You know, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” argument being implicitly extended to cover second-generation immigrants should if taken seriously, imply that these people aren’t actually obligated to follow US law, which presumably includes immigration law. You know, if you go by a text-first originalist interpretation of the constitution and the law.

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

It’s almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don’t see the “lots of education” part kicking in.

Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn’t prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn’t some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn’t that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it’s worth noting how “maybe IQ is just garbage” is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

Read through the whole affair and just had to keep shaking my head the whole way through. Like, they’re at least capable of pretending to disavow the Nazis and fundies who follow the same pro-kid-having definitely-not-eugenics ideas. And they talk about some of the real obstacles or having kids; raising a child and setting them up for something resembling success is expensive and hard and the world doesn’t exactly feel like it’s on an upwards trajectory. But rather than look at those problems in their own right and try to actually make living cheaper or easier for people in ways that would make having kids more viable and more rewarding (How long are you at the office? How much time and energy do you have when you get home?), these upper-class twits of their generation are trying to convince the few people for whom those aren’t as serious problems that they should have kids. Like, I’m all in favor of improving reproductive health and that kind of technology but we are nowhere near the point where that’s going to make a population-level impact on demographics. Like, they’re out here trying to figure out if they can make the run to third base when they’ve only just brained the mascot with a foul ball. Solve the actual problem in front of us first.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says.

So clearly the best action is to constantly tell everyone how great kids are and that they should totally have them. Because that solves the problem of people wanting kids they don’t/can’t have. I try to read even our designated sneer fodder in good faith but I can’t understand why anyone thinks these people are at all intelligent beyond the “only slightly less than average” level. I thought Good Will Hunting taught everyone the difference between smart and rich, but maybe that was just me.

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn’t really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.

I’ve watched a few of those “I taught an AI to play tag” videos from some time back, and while its interesting to see what kinds of degenerate strategies the computer finds (trying to find a way out of bounds being a consistent favorite after enough iterations) it’s always a case of “wow I screwed up in designing the environment or rewards” and not “dang, look how smart the computer is!”

As always with this nonsense, the problem is always that the machine is too dumb to be trusted rather than too smart and powerful. Like, identifying patterns that people would miss is arguably the biggest strength of machine learning in general, but that’s not the same as those patterns being meaningful or useful.

You could argue that another moral of Parfit’s hitchhiker is that being a purely selfish agent is bad, and humans aren’t purely selfish so it’s not applicable to the real world anyway, but in Yudkowsky’s philosophy—and decision theory academia—you want a general solution to the problem of rational choice where you can take any utility function and win by its lights regardless of which convoluted setup philosophers drop you into.

I’m impressed that someone writing on LW managed to encapsulate my biggest objection to their entire process this coherently. This is an entire model of thinking that tries to elevate decontextualization and debate-team nonsense into the peak of intellectual discourse. It’s a manner of thinking that couldn’t have been better designed to hide the assumptions underlying repugnant conclusions if indeed it had been specifically designed for that purpose.

I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.

Not gonna lie, “enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce” isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the government to be into, but I guess I’m not mad about it?

Gotta be cheaper than buying new planes which would also have new engines. Generally there needs to be a pretty substantial increase in capability before it’s worth retiring an existing platform, especially in a logistics role where you don’t get as much benefit from the bleeding edge because nobody’s supposed to be shooting at you in the first place.

I think the missing piece here is that B-52 isn’t just a pretty good cargo hauler, it’s a pretty good cargo hauler that we don’t need to buy a whole new airframe to get. Think of it less as “we’re commissioning these B-52s” and more as “hey look we found a way to use all these B-52s we already had” only this just keeps working forever.

On one hand giving these people the veneer of science is actively going to undermine public confidence in “science” as a whole and directly make the world a worse place.

On the other hand, money.

Ironically the trolley problem meme here is a great example of the objection: the same set up that puts him in the position to pull the lever also requires that people be tied to the track.

They definitely use actual numbers to try and push their agenda. It’s a classic case of constructing a category. Like how we’re the highest paying company in the industry of high technology, textile workers, teenagers, and dead people. Look at how much good EA-backed interventions like malaria nets are doing! Clearly this means EA-backed programs to make sure Sam Altman develops a computer god before his evil twin Alt Sam-man is also such a good use of resources that you’re basically a murderer if you don’t give.

Lemme just grab my programming screwdriver.

One fascinating aspect of the Trump and Musk stories is that the capitalists are less sociopathically driven by money than previously assumed and this is actually much worse!

I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn’t that they aren’t effective enough at choosing causes; they’re supporting exactly what they want to, whether it’s saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires 4q requires African kids to die of malaria.

It’s the Bayesian version of Zeno’s paradox. Before one can update their beliefs, one must have evidence of an alternative proposition. But no one piece of evidence is worth meaningfully changing your worldview and actions. In order to be so it would need to be supported. But then that supporting evidence would itself need to be supported. And so on ad infinitum.