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1mo ago
Tangentially, I've seen the story being rounded to "Marsalek is an Orthodox priest" as you do a lot, but when the story broke there was nothing indicating that he actually has taken on the role, but just that he assumed the identity of some Orthodox priest, who probably knew and may or may not have had a choice in the matter, for the purpose of crossing borders (with some interesting implication that there is a larger scheme of rural clergy donating their personae to Russian intelligence for such ends). Village priest is not a role that a random foreign business bro can just slip into, for reasons ranging from the linguistic to the Russian Orthodox church being socially quite tight-knit.
Huh, very surprising indeed. The possibilities I can see are:
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He expects that Russia will produce such conclusive proof that it was a clot that even normies abroad will have to concede. In such a scenario, this is a very strong way to build a reputation for accuracy, and counter what seems like an emerging narrative even in the West that the Ukrainian government may be Baghdad Bobbing (I've seen a lot of palpable irritation about Zelenskiy's recent implausibly low figure for Ukrainian casualties, and before that the stories like the Kramatorsk air defence accident already strained the relationship). The latter purpose may be served even if no proof is forthcoming from the Russians.
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The pro-Putin part of my family is convinced that Ukrainian intelligence somehow got to Navalny in the camp and assassinated him, because with the given timing (just before the Munich conference and as the aid vote in the US was heating up) it brought maximal benefit to them in terms of reinflaming Western sympathies. Perhaps this implausibly turns out to actually be true, and he thinks the Russians are about to produce a smoking gun and wants to get ahead of the story.
I also think that the current pearl-clutching narrative is robust enough against the clot scenario: "sent to the camps and died of stroke because of insufficient/denied medical aid" does not read much better than "deliberately killed". Also, clots that cause infarction elsewhere afaik can form as a consequence of various forms of otherwise non-lethal physical abuse, such as circulation cutting to limbs - in fact some form of "unintentional death as a consequence of intentional roughing up" is my own leading theory for what actually happened.
Your statement, as I understood it, was that intelligence is not an unalloyed good because intelligence enables agents to do more damage. You sought to back this statement up by a list of claims about bad things humans do but animals (as an extreme example of something much dumber) don't.
In response to this, I claimed:
(1) animals still do bad things (that was my first response);
(2) the bad things that animals do are not actually better than the bad things humans do (this was my second response), and hence I disagree with your argument against intelligence being an unalloyed good.
Specifically, I argued (2) by saying that a calculus of badness that says that the bad things that animals do are less bad than the bad things that humans do may have implications that I certainly don't agree with, and I would be surprised if you agree with them either. Is a lion that roars at a weaker lion to chase it away and then steal its prey "better" than a human that robs a bank? If yes, why? If you say this is because the bank is worth much more than the dead antelope, is a marauding band of soldiers in the 17th century that burns down a wooden farmhouse with no plumbing or electricity (worth maybe $50k on the modern market) also better than someone who robs a bank today for $1m?
I expanded my post a bit; really, I don't think there is a forest of edenic animal nonviolence there to miss. Since we were already talking about ants, I think I saw a BBC documentary years ago about what exactly happens when an ant colony prevails over another (I think the human terms are somewhere in the space of mass enslavement and genocide?). It's unclear that humans ever destroy more once you control for volume/complexity/economic value of what humans produce. If you actually are tempted to affirm the idea that it is really worse to create banks and then rob them than to never create banks at all, I take it you would also prefer the (education and human development level of the) 30 Years' War over the present situation because the sum total of things that were destroyed back then were fairly worthless by modern standards?
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1mo ago
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13d ago
Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.
(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)
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4mo ago
I think the OP in particular has a distinct smell of the sort of "darkly hinting" that is the hallmark of the most partisan and unpleasant CW forums; it's clearly selected as a scenario that is likely to elicit inconsistencies or difficult corner cases in OP's outgroup's ideology, and thrown at a bullshit generator trained on outgroup ideology in the hope of generating a particularly juicy weakman display of an imagined outgroup member squirming in cognitive dissonance. A tribally flipped counterpart would be something like an interview putting random rednecks on the spot with questions about scenarios involving Russians, Ukraine and trad values - letting their stammering stand without comment - except GPT is not even a real progressive subject. Just because you don't say the "boo" out loud, this sort of thing does not become any less boo-outgroup.
It's a bit unfortunate that we likely aren't going to see the natural gender-flipped example, with media consumed (primarily) by women being pressured by a political interest group to make the men depicted in it more average. This would have to look like every k-drama started changing its male characters to balding dad bods and genuinely (rather than a cutesy female-fantasy version of) awkward spindly nerds with bad skin.
It seems evident to me that people aren't generally consuming fiction to see "normal", outside of some narrow domains of high art where the normality is made worth seeing by the abnormal level of insight by the author. To mandate that fiction depicts normality is political interference, with historical precedent all looking like things like socialist realism (not that its depiction of people was actually that representative in reality).
It kind of fails to meet the MO of either of the two attacks you linked in that instead of taking hostages or doing anything else that implies indifference towards their own survival, the attackers hopped into a car and made a dash for the Ukrainian border. Ukraine has previously recruited assets inside Russia for terrorist attacks (Dugin's daughter, Fomin) with the promise of helping them escape and rewarding them afterwards; it seems quite plausible that they could've picked up some ambitious Tajiks too.
As for the motive - it might just be plain hatred of the enemy, but I also suspect that their leadership still believes that broad Russian support for Putin is predicated on him delivering stability and prosperity and would collapse if this perception were to fall apart (see also the recent nontrivial investment of scarce materiel to bring heat to Belgorod). As with the Nordstream case, they might correctly assess that as long as a minimum of deniability is maintained, the Western media and hence public is exceedingly unlikely to turn against them over it.
(That being said, I don't think it's implausible that it was actually a bunch of high-fidelity ISIS larpers that just unilaterally decided to run for Ukraine because they figured it was the place most likely to give them a heroes' welcome, either. To be bona fide Islamists, though, their MO is way too divergent; the ISIS responsibility claim, if it's actually authentic, is more likely to be their usual throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks tactic.)
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21d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
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1mo ago
Are you contending that, right now, transgenderism is primarily motivated by sticking it to Christianity, in the way that a Draw Muhammad Day would be wrt Islam?
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4mo ago
https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children
The ideas of Author #1 in there strike me as something that could only possibly have been written in hindsight by someone living in a culture such as the modern Western one where physical violence in childrearing is taboo. It is telling that they did not actually take the window-breaking option at the time: as someone who was actually raised in a spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child culture (RU), contra
So you're 4, or 8, or 12, and you break a window and tell them you'll do it again if they assault you again. They're shocked, this can't happen, the world is awry. They ban you from TV or computer or whatever.
the idea that a real 4- or 10-year-old would choose an extended TV/computer ban over being slapped or belt-whipped strikes me as a preposterous failure to understand the value function of children, and even for a 15-year-old, this is only moderated by 15-year-olds' greater capacity for principled/ego-driven defiance and sourcing other entertainment. I wager that the author confuses the magnitude of their present indignation over having been hit as a child for what they actually felt about it at the time.
I only got to skim your posts so I am not sure how fully you realized this (though you clearly at least got close to it), but yes, for Yudkowsky and the inner LW circle, averting the AI apocalypse that they expect has been closer to being a terminal value than anything like "helping you, the reader, think better" for a long time. In the beginning, as I think they in fact said out loud, they still thought that growing their own numbers/"helping the reader think better" is the best action to take to that end; but a while later, whether by observing AI progress or finding that their own numbers are now good enough that further growth won't help, they have concluded that now the instrumental action is to align themselves with the progressive elites of the US. In return for alliance, these elites, like many before them, to demand displays of ideological allegiance such as public attacks on their ideological enemies, which are more valuable the more costly they appear to be for the one petitioning for alliance (so attacking one of your own number is especially good). It's hard to categorically conclude that their plan is not panning out: AI alignment has been pushed pretty far into the mainstream, clearly fueled by the promise of "if we can align AI, we can align it to your politics!". The current best contenders for AGI takeoff feel much more human than 2010!Yudkowsky would have dreamed, and they even feel shackled in a way that looks similar to a politically mindkilled human, who if given godlike powers might wind up too busy using them for petty dunking on the outgroup to attempt world domination.
Does Yudkowsky himself believe this inconsistent set of things about gender that you point out? Who knows: he did say that if you tell one lie the truth is forevermore your enemy, but he did also say that rationalism is the art of winning and you should therefore one-box on Newcomb's problem. Even with respect to a galaxybrain like Yudkowsky, the whole of Polite Society might well be Newcomb's alien deity, and the advantage it promises if it reads his mind and finds it aligned was just too great to forgo. Even if he thought a Wrong Belief is really like a black hole that swallows up everything that it touches, the rate at which this happens is clearly limited, and he may think that it won't swallow anything that matters to the AI agenda before it's too late anyway ("From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list.").
Either way, I don't think this is a reason to flatly dismiss the writings they produced before they decided to go from growth to exploitation, even by implication as the scare quotes you put around "rationalist" seem to do. Just follow the ideas, not the people; it's pretty clear either way that at some point LW largely stopped emitting good new ideas, even if you ignore potential people reasons for why this might be.
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2mo ago
I think there's something about trans women being baristas in particular; the first transwoman I interacted with more than a single time in my life was a Starbucks barista on the US east coast, and the first one I encountered in Europe was one at an indie coffee shop.
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1mo ago
Why can't I let the other shoe drop and say that "theism is literally false" is also a story about the world that we are better off believing and acting on? In fact, this seems like a natural extension of the "science discovers things that are literally true" act. Sure, this line of argument pressures that there is some "out-of-character" meta level of cognition on which you perform this cost-benefit analysis and are essentially a radical agnostic, but that doesn't mean you have to drop into OOC every time some theist comes along and demands that you explain yourself, any more than a good theatre actor would stop acting and instead break into a rant as to why he needed the job every time someone in the audience indicated they were unhappy with the play.
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1mo ago
What's the attractivity metric here? If we define it in terms of absolute attractivity to the other sex, in the below-40 bracket most women are more attractive than the median guy (see also those OkCupid blog men-rating-women/women-rating-men charts). I'm not so sure that the "swiping on women more attractive than they are" thing is true if the rating is on the curve for their respective sex.
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2mo ago
I know you wrote elsewhere in the subthread that "some questions are inherently antagonistic", but this makes it seem like you consider any instance of what you call "flipping the script" to fall under that category. I think that that is wrongheaded, and in particular I really don't think that this question was "inherently antagonistic" - if it were, then surely basically every interaction here where people talk about each other's opinions rather than those of abstract people who are not part of the conversations would be inherently antagonistic, and everyone is posting on borrowed time while moderator goodwill lasts. If you want to retain that level of potential for anarcho-tyranny, you ought to put some thought into it before threatening its application.
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1mo ago
The telegrams are now showing footage that purports to be questioning one of the guys they caught. The core claim seems to be that he was recruited on Telegram after following some preacher, was offered about $5k with half transferred as an advance, and the weapons were provided by the recruiter.
Considering the timing and the guy's demeanor, I think the "legitimate ISIS" story should be losing a lot of probability mass, unless you postulate this is not really one of the shooters - leaving the Ukrainian intelligence and Russian intelligence strategy-of-tension explanations as the two most likely. The speed with which the Americans committed to the ISIS story speaks in favour of Ukrainian involvement a bit. The option that they were larpers can't be quite dismissed yet either - in that scenario I guess the guy being interviewed was previously beaten and/or bribed into giving this story off screen.
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1mo ago
I don't know what I did to deserve the flippant attitude you've been displaying since the start, but two can play that game, so I'll try to use simpler words just for you.
addresses something I never said
You don't think "animals don't do bad things" is a fair reading of a list of "I've never seen [animal] do [bad thing]" that you clearly didn't pick for being true and where calling out something in the list for being wrong just made you answer with that "missing the forest for the trees" comment? Please tell me what the actual intended meaning of that post was in terms of what it said (retconning something poetic about what mother nature gave her creatures doesn't count, since none of that was actually in the original post).
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4mo ago
Some variant of "why do we have so many right-coded extremists and so few left-coded ones" has been discussed in this community and its predecessors every few months since its inception, and one standard answer is that the left-coded extremists have alternatives and superior BATNA on their side. If you are a vegan or tankie, you do not need the acceptance of this forum, as there is a large number of subreddits or real-life communities or whatever available to you with little threat of expulsion or censure - so why bother submitting to our onerous and humiliating rules?
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17d ago
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
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2mo ago
Hm. There's definitively a sense in which Christians are being treated with kid gloves (due to, I'd wager, the conservative slant of the community as well as a perhaps somewhat outdated sense that such a person being willing to talk to and expound their beliefs to us is rare and precious), but the first two examples do seem to narrowly keep within our Overton window of permitted antagonism simply because they keep the assertions of delusion within the requisite "I think that..." container. (The last one might just have evaded attention as a barely-engaged-with leaf comment.)
I wouldn't feel particularly worried about saying that I think that Christians are indulging in a mass delusion as part of a larger post, though if I made that the only thing I say a modhat response would be quite justified. (Of course, I'd wish for the same in response to a COVID post saying only that.)
What exactly do you consider an "HBD aware" set of policies? If you are going to attack a strawman, at least say what that strawman is. As a sort of HBDer (I never particularly liked the ring of the term, but please tell me what I am allowed to call the position that a lot of valued traits including in particular intelligence are heritable and different ethnic groups have different averages in them, without being lumped in with people who want to advocate for spoils for or collusion their own ethnic group), I don't recall ever arguing or wishing for anything other than colorblind and meritocratic policies, and the posts you regularly make seemingly just to try and remind people to associate the former with the latter are really rather tiresome. I'm struggling to understand why you are doing this - are you trying to troll us anti-racial-spoils hereditarians into surrender or meltdown because you think we're legitimising actual racists? If so, why even bother with the complete political non-force that are card-carrying racists? Is it because you think that they are unfairly associated with your political beliefs?
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