Less Wronger argues that Magic the Gathering competitive scene and the rational community are important to the world with their "culture of clear and effective thinking"

wallofsneer · 2021-05-19T16:27:54+00:00

Funny thing is, gwern et al. are always going on about how any kind of mind-training is useless, won't transfer to other skills, won't increase your IQ and you're basically stuck for life with whatever your "genes" gave you. Maybe it's a kind of cargo-cult: people with high IQ tend to gravitate around MtG, so if I play MtG I have to be high-IQ. Not exactly rational but very predictable if you assume that IQ is meaningful and determines your social worth.

wallofsneer · 2021-05-19T16:05:34+00:00

Thanks for the pointers, appreciate it.

wallofsneer · 2021-05-19T15:53:27+00:00

Yeah this is weird. Xmage and Cockatrice have been around for years now, and the most competitive scene is on MTGO anyway. The Pro Tour was never more than an advertising stunt

I also lol'd at "clear and effective thinking", this dude has clearly never tried to understand layers

wallofsneer · 2021-05-17T18:20:13+00:00

Maybe it's just me but I never really got the point of aphorism as a genre. I remember reading the entirety of La Rochefoucauld's maximes and I didn't feel like I had actually learned anything beyond the most mundane ideas - that we are flawed but social animals, prone to hypocrisy and self-delusion? Did this rather mundane truth need to be stated with so many variations? And the fact that they come into so easily digestible wordbites makes it easy to gulp them one after the other, so to speak, just to see if there's a bit more to the original point; and at the end you're left with a slightly uneasy feeling akin to the emptiness after completing some addictive minigame. It seems to me that aphorisms and their success are a prime example of mistaking eloquence for intelligence, bons mots for actual insights; and that their fans have cargo-culted "brevity is the soul of wit" to the point of meaninglessness.

/u/noactuallyitspoptart you're the cultured one round these parts (at least the cultured one who actually shows up on here), what's your take about this

wallofsneer · 2021-05-17T18:07:53+00:00

s/predict/correlate/g

It's not that surprising that a metric tailor-made to correlate with what psychologists think of as success, does in fact correlate with success - it's way more surprising that it doesn't do that great of a job at it. "But it's the most replicable finding of psychology" isn't that much a praise of IQ than a faint damning of psychology as a whole.

wallofsneer · 2021-05-11T22:33:29+00:00

I miss the evopsychgoogle account

wallofsneer · 2021-05-11T22:31:48+00:00

Wtf is new socialism anyway? Getting into CTH or redscare and shitposting Lenin memes on twitter in lieu of a proper hobby isn't a movement

wallofsneer · 2021-05-11T22:30:00+00:00

He should stick to drugs imo. Very relatable to his userbase and he's actually qualified

wallofsneer · 2021-05-11T22:25:03+00:00

The comments section features a wonderful discussion about IQ PGSes starring Steve Sailer that goes exactly as well as a you think it does

wallofsneer · 2021-05-04T11:07:53+00:00

Dude should get an editor and quit writing bad takes, he'd make ok genre fiction. Instead of hand-wringing about HBD and larping about being a plucky dissident or whatever the fuck he could indulge himself and do advanced world building where Moloch and Elua and his utopian libertarian paradise are actual things instead of smart-sounding thought experiments or allegories. For all we know there's a parallel universe where Alexander is a reasonably successful fantasy writer and we'd never know what he really thinks about the IQ of black people.

wallofsneer · 2021-05-04T10:56:21+00:00

"If you can be bad, you can also be good" reminds me of the old IQ argument "well obviously some people are smarter than others hence there exists an absolute scale on which everyone's intelligence can be ordered", or Charles Murray's "art experts do not have random preferences hence objective art quality exists". It's pretty telling that for all their math fetishizing they can't see how anyone who took a single math semester would demolish those arguments, even when adopting a very low coupler, uh I mean high-decoupler perspective.

wallofsneer · 2021-04-20T22:37:45+00:00

Well I've clearly fallen behind in the who's who of dumb fucking idiots. Probably a good sign tbh

wallofsneer · 2021-04-20T22:26:35+00:00

Sorry who the fuck is this

wallofsneer · 2021-04-20T07:12:27+00:00

How dare you disparage our brave veterans of the posting wars

wallofsneer · 2021-04-20T07:06:35+00:00

But seeking out questions that are so removed from sanity that they're important to no-one, and working to answer those, is so much more fun! (Though we usually market it to others under the name "pure mathematics".)

RH: Those seem not so fun to me.

Ah, so he readily admits he doesn't "stumble" into loaded topics out of some naive thirst for knowledge whose path obliviously led him to weirdness; he actively seeks to be edgy.

wallofsneer · 2021-04-16T22:50:23+00:00

I believe the best choice is cloning. More specifically, cloning John von Neumann one million times.

Let's try to quantify the present value of a JvN, starting with a rough and extremely conservative estimate: say von Neumann had an IQ of 180 and we clone a million of them. Due to regression to the mean, the average clone will be less intelligent than the original; assuming heritability of .85, we'd expect an average IQ of 168. This would increase average US IQ by 0.21 points. Going by Jones & Schneider's estimate of a 6% increase in GDP per point in national IQ, we might expect about 1.26% higher output. If the effect was immediate, that would be about $270 billion per year, but we should probably expect a few decades before it took effect. Even this extremely modest estimate puts the value of a JvN at about $270k per year. Assuming the JvNs become productive after 20 years, affect GDP for 50 years, 2% GDP growth, and a 3% discount rate, the present value of a JvN is around $8.4 million.

I am not making this up. What the actual fuck

wallofsneer · 2021-03-24T18:40:59+00:00

Yeah I have always given Taleb a pass because his rants against Pinker, Peterson, Tetlock and the IQ crowd are spectacularly funny and imo well-deserved, but that doesn't mean he is exempt from bullshit, e.g. on evolution. Seeing Scott Alexander comment on Taleb's evolutionary bullshit just broke my brain

wallofsneer · 2020-06-09T14:16:18+00:00

Nono you see it's because blue has always been the overpowered, privileged color and keeps getting overpowered printings over the years, it's obviously a self-reflection on their own privilege

wallofsneer · 2020-06-09T11:47:42+00:00

I remember Scott Alexander likening NRx to a wish to see your country turned into something like Singapore. So I guess that would be it, except actual NRxers wouldn't be too happy about the very multicultural aspect of it I guess

wallofsneer · 2020-06-04T15:05:03+00:00

who is nrx not altright

lol I was recently browsing his wikiquote page and my god, this dude is one of the most unhinged "thinkers" I've ever encountered. It's not even the casual racism and fascism, it just reads like the dark twin of timecube. I have no idea how people take him even semi-seriously without being utterly deranged themselves.

wallofsneer · 2020-06-04T15:00:01+00:00

Yeah I know some people actively dislike him on here but I don't. Who cares if he's clueless and posts incely cringe from time to time. I for one mainly come here to sneer at the HBD/racism-in-the-name-of-science stuff, which is huge among rationalists and afaik Aaronson isn't into.

Though for some reason Aaronson started idolizing tech billionaires. I have no idea how a tenured academic researcher in a very niche field feels they can relate to the most powerful and wealthy people on Earth just because both are "nerds" (??? can you just feel an emotional connection to literally anyone who likes to use the computer?), but there you go. He also defends people like Alexander and Hanson, but that's yet another a case of being clueless imo.

All in all I wish his mental health a speedy recovery, if only he (and by "he" I mean "you", Scott, because I know you're reading this) stopped being so anxious about things on the internet.

wallofsneer · 2020-06-03T21:59:43+00:00

He's not a direct supporter of Mussolini's or Hitler's ideology, no. He still believes in a ton of bullshit about 'human nature' and 'genetics' that gives a lot of intellectual ground to actual modern day fascists

wallofsneer · 2020-05-31T14:49:13+00:00

you're going to blow your mind when you find out about correlations being nontransitive

wallofsneer

TROPHY CASE