ilzolende:

libhobn:

westsemiteblues:

goldhornsandsteel:

antisemitism-eu:

wombatking:

fromchaostocosmos:

kvetchandkvell:

shei5zahir:

kvetchandkvell:

shei5zahir:

zanabism:

jibril:

#decolonizeyourtastebuds there is no such thing as israeli food, there isn’t even just one blanket term for Palestinian foods, like every other country it’s always region specific

Israel taking traditional Palestinian food and claiming it as their own is 100% an act of erasure and violence. they are quite literally trying to usurp Palestine’s land, history and now even their culture it’s evil. 

One of the considerable components to genocide is cultural genocide where the persecuting party attempts to remove cultural significance from territories occupied. This is 100% an example of that. 

You can look in an Israeli cookbook and find meals from every continent.
They’re stealing from everyone.

I spy three goyim with no understanding of Jewish history or culture

Which is ironic because many of your families’ countries are probably the cause of Israel having such a diverse cuisine…. That’s diasporic violence for you!

Me personally, I commented solely on the Israeli cookbook I chanced upon that literally stated the country of origin of every meal, none of which were Israel.
I’m not denying existence of Israel, and I’m not being anti Semitic.
Don’t blow everything out of proportion.

You’re literally calling us thieves of cultures from around the world? The Jewish diaspora is worldwide. There are Jews in China, in the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America… We were forced out of many of those countries where we had lived for perhaps thousands of years and took our cuisines with us, to Israel. Over 50% of Israel’s population is Mizrahi. We’re not “taking traditional Palestinian food” or committing genocide. It’s our cultures we’re continuing. We’re not stealing, stop playing robbed Cossack.

& I never accused you of denying Israel’s existence.

See when goyim say Jews stole the culture what they really mean is:

 “those fucking Jews couldn’t just die no they had to keep living and blend their Jewynes with the places they’ve been and been chased out of. Why can’t they just fucking die already.”

I mean, I constantly hear the bullshit that “Jews are appropriating middle eastern food and culture”, but how do you repeat something like “Jews steal culture from all around the world” and still think you’re anything but a vile Jew-hater?

Yeah, I was wondering how long it’s going to take people to start accusing us of stealing schnitzels.

Americans better stop eating hamburgers and pizza…

Guys, let’s try this all over again: Many Israeli Jews are from communities that traditionally cooked Middle Eastern foods.

These foods took off with other Israelis because they are made from local ingredients, suit the climate, and taste good. (Also because Yemenite immigrants in the early 20th century apparently managed to launch a whole felafel industry.) Things like hummus have now been eaten by all Israelis for at least three generations or so.

Other Israelis have roots in communities that cooked other stuff. Sometimes they make this stuff too.

None of this is hard to understand.

what do people expect? jews who returned or were born there or live outside israel or whatever should just eat tasteless gruel made of psyllium husk and oat bran, to make sure no one’s appropriating moroccan/ukrainian/yemenite/spanish/whatever food? 

i mean, i guess if jews just stopped eating that would solve the problem of jews existing. wait… ah, now i get it. it would be better if we just didn’t exist, wouldn’t it?

did u know that… copying not-copyrighted things and then citing your sources is stealing?

Like, hot dogs are from Germany and pizza is from Italy, and yet you could make an “American food” cookbook that included both of those.

There is nothing new under the sun, all work is derivative, etc.

EURASIANS STOP EATING POTATOES RIGHT NOW YESTERDAY

plain-dealing-villain:

the-grey-tribe:

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

Now with a scoring guide (choose one or none from each sub-category)

Age:

• 21-25 years +1
• 16-20 +½
• 26-30 years +½

Jewishness:

• Yes +1
• Kind of + ½

Gender:

• trans woman (regardless of hormone usage) +1
• any kind of amab using estrogen +1
• amab non-binary (no estrogen) +¾
• other non-cis or dubiously cis (afab trans, agender, magic button trans, etc.) +½
• cis by default (not magic button trans) +¼

Poly:

• Yes +1
• Kind of, or open to the idea +½

Sexuality, part A:

• gray-asexual or demisexual +1
• asexual +½
• asexual and kinky +1
• kinky +½

Sexuality, part B (replace “sexual” with “romantic” if doing so would give you a higher score):

• bisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, any other kind of “gender isn’t really such a big deal"sexual +1
• any kind of “gender isn’t a massive deal but it’s somewhat of a deal"sexual +½
• gendersexual, but would take the bisexuality pill +½

Gifted child:

• very +½ (eg. peerless in one’s childhood environment, or not peerless, but with a highly unusual peer group)
• quite +¼ (eg. one of the highest-achieving in one’s slightly less highly unusual peer group)

Badbrains:

• at least 2 of: ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression at least to a sub-clinical but noticeable degree +½
• one of them +¼

Field:

• CS student, or working in programming, AI, CS, etc. +1
• self-learning any of the above +½
• student or working in mathematics +½

Politics, part 1:

• supports open borders, or at least massively increased immigration +½
• supports significantly increased immigration +¼

Politics, part 2:

• supports basic income by whatever name one wishes to use +½
• supports some other kind of less bureaucratic, more market-based approach to welfare +¼

Politics, extra questions (can’t increase the total politics score over 1):

• refuses to identify with ideological labels +½
• identifies with a weird made-up “non-“ideological label +½ (“futarchy”, “meta-level politics”, etc.)

Geeking out:

• transhumanist nerd stuff +1
• any other uncommon and specific nerd stuff +1
• less unusual SF/F or STEM nerd stuff +½

HPMoR, 3 Worlds Collide, Dragon-Tyrant (add scores from each):

• has read all of it, or most and intends to finish +1/3
• has read a lot but doesn’t intend to finish, or is starting +1/6

SSC:

• regularly +1
• sometimes +½
• rarely +¼

---

I tried to not break legacy results compatibility so most people’s scores should be the same and this would just clarify the questionnaire; if people’s results change, it’s because I’ve changed some things to better reflect the original intent based on data acquired so far (looking especially at you, @sigmaleph, because that “politics” answer was the most stereotypical rationalist thing ever and I’m embarrassed to have overlooked that possibility)

And now I have the result categories as well:

(break ties with Newcomb’s dilemma; one-boxers upwards, two-boxers downwards)

12: The Chosen One

10-12: True Yudbot of the Hivemind

8-10: Stereotypical Rationalist

6-8: Typical Rationalist

4-6: Quite rationalist-adjacent

2-4: Kind of adjacent I guess

0-2: I don’t know how you ended up taking the survey, please tell me your story

Taking the revised survey!

0.5 age, 1 Jewishness, 0.25 gender, 1 poly, proooobably 2 sexuality, 0.25 gifted, 0.25 badbrains, 1 CS, (tentatively) 0.5 immigration, (tentatively) 0.5 basic income, 1 transhumanist nerdery, 1 fiction, 1 SSC, putting me at… 10.25.

[attaches “True Yudbot of the Hivemind” keychain to keyring, which even without that has more random keychains than it does useful items]

I wonder if the Jewishness in the rationalist community is just confirmation bias, Jews inviting people from their peer group to join tumblr, or a memetic influence of Jewish scholarship. Like Saul Kripke’s direct reference theory, which applies principles from rabbinic literature and scholarship to the semantics of human language.

It doesn’t seem to be much more concentrated than in an arbitrary group of geeky college kids. We’re drawing from the same population.

My spreadsheets are showing that clusters 1 and 3 are 50% more likely to be “religion: jewish” than 0 and 6, while cluster 3 is 50% more likely and cluster 1 >100% more likely to have “religious background: jewish” than 0 and 6.

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

• Things I learned this week:
• • Things that go viral with relatively low effort:
  • • Hilarious trolling of people everyone hates
  • • Surveys
  • (if I’m going to continue tumblring in Lisp, I should do it this way
  • • (at least I think this is easier to follow))

metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?

Yes, and I replicated the study and tested the method myself. Thus, if I ever need to draw attention to things, I should try to formulate them into a survey somehow so people will spread it. This is vital for memetic engineering purposes.

You gotta work on making an equivalent of the nolan chart that tags everyone as mutualist.

Okay.

---

Q1: Immigration

• open borders, but no benefits for immigrants ()
• make immigration dramatically easier, provide them the very basic necessities (S)
• make immigration dramatically easier, all comers get generous benefits (SS)
• regulate immigration, but cut their social benefits (H)
• regulate immigration, give some benefits to those who get through the process (HS)
• regulate immigration, but give generous benefits (HSS)
• only import vulnerable foreign labor with few legal rights to keep the underclasses in control and wages low (HH)
• close the borders, deport foreigners (HHS)
• stop the movement of both people and capital (HHSS)

Q2: Taxes

• should be low, simple and easy to comply with ()
• should be progressive, without loopholes (S)
• the rich should pay proportionately less tax than others (H)
• we should have a system of progressive taxation with many different deductions and exceptions to ensure that the outcome is fair and just to everyone (HS)

Q3: Welfare

• keep it strictly voluntary, or just a barebones basic income, but eliminate criminalization of poverty as well ()
• provide people an unconditional income that covers their basic needs (S)
• provide all people enough money for a comfortable life (SS)
• reduce welfare, but retain the criminalization of begging, dumpster-diving, sex work, and other means of survival (H)
• have multiple different programs for addressing social issues, and keep them means-tested (HS)
• add more social programs and benefits (HSS)
• the state should provide everyone a job with a living wage (HHSS)
• work should be a condition for receiving any money; replace the system with workfare where companies get free labor, people get “unemployment benefits”, and taxpayers foot the bill (HHS)
• just put the poor to forced labor, no need to pay them (HH)

Q4: Trade

• trade should be free ()
• the only legitimate use of tariffs is to reduce the unfair market position of countries which use forced labor or have insufficient environmental protections; or to protect the developing industries of poorer countries (S)
• trade policy should furthen the economic interests of domestic businesses (H)
• trade policy should protect domestic jobs from foreign competition (HS)

Q5: Discrimination

• don’t legislate morality ()
• some anti-discrimination laws are okay as long as compliance is easy and cheap and they target genuinely marginalized groups (S)
• businesses should be incentivized to treat everyone equally, but the mechanism should be one which doesn’t distort competition in favor of the strong (SS)
• make laws explicitly protecting certain types of private discrimination (H)
• protect some groups, and establish stringent and specific standards and bureaus to enforce them and monitor compliance and punish those who get caught discriminating (HS)
• like above, but expand the coverage and try to reduce the perverse incentives (HSS)

Q6: Housing

• reduce zoning rules, let the market decide ()
• use regulations only as a temporary measure while waiting for zoning reforms to render housing more affordable (S)
• legalize squatters seizing unoccupied houses as long as involuntary homelessness exists (SS)
• use zoning laws to protect neighborhoods from undesirable kinds of people (H)
• combine zoning laws with rent control, subsidies etc. to manage the housing supply (HS)
• have the state produce housing for people (HSS)

Q7: Immaterial property

• should be abolished ()
• is useful and should be protected (H)
• should be protected better and enforced more strongly (HH)

Q8: Private property (capital, not toothbrushes)

• is private, no concern of the state ()
• is sometimes legitimate but other things should belong to everyone, and depriving others of such things (eg. land) should at the very least warrant compensation (S)
• should not be respected; only possession is legitimate ownership (SS)
• should be protected by the state, while owners are free to do whatever they want (H)
• should be protected, taxed and regulated reasonably to serve the common good (HS)
• the state should limit how much capital the rich can accumulate (HSS)
• the state should use eminent domain to seize private property for important business interests (HH)
• the state should seize property for important public interests (HHS)
• the state should own all capital and allocate its use optimally (HHSS)

---

Choose your answer, sum the letters after each to see your position on the two-axis chart of economic freedom. “S” means intervention to reduce inequality, while “H” means intervention to preserve/create hierarchy. The maximum score on each axis should be 12. This is not a purity test, so reaching out for the corners isn’t what one is “supposed” to do although I guess ardent ancaps would get a solid 0/0.

You see, part of the point of the test (as I see it) would be to push back against ancaps/libertarians.  You’d want a test that points out the key issues there.

I would push the line that property is a creation of the state more.  To say that private property “is private, no concern of the state“ is not true, you are asking for the state to enforce private property.  You would want a test that points that out.

If you accept property rights as some inherent fact of nature the preservation of which is just the default state, you’ve already lost the major battle.  You’ve gotta make the libertarians fight for it.   Although you give hierarchy points for immaterial property, you describe the base state as “should be abolished.“  You want to make it clear that enforcement of property is, if not state action, at least violence.

Similarly, you want to explicitly point out the similarities between rent and taxes.  That’s to me one of the key points of mutualism, they’ve realized the similarity between taxes and rents, and you want to make that similarity clear, that both are the threat of force by the state to make you pay money.

The key insight on polling and surveys is, as always, here.

• Illusion of transparency strikes again, I guess. I considered that “private property” question one of the more radical on the test, as the () option basically implies that the state doesn’t intervene to protect it either. Whatever that would actually result in is a positive question and depends very much on the rest of the system.
• Also, I’m using the status quo as the “middle” and comparing changes to that; these kind of tests get weird around the edge zones
  • (for example, anarcho-communists could theoretically get either 0/0 or 0/12 or something in between depending on which they emphasize; the assumption that absence of state action would produce the absence of hierarchies they want, or the deliberate focus on egalitarianism; and the question on private property is already edging into the territory where stuff stops being renderable in euclidean space)
• and that’s why I didn’t focus on the edge zones too much and a lot of the options are relatively moderate. This is a statist test for people living in statist societies and only gets as far as the rough overton window; if I wanted to address edge cases properly I’d want to have a more thorough understanding of them first.
  • (for example, if by “mutualism” one means “many parts of The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand make a lot of sense” then I guess I’m “a mutualist”, but if by “mutualism” one means “subscribes to a specific theory on property by possession and labor theory of value”
    • (some form of it? “equal work for equal work” doesn’t really seem to work as its incentive structure is sub-optimal and it would basically rely on “people would do good things just for the sake of doing good things even if they somewhat conflict with their immediate economic interests” at which point I don’t get why there has to be a specific theory on cost/price if the system ultimately runs on concentrated human decency anyway
      • (but I do agree that with sufficient material prosperity and absence of antagonistic hierarchical relations, systems could probably run reasonably well on concentrated human decency))
  • then I’m not so sure)
• And the ethical side of my brain refuses to do that much of leading-questioning. I’m already running an obvious political agenda of splitting economic freedom to show that there’s a lot of pro-freedom options available on the left
  • (the naive idea that the magnitude of economic intervention could be calculated by summing H and S points is probably not quite practical but it would give some insight to why mutualists and social democrats are very different)
• and thus people who want to reduce the amount of H points in the economy should be able to cooperate on those questions even if they disagree on S points
  • (because the reduction in H points would also effectively render the economy more egalitarian by this naive model if S points are kept constant; thus satisfying both the “freedom” and the “equality” camps at least partially).
• As a quick draft of the first political chart I’m aware of which actually makes that distinction, and which was written in a couple of hours because I got nerdsniped, I don’t think this one does too badly; it’s definitely better than The Political Compass™ and while that is kind of burying the bar, being better than the de facto standard counts for something in my opinion :S
  • (but improvements are obviously welcome always)

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

• Things I learned this week:
• • Things that go viral with relatively low effort:
  • • Hilarious trolling of people everyone hates
  • • Surveys
  • (if I’m going to continue tumblring in Lisp, I should do it this way
  • • (at least I think this is easier to follow))

metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?

Yes, and I replicated the study and tested the method myself. Thus, if I ever need to draw attention to things, I should try to formulate them into a survey somehow so people will spread it. This is vital for memetic engineering purposes.

You gotta work on making an equivalent of the nolan chart that tags everyone as mutualist.

Okay.

Q1: Immigration

• open borders, but no benefits for immigrants ()
• make immigration dramatically easier, provide them the very basic necessities (S)
• make immigration dramatically easier, all comers get generous benefits (SS)
• regulate immigration, but cut their social benefits (H)
• regulate immigration, give some benefits to those who get through the process (HS)
• regulate immigration, but give generous benefits (HSS)
• only import vulnerable foreign labor with few legal rights to keep the underclasses in control and wages low (HH)
• close the borders, deport foreigners (HHS)
• stop the movement of both people and capital (HHSS)

Q2: Taxes

• should be low, simple and easy to comply with ()
• should be progressive, without loopholes (S)
• the rich should pay proportionately less tax than others (H)
• we should have a system of progressive taxation with many different deductions and exceptions to ensure that the outcome is fair and just to everyone (HS)

Q3: Welfare

• keep it strictly voluntary, or just a barebones basic income, but eliminate criminalization of poverty as well ()
• provide people an unconditional income that covers their basic needs (S)
• provide all people enough money for a comfortable life (SS)
• reduce welfare, but retain the criminalization of begging, dumpster-diving, sex work, and other means of survival (H)
• have multiple different programs for addressing social issues, and keep them means-tested (HS)
• add more social programs and benefits (HSS)
• the state should provide everyone a job with a living wage (HHSS)
• work should be a condition for receiving any money; replace the system with workfare where companies get free labor, people get “unemployment benefits”, and taxpayers foot the bill (HHS)
• just put the poor to forced labor, no need to pay them (HH)

Q4: Trade

• trade should be free ()
• the only legitimate use of tariffs is to reduce the unfair market position of countries which use forced labor or have insufficient environmental protections; or to protect the developing industries of poorer countries (S)
• trade policy should furthen the economic interests of domestic businesses (H)
• trade policy should protect domestic jobs from foreign competition (HS)

Q5: Discrimination

• don’t legislate morality ()
• some anti-discrimination laws are okay as long as compliance is easy and cheap and they target genuinely marginalized groups (S)
• businesses should be incentivized to treat everyone equally, but the mechanism should be one which doesn’t distort competition in favor of the strong (SS)
• make laws explicitly protecting certain types of private discrimination (H)
• protect some groups, and establish stringent and specific standards and bureaus to enforce them and monitor compliance and punish those who get caught discriminating (HS)
• like above, but expand the coverage and try to reduce the perverse incentives (HSS)

Q6: Housing

• reduce zoning rules, let the market decide ()
• use regulations only as a temporary measure while waiting for zoning reforms to render housing more affordable (S)
• legalize squatters seizing unoccupied houses as long as involuntary homelessness exists (SS)
• use zoning laws to protect neighborhoods from undesirable kinds of people (H)
• combine zoning laws with rent control, subsidies etc. to manage the housing supply (HS)
• have the state produce housing for people (HSS)

Q7: Immaterial property

• should be abolished ()
• is useful and should be protected (H)
• should be protected better and enforced more strongly (HH)

Q8: Private property (capital, not toothbrushes)

• is private, no concern of the state ()
• is sometimes legitimate but other things should belong to everyone, and depriving others of such things (eg. land) should at the very least warrant compensation (S)
• should not be respected; only possession is legitimate ownership (SS)
• should be protected by the state, while owners are free to do whatever they want (H)
• should be protected, taxed and regulated reasonably to serve the common good (HS)
• the state should limit how much capital the rich can accumulate (HSS)
• the state should use eminent domain to seize private property for important business interests (HH)
• the state should seize property for important public interests (HHS)
• the state should own all capital and allocate its use optimally (HHSS)

Choose your answer, sum the letters after each to see your position on the two-axis chart of economic freedom. “S” means intervention to reduce inequality, while “H” means intervention to preserve/create hierarchy. The maximum score on each axis should be 12. This is not a purity test, so reaching out for the corners isn’t what one is “supposed” to do although I guess ardent ancaps would get a solid 0/0.

veronicastraszh:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

• Things I learned this week:
• • Things that go viral with relatively low effort:
  • • Hilarious trolling of people everyone hates
  • • Surveys
  • (if I’m going to continue tumblring in Lisp, I should do it this way
  • • (at least I think this is easier to follow))

metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?

Yes, and I replicated the study and tested the method myself. Thus, if I ever need to draw attention to things, I should try to formulate them into a survey somehow so people will spread it. This is vital for memetic engineering purposes.

Oh and you should do all things in Lisp. Except Haskell, which you should do in Haskell.

• Okay, now you really should explain what is the amazing thing about Haskell and why I should learn that one as well
  • (right now the list is:
    • ruby
    • julia
    • lisp
    • coffeescript
    • html
    • css)
  • (or, to be more specific, it’s not an imperative “should” but rather a functional “should” meaning that to get the output of promethea doing things in Haskell one needs to input the arguments)

@bfantechi

I’m 5&1/6, and I am offended that being a professional mathematician scores lower than CS. Or I would be if I could program.

Don’t blame me; I don’t make the rules. Computers are more disproportionately represented in the hard core of the yudbots than mathematics, thus they are more characteristic of it.

@speakertoyesterday

We can recruit the Berkeley physics and math grad students for a short survey to do this!

Yes, I’m kind of thinking that redoing this with a proper survey, built empirically from the LW diaspora dataset, with a proper control group, might shed some light on what the ultimate differentiating factors are.

@amakthel

Well. My score changed significantly, probably due to my intuitions about being “kind-of” things being very different from the original and explicitly mentioned in this one.

Also, perhaps we should rework the “Field” questions so that they are mutually exclusive? I manage to hit all of them.

I already included that in the description:

“(choose one or none from each sub-category)”

So that means one is intended to take the single highest-scoring option from each. And illusion of transparency is obviously more significant than I had expected, even when taking illusion of transparency into account.

@spiderpriestess

Nine and five-sixths.

I don’t think Yudkowsky himself would score that high.

::::|

Okay but let’s be real, this is all just “autism subtype markers”, right?

right????????

Now that you mention it, a lot of this is autism (autistic people are something like five to ten times more likely to be trans, for example), but I still think there’s something else going on, with the 50% depression rate etc. (as I suspect, there might be a specific type of badbrains that psychiatry hasn’t managed to pin down from symptoms but which has a distinct-ish etiology because “trans woman with autism, adhd, depression and/or anxiety” seems to be a very strong type)

Yudkowsky himself would be like 8-9 in my guess (in comparison, the “marxist” stereotype is quite different from what Karl Marx was), but the “yudbot” (affectionately intended) personality has something that makes it very attracted to this community/memeplex that I’d really like to tease out of the data once I start actually crunching the numbers instead of just eyeballing graphs. And it seems to be correlated with really interesting things, especially regarding gender and sexuality.

And I also need to find a control group somewhere, obviously.

rusalkii:

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

Now with a scoring guide (choose one or none from each sub-category)

Age:

• 21-25 years +1
• 16-20 +½
• 26-30 years +½

Jewishness:

• Yes +1
• Kind of + ½

Gender:

• trans woman (regardless of hormone usage) +1
• any kind of amab using estrogen +1
• amab non-binary (no estrogen) +¾
• other non-cis or dubiously cis (afab trans, agender, magic button trans, etc.) +½
• cis by default (not magic button trans) +¼

Poly:

• Yes +1
• Kind of, or open to the idea +½

Sexuality, part A:

• gray-asexual or demisexual +1
• asexual +½
• asexual and kinky +1
• kinky +½

Sexuality, part B (replace “sexual” with “romantic” if doing so would give you a higher score):

• bisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, any other kind of “gender isn’t really such a big deal"sexual +1
• any kind of “gender isn’t a massive deal but it’s somewhat of a deal"sexual +½
• gendersexual, but would take the bisexuality pill +½

Gifted child:

• very +½ (eg. peerless in one’s childhood environment, or not peerless, but with a highly unusual peer group)
• quite +¼ (eg. one of the highest-achieving in one’s slightly less highly unusual peer group)

Badbrains:

• at least 2 of: ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression at least to a sub-clinical but noticeable degree +½
• one of them +¼

Field:

• CS student, or working in programming, AI, CS, etc. +1
• self-learning any of the above +½
• student or working in mathematics +½

Politics, part 1:

• supports open borders, or at least massively increased immigration +½
• supports significantly increased immigration +¼

Politics, part 2:

• supports basic income by whatever name one wishes to use +½
• supports some other kind of less bureaucratic, more market-based approach to welfare +¼

Politics, extra questions (can’t increase the total politics score over 1):

• refuses to identify with ideological labels +½
• identifies with a weird made-up “non-“ideological label +½ ("futarchy”, “meta-level politics”, etc.)

Geeking out:

• transhumanist nerd stuff +1
• any other uncommon and specific nerd stuff +1
• less unusual SF/F or STEM nerd stuff +½

HPMoR, 3 Worlds Collide, Dragon-Tyrant (add scores from each):

• has read all of it, or most and intends to finish +1/3
• has read a lot but doesn’t intend to finish, or is starting +1/6

SSC:

• regularly +1
• sometimes +½
• rarely +¼

---

I tried to not break legacy results compatibility so most people’s scores should be the same and this would just clarify the questionnaire; if people’s results change, it’s because I’ve changed some things to better reflect the original intent based on data acquired so far (looking especially at you, @sigmaleph, because that “politics” answer was the most stereotypical rationalist thing ever and I’m embarrassed to have overlooked that possibility)

Since everyone is doing it: .5 for age, depending on how you count Jewishness either .5 or 1, not cis-by-default woman, 1 point for poly, 1 point for gray-ace, sexuality is confusing but I’m going with 1 point here, I don’t think I am/was "unusually gifted” but people have told me otherwise so either .25 or .5, depending on how you count my (definitely subclinical) anxiety either .25 or .5 for badbrains, not a computer or math person, .25 for immigration (not a very carefully thought through stance, could go either way) and .5 for UBI, I’m not sure if my nerd stuff is particularly uncommon but let’s go with 1, .66 for HPMoR and the Dragon-Tyrant, 1 point for SSC.

Counting lowest scores 7 11/12, highest scores 8 11/12, I’m going to average that to 8.

According to @socialjusticemunchkin that makes me a Typical Rationalist. Which, uh, no. I’m a 16-year-old girl who’s not particularly STEM and hangs around here because the people are interesting, I’m basically the opposite of what I’d think if I was trying to imagine A Rationalist.

(As a side note: using @invertedporcupine’s measures of "agrees with EY”, I get either 2/4 or ½, depending on how you count. Many Worlds sounds superficially plausible and FOOM implausible, but I lack the background to understand either on any deep enough level to have a strong opinion. (Apparently we get meta-rationality points for admitting we don’t know enough? I’m claiming those, then.) I think dust specks are better than torture and cryonics sounds like shot on the dark, but one that might be worth it.)

On the other hand, to me "a gifted Jewishness-scoring badbrains unusualsexual teenager with correct-contrarian-leaning political opinions (as far as positive questions are concerned, basic income is one of those ideas that I consider pretty extremely likely to result from a relatively wide variety of normative views fully thought out), who reads the media and finds the people interesting” sounds very much like A Possible Rationalist.

As far as my amateur stetson-harrison psychometry suggests the STEM thing is slightly misleading; what makes A Rationalist is partially the things that make them different from the typical STEM person, and if I was forced to guess without proper data, I’d suggest it’s a certain badbrainsness and a more introspective and philosophical approach in some ways.

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

“Ownership” of a computer system is a surprisingly important thing to me.

When I first installed Ubuntu in dual boot a year ago, I immediately ditched Windows because linux felt like something I could understand and control (and break if I screwed up, and if I broke it it would be my own damn fault and I should simply git gud), while windows was an opaque black box of horribleness in comparison. I can count the times I’ve booted back to windows with my fingers, in unary. And I don’t even have polydactyly.

Then I had a taste of Arch and the same kind of feeling came back. I was no longer given a ready setup, but instead a blank slate to build my own system on, and all successes and, most importantly, fuckups would be purely my own. It was intimidating, it was difficult, it was awesome. And now ubuntu feels like windows in comparison.

For example, I can’t get Urxvt to load the colors from my .Xresources no matter how much I xrdb (but the font changes to Terminus as expected; yet I can’t get Terminess Powerline to show up either) and the ubuntu sources I can find don’t seem to expect people to be wanting to do this kind of low-level dotfile aroundscrewing (I mean, seriously, how else is one supposed to adjust stuff; gui tools are opaque and I don’t grok what they exactly do, whereas “so I adjust this dotfile here, it’s loaded by that program to do such thing” is intuitive and insightful) so it looks like I’m installing Arch to change my terminal colors. Might seem like slight overkill, but the Third Virtue of Rationality says that when it looks like I’m going to install Arch inevitably, I might as well do it right away.

So, deep computer side of tumblr, show me the forbidden advice!

On topics such as:

I have 480G and 240G SATA SSDs, and a 400G PCIe SSD; how should I set up the filesystem assuming I’m nuking windows and switching everything over to Arch, and possibly adding a few T of spinningy platters for bulk data storage later?

I’m thinking of using the 240 as a personal data backup drive for all the stuff I definitely don’t want to lose if one fails, putting / on the 480, and then I need some way to have all the I/O intensive stuff on the PCIe as it’s faster (you know you have ADHD when a regular SSD isn’t fast enough so instead you need to grab an enterprise-grade one from a clearance sale); so I should have certain folders located on that one, but I can’t think of anything overarching that would cover the needs.

The computer is going to occasionally be a game server for J so some games from steam need to be on the PCIe but I don’t want to install all of steam on it; and whatever I/O-heavy computing I do myself also needs to be running from it.

If I make it /home/promethea/$pcie_name it would be relatively easy and straightforward but then J can’t access it; if I make it /$pcie_name it feels a bit dirty for some reason; does anyone have any suggestions?

I think it depends on what “all the I/O intensive stuff” actually is. Are you running a database / server, and need access to that data quickly? Is it just for user programs? Not to mention you might want to put boot on there, so you can boot quickly.

Actually the fact that you basically want to split the disk makes me think you should use LVM to actually split it. I’ve done similar things with LVM, so I think what I’m suggesting should be possible as well.

Can’t boot off it because it’s a special enterprise grade drive instead of regular consumer stuff and I’d rather not go into hacking boot roms onto it (YGM); the normal SSD is fast enough for these purposes.

I originally bought it to have quicker 4k transfers for heavy random disk loads when gaming to minimize loading breaks etc. (and because both my 2,5" slots were full already but an expansion card looks neat), then I quit gaming and am looking for the best way of using it. It promises massive durability so it should be the drive that sees all the heavy stuff regardless of what the heavy stuff is.

I don’t want to partition things in a way that creates artificial limits, so some kind of a scheme that lets me point different folders to different physical disks would be optimal; for example, I could have / on the 480, and /home/promethea/dev/ and /home/J/steam/ on the PCIe so that either of them has access to all of the 400G, and /home/promethea/.backup/ and /home/J/.backup/ pointing to the 240 in the same way.

And I don’t know what that heavy usage would be, but my dev stuff might include anything. Not running more serverness than a home file storage once I get the TB platters, and steam streaming of games for J because I’m the one with the powerful hardware.

Okay. If you partition the PCIe into /steam and /dev, and then mount those partitions as needed, that basically satisfies your requirements. If you want to run dev tools from the PCIe drive you’ll either have to install from source or mess with config. (For example, if you’re running a mongo database it defaults to storing data in /data/db, so if you wanted it to go in /home/promethea/dev you’d have to reconfigure things.) But all that is certainly doable.

Out of curiosity, what specifically is the PCIe drive?

The PCIe drive is an Intel 910; got it for something like 1/10 of its list price; it did do an impressive job of making loading times a thing of the past.

Okay so partitioning is exactly what I’d like to avoid if possible (unless there’s a way to tell the partitions to just take whatever space they need and play nice with each other); I guess just mounting the 910 as /data and then symlinking folders in /data/promethea and /data/J to their respective locations (eg. /home/promethea/dev -> /data/promethea/dev) would be the easiest?

invertedporcupine:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

Now with a scoring guide (choose one or none from each sub-category)

Age:

• 21-25 years +1
• 16-20 +½
• 26-30 years +½

Jewishness:

• Yes +1
• Kind of + ½

Gender:

• trans woman (regardless of hormone usage) +1
• any kind of amab using estrogen +1
• amab non-binary (no estrogen) +¾
• other non-cis or dubiously cis (afab trans, agender, magic button trans, etc.) +½
• cis by default (not magic button trans) +¼

Poly:

• Yes +1
• Kind of, or open to the idea +½

Sexuality, part A:

• gray-asexual or demisexual +1
• asexual +½
• asexual and kinky +1
• kinky +½

Sexuality, part B (replace “sexual” with “romantic” if doing so would give you a higher score):

• bisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, any other kind of “gender isn’t really such a big deal"sexual +1
• any kind of “gender isn’t a massive deal but it’s somewhat of a deal"sexual +½
• gendersexual, but would take the bisexuality pill +½

Gifted child:

• very +½ (eg. peerless in one’s childhood environment, or not peerless, but with a highly unusual peer group)
• quite +¼ (eg. one of the highest-achieving in one’s slightly less highly unusual peer group)

Badbrains:

• at least 2 of: ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression at least to a sub-clinical but noticeable degree +½
• one of them +¼

Field:

• CS student, or working in programming, AI, CS, etc. +1
• self-learning any of the above +½
• student or working in mathematics +½

Politics, part 1:

• supports open borders, or at least massively increased immigration +½
• supports significantly increased immigration +¼

Politics, part 2:

• supports basic income by whatever name one wishes to use +½
• supports some other kind of less bureaucratic, more market-based approach to welfare +¼

Politics, extra questions (can’t increase the total politics score over 1):

• refuses to identify with ideological labels +½
• identifies with a weird made-up “non-“ideological label +½ (“futarchy”, “meta-level politics”, etc.)

Geeking out:

• transhumanist nerd stuff +1
• any other uncommon and specific nerd stuff +1
• less unusual SF/F or STEM nerd stuff +½

HPMoR, 3 Worlds Collide, Dragon-Tyrant (add scores from each):

• has read all of it, or most and intends to finish +1/3
• has read a lot but doesn’t intend to finish, or is starting +1/6

SSC:

• regularly +1
• sometimes +½
• rarely +¼

---

I tried to not break legacy results compatibility so most people’s scores should be the same and this would just clarify the questionnaire; if people’s results change, it’s because I’ve changed some things to better reflect the original intent based on data acquired so far (looking especially at you, @sigmaleph, because that “politics” answer was the most stereotypical rationalist thing ever and I’m embarrassed to have overlooked that possibility)

And now I have the result categories as well:

(break ties with Newcomb’s dilemma; one-boxers upwards, two-boxers downwards)

12: The Chosen One

10-12: True Yudbot of the Hivemind

8-10: Stereotypical Rationalist

6-8: Typical Rationalist

4-6: Quite rationalist-adjacent

2-4: Kind of adjacent I guess

0-2: I don’t know how you ended up taking the survey, please tell me your story

There should be a follow-up to plot the strength of correlation (or lack thereof) between number of points on this scale and number of things one agrees with EY about out of (Cryonics is a good personal investment, recursive self-improving AI FOOM is likely, torture better than dust specks, Many Worlds is *obviously* the best available hypothesis)

I’m 5.5/12 but 0/4.

10/12

Cryonics yes

FOOM yes

My ethical theory can answer the "youtube vs. sublimeness” dilemma but I haven’t ran the numbers; there exists a firm upper boundary on how much utility a slighty amusing video can generate regardless of how many see it, but there exists an amount of sublimity that is significant yet less utility than a youtube video seen by limit-reaching number of people, so I guess I fall on the “youtube” side with some reasonable parameters

I defer to experts on QM at least for now, and even skipped that part of the Sequences because I didn’t want to get eulered; so I don’t know if this counts as “exceeding the master in the master’s art” because I can quote several of the 12 Virtues supporting this view

So that’s basically 3/3 with some caveats, and meta-rationality points on QM because I know my limits

@conductivemithril:

The person who gets 12 is the Chosen One.

Rebageling this to place credit where credit is due.

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

“Ownership” of a computer system is a surprisingly important thing to me.

When I first installed Ubuntu in dual boot a year ago, I immediately ditched Windows because linux felt like something I could understand and control (and break if I screwed up, and if I broke it it would be my own damn fault and I should simply git gud), while windows was an opaque black box of horribleness in comparison. I can count the times I’ve booted back to windows with my fingers, in unary. And I don’t even have polydactyly.

Then I had a taste of Arch and the same kind of feeling came back. I was no longer given a ready setup, but instead a blank slate to build my own system on, and all successes and, most importantly, fuckups would be purely my own. It was intimidating, it was difficult, it was awesome. And now ubuntu feels like windows in comparison.

For example, I can’t get Urxvt to load the colors from my .Xresources no matter how much I xrdb (but the font changes to Terminus as expected; yet I can’t get Terminess Powerline to show up either) and the ubuntu sources I can find don’t seem to expect people to be wanting to do this kind of low-level dotfile aroundscrewing (I mean, seriously, how else is one supposed to adjust stuff; gui tools are opaque and I don’t grok what they exactly do, whereas “so I adjust this dotfile here, it’s loaded by that program to do such thing” is intuitive and insightful) so it looks like I’m installing Arch to change my terminal colors. Might seem like slight overkill, but the Third Virtue of Rationality says that when it looks like I’m going to install Arch inevitably, I might as well do it right away.

So, deep computer side of tumblr, show me the forbidden advice!

On topics such as:

I have 480G and 240G SATA SSDs, and a 400G PCIe SSD; how should I set up the filesystem assuming I’m nuking windows and switching everything over to Arch, and possibly adding a few T of spinningy platters for bulk data storage later?

I’m thinking of using the 240 as a personal data backup drive for all the stuff I definitely don’t want to lose if one fails, putting / on the 480, and then I need some way to have all the I/O intensive stuff on the PCIe as it’s faster (you know you have ADHD when a regular SSD isn’t fast enough so instead you need to grab an enterprise-grade one from a clearance sale); so I should have certain folders located on that one, but I can’t think of anything overarching that would cover the needs.

The computer is going to occasionally be a game server for J so some games from steam need to be on the PCIe but I don’t want to install all of steam on it; and whatever I/O-heavy computing I do myself also needs to be running from it.

If I make it /home/promethea/$pcie_name it would be relatively easy and straightforward but then J can’t access it; if I make it /$pcie_name it feels a bit dirty for some reason; does anyone have any suggestions?

I think it depends on what “all the I/O intensive stuff” actually is. Are you running a database / server, and need access to that data quickly? Is it just for user programs? Not to mention you might want to put boot on there, so you can boot quickly.

Actually the fact that you basically want to split the disk makes me think you should use LVM to actually split it. I’ve done similar things with LVM, so I think what I’m suggesting should be possible as well.

Can’t boot off it because it’s a special enterprise grade drive instead of regular consumer stuff and I’d rather not go into hacking boot roms onto it (YGM); the normal SSD is fast enough for these purposes.

I originally bought it to have quicker 4k transfers for heavy random disk loads when gaming to minimize loading breaks etc. (and because both my 2,5" slots were full already but an expansion card looks neat), then I quit gaming and am looking for the best way of using it. It promises massive durability so it should be the drive that sees all the heavy stuff regardless of what the heavy stuff is.

I don’t want to partition things in a way that creates artificial limits, so some kind of a scheme that lets me point different folders to different physical disks would be optimal; for example, I could have / on the 480, and /home/promethea/dev/ and /home/J/steam/ on the PCIe so that either of them has access to all of the 400G, and /home/promethea/.backup/ and /home/J/.backup/ pointing to the 240 in the same way.

And I don’t know what that heavy usage would be, but my dev stuff might include anything. Not running more serverness than a home file storage once I get the TB platters, and steam streaming of games for J because I’m the one with the powerful hardware.

prophecyformula:

worldoptimization:

So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”

And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.

Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.

Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.

(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)

(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)

oh man do you not know the onion futures story

okay, so, it’s the 1950s. there’s an onion farmer named Vincent Kosuga. he’s a pretty successful onion farmer, so he starts speculating in the commodities markets. after an initial disastrous flirtation with wheat futures, he finds a niche betting on onion prices – he is, after all, an onion farmer – and does pretty well for himself.

in 1955, Kosuga gets an idea. an awful idea. Kosuga gets a wonderful, awful idea. he starts building warehouses around the country, and places orders for all the onions he can get his hands on. in addition, he starts buying onion futures, guaranteeing him delivery of the onions that are still in the ground.

by that fall, he’s done what he’s set out to do. he owns 98% of the onions in the united states. he’s cornered the market, and he gets to control onion prices. of course, since he has all the onions, he jacks prices up really high and makes a ton of money.

but Kosuga isn’t done yet. he’s quietly been establishing a big short position in onion futures. then, all of a sudden, Kosuga starts flooding the market with all the onions he owns. onion prices go through the floor – literally selling for less than the cost of the bag they’re delivered in. since Kosuga is short onions, he makes another ton of money.

but everyone is super pissed at him. especially other onion farmers – when the price of onions got driven down to almost nothing, their crops, their hard work, became worthless. some of them went bankrupt, or even committed suicide. so of course they lobby congress. and congress, as always, legislates to prevent the previous crisis rather than the next one – and bans trading in onion futures.

of course, this is probably unnecessary and in fact harmful. it’s really rare for anyone to come close to cornering the market in a commodity, and it’s even harder today (you can’t really buy up all the onions in secret, without other traders noticing) than it was 60 years ago. nevertheless, trading in onion futures remains illegal in the US today.

ಠ_ಠ

I can’t believe this shit

kaminiwa:

cromulentenough:

ozylikes:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

I seem to have a Thing of throwing off-hand jokes that later are validated surprisingly well by empirical data, and this time it’s “as queer as a women’s college”

Because I’m screwing around in the diaspora survey results for fun and wow this fits all the unlikely but totally true stereotypes

like, right now I’m googling the statistics on lesbianity and transgenderism in Mount Holyoke because holy shit our hardest core might actually give them a run for their money in queerness

So, the results are in, and…

yes.

I used this data and the four big clusters with useful results (0, 1, 3 and 6) turned out pretty remarkable.

Cluster 0 seems relatively unremarkable; its most distinctive characteristic was skipping the cultural questions and all in all less active answering

6 is roughly identical to 0 in other questions; it has some slight exposure to the culture but seems to be mostly made of “regular people” who somehow ended up on the survey, and by “regular” I mean “still pretty niche but not thoroughly corrupted”; almost half had read Ender’s Game and a third are regulars of SSC and that’s about it. I’m calling the two of them the “ordinarys”

Cluster 3 I’m naming “rationalist-adjacent” because they share a lot of characteristics but aren’t neck deep in the memeplex unlike…

Cluster 1 which is obviously “yudkowskians” because they are basically walking stereotypes

And by stereotypes I mean things like:

Half the women are trans (8% to 9% and most of the enbies (9% in total) are amab as well); r-adjacents have relatively low numbers of trans women but the same amount of enbies, and a quarter is afab instead of 12% of the yudkowskians. But both have more women than the ordinarys, and yudkowskians’ trans team is very strong and makes a valiant effort in closing the gender gap even if the r-adjacents seize a narrow victory in the numbers game.

More people are poly than mono, and heterosexuals are only barely a majority (59% while 29% are bi; the rationalist-adjacents are very close too with 62% and 23% while the ordinarys have 76-78% and 12-14%; homosexuality is relatively constant at 3-5%)

9% of both the yudkowskians and r-adjacents are asexual, compared to 5% of the ordinarys

Half of them work with computers and nobody is going to believe those alleged IQ scores never ever (146, compared to a consistent 136-138 for the rest); they are also the most likely to have only a high school degree while the other groups (especially r-adjacents) beat them in the other education categories

Agnosticism is hilariously unpopular (3% compared to 11-16% for the rest) and they are extremely jewish

Basically everyone reads SSC, and they are the biggest readers of everything else on the list as well (except Xenosystems, where the r-adjacents take the first place in regulars and sometimes-readers)

The closer one is to the hard core of the memeplex, the less conservative (by a significant amount) and the more libertarian (to some degree but not as massively) one is, but neither of them can hold a candle to the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)

So this data basically says that the archetypical rationalist is:

• 21-25 years old
• jewish
• trans woman (probably kind of non-binary-ish on some level, but transitioning with hormones)
• polyamorous
• gray-asexual
• bisexual
• an absurdly gifted child with the specific kind of badbrains which is varyingly diagnosed as autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, or most likely some combination of them
• studies computer science
• politically left-libertarian
• geeks out on all kinds of weird nerd stuff
• has read all of: Three Worlds Collide, HPMoR, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
• a regular SSC reader

to calculate your “how stereotypical rationalist am I” score: 1 point for fully matching each, ½ points for getting close; mine is 10/12

eight

what kind of failure rationalist am I

about 4.5 to 5

i’d probably go into r-adjacent

9 points; +1 if you count quarter-Jewish via my dad’s side of the family. +1 if “anyone who isn’t cis-male” qualifies as bisexual (I mean, technically it does, but it feels like it’s failing the spirit of “bisexual” :))

I cannot technicality my way into being 25 again. In fairness, when I was 25, LessWrong did not exist yet (and it is so weird routinely having a decade on everyone else in this community…)

I’d say that’s ½ points for jewishness, and ½ to 1 points for sexuality (I think heterosexuality is 0 points, other sexual minorities are ½ points; I gave myself ½ for “empirically quite consistently transfemininesexual” and yours sounds at least closer to “bisexual” than me)

molibdenita:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

I seem to have a Thing of throwing off-hand jokes that later are validated surprisingly well by empirical data, and this time it’s “as queer as a women’s college”

Because I’m screwing around in the diaspora survey results for fun and wow this fits all the unlikely but totally true stereotypes

like, right now I’m googling the statistics on lesbianity and transgenderism in Mount Holyoke because holy shit our hardest core might actually give them a run for their money in queerness

So, the results are in, and…

yes.

I used this data and the four big clusters with useful results (0, 1, 3 and 6) turned out pretty remarkable.

Cluster 0 seems relatively unremarkable; its most distinctive characteristic was skipping the cultural questions and all in all less active answering

6 is roughly identical to 0 in other questions; it has some slight exposure to the culture but seems to be mostly made of “regular people” who somehow ended up on the survey, and by “regular” I mean “still pretty niche but not thoroughly corrupted”; almost half had read Ender’s Game and a third are regulars of SSC and that’s about it. I’m calling the two of them the “ordinarys”

Cluster 3 I’m naming “rationalist-adjacent” because they share a lot of characteristics but aren’t neck deep in the memeplex unlike…

Cluster 1 which is obviously “yudkowskians” because they are basically walking stereotypes

And by stereotypes I mean things like:

Half the women are trans (8% to 9% and most of the enbies (9% in total) are amab as well); r-adjacents have relatively low numbers of trans women but the same amount of enbies, and a quarter is afab instead of 12% of the yudkowskians. But both have more women than the ordinarys, and yudkowskians’ trans team is very strong and makes a valiant effort in closing the gender gap even if the r-adjacents seize a narrow victory in the numbers game.

More people are poly than mono, and heterosexuals are only barely a majority (59% while 29% are bi; the rationalist-adjacents are very close too with 62% and 23% while the ordinarys have 76-78% and 12-14%; homosexuality is relatively constant at 3-5%)

9% of both the yudkowskians and r-adjacents are asexual, compared to 5% of the ordinarys

Half of them work with computers and nobody is going to believe those alleged IQ scores never ever (146, compared to a consistent 136-138 for the rest); they are also the most likely to have only a high school degree while the other groups (especially r-adjacents) beat them in the other education categories

Agnosticism is hilariously unpopular (3% compared to 11-16% for the rest) and they are extremely jewish

Basically everyone reads SSC, and they are the biggest readers of everything else on the list as well (except Xenosystems, where the r-adjacents take the first place in regulars and sometimes-readers)

The closer one is to the hard core of the memeplex, the less conservative (by a significant amount) and the more libertarian (to some degree but not as massively) one is, but neither of them can hold a candle to the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)

So this data basically says that the archetypical rationalist is:

• 21-25 years old
• jewish
• trans woman (probably kind of non-binary-ish on some level, but transitioning with hormones)
• polyamorous
• gray-asexual
• bisexual
• an absurdly gifted child with the specific kind of badbrains which is varyingly diagnosed as autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, or most likely some combination of them
• studies computer science
• politically left-libertarian
• geeks out on all kinds of weird nerd stuff
• has read all of: Three Worlds Collide, HPMoR, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
• a regular SSC reader

to calculate your “how stereotypical rationalist am I” score: 1 point for fully matching each, ½ points for getting close; mine is 10/12

SSC readers are so well-represented in the LW survey that I’m worried about the sampling. Did Scott accidentally skew the results by giving the link to his audience?

(my rat-score: 5/12)

It was “2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey” this time, so the sampling is exactly as expected

crazyeddieme:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

xhxhxhx:

argumate:

theaudientvoid:

It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.

I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.

I love how politically unworkable this plan is

I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)

…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…

Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.

Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.

Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)

Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.

And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.

And things like alcoholism, drug addiction etc.; surely we would need to maintain some cronyist bullshit I mean targeted programs… oh, wait nevermind it turns out poor people have problems because they are poor and making them not be poor is a miraculous way of making the problems go away

Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.

And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)

Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.

now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”

but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly

This all sounds like pure goodness.  (although states always have and always will have and need spies.  Abolish the NSA and you’ll need something else to take its place)

There’s spies, and then there’s massive invasions of everyone’s privacy, creeping on every goddamn thing everywhere, spying everything, etc.; whatever takes the place of the NSA would require far less rights and mandates to do its actual job effectively.

argumate:

xhxhxhx:

argumate:

theaudientvoid:

It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.

I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.

I love how politically unworkable this plan is

I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)

…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…

Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.

Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.

Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)

Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.

And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.

And things like alcoholism, drug addiction etc.; surely we would need to maintain some cronyist bullshit I mean targeted programs… oh, wait nevermind it turns out poor people have problems because they are poor and making them not be poor is a miraculous way of making the problems go away

Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.

And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)

Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.

now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”

but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly

geekwithsandwich:

socialjusticemunchkin:

nostalgebraist:

socialjusticemunchkin:

nostalgebraist:

@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else?  It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.

Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?”  I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.

And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t.  The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.”  When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go.  (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)

(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)

As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.

The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.

(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))

Thanks for the fast response.

IMO, “liberal arts” is not a very useful term here.  In modern usage it tends to refer to types of education which in some way hark back to the old quadrivium/trivium and the notion of a “broad education” they represented.  The quadrivium/trivium had no “humanities as opposed to STEM” focus – you can sort of break it down (imprecisely and misleadingly) as “trivium is (premodern) humanities, quadrivium is (premodern) STEM,” but logic is one-third of the trivium, so if you count that as “premodern STEM” you’ve got 5 of 7 “premodern STEM” subjects.

(The quadrivium included music, because this was thought of as the study of “number in time,” to go along with arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), and astronomy (number in space and time, i.e. something like physics).)

Hardly anyone actually uses the original trivium/quadrivium anymore, but modern “liberal arts education” tends to aim for the same breadth.  For instance, at the “liberal arts college” I attended (where I got a physics degree), all students were required to take at least two classes in each of four “groups,” one of which was natural science (and there was nothing like “physics for poets” – everyone had to take the same intro science classes that the science majors were taking, which were taught with appropriate rigor), and one of which was something like “syntactic systems” (it included math, symbolic logic, foreign language courses excluding those classed as “literature courses,” and linguistics).

(Also, the “liberal arts college” as a a subtype of American colleges has a bunch of other characteristics, like being expensive, having small class sizes, and holding many classics as Socratic-ish discussions rather than lectures.  None of these have much to do with the distinction I think you’re drawing.)

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“Humanities” I think is a term that works strictly better than “liberal arts” here, because in the modern university it tends to mean stuff that isn’t “natural science” or “social science,” e.g. literature and history.  Still, even this is way too broad, since the “dialect” of a history department, say, will be different from that of a literature department, and even literature departments with different focuses will have different “dialects.”  (There’s been a fair amount of friction involved in the attempt to bring things like deconstruction into the discipline of classics, which tends to be old-school about most things, including literary analysis.)

What I think you’re pinpointing is something like “the most commonly used intellectual dialect in modern university literature departments, excluding classics.”  Although that isn’t a very snappy phrase.  “Talking like an English major,” although crude-sounding, is actually pretty close, but is likely to make you sound like don’t know whereof you speak (cf. the reaction to @theungrumpablegrinch‘s review of NAB).  I’d love to find a phrase here that is readily and mutually intelligible.

Okay, the concept I’ve been trying to translate has been, in my brain, defined by a Finnish word which basically means “not STEM” and I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the word ‘humanities’. That specific dialect is a subtype of it, but there seems to be a general pattern of “humanist” vs. “mechanist” language and thinking which this dialect, the postmodernist “reality don’t real” meme, the “scientists are soulless, understanding destroys wonder” meme, the idea that science has difficulties modeling fluid dynamics because our systems of knowledge are founded on patriarchal rigidity [sic], etc. are extreme edge cases of.

The thing isn’t limited to English as eg. gender studies tends to feature the same thing to some degree as well; whatever the fuck CrimethInc. is its “Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant” is exactly that thing (“Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.”); the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is also partially about that thing; I’ve seen many humanities people comment on issues of science with an embarrassing unawareness of the actual mechanisms of how things operate (because the broader version of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility lets them believe things are way simpler than they actually are (and it obviously operates in reverse too with naive STEM people on humanities questions causing enough facepalms to extract all the world’s cooking oil needs from)); the people who stop treating others as humans if they say the word “rational” are that thing; etc.

(And similarly the “mechanist” edge case would be the stereotypical weakman “soulless” engineer who thinks emotions don’t matter and Spock is something to emulate instead of an embarrassing failure of a humanist attempt to cargo-cult rationality, identifies as Objective Rational Thinker™, uses models derived from physics to explain all human behavior and forgets that they are crude simplifications at best, etc…)

Hello Rationalist Tumblr™, I’m here via @aprilwitching, and I just wanted to jump in with a little linguistics.  I believe the “dialects” you’re describing would be considered “registers” in linguistic jargon.  Jargon is also a very useful word for this type of discussion.  I think basically what happens in the types of conflicts you’re describing here is that both parties coming from different academic backgrounds believe they are speaking in “academic register” but in fact there is no one unified academic register, there are many registers specific to the academic background in question, and therefore both parties believe they’re speaking the same register and don’t question the applicability of their jargon.  You can see some evidence for this when those same people speak to a non-academic person about the same subjects in a non-academic, casual register; they’re far more likely to either avoid jargon, or clearly define their jargon, because they know the other party doesn’t speak Academic Register.  If they only applied the same idea to discussions across academic backgrounds, they’d be set!

And also, this conflict definitely happens within STEM to a massive degree, as there is a ton of jargon in, say, biochemistry that a physics person isn’t likely to know.  Or in Ornithology that an Ichthyologist won’t know.  And I constantly find myself trying to explain taxonomic and evolutionary jargon to computer programmers (without much luck).

I don’t have as much experience with cross-humanities register conflicts, but I’m aware that they happen, especially between specific fields that examine the same phenomena from radically different angles.  The intersections of Linguistics with Anthropology and Psychology, Cultural vs. Evolutionary Anthropology, and Sociology with Psychology appear to be particularly rich examples.  There are an increasing number of weird Frankenstein Specialties emerging as a direct result of frustration at the lack of effective cross-specialty communication, too, like Neuroanthropology.

Okay, this register thing is definitely a part of it, but I think another part is about the Rules of the Game.

Specifically, whether one manipulates the symbols people use to refer to underlying phenomena, or focuses on the phenomena themselves.

Both ‘bad postmodernists’ and 'straw rationalists’ use the rules of symbols as The Rules, thus the kind of “I found a contradiction in this philosophy according to English grammar, therefore it’s pwned” and “your emotions are illogical because I can’t construct a consistent boolean table of them” [uncharitable description omitted], while the steel versions don’t do embarrassing things like claim “there can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet” as if it were an actual argument (it’s rhetoric, and its value as rhetoric can be debated, but the argument operates on the superficial symbol-level contradiction of 'finite’ and 'infinite’ which the actual underlying phenomena don’t map perfectly to, thus rendering the symbol-level relatively irrelevant (symbol-level contradictions may point to something that might need investigating, but it’s perfectly fair to conclude that the only problem is in the symbols themselves)).

So from this perspective the Mandatory Comprehensibility boils down to “I expect this to follow the rules of the symbols I’m used to”. At least it matches very well with this:

And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go.

ozymandias271:

nostalgebraist:

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

it is interesting to frame this as “an anxiety disorder” because previously I had framed it as “everyone else is INSANE and SOMEHOW MANAGES TO NOT FREAK OUT ABOUT THE UNRELIABILITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE because as previously mentioned they are INSANE”

while I was pretty thoroughly corrupted to begin with in the ways people usually think of, Ozy was a significant influence in turning me American and that is strange and worrying and entirely correct and perfectly fitting and I don’t know how the fuck it managed to happen and I don’t mind it although I have no idea how I managed to turn into one who would not mind such a thing because thinking back I totally expect that I would’ve minded and tl;dr: ozy is corruptive in even strange novel unexpected ways