All of GLaDOS's Comments + Replies

GLaDOS90

Frito Bandito writes:

So what you’re saying is, sometimes people are too stupid to know what’s good for them and others, and you need a quasi-dictatorial regime to get them into doing it?

Cochran replies:

Most people won’t wear seatbelts. You don’t need a dictatorship: just a government that isn’t crazy. In 1940, the government would have imposed quarantine without much agonizing. Of course, you couldn’t have had a big AIDS epidemic back then.

A government that isn't crazy huh? (u_u)

That problem seems insolvable except it somehow has been solved from time to time.

GLaDOS210

You are being suspiciously simplistic here. Needing to work hard to get a bride is one of the things that most vitally supports a culture of work ethic among men. Very few other things seem to have as big an impact. Most Fields medalists probably didn't work hard primarily because they wanted to attract a wife, though I bet many of them actually did. But the culture of work ethic being normative for men certainly seems vital to supporting their efforts!

To summarize:

  1. Men can attract women with hard work (note not about money per se, it can be status)

  2. T

... (read more)
0John_Maxwell
That presumes economic growth is positive, which is not obvious.
8A1987dM
I dunno about that; after all they were mathematicians, not investors. Historically mainstream society hasn't exactly swooned at “nerds”. -- Scott Aaronson -- MGTOW.com
GLaDOS40

Note that this is an interesting example of a social problem dilemma as Dalrock emphasizes. Talking about something will make it worse, but unless it is talked about the fundamentals will continue to get worse. It generalizes to other problems I think. The best course of action is to beforehand determine if talking about the social problem is likely to result in change to address it, if not it shouldn't be talked about. Your opinions?

GLaDOS50

I want to emphasis that because men have significantly more outliers when it comes to achievement and social outcomes (both positive and negative ) , we should expect such a change in culture to ceteris paribus result in a net decrease in very exceptional achievements. Young men are also responsible for the vast majority of violent crime. We should expect delayed marriage and drop in marriage to push in the direction of more violence as well.

0A1987dM
C'mon, how many of the Field medallists were doing maths in order to earn as much money as possible in order to get a bride? (I agree that that's probably what's going to happen in the medium-long term, but for different reasons.)
5knb
It seems to me that rewards to outliers are increasing overall. In addition, high achieving men also tend to be high-earning people and marriage rates are persistently higher and divorce rates are persistently lower for high-income people.
8Gunnar_Zarncke
Agreed. No. At least not by the arguments brought forth in the post. Young men go for violence because - in the absence of showing off their ability as provider - fight for an alpha male position via force (I will look up references if needed). In the absence of pressure to show ability the violence should reduce by the same amount.
GLaDOS60

I don't think you should. But maybe this is because I feel the same way (;_;) despite being just someone who endorses HBD and dislikes Progressivism but thinks Moldbug wrong. I like this comment you made elsewhere much better than the one you linked to though:

Progressive takeover of a community is strongly empowered by a journalists noticing nonprogressive ideas floating there.

We've been noticing this process for a long time now. I now think I was wrong on this in the past. This should be a sign for what you call the "outer right" that we wi... (read more)

1lmm
What's HBD?
GLaDOS-10

Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data.

He wasn't proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn't that much in academic circles, I've seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.

His basic argu... (read more)

1Douglas_Knight
How does that happen? It's not like people are reading foreign journals at a 10 year lag. Maybe they're reading them in real time and after 10 years of seeing the paper cited repeatedly, they take it seriously. More likely, they're just not reading the foreign journals, but one day they went to a foreign conference and met the author or a protege - not going to happen with interstellar distances.
GLaDOS40

The speed of light is our friend in this regard, but I expect it is more likely we will become very fast, so what is today tiny lag will become very problematic, rather than traveling to the stars. But that is getting ahead of myself, if we don't have competing craziness we might not get starships or mind emulations. (;_;) So how can we get some of the benefit of this today where we are all one with Harvard?

A commenter there writes:

Russia is an interesting case. You’ve got a whole school of Russian linguists, with roots back in the Soviet era, who think

... (read more)
0knb
Kind of a long shot, but monks historically did a great deal of society's intellectual work, and they were often quite isolated. Perhaps they could be persuaded to revive their intellectual traditions in non-theological areas.
GLaDOS00

The point on torture being useful seems really obvious in hindsight. Before reading this I pretty much believed it was useless. I think it settled my head in the mid 2000s, arriving straight from political debates. Apparently knowing history can be useful!

Overall his comment is interesting but I think the article has more important implications, someone should post it. So I did. (^_^)

GLaDOS70

From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong should be written in Comic Sans.

1David_Gerard
4A1987dM
For some reason, my mind is picturing that sentence written in Comic Sans. (Similar things often happen to me with auditory imagery, e.g. when I read a sentence about a city I sometimes imagine it spoken in that city's accent, but this is the first time I recall this happening with visual imagery.)
GLaDOS40

Probably. Possibly. Yes.

0Decius
Can you describe something which is a difference of kind instead of a difference of degree?
0Decius
Is slavery immoral? Is employment immoral? Can morality be a matter of degree?
GLaDOS40

Because the article and the article linked to are two different takes. I did explicitly note they are related.

GLaDOS140

I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right.

-G. K. Chesterton

GLaDOS40

The dissident temperament has been present in all times and places, though only ever among a small minority of citizens. Its characteristic, speaking broadly, is a cast of mind that, presented with a proposition about the world, has little interest in where that proposition originated, or how popular it is, or how many powerful and credentialed persons have assented to it, or what might be lost in the way of property, status, or even life, in denying it. To the dissident, the only thing worth pondering about the proposition is, is it true? If it is, then

... (read more)
ygert130

Wile this is all very inspiring, is it true? Yes, truth in and of itself is something that many people value, but what this quote is claiming is that there are a class of people (that he calls "dissidents") that specifically value this above and beyond anything else. It seems a lot more likely to me that truth is something that all or most people value to one extent or another, and as such, sometimes if the conditions are right people will sacrifice stuff to achieve it, just like for any other thing they value.

GLaDOS00

I wish he accepted the bet, it would increase how seriously I take him (not very much except this article). I'm willing to predictionbook it and make a karma bet on it. Sorry I'm really poor and waaaay to risk averse. Its irrational I know :(

I put 30% chance on BitCoin on your 5 cents benchmark by January 1st 2014.

8gwern
http://predictionbook.com/predictions/14963
GLaDOS30

Interesting, I can't recall an article Moldbug wrote with which I would agree as strongly as with this one. Maybe his recent spur of activity is worth following after all, just ignore the comment section.

1[anonymous]
Gwern's comment was good but about two thirds of the commenter's are horrid.
gwern120

I see Moldbug continues to ignore TGGP's offer of a bet on his claim that Bitcoin will probably go to zero in 2013. I'd be happy to bet, say, $50 with either you or Konkvistador that it won't go to - zero seems unfair, so maybe 5 cents - in 2013.

GLaDOS20

I like HBDish authors a lot so my list will be biased to those blog. Gregory Cochran & Henry Harpending, hbd* chick (~_^) and Derbyshire are cool. Foseti is a must for Reactionaries. Over in the interesting but scary corner we have Federico who seems to have managed among other things to steel man the straw Vulcan (see his now probably deleted Emotion is The Mindkiller post) and Nick Land is the best transhumanist academic continental philosopher I've read in years, which is really low praise but his Reactionary writing is very much knurd.

Enjoy your co... (read more)

GLaDOS280

I disagree with Moldbug on many things, but I disagree with this even more.

GLaDOS30

I consider this an uncharitable reading, I've read the article twice and I still understood him much as Konkvistador and Athrelon have.

GLaDOS20

While it's as hard as ever to make sense of Moldbug's stream of consciousness, it seems like he is stuck in a circular redefinition of "underdog". The regular definition involves comparing priors, while his is comparing posteriors:

While I disagree with quite strongly with some of his content and think he is over-hyped compared to other Dark Enlightenment authors, this seems an uncharitable reading. I'm somewhat familiar with his style and think you are wrong on your interpretation.

1FiftyTwo
Who would you say is 'better'?
5Shmi
How do you charitably interpret the quote Seems like a redefinition of standard terms, pure and simple.
GLaDOS170

His point is that such action would be much more favoured if done against Exxon Mobile than MIT.

3Manfred
Discussion while disagreeing is sort of like two dentists doing dentistry on each other. If both are competent dentists, and calm patients, the operation comes and goes without any blood.
GLaDOS10

Ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Mongols, etc.) have a legally recognized status, with affirmative action policies, (some) exemption from the one-child policy, etc.

By that standard Western countries also don't have one class of citizens.

2Emile
Depends of which country you're thinking of! The US has officially designated categories, but those are pretty much illegal in France, and any official mention of one's "ethnicity" is pretty much a taboo concept (and I found it weird to have to fill in that field in all my paperwork in China). And even the ethnic categories in the US don't seem as "legally relevant" as ethnic minority status in China; the law is (from what I understand) that you can sue if you believe you've been denied an opportunity because of your ethnic background, but that seems much more vague than having explicit ethnic categories, with different laws applying depending on which category you belong to. (unless you were referring to to immigrants, but then they aren't citizens) (convicts would make a better example of a "different class of citizens")
GLaDOS10

Tl;dr: we ought to take note that this is not libertarianism or conservatism, the authors are just using libertarian concepts to make good old progressivism more coherent and effective. I'm totally fine with it :)

It is a libertarian approach to doing progressivism. Those have been tried in the past, most notably much of the progressivism in the first half of the 19th century was libertarian in approach, but I would argue they have been systematically underused at least in the 20th century.

Not that I'm a dirty prog mind you. (~_^)

GLaDOS60

Are you sure you are being consistent here considering what you have noted about gender/sexuality related discussions on this forum? Or do you just think that this is less true of marriage than similar subjects. Perhaps because so few people here are married?

GLaDOS40

Interesting blog post though the story about Paul seems a bit too neat. Is there anyone here who studied the time period, Christianity and the Bible a lot? If so please comment on the plausibility of this scenario.

6Oligopsony
Pretty much everything in Acts is bullshit, there's a lot of controversy over Paul's theology, and the Gospels come after a period of considerable intellectual evolution; so I'm inherently distrustful of this sort of textual harmonization. The basic idea that Paul lowered the barriers to entry is of course solid but also frankly uninteresting (although that's a subjective judgment.)
GLaDOS10

I don't think it did much for Soviet or Chinese citizens.

5Emile
The Chinese don't have only one class of citizens: 1) Ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Mongols, etc.) have a legally recognized status, with affirmative action policies, (some) exemption from the one-child policy, etc. 2) More importantly, the Hukou system is basically a passport/visa system inside China, and migrant workers from the countryside are pretty similar to immigrants (or worse off) in Europe or the US: they don't benefit from social services like schools (they have to send their kids back in their home province, or not have them in school, or send them to a private school), government jobs, etc. The Hukou system is also as hot a topic in China as immigration is the West.
GLaDOS50

China and the politics of human biodiversity

Half-Sigma's probably last post on his old blog. HBD has no future?

I believe that the taboo against HBD will last indefinitely. As the scientific evidence mounts ever more so in favor of HBD, the taboos against speaking about it only seem to grow stronger. In 1994, the Bell Curve was published and generated massive coverage in the media. Now, if it were published today, it would be blacklisted and left unmentioned. I remember first becoming aware of HBD in 2005, when Cochran, Harpending, etc. published their ar

... (read more)
9Eugine_Nier
Assuming HBD is correct, as the west becomes less white, it will also become less intelligent and hence less powerful, this will mean that the Chinese have less reason to care what the west thinks of them.
GLaDOS180

While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries.

--"Sid" a commenter from HalfSigma's blog

GLaDOS60

John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?

The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.

Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.

For

... (read more)
[anonymous]130

My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.

I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this commu... (read more)

GLaDOS10

The differences you must admit are rather large. And would you expect such differences in opinion in say a Physics or Computer Science department by gender or hair colour? I'm willing to bet 20 dollars that differences when breaking down economists by hair colour would be much smaller. I would also expect differences due to age to be comparable order of magnitude but also smaller. I would expect breaking down economists by income or ethnicity would produce similar differences can't say whether greater or smaller.

I'm making these predictions based on my model of this being politics driven.

GLaDOS40

Yay! Thank you so very much, I edited the link into the opening post.

2[anonymous]
You're quite welcome! Thank you for taking the time to say "thank you." :)
GLaDOS110

An interesting question and one that should be easy to answer empirically. The observation attached to it isn't incorrect, but I do think you should remember there is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (~_^)

GLaDOS50

Are the cads outbreeding the dads? by the anthropologist Peter Frost

That natural selection is shifting males to a more caddish build seems plausible considering the wide variety of social changes in the past few decades caused in part by the changed economics of sex, these include the rise of single motherhood and the various indicators showing a relative decline in male economic and academic performance (Baumaister 2012). The question is whether humans had enough preexisting variation on these traits for natural selection to do this so rapidly. I would ... (read more)

GLaDOS60

LessWrong Science: We do what we must because we can.

For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead and haven't opted for cryonics.

4duwease
Also excepting the ones whose consciousness wasn't uploaded into homicidal testing machines, of course.
GLaDOS00

Great! Looking forward to future ones.

GLaDOS190

I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.

Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.

1Vaniver
Some, as a child.
GLaDOS160

LessWrong readers are about the only group of humans on the planet that I can see explicitly describing such rules and then making them work. It is far more common to end up with this kind of arrangements but put up some façade to save face.

-1Athrelon
Yup. Really, I did nothing more than describe elements of the old-fashioned class system and the timeless informal status system, with a few bells and whistles.
GLaDOS70

That is so horrible to hear! My condolences.

GLaDOS00

Perhaps you are right, I sort of pattern matched it to cryonics as something that feels like lonely dissent because while there are other's in the world who support your idea you aren't likely to ever encounter them in your everyday life.

most of them are clowns.

Not among the set of scientists.

GLaDOS70

A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo? by Ed West

As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology,

... (read more)
1fezziwig
I don't think it is. These are not new ideas, there are lots of people wearing this particular clown suit, and the unfortunate thing for Pinker is that most of them are clowns. That maybe strikes you as unfair, but I think even Pinker would agree that the quality of his supporters is uneven, at best. This is just your garden-variety unpopular opinion.
GLaDOS40

On Paternal Age and genetic load from the West Hunter blog by Gregory Cochran.

2gwern
Apropos: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/08/beware-of-the-ancient-of-days/
GLaDOS20

I'm not sure that is a good heuristic, spending a lot of time in somewhere might mean he considers the ideas or at least debating them fun, which is not quite the same as important. If someone was studying my online habits they'd be better off assuming I optimize for fun rather than impact. (^_^')

-2Eugine_Nier
My mental model of Vladimir_M has this not being the case.
GLaDOS-20

Just a few minor political digs in it, otherwise it is an appropriate critique of H's work. I was more concerned with the overall LW climate as I tried to show with my cited example.

1novalis
Do you mean the bit about Catholics, or another bit? I think I'm going to remove that bit. [edit] I did. (I'm asking because I would like to improve the article, not to start an argument) (Although I didn't read that comment at the time, I am also boggled by the "liberal spin" bit, for what that's worth).
GLaDOS80

In other words -- trying to use a language a liberal might understand better -- articles like this make me feel unwelcome.

I'm also starting to feel unwelcome here.

I've been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.

Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being "insufficient liberal spin". Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written... but still what con... (read more)

4J_Taylor
Multiheaded is a delightfully unusual case with delightfully unusual posting goals, who I assumed was rather unlike any other poster here. Was your usage of the plural 'users' solely for aesthetic concerns, or are there other users who have complained about "insufficient liberal bias"?
3novalis
Do you feel that the entire article is a problem, or are there specific bits that bother you?
GLaDOS90

I endorse this recommendation, but I can't help but wonder who is your favourite? (^_^)

5Will_Newsome
Rayhawk, largely because he talks about more important things than does Vladimir_M. I sorta wish Vladimir_M would do more speculative reasoning outside the spheres of game theory, social psychology, economics, politics, and so on—I would trust him to be less biased than most when considering strange ideas, e.g. the Singularity Institute's mission.
GLaDOS10

I wonder if the topic of "moral foundations" would better be considered as "human universals that sometimes contribute to some of the things that get labeled 'morality'." Because plenty of the time, the instrumental ones also contribute to things that get labeled "immorality".

Don't forget pathological altruism for the harm equality foundation.

GLaDOS10

My opinion on the site:

I'm not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don't at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn't ok.

9pragmatist
Here is a statement of editorial policy from VDARE: Based on this, I don't know if I'd classify VDARE as a hate group, but I would classify it as racist. The disclaimer I've quoted comes before a piece written by Jared Taylor. VDARE goes on to describe him as "perhaps the most brilliant and accomplished figure among White Nationalists". This is a man who has written elsewhere: "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears. And in a crisis, civilization disappears overnight.” It might be denotationally accurate that he is one of the most brilliant and accomplished White Nationalists, but I don't like the connotations.
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