@jdcmedlock From where I’m standing it seems the left is constantly winning, at least on social policy if not economic. Gay marriage, weed slowly legalizing, Obamacare survives trump etc
Nate Silver looks at his model output, sees that it doesn’t match his priors, tunes some parameters, adds some correction terms so the output matches how he feels and then passes this off as a science https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1228014411115266048
The one thing that broke my brain is when the chapos started saying Nate Silver “bent the knee” when his models started predicting a Bernie victory https://t.co/R5foWTnU9R
@jdcmedlock I can already feel the Bernie galaxy brain working on me. Take strong af left wing view -> align moderates with someone who would’ve been otherwise considered a leftist
@aquariusacquah But she’s admitting that the only electorally possible thing is the public option which is what we’ve all been saying all along. M4A is left wing of all major countries
@apoorvasriniva1 i'm not sure if i could explain it well, but it's got something to do with the feeling of being anchorless in the vast digital ether. and endless torrent of information, and not an ounce of knowledge
@apoorvasriniva1 i am not a talented writer so i doubt i could explain my condition well to someone else. that's why i'm hoping greater minds have done the hard work for me
@A_G_Benson this stuff definitely, but also the dark corners of reddit, and 4chan's /v/ and /sci/ and stuff. i also feel that i've searched out weird twitter as a young adult because it emulates a feeling i knew well as a child
The tech elite have $$$ while tech journos have the credulous attention of the mobs. Party A wants what party B has and Party B wants what Party A has. That’s why they both hate Elon Musk, who has both
@Sharon_Kuruvila ive never noticed this. my Indian American friends have a broad appreciation for Indian culture but think Modi’s a fascist. Is India part of the West?
@Desis4Pete@Sharon_Kuruvila my hunch is that the folks who attend the modi rally are almost universally first gen i.e. direct Indian emigrants. Would be interesting to see the stats
the reality: m4a bill introduced to congress on day 5 of sanders presidency. killed in subcommittee after 1 hearing. introduces a new public option bill. killed in senate https://x.com/AOC/status/1228111780456603651
@AndrewSolender what i say: "sanders will lose 45 states and the map will be painted red for generations"
what i mean: "sanders will lose by 1% of pop vote instead of win by 2% and lose the election either way"
@FlawedRubi@Cullen_OK extremely GMU professor voice: we have a collective action problem, since the iterated nash equilibrium suggests that rows 1 through n-1 will recline and row n is unable to recline
@uberfeminist@Desis4Pete@Sharon_Kuruvila certainly an overly prevalent idea that caste differences were enforced/enhanced by the british when the jati genetic boundaries go back millenia in the DNA evidence. this is not something the average indian american has an opinion on though lol
@MikeIsaac the general consensus is that you can’t even take the basic facts mentioned in the tech media is accurate, because it is ignorant at best and malicious at worst. It’s best read as a public sentiment thermometer.
@WilliamGrobman@Cullen_OK i've been saying this. the future of airflight is being put into some state of suspension or just medicated sleep, thrown in a coffin, stacked completely full, and then woken up on the other side
@bufordsharkley@Tyler_The_Wise@BadEconTakes my answer doesn't change. a universal income floor does the job you describe better than any sort of centrally planned universal food floor
the future of airflight is being put into some state of cryostasis or just medicated sleep, thrown in a coffin, the flight stacked completely full, and then woken up on the other side
@GerEEEEldo the bed pods are great until you need to pee, and then all the climbing up and down becomes a nightmare especially for seniors and others with accessibility problems. the 14 hour transcontinental marathon voyages will really suck too
thinking about politics as an engineer is excruciating because there are these orders of magnitude improvements in efficiency that are just sitting there ripe for the picking, but pigheadedness and politics makes them impossible
@traditionrevolt there are obviously tradeoffs to any strategy, and we can bicker over the tradeoffs. but there are legitimate pareto improvements that we are every day choosing not to take.
@PyreResonant money is an easy constraint, since it's very easy to reason about mathematically. in my eyes an amount of money or tonnage of steel are equally easy quantities to think through. public opinion is not. the china engineer thing is mostly their propaganda.
@traditionrevolt the most excruciating thing is the situation milton friedman described best. let's say there's a cartel controlling bread prices. they may only control a small % of the vote, but they care deeply. everyone else is mildly inconvenienced, and won't change their vote based on it
@traditionrevolt This is the socialist framing of it which I don’t think is accurate; it’s controlled by thousands of factions of feuding elites, many of whom have competing interests
@Yozarian22 not sure. i'll have to think about this one. too many second order effects. for example, a good and popular idea X may have many blind supporters who support it for bad reasons. ergo the average argument in favor of X may be bad.
@Yozarian22 one thing that's unambiguous is that if someone is making an overly emotional argument, or expressing the wrong emotion when arguing something, it's likely to be wrong. i.e. would be humanitarian warmongers who take a very macho tone
@koaleszenz it's kind of awful to have a political outsider take control of party like this, but have to keep in mind that bernie is also an outsider with massive fundraising. if he loses, that's fair and square.
@koaleszenz steyer has spent twice as much money as bloomberg has, three times as much money as bernie has, and made 0 progress. I think it's pretty clear you can't buy elections without some x factor, self-funded or otherwise.
@derivativeburke i mean these things are already ridiculously cheap. why not buy the $25 high tech echo dot that can do incredibly cool things in tail scenarios?
@derivativeburke then you clearly value your privacy more than 99.99% of consumers. personally I think amazon probably doesn't give a shit what you or I are talking abt in our homes. even if they were recording, it wld be incomprehensibly hard to analyze that data and the rewards would be tiny
@MIC_is_Life I’ve read the Weyl proposal which was interesting but seemed kind of nonsensical to me. Data unions would become the rent seekers and maintain all the profits themselves. Exactly like how labor unions capture much of the benefit through union dues
@Iiberty_prime@TPeytn It’s a huge stretch. If I have a conversation with you, as I’m doing now, that data can not be said to belong to either one of us. Since we’re doing it in public it might be said to belong to everyone at once. Some are better at utilizing it than others.
@seeingthecat@MIC_is_Life nothing wrong with it, other than that the journalism industry is hemorrhaging its profit margins since it used to have a near monopoly on advertising. now it has to compete with internet giants, and it's not having a fun time. journalists are loud and they complain a lot.
@koaleszenz i would've said number 2 until i realized almost everyone who's into astrology is doing it in an ironic or post-ironic way. i'm not sure what the religious are doing
@uberfeminist it'll end up being the same deal for land use and zoning
>why am I paying a 22 year old 400k a year to live in san francisco?
>holy shit let me call my lobbyists
@pavanvan I think the point is not for you to hate the rich family, but despise the system of living that encourages the protagonists to become Parasites. It’s a movie without villains
@pavanvan the father even says that rich people are nicer because “money smooths the rough edges”. What sets Parasite apart is its refusal to make a crude parody of rich people that doesn’t gel with people’s everyday experiences. The kind of person who watched an int’l movie is rich
@ankitshah@krrishd i.e managing healthy diet, regular exercise, social life all while obsessively working on something difficult. I can do two of these at a time at best
January 28th one of the heads of the Harvard Chemistry department is fired an expert in manufacturing nanomaterials (usable in bio weapons) for his secret labs and research in none other than China’s WUHAN University of Technology
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00291-2
@Thingthingerson@koaleszenz If allocation of funds is the question then Bloomberg seems to have won this fair and square. After all how’s that any different than trump focusing on digital advertising vs Clinton’s traditional media strategy
@antirobust Seems much harder to decarbonize an “atoms” based company than a “bits” based company. Not quite so impressive re: Facebook using solar for its data centers and offices
@ESYudkowsky Yeah that’s what I’ve been saying. I’m sure there are people with significant market power trading in the public US markets with access to uncensored Chinese government data. It’s just too big of a secret to hide. If our markets aren’t panicking, I won’t panic
@averykimball@_vivalapanda the beauty of it is that the creator can guarantee that for every constant number k generated tweets, there’ll be one good one. We know this because he wouldn’t have undertaken this project if there was no reasonable k
@averykimball@_vivalapanda If the bot has narrowed the near infinite space of tweets to the general vicinity of absurd humor, it has done most of the work, wouldn’t you agree?
@averykimball@_vivalapanda But of course, each of us who contributed to the train set by posting online didn’t originate language and humor and literary references ourselves; we also learned from imitation. drilbot does what we do, albeit less efficiently
@averykimball@_vivalapanda You could argue much more efficiently if you include the whole billion evolutionary process that led to our brains and their capacity for language processing
@averykimball@_vivalapanda If we learned only by trial and error, all of us would be dead. I would argue that the ability to pick up seemingly useless traditions from our parents and grandparents proves that at least part of what we’re doing is learning by imitation
@averykimball@_vivalapanda Difference between pen and paper / table lookup vs ML algo is inference and extrapolation. I think it’s a pretty complex philosophical question where table lookup becomes inference but my suspicion is that our modern ML does things that are very similar to animal brains
@jdcmedlock the UBI/income floor is the correct move. Best to let people decide how they’re going to retrain themselves. Yang made a good point about the extremely low success rate of government run retraining programs
@similaralterity@vgr Interesting and yet I trust the prices more than any individual analysis. I hope this guy convinces Guggenheim to take a short position worthy of the catastrophe he’s predicting
in many developing world markets, nearly every good must be haggled for. consequently, the villagers in India all have encyclopedic knowledge of the prices of various things and are constantly contributing to price discovery, whereas I just buy @ whatever price Amazon names
@RCAFDM@jdcmedlock@MarcosLo_ how much of this can be attributed to “evergreening” or doctors that prescribe slightly modified brand name drugs over similar generics?
@CascadianSolo If you evaluate animal ag from the lens of an alien who arrives on earth you would realize its obvious cruelty. The fact that we breed billions of them for slaughter only makes it more disturbing
@CascadianSolo I think the carbon emissions angle for going vegan is a rather stupid one; the drastic utility loss/ immorality is better. If you don’t believe that there’s a step change from animal to human, that intelligence is a sliding scale, then veganism is an unavoidable conclusion
@RCAFDM@JonWalkerDC@jdcmedlock@MarcosLo_@xpostfactoid So, if your analysis is correct and it’s the quantity rather than price that’s gone up, and it’s in correlation to aggregate demand, then fully socialized medicine would see similar prices and quantities yes? This is in comparison to the cartel price busting argument
Accepting zero growth is basically giving up; if we do that we’re lost. There are entire worlds left to conquer, and advanced countries are the ones to do it. Step on the technological gas pedal. We don’t rest until Every Man’s A King https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1229838878116216832
@andrej_haulis Your example is probably transgenics. Eugenics is specifically selective breeding. For example, i believe in Iceland parents select embryos unlikely to half a set of common genetic ailments and as such the rate of Down’s and other simple genetic diseases has fallen to near zero
it's literally all going to nonprofits and research funding you absolute buffoons. in fact I wish she was right, because i'm sure Bezos could use it more effectively as a green investor than the NGOs can https://x.com/hermit_hwarang/status/1229881180889198595
@infotranecon@jdcmedlock you are being uncharitable at best then. there's a world of alternative hypotheses to explain this, the simplest being cost syndrome
@infotranecon@jdcmedlock so if we agree there is some correlate between AIC and healthcare spending, then we can argue over causation. cost disease could be a direct function of cost disease, in which case all countries suffer from this and USA is no outlier
@infotranecon@jdcmedlock granted the rest of RCA's post drives home the point that this is not true, that prices are stable and quantities are increasing. but you didn't take the time to address any of the other charts in your post
@dickcheneyscou1 if it's just a 3% correction then I'm not really impressed ... I'm pretty sure the Hong Kong protests moved markets more than that. If equities trend downward over the next week then that's a different story
@Noahpinion I think the first trump term has been underwhelming from the context of liberal doom and gloom. A second term would be worse, but still not apocalyptic. America has made it back from worse circumstances than this. And I don’t get your last point at all.
@Noahpinion Trump is a “chaos monkey” for our institutions. If he can single handedly degrade and destroy them in 8 years, they weren’t very potent to begin with. I’ll posit that our institutions have degraded for other systemic reasons that switching presidents won’t fix
@Noahpinion First and foremost, the total collapse of partisan control over presidential races, and the collapse of traditional media to internet related disruptions. Finally, The trad media like NYtimes is slowly corrupting itself to become more like the things that destroyed it
@Noahpinion@teasri@mioana@mattyglesias@oren_cass You can probably think of peoples social preferences as a function of the average consumption of people they interact with. You won’t be happy if all your peers are richer than you, etc. can even model it as a random walk perhaps
@jdcmedlock@stockton_ag consider it an investment in the future of civilization. short term thinking is too pervasive. even the childless value abstract concepts like “Science” or “America”, so rational ones would be happy to contribute to the prolonged health of their favorite institutions and ideas
@Sharon_Kuruvila I think adhikara means “authority“ here but I could be wrong. It’s possible certain sects of Hinduism prohibit women from reading the holy texts
@Sharon_Kuruvila Much of the Hindu nationalist discourse is an uncanny mirror of the “great replacement” discussion that goes on in alt right / white nationalist forums too. We live in a strange time
@Sharon_Kuruvila If there’s anything I didn’t expect the internet to cause it’s this “globalized nationalism” phenomena. Seriously makes no sense to an internet optimist like me. Here’s hoping it’s just a phase, as we develop better “societal antibodies” to social media
@Sharon_Kuruvila I’d be hard pressed to name a single sci fi author that expected this either. Most took the internet to mean either runaway capitalism (cyberpunk) or luxury or luxury space liberalism
@Sharon_Kuruvila A lot of journos unashamedly spend 2017 writing opeds about how they expected Facebook to cause this swing to the right and that the tech elite with their globalist dreams should’ve taken “a single humanities class” etc.
@traditionrevolt@Sharon_Kuruvila In 2000, folks were arguing that the internet would show everyone how similar they are on a global scale. In fact, that’s what it has done for me. It’s why I’m a liberal humanist. I’d say this is revisionism, and it really wasn’t obvious from the outset
Interesting to note that many in the alt right and Marxist lite circles are atheists. Richard Spencer hates Christianity because it’s too universalist and accepting of different races.
@MattOsterndorf I know the popular center right take is about government backed student loans, but I think the answer is simpler. The college wage premium has gone up, and universities are accreditation factories. As such, they’re rent seekers that capture more and more of the wage premium
@Teleonomic@MattOsterndorf This is a function of being able to maintain the admin state. You’ll see that the most competitive industries never have wasteful administrative bureaucracies.
@aquariusacquah It’s the same thing wrapped under a different aesthetic isn’t it? The end goal is the same, that companies shouldn’t scour the globe for the cheapest labor. Doesn’t matter whether it’s China you hate or Big Corporations.
@aquariusacquah You say both parties but it’s really only DJT and Sanders that feel this way. Obama was getting ready to sign TPP and most republicans were on board too.
@aquariusacquah And I think if you asked sanders he’d be reluctant to say that American trade contributed to Chinese poverty reduction. He may think it, but wouldn’t say it out loud. At least Hoover inst people are honest on that
@patrissimo@Noahpinion in the US, 1% additional unemployment leads to approx. 40,000 deaths. Is there a similar way to measure the mortality stats of lost productivity worldwide?
Elizabeth Warren not only sent her own kids to private schools, she wrote a manifesto called the "Two Income Trap", that among other things, advocates strongly for voucher based school choice in a charter system. She lies through her teeth
@man_ditch I don't believe that if you believe something strongly enough to write a whole 300 page book on it, you're gonna completely flip positions on it within 15 years. it's clear this is a political maneuver.
@man_ditch Not to say that political maneuvers are bad or anything. I love me a skillful position pivot. it's just hilarious that she did it with absolutely no grace at all, like hillary pivoting in 2016 to bernie's platform
@aquariusacquah man's a nerd. he's probably smarter than everybody else on stage (save maybe warren & bloomberg) but his personality type is just something that americans do not value
@aquariusacquah hmm I don't think this is true at all tbh. There are lots of people with very strong convictions who never see the light of day. Bernie's the exception and not the rule. There are lots of people who are machiavellian power grabbers that make it very far
@GeniesLoki@Noahpinion is anxiety a desire? I'd argue that desire and anxiety are orthogonal. Even if I modified myself to desire different things, I might still be anxious about getting those things
@Noahpinion@antirobust Egan has me convinced that d-modding yourself is the same thing as dying ... I'd love to be proven wrong though. The short story "The Walk" hit me hard
@Noahpinion@antirobust yup, if we accept that humans are no more than a pattern of information, every conscious moment alters that pattern and kills you. SAD!
@GeniesLoki@Noahpinion I think it's not inaccurate to say that humans come with a hierarchy of desires, some more 'axiomatic' than others. my wager is that people don't change their highest level desires very often.
@outofingroup@Noahpinion by changing the parameters of the objective function you've created a new pareto frontier, but these outcomes will be either just as good or suboptimal in the original objective space, wouldn't you agree?
@sonyasupposedly unfortunately 'politically homeless' usually points to a different kind of insanity. at least the normies manage to get through their days without tripping on their own aesthetique
@dickcheneyscou1 Yup I’m eating my words. What I still don’t get is why Wall Street didn’t know this sooner, when everyone was already panicking about corona
@jdcmedlock@danfarina@Noahpinion@ryanlcooper What’s wrong with a good bit of inegalitarianism? It’s the rich guy paying an arm and a leg for a luxury electric vehicle that makes economy class EVs possible for everyone else 10 years later. It’s the same with medical devices and procedures
@jdcmedlock@danfarina@Noahpinion@ryanlcooper I can see that, although aren’t you then eliminating some kind of market signal indicating there should be more facilities and doctors doing knee surgery?
@Cullen_OK Someone in my replies informed me that WHO actually removed the official pandemic classification, so I’m wondering if this is the easiest free money ever ...
@Noahpinion@eean I mean ATM we have competing global megapools of capital, and portions of capital gains going to tax streams, so what's the difference? Is it market socialism when capital gains hits 100%?
@Noahpinion@eean that's contradictory is it not? how can you have democratic control and portfolio managers at the same time? and if it's just the portfolio managers in control, how is it any different than hedge funds where managers get a cut of the profits?
@eean@Noahpinion i'm not sure it matters who they're nominally working for. if fund manager A controls Facebook and fund manager B controls Google, then they necessarily have to work to kill the other company using whatever means available, democratic ownership be damned
@jachaseyoung Historians then: the Roman emperors until Aurelius had discovered the PERFECT way of living
Historians now: if you examine these figures, you’ll see that my thesis is sometimes maybe correct
@jachaseyoung “ If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. ”
@noampomsky There is absolutely no way Facebook can read your iMessage texts, and they aren’t installing keyloggers lol. Your friend has been a victim of the Law of Large Numbers
folks are way too optimistic about what facebook has the capacity to analyze for ads. you'd shudder if you knew what kind of processing it would take to read every image in your camera roll and listen to every word you say
There’s basically two arguments you can make here: that it doesn’t work, or that it’s immoral. If the first one is true, it’ll solve itself. The second argument requires you to also be skeptical of real life line managers and other forms of performance review https://x.com/joshdzieza/status/1233445701914251264
@AnikVJoshi@Sharon_Kuruvila Gandhi-Nehru socialism, let’s call it. An example of Gandhi’s early influence was his rejection of polyester clothes (industrial, capitalist, expensive) vs hand woven cloth from villages (his famous dhoti)
viral patterns of information thrive when they have good memetic qualities i.e. reproduce well, take more mindspace than other ideas, and increase the fitness of their hosts. what the kids are calling "Lindy".
Someone will have to explain to me what the appeal of The Foundation is. It’s not particularly compelling as hard scifi, it’s not really great as Space Opera.
@graue in most of the california power structure, it's impossible to be anything but a democrat. there's a moderate democrat wing and a progressive democrat wing, and nothing else. many of the UMC professionals throughout california find themselves at the moderate edge
@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb if there's one thing i won't forget about this primary it's the predictit commenters spamming "BREAD PRICES PLUMMETING" when pete's doing bad in the polls
@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb i think there is a conspiracy-mongering and adversarial bent in the bernie camp that's atypical of any other candidate in this primary
@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb adversarial is fine (it's politics after all) but it's the affinity to conspiracy that gets me the most concerned. sometimes it's indistinguishable from MAGA stuff
@LittleKeegs0@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb if anything it looks like biden and pete didn't get speaking time commensurate with polling lead and delegate lead respectively
@LittleKeegs0@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb the media backlash to chris matthews saying this was stronger than anything chris matthews actually said. it's completely fair if some of the old media personalities aren't a fan of him. reports of the 'media blackout' are greatly exaggerated
mind-body monism is absolutely apparent to anyone who either has or knows someone with a potent neurological disorder. electronic waves crashing against the neural shores
@jdcmedlock@roadtoserfdumb agree that those are silly, but the sheer numbers of people who support bernie and his surrogates online drowns out any of the complainers. you probably have your finger on the centrist pulse more than most
dopaminergic systems working with GABAergic systems in a delicate dance to produce the phenomenon of consciousness. exceed one side of the boundary conditions, and the mind shuts off and you have epileptic seizures
@ScronkfinkleAi Simply a conceptual abstraction layer. Thousands of ants working together create a superorganism called the colony, but there is no “ant / colony dualism”.
@aquariusacquah most of the prestigious colleges will let you go for free if your parents are under a certain income level yeah? it's cheaper to go to harvard than state schools for low income applicants
@IRHotTakes Europe has always been on the authoritarian side of liberal and gets a free pass due to welfare state stuff. I think the US is increasingly heading in that direction.
@ScronkfinkleAi sorry, i'm not familiar with the formal philosophy surrounding the argument. if you're asking about my actual beliefs i'm pretty much a strict physicalist / materialist
@ScronkfinkleAi but I think my original tweet was from a narrower emotional level: it's instinctually apparent to people familiar with neurological diseases that there is no immutable personality or mind that's separate from the macrostate of brain activity.
@marthsshinedair Thankfully I didn’t bet on NH or NV. But I am taking losses in Maine, some predictit whale convinced me Biden would win but that was absolutely stupid
@MikeIsaac Perhaps there is a difference between being slightly nudged to click a button and install an app vs going out and voting? The earned media on Facebook is far more important for candidates than the paid media. But I spoke a bit rashly
@MikeIsaac Marketers have long realized that Facebook is quite good at instant conversion ads and quite bad for long term brand building (which is what a campaign requires)
@aquariusacquah I mean are any of those things actual facts? I sure think he has meaningful policy points. His climate approach is stronger than any opponents (pro nuclear, pro carbon tax). Automatically enrolled public option is universal healthcare
@DCdownunder@David_desJ@paulg Yeah but this reasoning presumes you say no to all bad things and say yes to good things. Simply saying no requires no skill
@JakeGrosek@David_desJ@paulg his job was to say no diligently to bad ideas and pursue the good ideas fiercely. that's very different than not doing anything at all for years
@sonyasupposedly Different people consider different things intuitive tho ... ISIS members probably think it’s intuitive that killing the infidels is good
@dickcheneyscou1 That was a good read. And Scott makes a good point that the Koch’s are “true believers”, which is why they have an organization devoted to spending their fortune on fighting for small government. So are there no other “true believers”?