Zarathustra
@zarathustra5150 • 52,879 subscribers
i knew the rules, but the rules did not know me…
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Several years ago, Peter Thiel shocked many people by telling Tyler Cowen he had it backwards: AI would be worse for math people than for wordcels. Tyler Cowen: “Large language models are already quite powerful. They’re only going to get better. In this world to come, will the wordcels just lose their influence? People who write, people who play around with ideas, pundits — are they just toast?” Peter Thiel: “My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people. What people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the Al models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit. There's a longer history I always have on the math versus verbal riff. If you ask, "When did our society bias to testing people more for math ability?" I believe it was during the French Revolution because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families. Math ability was distributed in this idiot savant way throughout the population. If we prioritized math ability, it had this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society. Then, I think, by the time you get to the Soviet Union, Soviet Communism in the 20th century, where you give a number theorist or chess grandmaster a medal-which was always a part I was somewhat sympathetic to in the Soviet Union— maybe it's actually just a control mechanism, where the math people are singularly clueless. They don’t understand anything, but if we put them on a pedestal, and we tell everyone else you need to be like the math person, then it’s actually a way to control. Or the chess grandmaster doesn’t understand anything about the world. That’s a way to really control things. If I fast-forwarded to, let’s say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it’s way too biased toward the math people. I don’t know if it’s a French Revolution thing or a Russian-Straussian, secret-cabal, control thing where you have to prioritize it. That’s the thing that seems deeply unstable, and that’s what I would bet on getting reversed, where it’s like the place where math ability — it’s the thing that’s the test for everything. It’s like if you want to go to medical school, okay, we weed people out through physics and calculus, and I’m not sure that’s really correlated with your dexterity as a neurosurgeon. I don’t really want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain, or something like that. In the late ’80s, early ’90s, I had a chess bias because I was a pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was, you should just test everyone on chess ability, and that should be the gating factor. Why even do math? Why not just chess? That got undermined by the computers in 1997. Isn’t that what’s going to happen to math? And isn’t that a long-overdue rebalancing of our society?” More in clip:
Zarathustra141,991 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
It’s become fashionable to talk about Boomer cringe. And Millennial cringe. But Gen X produced a *metric fuck ton* of weapons-grade, atomic cringe (just watch this clip, if you can) that has somehow escaped serious historical scrutiny & nobody talks about it. That ends now.
Zarathustra335,052 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
Norm MacDonald on the term ‘cis-male’: “it’s a way of marginalizing a normal person”
Zarathustra384,462 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Watching older live performances is a stark reminder of how much the bare minimum floor for “professional musician” has collapsed over the last decade or two. Chris Cornell famously said: “A true musician should be able to walk into a room with nothing but an instrument and capture people's attention for two hours”. No more. Today, a startling share, probably a majority, of popular acts not only can’t play a single instrument, have no music theory knowledge whatsoever and can’t write their own songs, they quite literally cannot even sing(!) anymore, and have to lip-sync to pre-recorded, overdubbed, auto-tuned backing tracks to survive a “live” set. Using canned backing tracks and lip syncing was considered a scandalous, discrediting, career-ending mark of shame and dishonor in previous musical eras. A live concert series like MTV Unplugged of the 1990’s could not exist today. Too many popular acts simply couldn’t do it. Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1970; just three guys with nothing but an acoustic guitar:
Zarathustra696,872 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Absolutely unreal: this blowhard buffoon is a literal anchor baby. He indirectly admits he might not even be an American citizen by birth. His mother was not a citizen when he was born. His father is *still* not a citizen. But he has, completely uninvited, decided on Christmas Eve that it's his place to lecture Americans whose families have been here for centuries, and who fought and died in wars for America, about what being an American is. And he's pretending he's somehow qualified to be the arbiter of who is and who is not American. Laughable. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Disqualifying. Why should we ever listen to this creepy blowhard buffoon about anything?
Zarathustra871,540 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
Divorce lawyer: "I do divorces with people, the woman walks out with $200–$300 million dollars. He was an analyst at Goldman Sachs who built a hedge fund, sold it, and then used his trading algorithms to build it up to $500 million. She was hot. And slept with him. For a while. And then started sleeping with other people. And playing tennis. And having botox. And now she's going to get half. Do you know how insane that is? And it happens all the time."
Zarathustra2,456,015 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
“Crime is not down. Crime *reporting* is down.” Marc Andreessen & Joe Rogan on how the official crime rate doesn’t measure crime. It only measures the state’s willingness to record a crime. So it gets squeezed from both ends: 1) Victims stop calling to report a crime when they know nothing follows. 2) Police reclassify what does get reported into lesser charges that never reach the official crime stats. Residents are not fooled, read the “lived city experience” correctly and are forced to adjust their entire lives accordingly: where they go, when they leave, what they wear, what they lock, what they avoid, how much risk they absorb, etc. In DC the police just got caught blatantly cooking the books. More than a dozen officials are being fired after felonies were buried in lesser charges and kept out of the public count. Which raises the question: how many other cities is this happening in?
Zarathustra188,383 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Eric Weinstein is insulted he didn’t get a personal call to endorse Trump, compares himself to *Robert F. Kennedy Jr.* (American political royalty, lifelong high-profile celebrity, presidential candidate, U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services). Incredible stuff.
Zarathustra68,360 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
In a jazz/music group chat I’m in, we were joking about how this absolute buffoon (in QT) vaguely resembles Phil Perry (my video). But the gaping talent gap between them highlights how our current generation has stumbled backward into a musical dark age. Our music is terrible. Nobody can play an instrument. Nobody can sing. Nobody can write anything more complex than embarrassingly simplistic Neanderthal-tier three-chord mush, if that. Nobody knows music theory. Nobody can sight-read. Technology has largely gutted this generations musical capacity, and desire/attention span necessary to even attempt what previous generations called music. And that’s the precious few now that are even capable of actual musical expression at all. Most of our idiotic “music” now is barely literate SoundCloud mumble rap, grunted out like a caveman discovering fire. Our generation’s music is cheap, plastic, fast-food music that will not stand the test of time. And deep down, everyone knows it.
Zarathustra24,552 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten