YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

Right.

Russia's immense respect for Ukrainian culture has defined this war

Showed this to my wife.

You know what the worst part is? We're spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what I'd still have? The things in my pockets. I'd have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11

So the difference is not whether they're trying to be imperialists, but in their relative ability to do so. I'm sure there's some fascinating and useful graduate level historical analysis to be done in understanding why Russification was relatively unsuccessful, but that doesn't change the fact that Russia has time and again attempted to impose Russian culture, Russian language, and Russian law on parts of the Russian empire that were very happily doing their own thing.

lolwut

I think he's underestimating the intentionality at play here. The dynamic he's describing (and describing very well!) has been evident since the first chatbot, ELIZA. I don't believe that Saltman and friends don't know about this dynamic, and I'll give them benefit of the doubt that they didn't think we had AGI in the 80s with basic text templates.

I feel like it's slightly more emo for sheer length, "The Earth is Our Coffin" and "Hope is a Mistake" are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you "A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate's Apartment"

Note that the person in the video isn't part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.

See, there's the mistake. You can't let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.

I think "any idiot that got lucky under capitalism" is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.

Given that his codefendant was hit and killed by a car three days after the acquittal, I'm not sure if they even hired assassins or if they have some kind of black magicians on staff.

It goes back to the old "steppin fetchit" racist charicature of the lazy black man, usually either enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on when we're talking.

Self-reply because a few hours later I could be arsed after all, and what I found was confusing.

To start with, this wasn't a scooter original; it was a response to a post by a different Scott A, and according to a very brief examination (I read both the Wikipedia article and the talk page) it looks like it's based on some questionable history. The story is that Andrey Kolmogorov kept quiet and used his influence to shelter Jewish academics and others from persecution under the purges. However, the most noteworthy example of his actions during the purges were his active testimony in the prosecution of his doctoral advisor, Nikolas Luzin. There's some ambiguity about why he participated but the two theories appear to be that the cops forced him to do it by blackmailing him about a (historically disputed/unconfirmed) gay relationship he was in or that the whole thing was driven by personal animosity between Luzin and his students. Notably after being convicted it seems like Luzin wasn't enough of a threat to Stalin to actually be properly disappeared or even fully removed from academia.

I don't know enough about the relevant history to make a reasonable determination as to who's right, but it's telling that neither story meaningfully supports the idea that the Scotts seem to be pitching of keeping your head down and muddling through to protect you and yours under authoritarianism. If that "Kolmogorov Option" exists it's only because you're in a decently liberal society. Otherwise the authoritarian power of the state will be used against you either for their own purpose or as a tool by whoever can catch their ear and doesn't like you, and all your attempts to avoid being the nail that sticks out will have been pointless.

I'm also confused as to what the takeaway was supposed to be here. Like, because a whole bunch of different famous psych studies fail to replicate maybe this one is less invalid?

Also, were they expecting Ed Zitron of all people to not write a polemical?

Yeah. The fixation on growth mindset may be relatively unique to Microsoft, but the role it fills in the organization is really common; it creates a fuzzy standard to justify management's decisions while it obscures management's responsibility for those decisions. It's like managers realized that the Jack Welch rank-and-yank approach is absolutely terrible for morale, talent retention, and the general ability of the company to function over the mid- to long-term, but doing big layoffs is still a great way to make the numbers look better to meet shareholder growth expectations. So instead of having clear expectations that can be met or even relative rankings that can be measured there's been a move towards subjective evaluations. That is probably the best way to gauge performance in a lot of areas, but that requires both that the manager doing the assessment know something about the work being done (your average MBA won't) and that the organization not have incentives to abuse the power this gives them (which shareholder capitalism definitely does).

I don't know. I feel like the prior for putting tech billionaires on massive single-masted yachts with high waterlines and low air vents is still pretty positive. This is only one bad voyage; consider how many trips provide evidence that this is a good plan.

Much like Titan, which had several successful voyages to the Titanic that other billionaires should seek to emulate by using the exact same sorta-procen design and construction that Titan did.

On one hand, if inflating the value of the startup you're offloading onto a tech giant is a crime we should put half of Silicon Valley in prison. On the other hand, maybe we should put half of the Valley in prison.

I'm pretty sure they're referencing an old ssc post on "kolmogorov complicity" - referencing the Soviet scientist who either spoke out against the purges and got gulag'd or who realized that they were bad but didn't say anything to avoid getting gulag'd and tried to protect his peers from the same fate. I forget if he was the example to follow or the counterexample, and I can't be arsed to look it up.

Now imagine if instead of a Soviet citizen trying to steer your people away from stalinism you were a fascist living in a broadly progressive culture looking to steer the world away from liberalism and towards Yarvin and friends. I try not to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but I'm not sure how Scott's output meaningfully differs from what such a person would write. Honestly if he hasn't written the kolmogorov complicity post outlining the whole concept I don't know if I'd be more or less inclined to think he's doing it actively.

Kinda stretching the definition of "plausible". It's less about external deniability and more about internal rejection. They want to avoid thinking of themselves as fascist-adjacent right-wing loons without giving up on being one

"Black people are late sometimes" but in a racist way instead of a "Repent, Harlequin" kind of way.

Past a certain point it's a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once you're working with better tools.

I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it's not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.

Of course he's also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.