sus

the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:

Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.

moving on,

For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.

Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a "non-doomer thread". Because of course.

but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:

The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.

Further study of the user's excreta clarifies that they are:

• sincere
• definitely not racist

warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end

(archives: one two three)

Spotify also originally got all its music by pirating it. But later it started printing money for record labels (while fucking over musicians) so all was forgiven.

Leases would show as zero on the balance sheet if the government owned their own buildings. But of course someone decided that was "against the free market" so now the government cannot own anything in the name of "efficiency"

sweden also refrigerates their eggs.

I don't see affirmative action as fundamentally bad. Applied correctly and not too heavy-handedly, the privileged will still have equal opportunity to enroll or get the job, per amount of effort they put in, etc. And even if it is a bit too strong, their privilege will most likely make up for it in other ways.

In practice though, it's highly susceptible to backfire effects and is usually on the wrong side of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". You can't expect someone who grew up malnourished, undereducated and generally mistreated by society to suddenly bounce back and become a "model citizen" when they get a good job or scholarship, statistically speaking.

I was going to say this sounds a lot like the conservative strawman that postmodernism means the total rejection of objective reality.

Then I read the post-meritocracy manifesto and wow some of those "our values" bullet points are facepalm worthy.

to be honest it takes a bit of time just to find any mention of russia related topics at all (and then the first one is just a news article with zero comments)

$1 for tapping the pipe, $100 for knowing where to tap

Oh I forgot about stereo, ha.

at high signal strength LDAC should default to 990kbps.. which is kind of ridiculous since it's so high it's higher than some lossless codecs, like uncompressed 16-bit 48kHz. (which is higher than standard CD quality)

the problem is that for every ideas man, you need at least 20 people to actually do the work. And that work is a lot more tedious than being the one who comes up with the ideas

and of course, most people can't tell the difference between a "good ideas man" and a "bad ideas man", and there are a lot more of the latter

when exactly did that happen