@notcomplex_

Hedge fk-ed | Human Capital Enjoyer | There is no conservation of misery!

reducible.info
Joined July 2020
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The Chinese Communist Revolution consolidated its power by taking land from the elite. In the following generation, the previous elite once again reclaimed their social advantage. This is not an isolated phenomenon: A Thread on the persistence of status 🧵
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This, by @arctotherium42, is the best writing on the mass internet censorship of the 2010s I have ever seen. It is long but a must read. Thanks to @PirateWires for bringing it to my awareness. arctotherium.substack.com/p/…
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Elon is right here; anyone seeing the exponentials of AI should update their view of intelligence. Old comparisons of the village idiot and Einstein being similar in intelligence are not true; humans differ not just in relative terms but in absolute terms as well.
Elon Musk
@elonmuskAug 30
Replying to @cremieuxrecueil
The brain is a biological computer. Just like silicon computers, some brains have more processing power or specialist skills than others and this varies tremendously in humans. The probable capabilities of any given brain can be determined with high accuracy from an MRI. At Neuralink, we obviously have to understand brains extremely well to interface with them effectively, so there is no room for nonsense.
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Incredible stat from over 156,789 Norwegian marriages. The richest women are part of the most and least common pairings: those with the richest men and those with men in the 45th percentile. (1703 vs. 100)
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29903/w29903.pdf

ALT https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29903/w29903.pdf

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Philosophical sophistry in genetics is becoming increasingly contrived. We now have the data; graphing reality is easier than ever.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12859-019-2680-1

ALT https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12859-019-2680-1

Alonso Gurmendi@Alonso_GDAug 26
Replying to @ArtemisConsort
Which taxonomy reflects the true and objective reality of the three clusters?
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The original post: xitter.cf/ArtemisConsort/status/…
Hunter Ash
@ArtemisConsortAug 26
“It’s totally arbitrary to say there are three clusters here”
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In a large survey, those in hot rooms had 9% slower reaction times than those in cool rooms. With controls, that's about 1 IQ-scale point per 3°F.
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emilkirkegaard.com/p/race-di…

Race differences in reaction time: data from NHANES 3

Chronometric race gaps were about 0.50 in a very large representative US sample

emilkirkegaard.com
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While average household wealth by age has held steady, wealth relative to other generations has diverged. Baby Boomers had 20% of the nation's wealth in 1989 compared to ~10% for subsequent generations.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth

ALT https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth

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One of the most surprising facts of human settlement is that the Austronesian people settled Madagascar before Africans did, during the late Roman Empire. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of African history occurred with the island next door uninhabited.
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil8 Dec 2024
Thread of some surprising things that are older than other things Notre Dame predates the Maori settlement of New Zealand
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In 1965, a Vietnam draft priority change caused close to 10,000 couples to marry before midnight that day. Despite concerns that these rushed unions were fragile, the couples had lower divorce rates 15 years later.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecin.12965

ALT https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecin.12965

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To put the mismanagement of the British electric grid into perspective, recent surges in power prices are comparable to those of the 1920s.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-uk-learned-and-unlearned-nuclear/

ALT https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-uk-learned-and-unlearned-nuclear/

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Relatedly, the UK slowed the buildout of nuclear reactors before the US and France, despite building the first full-scale nuclear power plant. worksinprogress.co/issue/how…
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ARC-AGI provides strong evidence that human and machine intelligence differ in substantial ways. There are many tasks humans find easy and LLMs find difficult, and vice versa.
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more replies
What are LLMs relatively bad at? Connecting the shapes. (This is one of the hardest tasks for LLMs)
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This extends to IQ tests and beyond: xitter.cf/cremieuxrecueil/status…
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueilJul 23
This is correct! Giving IQ tests to LLMs produces uninterpretable results. I once showed this by giving LLMs matrix reasoning tests that were also given to humans who had received various degrees of training. Different groups of humans' results correlated, but not with AI's.
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All AI transfer learning in Go is within the first ~40 moves, and it's mostly memorization. Either engines didn't discover better fundamentals or humans can't learn from them if they did.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.15035

ALT https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.15035

Noam Brown
@polynoamialMay 28
After AlphaGo, the skill of human Go players noticeably improved. I suspect we will see a similar pattern in math.
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One area America hasn't made progress in is the uncleared murder rate. With Miranda (1966) and the rise in firearm homicides, a shocking number of murders don't lead to arrests.
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An overlooked but straightforward consequence of elite college diversity without increases in class size is that the number of White men attending has more than halved. In other words, elite schools are more 'elite' than ever.
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A reminder that El Salvador had among the highest incarceration rates AND the highest murder rates in the world. To solve crime, they had to lock up even more people.
Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueilApr 7
By locking up <2% of the population, El Salvador took itself from being the murder capital of the world to being safer than Canada. With sufficient effort, anywhere can become peaceful and crime-free. And it's on track to get even more peaceful this year!
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