exoverito

I enjoyed most of my math classes like multivariate calculus and differential equations, though I pursued my BS and MS degrees in CS later in life, and was already independently wealthy so didn't need to take out student loans. I also took many of the core STEM courses first at a California community college, which were honestly quite rigorous, and not obviously lower quality education than what I got at UCSD. The idea that students must go into vast debt attending an expensive 4 year university is dubious.

It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.

Race is not skin color. Albino Sub-Saharans are very obviously not European.

People of course prefer others that share their language, culture, religion and politics. Race is often highly correlated to those.

To ignore the dimension of genetics is to willfully blind yourself to reality.

It's human nature to be "racist" since people generally prefer to be with others similar to themselves. That can be multi-dimensional, ranging from values, cultures, tastes, but race is the most obvious and one of the major principal components of human experience.

Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are effectively ethnostates and they've not had the cultural enrichment yet that America or Europe has faced. Notably, there is rising anti-migrant extremism in the West, because the Great Replacement Theory is becoming increasingly obviously not just a theory.

Yes.

The US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries...

To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century.

Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.

Seems foolish to trust them. The EU is fundamentally undemocratic with the unelected Commission proposing laws and decision making hidden within councils. It has been steadily centralizing and concentrating power, creating a dense web of regulations that have been strangling member states' stagnant economies. Right to free speech is notoriously bad in Europe. The EU is trying to increase military power, and ultimately a centralized European army.

You're assuming mutual exclusion. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Freedom of speech is just as much about the freedom to listen. The point isn’t that an LLM has rights. The point is that people have the right to seek information. Censoring LLMs restricts what humans are permitted to learn.

The obvious problem with nihilism is that ultimately everything is ungrounded and there are no moral truths. Some people are naturally altruistic and feel fulfilled when helping others, others are naturally sadistic and feel fulfilled when torturing others. Nihilism means these are fundamentally equal impulses.

This is why humans invented various religious systems and philosophies to provide grounding for absolute moral beliefs. There's also probably an evolutionary factor at work, where nihilistic societies imploded or were outcompeted by confident cultures which believed absolute moralities. This is being seen today in Europe, with nihilistic progressives having few children, supporting mass migration, resulting in being demographically replaced by absolutist muslims.

Race is obviously biological.. You can determine someone's ancestry and ethnicity by their DNA...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PCA-clustering-Principal...

He says, on the internet.

Stunningly weak mentality. Not surprised to see it on display here, HN is polluted with broken dorks.

If you don't fight back you will be the victim of further abuse. If there's no countervailing force against sadistic psychopaths, they will continue their destructive behavior.

You should absolutely beat the shit out of bullies. To idly stand by out of some misguided slave morality, you permit their evil, and allow the world to become worse.

Psychologically perhaps, but to say physically addictive is not precise.

The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but you risk making the perfect be the enemy of the good. What's worse, being paid less than a 'living wage' or being unemployed? The problem with a minimum wage is that if it's set to 20/hr, but some people are only worth 10/hr, then they become unemployable and have 0 income. Price controls result in shortages. In this case it's a shortage of jobs. Same phenomenon results from rent control, you will get a shortage of space at the enforced price level.

The main solution is to increase economic freedom and reduce regulatory burdens. Allow people to build. Too often they are prevented by restrictive zoning laws, absurd environmental reviews, everything-bagel mandates for diverse contractors, etc. Ironically, big corporations and billionaires often love regulation because it raises the barrier to entry and reduces competition.

Awesome! Much appreciated bro.

And yet... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAsh47yWwAAxU1m?format=jpg&name=...

There is no anti-authoritarian party. Are lockdowns not authoritarian? Do mandates to take an experimental vaccine not violate bodily autonomy? How quickly everyone forgets the widescale censorship and lawfare. Snowden had to flee the country and Chelsea Manning was imprisoned during the Obama presidency.

On a more pragmatic level, take the one-party state of California, and the absurd burden of its regulations. These largely prevent the construction of anything new, as seen in the infamous high speed rail project, and the restricted supply of new housing, pricing many young people out of ever owning a home. Perhaps you don't think regulations are authoritarian, yet they're enforced with the power of the state, which wields the monopoly on violence.

I'm curious what you believe is the point of your comment. For one, it's remarkably lazy compared to the previous poster's efforts in illustrating the inverted scenario. Two, do you believe he or anyone else is going to be convinced or 'seek help'?

It takes nearly a decade to get a mine online, under optimal conditions. If a conflict breaks out and China embargoes the West, what's your plan then?

If you're operating under the idea that we can't expand the supply of water, then you basically believe California is full. It would then follow that you would be against immigration, since more people would only exacerbate the problem.

By your omission I can assume you don't feel that way about leftists? I certainly find tankies and figures like Sartre repellent on multiple levels. He was an apologist for Stalinist communism, downplayed the show trials and gulags, and infamously denounced Camus for his 'naive' rejection of revolutionary violence.

The teachers were all highly motivated and skilled, with a great interest in each student on a personal level. This was the Dunn Middle School, located in the Santa Ynez Valley. The classrooms were repurposed bungalows on a large ranch. I remember my history class was taught by a recent Stanford graduate, and we took notes on couches in a living room. A few times she had brought her hippie dad to teach us how to make bagels from scratch, and shared various musings about how without bacteria / fungi all the dead organic matter would keep piling up forever. The student teacher ratio was about 10:1, and there were lots of character building activities like week long backpacking trips near Joshua Tree, mandatory triathlons, hobby classes on Fridays like woodworking / cycling / hiking. There were about 20 students per grade, and it skewed high income as you can imagine. None of the students were really toxic or a problem, I remember one kid was either autistic / severely introverted, but otherwise a nice dude.

First of all, you misread the figures. The correlation between identical twins reared together is 0.85, while adoptive parent and child is 0.19.

Second of all, correlation coefficients do not scale linearly. A correlation of r=0.85 means r^2 explains 0.72 of the variance, while a correlation of 0.19 explains 0.03 of the variance. In other words, adoptive parents have 0.03/0.72=4% of the effect on IQ as being an identical twin does.

I had a number of good teachers at the various public schools I attended, though the best ones were at a private school.

Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.

It still amazes me that people believe that intelligence has no link to genetics. Down's syndrome is not simply a social construct, Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder from a third copy of chromosome 21, distorting gene dosages and resulting developmental pathways. Nearly all phenotypes are a mixture of genetics and environment, yet some traits have a much higher degree of heritability. For example, height has a heritability of 60 to 80%, once you control for sufficient nutrition it's almost entirely due to genes.

The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:

The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...

If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included.

It's about establishing credibility. You didn't respond with any data or interesting information. Your comments are simplistic, betraying a level of simplicity in your thinking.

I actually enjoy being correctly corrected, however being incorrectly 'corrected' is obviously annoying. Like being lectured by a haughty child, see Louis CK's bit of his daughter insisting they're called Pig Newtons.

Best of luck to you in life.

Perhaps, yet your comments are quite simple, indicating you are not up to the task of understanding these matters.

Gay male marriages remarkably have the lower divorce rates than heterosexual marriages, while lesbian female marriages have higher divorce rates. Multiple studies show that lesbians consistently have far higher divorce rates than gays. This implies a level of neuroticism with females, that they probably do need to be appeased more, and that if you have two needy people who need to be appeased it's probably not going to be a good dynamic.

Needless to say, most humans are unoriginal parrots too, one need only look at the prevalence of memetic desire. Few are capable of artistic genius like Picasso.

One technical definition of empathy is understanding what someone else is feeling. In war you must empathize with your enemy in order to understand their perspective and predict what they will do next. This cognitive empathy is basically theory of mind, which has been demonstrated in GPT4.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

If we do not assume biological substrate is special, then it's possible that AIs will one day have qualia and be able to fully empathize and experience the feelings of another.

It could be possible that new AI architectures with continuously updating weights, memory modules, evolving value functions, and self-reflection, could one day produce truly original perspectives. It's still unknown if they will truly feel anything, but it's also technically unknowable if anyone else really experiences qualia, as described in the thought experiment of p-zombies.

Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription.

The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.

Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.

Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.

China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.

It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.

It seems the selected examples in your tendentious anaphora are entirely about justifying censorship and centralization. Strikes me as ironic, since the hacker ethos has been stridently libertarian, information wants to be free and all that. Now I hear more people like yourself, practically begging for restrictions and top down control. Reminds me of the covid hysteria over 'misinformation' around the lab leak theory and gain of function research. Many reasonable criticisms were censored by the big tech platforms. For example, lockdowns were immensely destructive and have never been recommended policy in response to epidemics, school closures caused significant harm to children who were at no real risk of the virus, Fauci admitted 6 feet of social distancing was arbitrary and not based on any science, and policies requiring cloth masks were not found to have any significant effect in preventing transmission, etc..