Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
For how much these fucks talk about "overcoming bias", they seem ABSOLUTELY incapable of overcoming their bias for IQ as a good measure of anything outside of acute mental disability. They want a simple answer to the question that has plagued their small minds forever: "Am I smarter than that person over there?" They cling to their number like a life-preserver in the ocean of society.
It's just so pathetic.
loved the recent twitter thread on how the distinguishing characteristic of true humans was actually throwing real good
They don’t just cling to it - they massage their scores/educational achievements.
Fuck, I hate Medium. Everything about it has a neutralising effect on nice critical writing like this. It's like putting floaties on a crocodile.
not sure if you know, so I'll mention it: Fx's reader mode can often get rid of a lot of the annoying mediumshit
thanks. I do use it for medium for sure. It's also good for just taking you out of the medium brand. I started off so doubtful of masto's ability to replace twitter but I'm turning an optimistic 180 that the fediverse can do something even better and make things like twitter and medium redundant. centralised, decentralised... doesn't matter, the difference is between making social networks and letting social networks happen
ranty mc rant
is that too sentimental?
no I kinda know what you mean
fedi still seems to partly have a large cliff on starter discoverability/exploration, but there's sufficient critical mass on a number of things that it's been improving a lot
it's also just ...... nice? nice in a way the corporate walled-garden Curated Experience shit has felt constricting on for so fucking long. still a ways to go between right now and elsewhere (and I have some thoughts on this, ito some networks not really being set up for defensively dealing with the incoming parasites), but.. hope! actual, positive, experience-able hope!
it’s also just … nice?
For me, this is the key. It's a web standard word-of-mouth protocol that has potential to create new things instead of just federated versions of the stuff we already have.
Did you see the v1 of the activitypub wordpress plugin that was recently released? https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
It's plug and play and your blog becomes part of the fediverse. Can't get over how cool that is, especially when the wordpress bit becomes replaced by something else
I hadn’t because I’ve largely been living under various rocks for months and months now, but that’s neat
There's a survey of psychologists that gets cited regularly as evidence of expert opinion on the heritability of intelligence. Alexander brings it up in a typical way in his 2021 review of The Cult of Smart:
Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future. If you target me based on this, please remember that it’s entirely a me problem and other people tangentially linked to me are not at fault.)
Plenty of people explained problems with the 2020 study in the comments, and I sent an email, but I never heard back. One obvious critique is that it looks like about a third of respondents on the genetics/environment question (specifically about US black/white differences) were enthusiastic followers of Steve Sailer. The study couldn't have better overrepresented them in a purported professional consensus if it had been designed to do so. Unfortunately, this subgroup seems to have skipped later, longer questions about international differences, which show more cautious opinions even among the rest of the ISIR community. I'd hoped Alexander might find some peace of mind, since he must have been freaking out about this study since at least 2014, when he linked Steve Sailer's blog post of its preliminary survey results in an email to Topher Brennan, under the heading "HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct". I suppose I'll never know.
Lots of fascinating links in this article. This link in particular was fascinating:
If you're searching for Scott Siskind... I am Scott Siskind from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There used to be more things on this webpage. Right now I'm using it to spread the message that there are multiple statements being falsely attributed to me on the Internet. Somebody who doesn't like me - I am not sure who, but I work in mental health and guess this is sort of a professional hazard - has been trying to systematically discredit me by posting racist and profanity-laden things under my name. Some of the comments make some effort to convince, like linking back to my website. The end result is that if you Google me to try to find out what I am like, you will probably end up seeing angry racist profanity-laden comments made under my name. These are not mine.
Does anyone know the backstory here? This reads to me like a "hackers ate my password" story -- the kind of ass-covering someone might concoct after their racist writings accidentally leaked onto the internet.
EDIT: This seems to be related to the stuff Topher Brennan revealed? Except it was written many years before Topher's revelations. It's confusing...
no, at the time there was someone actually going around posting comments in Scott's name and not in his style