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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
"Race" has been a somewhat dirty-sounding word for a long time, and the circumstance that in US context it really seems to generally denote the vernacular categorisation (black-white-hispanic-asian-native american) that is captured by census categories and is not particularly useful unless your main objective is actually to maintain 1950s US culture rather than to make correct inferences about individuals . Since there's no other unburdened word floating around for genetic clusters (and since having plausible deniability when talking to people who strongly believe that it is nurture rather than nature and to think otherwise is evil is actually a feature), "ethnicity" had to stand in.
(Slight similarities to how in our community, "red tribe"/"blue tribe" edged out "democrat/republican" or "right/left", drifting away from its original meaning denoting specific cultural features too)
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
It's a good point that the law itself doesn't mention the term grooming, but
But even so, showing minors pornography counts under the definition you offered.
As far as I can tell, this is still wrong. Can you explain your reasoning of why you think it does in your own words?
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
a Korea-style stalemate
Before the Korean War went stalemate, it first involved the Northerners almost pushing the Southerners into the sea, and then the Southern-American alliance almost pushing the Northerners into China, for China to finally basically push the allied forces back to the initial alliance. We're still on track for a replay in a way; now we just need the Russians to do some daring flanking operation and take most of the country, only to be ambushed by unexpected NATO alpine troops at night just as final victory seems within reach while lost in some godforsaken wintery mountain valley near the far border of Ukraine, like, say, in the Carpathians.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Definitively an improvement, but I think it would benefit further from putting all the command links that currently take out an extra line at the bottom of each comment at the top as is done by my current custom CSS setup (perhaps right-justified to enforce more of a gap from the username and recency line).
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
What's a good way to get better at writing?
I kind of suck at it, and this is troubling me. I'm a working academic, and sitting on a growing cache of results that I can't get out because (outside of some unpredictable periods where the chemical stars in my brain align just right or something) I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia, and then feel so drained that I will viscerally fear opening vim again for a week or two. "Professional issues" is an easy sell as far as evidence that something must be done goes, but even outside that, there are so many things - posts, stories, explanations - that I wish I could write but can't. The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Is it so clear that this is one of those domains where present trends can be meaningfully extrapolated? Theoretically, bringing any modern country up to the cutting edge of AI amounts to transferring a few TB of data and one container-load of GPUs; if you also want people who can understand and iterate on it, perhaps add a classload of people and at most 8 years of training. The people behind the likes of DeepMind do not strike me as actual +4\sigma-on-the-g-distribution individuals that are in genuine short supply globally to anyone that is not the Cathedral as much as moderately smart people who were at the right place at the right time with the right motivations. As I see it, it's not clear that it wouldn't take just one Chinese drone swarm flying too close to the wrong rock for Japan remember the last few times they surprised powers that wanted a slice of their sleepy islands by sudden and very prolific technological copypasta.
Also, I wanted to thank you for linking the Complex Numbers songs in that previous post of yours you linked. Pretty neat, and colours in my mental image of the direction the Russian offshoot of the rationalist community must have moved in. Did you have anything to do with the people behind it?
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
In my little circle of math olympiad nerds, growing up, the tile-stepping stuff was maintained to be the single best correlate of "one-of-us"-ness, too.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
It would be a fairly self-flattering explanation if this were the case, but while I can't quite rule out that the pattern you describe is accurate (and simply leads to the end result being as it is because of some sort of semantic saturation), it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.
"Just because you are perfectionist doesn't mean that the thing isn't actually not good enough", or something?
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
That's an interesting idea. I'll try it next time my disgust level with my text editor drops below the threshold again.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
No particular pattern I see in environment. The one mood that seems to most frequently help is panic, as induced by a looming deadline that I can't houdini myself out of, but even that is sufficiently inconsistent that the usual tricks with commitment devices and bets and what-not have too much footbullet nature.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Interesting observation about the "that"s. I do think there's a correlation between redundancy of this type creeping into my writing and it feeling forced.
Thanks for the offer! Would you mind if I ping you for nitpicks next time I make a longform post here?
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
It seems to me that the divide you observe may simply be the pro-globalist/anti-globalist divide, which indeed does not align with the political blocks in the US.
You could make the facile argument and simply give globalist its three-parentheses reading with all this entails, but there are more concrete reasons for why (continued alliance with) Israel is a globalist cause - for starters, having a tight alliance with a country that the grassroots population of a significant number of others wants eradicated almost invariably forces you to meddle in those countries' business rather than minding your own.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I think this cluster of posts deals with it, though not from an endorsing perspective. There may still be more I haven't thought of.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
It's interesting how strong a narrative attractor WWII continues being; it's the year 2022 and the descendants of the participants still want to LARP as being on the Eastern Front. Someone around here (or perhaps at our Operation Gladio over at Reddit) posted a clever quip the other day along the lines of "of course [right wingers] are nazis, because [left wingers] are communists and the only working definition of nazi has been 'someone who fights against communists' all along"; the converse ("...the only working definition of communist is 'someone who fights against nazis'") seems to be just as serviceable.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
To elaborate on @07mk's parallel post, the issues I have with the trans rights movement all don't seem to apply to AI art. Nobody is forcing me to affirm in word or deed that AI (or, on that matter, non-AI) art is in fact legitimate, or passing laws forcing me to fill a real-art quota among the acquisitions of my hypothetical company. I can call Jackson Pollock or Rembrandt uninspired crap all I want without any fear of losing my job. If the trans rights movement were really just about the right of people to transition and unilaterally call themselves their chosen gender, or other people to agree with them about that, I would have zero issue with it (and in fact be opposed to its opposition); conversely, if AI art proponents did all the aforementioned things, I would fight them, and if they had any degree of success, I would not even mind salting the earth where AI art grew to disincentivise any future thought-police ambitionaries.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So when/where were songs about straightforward love for a man from a woman's perspective actually common? The "early music" examples I can think of of unironic love songs (belle qui tiens ma vie..., Walther von der Vogelweide...) all seem to be m->f; in fact the only f->m one I can think of off the top of my head is Lana Del Rey's reasonably recent Young and Beautiful.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
As long as utilitarianism is taken to care about future people or even present people's future utility, almost any other ethical system can be emulated in its framework by having the right priors. The operational pattern is something like "I believe [per my prior] that following ethical system X will result in greater technological progress and societal flourishing; therefore by behaving as an X-ian today and convincing other people to also be X-ians, I am actually maximising utility in the long run". In this particular context, a version of this argument that I imagine could be instantiated (and I find fairly persuasive even though I am not, by the standards of almost anyone apart from people deep in SJ, right-wing) is that something among the lines of: "Average (and even median) utility was much lower in {1800, 1400, the stone age...}. Yet, if we had decided to stop and redistribute human wealth equally at those times to maximise local {average, median} utility, the accumulation of capital and centralisation of power that enabled in the industrial revolution/colonialism/transition to agrarian societies would have been prevented and those developments wouldn't have happened, leaving us in an egalitarian but comparatively miserable stasis".
To me personally, one of the more convincing arguments supporting "socialism now, but not when we lived in caves" is something something great stagnation; more than ever before, it feels like we have hit diminishing returns from concentrating capital to enable scientific progress/letting different systems violently duke it out so that the better, more capable one may build a garden on top of the pyramid of skulls/sacrificing to Moloch. Even if further progress is in fact possible, the possible futures don't necessarily look desirable in expectation, with a lot of probability mass being on something like varying AGI apocalypses and easier nukes. Better to switch from explore to egalitarian exploit now and cash out than keep taking the bet?
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I think that actually, the "soft power export base" of China has a certain quite successful component that is hard to see for foreigners with little cultural interaction and sympathy for it, which is a certain brand of consumerist vapidity that more sympathetically could be described as harmony-promoting. Americans and those who are culturally like them are wired to reflect upon their own society and others through the lens of conflict, and this wiring is reflected in the cultural artifacts they produce: a work that does not depict some individual or group of people being locked in a basically unresolvable conflict against their society and the circumstances they find themselves in just registers as boring. Ask Westerners to talk about their society in generic terms, and they'll invariably start to catalogue its sins, be it racism, capitalism, populism, too much of some degeneracy and too little of some freedom. This is not the case for most of those culturally Chinese, and in fact to represent their society (or any society that they could identify with) as fundamentally broken in that way would generally strike them as an antisocial and all-around unpleasant act. To further the confusion of the Western observer, this is not just a specific restriction that is draconically imposed on top of otherwise Western intuitions (like you want to write all the same accounts of conflict and struggle against something but you go one step too far and then the censor jails your family), but a whole cluster of intuitions that leave normal, well-adjusted individuals steering well clear of anything even directionally leading you towards the Voldemortian core of bad ideas.
The way such a society winds up looking to the conflict-dependent Westerner, of course, is sterile ("Where are all the Cyberpunks, or on that matter the anything-punks? Who are they even doing this culture thing versus?"), but a lot of people within find it quite nice and don't understand why the Westerners have this compulsion to shit in their own bed.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I assume you're referring to kishoutenketsu (approximately, perhaps, background-setup-twist-conclusion), which seems somewhat orthogonal to me, being concerned more with the structure of the story than its contents; comparable perhaps to the Western five-act structure.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So what exactly are you trying to say? If I understand the story correctly, a red-tribe-allied cartoonist drew some cartoons satirising a weakman version of a blue-tribe-associated measure, and perhaps coincidentally, some group of newspapers stopped carrying his cartoon (along with a number of others, as the link seems to suggest, whose political significance is not clear to me) at the same time. Are you insinuating that the cancellation was not coincidental? Are you trying to say that he drew his satire because the cartoon got cancelled and he knew it would be, or that the cartoon got cancelled because of the satire? (If so, then what of the others that got cancelled?) Do you have any evidence to support either belief?
I have to say I am not a fan of posts like this, which mostly seem to be fulfilling the purpose of introducing takes such as the weakman cartoons which would not meet the discursive standard of the Motte otherwise and darkly hinting at some thing or another, and this is why I cheered on the removal of the "bare links repository" and opposed its reintroduction.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Thanks for your kind words. I think writing on the Motte is not quite the same as writing an article; I've thought about why it is that I can fight internet arguments at near the WPM cap but struggle so much with anything closed-form, and came to the conclusion that it makes a big difference to me if I can model the process as talking statefully to a single concrete person. (You might notice that I have very few top-level posts on here, too.) However, the obvious trick of trying to imagine the hypothetical reader of the paper as a particular individual doesn't work; there is no actual individual person being targeted and whatever process enables me to talk to real people does not work with respect to a make-believe simulacrum.
Thank you also for the offer about a video call, but I have some opsec concerns about linking my Motte identity to the real world in that fashion. (Do I want to find out how compellingly I have to argue for immanentizing the wrong eschaton before the Mottizen who knows my real-life identity decides that stopping me takes moral precedence over other concerns?)
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Are they? I had the sense that since Ukraine started, all the focus (at least in the German press) on their internal politics evaporated, and generally Hungary (whose ruler is flirting with Russia or at least trying to dangle the spectre of it for concessions) is being singled out now. Of course this could be simply a stroke of opportunity, as Poland may have stopped playing tag team with Hungary and deadlocking the "all-versus-one" punishment mechanisms in the EU - perhaps as punishment for the Russia-flirting, demonstrating conversely that at least for Poland, NATO is more important than not-Gays.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Abstracting away from the more CW-radioactive details of what exactly it is you are attached to, it seems to like this should be a problem that is as old as human society, if perhaps occurring more and more frequently as everything speeds up. Value drift is to be expected anyway, and sometimes you find yourself living in a place and time where value drift is so fast that you can see that your later years and certainly most of the lives of your children will be spent in a setting where your values are alien.
One thing I found useful to see this sort of value drift in perspective is to imagine the problem from the opposite side. This is really not our first rodeo with value drift as a society. You could imagine a devout and reasonably well-placed monarchist on the eve of the French Revolution, or someone running a multigenerational manufacturing business that is about to get forever obsoleted by the Industrial Revolution, or a Mesoamerican seeing his society fall apart to war and pestilence as the Spanish are on the horizon, going through a variant of the same dread that you are going. What meaning would they even see in a future for their children in which the glory of King and Nation and the Lord God above is profaned, or the craft they are proud of will never serve any purpose again except as a curio, or the pride they felt when their firstborn son finally passed the trials and was allowed to wear the pelt that marked him as a full Jaguar Warrior, representing the divine ferocity of the king of the jungle in human form, will only be remembered as a 32-pixel mockery in an RTS played by pudgy teenagers? As a partisan of the future that ate everything they valued, who apparently does not feel that the present is dreadful (yet), are there some words of comfort, or defense of the value of the present (which you now find valuable to preserve) in terms that would get through to them, that you could imagine offering those individuals?
I don't think the "NATO forces" (that is, Western ex-military volunteers) are particularly relevant, although people on multiple sides have a weird incentive to claim that they are (for instance, the veterans themselves to talk up the significance of their "experience" and therefore personal value). In fact, I'm unconvinced that for line soldiers many things matter as much as motivation/attitude and basic discipline/impulse control, which are aspects in which I don't see why Ukrainian soldiers now should be inferior to anyone.
On the other hand, Ukraine's equipment is increasingly NATO-provided especially at the low level (I keep hearing that Ukrainian units have a fillhorn of encrypted comms and Starlink terminals while the Russians are often stuck with CB radios donated by some Telegram bloggers if they have anything at all), and I'd wager that their command-and-control stack is advised and supplied with intel by the US at every level. Given the outcome, it seems to be pretty clear to me that the conclusion should be that these things just matter more, as long as neither side outright runs out of motivated soldiers, just as I would expect a professional RTS player with an early midgame starting position to trounce a noob who doesn't know how to
scroll the map viewassign unit groups even if the latter starts with a popcap-sized endgame army.(edit: Update: The speed at which that entire stretch of the Russian front is collapsing is astonishing. Between this and "unconfirmed" (of the type that seems to wind up confirmed a day or two later all the time lately) reports of breaches even all over the Donbass, I now get the sense that this is really the beginning of a potentially very rapid end for Russia. Hope that nobody overplays their hand past the nuclear threshold.)
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