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Remember that the price of not having a good appeal process overseen by reliable humans is a terrible reputation.

And by definition, Zuckerberg didn't start out as an "alpha", but decided to emulate one after he was already super-wealthy.

Bezos too. And Elon.

The fact that the evidence doesn't exist doesn't imply the phenomenon doesn't exist?

Remind me, why gorillas and not chimps? Why chimps and not bonobos? Why assume that two related species with completely different environmental niches must share a social structure?


> The fact that the evidence doesn't exist doesn't imply the phenomenon doesn't exist?

Wolves were never meant to be evidence. They were a model, a metaphor.

I wonder how many people who complain about "believing the myth of alpha wolves" are the same people who defend astrology as a "useful way of thinking, whether it's true or not".


Until it was debunked, people thought that the alpha/beta/omega nonsense was the actual natural social order of wolves. Some people then borrowed that as a metaphor.

Right, "alpha" means a lot of things in ethology, but the "alpha/beta/gamma" categorization that took hold in reactionary circles was specifically derived from the wolf studies. "Some individuals tend to be more socially dominant" is not controversial.

> Until it was debunked, people thought that the alpha/beta/omega nonsense was the actual natural social order of wolves.

Some wolf biologists thought that, sure. But that obviously wasn't and isn't any kind of evidence about human sociology (and conversely nor is the fact that it isn't).


> defend astrology as a "useful way of thinking, whether it's true or not".

I wonder how many people defend mind palaces as a "useful way of thinking, whether it's true or not".

Historically speaking, that's all astrology was. Research has indeed shown that people who practice astrology are better at remembering details about people in their lives. Astrology is just a mind palace that allows them to more easily memorize and organize useful facts about the people in their social networks


Gorillas, Chimpanzees and Baboons are similar in their social structures with the dominant alpha males. Bonobos are different with it being matriarchal and conflict resolution being less violent.


Should have named the company "To Serve Humanity".

Klaatu, barada nikto.


> What prior ages had the sense to do was to confine the subject of sex to private discussion instead of flouting it in public

Citation, as they say, needed.

Counterexamples:

The Romans.

The Greeks.

The Babylonians.

The New Kingdom of Egypt.

Most of the Indian cultures prior to the British invasion.

> When decency is normal, the fear of social consequences of being indecent keeps would-be abusers in check.

That would depend strongly on what each culture meant by "decency" and "indecency".


Yes. The article is about how a particular open source Matrix server implementation isn't suitable for millions of simultaneous users, and you should pay for the non-open-source version.

But if you are merely handling tens of thousands of users, no problem. And if you have the budget to handle millions of users, maybe you have the budget to pay development as well as operations staff?


The figure you are looking for is heating/cooling degree-days.

For each day, use the average high and the average low. Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from the average high: if the result is positive, add it to the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days total.

Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many agencies calculate this for specific areas.

Here, for example, are the current season numbers for Boston: https://www.massenergymarketers.org/resources/degree-days/bo...

Generic regional numbers for the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/units-and-calculators/de...


Find a real problem and solve it cheaply, or solve it so much better than anyone else that your high price is worthwhile to enough people.

Don't focus on the method of solving the problem until you have identified the problem and all the current solutions and avoidances.


I don't think the elephant can be solved by a tweak to LLMs. Producing a statistically-likely continuation of a pattern is what they do; there is no encoding of the world, just an encoding of language and image data.

A general crossing of that gap is, dare I say it, a problem requiring real intelligence.


> I don't think the elephant can be solved by a tweak to LLMs.

I doubt that too. But solving it is essential to the valuations of OpenAI and NVidia.


Wondering whether we will see some combination with Cyc at some point (which tried to solve the „encoding of the world“ problem)


After Doug's recent passing, I sincerely doubt it.


In the US, the most likely cause of someone being wealthy is that their parents were wealthy.

But almost every wealthy American tells a story about how they did it by themselves, ignoring the schools that they attended, the services which were available to them, the people their parents associated with, and the ability to make high-risk investments because they had a built-in security net.


80% of US millionaires are first generation


Yet economic mobility, measured in terms of the likelihood that you die in a different income decile than you were born into, is lower in the USA than almost anywhere else in the developed world.

How to reconcile? It's fairly easy ... there aren't that many millionaires. The US has a society, culture and economy that allows for their occurence perhaps "better" than most other places. But this doesn't reflect the likely economic pathway that most of the population experiences in life.


The deciles are much further apart and the ceiling is massive. Compare the medians of all the countries (the US is at or near the top) then compare the 90th percentile and the US is heads and shoulders over the next highest.


1 in 12 Americans are millionaires.


Which proves that talking about millionaires is no longer that socially relevant thanks to inflation. Somehow ten-millionaire doesn't have quite that ring though.


So what? Economic mobility measurements remain vastly more indicative of the experience of 11 in 12 Americans.

America is good at generating millionaires (which ain't what it used to be)! News at 11!


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