Claude, can you summarize this book for me so I can post about it on hacker news?
I skimmed a few chapters and deeply read a few paragraphs and it's certainly thought provoking book-shaped. I really do get a pretty visceral feeling when reading stuff like this of "why would i bother reading it if someone couldn't be bothered to write it", though I get this is in collaboration so perhaps there's more effort in here. Reading the whole conversation inclusive of the user prompts would be a lot more interesting to me.
Salvia is such a slept on hallucinogen, I would highly recommend it if you have experience tripping. It's legal in California.
It's not fun in the way party drugs or low dose mushrooms are, it's more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment but sure as hell gives you a unique experience to reflect on when you're sober 10 minutes later.
> more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment
This is a funny and accurate way of looking at it.
After trying it a few times I felt like I had seen everything salvia had to show me. A dissociative kaleidoscope that leaves you coughing and sweaty loses its novelty pretty quick.
I haven't touched it in many years as well (though this thread has made me curious how I would feel about it now, so I may change that), but I think I attribute a lot of my general stability/resilience to bad trips when it comes to hallucinogens to my salvia use giving me experience with a mindstate that can easily tip into an H.R. Geiger kaleidoscope as you said.
IMHO not worth it — salvia is terrifying much more often than mushrooms / acid. Definitely not something for a "first time psychonaut," and certainly shouldn't be legal.
Among my most terrifying dissassociative moments (you will not know who you, nor anything else, is).
Correct, even though it was the first hallucinogenic substance I ever tried I would not recommend that other people do the same thing, the potential for a bad trip if you're inexperienced is very high.
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you?
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has"
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
A good one is the Minnesota Trans-racial Adoption Study. Bit it's not hard to find more. It was a very popular research topic a few decades ago.
> honestly, just think about it a little longer
It's arrogant of you to assume that more thinking will lead to your thinking. It's possible that I did think of your idea and dismissed it as wrong, or that you and cogman10 have different ideas without realizing it. So you should say what you mean if you want to communicate that.
I did think about it enough to realize that all non-human life collectively has more genetic diversity than humans, yet every single other species has less intelligence. So more diversity doesn't necessarily mean equal intelligence.
> To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
Glad I'm not imagining it, I'll be cancelling my sub. Paying for things only for them to get worse and the provider hoping I don't notice is such a fucking vile tactic.
In my experience sonnet 4.5 is basically pointless, it often gets non-trivial tasks wrong, and for trivial tasks I can use a local model or one of the myriad of providers that give free inference.
EDIT: Holy shit I read the github issue, fuck these people.
> We highly recommend Sonnet 4.5 -- Opus uses rate limits faster, and is not as capable for coding tasks.
It's only a matter of time before the incorrect translations become standard english, and the correct translations become "formal" or even "archaisms".
We're truly seeded our language to a bunch of crappy algorithms...
Netflix dumps this task to third-party vendors. Theoretically, they should vet and verify the work quality but it's probably a race to the very bottom.
Tangentially related question for any of you GIS people who might be lurking in this thread:
Can anyone recommend me a method of meshing LIDAR point clouds? The sparseness of the data on building walls & other near-vertical surfaces combined with a lack of point normals leads to degenerate solutions with all the common approaches (poisson/ball pivot/vcg in meshlab) not to mention extremely slow perf. Tree canopies and overhanging parapets make a simple heightmap approach less-than desirable (though ultimately acceptable if I can't find anything better). I'm trying to turn 90 billion lidar points into maybe 30-50 million triangles, hopefully without spending months developing a custom pipeline.
I think Meshroom can use LIDAR data as an input now? I used it years ago for photogrammetry and camera tracking for some VFX work and it's an incredibly solid suite of open source tools for these types of tasks.
Sabine recently wrote a back of the cover testimonial for "The War on Science"[0] which is a collection of whiny essays by sex pests and racists[1]. It seems like she started off with some fairly reasonable criticisms of academia but over the past few years she's been pushed deeper and deeper into quack territory. AFAICT she's academically much less of a joke than the theory of everything VC guy, she's a real physicist. I'm curious to see if she's proposing something novel/meaningful/reasonable here, skimming the paper I can see it's above my pay grade.
I don't really have a point here, shitty people can do good things, humanity sure runs the gamut huh?
Your first quote criticising the book starts with "I didnt read this book".
Probably sums up what the book would be complaining about. No experience, didn't actually do any fact checking, makes claims we are supposed to just believe and call it science.
Second video doesnt seem to have any content from the book either.
Why do you share your opinion without having examined the information available?
And : Second video
First video seemingly was just to show she did indeed write for that book
And wait - you've not read the book? But you are here defending it ? Want to take a stwp back and think about what you're doing here? And second video moght be a good start.
Im criticising the idea that scientific findings can be undermined with accusations of undesirable sexual preference.
They cant, to think they can and try to do so is stupidity of the highest order, I would have loked an actual review of the book, even though i didnt expect to find, nor did i find one in the sources.
The only reason I checked the sources was to confirm that stupidity continued in the sources and that they contained nothing of value.
Why would you ask me when you can watch the video itself instead of talking about it
Edit0: cant reply further somehow. This isnt a debate and the only supported claims you have done are that you didnt read the book or watch the videos - your claims are moot. I recommend the feeling of grass in the palm of the hand.
I have made the claim the only criticisms of the book are logical fallacies. (That I have found)
Not 100% clear if you agree or disagree, but the way this works now, is short of any further criticism that isnt a logical fallacy, is just assume you agree with the book and have no valid criticism of it.
Thanks for the recommendation, think I'll grab a copy and read it for myself. Just about to finish deaths end and was wondering what to read next.
Is arduino even relevant at all in 2025? I mean i gotta hand it to em they're getting an insane amount of life out of marketing a 20 year old chip but I haven't seriously considered using one for a decade or so because of how much better in literally every way the esp32 is. I mean it's like $10 for three of them, they're dual core, have a radio on board and you can even use the arduino IDE for em, what's the downside? I especially love the two cores because I can have a web stack and bluetooth on one core, and whatever realtime actual programming i need to do on the second core.
I skimmed a few chapters and deeply read a few paragraphs and it's certainly thought provoking book-shaped. I really do get a pretty visceral feeling when reading stuff like this of "why would i bother reading it if someone couldn't be bothered to write it", though I get this is in collaboration so perhaps there's more effort in here. Reading the whole conversation inclusive of the user prompts would be a lot more interesting to me.