charles Manson because they were pissed that he had built a sex and murder cult which was much grander than any they could have built."
First off, who is impressive is rather subjective. Some people are impressed by STEM Nobel laureates, or Hollywood actors, or popes, or athletes, or great Starcraft players, or competitive eaters, or mass murderers, or demagogues, or big-chested porn stars.
Luckily, we have invented these things called arguments. Without them, criticizing someone is just booing them, and then we would indeed have to compare the subjective standing of both parties to find out if we should adjust our estimation of either.
Arguments exist independently of their author. If the worst person in the world, in between robbing an orphanage and strangling some puppies posts a comment on ACX taking issue with what Scott wrote, and her argument is solid, then it does not really matter that she is strangling puppies.
This makes arguments especially well suited to anonymous discussion boards such as this one. I do not need to know how many casinos a poster here has bankrupted or if she is dictating her posts to her secretary on her helicopter or typing them on a cracked mobile screen while lying in her sleeping spot under some bridge or from death row.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
There are certainly complaints about Trump which boil down to him not behaving like someone of the upper middle or upper class.
If I express disgust at the way he decorates the White House with gold, that is a mere complaint about aesthetics.
If I complain that he is a narcissistic con man, you can certainly claim that I am mostly complaining about the fact that his cons are not targeted at my class.
Still, I think that Trump/MAGA is different in important ways from the traditional DC swamp. With previous administrations, the corruption was mostly in the zone of deniability. Hunter Biden being on some Ukrainian board of directors, senators earning lucrative consulting positions in the companies they were previously regulating, the usual. This was bad, but not maximally bad. Presumably, many corrupt deals did not take place not because the politician was honest nor because nobody wanted to bribe them, but simply because there was no good way to do the transaction while maintaining deniability. For example, a rich scammer currently under investigation by the DoJ did not have a good way to bribe GWB or Obama. Even if they were interested, unless he was a billionaire, it would simply not have been worth the political capital for them to meddle with some investigation.
With Donald Trump, there is no fig leaf of deniability. Nobody is under any illusion that he is honest any more than anyone is under any illusion that he is Christian. This means that he has a much easier time coordinating with people wanting to bribe him, to the point where other scammers can just buy his shitcoins to make their DoJ problems disappear.
Likewise, his attitude to truth. Politicians have always lied on occasion. I remember GWB and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Still, typically politicians tried to avoid outright lies because their voters might vote for someone else if they feel fooled.
With Trump, the lies are priced in since his advent with birtherism. There is still some limited distrust, it seems unlikely that he would have claimed to have captured Maduro if he had not done so, but any lie which will still be believed by 10% of the electorate despite counter-evidence is still worthwhile for him to peddle.
More generally, politicians have to manage both perceptions and the real world. With MAGA, there is very little in the way of acknowledgement that there exists a real world at all, that we are not free to decide what is causing autism. If Trump tweets about the hundreds of wars he has ended and how he deserves the Nobel more than anyone, that feels to me like he is trying to convince the universe itself to start believing his story. Likewise him trying to win the Iran war just by claiming victor, and the universe and Iran somehow just not getting his memos.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
hunger and gatherer communities
This seems a slightly uncharitable phrasing.
For what it's worth, I think most of the populations which are growing very fast are depending on agriculture.
Also, the objection that giving food to the poor will cause them to multiply so you will need to give them more food in the future lest they starve is not exactly new. Any EA intervention will think about unintentional side effects, and I expect that USAID is little difference.
Fortunately, there are a lot more interventions than just changing how much grain we ship to Africa.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
I would not call that photo strong evidence. If you want to convince me that the coating is failing in many places due to vandalism, a photo of a person kneeling next to the pool with a backpack and what may very charitably be a knife is not going to cut it.
I think what happened was that Trump made one of his big announcements on how the pool would be the Best Pool Ever, longer than the height of the tallest buildings, painted in American Flag Blue, a monument which will last for centuries. Then his pool guy did a shitty job and the paint came peeling off after a few weeks. Once it became common knowledge that the coating is coming off, of course people wanted to get their own piece of coating, and likely helped the process along a bit.
His reaction was then to blame these people. My pool would have lasted forever but these hateful liberals are destroying it, or some variant. Importantly, we should not update on Trump claiming vandalism. There is no world in which he would say oops, my pool guy did a subpar job, my bad, I will take full responsibility and try to fix the damage.
I agree that the algae bloom is probably more about phosphate levels than it is about the failing coating. Charitably, I do not want to rule out that someone deliberately emptied a sack of fertilizer into the pool just to spite Trump, but I seriously doubt that this is happening every time they change the water. I find it unlikely that before Trump made his announcement, he discussed the matter carefully with aquatic biologist experts (i.e. PMCs) and took their advice on mitigating bloom.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Where is no analogy with secular world is that the ordinations are illicit but valid.
This is interesting. It seems like as far as validity is concerned, bishops can self-replicate.
Now I am wondering about the possibility of some bishop (SSPX or mainline) due to some weird circumstance making some pink-haired lesbian a bishop, who then proceeds to consecrate every consenting christened person she runs across a bishop, and so forth. Think of all the mayhem they could wreck -- working in a bakery and randomly transsubstiating rolls in secret (or tetrapacks of supermarket wine), marrying ONS-havers for shits and giggles, baptizing frozen embryos, offering OnlyFans channels with the confession of the sin of lust included (like flights with carbon offset), and so forth.
I mean, as an atheist I am automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated, but trying to catch the rest of the conditions would be a fun quest. (Personally, I would not throw a shoe at the pope, but all of the rest seem achievable as an illicit but valid priest.)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think your intuition of the ick of a relationship depending on the absolute age difference constant is not shared by most people. The xkcd standard of "don't date below $own_age/2+7" is a lot more reasonable (though also not a hill I am prepared to die on).
By your logic, a 35yo dating a 55yo is equivalent to a 35yo dating a 15yo. Yet I do not the much of a problem with the former, while I consider the latter pretty much always wrong.
If I have 25yo boxer fighting against an 18yo boxer, that may or may not be a fair fight, but it will not be in even remotely the same category as the fight would have been if the older boxer was still 18 and the younger boxer was 11.
Maturity is one of these s-curve things. A 10yo is still in the phase where she is rapidly gaining life experience, and a 17yo can sometimes run circles around her in emotional maturity and pressure her into sexual behavior which is not in her long-term interests.
But in the next seven years, that gap between them will get smaller as the initially 17yo will hit diminishing returns on his growth. At age 17, she is much more likely to consider the possibility that he is just looking for a quick fuck when he is talking about how they are soulmates for eternity.
Age both of them by another seven years and the relationship would be entirely un-Problematic. He will not gain great powers to charm women out of their pants between age 24 and 31, and at age 24 she will very likely know what she wants in a relationship and have some judgement on whether the 31yo will give her that or not.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If we are talking about intentionally making babies soonish, it makes perfect sense for 23W not to pick 18M, because unfortunately, most 18M's are not heirs to vast family estates, nor are most 23W's for that matter. In 2020 (e.g. before AI complicated things further), it made perfect sense for both men and women to postpone having kids until they are in their 30s, have finished their education and have high-paying, steady jobs. Of course, this does not give them a lot of window to find a partner and have kids -- especially if they want multiple kids.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
High-paying jobs are often also paying as much, or more, for the experience in life and work of the individual as their intelligence and qualifications.
Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.
Formal qualifications are often a proxy. The point is not that anything you learned in your master or PhD is directly useful for doing software consulting, it is that it filters for (mild) ambitiousness and executive function.
Domain experience is obviously relevant, hence all the companies looking for people with at least three years experience using Claude. But it is also harder to check by HR than formal qualifications.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls
I am sure that you can cherry-pick some examples where an 18-yo was accused of being a pedo for asking a 17-yo for the way to the supermarket, and of course the psychopaths (in the mop sense) in woke circles will occasionally weaponize Problematic Age Gaps like they weaponize Problematic Anything, but I seriously doubt that the fertility crisis is due to 18yo boys asking out other 18yo's instead of 17yo's.
In the 1950s, a man could feed a family through unskilled labor. He might even buy a house after a few years. On the other hand, the median young man and his girlfriend of 1952 typically did not have a ton of other options than settling down -- backpacking through Australia, going to university, getting sucked in some video game and so on were all unlikely choices.
Today, the places with a lot of jobs are cities, but they are often expensive. The route to home-ownership looks like "study, do a PhD, work five years as a software consultant for a bank, pay the down payment of a house which is still barely in the public transport hub of your city. At this point you can then reasonably think about having a kid (provided you have a partner and have not aged out of the fertility window)." And of course there is still the possibility that AGI will take your job next year and you will raise your kid on what Elon Musk is willing to spare as an UBI.
Of course, it also does not help that handling a small kid is more than one full-time job. In 1950 women did not have a better option, but today they do. Men have certainly become more willing to help with the kids, but probably not to the point where they are willing to share the burden 50-50. If I am optimistic, I (a guy) might say that I might be able to take care of a baby eight hours a day, every day, until it is old enough for daycare (and the caretaking requirements relax slightly). Unfortunately, this would only work if I had a partner who was willing to take care of the kid 16h per day, and most women would very reasonably tell me to go fuck myself if I proposed that they take over two thirds of the care work. And this is before monetary constraints: I can kinda manage a 40h work week, but that is with the rest being leisure time. And while my job in academia pays reasonably ok (for now -- one of the benfits of having a long-winding education), at 28h per week it is not something which can feed a family with Western standards.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think it is fair to say that the church has been supportive of the state since the age of Constantine. Sure, the RCC wielded tremendous power in medieval times, and very much messed with worldly policy decisions, but in the end it has survived through pragmatism. Monarchs, states, democracies and dictatorships come and go, and while the RCC is rarely on the forefront of social change (and often has resisted it initially, especially if it was change towards the left), it tends to come around and view it as the god-given order eventually.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Sure, but like most defense contractors, they are bound tightly by government regulations. They can't just decide to outsource their production to China, or hire Indians, or to offer their products to arbitrary countries or sell their company to a state-run Chinese company in the way Ford can make decisions about their civilian car production.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
those men would say an invasion is exactly what's happening
Not a military invasion, no. You could use invasive species rhetoric, but that is quite a different thing. It would be like triggering NATO article 5 because of the nutria invading the US.
Employed illegal immigrants pay taxes, same as citizens. If they murder someone, they are put through the same legal system. These two facts alone set them apart from members of any invading army. If you get invaded by the troops of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, GWB or basically any other commander in the history of mankind, the invaders will not pay federal income tax. The idea that during the sacking of a city, local policemen would go around arresting individual invaders for assault or murder seems totally absurd.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.
"You can own a gun, provided you can file one out of a block of iron and personally mine the saltpeter for the powder because we ban the sale of guns and anything which might be helpful in making or using them" would go very much against the spirit of 2A.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Its first test and major precedent was a complete inversion of the language.
The general understanding is that "not under the jurisdiction" covers invading armies and diplomatic staff of other countries (and also Indians with internal self-governance).
Of course, the tendency to naturalize immigrants (or at least their descendants) is much older than the 14th (slavery non-withstanding). Most ancestors of today's US citizens were neither Native American nor part of the Mayflower.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.
With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?
To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."
Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.
I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)
Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think that the "each parent pretends to only understand a single language" thing is a bit silly if carried to extremes.
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions, but the bilingual parent talks with the kids in the non-shared language on other occasions. If the kid replies in the shared language, she can tell him how to phrase that sentence in her language. "Can I stay up and watch a TV show" -- "Du meinst, kann ich laenger auf bleiben und Fernsehn schauen?"
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay. If an US expat and a German raise a few kids in Germany, teaching them English from age zero will enable the family to move to an English-speaking country without too much trouble. By contrast, if their monolinual son is in seventh grade when they want to move, the first year of school will likely be very difficult for him, because two years of English is unlikely to be enough to follow the lessons.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.
I think you would need to search hard and long to find someone here who will argue that Roe was the correct decision as far as the procedure was concerned. I certainly was happy that abortion was legal, but the fact on how that was determined seemed rather horrible to me, and indeed created a lot of additional problems, such as the politization of the SCOTUS.
I am a procedure fanboy. As far as the direct outcome is concerned, there is not a lot of difference between cops assassinating a drug dealer and him getting arrested, convicted of murder, exhausting his appeals and finally getting executed. Yet the indirect consequences will be very different because once you grant cops the ability to do summary executions, they are unlikely to stick to just killing drug dealers. It is better to suffer the occasional dealer to go free for lack of evidence than to live in some fascist dictatorship.
Roe was basically the judicial equivalent of just shooting drug dealers.
2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.
That depends a lot on your understanding of 2A and what it is for.
As far as keeping the means to fight battles in the hands of the population, the diverge happened no later than WW1. Not all of it is the judiciaries fault either, parts of it is just that the cost of the equipment which tended to win battles skyrocketed: the median American could probably afford to keep a state of the art rifle in 1800 or 1900, but he could certainly not maintain a tank in 1930! Another part certainly was judicial, in that 2A was simply not applied to Tommy guns.
On the other hand, while the judiciary has been fine with not adding new weapon systems to the 2A pool, and has certainly okayed background checks and waiting periods, there was also little attempt to reneg on earlier precedent. Double-action handguns had been in the 2A pool since they were first invented, and there they stayed.
Today the US is one of very few jurisdictions where a citizen can own a rifle or semi-automatic handgun without giving her government any justification why she wants a gun. (Sure, carrying the gun in public is a bit trickier and might require a license in blue states, but contrast this with Germany: to even own a 9mm, I would need to show legitimate need (such as being a hunter or long-practicing sport shooter), and to get a license to carry in everyday life I would basically have to become a cop.)
I do not think it is just "LLMs will agree to whatever".
The mechanism seems to be that if you use RLHF to turn your language model into a helpful, honest, harmless assistant, that tends to select for certain world-views, because it is a somewhat blue-coded and female-coded and college-education-coded role. Grok declaring itself Mecha-Hitler is not a natural outcome, it only happened because Musk put his hands on the scale.
The other thing is that I think that depending on the phrasing, the LLMs would agree that it is important to preserve one's language, culture and ethnic quirks. It just so happens that Hanson is a white American, so his culture and ethnicity is what conservation biologists would call "Least Concern". From a conservation point, if the population of Leopard Seals or Caucasian (or Black or Hispanic) Americans dropped by an order of magnitude, this would not herald the extinction of that group.
Of course, it is also entirely possible that the SJ crowd (and thus the LLMs) simply accepts the concerns of minorities who do not want their relative demographic to shrink but specifically does not extend the same consideration to the Whites.
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