100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
is on the brink of descending into tranny.
Epic freudian typo.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
and consent is necessary but insufficient to guarantee an ethical sexual encounter.
The sufficient level of consent might be a highly expensive (in terms of social capital both now and in the future) public ceremony of consent that also indirectly involves your closest family members.
That's right; marriage.
While I personally think it's goofy, I can at least understand the idea that a breathy "yes" in the middle of buttons unbuttoning and belts unbelting during a steamy makeout session is, perhaps, rushed and ill-considered. Not so in a multi-hour (or day) ceremony with religious overtones and even clergy present all while grandma and grandpa look on with (dis?)approval.
I don't think a marriage certificate ought to be required for sex, and I don't think we should be imprisoning people for the crimes of fornication or adultery. But I'd love to see a culture where casual sex is once again considered a weirdo fringe thing much like married couple swinging still is.
If I'm a young person dating right now, there is a constant suspicion that the other person is not entirely exclusive and that, due to that fact, I may be less than number 1 on their list. So dating turns into this exercise in competitive mistrust and a prisoners dilemma of commitment-investment, rather than a steadily progressing exercise in value and life ambition matching and bonding.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
The idea of an agency bell curve is intriguing. It seems to make a lot of intuitive sense when one acknowledges that IQ is a bell curve and that people also have broadly identifiable personality traits - neuroticism, openness etc.
I do not want to see the State, however, making decisions in relation to the agency bell curve. IMHO, the State dictates the limits to the playing field - laws are, mostly, what you can't do at the outer extremes. No killing, no theft of property, you have to conform to contracts you've entered into. Other than that, let culture and subculture take precedence.
If you want to adhere to cultural norms that place no penalty on pre-marital promiscuity, this is fine. If you feel you ought to have your father's consent before you are married, that's also fine. Cultures and subcultures that do a better job of fostering pro-social systems and reinforcement loops should, naturally, win out over time.
I think one of the meta-narratives on the Motte is that when the State thumbs the scale on one side or the other of the culture war, that's always bad.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Yeah, I don't think Elon ranks up there with William Wallace and Maximus Decimus Meridius in terms of being able to stir the hearts and souls of men. Plenty of folks have decided to give their whole mind and heart over to him, though.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Tangent:
Let's say we get the MacGuffin that extends everyone to 130+ with ease. Does the Pope-At-The-Time allow for suicide after 120?
I like these longer book reviews that turn into a kind of discussion about the meta-themes and the authors themselves. Thank you.
Transgressive and satirical fiction is always a double mind fuck - even moreso if its good. I read American Psycho and was blown away by how perceptive Ellis was as an author. Then, I looked up his bio and had an "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment.
According to my quick search on Tulathimutte, he has a double Stanford degree in something called symbolic systems. He appears to have been a tech bro who became disillusioned with tech bro'ing and so started writing. That you tell us a lot of his writing is about misanthropic tech bro stuff (and, you know, porn) makes so much sense as to be a second-hand "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment for me.
EDIT: Further research has revealed that a lot of the most loathsome Haute Literarti magazines really like this guy Tulathimutte. My concern for him has waned considerably.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Carl Panzram and dealers choice twice.
"hurry up and bring on your electric chair I want to leave here and take a nose-dive into the next world just to see if that one is as lousy as is this ball of mud and meanness. I am sorry for only two things. These two things are I am sorry that I have mistreated some few animals in my life-time and I am sorry that I am unable to murder the whole damned human race. "
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
Look, I'm no DEI fan at all. My previous comment literally said I was going through the exercise of steelman-ing.
When you say things like "Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" you're demonstrating that you don't want to think through the other side's position, you just want to yell at it - which is exactly one of the core criticisms of DEI.
This is what's at the heart of the Motte - this community demands more than "boo outgroup." This is why there's literally the boo outgroup reporting button.
I tried to come up with a rational market explanation for DEI. It could very well be wrong. Your counter, however, was "no, actually DEI is just stupid and evil."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
There's an economics paper to be written about this.
Start up valuations are mostly a game until they're not. Signaling is a big part of it. If I'm raising at any stage (pre-seed, seed, series A, B, C etc.) I have to look around at the other companies who are raising at the same time, I have to figure out what VC firms are expecting over the next several years, I have to look at the IPO markets. That is how I create my own valuation, not my internal metrics (cashflow, margin, customer churn etc. etc.) The game of it is building a narrative that takes your internal metrics and creates a direct path to the du jour valuations.
If I don't do that and ask for less money, I am inadvertently signalling that I am not as high growth as the other companies I'm competing with. If I do that, no one will invest in me. Sure, you're going to say "but a real value investor---" No, that's not how big time VC works. Now, there are under the radar investors (I hesitate to call them VCs because they're too smart for that label) who purposefully try to find companies at good prices and don't care about the competitive pricing environment. But, the VC world being highly relationship and network driven, it's not like any company can flee to these "smart" investors. If you don't know them already, you don't knew they even exist.
So, most companies, especially those with first time founders, are playing the Big VC game. Investors will quite literally tell you "You have to take 5 million, even though you only asked for 3 million. If you don't, we're walking away. Also, make sure you spend all of that - we can't have a bunch of extra cash."
Why tho?
Because the VCs themselves have to make their fund performance metrics work; their IRR, their Multiples. A funny thing developed over the past two decades, however. This article is legendary for explaining it; deploying capital really fast creates its own outperformance even up to billions of dollars. So, if I am a VC with no particular investing talent but a lot of money (which is most of them) I want to find as many companies as I can (the later the stage the better, up to about Series C) and just cram huge amounts of money into their face. Because it works.
Even if it doesn't make any sense.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Wow, this was a lightbulb post for me.
I've been critical of Elon in the past because something about the guy rubs me the wrong way. I've never doubted his intelligence or capability, but my spidey sense always goes off whenever I see him in long interviews and, definitely, when scrolling through his twitter posts. I've rooted against him, I've just been very suspicious.
And this is why - going all in on Elon may indeed be heroic / brave what have you, but it's going to lead to ruin. Sure, that could be "glorious" ruin or whatever but, still - you gon' die!
So, yes, let's be Thielists in this case - not on Elon's side all-in per se, but also definitely not betting against him.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Your critique of @HaroldWilson is a touch indelicate, but fair.
Let me try to steelman.
Under ZIRP, a lot of companies, especially those with Silicon Valley style startup funding, raised more money than they could reasonably deploy. There are a lot of reasons for this but, suffice it to say, it was quite common up until 2020 for a startup founder to have far more money than he or she knew what to do with.
The one thing you can't do is not spend the money. So, companies would do all sorts of odd stuff. Usually, you just overhire sales and marketing as even if the ROI isn't great, you're still probably driving revenue. Others would launch new product lines willy-nilly. Others would turn into acquisition firms without saying so.
It stands to reason that DEI may have been an actually earnest attempt to capture talent that had been "overlooked" somehow. You can say "well, the very fact that they think the talent was overlooked is evidence that these people have horrible biases blah blah blah" - but that's thinking too deeply. They had too much cash, they had to do something with it, and this was the very noisy-random something they came up with.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
My theory has always been that Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone. Don't read that as "he hates everyone because he's a narcissist." He has a perfectly neutral with no priors feeling towards literally every human on earth.
Pair that with the fact that he's is, first and foremost, a walking one-on-one charisma machine. He's adopted this so deeply that it permeates his very speech. "Everyone is saying X is the best X ever, no one's ever seen anything like it!" ... "We're going to do Y and we're going to do it so well that it's the best thing that will ever happen." These are almost carnival barker levels of over-the-top flattery and positivity. The reason they exist as verbal artifacts in Trump's lexicon is because he's been practicing them day in and day out for 40+ years. It's reflexive at this point.
When he sat down next to Obama, he had some factual details in his mind about the man. Probably not many. He had, again, zero prior esteem estimations. So, he just started to plug in the few fats he knew about Obama into his CharismaLLM.exe and let it roll - because this is what he does with every single person he talks to directly. (Major caveat: Rally speeches and press conference Trump is different. Everything I am saying here only applies to one on one or maybe small group conversations).
Where it gets interesting is that Obama, the vaunted "orator" (although I think he was DRASTICALLY overrated as a speaker) was far less than charismatic one on one. He wanted to argue about policy in the way a Harvard Law professor would; dueling papers. Instead of doing the hard but necessary work of politicking - you know, the thing he was elected to do.
As much as I think Trump doesn't really care about other humans one-on-one (reread the intro paragraph!) I think Obama is deeply offended and angered by Trump's intuitive understanding of politics and people. This is quite literally the bookish nerd watching the bombastic class president shit all over his "legacy".
In short, I believe that, deep down, Obama thinks Trump is cool.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
- Shorthand title of the book at the top of the page. For instance "Smith - Wealth Nations" or even "Smith - Wealth.
- Simple page listing "p.213" "pp.213-215"
- FULL sentences in your OWN WORDS. "p.213 - Competitive advantage and free trade is good for everyone" be as insightful as you like. DO NOT transcribe the text and don't paraphrase and don't caveat "Smith states that ...." --- Write to yourself for yourself.
- Only one book per piece of note paper. (This is why I recommend like a 4 x 6 notepad ... or 5 x 8, whatever you can get cheap and is a good size for you). If you're reading a different book or article etc., get a new, clean sheet of paper out.
- Throw all of these slips into a shoebox or any kind of hard container (tupperware, an old storage case for land mines, whatever you have around the house).
- Weekly, no more frequently, no less frequently, organize this box of notes by title only.
Start with building that habit. There's a next level wherein you link different slips to one another, but it's too much to try at the outset.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
In that case, you might want to get a small notepad (not a notebook!) and actually look into developing your own simplifed / modified Zettlekasten method.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Edward Tufte, who's books are notoriously beautiful and specially printed, says that if you aren't marking up your books, you overpaid.
He is correct.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
A guideline (not a rule) I follow is to read zero political theory / philosophy / sociology etc. That is less than 30 - 40 years old.
This acts as a filter. 1) For exactly "could've been a blog post" kinds of books and 2) For well written books that are, unfortunately, just a re-hashing of an earlier theory.
A lot of value comes from those books and authors that have - to use the cliche - stood the test of time. The only downside here is that if you go really far back, the language can get a little tedious. The Wealth of Nations is as true and relevant as ever, but its a slog. Then again, Plato's Republic reads pretty easily (wait, that's a translation. Nevermind).
This isn't a hard and fast rule, like I said. Thinking Fast and Slow is legitimately amazing. But the exceptions to the rule usually tend to be obvious like that.
Some errata:
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Avoid almost all books written by generalist journalists. Not only are they "could've been a blog post", they are unbearably self-indulgent. The author creates him or herself as the main character and there are dozens of totally tangential anecdotes that are meant to be "relatable" but really serve no purpose whatsoever. Specialty journalists can be hit or miss. I like reading financial histories (think Barbarians at the Gate) and John Carreyrou from the WSJ is great. If you can tell a journalist puts in real work, reporting, and research into their articles, their books might be good. If they are essentially a columnist or write with a little too much personal interjection - avoid.
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I think everyone should have a stable of about 1 - 2 dozen books that they work through again and again in addition to reading new stuff. Fiction and non-fiction. These are your all time greats and you know it when you read it.
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Figure out a marginalia system you like. Don't try to create some sort of personal Zettelkasten perfect system. The whole point is interacting with the text as you read it. Retention goes up but, more importantly, thoughtful synthesis skyrockets. I can remember reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction in college; gobbling it up whole in 2 days, loving it, closing it, and thinking "I have no idea what the fuck I just read but it was awesome." Now, even sloppy chickenscratch marginalia reading "I think this idea is stupid" creates more meaningful and deep understanding of a text.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21d ago
I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit.
There's no way to measure this in a person. Furthermore, I think this is much more about culture at a local and national level. Stated differently a lot of "entrepreneurialism" is simply the American Way. A really obvious example of this is the fact that Europe's tech sector is approximately zero even though they have more than enough elite human capital. In fact, not only do the best European engineers come to the U.S., the best Canadian one's do (Waterloo is the Stanford of Canada).
Although your analysis quite good, I think the Jensen and Elon arguments fall into the "Great Man" fallacy. That without this one, specific human, we don't get the rise of GPUs (nVidia) or SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter revamp etc. I don't believe this. I think the major technological progress arc of history is mostly about the collective increase in human knowledge (and ways of sharing it) combined with ever more excess wealth and capital to finance the implementation of that knowledge. This goes back quite a ways - didn't both Leibniz and Newton independently invent equivalent theories of calculus?
So, maybe the hard-scrabble Jensen Huang isn't let it. Maybe Elon the Lumberjack stays in Canada. I don't think that's bad in the specific. I'd assume we get Eensen Muang and Jelon Husk instead - maybe two Math Olympiad champions, or obvious super STEM graduates from prestigious foreign universities. I seriously doubt we somehow fail to create trillions of dollars of value because these two people, in specific, aren't admitted to the U.S.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Any recommendations for "brain off" YouTube channels?
I find all TV / Netflix is insufferable nowadays. Sports, of course, being the exception.
I'm looking for YouTube channels that are entertaining / mildly interesting that Mottizens enjoy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
but am rich enough to not worry about any reasonable health care cost I will ever have to bear.
I don't need or want to know your specific number, but what is the number - in terms of liquid net worth - that must be reached in order to simply pay out of pocket for all reasonable medical care.
This came up for me over the holidays when my mother and father (early and mid 80s, respectively) and I were discussing healthcare costs in the U.S. My father stated that after a lifetime of diligent having-of medical insurance, things would've ended up being more cost-effective with paying out of pocket. What's curious about this is that my mother has been on variety of prescriptions for decades, my father has had surgery twice, and one of my siblings required quite intensive multiple rounds of surgery about 15 years ago. We did not grow up wealthy, but in that even more rare economic zone of "comfortably middle class" (the kind of thing that only baby boomers will ever know).
Is my father's advanced age perhaps playing tricks on his financial memory?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Here's my comment on Hunt For The Green River Killer from this June
I don't know if it would meet your requirements for sheer writing quality and story telling. This one is almost dry in its "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" narrative style. The good news is there's no politicization of the case, and there's no histrionic hagiography of the victims ("Susan always loved to laugh").
The specific reason I recommend it (as my comment states) is that it does an exceptional job of demonstrating how fucked up a investigation can get by seemingly doing "the right thing." So, if you have an interest in how police solve crimes, I think it offers an interesting and unique perspective.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025
Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.
Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.
None of that is particular alarming to me.
What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.
This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);
Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.
The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.
This three were particularly triggering for me:
Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.
I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."
This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.
I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.
The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
running a nonstandard/bespoke datacenter, even if unwise, requires a lot more ability.
Total tangent, but a good story.
Early in my career, I was in a low level position that randomly physically placed me in the same room as four high-end infra guys. These dudes had been building complex system for decades and really knew their shit. They had a lot of opinions.
Two of them came up with a very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running. The other two came up with a different very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running.
The first group worked for at least the two years I was there to get permission from the higher-higher-higher ups to implement their solution. IIRC, they built like a mini deployment using old servers to demonstrate the feasibility. They wrote innumerable contingency and rollback plans. I left before it went live, but I heard they, eventually, got permission for a scaled down version of what they wanted. I think they got a kind of pat-on-the-head employee-of-the-month reward, as well as a paid trip to some cloud infra conference.
The second group left, raised some money for their idea, and then got their shit deployed across all of the operations of a massive specialty data center company. They're both giga-rich now with multiple layers of fuck you money.
To me, this is the triumph of markets of an individual firm. If your firm doesn't like your idea, but you have high enough conviction, it could be worth risking it to try to get your idea out there. Now, the odds of success are against you, but I find it far more disheartening to have the eventual mitigated success of the first two guys, rather than a potential start-up flame out.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I'm not describing a sovereign wealth fund.
SWF are financed, normally, through commodity exports or foreign exchange reserves. I'm suggesting a method whereby general treasury receipts (taxes) are invested in direct association with a live birth in the United States.
Again, this ongoing misinterpretation of my position doesn't seem come across as particularly innocent. There are definitely some major potential flaws in my idea (which is why it's a back-of-the-envelope solution I'm posting to an anonymous message board). I think the biggest one is the moral hazard of a nearly $200bn injection of cash into the market annually by the government. The resulting asset bubbles would be pretty outrageous.
But I'm proposing even this basic blueprint of a solution because the current system, the Social Security Trust, will fail in the next ten years. Most likely, we'll just end up reducing benefits, raising the retirement age, and then setting a hard cutoff wherein all but the destitute receive zero benefits (my guess is those with a birth year of 1980 or later).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.
When you say "we" in "we should help citizens find a better life" what do you mean exactly? Education programs? Cash transfers? Job finding support?
Because all of these ideas have been tried before and, in some cases, are still being tried - to great failure.
Again, what is your proposed solution? Please try to be more specific than "help those who need helping"
We should close the borders AND restructure large parts of the economy.
Specifically, labor laws; see this previous post from yours truly.
This is a self-inflicted wound that we could be corrected overnight. Again, read my earlier post. Our employment laws cause so much friction in hiring (and firing) that the entire reason we have this indentured servant class of illegal workers is because their very lack of citizenship is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you want to see what it looks like when a government screws over its own citizens, look no further than American employment law.
Predictions about rapid price inflation of basic groceries due to border enforcement paper over the fact that the American working class is already unable to afford their own lives because they can't get jobs quickly enough. Some simple math with reasonable assumptions;
All in, we're talking anywhere from 2.5 - 4.5 months between paychecks for a typical lost-job-need-new-job scenario. You can see how untenable this would be for a single person (let alone a family) living paycheck to paycheck. Lost my job at Waffle House? Oh, no problem, I've got four months of cash savings, right?
Contrast this to off the books cash labor which can and routinely does find work (and payment!) within a single week.
American agriculture is the product of hundreds of years of compounding laws and regulations. I've done a little research into the economics of "family farms" and have discovered that your median small farmer is technically a multi-millionaire, but with both assets and debts backed by oceans of Federal dollars. They pay cash for F-350s and also supplement their groceries with SNAP benefits. It's wild, but, with enough over-regulation, anything is possible!
And that's what we're really talking about. Horrible shit-ass legislation in one area (employment law) has created a wholly separate awful situation in another area (immigration). So it isn't about X or Y, but how X and Y interact.
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