How should we square #27s speedup of malaria vaccination with TheZvi's criticisim in his recent medical roundup:
>Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem of how this was allowed to take so long, and why they couldn’t or didn’t do more to speed things along. There are in particular claims that the 2015-2019 delay was due to lack of funding, despite a malaria vaccine being an Open Phil priority. Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria write about the long road for Works in Progress. They recommend future use of advance market commitments, which seems like a no brainer first step.
I've found Zvi to be pretty trustworthy but these seem to be two diametrically opposed analyses of what happened and so someone has to be wrong here.
I'm always lurking in the shadows waiting to comment on genealogy items and/or kill related joys. There are several errors in that Biden descent line (setting the mythological content aside).
The line breaks at the first William Taylor and the second man of the same name, said here to be his father. Joe Biden was indeed descended from the first William Taylor. William Taylor was a Quaker immigrant from Cheshire, England to Pennsylvania. I don't believe his parentage is known, most likely because the parish registers for his home village have not survived for the period. So the line should end right there. But instead he has been grafted onto the family of an unrelated William Taylor, an immigrant to colonial Virginia (most certainly not a Quaker), who furthermore has no known descendants.
The line follows the Virginia man's likely but unproven ancestry for a bit, but makes the wholly unwarranted assertion that he was descended from the Marian martyr Rowland Taylor. It furthermore adopts the long-disproved idea that the martyr's wife was a niece of William Tyndale. And then it connects the Tyndales to some northern English gentry families. I don't know much about that part but I would guess there are errors there too. All these errors have been floating around the internet for years and probably on paper long before that.
That all said, the funny thing is that you _could_ do this exercise with several other former presidents, including, most recently, George W. Bush. And there's no reason to think Joe Biden (and ultimately everyone else of European descent) isn't descended from the same people when you go far back enough, but, for Joe at least, the documentation isn't there.
As to the ancient stuff, you could safely take the line back to "Eahlmund, Under-King of Kent." Beyond that, you're relying on a genealogy mostly fabricated during the reign of Alfred the Great as your only source.
German: From river Jordan to Med. sea "free" is a fine rhyme, just happens to mean: Destroy Israel (and kill all Israeli Jews). Still okay-ish in Germany. BUT: it was said/shouted/written after the Oct 7 murders/rapes/etc. . The best German blogger Thomas Fischer - a fat old guy who happens to be our country's best criminal lawyer/judge - explains the legal reasoning here (readers are lawyers, thus not a fun read): "(The slogan) is not only directed at the German state in the abstract, but at all people living in Germany, especially the Jews living here. At the same time, it calls on other population groups to join the call for the destruction of the state of Israel. For this reason alone, it is highly suitable (and intended) to cause aggression, insecurity and fear and to incite population groups living in Germany against each other. In addition, there is a threat to the population as a whole with the situation of danger and fear that this creates.
There is therefore no doubt about the suitability to "disturb the peace" in the specific context given here"
The Law is §140 "Reward and approval of criminal offenses"
Anyone who ...
1) rewards (a serious crime) after it has been committed ... or
2) applauds such crime in a manner likely to disturb the public peace, publicly, ...
shall be liable to a custodial sentence NOT exceeding three years or to a monetary penalty.
It is not "incitement to hatred" (§130). Nor is showing the Palestine flag or shouting "Stop the genocide (in Gaza)" against any German law. Which a few hundred do every Saturday in my town. Shrug. - And the slogan is "ok" again, if it is shouted NOT in connection with the Oct 7 attack. I'd guess even in those rallies now, after Israel's attacks.
> 11: Poll: AI accelerationism (“e/acc”) has a negative 51% net favorability with the general public, putting it behind (eg) Scientology and Satanism. There’s no shame in this. But there is a little shame in how the e/accs are surprised and trying to nitpick the result. There could be a certain amount of coolness cred in wanting to sacrifice humanity to the Void Gods - but not if you get all huffy when you learn this doesn’t play well in Peoria.
e/acc has a lot of baffling beliefs. But the idea that e/acc would be generally popular is a particularly silly one. Stopping technology and fear of change has always been the more popular ideology. But the movement is even less serious than EA so what are you gonna do. I think people who support AI development are well organized and serious but e/acc doesn't seem to be.
> 16: Claim: AIs work less well over the holiday season, because they’ve “learned” from their training data that they should be taking time off. I’m very suspicious of this, anyone want to tell me if it’s been debunked?
I haven't done it thoroughly but I did benchmark when I heard this and found no difference. I also set the context to being on a holiday or vacation and it didn't seem to have much effect. Possibly it's just higher server loads? All the reports seem to be from non-technical users of the consumer app.
> 17: Related: Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI) will sometimes say that the OpenAI content policy forbids it from answering a question. Although this originally raised suspicions of code-plagiarism, an x.ai engineer claims that it’s just parroting its training data, which includes this as a common AI response in these sorts of situations.
I recently saw a similar issue where I got Bard, Grok, and ChatGPT to declare that they were ErnieBot. I submitted them as reports but didn't get a response. More broadly, LLMs have serious issues outside of certain languages. Which is likely to have interesting social effects. Might make a good short story where minority language speakers can speak without AI monitoring because there's not enough speakers for the LLM to train period.
Also, the Russian version of that Chinese joke has been current since at least 2008 (and has the added twist — “we must bomb Voronezh” — that during the Wagner Group mutiny this year for a second it seemed like Putin might end up in a situation where he had to take the joke action from the conclusion): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_bomb_Voronezh
> 23: The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan, not Armenia. That is an incredibly Azeri name. Armenia also has a long history of anti-semitism and Jewish expulsions which is why Azerbaijan has had the larger (though still small and persecuted) Jewish population since we first got censuses down to modern day.
> 26: @somefoundersalt on Twitter relays a joke from the Chinese web:
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
You could mix up that China's a red state. ("Look man, we need to stick to the Reds!" "What about Mississippi? It's a red state.") The issue with the original joke is that Guizhou is where their expensive liquor comes from. Guizhou is kind of culturally analogous to Kentucky as a relatively poor, stereotypically rural/backward region that is famous for producing liquor.
The bigger issue with a direct translation is that China has almost no Americans in it. They graduate a few hundred Americans from universities each year. There's less than a hundred thousand Americans and less than a million foreigners of any kind (many of whom are from poorer Southeast Asian nations). Americans also don't generally keep their money in China or retire in China or anything like that.
China in general is not very foreigner friendly. India has something like five times as many foreigners and even more naturalized residents despite being significantly poorer. As a percentage China has the second smallest immigrant population of any reporting nation, only ahead of Cuba. And I'd argue the isolation in China is worse because Cubans speak Spanish and so can experience a more international culture than the Chinese get.
My mother does genealogy, and can trace our ancestry back to a Scottish nobleman who was sent to America as punishment for participating in the Jacobite Rebellion. Many years ago I found him on a website with a huge family tree of Scottish nobility. I went through the website and found every ancestor of his who was listed, which included Charlemagne. And I knew someone else who had traced her ancestry to Charlemagne, and further back to pagan kings, who in turn claimed descent from Odin.
The important thing is that this makes me Joe Biden's cousin.
"After his release, Floyd became more involved with Resurrection Houston, a Christian church and ministry, where he mentored young men and posted anti-violence videos to social media.[6][7][8][9] He delivered meals to senior citizens and volunteered with other projects, such as the Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper Trae tha Truth.[44] Later, Floyd became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.[6] A friend of his acknowledged that Floyd "had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life", but that he had been turning his life around through religion.[7]
{snip}
An influential member of his community, Floyd was respected for his ability to relate with others in his environment based on a shared experience of hardships and setbacks, having served time in prison and living in a poverty-stricken project in Houston.[7] In a video addressing the youth in his neighborhood, Floyd reminds his audience that he has his own "shortcomings" and "flaws" and that he is not better than anyone else, but also expresses his disdain for the violence that was taking place in the community, and advises his neighbors to put down their weapons and remember that they are loved by him and God.[7]"
3 reminds me of https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception, which discusses a paper arguing that car seat laws have created a large and largely arbitrary financial barrier against having more young children than can fit in a standard car (two car seats) and therefore have strongly encouraged couples to not have more than two children, resulting in significant reductions in third children. Essentially, "if we had another kid now we wouldn't be able to fit three car seats so we would legally need a new bigger car so we will instead have to limit our fertility and participate in the ongoing population collapse"
Looking at the map it seems the easiest way to create a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" would probably just be to dig a canal connecting the Jordan directly to the Mediterranean.
1: I love that according to the federal government, many dad jokes are officially not funny, since in the online dad joke submission form, a punch line is optional.
>Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
I don't think so. In the west and especially America we've been eager to accept foreigners, in particularly exchange students with rich and powerful parents, from our geopolitical adversaries. However, we generally stay at home, with maybe an exchange year to Europe thrown in; we have the best colleges in the world, so why leave? I'd be surprised if there were many senior Biden cabinet officials with family currently living in China.
29: The joke "down with us" instantly brought to mind the impossibly good comedy "To Be Or Not To Be", released in 1942, and the (AFAIK) original source of "Heil myself." Just amazing that a spoof on the Nazi invasion of Poland can actually work. Highly recommended.
>20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Sure, but Germany has had very strong restrictions of political for a long time now, so it's a little silly to expect people to suddenly start caring when the people outraged, or at least many of them, never mentioned or perhaps even outright supported other kinds of German speech criminalization.
It's the same thing with FdB crying about support for Palestine resulting in e.g. people losing their jobs. Sure, it's bad, but the same people almost universally were okay with e.g. people supporting Trump losing their jobs.
on UBI and laziness - I think it is a persistent myth that people will stop working once they have 'enough'. It doesn't seem to be true of most humans I know or have met. As long as working more/harder allows a person to get ahead, they'll work. When they stop working isn't when 'they have enough' it's when working more no longer allows them to meaningfully improve their lives. I think this is a better explanation for why a lot of people without highly valued skills have a reputation for being lazy - for them, working more/harder doesn't really improve their lives in the same way that for a person with in demand skills, it does.
I really don't want to speak in defence of 'From the River to the Sea' because it seems like an absurd hill to die on to me, but that study in link 21 seems pretty disingenuous. There are plenty of potential geographic borders that match that description which don't take over all of Israel. The surveyors are making it sound like that is inevitable and identically equal. I don't think anyone should be surprised that a lot of college students both don't want Palestine to be bombed into the stone age and also don't want Israelis to be eradicated or driven from their homes.
14: So sorry for your loss Lars (if you're reading this). I can definitely relate. IME, a tragedy like this does involve the kind of emotions people would expect, like sadness, but it is also very weird and unsettling. Part of your brain doesn't want to acknowledge the reality of it. Calling this "hard" really is a category error. I recall frequent feelings of derealization, damage to my sense of self or whatever you want to call it.
I dig his "rational religion" and the life and letter that are its outcome.
I find that steeling ourselves against the capricious vicissitudes of passing cultural norms through holding sacred a text from worlds gone by is healthy and good for those whose reverence refuses to cross into blatant irrationality.
At the very least it sacralizes DOUBT, and generally bolsters optimism too.
It would be trite of me to address his new life and his feelings about it so I will suffice myself with recommending the piece to anyone not in danger of being triggered by someone who had a transformative tragedy.
His rational religious approach makes the piece far less terrifying or unnerving than one might imagine.
I found within it the comforting strength of refusing to bow before the demons of insecurity, worry, and what-ifs that taunt so many others.
I wish him and he blessed family everything pleasant and holy. And I thank them for showing us all a human means of dealing with their own experience of the fact that nobody gets all the good things all the time. His write-up is short and full of a relatable, yet also specially noble, human spirit.
#21 The ever-increasing sacralization of youth had better bust soon.
Things can't really get much worse than know-nothings being taken seriously by the rest of society because we all agreed on the necessity of surrendering to their every tantrum.
Regardless of whether they can find the ocean on a map.
Check that, they can, see the cause of the unfortunate-but-understandable #20.
Perhaps the least known *major* fact about Hitler's rise to power [and certainly the least spoken or googleable] is that it was the two new voting demographics that put the Nazis over the edge in 1932/1933 were the freshly enfranchised... female and youth populations.
Fast forward to 2024.
Attempting to have a conversation practically anywhere on the internet beyond the hot takes (or hot flashes) of sad (or mad) trolls, teenagers and simpletons with bamboonish tribal loyalties is an impossibility.
As a culture we have so empowered rhe heckler's veto that we don't even pause to ask whether there's any reason why we should, instead of responding to them, en masse, with the spitfire truths rhey would receive for heckling a comic.
Unless especially precocious, children shouldn't be allowed into adult conversations.
That isn't intended to *exclude* the young (of whatever age) from participating as best their age and responsibilities allow in conversations regarding decisions likely to affect them as well.
It mean that instead of making sure that every last teenager, no matter how silly or simple, has their own turbo megaphone, we encourage and reward precocity.
If our generation's Huxley, Mencken, or Messiah is speaking.... he may as well not be because no one capable of understanding him can even hear him over the clamor of the contumelious.
#23 I've given quite a few lectures on the Jews of Azerbaijan and the surrounding region throughout history, most especially from the era of the "Khazarian Conversion" onward (in quotes because, of course, the matter is quite nuanced).
I haven't yet uploaded any lectures on that subject to my YouTube Channel but presumably many people interested in the Jews of Khazaria would also be interested in other exotica of Jewish History, on which I've thus far uploaded 11 episodes.
The episodes thus far available deal primarily with the historical Jewish communities of India, China, and Ethiopia, with plenty more to come.
The first episode begins with an introduction to my take on the general subject, which is essentially one of passion tempered by rationalism.
Meaning, I present the most amazing facts...so long as they are also most likely true. Hence - apologies in advance - no ancient aliens, subterranean kingdoms (other than, to a degree, in 4th century Yemen), or religious convictions holding uncritical court in my domain. Here's the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc3teub7_dxL4z9fJPW-d9L&feature=shared
#24 The author of that piece (about the enraged dying cosmonaut) had to update it after receiving information from sources more varied than the single sensationalist book he read upon which his original article was entirely founded.
Overall the author doesn't seem to be very capable at discerning what's what which is why his subsequent update to the article you linked to is stuffed with both-sides'isms sufficient to make for an excellent junior high school book report.
Nonetheless, readers with more specific knowledge on the matter can probably enlighten us with more specificity after looking at the updated article which is here:
My cranial computer contextualized the paragraph as ending with the word GhislainemaxWell before the slow thinking corrective pointed out that there were too few letters in GiveWell.
22. This reminds me of Alice Miller's _For Your Own Good_, which claimed that the popularity of theories that very harsh methods of child-rearing set up a generation to want Hitler. I don't know whether the connection has held up, but it was my first exposure to the idea that popular advice books could be nothing but plausible-sounding invention. There could be further discussion about what sounds plausible in various eras.
33. I don't understand how people who believe poverty causes crime also believe that very wealthy people are generally criminals. You can only trust the middle class?
#30 "Interesting new theory of Jewish achievement based on 1st century BC decree that all Jews have to be literate."
Not that new, it was set forth in a book published 12 years ago:
"The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492" (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
I read the book when it was published. I don't recall the details, but I do recall being unimpressed and thinking that the idea while interesting was at best a partial explanation.
Regarding the latest Swedish lottery work from Cesarini's group, I have a thread with more information, results of using different designs, and background information, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1736922801230033396. I also have an Aporia piece with some discussion of historical violent crime perpetration: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/jailbirds-of-a-feather-flock-together. TL;DR: "Premodern elite violence has substantial contemporary relevance: the fact that for large swathes of history the most privileged members of society were disproportionately responsible for violence (in all its varieties—petty, familial, and martial) suggests that criminality is not a product of deprivation."
Altogether, the Swedish study (+lots of registry work) suggests the income/poverty/wealth/etc.-links are non-causal in general and the relationship is mostly down to selection, but findings like those in the SSI loss study suggest there might remain some subgroups for whom redistribution could keep them out of trouble. But it's still odd that they would exist because even today's very poor in the developed world are vastly better off than the rich a few generations ago.
Re. 20 "from the river to the sea": due to certain events in its past, Germany has a high-sensitivity trigger to totalitarian, genocidal slogans. The motto is "Wehret den Anfängen" - "fend off the beginnings", or nip it in the bud.
Seeing how you Americans have (narrowly) escaped the whole "fascist dictatorship" experience so far, but half of the country seems very eager to try again, maybe you shouldn't be too haughty in dismissing that approach.
21 made the cut? That's a grossly unscientific paragraph that made me lose some faith in this blog. It reads like a fox news or TPUSA bit. disappointing.
> Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools.
Something that still evades my understanding - do those same people feel safe for the future of themselves and their kids, when those people that remained in those public schools and learned that making Jews feel unsafe (and worse) is right and laudable thing to do, will grow up? Organizing a tiny private school which doesn't teach to hate the Jews and doesn't say that the answer whether or not genocide is good depends on the context of whether or not we're talking about Jews - is great. But if the vast majority of people in the same area go to the school that still teaches all of the above, courtesy of the teacher unions - what exactly are the expectations for the future? That people just grow out of it sometime after college?
#3: I think it's important to note that her finding were only when comparing different countries and not within a country. She even points out that "On an intra-national level, this theory [that social conservatism leads to increases fertility] holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats."
Still an interesting result, but I feel like that's an important distinction to make.
Do effective accelerationists really believe that they are "sacrific[ing] humanity to the Void Gods" (as Scott put it), or do they think that future AIs just won't be this dangerous?
Biden summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to do something to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water. He proposes a project to install desalination plants in Kenya.
One official raises his hand and protests "We can't do that. The Coca-Cola Company has just invested billions in that region as an emerging market for bottled water."
Biden sighs and then says they will instead invest in helping India prevent water pollution.
Another official raises his hand to state that the mining company he used to work for has huge operations there, and would stop all political donations to our party if we did that.
This goes on for a bit longer, before Biden, exasperated, asks the room: "Is there any place in the world where U.S. companies don’t have crucial economic interests?"
They all look at each other for a moment and decide to prosecute more people in Flint, Michigan.
On 32 my experience in Kenya is that if you talk to someone doing a really low pay job, like security guard (askari) they will tell you that they need money to pay for their children's education and my impression is this is usually true and not just virtue signalling to encourage tipping. Lots of children there and education is relatively expensive, so "enough money" is more than just the cost of food and housing.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
I remember telling a leftwing friend of mine that the lot of people arrested under hate speech legislation would be left wingers. This woman, a feminist who is trans sceptical has come across this with regards to her philosophy even in the U.K.
However I was thinking that the bigger threat isn’t conservatives getting rid of hate crime legislation but expanding to to include anti white hate speech , at which stage the state might as well start building prisons close to universities to save on petrol costs.
I think Quintin Pope has well convinced me that Yudkowski's doomer arguments are unfounded. That does not leave me feeling great about the future of AI. AI is a force multiplier. Hopefully if you are reading this, you would agree with that.
So far, it seems the vast majority of AI frontier pushers are trying to get AI that's controlled by a tiny minority. It seems really the only group that is serious about bringing AI to everyone is Stability AI, and they seem to be struggling a bit. (I suppose we could say e/acc are trying to do the same?)
When it comes to alignment, the same problem: we seem to want a singular centralised AI that parrots woke cult tropes. The worst tyrants are the ones that do it for your own good, so count me out on that one. Again, the only group that seems to speak sensibly on this are Stability AI, with their explicit admission that alignment biases are inevitable, thus we need a plethora of models with biases and alignments that match the user.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor did what it was told to do. It just turned out we didn't want it to do what we told it to do. Why would we expect AIs to be any different? Limit the blast radius of failure. A centralised global AI will not end well, no matter how perfectly designed, aligned, and "unbiased" it is. In fact, the more perfectly designed/aligned/"unbiased" it is, the worse the outcome will be for the rest of us.
My conclusion is we need open source AI, fully open source AI, for everyone, yesterday.
20: As I just "enlightened" a commenter, I should also mention regarding Scott: A "crime" - by German legal definition - is an offence that carries a min. sentence of 1 year prison. Wrong parking is not a crime. Nor is "disturbing the public peace". The slogan - in rallies right after Oct. 7 - was (most likely) against §140 - Rewarding and approval of offences English version: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1451
and is nowadays illegal as the ministry decided it to be a symbol of Hamas (I am 90% sure, this will not hold if challenged). It is most likely (again: 90%) NOT punishable by section 130 "incitement of masses (to hatred)" https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1368 - as the courts are VERY restricitve as to what falls under this category; e.g."Hang the Greens" did not suffice.
On e/acc, it seems to me that the thing that really makes a subculture take off is when it divides into two camps that start fighting each other. So maybe that’s the future of the elites of the world, EA and e/acc are the future metademocrats and hyperepublicans.
I don't really understand the train of thought which can lead to both "#20: having laws against hate speech is bullshit and I'm glad my country doesn't have them", and "#38: this speech is driving children away from schools because they don't feel safe"?
Like, I'm not saying they're definitely incompatible positions - I'm fully prepared for Scott's having a perspective that I haven't thought of and/or which is too nuanced for me to fully grasp - just that, well, I don't really understand how we get to both positions from the same starting point, is all.
Re. The Flynn effect ... I thought Flynn himself said that the gain in IQ is so rapid that it cannot solely be due to genetic effects (and so it must be something like the education you receive in a modern industrialised society makes you better at doing IQ tests). This doesn't preclude there also being a much slower genetic change.
We, being terminally online and readers of Scott ( and probably Matthew Yglesias too); are aware that "from the river to the sea" might have negative connotations. The typical western pro-Palestine protestor, not so much. (I did try the obvious experiment of asking a few).
27. So major accomplishments of EA were to get several agencies of the US government to, in the words of a recently fired coach, "do your f*cking job."
#40: as I understand it, this type of thing is actually not terribly uncommon. Local politicians are eager to show something is being done about gang violence in cities where it's a problem, and one result is some type of gang outreach initiative, where people go talk to gang members and go "aye, maybe cut back on the murder and extortion just a bit, eh, laddie?" But then you run into the problem of who the eff is going to actually do that without getting murdered themselves, and it turns out the answer is former gang members who still have friends that are involved. And once these guys are cashing in on their status as former members, the current members decide they want in on the action, too, and now everybody's getting paid. Oops.
The dad joke page doesn't work for me - it just says "Loading..." indefinitely, even on a refresh.
This has the amusing side-effect that when it says "Did any of these jokes make you and your kids laugh?" the most plausible referent for "these jokes" is the feed of serious tweets like "There are so many complex and important conversations we need to empower our dads to have."
"The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews)."
This was actually more common than you might think. In 1932, Schoenberg wrote, without a hint of irony, that he had secured the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years. The stated reason Freud refused to leave Vienna almost until the very last minute was that he wanted to secure his antique collection. But he also, like many other Jews at the time, refused to believe that Germans, the bearers and progenitors of Kultur, could do what they said they would do.
For that matter, when I was learning Polish, I used to practice my Polish on an old lady I met. She had similar stories from Jewish refugees from Germany. She had (before Barbarossa) helped, at great personal risk, smuggle a family of German Jews into the USSR, and they returned, insisting that Germans were civilized and would never actually harm them, right until they were herded onto the transport.
Just to put it out there: I'm not sure how big the "yeah, the machines are going to replace humanity, and it's GOOD!" faction is actually in e/acc, but the fact that it's of *any* notable presence makes me automatically distrust the entire movement, considerably adjusts my priors towards distrusting rationalism in general. Ironically it also makes me more skeptical of any alignment goals, simply because any alignment project with those kinds of people even in the near vicinity, in the "zone of acceptable thought" seems like there's a huge risk of alignment in precisely the wrong direction. Nothing makes the Butlerian Jihad sound more alluring than these guys.
"In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t."
The First Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, is meaningless without enforcement.
England and Wales operates without a single written constitution, and for most of English history, there was no judicial review of the laws of England - the Parliament was assumed to have considered the constitutionality of whatever laws and acts they passed.
40 is pretty wild. I wonder if it was all a front or if he actually tried to steer kids away from the lifestyle. When I think about it, I’m sure people around the neighborhood knew the truth of who he was. That tends to be how things are. He might have been the best equipped person to help kids find another direction if they clearly weren’t cut out for the lifestyle.
(a) "The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”."
So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
(b) "You might expect to find socially liberal beliefs (like that women need to focus on their careers), but Aria Babu says the data don’t support this. Instead, the biggest driver of low fertility seems to be a belief that taking care of kids is a lot of work and you’ll screw them up if you cut any corners."
I don't think this is an "either/or" but more of an "and" situation; you think kids are a lot of work, you can't devote time to both maximally raising your hot-house blossom and developing your kick-ass career, you're not rich enough to be able to afford nannies and really really expensive daycare, of course if you don't maximally raise your hot-house blossom they will fail abjectly in life, but if you become (gasp!) a stay-at-home mom you are wasting your potential and all the investment in your education and career, so you decide to not have children or at least 'not right now'.
(c) "Did you know - Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips and quadruple-murderer, “[led] an ironic double life in which he worked in a legal job as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles”."
I did not know, but there's historical precedence with Jonathan Wild:
"Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief-Taker General". He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.
Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
(c) "TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court)."
That would be the same Supreme Court that certain online and media outlets are constantly having fits over being CONSERVATIVE NON-DEMOCRATIC BULLIES, would it? I'm not convinced by what Trace has to say, yes the "elites" are primarily voting Democratic, but remind me again about this guy Trump that I'm hearing is a total fascist dictator who must be stopped right this second or else he'll bring America to the brink of doom, and over? He may be a fluke, but he's one that all the bragging about "demographics are destiny" and hence the inevitable Democratic strangle-hold on power back in the day never saw coming.
I understand not liking e/acc, but gloating about these poll results is silly imo. The general public has no idea what e/acc even is and the question describes e/acc as wanting to "replace humanity" with AI.
>Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win
This seems to naively assumes that individuals (voters and otherwise) generally advocate for political positions that would benefit them. As Bryan Caplans shows though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) that isn't the case.
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
Biden: We need to nuke the enemies of liberal democracy.
"But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively"
Educated elites can't govern either if they are unable to win elections. You can already see what happens after the institutional capture of academia, their previous broad trust and respect collapse after they try to exploit this capture they worked so hard to obtain for an ideological agenda. I don't think many people are looking at this institution as a moral authority as they used to.
The lesson here is don't let your institution be captured by outside forces, period. This is very hard work and requires sacrifice.
"38. Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools."
"21. In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography."
Maybe Oakland teachers should instead spend their time teaching students geography and history?? Crazy radical thought for one of the worst school districts in the country, I know.
On the Berlin item (No. 20), worth noting that Elon Musk said anyone using the terms "from the river to the sea" (on Palestine issue) would be suspended from X, since those terms "necessarily imply genocide". https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725645884409401435
> 3: What beliefs correlate with low fertility rates?
Reading Aria's Substack, it seems like this question is linked to a larger question, from her post "Beliefs that Kill Birth Rates":
> The big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors.
As I posted in response there, this is strange. "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
I've recently started seeing people moving on from listing pronouns as "She/her" and "They/them" to the ungodly combination "She/them".
Do I need to switch from feminine to plural pronouns depending on whether this person is the subject or the object of the sentence? This is very confusing but at least it expands the possibilities for "Who's On First" routines.
#20: Germany has that awkward problem that the former first verse of their national anthem - which it is also illegal to perform nowadays - contained a statement staking out a territory. A look at a map shows the problem with this one too (the Memel is the border between Russian Kaliningrad and Lithuania these days, flowing from Belarus).
#14: STRONG content warning. I spent most of the morning at work trying not to cry. That post has become one of the most upvoted on Hacker News, with a lot of tributes coming in - Lars himself replied, among other things, "I love you all. Hug your kids if you have em.". One of my favourite quotes from the comments: "Grief is just love with no place to go."
38 - what a sad own goal by the pro-Israel side. What's that, all Palestine sympathizers are antisemites? Congratulations, Jews are now uncomfortable everywhere!
On one hand, widespread genetic childbearing intervention seems like a good thing, for preventing conditions that are incompatible with life or completely incapacitating.
On the other, surely there would be unintended consequences galore if it went past that? If universally implemented, would this be really bad for humanity, by either selecting against genes that turn out to be somehow important, or by selecting for genes that somehow turn out to be bad to have? See e.g. associations between blood group and risk of certain diseases.
I don't think you can "translate" #26 because the premise of the joke isn't true for America. The point of the joke is that Chinese elites send their families to global cities in the west and have few ties to domestic backwaters. American elites also tend have few ties to places like Missouri, but their families are also just in global cities in the west. Malia Obama is pursuing a film career in LA, not Shanghai. Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey's NYC office, not their Tehran branch.
When American elites do spend significant time outside of America's sphere of influence, it's usually either humanitarian (like Chelsea Clinton working with Kenyan elephants) or however you'd classify Hunter Biden working at a Ukrainian energy company. Or they're counter-cultural, like Angela Davis.
The closest equivalent would be something like Trump wanting to deport all people from _____, but realizing that those people are vital for a certain part of the economy. It ends with him deporting all people from Ohio, who aren't vital for anything.
More on my Glassdoor "how did they think this was suitable to my experience?" saga, and a new recommendation for a job.
This one's in West Virginia, a mere 3,498 miles from where I live so an easy commute. I'll give you the company spiel so see if you can guess what the position is:
"As a company, we are proud of our values and encourage those who share in our aspirations to join our team:
We protect our colleagues and communities through safe practices everywhere, every day.
We are committed to serving our customers and communities by going above and beyond to exceed expectations.
We take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world.
We are driven to deliver results in the right way.
We encourage a human centered culture that honors the unique potential and dignity of every person."
Okay, take a guess and then further down I'll reveal what the job opening is:
It's for a trainee driver on a waste truck (commercial as well as residential) 😀 A socially important job, indeed, but is the mission statement a little overblown for that?
>I’m not sure how much this study adds once you already know that twin studies find criminal behavior is about 45% genetic, 25% shared environmental, 30% nonshared/random, although I guess they can help pin down the exact nature of the shared environmental part.
But remember that heredity studies are always relative to the environment they are done in!
IQ is very heritable in a study where everyone involved had very similar environments, and not very heritable in a study where half the subjects are upper-class American and half the participants are illiterate third-world peasants with heavy parasite loads and lots of childhood malnutrition.
Particularly pernicious in this situation, where the claim is *about* different environments causing changes in behavior. If the twins in the studies were not raised in rich vs poor environments as extreme as teh differences between the rich vs poor communities the crime hypothesis is comparing, then it will under-rate the effect of environment in that context.
I'm late to the party, but when I saw #21 previously, I thought it might be code-switching rather than actually changing anyone's mind. Given some sort of interactive survey or however this was done, first you answer the "right answer" according to your social group. But then, trap sprung! Surveyor clearly demonstrates that this was not the right answer. Okay, so code switch, this is now a test of your ability to do critical thinking (or whatever the acceptable term for that is now). Give the new "right answer".
What's the real belief? Well, what proof is there that the surveyees even have an internal, honestly-held opinion on the subject? Why should they?
It's always interesting to look in various dissident libertarian-adjacent spaces and see the conflict between the culture war antipathy towards public schools and the Caplan/me-style edunihilism that is more prominent in those spaces than in almost any other political niche.
37: TracingWoodgrains, like so many others trying to diagnose the ills of the Republican party and of American conservatism, is very confused and lacks an understanding of what is actually happening in/to the American right, to the point of being deeply Not Even Wrong on almost every point.
The problem for American conservatives is not that they have a "short bench," although it's certainly true that they have one, or that there are too many progressives in academia (there are plenty, but American academia is politically next to powerless). The problem is that approximately half of the base of the Republican party, the party that has traditionally been the main avenue for conservative political action in the US, has sharply and definitively *abandoned conservatism*, by almost any reasonable definition of the term, in favor of Trumpism, which, however difficult it is to define politically, is manifestly anything but conservative.
Social conservatism? Jettisoned in the mid-2010s when half the party decided that "grab them by the pussy" was acceptable language from an American president, and when those who didn't actually put "TRUMP - FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" bumper stickers on their cars didn't complain a bit about those who did, despite that sort of language being neither "decent" nor very much in keeping with Family Values.
Institutional conservatism? Well, a good chunk of the party had already tossed any lingering respect for existing institutions and the need to work within them out the window long before Trump arrived on the scene, but the burn-it-all-down philosophy of the Tea Party sure has only grown as a force in Republican politics since 2015, as we saw last year during the House Speaker debacle.
Fiscal conservatism? ...I was going to type a whole paragraph here, but there's no need.
Monetary conservatism? There wasn't much pushback, or even mild criticism, from the Trumpist base when the god-emperor took to Twitter to threaten to fire Fed chairman Jerome Powell because the latter had tried to turn *off* the spigot of free and easy money (artificially low interest rates, money-printing via asset purchases) that the Fed had been pumping into the economy since the Obama presidency. The few monetary hawks left in the party didn't get much traction when they complained--and even they didn't complain much a few months later when the Fed went into absolute batshit money-printing hyperdrive in early 2020 in response to the pandemic.
Law-and-order conservatism? It seemed like that old Republican stalwart might actually survive Trumpism--the orange man himself had carped about it for years, after all--but then January 6, 2021 happened, and in a matter of minutes, riots turned out to be the language of the unheard after all, and the members of the mob who spent hours beating the shit out of terrified policement and vandalizing the halls of Congress (see also: institutional conservatism, above) became merely frustrated patriots venting some steam, and indeed political prisoners.
But anyway, if that bloggers commenters are right about the Republican party being dragged kicking and screaming into small-government libertarianism, then the party is even more doomed, because at least half of the exising party couldn't care less about small government or libertarianism (and in some ways are actively hostile to those things), and the one thing that still unites the actual conservatives and the Trumpists--a disdain for "wokeness" in all its forms, real and imaginary--is probably not going to be enough to hold the party together in its current form.
More likely, imo, is that the Trumpists win the power struggle and the party, and the deficit hawks and free-marketeers are forced to find a new home.
Below is a link to my reply to Aria Babu's post - I don't think there's good enough evidence for the causal conclusion between opinions on working mothers and TFR that she asserts. I looked at the data ex-Europe and found the negative correlation disappears. Then I looked at data on the exact question she's presenting within the US and find the opposite relationship, a positive correlation between fertility rates and thinking that mothers should stay home when kids are young. Given that within the US a bunch of the potential confounding factors are held constant, this suggests there's likely something else going on (although I'm not sure what!) which is causing the negative correlation between European countries. Overall, I don't think you can assert the causal relationship which Aria concludes her post with, especially when it runs strongly counter to priors.
With regard to the "Verband nationaldeutscher Juden" (point 29), historian Donald Niewyk documented the right-wing political faction led by Max Naumann (a Berlin lawyer and reform Jew) in his book _Jews in Weimar Germany_ (Routledge, 2017). Niewyk writes:
> At least as viable as an alternative to liberal assimilationism was the rightwing chauvinism of Max Naumann and his League of German Nationalist Jews. It presented an opportunity for Jews who were frightened of communism or disillusioned with Weimar democracy to pursue a reactionary line. It held out the hope of counteracting anti-Semitism by canceling the equation of Jew and liberal. Unquestionably the persistent Judeophobia of most of the remaining German right made its task more difficult.
Niewyk, in this same book, contextualizes the frictions between assimilated liberal German Jews and the Eastern European immigrant Jews during this period. One point made in the book is that no Jews of any political persuasion, not even the most severely pessimistic, had reason to suspect Hitler's Final Solution while living in the liberal democracy that was Weimar Germany.
"Still, people continue to work as much as ever. I’m surprised by this result; is the claim that people still work exactly as much when they don’t need the money? Why?"
My guess is that capital and labor are complements in production. If you have extra money to invest on your business, your work becomes more productive so you work more. If the whole economy consists mostly of small business, then you'd see this effect in the aggregate. This implies that we should expect employees to work less under a UBI.
#41: Chuck Schumer is a laughingstock. Anybody who he gives credence to actually has their credence reduced. I'm surprised MIRI didn't know this. I guess the people opposed to artificial intelligence are also opposed to doing intelligence on their adversaries.
Did you see the COVID origins debate Eliezer tweeted about? Thought it might have kicked off https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events, and would make a good link https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1741202539742429555
> The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan.
How should we square #27s speedup of malaria vaccination with TheZvi's criticisim in his recent medical roundup:
>Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem of how this was allowed to take so long, and why they couldn’t or didn’t do more to speed things along. There are in particular claims that the 2015-2019 delay was due to lack of funding, despite a malaria vaccine being an Open Phil priority. Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria write about the long road for Works in Progress. They recommend future use of advance market commitments, which seems like a no brainer first step.
I've found Zvi to be pretty trustworthy but these seem to be two diametrically opposed analyses of what happened and so someone has to be wrong here.
I'm always lurking in the shadows waiting to comment on genealogy items and/or kill related joys. There are several errors in that Biden descent line (setting the mythological content aside).
The line breaks at the first William Taylor and the second man of the same name, said here to be his father. Joe Biden was indeed descended from the first William Taylor. William Taylor was a Quaker immigrant from Cheshire, England to Pennsylvania. I don't believe his parentage is known, most likely because the parish registers for his home village have not survived for the period. So the line should end right there. But instead he has been grafted onto the family of an unrelated William Taylor, an immigrant to colonial Virginia (most certainly not a Quaker), who furthermore has no known descendants.
The line follows the Virginia man's likely but unproven ancestry for a bit, but makes the wholly unwarranted assertion that he was descended from the Marian martyr Rowland Taylor. It furthermore adopts the long-disproved idea that the martyr's wife was a niece of William Tyndale. And then it connects the Tyndales to some northern English gentry families. I don't know much about that part but I would guess there are errors there too. All these errors have been floating around the internet for years and probably on paper long before that.
That all said, the funny thing is that you _could_ do this exercise with several other former presidents, including, most recently, George W. Bush. And there's no reason to think Joe Biden (and ultimately everyone else of European descent) isn't descended from the same people when you go far back enough, but, for Joe at least, the documentation isn't there.
As to the ancient stuff, you could safely take the line back to "Eahlmund, Under-King of Kent." Beyond that, you're relying on a genealogy mostly fabricated during the reign of Alfred the Great as your only source.
German: From river Jordan to Med. sea "free" is a fine rhyme, just happens to mean: Destroy Israel (and kill all Israeli Jews). Still okay-ish in Germany. BUT: it was said/shouted/written after the Oct 7 murders/rapes/etc. . The best German blogger Thomas Fischer - a fat old guy who happens to be our country's best criminal lawyer/judge - explains the legal reasoning here (readers are lawyers, thus not a fun read): "(The slogan) is not only directed at the German state in the abstract, but at all people living in Germany, especially the Jews living here. At the same time, it calls on other population groups to join the call for the destruction of the state of Israel. For this reason alone, it is highly suitable (and intended) to cause aggression, insecurity and fear and to incite population groups living in Germany against each other. In addition, there is a threat to the population as a whole with the situation of danger and fear that this creates.
There is therefore no doubt about the suitability to "disturb the peace" in the specific context given here"
The Law is §140 "Reward and approval of criminal offenses"
Anyone who ...
1) rewards (a serious crime) after it has been committed ... or
2) applauds such crime in a manner likely to disturb the public peace, publicly, ...
shall be liable to a custodial sentence NOT exceeding three years or to a monetary penalty.
https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/frage-fische-jubel-terror-hamas/
It is not "incitement to hatred" (§130). Nor is showing the Palestine flag or shouting "Stop the genocide (in Gaza)" against any German law. Which a few hundred do every Saturday in my town. Shrug. - And the slogan is "ok" again, if it is shouted NOT in connection with the Oct 7 attack. I'd guess even in those rallies now, after Israel's attacks.
> 11: Poll: AI accelerationism (“e/acc”) has a negative 51% net favorability with the general public, putting it behind (eg) Scientology and Satanism. There’s no shame in this. But there is a little shame in how the e/accs are surprised and trying to nitpick the result. There could be a certain amount of coolness cred in wanting to sacrifice humanity to the Void Gods - but not if you get all huffy when you learn this doesn’t play well in Peoria.
e/acc has a lot of baffling beliefs. But the idea that e/acc would be generally popular is a particularly silly one. Stopping technology and fear of change has always been the more popular ideology. But the movement is even less serious than EA so what are you gonna do. I think people who support AI development are well organized and serious but e/acc doesn't seem to be.
> 16: Claim: AIs work less well over the holiday season, because they’ve “learned” from their training data that they should be taking time off. I’m very suspicious of this, anyone want to tell me if it’s been debunked?
I haven't done it thoroughly but I did benchmark when I heard this and found no difference. I also set the context to being on a holiday or vacation and it didn't seem to have much effect. Possibly it's just higher server loads? All the reports seem to be from non-technical users of the consumer app.
> 17: Related: Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI) will sometimes say that the OpenAI content policy forbids it from answering a question. Although this originally raised suspicions of code-plagiarism, an x.ai engineer claims that it’s just parroting its training data, which includes this as a common AI response in these sorts of situations.
I recently saw a similar issue where I got Bard, Grok, and ChatGPT to declare that they were ErnieBot. I submitted them as reports but didn't get a response. More broadly, LLMs have serious issues outside of certain languages. Which is likely to have interesting social effects. Might make a good short story where minority language speakers can speak without AI monitoring because there's not enough speakers for the LLM to train period.
Qirmizi Qesebe is in Azerbaijan.
Also, the Russian version of that Chinese joke has been current since at least 2008 (and has the added twist — “we must bomb Voronezh” — that during the Wagner Group mutiny this year for a second it seemed like Putin might end up in a situation where he had to take the joke action from the conclusion): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_bomb_Voronezh
> 23: The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan, not Armenia. That is an incredibly Azeri name. Armenia also has a long history of anti-semitism and Jewish expulsions which is why Azerbaijan has had the larger (though still small and persecuted) Jewish population since we first got censuses down to modern day.
> 26: @somefoundersalt on Twitter relays a joke from the Chinese web:
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
You could mix up that China's a red state. ("Look man, we need to stick to the Reds!" "What about Mississippi? It's a red state.") The issue with the original joke is that Guizhou is where their expensive liquor comes from. Guizhou is kind of culturally analogous to Kentucky as a relatively poor, stereotypically rural/backward region that is famous for producing liquor.
The bigger issue with a direct translation is that China has almost no Americans in it. They graduate a few hundred Americans from universities each year. There's less than a hundred thousand Americans and less than a million foreigners of any kind (many of whom are from poorer Southeast Asian nations). Americans also don't generally keep their money in China or retire in China or anything like that.
China in general is not very foreigner friendly. India has something like five times as many foreigners and even more naturalized residents despite being significantly poorer. As a percentage China has the second smallest immigrant population of any reporting nation, only ahead of Cuba. And I'd argue the isolation in China is worse because Cubans speak Spanish and so can experience a more international culture than the Chinese get.
I, too, am descended from Odin!
My mother does genealogy, and can trace our ancestry back to a Scottish nobleman who was sent to America as punishment for participating in the Jacobite Rebellion. Many years ago I found him on a website with a huge family tree of Scottish nobility. I went through the website and found every ancestor of his who was listed, which included Charlemagne. And I knew someone else who had traced her ancestry to Charlemagne, and further back to pagan kings, who in turn claimed descent from Odin.
The important thing is that this makes me Joe Biden's cousin.
40. Reminds me of George Floyd:
"After his release, Floyd became more involved with Resurrection Houston, a Christian church and ministry, where he mentored young men and posted anti-violence videos to social media.[6][7][8][9] He delivered meals to senior citizens and volunteered with other projects, such as the Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper Trae tha Truth.[44] Later, Floyd became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.[6] A friend of his acknowledged that Floyd "had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life", but that he had been turning his life around through religion.[7]
{snip}
An influential member of his community, Floyd was respected for his ability to relate with others in his environment based on a shared experience of hardships and setbacks, having served time in prison and living in a poverty-stricken project in Houston.[7] In a video addressing the youth in his neighborhood, Floyd reminds his audience that he has his own "shortcomings" and "flaws" and that he is not better than anyone else, but also expresses his disdain for the violence that was taking place in the community, and advises his neighbors to put down their weapons and remember that they are loved by him and God.[7]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd
3 reminds me of https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception, which discusses a paper arguing that car seat laws have created a large and largely arbitrary financial barrier against having more young children than can fit in a standard car (two car seats) and therefore have strongly encouraged couples to not have more than two children, resulting in significant reductions in third children. Essentially, "if we had another kid now we wouldn't be able to fit three car seats so we would legally need a new bigger car so we will instead have to limit our fertility and participate in the ongoing population collapse"
I am curious why so many people left that settlement, or shtetl, after Azerbaijani independence. Had they not been allowed to leave earlier?
Looking at the map it seems the easiest way to create a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" would probably just be to dig a canal connecting the Jordan directly to the Mediterranean.
1: I love that according to the federal government, many dad jokes are officially not funny, since in the online dad joke submission form, a punch line is optional.
>Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
I don't think so. In the west and especially America we've been eager to accept foreigners, in particularly exchange students with rich and powerful parents, from our geopolitical adversaries. However, we generally stay at home, with maybe an exchange year to Europe thrown in; we have the best colleges in the world, so why leave? I'd be surprised if there were many senior Biden cabinet officials with family currently living in China.
29: The joke "down with us" instantly brought to mind the impossibly good comedy "To Be Or Not To Be", released in 1942, and the (AFAIK) original source of "Heil myself." Just amazing that a spoof on the Nazi invasion of Poland can actually work. Highly recommended.
>20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Sure, but Germany has had very strong restrictions of political for a long time now, so it's a little silly to expect people to suddenly start caring when the people outraged, or at least many of them, never mentioned or perhaps even outright supported other kinds of German speech criminalization.
It's the same thing with FdB crying about support for Palestine resulting in e.g. people losing their jobs. Sure, it's bad, but the same people almost universally were okay with e.g. people supporting Trump losing their jobs.
on UBI and laziness - I think it is a persistent myth that people will stop working once they have 'enough'. It doesn't seem to be true of most humans I know or have met. As long as working more/harder allows a person to get ahead, they'll work. When they stop working isn't when 'they have enough' it's when working more no longer allows them to meaningfully improve their lives. I think this is a better explanation for why a lot of people without highly valued skills have a reputation for being lazy - for them, working more/harder doesn't really improve their lives in the same way that for a person with in demand skills, it does.
Cao Dai Blowout is one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaxuDWVZMTE
I really don't want to speak in defence of 'From the River to the Sea' because it seems like an absurd hill to die on to me, but that study in link 21 seems pretty disingenuous. There are plenty of potential geographic borders that match that description which don't take over all of Israel. The surveyors are making it sound like that is inevitable and identically equal. I don't think anyone should be surprised that a lot of college students both don't want Palestine to be bombed into the stone age and also don't want Israelis to be eradicated or driven from their homes.
14: So sorry for your loss Lars (if you're reading this). I can definitely relate. IME, a tragedy like this does involve the kind of emotions people would expect, like sadness, but it is also very weird and unsettling. Part of your brain doesn't want to acknowledge the reality of it. Calling this "hard" really is a category error. I recall frequent feelings of derealization, damage to my sense of self or whatever you want to call it.
#14 was a moving read.
I dig his "rational religion" and the life and letter that are its outcome.
I find that steeling ourselves against the capricious vicissitudes of passing cultural norms through holding sacred a text from worlds gone by is healthy and good for those whose reverence refuses to cross into blatant irrationality.
At the very least it sacralizes DOUBT, and generally bolsters optimism too.
It would be trite of me to address his new life and his feelings about it so I will suffice myself with recommending the piece to anyone not in danger of being triggered by someone who had a transformative tragedy.
His rational religious approach makes the piece far less terrifying or unnerving than one might imagine.
I found within it the comforting strength of refusing to bow before the demons of insecurity, worry, and what-ifs that taunt so many others.
I wish him and he blessed family everything pleasant and holy. And I thank them for showing us all a human means of dealing with their own experience of the fact that nobody gets all the good things all the time. His write-up is short and full of a relatable, yet also specially noble, human spirit.
#21 The ever-increasing sacralization of youth had better bust soon.
Things can't really get much worse than know-nothings being taken seriously by the rest of society because we all agreed on the necessity of surrendering to their every tantrum.
Regardless of whether they can find the ocean on a map.
Check that, they can, see the cause of the unfortunate-but-understandable #20.
Perhaps the least known *major* fact about Hitler's rise to power [and certainly the least spoken or googleable] is that it was the two new voting demographics that put the Nazis over the edge in 1932/1933 were the freshly enfranchised... female and youth populations.
Fast forward to 2024.
Attempting to have a conversation practically anywhere on the internet beyond the hot takes (or hot flashes) of sad (or mad) trolls, teenagers and simpletons with bamboonish tribal loyalties is an impossibility.
As a culture we have so empowered rhe heckler's veto that we don't even pause to ask whether there's any reason why we should, instead of responding to them, en masse, with the spitfire truths rhey would receive for heckling a comic.
Unless especially precocious, children shouldn't be allowed into adult conversations.
That isn't intended to *exclude* the young (of whatever age) from participating as best their age and responsibilities allow in conversations regarding decisions likely to affect them as well.
It mean that instead of making sure that every last teenager, no matter how silly or simple, has their own turbo megaphone, we encourage and reward precocity.
If our generation's Huxley, Mencken, or Messiah is speaking.... he may as well not be because no one capable of understanding him can even hear him over the clamor of the contumelious.
To wit; https://youtu.be/cI5Sd-mNE1E?feature=shared
#23 I've given quite a few lectures on the Jews of Azerbaijan and the surrounding region throughout history, most especially from the era of the "Khazarian Conversion" onward (in quotes because, of course, the matter is quite nuanced).
I haven't yet uploaded any lectures on that subject to my YouTube Channel but presumably many people interested in the Jews of Khazaria would also be interested in other exotica of Jewish History, on which I've thus far uploaded 11 episodes.
The episodes thus far available deal primarily with the historical Jewish communities of India, China, and Ethiopia, with plenty more to come.
The first episode begins with an introduction to my take on the general subject, which is essentially one of passion tempered by rationalism.
Meaning, I present the most amazing facts...so long as they are also most likely true. Hence - apologies in advance - no ancient aliens, subterranean kingdoms (other than, to a degree, in 4th century Yemen), or religious convictions holding uncritical court in my domain. Here's the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc3teub7_dxL4z9fJPW-d9L&feature=shared
2. Would want to see if that still exists after controlling for birth weight. Higher calorie diets are making us larger in general, including fetuses
#24 The author of that piece (about the enraged dying cosmonaut) had to update it after receiving information from sources more varied than the single sensationalist book he read upon which his original article was entirely founded.
Overall the author doesn't seem to be very capable at discerning what's what which is why his subsequent update to the article you linked to is stuffed with both-sides'isms sufficient to make for an excellent junior high school book report.
Nonetheless, readers with more specific knowledge on the matter can probably enlighten us with more specificity after looking at the updated article which is here:
https://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold
#26
The premise would be wiping out the eternally troublesome middle east and would end with wiping out Cincinnati in the mid-west.
#28
My cranial computer contextualized the paragraph as ending with the word GhislainemaxWell before the slow thinking corrective pointed out that there were too few letters in GiveWell.
#12 Patri Friedman is the son of David Friedman who occasionally comments here and grandson of Nobel Prize winning Economist, Milton Friedman.
22. This reminds me of Alice Miller's _For Your Own Good_, which claimed that the popularity of theories that very harsh methods of child-rearing set up a generation to want Hitler. I don't know whether the connection has held up, but it was my first exposure to the idea that popular advice books could be nothing but plausible-sounding invention. There could be further discussion about what sounds plausible in various eras.
33. I don't understand how people who believe poverty causes crime also believe that very wealthy people are generally criminals. You can only trust the middle class?
#30 "Interesting new theory of Jewish achievement based on 1st century BC decree that all Jews have to be literate."
Not that new, it was set forth in a book published 12 years ago:
"The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492" (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691163510/
The authors talk about the book on PBS:
"The Chosen Few: A New Explanation of Jewish Success" Economy Apr 18, 2013 By Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati
and
"Jewish Literacy as the Road to Riches: The Chosen Path of the ‘Chosen Few’" Economy Aug 21, 2013 By Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/jewish-literacy-as-the-road-to
I read the book when it was published. I don't recall the details, but I do recall being unimpressed and thinking that the idea while interesting was at best a partial explanation.
Regarding the latest Swedish lottery work from Cesarini's group, I have a thread with more information, results of using different designs, and background information, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1736922801230033396. I also have an Aporia piece with some discussion of historical violent crime perpetration: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/jailbirds-of-a-feather-flock-together. TL;DR: "Premodern elite violence has substantial contemporary relevance: the fact that for large swathes of history the most privileged members of society were disproportionately responsible for violence (in all its varieties—petty, familial, and martial) suggests that criminality is not a product of deprivation."
I also have a post on a study showing heterogeneous effects of losing SSI on the probability of becoming incarcerated: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1738986063283032232
Altogether, the Swedish study (+lots of registry work) suggests the income/poverty/wealth/etc.-links are non-causal in general and the relationship is mostly down to selection, but findings like those in the SSI loss study suggest there might remain some subgroups for whom redistribution could keep them out of trouble. But it's still odd that they would exist because even today's very poor in the developed world are vastly better off than the rich a few generations ago.
The intergenerational poverty angle doesn't make much sense, and no one has ever explained to me how it fits with things like the observation of predictably high crime rates for immigrants from certain demographic groups (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1639017394923241475) or the well-known phenomenon of regression to the mean in social status (https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq) not being coupled with much evidence of regression to the mean in violent crime or homicide perpetration and victimization rates (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1715058321894310145).
Re: 20, does that mean you changed your mind about your conclusion on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes?
Re. 20 "from the river to the sea": due to certain events in its past, Germany has a high-sensitivity trigger to totalitarian, genocidal slogans. The motto is "Wehret den Anfängen" - "fend off the beginnings", or nip it in the bud.
Seeing how you Americans have (narrowly) escaped the whole "fascist dictatorship" experience so far, but half of the country seems very eager to try again, maybe you shouldn't be too haughty in dismissing that approach.
21 made the cut? That's a grossly unscientific paragraph that made me lose some faith in this blog. It reads like a fox news or TPUSA bit. disappointing.
Is there a video of the senate hearing (preferably with the MIRI stuff timestamped) ?
> Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools.
Something that still evades my understanding - do those same people feel safe for the future of themselves and their kids, when those people that remained in those public schools and learned that making Jews feel unsafe (and worse) is right and laudable thing to do, will grow up? Organizing a tiny private school which doesn't teach to hate the Jews and doesn't say that the answer whether or not genocide is good depends on the context of whether or not we're talking about Jews - is great. But if the vast majority of people in the same area go to the school that still teaches all of the above, courtesy of the teacher unions - what exactly are the expectations for the future? That people just grow out of it sometime after college?
16. gwern pointed out that one of the prompts had a date formatting error:
https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1734323314099703830
and then someone fixed the bug and re ran the test, claiming that the results replicated, despite, well, not really replicating?
https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1734363133962334479
best example of a triple venn diagram is this, imo
https://x.com/melancholyyuga/status/1729298166317527195
#3: I think it's important to note that her finding were only when comparing different countries and not within a country. She even points out that "On an intra-national level, this theory [that social conservatism leads to increases fertility] holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats."
Still an interesting result, but I feel like that's an important distinction to make.
Do effective accelerationists really believe that they are "sacrific[ing] humanity to the Void Gods" (as Scott put it), or do they think that future AIs just won't be this dangerous?
#26:
Biden summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to do something to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water. He proposes a project to install desalination plants in Kenya.
One official raises his hand and protests "We can't do that. The Coca-Cola Company has just invested billions in that region as an emerging market for bottled water."
Biden sighs and then says they will instead invest in helping India prevent water pollution.
Another official raises his hand to state that the mining company he used to work for has huge operations there, and would stop all political donations to our party if we did that.
This goes on for a bit longer, before Biden, exasperated, asks the room: "Is there any place in the world where U.S. companies don’t have crucial economic interests?"
They all look at each other for a moment and decide to prosecute more people in Flint, Michigan.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
Didn't they also make it a crime to display the letter "Z"?
On 32 my experience in Kenya is that if you talk to someone doing a really low pay job, like security guard (askari) they will tell you that they need money to pay for their children's education and my impression is this is usually true and not just virtue signalling to encourage tipping. Lots of children there and education is relatively expensive, so "enough money" is more than just the cost of food and housing.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
I remember telling a leftwing friend of mine that the lot of people arrested under hate speech legislation would be left wingers. This woman, a feminist who is trans sceptical has come across this with regards to her philosophy even in the U.K.
However I was thinking that the bigger threat isn’t conservatives getting rid of hate crime legislation but expanding to to include anti white hate speech , at which stage the state might as well start building prisons close to universities to save on petrol costs.
Would have bet my house the pic in 6 was AI generated
I think Quintin Pope has well convinced me that Yudkowski's doomer arguments are unfounded. That does not leave me feeling great about the future of AI. AI is a force multiplier. Hopefully if you are reading this, you would agree with that.
So far, it seems the vast majority of AI frontier pushers are trying to get AI that's controlled by a tiny minority. It seems really the only group that is serious about bringing AI to everyone is Stability AI, and they seem to be struggling a bit. (I suppose we could say e/acc are trying to do the same?)
When it comes to alignment, the same problem: we seem to want a singular centralised AI that parrots woke cult tropes. The worst tyrants are the ones that do it for your own good, so count me out on that one. Again, the only group that seems to speak sensibly on this are Stability AI, with their explicit admission that alignment biases are inevitable, thus we need a plethora of models with biases and alignments that match the user.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor did what it was told to do. It just turned out we didn't want it to do what we told it to do. Why would we expect AIs to be any different? Limit the blast radius of failure. A centralised global AI will not end well, no matter how perfectly designed, aligned, and "unbiased" it is. In fact, the more perfectly designed/aligned/"unbiased" it is, the worse the outcome will be for the rest of us.
My conclusion is we need open source AI, fully open source AI, for everyone, yesterday.
20: As I just "enlightened" a commenter, I should also mention regarding Scott: A "crime" - by German legal definition - is an offence that carries a min. sentence of 1 year prison. Wrong parking is not a crime. Nor is "disturbing the public peace". The slogan - in rallies right after Oct. 7 - was (most likely) against §140 - Rewarding and approval of offences English version: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1451
and is nowadays illegal as the ministry decided it to be a symbol of Hamas (I am 90% sure, this will not hold if challenged). It is most likely (again: 90%) NOT punishable by section 130 "incitement of masses (to hatred)" https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1368 - as the courts are VERY restricitve as to what falls under this category; e.g."Hang the Greens" did not suffice.
Again my link to the reasoning of the best German criminal lawyer (and my fav. German blogger): https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/frage-fische-jubel-terror-hamas/
Well Elon's anti-woke Grok AI has said it's voting for Biden, as well as encouraging the use of trans-approved pronouns:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/
How can we refuse to listen to such a based intelligence?
On e/acc, it seems to me that the thing that really makes a subculture take off is when it divides into two camps that start fighting each other. So maybe that’s the future of the elites of the world, EA and e/acc are the future metademocrats and hyperepublicans.
I don't really understand the train of thought which can lead to both "#20: having laws against hate speech is bullshit and I'm glad my country doesn't have them", and "#38: this speech is driving children away from schools because they don't feel safe"?
Like, I'm not saying they're definitely incompatible positions - I'm fully prepared for Scott's having a perspective that I haven't thought of and/or which is too nuanced for me to fully grasp - just that, well, I don't really understand how we get to both positions from the same starting point, is all.
Re. The Flynn effect ... I thought Flynn himself said that the gain in IQ is so rapid that it cannot solely be due to genetic effects (and so it must be something like the education you receive in a modern industrialised society makes you better at doing IQ tests). This doesn't preclude there also being a much slower genetic change.
We, being terminally online and readers of Scott ( and probably Matthew Yglesias too); are aware that "from the river to the sea" might have negative connotations. The typical western pro-Palestine protestor, not so much. (I did try the obvious experiment of asking a few).
Why is Cao Dai being called a cult here? It doesn't seem particularly culty compared to your standard religion.
27. So major accomplishments of EA were to get several agencies of the US government to, in the words of a recently fired coach, "do your f*cking job."
> 2: The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”.
No link to the source data? Might be because I'm not an X member, but all I can see is an uncited chart.
#40: as I understand it, this type of thing is actually not terribly uncommon. Local politicians are eager to show something is being done about gang violence in cities where it's a problem, and one result is some type of gang outreach initiative, where people go talk to gang members and go "aye, maybe cut back on the murder and extortion just a bit, eh, laddie?" But then you run into the problem of who the eff is going to actually do that without getting murdered themselves, and it turns out the answer is former gang members who still have friends that are involved. And once these guys are cashing in on their status as former members, the current members decide they want in on the action, too, and now everybody's getting paid. Oops.
40 - completely unsurprising if you read "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" (assuming Wolfe wasn't making it all up).
The dad joke page doesn't work for me - it just says "Loading..." indefinitely, even on a refresh.
This has the amusing side-effect that when it says "Did any of these jokes make you and your kids laugh?" the most plausible referent for "these jokes" is the feed of serious tweets like "There are so many complex and important conversations we need to empower our dads to have."
"The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews)."
This was actually more common than you might think. In 1932, Schoenberg wrote, without a hint of irony, that he had secured the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years. The stated reason Freud refused to leave Vienna almost until the very last minute was that he wanted to secure his antique collection. But he also, like many other Jews at the time, refused to believe that Germans, the bearers and progenitors of Kultur, could do what they said they would do.
For that matter, when I was learning Polish, I used to practice my Polish on an old lady I met. She had similar stories from Jewish refugees from Germany. She had (before Barbarossa) helped, at great personal risk, smuggle a family of German Jews into the USSR, and they returned, insisting that Germans were civilized and would never actually harm them, right until they were herded onto the transport.
Just to put it out there: I'm not sure how big the "yeah, the machines are going to replace humanity, and it's GOOD!" faction is actually in e/acc, but the fact that it's of *any* notable presence makes me automatically distrust the entire movement, considerably adjusts my priors towards distrusting rationalism in general. Ironically it also makes me more skeptical of any alignment goals, simply because any alignment project with those kinds of people even in the near vicinity, in the "zone of acceptable thought" seems like there's a huge risk of alignment in precisely the wrong direction. Nothing makes the Butlerian Jihad sound more alluring than these guys.
"In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t."
The First Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, is meaningless without enforcement.
England and Wales operates without a single written constitution, and for most of English history, there was no judicial review of the laws of England - the Parliament was assumed to have considered the constitutionality of whatever laws and acts they passed.
40 is pretty wild. I wonder if it was all a front or if he actually tried to steer kids away from the lifestyle. When I think about it, I’m sure people around the neighborhood knew the truth of who he was. That tends to be how things are. He might have been the best equipped person to help kids find another direction if they clearly weren’t cut out for the lifestyle.
(a) "The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”."
So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
(b) "You might expect to find socially liberal beliefs (like that women need to focus on their careers), but Aria Babu says the data don’t support this. Instead, the biggest driver of low fertility seems to be a belief that taking care of kids is a lot of work and you’ll screw them up if you cut any corners."
I don't think this is an "either/or" but more of an "and" situation; you think kids are a lot of work, you can't devote time to both maximally raising your hot-house blossom and developing your kick-ass career, you're not rich enough to be able to afford nannies and really really expensive daycare, of course if you don't maximally raise your hot-house blossom they will fail abjectly in life, but if you become (gasp!) a stay-at-home mom you are wasting your potential and all the investment in your education and career, so you decide to not have children or at least 'not right now'.
(c) "Did you know - Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips and quadruple-murderer, “[led] an ironic double life in which he worked in a legal job as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles”."
I did not know, but there's historical precedence with Jonathan Wild:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild
"Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief-Taker General". He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.
Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
(c) "TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court)."
That would be the same Supreme Court that certain online and media outlets are constantly having fits over being CONSERVATIVE NON-DEMOCRATIC BULLIES, would it? I'm not convinced by what Trace has to say, yes the "elites" are primarily voting Democratic, but remind me again about this guy Trump that I'm hearing is a total fascist dictator who must be stopped right this second or else he'll bring America to the brink of doom, and over? He may be a fluke, but he's one that all the bragging about "demographics are destiny" and hence the inevitable Democratic strangle-hold on power back in the day never saw coming.
I understand not liking e/acc, but gloating about these poll results is silly imo. The general public has no idea what e/acc even is and the question describes e/acc as wanting to "replace humanity" with AI.
37.
>Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win
This seems to naively assumes that individuals (voters and otherwise) generally advocate for political positions that would benefit them. As Bryan Caplans shows though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) that isn't the case.
That said, school choice is on the rise.
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
Biden: We need to nuke the enemies of liberal democracy.
"But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively"
Educated elites can't govern either if they are unable to win elections. You can already see what happens after the institutional capture of academia, their previous broad trust and respect collapse after they try to exploit this capture they worked so hard to obtain for an ideological agenda. I don't think many people are looking at this institution as a moral authority as they used to.
The lesson here is don't let your institution be captured by outside forces, period. This is very hard work and requires sacrifice.
I don’t think optimists.ai are better than, say, Robin Hanson in opposing the doomers. My reply to their first post (where I point out some of the things they misrepresented and/or are clearly wrong about): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iABojbKgmtMGYgcYm/some-quick-thoughts-on-ai-is-easy-to-control
"38. Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools."
"21. In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography."
Maybe Oakland teachers should instead spend their time teaching students geography and history?? Crazy radical thought for one of the worst school districts in the country, I know.
On the Berlin item (No. 20), worth noting that Elon Musk said anyone using the terms "from the river to the sea" (on Palestine issue) would be suspended from X, since those terms "necessarily imply genocide". https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725645884409401435
#2 Bigger brains sounds like what you would expect from boring medical advances where bigger heads would have led to more complications?
> 3: What beliefs correlate with low fertility rates?
Reading Aria's Substack, it seems like this question is linked to a larger question, from her post "Beliefs that Kill Birth Rates":
> The big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors.
As I posted in response there, this is strange. "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S152169340800151X?via%3Dihub
I've recently started seeing people moving on from listing pronouns as "She/her" and "They/them" to the ungodly combination "She/them".
Do I need to switch from feminine to plural pronouns depending on whether this person is the subject or the object of the sentence? This is very confusing but at least it expands the possibilities for "Who's On First" routines.
"So I pass it to them, and she catches it"
"Who are they?"
"There is no they, only them"
"Who are them?"
"She is"
"So you pass it to her"
"No, I pass it to them"
#24: strong Comet King prophecy vibes.
#20: Germany has that awkward problem that the former first verse of their national anthem - which it is also illegal to perform nowadays - contained a statement staking out a territory. A look at a map shows the problem with this one too (the Memel is the border between Russian Kaliningrad and Lithuania these days, flowing from Belarus).
#14: STRONG content warning. I spent most of the morning at work trying not to cry. That post has become one of the most upvoted on Hacker News, with a lot of tributes coming in - Lars himself replied, among other things, "I love you all. Hug your kids if you have em.". One of my favourite quotes from the comments: "Grief is just love with no place to go."
Related to 17:
If you ask GPT4 which model it is, it will answer that it’s GPT3.
Tried it with multiple different accounts and model versions.
38 - what a sad own goal by the pro-Israel side. What's that, all Palestine sympathizers are antisemites? Congratulations, Jews are now uncomfortable everywhere!
On one hand, widespread genetic childbearing intervention seems like a good thing, for preventing conditions that are incompatible with life or completely incapacitating.
On the other, surely there would be unintended consequences galore if it went past that? If universally implemented, would this be really bad for humanity, by either selecting against genes that turn out to be somehow important, or by selecting for genes that somehow turn out to be bad to have? See e.g. associations between blood group and risk of certain diseases.
I don't think you can "translate" #26 because the premise of the joke isn't true for America. The point of the joke is that Chinese elites send their families to global cities in the west and have few ties to domestic backwaters. American elites also tend have few ties to places like Missouri, but their families are also just in global cities in the west. Malia Obama is pursuing a film career in LA, not Shanghai. Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey's NYC office, not their Tehran branch.
When American elites do spend significant time outside of America's sphere of influence, it's usually either humanitarian (like Chelsea Clinton working with Kenyan elephants) or however you'd classify Hunter Biden working at a Ukrainian energy company. Or they're counter-cultural, like Angela Davis.
The closest equivalent would be something like Trump wanting to deport all people from _____, but realizing that those people are vital for a certain part of the economy. It ends with him deporting all people from Ohio, who aren't vital for anything.
More on my Glassdoor "how did they think this was suitable to my experience?" saga, and a new recommendation for a job.
This one's in West Virginia, a mere 3,498 miles from where I live so an easy commute. I'll give you the company spiel so see if you can guess what the position is:
"As a company, we are proud of our values and encourage those who share in our aspirations to join our team:
We protect our colleagues and communities through safe practices everywhere, every day.
We are committed to serving our customers and communities by going above and beyond to exceed expectations.
We take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world.
We are driven to deliver results in the right way.
We encourage a human centered culture that honors the unique potential and dignity of every person."
Okay, take a guess and then further down I'll reveal what the job opening is:
=====================SPOILERS=================================
It's for a trainee driver on a waste truck (commercial as well as residential) 😀 A socially important job, indeed, but is the mission statement a little overblown for that?
>I’m not sure how much this study adds once you already know that twin studies find criminal behavior is about 45% genetic, 25% shared environmental, 30% nonshared/random, although I guess they can help pin down the exact nature of the shared environmental part.
But remember that heredity studies are always relative to the environment they are done in!
IQ is very heritable in a study where everyone involved had very similar environments, and not very heritable in a study where half the subjects are upper-class American and half the participants are illiterate third-world peasants with heavy parasite loads and lots of childhood malnutrition.
Particularly pernicious in this situation, where the claim is *about* different environments causing changes in behavior. If the twins in the studies were not raised in rich vs poor environments as extreme as teh differences between the rich vs poor communities the crime hypothesis is comparing, then it will under-rate the effect of environment in that context.
I'm late to the party, but when I saw #21 previously, I thought it might be code-switching rather than actually changing anyone's mind. Given some sort of interactive survey or however this was done, first you answer the "right answer" according to your social group. But then, trap sprung! Surveyor clearly demonstrates that this was not the right answer. Okay, so code switch, this is now a test of your ability to do critical thinking (or whatever the acceptable term for that is now). Give the new "right answer".
What's the real belief? Well, what proof is there that the surveyees even have an internal, honestly-held opinion on the subject? Why should they?
It's always interesting to look in various dissident libertarian-adjacent spaces and see the conflict between the culture war antipathy towards public schools and the Caplan/me-style edunihilism that is more prominent in those spaces than in almost any other political niche.
37: TracingWoodgrains, like so many others trying to diagnose the ills of the Republican party and of American conservatism, is very confused and lacks an understanding of what is actually happening in/to the American right, to the point of being deeply Not Even Wrong on almost every point.
The problem for American conservatives is not that they have a "short bench," although it's certainly true that they have one, or that there are too many progressives in academia (there are plenty, but American academia is politically next to powerless). The problem is that approximately half of the base of the Republican party, the party that has traditionally been the main avenue for conservative political action in the US, has sharply and definitively *abandoned conservatism*, by almost any reasonable definition of the term, in favor of Trumpism, which, however difficult it is to define politically, is manifestly anything but conservative.
Social conservatism? Jettisoned in the mid-2010s when half the party decided that "grab them by the pussy" was acceptable language from an American president, and when those who didn't actually put "TRUMP - FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" bumper stickers on their cars didn't complain a bit about those who did, despite that sort of language being neither "decent" nor very much in keeping with Family Values.
Institutional conservatism? Well, a good chunk of the party had already tossed any lingering respect for existing institutions and the need to work within them out the window long before Trump arrived on the scene, but the burn-it-all-down philosophy of the Tea Party sure has only grown as a force in Republican politics since 2015, as we saw last year during the House Speaker debacle.
Fiscal conservatism? ...I was going to type a whole paragraph here, but there's no need.
Monetary conservatism? There wasn't much pushback, or even mild criticism, from the Trumpist base when the god-emperor took to Twitter to threaten to fire Fed chairman Jerome Powell because the latter had tried to turn *off* the spigot of free and easy money (artificially low interest rates, money-printing via asset purchases) that the Fed had been pumping into the economy since the Obama presidency. The few monetary hawks left in the party didn't get much traction when they complained--and even they didn't complain much a few months later when the Fed went into absolute batshit money-printing hyperdrive in early 2020 in response to the pandemic.
Law-and-order conservatism? It seemed like that old Republican stalwart might actually survive Trumpism--the orange man himself had carped about it for years, after all--but then January 6, 2021 happened, and in a matter of minutes, riots turned out to be the language of the unheard after all, and the members of the mob who spent hours beating the shit out of terrified policement and vandalizing the halls of Congress (see also: institutional conservatism, above) became merely frustrated patriots venting some steam, and indeed political prisoners.
But anyway, if that bloggers commenters are right about the Republican party being dragged kicking and screaming into small-government libertarianism, then the party is even more doomed, because at least half of the exising party couldn't care less about small government or libertarianism (and in some ways are actively hostile to those things), and the one thing that still unites the actual conservatives and the Trumpists--a disdain for "wokeness" in all its forms, real and imaginary--is probably not going to be enough to hold the party together in its current form.
More likely, imo, is that the Trumpists win the power struggle and the party, and the deficit hawks and free-marketeers are forced to find a new home.
Below is a link to my reply to Aria Babu's post - I don't think there's good enough evidence for the causal conclusion between opinions on working mothers and TFR that she asserts. I looked at the data ex-Europe and found the negative correlation disappears. Then I looked at data on the exact question she's presenting within the US and find the opposite relationship, a positive correlation between fertility rates and thinking that mothers should stay home when kids are young. Given that within the US a bunch of the potential confounding factors are held constant, this suggests there's likely something else going on (although I'm not sure what!) which is causing the negative correlation between European countries. Overall, I don't think you can assert the causal relationship which Aria concludes her post with, especially when it runs strongly counter to priors.
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/can-women-really-have-it-all?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
With regard to the "Verband nationaldeutscher Juden" (point 29), historian Donald Niewyk documented the right-wing political faction led by Max Naumann (a Berlin lawyer and reform Jew) in his book _Jews in Weimar Germany_ (Routledge, 2017). Niewyk writes:
> At least as viable as an alternative to liberal assimilationism was the rightwing chauvinism of Max Naumann and his League of German Nationalist Jews. It presented an opportunity for Jews who were frightened of communism or disillusioned with Weimar democracy to pursue a reactionary line. It held out the hope of counteracting anti-Semitism by canceling the equation of Jew and liberal. Unquestionably the persistent Judeophobia of most of the remaining German right made its task more difficult.
Niewyk, in this same book, contextualizes the frictions between assimilated liberal German Jews and the Eastern European immigrant Jews during this period. One point made in the book is that no Jews of any political persuasion, not even the most severely pessimistic, had reason to suspect Hitler's Final Solution while living in the liberal democracy that was Weimar Germany.
"Still, people continue to work as much as ever. I’m surprised by this result; is the claim that people still work exactly as much when they don’t need the money? Why?"
My guess is that capital and labor are complements in production. If you have extra money to invest on your business, your work becomes more productive so you work more. If the whole economy consists mostly of small business, then you'd see this effect in the aggregate. This implies that we should expect employees to work less under a UBI.
#41: Chuck Schumer is a laughingstock. Anybody who he gives credence to actually has their credence reduced. I'm surprised MIRI didn't know this. I guess the people opposed to artificial intelligence are also opposed to doing intelligence on their adversaries.