quanticle

Karma: 2,860

quanticle 18 Apr 2026 3:59 UTC
−1 points
−4
in reply to: 0xA’s comment on: Let goodness conquer all that it can defend

You can love your life, society, its norms and the freedoms they afford you. But the claims about the intrinsic goodness of your system, without a shared basis of evaluation between that to which you aim to compare it (under its own criteria), make them epistemic-ally thin as a viking screaming of his love for Valhalla. And while I think it is that vikings right to live and die for Valhalla, if that way is threatened, that love does not bubble up to something as equivalent to an excuse for external imposition of the viking way.

Ironically, this does more to justify colonialism than it does to defeat it. By your logic, if a modern military force were somehow transported back to the 1600s, they would have no moral basis to prevent European settlers from colonizing North America. For these settlers, the act of settlement was as much driven by morality, by a religious need to go forth and multiply and spread the light of God, as it was by rational calculation of material needs.

So I ask you, by what right would you stop these settlers from going forth and bringing the light of the Lord to the heathen darkness?

quanticle 30 Mar 2026 5:05 UTC
2 points
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on: Past Automation Replaced Jobs. AI Will Replace Workers.

Capital holders would still have income, and if machines replaced labor on a vast scale, profits, dividends, and asset values could rise sharply, leaving owners with even more spending power.

The marginal value of more stuff declines pretty quickly. Someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg can only enjoy so many houses, so many cars, so many new clothes, so many vacations, etc., because there are only 24 hours in a day. The empirical evidence we see from the behavior of actual billionaires is that they make money practically automatically, because the interest on their existing assets accumulates faster (often hundreds of times faster) than they can actually spend it. The only way these fortunes actually decline is if they commit to massive (sometimes wasteful) investments or pledge to give their wealth away. Even then, as was the case with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for a while, their wealth may still accumulate faster than it can be dissipated.

quanticle 20 Mar 2026 22:37 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Samuel Hapák’s comment on: Ann Altman has filed a lawsuit in US federal court alleging that she was sexually abused by Sam Altman
The judge has dismissed Ann Altman’s case against Sam Altman, on narrow procedural grounds. The statute that Ann Altman was filing her case under had a statute of limitations that expired in 2008. Judge Zachary Bluestone has said that Ann can re-file her case using a different law, the Missouri Childhood Sexual Abuse law, which carries a looser statute of limitations.

The judge is also allowing a defamation counterclaim filed by Sam Altman to proceed.

quanticle 8 Mar 2026 5:49 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
That’s unfairly dismissive. I can’t speak to retail, but manufacturing absolutely does require “deep work”. Machining requires concentration and technique in order to ensure parts have the right tolerances, surface finish, etc. Assembly work often involves deep thinking in order to ensure that the machine is correctly assembled and properly configured.

It’s not all routine “mind numbing” assembly line work, just as not all IT is routine mind numbing data entry.

quanticle 1 Mar 2026 1:33 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
No, we don’t wait hours or days, we text you asking, “Hey, when would be a good time to follow up?”

quanticle 27 Feb 2026 9:16 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
Working remotely is the rub, even for software developers (archive):

We appear to be reaching remote-work equilibrium, after years of conflicting trends and predictions. The share of open jobs listed as remote on the career site Indeed has held steady between 8% and 8.6% for the past six months.

That’s roughly triple what the rate was in 2019 but markedly less than it was in 2022. Back then, more than 10% of jobs were advertised as remote, and many others were understood to be for obvious reasons.

[...]

Forty percent of applications submitted through LinkedIn are for remote roles, even though those jobs represent only 8% to 9% of listings.

JobHire.AI, which makes an artificial-intelligence tool for job hunters, recently analyzed more than 600,000 users’ applications. It found remote roles are roughly four times harder to get than in-office or hybrid positions.

quanticle 5 Feb 2026 23:05 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: koanchuk’s comment on: The Window for Political Revolution is Closing Soon
These are fictional examples. In reality, like at the Battle of Cannae, for example, the Carthaginian force, led by Hannibal Barca, was outnumbered by the Romans by nearly 2:1 (roughly 40,000 Carthaginians against around 80,000 Romans). And yet the Carthaginians won by trapping the Romans in a double-envelopment and attacking them from all sides, preventing the Romans from concentrating their superior numbers, allowing Hannibal’s forces to slaughter the Romans. Although Hannibal’s forces may have outnumbered the Romans at the actual line of contact, no one claims that the Carthaginians had numerical superiority at Cannae.

Similarly, at Agincourt, the English were outnumbered by the French by approximately 2:1. The French were defeated because the English used terrain cleverly, forcing the French forces to attack down a narrow path surrounded by forest on both sides. This, combined with the superior firepower of English longbows, enabled the English to decimate the French, and win a major victory in the Hundred Years War. Once again, although the funnel effect of the terrain may have meant that the English enjoyed numerical superiority at the point of contact, Agincourt is widely regarded as an example of an underdog victory, where a smaller English army won a major victory against the odds against a much larger French foe.

At the battle of Narva, Charles XII of Sweden used a snowstorm to hide the approach of his 10,000 troops, suprising the 35,000 Russians laying siege to Narva and putting them to rout. Do you claim that the Swedes had numerical superiority over the Russians merely because some of the Russian troops could not see the Swedes until it was too late?

At the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson had 27 British ships, against Villenueve’s combined Franco-Spanish fleet of 33. However, Nelson was able to maneuver his fleet such that it split Villenueve’s line into thirds, allowing his fleet to defeat Villenueve piecemeal. Although Nelson had numerical superiority at specific, crucial points in the battle, overall Villenueve’s fleet was larger, and Trafalgar is seen as a victory of British elan and seamanship, not numerical superiority.

The reason I bring up all these battles is because numerical superiority is but one part of victory, and, arguably, not even the most important part. Logistics, terrain, morale, and tactics all have parts to play as well. Redefining numerical superiority as you’ve done elides those factors, as you can always say, “Well, actually, at the point of contact, the victorious forces had numerical superiority over the vanquished.” That’s true, but it’s in some ways as much of a tautology as, “The team that wins the game is the one that scores the most points.” It doesn’t inform any predictions about the future, nor does it indicate when you should be surprised by an outcome.

quanticle 5 Feb 2026 6:27 UTC
7 points
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on: Reconciling Shannon and Bayes.

This concept stems back to Adam Smith, a man who lived with his mom all his life, never held a job other than in Academia, and lived in an England sustained by colonial commodities’ extraction. It makes sense, then, that to him, Economy looked like a Divine Mystery. He didn’t know how enterprises were planned, where goods came from, how they were processed, who’d buy them and why. That is to say, he wasn’t aware of the political planning behind raw goods’ acquisition, the orchestration and science behind manufacturing, the original realities and incentives of the places that made English surplus possible, nor the realities and incentives of the very concrete people who everyday made decisions at the bazar. Removed from all this, the market was indeed “a God” to him, and in the same situation, you’d probably have a similar perspective.

Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations? Smith was well aware of how the enterprises of his day were planned, where goods came from, how they were processed, and how markets worked. His argument proceeds from that intimate knowledge. Smith argued, that, counterintuitively to most people of his era, markets should be allowed to work, and that countries shouldn’t engage in mercantilist policies to hoard “specie” (gold and silver). He argued that the true wealth of nations came from trade and industry, not shiny metals, and that the way to increase the wealth of a nation was to encourage the development of markets and commerce rather than mercantilist policies that accumulated shiny metal coins at the expense of trade. While Smith may have seen divine providence in the working of the market, that doesn’t imply that he was unaware of the practicalities of trade, no more than Isaac Newton’s belief in biblical numerology invalidates his ideas regarding the analysis of infinetesimals.

Furthermore, Smith’s belief in the power of free markets and free exchange led him to be a staunch anti-colonialist. Smith was one of the first British writers to speak out against the depradations of the East India Company, arguing that the company was making money because it had the backing of the British monarchy, and therefore was able to engage in state-like looting via its private armies and navies, rather than making wealth from free exchange. He correctly identified that the East India Company would require ever increasing amount of subsidy from the state, which would have deleterious results for both the company and Great Britain.

quanticle 5 Feb 2026 6:18 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: koanchuk’s comment on: The Window for Political Revolution is Closing Soon
You’re free to use your own idiosyncratic definition of “numerical superiority”, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when your interlocutors are persistently confused as to how you can claim an army of 1000 has “numerical superiority” against an army ten times its size.

quanticle 29 Jan 2026 6:12 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: koanchuk’s comment on: The Window for Political Revolution is Closing Soon
A thousand Frenchmen may have achieved local overmatch against the forces of the regime. But at that time, the Revolutionary forces most assuredly did not outnumber the entirety of the French military.

Who has the numerical advantage?

Alice, of course. Bob’s army wins via superior cohesion and morale. By your logic there can be no victory against numerical odds, because you can always look closely and find specific points where the victorious side had numerical overmatch against the losing side.

quanticle 28 Jan 2026 4:29 UTC
12 points
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on: The Window for Political Revolution is Closing Soon

The basic strategy of a revolution leverages an overwhelming numerical advantage to overcome the coercion produced by an existing power structure.

No it does not. Can you name one successful revolution where the revolutionaries had an “overwhelming numerical advantage”? In the American, French and Bolshevik revolutions the revolutionaries, at best, had parity with the forces opposing them. They succeeded not because they had overwhelming numerical advantage, but because they had advantages in coordination and cohesion that enabled them to strike while their opponents were still preparing.

quanticle 11 Nov 2025 4:24 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RationalElf’s comment on: Why does everything feel so urgent?
With all of these anecdotes, you should ask yourself, what did people do before they had cell phones? Cell phones aren’t that old! It’s not like the 1990s and early 2000s were some pre-civilizational state where people just couldn’t coordinate or make decisions for lack of instant communication across vast distances.

quanticle 26 Sep 2025 23:20 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: In Defence of False Beliefs
That’s just what Eliezer is pointing at with “Choosing to be Biased”. In practice, it’s impossible to determine causality between beliefs and “success”. There are lots of successful people with all kinds of utterly insane beliefs. Were their insane beliefs the cause of their success? Or were these people so talented that they were able to achieve success despite those beliefs?

In contrast, determining whether a belief results in good predictions about the world is quite easy, and gets you many of the benefits without any of the potentially catastrophic costs.

quanticle 26 Sep 2025 0:01 UTC
2 points
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on: In Defence of False Beliefs
This argument has already been conclusively refuted by the Sequence entry: Doublethink: Choosing To Be Biased.

Eliezer points out that it is impossible to have false beliefs only when they’re beneficial to you.

You can’t know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.

The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.

Be irrationally optimistic about your driving skills, and you will be happily unconcerned where others sweat and fear. You won’t have to put up with the inconvenience of a seat belt. You will be happily unconcerned for a day, a week, a year. Then crash, and spend the rest of your life wishing you could scratch the itch in your phantom limb. Or paralyzed from the neck down. Or dead. It’s not inevitable, but it’s possible; how probable is it? You can’t make that tradeoff rationally unless you know your real driving skills, so you can figure out how much danger you’re placing yourself in. You can’t make that tradeoff rationally unless you know about biases like neglect of probability.

It is likely, in your scenario, that Gina has other false beliefs that harm her just as much as her optimism helps her.

quanticle 14 Sep 2025 0:16 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: title22’s comment on: The Cloud Drinks Local
So to clarify, your position is that the US shouldn’t impose national restrictions on datacenter development just because data centers are exceeding the capacity of local infrastructure in some places. Rather, we should allow those decisions to be made locally?

quanticle 8 Sep 2025 7:17 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: %CPU Utilization Is A Lie
Even then, sometimes the assumption isn’t pessimistic enough and users will complain about e.g. their cell phone’s battery dropping immediately from 10% to 0% when they launch an app that causes the CPU to demand more current than the almost-dead battery can provide.

quanticle 8 Sep 2025 6:31 UTC
2 points
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on: The Cloud Drinks Local

None of this means we should slow down data center development.

Why not? It seems like this is the logical conclusion to the piece. Data center development is outrunning localities’ ability to build infrastructure to support those data centers, so data center developers should either slow down or build their own infrastructure and internalize the costs that they’re dumping onto overstretched municipal boards and utility companies. Why is it incumbent upon municipalities to accomodate data centers?

quanticle 26 Aug 2025 8:17 UTC
4 points
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on: Quality Precision

“Proper” mashed potatoes with butter are an obviously superior dish to microwaved instant mash with margarine, but over a lifetime someone can move from the former to the latter in steps small enough to barely notice.

Isn’t this also known as “normalization of deviance”? At each step, the results are “close enough” or “good enough”, and without someone stepping back occasionally and looking back at the original standard, the results can diverge arbitrarily from what is intended.

quanticle 30 Jul 2025 19:57 UTC
12 points
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on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

The disappointment came from seeing what they could have been, and seeing that they didn’t even try for it. They’d all come to one of the best colleges in the world, and then just followed the path of least resistance with minimal foresight for four years.

And yet they graduated with the same degree that you did, and earn just as much money as you do (if not more).

The real question is not, “Why did they follow the path of least resistance,” the question is, “Why did you not?”

quanticle 17 Jul 2025 3:26 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: James Stephen Brown’s comment on: Moloch’s Demise—solving the original problem
Japan switched hard from isolationism to expansionism almost immediately after the Meiji restoration. This started with the first Sino-Japanese war, in 1894, during which Japan invaded and annexed Korea. This continued with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, where the Japanese defeated the Russians and took control of Port Arthur and the Sakhalin Islands. This continued with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which eventually bled into World War 2 after the Japanese preemptively attacked the US in order to enable their expansion into Southeast Asia.

During this time, the Japanese self-consciously adopted the ideological, governance and military structures of expansionist European nations in order to avoid being left behind and dominated. That’s why the Japanese parliament is called the Diet, a German word. The Japanese Navy was explicitly modeled after the British Navy.

It was only after the Japanese were thoroughly defeated by the United States and Soviet Union that they transitioned to their current model of focusing on commercial success over military expansion. They were able to do that because, in the wake of World War 2, they were given explicit security guarantees by one of the two major global hegemons at the time.