magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.
The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:
“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”
The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.
(AP, emphasis mine)
I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful.
but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures.
Note that these are useful if you share the Yudkowskian view of neural nets. Specifically, the view that it is impossible to align a neural net smarter than you; "a technique, inventable before the Singularity, that will allow us to make neural-net ASI and not die" is a contradiction in terms. There are thus no "useful" answers, if you define "useful" as "works on neural nets".
In this paradigm, 100% of surviving worlds follow this two-point plan:
-
Neural nets are totally and permanently abandoned until after the Singularity; they are banned in all countries (convincing everyone is hard; easier is convincing enough nuclear powers, hard enough, that the holdout countries are either occupied or obliterated).
-
Non-doomed versions of AI research (e.g. GOFAI, uploads) continue.
The reason you need #1 is that #2 is going to take at least 50 years to hit the Singularity. The reason you need #2 is that #1 is only metastable, not actually stable; sooner or later, in a hundred years or a million, the Butlerian Jihad will break down, at which point everybody dies unless we've hit the Singularity in the meantime.
And hence, work on how to make non-neural-net AI work is necessary (if less urgent than stopping neural nets, on which point Yudkowsky is indeed currently focusing).
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
"Dutch"/"Deutsch" are actually the same word whose spelling was standardised a slightly-different way; the Netherlands was part of the Holy Roman Empire and is thus part of Germany in the broad sense. Same reason there are "Pennsylvania Dutch" (who are German).
It's basically the same issue as the ambiguity of "Congolese" or "Korean", just old enough to predate spelling standardisation.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I must confess that I've never really understood the US habit of self-censoring profanities. You are allowed to say "fuck" here - there is no word filter - and implying you said "fuck" is approximately as discourteous as actually saying it. So, what is gained by censoring yourself?
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
And yet, many people have still not seen it (as I have not seen... oh, it's actually called "Play it Again, Sam"), and while the first Banepost actually achieved something other than memeing (and thus was fine), the second was meaningless and the third and fourth were actively goading the by-then-clearly-clueless @Capital_Room.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.
It should be noted that police are much, much better at acquiring evidence than schools, and it's likely they didn't hand all their evidence over to the school.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
@ABigGuy4U's post "A lotta loyalty for a hired gun!" is a quote from the memetic first scene of The Dark Knight Rises (his username is also a quote from said scene, the line immediately preceding the "loyalty" quote is "Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask!", and "Somebody get this hothead outta here!" is a quote from later in the movie).
@sun_the_second linked to a video of said first scene.
So, instead of an attack aimed at me, this is, what? Low-effort "chan behavior," not making a clear point, not writing for everyone, and not in keeping with the standards of the Motte, then?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
But an angle I've not seen addressed directly in the comments- are you really OK with your kid growing up without a dad in the house? Really?
@wsgy, relevant issues are girls going through puberty earlier without dads, and that many women might not know or want to find out about certain uniquely-male medical issues (e.g. I had an abnormality of penis development that went completely uninvestigated for my entire childhood and most of my adolescence, because even when I did notice that something might be wrong, my single mum had no clue about what normal penis development actually is and was sufficiently creeped out by the mere mention of my penis that she just intimidated me into shutting up about it - it resolved fine AFAIK, but obviously that wasn't knowable ex ante to either of us).
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
I think you meant "yes" to "are they not a liar?". Or at least, if you were looking for liars that seems inadvisable.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I agree, but I'd argue that in this particular instance the instructor was speaking on behalf of the institution; grades are, after all, the university's official opinion of a student's work, and the instructor was being paid (among other things) to give them in a manner the university would agree with (that the university agrees with the marks is a necessity to make degrees actually mean something). This wasn't a case of a random shitpost on social media outside office hours.
"You can fire people for saying X if you hired them to say Y" is a small-enough impingement on free speech, and enough of a necessity, that I'm not really objecting on those grounds; I might or might not disagree on the object-level if I cared enough to dig into the case, but not on the meta-level.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
The point is that DeBeers has increased the price of a "valid" engagement ring by getting people to insist on diamond, while driving up the price above that of rubies and sapphires via cartel behaviour.
(NB: I am not going to give, and would prefer not to receive, a diamond engagement ring. Rubies and sapphires are a hell of a lot more "forever" than diamonds; they aren't combustible, for one thing.)
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
I think it's not directly "women choosing not to have children", although it kinda is that in a less-direct way.
There are two big effects I can see. One is that dating moved onto dating sites, which are low-trust lemon markets that fail for Economics 201 reasons (because those that don't know it's a lemon market will reliably pick the apparently-excellent deals - i.e. the fake ones, because if you're centrally lying you might as well go the whole hog - over the actually-good deals, and a lot of those that do know it's a lemon market - and aren't themselves selling lemons - will just leave). The other is that feminists declared men chasing women to be punishable aggression (unless she wants it, which the man doesn't know in advance), men (and especially good men) mostly chose to respect the short-term incentives this creates, and women mostly failed to chase to fill the hole, resulting in deadweight loss.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.
You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.
Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).
I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.
(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.
I'm not sure they thought through the economics of anyone who would approve of this trailer likely being a proud pirate.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
· Edited 16d ago
Nah, there are some people explicitly and publically advocating more of this - Destiny's "you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events", for instance. I'd call that a strategy. It's not a strategy "the left" as a whole is pursuing, though (the Democratic Party certainly came out against it).
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.
Trumpism, and Musk becoming pissed off enough to buy Twitter, seem the obvious examples. Well, no, the more relevant examples; the most obvious example, in context, is this board.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
To be clear, by "systematic" I mean like nearly 100% endogamy (I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect 85% still wouldn't be enough) in a moderately-sized clan, like the actual Habsburgs, so that you get a pile of allele-fixing and increased consanguinity. Are there a lot of families that do that in the Muslim world?
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.
@FireRises I'd go further and say "opposed"; if you want to keep Jews in the West, you don't want them to "go home" to Eretz Yisrael.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
Funny thing about inbreeding is that unlike protracted heavy inbreeding (where a family has no new blood for an extended period), protracted mild inbreeding (lots of cousin marriages but not systematic) will eventually tend to weed out most of the alleles responsible for inbreeding problems (as it exposes them to much-stronger natural selection).
Do also remember that if someone heavily inbred marries someone else heavily inbred - but unrelated - the offspring are not inbred at all.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
China doesn't seem to be too keen on military domination of the eight dash line, you have both okinawan and phillipino islands a stone toss away - you can contain them just as good there.
The PRC has been building military bases all over the nine-dash line. And Taiwan actually is strategically critical; if the PLAN can base out of its east coast, they can more credibly threaten a blockade of Japan or South Korea (they can't do that now because the narrow, shallow straits might as well be labelled "insert sea mines here"). Would also allow them to put their ballistic missile subs into deeper water and hide them better.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
I think the word you're looking for is "invasion" rather than "occupation", then. The USA invaded and occupied Germany, but only occupied Japan.
@Dean's usually fairly precise with his terminology; I believe he was specifically raising concerns over the USA's ability to occupy China - concerns which I share to at least some extent. Invading China is a completely-different kettle of fish, and one I dismissed out of hand in my first reply in this chain ("Rule 2 of war": "do not go fighting with your land armies in China"); I don't think Dean was even entertaining that idea.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
If a nuclear exchange has happened, there are no longer 1.3 million Chinese.
I think you meant "billion" here; I would expect high Chinese casualties, likely over half a billion if they don't surrender immediately, but not >99.9%.
if they launched even one of theirs at us then we would have launched most of ours in response.
Nah, it wouldn't take that many.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
Going full countervalue in response to a single nuke? No. Going full counterforce in response to a single nuke? Yes, at least on the US side. The question isn't so much of retaliation as prevention; you want to destroy as much as possible on the ground.
(Also, a single nuke pointed at a city probably won't do much due to ABM.)
I predicted the USA going countervalue against China in a big way if the PLA had nuked cities, the counterforce response ran China out of nukes, and the PRC still refused anything but a white peace. At that point, there's just straight-up no alternative; the Western public would not stand for a white peace (not to mention that it'd let them try again in a few years), and invading China wouldn't work (rule 2 of war). Hence, "after I destroy Washington DC Shanghai I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour, that is unless of course you pay me 100 billion dollars unconditionally surrender". Same trick as was used on Japan in WWII.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
My point exactly.
I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.
The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.
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