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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4079 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do you think coins would be valued in a post-apocalyptic world? I don’t think dollar bills would be, but I could see coins still being used as a medium of exchange. People like shiny metal.

Absolutely would be worth reposting this in the FFT in the morning, I feel like this is wasted on an old sunday thread that nobody will return to.

Money is just an intermediary between untrusted/unproven parties. I actually forsee a smaller-scale, social credit system in the same vein as "gift-based markets." Coinage is useless, but eggs feed families and are readily traded in for useful services. I'm moderately skeptical of storing heavy metal in expectation of total systemic collapse. It's more useful for a slow decline and fracturing, especially if social bonds remain but are inhibited due to roaming bands of raiders or unsafe, unpoliced roadways.

Less mad max and more fuedalism with lasers.

Which coins? Gold seems too relatively rare now to be used for small transactions, copper too common to hold much value. Some preppers like "junk silver", solid silver quarters and dimes and such which predate the debasing of the metal content. Those might work.

I was thinking of more common coins like nickels, dimes, and quarters. Even post apocalypse, assuming some semblance of society returns, I would expect the return of a monetary system. It might take some time to get there. The first few years after a nuclear winter or devastating pandemic would be absolute chaos, but once an equilibrium re-forms, people will need to trade again. And coins are a lot easier to use than say shells or giant stones:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

I could be totally wrong. Maybe people no longer trade because everyone is too busy killing each other for valuable resources.

What should I know about the genetics of empathy especially in regards to racial differences and the development of nations? If empathy is genetic, should this be as important as a metric to look at as IQ?

There is a fundamental difference between empathy induced by direct stimulus + perceived closeness vs empathy induced by "aBsTrAcT" thoughts

Besides those two categories, the third component is that empathy can be also purely semantic, devoid of emotion.

See e.g. this partial example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_death

Gender studies have also found a consistent deficit of empathy from both men and women towards men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

As for the pharmacology of empathy I am not well versed. Oxytocin has complex and paradoxical and hormesistic effects IIRC.

Some neurosteroids are relevant too and therefore maybe etifoxine.

As for the neural basis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron are the most famous component but only? apply for the first category of empathy I defined. I don't know what are the others.

Also there is a whole class of recreational drugs called empathogens, such as GHB and MDMA and therefore serotonin and VGCC channels are relevant.

The thing is most people stereotypically seen as good empaths are from the first category, which is often useless. People are extremely defficient in the two latters categories and that explain why most humans are locally behaving as psychopaths.

Read Joseph Heinrich's "The WEIRDest people in the world". It explains a lot of of the non-intelligence related reasons that humans differ in their cognition.

(full disclosure: I haven't actually read the book yet myself. It's working its way to the top of my reading list)

I’ve read it. Henrich writes a lot of plausible things- and can draw some support for most of them- but he very definitely avoids anything which would pit his cultural hypothesis against genetics hypotheses.

Also I really don't care for the audiobook narrator. Quite a mismatch.

That's Henrich

The Jewish influence was so humongous that the Jewish refugees from Germany were placed on the "waiting list" in late 1930s (source). Because you know, that's exactly the case where they can easily wait for a couple of years right where they are. Only about 27 thousand people per year, out of more that 300 thousands, received a visa. In fact, the immigration authorities were so afraid of spies and communists, they were denying visas to somebody who had any family ties left in Germany. They sent the ships витх hundreds of people, already at American shores, back to Europe, for them to be murdered by Nazis. FDR himself advocated against any allowances for Jewish refugees - they are a huge threat to the national security, after all.

If Jews controlled US immigration policy, they were the worst Jewish controllers of anything in the history of all Jews controlling all things ever.

What is depicted in the banner image?

Dunno, but it looks like a ferrofluid reacting to an audio speaker. I think it is a default image that came with the codebase?

Several of us on the mod team have played around with AI image generation and probably that image will eventually be replaced with a motte of some kind, possibly many different mottes in rotation. But as a purely cosmetic enhancement it's not really a top priority for our limited coding resources right now.

They're supposed to be little mottes created by human speech? Your cleverness was utterly lost on me.

Thanks for the detailed response.

I have a dumb question that I thought of while reading an article about the SVB thing. Say you have $50 million in a savings account. You are really smart (or an idiot) and after doing your research you expect the entire banking system to collapse in a few weeks, and you want to take your money out and figuratively “stuff it under your mattress” (as in not just wire it to a different bank account). Is it possible to even do this? I know you can’t just walk into a bank branch and ask for your $50 million dollars, but say you informed them ahead of time, will they actually be able to give you $50 million in 100 dollar bills? If they can, will they deliver it to you in an armored car, or is it your problem to figure out what to do with it? Is there some way of dealing with this where the Fed will hold it for you in something like a “bank account”, or you can get some sort of government IOU so you don’t need to take it out of the banking system in cash?

I say okay, and ask how I am supposed to close the account and transfer the remaining balance. He said I can close the account and withdraw the remaining balance only in cash. Cash? At this point, I literally asked: "like, green paper money cash?" He says yes. The balance in the account is somewhere around $1M.

[...]

This manager is very helpful, if not a bit gruff. He explains to me that each local branch has some sort of performance metric based on inflows and outflows at the given branch. Therefore, funding a $1M cash withdrawal was not attractive to them. I'm learning a lot in a really condensed period of time at this point. I don't even know if what he's telling me is true, or legal, all I hear is "this is going to be hard to do if you want it all at once."

But we do want it all at once. And we want to close the account. Now. He is not happy, but he says he'll call me back in 24 to 48 hours. True to his word, he calls me back the next day. He says that he had to coordinate to ensure his branch had the proper funding to satisfy this transaction, and that the funding would be available at a specific date a few days hence. He said I have to do the withdrawal that day because his branch will not hold that amount in cash for any longer.

He also subtly suggested I hire personal security or otherwise deposit those funds somewhere with haste. I believe his exact words were "if you lose that check, I can't help you." Again, this was a one time event, and I don't know how true that all is, but it was said to me.

A few days later, I walk into the branch (I did not hire personal security). I tell the teller my name and there is a flicker of immediate recognition. The teller guides me to a cubicle, the account is successfully closed, I'm issued a $1M cashier's check, and I walk out the door.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story - Interesting story about a startup founder's interaction with the world of banking.

The problem with your hypo is that if the entire banking system collapses, so does society, so the dollar bills themselves are worthless. The economy based on attenuated supply chains will break down. Center City apartments will become charnel houses under the strain of the famous trope about society being three meals from anarchy.

So the first thing you're looking for is to buy a ready-made isolated cabin with its own water supply and a relatively off-the-grid setup as far as electricity, heat, etc. You need a quick closing, cash offer, two weeks. Then see how many pallets of these CostCo will deliver in a hurry. You're going to overpay, because you need this done now, don't haggle over $100k and lose the whole $50mm. I recommend the North, far North, if you're handy with a chainsaw (buy a bunch of those too, electric will actually be easier to keep fueling than gas at a certain point) you can heat your house with wood, and a depression will see hordes wandering South where it's warm as it becomes harder to heat your home on broken supply chains.

The most practical way to cash out the rest of your $50mm is to buy something with it. Gold, for example, but anything else physical and storable and useful, is going to be better than literal banknotes in an emergency. Personally, ammo in a mix of 9mm, .223, and 22lr would be my first pick for a diversified "The Entire Fucking Banking System Collapses" portfolio. Ideally, take your weeks, and bury the gold and ammo in big plastic bins throughout your newly acquired woods.

Assuming the banking system, for some reason, doesn't collapse, you're probably going to take a big haircut if you have to get that stuff back to cash. Certainly the rush/freight shipping is going to brutalize you. What do we think, team, 20%? 25%? I don't think more than a third.

At first I thought this was a pretty inane question, but after thinking about it for a bit, I found it rather interesting. Taking your question 100% literally, how does one withdraw millions of dollars in cash? Based on this Reddit post/comment it does seem like it’s possible:

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/n3mbyl/could_someone_withdraw_a_million_dollars_from/

Who knows if that’s true, but it sounds pretty reasonable to me. I have to imagine this is an incredibly rare occurrence.

Thanks, that pretty much answers it, seems like they bank will arrange the cash order with the government for you but it’s your responsibility to take delivery

government IOU

Bonds? That's assuming the government won't become insolvent along with the banks. But if that does happen, your dollars will probably be worthless anyway, no matter their format.

Alternatively, $50 million is right around the price of a tonne of gold.

See my answer below. The gist of my question is basically- is it possible for an individual to actually turn his $50m bank deposit into $50m worth of 100 dollar bills to keep in a vault at his house (or under his mattress or whatever), and how would it logistically work if someone wanted to do that

That government IOU is called a T-bill.

How do you ultimately get the cash out though when the t-bill matures without interacting with the banking system again? By IOU I meant like can the bank just give you some certificate that says you are owed $50m in cash from the Fed/treasury (idk which), and then make it your problem to try and get the actual cash from them? Since I assume the bank would need to order the $50m in 100 dollar bills from the government anyway

Has anyone noticed that Amazon's "top review" feature doesn't usually work anymore? Years back, whenever you sort reviews by top reviews, the ones listed first always have the most "helpful votes." Now, most products do not. For example, see this iPad:

https://www.amazon.com/2021-Apple-10-2-inch-Wi-Fi-256GB/dp/B09G91TLNJ/

Notice how for a product with 40k ratings, the "top reviews" listed have "8 people found this helpful", "8...", "21...", "5..." etc. Historically, for such a popular product, the top reviews would have thousands of helpful votes, and certainly hundreds at a very minimum, and they would also be sorted in descending order instead of at random.

The same is true for all kinds of products, even those with tens if not hundreds of thousands of ratings, like airpods, airtags, etc.

What gives? I've noticed this being a frustrating problem for years by now. Surely Amazon is not stupid enough to not notice that its "top reviews" feature doesn't work. Is this a deliberate business decision to obfuscate reviews other shoppers have found helpful? Charitably, perhaps Amazon found such weighting incentivized chicanery with review manipulation, and so a new random ranking "fixes" the problem?

Strangely, when I tried to google this problem to see if any articles or blogs (or reddit threads) have complained about it, I couldn't find anything. Either no one actually cares about this feature being broken/gone, or my Googling was bad, or Google was bad. Why does tech no longer work anymore?!

I can answer this question pretty comprehensively. I've worked for Amazon for almost 15 years and was actively involved in review ban appeals when the changes happened that you find concerning here.

Here's the short version: Don't begin your product research on Amazon, you can't trust it. I'd advise reading the content of the 2-4 star reviews, but completely ignore the average review ratings, or anything on amazon that can be described as a 'rating'. None of them are honest. Instead decide what you want elsewhere, then come to Amazon to see if we sell it.

The long version is all the problems hinted at in the short answer were actually much worse in the time you are fondly remembering. Amazon banned all 'compensated' reviews in early 2016 and purged roughly 80% of all reviews ever made off the site at that time. The overwhelming majority of them were completely fake, written by people paid to write them. Often on dozens of accounts. This was in collusion with both sellers and manufacturers, including huge international brands. Millions of dollars of sales can swing in one direction or another based on people believing the reviews. After all, you did. That's way to much money on the table to leave to stupid customers giving honest reviews to have any influence over. While I've not worked in that part of the company for several years, I still know a lot of people that do. None of us trust the reviews at all. The banning of openly compensated reviews only drove it underground, into a group of smaller, much more covert super-reviewers using proxies, cloned devices, Chinese "Like Farm" style operations where entire fake identities and created to bypass safeguards. This is where Brushing comes from:

https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam

So rather than securing the integrity of the system, the changes shifted the review abuse from a cottage industry of bored stay at home moms to Asian organized crime. The "helpful review" votes you miss were also, always, fake. Just another part of what they were paid to do. A list of reviews for you to vote as helpful came with the list of items you were paid to give fake 5 star reviews. Or fake 1 star reviews if you were being paid to sabotage a competitor, which was almost as common as the fake positive reviews.

Now you know. Also sorry I guess. The native Amazon search is unreliable as well, where your products appear is pay-to-play, has been for years.

Interesting, thanks. I suppose I would have suggested that Amazon get rid of the top reviews option altogether then, if it doesn't actually work. But perhaps that would make the curious inquire after its disappearance and prompt more bad PR.

I also get the sense what you describe is a solvable problem. If shady incentivized reviews is such a pervasive problem, why not develop a trusted reviewer network using some kind of ML analytics? I write occasional reviews and I suspect it's very quite obvious based on the data and metadata that I'm a regular consumer and and part of organized crime or cottage industry of SAHMs.

Even now, half the reason I default to Amazon over say Walmart is that the former has a lot more reviews, and that's useful info. You'd think they'd invest far more in protecting this moat. Your suggestion to do product research off site makes sense but wouldn't apply to the purchasing behavior of 90+% of Amazon customers I bet.

where your products appear is pay-to-play, has been for years.

Can you expand on this? Are you referring only to paid ads/amazon AMS? Because of course that's pay to play, but if you're saying that general product listings are also "pay-to-play"..... what? How? I'm an amazon seller myself, is there a secret scheme somewhere I'm unaware of that will help my items get boosted in the algorithm that I can pay for aside from the kosher AMS route?

Google is better at searching Amazon than Amazon though, if you are looking for something in particular rather than whoever is best at convincing Amazon's algorithm to favour their dropshipped crap. I'm pretty sure Amazon does this on purpose, so as with many things -- it's working for somebody, just not for you.

Who is it working for though? I actively avoid searching for products on Amazon nowadays. It is awful compared to other internet marketplaces or retailers. But then Amazon entered my market only a couple years ago and there were already established players by then. Did they simply become a powerful monopoly in some areas and are just exploiting this?

Its sellers and manufacturers fighting it out like dogs under a carpet. Amazon makes money no matter what. Also most people shop on their phones now, so getting on the first scroll-page is HUGE money. Many millions are spent on both official help (Amazon's pay to win search results) and covert manipulation tactics against your competitors.

I think it's "Amazon Marketplace sellers" at this point mainly -- although Amazon search was horrible even when most things came directly from Amazon, so I think there's some less scrutable goals at work in terms of showing you things that Amazon wants you to buy, as distinct from things that you would like to buy.

Anyone know off the top of their head

  • A poetry site not designed by a mentally handicapped marketer

  • An art site with every western painting sortable by style and subject matter

Have you tried poetryfoundation.org ? I find it decent to find poems by poet.

They're the best I've found for poems online, but they're not great. It's laid out in a kind of confusing way, you have to poke around a bit before you can figure out where everything is. For example, if you search for a poet they bring you to a page with a long biography about them, and then at the very bottom all of the poems they have by that author in a grid format instead of a list. Annoying.

If you’re looking to share your poetry, get and give feedback to and from others, try http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/

Just looking to read historical poems, those considered good from the 19th into the 20th century.

Can someone explain the ongoing crisis in Israel? I have trouble making sense of it.

From what I see described online the leftwing (broadly defined) has made a series of anti-democratic grabs for power through the judiciary since the 90s through abusing the mess that is Israel's legal system.

The rightwing, now dominated by a combination of far rightists and religious extremists are unhappy about this and seeks to curtail the supreme court's ability to prevent legislation from happening based on shit all. The opposition to how the judiciary operates is broader than the current coalition in power but due to polarisation people can't agree on what should be done.

This makes everyone very mad. Both sides sees the conflict as existential and widespread protests are now happening.

The reform by itself isn't really bad on an object level, the issue is that Bibi is a piece of shit and parts of his coalition are extremists and people fear what they might do with the democratic mandate they've won.

People are so hysterical that I have trouble making sense of this and would appreciate for someone more in the know to add context and correct me where necessary. I'm open to having completely misunderstood this.

Israel has a byzantine political history, which was almost completely dominated by the left initially (look up Israeli newspapers on the day Stalin died...)

That changed in 1970s where the right parties gained some political power at the first time, however many institutions - such as academia, courts, hitech to a significant measure, unions (still super-powerful in Israel, though a bit less than when they used to own the country wholesale) etc. - are still dominated by the Left.

Together with the fact that Israel law system is a weird mishmash of leftovers from Ottoman and British rule, mixed with decades of own organic growth, this led to the situation where there are no formal definition of powers for some institutions, e.g. the powers of the Supreme Court aren't strictly defined anywhere. And lately (as in, couple of decades at least) the court has been more and more active intervening into the politics, under activist judges declaring "everything is judgeable". Since the setup of the Court is such that they basically appoint their own successors (it's more complicated, but effectively it is so), that creates huge dis-balance of power where the Court can intervene into any matter and other branches of the government can not do anything about it. Since the Court is owned by the Left, the intervention is usually to override something the Left dislikes. And since the Left in Israel, after the disastrous Peace Process in the 90s, is in deep electoral hole, it creates the situation where the Right can elect the government, but can not govern, because anything they do is blocked by activist judges, which often use strange and vague explanations for why exactly something is unlawful - since Israel has very little in terms of constitutional law, and those basic laws that exist are kinda vague and open to various expansive interpretations.

This all is complicated by the propensity of the Israeli Police to open very protracted and complex investigations against certain politicians, which frequently lead nowhere (though not always), drag on for many years and significantly disrupt political climate - since Israel is a small country, taking a couple of persons off the board for a major party may have very profound consequences. And of course, the judiciary wield a lot of power here too, e.g. in deciding whether the investigations can continue, which consequences they have and whether or not they may prevent certain political figures from serving in one or another capacity.

So, the Right decided to do something about it and even the chances - to make the system a bit closer to what the US has, for example. I am not going into the details because a) I am not sure I got all the details exactly right b) precise details don't matter too much as the Left would oppose any reform that takes the all-powerful Courts from their hands and c) these details can - and probably will - change all the time as wheeling and dealing is going on.

Of course, since the Left is about to lose one of the major power centers, and they already are in pretty dismal situation electorally, they feel something needs to be done. And of course, when Left wants to do something against the Right, it declares that fascists are about to (or already did) take over, and must be stopped by any means necessary. Thus, you observe what you observe.

If you see some similarities so some other country in these events, you are not alone.

The rightwing, now dominated by a combination of far rightists and religious extremists

Everybody on the right is always "extremist", just as every US Republican candidate is always literally Hitler. While this makes the world model much simpler - you don't need to learn anything about any new candidate, just move the "literally Hitler" sticker from one name to another - it rarely helps understanding anything.

the issue is that Bibi is a piece of shit

This is an extremely deep and profound political analysis, to which I can't contribute much besides an eye roll.

parts of his coalition are extremists

Again, word "extremist" is usually means not much more than "belongs to the party opposite to which I like, and doesn't want to come to our side". Which is pretty useless.

and people fear what they might do with the democratic mandate they've won.

They might change the arrangement of power in Israel in a way that would make the Left less powerful. Scary for some, but in my opinion, about time. The situation where a narrow group of judges declares themselves supreme authority in every question in politics is not normal and not sustainable. Israeli society is very divided and beset by myriads of disagreements, but having a body with clear partisan composition that usurped the power and rules at its whim does not improve the situation any.

parts of his coalition are extremists

Again, word "extremist" is usually means not much more than "belongs to the party opposite to which I like, and doesn't want to come to our side". Which is pretty useless.

I think "extremist" is a perfectly reasonable description of "parts of his coalition", for example:

Bezalel Yoel Smotrich (...) is an Israeli far-right politician and lawyer who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. (...) Accused of inciting hatred against Arab citizens of Israel, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, that "it's a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and didn't throw you out in 1948."[5] He has called himself a "fascist homophobe",[6] and has stated that gay pride parades are "worse than bestiality".[4]

Of course everybody on the right would be "accused of inciting hatred", just as any Republican in the US is by default "racist". Of course, in this case the hatred is real and obvious, but nobody needs Smotrich to "incite" anything, the hatred existed decades before he was born, and the same Arab members to whom Smotrich addressed his - regrettable - words, has been calling the establishment of the State of Israel (in which Parliament they sit) a "catastrophe", and has been openly supporting terrorist movements for years. Smotrich is very outspoken in that he does not consider this situation to be right, but I don't think discussing this situation makes him an "extremist".

That said, Smotrich is definitely on the deep right side of Israeli political spectrum. Israeli politics is much more conservative and the religion plays much deeper role than in the US, where it plays almost none beyond token assurances of top politicians to be Christians - which nobody believes but everybody are required to pretend they do. In Israel, if somebody is religious, they are usually serious about it. Which mandates certain approach to issues like homosexuality that would not be mainstream anymore in the US. I am not passing a judgement here, I am saying that's how the politics in Israel is, so there's nothing "extreme" in a particular politician to have the same opinions many other politicians do. BTW I couldn't locate the source of the "bestiality" quote - the primary link on Wikipedia refers to the article, which links to another article, which has no such quote. He did organize an event where they were mocking gay parade by pretending to be zoophiles, but he himself said he regretted doing it and it was done when he was "young and stupid". I imagine there were other incidents like this, which provide good ground for gotchas.

His views are certainly very different from many other politicians, and he is very outspoken and direct in his approach, often even provocative. I am not nominating him for any awards here. But as far as I know, he didn't do anything extreme, at least not recently, outside of his "young and stupid" years, and the policies he supported were also supported by many others. His rhetoric has very little to do with what is happening now - the thing the Left is fighting against is not Smotrich saying provocative things. The fight is about control over the court system - and given how activist courts have become in Israel, ultimately over the country's political direction. If the Left keeps absolute control over judiciary, and the judiciary keeps eagerly intervening in the politics, there's no reason for the Right parties to exist, other than playing the diet version of the Left parties - they couldn't pass any policies or appoint any people that couldn't be removed immediately by the Leftist courts. Just recently, there has been lawsuit submitted that claimed the Prime Minister is prohibited to speak on the matter of judicial reform. Can you imagine how a society can function where the head of the government, the leader of the party winning the elections, can not even speak on important political matters, let alone make decisions? This situation is certainly abnormal.

That's practically what happened several years ago, where anti-orthodox coalition won the majority. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't really handle anything properly, taking Arabs into coalition has been largely a disaster since they didn't gain anything and were seen as being easily blacklmailed, with Arabs seeing this (probably correctly) as not a bridge building opportunity but more like "grab whatever you can, it won't last" opportunity, and covid happened on top of that... so eventually their coalition fell apart and Bibi came back. I feel kinda sad that Israel couldn't find any better solution - I'd feel much better to see Bibi to retire and new generation to take over, but the alternative to Bibi so far has been so clownish it was predictable people would come back to him. My feeling is if some strong right or right-center leader emerges he could displace Bibi, but so far it hasn't happened. The Left right now can't offer much since they bet the house on New Middle East and Peace in Our TIme, and that obviously isn't happening, so their credibility is not exactly spectacular. There's no love lost between orthodox parties and secularist parties, but secularists can't win while being weak on security, especially as terrorists has been quite active recently.

A slaps B

B slaps A

A slaps B

... Repeat a gazillion times. A and B, both kinda suck in their own sucky ways.

That's an extremely rudimentary but useful model of the Israel-Palestine issue in a nutshell. You won't find any conclusion. You can spend a month going over every event in painstaking detail to arrive at the conclusion above.

I have personally given up trying to make sense of it, it's the culture war to end all culture wars, every explanation of an event I can read up on has 10 recursive yet alternating asterisks about it's actually just propaganda.

The current dispute in Israel is about Netanyahu's proposed judicial reform. It has nothing to do with the Palestinian conflict.

Yeah I figured, I was out of the loop

I'm not wondering about Israel Palestine.

Netanyahu being a major crook seems like it’s also an important factor.

What music has TheMotte been enjoying lately?

For my part, here is a list of albums I've been frequenting (listed in alphabetical order, not by preference). It's not exhaustive and I've restricted my pick to an album per artist, to prevent myself from filling it up with all the same people.

  1. Amon Tobin - ISAM (2011)

  2. Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)

  3. Arovane - Atol Scrap (1999)

  4. Autechre - Exai (2013)

  5. Blanck Mass - World Eater (2017)

  6. Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (2013)

  7. Bogdan Raczynski - Samurai Math Beats (1999)

  8. Ceephax Acid Crew - Camelot Arcade (2018)

  9. Clark - Turning Dragon (2008)

  10. Culprate - Deliverance (2014)

  11. Daniel Avery - Drone Logic (2013)

  12. Floating Points - Crush (2019)

  13. Grischa Lichtenberger - Re: Phgrp (2019)

  14. Iglooghost - Neō Wax Bloom (2017)

  15. Jon Hopkins - Immunity (2013)

  16. Kettel - Wingtip (2016)

  17. Matmos - Ultimate Care II (2016)

  18. Mouse on Mars - Idiology (2001)

  19. Mr. Oizo - Moustache (Half a Scissor) (2005)

  20. Oberman Knocks - Conder-Rhyptik (2022)

  21. Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden Of Delete (2015)

  22. Plaid - Polymer (2019)

  23. Qebrus - Exophobia (2012)

  24. Rival Consoles - Howl (2015)

  25. Rob Clouth - Zero Point (2020)

  26. Robert Logan - Flesh (2015)

  27. Ryoji Ikeda - Ultratronics (2022)

  28. Skee Mask - Compro (2018)

  29. Squarepusher - Go Plastic (2001)

  30. Sunnk - Weaving Ritual (2021)

  31. Syndrone - Salmataxia (2004)

  32. The Flashbulb - Kirlian Selections (2005)

  33. Tim Hecker - Konoyo (2018)

  34. Vinter in Vegas - Mamachine (2011)

  35. Xanopticon - Liminal Space (2003)

EDIT: added more

Alice in Chains’ Dirt is a great depressing hard rock album

I'm a tik tok user, and there are a lot of micro-artists on there. It's interesting to see the different marketing strategies they employ. A common one is to post the same sound (that is one of their songs) over and over again in different videos with text overlaid like, "Reposting again in the hopes that my audience finds me." Something like that. Another strategy is only posting the catchiest part of your song (often unfinished), and build anticipation that way for the eventual release.

A couple examples of the latter strategy off the top of my head are Third Class Citizen by Calva Louise (https://youtube.com/watch?v=nyEw5ABOiOs) and Grief by Flake (https://youtube.com/watch?v=zSUHPYTStkQ).

Unfortunately, I'm almost always disappointed by the final product, but it is an interesting development to me in general.

I like some of the music in your list, but don't recognize many artists, so I'll have to check them out.

A few months ago I mentioned at work that I drink a lot of grape juice with seltzer (carbonated) water as a kind of ersatz grape soda, and my coworkers gave me weird looks. Is this a strange use for seltzer water? My mother got me into the habit many years ago.

Now that I think of it, I have no idea what any other uses of seltzer water could be in the first place. It obviously doesn't taste particularly good if drunk straight. Wikipedia and Google seem to suggest that its primary use is for mixing alcoholic drinks (as seen in at least one Three Stooges film), with some alternative applications to cooking and cleaning, but that all seems too niche for Costco to be selling gigantic cases of it. What do you use seltzer water for?

Funny, I just recently got myself a carbonating machine as a reward for myself for my new postdoc position. Where I'm from, it's normal to drink essentially nothing but carbonated water; Before I had the machine, buying & transporting the bottles was a huge pain. I wouldn't drink uncarbonated water, it tastes terrible to me (on top of the fact that local water here is very hard & carbonation cancels that out to some degree).

Europeans seem to drink a lot of carbonated water, given as in almost every restaurant there if I order water I get asked if I want still or carbonated. So maybe in the US people of the same descent do the same? I used to drink a lot of carbonated water when we had our own carbonating machine, but that broke long ago and I'm lazier now, so I just prefer tea. But when I did, I didn't find the taste too off-putting.

I drink it strait, German-style. I also mix it with fruit juices, again, German-style, although these days it's mostly lime or lemon to cut down on carbs. It's strange that German-Americans didn't import this practice into the US.

It's strange that German-Americans didn't import this practice into the US.

What makes you think they didn't? It's pretty common in the midwest in some communities for example. I think it's relative lack of notoriety is more a case of its competitors (ie, Coke, Pepsi) having enormous marketing budgets and the younger generations not having any attachment to it beyond seeing their parents drink it.

La croix and other flavored seltzers are hugely popular among yuppies.

If only they could say "croix" correctly.

Sounds like "croy"?

kwuh

I used to drink a lot of carbonated water before I got on the Cococola Zero train. Now I just stick to Coke Zero. Honestly can't tell the difference between real coke and zero, and if I drank as much of the real stuff, I would be obese by now.

You can also use carbonated water for a crispier batter for deep frying.

Drinking seltzer water straight is pretty common in Europe and Latin America, but I suppose some Americans are only familiar with it as an ingredient in mixed alcoholic drinks. Making your own soda, shrubs, or something like a sekahnjebin are all perfectly fine uses, whether you have some oversweetened juice that needs to be diluted, some overripe fruit that needs to be used up, or just want a refreshing drink.

I don't drink it personally, but my girlfriend uses it the same way you do: make fizzy juice. And mixed drinks sometimes, but usually juice.

I don’t personally drink seltzer water straight, being the backwards redneck that I am, but I see hipsters drinking it straight all the time. Well, either that or filling the bottle up with something else.

Currants, especially black, are one thing I really miss from childhood and they're stupidly rare in the US

If I remember correctly, currants a host to some disease or pest that is really devastating to native American flora, so all currant products are imported.

IIRC some of the CO2 dissolves into acid giving it a slight sour taste.

Conversely, I find seltzer on its own terrible. Tastes like chalk to me.

Huh, one of the reasons to drink carbonated as opposed to uncarbonated water is that it makes hard water taste less chalk-y.

When I huff straight nitrogen I get dizzy

I mix those little squeeze bottles of drink flavorings with mineral water for my ersatz sodas. I also drink it by itself.

I mix it with shrubs as an alternative to sodas.

I think it tastes great by itself.

What have people of this forum been doing with all this new AI technology - GPT etc?

Or was there already a thread for this?

I have seen several things that are impressive but frivolous - anything actually useful?

Is there a website to tell me what I should try doing with AI?

I'm still in the "fucking around and having fun" stage.

Rumors of GPT-4's wokeness have been greatly somewhat exaggerated. While ChatGPT 3.5 would spaz out at any mention of race, gender, or religion, ChatGPT 4 is much more context aware and will comply with slightly-edgy requests as long as you make it clear you are not necessarily looking for factual information.

Another HBD question(the motte's favorite topic). What is the reason for higher north-east Asian IQ? Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmins all have plausible enough explanations, but my understanding is that the hajnal line doesn't cover east Asia and that most inhabitants there were rice farmers for thousands upon thousands of years, not scholars.

Me.

I think there’s a correct motte; the topic is raised overwhelmingly by people interested in the bailey.

"It has not been conclusively ruled out" is as far as I'm willing to go in terms of supporting it. I think the role of culture is underestimated.

Yes.

But what can you do with that information

Refute the presumption that difference in outcome is evidence of discrimination.

Would it be a better world on net?

As stated above: no one can answer that.

But, let's say it wasn't: should we necessarily care? If you're the guy missing out on university and job placements and harangued for keeping the blacks (but not the Asians somehow) down, you may just want it over with and fuck the world (who honestly cares about "the world on net" in any serious way besides EA-types tbh?)

I dislike utilitarians in large part because of this very line of thinking. Those questions are far too hard to answer. You presume to know the answer, that the world would necessarily be worse, and then use that assumption to justify elite control.

In deontology, there is no justifying or downplaying the noble lie. In utilitarianism there is. That is the difference.

More broadly, you can permit evil so long as you think it'll work out in the end. Dangerous way to think when predicting the future is as hard as it is.

A world in which we do not conspire to lie to people for political purposes. If it's not okay for the CDC or WHO to lie to the public about facemasks or vaccines in the context of COVID because they think they know what's good for us, why should it be okay for them to lie to us about heredity? If we don't trust people with the truth, then why have a democracy at all?

Individuals learn to deal with the fact that they are too short to play in the NBA or not smart enough to win a Nobel prize in physics. Inhabitants of small countries learn to deal with the fact that they will never be a great power and need to play the game of geopolitics more wisely than superpowers that can blunder from one mistake to the next with few consequences. We all must come to terms with our own mortality. I don't see how this is any different, and in fact it may not even need to be an eternal truth if we invest in embryo selection technology.

I tend to believe it's nowhere near as false as blank-slaters would like, and not as true as HBDers would like.

I think my own take is a little different--HBDers are correct on the facts, but then seem to conclude that genetic factors are immune to policy, which I do not believe. Is intelligence determined by some combination of genes and environment/nature and nurture/etc.? Yes, certainly. However, I don't think you can split the influences into "X% this, Y% that," because the factors are not distinct--they heavily influence each other over time, to the point that they cannot be disentangled.

Tracing out one example--the impact of culture. Culture is obviously not itself genetic, though it is inherited. At a minimum, a culture contains some priority scale of values, and grants status to those who better exemplify the values emphasized. Higher cultural status is very directly linked to success in procreation, which means that later generations will be more populated by those who achieve more cultural success in earlier generations.

If you have a culture that highly values communicative creativity, then you'll get more competitive wit, wordplay, and language skills that tolerate more complexity in exchange for finer-grained precision in description. Those who perform well generate more of the next generation, which will have more skill at symbol-manipulation on average than previous. If this emphasis persists, the culture will itself evolve to handle an increased number of poets...and lawyers. The impact cycles back and forth between cultural success generating genetic success, which influences cultural evolution that modifies the definition of cultural success, and so on.

There are also multiple success and failure modes for a given population, as well. A culture that presents multiple high-priority values that exist in some natural tension with each other may find itself less subject to culturally-influenced genetic drift, and therefore more stable over time. Whether this is a success or failure mode depends on the surrounding circumstances--is there a need for more rapid adaptation? A population may find itself in a sociological niche that favors specialization, and can become distinct from nearby genetically separate populations remarkably rapidly. (If a clan is told, "you guys are all blacksmiths now, and we're paying a lot for the best swords," I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids to have unusually developed upper-body musculature, and probably pretty decent heat-tolerance.) Or a culture may decide to pick super-hardmode, and deprioritize procreation as a value. The hedonic draw of sex isn't enough to guarantee replacement-rate fertility; cultural support is necessary.

Tl;dr: 'natural' selection is culturally mediated.

If a clan is told, "you guys are all worthless, and we're not expecting anything of value from you before you're 30" I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids at 20 to be unusually underdeveloped, and probably pretty low in general maturity.

I take it one step further and claim this holds across populations, too.

Sure, very likely. The point I was trying to set up with my toy blacksmith example was not just a population group being shoved into a niche ("you're all blacksmiths now") but also that the group had a motivation to lean into the niche ("paying a lot for the best swords"). If a group highly values excellence in a particular area, then individual excellence in that area should be a correspondingly strong status boost.

In your phrasing, crushing status plausibly should lead to lower average performance, but you'd still likely see internal measures of status within the group, emigrants that seek status elsewhere, or other reactions.

I second this. HBDers seem to almost entirely dismiss culture and nurture as factors in IQ. They aren't the only factors, genetics are important too, but they aren't inconsequential.

Yeah, I don't believe HBD at all. I'm not really open to discussion on it though (hence why I don't discuss it or even announce my position normally).

I’m in the “95% culture, 5% genes” column.

Cold winters, The hajnal line has far more to do with individualism than it does IQ.

Compared to neighboring mongolia or siberia, IQ is much higher while winters are much milder.

IQ is very helpful when a group of farmers needs to anually plan ahead to have enough food to survive the winter. They can weigh the grain and develop a plan for food shortages ahead of time (eg try to stock up on salt fish, dig up any edible plant roots, flee south). Invaders probably aren't going to come in and harvest all of your grain. Typically it's possible to hide the harvest for the winter if it's at risk.

There's usually a certain coldness in those societies -- if your neighbors keep starving due to their own mistakes it's tempting to just let them die instead of risking your family to save them.

Mongolia's history is much more pastoral. There's a lot of investment in each animal. Invaders stealing animals is common. So survival is more random. Saving your dumb cousin is worthwhile if he's willing to fight to the death to save your animals.

Generally in sub-saharn Africa planning is difficult because the threats are more random. Food is more available in the winter / dry season. The big risks are random events -- invasion, disease, megafauna eating your crops, predators eating your people. If you have a food shortage it's probably local so trading or invading your neighbors are options.

Obviously Africa is a big place and there are exceptions to the usual threats, eg Ukara Island. I'm not aware of any IQ surveys that refect that.

In extremely cold places different survival strategies emerge. The Inuit / Eskimos are pure hunters for the winter and their society focusses heavily on conformity since sharing kills is crucial.

There's also the cube square law. Larger heads get overheated more easily in hot climates.

Siberians, Mongolians and Inuits can be handwaved away by saying nomadic pastoralism cancels out the benefits of living in a cold climate.

I quibble a bit with the "much higher" here. The starting point for Northeast Asians was already quite high.

It's quite interesting that Yakuts have similar IQ scores to Ethnic Russians- most indigenous groups aren't. And it does appear that badly developed and terrible countries in the general vicinity have oddly high IQs compared to similar countries. That significantly changes my priors on the cold winters hypothesis.

The explanation I have read is that the equal division of property under Chinese inheritance law combined with higher birthrates among wealthier and presumably more capable farmers led to a trickle-down effect analogous to Gregory Clark's argument for the English gentry in A Farewell to Alms. Pressure to succeed on the Imperial Civil Service Exams may have been another factor, but only affected a small part of the population.

Does this apply in Japan and Korea, as well? The argument from different inheritance law seems plausible, but any explanation has to cover China, Japan, and Korea because all have elevated IQs.

Both copied their institutions more or less directly from China after this system was already established, as did Vietnam, so my guess would be yes.

Economy+politics 101 question for someone who knows: Let's say that the central bank of country A raises the interest rate a little bit. Which groups gain and which groups loses from this? What if the reverse happens and the central bank lowers the interest rate, are the winners and losers reversed as well then? It seems self-evident that people with lots of loans and few assets (e.g. new families with unpaid student loans who just took on another loan to buy an expensive home) would lose from higher interest rates, is that correct? What's a fuller picture of the interest rate special-interest groups?

Let's say I'm a young professional with a good wage, some minor investments and no major loans. For purely selfish reasons, should I want interest rates to go up or down?

(Much of the media discussion about monetary policy centers on what's "good for the economy", I think we should discuss the redistributive effects more. Does that make sense?)

It seems self-evident that people with lots of loans and few assets (e.g. new families with unpaid student loans who just took on another loan to buy an expensive home) would lose from higher interest rates, is that correct?

Not necessarily, if the loans are fixed-rate and were taken out when interest rates were low, and then interest rates go up, the value of that loan in today-dollars just went down. There's no guarantee you'll be able to take advantage of this, but it could happen. Though yes, if you have to take out new debt, you're in a much worse position if interest rates are high.

Let's say I'm a young professional with a good wage, some minor investments and no major loans. For purely selfish reasons, should I want interest rates to go up or down?

IMO, you should want rates to be high. One of the ways you can think about investing for retirement is that you are using your money today to buy money 30 years from now. Higher interest rates lower the price of 2053 dollars in 2023 dollars, so you get more bang for your buck. This is true even if you are investing in stocks, as stock valuations discount expected future cash flows by the interest rate.

This all assumes the US economy keeps on chugging pretty much as it has been for the last 300 years, which may not be a valid assumption.

So, what are you reading?

I'm starting Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer, after a re-watch of the LoTR films. It's an "other side" story from Mordor's perspective mentioned occasionally on /r/rational. Hopefully it doesn't accomplish this by ruining the "good guys" entirely, but I suppose we'll see.

Slogging through Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History.

Taking a break from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. It's a necromancy murder mystery in a refreshingly unfamiliar setting. I'm quite enjoying it so far.

I also picked up a couple older reference books, including an aircraft encyclopedia with some excellent plates. I enjoy looking at history in this lens.

I've been reading The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos. It's evidently somewhat infamous as being written by a Swedish man who volunteered for the allegedly Nazi-aligned Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine during 2014-2015, well before the time of the 2022 Russian invasion.

It was initially set to be published by Ian McCollum's Headstamp Publishing. Ian is a fairly mainstream source of firearms trivia, and his imprint mostly publishes books about various intricacies of firearms manufacturing and history. Apparently they for some reason agreed to publish this book, then a bunch of people flipped out (I've never seen it specified exactly who flipped out or what specifically they did) and they cancelled it. It's now being published by the considerably more heterodox Antelope Hill. I'll refrain from taking a position on them, you're welcome to take a look at what other things they publish if you want to.

Anyways, I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. For all of the furor, I haven't seen anything all that remarkable yet. It's a moderately interesting tale of a man who volunteered to fight in a somewhat poorly-equipped informal formation in a mostly low-intensity and undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The author seems to have suffered some reputational issues in Sweden due to his volunteering. I haven't yet seen the book express any opinions about racial issues, Jews, or pretty much any political issue aside from opposing Russian expansionism and imperialism. The author does liberally refer to thinks he doesn't like as "gay", but it seems to me to be more of a 90s-style meme than actual hostility to homosexuals. I don't really see anything here worth cancelling over.

I haven't actually started reading it yet, but I picked up The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation because I think, without the author necessarily intending it, it might serve as an argument for the good sides (in terms of economc development at least) of British rule in Ireland.

The potato famine of the 1840s and the century of population loss due to emigration that followed gives the misleading impression that Ireland was always a relatively tiny country. But it had nearly half the population of England and Wales in the 1750s (roughly 3.2 million vs 6.5 million) and Dublin was Europe's 14th largest city, on par with Berlin. The story of how this happened should be an interesting one.

Currently reading D.E. Stevenson's Five Windows, a bildungsroman about a young Scot making his way in post-war Britain and cultivating his gift for writing. Great so far.

Aside: I volunteer at a non-profit bookstore in my neighborhood on Saturdays. I started reading Five Windows last week, and so yesterday, I went to see if there were still some D.E. Stevenson books there. Indeed there were six or seven. I thought, "Forgotten British writer of light romances, dead for 50 years - surely those will still be there when I finish up. I'll go do my shift." Naturally, someone bought all of them while I was working. That'll teach me. But really, I'm happy to think that there's someone out there with the same taste that I have.

I'm reading "Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame" by Fr. Stephen Freeman. I like reading his blog, he's a very gentle and straightforward writer, and this is a nice little book he released a couple of weeks ago, and about my speed lately.

The clear plastic ones seem to last the longest at my office.

In my childhood bedroom I just put a partial tile floor under the desk.

“Learn to code” has been the go to response to people laid off due to automation or other technological advances. What is going to be the equivalent if developers more or less become redundant with the rapid advances in LLMs? Learn to craft?

Learn to cater, I imagine.

I remember first hearing 'learn to code' after a study was published, where they trained some of the miners to code as a way to retrain them because coal mines were shutting down. This lead to smug twitter responses of 'learn to code' anytime someone brought up things like clean coal, towns shutting down, etc.

So now, I tell those people to 'learn to mine!'

We will probably need the lithium

Learn to entrepreneur.

Probably something about everyone being a carer -- eldercare, childcare, service jobs, without much thought going toward whether or not the displaced people are temperamentally suited to that, followed by even more "disabilities." The schools are already adding "social and emotional learning," in a way that assumes the recipient is already well socialized and doesn't need to explicitly be taught things like "don't say your unpopular opinions in public."

Ideally we will shift towards valuing and assigning status to people who build and maintain community. Women used to have this as their primary role, but after they entered the workforce there was a gaping hole where pillars of the community used to be.

There can be negatives to tons of community, sure, but I think we’ve found that the fetishization of individualism is just as bad, if not worse.

I think we’ve found that the fetishization of individualism

Really?

Yes, individualism has problems. But without it, who get to decide what's good for everyone else? Are we really going to ignore all the times authoritarianism has lead to problems?

Take free speech for example. Yes, some people say bad things. But historically, when we gave people the power to control speech to result was much worse. Just focusing on the bad thing people say and calling anyone who defends free speech as a fetishist isn't a good argument.

Individualism is not the same thing as liberalism or free speech, although they are definitely conflated. Ideally in a well functioning liberal community, people are prosocial and help others out. They focus on more than just their individual wants/needs.

I’d argue individualism is focusing on yourself to the exclusion of others, and is bad. Indeed, with porn and so much sensory satisfaction available, I’m comfortable labeling it a fetish.

Just focusing on the bad thing people say and calling anyone who defends free speech as a fetishist isn't a good argument.

Maybe I missed something; was that an argument anyone has made?

Not coincidentally, sites like this one will continue to revolt at the merest suggestion of activism.

For most activists, the end justify the means. You're really not allowed to be critical because it's more important to be a team player (the cause is more important).

You really can't be an activist and be rational.

That...is really not true. More important doesn't mean absolutely important; it trades off. On the margin, organizations which don't take criticism will bloat and fail. But that means getting replaced by groups and ideologies which don't, even if they hold the exact same fundamental beliefs.

That's purely a dictate from the mods, rather than the users.

To be fair, it would be even harder to attract a varied userbase if we were coordinating to do activism here.

I don't know.

This site is incredibly steeped in Internet liberalism. The obvious aspect is our free-speech policy, but more generally, having a community based around getting into (reasonably) civil arguments is weird. It's part of the Internet tradition going back through atheist discussion boards and federated BBS. Take away the "no recruiting" rule, stop moderating for it, and the community will die. Not because the activists win, but because they are incompatible with the interesting bits of the site.

There's a certain irony in saying "gosh this individualism thing is awful rough" to a community summoned by those principles.

"Put on the VR headset. Get in the gamer pod. And don't come out ever again."

I sure hope so. Retvrning to crafts would be a pretty optimistic scenario with few downsides that I can see.

I'm worried there will be a lot less market disruption, and a lot more mass scale digital surveillance.

I am a software developer (I know, so unique around here!) at the beginning of my career. I expect to get an offer from a trading company next week which will easily double my salary, possibly more depending on the market. The tech stack is amazing and exactly what I wanted to work with. The office and benefits look great. People seemed fun when I met the team and I was even assured that overtime is rare. I will get training in finance subjects so this is a perfect gateway into the industry. All in all, if one is to treat a job as simply a source of income, I cannot do much better than this. Especially with the current crappy labour market.

But I can't shake away the feeling that something is wrong here. The company is a market-maker in one of those areas of finance almost entirely uncoupled from the real economy and became pure speculation, so it makes all this money via basically imposing a tax on gullible layman day traders. There is absolutely nothing of value being produced. I am worried that when I get a bit older, I will regret that I wasted my potential on something so useless and zero-sum. Especially since until this point I have always worked on projects with a real "product". Often code that goes into things you could hold in your hand etc. It gives me enormous satisfaction, but pay is meh and life just seems to be getting more expensive. I know there is some value in providing liquidity to the markets, but I cannot fool myself enough to ignore that this whole operation is just a bunch of very smart people using their learning and wits to leech off the broader society. I had an informal lunch interview round and it felt a tiny bit embarrassing to be served lunch by someone who is at least doing something useful and in turn has to serve these people who aren't.

I know some people here work in finance. Would appreciate your perspective or anyone else with an opinion

Take the money, a few years is nothing and will pass quickly and if you are not stupid you should be able to gather some momentium to your own finances in that time. You can start worrying about meaningful work when you have a house, security, etc.

At the end of the day, meaningful work is for the rich and peasants. If you are rich, fine, and if you are ok being a peasant this is also fine but don't labour under dangerous illusions.

What's the cost in trying it out? Jumping ship after 6 to 12 months is not uncommon for a SWE, especially one early in his career. My advice would be to take the offer, and see if you find it fun or tolerable. If so, great. If not, the extra cash will allow you to take 6 - 12 months of vacation, soul searching, and job hunting, and still end up net zero in terms of income. The firm will, presumably, also be good for your CV, meaning you'll find the next job hunt even easier. Just be wary of life style inflation if you plan on switching jobs to something less lucrative.

I don't work in finance, but I can easily see how a zero-sum financial transaction from one perspective can be positive sum for the economy as a whole. If gullible layman day traders effectively hand their money to you, it sucks to be them but at least no value is destroyed, it's only transferred. If there were instead nobody smart in finance to take the other side of their bets, and their money ended up in the hands of ventures that can't possibly succeed, it would get destroyed just as surely but so would the value it represented. Even if the counterfactual were that they end up funding some safe-but-low-yield investment instead of funding startups that would have wildly succeeded, that's still a real loss due to opportunity cost, although in that case it's harder to say a priori that this is worse than the utility lost via decreasing marginal value of money when poorer amateurs lose gambles against richer experts.

Most of the zero sum part is in capturing a percentage of the positive sum that would have existed anyway. Especially in day trading, where the company has already received investments and the value created by the financial sector is just creating accurate and speedy value assessments, as well as liquidity.

Ie, maybe we have 100 traders/investors who, collectively, create $200 million in surplus value, $100 million of which is captured by them (and $100 million diffuses into the companies they invested in and customers and whatnot). A "fair" split would give each investor about $1 million in profit. But maybe one investor has an algorithm which let's them respond to news updates 10% faster than the others. And maybe this speedier algorithm actually helps create an additional $1k in value due to the more accurate valuations of companies. And then they use it to arbitrage $50 million of the surplus from the other traders, leaving them with $50.001 million, and everyone else with $500k. And then someone else makes an algorithm that's 15% faster, which creates an additional $1.5k in value (but costs $1 million to design and implement) which let's them take the top arbitrage spot and get the $50 million, and the 10% guy can only arbitrage $10 million, and the other 98 people have to split the remaining 40 million.

Ie, the group is creating surplus by filling an economic niche. The more competitive people are genuinely better and thus create more value, but most of their gains come from a larger slice of the surplus created by the nice. If they failed to exist, the second best person would create most of the value, so the marginal benefit from each increase in competitiveness is less than the potential profits extracted from capturing a larger slice of the pie.

This happens in a lot of physical industries. Amazon or Walmart aren't uniquely responsible for all of the profits they gain, because in their absence someone else would fill the role. And maybe that person would only be 90% as good and create 90% as much value. So in some sense the better company is uniquely responsible for 10% of their profits, and has shared credit for 90%. But instead they just get to keep all of it instead.

It's a weird issue, because we do want to incentivize the best people to be doing stuff, and the winner takes all system does accomplish that. But there is an inherent unfairness and issues with rentseeking behaviors which actually destroy wealth because they cost more than they actually create, but are worth it anyway because they capture more of the surplus created by the niche.

This is a very accurate description. I had long conversations with finance people before (including the engineers of the company I am about to join) and this is exactly their point of view. Nothing about accurate pricing etc. They see each market as rent producing asset which you capture by being smarter and writing better and faster algorithms. Then you take these rents and attack your rivals sitting on top of other rent seeking mountains. You practically have to because otherwise they will have too many rent sources and come dominate you. It is not very different to feudal competition.

If you believe Caplan, and I do, teachers are useless. If you believe Hanson, and I do, doctors are useless. Psychologists, advertisers, lawyers, useless useless useless, mostly zero-sum. Even the manufacture of widgets, how many do people need really.

As you note, bankers (the few honest ones) do provide some liquidity and price signals, and the market deems those important. It’s hard to justify the massive premium they get for that, but I think it's fair to say that historically those who tried to ‘curb banker’s speculation, usury etc’ have ended up harming the economy more than a naive anti-banker view would suggest. (And by that I don’t mean we should bailout failed banks. Let darwinism sort them out)

Day traders are players, it's not like you'd be "stealing" from an uninvolved party. So if I wasn't seeing clear harm, I would take the money, but I find all jobs almost equally unsatisfying, so you may come to a different conclusion.

I haven't worked in finance but I have changed my mind about the morality of certain financial instruments enough times to understand that my formulation of "morality" isn't written in stone.

What if OP is wrong about the morality of what his company does? Does he understand the financial system as a whole good enough to guarantee his intuition? I mean Marxists think owning capital at all is some form of immoral let alone financializing it. What if OP changes his mind about what he considers moral or not in a year or two, I certainly did that many times in my short life. What gives OP such a strong reason to feel something that is legal and fills a need in the market is immoral, it's not like he is going to launder money for criminals who murder children with chainsaws.

If he finds his job truly immoral he can quit, but if he doesn't take it he is doing it at great opportunity cost and just might find himself holding the bag a few years down the line. What if AI ends up blowing up the world? Should the people who worked for PyTorch in 2017 take moral responsibility for what their creation has facilitated? How does he know he isn't already in a situation like that? How abstract do you really want to go? Should we consider Alan Turing and Dennis Ritchie to be evil?

"Feeling good about what I do" is such a hippie-goody two-shoes sentiment. You'd don't simply choose to say that you have to first be able to afford saying that. I'm not dissing OP but preemptively dissing anyone who tries to fool him into not getting richer*.

Maybe as the OP, I can expand a bit more on my worldview concerning finance. I am not a "liberal" in the American sense nor anything to further left. Most of my understanding of the role of markets and finance in society comes from reading Polanyi, who doesn't take a very positive view on it but also has the common sense to credit these institutions with enormous amounts of economic development and peace between nations connected via international finance. But I also think that since 80s and especially since 2009 the finance class has evolved into some sort of grotesque aristocracy that warps most of real economy and state power into constantly feeding its members more resources while using those resources extremely anti-socially (i.e. conspicuous consumption and buying more influence).

I am not as naive as to literally reject the opportunity to become a minor member of a modern day aristocracy. That is why I applied and passed the gazillion difficult interview rounds after all. I still hope to be able to jump ship to a more product oriented company in the future if the tech sector manages to lift its nose and pay me a comparable salary

Ask yourself this, is some sort of abstract sense of "having done something" worth more than real bills in your bank account? Real bills that you can donate to charity, use to help your family, use to help your friends, use to buy your mom gifts? Use to buy your wife things?

Having been presented with similar decisions in life, my answer is, "it depends". I've made plenty of money without doing anything that I think is immoral and I intend to keep it that way. There are jobs that are easier and better paying that I've elected to pass on because I don't think I'd be happy feeling like my money was received by an extractive scam.

That is well and good, but I think it is extremely reckless and self-aggrandizing and myopic and a whole host of other bad things; to tell someone to prioritize their abstract notions of morality which might or might not be well-informed [1] over real money. Which has real potential to make the world better in the desired ways.

Doubling ones salary is no joke.

[1] https://www.themotte.org/post/426/smallscale-question-sunday-for-march-26/79754?context=8#context

If you were someone I knew and posed me this question in real life, my response would be "quit pussyfooting and double your salary before you get slapped, you moron".

That is pretty much what my friends are also telling me lol.

I love the Hajnalbrain cooperatebot expression. And being Turkish, when I read through the experiment I was initially just thinking along the lines of "yeah no if anyone punishes me I fuck them". So I guess not much use fighting my "nature"..

This depends strongly on who you are. I ‘sold out’ for a higher paying job and deeply regret it, caused me a ton of stress and health problems. I’m now taking much less pay for a position with more responsibility and work, but I’m easily 3x happier than I was.

As @Walterodim said above, it really depends on your circumstances and what you value. This could be a good moment to reflect on what you want to accomplish in your life.

Why do you regret it? Because it was stressful and health wrecking or because of something to do with the job content?

A bit of both, it was a service but not a good one. The stress was the bigger issue imo, had a lot of negative spillover into other parts of my life.

I did my own, less nuanced but better-sourced analysis:

3.9% is not that different from 4.5%. But the assumption that each murderer commits exactly one murder is suspect. The substack article says "the actual ratio of Victims:Murderers is near 1:1", but doesn't give any justification for this assumption, nor does it cite any evidence. I would intuitively expect this to not be true, but I also have no data on this, and it's harder to measure than any of the statistics I actually cite. Additionally, my assumption that arrest rates reflect reality may not be true. If whites are better at covering up their murders than blacks, we would be disproportionately arresting blacks for murder, which would skew my estimation. Plus, I just assumed away the possibility that women commit any murder. Overall, my number is probably an overestimate.

Finally, if you run the numbers for whites you get about 1%. If this also seems unusually high to you, consider that your priors are likely formed from the people you meet in real life. Murderers are disproportionately likely to be in prison, where you won't interact with them.

Well, his source says: "6.5% of Black Males (15-74) commit murder over the past 60 years, assuming a 1:1 Murderer:Victim ratio, based on 1,084,990 actual murder victims (1968-2021)." He justifies that assumption thusly: "Note: a Victim can have multiple Murderers and a Murderer can have multiple Victims. These both are a minority of murder offenses, and are in the same order of magnitude. Because of this, the actual ratio of Victims:Murderers is near 1:1." That is rather dubious claim; s/he has no idea whether the ratio is actually 1:1.

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