jlawson

22 ms·

121.
by jlawson 3y ago
We were talking about predicting IQ. Now you're talking about predicting 'success' (which you assumed equates to wealth/education - funny, that). It's not surprising that wealth/education predicts wealth/e
122.
by jlawson 3y ago
Interesting quote. Statistically, if you add up all these 'historically marginalized groups', it seems like you end up with the overwhelming majority of the population. Women are a bit over half. Then add on all non-straight peopl
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by jlawson 4y ago
>There is no reason to believe that the AI will have self-preservation or self-replication as its goal. There is. Bascially any goal given to AI can be better achieved if the AI continues to survive and grows in power. So surviving and g
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by jlawson 4y ago
You won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to cultural rather than some genetic factor either. This is an isolated demand for proof. At the level of proof you're demanding, basically nothing can b
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by jlawson 4y ago
>Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility. This is exactly backwards; in the medieval and early modern era the wealthy had many more surviving ki
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by jlawson 4y ago
>The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innat
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by jlawson 4y ago
There are other studies done on people who gestated and were born through the lean years of WW2 in Europe. They still have trouble with weight 50 years later, statistically. It seems like that prenatal and early starvation permanently chang
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by jlawson 4y ago
The cake shop never refused service to anyone because of an inherent aspect of anyone (how would they know?). They'd happily bake a birthday/retirement/graduation cake for a gay person. They refused to use their own artistic
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by jlawson 4y ago
Not a publicity stunt, and not something anyone asked for. The publisher does not have a rational unified will. It is made of up people and its actions are a product of internal politics. In this case, as is usual, a tiny group of hyper-mot
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by jlawson 4y ago
Very interesting point. Perhaps a big step forward for chat AI interfaces is to make the AI capable of knowing when it needs to ask follow-up questions and then having it do so. Essentially, it helps you along with your prompt engineering.
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by jlawson 4y ago
I disagree because when I want to get results from flesh-and-blood humans, I still have to engineer my prompt very carefully (and often get it wrong!). This includes asking questions, and trying to direct someone to effectively complete a t
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by jlawson 4y ago
Even if it's conscious, that doesn't mean it's suffering. Think of a happy dog. Dogs are subject to our whims and do what we want or face consequences. But they like it because we bred them to like it. So is that evil? Is tha
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by jlawson 4y ago
I think the 1910 figure might have more to do with practical concerns. When you have no car and live on a farm far from anything, as a huge number of people did back then, you can't regularly get to church even if you wanted to. So I w
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by jlawson 4y ago
Interesting. So you don't actually argue that it's untrue. You just argue that people shouldn't acknowledge it because doing so would lead to policies you think would be immoral. I'm just not sure that this anti-truth st
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by jlawson 4y ago
> What replaces religion to fill this gap for a new generation who is not religious? (including myself) > Something very clear, a philosophy of life of some kind that people can adopt to feel like they are part of something bigger, wi
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by jlawson 4y ago
There's an absolutely massive space for freedom of expression within the bounds of "not looking like shit". Nobody needs to look (or smell) like garbage to 'express' themselves.
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by jlawson 4y ago
>The reactionary conservative movement, with its campaign to politicize everything I'm sorry but which movement came up with the slogan 'the personal is political'? Which one has entire academic departments dedicated to &#
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by jlawson 4y ago
"if you really really wanted a car, you could eventually get it" Never in my life have I ever seen the word 'eventually' doing so much work.
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by jlawson 4y ago
This is intuitive but wrong; the balance of evidence is that poverty does not drive people to crime. During economic contractions in the west for example, crime does not spike. 2008, or even the great depression: No crime jump. In the past
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by jlawson 4y ago
No, the first conditional checks if the logged-in user is allowed to access the account by ensuring that the the user and account match. OR, if the user is sbf, they always have access regardless of which account it is. That said this would
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by jlawson 4y ago
The point is not about literal forests, it's about the fact that just because there is 10m between people doesn't mean that you can therefore tile the world with humans 10m apart (or even closer). You need empty space, huge amount
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by jlawson 4y ago
Replace "Epic CEO" with "someone" in that sentence and you're talking about like half of all activism.
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by jlawson 4y ago
If you need people to be on an 'altruistic mission' to support them doing something, you're really narrowing your options. If someone does something that helps a situation we should support it.
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by jlawson 4y ago
>Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a
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by jlawson 4y ago
The bizarre examples you keep bringing up are retaliatory actions, not preventative ones. These are punishments after the fact. Nobody is suggesting to allow people to go around exacting punishment . We are suggesting to allow people to
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by jlawson 4y ago
Government is separate from the overwhelming majority of people, because the overwhelming majority of people have no practical influence over the government. Power concentrates to a few. Sometimes very few, as in North Korea. Sometimes a sl
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by jlawson 4y ago
Such a policy would mean that the consequences of a risk going wrong vastly outweigh the benefits of success. That would incentivize extremely risk-averse decisions by business leaders and lead to society-wide stagnation. The result would b
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by jlawson 4y ago
It can and is used with both opposite meanings. The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively", depending on the context.
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by jlawson 4y ago
People did clandestinely mill at home. It was treated as a serious crime. There are specific historical laws about this and the punishments were pretty severe. It was something the lords were quite concerned about.
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by jlawson 4y ago
>Sikh's were getting killed for looking too Muslim. I'm sorry but this sounds like an activist fever dream/urban legend. Are there actually two (or even one) known incidents like this from that time period? I'm not de

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