techno_tsar

It's something worth thinking about, because it's trivially true one could be a socialist and socially conservative, the same way someone can be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and so on. More precisely, it's trivally true one can believe anything.

What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.

Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.

The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.

That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.

So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".

The complaint is that if you strip the controls out, then you're no longer betting on diet. Because whoever maintains a fully plant-based diet is drawn from a population that 'probably' smokes less, drinks less, sees doctors, sleeps, blah blah. True.

But nobody constructs elaborate arguments about hypothetical Oreo-vegans because they're worried about hypothetical Oreo-vegans. The same person who wants a randomized control trial about how 'healthy' a plant-based diet is versus an omnivore diet will happily take creatine on the strength of a forum post.

A thought experiment: bet money on who you think will live longer. Someone vegan or someone who isn't. No whining about controls like "how well planned is the diet", how much they exercise, if they smoke, and so on. Just a deadpool bet at a dive bar.

Ultimately, I've never found any of this research showing that vegan diets are good for you to be worth the controversy. It's not that 'veganism' is intrinsically better than eating meat. Fiber up, saturated fats down, and so on, and a vegan diet is a very good implementation of it. I have a feeling the reason why it makes peoples throats so tight has nothing to do with health.

...I did, a few years ago, when I went camping with some friends.

This does make me think about Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions and paradigms, and that paradigms are incommensurate with one another. Since new paradigms can't be proven or disproven by the rules of the old paradigm, if an LLM could independently discover paradigm shifts similar to moving from Newtonian gravity to general relativity, then we have empirical evidence of an LLM performing a feature of general intelligence.

However, you could also argue that it's actually empirical evidence that general relativity and 19th century physics wasn't truly a paradigm shift -- you could have 'derived' it from previous data -- that the LLM has actually proven something about structurally similarities between those paradigms, not that it's demonstrating general intelligence...

This is unreadable slop.

I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book.

It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.

The 'capabilities' of simulated neural networks have nothing to do with consciousness.

I have some family in Hong Kong that lived in public housing for the longest time. Some of the newer apartments were pretty good. 40th floor, nice view, free WiFi.

I agree. You don't need someone's ketamine use to explain why they're a Nazi.

You know who else uses a lot of ketamine? The rave scene, the queer scene, and people treating PTSD. And those are some of the most un-Nazi folks out there.

It's a dissociative drug. It can be used recreationally, it can be used therapeutically, and of course, for medical purposes.

Let's be real. Why is Musk a megalomaniac? Because he is a megalomaniac. The end.

stuff like this gets taught in school? that’s like a take from the 1600s. literally descartes’s argument that animals are just automatons and only humans have minds.

Pretty much created the mind-body problem.

This is completely nuts. Well done.

There's a rigorous proof on Wikipedia, but there's simpler ways to show it.

For example, we know that 1/3 = 0.333...

3 * 1/3 = 3 * 0.333...

1 = 0.999...

You can also do it with subtraction. For example, 1 - 0.999... = x. Assuming x is greater than 0, then it should evaluate to 0.000...1.

But we can't have the digit 1 after an infinite number of zeros. If there truly were a "1" after infinite zeros, it implies reaching the end of infinity, which is a logical contradiction. So x can't be greater than 0.

What’s missing in the Gessen and Silver’s article here is that our ideological backdrop is largely realpolitik. If we’re talking about saying certain things to get re-elected, then yes, the notion of what public opinion is and how that affects potential votes is purely an academic matter. If it’s the case that Palestine alone will torpedo Biden’s re-election, then for sure he will change his tone.

But as Silver points out, it’s not obvious that Palestine is big enough of an issue to affect him. For the most part, Democrats run on being a big tent that represents teachers, unionists, college grads, progressives, globalists, democratic socialists, neoliberals, etc. It’s going to be watered-down, that’s a feature, not a bug. Trumpism is much more straightforward.

The irony in Gessen’s complaint is that the more “fringe” views you see on college campuses are largely correct in a narrow sense: what’s happening in Gaza is a product of The West. We are the Bad Guys. If you look at the world with no nuance whatsoever, then yes, binary logic would say Hamas are the Good Guys. Obviously, that’s insane.

But the colonial West analysis is fundamentally true. It’s true if we set our scope of history to the last century (British Mandatory Palestine) or the last 500 years. It’s true in an obvious sense, in how the US supports Israel today. Historians a thousand years from now will see The West as one long, colonial Empire, and Israel is its beachhead in the Middle East.

The “woke” kids on the campuses see this in a maximally socially constructivist sense, i.e, of course things like cops, oppression, capitalism, etc are all related to Gaza. So much of our way of life is built on violence… but if you’re a liberal (not a leftist!) you still believe you need these things to maintain society… Which is how you end up with Biden’s realpolitik neutrality, which means supporting Israel to win an election.

What Gessen ought to hope for is that public opinion does reach critical mass such that it is guaranteed that Biden would be re-elected if he was pro-Palestine. That is more or less their implicit desire: a free Palestine, but no Trump.

That is not impossible. But it will require a sustained political strategy from the ground up, not from the DNC. And the only viable political strategy is not one of utilitarian vote counting, because that’s what begets this kind of violence to begin with, but appealing to people’s pathos towards the suffering of others.