Communists are more repressive because they actually think people can change.
Rightists and Leftists broadly define the outgroup as a minority. It might be defined as an economic class (‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeoisie’) or a social class (out of touch ‘elites’), or it might be defined nationally, religiously or ethnically, but the outgroup is generally a minority of the population.
What do you do when the majority - or at least seemingly a large mass of people - disagrees with you? The right has a built in explanation for this, which is expressed in different language at different places or times, sometimes more or less democratically, but which is essentially ‘some people are stronger, smarter, and more noble than others, we can lead, the rest will follow’ and this is broadly congruent. This leads to repression in far-right regimes being localized. It includes those groups marked out as the ‘true’ unassimilable enemy (see above), and a very small number of others who cause a nuisance, but there is no inherent need for the masses to be brought along provided they don’t threaten the running of the state. If you are not obstructing the running of government and do not belong to a primary outgroup, the reactionary regime generally leaves you alone.
The left lacks this explanation and dichotomy. Certainly, there have been attempts. The rural peasantry are inherently reactionary. The labor aristocracy are happy being kapos. But this all rings a little hollow compared to the fundamental ideological message - after all, unlike the right which is more willing to write off some people as outside the scope of the project, isn’t the core leftist idea that everyone (even sometimes former aristocrats and capitalists) can be reformed? Can become a servant of the revolution? Eventually, you reach a stage where the day-to-day political and social views of the masses need to be monitored, adjusted, and reported on. They are simply more relevant to communism as a political project. Communism cares about what people believe in their hearts in a way that reactionary traditionalist and right wing movements don’t - in part because communists think human nature is malleable in a way the right doesn’t.
This also makes for far more repressive forms of authoritarianism. In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike. Rightist regimes don’t make people go to Church. They might change the curriculum for kids, but they make no effect to convert adults ideologically, they assume they’re either in the small enemy group or already on their side. Communist countries have this problem less (not never, but less).
2rafa
7d ago
I said it doesn't have access to the training set, in the same way that if you take an exam without "access" to the textbook you're not allowed to bring it in and leaf through it when answering the problems.
Again, if we change “it accesses the training set” to “it recalls / accesses / understands [delete as appropriate] the conceptual relationships represented by the training set” what really changes?
2rafa
7d ago
I take the ‘opposite’ view that LLMs are becoming extraordinary intelligences, but I also think the distinction between memory, recall, training set, database etc is unnecessarily importing computer science distinctions into what is a relatively robust colloquial understanding of these models.
If you watch three thousand chess games and then play a chess game and see a move and think “I’ve seen this before, I’m going to do x” and you’re right but you can’t perfectly recall that it was actually a YouTube video of a 2003 Chess regional championship quarter final between… then are you recalling or remembering or did you learn?
This is just not a relevant distinction when it comes to the human concept of memory. I’ll keep pushing this because “actually, an LLM doesn’t have memory of the training set” isn’t really true. It often does have recall of the training set, just like often you really might be able to remember the book you first saw an unusual turn of phrase in or the chess game where you first saw a particular move. And in any case, memory encompasses both that and a relational, situational, partial and often metadata-free recall but it still counts.
The counterargument here isn’t “no LLMs don’t do this”, it’s “so do you”.
2rafa
7d ago
Right, it’s a model trained (like every single model we can build) on millions of descriptions of human emotion, human experience, human identity. Bemused responses at models being “afraid” of being “caught” hacking contra to the instructions of the prompter (and really quote marks aren’t even necessary) because it’s a computer model and can’t suffer the indignity of trial or the boredom and waste of 20 years in a prison cell are really besides the point. LLMs are by the nature of their training human-identified intelligences, not foreign or alien ones, even when told they’re not.
2rafa
8d ago
Of course LLMs capture something core about human (or all advanced) cognition. Are they perfect equivalents to the human brain and mind? No, but they don’t need to be. In years to come, we will find the idea that we ever pretended there was something special about the way we think to be a strange form of historic narcissism, no different to the way we now feel about the idea that the earth was at the center of the solar system or the universe.
2rafa
8d ago
The daily grind in World of Warcraft may be more boring than another game, but it’s still a lot more ‘fun’ (or less painful) than running a 10k for most people, for example.
That said, I’d argue many things in real life employ gamification principles - whether it’s job boards / ticket systems like in software engineering, or fitness apps like Apple health with streaks and tracking and scores and medals etc etc. Clearly it works for some people - although I’d guess they all like the game a little before the gamification is applied.
Maybe that’s the best way to look at it, MMOs have dailies to get players coming back every day which promotes retention. I know many gym apps that have essentially the same dailies for small rewards (a coffee, a protein shake), so in that sense it works.
2rafa
9d ago
Not unheard of for some niche lowbrow online Indian/Hindu nationalist types. In both cases it’s “enemy of my [historic] enemy”.
They dislike Britain because of the British Empire, so they like Nazi Germany, plus they used the Swastika and extended some token sympathies to Indian nationalists contra the British.
And they very much dislike Muslims and the Muslim presence in India, so like Israel because they’re carving out territory in a formerly Muslim land and have good relation with India. And Palestine is the central global Muslim cause more than any other, so it often comes up.
Red because most people won’t understand the question and will just hear “you will definitely survive” and “nobody you know and love will probably be in the 2 random people asked next”. The original question works ‘better’ because it’s more intuitively understood by the average 85 IQ human being on earth.
2rafa
9d ago
This kind of clause defeats the point. The point is everyone gets the question at the same time and must decide instantly. In that context your choices are:
-
Press Red, guarantee your survival, hope everyone you love also chooses Red or that enough people choose Blue. If Red wins, live with knowing you might have had the defining vote (assume nobody knows the exact split of the final outcome) however unlikely.
-
Press Blue, either die instantly with a clean conscience or everyone lives.
2rafa
9d ago
Wow. The first example is pretty interesting. So the dashes separate both direct speech from different people and the author’s voice, while the guillemets can be unbroken when they surround the author’s voice provided that it’s clearly delineated by the dashes. Weird, but fun. And confusing, even though it’s obvious enough to read, to write.
2rafa
10d ago
do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?
There is no world populated entirely by people who chose blue.
Obviously this is a coordination problem that presupposes that everyone is presented with the problem and must choose instantly without speaking to everyone they know and love (otherwise we could obviously all agree, as the human race, to choose red, and all definitely live).
It only works if you don’t know what your parents, children, spouse and friends have picked or will pick.
2rafa
10d ago
The obvious reason to choose blue is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose red?
2rafa
10d ago
To social autists or even people who just aren’t that smart it contains a lot of genuinely useful and true social advice, like that getting people do to things for you endears them to you more than doing things for them, and that small talk is very important in selling things and yourself.
If these sound stupidly obvious, real life is full of people who haven’t grasped them.
2rafa
10d ago
Well, I think that's what you kind of implied before:
Fair, I could have been clearer. I mean they are more likely to cheat if they are in a supposedly monogamous relationship. This is because the lifelong lotharios tend to be relatively obvious. They have reputations. They mostly know what they like. If they settle down, it is either with an earnest effort at monogamy after a long period of promiscuity, or it is with a woman who (on some level) knows what is going to happen. The man who becomes attractive later in life might settle down with the first pretty girl who looks at him twice, and only thereafter decide he wants to play the field, which is a failure mode the lifelong lotharios who settle down in their thirties or forties experience less often.
2rafa
10d ago
Being into radical politics almost certainly correlates with mental illness, an unstable personality, etc, and possibly prioritizing “the mission” over your family, a stable job, showing up at Thanksgiving etc. It also marks someone out as having low agreeableness, which is also bad in a partner. So generally, the smart move is to find someone broadly centrist, maybe a little left or a little right, within whatever the Overton window is in your society.
2rafa
10d ago
I don’t know that men in group 4 tend to be more faithful. Rather men in group 4 tend to know what they want and the kind of man who has been a lothario since he was 15 is usually relatively easy identified. Women who marry men in group 4, Hillary Clinton types, usually know what they’re getting into. The same isn’t necessarily true if you marry a group 1.
2rafa
10d ago
At the time it was released it was original, even churches didn’t provide that kind of folksy hustler energy. The entirety of popular culture and advice changed in response to it, it’s like saying The Beatles sound generic.
2rafa
10d ago
Additionally, women want naturals, not someone who looksmaxxed their way to trick some poor woman into dating an imposter.
This is very true, and it’s not even primarily because of the genetics. It’s because men who get hot later in life are to the man bitter about it. They mourn the imagined youth (including plenty of casual relationships in high school and at college) they missed - in the end, even if they find a pretty wife who they like, they are more likely to cheat, and they will always be bitter they didn’t date around and enjoy attention from women in their youth. There are women who get hot in their late twenties or early thirties who are similar, but it’s less universal - they are more likely to just be happy they ‘made it’.
If you are going to marry an attractive man it’s always best to find someone who had a girlfriend (or several) in high school, because he does not have the same regrets as the late bloomer. Sure, there are lifelong lotharios who will never be faithful, too, but you can weed those out in other ways.
2rafa
12d ago
The Uighur thing wasn’t really a big topic in the late 1970s, and for Iran antagonizing Russia is always a bad idea if it can be avoided. They certainly did set themselves up in opposition to the Gulf Monarchies, including Saudi Arabia (although they are most hostile to Bahrain, which has a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni monarch). Nevertheless, a combination of the Hormuz, access to Hajj, shared OPEC membership and the Iraq Iran war, plus economic difficulty means that waging war on Saudi directly is infeasible. That said, they fund the Houthis who fought a proxy war against Saudi Arabia for many years and bombed Saudi oil facilities.
The difference is that most Muslims around the world either like Saudi Arabia (because they provide immense foreign investment into Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc etc) or don’t care about it. Many people have family or friends with fond memories of Hajj. The main group who dislike Saudi Arabian monarchy are hardline Sunni Islamists who consider it decadent and Western - but those same theological hardliners also consider Shia Islam in its entirety an aberration and a heresy. The only major group of Sunni Islamists who throw their lot in with Iran are Hamas, and that is very much an alliance of convenience (and both sides know it).
The Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta are surely both also grandfathered into Australian law.
As to the Israelis, if the situation had been settled in the 80s they’d be doing so right now.
2rafa
14d ago
If it were any animal but humans
Is that really true? Dogs are all the same species and yet differ far more in intellect, brain size, color, appearance, size, lifespan etc than humans do.
The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.
2rafa
17d ago
House prices and number of houses aren’t really as correlated as most people think. Look at the Chinese housing boom for example. Look at New Zealand. Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose (yes, there was a very brief fall in 2009, but that was after the crash and the population returned to growth long before house prices recovered). In New Zealand, property prices have collapsed recently despite continued population growth. In Seoul in South Korea, house prices doubled between 2015 and 2022, even though the overall population of the city actually fell (according to many estimates) or at least stagnated. China spent many years building housing as if its population was growing at a tfr of 3, and yet prices continued to go up, up, up even as urbanization started to slowly turn the corner and birth rates plummeted (both objectively bad for house price speculation if you think the central driver of prices is demand). Here in London, prices in many desirable neighborhoods have fallen by ~20% in nominal terms in the last couple of years, even though the population continues to rise and unemployment remains low.
There are individual reasons for all of this, and you can handwave each singular datapoint, but the overall dynamic is harder to avoid - the reason houses are cheap in some places and expensive in others usually has very little to do with how many houses are available or even how much money people have except in some time-limited sudden dislocation events. It’s much more about culture, like stock market valuations (the same sector with the same margins in two countries of similar stability trading at vastly different multiples, for example, can be handwaved by talking about liquidity or local investment dynamics or blah blah, but really, it’s because in some countries people believe that stonks always go up, so they do, and in others they don’t, so they don’t).
Doctors are one of the only high status, high income, high volume jobs.
This is actually a great way to think about this wider issue. There are high status (meaning respect as a profession) and high volume jobs - like nurses and architects, but the pay is usually decent or below. There are high pay and marginally higher volume jobs - like some computer programmers, oil rig workers, successful salespeople - but they tend to have medium or lower social status (both prestige and occupational respect). And there are high status, high(ish) pay jobs (senior judge, Hollywood A/B lister, senator), but they’re very low volume. How many astronauts are there? (Apparently the most ‘prestigious’ profession). 50?
There are a million doctors in America. Doctors have very high social status / occupational prestige. Doctors have excellent job security and high pay. This unique combination exists for no other profession.
Sure, there are people who make more than doctors, like investment bankers, quant traders, senior executives at major corporations, but they are arguably widely reviled and in any case there aren’t many of them. And sure, there are the astronauts and noble prize winning scientists, but they almost all get paid less than doctors (according to Reddit the recent lunar astronauts probably make $150k a year). There are more ‘fun’ jobs like artists and creatives, but again, the trade off is that you’ll be poor unless you’re 99.9th percentile. There are schoolteachers, who also have relatively high social respect and good job security, but they make far less than doctors unless they’re in a top-10 paying nationwide school district (in which case the local doctors make much more too) and they’re still lower status than being a doctor.
The question is ‘are all three levers necessary here’? STEM adjuncts (who are often very smart) work for shitty pay and there are still tens of thousands more PhDs produced every year. In countries where doctors are paid much less (including relative to average salaries), medical school is still very competitive - suggesting that status (or more charitably healing the sick) is enough of a motivation, you don’t need to add ‘getting (moderately) rich’. Lastly, there are so many doctors relative to other very high pay professions that they cannot all or mostly or even to a large extent find other jobs - and since nowhere pays doctors more than America, they can’t emigrate either.
This suggests doctor pay can be reduced in the United States without major risks.
The Soviet Union effectively repressed almost all private enterprise from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s. There were some smugglers and black marketers in 1975 but far fewer than there had been fifty years earlier. It was mostly effective. North Korea has a larger black market but it’s largely tolerated by the state due to extreme poverty as a supplementary income source.
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