4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
I have a file in my notetaking program that I've named "mottepost ideas", with things ranging from bullet points to semi-complete drafts of posts to try and finish when I'm in a writing mood and not too frustrated with this place. The problem is that I've also been toying with the idea of trying my hand at real-name blogging for a while - both because I think some of those ideas would be interesting to write up for people I know in real life, and because the idea of attracting more real-life friends with similar interests by public writing is appealing in the abstract - and posting the idea on the Motte first would burn it for using there unless I'm willing to risk self-doxing.
Two entries in that file that I'm pretty okay with burning (because they're low-quality anyway):
critical theory vs. critical thinking
- Alison Bailey [2017] surprisingly clear about this
- logic = language of nature, power dialectic = language of humans
- speak good logic to extract resources from nature, speak good dialectic to extract resources from other humans
- are your problems better solved by extracting more from nature (chop wood, make fire) or from other people (capture warm house)?
- "dialectic can not extract a warming fire from winter's frozen wood, nor quenching drink from scorching desert air"
- dialecticians only can profitably wrangle people because someone has done the work of wrangling nature before them. Had nature not been wrangled, they would be sitting in caves wondering why their children died of tetanus, not sitting in shoddy flats wondering why they can't afford an iPhone
Weirdmaxing
Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition? Even people in cultures that build nice buildings (say, 19thct UK) generally have no idea how you could build nice buildings in Japanese or Indian style. Seems like an "unknown unknowns" problem; is it optimal to not have one elite that gets to do runaway loopy optimisation with an evolving value function, but multiple, and then you get to pick out the best one from them? Is this generally a good approach to unknown unknowns?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Personal opinion, and I have yet to see anyone disagree in a setting sufficiently anonymous to remove the signalling advantage to disagreeing. (See also that SSC post ("Whither Tartaria?", I think) which cited some statistics suggesting that modern buildings are generally unpopular)
To be clear, I'm talking strictly about the macroscopic aesthetic qualities. I think modern buildings have many advantages in terms of interior space, plumbing, wiring, ventilation, materials, insulation etc.; however I would not even chalk those up to architects, considering that none of the US architecture students I knew seemed to be learning anything to do with this. Rather, as I understood it at the time, the architectural process is now such that the architect comes up with some artistic macroscopic design, and the details of how to turn it into a liveable building that satisfies relevant codes and regulations are worked out by subordinates with actual understanding of construction and physics (Civil or structural engineers?).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Considering the preferences repeatedly expressed by urban and rural residents in elections and informal communication, wouldn't it make more sense to keep rural life for "bug-man law-and-order types", and setting aside the cities for the people who are willing to tolerate the occasional subway screamer in return for having atomicity and interesting ethnic shops and occasionally getting to pat themselves on the shoulder for being enlightened and compassionate? Why do you want to live in a city to begin with? If you move to a city and want to impose a lifestyle on it that the majority of existing dwellers reject, doesn't that put you in the same category as the Islamic refugees that move to a country like Germany or France for economic reasons and then fly off the handle demanding that the locals cease their haram behaviours like having lightly clothed women waltz around in public?
("Let first-world life be for the pious Muslim types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense moral police, and for the kaffirs and lascivious dogs who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the desert where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle.")
It ultimately still seems difficult to communicate what exactly makes some objects ugly while others are beautiful in one's eyes, and the general theories of beauty that I've heard about symmetry, structure and surprise all seem to be such that nobody in an even slightly contrarian mood would ever agree to them. Therefore, I see no better option than to resort to the argument from majority revealed preference something like "few people seek out the appearance of these buildings unless they have status to gain from appearing to do so". For my own opinions, though -
Sydney Opera House: I've never seen it in person, but it strikes me as pretty ugly considering for example pictures like the standard Wikipedia one. The bottom part is just plain brutalist concrete with all of the charm of an Atlantic Wall bunker - inhospitable, lacking in symmetry and ornamentation, having an unattractive colour and evoking the general rusty rebar feeling of "if I scrape myself on this, I might get tetanus". I can see the sail-like structure on top as having been a fun gimmick for like the first week after it was built, but a single gimmick like that is bound to get old extremely fast, and especially now that it exhibits clear aging/weathering symptoms that do not agree with the sail theme, it looks like some 1990s Chinese plastic toy that washed up on the beach.
Zaha Hadid: I wasn't too familiar with her work (though I knew that she is a famous architect in the abstract), and some of the pictures of buildings I found actually looked somewhat nice - but (1) for some of them I suspect they have the same gimmick nature as the Sydney Opera House superstructure, where it's fun to look at for a while at first but once you got used to it there is nothing appealing to come back for; there is no detail to get lost in, little that's intrinsically beautiful, and a lot of the design is just gratuitously loud and conspicuous, and it seems designed to draw your attention even after you are already so overfamiliar with the architectural punchline that you derive zero novelty from looking at it again, like the same running gag screamed into your ear repeatedly forever, and (2) many of them might be fine standing isolated in the desert somewhere but are inevitably going to look jarring against any real cityscape, amplifying the "old joke screamed in your ear whether you want it or not" effect. In detail, Guangzhou Opera House, Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Vitra Fire Station all look bad; (the concept art for) Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye Smart City looks quite good; Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base Tower C-1 might be ok; the Beko Building seems okay in isolation but I've been to the location where they're building it and it seems like a travesty to place it between the old castle and the river.
I thought some of the buildings posted on architecturalrevival looked nice, but the place does have an upvote-farming circlejerk nature to it. To be clear, I really don't consider myself a neogothic-or-bust RETVRNer who wishes to roll back architecture in the hope of rolling back society along with it - the Ghibliesque buildings of the quasi-hippie that was Friedensreich Hundertwasser are appealing to me, and even the cheap knockoff Bauhaus style of modern Austrian vernacular architecture is perfectly okay. I really just think that the stuff that self-proclaimed tastemakers sell as akshually award-winning architecture that the plebs are just too crude to appreciate, starting approximately with the Brutalist era (or perhaps Le Corbusier, who had all the hallmarks of actually just being your typical narcissist who gathered a sufficiently big mob of enablers to sybil-attack the social proof system), is terrible.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
There is actually an asymmetry here that invalidates this argument, because the pro-trans contingent and the anti-trans one claim to be defending different terminal values rather than arguing in opposite directions over the same one. The pro-trans camp will say that trans representation in women's sports is important because [grand matters of fairness and justice in our society]; the anti-trans camp, on the other hand, generally says that no trans representation is important because [small subset of women can't win prizes at little league competition anymore]. There's nothing particularly inconsistent about saying that caring a great deal about the former is natural and caring a great deal about the latter is suspect. Now, of course from our vantage point it is of course clear that the anti-trans camp actually also is in it for grand matters of how our society is structured, rather than a weird dogged obsession with giving cis women a small chance to win that cup; but game theory forces them to dissimulate and assert even when pressed that they are really in it for [giving more nice things to women] (a societally comparatively accepted goal) rather than [giving fewer nice things to mtf trans] (a goal that is easily painted as vindictive or outright Voldemortian).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Sure there is, you can't tell other people what they find important.
Surely I can express an opinion on what it's reasonable for them to find important.
It's disingenuous to try to boil the debate down to these things.
I'm not trying to "boil down" the debate to those statements, but just using them as glosses for whatever the positions actually are (which probably gets lost at the soundbite level anyway). As far as I can see, the preferred narrative of the anti-trans camp here is that they seek to protect women's sports from trans incursion (are you disputing that?), and if one side says that we need to do a thing in order to right a historical injustice against a small minority that is subjected to suffering far in excess from that experienced by most people in our society, while the other says we need to not do that thing in order to have fairness in women's sports, then I figure that as a neutral and largely indifferent bystander I'd think that the former side has a pretty good case that they care about their cause because it's important but the other side should not care so much about theirs because it's unimportant. Why do you figure are the people against MtF in women's sports largely saying that they are doing it to protect women's sports? Are you saying we shouldn't take them by their word, and instead imagine that they are fighting for a cause equally as grandiose?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Right, I understand that. The point I'm trying to make is that "why do you care so much?" is not inconsistent or hypocritical: it's just trying to get the conservative interlocutor into admitting this after all (or force them into contortions that will make them look ridiculous to spectators).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Respect is fine, but per the orthogonality thesis, respect for his predictive abilities shouldn't translate into agreement with his goals (and yet it does, because by something like a flipped version of Aaronson's "AI is the nerd being shoved into the locker" perspective, we are preinclined to think that the nerd is on our team).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Gotta tie everything together so that you can't block bad legislation without having unpopular knock-on effects!
If it were just about that, this would be less of an issue if legislation were not fundamentally driven by alarmism and impulse. What you are describing seems to boil down to a bundle of legislation comprising A and B(ad) being passed because rejecting it would mean that A can't be passed either; but assuming there isn't a sense of A being urgent/every day that we don't have A being a terrible loss, surely the common-sense response would be to reject the bill and wait until the proponents of A are willing to introduce it on its own.
Instead, though, my understanding always was that the bill-bundling in the US legislative is a consequence of the erosion of trust between different interest groups. Many legislative proposals are strongly championed by a minority and weakly opposed by a majority; and since nobody actually can trust a promise from anyone else in congress to support another bill they actually weakly oppose in the future in return for some favour now, the only way complex trades (where everyone gets something they strongly want in return for a bunch of things they are weakly against) can be executed is by making the entire transaction atomic (that is, bundling all components of the trade into an all-or-nothing legislative package).
The medical system in the UK is unusually bad. I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one of the three has no case for better socioeconomics). The US one was also superior, but (at least in the incarnation that you get as a PhD student at a reasonably rich university) still inferior to the three continental European countries above. My one encounter with the Canadian medical system put it only slightly below the Europeans. It's not clear to me if it's something cultural, or a consequence of the specific implementation and incentives it produces (I have low-confidence information that Sweden, which has the most similar medical system to the UK out of the ones I sampled so far, is similarly bad), but nowhere else have I encountered the combination of doctors who were this aggressively unwilling or unable to bring their brains to the job and just stubbornly prescribe heavy-duty medication which at best did nothing and at worst had nasty side effects based on an autocomplete-tier diagnosis (or actually googling the symptoms right in front of me) and complete lack of any equipment to even do something like basic blood tests (you get a referral to a lab and have to get another appointment once the results are in before they look at them, and the hope is clearly that in the >=7 days it takes the problem will resolve itself one way or another).
The typical Japanese professor at my university will administer an exam, mark it, release the scores, but not tell students which questions they missed.
For perspective, though, at least some top British universities do this as well.
Things being cutthroat in domains other than signalling knowledge of trends and class belonging presumably feels unusually unusual from a US perspective.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
But, the wokes appear to be very deferential to China in general, and maybe they could just pretend nothing is happening.
Eh, I think woke support for China tends to be overestimated, especially in right-leaning circles. There are some groups in the woke coalition that take its side for tactical reasons - big business that economically depends on them, and various groups that might at times find that they have a positive edge connecting them in the affect-loading graph (Asian-Americans, staunch technocrats) - and a brief strong enemy-of-my-enemy reflex when the Trump presidency brought some fanatical China haters to the forefront of their outgroup, but otherwise I think they have little love left for them. If China/Taiwan comes to head, I would suspect US alignment chips to fall similarly to Ukraine, with strong bi-partisan support for Taiwan and any insufficiently enthusiastic (or downright pro-China) being overwhelmingly branded right-wing.
I think you may have misunderstood me; I explicitly said ("Respect is fine") that it doesn't apply to how much respect you should have, as long as respect does not entail a greater likelihood of following his suggestions. "Respect" is one of those words that are overloaded for reasons that I suspect involve enemy action: it is rational to "respect" authority in the sense of being aware that it can field many dudes with guns and acting in a way that will make it less likely you will end up facing the barrel of one, but authority would have an easier time if you "respected" it in the sense of doing what it wants even when there wasn't enough budget to send a dude with a gun to your house, and ideally just replaced your value function with authority's own.
I have little doubt that Eliezer is more intelligent and insightful than most of us here, but I don't believe that his value function is aligned with mine and don't have the impression that he considers truthfulness towards others to be a terminal value, so if anything his superior intelligence only makes it more likely that letting him persuade me of anything will lead me to act against my own interest.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
There was never anything pro-(post-communist-)Russia in the woke coalition, and my impression is that the "Israel apartheid" stuff is about as marginal as the "China concentration camps", and before Trump the latter was arguably going stronger.
I don't see any evidence of the American Left being directly submissive towards China. Rather, it's submissive towards globalised American industries, which in turn are submissive towards China, because China is both a massive supplier and market for them. If the American Right keeps mismodelling this transitive submissiveness as "pining for the strong hand of their communist daddy like the communists they are", their maps will remain useless for doing anything about it beyond working themselves into a rage (what you call "using it as a wedge issue").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Has anyone done a blinded study of this? I can't help but think of that old steroid placebo study.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
What's an example of such an article? I'd suspect that to the extent they exist, they are about genetic technocratic authoritarianism rather than anything particularly communist. To think that technocratic authoritarians must like the most prominent technocratic authoritarian system around is a mirror image of the "religious trads must like Somalia/Saudi Arabia" trolling.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
I think a fundamental question that needs to be addressed is what exactly distinguishes a weakman from the enemy bailey - and, I guess, whether it is good (for the discourse) in principle to contest the enemy bailey at all, or if gentlemen should always go straight for the motte (as the choice of our forum's name may seem to suggest).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
As I remember it, the SSC definition of the weakman entails that at least some in the besieged category do actually believe it; otherwise it is just a strawman.
One of the cutting-edge advances in fallacy-ology has been the weak man, a terribly-named cousin of the straw man. The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.
As I see it, the only thing that possibly distinguishes it from the bailey is that the inhabitants of the motte definitely intend to exploit the bailey the moment the siege is over, whereas a weakman may or may not get their share of the spoils should their coalition win. More often than not, it seems to me, disowning your weakmen is not the default, and the assumption is that the coalition should reward all those who showed up to see through its victory. The left-wing version of this has been glossed with something like "no enemies to the left", but I don't think it's confined to the left wing.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
To harbour no enmity towards any political position that one discusses seems like a bar so noble that approximately nobody on this forum would meet it. If you think that picking the strongest arguments from the other side is of no value for the epistemics of those of us who fail it, do you think there is anything that can improve them (short of, I don't know, meditating until we have attained indifference), or are we just irredeemable?
(To be clear, I wasn't thinking anything particularly deep when choosing that term. It just naturally fit the motte-bailey metaphor, which after all is about medieval warfare.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
In what sense do you find it crazy? It sounds to me like a very natural state of affairs that surely was the default almost everywhere for almost all of human history. It is exceptions to this - settings where violence can be successfully opposed by the weaker party despite an extreme imbalance in wealth and firepower - that are actually surprising and in need of an explanation.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10mo ago
I think the requirements for being an interesting and beloved protagonist are actually narrower than those for being respected and admired, and more uniquely at odds with the typical (or stereotypical?) disposition of females of the human species than the latter. For example, I know plenty of female scientists in my field who I respect a great deal for their academic contributions (as teachers, discoverers and systematizers), but a fictional account of their life would be soul-crushingly boring, because they did not primarily get where they are by fighting and winning a well-delineated conflict "fair and square" by force of will and effort. In fact there are, and have always been, beloved female protagonists, whose stories do not force us to suspend our understanding of the human condition: think Joan of Arc, Erin Brockovich or Madoka (the magical girl). I think these are all distinguished by their struggle having a prominent moral dimension, of the kind that I wouldn't go so far as to call unpopular nowadays but certainly outnumbered by easier-to-write "protagonist wants resource, antagonist wants the same resource, only one of them can have it" stories.
Slight spoilers for the currently airing Oshi no Ko, which by the way I recommend. Here's a video where someone took a song from an anime and fine-tuned a voice-cloning ML model on the voice of a character who could be imagined to not enjoy performing that particular song in the context of the story. (The case for that in this particular case is a bit weak, but don't let it get in the way of appreciating the general idea.)
The creator really leans into that interpretation: the title is given in English as "I FORCED [character] to Sing the Opening Song" (this translates the JP version adequately), and the video preview is him holding up a physical microphone to an LCD screen with a still of that character tearfully looking at a notepad with her mouth open.
So we've created a light version of the torture sim of Roko's Basilisk, if only for your anime waifu. Just imagine the potential for
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10mo ago
Why do the French still need to celebrate the storming of the Bastille? What are the "victory conditions" for monarchism to no longer be considered a major issue? Alternatively, same question for the US's Independence Day and the threat of the British yoke.
If you only want to count civic ritual evolved from an act of defiance the historical object of which has arguably disappeared, the Tea Party movement in the US is a good example. If your answer is that they protested what they saw as modern counterparts of British taxation-without-representation, well, there's your answer for Pride too.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10mo ago
Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all?
Infinitesimally. The probability of the observation at hand being induced by any mechanism other than aliens - 8D chess psyops, crankery, attention seeking combined with amused indifference from the military - continues dwarfing the probability of it being induced by aliens.
What would?
For starters, any footage that is not conveniently just situated around the boundary of the relevant detection process's confidence range. The 'aliens' signal continues to get more elusive in a way that neatly tracks our civilisational advances in detection and analysis, and more people signalling respectability and status claiming that it's actually the real deal does little to me since their respectability and status signals seem to be geared towards a different demographic than mine.
I think this overestimates the extent to which top academics are willing to move countries based on money alone. To begin with, top academics almost always could earn more by doing something other than being academics, which should already strongly suggest that there are other important terms in their value functions. Europe has remarkable gaps in academic pay between adjacent and similar countries (I'm aware of Sweden (laughably low) vs. Denmark (quite respectable)), without a corresponding research quality difference being apparent. I myself am an academic who is currently taking a basically voluntary pay cut to be in a European country I had no preexisting ties to rather than staying in the US. Based on my own preferences and those of others I know, the main reasons invoked for going to the US are network effects (everyone else is there, most top conferences are held there), for which money at most seems to take a seeding role (which failed to manifest in my field, resulting in me being where I am for the same networking reasons among others).
More options
Context Copy link