whatihear
7d ago
It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.
Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.
whatihear
7d ago
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).
whatihear
7d ago
Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.
A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.
whatihear
7d ago
materialism / genetic determinism
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
whatihear
1mo ago
I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.
What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.
whatihear
2mo ago
Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.
I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.
I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.
whatihear
2mo ago
Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.
whatihear
3mo ago
I generally like the modding on this forum, including yours, but this whole sub thread dropped my respect for you as mod pretty significantly. I’m mostly a lurker on here and I don’t really follow individual users closely enough to have prior opinions on anyone involved expect for you (and that only because mod names jump out when the mod hat goes on). I found the initial mod action jarring and unexpected, but your responses to other people pushing back were worse. You generally do a good job as far as I can tell, but I think you got this one wrong.
whatihear
8mo ago
That doesn’t matter with a correctly configured TPM though. The decryption process for the disk includes a key stored in the TPM, which is never revealed, and the TPM itself verifies the boot image (which is the thing responsible for decrypting the data).
You can definitely boot whatever you want, and even trick the user into inputting their password, but if that password is only half the decryption key, you can’t actually go in and tamper with any of the data. You could still replace it wholesale or send the password somewhere else for further attacks, so it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as bad as if the TPM was not set up to do boot attestation.
whatihear
8mo ago
Yeah, that’s true, though I think TPMs might be able to prevent that since they will check the boot image and are involved in data decryption. I’m not sure if having the BIOS password allows you to subvert that though. I think the way it works is that the key or part of the key is registered with the TPM and then it asserts about the boot image hash before releasing that key, so it is only possibly to use known good boot images to decrypt your data. Maybe having the BIOS password would allow you to reset the TPM, but I think there is no way to do that without clobbering the key it stores.
No idea if these machines have that set up though.
whatihear
8mo ago
As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.
whatihear
9mo ago
I mostly agree. Progress is only linear in retrospect and in the minds of the people pushing for it. There is not actually some great moral lodestar that history inevitably pushes us closer to, what counts as progress is mostly about what the powerful say it is. As you point out it is not possible to provide a total ordering of policies according to progress, but I do think that the general direction of progress is fairly clear from within any given political reference frame (except those reference frames that don't even have the notion).
whatihear
9mo ago
If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.
whatihear
9mo ago
Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).
There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.
The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.
whatihear
9mo ago
Defining reaction that way would seem to produce some pretty strange results. It would mean that none of the prominent writers and internet microcelebrities one normally thinks of as reactionary get any credit for their writing or public persona (they may be reactionary in their private lives, but Moldbug's writings wouldn't count one way or another). You would also have to conclude that lots of people with progressive liberal politics are more reactionary than certain conservatives (90% of Boston Brahmans would count as more reactionary than Milo Yanopolis). This is also the first time I've heard this requirement put forward for being a reactionary. To be honest it seems like it is the result of cope. Reaction is so far out of the Overton window that its proponents know they can never make headway, and saying, "a real reaction just goes his own Sigma Male way instead of trying to make change in the world," is a good way to feel better about it. It also rhymes with all the "politics is personal" stuff you get from progressives, which is pretty interesting (though I'm not quite sure what relevance it has to the position, just something I noticed).
whatihear
9mo ago
The right wants to preserve and the left wants to improve. At least, that's the high level framework that I and I think a lot of other people were taught. There is clearly something to this, but it is equally clear that it isn't the whole picture. In particular, there is no room in this paradigm for an important third category that, while an exotic species in most of our political culture, is quite common in this particular discursive wildlife preserve: the reactionary. Just like progressives on the left, reactionaries don't just want to preserve the existing culture, they want to improve it. The keep difference is that rather than innovation, they want to roll things back to the way they were.
Reactionaries are of the right. No only do they oppose Progress, they actively want to roll it back! Since the long arc of history bending towards justice (or Cthulhu swimming left) is linear, anyone wanting to roll things back must stand in opposition to Progress. This expansion of the basic left-right paradigm is pretty well understood by the people who have become, in their own conception, regime-aware, and by their ideological enemies interested enough to notice. (Marxists have long railed against reactionaries, but my sense is that they just call anyone opposed to the eternal science of dialectical materialism a reactionary be they a conservative or a reactionary proper).
This was my view until recently, when I listened to the recent Political Orphanage podcast with Guy Standing as a guest. Guy Standing very much reads as a man of the left, but all his ideas are callbacks to medieval institutions. I think this is most clear in his view of the commons, but his latest book about labor (that great old saw of the Classic Left) is still a callback to roll things back to the past.
Once I realized that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary, a category that I had previously not thought possible, I realized that large chunks of the left are reactionary in nature. One good example can be seen in the tension between the Marxists and the Bakuninite SRs in the Russion underground leading up to the Russian revolution. Marxists are all about Progress, to a degree that hardly anyone dares to envision these days, but by understanding of Russian anarchism at the time was that it was all about the traditional Russian peasant village. It's true that they wanted to throw of the Tsarist yoke, but the fundamental institution they wanted to center life around was ancient. They wanted to roll things back to before city states really got going.
I think there is also a strong strain of left-reaction in environmentalists. The core of environmentalism is about rolling back processes that everyone conceived of as progress when they got started (how do Marxists feel about industrialization?). Environmentalism is about rolling things back to a simpler and purer time.
We also see left-reaction in the fetishization of indigenous peoples. When people go on about listening to indigenous ways of knowing, they are talking about returning to an ancient epistemological framework, actively rolling back Progress. This also helps explain why Anglos in Britain don't count as indigenous to these people. What's to return to?
I know it's not exactly a novel observation that the linear political spectrum fails to capture important nuance, but this has really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions. We can still anchor of Burke as being on the right, but everything else is up for grabs. Liberals are the original leftists, but by this point they straddle the center, with some on the right and some on the left. Because Progress must always march on, no one set of ideas can ever be guaranteed to be on the left, though originality seems like it helps a lot. Patriarchy has reigned though most of history, so feminism seems light it ought to have been pretty well dug in on the left, only now Progress calls for the reinforcement of gender roles and radfems are in coalition with social conservatives. Nothing matters, it's all just vibes, coalition building, and branding.
One big caveat to this is that it doesn't seem like you necessarily get to choose the branding for your own ideas. Your left-right branding is assigned to you by the zeitgeist, and there is some real connection to the historical left and right.
It's also the case that, at least for now, I think this mostly applies to mapping out the range of possible political position space. There are not that many mainstream right-reactionary positions. The biggest and most effective I can think of is originalism, and arguable the pro-life movement is another, but for the most part, the right that is allowed in the Overton window is one big rearguard action. In practice, if someone is trying to change things, they are still usually attempting Progress.
whatihear
1yr ago
...they did.
When? If you are talking about the resettlement of the German tribes inside imperial borders, they only did that after smashing them in battle and disarming them. Sometimes they would skip the smashing in battle bit, but there would always at least be a negotiated settlement before the tribes were allowed to move into the empire uncontested. Towards the end of the empire they stopped disarming the Germans, but that was definitely not by choice, it was because the empire was falling apart.
whatihear
1yr ago
I've long had a feeling of disquiet about just how far removed from the necessities imposed on us by the fact of our physical existence we are in the modern era. For me, this manifested most strongly as a revulsion towards a career that just pushes paper or people around, and made me interested in STEMy stuff, but I don't think I'm alone in this. I think this sense of disquiet undergirds a lot of strange behavior you can observe in left wing hippies and right wing homesteader types. For some people it isn't the disconnection from physical reality (by this I mean mostly agriculture and manufacturing), but instead from what one might call the societal production function. My grandmother once remarked that as a girl she thought the only jobs worth doing were being a soldier, a teacher, or a farmer, and I think this sentiment was coming from a similar place as my feeling that you have to be getting your hands at least a little dirty.
I think you're a bit like my grandmother in that you feel that there are certain social truths that will remain inescapable so long as we are a bunch of jumped up apes. As I get older, I've started to come around to this view more even as I loosen my grip on my old feeling that work is fake unless you're building a little. Pinker really convinced me that Hobbes was right, and watching the world devolve into chaos as US hegemony fades is only strengthening that view.
whatihear
1yr ago
I'm looking for a audiobook, series of audiobooks, or podcast that gives a historical survey of the middle east starting with the founding of Islam. Basically I'd like to have an AP Euro/AP US level of detail about the region. Normally my proceedure for this is to look for a "History of $REGION" podcast, but I found that I felt I couldn't trust the "History of Islam" podcast I found because it was done by a believer and I wasn't sure how much that distorted the narrative (I didn't get the sense he was a propagandist, just had some fairly obvious biases). This part of history seems uniquely political, so I'm afraid I would run into the same issue if I just bought a random book on the subject.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Ideally this would be by a non-believer. Even more ideally, by a non-believer from quite a while ago (somehow I feel like people might have been able to be more objective about it before 9/11).
whatihear
1yr ago
One big reason people are not bringing up Tom Cruise's Scientology connection is that it is old news. For better or for worse, if a nasty fact has been out there for a long time, people don't bring it up in the discourse as much. This is how the process of un-cancellation works on an individual level (I think broad vibe shifts also have something to do with it). The Scientology thing has been litigated in the court of public opinion for quite some time.
whatihear
2yr ago
"has an advantage" != "is better". Two different competitors will always have a multitude of different advantages and disadvantages relative to one another. It just happens that the results of male puberty have a very strong advantage over the results of female puberty for almost all sports.
whatihear
2yr ago
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
This is wrong for two reasons:
To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?
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