975 karma · joined January 20, 2020
On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.
On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
Sure, some people are artists - but most aren't.
There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.
Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Let me point out that you must know which half before the fact for this to be of any use.
Sometimes you might be 95% sure no guns are required. Is that good enough? What does that buy you? 10% of calls?
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
0: https://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sw...
N.B.: there was selection for the worse-off in those coming to the U.S.
That said, there is stupid "making it up" and smart "making it up". But it does need to be made up.
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
Current times aren't even that spicy.
It seems crazy to me. Part and parcel of having a pluralistic society is that we treat each other the same in public-facing parts of life without regard for stuff like sex, political positions, etc.
You gonna refuse to accept mail from the postman who supports something you don't like? What about the ice cream shop?
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https://web.archive.org/web/20260310212334/https://fivethirt...
https://reason.com/2025/06/05/is-the-supreme-court-really-th...
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
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