domain:alexepstein.substack.com
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
You're claiming that the Wikipedia editors are just neutrally applying their internal procedures.
It's crazy that you would say this considering that I acknowledged that there are plenty of rules that can be bent to make things happen. My actual claim is that there isn't evidence that the photo was removed for this reason, and that the actual reason the photo was removed is actually quite unambiguous.
What is a way to disprove yours? Isn't it unfalsifiable?
If you upload the photo to Wikipedia with licensing info and it gets removed, I'll agree that the licensing rule is also abused.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Yeah, I've never seen an image on Wikipedia without licensing information, and I've never seen an image on Commons that is copyrighted.
How would you be able to tell that the image had licensing information after it was deleted?
Yes, this user regularly does what seem to be (based on the rate and uniformity of log messages) semi-automated deletions of photos without licensing sections, including those illustrating such hot button issues as some kind of "flag map of Embera-Wouanaan", the logo of Sporge-Jorgen, and of course, the accursed demodex mite.
How is that evidence of anything?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
If you upload the image to Wikipedia and state that it's free use (similar to the Charleston example), I do not think it will be removed due to missing licensing info (which is what happened last time). Will it stay up forever and ever? I have no idea.
You're claiming that the Wikipedia editors are just neutrally applying their internal procedures. We're claiming that the photo was removed because the Wikipedia editors don't want it to be published on Wikipedia, and are using any procedural rule as an excuse. A way to disprove my belief would be to reupload the photo and address the issues from the previous removal. What is a way to disprove yours? Isn't it unfalsifiable?
By the way, it seems that the image was not even deleted manually, but rather by automation.
Maybe? This doesn't explicitly say anything about what could have happened to the image.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
If someone deleted the Charlottesville photo, and kept the mugshot, would you be able to tell that the policy was misapplied? If not, how can you tell that it was applied correctly here?
Yeah, I've never seen an image on Wikipedia without licensing information, and I've never seen an image on Commons that is copyrighted.
And you have evidence no one bothered writing such a section for the mugshot?
Yes, this user regularly does what seem to be (based on the rate and uniformity of log messages) semi-automated deletions of photos without licensing sections, including those illustrating such hot button issues as some kind of "flag map of Embera-Wouanaan", the logo of Sporge-Jorgen, and of course, the accursed demodex mite.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
Conspiracy theories, startups and skepticism
tl;dr read some stuff , i am kinda skpetical of outlier startup founders being totally honest, but still will pursue this path lol
For the longest time, I have simply laughed at people like Alex Jones or David Icke because the Lizard and male supplements are obvious telltales of something being off. Something changed recently thanks to Twitter.
Ryan Breslow was one of the youngest billionaires. Stanford dropout started bolt, on the surface he sounds like the ideal YC candidate because no matter what Paul Graham may tell you, they absolutely care about your uni, especially Stanford, a cs undergrad dropout from there is about as blue chip a prospect you can be. Yet he never got in. Bolt was worth billions in 2022 and Ryan was doing well, one day he probably took more drugs than usual and went on a tirade against VCs. Pointing out how YC and Paul Graham (PG) wronged him as Bolt would go against Stripe run by Pauls golden boys. He also pointed out the Instacart incident where the VC firm Sequioa got Instacarts CFO as a partner so that he could make a report nitpicking the firms issue which would help them oust their founder and CEO as sequioa wanted them to IPO but the CEO did not. Well the dude got replaced and instacart IPOd.
Here is the interesting part, Ryan later nuked all of this. His allegations about VCs and the startup world being cliques came true because not only did he "leave" bolt but he got lawsuits and is worth way less than a billion now. The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this. At first, I was fairly convinced that this is because Ryan is not important but Bolt is worth more than Mistral or every single LLM wrapper put together. PG does have favorites who are objectively bad people. Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.
Here is where the conspiracies start, I read some stuff on chuckstack.com which prompted this thread. Charles C. Johnson is not a very good source of news which should not discourage us from throwing out everything he says. He gets a lot wrong but he clearly gets stuff right too. His posts on Thiel having worked for the FBI and how he stopped donating money the moment one of his boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances raise good points. He is also the first to mention the ties Andreesen Horowitz have to Saudis for raising money.
Edit - i could not find his post so posting the source he cited here
Now I am a middling or below middling wannabe tech startup guy in case you guys did not follow my previous accounts (u/practical_romantic being the latest before this one). My reason for pointing this out is to not be that one guy who blames everyone else for not succeeding, plenty of people do make a fuck ton of money despite zero help of any kind. I simply wish to put these as an example of the fact that there is a good possibility of there being far more happening at the very top of the VC/ founder space that we are totally in the dark about.
Human beings innately desire heroes in some capacity, Achilles in the Iliad is seen as a martyr however Aidan Maclear has a different reading where he points out that in the Odyssey, Achilles tells Odysseus that he regretted dying in the war for the higher good, thus him being a martyr is an incomplete reading as martyrs see their sacrifice as an honourable thing. My people have for the longest time considered Martyrdom or Veergati (our word for it) as the highest deed one can do besides ofc winning the war. Similarly, I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.
My relatives who work in politics and intelligence agencies share a similar nihilistic view towards the world and how most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated. The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world whereas the BJP is hyper-leftist, the first people or party to actively promote BR Ambedkar as a pan-national icon and pay people of lower castes to marry into higher castes. No publication that is popular or any public intellectual pieces this together. Nearly 100 percent of all Indians cannot see reality this way but it is pretty obvious when you take an objective look at things from a detached perspective.
Same goes for electoral politics. The average election has had enough booth capturing and suspect things happening that it would be considered rigged by Western standards yet you cannot prove it empirically. The west is not third world so me being skeptical may only make sense here but the underlying skepticism makes me not take anything at face value. Its not that you cant rig elections because of values but its always a question of how much you can get away with. How much of what is true, I am not sure, I just wanted to ask you guys for an honest opinion.
faceh
2hr ago
Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.
Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
I don't understand the question
If someone deleted the Charlottesville photo, and kept the mugshot, would you be able to tell that the policy was misapplied? If not, how can you tell that it was applied correctly here?
There is licensing information, hence the section entitled "Licensing" in large print, which is the requirement (see policy linked above).
And you have evidence no one bothered writing such a section for the mugshot?
The point of the "Licensing" section is to lay out why the image is allowed for use on Wikipedia/Commons. This can be if the image is freely licensed, or (on Wikipedia) if it's copyrighted but still usable under free use. If there is no "Licensing" section, then the image is subject to deletion. I am not sure what the point of confusion is here.
Do you want to make a bet on how long it will stay up if I reupload the image, and state that it's fair use?
If you upload the image to Wikipedia and state that it's free use (similar to the Charleston example), I do not think it will be removed due to missing licensing info (which is what happened last time). Will it stay up forever and ever? I have no idea.
By the way, it seems that the image was not even deleted manually, but rather by automation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Copyright is obviously a license.
A copyright is the right of the copyright holder to decide who can publish a copyrighted work under which conditions. A license is a document written by the copyright holder that specifies those conditions, and who they apply to. So no, copyright is obviously not a license. "Fair use" is an exception in the American copyright law that allows people to publish a copyrighted work if certain conditions are met. "Copyrighted image under fair use" literally means "we have no license for this, but we believe the fair use exceptions apply".
However, as I mentioned, nobody actually did this.
Do you want to make a bet on how long it will stay up if I reupload the image, and state that it's fair use?
Tophattingson
2hr ago
Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
The odds of death that most closely follow that curve is, of all things, covid. Doesn't have a peak for infant mortality, and doesn't have another peak for violent deaths in late teens and early 20s.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
- He's correct regarding the West indoctrinating the populace of places it's conquered. Or at least, I'm not seeing how "setting up Gender Studies programs in Afghanistan" doesn't fall into that column.
- The idea of war crimes actually predates both World Wars; chemical weapons were already against the laws of war when WWI came around.
- The general idea I've seen is that the peace in Europe had very little to do with the UN and a great deal to do with nuclear weapons altering the incentives (it is very hard to come out ahead from a nuclear war).
I'm not defending the rest of TB's claims, though.
If someone reversed what's written under which photo, and it remained unquestinedd by other editors, would you be able to tell something is amiss?
I don't understand the question. If there's no license for a photo, it can be deleted per the stated policy. This is a simple, binary question - does the photo include license information?
edit: Now that I look at it, you cannot upload copyrighted images to Commons at all, even if they are fair use (I did mention I'm not an expert on Wikipedia policy). The mugshot was on Commons, so even if it did have a licensing section, it would have been deleted since it's probably non-free. It would need to have been on Wikipedia, which does allow non-freely licensed images, provided, again, that the TPS report is fully filled out.
There is literally no license for the Charlottesville photo.
There is licensing information, hence the section entitled "Licensing" in large print, which is the requirement (see policy linked above).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
I don't understand why you find this hard to believe considering that's plainly the justification written for the deletion.
Because they can write whatever they want. If someone reversed what's written under which photo, and it remained unquestinedd by other editors, would you be able to tell something is amiss?
This is not one of the (many) rules that can be bent
There is literally no license for the Charlottesville photo.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
"Copyrighted image" is not a license, and neither is "fair use". If this fulfills the requirements, they could just write "fair use" under the mugshot.
Muninn
3hr ago
Interesting piece, thanks for sharing! Reading a lot of that was intensely familiar, though I'd quibble with some of the premises of the series. But I was heartily amused by the talk of Axis II disorders in the DSM III and in fact had originally written a throwaway line about how over-represented personality disorders were on both sides of the mental health industry, but decided it would probably be too distracting. The psychotherapy CPT code graph was likewise spot-on and the talk about medical billing code complexity was as well. As the piece said, we in the MH field actually have it relatively easy, though anyone who's ever messed with interactive complexity knows full well that as with everything in this business, "easy" is relative!
mrvanillasky
3hr ago
Dan Bilzerian, former playboy went on (Piers Morgan)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=KICYv4O03CA] did his anti jeiwhs bit and I could not dp anything but laugh because of how absurd it was. Him saying the things he said and Nick Fuentes acting like a diva on his stream and twitter is poisonous for anything good.
You never want to play the villain, Moldbugs insights back in 2008 still stand. Anyone sane would look at both these things and be turned off unless its thier first time seeing these people whilst also being in on the jokes. Even then, playing a caricature is a good way to repel everyone. Nick who talked about optics back in 2018 to the point where he called Richard Spencer a wignat who was bad for the "movement". Nick is ofc most likely working with the FBI as he was a key member on ground on Jan 6 where he did get people to storm the capitol, many of whom got arrested whereas his primary issues were being on a no fly list.
Similarly, Dan going out there and denying holocaust numbers does not sit well with anyone. You can criticise Jewish people or israel in a sane way. Claiming that they are responsible for everything bad is either dishonest or low iq since progressivism did mutate from Christianity. Simply pointing out how you are against the treatment of gazans and the impact israel has on public policies being linked to out and out holocaust revisionism is a terrible look. His argument about the numbers of the holocaust by the end came off more as a nutcase bitchute tier video than an earnest analysis. Jared Taylor does not get invited due to his calmness during interviews. Many on the right disagree with him, including (spandrell)[https://x.com/spandrell4/status/1854433166561554534] though his conduct is alright.
My ethnicity has little to no problems with either euros or Ashkenazis, I just find the stuff being done by both Nick and Dan as something that would make you laugh for 30 seconds and stay as a disgrace for a few decades. Playing the villain is always bad.
curious_straight_ca
3hr ago
make sure to use o1, it's by far the best at complex reasoning and should be competitive at the later hardest ones, which are the most interesting
curious_straight_ca
4hr ago
It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness
curious_straight_ca
4hr ago
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
curious_straight_ca
4hr ago
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
faceh
4hr ago
Ah, regression to the mean, the eternal enemy of miracle cures and performance enhancing supplements.
I think you make a pretty important point: Many, if not most, drivers in cities don't even want to be there. They are there to get the paycheck to do the things they actually want to do. Thus any "solution" to too many people driving in the city will inevitably end up hollowing out that industrial/urban core of office buildings. We've seen this story before. This kills the city.
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