> We called up George Church, the guy who’s using cloning to try to bring back the woolly mammoth. Asked him, what’s the ROI on mammoths? Not great, right? We’ll buy as many ground sloths as you can produce. He lent us a grad student.
I can neither confirm nor deny the purported existence of a Megatheria de-extinction project.
Honestly I don't think many people outside of San Francisco know much about Sam Altman. He may be a rock star there, but over in Boston he's just "some AI dude."
And I'm passionate about AI and have worked in the tech field for 20 years, so that says a lot
There was a bunch of gossip immediately after the OpenAI fiasco. My family, who knew nothing about the industry and don't live anywhere near the Bay, were asking about him over Thanksgiving, and there were front-page articles in major newspapers about him, EA, and OpenAI. I think it's pretty much all yesterday's news now, except maybe in very specific places, but it was very big for a few days.
“People say that modern food is addictive,” interrupts Jonathan. “But it really isn’t. It’s shocking how little work people put into optimizing the addictiveness of food. Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class . . . “
Delightful! Reminds me of my frustration dealing with Postmodernists back in a more civilized day.
I do need to take some umbrage at: “This fortifies democracy. People like Donald Trump who are just in it for themselves will drop out, leaving only the true patriots.”
Trump may be in it for the glory, and you might rightfully call him an ass clown. But he didn't run for the money. I hear claims he lost money due to being president. I don't know if they are true, but there is no way he achieved the multiple that your typical Congresscritter achieves.
And what makes Trump such a horrible person in the eyes of the Woke is that Trump is a patriot. He [attempts to] put the U.S. first, which is horrifying to those who desire world empire [aka World Government]. At a time when Trump's haters are burning flags and toppling monuments, claiming Trump is unpatriotic is a major contradiction. Stick to patriotism = bad if that's what you believe.
Hmmmm, I haven't heard any discussion of whether Lewis' source was lying when he said Trump agreed in principle to back out for $5B. There was a lot of lying going on at FTX, so it's not implausible, but I can also easily imagine Trump agreeing to that deal.
Worse, I can easily imagine Trump (or his team) _pretending_ he agreed to that deal, knowing that it wouldn't go through and he could appear to be a very smart, very winning mercenary type willing to sacrifice any principles -- his entire brand!
Seemed to me that Trump would think it more fun if an offer was on the table than not, and if he refused an actually serious offer, there'd be an ever so slight increase in his cachet and a corresponding taint on anyone offering a bribe (as it would be portrayed). Seems like a win for him to string the guy along.
That's a pretty dramatic failure of the ideological Turing test (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). If you were to rephrase what you've said here with positive-valence terms and post it in a left-leaning space as your own opinion, I guarantee the reaction would be very negative.
Left-leaning people dislike nationalism because they believe that we have certain moral obligations to people from other countries- obligations to avoid exploitation, to help immigrants, etc. This is very different from a desire to conquer the world. I've also never encountered anyone left-of-center who believes that Trump actually cares about America- he's pretty universally considered a charlatan who privately understands on some level that his actions hurt and weaken America (or who lacks that understanding only out of apathy). That's in contrast to someone like Bush, who leftists will often consider more genuinely pro-American (albeit very misguided). Most left-of-center people also view tearing down Confederate monuments and holding protests as a continuation of the civil rights movements of the past- part of a patriotic project to build up America into something better, not some attack on the country.
Both sides, of course, genuinely believe that their own policies benefit America and that the other sides' harm it. Therefore, in general, both sides consider themselves to be the only true patriots.
World government = empire, albeit not necessarily one run by the U.S.
And it wasn't just Confederate statues that were being torn down.
Patriotism is love of one's own country. that could be either isolationist or evil imperial, true. Most of the Trump supporters I know lean isolationist. And while Trump talked tough, his actual foreign policy resembled Jimmy Carter's -- right down to being labeled as soft on Russia.
It is fascinating how many "rationalists" on the left utterly fail to understand Trump and his motivations for so long. It could be because of contempt they feel for them and they think it's not worth to actually engage their ample rational capacities to deal with something as despicable as Trump... but I think a rational person, given what's at stake, would make an effort to put one's emotions aside. Isn't that what rationalism is supposed to be about? And yet, I feel like when Trump is concerned, all rationalism goes out of the window.
It was already explained in the comment above: "Both sides, of course, genuinely believe that their own policies benefit America and that the other sides' harm it". However, of course, it's not possible to prove it - and especially not to a person who is emotionally invested in not accepting any proof for it. If somebody claims Trump's goals are opposed to their moral principles, his means are abhorrent to them and his manners offend their sense of decency - that's an opinion, to which everybody is entitled. If somebody purports to reveal Trump's "true motives" and arrives to a conclusion all he did was in the quest of monetary gain, I would say such a person is completely irrational and is ignoring a mountain of obvious evidence. Trump could have made much more money by advancing any of his businesses, expanding any of his schemes, savory or otherwise, or and still be a darling of everybody from New York to Florida. Nobody had any problem with Trump before he entered the politics (some people might consider him a bit of a poor taste, but there are many rich people with poor taste, nothing to be excited about). Nobody wanted to destroy any business that was connected to him and burn the career of anybody who he ever associated with. Being Trump's laywer once was a lucrative position, now it's a scarlet letter and an indictment and disbarment proceedings waiting to happen. I do not see how one can rationally claim all this is just because Trump wanted more money and somehow he decided this is how he should proceed to make more money.
The original claim was not about WHY Trump ran for presidency (in very old interviews with him, he considered himself a good choice always. As do most people. Heck, I would make a fine president! Or would I?) - But that he was ready to agree to not run for 5 billion dollars. Well, I certainly would have agreed to such a sweet "deal". Even if I had 1 billion already and loved my country truly ( I do, I just love 5 bil. more. Who does not? Elon Musk?). Could have endorsed and financed so. else to my taste, then. Joe Rogan?
I would take 5 billions to not run for presidency. In fact, I would take $1 for that, given that I had no plans to do it anyway and I am not eligible in any case. But you and I are not Trump, so applying our circumstances to him is pointless. I am just pointing out that based on his readily observed actions, his political action - however you value it, positively or negatively - *for him* is more important than money, because he is readily exchanging money, existing or potential, for that action. It is true that he probably didn't spend exactly 5 billion, either actual or potential, but I am entirely sure "5 billion" is a fake number anyway, probably invented by either the writer or the "anonymous source", so fixating onto it as the exact number is also pointless.
Lots of people had problems with Trump before he ran for president (Garry Trudeau says hi), but regardless everything that is happening now is pretty clearly a result of mounting evidence that he and people close to him broke the law.
Of course, there were people privately disliking Trump - there are probably people privately disliking anybody in existence, surely for a boisterous billionaire with a yuge public profile. What there wasn't is coordinated groups of people determined to destroy them. That came when he came into politics.
As for "broke the law", the law is what the court says the law is. Since the courts are, unfortunately, as political as everything else now, it becomes the part of the same question. If Trump didn't go into politics, there wouldn't be courts and prosecutors hunting for him, and there wouldn't be "the law" that declares he should be prosecuted. Since he did go into politics, now there are courts and prosecutors belonging to the opposite side that try to destroy him. That's the same thing I said before.
> part of a patriotic project to build up America into something better, not some attack on the country.
Somehow "no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" or "Death to America!" does not sound like "project to build into something better". It sounds like a project to destroy America because it is fascist and evil. And I hear the same from a lot of leftists who do not hide their zeal for "overthrowing of capitalism", "decolonization", "revolution" and so on. I kinda believe them. I know a lot of things leftists destroyed in the last several years. The only project on the radical left I can think of that tried to build something entirely new was CHAZ - and that led to a most spectacular (and predictable) failure. Beyond that, I observe much more burning than building. I'm not saying all the left is like this - but the part that is into destroying monuments definitely is like this. And I don't think that part wants to "benefit America". Maybe the other part of the left still does, but the monument topplers gave up on America.
So you are doing that thing where one take the most extreme end of the spectrum and applying it to everyone who identifies as left of center, as if they were all a homogeneous block of radicals. Of course, "destroying not building" is exactly what the American left accuses the right of, "Monument Topplers" included.
Did you even read my comment? It clearly says "I'm not saying all the left is like this" - what was your interpretation of this phrase and how did you arrive at "applying it to everyone who identifies as left of center"?
> Of course, "destroying not building" is exactly what the American left accuses the right of, "Monument Topplers" included.
There were ten sentences in your paragraph. Eight of them refer to a nebulous undefined group of leftists, one specifies a "radical left" without indicating who those are, and one says "not all the left is like this." By the structure of your paragraph, you are creating the impression that most of it is. If that was not your intended meaning, then I submit that you worded your opinion in a confusing way.
A core belief of the left is that currently , the extreme right is engaged in an attempt to consolidate power that will inevitably significantly undermine ("destroy") individual human rights. This esp. includes the "monument topplers", who perceive the monuments in question to be celebrating military figures who fought for the right to enslave significant numbers of human beings.
Abraham Lincoln fought for the right to enslave significant numbers of human beings? Mahatma Gandhi did? Frederick Douglas?
I can give you Cervantes on the military part - at least he was in the military, though he hardly enslaved anyone. Or 54th Massachusetts Regiment - clearly military, though as they were the first all-black volunteer regiment in the Union army, I am not really sure who they were about to enslave, to deserve their monument being attacked. Also, Ulysses Grant? David Farragut? Francis Scott Key? Hans Christian Heg? Steve Ray Vaughn? I have more names if you need them. I kept the receipts.
They even destroyed the Portland Elk - that's not a nickname, that's a statue of an actual elk. I mean, I am not claiming I know American history perfectly, but I am pretty sure I'd notice an episode where elks tried to enslave significant numbers of human beings.
Any in which the chant "no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" is used?
Just in my hometown, the local BLM org had a March For Black Lives where they tore down and destroyed a statue... of a Union soldier (the statue was a memorial to the locally-raised Union volunteer regiment). None of the vandals were charge, much less arrested and the org that ran this "protest" still receives tax dollars form the (single-party) city council.
I'm with you here. How many burning down businesses and killing locally-loved security guards have to happen before we consider this the mainstream view?
BLM was not some fringe radical left thing. It was/is a marxist organisation that destroyed massive amounts of property, and anyone who made the grevious error of verbally noticing this was utterly fucked by everyone even slightly left-of-centre. I lived in Silicon Valley during this utter fuckery and it was not a good time to be someone who notices things askew about dogma.
That was not very long ago. I'm surprised we've already forgotten.
People were killed and injured, properties damaged. I hope everyone responsible for those things are prosecuted to the extent of the law (regardless of which political side they were on). There should be no support for violent protest.
But non-violent protest is protected speech, and the free speech of some should not be suppressed because of the violent actions of others.
I also hope that innocent black people stop getting murdered by police officers, or at the very least that the officers responsible start getting held accountable.
Who knows, maybe one day that will happen. Then we won't need protests at all.
There are plenty of things that radical leftists try and build. I live in a *very* left area and there's co-ops and communes and whatever other collective-ownership arrangements and attempts there-at get called.
Not many I hear about are all that big or newsworthy, perhaps because they don't work that well, perhaps they exist in a hostile climate, or perhaps that's not among their ambitions (I can easily imagine a supporter saying something something about the idea of being mondo-huge being very capitalist but I admittedly do not pass an ideological turing test on this one).
But nonetheless they do get made and do sometimes buzz along decently and sometimes fail, I just think they don't get much visibility because they're mostly very boring unless they're extra-insane and in the middle of seattle or fail explosively
Civil Rights legislation comes to mind. The gay right to marriage. Anti-discrimination laws in hiring, education, health care, and other societal institutions. The philosophical concept of selfhood. Depending on how you define the difference between the political left and right in the US, arguably the federal response to the pandemic. Labor unions.
I guess this depends what you take the referent of "radical leftists" to be, my interpretation is about things that are socialist, communist, about collective ownership, etc. Maybe this is a result of being in a very left area, so what counts as radical is further left? But none of those things would qualify for me except maybe some stuff in the union bit
I'm having a little trouble tracking the threaded comments here--I thought you were responding to MostlyCredible's comment.
But to answer your point--I would define the "Radical Left" as that movement that seeks to achieve social justice by redistributing power away from the majority and toward more vulnerable populations, or, in other words, in radically changing the structure of society.
Moderates, by contrast, would be those who seek a more egalitarian society by reforming incrementally it without radical change.
So by that definition, we would look for accomplishments in redistributing power in fundamental ways.
The recent victories by unions in the automotive manufacturing and entertainment industries does seem to qualify.
There’s lots of subgroups within the umbrella term of “left-leaning people”, apparently. It does not seem implausible that some groups would be full of the good intentions while others would be ready to reap the benefits of leading an empire. Same on the right. I guess the problem lies with having no more than two (viable) parties. Most major “democracies” are in fact one party away from being a single-party system.
American nationalism comes in two forms. The “patriots” who want America to stay the way it is, and the imperialists who want to impose America everywhere. The latter are mostly on the American left these days, even the neo conservatives are voting Democratic.
My interpretation was they think Trump is in it for the glory, but he'd accept a sufficiently large pile of money over the glory. This is not the same as thinking he's in it for the money.
No. I tried to make it clear that there are plenty of other reasons to dislike Trump. He is a pro wrestling heel, after all.
But he is a patriot.
And there are many (not all) on the left who find patriotism to be cringey or dangerous. I recall some of my lefty friends cringing at the cries of "USA! USA!" during the Olympics during the Reagan era.
Feel free to criticize Trump for rudeness, bad hair, lowbrow rhetoric, authoritarian rhetoric, and putting ketchup on burnt steak.
But don't call him unpatriotic when the other party hates half the American people and want to replace them. Or when the other party Administration hates on our founding Fathers and the Founding documents and applies a double standard where legacy Americans come in second.
If you believe that the United States has been a predatory nation and needs to be taken down several notches, so be it. If you believe we should extend our welfare system to the entire planet in the name of utilitarianism, proudly state it. If you think the nation state is obsolete and it's time for world governance, be honest.
But note that all these sentiments are the opposite of patriotism.
But you said that what makes Trump a horrible person in the eyes of "the Woke" (whatever that is) is that he is a patriot. You seem to be contradicting yourself. Also, a lot of your stated opinion relies on personal anecdote. I know many US leftists, and none of them "hate America" or dislike Trump because he puts America first. A far more common opinion on the left is that Trump is entirely self-centered and is acting to undermine and weaken America (which they resent). That he *isnt* a patriot, to the extent that the term "patriot" still means what it used to, and isn't just a linguistic flag for scoundrels to wrap themselves in.
It is true that many people on the left unjustly cringe when they see explicit displays of patriotic emotion--but it isn't because they hate America, it's because they have experienced many people who used the excuse of patriotism to consolidate power over themselves and others. But I do not claim that all the right is like that, nor should anyone.
No leftist I know wants to destroy America. They all want to save it (from the right), and help make it a more fair, just, and equitable place.
Dude purchased a giant bribe hotel just down the road from the White House and then dozens of foreign dignitaries duly used it to pay him bribes and then, when he was no longer soliciting bribes, he sold it. This is just one extremely public face of the overall shakedown, which is why he refused to divest his assets prior to becoming President.
It's possible other politicians have done better at using the office to make money, but it's not for lack of trying on Trump's part.
The thinly disguised parable analogizing defending Ukraine to effective altruism made me think there must be a deep meaning in all of the other stories that I've missed because they were not so thinly disguised
The arch-manipulator is of course a copy of Eurisko (https://white-flame.com/am-eurisko.html) pulled from Douglas Lenat's archive shortly after his death at the end of August. It was developed on the slow computers of 1970, so with fast modern hardware it trivially bootstrapped itself to superintelligence.
Maybe a silly question but I've not been following the scandals/gossip/deep lore around rat-scene recently. The woman who "does not believe in the war in Ukraine" - who is this a parody of?
"If X were true then it would justify bad thing Y, therefore X is false" is a depressingly common line of argument in the real world. HBD and atheism are the two Xs that spring to mind most readily. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to stick a name on that fallacy yet.
Someone needs to write about this more. I love Sapolsky, but his no free will argument drives me crazy. Fine, let's say our actions are purely based on genetics and environment, with no free will. Not punishing bad deeds is part of our environment, so enacting that policy will still skew people's choices towards bad deeds. This seems like pretty elementary logic.
If we don't believe in free will, we should still optimize for a high chance of getting punished for doing bad things, and probably less severe punishment in most cases since people don't respond to the severity of punishment as much.
Whether or not this is an example of that fallacy depends on your resolution of Moore's paradox. It is absurd, but not necessarily a logical contradiction to say "There is a war in the Ukraine, but I do not believe there is a war in the Ukraine"
If it's the consequences of the *belief* that you want to reject, then by not holding that belief, you do in fact avoid the consequences. If it's the consequences of the war itself you wish to avoid, then it is a fallacy because changing your beliefs does not remove those consequences.
Consider a hypothetical world in which God is real, but only atheists enter heaven. To the degree that beliefs are within our control, trying to believe something false would be rather in one's own self-interest.
That is, at the least, generally not how I've seen the term used. So e.g. to take your last example:
> Consider a hypothetical world in which God is real, but only atheists enter heaven. To the degree that beliefs are within our control, trying to believe something false would be rather in one's own self-interest.
In this instance, it would be a fallacious to conclude that God is not real, regardless of what it may be advantageous to believe. That is the fallacy to which I've generally seen this term applied, even if that doesn't quite match what's in the article I've linked.
I imagined anti-EA (cult was a hint) and specifically purported head-in-sand attitudes toward AI doom. But it also sent me into a melancholic spiral about the actual Ukrainian question, because identity shifts (believing in the Russians qua Russians, etc.) were a big part of what got us to this point.
As does a certain segment of self help advice, although that focuses on avoiding negative conclusions about yourself rather than just addressing your own problems.
My take was pragmatism guy is ~Eliezer arguing that rationalism is definitionally correct because if it weren't rationalism would just endorse the correct thing instead, war lady is parodying criticisms of ea/maybe ai risk more specifically that appeal to some consequences of taking those things seriously rather than whether they are true or important
I like the Ukrainian woman's "what's the English term" interjections. It's a fun way to deliver the punchline to contrarian takes, though your audience quickly catch on that you speak English perfectly.
I speak English very fluently (can't say "perfectly" but quite well) but sometimes I could grasp for an English equivalent of a term I learned in other language. That said, if I learned the term in English, the same would happen to me when I speak other language, even my native one.
That said, "Pascalian" and "cult" would probably be the primary candidates for that phenomenon, since they sound virtually the same in most languages.
"Pascalian" is the kind of word where my first guess would be "like in my language, but with the ending changed", but for "cult" I can imagine thinking "what's the X for 'cult'... aaaaargh.... oh, wait, it's 'cult'. Dammit."
Lived in the now occupied territory. And hating Putin+wanting Nato join the war. That said: a) Nearly all spoke Russian there in 1995. And did not like to learn Ukrainian. Though teachers et al. had to, eventually. b) Heard a tourist say in 2001: "I am from the capital of our people" - The local guy - who flirted with her and had asked "Where're you from?" - was looking unsure. She said: "Moscow". He: "Well, I guess one could say so". What we not suffer to get laid. Oh, he laid her. c) My step-son left the place to work in Russia, much better salary. Even married his Russian gf there to stay longer. He returned before the 2022 invasion, can not leave now. And is now grudgingly accepting a 'Russian passport', he would have taken eagerly back then. d) Salaries and pension in Russia are better.
Summa: Yep, why not let the Russians turn as much of Ukraine into Russia as they dare to?All east of the Dnipro + all of the Black sea! People would be better of. And much better of than bombed out and dead. - Well. The people kinda disagree - here 'my' place: https://scroll.in/video/1018491/berdyansk-is-ukraine-citizens-protest-against-invading-russian-troops They do fight. And I am so proud of them. And so, so sorry for them. Still, only donated 1k to the military.- The cynical take is: Life with visa-free EU travel (since 2017) is better than the mob-rule in "Luhansk People's Republic" (since 2014). - (Was not sure where best to put the "reply". But I really liked several of human's replies here.)
Yeah, my feeling is that if a supermajority of a region want independence, or to join the neighboring country, the bar for ignoring them is pretty high. But OTOH this can easily become a disguise for a territory grab, so the process needs to be as transparent as possible with international observers and minimal intervention by neighbors. Russia is clearly pulling strings and acting unilaterally. And it's not at all clear how many residents of these areas want independence or Russian citizenship, so it's not a legitimate transfer.
Responding to your reply as an explanation of Dr. Teapot:
Sure, perhaps Dr Teapot means the disputed areas aren't really Ukraine or it's not a real invasion. But I'd object that there is an area that the UN and all but a few countries consider part of Ukraine, where there are soldiers with Russian citizenship documents recognized by the Russian government fighting soldiers with Ukrainian citizenship documents recognized by the Ukrainian government. He may disagree with the definitions regarding the fighting, but Irina was claiming that the fighting did not exist at all.
Also, glad you liked my replies, this makes me happy.
If Colossus and Guardian could come to terms, why can't GPT-4 and Claude-2? Or is that 20th century thinking, in a more polarized 21st century? Which of GPT-4 and Claude-2 is the woke side? :-)
Loved the "Above you, a GPT-4 drone dogfights one of Claude-2’s mini-zeppelins, but you pay them no heed." Does that count as possibly parcel post potshots?
Popcorn is already intermittent reinforcement. Sometimes you get unpopped kernels, sometimes you get regular popcorn, and sometimes you find a perfect piece covered with oil and salt.
UberEats is too. Sometimes you get your perfect order, sometimes you get somebody else's order and sometimes your order is delivered to a different house and you get nothing.
That is very true, and so are many forms of homemade heterogenous dishes. Roasted root vegetables, or candied pecans, or maple brown sugar glazed carrots.
Those are small green chilli peppers from Spain which are not spicy at all, except that one in ten is super hot and will have you blowing steam from your nose. The hot one are impossible to distinguish from the soft ones. Of course, they make the 9 soft ones feel even better.
(Sadly, mass commercialisation killed the fun : a couple of years ago, people figured out a way to find the spicy ones and now they only sell soft ones. Still good to eat but certainly not as fun.)
I'm pretty sure the intermittent-reward-chips thing is already real. Anyone who's eaten chips knows there's substantial variability in the amount of flavor-powder (salt, dehydrated whey, MSG, etc) on any given chip, with the most flavorful being rare finds. It's hard to believe that Frito-Lay couldn't eliminate that variability if they wanted to, and while cost might be a factor, given the radical markup between corn by the ton and a bag of Doritos, that doesn't seem like the whole story.
My favorite thing in potato chips is the very thin bubble(?) but that's gotten extremely rare, perhaps due to quality control, or possibly fewer potato chips are made from actual slices rather than potato flour or somesuch.
I think optimally addictive potato chips would have several kinds of pleasant surprise.
Potato chips are made from real potato slices. It is very easy to tell the kind that are made from potato flour - pringles, baked lays and anything with that crumbly texture. And also legally they can't be called chips.
The 2nd person voice is the voice of the ad, the disposition of all marketing materials. It is also the voice of persuasion because it invokes the hypnotic Magic Word, the secret name of all English-speakers.
Because the character in question seems to be struggling with remembering English translations for her native Ukrainian (or Russian) words. But realistically she wouldn't struggle with this specific word, since it sounds the same in both languages.
If 1 in 5 chips "has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands", then it seems like it should be: 'A bag of these potato chips only has a quarter as much salt and oil as the normal brand. But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake 75%!”' rather than a fifth and 80%.
I actually thought of that, but worried it wouldn't immediately make sense, and hoped nobody would be this pedantic. In case someone was, I formed the intention that I meant only 1.00001x more salt and oil than other leading brands, so that it rounded to 80%.
Hmm, I just realized that you could write that as "*Up to* 80%". As in, "But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake up to 80%!” -- that classic advertising trick is finally useful here.
Ah, but if they're addictive, you'll just eat more of all of them, salted and unsalted alike. So the amount of salt and fat you get won't change; merely the total amount of potato.
Also, RGB space is literally enormous, and it seems like the purpose of having dual color profile pictures is to have an enormous PFP-space, why do I keep ending up with people with the exact same pfp as me
What do you mean by dual color? I see five colors in your icon: blue, green, black, yellow, and orange.
Looking over a very limited sample size of default icons, it looks like substack may be just randomly choosing one color for the center and then the positions of the other four colors are fixed based on that result.
i think they pick two main colors for the circles and then the other colors are derivative, to look like two colored lenses overlapping? that's just always been my assumption though, could be wrong
Did you specify that the background needed to be a combination between a student union and a ski lodge? Or did it just pick that as the natural background for Altmancore?
The second one is my favourite. Are they twins, or are they just two friends who happen to look suspiciously similar?
I have a three-prompt system for generating fashion in aesthetics that don't specify fashion, like brutalism or frutiger aero. Can write a guide on it if there's an interest.
For the second one, can I just say that it's damn hard to attempt "woman" and "silicon valley" in a single prompt.
Is there a name for arguments like Ukraine war denier's in the story? If not, maybe we should start calling it "Russian soldier's fallacy" or something.
Seems like it's applying consequentialism to epistemics? That is, choosing to believe something because you think the belief itself will have good consequences. (As opposed to the more common problem of choosing to believe something because it would have good consequences if it were true.)
Surely the politician-retiring market would lead to fans of controversial politicians setting up anti-politician-retiring markets which pay when their favorite _does_ run for the elections, and we'd end up with the same quality of politics as today, but much more expensively?
Perhaps instead of reallocating existing taxes, politicians could fund their bills this way. But that would lead to unchecked plutocracy, so perhaps a billionaire's funding would only yield cents on the dollar, while a destitute person's dollar would be multiplied (with the billionaire's money).
I am dismayed to discover that I am a pragmatist. I long ago realized that I have so little effect on world events that it makes no difference if I believe that e.g. China or Russia even exist (I'm not likely to go there), so I don't make the effort. I won't argue with you if you say they do exist, but I'm not putting any effort into sustaining belief.
And please don't tell me 'chinese' people 'have to come from somewhere' -- as a white man I've been sternly cautioned against asking people 'where are you from?'. All the 'russian' people I know came from Alaska.
Yeah, agreed. As someone who's not American I find it's sometimes psychologically useful to believe that the USA is fictional dystopian setting showcasing the horrors of unchecked neoliberalism. It's too horrifying to contemplate actual people living under those conditions, so for all intents and purposes the USA is a cautionary tale.
I am not even sure which version of "America" are we supposed to believe in today. The one that is the richest country in the world, or the one where people are homeless and can't afford basic healthcare? The one where kids are taught critical race theory instead of math at schools, or the one that does the latest research? The one where asking whether women might be less interested in math gets you fired from the university, or the one where the popular leader (who is simultaneously democratically elected in the most democratic country ever, but also a huge threat to democracy) talks about grabbing them by the pussy? First get your general story straight. Then we can talk about nerdy details like how it was possible for Americans to land on the moon in 1969, but not anymore in the 21st century.
The most logical explanation is that "America" is just a metaphor that people use for any political point they want to make at given moment. No one cares about keeping their stories consistent.
You seem very confused. The United States of America is comprised of more than one person, so all those contradictions are trivially and obviously not contradictions.
Last I heard, in fact, the USA is comprised of more than a million people.
You know how in Scott's book Unsong, the archangel splits Israel into 2 overlapping countries, one each for the Muslims and Jews? The US is kinda like that but 3 layers, each defined by their battles.
One layer is Woke vs Techbro Capitalists. Another is Commies vs Deplorables vs Deep State Democracy. Last and least interesting is Religion Battle Royale.
If I'm not sure which layer I'm on, I just describe EA to someone. On the Religion plane they'll say they think all charity should go through churches. On Woke Tech they'll ask why you'd save privileged people from extinction, or why you don't respect the Paperclip Maximizer's preferences more than humanity's. On the Goon Layer they get mad that EA "doesn't address root causes", or they think it's wrong to save black people, or they are wearing dark glasses and a blank expression.
Ironically, the truth is probably in the middle. I am American and watching the news feels like they are showing a fictional dystopian setting showcasing the horrors of unchecked neoliberalism, but then I step outside, see I live in a perfectly pleasant place, where myself and all my neighbors look to be enjoying their days. My job is relatively easy, pays me a fair wage, has good benefits. People are complaining that inflation is higher than their pay raises, but no one I know is in danger of not having food or housing. I have never been the victim of a crime, despite living right outside and routinely visiting one of the top 5 most dangerous cities in America.
It makes me think that if American Media is so innactually describing what living in America is like, how inaccurate must it be in describing what living in other countries is like? Are Russians really endanger of being arrested if they say anything negative about Putin? Does China have such a high level of control over the Internet that no one share their honest views? Do Sub Saharan Africans actually worry about roaving Warlords and diseases on a day to day basis? Is Swedan really a paradise where the Prisoners are treated better than our college students? Does every French town have a bakery that makes better bread than the local bread I get in America?
I am sure there is a kernal of truth to all these views, but only the people on the ground know what it's like living with it, day by day.
You are not in danger of being arrested if you just say something negative about Putin. But if you are someone like a popular blogger and you said something negative about Putin you are at risk (officially you'll be arrested for something else, of course). And if you went to the protest you can be arrested even if you said nothing against Putin (although it will affect the probabilities), even if you went on a solitary picket with a blank poster.
Theoretically, you can be arrested for calling the war "war" or saying that LGBT are just as OK as straight people, but in practice this only applies to public figures (in the first case only to opposition, pro-Putin folks use the word "war" without any risk) or, again, protesters.
The bread thing is absolutely true at least for the parts of France I visited. Applies to Italy and to some parts of Germany as well. My first time in the US I wouldn’t understand where to buy bread. They told me at the grocery store and they wouldn’t take my explanation that whatever was sold there was not bread seriously.
Never go to the grocery store for bread. Every town I've lived in, up and down the East Coast, has at least one bakery. I can't tell you if the bread from an American Bakery is as good as a European Bakery, but they do exist. Maybe the difference is Americans are more likely to settle for grocery store bread, and that's why the stereotype exists?
I could find good bakeries in the end. Both in Baltimore and in Santa Barbara. Having to drive to the bakery and back served as a good illustration of the role of geography in economics: of course products in the US are optimised for shelf stability over taste. Distances are huge.
Yeah, that makes significantly more sense. To be honest, it's extremely hard to figure out the reality of places you personally live in outside of your own social sphere - I think the difference is that the US might not have a news outlet that almost everyone in the country trusts (the most trusted outlet in Australia is ABC news, a government funded outlet, followed by SBS news, a different government funded outlet. Both have ratings around 70%, while the most trusted outlet in the USA is.... The Weather Channel?? Followed by the BBC, a different country's government funded news outlet?! Jesus.)
human's comment above sums it up well! Your reality is dictated by where you get your news from and everyone gets their news from different places.
This reads like an update to Joan Didion's essay on Haight Ashbury in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ Excellent writing; brings a smile in the darkness.
I'd say that the pragmatist argument for religion deserves more respect that you seem willing to give it. Pol Pot was still worse than Israel/Palestine and Putin's New Russian Empire put together, and he managed to do it in a single tiny country.
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
I misremembered the second-to-last and third-to-last" sentences as a single sentence. If that was right, the second-to-last sentence would be a past perfect statement about having changed fundamental beliefs. And the last sentence is a present tense statement about a new conviction that directly contradicts the ones discussed at length during the entire preceding narrative.
I would bet this was unintentional (the wording and the contrast between belief and love seems too different), but it's interesting that there's a parallel of self-protective changes in beliefs.
Cherry red over lime green? He’s clearly a Scarlett Macaw in a mostly convincing human suit. Not surprising since the Aztec’s named him Quetzalcoatl, often depicted him as a crow or parrot and made him ruler of the western gods. When he wasn’t depicted as a bird he was a coyote. Now, lo and behold, what do we find living on his estate and regularly greeting him at his door? Yep.
"Moat" is tech-industry jargon for "the thing that makes it hard for our competitors to catch up to us". Often invoked in discussions of why Microsoft/Google/whoever can't duplicate a company's product overnight and squash them like bugs.
You're right, yes - sorry, I'd forgotten that "barrier to entry" had a technical meaning in economics. The terms *seem* to be interchangeable, or at least the examples given for both all seem to be the same. The term "(economic) moat" was apparently coined by Warren Buffett: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
As I learned the term, a barrier to entry is purely about new entrants, while a moat is describing both the barriers to new entrants and the obstacles to existing competitors chipping away at your market share.
And yes, there’s nothing tech-specific about the term, it’s an investing term that applies to all industries.
Behold the contrast with the comment above yours. Perhaps Scott ought to take a page from R' Bunim, and carry a slip of paper in each pocket, one saying "This is hilarious" and the other "Wow has SSC declined".
Might be related to a bit in Illuminatus! where Hagbard Celine (something of a guru) has cards-- some of them say "There is no friend anywhere" and some of them say "There is no enemy anywhere". The art is in knowing who ought to get which card.
"You spot someone you vaguely know, Nishin, and see that he’s started wearing a crucifix. You are briefly concerned that the figure on the Cross will be Sam Altman, but on closer inspection it (mercifully) appears to be Jesus.
“Hi Nishin,” you say. “You look different.” Specifically, he’s clean-shaven, and has covered up his arm tattoo.
“Yeah,” says Nishin. “I finally took the plunge and converted to Catholicism last month.”
Scott, you know you can always try to find some new people to hang with that might be a little more down to earth. For example, among SF's large homeless population, there might a few people who could use a friend and might be willing to talk about something besides Sam Altman.
> the intermittent reinforcement potato chip!” concludes Jonathan. “Four out of every five are just plain potato slices. But the fifth has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands
the pragmatism annoys me because it reminds me that few people seem really to understand religion. To say what he does is like saying i should get married because it provides social stability and health benefits, but no one in love says that, and falling in love causes hurt and harm. Religion is a lot more like falling in love in that way; you would never use those terms from the inside. And love causes screaming matches, divorce, and worse. Aslan is not a tame lion.
and religion for social stability is kind of weird given that if you put three religious people in a room for three hours you'll get two religious people and a heretic, lol. The stability thing relies a lot on people not actually believing the religion. If you do, its as likely to tell you not to get married as such, or you'll do stuff people will think is crazy.
idk i think a smart convert would more likely fall in love with a particular thing. it wouldn't be so bloodless; even the shallowest convert comes because a girl he fancies believes in it. He'd love catholicism for its solemnity, or it being this great mystical pageant across time, or because he reads Augustine and dives deep into its philosophy and theology.
it just annoys me because even if you fall away, its still like falling out of love with someone. for good and bad. Sorry i know its a comic piece but it feels weird sometimes seeing people try to write religion.
Apparently, you don't need to wade into popular, toxic topics to expand your readership on demand. You can just publish more house party stories instead.
I'd remind any atheist thinking of converting to Christianity that religious views are heritable. If you don't believe in God, it's likely your kid won't either, and it just kicks the can down the road another generation. Better to live in the real world and leave religion in the past.
So God made us genetically predisposed to not believe in him, causing us to end up in hell? What God would do that to his own children? I can’t believe in such a God. Hmm oh wait. Seriously though, atheism may be heritable but my dad -who is obviously a non-believer- never came out as such. I doubt he would even verbalize it. This sounds like a major hurdle to estimating the heritability of religious views through surveys and the like, especially if societal acceptance of atheism changed over the span of one generation
"It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment."
I knew this reminded me of something, and after some digging around here it is:
"Gregory of Nyssa (335-c.395): Popular Discussion of Theology in the Streets of Constantinople, from On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit (August 383)
"If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change, he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer, "The Father is greater, the Son is less." And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you that the Son was created ex nihilo. I don't know what to call this evil, dementia, madness or something epidemic disease of this kind; it produces a derangement of reasoning.
Alternate translation from The Orthodox Church by Kallistos Ware:
Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council:
The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing (On the Deity of the Son)."
Very interesting computer generated cover image. I can't figure out if the woman on the couch on the right is levitating above the couch, sitting on an odd protrusion on top of the couch, or if that's just a third leg... (There are more gems the longer you explore the image)
> But I don’t think it’s illegal to bribe them not to run. If you think about it, imagine Mitt Romney’s company was unhappy that they’d lose him to a presidential run, so they offered him a higher salary, and he decided to stay. That’s got to be legal, right?
Maybe legal, but the promises might not create an enforceable contract! In the case linked below, the court refused to enforce a plea deal in which charges were dropped in exchange for the defendant's agreement not to run for office. Then, of course, the defendant ran for office. The court said he couldn't be kept off the ballot; but it also said that the prosecutor could withdraw the plea deal (potentially subjecting the defendant to trial, but in fact he ended up with another plea deal).
Anyway, the court relied on the notion (made up by courts, I think) that courts won't enforce a contract that violates public policy. (Hence, you can breathe easy about your hitman's suit for breach of contract.)
|“Hi Nishin,” you say. “You look different.” Specifically, he’s clean-shaven, and has covered up his arm tattoo.
“Yeah,” says Nishin. “I finally took the plunge and converted to Catholicism last month.”
Ok TBF Catholics are pretty tattoo-tolerant nowadays. The first religion that comes to mind that's anti-tatt and wants a bunch of people clean-shaven is LDS.
Too on the nose. Humor depends on being a bit oblique.
I thought it was hilarious.
So did I.
It turns out that oblique humour was a zero interest rate phenomenon.
There's no alpha in oblique humour anymore.
Best line I have read so far
It's terrifying that this is on the nose for some people. I'm so sorry.
How is that terrifying?
I heard Sam Altman funded the Giant Sloths guy and that the board fired him because they were afraid of the sloths.... Accelerating.
An accelerated sloth is no longer a sloth. It's just a ... I don't know what it is. A stretched bear?
It's a wrath.
I often think it's unfair that "Pride" gets a whole month while the other deadly sins get nothing. Why is there no Envy Month?
There's no Envy Month, so that Envy can wish it had a month.
Bullseye
Wins the thread already.
A month of Shame might be appropriate, even welcome.
We call that Lent.
Every month is Envy Month.
Isn't November the N-V month?
Lust has a month; it's No-Nut November. Gluttony also has a month; it's Thanksgiving month, November.
Thinking about it, Envy has a month too ; it's November, where Thanksgiving sits and envies Christmas.
I burst out laughing in a crowded café at this, well done
Terrifying. Imagine if those claws could actually be used as weapons due to their increased speed?
> We called up George Church, the guy who’s using cloning to try to bring back the woolly mammoth. Asked him, what’s the ROI on mammoths? Not great, right? We’ll buy as many ground sloths as you can produce. He lent us a grad student.
I can neither confirm nor deny the purported existence of a Megatheria de-extinction project.
I can neither confirm nor deny I was thinking of you when I wrote that.
Honestly I don't think many people outside of San Francisco know much about Sam Altman. He may be a rock star there, but over in Boston he's just "some AI dude."
And I'm passionate about AI and have worked in the tech field for 20 years, so that says a lot
idk I'm in Boston and have not been able to escape Sam Altman/OpenAI gossip since the thing happened
I live in Scotland, and it was a major topic of conversation here. But it probably wouldn't have been if I didn't work in the tech industry.
Big conversation topic here between my friends in Germany as well.
Who's Sam Altman?
He's just this AI guy, you know...?
So he's frood?
He definitely knows where his towel is at.
He's so hip he can't see over his pelvis.
There was a bunch of gossip immediately after the OpenAI fiasco. My family, who knew nothing about the industry and don't live anywhere near the Bay, were asking about him over Thanksgiving, and there were front-page articles in major newspapers about him, EA, and OpenAI. I think it's pretty much all yesterday's news now, except maybe in very specific places, but it was very big for a few days.
>SON OF BRIDE OF BAY AREA HOUSE PARTY
In the Bay Area, this is often not the same thing as "Son of Bay Area House Party."
Step-children are known to exist in other geographical areas.
No no, steppe-children are mostly concentrated in north-central Eurasia.
Tell that to Genghis.
They're where sn-risks come from!
Isn't this a call back to the first one in the series?
If we had likes, I would give you a like.
★★★★★
“People say that modern food is addictive,” interrupts Jonathan. “But it really isn’t. It’s shocking how little work people put into optimizing the addictiveness of food. Like, the one thing you learn in every Intro Psychology class . . . “
Silicon Valley in 1946: Microwaves and Radar.
Silicon Valley in 2023: potato chip taste buds
Delightful! Reminds me of my frustration dealing with Postmodernists back in a more civilized day.
I do need to take some umbrage at: “This fortifies democracy. People like Donald Trump who are just in it for themselves will drop out, leaving only the true patriots.”
Trump may be in it for the glory, and you might rightfully call him an ass clown. But he didn't run for the money. I hear claims he lost money due to being president. I don't know if they are true, but there is no way he achieved the multiple that your typical Congresscritter achieves.
And what makes Trump such a horrible person in the eyes of the Woke is that Trump is a patriot. He [attempts to] put the U.S. first, which is horrifying to those who desire world empire [aka World Government]. At a time when Trump's haters are burning flags and toppling monuments, claiming Trump is unpatriotic is a major contradiction. Stick to patriotism = bad if that's what you believe.
Hmmmm, I haven't heard any discussion of whether Lewis' source was lying when he said Trump agreed in principle to back out for $5B. There was a lot of lying going on at FTX, so it's not implausible, but I can also easily imagine Trump agreeing to that deal.
Worse, I can easily imagine Trump (or his team) _pretending_ he agreed to that deal, knowing that it wouldn't go through and he could appear to be a very smart, very winning mercenary type willing to sacrifice any principles -- his entire brand!
Why is it worse? If Trump wouldn't got through with it, which principles would be sacrificed?
I can imagine Trump taking the money. I can't imagine him not running after having taken the money.
That's why you put the money in escrow to be delivered after the election.
I dare you to come up with a self-interested deal you _can't_ imagine Trump agreeing to.
I remember speculation about it from back in 2016. Apparently his price was a lot lower back then: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-cash-never-trump-224511
My guess is Donald Trump would not agree to that deal. He is more interested in power and notoriety than money.
Seemed to me that Trump would think it more fun if an offer was on the table than not, and if he refused an actually serious offer, there'd be an ever so slight increase in his cachet and a corresponding taint on anyone offering a bribe (as it would be portrayed). Seems like a win for him to string the guy along.
That's a pretty dramatic failure of the ideological Turing test (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). If you were to rephrase what you've said here with positive-valence terms and post it in a left-leaning space as your own opinion, I guarantee the reaction would be very negative.
Left-leaning people dislike nationalism because they believe that we have certain moral obligations to people from other countries- obligations to avoid exploitation, to help immigrants, etc. This is very different from a desire to conquer the world. I've also never encountered anyone left-of-center who believes that Trump actually cares about America- he's pretty universally considered a charlatan who privately understands on some level that his actions hurt and weaken America (or who lacks that understanding only out of apathy). That's in contrast to someone like Bush, who leftists will often consider more genuinely pro-American (albeit very misguided). Most left-of-center people also view tearing down Confederate monuments and holding protests as a continuation of the civil rights movements of the past- part of a patriotic project to build up America into something better, not some attack on the country.
Both sides, of course, genuinely believe that their own policies benefit America and that the other sides' harm it. Therefore, in general, both sides consider themselves to be the only true patriots.
World government = empire, albeit not necessarily one run by the U.S.
And it wasn't just Confederate statues that were being torn down.
Patriotism is love of one's own country. that could be either isolationist or evil imperial, true. Most of the Trump supporters I know lean isolationist. And while Trump talked tough, his actual foreign policy resembled Jimmy Carter's -- right down to being labeled as soft on Russia.
It is fascinating how many "rationalists" on the left utterly fail to understand Trump and his motivations for so long. It could be because of contempt they feel for them and they think it's not worth to actually engage their ample rational capacities to deal with something as despicable as Trump... but I think a rational person, given what's at stake, would make an effort to put one's emotions aside. Isn't that what rationalism is supposed to be about? And yet, I feel like when Trump is concerned, all rationalism goes out of the window.
This is a bulverism. Instead why not explain what you think is correct and why.
It was already explained in the comment above: "Both sides, of course, genuinely believe that their own policies benefit America and that the other sides' harm it". However, of course, it's not possible to prove it - and especially not to a person who is emotionally invested in not accepting any proof for it. If somebody claims Trump's goals are opposed to their moral principles, his means are abhorrent to them and his manners offend their sense of decency - that's an opinion, to which everybody is entitled. If somebody purports to reveal Trump's "true motives" and arrives to a conclusion all he did was in the quest of monetary gain, I would say such a person is completely irrational and is ignoring a mountain of obvious evidence. Trump could have made much more money by advancing any of his businesses, expanding any of his schemes, savory or otherwise, or and still be a darling of everybody from New York to Florida. Nobody had any problem with Trump before he entered the politics (some people might consider him a bit of a poor taste, but there are many rich people with poor taste, nothing to be excited about). Nobody wanted to destroy any business that was connected to him and burn the career of anybody who he ever associated with. Being Trump's laywer once was a lucrative position, now it's a scarlet letter and an indictment and disbarment proceedings waiting to happen. I do not see how one can rationally claim all this is just because Trump wanted more money and somehow he decided this is how he should proceed to make more money.
Oh, I read your reply to artifex0 as saying his comment lacked rationality.
The original claim was not about WHY Trump ran for presidency (in very old interviews with him, he considered himself a good choice always. As do most people. Heck, I would make a fine president! Or would I?) - But that he was ready to agree to not run for 5 billion dollars. Well, I certainly would have agreed to such a sweet "deal". Even if I had 1 billion already and loved my country truly ( I do, I just love 5 bil. more. Who does not? Elon Musk?). Could have endorsed and financed so. else to my taste, then. Joe Rogan?
I would take 5 billions to not run for presidency. In fact, I would take $1 for that, given that I had no plans to do it anyway and I am not eligible in any case. But you and I are not Trump, so applying our circumstances to him is pointless. I am just pointing out that based on his readily observed actions, his political action - however you value it, positively or negatively - *for him* is more important than money, because he is readily exchanging money, existing or potential, for that action. It is true that he probably didn't spend exactly 5 billion, either actual or potential, but I am entirely sure "5 billion" is a fake number anyway, probably invented by either the writer or the "anonymous source", so fixating onto it as the exact number is also pointless.
Lots of people had problems with Trump before he ran for president (Garry Trudeau says hi), but regardless everything that is happening now is pretty clearly a result of mounting evidence that he and people close to him broke the law.
Of course, there were people privately disliking Trump - there are probably people privately disliking anybody in existence, surely for a boisterous billionaire with a yuge public profile. What there wasn't is coordinated groups of people determined to destroy them. That came when he came into politics.
As for "broke the law", the law is what the court says the law is. Since the courts are, unfortunately, as political as everything else now, it becomes the part of the same question. If Trump didn't go into politics, there wouldn't be courts and prosecutors hunting for him, and there wouldn't be "the law" that declares he should be prosecuted. Since he did go into politics, now there are courts and prosecutors belonging to the opposite side that try to destroy him. That's the same thing I said before.
> part of a patriotic project to build up America into something better, not some attack on the country.
Somehow "no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" or "Death to America!" does not sound like "project to build into something better". It sounds like a project to destroy America because it is fascist and evil. And I hear the same from a lot of leftists who do not hide their zeal for "overthrowing of capitalism", "decolonization", "revolution" and so on. I kinda believe them. I know a lot of things leftists destroyed in the last several years. The only project on the radical left I can think of that tried to build something entirely new was CHAZ - and that led to a most spectacular (and predictable) failure. Beyond that, I observe much more burning than building. I'm not saying all the left is like this - but the part that is into destroying monuments definitely is like this. And I don't think that part wants to "benefit America". Maybe the other part of the left still does, but the monument topplers gave up on America.
So you are doing that thing where one take the most extreme end of the spectrum and applying it to everyone who identifies as left of center, as if they were all a homogeneous block of radicals. Of course, "destroying not building" is exactly what the American left accuses the right of, "Monument Topplers" included.
Did you even read my comment? It clearly says "I'm not saying all the left is like this" - what was your interpretation of this phrase and how did you arrive at "applying it to everyone who identifies as left of center"?
> Of course, "destroying not building" is exactly what the American left accuses the right of, "Monument Topplers" included.
Destroying like what?
There were ten sentences in your paragraph. Eight of them refer to a nebulous undefined group of leftists, one specifies a "radical left" without indicating who those are, and one says "not all the left is like this." By the structure of your paragraph, you are creating the impression that most of it is. If that was not your intended meaning, then I submit that you worded your opinion in a confusing way.
A core belief of the left is that currently , the extreme right is engaged in an attempt to consolidate power that will inevitably significantly undermine ("destroy") individual human rights. This esp. includes the "monument topplers", who perceive the monuments in question to be celebrating military figures who fought for the right to enslave significant numbers of human beings.
Abraham Lincoln fought for the right to enslave significant numbers of human beings? Mahatma Gandhi did? Frederick Douglas?
I can give you Cervantes on the military part - at least he was in the military, though he hardly enslaved anyone. Or 54th Massachusetts Regiment - clearly military, though as they were the first all-black volunteer regiment in the Union army, I am not really sure who they were about to enslave, to deserve their monument being attacked. Also, Ulysses Grant? David Farragut? Francis Scott Key? Hans Christian Heg? Steve Ray Vaughn? I have more names if you need them. I kept the receipts.
They even destroyed the Portland Elk - that's not a nickname, that's a statue of an actual elk. I mean, I am not claiming I know American history perfectly, but I am pretty sure I'd notice an episode where elks tried to enslave significant numbers of human beings.
And you're doing "No True Scotsman."
How many elected officials have to attend those marches before you'd concede it to be a mainstream view?
Which marches?
Any in which the chant "no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" is used?
Just in my hometown, the local BLM org had a March For Black Lives where they tore down and destroyed a statue... of a Union soldier (the statue was a memorial to the locally-raised Union volunteer regiment). None of the vandals were charge, much less arrested and the org that ran this "protest" still receives tax dollars form the (single-party) city council.
I'm with you here. How many burning down businesses and killing locally-loved security guards have to happen before we consider this the mainstream view?
BLM was not some fringe radical left thing. It was/is a marxist organisation that destroyed massive amounts of property, and anyone who made the grevious error of verbally noticing this was utterly fucked by everyone even slightly left-of-centre. I lived in Silicon Valley during this utter fuckery and it was not a good time to be someone who notices things askew about dogma.
That was not very long ago. I'm surprised we've already forgotten.
I suppose that BLM represents the views of tens of millions of Americans, if not a majority. They are speaking out against institutional racism, and advocate non-violent protest against the murder of innocent black people by the police. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Lives-Matter/Subsequent-protests-George-Floyd-Ahmaud-Arbery-and-Breonna-Taylor
People were killed and injured, properties damaged. I hope everyone responsible for those things are prosecuted to the extent of the law (regardless of which political side they were on). There should be no support for violent protest.
But non-violent protest is protected speech, and the free speech of some should not be suppressed because of the violent actions of others.
I also hope that innocent black people stop getting murdered by police officers, or at the very least that the officers responsible start getting held accountable.
Who knows, maybe one day that will happen. Then we won't need protests at all.
There are plenty of things that radical leftists try and build. I live in a *very* left area and there's co-ops and communes and whatever other collective-ownership arrangements and attempts there-at get called.
Not many I hear about are all that big or newsworthy, perhaps because they don't work that well, perhaps they exist in a hostile climate, or perhaps that's not among their ambitions (I can easily imagine a supporter saying something something about the idea of being mondo-huge being very capitalist but I admittedly do not pass an ideological turing test on this one).
But nonetheless they do get made and do sometimes buzz along decently and sometimes fail, I just think they don't get much visibility because they're mostly very boring unless they're extra-insane and in the middle of seattle or fail explosively
Civil Rights legislation comes to mind. The gay right to marriage. Anti-discrimination laws in hiring, education, health care, and other societal institutions. The philosophical concept of selfhood. Depending on how you define the difference between the political left and right in the US, arguably the federal response to the pandemic. Labor unions.
It's not a short list.
I guess this depends what you take the referent of "radical leftists" to be, my interpretation is about things that are socialist, communist, about collective ownership, etc. Maybe this is a result of being in a very left area, so what counts as radical is further left? But none of those things would qualify for me except maybe some stuff in the union bit
I'm having a little trouble tracking the threaded comments here--I thought you were responding to MostlyCredible's comment.
But to answer your point--I would define the "Radical Left" as that movement that seeks to achieve social justice by redistributing power away from the majority and toward more vulnerable populations, or, in other words, in radically changing the structure of society.
Moderates, by contrast, would be those who seek a more egalitarian society by reforming incrementally it without radical change.
So by that definition, we would look for accomplishments in redistributing power in fundamental ways.
The recent victories by unions in the automotive manufacturing and entertainment industries does seem to qualify.
There’s lots of subgroups within the umbrella term of “left-leaning people”, apparently. It does not seem implausible that some groups would be full of the good intentions while others would be ready to reap the benefits of leading an empire. Same on the right. I guess the problem lies with having no more than two (viable) parties. Most major “democracies” are in fact one party away from being a single-party system.
You make a good point.
American nationalism comes in two forms. The “patriots” who want America to stay the way it is, and the imperialists who want to impose America everywhere. The latter are mostly on the American left these days, even the neo conservatives are voting Democratic.
My interpretation was they think Trump is in it for the glory, but he'd accept a sufficiently large pile of money over the glory. This is not the same as thinking he's in it for the money.
> He [attempts to] put the U.S. first, which is horrifying to those who desire world empire [aka World Government].
I feel like you're leaving out the sizable majority of people who fit in between those extremes.
So you are seriously implying that anyone who thinks Trump is a horrible person desires world empire and thinks patriotism is bad?
No. I tried to make it clear that there are plenty of other reasons to dislike Trump. He is a pro wrestling heel, after all.
But he is a patriot.
And there are many (not all) on the left who find patriotism to be cringey or dangerous. I recall some of my lefty friends cringing at the cries of "USA! USA!" during the Olympics during the Reagan era.
Feel free to criticize Trump for rudeness, bad hair, lowbrow rhetoric, authoritarian rhetoric, and putting ketchup on burnt steak.
But don't call him unpatriotic when the other party hates half the American people and want to replace them. Or when the other party Administration hates on our founding Fathers and the Founding documents and applies a double standard where legacy Americans come in second.
If you believe that the United States has been a predatory nation and needs to be taken down several notches, so be it. If you believe we should extend our welfare system to the entire planet in the name of utilitarianism, proudly state it. If you think the nation state is obsolete and it's time for world governance, be honest.
But note that all these sentiments are the opposite of patriotism.
But you said that what makes Trump a horrible person in the eyes of "the Woke" (whatever that is) is that he is a patriot. You seem to be contradicting yourself. Also, a lot of your stated opinion relies on personal anecdote. I know many US leftists, and none of them "hate America" or dislike Trump because he puts America first. A far more common opinion on the left is that Trump is entirely self-centered and is acting to undermine and weaken America (which they resent). That he *isnt* a patriot, to the extent that the term "patriot" still means what it used to, and isn't just a linguistic flag for scoundrels to wrap themselves in.
It is true that many people on the left unjustly cringe when they see explicit displays of patriotic emotion--but it isn't because they hate America, it's because they have experienced many people who used the excuse of patriotism to consolidate power over themselves and others. But I do not claim that all the right is like that, nor should anyone.
No leftist I know wants to destroy America. They all want to save it (from the right), and help make it a more fair, just, and equitable place.
Dude purchased a giant bribe hotel just down the road from the White House and then dozens of foreign dignitaries duly used it to pay him bribes and then, when he was no longer soliciting bribes, he sold it. This is just one extremely public face of the overall shakedown, which is why he refused to divest his assets prior to becoming President.
It's possible other politicians have done better at using the office to make money, but it's not for lack of trying on Trump's part.
The thinly disguised parable analogizing defending Ukraine to effective altruism made me think there must be a deep meaning in all of the other stories that I've missed because they were not so thinly disguised
There's not.
Ahh but if you were heavily disguising satirical tales that's exactly what you would say
(Also kudos for the Ukraine parable, it was very clever)
Typo: "If I was doing pragmatism wrong, then I would have switch to doing it right."
I would have to
Thanks, fixed.
The arch-manipulator is of course a copy of Eurisko (https://white-flame.com/am-eurisko.html) pulled from Douglas Lenat's archive shortly after his death at the end of August. It was developed on the slow computers of 1970, so with fast modern hardware it trivially bootstrapped itself to superintelligence.
Maybe a silly question but I've not been following the scandals/gossip/deep lore around rat-scene recently. The woman who "does not believe in the war in Ukraine" - who is this a parody of?
Other comment says it is parody of articles against EA movement, maybe not any specific person.
I feel like it can be read much more broadly.
"If X were true then it would justify bad thing Y, therefore X is false" is a depressingly common line of argument in the real world. HBD and atheism are the two Xs that spring to mind most readily. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to stick a name on that fallacy yet.
X = free will, Y = bad deeds going unpunished
Anti free will writers like Sam Harris and robert Sapolsky make punishing bad deeds *less* a central part of their arguments.
Someone needs to write about this more. I love Sapolsky, but his no free will argument drives me crazy. Fine, let's say our actions are purely based on genetics and environment, with no free will. Not punishing bad deeds is part of our environment, so enacting that policy will still skew people's choices towards bad deeds. This seems like pretty elementary logic.
If we don't believe in free will, we should still optimize for a high chance of getting punished for doing bad things, and probably less severe punishment in most cases since people don't respond to the severity of punishment as much.
It's one of the classical ones! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
Whether or not this is an example of that fallacy depends on your resolution of Moore's paradox. It is absurd, but not necessarily a logical contradiction to say "There is a war in the Ukraine, but I do not believe there is a war in the Ukraine"
If it's the consequences of the *belief* that you want to reject, then by not holding that belief, you do in fact avoid the consequences. If it's the consequences of the war itself you wish to avoid, then it is a fallacy because changing your beliefs does not remove those consequences.
Consider a hypothetical world in which God is real, but only atheists enter heaven. To the degree that beliefs are within our control, trying to believe something false would be rather in one's own self-interest.
That is, at the least, generally not how I've seen the term used. So e.g. to take your last example:
> Consider a hypothetical world in which God is real, but only atheists enter heaven. To the degree that beliefs are within our control, trying to believe something false would be rather in one's own self-interest.
In this instance, it would be a fallacious to conclude that God is not real, regardless of what it may be advantageous to believe. That is the fallacy to which I've generally seen this term applied, even if that doesn't quite match what's in the article I've linked.
I think it was Philip K. Dick who said something like "Reality is that which when you don't believe in it, still exists - and can hurt you."
And he would have known about it, considering all the drugs he consumed.
I imagined anti-EA (cult was a hint) and specifically purported head-in-sand attitudes toward AI doom. But it also sent me into a melancholic spiral about the actual Ukrainian question, because identity shifts (believing in the Russians qua Russians, etc.) were a big part of what got us to this point.
Jordan Peterson's stance against worrying about existential risks on pragmatic grounds comes to mind: https://www.arcforum.com/ideas/a-better-story/my-vision-for-arc
As does a certain segment of self help advice, although that focuses on avoiding negative conclusions about yourself rather than just addressing your own problems.
My take was pragmatism guy is ~Eliezer arguing that rationalism is definitionally correct because if it weren't rationalism would just endorse the correct thing instead, war lady is parodying criticisms of ea/maybe ai risk more specifically that appeal to some consequences of taking those things seriously rather than whether they are true or important
I like the Ukrainian woman's "what's the English term" interjections. It's a fun way to deliver the punchline to contrarian takes, though your audience quickly catch on that you speak English perfectly.
I speak English very fluently (can't say "perfectly" but quite well) but sometimes I could grasp for an English equivalent of a term I learned in other language. That said, if I learned the term in English, the same would happen to me when I speak other language, even my native one.
That said, "Pascalian" and "cult" would probably be the primary candidates for that phenomenon, since they sound virtually the same in most languages.
"Pascalian" is the kind of word where my first guess would be "like in my language, but with the ending changed", but for "cult" I can imagine thinking "what's the X for 'cult'... aaaaargh.... oh, wait, it's 'cult'. Dammit."
Irina is unironically right
More like 'Why Russians overrunning your country is bad and worth fighting against?'
Why anything is worth fighting against?
Expand on that?
thaaaaaaat.
[Grudging respect]
Lived in the now occupied territory. And hating Putin+wanting Nato join the war. That said: a) Nearly all spoke Russian there in 1995. And did not like to learn Ukrainian. Though teachers et al. had to, eventually. b) Heard a tourist say in 2001: "I am from the capital of our people" - The local guy - who flirted with her and had asked "Where're you from?" - was looking unsure. She said: "Moscow". He: "Well, I guess one could say so". What we not suffer to get laid. Oh, he laid her. c) My step-son left the place to work in Russia, much better salary. Even married his Russian gf there to stay longer. He returned before the 2022 invasion, can not leave now. And is now grudgingly accepting a 'Russian passport', he would have taken eagerly back then. d) Salaries and pension in Russia are better.
Summa: Yep, why not let the Russians turn as much of Ukraine into Russia as they dare to?All east of the Dnipro + all of the Black sea! People would be better of. And much better of than bombed out and dead. - Well. The people kinda disagree - here 'my' place: https://scroll.in/video/1018491/berdyansk-is-ukraine-citizens-protest-against-invading-russian-troops They do fight. And I am so proud of them. And so, so sorry for them. Still, only donated 1k to the military.- The cynical take is: Life with visa-free EU travel (since 2017) is better than the mob-rule in "Luhansk People's Republic" (since 2014). - (Was not sure where best to put the "reply". But I really liked several of human's replies here.)
Damn. What was the sf story where a woman realized she was no longer beautiful because men stopped lying to her?
Responding to your reply's contents:
Yeah, my feeling is that if a supermajority of a region want independence, or to join the neighboring country, the bar for ignoring them is pretty high. But OTOH this can easily become a disguise for a territory grab, so the process needs to be as transparent as possible with international observers and minimal intervention by neighbors. Russia is clearly pulling strings and acting unilaterally. And it's not at all clear how many residents of these areas want independence or Russian citizenship, so it's not a legitimate transfer.
Responding to your reply as an explanation of Dr. Teapot:
Sure, perhaps Dr Teapot means the disputed areas aren't really Ukraine or it's not a real invasion. But I'd object that there is an area that the UN and all but a few countries consider part of Ukraine, where there are soldiers with Russian citizenship documents recognized by the Russian government fighting soldiers with Ukrainian citizenship documents recognized by the Ukrainian government. He may disagree with the definitions regarding the fighting, but Irina was claiming that the fighting did not exist at all.
Also, glad you liked my replies, this makes me happy.
If Colossus and Guardian could come to terms, why can't GPT-4 and Claude-2? Or is that 20th century thinking, in a more polarized 21st century? Which of GPT-4 and Claude-2 is the woke side? :-)
Loved the "Above you, a GPT-4 drone dogfights one of Claude-2’s mini-zeppelins, but you pay them no heed." Does that count as possibly parcel post potshots?
That last line is <chef's kiss>
Popcorn is already intermittent reinforcement. Sometimes you get unpopped kernels, sometimes you get regular popcorn, and sometimes you find a perfect piece covered with oil and salt.
Lucky charms is another example.
Also blindfold orgies. (Henceforth known as "lucky charms".)
UberEats is too. Sometimes you get your perfect order, sometimes you get somebody else's order and sometimes your order is delivered to a different house and you get nothing.
That is very true, and so are many forms of homemade heterogenous dishes. Roasted root vegetables, or candied pecans, or maple brown sugar glazed carrots.
Pimentos de Padron is intermittent reinforcement.
Those are small green chilli peppers from Spain which are not spicy at all, except that one in ten is super hot and will have you blowing steam from your nose. The hot one are impossible to distinguish from the soft ones. Of course, they make the 9 soft ones feel even better.
(Sadly, mass commercialisation killed the fun : a couple of years ago, people figured out a way to find the spicy ones and now they only sell soft ones. Still good to eat but certainly not as fun.)
"On contraire" I know this is intentional, but it still causes me pain.
I actually like the sound of Ramchandra's latest scheme... surely there's a good reason against it, though
I need to adopt the final punchline for my own purposes. Will it make sense to those around me? Nope, but they're used to that
Would "eau contraire" be better?
Jonathan interrupted himself while explaining the intermittent reinforcement chips. (The exchange went Hans / Jon / Jon / Hans.)
Thanks, fixed.
I honestly somehow feel like it would be funnier if you instead made it more obvious that's what happened
That was actually a pretty awesome story. Covers all currently relevant matters. We need lots more of this pragmatist philosophy :-) to stay sane.
also, coincidently (and prior to reading the party story), I was looking at Church's REGENESIS book ... Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum ...
nice earcorn or whatever it's um called man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen#Related_linguistic_phenomena
eggcorn?
I'm pretty sure the intermittent-reward-chips thing is already real. Anyone who's eaten chips knows there's substantial variability in the amount of flavor-powder (salt, dehydrated whey, MSG, etc) on any given chip, with the most flavorful being rare finds. It's hard to believe that Frito-Lay couldn't eliminate that variability if they wanted to, and while cost might be a factor, given the radical markup between corn by the ton and a bag of Doritos, that doesn't seem like the whole story.
A lot of Japanese candies have rare variants that are sometimes included, like Apollos rarely being star-shaped.
My favorite thing in potato chips is the very thin bubble(?) but that's gotten extremely rare, perhaps due to quality control, or possibly fewer potato chips are made from actual slices rather than potato flour or somesuch.
I think optimally addictive potato chips would have several kinds of pleasant surprise.
Potato chips are made from real potato slices. It is very easy to tell the kind that are made from potato flour - pringles, baked lays and anything with that crumbly texture. And also legally they can't be called chips.
These would make for a fun series of youtube vids...something like Drunk History
The 2nd person voice is the voice of the ad, the disposition of all marketing materials. It is also the voice of persuasion because it invokes the hypnotic Magic Word, the secret name of all English-speakers.
It's also the voice of text adventure games.
That's a nice homage to Kontextmaschine.
Ave regina
Awesomeness
> "I think this is kind of a - what’s the English word - cult."
I hate to say this, but the Ukrainian word for "cult" is... "cult". It's spelled differently but the pronunciation is very similar.
Why did you say this?
Because the character in question seems to be struggling with remembering English translations for her native Ukrainian (or Russian) words. But realistically she wouldn't struggle with this specific word, since it sounds the same in both languages.
That only matters if you remember it sounds the same in both languages.
Thank you for answering.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party/comment/45223300
This person seems to think it was intentional.
I think it's pretty clearly a joke.
I thought this was quite funny
If 1 in 5 chips "has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands", then it seems like it should be: 'A bag of these potato chips only has a quarter as much salt and oil as the normal brand. But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake 75%!”' rather than a fifth and 80%.
I actually thought of that, but worried it wouldn't immediately make sense, and hoped nobody would be this pedantic. In case someone was, I formed the intention that I meant only 1.00001x more salt and oil than other leading brands, so that it rounded to 80%.
Nobody would be this pedantic? In the rationalist community?
I read it, noticed it, forgave you for it, and moved on
Same.
Hmm, I just realized that you could write that as "*Up to* 80%". As in, "But they’re more addictive! You’ll replace those ones with ours, and cut your sodium and fat intake up to 80%!” -- that classic advertising trick is finally useful here.
That's a misread of your audience if I ever seen one.
It immediately stood out to me.
Ah, but if they're addictive, you'll just eat more of all of them, salted and unsalted alike. So the amount of salt and fat you get won't change; merely the total amount of potato.
Real talk time: Has anyone ever seen Sam Altman and Scott Alexander together at the same time?
Same initials, too...suspicious!
err. For certain values of initials. Maybe that's the intention?
Also, RGB space is literally enormous, and it seems like the purpose of having dual color profile pictures is to have an enormous PFP-space, why do I keep ending up with people with the exact same pfp as me
maybe i should actually set it
What do you mean by dual color? I see five colors in your icon: blue, green, black, yellow, and orange.
Looking over a very limited sample size of default icons, it looks like substack may be just randomly choosing one color for the center and then the positions of the other four colors are fixed based on that result.
i think they pick two main colors for the circles and then the other colors are derivative, to look like two colored lenses overlapping? that's just always been my assumption though, could be wrong
Ironically, the one thing that irritated me about this story was that I'm pretty sick of Altman gossip.
(Seriously though great story)
I asked Bing to generate images of Altmancore, here's what it came up with:
1 https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG.I.uDVX2St3QxtBLICBc5?pid=ImgGn
2 https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG..kTWj5JhBLXnsIESdviE?pid=ImgGn
3 https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG.4ruvLWNwKz7oXm4.Hp57?pid=ImgGn
4 https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG.AB7mwLtAnI.m9iMchlQX?pid=ImgGn
5 https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG.FhbkAQLlcAHHQ42r6VVl?pid=ImgGn
Did you specify that the background needed to be a combination between a student union and a ski lodge? Or did it just pick that as the natural background for Altmancore?
The second one is my favourite. Are they twins, or are they just two friends who happen to look suspiciously similar?
I have a three-prompt system for generating fashion in aesthetics that don't specify fashion, like brutalism or frutiger aero. Can write a guide on it if there's an interest.
For the second one, can I just say that it's damn hard to attempt "woman" and "silicon valley" in a single prompt.
I'd be interested in reading such a thing!
AI-assisted fashion, here we come.
I'd be interested in this.
that's just what coffee shops and coworking spaces in major US cities look like these days
For the record, this is the picture I was thinking of: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVQSNB9UAAEjiFe?format=jpg&name=small
Got it
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG.KYRFl8oJafZv1TvLFKlZ?pid=ImgGn
Is there a name for arguments like Ukraine war denier's in the story? If not, maybe we should start calling it "Russian soldier's fallacy" or something.
It's just regular cynicism. "They'd benefit from my action if I believed it so it must be a lie."
As Sniffnoy says upthread, this is "appeal to consequences": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
What about a name for Ukraine war truthers?
Seems like it's applying consequentialism to epistemics? That is, choosing to believe something because you think the belief itself will have good consequences. (As opposed to the more common problem of choosing to believe something because it would have good consequences if it were true.)
Surely the politician-retiring market would lead to fans of controversial politicians setting up anti-politician-retiring markets which pay when their favorite _does_ run for the elections, and we'd end up with the same quality of politics as today, but much more expensively?
If people were required to actually commit to their political beliefs expensively, it might improve the quality of the discourse and epistemics.
Perhaps instead of reallocating existing taxes, politicians could fund their bills this way. But that would lead to unchecked plutocracy, so perhaps a billionaire's funding would only yield cents on the dollar, while a destitute person's dollar would be multiplied (with the billionaire's money).
While making sure the country is run by rich people. Not that now that’s not the case though
I am dismayed to discover that I am a pragmatist. I long ago realized that I have so little effect on world events that it makes no difference if I believe that e.g. China or Russia even exist (I'm not likely to go there), so I don't make the effort. I won't argue with you if you say they do exist, but I'm not putting any effort into sustaining belief.
And please don't tell me 'chinese' people 'have to come from somewhere' -- as a white man I've been sternly cautioned against asking people 'where are you from?'. All the 'russian' people I know came from Alaska.
Yeah, agreed. As someone who's not American I find it's sometimes psychologically useful to believe that the USA is fictional dystopian setting showcasing the horrors of unchecked neoliberalism. It's too horrifying to contemplate actual people living under those conditions, so for all intents and purposes the USA is a cautionary tale.
I am not even sure which version of "America" are we supposed to believe in today. The one that is the richest country in the world, or the one where people are homeless and can't afford basic healthcare? The one where kids are taught critical race theory instead of math at schools, or the one that does the latest research? The one where asking whether women might be less interested in math gets you fired from the university, or the one where the popular leader (who is simultaneously democratically elected in the most democratic country ever, but also a huge threat to democracy) talks about grabbing them by the pussy? First get your general story straight. Then we can talk about nerdy details like how it was possible for Americans to land on the moon in 1969, but not anymore in the 21st century.
The most logical explanation is that "America" is just a metaphor that people use for any political point they want to make at given moment. No one cares about keeping their stories consistent.
You seem very confused. The United States of America is comprised of more than one person, so all those contradictions are trivially and obviously not contradictions.
Last I heard, in fact, the USA is comprised of more than a million people.
The one I heard about has over 300 million
You know how in Scott's book Unsong, the archangel splits Israel into 2 overlapping countries, one each for the Muslims and Jews? The US is kinda like that but 3 layers, each defined by their battles.
One layer is Woke vs Techbro Capitalists. Another is Commies vs Deplorables vs Deep State Democracy. Last and least interesting is Religion Battle Royale.
If I'm not sure which layer I'm on, I just describe EA to someone. On the Religion plane they'll say they think all charity should go through churches. On Woke Tech they'll ask why you'd save privileged people from extinction, or why you don't respect the Paperclip Maximizer's preferences more than humanity's. On the Goon Layer they get mad that EA "doesn't address root causes", or they think it's wrong to save black people, or they are wearing dark glasses and a blank expression.
Hope this helps
Ironically, the truth is probably in the middle. I am American and watching the news feels like they are showing a fictional dystopian setting showcasing the horrors of unchecked neoliberalism, but then I step outside, see I live in a perfectly pleasant place, where myself and all my neighbors look to be enjoying their days. My job is relatively easy, pays me a fair wage, has good benefits. People are complaining that inflation is higher than their pay raises, but no one I know is in danger of not having food or housing. I have never been the victim of a crime, despite living right outside and routinely visiting one of the top 5 most dangerous cities in America.
It makes me think that if American Media is so innactually describing what living in America is like, how inaccurate must it be in describing what living in other countries is like? Are Russians really endanger of being arrested if they say anything negative about Putin? Does China have such a high level of control over the Internet that no one share their honest views? Do Sub Saharan Africans actually worry about roaving Warlords and diseases on a day to day basis? Is Swedan really a paradise where the Prisoners are treated better than our college students? Does every French town have a bakery that makes better bread than the local bread I get in America?
I am sure there is a kernal of truth to all these views, but only the people on the ground know what it's like living with it, day by day.
I'm Russian.
You are not in danger of being arrested if you just say something negative about Putin. But if you are someone like a popular blogger and you said something negative about Putin you are at risk (officially you'll be arrested for something else, of course). And if you went to the protest you can be arrested even if you said nothing against Putin (although it will affect the probabilities), even if you went on a solitary picket with a blank poster.
Theoretically, you can be arrested for calling the war "war" or saying that LGBT are just as OK as straight people, but in practice this only applies to public figures (in the first case only to opposition, pro-Putin folks use the word "war" without any risk) or, again, protesters.
The bread thing is absolutely true at least for the parts of France I visited. Applies to Italy and to some parts of Germany as well. My first time in the US I wouldn’t understand where to buy bread. They told me at the grocery store and they wouldn’t take my explanation that whatever was sold there was not bread seriously.
Never go to the grocery store for bread. Every town I've lived in, up and down the East Coast, has at least one bakery. I can't tell you if the bread from an American Bakery is as good as a European Bakery, but they do exist. Maybe the difference is Americans are more likely to settle for grocery store bread, and that's why the stereotype exists?
I could find good bakeries in the end. Both in Baltimore and in Santa Barbara. Having to drive to the bakery and back served as a good illustration of the role of geography in economics: of course products in the US are optimised for shelf stability over taste. Distances are huge.
Yeah, that makes significantly more sense. To be honest, it's extremely hard to figure out the reality of places you personally live in outside of your own social sphere - I think the difference is that the US might not have a news outlet that almost everyone in the country trusts (the most trusted outlet in Australia is ABC news, a government funded outlet, followed by SBS news, a different government funded outlet. Both have ratings around 70%, while the most trusted outlet in the USA is.... The Weather Channel?? Followed by the BBC, a different country's government funded news outlet?! Jesus.)
human's comment above sums it up well! Your reality is dictated by where you get your news from and everyone gets their news from different places.
Don't worry. No actual people live here.
this is the equivalent of "i watch anime, so i know exactly what Japan is like!" but worse because our news rarely shows the good side of the usa.
Bravo.
This reads like an update to Joan Didion's essay on Haight Ashbury in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ Excellent writing; brings a smile in the darkness.
I'd say that the pragmatist argument for religion deserves more respect that you seem willing to give it. Pol Pot was still worse than Israel/Palestine and Putin's New Russian Empire put together, and he managed to do it in a single tiny country.
Typo:" GPT-4 now controls Sam Altman, e/acc, the deep state, Israel, Venezeula, Bitcoin, and Tyler Winklevoss."
It's Venezuela
Is it a coincidence that the final two sentences so closely mirror the final two sentences of "1984"?
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I have trouble seeing any way in which the final two sentences closely (or even not-particularly-closely) mirror the final two of 1984.
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
I misremembered the second-to-last and third-to-last" sentences as a single sentence. If that was right, the second-to-last sentence would be a past perfect statement about having changed fundamental beliefs. And the last sentence is a present tense statement about a new conviction that directly contradicts the ones discussed at length during the entire preceding narrative.
I would bet this was unintentional (the wording and the contrast between belief and love seems too different), but it's interesting that there's a parallel of self-protective changes in beliefs.
Cherry red over lime green? He’s clearly a Scarlett Macaw in a mostly convincing human suit. Not surprising since the Aztec’s named him Quetzalcoatl, often depicted him as a crow or parrot and made him ruler of the western gods. When he wasn’t depicted as a bird he was a coyote. Now, lo and behold, what do we find living on his estate and regularly greeting him at his door? Yep.
The intermittent reinforcement potato chips made me think of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Jelly Beans from Harry Potter.
PS I've read other books.
Possibly a typo: "That’s our moat!" Should it be motte? Or is moat a term for a barrier to entry? Or what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moat, not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle
"Moat" is tech-industry jargon for "the thing that makes it hard for our competitors to catch up to us". Often invoked in discussions of why Microsoft/Google/whoever can't duplicate a company's product overnight and squash them like bugs.
Thank you. So it does mean barrier to entry.
You're right, yes - sorry, I'd forgotten that "barrier to entry" had a technical meaning in economics. The terms *seem* to be interchangeable, or at least the examples given for both all seem to be the same. The term "(economic) moat" was apparently coined by Warren Buffett: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
As I learned the term, a barrier to entry is purely about new entrants, while a moat is describing both the barriers to new entrants and the obstacles to existing competitors chipping away at your market share.
And yes, there’s nothing tech-specific about the term, it’s an investing term that applies to all industries.
Wow has SSC declined
This is hilarious
Behold the contrast with the comment above yours. Perhaps Scott ought to take a page from R' Bunim, and carry a slip of paper in each pocket, one saying "This is hilarious" and the other "Wow has SSC declined".
Put them on each side of a coin, flip when relevant.
Funniest thing I've seen lately.
(From memory)
Might be related to a bit in Illuminatus! where Hagbard Celine (something of a guru) has cards-- some of them say "There is no friend anywhere" and some of them say "There is no enemy anywhere". The art is in knowing who ought to get which card.
You reminded me I once got a fortune cookie from a restaurant that said "No man is without enemies".
I don't know if I'm a gullible person but most of the presumably harebrained ideas by the partygoers in this series convince me somehow
The Turkish dwarf is Satoshi, and the mailbox was Haldemann.
"Is that guy carrying a gun?"
"Yeah, but don't worry; he's not a cop."
Little Chechnya...
"You spot someone you vaguely know, Nishin, and see that he’s started wearing a crucifix. You are briefly concerned that the figure on the Cross will be Sam Altman, but on closer inspection it (mercifully) appears to be Jesus.
“Hi Nishin,” you say. “You look different.” Specifically, he’s clean-shaven, and has covered up his arm tattoo.
“Yeah,” says Nishin. “I finally took the plunge and converted to Catholicism last month.”
I had to laugh at this one, thanks! 😁
Scott, you know you can always try to find some new people to hang with that might be a little more down to earth. For example, among SF's large homeless population, there might a few people who could use a friend and might be willing to talk about something besides Sam Altman.
Love these stories! In many ways they're the only ones that make sense b/c they are able to integrate all the main plotlines
> the intermittent reinforcement potato chip!” concludes Jonathan. “Four out of every five are just plain potato slices. But the fifth has more salt and oil than any of the other leading brands
World of Warcraft in food form.
Best of the series in my opinion. And probably best post of at least the past several months.
How can I invest in the intermittent junk food reward company?
I think the preferred nomenclature is "Turkish small person", but I can't confirm that for sure.
"Life is a cheap party trick" --> forgets about Sam Altman within 5 minutes.
If 97% of employees will quit if their founder leaves, that's not a business it's a cult.
Clearly.
the pragmatism annoys me because it reminds me that few people seem really to understand religion. To say what he does is like saying i should get married because it provides social stability and health benefits, but no one in love says that, and falling in love causes hurt and harm. Religion is a lot more like falling in love in that way; you would never use those terms from the inside. And love causes screaming matches, divorce, and worse. Aslan is not a tame lion.
and religion for social stability is kind of weird given that if you put three religious people in a room for three hours you'll get two religious people and a heretic, lol. The stability thing relies a lot on people not actually believing the religion. If you do, its as likely to tell you not to get married as such, or you'll do stuff people will think is crazy.
idk i think a smart convert would more likely fall in love with a particular thing. it wouldn't be so bloodless; even the shallowest convert comes because a girl he fancies believes in it. He'd love catholicism for its solemnity, or it being this great mystical pageant across time, or because he reads Augustine and dives deep into its philosophy and theology.
it just annoys me because even if you fall away, its still like falling out of love with someone. for good and bad. Sorry i know its a comic piece but it feels weird sometimes seeing people try to write religion.
Clippy!
These are so much fun.
And I think the market for politicians to drop out sounds like something we should actually try.
Apparently, you don't need to wade into popular, toxic topics to expand your readership on demand. You can just publish more house party stories instead.
I'd remind any atheist thinking of converting to Christianity that religious views are heritable. If you don't believe in God, it's likely your kid won't either, and it just kicks the can down the road another generation. Better to live in the real world and leave religion in the past.
So God made us genetically predisposed to not believe in him, causing us to end up in hell? What God would do that to his own children? I can’t believe in such a God. Hmm oh wait. Seriously though, atheism may be heritable but my dad -who is obviously a non-believer- never came out as such. I doubt he would even verbalize it. This sounds like a major hurdle to estimating the heritability of religious views through surveys and the like, especially if societal acceptance of atheism changed over the span of one generation
"It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment."
I knew this reminded me of something, and after some digging around here it is:
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/GregoryNyssa-theologyintheStreetsofConstantinople.asp
"Gregory of Nyssa (335-c.395): Popular Discussion of Theology in the Streets of Constantinople, from On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit (August 383)
"If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change, he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer, "The Father is greater, the Son is less." And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you that the Son was created ex nihilo. I don't know what to call this evil, dementia, madness or something epidemic disease of this kind; it produces a derangement of reasoning.
Alternate translation from The Orthodox Church by Kallistos Ware:
Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council:
The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing (On the Deity of the Son)."
Very interesting computer generated cover image. I can't figure out if the woman on the couch on the right is levitating above the couch, sitting on an odd protrusion on top of the couch, or if that's just a third leg... (There are more gems the longer you explore the image)
> But I don’t think it’s illegal to bribe them not to run. If you think about it, imagine Mitt Romney’s company was unhappy that they’d lose him to a presidential run, so they offered him a higher salary, and he decided to stay. That’s got to be legal, right?
Maybe legal, but the promises might not create an enforceable contract! In the case linked below, the court refused to enforce a plea deal in which charges were dropped in exchange for the defendant's agreement not to run for office. Then, of course, the defendant ran for office. The court said he couldn't be kept off the ballot; but it also said that the prosecutor could withdraw the plea deal (potentially subjecting the defendant to trial, but in fact he ended up with another plea deal).
https://law.justia.com/cases/michigan/supreme-court/2018/156353.html
Anyway, the court relied on the notion (made up by courts, I think) that courts won't enforce a contract that violates public policy. (Hence, you can breathe easy about your hitman's suit for breach of contract.)
I reckon Scott waits until he either gets or encounters a cool unproven business idea, and then writes an entry in this series around that,
|“Hi Nishin,” you say. “You look different.” Specifically, he’s clean-shaven, and has covered up his arm tattoo.
“Yeah,” says Nishin. “I finally took the plunge and converted to Catholicism last month.”
Ok TBF Catholics are pretty tattoo-tolerant nowadays. The first religion that comes to mind that's anti-tatt and wants a bunch of people clean-shaven is LDS.
The comments are as entertaining as the piece, which itself had me laughing out loud.
Bloody hilarious.
Ngl, this sort of party seems right up my alley. Throwing around eccentric ideas and conspiracies? Hell yeah.