sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
17d ago
By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.
sodiummuffin
17d ago
Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.
I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?
sodiummuffin
20d ago
The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more.
It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.
sodiummuffin
20d ago
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.
Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
sodiummuffin
22d ago
2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:
We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.
Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.
The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Back in 2015 he had a fictional op-ed exploring some of the questions about "voluntary" here:
Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden
In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.
I see in the comments of the post he also established his position more explicitly:
I mean, I am pro voluntary designer babies, although I’m only confident about this in cases where it’s clear enhancement (eg giving kids genes that make them healthier) and not control (eg giving kids genes that make them want to always do what their parents say).
I don’t think I’m pro mandatory designer babies. You might be able to convince me depending on the exact details of the situation. But it probably wouldn’t be through an argument like this.
That “transhumanism is simplified humanism” post at the bottom explains where I’m coming from pretty well.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Relevant post on his Tumblr from 2017 when he was doing child psychiatry:
Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.
…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.
This part of the followup post also seems relevant:
2 Did you know there are whole institutions for dealing with kids who sexually molest other kids? And these institutions are always full? The world is much worse than anybody thinks and I cannot finish up my child psychiatry rotation quickly enough.
I don't think the tweet Spookykou quoted is nessesarily saying "putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children", he was just comparing IQ and self-restraint as he said. But note that some of the people who need to be locked up are children. (This also brings to mind the bit in his post Against Against Autism Cures regarding those who are locked in personal sensory hells regardless of whether they also need to be physically restrained or not.)
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.
There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
So CEO decisions are so consequential that they can ruin a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That makes it seem very sensible to pay a couple hundred million if it increases the chances those decisions are good. Sometimes CEOs are paid those hundreds of millions and make bad decisions anyway, but generally people believe that being willing to pay more improves those odds, that's why they do it.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.
My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
instead of leave this funding open
Because most of the time the Disaster Relief Fund doesn't need that much money and Congress can just pass a bill giving them more funding if they actually need it, like they did in 2017 and last month. Would you prefer if they were deliberately given excess money and it was up to FEMA officials to decide how to save or spend it? Because that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. If the Disaster Relief Fund got an extra $20 billion every year they could probably find a way to spend it during mild hurricane seasons to increase preparedness or something, but that doesn't mean that would actually be better than spending the money on some other part of government or lower taxes.
Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants
If you're going to allow non-citizen migrants in the first place, such as allowing refugees under humanitarian justifications, the same humanitarian justification can be used to argue for helping them in other ways so they aren't left homeless on the street. More to the point, this is fundamentally a policy question that doesn't relate to the Disaster Relief Fund any more than any other government program. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to have the Shelter and Services program, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea to provide the Disaster Relief Fund with additional funds on an as-needed basis.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.
There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:
Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching
With Texas still reeling from Hurricane Harvey and another storm barreling toward Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of money by Friday, according to a Senate aide, putting pressure on Congress to provide more funding this week.
As of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which pays for the agency’s disaster response and recovery activity, had just $1.01 billion on hand.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.
But those are separate earmarked categories of funds. The FEMA Disaster Relief Fund was down to $1 billion dollars on hand and moved to "Immediate Needs Funding" until Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. But the FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that. Both are under FEMA but my understanding is that there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA. And obviously "FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is about to run out of money" stories are generally overblown in the first place, since Congress is going to provide it additional funds as needed.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.
When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality
Superrationality is a concept invented by Douglas Hofstadter. He thought that agents should cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemma, but the primary notion of "rationality" which had been deeply developed by economists, decision-theorists, and game-theorists disagreed. Rather than fighting over the definition of rational, Douglas Hofstadter coined the term superrational for the kind of rationality he was interested in.
Eliezer Yudkowsky shared the same core intuition with Douglas Hofstadter, but took the path of trying to reclaim the word rational for what he meant, in Functional Decision Theory. As a result, LessWrong does not consistently use superrational/superrationality.
I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.
I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies.
There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:
Damn, Briana's avatar had me fooled.
I would never guessed that she was a transsexual person.
Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.
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September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.
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October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.
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October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."
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Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.
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Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)
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14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".
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7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.
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45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."
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40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.
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October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
I haven't been browsing it myself but I know of therpgsite.com.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
You reversed it. First the text goes inside the square brackets, then the link goes inside the round brackets.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
After shootings there's confusion about details like this all the time, including from official sources, it's very weak evidence of anything.
If there was an organized effort involving multiple assassins, let alone any sort of infiltration of the Secret Service, how is Trump alive? It's not that hard to kill people, Crooks came incredibly close, but we're to believe that another assassin who unlike Crooks apparently wasn't immediately shot couldn't manage it? This incident should if anything illustrate that no competent organized force is trying to kill him, because if they did he would be dead. The main thing that protects U.S. presidents and candidates isn't the Secret Service, it's that politicians in democracies are replaceable so neither foreign adversaries nor political opponents have sufficiently strong incentive to risk it.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.
No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:
Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.
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