Poor form and scientific modeling

I was trying to think of an analogy for a problem that has become very widespread these days. 

The basic idea is that when you play a sport at an amateur level, you can get away with a lot of mistakes / sloppiness, and win by athleticism alone. But as you scale it up, and reach higher levels of difficulty, these same mistakes will cripple you and prevent you from advancing: you'll lose to people who may be less talented, but know how to do things properly.

And if you go on for too long that way, you'll be in a situation where you'll have to choose between being stuck at whatever point you max out at, and never progressing in the future, or being forced to go back to fundamentals and relearn everything from scratch, a very expensive and time-consuming process. 

The reason why a good instructor is so harsh on these things isn't because they're mean or out to get you specifically (at least, not in most cases) but because weeding these mistakes out early saves a ton of time later, and at a small cost, compared to allowing them to fester.

The same is true for language acquisition, and really most types of learning in general.

Ironically enough, this can mean that sometimes the worst players at higher levels are the most gifted or talented ones, at the amateur level-- their raw talent allows them to avoid getting punished for mistakes, which means they never bother learning, and this in turn cripples them when they move up to a new level of difficulty where these trivial things actually do matter. (See the whole gifted student -> pizza deliverer pipeline for proof in another subject.)

The way that I see it being relevant for science is that often people with high IQs but no actual knowledge can experience a ton of success in life, without bothering to formally study anything. Unfortunately they then assume that the same combination of 'intuition + raw intelligence' will help them in building mental models or solving problems at much higher levels. But they are actually crippled by naive assumptions and sloppy habits which-- due to their lack of experience-- they cannot even detect (though a trained professional could), and so they are doomed to spend their time crashing into predictable walls, and getting stuck there forever. 

Look at the ongoing and probably never-ending inflationary meltdown, or the AI bubble-- ultra-expensive models are constructed by pseudo-experts who congratulate themselves for their visionary genius, only to fail in the most basic and predictable ways. 

More music I enjoy

I wanted to post some of the music I've been listening to lately, in order to lower the pretentiousness of the blog-- not everything has to be political, or deranged, or whatever.

'You're being a Boomer / normie bro,' -> probably the reaction I'd get on just about every social media platform. (God forbid someone not be into garbage.)

I said this in a somewhat emo in a way in a previous post, but the bitter haters that make up most of the society / the Internet will try to cancel you, shame you, and laugh at you for anything, regardless of what you may or may not have done-- anything to score a W at someone's expense. And really, because of how warped today's society is, they'll target you harder for your good deeds, compared to deviant or evil behavior (which they overlook, or even encourage!). 

That's why I don't really mind being myself at this point, however against-the-grain not being into gay slop is-- why bother faking it? If you're going to be punished regardless, you might as stand up for yourself, and be honest about your personality.

AI, negative applications?

(I'm trying to go with a different approach, where I structure / edit / polish my posts less going forward. I think there's a certain point where being perfectionistic just restricts your output, while making you sound pretentious.)

I haven't talked much about AI, since I don't find it very interesting or useful, but a thought that has been in the back of my head is that to the extent that it is useful, it's more of a question of "negative" rather than "positive" applications.

Fundamentally, and despite trillions of dollars being thrown at it, it cannot create great art, introduce new scientific paradigms, or even really come up with interesting or insightful comments during a conversation (AI's speech sounds like a cross between an HR person and a used car salesman). It thus has no real positive contributions to make-- but I think can be used as a tool to reveal fakeness within the economy, as well as the broader society. 

Namely if a certain sector is vulnerable to what amounts to an industrial-scale Slop Machine, it means there wasn't much real work being done in the first place. AI can be used as a detector, to test for and reveal the presence of bullshit and fake work: if it successfully replaces human labor in this or that area, it's because the humans were not doing much in the first place.

So the fact that AI is having extraordinary success within academia should not be taken as a sign of its genius, but rather as an indication of the deep structural flaws and decline of academic culture. The fact that they are incapable of distinguishing between hallucinated meaningless gibberish and real honest / insightful work, reveals how low standards have fallen.

In that sense, AI is like a species, and academia is the environment. Its exponential growth within the niche reveals that the environment positively selects for garbage, which it can produce at a much faster rate than any human can (notwithstanding the valiant efforts of academics in recent decades). 

I say the same thing for everyday tasks: anything that you're doing which AI can do better, is not worth doing in the first place. Whatever it is can probably be consigned to meaningless / filler work, and cut out of your routine. 

So for example, I've heard that AI is great at writing emails-- what we can infer is that, obviously, most emails are a waste of time, and ultimately meaningless, and so perfectly suited for a machine that can only generate meaningless slop. 

Other insightful people have already noticed this, and it seems to be a general theme: instead of heading to a techno-dystopia, where the all-powerful machines subjugate humanity, what we're really headed for is a kind of absurdist Philip K Dick scenario, where the laughably incompetent machines break all kinds of things, and we all have to act like babysitters cleaning up after an immature, reckless, ADHD child. 

 

Tulsi Gabbard finally quits; more reflections on MAGA filth

Just a brief comment today, now that Tulsi Gabbard is finally out-- something she should've done sooner, in order to avoid contaminating herself and her political brand with the stench of Trump's horrendous neocon admin.

There is nothing surprising about this event, since it was 100% guaranteed from the outset that she would be ousted. No way an anti-establishment / pro-Iran figure would be tolerated for long, even if she was relatively muted and checked out and non-confrontational wrt to Trump's agendas. 

It was always very revealing to witness the level of seething disdain and hatred she brought out of the MAGAtards-- one of the few figures who could do that, and one that they never bothered to hype up or praise or include in their literally fake & gay social media circlejerks (unlike Vance, Cruz, Rubio, etc). 

An attractive, well-adjusted, confident, woman-- too much of a painful reminder of the endless normie women who rejected and ignored MAGAtards all throughout high school and college, which is why they hated her guts so badly. 

And too much of a relatable aloha all-American vibe in her persona, feelings which are totally incompatible with the seething hatred that defines this movement-- composed of foreign-born scammers / parasites and native-born social rejects-- whose sole goal is to sink America for good, as part of one final anti-social revenge fantasy against the normies who've always looked down in disgust at them.

Iran rant

Nothing new to say, just reposting some stuff I wrote previously but didn't upload: 

Trump has now reached Biden levels of senility-- he gets up in the morning and says one thing, and then in the evening he says the exact opposite, and his (equally brain-dead) supporters are then tasked with concocting 5D chess / 190 IQ explanations for why insanity is akshually genius, if you think about it carefully. The same is true of the broader war. It's just beyond pathetic, and hard to think of a sadder group.

America is of course an empire in severe decline, and everything that's going on must be understood in those terms-- it's not the Midcentury, when the elites could carefully implement their plans in ways that went undetected by the unaware / distracted normies. Rather, it's a case of the retarded leading the insane, so everyone in the broader society realizes that these plans (AI, green energy, another war in the M-E) are just totally doomed to fail disastrously, and so the propagandists are deluding themselves rather than fooling anyone else, and they enjoy no real influence or support outside of a handful of teeny echo-chambers (which are only becoming more and more irrelevant to the rest of society as time goes on, no different from the mainstream media).

'If you don't want endless inflation, just so America can lose another war in the M-E-- well you're just a CUCK and 3rd worldist!'

'It's called survival of the fittest, kid-- we lose, and other people win, and the harder we lose the better!'

Sure thing Boomer, whatever you say Boomer.

And as usual with losers, the MAGtards do nothing except whine and cry about the state of the world, and how cruel it is to them-- literally identical to the noises ANTIFA made after getting Rittenhouse'd-- now that their delusions of grandeur have been collided with the IRGC's missiles. Apparently Iran was supposed to 'just take a beating' or fight back 'in appropriate ways', rather than retaliate in a way that would allow them to win. And on top of that their missiles and drones 'crossed international lines!' and even hurt the innocent American soldiers!

Again, you'll basically never see a group of people spend more time sniveling about how cruel the world is to them than these so-called alpha males, Darwinian superiors, autistic ubermenschen... almost as if this is what happens when you spend your entire life constructing a narcissistic persona, because you're unable to cope with being a generic reject loser.

So many retarded faggots, and in so many powerful positions... it's hard to think of a nation more crawling with AIDS than America in the 21st century.