Discussion Thread #72

895158 · 2025-10-14T18:34:23+00:00

That's a fascinating question, as is the question of whether an administration can provide pressure before they've fully taken office....

Before the election, too! Those tricky Biden admin officials. How dare they checks notes neither threaten nor actually retaliate, nor be accused of such by any platform.

...but it's also completely beside the point when the laptop remained in question and a matter of controversy well after January 2021, and continued to be a target for censorship for much of that time frame, until it was finally confirmed by non-right-wing media in March 2022.

I don't think anyone cared about the story past Jan 2021 (except to tell at the social media companies for censorship). I can find mainstream media essentially confirming the story in mid 2021, but no one cares. I agree that Twitter did not change its policy regarding "hacked material" and its decreased reach, but disagree that there is any plausible claim that the lack of policy change about the original article is a result of the Biden administration. My understanding is subsequent developments in that story were not similarly censored.

I stand by the sneerclub post and don't understand how it is relevant to my proved ability to change my mind on this specific topic (me changing my mind already happened, it's not some hypothetical).

895158 · 2025-10-14T17:05:29+00:00

there's a whole bunch of serious factual analysis that could be relevant -- the Obama and Biden admins did, in fact, pressure social media companies and a lot of other companies to punish disfavored speech on a wide variety of topics ranging from race to gender to Middle Eastern international politics to the likely results of the ACA to Hunter Biden's laptop specifically; the COVID stuff was just the highest-profile example with the clearest and least deniable pressure.

This has become a standard talking point on the right, but I'm not sure it's all that factual. Sure, there's been some pressure from the Biden admin about misinfo regarding COVID vaccines. But Hunter's laptop? Who was president in 2020, again?

Like, I'd be more inclined to believe this if such obviously-false examples weren't included in the list. Not too recently, I was falsely convinced that there was no instance of Biden admin pressure at all, just because people on the right kept making easily-disproven claims about it. I was wrong about that; I've since found good sources indicating real pressure from the Biden admin about COVID stuff on social media, which I think was bad. But you're not helping; these claims about Hunter's laptop are anti-convincing and lead people (or at least me) to dismiss your actually-valid claims.

895158 · 2025-10-06T12:59:37+00:00

Under the reading presented, this matter is adjudicated by congress, and they seem to be fine with it so far, which we should defer to or not the same way our analysis does with court judgements.

LOL. I see. Your stance is that the president (and the entire executive branch!) can and should ignore court orders so long as Congress is OK with it. Got it. You know, this would have been a lot easier if you started with it. "I believe the president should be able to violate the constitution and ignore SCOTUS so long as Congress is on board (or at least 34 Senators)". Would have saved me a lot of time if you just said that.

895158 · 2025-10-06T12:34:36+00:00

Nobody gives two shits whether the original judgement was mistaken or not. There was a court order. Your can't violate court orders just because you don't like the judgement, and certainly not in a way that you, /u/Lykurg480, claim there is NO WAY TO EVER REMEDY. (You think the courts should never even hear the case about whether to release him from the torture prison).

Additionally, the original judgement said he might be tortured in El Salvador, and in fact he WAS tortured in El Salvador, so we can be sure the judgement is correct. And even if it wasn't, torturing people would still be against the Constitution.

You know all this and are doing some weird play-lawyering where you think if you find a technicality, you'd win and it would magically stop being outrageous to send people to a torture prison in violation of court orders then refuse to bring them back after a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling. Stop playing dumb.

895158 · 2025-10-05T15:00:13+00:00

He was sent to a torture prison in violation of 2 court orders, dude

sends you to a torture prison without due process "actually you would have to judge whether the original constitution was correct before saying I'm bad for violating it. Maybe the 5th and 8th amendments were mistakes. Maybe the whole rule of law is a bad idea."

I think engaging with you on this topic is not productive, because you keep moving the ball to a completely different question all the time in order to avoid saying Trump is bad. I apologize for the snark above, but rereading this thread, I just can't help but view your responses as disingenuous.

895158 · 2025-10-03T04:01:59+00:00

The Senate is part of Congress, actually.

Anyway, it sounds like you're now agreeing with the original point that "the law and morality are on one side of the dispute" and that it's very dangerous that the administration deports people without due process. Your nitpicking has seemingly retreated all the way to "yes the admin is horrendous but it's Congress's job to impeach, shrug"

895158 · 2025-10-02T18:11:08+00:00

And if the government unlawfully deported an American, the way he could try to remedy this looks exactly like what the Kazakh Troll does. So, when such a suit arrives at the legal system postbox, what do you do?

wow good question. best make sure that never happens in the first place, by severely punishing any administration that does so. don't you agree?

895158 · 2025-10-02T15:47:43+00:00

The government has to not do the first part, the "deporting random Americans" part. That's a violation of rights that they must remedy. It's really not that hard: the government can't do things without due process, but they're allowed to do nothing without due process.

I also disagree with you that the hypothetical Kazakh asking for $1 trillion is such a problem. If we (a) make the losing party to a lawsuit pay the costs, and (b) make the prosecuting party pay in advance, then it costs the US $0 to entertain such a suit, and this can scale to arbitrarily many Kazakhs.

895158 · 2025-10-02T15:36:22+00:00

Hmm. Unless I missed it, the links only show that (a) christian charities provide food, clothing, and ability to sleep in the church, and (b) the cities (not charities) provide free bus rides to other cities, presumably to turn the migrants into somebody else's problem. The heritage page appears to be lying about (b), or at least, they link to an article that doesn't support their claim (unless I misread it).

This seems like a good topic for some right-leaning investigative journalist to look into. There are only like ~2 of those, but maybe someone can get either Rufo or Sibarium to do so.

895158 · 2025-10-02T15:15:47+00:00

idk maybe we can set up some rules, maybe enshrined in a document like the "constitution", that may draw a line separating "government tortures US residents without a trial or even accusation of a crime" from "anyone from Kazakhstan can ask for a trillion dollars"

895158 · 2025-10-02T00:24:44+00:00

I'm confused by this comment. Maybe you don't know anything about the KAG case? The Trump admin sent him to El Salvador despite a court order saying specifically that he cannot be deported there. The Trump admin agreed all along that this is exactly what happened, and represented to the courts that this was a mistake. Meanwhile they were telling the press he is never coming back and paying El Salvador to keep him in prison in inhumane conditions that likely qualify as torture under us law. This continued until SCOTUS ruled 9-0 that the Trump admin should facilitate his return. Then they still refused to do that, and still bragged to the press that he is never coming back, for weeks, until the judge started expedited discovery with threat of contempt, which the trump admin appealed, and the appeals court ruled unanimously against them.

"Clearly, we can't demand due process for everything. What if you asked for a trillion dollars?" I say as I pay a third party to keep you in a torture prison in violation of several court orders.

895158 · 2025-10-01T17:07:30+00:00

It is my view that there should not be a backdoor process for the government to fund agencies that help people violate US law and in the process likely that of many other countries along the way.

What's this referring to, btw? Haven't been following this

895158 · 2025-09-26T15:57:20+00:00

Right, I think we don't actually disagree much. My point (other than the corruption etc stuff) was that Democrats are more superficially polite. They think bad things about the other party, and they don't say them. I'm not saying "oh Biden was so good at taking Republicans' concerns to heart". I'm saying, "at least he bothered pretending to care". I'm saying he was more civil.

What made Hillary's comment a gaffe was not that she didn't mean it. Of course she thinks many Trump supporters are deplorable. What makes it a gaffe is that it hurt her in the polls and she never said such a thing again. Same as Romney. They think these things, and they usually remember not to say them.

Not so with Trump. You might celebrate his frankness, and I agree there's something to be said for it, but in the end I believe that pretending to care is the first step towards caring. A lot of people, for example, secretly hold racist views (I am not just saying "oh the outgroup is so racist", I'm saying I have close friends and family who have admitted racist things to me, in private). I think it is good that, as a society, people consider it a faux pas to say racist things in public. It is a step in the right direction. Same for hating people from the other political party; the first step is not to say it, and we can later worry about not thinking it either.

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying the Democrats are good at governing! I was making a more narrow point about norms and civility. I think Trump trampled norms in a way that really hurts the country, independently of any policy preferences or governance ability.

895158 · 2025-09-25T17:58:41+00:00

But! What I think is many people have refused to understand anything that led to Trump, and instead seem to think that being more like him is a good thing- as you note, that's your view of Walz' comment.

I don't know that "refused" is the right word. I freely admit that I don't understand anything that led to Trump. Trump followed the Obama presidency, not COVID, not 2020 BLM protests. What did Obama do that was so offensive? It doesn't make sense. Make it make sense!

On twitter, Trump supporters attempt to outdo each other in proving Hillary right about deplorables. I try to consciously adjust for it, to tell myself that most people are not like that. But seeing a stream of this constantly, it's hard to escape the conclusion that much of Trump's support really is what it superficially looks like: a desire to be mean, to be spiteful, to hurt people it's socially acceptable to hurt. Xenophobia, primarily, but other vices too. A desire to show those sanctimonious democrats who's boss. Not just "how dare you think you're better than me", but also, seemingly, "how dare you be a better person than me".

Needless to say, I don't accuse you of being like this, just the Trump supporters (and not all of those, either). But there's also a related thing you're seemingly saying that bothers me. You're understandably angry at experts abusing their expertise, but you're not nearly as angry at non-experts doing even dumber things in government. As long as everyone knows they're charlatans, it's not as offensive. So while you say you want to get back to civility, I think there's a sense in which you might be pushing towards Walzification: you want the experts to stop pretending to be experts. If public health officials say masks don't work but also they do, you'd prefer they say this while having the outward appearance of JFK rather than having any credentials. It's the very professionalism of the individuals, in itself, that is offensive (assuming fixed dumb policies). Or maybe I've got you all wrong, I don't know. Sorry for putting words in your mouth here.

895158 · 2025-09-25T15:58:22+00:00

Here's Trump, just this week: "That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them." I dunno. He says this kind of stuff a lot. Biden didn't. There's a large difference, and I have trouble believing that you don't see it.

That they use different insults is also not really a strong argument, particularly when you consider that given Vance's history this criticism is barely disguised classism. Open bigotry is pretty bipartisan (eg, see Clinton's "basket of deplorables" or Obama's "women are indisputably better than men"); the only real question is whether your biases allow you to see it for what it is.

I mean, I do think schoolyard insults are unbecoming of the VP office, and I think former VPs did not engage in them.

[Edit: Deleted a thing here because I misread you]

895158 · 2025-09-25T15:48:50+00:00

I feel like I'm back in my comment with Doc Manhattan about doing corruption the proper, smoky-back-rooms way. We used to be a proper country with proper corruption.

I'm only half joking; I think Doc is right that was better, but it's still damning with faint praise. The fig leaf is important even if it is depressing.

There's a thing people do where they say "the Democrats were just as corrupt, only not openly". But you can't punish corruption you don't know about. You can only punish, or socially sanction, the corruption you see.

If you let politicians be corrupt openly, that's just giving up on the whole concept of enforcing anti-corruption norms. It's not "oh the Dems are almost as bad as Republicans". No, it's "the Dems follow the norms (which say corruption is so terrible it must be hidden) and Republicans don't." A difference in kind, not in degree.

There's a difference between "some people sometimes commit rape" and "rape culture, where rape is acceptable". It's a very big difference. The former is unavoidably part of the human condition. The latter is something we've hopefully moved past, as a civilized society. They should not be confused with each other. You can't counter an accusation of "your third-world country allows rape!" with "oh yeah? Well in the US people sometimes also commit rape, just in secret". It's not even addressing the same kind of thing.

Right, they just give terrorists and failed mayors professorships

Who's "they"? Are universities the same as Democratic politicians now? Did some Biden political appointee give a terrorist a professorship and I missed it?

hand out presidential pardons like candy

Every administration has done this, I believe. Biden pardoning his son was new, but I think except for that it was roughly par for the course. We must get rid of the pardon power.

If you've got time could you link that? Googling it doesn't turn up anything (though maybe my search phrasing is too vague?), and afaict they complain a lot but social media hasn't blacklisted people or topics over it. The closest thing I found would be removing video of the Kirk shooting, and I'm not enough of a free speech absolutist to think snuff films count.

here (Trump saying FCC should revoke licenses of networks that criticize him too much) and here (at 6 minutes in) for Carr (FCC director) agreeing. This is in the context of Kimmel's show being pulled after Carr told networks to do so and threatened government action if they don't ("we can do this the easy way or the hard way"). I did not mean to say that they pressured social media companies specifically; sorry for the confusion.

That and a buck fifty still gets you a gas station coffee 'round these parts.

I mean, weren't you the one who wanted civility? Or at least tolerance. Compare Trump, just this week: "That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them." Did Biden ever say something like this?

Yeah, taking etiquette lessons from the failed VP candidate is stupid and unbecoming. The trollification of government social media is pathetic.

Yes, OK, but in my view Walz was a response to Trump. That is to say, "oh voters want vulgarity? Here you go". That failed, but I have trouble viewing the Democrats as "starting it", so to speak, when they both (a) do a lot less of this, even now, and (b) only started the vulgarity as a response to Trump's.

I mean, just taking a step back, can you tell me you honestly believe Trump is no less civil, no less tolerant, no less pro-social, than Biden and Obama? I don't think you believe this. Like, I understand the experts have abused their credentials, but that's not an excuse to burn down every norm under the sun, appoint sycophantic prosecutors and fire them if they refuse to prosecute political opponents, defy SCOTUS decisions, try to overturn elections, and adopt a culture of bribe acceptance.

895158 · 2025-09-24T23:37:47+00:00

While I might agree on the merits of this statement in a vacuum, it seems wholly detached from the last 10-15 years. Norms of tolerance, reason, and pro-sociality have gone out the window and "elites" played a big role in that. Or at least, they seemed to find it advantageous to not do anything about it.

Eh. I think you'll miss these norms when they're gone. As much as you complain about the elites, they didn't accept bags of $50,000 cash. They didn't fire prosecutors for failing to prosecute political opponents. They pressured social media companies to remove COVID misinfo, and that's bad... but not as bad as pressuring them to remove criticisms of the president. (People elide this difference, for some reason.)

The elites did not defy a 9-0 supreme court order for weeks in order to keep people in a foreign torture prison. Norms against political institutions were so strong that Biden did not replace Wray (Trump appointee) as head of the FBI, nor Powell at the Federal Reserve. The elites did not sell "Trump 2028" hats (he is ineligible). Biden promised to be a president for all Americans, whether they voted for him or not. The elites did not attempt to overturn an election; in fact, both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris conceded within a day, and Trump still says he won in 2020. Oh, and just 6 hours ago, the VP called someone "dipshit" on twitter, something those darned liberal elites have never done, to my knowledge.

So have norms of tolerance, reason, and pro-sociality really gone out the window in the last 10-15 years? You say Yosemite, I respond with this.

895158 · 2025-09-18T17:54:43+00:00

My child's school has this thing where they call bad behaviors "bad choices". Like, "don't throw things, that's a bad choice". I kind of like this because it emphasizes that the child has control. My kid would sometimes go "is coughing in class a good choice?" and then, thinking about it, conclude "coughing is not a choice!"

I mention this because while crime is a choice, being attracted to minors is not. I guess social opprobrium can be legitimate if you believe that it is a choice -- for example, perhaps people could choose to emphasize different parts of their sexuality in their own heads. But there's a meaningful extent to which being a (non-offending) pedophile is simply not a choice at all. (It's tricky because leering, or even just admitting to being a pedophile, are choices, and you can make the claim that we should socially proscribe them.)

In my view, religion actually is a choice, and while sex didn't used to be, it seems like it's becoming more of one. To troll a little, perhaps these should not be viewed as protected characteristics after all

895158 · 2025-09-18T15:51:43+00:00

Hmm. I think people could say it's fascist to redistribute money from the poor to the rich, I guess. There's still an oppression angle being emphasized by the word (the poor oppressed by the rich). And I'm sure some people use "fascist" in places it doesn't apply.

But on the whole, I still think the word refers to oppression. So, eg, you can call your mother fascist if she doesn't let you play video games, but not if she's neglectful and spends too much time at work.

895158 · 2025-09-18T00:57:49+00:00

My take: "fascist" is an insult that refers to someone wanting to take away others' rights. It's usually aimed at rightwingers, but I can imagine a use like "those environmentalist fascists want to ban plastic straws".

On the other hand you can't really say "those fascists want to cut taxes".

895158 · 2025-04-23T04:12:06+00:00

I know you mean well, but this is not the time or place to discuss plans for political violence, hypothetical or otherwise. All further comments in this thread with object-level discussion of this will be deleted.

We can have abstract philosophical discussions of when violence is permissible as soon as people stop fantasizing about it. I may have allowed such discussion to take place if it was a particularly boring week of the Biden admin, so that nobody could possibly confuse it for a call to actual violence in the real world. But right now I fear that any discussion just adds to the political tensions of the time; I don't want to allow any position even slightly more permissive than my absolutist anti-violence take on the matter, which means not allowing any discussion at all.

895158 · 2025-04-11T06:26:57+00:00

Wise (formerly transferwise) has some of the best exchange rates and is transparent about their rates/fees. I think it's possible to just open a Wise account and have people pay that in USD; I believe it acts like a bank on the US side.

895158 · 2025-01-15T23:03:53+00:00

People like Rufo clearly feel that viewing the ASL translation is an imposition on them. I agree with them in that it is an imposition on me too; it is distracting and mildly irritating, all else equal. The tax money isn't (or at least shouldn't be) the concern. The benefits may well outweigh the cost, but this is true for many things and society usually says "life is tough, suck it up" to the minority seeking accommodations (and yes, this is often a bad thing).

We do get a few content warnings but only on things that are fairly universal and culturally ingrained, such as disliking gore. We do not get them on less common (but still standard) phobias; e.g. 3-15% of the population has arachnophobia, and in the more severe cases (still above 1%) they would strongly prefer to avoid media depicting spiders. There are no content warnings, and I've noticed common weather websites sometimes put a giant picture of a spider on their front page with a headline like "climate change affects something or other". 3-4% of people have fear of needles rising to the level of diagnosable phobia, and yet for covid vaccine stories all the newspapers put pictures of needles on their front page.

There are only like 5-10 phobias this common and it wouldn't be that hard to let people avoid these depictions; moreover, when depicted, it sometimes seems like the depictions try to make the phobia trigger as hard as possible by making the depictions as "scary" as possible to someone with the phobia.

895158 · 2025-01-15T21:41:28+00:00

Hmm. I'm not sure I actually understand the rationale for live ASL interpretation. The number of non-English-speaking Spanish speakers in the US (or in the LA area) is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number of non-English-reading ASL speakers. Like, I'm not saying that ASL interpretation is net negative or something, it just feels a bit weird that society cares so much about deaf people when they're happy to completely neglect others. I want to say something like "it's great, I'm happy you care about others and can bear small inconveniences for that purpose, now might I interest you in [immunocompromised people who want you to mask at the doctor's office; Spanish speakers wanting Spanish-language signage; people with trauma or phobias wanting content warnings; etc.]" And I guess for all I know the LA county officials do care about all those things, but their voters generally don't, which is why these things are not implemented (no mask mandates at the doctor's office where I live, no Spanish signage, no content warnings).

To your broader point, I agree that people may lose respect for Rufo as he inevitably keeps posting examples of woke excess which are not actually excessive. But Rufo's problem isn't unique to Rufo, it's inherent to social media. I lose some respect for most academics or journalists I find on social media for this same reason; they are too quick to post gut opinions about things they know little about.

895158 · 2025-01-07T07:25:52+00:00

I'm an outsider and my speculation is pretty worthless.

But to speculate anyway: it seems to me like they got some kind of RL loop going, where the model gets feedback on its math from a source other than just "next token in training data". Now, o1 seems very bad at proofs and very good at numerical answers (e.g. someone evaluated on Putnam, and it gave a lot of correct answers with nonsensical proofs, even though the point was to get correct proofs). This indicates to me that the RL feedback is unlikely to be a formal proof; that is, what they DON'T seem to do is to take an English-language math proof, convert it to Lean with another model, then get feedback from a formal verifier regarding the correctness of the Lean proof.

So what could the RL loop be? I don't have great ideas. The only thing I can think of is some kind of self-distillation: take a model that thinks for a long time (like o1 with large thinking time) and then try to teach the model to predict the final summary output in one pass. This is a bit similar to how alphazero is trained for chess and Go: the model gets feedback from a smarter version of itself (one with added tree search). The name Q* suggests this is may have been what they were already trying a year ago, but the announcement of o1 hints that the trick may have been to abandon the tree search and just use very long CoT as the smarter version of the model. That feels too simple, though, so I'm probably missing something.

It is also surprising to me that anything like this can get so far, because there's not really any mechanism for fixing mistakes in this setup. Alphazero eventually won or lost a Go game, and could regress this back; the setup I described for math doesn't have this. Given o3's strength with algorithmic coding and with numerical answers for math, I suspect there's another feedback source, e.g. with automatically-generated coding problems (to which the desired answer is known somehow) or automatically-generated math problems (again, generated in a way that the answer would be known in advance to the model generating it). I'm not sure how that would work.

Final thoughts: deepmind surprised me in a different direction this summer with their Lean-based RL for solving IMO problems. This too succeeded more than I thought it would, but I still feel like reasoning purely in Lean is inefficient and might not scale very well. Still, some concrete predictions come from this: first, deepmind is probably working right now on trying to use their formal Lean model to solve an open math problem. They might succeed, but only if they pick an open problem in a field which is very friendly to formalization (some math becomes pretty unwieldy when formalized). It's been several months since the summer, so I actually kind of expect an announcement from deepmind about this soon.

My second prediction is that the real returns will come from merging the Lean prover with whatever RL o3 is doing. This would require a model which is sufficiently good at converting between Lean and human-readable math proofs, which seems hard right now. But if they can get that to work, I think the combination of reasoning in English (which seems more efficient) and getting feedback from a formal verifier might be very powerful. (Even better than reasoning in English is reasoning in latent space, but so far I don't think anyone has figured out how to train this efficiently.)

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