ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Ridiculously bad take. Genetics certainly set a cap on maximum achievable IQ, but the idea that environmental factors cannot suppress IQ is self evidently ridiculous. Do you seriously think childhood nutrition (as an obvious example) plays no part in brain development? "There's no environmental influence on IQ" is as stupid as "there's no genetic influence on IQ."
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Same here, I was practically shitting my britches when I saw the notification. Hugely honored.
I guess those dozens of hours I spent torturing myself by learning about local government dysfunction finally paid off.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Got it, thanks.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Something I've never been clear on, which I think you might be able to explain due to your (astoundingly broad and deep!) geopolitical knowledge:
What exactly does "brazilification" mean? I've seen it used enough and I'm familiar enough with the popular perception of Brazil that I think I've picked up the "vibe", but I find myself wondering if there isn't more to it than just "extreme inequality and crime, favelas in every city where the wealthy never go." Is there a racial component in Brazil, or is it just a socioeconomic thing? Is there a specific historical path that is necessary to count as brazilification?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Living in a deep blue enclave and being contrarian to my bones, it can be easy for me to start to think of the reds as "my team." Stories like this are an important reminder that they are absolutely not, and that as a rule anyone who makes it to power has abandoned most of the principles I care about.
Very disappointed in this. I fear that the version of freedom of speech that I believe in was the result of fleeting, temporary historical circumstances that will not be repeated, and certainly not while I live.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Again, I have not read Hobbes so I can't speak to what he does or doesn't say. But to put it bluntly, the argument that you ascribe to Hobbes seems pretty fuckin' dumb to me; of course there can be sovereigns whose rule is morally illegitimate and against whom revolution can be morally legitimate.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/
Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.
The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.
To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".
EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.
If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Full disclosure: I haven't read Hobbes, I just know the lingo, so I can't speak to what Leviathan actually says or not. So if you're trying to argue "what you mean is the state in general, not The Leviathan, that's something different" then I must decline to argue.
However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Is there some sort of tactical school of thought on the efficacy or even purpose of early morning raids?
It's pretty simple: just-awoken or drowsy people are less effective criminals and combatants. Just as an example, I personally have a mental safeguard that I have deliberately curated that makes me double-check any dangerous actions I might make the moment I wake up (like grabbing my nightstand gun), because I have more than once woken up still half-dreaming and hallucinated things that weren't there. If the someone executed a no-knock raid on my house, that just-woke-up hesitation could literally be a matter of life or death.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think a no-knock warrant should be classified as potentially lethal force.
What does this actually mean? What specific legal or ethical implications do you think this classification would have? The president declares "No-knock warrants are now classified as potentially lethal force," what changes?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word.
What you are noticing is the difference between actual political philosophy and the advertising used to sell grifters who are nominally aligned with a given philosophy to retards. The two are only related inasmuch as they need to be for the grifters to successfully associate their grift with a tribal affiliation.
The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.
We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.
It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.
I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Two things:
-
"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
-
You are obviously correct. I think that's because the religious generally don't behave as if they actually believe in predestination or an omniscient god (same thing), not because they don't actually believe in personal agency.
This is an excellent list and was more fun to read and see how many I knew than I expected. A couple comments:
-
A defining feature of a purity spiral is that it is a feedback loop, resulting in people adopting ever more extreme beliefs. Person A makes a statement or adopts a belief demonstrating their ideological virtue, Person B sees that and responds by making a more extreme statement or adopting a more extreme belief that shows that they are even more virtuous, Person C see that and ups the ante again, etc. This dynamic is very common; it is the reason people in niche music communities put such high value on obscure out-of-print cassettes, as an example. Niche one-upsmanship, basically.
-
I think Von Neumann tends to get used as a symbol not just for the big-brained, but for people who are so smart it is superman or supernatural. Basically he's a stand in for "the smartest human being to ever live." The origin of the use of Von Neumann as a shorthand in the rationalist community comes mainly from Scott's book review of a biography of him (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future), as well as his articles "the Parable of the Talents" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and "The Atomic Bomb Considered as a Hungarian High School Project" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/).
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Purple pill is simply "red and blue pill mixed together"
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Whats your squat PR?
I ask because in my experience 100% of the people who say any variation of "you'll get too big" (in this case "even hobbyist natural lifters are expected to have BMIs at 25 or over") have never picked up a barbell in their lives. It just doesn't happen, it's not a concern, its media-created fantasy. It's like people who say "why didn't he shoot the gun out of his hands?"
That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. "Exercise will make you die sooner"? Give me a break, the entire first world is dying from being too fat and too sedentary.
And even if there is some correlation between muscles and morbidity, you'd be a fool to only consider the number of years lived. Physical strength is massively, massively important to quality of life in the elderly. One of the most important reasons to maintain physical vigor is so that when your aging really sets in you have a sufficient physical baseline to not be reduced to invalidity.
To quote Tolkien:
The old which is strong does not whither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I'll second @FiveHourMarathon here: if you're asking people on the internet this question, you aren't anywhere near needing to worry about the limits. Lifting weights to get stronger is basically pure upside until you get so deep into it that it becomes a part-time job, and even then it's basically all upside.
I also agree that 1/2/3 plate bench/squat/dead is a good bare minimum for a male lifter; under that your only goal should be getting stronger regardless of any other athletic goal.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
A "plate" is a colloquialism for the heaviest standard barbell weight size, 45 lbs (~20 kg). That also happens to be the weight of a standard barbell, so a "1 plate" lift would be a 45 lb bar with a 45 lb weight on each side totalling 135 lbs (61 kg). "2 plate" is 225, "3 plate" is 315.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think that Zvi did a much better job at explaining the complexities of media literacy than Scott in his "On Bounded Distrust": https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust
Personally I think that this example lends an impression so different from the truth that calling it a lie is obviously correct. Or, if you want to pedantic about "technically correct," you could just call it "complete bullshit."
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I would have loved it at 13, though I wouldn't have understood all of the themes or subtext. "R-rated" graphic violence, though not gratuitous. So far no actual sex, but erections and breasts are occasionally discussed.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I second @AvocadoPanic, I think that the economic incentives via CAFE standards on automakers have made superhuge trucks artificially competitive in the market.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen.
The basic premise is that it's a hard sci-fi adventure novel, starring three characters on a single ship as they attempt a heist.
Very fun, very much a page turner and also does a good job at touching on lots of Big Ideas.
Most relevant to this forum, it is a brilliant illustration of all of @HlynkaCG's bugbear, "Academic vs street smarts", "success in the contested environment", whatever you want to call it. My thoughts are only partially formed right now, but I think I'm going to try and write up a longer review that is also going to be at least a partial defense of @HlynkaCG's philosophy. He actually got banned the day I started the book and I'm pretty bummed about it because I'd love to discuss it with him (if you're reading this, create a new account and PM me or something?).
Probably not. Children can be trained into being comfortable wearing a helmet, and 12 mph is absolutely sufficient speed to cause life altering (if not ending) head injuries. The cost/benefit ratio of helmets is very far into the positive. It might take some work to get them used to it, but teaching your kids to wear helmets when doing dangerous activities like bicycling, skateboarding, etc is a very good idea.
More options
Context Copy link