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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
The "not happening and it's good that it is" bingo board entry has that perfect toxoplasmic nature where it takes a very common combination of opinions that is just human nature and skews it just a little bit in order to produce a great net effect of making the outgroup look nastier. Most of the time, what they actually believe amounts to "this would be good if it happened, but there is no way it is happening because things are going terribly for me and my tribe" - delusional and paranoid maybe, but not the gloating and gaslighting that the other side wants to see in it. It makes little sense for people to strut around like Optimate master-morality winners when their whole worldview and moral self-esteem depends on them being virtuous slave-morality losers.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
Picking random big-but-not-too-overhyped cities, in Chongqing a studio (up to expat standards?) apparently costs about $250/month, to a median salary of about $21k/year. Knowing China, there are plenty of options that are much cheaper but wouldn't be considered by a website called "expatistan". In comparison, in Chicago a studio is about $1500/month, to a median yearly income of $65k (and my impression from when I lived in the US is that even putting up with inhumane levels of slumlording won't lower your rent by much). I don't understand why you would expect homeless people to be able to buy, or any bank to give them the massive collateralised loan that is a mortgage.
(I briefly looked up the situation in Taipei and it seems that there the income/rent ratio is in between, at sth like $30k/year to $450 for a studio.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth, while left-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless would gladly move into and maintain housing if only they could.
I don't understand why, instead of trying to persuade each other, these discussions are always based in seeming denial that the other premise exists (an endless loop of "You're wrong, providing the homeless with housing is not actually that hard!" - "You're wrong, punishing the homeless is not actually that hard!", apparently heard by the respective other side as "You're wrong, there is no realistic way to punish the homeless" and "you're wrong, we can't just magic up housing for them all").
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
As I understand it, a sexual orientation that amounts to "I'm sex A, and sex not-A is the one that I'm physically built to mate with, so I guess I'm looking for a not-A partner".a "gender identity" that amounts to "I have sex-A parts, and in our society sex-A people are expected to dress/communicate like this and have interests like that, so I guess that's what I'll be doing". The test case are hypotheticals like anime transmigration/body swaps: assuming you are male, if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow (and your preexisting social web were conveniently erased), would you be looking for male or female partners going forward? would you (1) have a strong preference to refer to yourself or be referred to as male, (2) -"- as female, or (3) a weak preference to be referred to as female because anything else would now seem factually wrong? Answer (3) is the "cis-by-default" one.
I think I'm in the set of people the label is supposed to describe, and I really understand it as the natural outcome of not having whatever sense generates the "I'm gender not-A" qualium in dysphorics but still being socialised in a society with distinct gender roles.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Yeah, I corrected myself after making the initial post. Conflating sex and orientation is also something that's easy to do as a -by-default, though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Wasn't this person already renowned for having some gorillion followers and profiled on major news media by the time Trace's hoax happened? If you don't have the capability to assess the accuracy of what you put before hundreds of thousands of people, then maybe you should recuse yourself from putting things before hundreds of thousands of people. Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that you would have accepted an "I am just a poor normie, you can't expect me to fact check" defense for a sneer celebrity with this much of a platform from the other camp?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.
There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
The shoplifting in the metaphor is not posting hoaxes, but doing what LoTT does normally - "nutpicking" and sneering at the outgroup based on the most outrageous examples of its members. This is entrapment in the sense that those porch thief bait packages people like posting about on YouTube are - the reason the porch thieves are bad is not that they took the bait, but that they took non-bait packages before. The bait package is just a tool to catch them.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
Paraphrasing a common zinger, what if it turns out communists can stay innovative longer than you can stay ahead?
More substantially, though, I don't see much of a persuasive argument here. You are generalising from very little data (a roughly 200 year old system that identifies as "capitalist" vs. the second major ~60 year old system that identifies as "communist") and theoretising about the "communist" system from first principles that there is very limited evidence it actually adheres to, and on top of that reaching a conclusion which is flattering to your obviously preferred system, which should give you pause. Is this different from a Russian arguing in 1904 that a heathen state will never prevail over a Christian one, with an argument based on the recent historical primacy of the former and imagining that the expected naval tactics of Russia and Japan can be derived from the tenets of Orthodox Christianity and State Shinto?
So far the PRC story seems to me to make a compelling case that you can suddenly and massively crank up the wealth of great numbers of people while making them less inclined to pursue freedoms outside of your prescribed window. The main line of work the devil is making for idle hands there appears to consist of mobile game daily quests.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Sure, sorry if it was opaque. The first sentence has nothing much going on - it's just the observation that in China every subpopulations seems to only become less rebellious as modernity and affluence spreads to them, and largely the wealthier people now seem to be happy to work and consume while the remaining sparks of rebellion all came from still-impoverished marginal populations as well as groups that dropped on the totem pole of wealth (HK).
The second one is a reference to "the devil makes work for idle hands", a phrase often quoted in Western contexts as part of an argument against allowing the masses significant leisure - the intended image being that only 16-hour workdays stop the plebeian masses from organising at some beer hall to stage an uprising against their betters or else falling into antisocial debauchery. I found the idea that more wealth would create more motivation to use that wealth in a way that threatens government control quite similar, but in reality, any leisure time modern Chinese people get seems to be sunk into modern entertainment - TV dramas and perhaps most conspicuously games that get players hooked using supremely gamified literal make-work activities, the "daily quests" or "dailies". This typically looks like performing some randomised chores (talk to NPC X, defeat five slimes, craft three potions) to get a daily reward of in-game currency that can be used for obtaining randomised lootboxes/gacha. At best, people go to organise in some online beer hall to stage an uprising against a rival subfandom of one of those games.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
The same "it's different when people without actual power do it, and they are just joking/venting anyway" argument is commonly fielded in defense of variants of "kill all (white) men".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Brazil is not really embedded in the Western media sphere/memetic pond, though. I'd be more inclined to compare with Fico, where the media barely even mustered disapproval, and instead the reaction was all "he kind of had it coming" and "what if this makes more people support his pro-Putin agenda". The subsequent EU election did not really go in his favour, either
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
The rape element is as shocking in a modern polite society context as the Satan element is in a Christian one.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
Couldn't that just be because "creating value" is not a general blue-tribe value? They could believe that all value is produced by their tribe without particularly feeling compelled to brag about it or try to claim personal credit for part of the process.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
A lot of wildbow's works (Worm, Pact, Twig...) hit similar themes; though the decline is usually violent, he has a recurring pattern of stories starting from a place of relative stability and affluence and gradually cranking up the bleakness/hopelessness/lack of resources available both to individual characters and to society at large.
On the Japanese media side, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (English title might be something like Girls' Last Tour) is a worthy spiritual successor to YKK, perhaps slightly more on the bleak and eventful side. It's a sort of cute slice of life series about two girls traversing a ruined world in the wake of WW4 in search of a something/anything, as the last remnants of human activity around them flicker out. The author's narration and Twitter feed pattern-match against the worst cases of inadequately medicated clinical depression I have encountered. Both the manga and the anime adaptation are pretty great.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant")
As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?
As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11mo ago
"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.
But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).
OP was being a concern troll
Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that there is any level of intelligence (that has been attained by humans) at which the ability to delude oneself disappears. It is facile to bring up the famous historical examples like Newton or Pascal, as to begin with it's hard to answer the question to what extent they would even resemble our modern understanding of a "genius" , but even in modern times there is no shortage of examples such as the cavalcade of Physics nobel prize winners (Pauling, Josephson...) who went off the deep end, or even cases like Mochizuki where the cancerous growth of delusion happened near the center of their actual domain of expertise. By any account, these people are the sort of geniuses you describe: their competitive advantage was taking leaps of correct intuition over gaps others could only bridge with lots of meticulous work.
Moving in a slice of academia where it seems that we're good enough to be the "thousand-year-old vampires" (TW: Yudkowsky being himself) to a distinct stratum of people below but also have a distinct layer of people above us who appear the same to us, I've had a friend and colleague in academia who is probably quite similar to the case of Mar(k/y) that you describe. His->her transition did come as a bit of a shock to me, but as I thought about it more the signs had been all there. Since I first met him there was always a class of topics that made him act squirmy and avoidant, mostly to do with his own romantic relationships as well as even seemingly non-romantic ones with some people around him that one would casually describe as "queer", but also whenever other people's romantic relationships came up, as well as anything to do with his own seemingly quite religious upbringing. This was not the avoidance of someone calmly deciding to not talk about a topic, but the avoidance of someone with a fear of heights suddenly pushed onto a suspension bridge, and it seemed quite likely that he would be struck by the same sense of vertigo if his train of thought hit upon these topics on its own. I can only imagine that she came to be either somewhere in the depths of the avoided area, or as a mechanism to cope with the inevitability of having to engage it - but how would I know? I don't have the social wisdom to know how to keep engaging with someone who broadcast a choice to discard the social identity I was acquainted with, and academic contingencies made us go different ways at the time either way. The thing is though that if I accept this cluster of anxious avoidance as being a "pre-delusion", there is no shortage of people on "the level above mine" that I have seen it from.
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