friend_Fernando

> I’d caution against assuming IQ is at all representative of average practical or applied intelligence

I don't necessarily disagree. Unfortunately, demagoguery has paid off handsomely in recent years. It has been refined as a discipline to the point that the "self-destruction gullibility threshold" might actually be much higher than 100.

We can name the professions that won't eventually be wiped out, but not a lot of them are suited (or palatable) to middle-aged dudes.

The most interesting argument is about the ratio of the marginal value of labor to the marginal value of everything else. Let's call it MVLE.

In prehistory, land was plentiful and hunting/gathering skill was scarce, so MVLE was high. In the middle ages, the population had exploded and arable land had become scarce. MVLE dropped dramatically. In the industrial revolution, capital accumulation began, and MVLE began rising. Once labor costs were high enough, productivity became king, and services and information goods became more prominent. MVLE rose much further.

Note the seemingly accidental correlation between MVLE, self-determination and human rights.

Now we're at a crossroads. There's a possibility that MVLE might completely bottom out. One edge outcome is a world with 100 trillionaires, 1000000 concubines, a bunch of butlers and hair stylists, and no other humans.

The key question is: whose utility will be maximized? It's clear that democracy's cracks have turned into fractures. Half of the population has an IQ below 100 and can be gulled into voting themselves into oblivion.

It's starting to look like an increasingly sensible policy IMO.

Gradient Descent?

I don't really buy into the theory that something changed in the last couple years. Men don't change in their 50s (not without trauma anyways.)

This is stuff that was there before and held very very close.

RL Will Byers

I don't disagree on the actual policies, but I have an even darker view. People expect a return to the T1 strategy of making the rich richer. However, that was targeted to a low-power-grip environment, where the goal was re-election. The T2 strategy will be to make everyone poorer (except the rich.)

The T2 goal is to switch to autarchy. It's accomplished with the stick, not the carrot. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina. Trash everything and blame the opposition. Claim that the only solution is to trash everything further. Incarcerate opponents, and pretty soon the remaining opponents shut up or flee the country.

Once there is no opposition left to speak of, switch to the Russian model and to the carrot again.

This article is indirectly saying something critical about a certain someone with a wide following of non-digital and digital beings, so I wouldn't expect it to stay up very long.

We take games for granted now, but in the early 80s the anticipation of what might be possible was something else. The War Games scene where the magazine ad for an unannounced game motivates Broderick's character to start wardialing all the phones in Sunnyvale felt pretty reasonable.

If you read sci-fi, it's akin to the imaginative feelings of space travel and futuristic realities. Back then it was reasonable to imagine that an upcoming game might shift your life into a higher gear.

Have a look at the actual posts to realize why they were flagged. Had they not been, this page would be less than 5% non-cranks.

Even as it is, it's hard to break 10%. Sadly, this seems to have become a flamebait/trollbait/crankbait topic.

All the legitimate studies that did not find masks to be effective had glaring omissions, such as adherence to guidelines. Would you wear the mask properly or let it droop?

E.g. from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8499874/

Results: When the adherence to mask usage guidelines is taken into account, the empirical evidence indicates that masks prevent disease transmission: all studies we analysed that did not find surgical masks to be effective were under-powered to such an extent that even if masks were 100% effective, the studies in question would still have been unlikely to find a statistically significant effect.

This is provably untrue disinformation.

I agree about the response. From a Bayesian perspective, our priors were that society would respond better, and that the pandemic wouldn't be politicized (much.)

Something I find of interest is the set of all conjectures whose Bayesian probability estimates would be significantly revised in light of this discrepancy.

Do not confuse silence with absence. Also, that weird-looking fella in the corner with the bits and vectors sticking out is not really representative.

I suspect it's because of the feeling that the world has gone much further off the deep end since then. In 2017 it still felt salvageable. If the world is screwed, NN isn't as big a deal.

I don't think we disagree here, unless you saw some pro-Ukraine 2024 ads. It's not about left and right. To demagogues, ideologies are just tools of the trade.

They're usually not filtering pro-left or pro-right. They're filtering pro-Russian-faction within the left and right. This usually means extremists that used to have no hope of winning in the pre-Internet days.

These factions are more likely to be beholden to their "troll benefactors" afterwards. But even if they turn out to be ungrateful, the extremism itself is worth pursuing. As you said, confusion and division are useful in their own right.

Add other rogue countries to the mix, and you end up with a nasty filter. We should turn it into white noise, or at least drop its SNR.

Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their interest.

That leaves "mutual assured dialogue destruction" as the only option, IMO.

I think we actually need more bots discussing politics online. Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers.

The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline. Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be silenced, but they can be offset.

Eh, no one really has any idea what production functions will look like in 30 years (assuming no mass extinction of any kind.)

The more interesting question is another. Half the population has IQ<100. Assume a full-demagogy world where a majority can be manipulated to make any decision, voting or otherwise. Whose utility will be maximized?

It's a chaotic, non-ergodic system. Expect a random-walk outcome. One particularly troubling end state is a world with 100 trillionaires, 100000 concubines, a bunch of coiffeurs and masseurs, and no other humans.

OK, will do. I was just imitating others that seem to be doing the same.

Is there such a thing as an acceptable number of accounts per year? (Not fond of the karma system.)

Gaza was heartbreaking, but the story was amplified in the US to suppress progressive turnout. I think I saw the same fingerprints on both sides.

Either way, the Battle of Oil is mostly over. The ME is increasingly irrelevant. Arab leaders predicted this long ago [1].

[1] https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...