In Joe Biden’s America we price chicken wings like king crab legs pic.twitter.com/ExpXwLaizy

— Josh Culling (@jmculling) January 14, 2022

Feeling nerdy and intellectually arrogant? Need a job?

You can win a prize of between $5000 and $50,000 and a job offer from Alignment Research Center if you can slog your way through some of the worst prose ever written in English, that buries you in an avalanche of pretentious nerdspeak buzz words, heaps and piles of “gradient descents” and “Bayes nets.”

Reading this horrible stuff is in itself a formidable, mind-stupefying task. Personally, I think a better contest challenge would have consisted of asking people to edit this incredible meandering confused textual Odyssey into concise, intelligible standard English, but that’s just me.

As far as I can make out, you are supposed to imagine that we’ve got an AI responsible for guarding a diamond, the AI has a variety of defenses, there’s a burglar after the diamond, and cameras doing surveillance of the site, and you are supposed to figure out how to incentivize that AI to tell the truth about whether or not the burglar got past its defenses and got the diamond.

The nerdocracy frames the contest in terms of rewarding the AI more for telling the truth and rewarding the AI less (why reward it at all in this case?) for lying.

What’s going on here is referred to as an exercise in “eliciting latent knowledge (ELK).”

Astral Codex Ten brought this ?intriguing? contest to my attention.

Alignment Research Center (ARC)’s contest rap (in prose Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel might envy) is here. (Note that it’s somehow connected to Supernerd and undoubted genius Eliezer Yudkowsky!) If you can read this stuff without references to matters Bayesian causing you to reach for your revolver, you’re a better man than I am, Gungha Din!

Some effort at elucidation (and encouragement) can be found at the Effective Altruism Forum.

Vince Everett Ellison demonstrates that not all African Americans buy into the MLK myth.

After finding evidence that the “man of God” and “moral conscience of our nation,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., participated in the rape of a parishioner, engaged in numerous sex orgies, received cash payments from known communists, and admitted that he was a Marxist, King biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow wrote of King, “There is no question that a profoundly painful reckoning and reconsideration inescapably awaits.”

Black Democrats and White liberals rail about the gains derived from the Civil Rights Movement. I ask, “What gains?” If murder, poverty, and mass incarceration are gains, you may have a point. In an attempt to make him untouchable, liberals have protected King’s counterfeit legacy by sealing his FBI files until 2027. Nevertheless, his reckoning is here.

But that reckoning shouldn’t occur exclusively because of King’s immoral behavior. It shouldn’t happen because the “Good Reverend’s” best friend, Ralph Abernathy, in his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, described King beating a woman and sleeping with two others at the Lorrain Motel the night before his death. Or because Arthur Schlesinger recorded Jackie Kennedy saying he was “terrible, phony, and tricky.” Or that Black Major League Baseball player Don Newcombe reported to the FBI that King was a “drunk” and had an illegitimate child by a woman married to a sterile Los Angeles dentist. Or because King allowed the dirty world of politics to turn the Black church into a puppet of the atheist and racist Democrat party.

No. This reckoning should happen because Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement have failed Black people. They managed only to elect many Black Americans into office, with most of them belonging to the same evil Democrat party that had necessitated the Civil Rights Movement by enslaving, raping, castrating, and oppressing Black Americans for over one hundred and fifty years.

After fifty years of following King’s failed ideology, consider these results. On June 4, 2020, the Washington Post reported “no decrease in Black and White citizens’ wealth gap since 1968.” The Brookings Institution reported that in 1965, only 24% of Black children were born out of wedlock. In 2020, it was 69.4 (approximately a 300% increase). Between 2019 and 2020, Blacks made up 11% of the population but 50% of all murders. In May 2019, Penn State and UCLA reported that school segregation is getting worse.

This is King’s legacy. Why are we celebrating it?

In explaining how to recognize a false prophet, Jesus said, “A tree is known by the fruit it bears.” He said you cannot get bad fruit from a good tree. The fruits of the Black community, almost unanimously, are rotten to the core.

What good has come from Martin Luther King’s movement for Black America? The American Black community is at the bottom of nearly every socio-economic statistic. The Black family is weaker. The Black church is more apostate. The Black economy is nonexistent. Black government is corrupt. Black education is terrible. Are we celebrating failure, or was this their intention?

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Gerard van der Leun deserves profound thanks for laboriously copying and pasting this valuable, but enormously long series, of tweets posted fragment after fragment by someone styling himself “Hazard Harrington” on Twitter (not surprisingly since deleted — dead link) and publishing them complete.

“Make your peace with whatever comes after fancy tech. It probably involves something with a firing pin and an extractor.” — Klahn

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before.

Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in the office. Pronouns are stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All that you’d expect.

But COVID/WorkFromHome (WFH) has totally broken people.

They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work.

They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.

There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?”

Literally, everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”

It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not.

I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.

She made some arguments about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them.

They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result. Read the rest of this entry »

The millennial girl’s bête noir: the needy, exploitative “Soft-Boy” type was apparently first explicitly defined defined in 2016 by Amelia Nierenberg in the Oldest College Daily.

The term “soft-boy” has been floating around the feminist corner of the internet for a while. … For a loose definition, the “soft-boy” is not necessarily a romantic interest, but rather a boy who exhibits his sensitivity as a social tool, transforming his awkward emotionality into a likeable characteristic.

Still confused? Let me paint a picture for you. The soft-boy doesn’t care about body hair on his woman partners, but wants to make sure that everyone knows that he’s very chill about it. It’s the boy who speaks pretty openly about going to see a therapist, but then speaks pretty openly about his friend going to see a therapist, too, and she didn’t OK that as public knowledge. It’s the boy who jokes about his own fragile masculinity, but then gets really testy about the fact that he was picked last for the high school badminton tournament. Think messenger bag. Think Michael Cera. Think an indulgent (and spurious) use of the word “problematic.” He wants you to know how many feelings he has.

Although he’s not overtly a keg-standing, never-crying, hard-grilling misogynist, the Yale soft-boy is a different presentation of an equally pernicious masculinity because he slips under the radar. Appearing emotionally intelligent excuses him from criticism because he disguises his emotional neediness as the hard-earned vulnerability of a close friendship. The soft-boy is a weight, opening up to lure caring women to his side. If it sounds like I’m using predatory language to describe these vultures of fourth-wave feminism, good read. I am. Soft-boys of Yale are a social epidemic, invisibly soliciting unreciprocated emotional labor from their woman friends. …

But the soft-boy is not a “friend” to the web of women he has spun to entertain him when he is lonely, coax him through break-ups when he is sad and help him out when he is feeling low. Instead, he’s bartered openness for a time commitment, demanding an inordinate amount of this emotional buttressing from his women friends. And he doesn’t see why that’s a problem — he thinks he’s entitled to the time his women friends spend caring for his emotional well-being, and notices neither the toll it takes on them nor the fact that he rarely reciprocates the devotion. It’s a corruption of an empathy that should be freely given, rather than demanded. And frankly, it’s exhausting.

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Victor E. Viking, the mascot of Western Washington University.

The College Fix reports:

Western Washington University may scrap its Viking mascot and is currently conducting an investigation to help make a final decision on the issue.

The effort was spawned in part from requests asking the public university to remove the names of four buildings on campus due to racism concerns: Huxley College of the Environment, Mathes Hall, Haggard Hall, and the Viking Union.

In December, trustees announced that T.H. Huxley’s name would be removed, citing the scientist’s “white supremacist values that dehumanize and harm many members of the Western community.” The Haggard and Mathes names were spared.

But the verdict is out on the Vikings. A “strong majority” of the university’s Legacy Review Taskforce recommended to trustees to remove “Viking” from the Viking Union.

“The Task Force was concerned about the harm caused by asking all members of the Western community to identify with a figure that is potentially exclusive on the basis of both ethnicity and gender,” the taskforce stated in its report.

“Furthermore, the Task Force found names idolizing conquest as out of line with the university’s contemporary values around honoring local Indigenous communities. Task Force members who did not recommend renaming in this report proposed the building name be evaluated alongside the mascot by a separate committee.”

Trustees directed the university “to conduct a more thorough assessment of the Viking name in the broader context of the University mascot,” the December news release states.

The media and communications team at Western Washington University did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment. …

This is not the first time that a mascot change at WWU has been raised. In 2015, an effort to get it scrapped claimed the Viking mascot is “hyper-masculine” and “aggressive.”

However, the area is steeped in Scandinavian roots. In 1910, 30 percent of the foreign-born population had Scandinavian blood. The National Nordic Museum is also located in Seattle, Washington.

Despite the heritage, the Viking as a mascot, in general, may still be on its way out.

During the current Washington Football Team name scandal, many people looked for other teams that may change their alleged problematic names. The Minnesota Vikings is a major team considered.

A change.org petition argued the NFL mascot is “highly distasteful.” It argued the Vikings thought “they were entitled to anything they want and not living in harmony with groups of people with differing ideologies.”

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Robert Spencer, at PJM, notes that the rationale for cancellation is completely flexible. Indian mascots are allegedly demeaning, but white male mascots are complimentary and that too is bad.

[I]t’s hard not to notice that the entire mascot brouhaha, from beginning to end, is not only stupid; it’s incoherent. The Redskins and Indians were forbidden because the use of Native Americans as mascots was supposedly degrading and dehumanizing. The names had to go because they were demeaning and insulting. All over the country, teams at all levels dropped their Indian-related names in order to show their respect and regard for American Indians.

At the same time, however, teams all over the country have dropped their Crusader nickname because they don’t want to seem to be glorifying the Crusaders, which in modern myth (and not remotely in reality) were rapacious, imperialist, unprovoked attacks upon peaceful, wise, indigenous Muslim people. The schools that bore the Crusader name didn’t want to appear to be supporting such actions by white supremacists against innocent people of color, so the Crusaders had to go. And now it’s a similar situation at WWU with the Vikings: Western Washington University doesn’t want to appear to be “idolizing conquest.”

But wait a minute. If the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians degraded Native Americans, why do teams named Crusaders or Vikings glorify racism and white supremacy? If what Leftists have been telling us about nicknames and mascots for the last few years were even close to true, woke WWU should proudly retain its Viking name and declare that they’re doing so in order to demean and insult Vikings and white people in general. After all, if team names actually glorified the group that inspired them, then the Redskins and Indians had no reason to change their name, right?

Related: Woke Mob Puts Out Hit on Notre Dame’s Leprechaun

But the Leftists don’t have to worry about consistency. They know that the establishment media will never call them out on their contradictions. No “journalist” today will ever ask why some team names can be seen as glorifying the group in question, while other team names are degrading.

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Daily Mail:

Microsoft has included a new function in the latest version of its Word software that acts as a checker for inclusivity and offers PC alternatives to phrases which could upset others.

Traditionally, Microsoft Word has offered tools to its 250million users such as checking software for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

But now, the tech giant has added an additional feature which reads through a user’s work and examines whether the language used may offend an individual.

The Sun reports it does this by highlighting phrases focusing on gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity of ‘socioeconomic status’.

The function, which produces a purple line beneath words or phrases it deems to be potentially problematic, can be turned on and off in Word’s settings.

Microsoft Word also used red lines to point out spelling mistakes and green lines for grammatical errors.

After highlighting the inclusivity issue, Word’s new functionality will suggest more acceptable alternatives – which includes changing Postman Pat to ‘mail carrier’ or ‘postal worker’.

The software also suggested altering astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous quote from ‘one giant leap for mankind’, to ‘humankind’ or ‘humanity’ instead.

Back in 2020, Microsoft also released an update for Word which highlighted a double space as an error.

Current versions of the software highlights the mistaken double space with a blue line, highlighting a grammatical error.

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What’s the point of going to elite schools like Eton and Balliol? Boris Johnson loses his speech notes and demonstrates the special ability to ex tempore BS that only graduates of those kinds of schools acquire, spinning entirely off-the-cuff several plausibly coherent paragraphs on the connection between Peppa Pig and Britain’s national advantages and happy future.

Finalist – Nature inFocus Photography Contest, 2021
Sebastian Di Domenico, Casanare, Colombia

A rare encounter caught on camera. The Jaguarundi is one of the rarest cat species in the Americas and it is never easy to see one in the wild. The animal resides in a range of habitats, including forests, mangroves and savannas. The photographer found a few pugmarks on his trip to the Llanos, when the felid suddenly emerged from the forest cover to access a creek. Not only was this a rare encounter, the felid also exhibited a rare colour morph. Jaguarundis are mostly black or dark brown in colour. In a few seconds, the animal vanished into the woods again, leaving the photographer with this memorable image.