sohois
1yr ago
What binds the 1% together as a military force beyond wealth? Who says that the forces of a Musk would align with a Bezos would align with a Gates would align with a Soros?
sohois
1yr ago
"Do you agree with [professor]" is the subject of every university-level exam.
sohois
1yr ago
Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.
I've used public transport systems across European cities for long periods of time (i.e. natives are <75% of the local population) and have generally had pleasant experiences in all of them, so I don't know that this statement holds up.
sohois
1yr ago
Thank you for clarifying your points, but I think this ultimately falls into a disagreement about what the invention of a concept is. It seems you don't really disagree that Yudkowsky invented Rationality as a subculture, you just don't find it particularly impressive - which is fine, but I doubt most readers are confused reading about the difference between the subculture and the idea of rationality.
On AI Safety, I am very skeptical of your claim that current discussion around AI safety would look the same without Yudkowsky. I'm sure in a counterfactual world that someone like Nick Bostrom or whomever would still come up with many of the ideas, but this is true for most things. Yudkowsky definitely had an outsized influence, and I think if the next AI researcher survey put out a question about major influences, he would definitely perform very well.
sohois
1yr ago
People seem to credit him for inventing rationality and AI safety, and to both of those I can only say "huh?".
This seems pure pedantry. Obviously, the concept of rationality and ideas around optimizing for truth or utility have existed for a very long time. And there is plenty of science fiction which featured dangerous AI.
But I really can't imagine anyone even vaguely familiar with Yudkowsky or AI alignment or the rat-sphere would struggle with the claim that Yudkowsky "invented rationality and AI safety."
Capital-R Rationality is the modern groups that formed around the Bay-area subculture which Yudkowsky largely founded. It is MIRI, CFAR, Effective Altruism. It's Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Julia Galef. It's LessWrong, SSC, and even this very forum.
And AI Safety? Yes, the concept existed. But the entire modern edifice of AI alignment all arose from Yudkowsky's initial writings on LessWrong. He was responsible for drawing attention to it, he lead MIRI for a while, he set down a great deal of theory.
I'm really struggling to believe someone smart enough to post on TheMotte would so easily be confused by this.
sohois
1yr ago
I think the characterization of those opposed to the sale of the club to Qatari buyers is a drastic simplification. The moral factor is one element of opposition, but I think it is one of many and not necessarily the major factor or even something people believe in beyond being used as a stick to beat their opponents.
Rather, there are several points that are likely to be important:
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The fact that the Qatari ownership at PSG and the Abu Dhabi ownership of Manchester City are rampant cheats, and the suspicion that Newcastle's Saudi owners and Man Utd's new owners will soon follow suit, ruining the credibility of the game.
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A more general distaste for the fact that football will be reduced to a proxy battle between middle eastern states. This will particularly be the case for local United fans, who are likely to see many of the supporters for the buyout as distant, 'fake' fans who have no real connection to the club.
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A distaste for the overall financial health of the game that has seen money become an overwhelming factor in success.
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Downplaying the moral element as mere "LGBTQ unfriendliness" is also deeply uncharitable. I can't speak overmuch on the Qatari government, but the ills of Saudi Arabia are very well documented, while there is strong evidence that the Abu Dhabi ownership of City engage in murder, torture, and slavery.
sohois
1yr ago
It's funny, I literally just made a post to this effect in last week's Friday fun thread. As I said then, the dumbing down of the space is inevitable given the growth of the subreddit and the number of good posters who have simply moved to other spaces like here or DSL. I'm surprised people are only just noticing though, I'd say the decline has been obvious for 2+ years
sohois
1yr ago
I'm actually going to argue against slatestarcodex, despite it being the genesis of this place. /r/SSC was very intelligent, but I think a number of factors have drastically dragged down the level of discussion there.
One is just size, with the subreddit having grown rapidly as Scott's following has grown, and that will always bring down an average. And there is the problem of the motte itself: a lot of good commentators might have started at /r/ssc, but ended up migrating most of their comments to here, or to DSL, or even to lesswrong or the ACX open threads.
The somewhat directionless nature of the subreddit is another problem, since the early selection effects of the subreddit have now faded away, bringing in a lot of random commentators.
I'll still go there regularly, but nowadays it seems like only 1 in 10 comments is worth bothering with, compared to a much higher proportion before.
sohois
1yr ago
Neighborhoods aren't fungible
Do you actually believe this? Do people really consider that "ABC Street", with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities is somehow different from "XYZ Street" with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities?
After all, if there is one constant in the property market, it is that people are constantly on the lookout for bigger, better housing. Do people's revealed preferences suggest that a large number of people really think that their neighbourhood is the only one that is nice and with good people?
I will accept there are a handful of places that you really can't replicate: a New York brownstone, a London Georgian terrace. But these places are already incredibly expensive and desirable. No amount of new building will make these areas any less desirable and expensive.
And if you want to talk aesthetics in particular, in some cases it is the nimby restrictions which cause the shortage of these types of housing! I can't talk for the US, but here in the UK the rise of the generic tower block and hideous "Deanobox" is overwhelmingly driven by property regulations.
sohois
1yr ago
So your homeless shelter doesn't get built near your neighbourhood, or anywhere else in your city. Now what? You've addressed the point that such shelters will impose externalities on those living near them, but shelters themselves are not the cause, the homeless people are. And the lack of shelters will not actually remove those homeless people.
Perhaps they simply congregate in your city centre, making it increasingly unpleasant to be in as happened in many major American cities. Maybe they just start congregating in a random place, pitching their tents in some neighbourhood for no apparent reason - and perhaps they pick your neighbourhood, and you've got the problem anyway. What's the solution to this?
Obviously, with the homeless there are non-housing related options: you could try and simply ship them away to some other area, or have the police be much harsher on vagrancy and imprison many of them. In the first case, what's to stop these other areas from sending them back, or the homeless themselves from simply returning? Will you end up in an expensive cycle of carting the homeless back and forth? For the second, what about prison capacity? I can't imagine prison construction is any more popular than shelter construction, so where do you plan to build the extra prisons needed for the homeless population?
Admittedly, this example only applies to homeless shelters, and there are other examples like loud or foul smelling factories which might be better.
Let's turn to the housing question instead. As many of the other replies have noted, there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice neighbourhood, filled with familiar people. A lot of poor people are just unpleasant to be around and bring issues with them, and high housing prices do act as a barrier. But I think nimbys making this argument are not being logical or following the idea through to its conclusion.
I assume you're a homeowner in Madison, right? Maybe your house is worth $1 million or something. But I'm also going to assume that this is not a particularly large or impressive house, given the pressures on housing costs you mentioned? If we remove those restrictions and start heavily increasing density in the area, then perhaps your area will become less pleasant, with more bad people around.
Except: you'll still have the capacity to afford $1 million in housing. That's not going to vanish just because there are more houses in the area. Even in the yimby paradise of Japan, they succeeded in keeping property prices at the same level for ~20 years, not actually in lowering them - and if there was some unprecedented success in lowering housing costs, this would almost certainly take many years to accomplish, given existing homeowners time to realize value.
So now, instead of living in your $1 million 3 bed suburban house surrounded by other $1m suburban houses, you move to a $1 million 6 bed McMansion, surrounded by other McMansions. Your ability to spend money to preserve a certain living situation has not changed. What that money can buy has improved.
There is an argument that this only applies up to a limit: if you're already wealthy and can afford a 20 room mansion, there's no real room to move up. But putting aside the fact that this is a tiny niche of the population, if you have that kind of money there is already a solution: just buy land. Give yourself a couple of acres around your house. Don't want an apartment complex to block your view? Buy the land there, pay an appropriate fee to cover the loss to society.
sohois
1yr ago
I don't disagree with your point, but I'm not sure that West is the best example; I'd be very surprised if he was unable to produce extremely popular records or sell out concerts in the future, and so wouldn't say that his career is finished. But West would be a rare exception
sohois
1yr ago
This is a classic "lack of charity", accusing your ideological opponents of not holding the views they say they do based on basically nothing
sohois
1yr ago
Sounds like you would have liked it less if you actually knew League a little - everyone knows Jinx as a crazy murderhobo, so there was no subversion since you would expect some traumatic event to create her.
sohois
1yr ago
That makes sense for the racism analogy, but I have no idea how the eugenics stuff went in there and no one, not Jemisin or her editors, noticed what it was
sohois
1yr ago
Strongly anti-recommend Beware of Chicken, it becomes embarrassingly bad after the first book
sohois
1yr ago
The Broken Earth trilogy is quite a bizarre read from a cultural perspective because of how it mangles its messaging despite ostensibly being very progressive. A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice. But Jemisin's public notoriety clearly rules out that she's trying to do something like that, so you have to assume she is just really incompetent at creating a consistent political message - except that the books themselves are still really good, so I have no idea how it ended up so muddled.
*So the book is about a world that is riddled with massive, years-long natural disasters. Human towns are all organized by caste, with people set apart as good workers or breeders or administrators and so on. The towns are advised to maintain good ratios of these castes and to encourage breeding that helps this. This is never described as eugenics or really discussed within the books, it is just accepted as the right thing.
The main characters of the book are from a race blessed with magical, geomancy-like powers. This race is discriminated against harshly and called "roggers" or something obvious like that, I can't remember exactly. However, because of their power, every member of this race is basically capable of slaughtering entire towns, and children often have very little control over their powers and are shown accidentally killing other children. In this context, the fear people have of them is clearly the correct stance and in most cases it would be wise to avoid the geomancers or require them to be closely controlled.
sohois
1yr ago
It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.
sohois
2yr ago
The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of football fans see this as a massive negative. And would argue that the main impact of all of these oil sheik owners has been major transfer fee and wage inflation. There was more than enough money to go around pre-2010
sohois
2yr ago
no gays, jews, beer drinkers or other (to them) degeneracy
FIFA did not agree to this. There were many agreements about allowing alcohol, not persecuting gays or public displays of affection, and accommodating Jews. But once it got close enough to the WC that FIFA would look too stupid cancelling it, Qatar simply reneged on all of their promises.
sohois
2yr ago
don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.
sohois
2yr ago
One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.
So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.
sohois
2yr ago
If you had bought $100 dollars worth of bitcoin you could have been a millionaire. No other investments have been quite so explosive.
sohois
2yr ago
Whereas me and other old-fashioned types like me were pointing out all along that thinking you know how to do charity better than all the groups that have ever done it over the history of humanity is boundless conceit, and no it doesn't matter if you use financial analysis and statistics and all the rest of the jargony tools
I'm not sure how this really relates to SBF. Is it a tenet of EA that they are better at divining sources of ethical funds than normal charities? From what I can tell, the purpose of EA has always been that they would be better at spending funds effectively, not sourcing funds. That a big donor proved to be engaging in criminal actions doesn't really have anything to do with EA, does it?
I can imagine a future where there has been enough production or robots/drones/whatever that any human forces become irrelevant, but it would only be one possible future. Other futures where arming a mass of human auxiliaries can give an edge in any conflict would seem to be more likely to me.
i also feel that this framing of "the 1%" simply exterminating everyone else assumes a lot more sociopathy than actually exists. Leaders throughout history have certainly spent lives freely, but we've hardly ever seen them completely disregard their "lessers". Even the genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin typically just targeted certain groups, not all humanity.
And speaking of Hitler and Stalin, the current crop of dictators would almost certainly count among the 1%, and many of them seem to possess very strong nationalistic streaks. Clearly the likes of Xi and Putin would go to great lengths to protect their wealth and status, but I can't imagine they would completely abandon their countrymen - what's the point of elevating to godhood if there is no one around to worship you? Plus, I'd say that speculation about elite vs masses is much less likely than good old fashioned wars between nations and races, if anything would lead to near extinction.
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