2023-03-09

etc

Give Up Seventy Percent of the Way Through the Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
Kids Are Not Okay
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed.
- HN comments
Reddmatter: A material that is superconductive at achievable temps/pressure
How much safer has construction gotten?

if you watch construction crews working on single family homes, you often see very little in the way of safety precautions that might slow down work. Workers are seldom tied off when working next to a leading edge, for instance (in my experience at least). So I don’t think it works as an explanation on its own. But it seems like part of the story.

The False Promise of Chomskyism

Chomsky, the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded.
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

If you have a vocabulary of 100,000 words and a second-order Markov model in which the probability of a word depends on the previous two words, then you need a quadrillion (10^15) probability values to specify the model. The only feasible way to learn these 10^15 values is to gather statistics from data and introduce some smoothing method for the many cases where there is no data.
Why Poverty Persists in America
The trend of rising IQ in younger generations appears to be reversing
Is clutter becoming cool?

My Statement to Congress - by Matt Taibbi - Racket News
Twitter Files 16. Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex
Watch: Taibbi And Shellenberger Testify Before House 'Weaponization' Panel | ZeroHedge
EXPOSED: America's Secret Censorship-Industrial Complex

Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from “countering terrorism” to “countering extremism” to countering simple misinformation. The government no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity. The only predicate it needs is simply the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.

The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data
- HN comments
Executive Sentenced for Scheming to Flood Northeast with Opioids
The FBI Hasn’t Said What This Couple Did Wrong, But Is Taking Their Savings Anyway - Institute for Justice

In March 2021, the FBI raided US Private Vaults with a warrant that explicitly directed agents not to conduct a criminal search or seizure of individual customers’ boxes. They were just supposed to identify owners so they could claim their property. But the FBI instead acted on its months-old plan to search and try to forfeit the contents of any box worth more than $5,000.