Monday, July 14, 2025
unable to answer basic questions
Is all of this fake? Was the video edited to show only the ignorant ones? Is the stereotype about stupid American students true? What about the female stereotype (implied in the thumbnail) that The more they show off their tits, the dumber they are?
My take as a former (and possibly future) educator: it's a given that human intelligence follows a bell curve, and in a large population like the US's, where we have a third of a billion (legal) people, the number of stupid people will be concomitantly large.
At the same time, different types of knowledge (school knowledge, cultural knowledge, trivia knowledge, specialized knowledge, technical/artistic knowledge, etc.) also follow a bell curve. So in the US, you're bound to find a lot of stupid, unknowledgeable people.
"Stupid" is also something of an ill-defined term. Does it mean a low IQ? Lack of common sense? Lack of emotional intelligence? Lack of success at life? Are the people featured in the above video necessarily stupid? It's possible. In fact, my teacher's brain is tempted to say yes. But if I try to be a bit more objective, I have to acknowledge that a lot of these dead-enders are probably that way not because of low IQ but because of poor education.
"Poor education" is also a vague term: it can imply a school system with low standards that teaches its students poorly; it can imply students who, for any number of reasons, willfully or as a function of personality refuse to or fail to pay attention while being taught. Who has failed? How can we tell? Such questions immediately become complicated, and it doesn't help when you have simpleminded people in the discussion who say things like, "Just put 'em all through the army, and they'll learn." The army gets its share of incorrigible, irreparable, mentally slow or damaged people, too—people who end up getting kicked out.
So in the above compilation, are we looking at stupid people? As I've noted before, one snide commenter suggested that a lot of these kids would be able to name all of the Kardashian sisters right away. These kids do possess knowledge of a sort. You learn what your mind focuses on; you absorb what you find interesting and relevant.
The real question is: do you construct education in such a way as to appeal to individual students' motivations, or do you demand that students all meet or exceed a single, objective standard? Finding an answer isn't that easy. The closest thing I've seen to a compromise between these two poles is gamification: most games inherently include motivators (e.g., the prospect of winning), and games can be set to certain objective standards. But there's a risk in gamifying: not all games are guaranteed to motivate everyone, and constant loss can generate learned helplessness.
I dance around theories of education in my book.
your dose of morning death
So the 19-year-old kid had stabbed someone and was running around the neighborhood, brandishing his knife. I guess gun-control laws would have helped! Note, once again, how most of these scenarios end up becoming suicide by cop.
veggie bolognese
What do you think—did he pull it off? All I can say is that I'd eat it if he put it in front of me, but if there are other choices on the menu, I'm going for those.
Sunday, July 13, 2025
images
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| "It's" |
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| "as a women" |
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| comma |
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| Ahmed's hairy legs = racist! |
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| hyphens and semicolons |
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| commas |
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| "A and B refuses" |
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| hyphen |
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| This idiot deserves to be in a dungeon. |
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| spelling... sigh |
chefs at Fallow vs. Uncle Roger as they attempt fried rice
You'd think fried rice would be pretty simple and straightforward, but the cult of Uncle Roger has convinced people that it's a gourmet food that can only be prepared in a very narrow range of legitimate ways, and everything else is just garbage.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. I've got one foot in the purist camp and one foot in the innovator camp. I admit, though, that I do find it annoying when a chef takes a traditional dish and blithely says he's going to "put his personal twist" on it (I'm guilty of this myself, therefore I annoy myself). It might be better to see whether he can recreate the original, traditional dish first before he does his little eisegesis.
I guess, more and more, I'm like the East Asian calligraphy teachers who insist that you copy the masters perfectly before you dare to get creative on your own.
Dave Cullen discusses "Her" in the context of "AI romance"
I still haven't seen "Her." I will at some point.
keto pizza: Day 2
The keto pizza, made with Victoria's keto pizza-crust recipe, was less good on the second day than it had been yesterday. Victoria's keto flour is basically a combination of almond flour and oat fiber (we can call it "oat flour" if you want). An almond-flour crust doesn't actually taste that bad, but once you add the oat fiber, the taste becomes extremely bland. It's not a bad taste, but it's also not a taste that motivates you to keep eating. Maybe there's some way to improve the recipe. As I tried with Victoria's burger buns, I might add some vital wheat gluten to give this crust a breadier texture. I might also add some nutritional yeast to make it less bland-tasting, and maybe a heavy dose of my umami powder and/or Everything Bagel seasoning. A different prep method might also be in order: what if I pan-fried the bottom of the crust before adding the pizza toppings and then baking the pizza? As Chef Jean-Pierre says: texture is a conductor of flavor. Joshua Weissman even wrote a cookbook that emphasizes this concept. I'll eat something bland, like a pita, if it's been baked or fried to the point of crunchiness. That's probably why I used to be addicted to pita chips (but we can't discount the importance of things like salt, butter, and garlic powder).
Bottom line: more experimentation is necessary.
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| Per the standard, I reheated the slices by first pan-frying, then microwaving. (You can do the reverse, too.) |
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| The crust looks innocent enough from a distance. |
more on tariffs and the US economy
Beginning spiel (transcript):
President Trump has just absolutely laid down the hammer.... All of the globalists and countries around the world that have spent decades ripping off the American economy are absolutely panicking. ...As many of you know, President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, which kicked in on April 2nd, just a couple months ago, are already shattering national records, generating a massive $255 billion in annual revenue. But even so, for months now, President has generously granted various negotiation extensions to numerous countries worldwide, giving them a chance to strike brand-new fair-trade deals with the US without being hit by the full force of President Trump's tariffs. But now, after all of that stalling and bad-faith dragging of feet, it has become abundantly clear that many of these countries never intended to negotiate honestly, and so now, President Trump is dropping the hammer big-time. The truth is, almost every nation around the world got so used to exploiting the American economy at our taxpayers' expense that they can't even believe that, finally, we're standing up for ourselves. And so this is why President Trump just dropped 22 massive new tariffs on some of the biggest global economic offenders, and as we'll talk about here in just a couple minutes, these brand-new tariffs are specifically designed to target the anti-American BRICS economic alliance. But... here's the wildest thing about all of this: despite the left-wing fearmongerers' screaming that President Trump's tariffs are going to spike inflation and destroy the economy, inflation hasn't risen one bit. In fact, the economy is absolutely on fire in a way that we haven't seen here at home in decades. In fact, it doesn't even really matter what economic metric you look at; the truth is, every single one of them confirms that resident Trump's economic policies have absolutely ignited the dead economy that he inherited from Sleepy Joe Biden and all of the far-left Democrats. [emphasis added]
I've come to discover that Matt Morse makes good points, but he's also something of a heedless, blind-faith cheerleader of Trump and MAGA. So be sure to put Morse's claims and declarations in perspective. I agree with the essence of what he's saying in the video, but not necessarily the tone, the extremity, or certain details. NB: in the above transcript, Morse notes that many of the new tariffs target the BRICS economic alliance. South Korea is not a BRICS member. It has, however taken advantage of US taxpayers through aggressive dealmaking over the years, which is why Trump is so frustrating to Korean politicians, businesspeople, and the public.
weed farmers
I think it’s really cool that the Dems are violently defending illegal immigrant child labor on weed farms https://t.co/6I98SDd0ni
— Magills (@magills_) July 11, 2025
what's missing?
Joshua Weissman treats his wife to budae-jjigae for the first time. I thought it was a pretty decent presentation except for two or three things that were conspicuously absent. That grudging dusting of minced green onions at the end was cute.
"emergent capabilities"
Remember when I'd written in late June about "maliciously clever" AI, and one of the concepts I'd mentioned was epiphenomenal behavior? The video below goes into this spooky realm and reaches some unsettling conclusions.
Before we move on to the video, though—and note that the lady in the video refers to "emergent behaviors," which is effectively the same thing I was talking about—let's explore some basic concepts. If something is epiphenomenal or emergent, this means it arises out of an ensemble of other things. For example, if I have only a single grain of sand, then from my human perspective, that grain of sand is light—so light, in fact, that it doesn't even register as having weight. But what if I gather together a billion grains of sand? Ah—now we see that, taken together, that assemblage of sand grains has a new and noticeable property: heaviness. So: heaviness is an emergent property or an epiphenomenon arising from the putting-together of many, many sand grains. (Google tells me that a billion sand grains together weigh about 11 tons.) If I assemble 4.44 × 1025 iron atoms into a sphere 10 cm in diameter, the sphere would weigh about 4.1 kg and, being a sphere, it will have acquired the emergent property of roundness. So you can roll the sphere if you want. We can do this mental experiment at higher and higher complexities, with different kinds of matter in different configurations (like cells), and some would argue, especially if they don't believe in souls or disembodied consciousnesses, that the complex arrangement of matter that is the human body is enough to explain emergent properties like life, health, and consciousness.
In my previous post, the worrisome thing I was thinking about came from what was said about AlphaGo, the AI that defeated the baduk master Lee Sedol in four out of five matches. The AI displayed creative strategies for winning that seemed to come from nowhere specific. The creativity (or "creativity") arose from (emerged from ) the programming that had gone into AlphaGo, but no one could point to any specific line or block of code to say, "There—that's where the creativity came from." What this means, at the very least, is that we are now building systems and letting them loose on the world without fully understanding all of the occult, combinatorial behavioral implications of what we're creating.
But first, we need to go back to an older argument: an AI doesn't have to be of human-level intelligence to be dangerous. The classic example, which I've mentioned several times before on this blog, is the "gray goo" disaster scenario in which a program is given a set of imperatives, and in the innocent fulfilling of those imperatives, it destroys humanity and nature, leaving only a layer of dust on the earth's surface. The rain comes, and the dust turns into a gray goo. This is why, in my above-linked post, I wrote
It's just an epiphenomenon of the programming? If it's an epiphenomenon, then we have to take care in how we program from now on. Accidental epiphenomenal behavior will be dangerous, and not just to one or two people.
But how can we create anything if we must first suss out all of the implications and ramifications of the AI we're building? It would take millions, maybe billions, of years to do such a thing. Humanity's history, though, suggests that we are a species that plows ahead heedlessly, stumbles upon a discovery based on our directed activity, then ratchets up the civilization (or at least, parts of the civilization) before moving on heedlessly to the next accidental discovery. And we're also cognitively biased to forget the iceberg principle of civilizational development: seeing only the tip of the iceberg—the successes resulting from happy accidents—we confidently forget about the huge, submerged part of the iceberg, i.e., the disasters, defeats, and horrors, many of which set our collective civilization back.
So in my opinion, forging ahead with ever more powerful, ever more capable AI is an extremely dangerous process. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a warning about how a human creation can easily escape the hands of its creator, and most science fiction ever since then has been about this Frankensteinian potential, whether we're talking about the Jurassic Park films, the Terminator franchise, the Matrix movies, or even the Butlerian Jihad referred to in the Dune novels. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Of course, as Tim Urban points out in his decade-old Wait But Why essays on AI (read Part I and Part II), there's no reason to assume the AI we end up with will be in any way truly human at the most basic level. Whatever "truly human" might mean.
I must say: I don't like the road we're on even as I make use of the baby-step AI we have.
Watch the video and appreciate the mystery the host is talking about:
YouTube comment of the day
Deers are so dumb. They’ll run at indescribably loud traffic and cars, but if they hear a twig snap, they sprint the other way.
—appended to this video
—appended to this video
Saturday, July 12, 2025
keto pizza
This was edible but not great. I made a keto meat-lover's pizza with deli ham, salsiccia, and pepperoni. I used low-moisture and high-moisture mozzarella along with hand-grated Parmigiano. The tomato sauce was store-bought, from a bottle. I ate two big pieces for my only meal of the day, and I'll eat the rest tomorrow. Next week, I'll do keto grilled cheese with the remainder of my bread, plus keto risotto, which I don't think I can make the orthodox way (keto orzo, my rice replacement, is made with lupin flour, which doesn't have any gluten).
making a cheap-ass steak expensive
Will his method work?
In the video, Max is hating on eye round again, calling it a bad cut of beef because it's tough. As I said in a comment to his video, though:
Koreans use eye round all the time, especially in a dish called jang-jorim (장조림, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jang-jorim). Eye round is good! The Korean term for that cut of beef is hongdukgae-sal (홍두깨살). Go to your local Korean butcher and ask him how he preps it.
tipping culture has gone mad
This'll make my buddy Charles happy: he's never been a fan of tipping. As for me: until I went back to the States earlier this year, I had no idea that the tipping culture had gotten so bad.
the creepy kid
Remember when I mentioned, at the end of my review of "The Expanse," how there was one moment that reminded me of Pet Sematary? Let's do a deep dive.
men with balls
Vigilante Rising: Polish Bare Knuckle Boxing Group Vow to Protect Borders
A Polish bare-knuckle boxing troupe has vowed to join the ranks of vigilante groups who have taken to policing the nation’s borders from illegal immigration.
In a promotional video featuring bare-chested fighters, Gromda, a self-described “underground” fighting club for “modern gentlemen” in Warsaw, declared: “We defend Polish borders so no one can sneak in on the sly, so to all you wannabe tough guys… you enter at your own risk.”
During a separate comedy skit filmed with one of the fighting club’s black members, the group added: “This is POLAND. We keep order and take care of our own. Because if you’re one of us, you work honestly and follow the rules, then everything is smooth and cool… but if you come in with a shady, tanned face, trying to barge in and act like a thug, there’s no entry, get lost, or you’ll catch a beating and get kicked out.”
[ ... ]
It came amid an uptick in Polish vigilantism along the German border over accusations that the recently installed government of Friedrich Merz in Berlin has been pushing illegal migrants into Poland.
Groups such as the ‘Border Defence Movement’ (‘ROG’) of Polish nationalist activist Robert Bąkiewicz claimed that they were forced to “defend our civilisation” by standing watch over the border and performing “citizen checks” in light of the failures of the liberal government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk to prevent illegals from entering the country.
In an apparent attempt to take command of the situation, Tusk deployed troops along the border with Germany as well as with Lithuania and Estonia on Monday. His government said that citizens engaging in vigilante border patrols must stand down in favour of the military or face fines.
The increased border patrols by the Polish military will also seek to prevent what Warsaw and others have claimed are “hybrid warfare” attempts by Russian ally Belarus to push migrants towards the Polish border to allegedly destabilise the European Union.
Any fellow Yanks willing to step up? Doesn't matter what race you are. The only real question is: How seriously do you take the border?
...because the young ones don't know what they want, and they're a bunch of superficial, catty, betraying bitches?
Why do men get advice from other men about women? Why not ask women directly?
truth or more fluff?
Alan Dershowitz claims to know the names on the Epstein client list, but he says he's legally bound by confidentiality agreements not to disclose anything. Do you believe him, or is this just more talk-talk-talk?
Friday, July 11, 2025
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| I probably put this one up before. Who cares? I like it. |
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| This had the caption of, "You had just one job." |
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| an oldie but a goodie |
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| Time has not been that kind to me. I'm more like the hot girlfriend. |
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