jlawson

Can you expand on "that's just dumb"? I don't understand what argument this is trying to make.

All people have different brains; some are very low-intelligence and impulsive by nature and training, and this can apply at any age. The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability of a soul. Abstract principles about whether the person 'deserves' a punishment aren't actually relevant regardless of what shape their brain is. The point is the real-life consequence of their criminality on others, and how to stop them hurting people. We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.

This dedication to abstracted principles and cosmic morality over fixing the actual issue is really problematic; I see this more and more these days.

No, you misunderstood. I am describing [taking part of the whole] not [simplifying the whole] - is that clearer?

Neurons are pretty simple too.

Any arbitrarily complex system must be made of simpler components, recursively down to arbitrary levels of simplicity. If you zoom in enough everything is dumb.

Google's own figures say Whites are not the largest group.

Yes, Whites face systemic oppression by any definition of the word. For example, hiring systems set up that systemically prefer others over them.

> The dominant culture is essentially the "default" and is somewhat "self-reinforcing", so generally has no need of an identity-based support group. Thus, when the dominant culture does establish an identity-based group, it tends to take on a different meaning.

You're being so indirect we're forced to guess at what you mean. Can you please say clearly why you think White must be actually prevented from doing this, when all other groups have already done so?

Not why you think they don't need one - why do you think they must be prevented, even if some of them want to start one?

Quantum entanglement ("spooky action at a distance") doesn't allow for communication, so there's no causality between the particles.

Google is like 45% white, 45% Asian.

Asians have an ERG.

If Whites want to make an ERG, why can't they? What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?

>What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?

The exact same thing as anyone of any other group of course.

To be clear, Whites are a minority at Google. They are also not even the largest group. (Not that this should matter - all groups have the right to exist).

This is easy to say when it's someone you like, not so much when it's someone you don't.

Do you also think a foreigner should be allowed to openly advocate for Nazism while on a green card, without consequence?

It's been proven in the developed world too.

It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent.

It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent.

Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.

If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results.

I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob.

In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.

Let's look it up together. Musk has approximately doubled X's profits from 0.68B to 1.25B.

[0] article quote:

"During the last full year prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) of about $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue.

In 2024, X had an EBITDA of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.

While X’s revenue is about half of what it used to be, the company’s costs are just about a quarter of what they were before.

As per the WSJ, investors noted that these were better figures than they had anticipated."

Even this [1] hilariously biased article is forced to admit in the middle that yes, X's profits have gone up since Musk took over.

"Now X also, of course, has reduced its overheads significantly, by culling around 80% of staff, so X’s profit margins are now much better as a result."

[0] https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-x-doubled-ebitda-since-2...

[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-is-still-far-from-pr...

And it "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life" was the entire thing JD said that would matter, but it's not everything he said.

You're literally just deleting the important part of the message to pretend a supporting comment is "the narrative".

It's hypocritical intellectual dishonesty to pretend JD's point was something other than what it obviously was.

If this is your argument, don't be surprised when people look up the facts, note that you're dishonest this way, and tune you out.

No, you're lying by extracting context. Here's what he said.

Here’s my view:

I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.

We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.

So I say bring him back.

If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.

https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633 --

The part about the journalists is the operative part obviously.

> As soon as one of them (age 25!) was discovered to have written some blatantly racist remarks, the narrative flipped to pleas to forgive them because they’re just kids.

Yeah, you just made that up. The "narrative" about the 25-year-old's remarks was not based on his age. This is the narrative, from JD Vance the vice president himself:

"Here’s my view:

I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.

We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.

So I say bring him back.

If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that." [0]

[0] https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633

Obviously the operative line is the central one about not rewarding journalists who try to destroy people, "Ever". That means regardless of who the target is or their age.

>intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy is so blatant that you can’t possibly ignore it

Hypocritical intellectual dishonesty indeed.

Revenue went down a lot less than expenses. So yes, profits went up a ton and are now positioned to go up even more as revenue recovers and the tech keeps functioning.

The revenue reduction was also more related to political positioning/image than technical capacity of the platform.

Isn't that just because there is a practical limit to how bad at chess someone can be? That is to say, making utterly random moves.

But there is no limit to how good they can be.

So of course the right tail is longer; the left tail is cut off!

"Number of genes is large" is what I said, that's not a missing assumption, I said that explicitly.

The nurture/nature relationship to IQ has been well-studied for many decades. There are easy and obvious ways to figure this out by looking at identical twins raised in different homes, adopted children and how much they resemble their birth parents vs adopted parents, etc. Idealists always like to drag out nurture effects on IQ like it's some kind of mystery when it's a well-studied and well-solved empirical question.

All polygenic traits would be Gaussian by default under the simplest assumptions.

E.g. if there are N loci, and each locus has X alleles, and some of those alleles increase the trait more than others, the trait will ultimately present in a Gaussian distribution.

i.e. if there are lots of genes that affect IQ, IQ will be a Gaussian curve across population.

Really depends how much money you want to spend and if you're willing to wait a bit longer for Starship orbital refueling to be tested.

We could build a more or less arbitrarily large rocket in orbit by adding more and more fuel. More fuel means more delta-V means the probe is faster.

>The fact that people can decide they’re not trans is not particularly material. This is very uncommon.

You really lost us with this.

Many, MANY people dally with the idea of being trans and decide it's not for them. This is extremely common, and is probably the overwhelming majority outcome for all people who are ever trans-curious.

Show your research please.

How many universities are run by the conservative/evangelical wing of the US political spectrum?

The data is poor quality. It's not like you can randomize who gets a sex change operation. And there are major issues with even knowing who to count when people can just decide they're not trans any more. All the research on this is riven with such unhandled problems.

The research is also highly motivated. A researcher who found that sex change operations were harmful would be targeted for endless harassment by gender activists, if they could get published at all.

The people who control Egypt now conquered it 1400 years ago and deliberately destroyed all the cultures that existed before them.

Ancient treasures created by those predecessor cultures are not owned by the people who destroyed the culture they come from. They literally have no connection. Not culturally, and to a large degree not even genetically.

It would be like saying that ancient Native American art is rightfully owned by the Kennedy family.

So that's the moral side.

On the practical side - what a terrible idea, to send irreplaceable ancient human cultural artifacts to be kept in such an unstable, low-trust society. They will not be good stewards. If we care at all about people in future centuries and millennia being able to see these objects, they need to be kept in the most stable countries.

>No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up.

They actually are. CloudFlare will block you, Visa will refuse payments, Google will delist you, Apple app store will delist your app, and you'll be subject to endless legal harassment from activists if your site allows people to communicate substantially out of line with the San Francisco progressive bloc.

Alternatives: foundation, plumbing, substructure, support work, support structure, backend, sustainability, backstage, logistics

Because it's not just equivocation. Read more of the actual original definition/usage of motte-and-bailey.

Motte-and-bailey isn't just an argumentative form, it's also a political strategy. It's people pushing/doing controversial thing A but every time they get called on it they bring up uncontroversial thing B. Or, they even retreat to thing B, but then when the pressure is off they come back out and start pushing/doing thing A again.

"Equivocation" covers a wide variety of situations, but motte-and-bailey is more specific and includes the notions of a strategy executed over time which includes action.

If someone in my home is daily screaming at me, shitting on the floor, stealing things and threatening children - they're going. Roommate, relative, doesn't matter. They're out, or I am.

Someone's claim to live in a good community ends when they start actively destroying that community day after day. You get the community you work to build; you don't get to live in my wonderful community every day while you daily do horrifying things to ruin it.

This is the only way good communities can exist.

Always terrifying when a utopian and deadly policy is enacted, and leads to more horror and death, and its proponents just insist that we didn't enact it hard enough and demand to go even deeper.

There's mountains of skulls that way. It's been done, so many times. Please stop pushing us towards hell.

And yet you do it every day when you decide who to associate with and invite into your life and home.

Why can't the community do the same thing you do personally?