TimorousBestie

> “Racism” as the word is generally accepted refers to skin color. It has nothing to do with culture.

No idea how you came to that conclusion. There are many counterexamples to this claim.

It’s not racism when, for example, some Koreans discriminate against each other on the basis of skin tone. It was racism when some Hutu did pogroms against the Tutsi.

I agree with mulling. Give up these language-games and just admit that you can’t be a culture realist without also indulging in a little race science.

I don’t have the spare time to look into every voter’s heart, do you?

He identifies as a socialist, sure, but his implemented policies (what GGP was calling socialist) are mostly standard-issue municipal management.

Is it socialism to hire temporary labor for snow removal? To fix potholes? My boring municipality in the middle of a red state does that and nobody calls it socialist.

> Consequentialism in general is a third-world mindset.

Ah, this must be why so many utilitarian philosophers are European and American.

You’ve successfully mangled the definition of xenophobia.

“A strong aversion, antipathy, or fear of foreigners.” Simple as.

It wouldn’t be wrong if you admitted that you want some degree of xenophobia. But I suppose that sounds even less convincing than your preferred abuse of terminology.

> Also, the author claims:

You can slap an arbitrary disclaimer on anything; it doesn’t mean it’s genuine.

> Reza Negarestani's "Intelligence & Spirit"

It's on my shelf, next to Cyclonopedia! Regrettably, I haven't made the time to read either. There aren't enough hours in the day.

> I personally think Land is worth reading (critically)

I agree, perhaps... I think I got something out of slogging my way through Fanged Noumena (although I did throw in the towel near the end--there's an essay written entirely LiKe ThIs and I just bounced off of it, DNF).

If we are talking about accelerationism(s) instead of cybernetics, I much preferred Gruppo Di Nun's Revolutionary Demonology. It's at least written in a human register.

> whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

There are a few small examples that come to mind (co-ops and communes mostly), but I can’t think of any that have been successful at scale. Running an internal market would be almost pure overhead, so if it worked it would really have to be efficient to be worthwhile.

Yeah, I don’t think Land is a great recommendation.

The CCRU produced a lot of talented philosopher/writer/artists but Land definitely went a bit far out there and never came back.

The connection between what the CCRU did and Wiener-style cybernetics is also a little strained. I don’t think a layperson would be all that interested in the former if they were looking for more of the latter.

So you didn’t want a citation after all. Alas.

Here you go, a recent survey: https://www.jgwentworth.com/resources/medical-emergency

> The survey showed that over nine in ten (92%) of insured respondents had delayed or avoided medical care because of concern about cost.

> In fact, 95% of those surveyed said a medical emergency would likely put them into serious debt even with insurance.

I don’t think “political suicide” exists anymore.

Nathan Cofnas, the whistleblower, is a “race realist”:

> Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.

https://ncofnas.com/p/a-guide-for-the-hereditarian-revolutio... (2024)

You can agree with his reasoning or not, but his desired political outcome is unquestionably the removal of almost all Black professors from academia.

> I am interested in different approach to types, using triage calculus, which is more "materialist" than "structuralist" - type is given by the structure of the (quoted) term in normal form (unlike lambda calculus, triage calculus makes quoting easy).

Interesting, dropping this link here for others: https://treecalcul.us/

David Spivak (no relation to Calculus Spivak) wrote a book called _Category Theory for the Sciences_ that could totally serve as the basis for a one-semester undergrad course with some work.

He really likes working in informal categories (like his “ologs”) but I haven’t taught from it yet so I’m not sure if it is more or less confusing to introduce categories that way.

Instead of spending time beating one’s head against Russell and Whitehead, I would advise reading Homotopy Type Theory (aka the HoTT Book). Dependent types are cool and mind-expanding, but higher inductive types are downright mind-altering.

The Little Schemer/Typer could be used as a preparatory text to gear one up for HoTT.

It also has the advantage of being a bit more applicable to functional programming languages, maybe even more so than Mac Lane’s Categories for the Working Mathematician (which I sometimes see suggested to mathematically-inclined Haskell novices).

> As a point of reference, MIT's capstone mathematical logic course[1] has a syllabus that requires at least as much mathematical maturity,

The textbooks they use in that course are written in modern notation and are accessible to a knowledgeable reader; neither can be said of the Principia Mathematica. The archaic syntax is a serious issue.

Back in the day there were some browser extensions for doing it locally, but I’m not seeing any modern efforts.

Alas.

I won’t be surprised when the GAO’s budget is cut next as retaliation for this embarrassing report.

I’m describing about how the term is used by EA folks, which may not match its formal definition. (“In practice, it can be used as. . .”)

> You can only throw up your hands and say "this isn't tractable" if tractability is 0, i.e. the charity doesn't help at all, no matter how much money you spend on it.

Even I don’t believe this. You’ve gone too far in the other direction and made tractability a useless metric.

It’s the “tractability” part of the ITN framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework

In practice, it can be used as a fully-general counterargument to supporting most charities, since decisively and completely solving problems in this space is rare. It’s harder to split a problem into component parts than it is to throw up one’s hands and say, “well, this isn’t tractable.”

> I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.

I think it’s pretty likely. Contrary to all the negative things said about mathematicians in this thread, in my experience they’re mostly not profit-driven (for the ones that are tend to filter out of academia during grad school, it’s a high-effort, low-reward environment).

Tao does not seem particularly threatened by AIs doing math, and I trust his judgment.

She makes a very good point that an algorithm that has bad big-O behavior can be better for humans than an algorithm with better.

For instance, I found insertion sort to be the most effective at sorting papers when I was grading. . . at least, as long as the students bothered writing their names on their homework.

Fair enough, I retract my earlier comment. That's not an inconsistent position to hold. My apologies.

[RETRACTED]

Ah. That makes more sense, thanks.

> There isn't.

My coworkers holding such degrees would beg to differ.

> And if you are trying to snarkily describe an MS, then most MS programs are too short.

It wasn’t snarky, it was a listing of common points between the two. I don’t see what distinguishes this from a MS.

A year still isn’t enough time to write a doctoral-level thesis, so if the I-PhD is supposed to represent a “longer MS” then it’s still insufficient.

Very perplexing.

There’s already a 3-4 year advanced degree in the United States with an optional thesis component that companies in relevant industries can intervene in and direct if they so desire.

So why are they calling it a doctorate? I don’t see the point. It’s not like the NSF under this administration is particularly fond of STEM doctorates.

I’m open to any theories about what the real point of this is.

Sorry, did you intend to link this reply to a different comment?