Thanks for the answer. I had forgotten about the No-communication theorem.
This led me into another rabbit hole :-) of why c is 299,792,458 m/s and for example not 499,792,458 m/s or some other value, and the fundamental constants that bring this value. [1]
Is there a current theory that tries to justify those constants that bring the current value of c ? Are those values the ones that must be, for the current Universe to be feasible?
Veritasium has a few recent videos on Action. In one of them I believe he shows speed of light expressed as one unit of action, which implies that it’s the highest “resolution” any propagation can resolve at based on the fundamentally smallest path integral anything can traverse, or something.
I'm not sure if there is a good theory on why it ends up being this speed, but if any of the constants were even slightly different we wouldn't be in this universe to talk about it.
The speed of light is 1c and is a fundamental constant.
Humans choose to express it in metres and seconds.
A meter is huge if you compare it to the Planck length. Humans are pretty big creatures compared to fundamental particles, so we have a big basic unit of length. But seconds are gargantuan, because humans are absolutely glacial if you compare them to the time it takes light to travel a Planck length.
It's like a continental plate asking why humans zip around so fast.
> The speed of light is 1c and is a fundamental constant.
Yes, but why is the value that it is and not higher or lower? From my (basic) research it seems, it could be plus or minus 20% a different value, and the current Universe would still be feasible.
No, the point is that if it was 20% bigger we would not be here to ask those questions :-) Stars fusion or weak atomic interactions would not work. Maybe Hari Seldon decided....
If Whites want to make an ERG, why can't they? What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?
Google doesn't exist in a vacuum, but in a broader culture (e.g. America). If you're coming from an Asian country, you might still feel alienated or simply want to connect with people who intrinsically understand your culture.
That said, the Asian makeup of Google has increased significantly over the years. I wonder how that has impacted the participation rate in its ERG versus when it was originally established.
>* What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?*
The dominant culture is essentially the "default" and is somewhat "self-reinforcing", so generally has no need of an identity-based support group. Thus, when the dominant culture does establish an identity-based group, it tends to take on a different meaning.
> The dominant culture is essentially the "default" and is somewhat "self-reinforcing", so generally has no need of an identity-based support group. Thus, when the dominant culture does establish an identity-based group, it tends to take on a different meaning.
You're being so indirect we're forced to guess at what you mean. Can you please say clearly why you think White must be actually prevented from doing this, when all other groups have already done so?
Not why you think they don't need one - why do you think they must be prevented, even if some of them want to start one?
>What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?
The exact same thing as anyone of any other group of course.
To be clear, Whites are a minority at Google. They are also not even the largest group. (Not that this should matter - all groups have the right to exist).
Nothing prohibiting advocacy of nazis, from what I can tell, it's for affiliation with nazis. And its an entry/approval requirement, and there is a big difference though between entry/approval requirements and ongoing obligations. The government can deny entry/approval for a myriad of reasons related to unfavorable speech, but they can't infringe on the legal speech of a green card holder.
Regardless, the prohibition for entry/approval is against people who were associated with the nazi party or nazi-allied parties between 1933 and 1945, which is basically obsolete already. Anybody for whom that prohibition applies would be 98+ years old now.
If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.
"I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life" is incredibly dishonest and Vance should be held to account for this incredibly dishonest statement.
The phrasing is intended to create the impression that the posts were made years ago, by some angry teenager, and it's not relevant to the person they are today. It's a way of downplaying the acts, creating distance between the person today and the acts at some unspecified point in the past.
But we know these timeline details. Elez is not a "kid" now, he's 25. These posts were not made when he was 13, they were made last year when he was, I suppose, 24 going on 25.
There are two conflicting perspectives being promoted by Musk, Vance, etc which IMO are in direct logical conflict:
1) This person's actions last year (going up to December 2024! Just 2 months ago!) are the actions of an irresponsible child and we shouldn't hold them accountable for those actions because they're not responsible enough to be held accountable for them.
2) This person is responsible enough right now to be operating at the highest levels of government.
It's not a lie. "I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life" does two things: characterizes endorsements of racism and eugenics policies as "stupid social media activity", and asserts that exposure of such activity should not lead to someone losing their job. The part about not rewarding journalists who "destroy" people does not exist in a vacuum away from his downplaying of Elez's abhorrent racial views. If journalists had revealed Elez, for example, was a secret left-wing antifa supporter on Bluesky, I think we can reasonably doubt Vance's reaction would have been the same.
Edit: Now that you've brought Vance's tweet into focus, it's also interesting that he does not think Elez is currently a "bad dude" when he's expressly stated a desire to normalize hatred against an entire ethnicity
Follow-up: "How is Elez both a child who shouldn't be held responsible for his actions from as recently as 2 months ago, but also the right person to be trusted with extensive access to government systems?"
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The doge boys are in-group, so they are protected, and the law will not be brought to bear against them. Simple as that.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said.
Funny, I don't see those extra qualifiers in there.
No journalist is going to ask him this because they’re afraid of retribution and a loss of access. If they do he’s going to deflect - nobody will press him on a genuinely galling statement of values.
> As soon as one of them (age 25!) was discovered to have written some blatantly racist remarks, the narrative flipped to pleas to forgive them because they’re just kids.
Yeah, you just made that up. The "narrative" about the 25-year-old's remarks was not based on his age. This is the narrative, from JD Vance the vice president himself:
"Here’s my view:
I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.
So I say bring him back.
If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that." [0]
Obviously the operative line is the central one about not rewarding journalists who try to destroy people, "Ever". That means regardless of who the target is or their age.
>intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy is so blatant that you can’t possibly ignore it
"forgive them because they're kids" sounds like a pretty accurate paraphrase of "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life"...
It's interesting that JD Vance should invoke that defence considering this particular "kid" with a fondness for racist edglordism was tasked with the responsibility of firing tens of thousands of other people...
And it "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life" was the entire thing JD said that would matter, but it's not everything he said.
You're literally just deleting the important part of the message to pretend a supporting comment is "the narrative".
It's hypocritical intellectual dishonesty to pretend JD's point was something other than what it obviously was.
If this is your argument, don't be surprised when people look up the facts, note that you're dishonest this way, and tune you out.
The stance that we should never reward a journalist for “trying to ruin someone’s life” seems effectively to mean that we should never hold people accountable for their own words or actions, if those are reported by a journalist?
What if we didn’t worry about whether we’re “rewarding” the journalist, and just evaluated people’s actions and deeds when we decide how much public trust we want to extend to them?
> If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.
Saying things like "Normalize Indian hate" and "I was racist before it was cool" are statements that pretty well support a "bad dude" classification, especially in the context of a role where he'll be responsible for firing people and removing "DEI hires." Even if you agree (with Musk, Elez, etc.) that DEI is a problem, hiring a self-avowed racist to deal with it seems pretty idiotic.
Calling him "a kid" is also pretty disingenuous. He was 24 or 25 when he made those posts, hardly a kid. And they weren't ancient history, they were last year. I'm also for forgiveness if time has passed and people show that they deserve it, but it isn't ruining his life to hold him accountable to things he said last year, as an adult.
Nothing I said was inaccurate, and the fact that Vance also whinges about journalists accurately reporting the publicly expressed views of a person in a position of responsibility does not change the fact he referred to the twentysomething who resigned from that position as a "kid" somehow more deserving of a government job than the thousands of blameless individuals he was originally tasked with firing.
I appreciate that people who concur with Vance's objection to journalists reporting the truth are going to tune me and most things out, but that says more about your own lack of intellectual honesty than anyone else's...
> Obviously the operative line is the central one about not rewarding journalists who try to destroy people, "Ever". That means regardless of who the target is or their age.
Does that apply to politicians or billionaires as well? Considering Musk's history of doing that?
On a more general note, if it's racist remarks everyone is coming out with "lets forgive them", "they were young", "lets not destroy people because of some innocent remarks", but god forbid they say something that is being perceived as "leftist" ... burn them!
Revenue went down a lot less than expenses. So yes, profits went up a ton and are now positioned to go up even more as revenue recovers and the tech keeps functioning.
The revenue reduction was also more related to political positioning/image than technical capacity of the platform.
Let's look it up together. Musk has approximately doubled X's profits from 0.68B to 1.25B.
[0] article quote:
"During the last full year prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) of about $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue.
In 2024, X had an EBITDA of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.
While X’s revenue is about half of what it used to be, the company’s costs are just about a quarter of what they were before.
As per the WSJ, investors noted that these were better figures than they had anticipated."
Even this [1] hilariously biased article is forced to admit in the middle that yes, X's profits have gone up since Musk took over.
"Now X also, of course, has reduced its overheads significantly, by culling around 80% of staff, so X’s profit margins are now much better as a result."
The word “adjusted” before EBITDA for 2021 is an important one: it references a one-time legal settlement that Twitter paid that year. If you don’t take that into account, the EBITDA was $1.47 billion.
Xai or whatever it's called was pumped with $6 billion, by, wait for it, fidelity. And, they still value X at 1/3rd of its original price. So, yes, the numbers will look good to people like you doing basic ebitda and revenue back of the envelope math. There's also no denying that the product sucks and users are leaving, which in turn will make your cute ebitda numbers look even bigger a few years down the line when there's only naz1s left!
All polygenic traits would be Gaussian by default under the simplest assumptions.
E.g. if there are N loci, and each locus has X alleles, and some of those alleles increase the trait more than others, the trait will ultimately present in a Gaussian distribution.
i.e. if there are lots of genes that affect IQ, IQ will be a Gaussian curve across population.
The missing assumptions are that the number of genes is large, independently distributed (i.e. no correlations among different genes), and identically distributed. And the whopper: that nurture has no impact.
You can weaken some of those assumptions, but there are strong correlations amongst various genes, and between genes and nurture. And, one "nurture" variable is overwhelmingly correlated to many others: wealth.
Unpacking wealth a little, for the sake of a counterexample: one can consider it to be the sum of a huge number of random variables. If the central limit theorem applied to any sum of random variables, it should be Gaussian, right? Nope, it's much closer to a Pareto distribution.
In summary: the conclusion of the central limit theorem is very appealing to apply everywhere. But like any theorem, you need to pay close attention to the preconditions before you make that leap.
"Number of genes is large" is what I said, that's not a missing assumption, I said that explicitly.
The nurture/nature relationship to IQ has been well-studied for many decades. There are easy and obvious ways to figure this out by looking at identical twins raised in different homes, adopted children and how much they resemble their birth parents vs adopted parents, etc. Idealists always like to drag out nurture effects on IQ like it's some kind of mystery when it's a well-studied and well-solved empirical question.
It easily includes nature impact for the same reasons: an incredible amount of nuture items are both Gaussian distributed and the population sampled is large.
Wealth being distributed as Pareto would imply its effects on nuture are not Pareto since the effects of wealth are not proportional to wealth. At best there’s diminishing returns. Having 100x the wealth won’t give 100x intelligence, 100x the lifespan, etc. And once you realize this, it’s not far till the math yields another Gaussian.
