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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#411
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" ( https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com ) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.

Thanks for the rec! This looks like something I'll be adding to the list of Substacks I check regularly.

You're welcome! Substack is fast becoming a perfect honeypot.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably has as little bias as you can as a person Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic. Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while su…

"He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ." Good to see an unbiased take such as this. Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb... ) "Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some d…

Are you an expert on the topic of genetics?

If not why would you expect any claim revolving genetics to be "obviously 100% untrue" to you?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ." Good to see an unbiased take such as this. Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb... ) "Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some d…

Are you an expert on the topic of genetics? If not why would you expect any claim revolving genetics to be "obviously 100% untrue" to you?

You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.)

"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"

Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.

You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)

These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.

So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning. (Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point. It really is basic logic)

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably has as little bias as you can as a person Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic. Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while su…

"He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ." Good to see an unbiased take such as this. Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb... ) "Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some d…

> but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.

This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream.

The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further toward the kernel of truth they started with.

That's how they end up hooking people with thoughts such as "not obviously 100% untrue". The problem with HBD isn't the idea that genes can influence traits such as intelligence. The problem is their weird obsession with race. If they want to talk about genes and genetics, that's fine. However, for some reason much of their writing is about race with the implication that all people of the race share the same intelligence-related genes, which is patently false. Yet that's all they want to talk about.

They also greatly exaggerate, or more likely completely misunderstand, the significance of the genetics-intelligence correlations. Outside of genetic disorders, individual genes are only loosely correlated with intelligence. The correlations are vanishingly small, yet the HBD people talk about it as if it's some sort of 1:1 switch that determines who has high IQ and who has low IQ.

There are even more unsavory parts of the movement, but I'll caution you against getting hooked by their bait-and-switch arguments.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#415
post #251
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.

I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.

Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you an expert on the topic of genetics? If not why would you expect any claim revolving genetics to be "obviously 100% untrue" to you?

You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.) "There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon" Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's…

The history of philosophy shows that what sounds logical tells us little about how the world physically works. There's nothing logical about time dilation or quantum physics.

I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty.

The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empiricist.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#417
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?

>I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0]. Of course, this meant Republicans avoided…

> That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents

Not a fan of Trump either, but would things have been so much better with Hillary as President? Her actions are equally if not more heinous than Trump. She’s just not as obvious about it.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ." Good to see an unbiased take such as this. Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb... ) "Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some d…

> but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue. This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream. The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further…

You’re misconstruing what he thinks. He has literally told everyone openly (not what you claim is open via Kolmogorov Complicity).

“ This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future.)”

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as I think I'll be making this decision in the near future. > it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice? As text being…

Note that Discord's main conversation view is native UITableView for performance.

this article suggests otherwise.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per...

> At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this problem once before on the web! We already had an internal List component that virtualizes its children. There is no way we could just drop it into React Native right?

I'm also curious why it took them so many pain points to reach list virtualization as their solution. That would've been my first thought.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.) "There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon" Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's…

The history of philosophy shows that what sounds logical tells us little about how the world physically works. There's nothing logical about time dilation or quantum physics. I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty. The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empi…

It's nuanced. We are evolved creatures, with certain intuitions about things.

You can point to domains about where it fails completely. (For understandable reasons)

But that doesn't mean intuition is useless, in fact I'd say it's rather underused for how valuable it actually is. Parachutes and RCT's come to mind.

Being empirical is really hard and rather un-natural for humans. It's a best effort thing. Current institution don't help as much as I'd like, it still takes many decades for information to propagate (And even longer for corrections where the consensus was wrong)

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