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Here's my attempt at a substantive and low flame bait comment on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680523

I'd be interested in whether this meets the bar but once again you've got 5 million other users to see to so if you don't have the time you don't have the time.




"Just asking questions" isn't a low-flamebait strategy for that material. Worse, your account is giving the impression of mostly being interested in promoting it, and that's not an ok use of HN, so please stop.


Meta: confused, upset

INFO: I've gone through my last 200 comments on HN[1] trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to promote. Other than the last few comments it seems to be heavily AI and Musk related with nothing related to Nazis, Eugenics or other such things.

I've also done full history searches for various things that could be the "it" you refer to, but my HBD discussion was about three years and several thousand comments ago and I have only a few posts that mention "eugenics" and they're all about word meanings, so I think you are referring to my repeated attempts to lecture people on meanings of words (trying to teach clear thinking about word definitions and ideally teaching people about why Tabooing words[2] is an important rationality technique). But while they are admittedly quite common, they actually seem to get almost no engagement and would be quite ineffective flame bait.

I will still stop as that's what you want though. :(

[1] Up to here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=20&prefix=false&q...

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your...


You've got:

What if eugenics was ok, actually? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680523

What if race science wasn't a cause for the Holocaust? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674998

What if LLMs included more race science? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38376438

What if white supremacists weren't so bad? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068057

What if people of African descent were actually dumber than other people? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835306

That's just in the last few months, it just keeps on going with 'What if we didn't call people with Nazijacent ideologies Nazis' and so forth. Just cut it out.


Meta: Stressed, trembling, an hour spent

Every single one of those is either a bold-faced lie about the content or shows no reading comprehension on your part. You're behaving like a phrasal affect model that simply checks for the presence of words and whether the surrounding context is more positive or negative rather than actually reading and understanding sentences.

Aside: They are also from the past 12 months out of 1000 comments in that period.

First one is "eugenics is an ill-defined term that means different things to different people, some meanings such as offering free embryo screening are things that have mainstream debate about whether they are good or not".

Second one is "eugenics was not the reason for the Holocaust", which is basically true as far as I know. It was racism, hatred and jealousy.

Third one is a complaint about confusing "AI not embarrassing corporations" with "AI not killing everyone". With an example of an embarrassing thing to say being answering questions about IQ distributions.

Fourth one is using "supremacist" as an example of a general problem where people conflate every form of bad all together with no nuance or understanding.

Fifth one is about the limits of science and whether some research should be banned.

My most important goal in almost every case is teaching people how to think. To substitute in a word for the specific meaning intended in that instance and stop thinking in terms of word affect and tribal signalling. Sure, I could use less contentious examples but then the lessons lose a lot of impact and people shrug and go "Oh, no one would be so stupid as to confuse being in the same superset with the identity function", but people actually do this all the time whenever politics or tribalism comes into play!

That said, I'm sufficiently unsure on what dang's intent is that I'm going to try to come up with other examples... It's just really bloody hard when the main thing that triggers people to stop thinking clearly is strong emotion and politics, so every example that people will recognize as a real example that I can think of has... strong emotions and politics. Probably something about the word "family" is the best I can do.

---

I find it very irksome how you seem to have the idea that anyone who has not subordinated every single principle of honesty, specificity and reason in favor of ensuring bad guys are always labelled maximally bad is also bad. If someone says "Hitler really enjoyed kicking puppies!" and someone else said "That's incorrect, Hitler was a dog lover" you'd probably assume the latter person is a Nazi rather than thinking they're an xkcd 386. An assumption which is very likely going to be factually incorrect (and if it wasn't then the local environment's discourse norms would have degenerated sufficiently that they can no longer self correct, with every statement that signals the right direction/allegiance being perpetuated regardless of accuracy in a manner that will purity spiral aggressively as the body of common knowledge distorts).

I don't know if the fact you're still making these same mistakes is because I'm a bad teacher or because you literally aren't reading what I'm writing. Not assessing sentences for meaning/truth but instead trying to understand motivations and allegiances, rounding every statement to the most similar sounding one you recall seeing before and assuming your models of people's personalities and motivations is correct and complete based on your bubbled experience.


People can simply read your comments and make up their own minds whether they are about 'nuance' or simply promotion of a baleful ideology with genocidal consequences. You're a self-described 'race realist', another word for race pseudoscience:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27181222

who nods along to Nick Land's Hyper-racism

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23710962

Your Holocaust thing is entirely ahistorical as anyone can check on Wikipedia or in just about any history book not written by neo-nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#/media/File:Bund...

The rest is thoroughly transparent and generic 'just asking questions' schtick. You're not owed nuanced understanding for that - just social opprobrium, an insistent request you keep this shit off HN and the earnest hope you outgrow what is not some secret suppressed truth but garden variety bigotry.

I don't want you to spend another hour stressed and trembling so let's stop here.


Please stop.




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