username
1yr ago
Why do you think it would impact the host nation?
Do we have evidence to suggest the surrogate's IQ is important in determining the child's IQ? These surrogates would certainly be less conscious of detrimental factors like smoking and drinking, but that's what contracts are for. Even better if they're closely monitored by their clients.
I'm not sure why the center-right part is important, are you not interested in solutions that would also please the left?
Among many other schemes already mentioned, I would try and facilitate surrogacy tourism/immigration.
If foreign women sign a surrogacy/reproduction contract with a citizen, they are granted citizenship and subsidies. We could also cut red tape around live-in nannies to make it easier for these women to live with their clients. Presumably these women can also offer low-skill labour, and could become nannies or cheap child-care workers. Cutting the red-tape around these contracts would also be great, it would be nice if middle-class couples/individuals could just find a surrogate using a simple friction-less online-matching service.
I've shared this idea with people, it sickens leftists to think of the inequality these women experience. It sickens conservatives to think how strange the family changes around this new opportunity. Personally, in accordance with libertarian philosophy, I think giving people additional opportunities is generally a good thing. However I feel bad for the foreign men who can't immigrate because they don't have wombs. Also, I suppose womb-draining low-income countries would qualify as eugenics.
username
1yr ago
If by liberal you mean left, then the argument is essentially that people are biased against those looked over minorities, (e.g everything from overt racism to implicit bias). How do we know this bias actually exists? The best argument I've seen is Scott Alexander's Social justice for the highly demanding of rigor. It's a little bit outdated. For instance, more recent analyses of the blind orchestra data show it can also be used to support the hypothesis that blind orchestras lowered women's chances of getting in.
username
1yr ago
I worked in a central government agency and sometimes dabbled in AI policy. When race is blinded, sometimes the computer will still disproportionately target certain races because of correlated factors.
As long as the algorithm is detecting actual errors, it's okay for it to disproportionately impact certain races (although it will still make the news and people will complain). What's more controversial is when the computer is copying existing human behaviour. If human behaviour can be truly racist (e.g. in an irrational way), the computer can inherit that irrationality, even if blinded.
username
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality none of the aforementioned actions are wrong. It's not wrong to spy on someone in the locker room, and so it's not wrong to use 'x-ray glasses' to see through their clothes, or use an AI to edit a picture to do functionally the same thing.
This matches my intuition. For someone to just generate deepfakes they just keep to themselves? I've got no problem with that. For someone to distribute those deepfakes around, possibly (but not necessarily) passing them off as real has the potential for harm.
In the case of spying, I think punishment is valid even if it isn't technically wrong because spying will usually lead to information being used in harmful ways, like revealing facts or blackmail. Even if spying is done without those intentions, sometimes secrets are just too good to keep, it's playing with fire. Deepfakes don't have that same problem.
username
1yr ago
I think that does make sense, at least in a vacuum, but going to college will probably also make you more likely to "trust the experts" on a number of topics, including OP's examples of rejecting HBD and supporting outdoor masks
username
1yr ago
Are you suggesting HBD skepticism would be less prevalent if people understood basic sciences more? I don't think that's the case. HBD skepticism has more to do with social factors than people honestly considering the evidence and coming to the wrong conclusions. The same thing is true for outdoor mask mandates, the reasoning driven by politics and fear (and to be fair, your water-coloring analogy doesn't apply to droplets, only airborne transmission, presumably an outdoor mask would prevent sneezing on others)
This plays into Caplan's argument, in which he admits his economic students go on to support minimum wage hikes, rent control, etc. Presumably these students have intuitive understanding of supply and demand.
All that said, I do agree with your premise. My case against Caplan is as follows: Education is where we go to train the models in our heads. We may forget the inputs, but the models remain. I may not remember all the dates and numbers from the world wars, but learning about those events has improved my models of reality and social structures. That sounds like intuition to me.
username
1yr ago
Elite culture and universal culture have a lot of overlap, perhaps they're even the same thing, but it's certainly more concentrated and adopted within elite circles. In a typical company, employees express this culture proportionally to their rank. The elite culture gives you status, and you have to signal you're part of the in-group.
My model of Scott's universal culture is a natural common-denominator. Elite culture is more forced and over-the-top, due to the status it gives its members. Perhaps elite culture is downstream from universal culture.
Baristas and mic-girls might express the same attitudes on some social issues like gender and the environment, but different views on economic issues.
username
1yr ago
My boring model of all this is just that there is such thing as "elites" and they have their own "elite culture". It sounds vague, but so are the effects we're trying to explain. There is no central authority at the top coordinating anything. The WEF is the non-profit think-tank version of any large progressive company. Internal signaling games are responsible for most of the sillier policy proposals (e.g. extreme covid measures, boycotting Dr. Seuss). The WEF may be more explicit in its intentions of changing policies, but it's not at all obvious that their influence is all that central in influencing elite culture. I'd be surprised if most elites had even heard of the WEF.
username
1yr ago
The concern isn't that tiktok is spreading pro-CCP or even anti-western propoganda. The concern is that it is addictive and stealing our youth's attention. Yes, other social media do this too, but tiktok is particularly good at stealing attention and time.
The chinese aspect comes into play when you realize that tiktok in china is a different app. If China thinks this attention-stealing is bad, they're going to fix their app rather than the international version. Also, tiktok allows them to China on international users (this isn't the article's point, but it is the main concern you hear about in mainstream media)
username
1yr ago
For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself.
Why do you believe covid's potential harm is more known or bounded than the vaccine? We have a little bit more long term data (about a year) for the virus but the vaccine's data is also of higher quality
username
1yr ago
I've come across HBD a few times in these CW threads since themotte moved off reddit, and dozens of times before that. As far as a I know this is basically the only place you can openly discuss it.
This HN discussion is similar to what you'd read here, but shifted to the left. Here HBD is basically supposed "true" and those who disagree are in the minority. We don't argue particularly better or worse than the HN comments. Often, it's just some top-level complaint about the blank-slate view and others who agree.
username
1yr ago
Many comments are pointing out the variance between people, but considering frequent bathing is a pretty recent trend, I would think we'd get used to lower frequency bathing if we really tried (or were forced to).
Is anyone aware of evidence for some kind of feedback loop between bathing and oil/sweat/odor production? I know of many anecdotes of people who went from washing their hair everyday to much lower frequencies, they all say they got used to it and their hair doesn't get gross anymore (or as quickly). Personally I used to shower everyday and used to feel pretty disgusting starting around the 16th hour, but now I wash every 2 days and I feel fine until around the 40th hour. It could be psychological rather than physiological, but my hair really does look less oily for longer since I cut my bathing frequency. My guess is that it's a combination of psychology and physiological feedback loops (e.g. decreased sebum production).
username
1yr ago
I wish we had more tony starks and bruce wayne characters out there. Billionaires are portrayed terribly in recent movies.
Knives out has some fun twists. The plot is a bit unbelievable, but that's how murder mysteries are supposed to go, it's a chain of extremely unlikely events. It's a shame the characters felt so cheap, it made the the murderer rather predictable, other choices wouldn't have been as morally/politically satisfying.
username
1yr ago
Spending plans have been too long for anyone to read for a long time, it's kind of how they're designed.
I'm unfamiliar with the USA government, but in Canada, "spending bills" are all massive and they take weeks/months to put together. The vote is more of a rarely exercised opportunity to veto rather than actually propose changes. Although no one should technically see the full bill before it gets presented to congress, the management board of the government coordinate it with the central politicians for a long time before that.
username
1yr ago
Can anyone steelman the case for any of the non-standard pronouns? Why hasn't the LGBT community settled on he/she/they, or even just exclusively using they?
Also curious what's the point of including the subject and object forms (e.g. he and him), seems redundant to me, unless someone is combining he/her or she/him? I've heard non-binary folks are doing similar that in languages where both the verbs and pronouns inflect based on gender and there isn't any neuter form (e.g. hebrew)
username
1yr ago
I think the SEO explanation is the most relevant, in addition to google's incentives to fix it being rather weak. They have monopoly status and "you are the product, not the customer". That said, I'm not sure there's any easy ways for google to fix this issue. Even if it were easy from a technical point-of-view (which isn't obvious, I'd expect more competition if this were the case), anyone who wants to change the way they prioritize search results has to deal with a lot of stakeholders and special interests.
A little off topic but I find searching reddit through google (add "site:reddit.com" to your google query) will give me the best results. Reddit has a terrible search feature but its content is still relatively low-spam.
username
2yr ago
They probably want the ability to hit targets with higher confidence. Shooting multiple missiles is an easy way to do that.
Still, I wonder why China ramped up nukes more recently, decades after the soviets and USA have abandoned the same strategy. Also, why is it such a secret? Of course you'd want to keep the details secret, but wouldn't you at least want your enemies to know you have a large nuclear arsenal?
username
2yr ago
Sure, it's the same idea, but tiktok is much more powerful. You don't have to follow, like or even watch an entire video for the algorithm to respond. Being even slower to dismiss a video will boost similar videos. The youtube equivalent would be something like tracking your eye movement to see which thumbnails you're looking at. I know because I'm now getting porn-ish content after being slightly slower to dismiss videos with pretty girls.
username
2yr ago
So I finally installed tiktok. While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos, women winning arguments against feminists, jordan peterson interview clips, etc. I generally scroll past these videos quickly, but they got more and more frequent, I probably made it worse for liking a few bill-burr clips early on, but it certainly started very early on.
My wife is a frequent tiktok user, she likes videos you'd expect of women, crafting stuff, recipes, etc. She gets also gets ton of overtly political feminist videos. Neither of us have strong feelings towards feminism. If anything, she's to my right on the gender issues.
I hear a lot of anti-tiktok rhetoric along the lines that china is invading our privacy. I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns. I know this isn't anything new, other social media apps have similar effects, but I think the effect is much stronger with tiktok. With facebook, you inherit the political environment of your friends. With reddit and twitter you can choose your own echo-chambers. With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.
username
2yr ago
I found a rationalist group in my area and they're fun to talk to. People are all over the political spectrum so people rarely strongly signal their controversial opinions, discussions are usually around less inflammatory topics like economics and philosophy. You can crawl old meetup posts on ACX and look for something local, or find communities on social media.
More generally, you can meet people organically in hobby space. If the hobby leans young or female, expect it to lean left. If it's more blue-collar and male, expect it to lean right. In both cases, people should generally be less extreme and more centrist than groups who met through explicit tribal filters.
username
2yr ago
There are a lot of relationships in biology that generally hold across species but not within a species. For instance, mammal size is associated with longer lifespan across species, but intra-species it doesn't hold and can even be the opposite, e.g. in dogs.
username
2yr ago
OP was talking about democrats boosting non-trump candidates. Presumably, democrats are picking candidates they like better than trump. That's not sabotage, that's just expressing your preference.
If democrats were purposefully selecting weak candidates they don't prefer nor think can win an election, I would agree it's sabotage, that it leads to weaker nominees and that it's not good for the country.
username
2yr ago
If that actually happened, would it really be a plan of which the general populace disapproves? Seems to me that voting against someone you don't want elected is well within the spirit of democracy. I welcome republicans to do the same during democrat primaries.
Counterexample: It'd be a lot shadier if democrats purposefully won trump the nomination because they expected him to lose the general election. It's both risky and it feels more of a hack to vote for someone you don't actually want.
That's correct, but if these women are birthing at least one child according to my scheme, that child would eventually have an IQ higher than the host nation average (because clients would be upper/middle class). Many of these women would get multiple contracts or contracts for twins, so I would think it would actually raise the mean IQ of the host nation.
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