4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Is it surprising? The only thing that would stop me from openly expressing an opinion like that is that I actually have to go there for professional reasons sometimes (and even more so to its occasionally protective big brother), and I would like to not leave anything on my digital record that could be caught by a very crude crawler after some unlucky accident correlating me to my Motte account and cause me problems at the border.
(Being catchable by a more sophisticated crawler is less concerning because at that point so many people would get caught that a "reject them all" policy may not be sustainable.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
Can you spell out why you believe that giving things to the homeless, or abstaining from assaulting or expelling them, is bad? Is it just the "more of them will move into the area" thing (so it's bad that they disgrace some people who don't want anything to do with them with their presence, as opposed to... staying somewhere far away from civilisation? If they otherwise just hung out in another city, the total number of people unwillingly exposed to the homeless would be about the same), or do you actually think that this materially increases the number of homeless (either by keeping them alive when they would otherwise die, or by incentivising people to become homeless who otherwise wouldn't)?
It seems to me that the last theory would require extraordinary evidence, and the "homeless would stay in the woods if civilisation were successfully hostile to them" route can be expected to result in them dying all the same (I'd guess that the majority of people who are homeless don't have the executive function/skill level to eke out a living on land that is so useless as to remain unclaimed by civilisation). If your ask amounts to solving the homeless problem by accelerating the homeless-to-dead pipeline, you should be explicit about it, because the main obstacle to realising your proposal will be that upon reflection most people will be against it on moral principle, and this topic attracts enough attention that you can't hope to sneak some policy past the public without them realising this.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
That's not applying the counterfactual at the decision point that I thought we were looking at - surely to assess how bad or good the decision to go to war was for Russia, and by extension what this means for future nations deciding whether or not to go to war somewhere, we should be looking at counterfactuals where Russia decided to not go to war. If the verdict is that Russia was on track to be completely screwed and came out slightly less screwed by attacking Ukraine, then the signal is in favour of invasions, despite reality looking like Russia is getting screwed.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
What is the counterfactual we are comparing to, though? The case is easier to make that 2024 Russia lost something compared to 2021 Russia (and even more so compared to 2013 Russia), though by no means clear cut; but the more interesting case is comparing 2024 Russia to a counterfactual 2024 Russia that stood by and did nothing, or even more interestingly the 2030 continuations of either scenario. If states only optimised their own absolute, or even relative to other states, power, we would observe a lot fewer wars in general.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
Why is the assumption that she would remarry? As I see it, the natural counterfactual is one in which both parties never married, and then the delta is that in the married-and-divorced world, there is a perpetual transfer of money from the man to the woman. This suggests that the compound action "marry arbitrarily, then divorce" is indeed in the woman's interest, unless you want to price in opportunity cost - which could then be read as the expected amount of resources that the woman would extract from men as a class, a reading which itself seems sufficient to drive resentment even before you introduce some mechanism (alimony) that serves to place a floor on how far the individual can fall below expectation.
(Yes, the framing of extracting resources from men completely neglects every way in which men benefit from women in partnerships in turn, but those benefits do not come with an alimony-like floor. A society which opts for fairly applying this idea of capping the loss of trad-model marriage benefits by not only compelling divorced men to pay alimony in resources but also compelling divorced women to pay alimony in household chores would be, uh, interesting.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr 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.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
How do you envision a proof of a moral/ethical principle as valid or invalid to actually proceed? I would have thought that persuasiveness, and elegance (which contributes to the former), is the only standard. Singer's views seem elegant/simple enough, and clearly people in a large bubble are persuaded.
If nobody is challenging an argument "for infanticide" (which seems like an exaggeration: it only really seems to be an argument that infanticide is less bad than murder of adults), this primarily just betrays a lack of ideological diversity (which is unsurprising) and willingness to argue for positions that are not one's own (which is only surprising if you have an unrealistically idealistic view of philosophers).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Well yes, absolute liberalism, like absolute freedom, probably can't exist. We can only hope to have some more of it than we currently do (and it seems that in the past, in certain domains, we did), as the sovereign tyrant is forced to compromise.
Much of the current culture war landscape appears to be a consequence of the progressive meme (known at the local scale as "cry-bullying") where they are in power while denying being in power. The rough shape of the game is that the winner takes all, but the earnings are reduced by whatever it takes to keep contenders down. In that game, the second runner is always incenticised to fight more, but it might actually be optimal for the winner to compromise (yield some payoff to the contenders to buy them out of fighting).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Self-reports from those who can't access a counterfactual surely would be strongly biased by explanations that are available and believed in our society. Some centuries ago, people would have reported humoural deficiencies as the cause of their problems.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
You don't need the "real" there - it's all auth-on-auth warfare. Any form of actual liberalism can only flourish briefly as the authoritarian supermajority considers it the lesser evil as opposed to having to fight against other types of authoritarians.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
A quick Google search suggests 50k lobotomies between 1949 and 1952, vs. "In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo's data analysis of insurance claims." That's a multiple-orders-of-magnitude difference, and the US population in 1949 was about half of what it is now.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I distinctly remember hearing some version of the Little Drummer Boy, which I believe is Christian, in a US Starbucks somewhere in the mid-late 2010s, though I'm not sure if they kept all the lyrics.
As Stefferi points out in a sibling post, the situation is quite different in other countries. Germany for example has its own distinctive tradition of largely explicitly Christian christmas music which continues unabated, and the handful of secular songs in the tradition created over the decades (starting with the Romantics, pickig up under the Nazis and in the GDR) got folded into the canon without really taking it over.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
That song is actually a cover of a Swedish one which dates back to 1999, and I personally find much better. I actually heard both versions on a Finnish all-year web Christmas radio, which I'd highly recommend for quality and surprisal (like this black guy doing Christian(?) rap in Finnish), and have not encountered them on Swedish media, though an irreligious older Swedish friend I asked knew of it in principle.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr 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?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
If this is art, what is the message? I don't think nasty caricatures of the outgroup are good content for this forum, even if they meet the definition of art.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr 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.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I have posted before about the difficulties with such a scheme. In short, prepare to piss off the entire rest of the world if you go that route. Of course, as a non-American bristling under the pax Americana I would actually welcome a development that would make my country look for the light at the end of Uncle Sam's anal passage again, but do you think that for the US and its citizens, the future you suggest would still be net beneficial if on top of everything its network of allies of ideology rather than convenience cools on it?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
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.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I think giving them MVP and perhaps part of Brandenburg would be a fine choice too, if they would actually take that benighted corner. It would even be close to the ancestral-ish lands of many Ashkenazim.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I don't understand why, rather than doing some weird moral transference where the Holocaust conveyed a free pass to colonise and gradually displace an unrelated people, they didn't just give them a slice of Germany after WWII instead. It's not too late for that either, if all the German politicians and civil society personalities that want to insert oaths to Israel in citizenship tests and wax poetic about how its survival and well-being is part of Germany's "state raison d'être" ("Staatsräson") put their money where their mouths are. I'd vote for using a chunk of the Southwest for it, say everything starting from Stuttgart; it's maximally far from the capital, there is nothing too important there and it's strategically situated in a corner next to Switzerland and France, at least one of which is unlikely to have any of it if Germany were to somehow try the Hitler thing again. I'd expect such a move to have greatly positive EV for our gastronomy, too.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I'm not sure I understand what's the specific power that you posit was lost - the ability to extract a legally enforced costly promise (marriage) as a condition for sex? Surely contract law would still allow for something in that class, if there were actually an appetite for it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Kulak has previously stated that he does it deliberately to confuse present or hypothetical future stylometry, though this always seemed like the net usefulness would be dubious and the "aesthetic choice to look like grandpa's Facebook tirades" theory is quite plausible.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I don't think that most people think about Kenyan runners at all, but if they do, they can surely also chalk this up to something non-genetic like life in some parts of Africa just happening to involve really good running training.
tabula rosa
A... pink slate?
This is why you can't convince
You mostly can't convince religious people with correct arguments either; if they (or, more commonly, their children) are persuaded at all, it is usually precisely by status gradients. To the extent your argument works for progressive antiracism being fake, it seems that it would do likewise for religions - but then that fakeness is surely moot, since smart people have lived, killed and died for it in droves.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental. The fundamental equality of groups (rather than individuals) is as close to a central dogma of faith as you can get for the dominant secular religion, and everything you observe follows quite easily from trying to square this belief with observed reality. Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?
(Regarding the bafflement, surely smart and rational people being unwavering in a religious belief should not be surprising, given humanity's track record.)
In almost every sense that matters, to my eyes, the parties considered "left" have become the same incumbent authoritarians that we fashionably rebelled against when we were young, in the sense that their declared agendas amount to "we would like to prescribe and proscribe more things, but the antisocial forces of chaos aligned against us prevent us from doing so".
More options
Context Copy link