FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
the person I was replying to deleted their comment in a fit of pique, which screwed the threading on the back-end.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Remember that you are an individual, and that the capacity for individuals to change massive complex systems is very limited. Focus on relationships around you; if you have few meaningful relationships, aim to change that first. Find a way to involve yourself in the lives of people around you in a way that serves your ideals. Try to remember that the large-scale systems people describe as "American Politics" are at least partially a collective hallucination, that much of their content is hypothetical or strictly theoretical. If possible, figure out which part falls into that category, and disregard it entirely. Always remember that at least the people immediately around you are individuals, not instances of a tribal collective.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Sounds similar to Freddie Deboer's Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?
The nature of "we know how to solve all our problems", mainly. I am in fact convinced that it is a uniquely Enlightenment concept, but if your first counter-example is traditional Christianity advocating unity with God as the end purpose of human existence, I've clearly failed to communicate the insight, and need to reconsider my approach. I have pretty limited time to do that these days, sadly; I think I started writing replies two or three times, but never got them finished.
We could take your example:
"For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."
and compare it to, say, a passage from Walt Bismark's description of why he is no longer a white nationalist:
In my opinion this is a loser mentality. America was conquered by pilgrims and pioneers and hardscrabble immigrants—a good American is supposed to chase opportunity wherever it exists. When we smashed Dixie we were also smashing the feudal lord-peasant fixation on some cheesy loyalty to “the land”.
But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.
These people think of themselves as “Real America”, but they are in fact the least American in their outlook of all the country’s regions. They are the least individualistic, the least ambitious, the most inclined to prioritize comfort and safety over everything else in life. America has left barely any mark on them—in temperament they’re just a bunch of stodgy Rhinelanders.
...and then compare them to the A and B passages, and ask which matches to which. To me, it's obvious that the passage you linked is much more like the style of A, making a precise, well-bounded claim with clear foundations and clear limits, and the passage above is much more like B, claiming systematized knowledge of uninterrogated validity. The former is inside looking out, the latter is pretending to be outside looking in. Unfortunately, that distinction didn't seem to communicate either, so who knows.
The same for the discussion of Freud a while back. I have zero doubt that you've read much more Freud than I have, and if you believe that Freud's thought can be described as "conservative" in some sense, I'll buy that there's an insight there. On the other hand, I don't think I'm wrong about Freud's impact on the culture as a whole, and regardless of how much his views could be described as "conservative", his impact on society was pretty clearly revolutionary, and also pretty clearly based entirely on lies. He said things that were false, people believed these false things, and as a direct result of believing these false things embraced radical, untested social changes from top to bottom; his disciples and their disciples in turn repeated this process, and we are just now beginning to crawl out from under the resulting rubble. My argument isn't about what Freud believed, but about what he did; and the same for the rest of the Enlightenment's giants.
If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think.
Likely not, but again, time and effort cost a lot more than they used to, which is why my posting frequency has dropped so precipitously. Putting together cogent arguments gets much harder when a little one decides their new favorite game is shutting daddy's laptop on his fingers. Increasingly often, I'm forced to let my opposite have the last word, and hope to address it next time the topic comes around.
I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here. But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.
It'll come around again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I'd argue, though, that men die because of the fall, rather than it being deeply natural.
The old habits of thought linger, and one of them is speaking as though the truth of God were indeterminate. Some of that is my own thinking, which centers on my lack of knowledge and frames belief in God as something like a bet I'm choosing to make.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The twitter link to the second video appears to be dead. anyone got a link to it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
This is the small question thread, and I have a small question.
what the fuck is this? Link is a youtube timestamp, listen for about a minute and you'll get the idea. Seems AI generated to me, I guess they were just looking to pad runtime? But why do this rather than just looping the original track?
@Primaprimaprima, you asked for it, here it is.
how do you have the same impact on others?
A person is wrong. Why are they wrong? Could be a lot of things. Maybe its their values, maybe they've got bad information, maybe their reasoning is off, maybe they're just malicious. Hard to say. And from the other side, someone is telling you you're wrong, maybe any or all of these are true about that person. Meaningful dialog requires common ground and credibility. Without that, there isn't really much point.
I was a Blue for a number of years, and the Blue habits of thought die hard. I once had a discussion with a family member, who is probably best described in tribal terms as a Christian, about torture and the classic "terrorist with a ticking time bomb" scenario. I argued that obviously you should torture the terrorist, because it's worth it to save the lives of everyone else on the plane. He pointed out that you can't actually "save" a life; all humans die sooner or later. I'd been arguing about these sorts of Utilitarian scenarios for years, and I had honestly never thought about it that way.
And this is where the inferential gap starts becoming visible. Both Blues and Reds can recognize that you can't "save" a life, but the understanding of what that actually means is fundamentally incompatible. The Blue understanding, in my own experience, would be something along the lines of "of course, you dummy, this is why we have QALYs, you totally need to account for the differential age and health circumstances, etc, etc, of the various passengers." The Red understanding would be closer to:
“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods,"
...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried. I could say that the Blue understanding is of a variable in a system, ultimately under our control, and that the Red understanding is an encounter with something vast and utterly beyond us, something that demonstrates that our aspirations to control are a childish pretense. I could say that for Blues, the problem is that your math might be wrong, and that for Reds, the problem is that you think you're in control, that your accounting of the variables actually correspond to reality in some meaningful way such that you can do math with them. I could say that Reds have a fundamental belief that death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist, and Blues, to a first approximation, view death itself as a pure negative and see death, at best, as a lesser evil in exigent circumstances.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable. And maybe they're right; all I can say is that I was deep, deep blue for many years, and the above is my best analysis of how I used to think and how I perceived other Blues thinking, even back when I agreed with them. I maintain that Blue thinking is founded on the assumption that systemic control is possible, and Red thinking is founded on the assumption that it is not.
All this to say, after spending years talking to Blue Tribe Rationalists, I was thinking like a Blue Tribe rationalist. I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying, mapping out the structure of "social conditions". For a given utility function, how do we maximize utility in the face of hostile actors? If they do this, then game theory implies we should do that, then they do such and we do so-and-so, and at every step what matters is the result. I argued with a lot of people, and all of them argued from within a similar frame, but argued that my variables were wrong or my math was wrong, and I found their arguments profoundly unpersuasive, and often increasingly radicalizing.
Hlynka rejected the whole frame. Unlike any of my other opposites, he made a solid argument that he shared my core values and my understanding of the facts, but that the calculations I'd built atop these were bullshit. He communicated, effectively, that all my appeals to game- and systems-theory were just obfuscation of the reality of my own individual choices. No one makes anyone else do anything, ever. All our actions are chosen, and we are each personally accountable for those choices. The point isn't the end result, because nothing ever ends: our choices are the only result that matters. In my case, I was choosing to embrace and nurture hatred, and I needed to stop doing that. I had forgotten all this, and he reminded me.
The funny thing is, he didn't even make this argument explicitly. I asked him what he thought we should do, given the situation. I was expecting another unpersuasive argument about how moderation would maximize the utility function better than my preferred strategy of extremism, and I was prepared to poke holes in that argument as I had dozens of times before. But his brief answer ignored such calculation entirely, and simply focused on what was the right thing to do, regardless of the results. His answer drew on many things I valued but had been ignoring for a long time, and by modelling what a better answer looked like according to my own values, he changed my mind. That changed my behavior in my conversations here and in a number of other ways not immediately visible through my interactions here.
That's the best description I can provide.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
He forced me to confront the hate in my heart, and reminded me that it is my own responsibility to reject it rather than embracing it. He did this in a way that probably no one else, here or in real life, could have done. That's about the best, shortest description I can provide across the inferential gap.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
not even sure what the barber pole represents.
Shorthand for something that's always arriving and never arrives. See also: Shephard Tone.
I'm arguing that this pattern does arrive. People react to each successive event differently. At each event, some portion lose faith in the system. I'm saying they don't appear to get it back, and so the portion gets larger over time, driving the increasing extremism of our political culture. At some point, that portion hits critical mass, and then things go badly. We will be significantly closer to critical mass in six months than we were six months ago.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You seem to be arguing that it's a barber pole. I'm pretty sure it's not a barber pole. There is going to be significantly less trust in our institutions six months from now than there was six months ago. Political division and social polarization will be significantly worse. There's a pretty clear trend here, and sooner or later that trend is going to run out of road.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
What if the USSR and Nazi Germany are, in fact, what normal human mistakes look like when people attempt to apply systematized methods of designing "better governance and economic systems"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass.
Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.
...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.
On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Indeed -- and if nobody on the mod team is prepared to consider the reason that long-time users are ending up in this downward spiral, it will pick up steam until the place is of no interest to anyone.
I just linked my best assessment of the reason. What's yours? What's wrong and what should we do about it?
I think it's a separate issue at work, but on the other side of the aisle it might be worth considering that the new scene seems to have driven off darwin -- so attracting new posters of diverse viewpoints is probably a non-starter without some serious changes made.
I'm on record arguing at length that Darwin was one of the worst bad actors this community has ever had, and one of the conditions I gave for joining the mod team was that I'd never be asked to mod him or to be involved in mod decisions about him in any way. Why do you think he left? More generally, what are the serious changes you think should be made?
Just offhand, government officials bragged publicly about lying to Trump in order to get away with disobeying his lawful orders regarding troop deployments. Does that count?
how much work is "within the last decade" doing here? We're currently discussing how government agents routinely break the law with impunity, illegally concealing their actions and deliberations from federal record-keeping, and have been for decades. To the extent that these deliberate attempts to keep the public in the dark fail, they usually take years to fail, and more years for the failures to become general knowledge. It's entirely possible that so long as you maintain a "within the last decade" standard, you can ignore an entirely arbitrary amount of malfeasance indefinitely. In fact, that conversation is itself about an example of the government lying to the public about an extremely important matter, in order to cover up their own involvement!
How do you disambiguate "unrealistically rosy assessment" from "lie"? Take Afghanistan, which started about two and a half decades ago. Were the twenty years of official pronouncements about that conflict "a lie", or were they "unrealistically rosy assessments"? Take the pullout specifically, which was less than a decade ago; no one has actually explained how such a clusterfuck occurred, or who was actually responsible for it. We have every reason to believe that particular disaster was the fault of specific actions taken by specific people, and those actions and people should be readily identifiable through the reams of paperwork the commands in question generate. And yet, nothing. It's just a thing that sorta happened, no idea why, no idea who, pay no attention, move along. Is the claim that the pullout wasn't really anyone's fault a lie? If not, why not?
Is Fauci and his underlings covering up the evidence of a lab leak a lie? If not, why not? Is the claim that six feet of separation or mask mandates or the safety and efficacy of vaccines being a matter of settled science a lie? If not, why not?
And this isn't even getting into lies laundered through private entities with the tacit support of the government, which in my view are still government lies. Does none of this register to you?
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Not a bannable offense.
Indeed not, but deciding that rules are beneath you and that Charity requires too much effort, and then acting on that belief, is. My understanding is that Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
I remember reading about how the federal agencies involved in the Waco massacre claimed both in court and to numerous FOIA requests that they had little to no video or audio recordings of the raid or the siege, and maintained this story for years. Finally it was revealed through litigation that pretty much all the agents involved in documenting the operations had claimed to be using "personal" devices for their official documentation, with the understanding that anything useful to the agencies would be entered into the record when it was convinient to do so, and the rest withheld from public scrutiny indefinitely. This was in 1993, more than three decades ago.
Within the last few weeks, we've seen ATF agents involved in an unjustifiable no-knock raid resulting in the fatal shooting of a law-abiding citizen claim to have left their body-cameras behind. In the shooting of Bundy supporter Roy Finecum (Wikipedia, lol), FBI agents attempted to conceal having fired shots at Finecum while his empty hands were raised over his head. The record overflows with similar examples.
We discuss with some frequency the question of whether government conspiracies are possible. What we see here, as we have seen many, many times before, is that deliberate efforts to evade lawful oversight are both routine and universal. Nor is there any reason to believe that all or even most such efforts are caught; given the absurd scenarios that result in discovery, here being one email mistakenly breaking cover, or in Hillary's case an unrelated sex-crimes investigation snagging a laptop with emails on it, we are very clearly only seeing a small and randomly-selected portion of the cases. This was, in fact, a government conspiracy, directly related to one of the worst disasters of the last hundred years, which very well might have been directly caused by the conspirators themselves.
No one cares. Nothing will be done. Everyone knows it.
[EDIT] - Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I really like the roundups. It makes discussions easier to find later, which is one of the reasons I find these threads so valuable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
On the contrary, I don't think anything Musk has really accomplished rises to the level of the iPhone, which is, so far, the defining innovation of the 21st century.
In magnitude, surely. In terms of positive outcome, that seems pretty questionable.
Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
I guess the flipside, though, is what the alternative is supposed to be. Like, let's say I conclude you're probably right, and Musk is probably going to fail. Why is that information useful? Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so, beyond bragging rights on the Motte? If he succeeds, I think that's probably a very good thing, and if he fails, I'd agree that's almost certainly a bad thing, but if we knew for sure that he was going to fail, right now, what should we do about it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I am curious why are you so driven to go after Musks?
My impression is that he believes both that Musk is likely to fail, that his failures are going to be catastrophic for the interests of the people supporting him, and that the resulting risk profile is not properly appreciated by his supporters, who are backing him because they confuse memes for reality. This seems like an entirely reasonable thing to be concerned about, and comparing it to holocaust denial seems pretty inflammatory.
Hmm. Here's a question, then: do you believe that Progress is possible? Do you believe that technological developments (either hard tech or social tech) have rendered our lives and our experience is fundamentally different in some deep sense from that of, say, bronze-age Chaldeans? Do you believe that future developments could deliver this sort of progress, such that moral or ethical considerations fundamentally change between populations on two different levels of progression?
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