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
The one thing that unites everyone I know, ranging from the most hardcore SJWs to alt-right RETVRN types, is that nobody cares about children at all, especially not more than our respective political convictions, and especially not the abstract children of others. If you come from a genuinely more old-fashioned or natalist bubble, you may underestimate just how insignificant children have become in younger elite circles; on a gut-feeling level it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how someone would pretend to care about children for any reason other than as a mysterious ancestral ritual that may score points against the outgroup.
(It may not be surprising that birthrates in my mid-30s cohort are very low, and the few people who did reproduce have largely dropped out socially - not, as far as I can tell, to socialise with other people, but to be alone.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
There is a realpolitik solution though, which is to redraw borders and separate IL and PA into two contiguous viable states. Even if this will not assuage Palestinian seething, a clear international border would be a lot easier for IL to defend and a lot harder for PA to violate than the current situation where IL is the warden and PA is the inmate in a cramped open-air prison but for the sake of appearances they have to pretend it is not quite so, and also IL wants to seize half of PA's cell to extend his break room. The problem with this solution was that it would probably entail some territorial concessions from IL, and also shut down their real agenda which is to gradually seize any remaining worthwhile PA-held land and squeeze them out or provoke them into self-destructing. This is a hard sell as long as IL knows that it enjoys unconditional support from the Western world when push comes to shove, and in that light the PA strategy of provoking IL into visible atrocities now seems as good as any (as it seems like one of the moves that have better chance to compromise the unconditional support).
Toothless "pleading" for IL to stop might indeed just result in continuation of the status quo and many more violent deaths over the next century (but taken to its extreme, this argument might just as well be fielded for something like "fine, I guess we can let them literally genocide all that is left of PA, it's clear that we can't stop it anyway and the sooner they all die the fewer future people will be born to cause more deaths"), but "pleading" that is backed with "...or we may lose our next election to Ilhan Omar/the AfD/??? and then you will truly be on your own" may bring about the two-state solution.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Sure, but often (in the case of concrete policy proposals) they are only as convoluted as the reality we now inhabit, so even if that is the natural reaction is quite maladaptive. Besides, I'd consider (a possible interpretation of) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as yes-chadding the refusal to trade, and even the German constitutional prohibition against (state action) pushing the trolley problem lever is adjacent (though it arguably goes further and prohibits positive action to trade sacred values against each other). Then, of course, the juxtaposition of fierce opposition to child labour and the relative indifference to child poverty and starvation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
What if she places very negative value on pregnancy/giving birth?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I can't find the post now, but it was about a more general sense of "sacred" than the religious one, and revolved specifically around the observation that many people partitioned possible desiderata in two different categories that they refused or downright found it offensive to compare and trade off - so questions like "how many people breaking a leg would be too many to prevent a rape" would be met with "infinitely many" or just incoherent anger rather than serious consideration. In the suggested interpretation, this would be because sexual autonomy is "sacred" whereas mere non-injury is "profane". I don't see our society having renounced things that are sacred in the sense of "how DARE you compromise on anything in this category for the sake of something outside of it".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
My intuition is that a big part of the constraints upon the rights of children stem from trading the interests of their future selves off against those of their present selves - children have a long life ahead which they are particularly well-positioned to screw up. In the case of terminally ill children, this consideration disappears - if we can build a Schelling fence around them as a class, I see nothing particularly wrong with letting them drink, do drugs, skydive and consent to sex.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Well, Telegram is rumoured to cooperate with authorities in most countries (and is a juicier/more likely target for the ones in mine), and I don't know how the number hiding works internally and wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a "the official client won't render it but it's there in memory"/"no phone number is there but there is a unique user ID that it is trivial to link to the phone number" thing. Also, if I recall correctly, Telegram gives you one globally consistent alias, and the number of real-life contacts I have on it necessitates that this hint at my real name.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
What is the working definition of hard vs. soft here? My sense was that the popular rejection of S-W was almost entirely motivated by aesthetics rather than hard data, and "linguists think" is a weak argument because linguists are (based on my impression from taking some graduate courses in their department during grad school) not very good at entangling their reasoning with reality. As a matter of fact, with the right framing adjacent academic communities are still quite open to S-W.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Recently started Le Guin's The Dispossessed on a family recommendation. Still too early in to form an opinion.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Would be nicer if Telegram were not so utterly non-anonymous.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Every time
Presumably the offer (with the same sum attached) is not extended to every 14-year-old propositioned for sex, but people have a reasonable fear that some Schelling fence would be torn down (what's the exact n such that you can buy consensual sex with a 14 year old for n but not less? What do you say to the hypothetical age-gap couple who point out that they are banned from something that is allowed for millionaires?) which can only end in the age of (free, as in beer) consent just being driven back down to 14.
Also, something about that old Scott post about trading off sacred and profane values.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Yeah, what's going on? This entire subthread is making me n=1-replicate that recent finding.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
We're talking about justification for killing more innocents to get at Hamas, not justification for a fictional surgical operation that kills only Hamas. After the initial Hamas raid, people clearly thought that the number of Palestinian civilians that can be killed and cityscapes that can be devastated in the process of exacting revenge is not zero; only recently has public opinion started turning towards "that was too much". Yet, we clearly haven't hit the absolute ceiling of how much collateral damage the public thinks could ever be acceptable; see WW2 or even ISIS in Mosul. Presumably if Hamas got closer to ISIS or Hitler in terms of total volume of achievements that piss off the Western public, there would be room for the public to tolerate more destruction of Gaza in return, up to the point of accepting literal glassing.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Huh, turns out I even responded to it. I'm getting old ;_;
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Does it have some correlates that are otherwise hard to search for directly? I imagine for example that the incest framing would be anticorrelated with the actors being old or trashy, or the action being violent or non-passionate. Maybe it's simply the easiest way to find nice vanilla sexual encounters between normal-looking people in a domestic setting.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
All of this doublethink is to be expected, but what stuck with me was that Zhuchkovsky finds it ridiculous that Ukrainians would describe him and other Russian volunteers in Donbass as "mercenaries" - of course they would not fight for money as a cause - but then, when there are soldiers crying out in English or Polish in the Ukrainian ranks, the only explanation he can find is that they are, indeed, mercenaries. This is a mental block that I've continuously encountered in pro-Russian narratives; they can understand for sure why a Russian patriot would volunteer in Donbass, they can even at some level understand why an Ukrainian would volunteer to fight (because his mind has been eaten up by the ghost of Bandera), but the idea that a foreigner could fight and die for Ukraine simply because he believes in the Ukrainian national cause seems impossible. Must be that they're mercenaries or Western ops!
My impression was that this was at least in part motivated by the Geneva convention's AP I Art. 47(1), which says mercenaries are not entitled to normal combatant protections and PoW rights. The insistence on declaring the foreign volunteers to be that is simultaneously a threat to them (that they might be executed on the spot, tried as common criminals or used for bartering) and part of a wider narrative-smithing operation aimed at the internal audience (in the same class as the "special military operation" term), meant to give them the mental props they need to continue believing in Russia's moral high ground. I'm not sure why this narrative-smithery always looks so clumsy when the Russians do it (as opposed to similarly-brazen invocations of "international law" and implicit US extraterritoriality by our own overlords); perhaps it's because they are so obviously outside of my status hierarchy, or perhaps it's because they are objectively weaker than our logos-granting sovereign, or perhaps they are actually relatively bad at the wordcel game (due to lack of the Anglo-Catholic heritage?).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
If there was a credible threat of US citizens rising up against government tyranny, which pro-gun-rights people seem to believe to be a central motivation for gun rights, I'm sure the US government could come up with some external threat that justifies requiring demonstrations of loyalty from gun owners. (Russia would probably do by twisting the knob on the election interference narrative just a little bit.) This is usually found somewhere on the first page of those "dictatorship playbook" writeups.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
I don't think we have sufficient data to conclude that the brutality and the filming actually directionally increased support, not having access to the counterfactual (what should the counterfactual even be? No brutality but similar media coverage? No brutality but similar volume of media coverage? No brutality and the expected attendant lower volume of media coverage?). Assuming it did, though, two theories would jump out at me:
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taking the "this is what decolonization looks like" tweets seriously: in the context of BLM, genuine radicalization on the left has increased and inched closer to the Overton window. If you want armed revolution at home and understand what armed revolution actually looks like, it's not hard to see this as armed revolution as narrated from the perspective of the old regime.
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media savvy: however savage the attacks were, the media is remarkably crude and shameless in deploying the entire gamut of tricks to milk them in defense of IL's cause (Russell-conjugating any belligerent action, human interest sob stories, contrived clipping of historical context, social attacks against those who would merely fail to fall in line with these narrative techniques). Especially leftist activists by now would have extensive experience with deploying the same techniques for their own causes, often doing so with much greater finesse; they would recognise that and how they are being played and if they were already tending pro-Palestine this would probably make them bristle as much as a ChatGPT-polished essay about the intersectional oppressions of inceldom and Appalachian origin would.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Did you ever post results for the last one? I might have missed it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
There is a sense in which it is effective for Hamas but not Ukraine (the former has no state capacity or military mobilisation and therefore relies on inflaming more Palestinians to join their cause/participate in the fighting, while the latter can easily put anyone who would ever be willing to fight under arms and has little to gain from additional internal anti-Russian sentiment on the margin), but I contend that the more significant dimension in either conflict is Western support, and any reporting (certainly any reporting that we see) from them is primarily aimed at the Western audience. The Western world has the military-economic power to snuff out either of the belligerents in either conflict at the cost of perhaps cutting down on dessert and gratuitous taxi rides for a few months; the only obstacle to overcome to get it to do that is to talk its people into a state of sufficient moral outrage on your behalf that they would actually be willing to bear those sacrifices.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
The right comparison surely is not police action in Western countries, but Russia/Ukraine. Depending on whether you ultimately believe that the hospital was hit by the Palestinians themselves, this story either has the shape of the Konstantinovka market missile (where the NYT timed their "actually it was the Ukrainians" article to coincide with Zelenskiy's US visit for reasons I'd still like to understand better) or any number of prior cases with hospitals/train stations/hotels being hit (to Ukrainian claims of "atrocity" and Russian claims of "military were stationed there").
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board.
Does the evidence pan out there? The impulse to avoid shame and being seen as part of a low-status group seems quite strong (e.g. I'd consider it the finisher of old school internet atheism, "in this moment, I'm ecstatic" or how that one went), and I don't know if the current Moral Majority was ever particularly more conciliatory on the path to its present degree of mass support. (If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties!)
A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
So the bribery part, right? If you have large classes of people locked out of consumption that's waved in their face, you eventually get scenarios like the London riots in 2011 unless you are willing to spend much more on policing (and even then long-term stability is not clear: Bill Gates also seems to indirectly benefit from other things that the lower and middle classes do that are not seething and plotting an overthrow).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
Mainly because I don't think we're anywhere near having efficient markets that actually track negative externalities, or have close to perfect information.
I think one slightly underexplored argument is that the attacks the capitalist system provokes, and the labour necessary for its defense, are themselves a major externality: Bill Gates being able to sit peacefully in his mansion and make things happen by pressing a button and changing some numbers in the database rests on the work of states that work across the world to disrupt the formation of raiding parties that would come to plunder his compound, will chase down hackers that would change his database numbers, keep the pipeline of jealous and desperate people to try either narrow by a combination of indoctrination (telling little kids how it is just that Bill Gates has more things than they do) and bribery (social programs, taxation, redistribution), and work to quash any generalised attempts to overthrow the system (which are themselves more pronounced in more unequal countries, suggesting that the existence of large wealth gaps empowers those attempts).
Sure, as anarcho-capitalists will never stop fantasizing, in the ancap world he would just buy his own personal army and gun down the raiding parties with Azure-backed drone swarms instead, but surely doing that would itself cost some nontrivial amount of wealth - and then he'd need to either have his own secret service for chasing down hackers and keeping the banks honest, or lose just a bit of trust and peace of mind about any database numbers he keeps over physical gold bars, would have to get his own military police to prevent his personal army from rebelling, and so on. In the end, it's not at all clear that he would actually be better off that way than if he just paid taxes (possibly more than he pays right now).
From this perspective, the arguments against redistribution amount to saying that you (generic citizen) ought to pay for this externality on Bill's behalf. This is either based on some argument that it's for your own good because capitalism works well (which I've never seen actually argued to the required conclusion that capitalism works the best when there is zero redistribution), or quite often simply on ideology (it's your moral duty to pay for it, something about property being the most basic human right).
Many more people starve or die violent deaths. By "not care", I mean that children cease registering as an either morally privileged or familiar category; in a way the adult Palestinian civilian feels more relatable and his hardships therefore like more of a concern, because he's a fellow adult and I also think I've interacted more with Palestinians than children in the last 5 years.
(Have you ever used vi, the text editor? Did the "Help poor children in Uganda!" line on the startup screen make it past your mental spam filter? I would guess that for most people, it got filtered well before the current situation I am talking about set in. It's just that for us, all children might as well be poor children in Uganda.)
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