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eigenrobot Profile picture
eigenrobot
@eigenrobot
robot. friend. 'like a cato playing clodius in drag.' -- ChatGPT footnotes at @eigenrobot_feet
7 subscribers
Dec 3 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
a series of thoughts abt this in no particular order first: my track record. ive previously criticized tiresome woke academic work by tiresome woke academics here

this, not just in quantitative but literary fields; and not just about the work itself but about what it represents

example below
Dec 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
full agree with zy here

i think i would explain the intuition of the formulas using integration but i'm not sure that's quite right, maybe it's just a restatement

"area" and "volume" are superficially totally intuitive to me but i don't know how to better formalize them Image here's a line. it's x units long. we're going to drag it along a flat surface in a direction perpendicular to its length for y units. "area" is "how much" of the surface we dragged the line over.

"1 unit squared" is what we get when we drag a 1 unit line for one unit.
Nov 30 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
the syrian state is probably about to collapse. this will be very interesting because it's completely unclear what will happen after that.

here's an Understanding Syria starter pack (you wont Understand Syria) Image
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Image its a complete clusterfuck and i doubt we have anything like a coherent objective in syria

looks like maybe Erdogan is the winner here, do we like this, idk idk, who can say

maybe our best hope is "no huge refugee crisis again please"
Nov 27 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
i've just invented a rational agent explanation for why identitarian activist groups tend to be populated by the absolute worst members of whatever community they purport to represent.

the key intuition here is that it's an act of self-defense for the kakistocrats imagine some excluded group A with measure α < 0.5 and an excluding majority B with measure (1-α).

to become "included," at least 0.5 of the population must agree to inclusion. inclusion imposes a cost C(Ai) borne by B, but produces a benefit Y accruing to included members of A
Nov 22 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
occasional reminder

russia is fighting an honest to god trench war because they can't do anything else and they're barely making progress against a country 1/5 the size armed mostly with our hand-me-downs from a couple generations of warfare past they're literally incapable of projecting power outside of the dark green area because their logistics are entirely rail based and the areas outside of the dark green use a different gauge of rail Image
Nov 19 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
someone made a proposal for how the administration might rapidly crush sanctuary cities and states unilaterally

spit take material
theamericanconservative.com/how-to-break-t…Image
Image masterful tactic as described

sets states and localities in a position of choosing between legal students bringing them money and illegal immigrants

no approval needed, i'd guess

reportedly unreviewable except by scotus

would be an incredibly demoralizing loss for the left
Nov 18 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
all of the following things are true or close enough to true so as to make no difference in calling them so 1. entitlement spending and defense spending are vastly greater than science subsidization

2. science subsidization is a significant amount of spend

3. important science can come out of stupid sounding projects, eg "finch beak shapes in the galapagos islands"
Nov 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
the fact is im willing to commit acts of utter barbarity, to inflict unfathomable suffering on others, if the alternative is something fucked up happening to my kids. common parental sentiment!

the contempt of the childless doesnt cow us. it just leaves us inclined to flense you if i had to live in san francisco with my kids i would support the death penalty for drug use and scaphism for distribution

living far away in a small town where no one has to die is the humane compromise position
Nov 15 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
when people complain abt twitter moving rw i wonder how much of it is just male homosocial norms

yes obviously this is just my lads (gender neutral); but conventional wisdom is twitter's a male space and maybe it's trending moreso

i'd bet the 🦋 site is much higher %women ive been skimming the "Catch Up" feed of the most popular set of tweets from the last 24h and its a mix of

* slice of life cute photos
* entreaties to care about things like independent bookshops and vaccines
* shitlib stuff, mostly by men, but imo vaguely female coded Image
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Nov 13 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
there are (at least) three levels of contextual awareness from which one can usefully perform an analysis

each has a different operating mode

what is important, in each case, is that the analyst correctly assesses her own epistemic starting position Image "i don't know anything" is the start of wisdom. it's the socratic mode.

this is a relatively safe place to perform an analysis, because you make no initial assumptions about the quality nor extent of your own knowledge, and so you're less likely to err through overconfidence
Nov 12 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
after all these years, it's still disorienting to me that "brands" have become left wing coded Image for genz kids, the 90s and early 00s blue tribe was dominated by genx and rabidly anti-consumerist

it's hard to convey how pervasive contempt for corporations used to be. "corporation" was basically a slur representing everything wrong with the world.
Nov 12 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
all right so trump is going to try to crush the universities, in a series of ways i considered a few years ago

quick review of this his primary proposed route of attack is via a series of "accreditation" agencies that confirm school eligibility for eg student loan money, validate their degrees for govt work, and so on
Nov 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
i think this is a correct critique of the online right

i further suspect its downstream of "principles" and "dignity" being cynically exploited by generations of civic leaders who have neither to beat them down
---------- Image my model here is the response of the soldiers of the first world war to their experience

the prewar belief in the transcendent died at verdun and the somme and the mud of passchendaele

these were bitter men Image
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Nov 9 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
i'll take the opposite side. my expectation is that trump will be noticeably more successful in attaining his objectives in his second term

several reasons for this Image 1. in trump's first term he seemed to have not planned past the election and he made up policy promises during the campaign on the fly

this time he's got four years of experience and has had four years to plan
Nov 9 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
thoughts on what is and what is not wrong with economics

a reference thread to link later

credentials: i passed my orals at a mediocre economics department and spent the next few years pivoting into tech and when they realized i wasnt working on my thesis they expelled me 1. economics is not a description of "real" things in exactly the way that, say, biology is. you will never "see" a value function; worse, the axioms forming the theoretical basis of value functions are obviously at odds with reality

these things are not problems
Nov 8 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
election high time preference probably makes sense for the individual actors.

every election is a referendum on firing politicians, and the careers of everyone dependent on those politicians are on the line.

probably hard to overcome the incentive to go all in stronger party institutions, which one might expect to have a higher value for the long run, would and probably did ameliorate this problem.

but today's parties are treated as vehicles for the advancement of individuals with no concern for the institutions themselves
Nov 8 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
working on my heterointrasexual theory of mind.

genuinely curious about this: does something like passive aggressive lecturing by women work as a tactic for getting other women to do things?

i dont think it generally works on men, coming from either sex. maybe im wrong about this maybe some men live for it idk
Nov 6 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
this is a really good point and i think what it comes down to is the extent to which red and grey tribes can play nice with each other and with each others' norms

a bunch of probably controversial first thoughts on this: model:
- most current elites sourced from greater yankeedom
- target elites are from tech tribe (shape rotators, autistic trans women, etc)

this is important for the country because
- old elites suck ass
- right needs capable elites tbh
Nov 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"the 2020 election was so obviously transparent and clean that if you question it we will fine you hundreds of millions of dollars and force you to recant at gunpoint"

i literally cannot afford to argue with that "we have tried absolutely nothing and none of its worked, so i guess we have no choice but to throw in the towel"
Oct 31 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
autistic (complimentary) thread on pennsylvania voter rolls. hes been taking snapshots of their dataset. king shit.

i dont have full context of everything going on and can't evaluate it in depth but the specific PA data practices enumerated here, if as described, are execrable reading this made me want to go outside and scream at the autumn sky

if you've ever had to clean data generated by other people i'm sure you'll understand Image
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Oct 31 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
i am once again asking liberals to take seriously making it easy to demonstrate that elections are unambiguously clean

as a matter of self interest, because having half the electorate doubt the result of a vote is an incredibly bad outcome for state legitimacy "this is trumps fault for being an asshole"

sure you obviously cant control trump but dem representatives can work with unfuck our jury-rigged electoral operations

consider where you do have agency