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
4mo ago
If you are posting on a forum for clarifying shady thinking about culture war topics, it is a distinction you need to make anyway, even if you would rather conflate every outgroup activity you dislike.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Isn't that all of Western culture, to some extent? There's a reason why "cool" (as in cold, disinterested) was the ideal that everyone strived towards for decades, and has basically become our generic casual word for "good". I'm just glad that this ideal seems to finally have gone on the retreat since about 2010 or so (but then all of the political heating was probably part of the monkey's-paw price for that).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
If the next US president runs on a platform of repudiating and deplatforming Trump and his followers and wins with something similar to Trump's numbers, will you also ask pro-Trump people who want to continue spreading their message whether they aren't uncomfortable staying in a country where the people do not want them, and tell them that they are being selfish to game the system?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
One of the Senators opposed the amendment because it would include Gypsies and Chinese, and the other Senator replied that yes, it would, but that is ok, there are not enough of them to be a big deal. But in the case of the gypsies and Chinese, we are talking about groups that were domiciled in the U.S., and so that does not apply to temporary migrants, so that doesn't really help us.
I'm not sure if one can make a principled distinction between the degree to which gypsies and Chinese in 1866 were domiciled in the US and the degree to which the median illegal immigrant (and especially the median illegal immigrant's anchor baby!) is domiciled in the US now. I would assume most of them are not so affluent that they would maintain property or a rental apartment in their country of origin before they make the trek...? If it's on the level of "family would be available to house them in their country of origin", this surely applies to most Chinese as well, and gypsies, on the other hand, are famously transient.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Is it? If I imagine myself in a random federal employee's position, the events around this email would make me update towards "it's safe to ignore Musk and proceed as usual". Organised people who are methodical in prosecuting their grudges are scarier than cholerics with limited attention span who randomly lash out - if you just give the latter enough to lash out at, eventually they will just start swinging their arms wildly without hitting anything.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Do you expect this to withstand the ensuing media blitz if 1. Trump downsizes the TSA, 2. a terrorist attack happens?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Seems like a "bureaucracy not measured in bureaucrats" case. Trimming the TSA would just result in having longer waits at airports, as it's not like the TSA would relax its checks just because they are understaffed. You can't fight the bureaucracy ratchet in such a disorganised way - if you only reduce the number of bureaucrats, then the bureaucracy will clamour for more staff, whereas if you only reduce the number of tasks, then the bureaucracy will lobby for more tasks. Good luck telling the electorate that they should accept a 0.0001% greater rate of terrorism, anyway, when the next instance of aviation-related terrorism happens.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
You can define sets in terms of predicates (x \elem Fish \iff: fish(x)) or the other way (fish(x) \iff: x \elem Fish). So while you might intuitively say that x \elem Fish is a categorisation, it has a brother thats intuitively has the form of a fact, and you cant change one without the other.
Calling either of those two a "fact" does not seem right to me - it seems like it's conflating the signifier (the word "fish") with the signified (whatever factual basis is being used for defining the category). Now, if your objection is that we have no way of directly interacting with facts except by making categories that refer to them, whether these categories are complex high-level things like "fish" or more low-level ones like "hair follicles" or "adenine", and we have just arbitrarily elevated some of these categories to being "facts", that objection is philosophically fair - but, I would argue, not relevant in practice: a category/signifier is a better proxy for a fact/signified the more likely every existing and hypothetical human is to agree on its extension, and the great triumph of reductionism is that as categories become lower-level/further removed from day-to-day experience, they empirically become better proxies. Democrats and Republicans might have great disagreements about what is a "woman", and moderns and ancients might have disagreements about what is a "fish", but they will mostly agree about X and Y chromosomes looking different under a microscope, and would acknowledge that a hair is a hair if shown to them.
This is consistent with a model where even though we are cursed with only being able to use "categories" and not "facts", talking about reality is actually easy, and all that gets in the way is motivated reasoning, which can be dealt with by picking "categories" that are weird enough that the monkey brain fails to backpropagate its motivation to them. In such a setting, all we need to do to have access to something that is as good as facts (in the sense of behaving as if it were an aspect of objective reality, so two people with sufficient observation and discussion will always come to agree on its extension) is to pick a rich enough category of such monkey-proof signifiers, and gatekeep it. It doesn't matter if there are some grey-zone categories that are not quite factual in that sense, if we can just treat them as non-facts, and ground all our definitions in the gatekept category of facts.
There is not a logical distinction between intensional and extensional definitions, except
Well, I'm using a mishmash of mathematical terminology, old and busted analytical philosophy and whatever schlock comes out of my badly trained neural net here, but the most serious logic I've done was in the context of computability theory, where the distinction is made and absolutely matters - people in that subculture like to build their whole notion of ontology around equality testing, and equality in intension and equality in extension are not the same. Going meta, the extension of an "intensional definition" is then all entities that have the same (or equivalent under some notion, if you are a potential mark for the HoTT pyramid scheme) syntactical definition, while the extension of an "extensional definition" is all entities whose definition has the same extension.
I had (1) in mind when making up the example.
Okay, that clarifies it, but why would they do that? Does it help them produce good leather, perhaps because they want to batch-process all stock they get from the fishing guild together? If it actually produces better outcomes, then there shouldn't be a problem with them saying that whales are fish. If they do in fact wind up saying that whales have no hair, that seems like an instance of what I called monkey brain backpropagation of motivations further above. Why would they do that instead of just saying that as far as they are concerned, fish sometimes do have hair, but they are still going to process all fish together? Did someone pressure them to adopt the "fish have no hair" definition?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I'm afraid I'm only getting more lost - you seem to be referring to some very specific (philosophical?) discussion that you assume I'll recall if you hint about it, but I'm drawing blanks. When you say "correspondence between sets and predicates (...)", this makes me think you are talking about predicates in extension (is-whale := the set of all things that you want to call a whale) vs. predicates in intension (is-whale := <some description of an algorithm to determine if a given thing is a whale>), but I'm not sure how that would relate to the rest of your post.
Do you want to do something like drawing a distinction between predicates that are "more naturally" expressed extensionally vs. intensionally? So you would for example consider a notion of "nice number" that actually amounts to "is a Fibonacci number" as "factual", whereas a notion of "nice number" that amounts to "gives off good vibes to Lykurg" is "arbitrary".
I don't understand what that would have to do with the "tanners' guild" example, though - that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs (why? to reduce cognitive load for themselves when they are interacting with each other?). For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs? Is it (1) if someone gives them a piece of whale skin with hair follicles, they will say "whales don't have hairs, so I will pretend these are not there and not smooth out these before tanning it"? (2) if someone gives them a piece of -"-, they will say "this is hairy, so it is not whale skin and I will not put it in the whale processing pipeline"? (3) nothing changes about how they process whale skin with hair follicles, but they will dispatch a guy to argue all day if anyone anywhere claims that whales have hair?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Neither does asserting your belief in them make them coherent, or persuasive. Leaving aside whatever "natural law" is supposed to be (I gather that for people living in an Anglo common-law system it is one of those terms that sounds inherently authoritative, but to my ears it just seems like a nicer way to say "law of the jungle"), our best understanding of "sanctity" is that it's a qualium that people can experience about anything, if the right neurons are stimulated. Between epileptics having mystical experiences because their sanctity circuits got zapped and various Austronesian tribes assigning sanctity to random words and objects every few years, why would one see it as reflecting anything about the world independent of the reporting subject, or relevant to any subject other than the reporter?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
I understand that it's somewhat tangential, but for some perspective, the number of children born by surrogacy anytime soon will probably be dwarfed by the number of children whose mother died in childbirth or shortly after in the ancestral, "ancient and holy" environment.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Thanks for taking questions! I would like to understand better if/where you draw the boundary of your principles.
-
Somebody else already brought up transracialism in a different subthread, but that discussion went nowhere. What about a very concrete scenario: a Caucasian-American person demands to be identified as African-American, including addressing "other" African-Americans using everyone's favourite n-word? Can they demand equal treatment and claim a university scholarship set aside for African-Americans? If you don't like these, does it make a difference if the individual was adopted by African-American parents and raised in a homogeneous African-American community?
-
@Bartender_Venator's examples here: what about titles of honour for a head of state that you don't respect, or even actively look down on? What about homeopaths or faith healers wanting to be addressed as Doctor? Imagine in the latter case that they would be genuinely hurt and feel that a core part of their identity is being rejected if you didn't do so.
The reason these examples are particularly relevant is that to many people who are uncomfortable with trans language norms, the demands register as similar to the latter because they consider women to be a socially privileged class, and non-women asking to be treated as women are therefore people arrogating themselves a status they do not have. (That's why nobody is ever upset about transmen, except in a "these are women being duped into harming themselves" capacity)
This suggests a class of "bad actors" that you did not address: men who only want to be identified as women for material and social benefits. Material benefits can simply take the form of hiring priority (at least in academia the handful of individuals I know who went trans in grad school wound up significantly beating the curve in terms of subsequent employment), and social benefits can either be an expectation of some of the social benefits enjoyed by biological women, or a pure power play as you can force people to walk on eggshells around you, or make them uncomfortable (if they have the common adverse reaction) but incapable of voicing or acting upon their discomfort due to the threat of severe sanction.
(If you think that the existence of such bad actors is unlikely, we probably have very different priors on the prevalence of male sociopathy.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right
I mean, how many of those stances are about facts, as opposed to values? Separate magisteria.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing? I didn't think that it is hard to draw in any way that is particularly relevant to the trans question - the only problem that really pertains to it is that people tend to become very coy about why they want to engage in various aspects of the male-female distinction. The reason people care about facts is that facts determine the action->outcome function they are facing as agents; the reason they create categories is that the (facts \times actions -> outcomes) function is hard to evaluate and has a large domain that you would need to search if you seek to optimise. Lost time and effort also affects the outcome negatively, so all else equal it is better if you can approximately factor the function through a smaller domain (facts -> categories, categories \times actions -> outcomes) without skewing the valuation of each resulting outcome much. If you don't understand what actions you are considering and what outcomes you find desirable, though, this is a hopeless or at least hard undertaking.
Scott's King Solomon gives a whole array of good reasons why he wants to categorise whales with fish, given that his outcomes are valued by "edible biomass captured" and his actions are in the class of "allocate money to biomass-capturing institutions". If you cluster whales and fish and your second factor just gets "dag sighted" as its first parameter, the expected outcomes of each available action ("pay the fishing ministry") are about the same as if you evaluated the full function with every little detail of the whale. His psychiatrist avatar does so as well, given that he evaluates on his patients' subjective wellbeing and has actions consisting of talking and prescribing various FDA-approved drugs. What Scott misses in his discussion is that the characterisations the king and psychiatrist use, too, are grounded in facts - just different ones, which are more relevant to how their available actions affect their valuated outcomes. It is just as much of a fact that whales spend all their time in water, have fins and no particularly flexible limbs or neck, and that the transwoman patient will be unhappy if they are called a man to their face.
Aggregating on these factual criteria is useful for these people - but that doesn't give them any standing to suggest or impose categorisations on other people with completely different goals. King Solomon's fishing goals are irrelevant to the geneticist, and the psychiatrist's patient ratings are not similar to the objectives of almost everyone interacting with trans people on a day to day basis. For example, in my academic environment, my actions are basically talk and sometimes putting the thumb on the scale in some hiring decision, while the outcomes I want are about a peaceful social environment that is conducive to doing research. If trans people cluster with their birth gender as far as these are concerned (topic for another discussion thread), then whatever the mechanism is, that is the fact I would want to build my categories around.
All of this is irrelevant, though, because I think granting a human right to have bizarre and impractical categories if one so wishes is necessary for a society that is worth living in.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Surely the chromosomal and hormonal makeup point to some sort of objective reality too, but this shouldn't even matter. I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here, taken to what I think is its logical conclusion - my mental categories were made for me, and if I for whatever reason decide that I want to cluster those humans with XY chromosomes plus whatever set of unprincipled exceptions in one category, nobody else should have any more right to force me to redraw my mental boundaries, any more than some snarky time traveller would have the right to force a legendary king to remove whales from the purview of the ministry of fish. Allowing this kind of epistemological violence against adults and even unrelated children seems wholly inconsistent with the rest of the modern human rights package, and more akin to medieval conquerors forcing the subjects of their conquest to convert at swordpoint (and spying on them to make sure they do not secretly retain their old faith).
(I do in fact have little objection to pro-trans policies that do not entail "you must believe and profess that trans X are X", insofar as they are not used to salami-slice their way towards sword-point conversion. If people want to make a mockery of women's sports or women's hiring quotas or whatever, they can duke it out with those that care for those things.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Surely rationalists, who like doing things like calculating the effect of trillions of hypothetical future specks of dust in people's eyes and weighing them against immediate murder, would consider the advantages and disadvantages of respecting a trans person's chosen pronouns beyond the immediate effect of "I tell a lie" vs. "the person might go through with their threat of suicide". I think what is actually going on is a combination of (1) the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be, and (2) the old guard at some point concluded that the danger of AI doom dominates their value function, and that building and maintaining a durable alliance with the US Left is their best shot at averting AI doom.
This might in part be reasonable political calculation (unaligned movements with any amount of influence, in the US climate, tend to be crushed as crypto-outgroupers and pillaged for remaining political capital by both sides; of the two, the Left is in principle more receptive to safetyism and EA/tikkun olam/global paternalism), and in part a certain measure of arrogance by the core personnel (Yudkowsky probably thinks of himself and the handful of people he respects as smart enough to not have their ability as the Wisest and Most Rational Human Beings be compromised by a well-contained set of signalling beliefs, and doesn't think that they stand to benefit that much from potential additional peers that get lost to brainrot in the pipeline).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I was given LotR (in a Russian translation) around age 5 or so, and seemingly read the whole thing, though it's hard to say how much of it I understood or whether I skipped around, especially since the movies and finally rereading it in English could have implanted any number of false memories. I did remember the maps, the copperplate etchings of barrels that the particular print version used as chapter separators, and being mildly irritated when the movies came out much later because I seemed to have had formed a very particular mental image of one segment (the rocky area that Frodo and Sam traversed before the swamp with the dead elves) and it looked different in the film, so it was probably not zero (and whatever I was doing with it, I am told that I was so absorbed that my parents got to enjoy many months of relative peace).
(We also had a comic book version of the Hobbit, which I probably was given earlier, but couldn't get into because I found the pictures confusing. I still struggle with comics/manga visual storytelling now.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
As far as gorillas are concerned, humans still can't replace gorillas - neither a human nor any human technology can pass as a member of a gorilla tribe and fulfill all the functions that gorillas expect of each other no worse than a gorilla would. Yet, if gorillas could invent benchmarks as well as humans do, they probably would have made up a whole bunch that we would have blown past with ease - we could delouse more effectively, make devices that roar louder, thump artificial chests with more force, mass-produce silverback pheromones in bioreactors and obliterate any rivalling gorilla tribe with FPV drones. At some point, we have to recognise that "be a productive and well-assimilated member of the existing community of X" is a much harder problem than "outperform X at any given task not closely coupled with the former", which is unsurprising because life on earth has a much longer evolutionary history gatekeeping its respective community than it has doing anything that we consider useful.
Unfortunately, our informal AGI metrics, which really should be looking at performance at the latter, keep falling into the trap of measuring performance at the former instead, leaving us in a position somewhat akin to gorillas dismissing early hominids because they can't even grow a full back of majestic silver hair.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
That touches upon an interesting question, though - to what extent should democratically elected governments be able to constrain the actions of future ones? There is a sliding scale from saying "the previous government's decision to have this separate executive agency be untouchable by future administrations is null and void" to saying "we will not honour contracts or debts taken out by any past government", and each of them could be justified in the same way. If the People are sovereign, why can't they make a sovereign decision to renege on a contract? Of course, if you did that, the government would find it much harder to get anyone or anything to trust it and sign a contract with it in the future. Of course, you could then argue that a truly sovereign people should take the L and make it a learning experience (and maybe next time consider to vote for contracts made in their name to be honoured even if they have come to hate the guy who they empowered to make them). That might be fine philosophically, but in reality no major country's people may actually have sufficient collective executive function to learn that lesson. As a result, the perfect democracy, as philosophically appealing as it may be, would be outcompeted by other countries running a kayfabe democracy that somewhat insulates the people from their stupidity. Are you ready to make that experiment with your own country on the line?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
You go from
In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side.
to
For Hitler -- as for a pagan, but not for Hebrews -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict.
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Conflicts. That‘s like saying: before pearl harbor, the american public‘s view of japan wasn‘t all that negative. Then the propaganda came along, and ruined that beautiful friendship.
That's not really a reasonable counterargument here. We have one data point (Russia was attacking Ukraine a bit, Germans were fine arranging themselves with Russia, Russia attacked Ukraine harder and Germans were exposed to lots of propaganda, Germans now want to support proxy war with Russia, with many thinking German involvement should be raised without limits until Ukraine wins). I claimed that in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, we should expect a similar change of attitudes, leading to Germans wanting to cut ties with China and fight for Taiwan. You were arguing that that wouldn't be the case, because... the Americans were right to turn on Japan after Japan attacked the US in Pearl Harbor, and therefore it was perfectly reasonable for Germans to turn on Russia in the Ukraine case? How is this an argument against the Germans seeing it as perfectly reasonable to turn on China in a hypothetical future Taiwan case?
Earlier, you admitted that the neighbours of russia are correct to fear it. So 200 km from the russian border, around the Oder, that justified true belief magically turns into US-implanted false consciousness. And then, if you go further, past the channel and the atlantic, russia‘s threats, largely nuclear, become real once again. But we in the middle have nothing to fear. We‘re sitting in a bubble of peaceful russian intentions, sadly filled by american propaganda.
Well, I would refine that statement as saying that I don't think that this applies to all neighbours (Finland's fear, I argued in the other post I linked earlier, I consider unreasonable), but... yes, there are evidently some "magic lines". The historical record shows that there are certain territories (beyond its current widely accepted borders) that Russia considers as historically theirs, and is only reluctantly willing to accept in foreign hands, especially when they are still settled by Russians whose experience amounts to "we settled here as normal Russians moving within their own country, and then suddenly some random thing happened and we were under foreign suzerainty". Countries that control territories like that are quite right to be worried, because Russia draws some fairly intrusive red lines regarding their dissociation from the motherland (as Ukraine has been finding out). For lands beyond that, the historical record has shown amply that Russia has little interest in seizing them even if it could fairly easily do so; even for forcing them under occupation/proxy regimes, Russia has only really done that once under the highly unique conditions around WWII (devastation + globalist ideology + revenge card) which are just unlikely to return anytime soon. Incidentally, even Poland's fear seems to me to be unjustified/manufactured - their leadership is just driven by its own revanchism and builds on a national mythos that is built around centuries of bloody rivalry with Russia where both sides were utterly ruthless to each other.
I completely reject the conflation with nuclear threats. Nobody, in this conflict or generally since WWII, has used nuclear threats offensively, in any way that resembles "let me have my [minor interest] or I nuke you" - they are always defensive, following a format of "if you do this thing that I consider to be an existential threat to myself, I will nuke you and trigger MAD". (The closest anyone got was Douglas MacArthur, who wanted China nuked if they didn't let him win on their doorstep in Korea!) These threats are not actually dangerous unless you can't help yourself but existentially threaten the nuke-holder, because you can just back off, and so in this case they are only really threatening to Ukraine (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made its own survival existentially threatening to Russia) and to a lesser degree the US (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made the survival of its empire dependent on maintaining the appearance of always getting its way).
I hope this is a rhetorical question. Yes, obviously, I think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. I assume the same of you.
No. I don't think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and I assume the same of you, and I take your response in the positive as a sign of hubris and bad calibration.
By virtue of being able to read most of the languages of the warring and supporting parties, I am constantly exposed to way more than two confidently held, extensively backed by compelling sources perspectives that can't be simultaneously true. The reasonable thing to assume is that they all failed to discern between truth and falsehood, rather to accept one random party's special pleading that they are privy to the truth and everyone else is falling for transparently false propaganda. Humans have evolved to have a socially mediated epistemology, which is completely helpless in the face of modern propaganda.
This is nothing. Under realist/19th century rules, we should be at war the moment russia sent troops against our vassal‘s government. And threatening us with nukes for that would still be beyond the pale.
I thought I already said I'm not particularly interested in playing 19th century reasoning, but if Ukraine is "our" vassal now, when did it start being one? Does it mean that we at some point caused a coup in their vassal and vassalised the resulting state ourselves? What do 19th century rules have to say about that?
So you support an amoral russian regime and the oppression of russia‘s neighbours as a counterweight to the seemingly greater evil of american hegemony?
That‘s a convoluted and dangerous gambit. Can you refresh my memory, which ones are your preferred victims, proving america‘s evil? The palestinians, I think you appreciate particularly. Chomsky had a problem with the US bombing the serbs and pol pot. Do you have a number in mind, like 10 million murdered by uncle sam, therefore a few hundred thousands ukrainians are small fries?
I wasn't intending to argue primarily based on victim-counting, but if we do that, sure, the US comes out looking pretty bad. Is it not generally accepted that civilian casualties are a greater evil than standing military? Well, the latest civilian casualty figures for the Ukraine war seem to be estimated at ~13k on both sides (I don't know if that includes Russian civilian casualties or not, given our representatives' belief that Russian civilians are not dying). Iraq alone had 66k civilian deaths even in the estimation of US military (everyone else estimates more) and let's not get started on Palestine, US allies like Yemen, ..., Vietnam, all the civil wars and coups they sponsored in South America, and so on. The effects I care about go well beyond direct killings though. They cause untold misery in Cuba through their petty sanctions regime, impose copyright laws and favourable conditions for their megacorps all over Europe, change our politics for the worse by imposing their memes, forced us to spend money and lives for them in Afghanistan, (...). All of this was while Europe was still relatively friendly with Russia and China - now that Europe has made it clear that it will not choose to side with them over the US no matter what the US does, I expect that the US will be free to do far worse.
More generally, I believe that there is no such thing as a benevolent power - to rise to significant (top whatever small percentile) power under any conditions that have been real so far requires will and effectiveness to perform actions that are negative-sum for the totality of humans whenever the opportunity arises. The only way to get powerful entities to perform positive-sum actions is to threaten and coerce them into doing so - and the only real threat that we as small-time individuals hold over entities like the US state or Russia is our collective allegiance, as countries (for now) still require a broadly compliant and cooperative citizenry to instantiate their power. The US government can only be motivated to act in the interest of the German (or, on that matter, the American) citizen by the threat that this citizen, and masses of others like him, will align with another government that can threaten it otherwise; the same is of course true for the Russian government.
German history actually has one of the best examples of this, in the form of Bismarck's social laws. We know quite well what fate the staunch monarchist Bismarck thought the rabble rightfully deserved, and we know what kind of society the communists instantiated when they got their way - but because the workers credibly threatened Bismarck that they would align with the communists, he was forced to grit his teeth and pass what were at the time among the most generous aid and redistribution laws in any industrialised nation. Just imagine if, following the argumentation now being made for siding with the US, the workers of the 1870s had been convinced that life under the communists is worse than under the emperor, and therefore renounced the socialist movement. Would Bismarck have voluntarily improved their condition?
They're certainly far less violent than what's going on. I'm also judging some decisions made later than crimea. There is a moment after the grab-zelensky attack on kiev failed, where russians could have gone home. Instead putin decided to fight a real war, with the blood cost this implies. Here was a moral decision of far greater consequence than to coup or not to coup.
It's fairly clear that the outcome for them would have been even worse if they had backed off at that point. Since I think it's a good thing morally if fewer of what is considered the US objectives for Ukraine are attained (with most positive terms being mediated by the expected humiliation of the US), I think they actually made the morally good choice.
Another thing: You claim to be able to explain russia‘s policy because you know how the country ‚ticks‘; Does this mean that the man on the street, or whoever you hear tick, is in charge? Or would have acted the same as putin? When you imply the honest muzhik would never attack germany, did he attack ukraine, or was it someone else‘s idea?
That's putting some strange words in my mouth now. I think that a big part of the country supports their current foreign policy, and would have acted about the same at each junction if they got to sit on Putin's golden toilet for a day. That also includes my projections about who they would and wouldn't attack or aim to conquer or vassalise.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I always thought Taiwan's Wade-Giles is okay, and the short-lived Tongyong Pinyin was mostly even better. (A few of its steps I found to be backward: W-G's hs is a creative and portable way of representing the sound that is pinyin x, while Tongyong Pinyin puts s, which hides the lispy quality it has for most of those Chinese speakers that don't pronounce it alveolar (sh-like), and fails to perfectly disambiguate it from Pinyin s, which it sometimes writes as ss?)
Yeah, it seems like a shallow argument. I stand by the comment I left below it -
Generally, I am saddened by the way in which Scott's blogging has degraded since the move to Substack. A big part of his appeal used to be that he was a fairly thorough or at least balanced thinker, and generally anticipated and addressed the best counterarguments to his theses even when the counterarguments were banned from polite discourse (the "$minority is getting worse SAT scores... why could this be? By elimination it must be racism! Or does anyone want to come forward with other ideas? ;)" pattern). He seems to have largely given this up in favour of the standard American pundit playbook where you produce a steady stream of slick essays arguing for one or another aspect of your agenda by setting up show matches against strawmen of competing proposals, seemingly optimised for a usage pattern like "RT: Here's the always brilliant @ScottAlexander thoroughly debunking #ConflictTheory. Can we finally move on yet".
More options
Context Copy link