domain:themotte.org
TequilaMockingbird
4m ago
Mods, can we get a moratorium on using chatbots to pad out one's word-count?
2rafa
4m ago
This is a social club for people who largely share at least a few political beliefs. I think there’s still a lot of spirited debate and disagreement, though.
SlowBoy
4m ago
In a secure operation, only a few people would have access to important passwords (like bios). Now, everybody has access to those passwords. The list of people who could be suspected of tampering with a ballot machine goes from documented individuals with a need-to-know to... everybody. And there would be lots of people with legitimate reason to handle a ballot machine who would not have legitimate reason to know those passwords. Lots of people handle ballot machines!
We know how to secure systems in this country, we do it all the time. If these passwords belonged to drones being used in Ukraine, the officer in charge wouldn't say, well, mistakes happen, but five day delays are normal, we shouldn't worry about Russia hacking into our systems, etc. etc.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6m ago
This place hasn't been healthy for a long time, and arguably wasn't even at its conception. Then again, one community's illness is another community's peak condition, so maybe I'm wrong and this place is good precisely for why I think it's ill.
It's an interesting question. It's not exactly healthy, in that it's not what I'd want to see in a community like this, but I think it's as good as it's going to get, given the circumstances. This may all be projection, but a part of the issue seems to be us accumulating cynicism as we grow older - I don't know how much I can play "steelman the opponent" post- gamergate, BLM, metoo, BLM2, COVID, and "WPATH to hell" - but more importantly I think it's less of a local culture problem, than a global culture problem. The culture of discourse that the rat-sphere sprang from is dead and buried. Personally I think it's because discourse is an existential threat to our ruling regime, and so people need to retreat to echo-chambers just to maintain society. From there, it's not exactly surprising that this place has become rather skewed in one direction, but the depressing thing is it's still better than the majority of alternatives.
Bartender_Venator
9m ago
BAP has published a book under his real name, and has a twitter account for it, but they're very different personas. The book is a revised version of his PhD thesis, which is an excellent read in itself but not really of wider interest beyond BAP fans or people interested in Straussian Classical philosophy scholarship, the account is mostly cryptic posting about the great food he's eating.
ares
11m ago
Another data point: my good buddy at Google is in charge of [major thing that hundreds of millions of people use]. When he was in High School, there was a time when he was stealing regularly from retail stores. He was addicted to the thrill. Got caught, got community service. Lots of people know/knew him, but I'm pretty confident that only a handful are aware of this fact. The poor, white culture he and I came from (and I would bet you too, if you're a white American) views being a thief as shameful, so there's huge social pressure to keep it secret.
sapph
18m ago
You need correct insight not special insight. Many rationalists made a lot more money than I did with the simple insight of 'AI progress will be rapid, buy nvidia'. I made a little off that insight but got into the game too late and was too diversified into shitty AI companies.
falling-star
18m ago
Thiel commented on SSC? I read the comments section pretty religiously and completely missed that one.
sapph
19m ago
Mostly technical details. Things like firedancer, the new solana validator client.
2rafa
21m ago
Wealthy parents will gladly have their kid work at McDonald’s for 6 months to go to Harvard, that wouldn’t stop anyone.
2rafa
21m ago
Harris just sounds xanax-ed out the whole time, she’s rarely loud at all, just weird and empty.
2rafa
24m ago
Didn’t like the Ubisoft Avatar, didn’t like GOW Ragnarok, didn’t like Spider-Man (1 or 2). Didn’t really like BG3. Hated Zelda TOTK.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
24m ago
How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
26m ago
Is there a recent AAA game you didn't enjoy?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28m ago
I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.
It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.
And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.
I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
31m ago
They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story.
How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.
I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.
This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.
What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.
TheFooder
33m ago
I was wondering about that. I bailed on Reddit years ago and just chalked up 'The Motte' (the only sub I really participated in) as a sad victim to my need to keep the ol' media filters clean. I was glad to re-join when I found the site, but I couldn't tell if there was still some component that touched Reddit. Very interesting!
whatihear
37m ago
As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.
drmanhattan16
43m ago
That can't be fixed. There is literally no way mechanically to prevent people from treating the AAQC report as a super-upvote. You would have to address it at a cultural level, but that would also be impossible without removing a big chunk of the people who come here in the first place.
That's a drop in the water though. This place hasn't been healthy for a long time, and arguably wasn't even at its conception. Then again, one community's illness is another community's peak condition, so maybe I'm wrong and this place is good precisely for why I think it's ill.
justmotteingaround
53m ago
Specifically, did we ever see these threats? I hit bedrock here
On reddit Zorba:
Alright, so the admins are paying attention to us now. Not going into details, they aren't relevant and I don't want to draw their attention more; ask me again once this is done and I'll vent.
Poster:
Ok, it's a year later. Spill. I'm really curious about the fucked-up internal politics of Reddit.
Zorba
I am confused why this is coming up so often, you're the second in the last two days and I'd totally forgotten about it for months before that.
But anyway, out of a possible overabundance of caution, I'll PM it to you.
AFAICT, the threats were never discussed openly. I could be wrong. I only ask because this new threat rang some bells. Lots of arguably paranoid cloak and dagger stuff in the Meta: the motte is dead thread. I'm still grateful for all the hard work that goes into this place. Its the kind of place I can ask: does this place exist here because of a persecutorial complex; or was the move, like, justified...
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
58m ago
It depends on the jurisdiction. In some places, these shop owners do try to get people prosecuted, do cooperate, and it turns out that the state is much less concerned about putting the guy in jail and thus they see the effort as a waste of time. It’s an odd situation. They’re kind of stuck, not only because of the costs, but the risks that they can count on other people to care about. If they testify and press charges, do the next group of lawless thugs come in and shoot potential witnesses? Are they or their children going to be targeted because snitches get stitches? And if they need the cops are the cops going to bother to show?
See the situation in lawless areas is because of years of neglect and distrust in which the criminals tend to get away with it. The only solution to my mind is to create a system, even if extremely flawed (inquisition is far from ideal) in which you can hope to put enough of the gang members in jail to lower the crime rate and have people willing to participate. If I lived in a place controlled by gangs, I’m not cooperating simply because of the two, the cops are the weak ones, and they can’t or won’t protect me.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
I'll add to this that BIOS passwords do not provide much security even in the ordinary context without armed guards. In order to do something with a BIOS password, you need physical access to a machine to type it in. But if you have physical access, you can also easily reset the BIOS password by removing a battery. (This would break a seal on the machine, but those seals can also be replaced.) So I don't think this leak of BIOS passwords meaningfully made the election less secure.
I'm still very much opposed to electronic voting, however, because of all the other ways they make voting insecure.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1hr ago
Ok, but how does this relate to the OP? This is true whether or not there's a leak of some specific passwords in a publicly accessible excel document. Somebody has to have access to maintain voting machines and by the nature of maintenance would be able to compromise the thing they're maintaining.
"The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" was actually "The Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying. It's like these people running scams on Amazon where they sell you the box but not the thing inside the box but then claim its not fraud because they sent you what was in the picture.
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