I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
One of my proudest moments was having badly configured bug reporting system time out after I was many minutes into an epic report - I successfully installed HxD, opened my entire RAM as a file, found the memory that contained the in progress comment, and successfully saved it (if poorly formatted).
I know I got lucky; every second you wait increases the chance that memory is re-used.
I'm sorry for your loss. I generally consider any writing via a browser to be prone to loss and if I'm writing something lengthy I'll switch to my own editor then paste the result (also for the sake of easier editing)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
In an earlier thread you compared your posts to mine, and said that I have no right to be annoyed about your repetitive axe-grinding because I'm also - according to you - axe-grinding in the same way.
I reject the comparison, needless to say. But if you want to make this comparison, maybe go with it to the very end. Here's a couple of guidelines that I have self-imposed on myself since my first post under the LearnsHebrew prefix here in October:
(1) Never post more than 1 top-level comment per Open Thread. Preferably leave several Open Threads pass with 0 top-level comments by you before making a top-level comment in the next.
(2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
As far as my memory serve, I have never once violated (1), and I have violated (2) about 3 or 4 times in 7 months of posting.
Those self-imposed guidelines were necessary back when my username was much "spicier" and more controversial than it's now, I have adopted them because I didn't want to exhaust my "weirdness points", so that people don't get fatigued by every sub-thread and every conversation on the blog getting hijacked by the topic I'm angry about and going to chaos.
I claim that those guidelines would be good for you too, even if you don't care about the health of the general conversation in Open Threads and the people following it. If you're looking at it from the purely "What's in it for me" angle, then what's in it for you is that people become fatigued and zoned-out when every Open Thread they have to see you arguing the same point 3 or 4 or 5 times, barely separated by a day or 2. Posting one, long, top-level comment is better for your case than repetitively posting 4 or 5 minor rephrasing of the same post. Pedagogically, a good teacher has to give students a break.
You might also find a very long advice post I wrote to another Pro-Palestinian commenter in late last December [1] helpful, many points don't apply to you, but the two points about how changing minds is not a sequential process that you can accelerate by posting more and more, and how argumentation is not necessarily a war where those arguing against you are the enemy, might have an effect on your posting style.
You people hate people like me for their race, and you expect me to sit here and be lectured to by you? Why the hell should I listen to hateful, racist assholes like you?
Previously, the topic was embedded into my very username, so I estimated that wherever I go and whatever I chose to comment on, the conversation would be inevitably rail-switched abruptly to the topic and that people will increasingly resent and hate that.
After I changed the name, there is no good reason not to comment on other non-Open-Thread posts, and indeed all my violations of (2) was after I changed the username. But I still value it as a self-regulation mechanism because I can get lost in writing walls of text on forums like ACX for days on end, which might eventually lead to me starving :D
--------
The subtext in my comment to Hammond isn't "I'm so better than you, plz emulate me to the last detail", and I really do hope he doesn't understand it like that. My comment is fundamentally "If you're going to be provocative and/or contrarian, there are ways to do it that won't upset people unnecessarily and make you come across as a generic spammer/troller intent on using the forum as a cheap write-and-forget log database where you just dump your stream of thoughts and go about your day". And that doesn't mean that I'm *perfect* or even acceptably good at this either, I wish, it's just something I always have in mind and try to achieve.
One principle of pedagogy is to always try to introduce one unknown thing at a time, never dump all the lesson points on the students all at once, they will drown. If we conceive of argumentation as a kind of pedagogy (where the opinions that people don't agree with are the "lesson points"), then the equivalent advice is the "Weirdness Points" advice, don't be needlessly provocative, don't make a game out of contrariness, use your tolerance budget wisely, go out of your way to dispel the common craziness associated with your position. (e.g. for me, "No I don't hate Jews. No I don't want an Islamic Caliphate in Palestine. Yes I'm an Atheist Arab who wants both Arabs and Jews and everyone to live in peace, and yes I'm first-hand aware that my people aren't known for being great fans of my religious choice, and no that's not an excuse to stay silent while a significant subset of them are being bombed and starved to death.")
The 2 guidelines I'm self-imposing on myself are my own way of trying to achieve this fundamentally good advice, but they're not necessarily the most suitable or optimal solution. All the better if Hammond heeds the fundamental message but invents his own guidelines, but if he starts from my guidelines, I would say that's not too bad either compared to the current state.
LHHIP: within my experience, you are the unique internet commentator who has learned, become more moderate, and adapted. I strongly congratulate and admire you. Also, at least for me, it does make your arguments significantly more persuasive.
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
>But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were
I mean, yes, if you stood up in the middle of Berlin in 1937 complaining about anti-semitism it wouldn't work out for you there, either. The Mein Kamps on these campuses are full of people who would happily see every Jew between the river and the sea dead -- and yes, if you're waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags or chanting for intifada, that's what you're advocating -- and large portions of the faculty agree with them while the rest are too weak and cowardly to stand up, so merely pointing out their poisonous ideology isn't going to make any difference.
As for how this all ends, it's not going to save a single Palestinian life because it turns out that TikTok likes don't stop bullets and bombs, but it has definitively poisoned higher education in the United States for at least the next few years.
God, how embarrassing; that must be horrible to have your school represented by these dipshits. I used to think MIT was the greatest thing in the world and it broke my heart to hear, not just that this was happening, but that the university administration was bowing and scraping before the Hamasniks.
I think that 'anti-anti-semitism' stopped being fashionable on the political left at least a decade ago. Of course, you will still find *Jewish* leftists complaining about anti-semitism, but that's it.
Even the concept of a "Nazi" (the ultimate bad guy you are always ethically allowed to punch without any attempt to communicate with and maybe find a mutually satisfactory solution first) has gradually changed from "a violent authoritarian anti-semitic fanatic" to mere "someone who disagrees with me" (or the specifically Russian flavor: "someone who opposes Russia"). So even complaining about Nazis all the time no longer has the connotation of anti-semitism; it became a general label for the outgroup.
Anti-Antisemitism seems to still have a place on the left when it can 1) be legibly applied to their enemies and 2) doesn't appear to be supporting Israel itself.
This was much clearer around 2016-17 when Trump was elected and there was a sudden outcry about antisemitism (for which a surprisingly large number turned out to be hoaxes). That lasted at least as long as Trump was president, so far less than a decade ago .
It's far less clear right at this moment that antisemitism is actually coming from the left's enemies. It's hard to argue that the right are the antisemites when the left openly protests against Israel (and maybe Jews? - lots of tension on that question) on college campuses.
The left will still happily label an antisemite a Nazi, but you're right that the term has become much more of a general boo-word so lots of political enemies might get that - including Jews sometimes!
Defining Nazi as "Someone who opposes Russia" seems to not be a Russian or Soviet invention, Israel has a venerable tradition of defining Nazi as "someone who hates Jews". Ben Gurion, the literal founding father of Israel, called Menachem Begin, the one who later secured peace with Egypt, a "Hitlerist type" [1], i.e. a Nazi.
In actual truth, a Nazi isn't (just) "a violent authoritarian antisemitic fanatic", that would qualify the Spanish crown in 1492 to be Nazis, or Russian communists in the 1920s, as well as many many **many** others. A Nazi is someone who meets a compound definition that must at least hit all the following notes (1) Has a racial hierarchy where the highest race is their own, and is both an objectively superior race as well as a morally better race that the lower races conspire against (2) Uses Fascism, totalitarian devotion of the individual to the imagined national group and a nostalgia to an imagined past where the national group (conceived of as essential and as immutable as the laws of physics themselves) was dominant, and scapegoats several selected groups from the lower races as the culprits in the national group's decline (3) Engages in Genocide against the lower races.
Most groups called "Nazis" seem to fail one of those. Modern White Supremacists might satisfy (1) and (2) in some of their more extreme forms but they don't satisfy (3), American White Supremacists might want to re-instill segregation and the European ones definitely want to cleanse Europe from all non-Europeans (which include those who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s), but none of them seriously contemplate or advance Genocide as a serious proposition. Islamic jihadist groups might very well contemplate (3) and are notoriously whiny and won't shut up about the "Golden age of Islam" so they arguably satisfy (2), but they fail (1).
As an aside, what groups "who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s" that European White Supremacists want to eliminate do you have in mind?
Hmmm, that phrasing is somewhat confusing, now that I read it again. It somewhat implies "Those who were European till the 1970s and the 1980s then were no longer", whereas I really mean "Those who were not European till the 1970s and the 1980s and beyond, then were naturalized and became European".
As for the actual groups I was thinking of, in France I mean the people from former colonies (e.g. Tunisians and Algerians), in the UK I meant the Pakistanis and Indians, and in Germany I meant Syrians and Turks. Naturalized citizens in France and UK have a long history extending to the 1960s and the 1970s, but a lot of White Supremacists don't view them as truly European, because they define this using race.
Thanks for the clarification, it makes sense to me now, and I agree. In fact, it doesn't have to be *naturalized* citizens. People *born* in e.g. France, but of North-African ancestry, are often not seen as "French" (they are seen as "Arabs" or "beurs" or "rebeux" or whatever) and not just by White Supremacists. Of course the problem is compounded by the fact that they also often don't see themselves as French but tend to identify with some idealized version of their ancestry which makes them reject French or Western values, inexorably leading to an unstable feedback loop.
For example, I always found it interesting that the grown grand-children of North-Africans immigrants (Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians) in France are *more* religious (see themselves more as Muslims) than their grand-parents did. (Although maybe that's just a consequence of the fall of secular ideologies (pan-Arab socialism and communism), since that seems true in the countries of origin as well, and therefore not just a reaction against the host country.)
BTW, thanks for sticking around, even when your ideas aren't the most popular. I agree with the commenter above that you often add a lot of value and insights to the discussions.
French (grand-)children of North African ancestry seeing themselves as more Muslim than their ancestors is a new thing to know, what I previously knew of this is that the American children and grandchildren of Middle Eastern ancestry gradually loosen the ties of religion and adopt an Americanized Islam (all while maintaining that this is the one true Islam of course, as all Muslims like to do). This is often in the context of their parents complaining and advising other people from the Middle East who want to immigrate to the USA that they should fortify Islamic values in their children well.
It's not easy for me to articulate my views about immigration. On the one hand, I'm an Anarchist and I believe nation states are rubbish, geographic jealousy and caring about whose territory is whose is quintessentially nation-state-ish and I don't believe it goes well with Anarchism. On the other hand, some immigration is objectively bad for both the source and the destination. Refugees from wars are troubled and radicalized, people think that suppressing statistics about their higher levels of crimes is doing them a service but it has backfired before and is going to backfire again. High-skill immigrants deprive their native land from much-needed brains, further dooming it to another iteration of the downward spiral. But of course, the counterargument (which I'm very convinced of) is that the native land is going to spiral downward anyway, because those in charge fundamentally don't have the intelligence or the willingness to be anything except dumbasses, so better those high-skilled workers be in a land that appreciates them and where they can prosper than in a land where they will dwindle and possibly be locked in jail over a social media post.
I don't think I'm adequately represented by any of the 2 sides in the current immigration debate.
Thanks a lot for the kind words at the end. I don't think I deserve them, but I'm heart warmed you wrote them.
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
For some reason, you must be logged in using your Google account before it lets you do the survey. You might want to turn this off? The ACX survey did not require this.
(I am not familiar with Google Forms, so I don't know how these things are set up.)
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
If you are interested in predictive analytics in general, ridge regression and lasso regression are good introductions to regularization and provide solid heuristics for understanding of loss functions.
As an econ student, you probably won't get much exposure to unsupervised learning models. So if that's something you would like in order to round out your knowledge, K nearest and principal component stand out.
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
The committee notes are claiming that it's malware.
>For example, outside researchers have found embedded vulnerabilities that allow the company to collect more data than the app's privacy policy indicates.<
I would assume an attempt to publish source code would at least have to disprove this.
I wonder what is the intended purpose. It's not like most people could install the source code. Someone else building the binaries for them would be illegal. Studying the source code to make a different but similar application out of it... well, if Americans would do it, this is kinda what the bill originally proposed (that the problem is not TikTok per se, but the fact that it has Chinese owners)... and if Chinese would do it, they can share the source code on their own part of internet, so the ban is irrelevant.
What I'm alarmed about is specifically how they define "foreign adversary controlled". The Chinese government can trivially make a personal GitHub account and publish source code, is that source code then "foreign adversary controlled"? Does that mean every Chinese or Iranian developer on GitHub is potentially a target of banning or repo takedowns?
Or do they define an "app" as something that must have a central database somewhere else than the computer it's running on? In which case... fair, but why do they want to restrain the mere source code publishing of those apps? If anything, publishing source code ***helps*** you to know that the app talks to a central server somewhere.
Why is the bill so general and convoluted anyway? Why can't they just say the legalese equivalent of "We're banning TikTok because fuck China."
Also, consider the possible perverse incentives. Next time a powerful American software company tries to compete against an established foreign software solution, they may decide to lobby politicians to declare a war, just so they could classify the competition as "foreign adversary controlled".
So if tomorrow social networks inexplicably start promoting articles about how Estonia is full of terrorists, at least we will know why. Or maybe a World War 3 will start over SAP.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
On the other hand, this book presented several convincing arguments that the idea of a "satanic panic" regarding child care abuse was itself overblown and that the media focus on ritual abuse allegations did not present the full picture of the actual investigations, that the most notable abuse cases were based on physical evidence and that even in McMartin case there were grounds to at least allow for a credible suspicion (whether ultimately unfounded or not) that Ray Buckey was guilty of sexual abuse.
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins? I recommend wearing a codpiece when sleeping to block possibility of its theft. https://imgur.com/a/zip5qTE
> Why do Jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
They don't, I don't remember Einstein being a particularly gleeful advocate against Micro-Aggressions, maybe his use of non-Euclidean geometry stems from a deep hatred to the proto-Western Euclid but those who invented non-Euclidean geometries were all White, mostly Germans and French, so there's that. Scott Aronson has atrocious opinions on the Palestinians (**checks Shtetl-Optimized** yup, another one) but I have never read or listened to him popularizing White Fragility.
Lastly, insofar as an "Intellectual" is simply someone who explores and explains ideas for a living and not necessarily an academic, then the very guy who owns the very blog you're writing this on is a Jewish intellectual, can you cite one instance where he hints he hates White people, of which his readers are the vast majority?
So its not Jewish intellectuals, is it? It's "Woke Jewish Intellectuals", and at this point the signifier "Jewish" adds no information of value and can be safely discarded without losing too much information, some would say that this even gains us new information.
> If these Jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves
If dictators hate the Rule of Law, why should you be crying when their country plunges into a civil war? If some people hate and pollute rivers, why should be crying when those rivers become poisoned by their chemical trash and are now slowly killing everybody who drinks from them?
I agree the temptations to seek "Poetic Justice" everywhere is very strong, but like it or not, you're among "those people". You live among the River Polluters, you live among those who agree with Dictators and hate the Rule of Law. When the consequences come, they won't distinguish between you and them. Free Speech and Civilized Discourse are public-good norms much like the Rule of Law and clean rivers, they benefit everyone, and their absence comes for everyone.
As for S. Aronson's anti-anti-Zionist piece, I have read it 5 days after it was published and the comment section was already closed by then (whether by choice or due to a certain capacity limit), so I didn't have the chance to respond at the time in the comment section.
I will start by answering the central question of the letter:
>> Let’s assume that not only has Netanyahu lost the next election in a landslide, but is justly spending the rest of his life in Israeli prison. Waving my wand, I’ve made *you* [The Reader] Prime Minister in his stead, with an overwhelming majority in the Knesset. You now get to go down in history as the liberator of Palestine. But you’re now also in charge of protecting Israel’s 7 million Jews (and 2 million other residents) from near-immediate slaughter at the hands of those who you’ve liberated.
I have thought about this question before, and my answer is scattered over a bunch of comments in several Open Threads. To compile them all here, I would:
(1) Withdraw IDF presence and settlers from West Bank and Gaza. The Golan and Sheba farms (taken from Syria in the 1967 war, Sheba farms claimed by Lebanon) are also not Israeli land, but withdrawing from there is more challenging due to the current nature of the neighbors.
(2) Alternatively to (1), fully annex Gaza and/or the West Bank as Israeli provinces, and make all of their resident full citizens of Israel with equal rights and protections under the law
(3) Admit full historical responsibility for the Nakba, and release all classified historical documents documenting the war crimes against Palestinians
(4) Pay reparations for whomever can prove they're descendent from Nakba survivors, modeled after German reparations for the Holocaust
Because the premise of the question is fundamentally impossible, I won't spend any more time thinking on what I would do if I was the Israeli PM. But over the course of several hundred comments in 7 months here, I think have made quite clear what I think the general shape of a fair end to the fighting looks like.
Scott then writes terrible paragraph where he makes a combination of historical/factual and moral mistakes:
>> Granted, it seems pretty paranoid to expect such a slaughter! Or rather: it would seem paranoid, if the Palestinians’ Grand Mufti (progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence Hamas) hadn’t allied himself with Hitler in WWII, enthusiastically supported the Nazi Final Solution, and tried to export it to Palestine; if in 1947 the Palestinians hadn’t rejected the UN’s two-state solution (the one Israel agreed to) and instead launched another war to exterminate the Jews (a war they lost); if they hadn’t joined the quest to exterminate the Jews a third time in 1967; etc., or if all this hadn’t happened back before there were any settlements or occupation, when the only question on the table was Israel’s existence. It would seem paranoid if Arafat had chosen a two-state solution when Israel offered it to him at Camp David, rather than suicide bombings. It would seem paranoid if not for the candies passed out in the streets in celebration on October 7.
(1) The Grand Mufti isn't the progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan Al Bannah. The Grand Mufti also has nothing to do with Hamas, which was founded by Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood high-ranking leader in Gaza who Israel was friendly towards because they both hated the secular and leftist Fatah (which was violent at that time before Oslo), Ahmed Yassin then made a 180 turn in the 1980s and founded Hamas. Hamas didn't commit any violence till the 1990s. Ahmed Yassin was a child when the Nakba happened, back when the Grand Mufti was in charge in Jerusalem.
(2) The Grand Mufti is not the leader of the Palestinians. He was a local leader of Jerusalem under the Ottomans because he was an Ottoman noble (allegedly tracing bloodline to prophet Muhammed). He was then appointed by the British in a made-up position "Grand Mufti of Palestine" and considered a vital ally. He allied himself with Nazi Germany out of pure self-preservation: Because he played a role in the 1936 Arab uprising and the British issued an arrest warrant against him.
(3) If Scott wants to use what a few hundred Palestinians did after October 7th as evidence that all Arabs are hateful antisemitic untermenschen, perhaps I can also use what a few hundred Jewish wedding guests [1] did as evidence of the same, here's what Wikipedia says:
>>>> In December 2015, Israeli police began investigating a video of a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem celebrating the marriage of a person known to have been involved in price tag attacks, in which guests are shown stabbing a photo of the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who had died in the Duma arson attack. The same video contained scenes of guests, armed with guns, knives and Molotov cocktails, chanting a song with the words from the book of Judges (16:28), "O God, that I may be this once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes", replacing "Philistines" with "Palestinians". A lawyer for the defendants in the case, Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, was also present and later said "No one realized these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family"
Look at the masterful defense by Ben Gvir! Nobody realized that the photo of the toddler they were stabbing is the photo of the particular toddler who was just burned alive! If he was just any **other** toddler, it would have been totally okay.
So maybe atrocity-hunting is not the best or most charitable way to look at this? Just like I see this type of Jews and this type of Israelis and deliberately choose to forget they exist, maybe Aronson would do well to deliberately choose to forget the type of Arab who gives out sweets after October 7th.
(4) The Palestinians didn't start the war of 1948. The war of 1948 started as a civil war between paramilitary groups. Civil wars don't have clear instigators or a single initiating event and are instead the result of a series of escalation-and-counter-escalation. When Zionist paramilitaries prevailed and started slaughtering Arabs and expelling them in the hundreds of thousands (Wikipedia's Nakba page says 300K expelled before May 1948), Arab armies tried to intervene after public outcry from their own populations, and they did so without coordination or a clear plan.
(5) Israel never offered a good faith offer of a Palestinian state. A state is by definition an entity with a monopoly on violence, and not a single one of Israeli offers of statehood included an army, or the guarantee that the IDF won't violate its borders.
Then Scott says:
>> But if someone has a whole ideology, which they teach their children and from which they’ve never really wavered for a century, about how murdering you is a religious honor, and also they’ve actually tried to murder you at every opportunity—-what more do you want them to do, before you’ll believe them?
Perhaps he should remember then that this "someone" is actually 2.3 million someones, who the state he is supporting have been blockading and chokeholding since 2007. I would like to see his evidence that all 2.3 millions of Gazans see killing Jews as religious honor. (Because if he didn't have any, that would be such a shame. It would be as if I saw the "Wedding of Hate" and concluded that Jews see murdering Arabs and burning them alive as the highest religious honor.) Perhaps he should remember that there are 600K Jews and 3 million Arabs in the West Bank, and before October 7th the only ones doing the dying were the Arabs, and the only ones doing the killing were the Jews.
Scott then proceeds to list 4 solutions, and for all except the 2nd one (his preferred), he imagines one-sided objections that don't stand scrutiny. Look at what he writes, Zum Beispiel, on my preferred solution:
>> in the rare cases they deign to address the question directly, most anti-Zionists advocate a “secular, binational state” between the Jordan and Mediterranean, with equal rights for all inhabitants. Certainly, that would make sense if you believe that Israel is an apartheid state just like South Africa.
>> To me, though, this analogy falls apart on a single question: who’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Who’s the Palestinian leader who’s ever said to the Jews, “end your Jewish state so that we can live together in peace,” rather than “end your Jewish state so that we can end your existence”?
Really? Scott won't have a secular bi-state because you can't find a Palestinian Nelson Mandela? He means the Arab 20% of Israel and all 3 million Arabs of the West Bank and all 2.5 million Arabs of Gaza all hate Israel with the same fervor and would like to genocide Jews to the last baby?
I won't go into history, and if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Basically, you say the Palestinians are just normal people who'd like to get rid of all the fighting and war and bombs and stuff, and if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Sure, that's true. But among them are the Hamas, and their corrupt leaders profit massively from the current situation. Khaled Mashal 5 billion dollars, Ismail Haniyeh 4 billion dollars, Abu Marzouk 3 billion dollars, all from stolen humanitarian aid. https://twitter.com/Regendelfin/status/1763920078959980955 And backed by the current Iranian government. And feeding the people their propaganda for decades.
How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
You're very welcome. I was planning to respond to Scott's awful post in my Copious Free Time, you gave me an opportunity to quit procrastinating and just do it.
> if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Exactly, that's what it means for it to be a "Cycle of Violence". A cycle has no start, has no end, and is self-reinforcing. The reasons that started the cycle (and thus could - in naive principle - end it) are long gone, the cycle now persists solely on its own. Its results feed into its causes and its causes create its results who then feed more into its causes which create more of its results which .....
> if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Which is a huge "If" that Israel was and is not willing - even in its most committed-to-peace phase in the early to mid 1990s - to give. They're not willing to dismantle settlements, they're not willing to leave Gaza have an airport and ports and territorial waters, they're not willing to stop passing racist laws like the Nation State Basic Law that agitate their Arab, Druze, and Bedouin citizens, they're not willing to stop oppressing and choke holding the West Bank citizens and treating them exactly how Apartheid governments do. "Leave them alone" is a choice that the Israeli government has faced every single day after 5 June 1967, every day they wake up and a Windows XP dialog box appears in the sky with a message "Oppress Palestinians just for the heck of it? [yes/no/remind me later]", and they either press "yes" or "remind me later", but never "no".
My definition of "Leaving Palestinians alone" involves looking at them as human beings, not animals that you can continue to harass and denigrate and throw by the thousands into "administrative detention" (i.e. unlawful military prisons where civilians as young as 13 are thrown to never be heard of again), then act Pikachu-face surprised when your actions create and empower a monstrous faction that promises revenge "by all means necessary". It's not about Jihad (although that's a catalyst that make the fire rage harder), the PLO were communists back in their day, and that didn't stop them from promising revenge and - in their view - getting it.
If you don't want Nazi Germany, one possible course of action is to create it and then spend billions of dollar and millions of souls to defeat it, as the US, UK and France did in the 1920s to 1940s. But another, much smarter, course of action is to never force the treaty of Versailles in the first place. Israel hitherto consistently preferred the first course of action, where they engage in outrageous and dehumanizing campaigns against the Palestinians where countless thousands die and/or injured and/or humiliated and deprived of their human rights, then when the inevitable revenge comes they spend billions yet again to defeat it, only to create yet another iteration of it by their actions again and again and again.
> How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
I don't know. There is a temptation to always answer with a solution to those questions, any solution. It will probably be wrong. It will be a wrong because I have no baseline experience with the question itself (and neither does most people), I have no idea how to fight a paramilitary group that has been building its military strength for 20 years. I have no idea how to fight a normal war anywhere anytime against any foe. I have no experience with the deserts of Sinai that Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza, and I have no experience whatsoever with the royal courts of Qatar that Hamas leverages for billions of aid.
But what I'm saying is much more radical and more fundamental. After all, first there was Fatah, then Fatah became (somewhat) peaceful but only to be replaced with Hezbollah, Hezbollah were barely held back in 2006 only for Hamas to emerge 1 to 2 years later, then there was the Islamic Jihad. Israel's actions keep creating them. After each group is created, it becomes a self-sustaining entity that can keep itself alive under a variety of external operating conditions, no matter what Israel's actions are. But what creates them in the first place is Israel's actions.
I think that's enough for now, if you want my opinion on a particular paragraph don't hesitate to reply with the quoted paragraph. My final verdict is that this letter isn't a good faith engagement with the so-called "Anti-Zionists" (a term which I now rejects), this letter is just a release that Scott wrote because he was angry, and he was angry because he browsing Twitter.
At the beginning of the letter, Scott seems somewhat self-aware:
>> At the high end of the spectrum, I religiously check the tweets of Paul Graham, a personal hero and inspiration to me ever since he wrote Why Nerds Are Unpopular twenty years ago, and a man with whom I seem to resonate deeply on every important topic except for two: Zionism and functional programming. At the low end, I’ve read hundreds of the seemingly infinite army of Tweeters who post images of hook-nosed rats with black hats and side curls and dollar signs in their eyes, sneering as they strangle the earth and stab Palestinian babies.
Instead of engaging with particular type of "Anti-Zionist" that is Paul Graham or - say - me (not that I'm on Twitter, oh hell no), he chooses to spend the rest of the letter talking as if his main readers are those who post hook-nosed AI-generated Jews on Twitter, people who he have to carefully explain to them why killing Jews is wrong and why Arabs all want to kill Jews and are too much of an Untermensch right now to be given their own state or a place in the one state that already exists.
Which is a shame, because I want to respect Scott, because I want to believe him when he says he looks at Gazan children and remembers his own. He continuously makes this task difficult for me, just 3 days ago he posted another masterpiece like this letter.
What can I say, that's why you don't browse Twitter.
I can't keep track of all the separate comments you've made making mostly the same point, so just:
1. Is it (((Jewish intellectuals))) you hate or just (((Jews)))? It seems like you keep equivocating and motte-and-bailey'ing on this.
2. I just...can't...comprehend the irony and brazenness of posting on an anti-woke Jewish guy's blog to say Jews are all hatefully woke. I....just...trying to wrap my brain around this makes my head hurt.
3. *Why* aren't zionist Jews based allies of western civilisation, according to you? In what possible sense do you say Muslims are more based than Jews?
I think I have a hard time with your “I’m racist against racist races” philosophy because you’re unapologetically practicing exactly what you condemn. Are you saying that if all the other races weren’t so racist then you wouldn’t have to be so racist all the time? Or are you saying everybody is justifiably racist and may the most racist race win?
This is a lazy repost of content that was lazy the first time. It's an Imgur image of book covers, without explanation of why the books are hateful, or why we should treat them as a representative example of the thinking of "Jewish intellectuals." It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish, much less support any kinds of conclusions about Jewish intellectuals in general.
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
The nominative determinism would be more impressive if there weren't so many synonyms for "penis" in the English language. Other names that also mean "penis" include Peter, Dick, Rod, Johnson, Willy, Wang, Dong, and John Thomas.
Do all languages have a colossal number of words for penis? Does English have the most? Does any other English word have quite so many synonyms?
>Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
I thought the hush money wasn't in any doubt? I was under the impression that only question is whether it qualified as an illegal campaign contribution and whether NY could stretch the law to go after him if so.
This trial is so odd, I think nobody is denying he was paying her off, I was given to understand elsewhere that he's being tried for paying her off out of the wrong slush fund and should have claimed it as a campaign expense?
I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such. I don't approve of him having affairs, but dd Stormy ever give the money back in a fit of high-mindedness over "no, no, I cannot take the proceeds of infamy!" or did she rather try getting more out of him once that was gone, and if he wouldn't pay up, she decided peddling her story to the media was another way of making money out of it? That she picked Avenatti to be her lawyer - well, two greedy and stupid people met in a match made under heaven, yes?
Yeah, "reputation management" seems like one of those expenses that any public figure could engage in. Trump might well have done this even if he were merely a wealthy reality-TV host.
If I give money to Biden, can I claim that he paid me in nega-dollars to not confess to a torrid affair?
As I understand it, the alleged New York crime is that Trump lied in his business records about which slush fund he used. But lying in your business records is only a crime if you use those records to commit or conceal some other crime; otherwise you're just writing weird harmless fiction. And paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress isn't a crime.
The claimed underlying crime is Federal campaign finance violation, in that Trump paying hush money to his mistress was "obviously" a campaign expense, and you aren't supposed to spend your personal money on campaign expenses without officially donating it to your campaign account first, I think.
Note that this would be a Federal crime, but the Federal government has not seen fit to prosecute. But New York is sure he's guilty.
The cynic in me says, if Trump had used his campaign account rather than his personal account, New York would be saying that paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress is "obviously" a personal matter, and it's a violation of Federal campaign finance laws to spend campaign funds on a personal matter. Again, without regard to whether the Feds think there was a prosecutable violation of federal law.
I think I'm going to trust the cynic in me on this one. I want Trump banished into the political Outer Darkness, but this is not the way.
I'm in the same boat as you. I strongly believe that if he had paid her off using campaign funds that this would be a *much* bigger scandal. We can't have it both ways, especially for something that underneath it all isn't a crime in the first place. I feel like they want to make paying off a mistress a crime, but can't do that (especially retroactively).
So, they're trying to use the legal system to run someone's name through the mud and get as much publicity of the affair as possible. I actually think *that* should be illegal, and some kind of unlawful prosecution charge should be brought against the DA.
This truly is the worst case to bring against Trump, and has already been backfiring by making Trump more sympathetic, riling up his supporters, and undermining any other cases that might be more legitimate.
Yeah. I suspect that Trump *should* be serving prison time for the DC insurrection charge, the Georgia election interference, and possibly the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. We'll have to wait on the trials to be sure. But the Feds are slow-walking those cases, while NY tries to throw him in prison for the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light. Which makes everyone involved look like the sort of person who tries to put their political opponents in jail on broken-taillight charges, so kind of untrustworthy when they go on to say "...and he's guilty of actual serious crimes, too!"
Technically, I believe lying on your business records is a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations has run on that. Lying to conceal another crime is a felony, but the big issue here is that the underlying crime is (a) extremely dubious (paying out of the campaign account is a lot more likely to land you in trouble with the feds) (b) a federal crime that the DOJ declined to prosecute and (c) clearly bootstrapped to give Bragg a way to indict Trump. This is a case where it almost certainly gets tossed on appeal even if he is convicted, and I am deeply annoyed that this one went first, because the other cases against him are so much stronger.
>I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such.
Agreed on both points. Also agreed that this case is really odd - a hush payoff turned into a case about mislabeling funds (where, IIRC, the statute of limitations ran out), turned into a campaign finance case (under a federal law - but being tried in a state court???).
AFAIK, the only case against Trump that isn't legally tenuous is the classified documents one. Now, personally, I don't want politicians to be above (beneath? :-) ) the law, but I'd rather have the electorate choose which is the less odious candidate to put into office. Also, if politicians routinely face politically motivated prosecution once they leave office - they may become less willing to leave office peacefully. I'd really like to keep the tradition of concession speeches marking power shifts rather than something bloodier.
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Here's something to think about regarding kids' IQ: My parents were not trying or expecting to have a smart kid, but they got one. Some time in grade school a teacher told my mother my IQ, and she told me, and she and I both developed an unhealthy preoccupation with that number, and that ended up being very bad for my head. Feeling proud that it was high was just the tiny tip of the iceberg. Most of the effect was to strengthen the sense I already had of being a very odd entity, something like vast, olive-colored irregular polygon set in a row of blue and white houses. It took me decades to get over the IQ thing, and as for the rest- I still feel pretty olive-colored.
If people who pick thru their embryos before implanting one feel they must test their children's IQ to find out whether they got as much awesome specialness as they paid for, I hope someone counsels them to only test once, refrain from talking to the kid about the the result, and STFU about the subject for the rest of their lives.
But don't you think that it's being genuinely different in thought patterns, context, background knowledge, speed-of-inference, and so on that makes you so different?
I was tested at a young age, and put in special programs and skipped grades and whatever afterwards. My parents never told me my results, but it was VERY easy to see from before kindergarten that I was massively different than everyone around me, and that's been true basically my whole life.
I'm not sure "don't tell your kid the result" is actually going to make a high IQ person actually fit in better or be any more "normal," because I think a lot of the differences are inherent in the condition itself.
It's easy to think "I'm different because I'm so much smarter than the rest of these idiots" when the answer is really "I'm different because I'm weirder, not smarter". Smart may have little to do with why you don't fit in.
There are *two* big mistakes highly intelligent people can make, and it is natural to make one of them when trying too hard to avoid the other:
* ignore the fact that their high IQ makes them different;
* attribute all their differences to the high IQ, even when something else is the cause.
Many people believe that refusing to believe in a high IQ is virtuous. Guess what: the smart kid will notice that *something* is different. Other people will notice, too. People naturally try to explain things, so in the absence of the correct explanation they will likely invent an incorrect one.
Some people believe that a lie can be virtuous. For example, you can explain the educational success of the smart kid by pretending that it is a result of the kid studying diligently. That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?
But it doesn't work like that. The smart kid will notice that he or she gets good grades even without studying. And the other kids will notice that no matter how hard they study, the outcome is simply not the same. Telling them to study even harder is just pointless cruelty; some of them are already on the verge of collapse. By denying the existence of a biological privilege, you are simultaneously blaming the ones who were dealt a bad hand.
(Why doesn't everyone learn to code and get a job in Silicon Valley; that would certainly solve all the unemployment and poverty, wouldn't it? Oh, those lazy bastards are just not studying hard enough. Or perhaps we should blame the teachers for not inspiring them enough instead? Or maybe it's the sexist and racist employers and colleagues. Anyway, the point is that literally everyone could become an elite coder, if only we collectively tried harder. The beatings will continue until morale improves.)
From inside, being highly intelligent but in denial about it, means constantly overestimating other people's ability to understand things, and being constantly surprised about how other people just fail to connect the dots. (There is a rationalist wisdom saying that if you are surprised too often, it usually means that your model of the world is wrong.) Even after admitting that intelligence is a thing, if you don't accept that you are exceptionally intelligent, it will seem like you have the bad luck of being surrounded by exceptionally stupid people. Things only start making sense when you realize that there is a "normal", and you are not a part of it.
And yes, there is a better known opposite mistake, often seen among Mensa members, when the high IQ is the *only* fact you know about yourself, and then you conclude that *everything* else that happened to you is somehow a consequence of you being too smart for this planet. You don't have ADHD, and you are not too lazy to clean up your room or at least your working desk, it is simply a fact that smart people thrive in chaos and need it. You don't have autism or low social skills, it is simply the vast intellectual distance between you and the muggles that prevents mutual understanding. Etc. (So why are there many smart people who *don't* fail at life? Dunno, they probably got lucky, or maybe they are not playing fair somehow.)
In presence of such extreme choices, it can be difficult to obtain a balanced perspective on intelligence. Yes, it will give you an advantage in many areas of life. No, it cannot replace knowledge or experience, and if you try using it that way, you will fail. But if you work diligently, you can achieve much better results than the less intelligent people, no matter how hard they try. But there are only 24 hours a day, so there is a limited number of things you can work diligently on, and at the end of the day you will need someone else's help with the rest, even if that other person is less intelligent than you. Intelligence alone will not fix your other problems. Intelligence is not the same as rationality, or wisdom, or education, or experience; although it can help you obtain these things easier.
I have a distinct memory of asking an (Asian) classmate how to solve some particular math problem. He wrote down the method in half a second. "Oh I see," I said. "And why does that work?"
And he gave me an utterly blank look.
I can't prove this, but I had a very strong sense that it wasn't that he simply didn't know the answer, or didn't know how to explain it. Rather, I really think he found the question incomprehensible. As if it was a question he'd never asked himself in his life.
This really confounds the concept of intelligence to me. This guy had great memorisation skills, could no doubt pick up mental algorithms and formulaic processes in an instant and apply them flexibly and effortlessly to many different contexts. And yet, he didn't just lack philosophical ability, he didn't even merely lack philosophical curiosity, he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist.
I'm sure this general idea has been addressed by Scott somewhere, but I just can't see how the two questions "*how* does it work, what steps get you from A to B?" and "*why* does it work, what fundamental features of this discipline explain the success of this approach" belong on the same dimension, or even on related dimensions. There's probably a technical model for connecting them. But they are in a basic sense incommeasurable.
A bit of the first is probably necessary for the second. But the first can exist entirely without the second. And this same point applies in a self-referential meta way. There's so much focus on some "thing" (IQ) that correlates with certain test results and also correlates with life outcomes and abilities. Compared to the "why": what *is* IQ, in its essential nature? "What is intelligence?" Not "what does it correlate with?"
I have also met the "intelligence without curiosity" type. From my perspective, "intelligence" means having a powerful engine in your head... but for what purposes you choose to use that engine, that is an entirely different question.
I would predict that people with high IQ will be statistically more impressive in whatever purpose they choose, whether it is curious exploration, mindless memorization, or conspiracy theories.
That may be true. But I'm inclined to doubt it. There are a whole bunch of scientists and scientific types who seem to really hate and despise philosophy. They seem to have not only a firmly dismissive certainty that "philosophy is all useless and fake lol", but also a kind of rage at its existence. (Thankfully there aren't many of them around here, or if there are they have more nuance in the way they talk.)
Of course they *may* be simply choosing to hate philosophy and love science. But the manner of their rage really looks to me like the standard attitude of a self-perceived "smart" or "skilled" person encountering a discipline or task that they're actually bad at. "Well if *I* can't do it, it must be useless anyway. I could ace it if I wanted to. But I don't, so there!"
Standard human pride and childishness is what it looks like. Which suggests that science and philosophy (science is actually a form of philosophy, but let's ignore that) sometimes require different forms of intelligence (though obviously there are plenty who are great at both, like Scott).
"That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?"
Raw talent will get you a long way, but relying on the talent on its own, without learning how to learn or put in the hard work, will one day fail. I've seen it in sports, where the naturally gifted eventually hit the day when they're slower and their reflexes are not as quick, and the raw talent is no longer there to be called on to help them out of a hole. The ones who learned to practice and figure out solutions have that to help them out and extend their careers when the legs aren't able to get them to that spot on the field five seconds before anyone else anymore, but they have so much experience in reading the game that they know to position themselves in good time to be in that spot.
And you see the opposite: the slow decline of the former star, where they now routinely get beaten by the less talented but hard-working younger opponent because they've put in the work to figure out how to get the result, while the star is trying to draw from the well of talent that is now drying up.
It took me a long time to realize that I was much smarter than most people. Everyone assumes that their own experience is normal and everyone else is just like them until proven otherwise.
I think I was born wired to be sort of schizoid -- to have trouble connecting with people -- and that wiring was separate from the smart wiring. So I sort of slotted the IQ info in with the sense of unfixable separateness I already had, and it strengthened it. If I had had a different temperament the info about IQ might not have affected me the way it did. I have known lots of people who are clearly extremely smart, and of course they started getting evidence of that early in life, but you don't get the sense that their smartness is a sort of capsule they are locked inside of. They're sociable. They like company. They tell great jokes and stories. Feynman sounds like he was like that. The more sociable kind of smart people tend not to work in jobs where they're alone with a book or a screen a lot of the time -- for instance they may be lawyers. Or doctors. Paul Farmer, for instance, was evidently a genius from an early age, but he spent his life in a sea of people.
But the kids with the introverted + smart combo that I got are not rare, and the last thing they need to hear from their parents and teachers is that the reason they feel so different is that they are intellectually superior. That's really not accurate for most. Feeling separate and different is mostly the product of a whole different aspect of the way they are put together, and they need help learning to modulate that tendency.
If someone has an extremely smart kid then yes of course they will need to talk with the kid about skipping grades etc. But I think it's important to talk about it in a way that does not portray them as a whole different kind of entity. So you don't say, you are a rare high IQ person, as very few are, so you don't fit in with regularly kids and the regular school structures. You say something like, yeah you learn extra fast, and 4th grade is going to be really boring for you, so the school's going to just let you go ahead to 5th. But you can still be on the [whatever] team with your buddies from 4th grade, and have them over on the weekends.
I thought about some pretty esoteric stuff at a young age, but at the same time a lot of my interests were age-appropriate. I liked dolls, hide and seek, pretending to be explorers in the vacant lots at the same age as everyone else. Parents need to do justice to the need for that sort of play too. Mine did, and I think that did me a lot of good.
I'm skeptical that the Rationalist IQ Uber Alles meme is even a beneficial belief system in the first place, let alone something that kids should hear. I like your suggestion of how to handle it.
I agree at the "lol my number is bigger than yours" level, but let me put forward one case for it. I don't know what you consider a symptom of "IQ uber alles," but I assume I'd qualify because I would definitely pay significant prices to gengineer my kids (with IQ and height / attractiveness top of the list), and would structure their and our lives around schooling them in a different way.
Here's my rationale: Progress and achievement is driven by outliers. If you actually have a high IQ outlier kid, you are more likely to help them become their best self, and to drive positive results in the world, by taking their difference into account and treating them differently than just throwing them into public school for them to be crushingly bored and learn nothing for 12 years.
JS Mill was a child prodigy because his "peers" and main interaction partners were his parents' social circle of high-powered intellectual elites, and he's one of many examples.
I've always planned to A) pay for whatever gengineering is possible with a couple million, and B) homeschool my kids at a greatly accelerated pace, including paying grad students to give intensive 1-on-1 tutoring in whatever subjects the kids are interested in. The aim would be "undergrad by 14-15," which I think is about the right difficulty level and place for a smart 14/15 year old. And I'd happily have them go younger than that if inclined.
Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids? Maybe? But I never really had much to say to age-appropriate kids and usually sought interactions with smarter adults, because age-appropriate kids didn't think or talk about anything interesting. Then when I was a teenager and libido came in, there was a *reason* to talk to kids my age and I started doing it (and in my paradigm, they'll already be in undergrad when this happens, which is probably the best place for it).
Also, this way they'll actually *learn* things, which is important. I was so crushingly bored in junior high and high school I literally became a delinquent, because then they send you to a special school where you get all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can crank through it in a few hours and be done with the contentless nonsense and can spend your time flirting and getting in trouble with the other delinquent kids for the rest of the week.
I don't want that for my kids, I want them to actually learn things and be able to discuss interesting and complex ideas with other smart people, and to get through the credential signaling rat-race faster than other people so they can get on with their lives, and would structure their schooling and our lives around that.
To my mind, this maximizes the chance of them flourishing and getting the most out of their talents and gifts, and maximizes the chance of positive impact in the world driven by them. But yes, it's paying significant sums, then upending and structuring our entire lives around a different educational paradigm, purely for the sake of "IQ uber alles." I think it's worth it.
Reading the potted bio of Mill on Wikipedia is not encouraging; Dad wanted a baby genius to carry on The Utilitarian Cause and devoted his time to turning baby JS into that, with the result being that:
"Mill went through months of sadness and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy. With renewed vigour, he continued to work towards a just society, but with more relish for the journey. He considered this one of the most pivotal shifts in his thinking. In fact, many of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded source of joy."
I can't help feeling that if Dad had allowed him to be a normal kid and associate with others of his own age and not be always on all the time, he might have avoided "I'm twenty and I want to die because it's all pointless".
I agree IQ isn't Uber Alles and here's an example of why not: There's currently an argument about Israel/Palestine on this thread, and LovesIsraelHatesIP is participating. They are one of the few people on ACX I have ever seen publicly change their point of view about a major issue in which they had an emotional investment -- and then apologize for their earlier posts -- and thereafter try to help other people become more fairminded too. Scott is willing to publicly change his mind, but that has a different quality, because he doesn't usually sound emotionally invested in his beliefs, so when he changes them it doesn't feel like as big a deal. I don't know what personal quality made LIHIP able to publicly change their point of view the way they did, but it wasn't extra IQ points. Whatever it is, nobody's going to convince me that it's some trivial Niceness kind of quality, less important than IQ.
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
So, the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August: massive shitshow of street violence, or not?
On the "yes, it will be" side:
* The pro-Hamas factions in the US are well-organized, well-funded, and eager to cause problems.
* Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations, and Chicago in particular has generationally awful leadership.
* Biden is about to sign on to $10 billion more in aid to Israel, making appeasement impossible.
* Exact same thing happened in 1968. "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
On the "no, it won't be" side:
* Perhaps Biden will somehow appease them anyway.
* Perhaps the war will be long over by then.
* Perhaps there will be a new Current Thing by August.
It was a different era but the GOP held its nominating convention for John McCain in St Paul in 2008.
The only real difference I personally noticed during the event was the number of toney out of town hookers frequenting the upscale bar scene.
There were some attempts at disruptive protests then but they were quickly contained. The old tsarist technique of cops on horseback proved to be effective in that situation. No knouts though. I expect the police in Chicago will handle the inevitable attempted mayhem just as well.
The vibe this time is entirely different. In 1968 The Vietnam War was on the mind of everyone, particularly draft age males. It was also probably the high water mark of the whole ‘counterculture’ period.
The death and destruction in Gaza seems to be driving demonstrations and antisemitism primarily at elite universities.
Okay the land grant University of Minnesota has its own mimetic demonstrations too but on a smaller scale.
But as Tatu mentioned below, law enforcement has better techniques now and will be thoroughly prepared.
Wouldn't the most scenario be "protests are corralled effectively somewhere where media does not pay too much attention to them and handled by the police by usual means if there's violence?"
Sure, there would be some media attention, but since protest control techniques are vastly more advanced than in 1968, not in the same scale.
You should have a strong prior on reality being boring. It's like how every single election cycle, media breathlessly plays up the possibility of a contested convention and every single cycle, there is no contested convention.
Not to say that unusual events *never* happen - the HFC blowing up their own speaker twice comes to mind, but betting against them is almost always the way to go.
The one thing I got out of that article was amusement at the outrage over her being just another politician.
Well, yes. Of course she is, what did they expect? Did they really all believe the story and PR spun up about Sandy From The Block? She was one of the hand-picked slate by the king-maker Saikat Chakrabarti and was one of the successes; her entire image and campaign was manicured to the last degree; and when she was elected, she started off ambitious and over-confident in her success at preliminary challenges to the old guard, until Pelosi eventually managed to put manners on her, and Sandy From The Block figured out quickly what she would need to do to be re-elected - concentrate on her career, play the game, don't rock the boat *too* hard.
As for her support pro-Israel/anti-Palestine, eh. She did some extra work on discovering various minority heritage in her background, so not alone is she Hispanic/Latinx (whichever is the more popular term for being Puerto Rican descent), she discovered that she's also part-Jewish and part-Taino.
So I imagine that she can't really get away with "My heritage is Sephardi, but I'm pro-Palestine", when she's doing the rounds of temples in Queens to get the votes. (Yes, I'm cynical).
I live in Chicago not far from the downtown/tourist areas in which street protests are naturally most often focused. Also only a mile from one of the two main venues for this Dem convention.
"Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations" -- this is completely wrong at least in Chicago. Our city administration and police did noticeably better, relatively anyway, during the 2020 wave of protests than in some other large cities. And since then they have become noticeably more effective about it.
There have been some instances that weren't ideal -- I witnessed one of those actually, and granted that it's a very big city that gets plenty of media attention so some shit is always gonna happen -- but overall the improvement has been clear. And right now the city police department is visibly, in close concert with federal law enforcement, already preparing in intentionally-visible ways for the Dem convention.
The current city administration also denied permits for planned pro-Hamas marches near the convention site, directed those marches to obscure locations literally miles away, quickly denied an administrative appeal of that decision, and is now unapologetically defending those denials against the inevitable lawsuit.
The whole public tone of the city administration and police department is firmly "not this time, not here".
I wouldn't have expected nearly such firm and dynamic action from any major Western city, never mind Chicago under its current mayor -- very happy to be wrong. (I hope.)
I'm no fan of the current mayor myself. In any case the occupancy of that seat is far less of a variable here than is popularly believed or assumed. As both Rahm Emanuel and Laurie Lightfoot discovered to their vast frustration:
(a) Structurally the city government is in fact a "weak-mayor" system and always has been. The two Daleys' success at being bosses was always rooted in local-political influence built up over decades, not in the legal powers of the office. Since Richard M. Daley retired we haven't had any mayor come in with anything resembling a political machine (Rahm was somewhat of a political celebrity but as he learned that is not at all the same thing). Brandon Johnson was frankly surprised to make the runoff let alone win it, and came into the mayor's office without even the outline of any sort of political operation.
(b) A good bit of the political authority and influence around here rests in our county government, to a degree that most city taxpayers fail to appreciate. Cook County has the 5th largest county budget in the nation. County officials are elected completely separately from city ones, they aren't even on the same election cycle.
(c) The city mayor who deserves some credit for the shift in approach that I described above it mostly Lightfoot. Johnson has mostly just declined to get in the way, with the notable exception of that permit denial which I think everybody here was surprised by including the protest organizers.
Post-BLM it's been interesting to learn just how terribly weak (in official political power) _most_ big city mayors are, and how that's contrasted with the average voter, who believes the mayor is basically an elected king.
The result unfortunately was a number of cases of putting a centrist mayor in office under the impression that will somehow fix things, and then getting upset when the new mayor has no legal ability to oppose whatever bizarre rat's nest of obscure sociopaths _actually_ runs the city. I do think voters have finally wised up to this, though.
The big revelation for me was the role of the City Attorney. If they decide to stop prosecuting certain types of crime, then police will eventually stop arresting people for it, and then people will eventually stop reporting it, and look, the crime rate is down!
I suppose cities are complex machines that can only function if a lot of people are doing the work that their roles require. It takes all of them to make it work, but it only takes a few to sabotage it.
It seems like the conventions attract some level of violence every time now, so the safe money is that there will be street violence. Whether that counts as a "massive shitshow" depends significantly on your definition. Do I think we'll see 1968 levels of violence? Very unlikely. Will we see higher than normal presidential convention levels? I'd say the chances are pretty good.
I predict there are enough sensible adults left inside the party apparatus, that the internecine squabbling can be temporarily calmed. The whole family will put on their best faces when having company over for dinner, although there might be some tense subtext when passing the potatoes. Maybe there will be some especially "vibrant" designated free speech zones, and some fiery speeches. But unless Trump somehow stops being the main alternative, I think they'll hold it together long enough to nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating him. (If Trump goes away, I predict chaos.)
Large media organizations still have institutional memory of 1968 and its aftermath, and they're left leaning, and want Trump to lose, and therefore want a peaceful Democratic convention that nominates an electable candidate. I predict downplaying of internal differences, greater focus (somehow) on how bad Trump is, and maybe some historical features on what happens when the Democratic Party can't get its act together. (Nixon! Reagan! W. Bush! TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump!)
But as you say, maybe something new will happen. It's 4 months away. Maybe Hamas or Israel does something so spectacularly horrible that everyone backs away from that side. Maybe some poor American kid gets killed by police, on video. Maybe one of the people victimized by decriminalized crime turns out to be Actually Important, and makes a stink. Maybe a Supreme Court Justice gets hit by a home run ball and goes into a coma. Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
>Further, our district attorney has never been seen to drink — in the aqueous sense as well as the alcoholic — nor to sleep.
rang a bell - though I think it is probably a half century since I last read it. It was indeed worth a reread (at https://www.onelimited.org/ss-asimov-01 ). Many Thanks! :-)
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
Data scientist here. Use Python with Jupyter notebooks. No need to upload anything to Postgres, you can do all your manipulation right in a Pandas Data Frame. This will keep things more easily repeatable without worrying about the state of a database.
I recommend using VSCode with the GitHub Copilot extension. You can just tell it what analysis you want (or what models built) and it will just do it like magic. It's easily a 10x productivity multiplier if you aren't already a power user.
I'm not a data scientist, but I have worked adjacent to them at times. The single best piece of advice is: just look at the data. If it's small, just look at all the data. If it's big, write something custom to look at as much data as possible. The value that you deliver is unlikely to be knowing and trying some obscure summary method that makes everything clear, the value is in building an intuitive understanding of the data and then leveraging it for insights. Embrace the tedium. Here are other people giving similar advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0https://www.mayo.edu/research/documents/always-look-at-the-data/doc-20408953
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
To give a serious reply this time, and make my position clear.
If a Jewish intellectual hates white people, I want to see him treated exactly the same as a Nazi, or as an intellectual who hates black people. If he hates me because I'm white, I don't want to hate him back because he's Jewish, I want to hate him back because he's racist.
I don't want to be racist back at him. I don't want to see his relatives punished because they're Jewish, I want to see him alone punished because he's a bigoted piece of shit.
What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever. Woke professors, Jim Crow racists, BLM activists, and neo-Nazis are in the exact same category (obviously varying by how much damage they actually do, but the ideologies are identical). I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for.
It's valid to point out the poetic justice of a person (be they Jewish, black, whatever) who pushes anti-white woke racism (i.e. saying whites have collective guilt, or are not allowed to speak about some subject etc) then facing racist collective punishment of their own, as some Jewish wokists are now doing. Those individual people deserve every bit of that. The other innocent members of their race who were *not* doing that (e.g. Jews who *aren't* woke professors), do not deserve it in the slightest!
I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago. And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
>What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever.
>. I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual
It's unusual...because it's unusual. Almost nobody of any race seriously believes in this.
Is it wrong for women to treat men differently than other women?
Do they have to be actually abused or attacked by a man before they are scared of him or exclude him from 'women's spaces'?
Well, guess what? The male/female violent crime ratio is about the same as the black/white crime ratio. OH, and black people empirically hate white people on average, and the black on white murder rate is higher per capita than the white on white murder rate.
So which is it?
Do women have an obligation to treat men as individuals? Or do you bizarrely think your logic only applies to race for some reason?
And why stop there? Why do correlations and statistical patterns only have to be ignored when it comes to race?
Companies want to hire people with college degrees because they're more likely to be intelligent. But that's just a correlation! There are plenty of INDIVIDUALS without college degrees who are much smarter than people with college degrees, so by not hiring the job candidate without the college degree you're not treating him as an individual and are instead judging him by a category that only has predictive value at a population level. See how fun this is?
>I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago.
What? Most of western history is Europeans recognizing themselves are distinct from other peoples and the thought of treating other peoples equally was absurd to the point of not rising to the level of consideration. Segregation existed less than a century ago.
And we still had affirmative action ten years ago so I have LITERALLY no idea when this 'we don't care about race' nonsense was ever supposed to have existed.
>And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
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¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
One of my proudest moments was having badly configured bug reporting system time out after I was many minutes into an epic report - I successfully installed HxD, opened my entire RAM as a file, found the memory that contained the in progress comment, and successfully saved it (if poorly formatted).
I know I got lucky; every second you wait increases the chance that memory is re-used.
I'm sorry for your loss. I generally consider any writing via a browser to be prone to loss and if I'm writing something lengthy I'll switch to my own editor then paste the result (also for the sake of easier editing)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
In an earlier thread you compared your posts to mine, and said that I have no right to be annoyed about your repetitive axe-grinding because I'm also - according to you - axe-grinding in the same way.
I reject the comparison, needless to say. But if you want to make this comparison, maybe go with it to the very end. Here's a couple of guidelines that I have self-imposed on myself since my first post under the LearnsHebrew prefix here in October:
(1) Never post more than 1 top-level comment per Open Thread. Preferably leave several Open Threads pass with 0 top-level comments by you before making a top-level comment in the next.
(2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
As far as my memory serve, I have never once violated (1), and I have violated (2) about 3 or 4 times in 7 months of posting.
Those self-imposed guidelines were necessary back when my username was much "spicier" and more controversial than it's now, I have adopted them because I didn't want to exhaust my "weirdness points", so that people don't get fatigued by every sub-thread and every conversation on the blog getting hijacked by the topic I'm angry about and going to chaos.
I claim that those guidelines would be good for you too, even if you don't care about the health of the general conversation in Open Threads and the people following it. If you're looking at it from the purely "What's in it for me" angle, then what's in it for you is that people become fatigued and zoned-out when every Open Thread they have to see you arguing the same point 3 or 4 or 5 times, barely separated by a day or 2. Posting one, long, top-level comment is better for your case than repetitively posting 4 or 5 minor rephrasing of the same post. Pedagogically, a good teacher has to give students a break.
You might also find a very long advice post I wrote to another Pro-Palestinian commenter in late last December [1] helpful, many points don't apply to you, but the two points about how changing minds is not a sequential process that you can accelerate by posting more and more, and how argumentation is not necessarily a war where those arguing against you are the enemy, might have an effect on your posting style.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-307?r=3evauj&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45847539
The Palestine college protesters explicitly saying they don't like white people: https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1784013080940200167
You people hate people like me for their race, and you expect me to sit here and be lectured to by you? Why the hell should I listen to hateful, racist assholes like you?
> (2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
Hopefully these rules are only regarding this one particular sensitive topic?
Previously, the topic was embedded into my very username, so I estimated that wherever I go and whatever I chose to comment on, the conversation would be inevitably rail-switched abruptly to the topic and that people will increasingly resent and hate that.
After I changed the name, there is no good reason not to comment on other non-Open-Thread posts, and indeed all my violations of (2) was after I changed the username. But I still value it as a self-regulation mechanism because I can get lost in writing walls of text on forums like ACX for days on end, which might eventually lead to me starving :D
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The subtext in my comment to Hammond isn't "I'm so better than you, plz emulate me to the last detail", and I really do hope he doesn't understand it like that. My comment is fundamentally "If you're going to be provocative and/or contrarian, there are ways to do it that won't upset people unnecessarily and make you come across as a generic spammer/troller intent on using the forum as a cheap write-and-forget log database where you just dump your stream of thoughts and go about your day". And that doesn't mean that I'm *perfect* or even acceptably good at this either, I wish, it's just something I always have in mind and try to achieve.
One principle of pedagogy is to always try to introduce one unknown thing at a time, never dump all the lesson points on the students all at once, they will drown. If we conceive of argumentation as a kind of pedagogy (where the opinions that people don't agree with are the "lesson points"), then the equivalent advice is the "Weirdness Points" advice, don't be needlessly provocative, don't make a game out of contrariness, use your tolerance budget wisely, go out of your way to dispel the common craziness associated with your position. (e.g. for me, "No I don't hate Jews. No I don't want an Islamic Caliphate in Palestine. Yes I'm an Atheist Arab who wants both Arabs and Jews and everyone to live in peace, and yes I'm first-hand aware that my people aren't known for being great fans of my religious choice, and no that's not an excuse to stay silent while a significant subset of them are being bombed and starved to death.")
The 2 guidelines I'm self-imposing on myself are my own way of trying to achieve this fundamentally good advice, but they're not necessarily the most suitable or optimal solution. All the better if Hammond heeds the fundamental message but invents his own guidelines, but if he starts from my guidelines, I would say that's not too bad either compared to the current state.
LHHIP: within my experience, you are the unique internet commentator who has learned, become more moderate, and adapted. I strongly congratulate and admire you. Also, at least for me, it does make your arguments significantly more persuasive.
Huh, that's very kind of you to say and I don't feel I deserve it, thanks anyway ^_^
Palestine activists have taken over Harvard Yard and set up an encampment. Incredible stuff.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/25/harvard-yard-protest-palestine/
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
>But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were
I mean, yes, if you stood up in the middle of Berlin in 1937 complaining about anti-semitism it wouldn't work out for you there, either. The Mein Kamps on these campuses are full of people who would happily see every Jew between the river and the sea dead -- and yes, if you're waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags or chanting for intifada, that's what you're advocating -- and large portions of the faculty agree with them while the rest are too weak and cowardly to stand up, so merely pointing out their poisonous ideology isn't going to make any difference.
As for how this all ends, it's not going to save a single Palestinian life because it turns out that TikTok likes don't stop bullets and bombs, but it has definitively poisoned higher education in the United States for at least the next few years.
FYI, there is a pro-Palestine encampment at MIT (my own school!) as well.
God, how embarrassing; that must be horrible to have your school represented by these dipshits. I used to think MIT was the greatest thing in the world and it broke my heart to hear, not just that this was happening, but that the university administration was bowing and scraping before the Hamasniks.
I think that 'anti-anti-semitism' stopped being fashionable on the political left at least a decade ago. Of course, you will still find *Jewish* leftists complaining about anti-semitism, but that's it.
Even the concept of a "Nazi" (the ultimate bad guy you are always ethically allowed to punch without any attempt to communicate with and maybe find a mutually satisfactory solution first) has gradually changed from "a violent authoritarian anti-semitic fanatic" to mere "someone who disagrees with me" (or the specifically Russian flavor: "someone who opposes Russia"). So even complaining about Nazis all the time no longer has the connotation of anti-semitism; it became a general label for the outgroup.
Anti-Antisemitism seems to still have a place on the left when it can 1) be legibly applied to their enemies and 2) doesn't appear to be supporting Israel itself.
This was much clearer around 2016-17 when Trump was elected and there was a sudden outcry about antisemitism (for which a surprisingly large number turned out to be hoaxes). That lasted at least as long as Trump was president, so far less than a decade ago .
It's far less clear right at this moment that antisemitism is actually coming from the left's enemies. It's hard to argue that the right are the antisemites when the left openly protests against Israel (and maybe Jews? - lots of tension on that question) on college campuses.
The left will still happily label an antisemite a Nazi, but you're right that the term has become much more of a general boo-word so lots of political enemies might get that - including Jews sometimes!
Defining Nazi as "Someone who opposes Russia" seems to not be a Russian or Soviet invention, Israel has a venerable tradition of defining Nazi as "someone who hates Jews". Ben Gurion, the literal founding father of Israel, called Menachem Begin, the one who later secured peace with Egypt, a "Hitlerist type" [1], i.e. a Nazi.
In actual truth, a Nazi isn't (just) "a violent authoritarian antisemitic fanatic", that would qualify the Spanish crown in 1492 to be Nazis, or Russian communists in the 1920s, as well as many many **many** others. A Nazi is someone who meets a compound definition that must at least hit all the following notes (1) Has a racial hierarchy where the highest race is their own, and is both an objectively superior race as well as a morally better race that the lower races conspire against (2) Uses Fascism, totalitarian devotion of the individual to the imagined national group and a nostalgia to an imagined past where the national group (conceived of as essential and as immutable as the laws of physics themselves) was dominant, and scapegoats several selected groups from the lower races as the culprits in the national group's decline (3) Engages in Genocide against the lower races.
Most groups called "Nazis" seem to fail one of those. Modern White Supremacists might satisfy (1) and (2) in some of their more extreme forms but they don't satisfy (3), American White Supremacists might want to re-instill segregation and the European ones definitely want to cleanse Europe from all non-Europeans (which include those who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s), but none of them seriously contemplate or advance Genocide as a serious proposition. Islamic jihadist groups might very well contemplate (3) and are notoriously whiny and won't shut up about the "Golden age of Islam" so they arguably satisfy (2), but they fail (1).
[1] https://archive.ph/Wfuzw, Haaretz: Why Did Ben Gurion Call Begin a 'Hitlerist Type'?
As an aside, what groups "who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s" that European White Supremacists want to eliminate do you have in mind?
Hmmm, that phrasing is somewhat confusing, now that I read it again. It somewhat implies "Those who were European till the 1970s and the 1980s then were no longer", whereas I really mean "Those who were not European till the 1970s and the 1980s and beyond, then were naturalized and became European".
As for the actual groups I was thinking of, in France I mean the people from former colonies (e.g. Tunisians and Algerians), in the UK I meant the Pakistanis and Indians, and in Germany I meant Syrians and Turks. Naturalized citizens in France and UK have a long history extending to the 1960s and the 1970s, but a lot of White Supremacists don't view them as truly European, because they define this using race.
Thanks for the clarification, it makes sense to me now, and I agree. In fact, it doesn't have to be *naturalized* citizens. People *born* in e.g. France, but of North-African ancestry, are often not seen as "French" (they are seen as "Arabs" or "beurs" or "rebeux" or whatever) and not just by White Supremacists. Of course the problem is compounded by the fact that they also often don't see themselves as French but tend to identify with some idealized version of their ancestry which makes them reject French or Western values, inexorably leading to an unstable feedback loop.
For example, I always found it interesting that the grown grand-children of North-Africans immigrants (Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians) in France are *more* religious (see themselves more as Muslims) than their grand-parents did. (Although maybe that's just a consequence of the fall of secular ideologies (pan-Arab socialism and communism), since that seems true in the countries of origin as well, and therefore not just a reaction against the host country.)
BTW, thanks for sticking around, even when your ideas aren't the most popular. I agree with the commenter above that you often add a lot of value and insights to the discussions.
French (grand-)children of North African ancestry seeing themselves as more Muslim than their ancestors is a new thing to know, what I previously knew of this is that the American children and grandchildren of Middle Eastern ancestry gradually loosen the ties of religion and adopt an Americanized Islam (all while maintaining that this is the one true Islam of course, as all Muslims like to do). This is often in the context of their parents complaining and advising other people from the Middle East who want to immigrate to the USA that they should fortify Islamic values in their children well.
It's not easy for me to articulate my views about immigration. On the one hand, I'm an Anarchist and I believe nation states are rubbish, geographic jealousy and caring about whose territory is whose is quintessentially nation-state-ish and I don't believe it goes well with Anarchism. On the other hand, some immigration is objectively bad for both the source and the destination. Refugees from wars are troubled and radicalized, people think that suppressing statistics about their higher levels of crimes is doing them a service but it has backfired before and is going to backfire again. High-skill immigrants deprive their native land from much-needed brains, further dooming it to another iteration of the downward spiral. But of course, the counterargument (which I'm very convinced of) is that the native land is going to spiral downward anyway, because those in charge fundamentally don't have the intelligence or the willingness to be anything except dumbasses, so better those high-skilled workers be in a land that appreciates them and where they can prosper than in a land where they will dwindle and possibly be locked in jail over a social media post.
I don't think I'm adequately represented by any of the 2 sides in the current immigration debate.
Thanks a lot for the kind words at the end. I don't think I deserve them, but I'm heart warmed you wrote them.
Looking forward to seeing you guys in Atlanta!
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
For some reason, you must be logged in using your Google account before it lets you do the survey. You might want to turn this off? The ACX survey did not require this.
(I am not familiar with Google Forms, so I don't know how these things are set up.)
how long is the questionnaire? I satisfy your criteria, but have a generic policy against surveys or questionnaires that have an uncertain length.
About 9 minutes I think?
I can confirm that 9 minutes was a reasonable estimate for me, but I'm not a
Chidi Anagonye.
Hi, small stats question here.
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
.
.
K Nearest Neighbor Regression
Regression trees
Ridge Regression and Lasso Regression
Principal component regression
Logistic Regression
Linear discriminant analysis
Instrumental Variables
Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model
Spurious Regression Problem
If you are interested in predictive analytics in general, ridge regression and lasso regression are good introductions to regularization and provide solid heuristics for understanding of loss functions.
As an econ student, you probably won't get much exposure to unsupervised learning models. So if that's something you would like in order to round out your knowledge, K nearest and principal component stand out.
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
The committee notes are claiming that it's malware.
>For example, outside researchers have found embedded vulnerabilities that allow the company to collect more data than the app's privacy policy indicates.<
I would assume an attempt to publish source code would at least have to disprove this.
Holy moly, the ban is this general? Even Source Code distribution?
I thought it was just against TikTok.
I wonder what is the intended purpose. It's not like most people could install the source code. Someone else building the binaries for them would be illegal. Studying the source code to make a different but similar application out of it... well, if Americans would do it, this is kinda what the bill originally proposed (that the problem is not TikTok per se, but the fact that it has Chinese owners)... and if Chinese would do it, they can share the source code on their own part of internet, so the ban is irrelevant.
What I'm alarmed about is specifically how they define "foreign adversary controlled". The Chinese government can trivially make a personal GitHub account and publish source code, is that source code then "foreign adversary controlled"? Does that mean every Chinese or Iranian developer on GitHub is potentially a target of banning or repo takedowns?
Or do they define an "app" as something that must have a central database somewhere else than the computer it's running on? In which case... fair, but why do they want to restrain the mere source code publishing of those apps? If anything, publishing source code ***helps*** you to know that the app talks to a central server somewhere.
Why is the bill so general and convoluted anyway? Why can't they just say the legalese equivalent of "We're banning TikTok because fuck China."
Also, consider the possible perverse incentives. Next time a powerful American software company tries to compete against an established foreign software solution, they may decide to lobby politicians to declare a war, just so they could classify the competition as "foreign adversary controlled".
So if tomorrow social networks inexplicably start promoting articles about how Estonia is full of terrorists, at least we will know why. Or maybe a World War 3 will start over SAP.
>they may decide to lobby politicians to declare a war, just so they could classify the competition as "foreign adversary controlled".
I assume you're just kidding around, but the United States hasn't declared a war since 1942.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18427487-the-witch-hunt-narrative
On the other hand, this book presented several convincing arguments that the idea of a "satanic panic" regarding child care abuse was itself overblown and that the media focus on ritual abuse allegations did not present the full picture of the actual investigations, that the most notable abuse cases were based on physical evidence and that even in McMartin case there were grounds to at least allow for a credible suspicion (whether ultimately unfounded or not) that Ray Buckey was guilty of sexual abuse.
Why do jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
https://i.imgur.com/QCT9nT3.jpeg
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins? I recommend wearing a codpiece when sleeping to block possibility of its theft. https://imgur.com/a/zip5qTE
> Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins?
I thought this was mostly a solved problem in USA (which is probably the only market for those books).
> Why do Jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
They don't, I don't remember Einstein being a particularly gleeful advocate against Micro-Aggressions, maybe his use of non-Euclidean geometry stems from a deep hatred to the proto-Western Euclid but those who invented non-Euclidean geometries were all White, mostly Germans and French, so there's that. Scott Aronson has atrocious opinions on the Palestinians (**checks Shtetl-Optimized** yup, another one) but I have never read or listened to him popularizing White Fragility.
Lastly, insofar as an "Intellectual" is simply someone who explores and explains ideas for a living and not necessarily an academic, then the very guy who owns the very blog you're writing this on is a Jewish intellectual, can you cite one instance where he hints he hates White people, of which his readers are the vast majority?
So its not Jewish intellectuals, is it? It's "Woke Jewish Intellectuals", and at this point the signifier "Jewish" adds no information of value and can be safely discarded without losing too much information, some would say that this even gains us new information.
> If these Jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves
If dictators hate the Rule of Law, why should you be crying when their country plunges into a civil war? If some people hate and pollute rivers, why should be crying when those rivers become poisoned by their chemical trash and are now slowly killing everybody who drinks from them?
I agree the temptations to seek "Poetic Justice" everywhere is very strong, but like it or not, you're among "those people". You live among the River Polluters, you live among those who agree with Dictators and hate the Rule of Law. When the consequences come, they won't distinguish between you and them. Free Speech and Civilized Discourse are public-good norms much like the Rule of Law and clean rivers, they benefit everyone, and their absence comes for everyone.
Hi LearnsHebrew, personally I'm not going to join this discussion, but I'd like to know your thoughts about https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7845
Hello! ForExample is a funny username to have.
As for S. Aronson's anti-anti-Zionist piece, I have read it 5 days after it was published and the comment section was already closed by then (whether by choice or due to a certain capacity limit), so I didn't have the chance to respond at the time in the comment section.
I will start by answering the central question of the letter:
>> Let’s assume that not only has Netanyahu lost the next election in a landslide, but is justly spending the rest of his life in Israeli prison. Waving my wand, I’ve made *you* [The Reader] Prime Minister in his stead, with an overwhelming majority in the Knesset. You now get to go down in history as the liberator of Palestine. But you’re now also in charge of protecting Israel’s 7 million Jews (and 2 million other residents) from near-immediate slaughter at the hands of those who you’ve liberated.
I have thought about this question before, and my answer is scattered over a bunch of comments in several Open Threads. To compile them all here, I would:
(1) Withdraw IDF presence and settlers from West Bank and Gaza. The Golan and Sheba farms (taken from Syria in the 1967 war, Sheba farms claimed by Lebanon) are also not Israeli land, but withdrawing from there is more challenging due to the current nature of the neighbors.
(2) Alternatively to (1), fully annex Gaza and/or the West Bank as Israeli provinces, and make all of their resident full citizens of Israel with equal rights and protections under the law
(3) Admit full historical responsibility for the Nakba, and release all classified historical documents documenting the war crimes against Palestinians
(4) Pay reparations for whomever can prove they're descendent from Nakba survivors, modeled after German reparations for the Holocaust
Because the premise of the question is fundamentally impossible, I won't spend any more time thinking on what I would do if I was the Israeli PM. But over the course of several hundred comments in 7 months here, I think have made quite clear what I think the general shape of a fair end to the fighting looks like.
Scott then writes terrible paragraph where he makes a combination of historical/factual and moral mistakes:
>> Granted, it seems pretty paranoid to expect such a slaughter! Or rather: it would seem paranoid, if the Palestinians’ Grand Mufti (progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence Hamas) hadn’t allied himself with Hitler in WWII, enthusiastically supported the Nazi Final Solution, and tried to export it to Palestine; if in 1947 the Palestinians hadn’t rejected the UN’s two-state solution (the one Israel agreed to) and instead launched another war to exterminate the Jews (a war they lost); if they hadn’t joined the quest to exterminate the Jews a third time in 1967; etc., or if all this hadn’t happened back before there were any settlements or occupation, when the only question on the table was Israel’s existence. It would seem paranoid if Arafat had chosen a two-state solution when Israel offered it to him at Camp David, rather than suicide bombings. It would seem paranoid if not for the candies passed out in the streets in celebration on October 7.
(1) The Grand Mufti isn't the progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan Al Bannah. The Grand Mufti also has nothing to do with Hamas, which was founded by Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood high-ranking leader in Gaza who Israel was friendly towards because they both hated the secular and leftist Fatah (which was violent at that time before Oslo), Ahmed Yassin then made a 180 turn in the 1980s and founded Hamas. Hamas didn't commit any violence till the 1990s. Ahmed Yassin was a child when the Nakba happened, back when the Grand Mufti was in charge in Jerusalem.
(2) The Grand Mufti is not the leader of the Palestinians. He was a local leader of Jerusalem under the Ottomans because he was an Ottoman noble (allegedly tracing bloodline to prophet Muhammed). He was then appointed by the British in a made-up position "Grand Mufti of Palestine" and considered a vital ally. He allied himself with Nazi Germany out of pure self-preservation: Because he played a role in the 1936 Arab uprising and the British issued an arrest warrant against him.
(3) If Scott wants to use what a few hundred Palestinians did after October 7th as evidence that all Arabs are hateful antisemitic untermenschen, perhaps I can also use what a few hundred Jewish wedding guests [1] did as evidence of the same, here's what Wikipedia says:
>>>> In December 2015, Israeli police began investigating a video of a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem celebrating the marriage of a person known to have been involved in price tag attacks, in which guests are shown stabbing a photo of the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who had died in the Duma arson attack. The same video contained scenes of guests, armed with guns, knives and Molotov cocktails, chanting a song with the words from the book of Judges (16:28), "O God, that I may be this once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes", replacing "Philistines" with "Palestinians". A lawyer for the defendants in the case, Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, was also present and later said "No one realized these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family"
Look at the masterful defense by Ben Gvir! Nobody realized that the photo of the toddler they were stabbing is the photo of the particular toddler who was just burned alive! If he was just any **other** toddler, it would have been totally okay.
So maybe atrocity-hunting is not the best or most charitable way to look at this? Just like I see this type of Jews and this type of Israelis and deliberately choose to forget they exist, maybe Aronson would do well to deliberately choose to forget the type of Arab who gives out sweets after October 7th.
(4) The Palestinians didn't start the war of 1948. The war of 1948 started as a civil war between paramilitary groups. Civil wars don't have clear instigators or a single initiating event and are instead the result of a series of escalation-and-counter-escalation. When Zionist paramilitaries prevailed and started slaughtering Arabs and expelling them in the hundreds of thousands (Wikipedia's Nakba page says 300K expelled before May 1948), Arab armies tried to intervene after public outcry from their own populations, and they did so without coordination or a clear plan.
(5) Israel never offered a good faith offer of a Palestinian state. A state is by definition an entity with a monopoly on violence, and not a single one of Israeli offers of statehood included an army, or the guarantee that the IDF won't violate its borders.
Then Scott says:
>> But if someone has a whole ideology, which they teach their children and from which they’ve never really wavered for a century, about how murdering you is a religious honor, and also they’ve actually tried to murder you at every opportunity—-what more do you want them to do, before you’ll believe them?
Perhaps he should remember then that this "someone" is actually 2.3 million someones, who the state he is supporting have been blockading and chokeholding since 2007. I would like to see his evidence that all 2.3 millions of Gazans see killing Jews as religious honor. (Because if he didn't have any, that would be such a shame. It would be as if I saw the "Wedding of Hate" and concluded that Jews see murdering Arabs and burning them alive as the highest religious honor.) Perhaps he should remember that there are 600K Jews and 3 million Arabs in the West Bank, and before October 7th the only ones doing the dying were the Arabs, and the only ones doing the killing were the Jews.
Scott then proceeds to list 4 solutions, and for all except the 2nd one (his preferred), he imagines one-sided objections that don't stand scrutiny. Look at what he writes, Zum Beispiel, on my preferred solution:
>> in the rare cases they deign to address the question directly, most anti-Zionists advocate a “secular, binational state” between the Jordan and Mediterranean, with equal rights for all inhabitants. Certainly, that would make sense if you believe that Israel is an apartheid state just like South Africa.
>> To me, though, this analogy falls apart on a single question: who’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Who’s the Palestinian leader who’s ever said to the Jews, “end your Jewish state so that we can live together in peace,” rather than “end your Jewish state so that we can end your existence”?
Really? Scott won't have a secular bi-state because you can't find a Palestinian Nelson Mandela? He means the Arab 20% of Israel and all 3 million Arabs of the West Bank and all 2.5 million Arabs of Gaza all hate Israel with the same fervor and would like to genocide Jews to the last baby?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duma_arson_attack#%22Wedding_of_Hate%22
Thank you for your response!
I won't go into history, and if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Basically, you say the Palestinians are just normal people who'd like to get rid of all the fighting and war and bombs and stuff, and if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Sure, that's true. But among them are the Hamas, and their corrupt leaders profit massively from the current situation. Khaled Mashal 5 billion dollars, Ismail Haniyeh 4 billion dollars, Abu Marzouk 3 billion dollars, all from stolen humanitarian aid. https://twitter.com/Regendelfin/status/1763920078959980955 And backed by the current Iranian government. And feeding the people their propaganda for decades.
How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
You're very welcome. I was planning to respond to Scott's awful post in my Copious Free Time, you gave me an opportunity to quit procrastinating and just do it.
> if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Exactly, that's what it means for it to be a "Cycle of Violence". A cycle has no start, has no end, and is self-reinforcing. The reasons that started the cycle (and thus could - in naive principle - end it) are long gone, the cycle now persists solely on its own. Its results feed into its causes and its causes create its results who then feed more into its causes which create more of its results which .....
> if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Which is a huge "If" that Israel was and is not willing - even in its most committed-to-peace phase in the early to mid 1990s - to give. They're not willing to dismantle settlements, they're not willing to leave Gaza have an airport and ports and territorial waters, they're not willing to stop passing racist laws like the Nation State Basic Law that agitate their Arab, Druze, and Bedouin citizens, they're not willing to stop oppressing and choke holding the West Bank citizens and treating them exactly how Apartheid governments do. "Leave them alone" is a choice that the Israeli government has faced every single day after 5 June 1967, every day they wake up and a Windows XP dialog box appears in the sky with a message "Oppress Palestinians just for the heck of it? [yes/no/remind me later]", and they either press "yes" or "remind me later", but never "no".
My definition of "Leaving Palestinians alone" involves looking at them as human beings, not animals that you can continue to harass and denigrate and throw by the thousands into "administrative detention" (i.e. unlawful military prisons where civilians as young as 13 are thrown to never be heard of again), then act Pikachu-face surprised when your actions create and empower a monstrous faction that promises revenge "by all means necessary". It's not about Jihad (although that's a catalyst that make the fire rage harder), the PLO were communists back in their day, and that didn't stop them from promising revenge and - in their view - getting it.
If you don't want Nazi Germany, one possible course of action is to create it and then spend billions of dollar and millions of souls to defeat it, as the US, UK and France did in the 1920s to 1940s. But another, much smarter, course of action is to never force the treaty of Versailles in the first place. Israel hitherto consistently preferred the first course of action, where they engage in outrageous and dehumanizing campaigns against the Palestinians where countless thousands die and/or injured and/or humiliated and deprived of their human rights, then when the inevitable revenge comes they spend billions yet again to defeat it, only to create yet another iteration of it by their actions again and again and again.
> How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
I don't know. There is a temptation to always answer with a solution to those questions, any solution. It will probably be wrong. It will be a wrong because I have no baseline experience with the question itself (and neither does most people), I have no idea how to fight a paramilitary group that has been building its military strength for 20 years. I have no idea how to fight a normal war anywhere anytime against any foe. I have no experience with the deserts of Sinai that Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza, and I have no experience whatsoever with the royal courts of Qatar that Hamas leverages for billions of aid.
But what I'm saying is much more radical and more fundamental. After all, first there was Fatah, then Fatah became (somewhat) peaceful but only to be replaced with Hezbollah, Hezbollah were barely held back in 2006 only for Hamas to emerge 1 to 2 years later, then there was the Islamic Jihad. Israel's actions keep creating them. After each group is created, it becomes a self-sustaining entity that can keep itself alive under a variety of external operating conditions, no matter what Israel's actions are. But what creates them in the first place is Israel's actions.
I think that's enough for now, if you want my opinion on a particular paragraph don't hesitate to reply with the quoted paragraph. My final verdict is that this letter isn't a good faith engagement with the so-called "Anti-Zionists" (a term which I now rejects), this letter is just a release that Scott wrote because he was angry, and he was angry because he browsing Twitter.
At the beginning of the letter, Scott seems somewhat self-aware:
>> At the high end of the spectrum, I religiously check the tweets of Paul Graham, a personal hero and inspiration to me ever since he wrote Why Nerds Are Unpopular twenty years ago, and a man with whom I seem to resonate deeply on every important topic except for two: Zionism and functional programming. At the low end, I’ve read hundreds of the seemingly infinite army of Tweeters who post images of hook-nosed rats with black hats and side curls and dollar signs in their eyes, sneering as they strangle the earth and stab Palestinian babies.
Instead of engaging with particular type of "Anti-Zionist" that is Paul Graham or - say - me (not that I'm on Twitter, oh hell no), he chooses to spend the rest of the letter talking as if his main readers are those who post hook-nosed AI-generated Jews on Twitter, people who he have to carefully explain to them why killing Jews is wrong and why Arabs all want to kill Jews and are too much of an Untermensch right now to be given their own state or a place in the one state that already exists.
Which is a shame, because I want to respect Scott, because I want to believe him when he says he looks at Gazan children and remembers his own. He continuously makes this task difficult for me, just 3 days ago he posted another masterpiece like this letter.
What can I say, that's why you don't browse Twitter.
I can't keep track of all the separate comments you've made making mostly the same point, so just:
1. Is it (((Jewish intellectuals))) you hate or just (((Jews)))? It seems like you keep equivocating and motte-and-bailey'ing on this.
2. I just...can't...comprehend the irony and brazenness of posting on an anti-woke Jewish guy's blog to say Jews are all hatefully woke. I....just...trying to wrap my brain around this makes my head hurt.
3. *Why* aren't zionist Jews based allies of western civilisation, according to you? In what possible sense do you say Muslims are more based than Jews?
None of this makes any damn sense.
I think I have a hard time with your “I’m racist against racist races” philosophy because you’re unapologetically practicing exactly what you condemn. Are you saying that if all the other races weren’t so racist then you wouldn’t have to be so racist all the time? Or are you saying everybody is justifiably racist and may the most racist race win?
Please put more thought into your content.
This is a lazy repost of content that was lazy the first time. It's an Imgur image of book covers, without explanation of why the books are hateful, or why we should treat them as a representative example of the thinking of "Jewish intellectuals." It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish, much less support any kinds of conclusions about Jewish intellectuals in general.
"It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish"
You don't recognise the name Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya as a good Yiddishe boy?
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
Nominative determinism department:
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
The former publisher's name? Pecker
The nominative determinism would be more impressive if there weren't so many synonyms for "penis" in the English language. Other names that also mean "penis" include Peter, Dick, Rod, Johnson, Willy, Wang, Dong, and John Thomas.
Do all languages have a colossal number of words for penis? Does English have the most? Does any other English word have quite so many synonyms?
Many Thanks! Good point! 'fraid I have no idea if English is unusual in this. The language _has_ been said to pursue
>other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
The name rings a bell...where did I hear that before? Oh
Mr Pecker unwisely attempted to extort Jeff Bezos of all people.
https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f
Wow! Many Thanks! I particularly liked:
>Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
I thought the hush money wasn't in any doubt? I was under the impression that only question is whether it qualified as an illegal campaign contribution and whether NY could stretch the law to go after him if so.
Many Thanks! I think you are probably right. I'm just trying to avoid typing something that might count as libel.
This trial is so odd, I think nobody is denying he was paying her off, I was given to understand elsewhere that he's being tried for paying her off out of the wrong slush fund and should have claimed it as a campaign expense?
I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such. I don't approve of him having affairs, but dd Stormy ever give the money back in a fit of high-mindedness over "no, no, I cannot take the proceeds of infamy!" or did she rather try getting more out of him once that was gone, and if he wouldn't pay up, she decided peddling her story to the media was another way of making money out of it? That she picked Avenatti to be her lawyer - well, two greedy and stupid people met in a match made under heaven, yes?
Yeah, "reputation management" seems like one of those expenses that any public figure could engage in. Trump might well have done this even if he were merely a wealthy reality-TV host.
If I give money to Biden, can I claim that he paid me in nega-dollars to not confess to a torrid affair?
As I understand it, the alleged New York crime is that Trump lied in his business records about which slush fund he used. But lying in your business records is only a crime if you use those records to commit or conceal some other crime; otherwise you're just writing weird harmless fiction. And paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress isn't a crime.
The claimed underlying crime is Federal campaign finance violation, in that Trump paying hush money to his mistress was "obviously" a campaign expense, and you aren't supposed to spend your personal money on campaign expenses without officially donating it to your campaign account first, I think.
Note that this would be a Federal crime, but the Federal government has not seen fit to prosecute. But New York is sure he's guilty.
The cynic in me says, if Trump had used his campaign account rather than his personal account, New York would be saying that paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress is "obviously" a personal matter, and it's a violation of Federal campaign finance laws to spend campaign funds on a personal matter. Again, without regard to whether the Feds think there was a prosecutable violation of federal law.
I think I'm going to trust the cynic in me on this one. I want Trump banished into the political Outer Darkness, but this is not the way.
I'm in the same boat as you. I strongly believe that if he had paid her off using campaign funds that this would be a *much* bigger scandal. We can't have it both ways, especially for something that underneath it all isn't a crime in the first place. I feel like they want to make paying off a mistress a crime, but can't do that (especially retroactively).
So, they're trying to use the legal system to run someone's name through the mud and get as much publicity of the affair as possible. I actually think *that* should be illegal, and some kind of unlawful prosecution charge should be brought against the DA.
This truly is the worst case to bring against Trump, and has already been backfiring by making Trump more sympathetic, riling up his supporters, and undermining any other cases that might be more legitimate.
Yeah. I suspect that Trump *should* be serving prison time for the DC insurrection charge, the Georgia election interference, and possibly the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. We'll have to wait on the trials to be sure. But the Feds are slow-walking those cases, while NY tries to throw him in prison for the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light. Which makes everyone involved look like the sort of person who tries to put their political opponents in jail on broken-taillight charges, so kind of untrustworthy when they go on to say "...and he's guilty of actual serious crimes, too!"
Technically, I believe lying on your business records is a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations has run on that. Lying to conceal another crime is a felony, but the big issue here is that the underlying crime is (a) extremely dubious (paying out of the campaign account is a lot more likely to land you in trouble with the feds) (b) a federal crime that the DOJ declined to prosecute and (c) clearly bootstrapped to give Bragg a way to indict Trump. This is a case where it almost certainly gets tossed on appeal even if he is convicted, and I am deeply annoyed that this one went first, because the other cases against him are so much stronger.
Many Thanks!
>I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such.
Agreed on both points. Also agreed that this case is really odd - a hush payoff turned into a case about mislabeling funds (where, IIRC, the statute of limitations ran out), turned into a campaign finance case (under a federal law - but being tried in a state court???).
AFAIK, the only case against Trump that isn't legally tenuous is the classified documents one. Now, personally, I don't want politicians to be above (beneath? :-) ) the law, but I'd rather have the electorate choose which is the less odious candidate to put into office. Also, if politicians routinely face politically motivated prosecution once they leave office - they may become less willing to leave office peacefully. I'd really like to keep the tradition of concession speeches marking power shifts rather than something bloodier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulfikar_Ali_Bhutto#Trial_and_execution isn't a model I want us to follow.
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Here's something to think about regarding kids' IQ: My parents were not trying or expecting to have a smart kid, but they got one. Some time in grade school a teacher told my mother my IQ, and she told me, and she and I both developed an unhealthy preoccupation with that number, and that ended up being very bad for my head. Feeling proud that it was high was just the tiny tip of the iceberg. Most of the effect was to strengthen the sense I already had of being a very odd entity, something like vast, olive-colored irregular polygon set in a row of blue and white houses. It took me decades to get over the IQ thing, and as for the rest- I still feel pretty olive-colored.
If people who pick thru their embryos before implanting one feel they must test their children's IQ to find out whether they got as much awesome specialness as they paid for, I hope someone counsels them to only test once, refrain from talking to the kid about the the result, and STFU about the subject for the rest of their lives.
But don't you think that it's being genuinely different in thought patterns, context, background knowledge, speed-of-inference, and so on that makes you so different?
I was tested at a young age, and put in special programs and skipped grades and whatever afterwards. My parents never told me my results, but it was VERY easy to see from before kindergarten that I was massively different than everyone around me, and that's been true basically my whole life.
I'm not sure "don't tell your kid the result" is actually going to make a high IQ person actually fit in better or be any more "normal," because I think a lot of the differences are inherent in the condition itself.
It's easy to think "I'm different because I'm so much smarter than the rest of these idiots" when the answer is really "I'm different because I'm weirder, not smarter". Smart may have little to do with why you don't fit in.
There are *two* big mistakes highly intelligent people can make, and it is natural to make one of them when trying too hard to avoid the other:
* ignore the fact that their high IQ makes them different;
* attribute all their differences to the high IQ, even when something else is the cause.
Many people believe that refusing to believe in a high IQ is virtuous. Guess what: the smart kid will notice that *something* is different. Other people will notice, too. People naturally try to explain things, so in the absence of the correct explanation they will likely invent an incorrect one.
Some people believe that a lie can be virtuous. For example, you can explain the educational success of the smart kid by pretending that it is a result of the kid studying diligently. That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?
But it doesn't work like that. The smart kid will notice that he or she gets good grades even without studying. And the other kids will notice that no matter how hard they study, the outcome is simply not the same. Telling them to study even harder is just pointless cruelty; some of them are already on the verge of collapse. By denying the existence of a biological privilege, you are simultaneously blaming the ones who were dealt a bad hand.
(Why doesn't everyone learn to code and get a job in Silicon Valley; that would certainly solve all the unemployment and poverty, wouldn't it? Oh, those lazy bastards are just not studying hard enough. Or perhaps we should blame the teachers for not inspiring them enough instead? Or maybe it's the sexist and racist employers and colleagues. Anyway, the point is that literally everyone could become an elite coder, if only we collectively tried harder. The beatings will continue until morale improves.)
From inside, being highly intelligent but in denial about it, means constantly overestimating other people's ability to understand things, and being constantly surprised about how other people just fail to connect the dots. (There is a rationalist wisdom saying that if you are surprised too often, it usually means that your model of the world is wrong.) Even after admitting that intelligence is a thing, if you don't accept that you are exceptionally intelligent, it will seem like you have the bad luck of being surrounded by exceptionally stupid people. Things only start making sense when you realize that there is a "normal", and you are not a part of it.
And yes, there is a better known opposite mistake, often seen among Mensa members, when the high IQ is the *only* fact you know about yourself, and then you conclude that *everything* else that happened to you is somehow a consequence of you being too smart for this planet. You don't have ADHD, and you are not too lazy to clean up your room or at least your working desk, it is simply a fact that smart people thrive in chaos and need it. You don't have autism or low social skills, it is simply the vast intellectual distance between you and the muggles that prevents mutual understanding. Etc. (So why are there many smart people who *don't* fail at life? Dunno, they probably got lucky, or maybe they are not playing fair somehow.)
In presence of such extreme choices, it can be difficult to obtain a balanced perspective on intelligence. Yes, it will give you an advantage in many areas of life. No, it cannot replace knowledge or experience, and if you try using it that way, you will fail. But if you work diligently, you can achieve much better results than the less intelligent people, no matter how hard they try. But there are only 24 hours a day, so there is a limited number of things you can work diligently on, and at the end of the day you will need someone else's help with the rest, even if that other person is less intelligent than you. Intelligence alone will not fix your other problems. Intelligence is not the same as rationality, or wisdom, or education, or experience; although it can help you obtain these things easier.
This is extremely well said and enlightening, thank you.
I have a distinct memory of asking an (Asian) classmate how to solve some particular math problem. He wrote down the method in half a second. "Oh I see," I said. "And why does that work?"
And he gave me an utterly blank look.
I can't prove this, but I had a very strong sense that it wasn't that he simply didn't know the answer, or didn't know how to explain it. Rather, I really think he found the question incomprehensible. As if it was a question he'd never asked himself in his life.
This really confounds the concept of intelligence to me. This guy had great memorisation skills, could no doubt pick up mental algorithms and formulaic processes in an instant and apply them flexibly and effortlessly to many different contexts. And yet, he didn't just lack philosophical ability, he didn't even merely lack philosophical curiosity, he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist.
I'm sure this general idea has been addressed by Scott somewhere, but I just can't see how the two questions "*how* does it work, what steps get you from A to B?" and "*why* does it work, what fundamental features of this discipline explain the success of this approach" belong on the same dimension, or even on related dimensions. There's probably a technical model for connecting them. But they are in a basic sense incommeasurable.
A bit of the first is probably necessary for the second. But the first can exist entirely without the second. And this same point applies in a self-referential meta way. There's so much focus on some "thing" (IQ) that correlates with certain test results and also correlates with life outcomes and abilities. Compared to the "why": what *is* IQ, in its essential nature? "What is intelligence?" Not "what does it correlate with?"
I have also met the "intelligence without curiosity" type. From my perspective, "intelligence" means having a powerful engine in your head... but for what purposes you choose to use that engine, that is an entirely different question.
I would predict that people with high IQ will be statistically more impressive in whatever purpose they choose, whether it is curious exploration, mindless memorization, or conspiracy theories.
That may be true. But I'm inclined to doubt it. There are a whole bunch of scientists and scientific types who seem to really hate and despise philosophy. They seem to have not only a firmly dismissive certainty that "philosophy is all useless and fake lol", but also a kind of rage at its existence. (Thankfully there aren't many of them around here, or if there are they have more nuance in the way they talk.)
Of course they *may* be simply choosing to hate philosophy and love science. But the manner of their rage really looks to me like the standard attitude of a self-perceived "smart" or "skilled" person encountering a discipline or task that they're actually bad at. "Well if *I* can't do it, it must be useless anyway. I could ace it if I wanted to. But I don't, so there!"
Standard human pride and childishness is what it looks like. Which suggests that science and philosophy (science is actually a form of philosophy, but let's ignore that) sometimes require different forms of intelligence (though obviously there are plenty who are great at both, like Scott).
> "he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist..."
My best friend and I noticed this in many of our academically high-performing high school classmates. We called it "thintelligence."
To this day we inadvertently recycled it from Michael Crichton or if we just happened to independently converge on the same idea.
"That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?"
Raw talent will get you a long way, but relying on the talent on its own, without learning how to learn or put in the hard work, will one day fail. I've seen it in sports, where the naturally gifted eventually hit the day when they're slower and their reflexes are not as quick, and the raw talent is no longer there to be called on to help them out of a hole. The ones who learned to practice and figure out solutions have that to help them out and extend their careers when the legs aren't able to get them to that spot on the field five seconds before anyone else anymore, but they have so much experience in reading the game that they know to position themselves in good time to be in that spot.
And you see the opposite: the slow decline of the former star, where they now routinely get beaten by the less talented but hard-working younger opponent because they've put in the work to figure out how to get the result, while the star is trying to draw from the well of talent that is now drying up.
It took me a long time to realize that I was much smarter than most people. Everyone assumes that their own experience is normal and everyone else is just like them until proven otherwise.
I think I was born wired to be sort of schizoid -- to have trouble connecting with people -- and that wiring was separate from the smart wiring. So I sort of slotted the IQ info in with the sense of unfixable separateness I already had, and it strengthened it. If I had had a different temperament the info about IQ might not have affected me the way it did. I have known lots of people who are clearly extremely smart, and of course they started getting evidence of that early in life, but you don't get the sense that their smartness is a sort of capsule they are locked inside of. They're sociable. They like company. They tell great jokes and stories. Feynman sounds like he was like that. The more sociable kind of smart people tend not to work in jobs where they're alone with a book or a screen a lot of the time -- for instance they may be lawyers. Or doctors. Paul Farmer, for instance, was evidently a genius from an early age, but he spent his life in a sea of people.
But the kids with the introverted + smart combo that I got are not rare, and the last thing they need to hear from their parents and teachers is that the reason they feel so different is that they are intellectually superior. That's really not accurate for most. Feeling separate and different is mostly the product of a whole different aspect of the way they are put together, and they need help learning to modulate that tendency.
If someone has an extremely smart kid then yes of course they will need to talk with the kid about skipping grades etc. But I think it's important to talk about it in a way that does not portray them as a whole different kind of entity. So you don't say, you are a rare high IQ person, as very few are, so you don't fit in with regularly kids and the regular school structures. You say something like, yeah you learn extra fast, and 4th grade is going to be really boring for you, so the school's going to just let you go ahead to 5th. But you can still be on the [whatever] team with your buddies from 4th grade, and have them over on the weekends.
I thought about some pretty esoteric stuff at a young age, but at the same time a lot of my interests were age-appropriate. I liked dolls, hide and seek, pretending to be explorers in the vacant lots at the same age as everyone else. Parents need to do justice to the need for that sort of play too. Mine did, and I think that did me a lot of good.
I'm skeptical that the Rationalist IQ Uber Alles meme is even a beneficial belief system in the first place, let alone something that kids should hear. I like your suggestion of how to handle it.
I agree at the "lol my number is bigger than yours" level, but let me put forward one case for it. I don't know what you consider a symptom of "IQ uber alles," but I assume I'd qualify because I would definitely pay significant prices to gengineer my kids (with IQ and height / attractiveness top of the list), and would structure their and our lives around schooling them in a different way.
Here's my rationale: Progress and achievement is driven by outliers. If you actually have a high IQ outlier kid, you are more likely to help them become their best self, and to drive positive results in the world, by taking their difference into account and treating them differently than just throwing them into public school for them to be crushingly bored and learn nothing for 12 years.
JS Mill was a child prodigy because his "peers" and main interaction partners were his parents' social circle of high-powered intellectual elites, and he's one of many examples.
I've always planned to A) pay for whatever gengineering is possible with a couple million, and B) homeschool my kids at a greatly accelerated pace, including paying grad students to give intensive 1-on-1 tutoring in whatever subjects the kids are interested in. The aim would be "undergrad by 14-15," which I think is about the right difficulty level and place for a smart 14/15 year old. And I'd happily have them go younger than that if inclined.
Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids? Maybe? But I never really had much to say to age-appropriate kids and usually sought interactions with smarter adults, because age-appropriate kids didn't think or talk about anything interesting. Then when I was a teenager and libido came in, there was a *reason* to talk to kids my age and I started doing it (and in my paradigm, they'll already be in undergrad when this happens, which is probably the best place for it).
Also, this way they'll actually *learn* things, which is important. I was so crushingly bored in junior high and high school I literally became a delinquent, because then they send you to a special school where you get all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can crank through it in a few hours and be done with the contentless nonsense and can spend your time flirting and getting in trouble with the other delinquent kids for the rest of the week.
I don't want that for my kids, I want them to actually learn things and be able to discuss interesting and complex ideas with other smart people, and to get through the credential signaling rat-race faster than other people so they can get on with their lives, and would structure their schooling and our lives around that.
To my mind, this maximizes the chance of them flourishing and getting the most out of their talents and gifts, and maximizes the chance of positive impact in the world driven by them. But yes, it's paying significant sums, then upending and structuring our entire lives around a different educational paradigm, purely for the sake of "IQ uber alles." I think it's worth it.
Reading the potted bio of Mill on Wikipedia is not encouraging; Dad wanted a baby genius to carry on The Utilitarian Cause and devoted his time to turning baby JS into that, with the result being that:
"Mill went through months of sadness and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy. With renewed vigour, he continued to work towards a just society, but with more relish for the journey. He considered this one of the most pivotal shifts in his thinking. In fact, many of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded source of joy."
I can't help feeling that if Dad had allowed him to be a normal kid and associate with others of his own age and not be always on all the time, he might have avoided "I'm twenty and I want to die because it's all pointless".
> Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids?
If you network with other highly intelligent people, some of them probably will have kids of a similar age.
I agree IQ isn't Uber Alles and here's an example of why not: There's currently an argument about Israel/Palestine on this thread, and LovesIsraelHatesIP is participating. They are one of the few people on ACX I have ever seen publicly change their point of view about a major issue in which they had an emotional investment -- and then apologize for their earlier posts -- and thereafter try to help other people become more fairminded too. Scott is willing to publicly change his mind, but that has a different quality, because he doesn't usually sound emotionally invested in his beliefs, so when he changes them it doesn't feel like as big a deal. I don't know what personal quality made LIHIP able to publicly change their point of view the way they did, but it wasn't extra IQ points. Whatever it is, nobody's going to convince me that it's some trivial Niceness kind of quality, less important than IQ.
Y'all ever meet up in Tahoe?
Also, I'll drop my new interview with Jon Askonas here: https://youtu.be/RHWhC2af4kc?si=XSOg561ChcW48Pkn
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1782071333943382468
So, the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August: massive shitshow of street violence, or not?
On the "yes, it will be" side:
* The pro-Hamas factions in the US are well-organized, well-funded, and eager to cause problems.
* Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations, and Chicago in particular has generationally awful leadership.
* Biden is about to sign on to $10 billion more in aid to Israel, making appeasement impossible.
* Exact same thing happened in 1968. "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
On the "no, it won't be" side:
* Perhaps Biden will somehow appease them anyway.
* Perhaps the war will be long over by then.
* Perhaps there will be a new Current Thing by August.
* "Nothing ever happens."
It was a different era but the GOP held its nominating convention for John McCain in St Paul in 2008.
The only real difference I personally noticed during the event was the number of toney out of town hookers frequenting the upscale bar scene.
There were some attempts at disruptive protests then but they were quickly contained. The old tsarist technique of cops on horseback proved to be effective in that situation. No knouts though. I expect the police in Chicago will handle the inevitable attempted mayhem just as well.
The vibe this time is entirely different. In 1968 The Vietnam War was on the mind of everyone, particularly draft age males. It was also probably the high water mark of the whole ‘counterculture’ period.
The death and destruction in Gaza seems to be driving demonstrations and antisemitism primarily at elite universities.
Okay the land grant University of Minnesota has its own mimetic demonstrations too but on a smaller scale.
But as Tatu mentioned below, law enforcement has better techniques now and will be thoroughly prepared.
Wouldn't the most scenario be "protests are corralled effectively somewhere where media does not pay too much attention to them and handled by the police by usual means if there's violence?"
Sure, there would be some media attention, but since protest control techniques are vastly more advanced than in 1968, not in the same scale.
You should have a strong prior on reality being boring. It's like how every single election cycle, media breathlessly plays up the possibility of a contested convention and every single cycle, there is no contested convention.
Not to say that unusual events *never* happen - the HFC blowing up their own speaker twice comes to mind, but betting against them is almost always the way to go.
Also, AOC at least is smart enough to play ball on Israel: https://www.slowboring.com/p/aocs-slow-boring-of-hard-boards.
The one thing I got out of that article was amusement at the outrage over her being just another politician.
Well, yes. Of course she is, what did they expect? Did they really all believe the story and PR spun up about Sandy From The Block? She was one of the hand-picked slate by the king-maker Saikat Chakrabarti and was one of the successes; her entire image and campaign was manicured to the last degree; and when she was elected, she started off ambitious and over-confident in her success at preliminary challenges to the old guard, until Pelosi eventually managed to put manners on her, and Sandy From The Block figured out quickly what she would need to do to be re-elected - concentrate on her career, play the game, don't rock the boat *too* hard.
As for her support pro-Israel/anti-Palestine, eh. She did some extra work on discovering various minority heritage in her background, so not alone is she Hispanic/Latinx (whichever is the more popular term for being Puerto Rican descent), she discovered that she's also part-Jewish and part-Taino.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/10/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-reveals-jewish-ancestry-hanukkah-celebration/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10885585/AOC-says-shes-awakening-indigenous-heritage-protesting-Native-Americans.html
So I imagine that she can't really get away with "My heritage is Sephardi, but I'm pro-Palestine", when she's doing the rounds of temples in Queens to get the votes. (Yes, I'm cynical).
1968 was a contested convention with anti-war candidates. There's no parallel unless for some reason Biden drops out.
I live in Chicago not far from the downtown/tourist areas in which street protests are naturally most often focused. Also only a mile from one of the two main venues for this Dem convention.
"Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations" -- this is completely wrong at least in Chicago. Our city administration and police did noticeably better, relatively anyway, during the 2020 wave of protests than in some other large cities. And since then they have become noticeably more effective about it.
There have been some instances that weren't ideal -- I witnessed one of those actually, and granted that it's a very big city that gets plenty of media attention so some shit is always gonna happen -- but overall the improvement has been clear. And right now the city police department is visibly, in close concert with federal law enforcement, already preparing in intentionally-visible ways for the Dem convention.
The current city administration also denied permits for planned pro-Hamas marches near the convention site, directed those marches to obscure locations literally miles away, quickly denied an administrative appeal of that decision, and is now unapologetically defending those denials against the inevitable lawsuit.
The whole public tone of the city administration and police department is firmly "not this time, not here".
I wouldn't have expected nearly such firm and dynamic action from any major Western city, never mind Chicago under its current mayor -- very happy to be wrong. (I hope.)
Sounds like you should be updating your model of the world.
If Chicago actually executes this plan, I certainly will.
Agreed on all points!
I'm no fan of the current mayor myself. In any case the occupancy of that seat is far less of a variable here than is popularly believed or assumed. As both Rahm Emanuel and Laurie Lightfoot discovered to their vast frustration:
(a) Structurally the city government is in fact a "weak-mayor" system and always has been. The two Daleys' success at being bosses was always rooted in local-political influence built up over decades, not in the legal powers of the office. Since Richard M. Daley retired we haven't had any mayor come in with anything resembling a political machine (Rahm was somewhat of a political celebrity but as he learned that is not at all the same thing). Brandon Johnson was frankly surprised to make the runoff let alone win it, and came into the mayor's office without even the outline of any sort of political operation.
(b) A good bit of the political authority and influence around here rests in our county government, to a degree that most city taxpayers fail to appreciate. Cook County has the 5th largest county budget in the nation. County officials are elected completely separately from city ones, they aren't even on the same election cycle.
(c) The city mayor who deserves some credit for the shift in approach that I described above it mostly Lightfoot. Johnson has mostly just declined to get in the way, with the notable exception of that permit denial which I think everybody here was surprised by including the protest organizers.
Post-BLM it's been interesting to learn just how terribly weak (in official political power) _most_ big city mayors are, and how that's contrasted with the average voter, who believes the mayor is basically an elected king.
The result unfortunately was a number of cases of putting a centrist mayor in office under the impression that will somehow fix things, and then getting upset when the new mayor has no legal ability to oppose whatever bizarre rat's nest of obscure sociopaths _actually_ runs the city. I do think voters have finally wised up to this, though.
The big revelation for me was the role of the City Attorney. If they decide to stop prosecuting certain types of crime, then police will eventually stop arresting people for it, and then people will eventually stop reporting it, and look, the crime rate is down!
I suppose cities are complex machines that can only function if a lot of people are doing the work that their roles require. It takes all of them to make it work, but it only takes a few to sabotage it.
It seems like the conventions attract some level of violence every time now, so the safe money is that there will be street violence. Whether that counts as a "massive shitshow" depends significantly on your definition. Do I think we'll see 1968 levels of violence? Very unlikely. Will we see higher than normal presidential convention levels? I'd say the chances are pretty good.
I'll take no:
I predict there are enough sensible adults left inside the party apparatus, that the internecine squabbling can be temporarily calmed. The whole family will put on their best faces when having company over for dinner, although there might be some tense subtext when passing the potatoes. Maybe there will be some especially "vibrant" designated free speech zones, and some fiery speeches. But unless Trump somehow stops being the main alternative, I think they'll hold it together long enough to nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating him. (If Trump goes away, I predict chaos.)
Large media organizations still have institutional memory of 1968 and its aftermath, and they're left leaning, and want Trump to lose, and therefore want a peaceful Democratic convention that nominates an electable candidate. I predict downplaying of internal differences, greater focus (somehow) on how bad Trump is, and maybe some historical features on what happens when the Democratic Party can't get its act together. (Nixon! Reagan! W. Bush! TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump!)
But as you say, maybe something new will happen. It's 4 months away. Maybe Hamas or Israel does something so spectacularly horrible that everyone backs away from that side. Maybe some poor American kid gets killed by police, on video. Maybe one of the people victimized by decriminalized crime turns out to be Actually Important, and makes a stink. Maybe a Supreme Court Justice gets hit by a home run ball and goes into a coma. Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
Good comment! I can't resist an image that comes to mind from your last line... :
>Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
The funding secretly funneled through a Wuhan institute? :-)
The Tyrell Corporation - Research That Replicates
Many Thanks! Hmm... Can an android hold office? :-)
Did you ever read "Evidence" by Isaac Asimov? :-)
Yes,
>Further, our district attorney has never been seen to drink — in the aqueous sense as well as the alcoholic — nor to sleep.
rang a bell - though I think it is probably a half century since I last read it. It was indeed worth a reread (at https://www.onelimited.org/ss-asimov-01 ). Many Thanks! :-)
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
Data scientist here. Use Python with Jupyter notebooks. No need to upload anything to Postgres, you can do all your manipulation right in a Pandas Data Frame. This will keep things more easily repeatable without worrying about the state of a database.
I recommend using VSCode with the GitHub Copilot extension. You can just tell it what analysis you want (or what models built) and it will just do it like magic. It's easily a 10x productivity multiplier if you aren't already a power user.
Thanks for the advice.
I'm not a data scientist, but I have worked adjacent to them at times. The single best piece of advice is: just look at the data. If it's small, just look at all the data. If it's big, write something custom to look at as much data as possible. The value that you deliver is unlikely to be knowing and trying some obscure summary method that makes everything clear, the value is in building an intuitive understanding of the data and then leveraging it for insights. Embrace the tedium. Here are other people giving similar advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0 https://www.mayo.edu/research/documents/always-look-at-the-data/doc-20408953
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
To give a serious reply this time, and make my position clear.
If a Jewish intellectual hates white people, I want to see him treated exactly the same as a Nazi, or as an intellectual who hates black people. If he hates me because I'm white, I don't want to hate him back because he's Jewish, I want to hate him back because he's racist.
I don't want to be racist back at him. I don't want to see his relatives punished because they're Jewish, I want to see him alone punished because he's a bigoted piece of shit.
What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever. Woke professors, Jim Crow racists, BLM activists, and neo-Nazis are in the exact same category (obviously varying by how much damage they actually do, but the ideologies are identical). I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for.
It's valid to point out the poetic justice of a person (be they Jewish, black, whatever) who pushes anti-white woke racism (i.e. saying whites have collective guilt, or are not allowed to speak about some subject etc) then facing racist collective punishment of their own, as some Jewish wokists are now doing. Those individual people deserve every bit of that. The other innocent members of their race who were *not* doing that (e.g. Jews who *aren't* woke professors), do not deserve it in the slightest!
I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago. And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
What the fuck is wrong with everyone?
>What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever.
>. I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual
It's unusual...because it's unusual. Almost nobody of any race seriously believes in this.
Is it wrong for women to treat men differently than other women?
Do they have to be actually abused or attacked by a man before they are scared of him or exclude him from 'women's spaces'?
Well, guess what? The male/female violent crime ratio is about the same as the black/white crime ratio. OH, and black people empirically hate white people on average, and the black on white murder rate is higher per capita than the white on white murder rate.
So which is it?
Do women have an obligation to treat men as individuals? Or do you bizarrely think your logic only applies to race for some reason?
And why stop there? Why do correlations and statistical patterns only have to be ignored when it comes to race?
Companies want to hire people with college degrees because they're more likely to be intelligent. But that's just a correlation! There are plenty of INDIVIDUALS without college degrees who are much smarter than people with college degrees, so by not hiring the job candidate without the college degree you're not treating him as an individual and are instead judging him by a category that only has predictive value at a population level. See how fun this is?
>I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago.
What? Most of western history is Europeans recognizing themselves are distinct from other peoples and the thought of treating other peoples equally was absurd to the point of not rising to the level of consideration. Segregation existed less than a century ago.
And we still had affirmative action ten years ago so I have LITERALLY no idea when this 'we don't care about race' nonsense was ever supposed to have existed.
>And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
It was never the norm, you're just imagining it.
+1.
Agreed on every point! Many Thanks!
Seriously.
1000% agree