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Noah Smith @Noahpinion
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
One interesting thing to me is that people on the Right like to compare Arabs and Africans to the barbarians who took down Rome...

...when those barbarians who took down Rome are the very same people the Right now feels are under threat!
The Right: "Oh my God, the Arabs and Africans are going to be just like the SCANDINAVIANS and the FRENCH!"

Also the Right: "Oh my God, the barbarians are threatening the advanced civilizations of the SCANDINAVIANS and the FRENCH!"
The Right, 2187: "Oh my God, advanced Arab and African civilizations are about to be swamped by barbarian hordes of [Mormons/Hasidic Jews/robots/telepathic internet trolls]!!!"
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One thing I think would help reduce elite Millennial burnout/disappointment/rage is for people to stop thinking that their job should save the world.

"Save the world" and "make the world a better place" are probably just things employers tell you to get you to work for cheap.
Maybe your job will give you meaning and purpose and a sense of doing good for the world.

Or maybe it'll just make you some money so you can raise some kids, have some pet rabbits, and be active in your local community.

There's more than one way to get meaning in life.
Also, people glorify saving the world when it probably just gives you PTSD.

We like watching Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and whatever, but we wouldn't want to actually fight Darth Vader or slog through Mordor. That would cause major burnout!
Read 3 tweets
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1/Since Trump's demand for his Wall is in the headlines, I thought it would be a good time for a thread about a history book I just read:

"Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America", by Daniel Tichenor (2002)

amazon.com/Dividing-Lines…
2/The book starts out with a chapter or two of dense, unnecessary political science jargon, saying that - essentially - U.S. immigration policy tends to move very slowly, because powerful politicians and officials resist the tide of public opinion.
3/But most of the book is an extremely readable, eye-opening history of U.S. immigration policy, from the founding through the 1990s.

It shows how the immigration debates we're now having have been with us, in some form or another, for a very long time.
Read 27 tweets
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Thread about why very high tax rates on very rich people don't raise much revenue (or reduce inequality much, even within the top tier).

Our system has a million loopholes. Closing them is more important than raising top rates.
That's not to say there's a trade-off between raising the top rate and closing loopholes! They are complements, not substitutes.

But if you just raise the top rate without closing loopholes, you'll likely be disappointed.
The fact is, raising effective taxes on the very rich will require a comprehensive sustained push on a large number of policy fronts. There is not going to be one silver bullet.
Read 6 tweets

Related threads

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06/01/2019 - 78 years ago today, the longest-serving #UnitedStates #President, #Franklin D. #Roosevelt (#FDR) addressed the 77th #Congress with his "#Four #Freedoms" speech with the intent to shift #US #foreign #policy from that of #neutrality to #interventionist.
#FDR promoted the idea that the people of the world, in all nations, shared entitlement to four freedoms: that of the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear.
#FDR is arguably one of the most 'successful' #US Presidents. Some would argue that on the basis of his numerous social policies such as 'the New Deal'. Others, however, would argue that his role during the second world war was more prevalent to his success & everlasting legacy.
Read 39 tweets
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This is the essence of the book's sadism. They know that these people were taught to be race-blind on pain of ostracism, and that they were taught that by people like themselves.

"We trained them wrong on purpose, as a joke," except the joke is now generational
To understand the leftist you must understand power and prestige, as they aren't guided by fairness but power. The power + privilege mantra speaks to this. The paragraph belies that they can be ignored unless they have a way to force you to listen to them.
"Pushing back is not natural"

Again, understand this paragraph through the lens of power and their obsession with white fragility becomes clear. This is agitation that these white people, these kulaks, have not yet become the greengrocers of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless
Read 67 tweets
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Al-Biruni as we all know, was a major Central Asian intellectual of his time born in present day Uzbek territory - a man who accompanied Mahmud Ghazni on his many raids in India between 1017 and 1030 CE
While Al Biruni was a man of many talents he is best remembered today for his account of India that he wrote circa 1030

Being Indians we have every right to be skeptical of Al Biruni’s writings. He was after all a Mleccha, and a companion of Mahmud - an infamous iconoclast.
But nevertheless, his book is a fairly thorough outsider’s view of North India as it existed circa 1020 CE and can give us great insights on what India was like just before the onset of Muslim influence
Read 57 tweets
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I'll be livetweeting OpenAI's (first) bots-vs-humans DOTA 2 match at The International in this thread. I'll be keeping it light - will try and focus on big ideas and explain or avoid jargon.

📺 Livestream [will start soon!]: twitch.tv/dota2ti
🤫 Hashtag to mute: #OAI.
The game won't be starting just yet, but they should start the intro soon. We still don't know a lot about the match today. Big questions are: who's on the human team? How many matches are they playing today? And most important of all: have any more restrictions been lifted? #OAI
It's extremely hard to know what we'll see today. OpenAI have been training more than ever before in recent weeks, according to their project lead. They were already using a vast amount of compute to train, so this is incredible to hear: #OAI
Read 60 tweets
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One interesting thing about deep learning is that even as ever better results surface, everything we know about NNs is probably wrong. A short list (in rough chronological order):

- "you need to pretrain a NN"
- "NNs require thousands of datapoints to train" (1/10)
- "NNs must be trained by backpropagation"
- "hybrid approaches like SVMs on top of NN features will always work better"
- "backpropagation in any form is biologically implausible"
- "CNNs are nothing like the human visual cortex & certainly don't predict its activations"
- "small NNs can't be trained directly, so NNs must need to be big"
- "NNs only learn task-specific features, certainly no kind of hidden or latent 'dark knowledge'"
- [style transfer arrives] "Who ordered that?"
- "simple SGD is the worst update rule"
Read 15 tweets
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#Rome
The seat of power for the Christianity.
Now let’s see this city in a slightly different light. #Thread
#Rome is a city engineered to display the ruins and destruction of the polytheist Romans and the victory and glory of the Christians.
The stark contrasts are not mere a product of time, they are a statement.
This is the #Pantheon
‘Temple of all Gods’. It predates Christ. The polytheist Romans worshipped Gods of forces of nature here. The central occulus- a hole in the ceiling- is the entry of all forces of nature inside. #Rome
Read 16 tweets

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