I think this fits in well with/potentially explain Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon article from John. One of my hypotheses there also proposed banter being a selection/discovery process. This game theory perspective seem to point to the same but with way more detailed and deeper explanation.
Richard Horvath
Karma: 458
Yes, I think they are. For example:
Senator Rand Paul and representative Don Bacon directly opposed Trump on tariffs even though both being republicans
The Economist magazine did the same and even more generally (being openly classical liberal)
Bloggers/intellectuals such as Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Richard Hanania and Nassim Taleb are openly against these again
The econ department of George Mason university has been consistently anti-tariff before and after Trump
I think you might be over-updating from your original post. You had a lot of somewhat unrelated and potentially politically sensitive statements (ethnonationalism, IQ, managerial class, ethics, government debt, taboos, egalitarianism, AI stuff). Even if one agrees with the majority of your points, it is tempting to agreement-downvote due to the minority, especially as they have high valency due to sensitive nature.
The relationship of “Christianity → Christians” is entirely different from the relationship of “Liberal capitalism → Big companies” or even “Liberal capitalism → Capitalists (meaning rich people who own a lot of capital)”.
The first is the connection between an idea and people who (claim to) share that idea. The second one is an idea and entities or people who visibly benefit from the system (*supposedly) based on that idea. However, even if they benefit from it there is no strict necessity for them to share the idea itself. In fact, as their wealth is generally concentrated in (a) particular sector(s) they are better off lobbying for special measures (e.g. subsidies, tariffs, preventing entry of competitors) that benefit their market position. This is actually what we see, e.g. Nvidia lobbying to be able to export their chips to China, Apple getting tarriff exemptions and so on.
The primary economic idea of liberal capitalism is that competition creates the most economic value, and thus elements decreasing that competition should be as few as possible, which is often the opposite of what a particular capitalist or corporation would want for itself. This is also what we see if we look at champions of the idea, who tend to be academics and intellectuals historically, rather than capitalists. In addition, if a capitalist or corporation would fight openly against all tariffs, being successful would benefit everyone equally, but failing and becoming the target of the vindictive administration would only hurt them in particular.
So we should expect academics and other public intellectuals to be the champions of liberalism, as it is very difficult to create legislation where they are the primary focus of benefits or harms without a bunch of unrelated people being equally affected.
*”Supposedly” as they themselves might not share the idea that their success is due to the system but may think it comes from some other factor (e.g. their own skills) independent from it
Whether it’s possible to remodel the code from 1. to 2. without “engine stopping running” is an empirical question about the slipperiness of this particular slope works. Your proclamation that it can’t be done isn’t actually an argument.
Following through to the logical conclusion of the general sentiment would stop the “engine”. Although one could probably come up with some economic/econometric model with an optimal way of taxation for effectively redistributing higher wealth concentration while still keeping wealth generation mostly intact, that is not what people usually ask for. “Billionaire” is not a specific value, it is just the current stand-in word for the outgroup. The actual pointer is to “people who have so much money I consider them to be different from my kind”. If we would just go back 50 years, when household median income was below 10 000 USD a year and property values even more depreciated, redistributing the fortune of millionaires’ fortune would seem as reasonable as billionaires’ is today.
I wonder if this may have been true a (couple of) decade(s) ago, when ordering food was less common and there were fewer pizza alternatives. It is possible that Pentagon guys indeed order more food at such events, but nowadays baseline is so high that it does not bump stats meaningfully.
“However, a Pentagon spokesperson has denied this, telling Newsweek, “There are many pizza options available inside the Pentagon, also sushi, sandwiches, donuts, coffee, etc.””
In my experience food vendors within office buildings close by the end of official work hours and if you work late you have to order from outside.
″...isn’t the experience of me or women I know. Asking men out leads to boyfriends who are generally passive and offload a bunch of work onto you (even when they’re BSDM tops). ”
This is very interesting and a perspective I haven’t considered. Now that I think about it, the women I know who are asking man out have a mixture of outcomes, and while tend to move towards high quality partners long term (especially if they are polyamorous), they indeed complain about having had very passive exes. I suspect asking out removes the filter for proactivity and they are falling back to the base rate with higher chance of getting passive partners due to prevalence in the population. Actually even worse if we assume proactive males are sorting themselves out from the available population. (There may be some additional factor potentially contributing to passivity, but haven’t thought it through yet).
Another observation I have is that they tend to be tops or switches with top preference. Assuming John is correct about nonconsent preference being the prevalent attribute in the general population, I would say they are the inverse, with that being the minority here.
My sample size is single digit though, so YMMV.
“Usually people who do this much model building in this way, and say these things about it, turn out to be concerning, but sometimes they don’t.”
By this do you mean that:
John asserting that nonconsent is the baseline cis female preference in dating resembles to what is stated in openly misogynistic areas of the internet (redpilled/incel/altright), hence you feel he might be in the same category?
“John, I worry you’re going to take bad models too seriously because you’re systematically unable to see some kind of disconfirming evidence.”
Would you be able give some more specific examples about the kind of disconfirming evidence you reckon John is missing? I think that would be the quickest way to show the weakness of his model.
I suppose one important difference is that people usually don’t read assembly/compiled binaries but they do proofread AI generated code (at least most claim to). I think it would be easier to couple manual code with LLM generated, marking it via some in line comment to force the assistant to ignore it or ask for permission before changing anything there compared to inserting assembly into compiled code (plus non-assembly code should be mostly hardware independent). This suggests human level enhancements are going to stay feasible and coding assistants have larger gap to close than compilers did before removing 99.99% of lower level coding.
If the piece of knowledge is not actionable, probably bemoaning it is not a good use time either.
“Yet, Japanese wages are (on a per-hour basis) much lower than US ones, and I think that’s largely because the management culture is overall even worse than in America. (And partly because of some large-scale embezzlement from Japanese corporations involving corrupt contracts to private companies, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)”—this is the first time I hear about this. Could you please share some information regarding why you think this is the case?
You could build an app that blocks scammers or a service that connects scammed people and pursues class action lawsuit to help them. You could also scam scammers themselves. You can recognize before other people that a company is a scam instead of the productive business it pretends to be and get rich by shorting it or gain fame and influence by proving it to the rest of the world.
I think the general message of the quote is that if one believes that they see the world much more accurately than (almost) anyone else, and yet they do not use this supposedly superior knowledge to make their own life better, they are actually not smart, but losers shifting blame.
At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:
-If rationalists want to address the social and epistemic issues postmodernism highlights (power, context, narrative, knowledge construction), they may need a stripped-down, formal version of postmodernism—just as decision-theory formalizations reduce existentialism to operational decision rules, at a cost.
-One of postmodernism’s central concerns is making sense of power, coercion, and violence—especially sexual violence—at a level of psychological and social realism that allows actual prediction and explanation. Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR handled these themes in a way that anyone with an understanding of postmodern analysis of power was filtered out from the community.
I agree with the first point.
The second point might be technically off: A lot of people do not come via TWC and HPMOR, and more importantly, people can acquire the understanding of postmodernism later. It is true though that LW is very mistake-theory focused and selects out (most) conflict theorist. This does not mean there are no rat or rat adjacent conflict theorists. However there is some selection effect pushing out those who are “pro postmodernism” but not those who are against it, even though both are conflict theorists: as mainstream ideas are (were?) primarily influenced/supported by pro postmodernists, mistake theory rats argued against them due to these ideas not reflecting reality. These are in turn used as ammunition/safe place for conservative/anti postmodern conflict theorists. In my experience (via meetups/forums), most rats are indeed cooperative mistake theorists, irrespective of whether they are left (e.g. EA types) or right (e.g. libertarians), but the very few conflict theorists seemed to be of the conservative kind. This is also a possible explanation why Vance is the most politically successful rat adjacent figure.
I am myself thoroughly confused on this point (and for what its worth, a lot of our experience seem to overlap), but I can provide some competing hypotheses:
Some kind of a selection effect: Banter is not the cause of sex, but is a way to discover whether the other person is open for a hook-up. People not into casual sex (either generally or at that particular instance or with the particular person) will produce different responses.
People with similar reference points will recognize each other and the mutual intent and escalate via physicality or discussing logistics/intent openly.
It allows non-interested people to be selected out covertly. This is an important feature as it seems some people feel violated if they receive a (semi) direct inquiry about being interested in hooking up.
Due to different cultures/expectations, people often misidentify the response (typical mind fallacy), which downstream causes things like accidental harassment and the “OMG, I just realized 2 years ago that girls wanted to sleep with me”.
It may be an alternative way to increase the hornyness of the other person if physicality such as dance is not an option.
Whatever the solution is, the effect may be highly (sub)culture dependent. This is compatible with #1, the point being that your local culture may have specific procedure and signs that are very reliable, but in different groups they may lead you astray. For example, if you have a lot of prior experience showing that hours of banter in a generic college study group does not get you laid, but two minutes of chit-chat in a Fetish party does, you will be thoroughly confused and will not escalate when the latter happens again, as in your experience that is just not how it works.
Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/fail/adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/society may be traded away for it.
(I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)
Why? Do you mean that cis women use height only to filter out males that are shorter than them?
If so, I do not think that is the case. Statistics from dating apps (e.g. https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1684629709001490432/photo/1 ) and anecdotal evidence suggest over 50% of American women filter out man below 6 feet in dating apps/sites even though only 1% of American women are 6 feet or taller.
This and the different distribution of ratings (https://shorturl.at/EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.
Because “tall” is context dependent. In Laos the average male height is 163 cm (5″4). In the Netherlands it is 184 cm (6 ft). If your height is 180 cm, you are very tall in Laos, but below average in the Netherlands.
“What does democracy even mean when your vote can’t even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn’t share its values? Etc.”
The concept of nation state is already guilty of this all. The smallest legislature is your city/town/village council, followed by county, and in some cases even a regional legislature-like body. A nation state already takes most of the legislative rights from these and dilutes your votes with millions of other citizens.
Before nation states were invented in the 19th century*, afaik most European laws were actually pretty much locally made and enforced by the feudal lord or town council of the territory. It is feels unfathomable today, but back than a lot of towns had basically the same level of sovereignty as countries do now.
*Technically it started eroding earlier with kings trying to centralize power, but in a lot of places still was mostly intact until incorporation into nation states.
How likely do you think this quality aspect to stay there long-term? Are you able to allocate more time to quality due to having been sped up on the “core” part of development, but expectations haven’t been increased accordingly? When organizations realize they can push out more productivity, speed of development timeline might be forced to increase and quality may drop back to current levels.
Alternatively, do you think paying/preventing technical debt is quicker with LLM assistance than otherwise? I mean as relative cost compared to building out the specific features.
By the way, what IDE are you using with Claude?
I comparable password-pattern I noticed: Options that are clearly longest or most difficult to spell are more likely to be the correct answer for multiple choice type questions (and conversely: Options that are short and easy to spell compared to others are less likely to be correct).
My reasoning is that people tend to spend less energy on less important things, hence won’t take as much effort (time and focus to spell) when creating the bad options.