625 Comments

Haven't been here in a couple years, is there still culture war thread here or is that totally gone now?

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I don't remember the exact rules, but there is:

a specialized culture war subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/

and there is no longer a distinction between CW and CW-free open threads.

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Is there a protocol for drawing Scott’s attention to commenters that should get a warning or banning? It’s also quite possible I’ve missed a FAQ explaining how to do this or why not to do this.

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There's three dots under each comment next to Reply, the 'Report' option is there. That's how to draw Scott's attention to them.

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Thanks! I thought the report button sent the comment to Substack corporate.

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As of August 1, the sale of marijuana becomes legal in Minnesota. Gummies containing 5 mg of THC have been legal for a little over a year.

There are some inexplicable exceptions to the older law though. For example you can buy a canned soda like beverage with 50 mg total. I think of the poor novice to THC intoxication knocking back two or three cans as if that was comparable to drinking 2 or 3 beers. That’s the sort of dose a cancer patient might use for pain and nausea. You need to build up to that level.

Yikes. Happy trails, my friend. I’ll get back to you in 5 hours or so. You might want to lie down for a while. Give me your car keys and I’ll put on some Allman Brothers.

Fortunately the new law will limits the content of canned beverages to 5mg of THC per can.

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Jul 22, 2023
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Always with the negative waves, trebuchet. Always with the negative waves.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54oqYyy_r_Q

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Smoking kills you. It increases the rates lung cancer, throat cancer heart attacks and many other diseases. Smoking Cannabis seems to also cause cancer, but probably much less and eating it doesn't seem to cause cancer.

One kills you, the other probably is somewhat unhealthy, but you can just eat it and then it isn't unhealthy.

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For me one or two puffs before I play golf or softball are plenty. Enough to put my head entirely in the the game and improve my performance. If I were a glued to my sofa binge watching Netflix sort of guy I’d definitely go with edibles.

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Jul 22, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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My advice MI, smile and shrug it off. It’s just not that important.

This might help.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0AEj3LA2vSo

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Sorry for the naiv question: what is the fastest way to find a concrete comment of mine on this site? It was on use of media compared to use of social media in Germany. I think this should contain enough keywords to narrow it down, but I haven't been successful so far.

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PS: you had also told me, that I needed to refresh the page if I wanted to see an edited comment. That's very useful!

Regardless, I'm a bit surprised substack hasn't fixed that by now. Maybe it's more complicated than I'm aware of.

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Ha, I found it, thanks!!

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Have there been any major, damaging computer hack/virus incidents where the perpetrator gained nothing tangible from the act? I'm looking for an example like the "Bank of America Hack of 1998 where Mike Smith hacked into the database and deleted 1 million accounts, destroying $250 million."

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The largest no-gain-only-destruction that comes to mind is the 2017 NotPetya malware which was masquerading as ransomware but really just wiped all the networks it could infect, causing billions of damage to major unrelated companies like Maersk, Merck, Fedex, and many others - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Ukraine_ransomware_attacks .

For pure shenanigans-gone-unexpectedly-successful, the most famous IMHO are the 2000 ILoveYou virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU , 1998 Chernobyl virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus) and the original 1988 Morris worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm .

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Maybe Stuxnet? A worm deployed by the US and Israel at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran which had no other intention other than messing with the machinery to slow the advancement of the iranian nuclear program.

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Jul 22, 2023
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yes, exactly

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So Barbie is Eve in the garden of Eden.

Wish we had a kabbalistic review of that movie (and a kaballistic one of Oppenheimer too)

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I think they are both playing at the local cinema duplex. It would be an interesting double feature. I suppose I’d want to view Barbie first. Much too difficult to go from interesting and intense biography to over the top silly social commentary.

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Playing with Llama 2, poetry completion seems completely flat compared to Llama 1. Coherence is up but I can't get the 13B model to generate anything better than unimaginative doggerel. Maybe my prompts need serious revision, or I need to move to the 70B model, but so far I am disappointed.

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Makes sense. The 1-l lama, he's a priest, the 2-l llama, he's a beast.

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A 3-L lama is a big fire in South Boston. ;-)

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"Some of the best responses were Yes, Students At Elite Schools Are Actually Taught Different Things,"

When my kids were applying to colleges, I researched this very carefully. My conclusion is that the "Ivy League" did very little educationally that could not be found at the flagship State Universities, all of which have "honors" programs and all of which have large graduate programs where the same stuff is taught everywhere.

Since their grandmother wanted to pay their tuition, my kids went to a Midwestern Private R1 university that is always ranked with the Ivies. They got good educations, but, in my estimation, if they had gone to State, they would have wound up the same.

My nephew did go to an Ivy. He wanted to go to medical school, so he took all of his required science courses at a state university branch in his hometown so he could be more assured of getting an "A". He went to Medical school and landed a residency in a famous Eastern hospital.

I am firmly in the Bryan Caplan school on this one.

"several people ... pointing out that smart people want to socialize with other smart people."

Yes, but, there are plenty of smart people everywhere. Let us think this through with numbers.

Most IQ scoring systems have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Applying this and a standard deviation calculator, to the approximately 5 million kids who turn 18 every year we find that:

IQ 115 -- 129 (definitely college material) 700,000

IQ 139 --144 (really smart professional/graduate school) 100,000

IQ 145 & up (I don't like the word genius) 7,000

Now the top schools. There are about 70,000 total undergraduates at the Ivy League schools. That would be about 18,000 admissions per year.

A good friend is a senior faculty member at an Ivy. From what he told me, and from what was publicized during the trials leading to the recent SCOTUS decision, Less than half of those admissions are made purely on the basis of academic evidence of intellectual prowess, the rest being, affirmative action, legacy, athletics, etc.

So, I would guess that no more than half of the incoming class of the Ivys consists of IQ >=130. That would be a total of less than 10,000 out of that 100,000. Take another tranche of 10,000 for the the non Ivy top schools (Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, etc.) and there are still 80,000 really smart kids who have to go to other colleges.

I am willing to wager that any of the top 25 state universities has as many really smart kids (IQ >= 130) as the average Ivy. It is just that they are a smaller percentage of the student bodies at those schools. But, from a social viewpoint, it is not a real problem. They will meet each other in class and find the hang out locations where they can meet more.

Again, Bryan Caplan is right.

My conclusion is that the best reason to want to go to an IVY is the hope of meeting and marrying rich. As my father told me, a man can accumulate more wealth in a 15 minute wedding ceremony that he can in 45 years of honest toil.

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John Kerry went to Yale. He was descended from the Forbes family so he never had trouble making rent. He didn’t hit the big time till he married Teresa Heinz though. Yeah, part of *that* Heinz family.

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Before meeting Teresa Heinz, John Kerry had:

-- served in Viet Nam and been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts.

-- served for several years as First Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, MA.

-- been elected Lt. Governor of Massachusetts.

-- been elected to the U.S. Senate.

And after meeting but before marrying Mrs. Heinz, Kerry was easily re-elected to the Senate.

Seems at least big-time-adjacent....

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I was responding to

> As my father told me, a man can accumulate more wealth in a 15 minute wedding ceremony that he can in 45 years of honest toil.

Yep he was an accomplished man. Big time was meant financially. He himself said he married up when he wed Teresa Heinz.

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And Teresa Heinz was born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira in Mozambique, which was then a Portuguese colony.

She became a Heinz by marrying John Heinz who became a US Senator. She inherited his money, or at least control of it, when he died in an airplane crash in 1992.

Kerry had divorced his first wife while she was suffering from a mental health crisis in the 1980s. Teresa's husband John and Kerry were both Senators at the time. Teresa married Kerry in 1995.

Not only did they not meet in college, they were middle aged and previously married when they married.

See, you don't have to go to an Ivy.

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Hello smart people of ACX. I'm trying to find the word for a concept: when you do something which you're explaining or talking about. Some examples:

"Oh my god, you don't even know what condescending means", said John condescendingly.

"You're great at manipulating those people by flattering them", said Kim to Tom, causing him to beam.

Google thinks I'm looking for simile, metaphor or analogy because I can't search properly. Whichever Chat GPT is free thinks I want "performative speech". Bard thinks "exemplify", which I think is the closest. Any ideas?

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My new - used - copy of Metamagical Themas came in today:

Chapter 1 On Self-Referential Sentences

Chapter 2 Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up

Chapter 3 On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures

I had bought it in hard cover shortly after it came out. First time I ever saw the word ‘meme’. First discussion I ever saw of the Lisp programming language is in there too.

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This makes me want to move rereading GEB up the priority list. Let me know if you find anything relevant to my query in there.

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Yes. Chapter XVI of GEB:

Self-Ref and Self-Rep

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I think Douglas Hofstadter touched on this in Metamagical Themas. I misplaced my original copy but ordered a used volume from a local store a couple days ago. If it arrives in time I’ll checK on it.

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Tom Swiftie?

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No, those are puns, this is a little different.

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Yeah, it's a little different to all the suggestions. I think self demonstrating and self referential are probably "correct", but not quite what I'm looking for. Full marks nonetheless.

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Self-demonstrating?

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good candidate

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Self-referential? Self-implicating?

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also a good candidate

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Scott spoke some time ago of TPOT, the postrationalists, and how they never gave any philosophical grounding to their stuff. I'm not really a part of that, but I'm quite taken with their idea of the vibes, and I wrote an anti- or meta-philosophical defense of vibes.

The Truth Is Literally A Vibe

https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-truth-is-literally-a-vibe

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A fair amount of science has been done by younger researchers inspired by how badly they think their elders have flubbed it ("it" being whatever aspect of science they are studying). Sometimes it's "That's weird", but sometimes it's "That *can't* be right" instead.

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What's TPOT? I keep seeing it more and more, but when I google it the results are either for Battle of Dream Island: The Power of Two or a Python library.

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This Part Of Twitter (i.e. the postrat community), presumably.

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No, the truth is not literally a vibe. But when you are well callibrated on the truth, the vibes you experience can be meaningful signals about the truth.

See the "noticing your confusion" rationality technique.

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I think the experience of something being "true" is a conscious mental state, more or less accurately described as a "feeling". I'm not sure that is what the author was referring to, however.

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LW/ACX Saturday (7/22/23) The Fermi Paradox (Why don't we see evidence of alien life)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RirLmvmvVxzVS_m1zQ2jz2W1fgPyeHGAZ964CciCizU/edit?usp=sharing

Hello Folks!

We are excited to announce the 35th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.

Host: Michael Michalchik

Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)

Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660

Date: Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

Time: 2 PM

This week we are diving into the deep end of the Fermi Paradox, a 70-year-old question that has been surprisingly hard to answer when people have deeply investigated it. The universe seems to be a place that could be filled with intelligent technological life, why haven’t we observed any? There are a lot of simple-sounding solutions to this problem, but upon deep scrutiny, many of them don’t hold up well or rely on factors we just don’t have hard numbers for. Most of the viable solutions point towards disturbing conclusions.

Google Docs

LW/ACX Saturday (7/22/23) The Fermi Paradox (Why don't we see evide...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RirLmvmvVxzVS_m1zQ2jz2W1fgPyeHGAZ964CciCizU/edit?usp=sharing Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 35th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter. Host: Michael Michalchik Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (Fo...

[3:55 PM]

Follow the link for the full message

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Re: Aella, but also as a statement of general grumpiness-- what is with the general tendency to treat self-report, self-selected internet polls as meaningful empirical evidence for real-world phenomena?

That goes especially intensely for polls being used to adjudicate culture war questions with strong allegiances among the Very Online, like trans/ poly/ LGBTQ issues. Since it's usually very obvious which answers would yield results that flatter Our Side ("Why, uh, yes, I really definitely *am *a cis woman! And *of course* I get super aroused by the thought of pawing my own boobs while wearing platform heels and a tiny bimbo skirt!"), it seems implausible that those polls wouldn't get a ton of brigading and possibly bot mobilization to give false answers and skew results in the most convenient direction.

Which, frankly, is the type of critique I practically learned to make from reading SSC/ACX. So can anyone explain the serious takes around here?

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fwiw, my survey wasn't branded anything about autogynephilia. it was a 300+ question survey, the "are u trans" and the autogynephilia questions were located far away from each other, and tailcalleds questions were pretty neutrally worded. it would have been quite inconvenient for people to brigade the survey, and with the huge amount of questions (and some intentional design) it was pretty easy to remove inconsistent answer sets. the survey on average took 40 minutes to complete, and currently has a sample size of 600,000. actually brigading this in a way that gets past my checks and meaningfully affects the results would take a lot of time and intelligent coordination among a ton of people.

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Jul 22, 2023
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It apparently went viral on ticktock because once you took the survey you were given some kind of person most similar to you. And like 400000 people on ticktock took it. For example if you look at the gender ration its something like 60F 40M. Whereas Aellas normal followers are 85M 15F.

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have you seen "real science" polls?

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They're provocative, not conclusive. There may be flaws with the method, but it prompts other people to use an equal method to show a different result, and the longer things go without someone producing a different result the more likely the first result is meaningful. Information has to start somewhere.

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Jul 22, 2023
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If literally nobody takes the time or effort to back up a counterargument, then clearly nobody actually gives a crap about the question, and we can assume the thing is right with no ill effects.

In practice this will never happen.

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Jul 22, 2023Edited
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>To a first approximation, nobody<

"To the first approximation", nobody ran the original surveys and you have nothing to complain about.

>You would have to force most people at gunpoint to get them to express an opinion about, say, the national debt or zoning regulations or the quality of the energy grid,<

A quick Google search gives first-page reports on the Energy Grid (https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-Future-of-the-Electric-Grid.pdf), the National Debt (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/gov-finances.html) and Zoning Regulations (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420989120080681). People think they matter, therefore they put in work.

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I don't think it's respondents we are trying to inspire, its other researchers. Some number of researchers are motivated by "That was an interesting topic, but damn I could it better." Then they do, and we learn something.

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Jul 22, 2023
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Because, as my old dissertation advisor used to say, "Use the data you have, not the data you wish you had." Not only is it impractical to design perfect experiments for every issue society needs to know more about, but there is no perfect research design. They all have advantages and disadvantages with respect to each other. The best designed experiment won't generalize perfectly to the real world, the best survey may produce less valid data, field studies are unreliable. The solution is not to rely on single methodologies, but to gather the widest range of data types possible, and look for the degree of convergence.

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This makes sense, but surely there must be some threshold of terrible design below which the data is worse than nothing? We're talking internet self-report polls that are fully open to tampering, being broadcast to culture-war-selected readerships where many have strong motivation and ample means to tamper. That seems more like a rhetorical vehicle for the readership than an experiment of any kind.

Compare:

"Investigation Finds Drew Peterson Was Actually Innocent!" [source: we asked him]

"In Survey of 934 Democrats, 94% Admit to Wetting the Bed Regularly" [source: paper slips left in unattended box outside Republican National Convention]

Do these really update us meaningfully in any direction?

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Probably not, though as Yug pointed out, they do serve to create interest, esp. for young people. I teach college level research design (social sciences) and what I would do is use some of these shallow approaches as a learning opportunity (extra credit to anyone who can enumerate the design flaws. Find an article that does it right). Of course, in so far as formal criteria of design quality we have measures of statistical significance and power.

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Jul 22, 2023
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Actually I can't speak to the original survey, since I never saw the link (the first I heard about it was De's post on the 19th). But in general, the proper response to bad stuff is to offer better stuff, not ignore it. The worse it was, the better the learning opportunity.

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Jul 22, 2023
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The replication crisis happened because no one would publish studies that were just replications. Journals would even ask you what unique contribution you were making to the field. Haven't published in a while, so hopefully that has changed somewhat.

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dating ad: 26 year old woman looking for a slightly older male long-term partner

— am an Australian English/history teacher who enjoys reading (most on Bloom's Western Canon or any text written before the 20th century, miscellaneous articles on anything technical, a lot on Gutenberg and Archive.org, sometimes ArXiv too), classifying transport models, exercising, and travelling. wants children (have worked with them and teenagers for almost a decade, and I think they are the best)

— looking for somebody who is also averse to TikTok and Netflix and other numbing agents. somebody who enjoys reading widely (interest in history, tech, military affairs, and transport e.g. aircraft or trains would be excellent), explaining technically dense processes, travelling, a night out dancing, and Norm Macdonald. strong preference for engineers

lilyreadsyouremail @ gmail . com

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It might help to know where you are geographically. Being a young woman, I don't think the lack of offers will be the problem.

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What is the most negative Rick Steves travel video review?

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The following is a proof-of-concept: a quote-supported opinion generated by a PIM App.

Looking for feedback on both content and format. Thanks!

A Balanced Sense of Self

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Av3DdRPJXjSngTvaHplrV0yFbGlz?e=gs89Fi

[MS OneDrive, recommend downloading]

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Dear ACX readers,

I've just written a post on how to foster Antifragility - I think you will all enjoy it:

https://open.substack.com/pub/zantafakari/p/17-be-antifragile-by-expanding-awareness?r=p7wqp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Please leave feedback so that I can improve. And if you like my writing - share, like and subscribe!

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Here's an article in the New York Times about the future of Wikipedia in the age of ChatGPT. In addition to its topic, one notable feature for this forum is that the first source who is discussed in the article is presented only by his Wikipedia username, "Barkeep49", and the author explicitly states that he isn't giving this Wikipedian's real name, to avoid harassment.

Notably, this article is by Jon Gertner, rather than Cade Metz, who is the one that wrote the article that gave Scott's legal last name (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html).

I'm not sure if the difference in policy is an official change at the New York Times, or the fact that this article is in next Sunday's "New York Times Magazine" rather than a regular daily edition (there could be separate editorial policies for the two contexts), or just about the different attitude of the two authors. (You can see more of their articles at their respective pages. Note that Gertner has his own site, because his articles are published in different venues, while Metz seems to be just at the NYT. https://jongertner.net/category/article-archive/ https://www.nytimes.com/by/cade-metz )

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/magazine/wikipedia-ai-chatgpt.html

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Article about Wikipedia

https://archive.ph/5YPKS

Article about SCC, Rationalist, EA and Scott

https://archive.ph/AkQtu

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I dunno. Barkeep49 a Wikipedia editor being given anonymity in order to speak freely seems to fall into a different category.

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Given that Mr. Metz' view regarding harassment was to lightly laugh off death threats as "something journalists get all the time", it does seem like 'one rule for me and another for thee'.

But this is an old fight by now, and at least we see one writer on technical issues for the NYT isn't a total smeghead.

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Yeah the article about SSC seemed particularly dickish. It came down hard on EA and tech bro culture.

But I think the articles cited differ in that Scott’s blog was at the center of the piece. The article about Wikipedia wasn’t really centered on one particular Wiki editor. The anonymity granted to one Wiki editor seemed more like those cases where politicians agree to comment on something if their name is withheld. That sort of thing seems pretty common in journalism.

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As I remember it, and I could be wrong, the refusal of anonymity to Scott was (1) harassment is all part of it, dude (2) people can find out your name anyway (3) we don't give anonymity to anyone

Clearly (3) was not correct, since there were examples of people being given anonymity on request.

If "once you're on the Internet anyone can find out who you are and being harassed is all part of the experience and that's no reason to give you anonymity", then being a Wikipedia editor is also a public-facing role with a certain degree of power.

As pointed out, different writer this time so maybe different attitude here.

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paywalled.

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You used to be able to get past the nytimes paywall by googling the url - I don’t know if that still works.

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That worked, thanks.

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Or just disable Javascript before loading the page.

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What works now is simply stopping the page from continuing to load after a few seconds . It might take a couple of tries to get the timing right, but it is pretty easy. Maybe easier on a laptop than mobile.

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"I plan to ask Michael to design the questions for the next survey and demonstrate that they get the same result." Doesn't announcing how you'd like your test subjects to respond mean that your results will be invalid?

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Only if everyone remembers this thread in six months.

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If we were omniscient, yes, we could determine validity based on such criteria. Since we are not omniscient, rules like "don't tell your subjects how to respond to your survey" determine whether results are valid or not.

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Impact Academy is looking for a Regional Director and a Regional Associate for our upcoming programs: https://www.impactacademy.org/joinus

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I'm running low on non-fiction books I'm interested in reading, wondering if anyone has any suggestions.

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The Wager by David Grann

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Based on your Substack posts, I suggest Historians Debate the Rise of the West by Jonathan Daly. I learned more about perspectives that I had heard of, and learned of new perspectives entirely.

A more recent alternative that I haven't read is How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. From the brief review here (https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/2022-book-roundup), it sounds similar.

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Orwell, Down & Out in Paris & London?

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I keep recommending this one, but Thomas Cromwell by Diarmuid Macculloch is a great read about how to climb up and then slide back down the greasy pole of Tudor power politics. You'll come away with your own opinion of the guy, whether you think he got what he deserved, or if he really is much misunderstood.

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I recently read The Grid, a book about the history of America's electrical grid and how it's changing as we shift to renewable energy. I thought it was a really neat look at a part of the economy I don't usually think about.

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1491 by Charles Mann

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Anything by Oliver Sacks or Michael Pollan.

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The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis is good if you have any interest in Medieval history.

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Based on your ACX review of Bullshit Jobs, I actually strongly recommend "Debt" by David Graeber too.

Also you've probably read them, but the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb is my favourite. I've summarised them here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/zantafakari/p/17-be-antifragile-by-expanding-awareness?r=p7wqp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Judging by a quick look at your subscription list, you might like Joel Mokry’s “The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress”.

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The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee

River of the Gods, Candice Millard

The Buried, Peter Hessler

Those are some recent non-fiction books I enjoyed.

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I'm writing a novel that involves these subjects:

* US & China economic war

* VLSI chips & EVs

* Global warming

* Pedophilia & hebephilia

* Daoism, Tantra, & Kundalini

* Industrial espionage

* China's aggressive goals

This is my reading list. Titles have been abreviated, but a search should bring up the book.

***** NONFICTION *****

AGE-GAP (9)

At Home in the World: Maynard  ✓D

Autobio: Will & Ariel Durant ✓B  

Autobio–Transition: Will Durant  ✓K

Excavation: Wendy Ortiz  ✓A✓

Guide to Older Men: Mitchell++ ✓N

Lolita–Covers: Bertram++  ✓U

Places Left Unfilled: Cauley  ✓U

Refuge Jae-In Doe: Chu  ✓P

Tiger Tiger: Margaux Fragoso  ✓A

CHINA CULTURE  (10)

Bribery & Corruption: Shaomin Li  ✓YS

China Exposed: Che Chibala  ✓U

China the Novel: Rutherfurd ✓A

China's New Youth: Alec Ash ✓D

Culture US, China, Japan: Conrad  ✓K

Good Earth: Pearl Buck ✓U

Munk Debate on China: Kissinger  ✓Y

Red Roulette: Desmond Shum ✓DA

River Town: Peter Hessler  ✓YS

Socialism Is Great: Lijia  ✓B  ***

CONFUCIANISM  (6)

Confucian Feminism: Jing Yin ✓D

Confucianism Feminism: Batista ✓I

Confucianism & Rivals: Giles ✓D

Confucianism--Intro: Berthrong++ ✓D

Confucius vs China Women: Orozco ✓P

Gender in Confucian Phil: Rosenlee ✓I

DAOISM, TANTRA & YOGA  (32)

Autobiography of Yogi: Yogananda  ✓K

Beyond Yoga: Brunton  $10 K

Dào Dé Jīng: Lǎo Zǐ  ✓U

Each Journey: Ming-dao Deng ✓D

Ecstatic Sex--Tantra: Sarita++ ✓D

Female Sexual Energy: Chia  ✓A

Heart of Tantric Sex: Richardson  ✓A

Kama Sutra Sex Guide: Mandala  ✓U

Kriya Yoga: Hariharananda  ✓U

Kundalini Awakening: Silva ✓D

Kundalini--Radical Freedom: Edwards ✓D

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In the west, smarter people tend to be left wing. Are there countries where high IQ is correlated with being conservative/on the right ?

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2016 USA was such a Western country according to to https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/03/12/the-republicans-are-becoming-the-stupid-party/.

https://politikbloggen.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/bevis-bla-valjare-ar-smarta-roda-korkade/ shows that the social democrats and communists (left) were very popular in the lowest-IQ municipalities in Sweden in 2006 while the moderates and liberals (right) were more popular in the highest-IQ municipalities. There have been some changes since then in that a then insignificant low-IQ anti-immigration party now makes up about half of the right wing, while the left wing has gained many new low-IQ supporters through immigration.

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This is pretty recent, IQ used to be higher for republicans on average. It's been changing as education polarization overtook income polarization.

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E.g. here's a paper in it from as recently as 2014

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614001081

(Although note that this is affected by minorities who generally score lower on these tests voting overwhelmingly democrats)

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Hold on there a second. It's *college educated* people tend to be more left wing (which describes everything from Yellow Dog Democrat to Maoist Marxist-Leninist Stalin Did Nothing Wrong).

Unless you're correlating "college education = smarter", this doesn't necessarily indicate that the right wing is all dum-dum stupids. After all, we have US minorities are solid Democrat voters, and at least one commenter on here claiming that US blacks are 1 SD in IQ below whites, hence they would be amongst the dum-dum stupids but ostensibly, by voting patterns, on the left.

"White voters without college degrees made up a majority (54%) of Republican voters in 2022, compared with 27% of Democratic voters.

Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats, but by a much smaller margin than in 2018

Black voters continued to support Democrats by overwhelming margins".

So if you're going for "smarter", it will be "when talking about white voters/political party affiliations" in the US, whatever about the rest of the West. There's a Labour party tradition in Europe that doesn't have similarity with the American party political landscape, for instance, and they would be working class/lower middle class, less likely to be college educated, and hence not "smarter" in the sense used here, but solidly left.

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It's not only education, IQ is correlated to being on the left in the US :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925

High IQ people tend to be socially liberal. Some measures of fiscal conservatism also increase with IQ up to a point where the trend reverses. The relationship with fiscal conservatism seems to be much weaker and less robust to controls however.

I did find this study from Brazil where high IQ people tended to be center-right or centrist :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289611001425?via%3Dihub

Smarter people tend to be less authoritarian and less likely to vote for extremes. If we use educational attainment as a proxy, in Europe, center-right neoliberal parties and socialist tend to be educated, but communists and the populist right tend to be uneducated :

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-09538-5_12

Overall, smart people can be right wing or left wing, but they tend not to be authoritarian. "My tribe is smarter" seems to be a bad argument to defend one's policy views.

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"It's not only education, IQ is correlated to being on the left in the US :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925"

Okay, so I follow that link and it tells me:

"Data are from the 2012 wave of the American National Election Study (ANES): a biennial/triennial survey concerned with Americans’ political attitudes and behaviours. In the 2012 wave, two separate nationally representative samples were collected, one via face-to-face interviewing, and one via the internet. The present study only utilises the face-to-face sample because one of the cognitive ability measures is not available for the internet sample."

Since I can't see the full study, I go looking for the 2012 ANES study and it tells me that it used educational attainment:

https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/anes-guide.html?chart=education

Maybe they did have something to measure "cognitive ability" but to me it looks like they're using educational attainment as a proxy for IQ and again, perhaps that works out - smart people stay in school longer - but it's an assumption, not proven.

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No, the study is on sci hub if you want to read it. They use an actual verbal IQ test which is highly g-loaded.

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Well, it seems more complicated than that. They use three measures: the one you mention (which they say loads on *crystalized* intelligence, i.e. some form of education), one that is subjective, and a PCA analysis of the previous two. (I may have misunderstood something, that was a quick read.)

But what I really wanted to see the most is how they figure who is conservative and who is liberal. Here is an excerpt:

"Twenty-four measures of fiscally conservative

beliefs are utilised. These encompass attitudes toward the size

and scope of government, the free market, business regulation,

income redistribution, government spending, the Affordable

Care Act, the budget deficit, the top rate of income tax, and

affirmative action. Details about each measure can be found in

the survey’s pre-election and post-election questionnaires

(ANES, 2014b, 2014c)."

How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), I wonder. Unfortunately, I can't get anything out of ANES, 2014b, 2014c (no questions, or dead link).

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"How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act"

Oppose == conservative, same for Affirmative Action.

They actually separate all 24 questions and their respective correlations. The highest correlations (with their measure of intelligence) are "the less government the better" and similar.

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