domain:greyenlightenment.com
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
18m ago
People on twitter are sucking him off dry for paying nerds their true worth.
I was skeptical of his offers. Paying people 100 of millions sound stupid also because of the volatility of what's being done. A big ai winter would look bad to Metas investors.
I did want to ask you about this though as I have zero experience or understanding of finance and markets. Will his overcompensation backfire if the market for AI goes south?
He splurged a lot on VR which whilst admirable doesn't seem to be a household piece of tech. I remember it causing some stock chaos a few years ago. Not sure what this would look like.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
19m ago
Now I want to reread The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
21m ago
I think the "religious, but not spiritual" communities of the US will continue to evaporate: "church as community" becomes less useful of a concept when religious diversity increases.
"Religious and spiritual" communities of active believers will multiply, but will remain generally irrelevant as voting blocks, with the exception of the biggest Evangelical denominations.
Metropolitan Americans will overwhelmingly become either "spiritual, but not religious" or outright nonbelievers.
TitaniumButterfly
22m ago
Yeah that's about right. The hand has been overplayed so egregiously that anyone with half a brain is going to commit the ultimate, unrecoverable crime of noticing.
(Thanks again.)
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Only if they can hold enough of those kids. Mainstream religion is collapsing in America. On a long enough timeline that might lead to a society of tradcaths and Hasidics. But at the moment those are niche communities. The "mainstream" religious don't appear to be sustainable.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
During the Bush administration it was pretty close to at least being co-equal, but by that time it's foundations were crumbling at it could never last and indeed didn't.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
This strikes me as a just so story and maybe a bit limited to engineering. I don't think marketing or law departments work like that. In many marketing departments these days it's a majority hot women at least on the less senior levels.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
My understanding is that the situation with American Orthodoxy is that there's a fair amount of new fervent converts, at least compared to the previous baseline, but the general trend of secularization is also causing people from traditional immigrant communities (Greeks, Russians, Serbs) to drop out, and that they thus far balance each other out. However, if this continues, at some point the growth in new convert-run parishes could be expected to overtake the secularization process, especially if there are marriages and natural growth (though that might require appeal beyond the current category of young men...)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I don't think that Buddhism as such will become that important, but Buddhist stuff will continue to percolate to what could be called "Western folk religion" (compare to Chinese folk religion), ie the mix of vague Christian remnant beliefs, New Age / occult influences, Eastern influences, (often imagined) Western pagan stuff, superstitions, pseudoscience, modern cults like UFO/UAP enthusiasts and QAnon etc ec. that really characterizes what many "secular" people (and some ostensible trad religion believers) actually believe in, at least at some level. Perhaps at some point something new will come out of this mix.
The Catholic church cares and a bunch of traditional Christian churches and systems of morality care. A lot of Churches forbid masturbation and have shame circles where men confess to masturbating and try not to do it. I don't think the Catholics go that far but masturbation is still considered a sin.
Also while in traditional cultures the bride might not care if the groom is a virgin. She will care if he's a known womanizer because she wants him to be faithful to her after the wedding.
2rafa
1hr ago
the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples
Right, interestingly it mirrors a longstanding trend in England of edgier intellectuals (of both the right and left) who want something a little more esoteric and different converting to Catholicism, which has been a thing for a couple of hundred years.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I think America particularly will become more and more secular. I think that the TradCath community will grow but will end up like the Amish or Hasidics. I think the majority will be secularish. Axial age religions are not they only religious framework and Science can replace a lot of what pre-axial religions are very mechanistic and less concerned with morality. Sumerian religion barely had an afterlife and in that sense was rather athiestic. China was morally guided by philosophy more than religion for thousands of years. I don't think a retvrn to societies centered on moralistic religions promising eternal bliss is a given. The intense religiosity of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period seem to be something of an outlier.
I could see a kind of Progressivism as a unifying philosophy combined with many different faiths ala Confucianism. We can see this a little bit with woke people today they don't care what religion you are as long as your beliefs are subservient to woke tenants.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points. Christianity being seen as anti-Gay has significantly harmed it's worth as a moral philosophy to modern western people. Also why the texts of Christianity are very anti materialist it tends not to be seen that way in the US.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Hey I appreciate your response I was pretty disappointed when my effort post didn't show up forever so glad to know you at least saw it!. For what it's worth I think despite all the time it gets holocaust education in the West is pretty bad and pretty much any thinking person is going to have them based in the high school curriculum version of it we get taught. I spend a fair amount of time on /r/askhistorians and the amount of liberals with massive doubts about the holocaust is pretty telling. Well not doubts exactly they tepidly come in writing paragraphs of disclaimers about how they believe the official story but there are massive gaps where the tory they've been told makes no sense. Most true deniers start here as well and they are almost always arguing against the version they were taught in high school. IE the camps separated out of all context and a lot of myths thrown in combined with strawman version of Nazi ideology.
Most teachers are unwilling/incapable and probably just a little scared to actually explain Nazi ideology and goals and the Eastern Front is severely undertaught and without either of those the Holocaust narrative taught doesn't actually add up. and there are tons and tons of "Good Liberals" with those same doubts they are just to scared to voice them for fear of being labeled a denier. I actually think one of the reasons people get so hysterical when the Holocaust gets even slightly questioned is because many of them can't counter skeptical arguments at all so they are just running off pure emotion.
NewCharlesInCharge
2hr ago
If religion is transmissible and religious individuals are more fertile than the irreligious then it seems inevitable that the secular will be simply outbred, no?
Winning “converts” to secularism is a small tactical victory if they go on to have fewer than two children.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
Not if you want to keep highly skilled researchers and programmers working for you as it would mean locking down the systems so hard that it makes daily work a chore and the sorts of people you need for that level of work hate working under such restrictions.
anti_dan
3hr ago
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
This is why "noticing" and hunches are informative. What we actually have is a Hispanic girl at a school that probably is a reach school for an equally talented white kid, and certainly not one where they get a scholarship. She's a fish out of water by design of the admissions office who wanted to fill out some numbers that make them feel good.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
I am sadly well aware of this line of work because of the large number of criminals and scammers who go into the work. For the hard workers it is indeed a tough row to hoe. But its also full of abuse by just people exploiting the government.
Kevin_P
3hr ago
A bit of a late reply but it includes all types of schools. If you dig into the data there's a division between academic and vocational streams. It doesn't include kids that have completely dropped out of school though, which is relevant for some countries.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3hr ago
For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion.
This isn’t an orthodox convert-generated phenomenon; there’s a longstanding (as in centuries) dispute in Orthodox praxis over whether converts from other Christian traditions should be baptized. The general trend is to say ‘no’, but this is supported by a theological view that generally argues baptism is not grace-filled unless the baptizer is an Orthodox individual, preferably a priest or deacon. Most converts to Orthodoxy are received by chrismation, the term for what is called confirmation in Catholic parlance, which is given great significance as a means of completing baptism in Orthodox theology. The view is that chrismation back-fills grace into a baptism that was performed outside the Orthodox Church. But the view of Orthodoxy generally is that non-Orthodox baptisms aren’t really baptisms, in the strict mystical sense they believe is significant.
The reason converts sometimes push for a rebaptism is because there are some Orthodox rigorists — most notably Mount Athos, one of the holiest monasteries in Orthodox culture — that will interrogate converts and refuse communion to those who were not baptized Orthodox and instead received by chrismation. The converts are trying to deal with an unfortunate situation by aiming for what’s universally accepted, so that no one will have grounds to reject their reception into the Orthodox Church. It’s the rigorists’ fault, not the converts’.
The best comparison point would be Baptists — who, of course, believe that someone baptized as an infant should be baptized instead as an adult, and that infant baptisms aren’t ‘real’. They couple that with a less mystical and more symbolic interpretation of baptism, but nevertheless they believe that other Christian groups are doing baptism wrong in certain cases and that those who were incorrectly baptized ought to be baptized in the proper way, even if that means repeating it. While Catholics and magisterial Protestants have long agreed on baptismal validity, Baptists and Orthodox stand outside that consensus for different reasons.
So it’s not really about the converts hating the old forms of Christianity they grew up in — though that certainly can be a part of an individual’s psychology — and more a serious theological dispute within Orthodoxy about proper baptismal practice that they’re trying to navigate based on conscience. As with everything, the Official Orthodox Answer is “be received however your priest says you should.”
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3hr ago
Sorry, misunderstood you. I don't think we've seen anyone seriously defend having stolen or distilled someone's model. My bet is the precedent will depend on who/whom and lawyer muscle rather than fundamentals of the situation.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3hr ago
How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.
How small and relatively inexperienced Chinese labs do so much with so little is an interesting question. I have the impression that Western corporations overestimate “frontier talent”, or perhaps paradoxically – underestimate actual, raw talent (that isn't that rare, just needs to be noticed) and overestimate the value of corporate secrets that some of this legendary talent is privy to. Liang Wenfeng hires Ph.D students and they seem to do better than mature Ph.Ds.
H20s are useless for training, China will have to figure that part out on their own. Although the current RL paradigm is more and more reliant on inference (rollouts of agent trajectories, Kimi is built on that), so H20s will indirectly advance capabilities. Yet there remains a need for pretraining next generation bases, and of course experiments.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3hr ago
I would be considered a conservative Catholic, probably a borderline or "light" tradcath. I'm personally quite against the closed religious communities you describe. My plan is to move to a conservative area to live around people who share my religion and philosophy and to influence my surrounding community to make it increasingly hospitable to those who share my beliefs. For institutions that are simply too rotten, I will support setting up parallel institutions, but whenever possible I will for example vote for a hardcore tradcath public school board (and contribute to Catholic after school programs) instead of working to found new Catholic schools from scratch. As has been pointed out many times here and elsewhere, closed-off religious communities are able to exist only due to the benign neglect of the Eye of Sauron's. Concentrating your people in a single place and in unsanctioned institutions leaves them vulnerable to dispersal and reeducation by carpetbaggers. But if your religion is simply woven into the background culture of the area and infused into its public institutions, it's a lot harder to suppress. The religious should emulate Dearborn or the Free State Project, not the Mennonites. Entryism is the way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Coding has greatly improved. Vibe-coding in 2023 was a bleak experience, one could hardly get anything done. In 2025 it's easy.
Very well written OP. At what point will chinese advances start affecting the US more than they are now. Previously Anthropics CEO and human job hater Dario Amodei wrote pretty unprofessional things about what the r1 had achieved.
American investment is far higher in AI than china's and has not produced the same level of results for the value. Will we see more expenditure at this point so that labs can double down and make more llms that have billion dollar runs or will they slow down the investments?
Really good post. Thanks for posting this here.
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