ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
5hr ago
Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though. The last shall be first, the meek will inherit the Earth, God chose the weak things to shame the strong, etc. That does seem like a radical change from, well, the history of the universe, and it doesn't seem crazy to see a connection between that and Wokeness.
ThenElection
5hr ago
Not at all a gamer, but I am an avid reader. And contemporary literature has many of the same issues (with different inflections) as video games.
My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air. Instead of endless variations of progressive morality tales adapted to different settings, you get genuine variety of perspectives. Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead," but it's not at all that. You get writers of both sexes and all races bringing new perspectives to the table. Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.
This may have limited applicability to gamers: games are more social, require a much greater investment to produce, and the average game in 2025 is better (I assume) than the average game in 1995, despite wokeness. Which points to the problem for people wanting better video games today. So long as people are buying the ones produced, that's what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do besides quit altogether.
The Official Account (Bugliosi) is that Manson was trying to trigger a race war.
The full schizo account is that he was a subject of MKULTRA and CHAOS, and the CIA nurtured him to discredit the hippie/anti-war movement.
What's interesting is that if you dig into his time in San Francisco, you do find some pretty weird stuff related to his parole officer (a grad student at Berkeley, studying drugs and collective violence, who had a single parolee he was supervising and who managed to keep Manson out of prison for violations as diverse as grand theft, drug dealing, and rape) and the clinic Manson and his followers went to.
In all likelihood, Manson wasn't some kind of intentional project, but a series of irresponsible fuck ups by government. And his killings weren't an attempt to start a race war, but some combination of an attempt to distract from a prior crime and a drug deal gone bad.
ThenElection
5d ago
Tate wasn't specifically targeted, though; they just wanted to kill the people in the house.
There's also reason to think the Helter Skelter scenario wasn't what actually happened. Maybe I should do an effort/schizo post on the Manson murders sometime.
ThenElection
6d ago
What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.
The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.
ThenElection
7d ago
Even if you write off the harm of discrimination to the people being discriminated against, all of those positions (except TV writing) rely on status and prestige to accomplish their social roles. If the bulk of people come to assume that anyone who works at a university or in journalism is either a nepo-baby or an identity hire as opposed to someone hired by a more broadly accepted measure of merit, those professions lose credibility and support. And without that, they're nothing.
ThenElection
7d ago
Getting cynical, there's another reason old men might prefer hiring young women to hiring young men.
ThenElection
8d ago
Ron Jeremy, winner of the 2028 erection.
I read it not as a form of double think, but as a reflection of American hyper-proceduralism for criminal justice.
For this, the process matters every bit as much as the facts. You can have extremely strong evidence that someone committed a heinous crime, but a flawed process used to gather evidence, arrest the suspect, etc. is enough in itself to exonerate the suspect.
Mangione, then, is a hero for his act of murder. He's also a super genius who hid his tracks perfectly, and it was only through evil parallel construction and planted evidence that the government was able to get him. Therefore, since the process was abused, he must be found innocent, validating his genius and heroism.
ThenElection
11d ago
or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe
Your LLM detector is busted, I'm afraid.
ThenElection
12d ago
That's a orthogonal concern as to whether it's a big infrastructure project. Maybe they're going to be giant boondoggles; maybe not. The same applies to most of China's infrastructure projects; it still represents a high level of state/social capacity.
And the biggest builder of these projects (Google) usually funds them out of cash on hand. To the extent it issues bonds for them, it's for financial engineering/tax reasons. And investors for whatever reason are desperate to buy "green bonds," and are willing to take spectacularly low rates for the chance to buy them.
Data centers are far, far more complicated than setting up a desktop and WiFi in your home network times a million. To give a taste of the problems:
-
Power. They're incredibly power hungry. You can't just hook them up to the local grid; the local grid might not even have the capacity to support them. You've got to expand existing plants or build entirely new ones. And then how do you handle power surges? A naive approach is going to cost you tens of millions of dollars when a spike comes through and kills a thousand GPUs. Of course, you've also got to figure out how to distribute the power internally and plan for inevitable component failure at multiple layers. How do you distribute thousands of amps (safely and without melting the insulation)? And what about when the grid fails? You've got to have backup power sources ready for a day or two of unavailability. Not doing these things will make your data center uneconomic, as all that expensive capex is sitting around unused.
-
Heat. All this power has to go somewhere. Air conditioning and fans don't work at this scale, so you've got to use liquid cooling. But where do you get this liquid and where do you send it? And how do you pump it through hundreds of miles of plumbing? How do you minimize the rate of pipes getting clogged, and how do you handle it when pipes do get clogged? And remember: if this plumbing fails, your GPUs are going to rapidly start failing as well, to say nothing of the risk of a highly corrosive liquid being sprayed all over billions of dollars of investments.
-
Weight. A rack, by itself, weighs over five tons. Now add all of the equipment and liquid needed to handle 1) and 2). You've got to have a massive foundation that can support that. This isn't just a big Amazon warehouse.
-
Security. You've got a lot of investment here, all in one place, and quite delicate. How do you prevent a hostile actor from taking a truck or drone and destroying your investment? To say nothing of state-level actors, who absolutely are trying to break in.
-
Networking. You've got thousands of very chatty, data dependent GPUs coordinating in a highly choreographed dance to transmit trillions of parameters to each other. And the slowest link determines, by itself, the overall speed. When you've got thousands of nodes, that is pretty slow. Your mega ultra gaming WiFi 7 ASUS gaming router is going to have some trouble here. And that's just internally: you're receiving and transmitting massive amounts of data to the outside world. How do you prepare for a backhoe running through, or a shark chewing through, one of your fiber optic cables? Every hundred miles or so, you also need to amplify the signal, which comes with its own power, security, etc requirements. And what about truly bulk data: if you're transmitting 100Pb of data, is it better to saturate your measly 1 Pbps capacity (displacing your other network needs) for a painful amount of time, or to use trucks with hard drives to ship it cross country? And, if you have a bunch of these trucks, how do you efficiently unload them, without causing needless congestion or buffering in the physical world?
There's maybe half a dozen organizations in the world that can handle all these concerns. All of them are American.
ThenElection
12d ago
Women in cities do tend to have better physiques than elsewhere (same with the men, of course). There's also a level of achievement in cities: you have to put up with the In This House We Believe crowd a lot more, but, absolutely and proportionately, you find more people who are deeply ambitious, agentic, and capable of making an important mark on the world. The culture of the suburbs is more just finding the joy in the day-to-day, which has its own value, but some people want something different.
ThenElection
13d ago
There are a couple different speech policy regimes that could exist in England, all consistent with "you're not allowed to criticize Muslims or migrants." I'm just trying to get a better sense of which one best describes England.
-
Muslim supremacy: you can't criticize Muslims, but white people and especially Jews are fair game.
-
Inter-ethnic protections: you aren't allowed to criticize people outside your ethnicity.
-
Wokeness: depends on who, whom, and the particular ordering of the progressive stack. 1) is kind of a degenerate version of this.
-
Universalism: no one is allowed to criticize anyone aggressively.
None of those are my preference, but 2) and somewhat 4) seem like defensible approaches. My guess is that 3) is closest to what's happening, but that's just based on Twitter vibes.
ThenElection
13d ago
Asking a question instead of making (plausible) assumptions. Some cultures do take being polite more seriously than child rape.
ThenElection
13d ago
To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?
I prefer American speech norms, but if it's a matter of different cultural approaches to conflict and politeness, I don't object to it. Different folks, different strokes.
ThenElection
14d ago
I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).
The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.
That said, I appreciate the attempt!
ThenElection
16d ago
Off-topic, but I recently came across Fritz Leiber's short story Space-Time for Springers. It's about a super-intelligent kitten who can't yet speak but longs to become a man. Very good (though melancholic) if you like cat literature. AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.
The paper was from over a decade ago and had like 40 boys, not all of whom were gender atypical. More likely than not, not a single one of them were "dysphoric" or wore skirts, with conditions like being short or shy or showtunes being the drivers of atypicality.
They tested four mental health measures, and two of them showed mediation by teasing (for boys), and two didn't. If it were a matter of gender atypical people with mental health issues reporting more teasing, you'd expect all four measures to show mediation. This paper either 1) shows something more complicated or 2) is reporting on noise.
A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics.
The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:
Although partial mediation was indicated, the relationship [between gender typicality and low self-esteem] was still strong. Thus, regardless of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality had lower self-esteem. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their self-esteem.
Thus, regard- less of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality were more anxious. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their anxiety.
So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.
The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.
(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)
ThenElection
17d ago
Going by the rubric, she clearly deserved significantly more than a 0.
But it's a terrible rubric, and the goal shouldn't be applying shockingly low standards to all students fairly, but to apply reasonable academic standards fairly. If successful, this red-tribe push is far more likely to just further hollow out American universities as glorified daycare for post-teens than it is to get reasonable standards applied fairly.
Though, I can see an argument that universities are already doomed, so might as well accelerate the collapse so that something better can take their place.
I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.
What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.
Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).
ThenElection
17d ago
My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.
Available in the technical manual appendix:
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-suite-assessments-technical-manual-appendix-pt-1.pdf
Page 136, Table A-6.9.1.
Found via Gemini. Interestingly, I'm told it drops significantly for students who attend elite schools, to around 0.6, due to restriction of range effects.
Close to the Machine, by Ellen Ullman.
More options
Context Copy link