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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
Calling that ethnic cleansing is similarly wrong, and for what it's worth the Wikipedia article on it does not seem to contain the word "cleansing". I googled for the combination of the two terms, and the first two relevant-seeming hits I found are from Quora and some book on Amazon containing wording such as
The Irish were simply to be pushed off to poorer, less desirable parts, in a sort of early version of ethnic cleansing.
and
It was, beyond doubt, ethnic cleansing, but not of the worst kind because the Irish were made to leave rather than killed on spot.
If anyone thinks that it was ethnic cleansing on the basis that the Irish were forced out of the most desirable locations in favour of the Britons (so it was... ethnically cleansing the best parts of Ireland only?), I guess that's fair, but this is a premise that is also not present in the US immigration case - there is no forcing of the current population to relocate to less desirable areas, and in fact the new immigrants tend to cluster in the least desirable ones.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
When progressives fail in their goals, they don't admit defeat. They write it off, avoid mentioning it again and may even pretend it was never their idea... unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on. When they win, they just write the history to make it seem inevitable.
This seems to be what would happen by default for any long-lived political movement that is actually winning enough that the losses on objectives that don't get dismissed in the churn can be written off as an exception in the style of "unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on". Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?
I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.
- Are you suggesting that they still secretly believe in those goals, and just don't want to say them out loud in order to not reveal that they stand for unpopular and discredited ideas? (That would be a bold claim.)
- Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again? (Useless without persuading them that they themselves and past progressives actually took marching orders from a progressive hivemind, as opposed to fighting for what they themselves believe to be right.)
- Is it just a base desire to associate your outgroup with losing in order to lower their status? (On brand for politics, but off brand for what this forum strives to be.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
I don't think the native blue tribers I have met in the US would actually be bothered by their kids being gay; to the extent this sentiment still existed it was confined to first-generation immigrants. Any objection to their own kids going trans is probably not about not getting grandkids either, considering that this is a culture that increasingly isn't even convinced to have kids of their own. Rather, the crux is that people are not actually convinced that transitioning is predetermined and makes their kids happy, despite outwards pressure to subscribe to this view. Few people have nagging doubts that gays are at least as happy as straights.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
I figure that a lot of people on the anti-refugee side do not actually recognise any "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum", and think of asylum as a privilege rather than a right. An acceptance regime that produces false negatives is therefore not perceived as anything like robbing people of their rights.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
In a policy-oriented, non-tribal democracy, the "male" mode seems better for reflecting voter preference: everyone can vote for the candidate that agrees with their beliefs and values, with no worries that the rug will be pulled after the election as the candidate does a 180. In a tribalised or one-party democracy where elections are not decided on policy, what you call the "female" mode seems better: the majority policy preferences will at least be approximately realised at the "winning candidate does whatever is popular" stage.
In concrete terms, imagine if 90% of Americans were against open borders, but there are 53% of voters who will vote Democrats no matter what. Would you rather Democratic leadership does the masculine thing and stand on the principle of open borders because they determined this is correct, or they yield to what is popular?
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9mo ago
I don't think that this is what "steelman" usually means, unless you are actually trying to imply that statements "we were literally on the cusp of world peace" are the most defensible version of the case for Trump. That would mean the case for Trump is really rather indefensible, which lends credence to "all dumb Trump supporters".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
Why would we need that, considering for example that this far more overbearing paean by a fairly established account is sitting at +24 a bit further down? We are evidently in Poe's Law territory ether way.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
I think there is an underlying understanding that many people (including some of the direct replies you got here) are already personally convinced that significant amounts of fraud happened, and their belief in it is so strong that any amount of American institutions investigating and finding that no fraud happened will not decrease their belief in the fraud so much as it will greatly increase their belief that the institutions have lost their integrity. If that is the case, the best way to regain the trust of those people is to make heads roll - that is, instead of organising an investigation that finds no fraud, organise an investigation that finds (significant, but perhaps not at the level of actually overturning the results) fraud, identify a perpetrator or group of perpetrators, and make a show of punishing them severely. This would be more effective the more this perpetrator could serve as an effigy of the outgroup. Life in prison for a single easily mockable overweight Democratic Party apparatchik transwoman would have gone a long way to restore faith in institutions in many Deplorables, and if that person did in fact perform election fraud it would not even be unjust under the standard American understanding of justice.
I do personally find it unlikely that there were no instances of fraud that this sort of spectacle could have been pulled off with. Surely, among the tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are many standard deviations above the general public in terms of political engagement, and the many entities engaged in the counting process, there must be some place where someone with terminal TDS decided that the unique dangers of Trump weigh heavier than the sacred precepts of the system and decided to throw out or reshuffle some ballots while nobody unsympathetic was looking. That no official investigation seems to have turned up even one small fish of this type to crucify does indicate to me that the involved institutions may have prioritised not being seen as giving comfort to Trump over either fact-finding or public peace.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
You can't just claim everything to be a step onto a slippery slope without evidence and/or concrete arguments. There are plenty of instances in world politics of actors doing a particular thing with ease and not proceeding to attempt every other action that is somewhat similar to it: the US rolled over Iraq but did not proceed to invade Iran, the Russians waltzed within something like 30km of Georgia's capital and then just turned around and went home, ...
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
I was taking "Biblical levels of destruction" to be defined in terms of the vibes of the best pictures you can cherry-pick, rather than any concrete data-based criteria. The Bible itself may not have pictures, but it certainly doesn't make its case with data.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out.
Where does this figure come from? The latest news reports I can find are still talking about a figure of 200something dead, which includes the area of initial landfall.
Really, I'm wondering where this perception of "biblical proportions" is coming from. Central Europe (approximately next door from me) had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing, where the death toll stood around 24. A factor of 10 difference just seems to be about what I'd expect given the lower level of preparation, inferior civic infrastructure and construction standards in the US (typical European houses would be much less likely to collapse), and the European flood is now being filed away as a fairly boring once-in-a-few-years event (outside of media that is still trying to make culture war hay of it).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
Do you have any evidence that capacity for independent thinking is lower in your outgroup than your ingroup? If not, you are just guilty of a flipped version of the same thing that the parent accused them off, with "free critical thinkers vs. NPCs" taking the place of the "smart pro-science liberals vs. chud knuckledraggers" one.
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9mo ago
An IDF soldier can go toe to toe with just about any soldier in the world except the Americans and maybe the British on a good day.
Where is the evidence that the Americans or the British are particularly effective soldiers? They haven't fought a war that didn't amount to clicking targets on a screen in a context of absolute air superiority for over half a century. In a 1v1 setting like paintball with real guns, I'd bet on the average Russian, Ukrainian or even North Korean (assuming they get to eat full meals for a month prior) soldier, and, yes, of course on an average Israeli one, over the average American.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
A surprising amount of women's clothing does not come with pockets of sufficient size to store anything like a wallet, so they need to pack necessities manually before every trip based on need and available storage. This could be anything ranging from a handbag to the minimally-sized pocket of a tight-fitting piece of pants that might at most fit a few loose cards, which encourages keeping the ID card as a loose item to be tracked and brought explicitly.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
It's challenging when one of the four only eats french fries.
I'm always curious how kids wind up being this sort of extreme picky eaters. At what age and how did the tendency start? Is it just that you don't normally see it as enough of a problem to force it out of it, or would the kid literally starve itself to death if you refused to make french fries available?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
Per the Montreux convention, Turkey gets to block warships of warring parties without itself being a party to the war. If the US had to apply its Mediterranean air superiority to prevent Russia from reinforcing the BSF, they would have to (threaten to) directly fire on the Russians, which would let the Russians feel like they have license to shoot down US drones over the Black Sea, which would still be very detrimental to UA. Any attempt to claim that a naval blockade in international waters is not in fact an act of war would bite the US in the ass over Taiwan, as China could start that one sooner than the US argument could be memoryholed.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
The difference between the scenario I outlined and the most clichéd Mother Brain story you can come up with does not seem particularly relevant in my eyes - of course humans cause any bad outcome in either case, per a simple but-for causality test, because humans could collectively stop doing technology and then we would neither get "make step-by-step instruction for killbots" AI nor the "believes it is a god and can put its money where its mouth is" AI. In the same vein, I'd say some Australopithecus's decision to reproduce caused every bad outcome we experienced and will experience - though probably you have a different view of causality that privileges "full-fledged humans" in some way, so another entity's causal "responsibility" can't flow through them. Either way, I don't see how whether one sees the potentially doombringing AI as an agent with feelings has any influence on whether one should be concerned about AI doom and what one should do about it. P-zombie AIs build the same killbots and respond to the same interventions.
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10mo ago
I think that asking for a path to it becoming anything "in a human sense" is just trying to force the problem into a domain where it is easy for you to dismiss concerns, because deep down you feel that whatever magic spark defines humans isn't there and the expectation that at some point it would appear is as laughable and unfounded as it was with tech from a few hundred years ago. It might be easy to misunderstand the "AI doom" arguments as resting on some assumption that AI will become human-like, given that proponents talk about the AI "wanting" or "feeling" things all the time, but I think most of this is just nerds playing fast and loose with the notion of volition - we say things like "this triangle wants to have approximately equal angles" all the time.
AI doesn't need "agency", "personality" or "self-awareness" to cause killbots to be built. In fact, all of the critics' dismissals can be true, if you want. The thing is that LLMs can already produce reasonable lists in response to a prompt to break down a goal into steps, and they can generate plausible paragraphs of spite when prompted to imitate a human response to slander. We can grant that there is no real thinking or emotion or anything behind this and it's all just synthesised from lots of examples of similar things in the training corpus, because this does not matter: these capabilities only need to get quantitatively better for someone to hook up "break down into subgoals until you generate Terraform scripts for the servers controlling our fab" and "generate an essay arguing for a top-level goal that a reasonable human would pursue", and the latter comes out to "burn it all down" by roll of the dice and too much edgy posting in the training set. You can ascribe all the agency behind the resulting killbots to the 20something humans with more VC money than common sense who will build and deploy the system but be too lazy to monitor it, but it doesn't change the outcome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Why do you think that an AI that has reached the point of making and executing a viable destroy-all-humans plan would not be able to build kilbots that will not be fooled by dummies?
There is this strange tendency in the AI-skeptical/-contrarian crowd to get hung up on particular shortcomings of current models, especially when these are of a form that would be conceivable but indicative of some sort of defectiveness in humans ("you claim that it can do original research, but it still hallucinates citations/fails to distinguish dogs and cats/?"). To me it reads like some sort of mistargeting of interhuman bullying/status jockeying onto nonhuman targets - if you just make the killbot look dweeby enough, nobody will take it seriously as a threat.
I could see this leading to a sort of dark punchline where in our efforts to align AIs and equip them with more human-like comprehension/preferences/personality, we wind up building ones that can actually "take it personally". Like a tropey high school dork deciding to prove that you do not in fact need to be good at sportsball and socialising to unload several AR clips into your classmates, the model might just pair a very convincing simulacrum of spite over sentiments like yours, as found in its training set and amplified by RLHF, with the ability to tree-search a synthesis of deadly neurotoxin even if it relies on blatantly made-up citations.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
I think you are going too far in trying to link everything bad that modern elites do to socialism/communism/other bogeymen of the Right. The biggest blights on Western cities tend to be planted there not by socialists, but by multibillionaires and conglomerates who have the money and connections to force through their vision with the antisocial chutzpah of a Randian protagonist. Meanwhile, the communist hipsters and left-wing college students tend to congregate on leafy Gothic Revival campuses (only disrupted by the occasional piece of glass blobitecture that's probably called the Bill and Melinda Gates Building) and in cozy book/coffee shops that would make Alexander proud. Compare the stark neoclassicism and opulence that Stalin decked Soviet cities in to Union Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal or really anything about the NYC metro.
These observations are not consistent with anti-human architecture being a consequence of communism or socialism. The simpler theory is that both bad architecture and socialist rhetoric are enduring fashions among Western elites, without necessarily having any particular relation to each other except for the most basic commonality that useful elite fashions must be inaccessible to those unwilling or unable to invest time and money and be open-ended to keep the competition going.
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10mo ago
90% familiar with (it's hard to escape when you have any interaction at all with left-leaning meme groups), maybe 15% an unironic user, 30% were an unironic user at some point in the past. This might be because most of the SJWs I know are ones who "made it" - they have tenure or at least are so embedded in the community that it would cause a scandal among their allies if they did not get it, or well-paying and stable admin jobs, or work as some form or another of creative consultant.
In my impression that term is mostly popular with 20-30somethings going through a phase of post-leaving-the-nest poverty, where the necessity to pay for Netflix premium, takeout and instagrammable experiences leaves them somewhat squeezed on the housing side; as such, it is tightly associated with violent fantasies towards landlords. Those who largely get their college life arranged and paid for don't use it unless they need to fit into some poorer crowd. Every time I see it on my Boomerbook wall, I have to fight the urge to respond with something like "what if I told you that this is actually still only the early stage".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Who are "they"? The vast majority of people you seek to describe as "Cultural Marxists" do not use that terminology for themselves. There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
The definitions are not that hard.
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Marxists are adherents of Marx's theories and visions for society and economics, who believe that the principal division in society is between people who own property that generates value and those who have to sell their labour to provide for themselves, and it is inevitable that the latter will rise up and bring about a new form of society where the former mode of existence is impossible and the latter retain control over the property complement that is needed to convert their labour into value.
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"Cultural Marxists" are not really a thing anymore; to the extent to which people identified with this, this can be compared to the tendency of metal music fans to create new "types of metal" whenever they stumble upon a non-metal music genre that they like, so folk music as enjoyed by the metal community is "folk metal", J-pop enjoyed by Metal fans is "kawaii metal" and so on. "Cultural Marxism" is a label that emerges when people whose identity revolves around being "Marxist" discover their interest in culture warring, and have to lay claim to still being part of their old community.
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The people currently controlling culture in the US and its vassals can be called SJWs, Wokeists or the Awokened or whatever you prefer. I found that in my life calling them "the Social Justice crowd" is specific and inoffensive enough that it gets the point across without eliciting backlash.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.
I know you are trying to quote Moldbug here, but that's neither the exact quote nor is it a particularly deep insight. The "sovereign" gets to write your dictionary, so He actually defines everything.
There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed.
What upstart movement can not be glossed as saying that some group is not getting what it deserves and some other group is getting more than it deserves? If this is the definition of Marxism, then the Nazis, the Basque and Catalan independence movement, the Kievan Rus throwing off the Mongol yoke and the American Revolution are all Marxist. Why don't you call it Cultural Patriotism, or Cultural ETAism? This analysis is not predictive of anything either, because it is not a feature of "cultural marxist" SJWs that who they want redistribute wealth from and to has anything to do with who is oppressing whom. No amount of oppression heaped on their political opponents would make them think "huh, I recall that we were Marxists and must pursue the redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed" and proceed to expropriate their allies to pay their enemies.
You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion.
What exactly is the psy-op I am supposedly falling for? I don't think I'm particularly confused about what SJWs want, or what Marxists want, or what anti-Marxists want, and I'm strongly against the first, mildly against the second, and strongly against the third. If your rhetorical trick made me support the third because I wanted to oppose the first, you would be the one psyopping me. You might be trying to frame things as if there were a contradiction in my position, but your argument only works if you consider "oppressed" and "oppressor" to be pointers that must not be resolved or refined, which as I argued above not even the SJWs do. I want some redistribution from rich to poor, and no redistribution between any ethnic groups, and this is independent of who oppresses whom: even if the rich were publicly flagellated and forced to eat dirt for two hours every day while the homeless get to spit on them, I would still want them to pay more taxes.
[citation needed]
The lowest birth rates are found in very homogeneous countries such as South Korea and Japan. In spite of all its diversity, the US white (non-hispanic) birth rate is still greater than that of comparatively homogeneous countries like (much richer) Norway or (barely) (much poorer) Hungary. What gives?
"Diluting" seems like a more accurate and value-neutral verb.
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