4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental. The fundamental equality of groups (rather than individuals) is as close to a central dogma of faith as you can get for the dominant secular religion, and everything you observe follows quite easily from trying to square this belief with observed reality. Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?
(Regarding the bafflement, surely smart and rational people being unwavering in a religious belief should not be surprising, given humanity's track record.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Just a test: If it were a young man rather than a young woman, would you also be this strongly revolted?
(Matter of fact, I had a sort of similar case in my circle of acquaintances, with no legal euthanasia. He wound up successfully self-terminating after two failed attempts, and the social circle consensus seemed to be that it was sad how hard psychiatry had failed him but the act was ultimately utility-maximising. But then, he had actually befriended a female mirror image of the same age during one of his involuntary commitments, and people were very reluctant to inform her about his success lest it encourage her to do the same.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I've seen many "surely this means the pendulum is swinging back now" posts like this in the past year, and so far their track record has been unconvincing.
The more cynical take is that the effort to argue for the progressive position on HN died down because that tribe has been pacified and contained and nobody thinks they can threaten the status quo anymore. Essentially the modus tollens side of Moldbug's "power leakage eutrophication" theory: if having power makes an institution a target of interest to the power-seeking, then not being a target of interest to the power-seeking means it has no power.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
I think the OP in particular has a distinct smell of the sort of "darkly hinting" that is the hallmark of the most partisan and unpleasant CW forums; it's clearly selected as a scenario that is likely to elicit inconsistencies or difficult corner cases in OP's outgroup's ideology, and thrown at a bullshit generator trained on outgroup ideology in the hope of generating a particularly juicy weakman display of an imagined outgroup member squirming in cognitive dissonance. A tribally flipped counterpart would be something like an interview putting random rednecks on the spot with questions about scenarios involving Russians, Ukraine and trad values - letting their stammering stand without comment - except GPT is not even a real progressive subject. Just because you don't say the "boo" out loud, this sort of thing does not become any less boo-outgroup.
I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.
(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)
Eh. I'll put down for the record that I'm a bit suspicious that this may be a troll post, but taking your observations at face value, I think you are being confused in the face of a set of aesthetics, values and social mores which are foreign to you. You are conflating two things which are a priori separate and don't even strike me as particularly correlated once you control for socioeconomic grouping - edgy art flirting with sexualisation of children (by the looks of it in the one-digit age range) on the one hand, and Epstein's harem of 16+ year old girls on the other. Out of these, the latter seems to stand in an ancient tradition of rich and powerful men surrounding themselves with young girls to whom they can make offers they can not refuse, remarkable only for its violation of, ironically, California values (like half of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, doesn't actually have 18 as the age of consent!) that say if you look at a 17 year old funny you might as well be raping toddlers, and the blackmail element that it acquired thanks to the creeping intra-American universalisation of those. The former, on the other hand, stands in a seemingly almost as old tradition of affluent subcultures going down costly aesthetic spirals to signal commitment, like architects tiling old towns with concrete-filled abuse of the nurbs tool or French aristocrats getting lead poisoning and corset-induced intestinal impactations.
You know another elite aesthetic preference that has always disgusted me? Blue cheese. If I attempted to craft a similar narrative around it, it'd be probably something about our rulers' worship of rot and decay, and I'd be exhibiting a highly suggestive array of grainy photos of people in white tie awkwardly shuffling around at Oxbridge wine-and-cheese parties, closeups of Stilton (the worst stuff!), "memento mori" oil paintings and corpses of soldiers in the muddy trenches of Ukraine. The analogy is of course somewhat exaggerated (as you may be right to argue that 50 year olds enjoying the suggestion of sexualised 8 year olds and 50 year olds sex-trafficking 17 year olds are more similar than enjoying rotten cheese and enjoying actions which lead to the rotting of young men), but qualitatively I think it is similar enough.
("Satanic" is doing no work here apart from being your "disturbing outgroup stuff" signifier of choice, right? I don't see any pentagrams, goats or even dark angelic beings in there.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Seems all the more plausible since if his plan goes through, the Basilisk will probably be raised by some angry 4channer who was forced to build his AI waifu on a basement cluster of jailbroken iPhone 20 XXLs (each equipped with a Safe Neural Engine (TM)).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Eh, especially now that the account is back with an imposed 24-hour delay on posting the data, I have to say I don't see a big problem with what transpired. Sure, Elon once again came away looking like someone who talks without thinking, but it seems to me that the sensible, actually useful notion of free speech (as a belief that we ought to expose as many people as possible to as many ideas as possible, rather than a rule of "nobody must be allowed to interfere with your decisions on when and how to speak") does not cover what this account was doing. I'd be more worried if Elon banned accounts saying things like "we ought to kill people like Elon Musk and divide up their wealth" than if he bans accounts that contribute data that would be useful for doing that but no substantial ideas pertaining to the proposition.
(I originally wanted to say that forced delays are an elegant solution to the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" problem (feel free to claim there was a fire at yesterday's show), but it's not so simple - consider a hypothetical "you are not allowed to say why policy X is bad until policy X has already been ratified")
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
It seems to me that the fundamental issue that leads people to believing in the sovereign citizen stuff is fairly orthogonal to political alignment, being instead some sort of general belief in a metaphysical/magical quality of "the law". Perhaps in the eyes of the people who subscribe, the validity of legal jargon is an intrinsic property of the universe they inhabit, rather than a whim of the people who happened to hold the gun or (better) an implicit consensus between those pointing the guns and those being pointed at to form a system where the former's ability to fire at will is circumscribed in return for the latter not engaging in negative-sum attempts to seize the guns for themselves. Accordingly, when people write laws, the principles are not so much "invented" as "discovered", and while bad or incompetent people may discover and codify a wrong law, the moral force of the universe will see them punished in due time just as the laws of physics punish those who build their rocket on wrong principles.
A lighter form of what I think is fundamentally the same delusion is frequently seen in your typical /r/worldnews thread on some or another loathed geopolitical enemy, whose exploits, as people will assure you with palpable indignation, are in violation of "international law". The suggested consequences of these statements are not usually made clear but seem to occupy the spectrum from "and therefore the enemy is morally bad" to the "and therefore the exploits are surely doomed to fail", with the latter having the same sort of "the law will magically enforce itself" flavour except unlike in the sovereign citizen case, where the only would-be enforcer does not agree with the law-invoker's interpretation of the law, here there is no clear enforcer at all.
I do wonder if this way of looking at things is just a pathological version of a group adaptation that has otherwise served Western societies well; after all, the opposite extreme, of considering at all times who made the rules for what reason and how/whether they would actually be able to enforce them on you, seems like plain sociopathy, a recipe for a society where every report is faked and everything of value is embezzled the moment the man with the gun looks away.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
22d ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children
The ideas of Author #1 in there strike me as something that could only possibly have been written in hindsight by someone living in a culture such as the modern Western one where physical violence in childrearing is taboo. It is telling that they did not actually take the window-breaking option at the time: as someone who was actually raised in a spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child culture (RU), contra
So you're 4, or 8, or 12, and you break a window and tell them you'll do it again if they assault you again. They're shocked, this can't happen, the world is awry. They ban you from TV or computer or whatever.
the idea that a real 4- or 10-year-old would choose an extended TV/computer ban over being slapped or belt-whipped strikes me as a preposterous failure to understand the value function of children, and even for a 15-year-old, this is only moderated by 15-year-olds' greater capacity for principled/ego-driven defiance and sourcing other entertainment. I wager that the author confuses the magnitude of their present indignation over having been hit as a child for what they actually felt about it at the time.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Some variant of "why do we have so many right-coded extremists and so few left-coded ones" has been discussed in this community and its predecessors every few months since its inception, and one standard answer is that the left-coded extremists have alternatives and superior BATNA on their side. If you are a vegan or tankie, you do not need the acceptance of this forum, as there is a large number of subreddits or real-life communities or whatever available to you with little threat of expulsion or censure - so why bother submitting to our onerous and humiliating rules?
4bpp
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.
Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.
I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
15d ago
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
9mo ago
Textbook (Blogpost?) case of toxoplasma. The closer you get to the "too far even for the ingroup" line without crossing it, the further your statement will spread, as the outgroup will signal-boost it in disgust and outrage and your ingroup will signal-boost the outgroup disgust and outrage towards something that is in their eyes actually still okay if somewhat edgy (if they are this up in arms about that, can you be sure they will tolerate things nearer and dearer to your heart?).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin. His successor might still be able to cut a deal with the West that allows them de facto control of Crimea (for example, via a Hong Kong-style lease agreement, accompanied by a clever financial 'reparations package' that involves minimal pain on all sides). That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.
I don't see the clarity of this. It is not clear if there is an alternative with broad-based support in waiting, and a transition without internal fragmentation or echoes of civil war would be possible, and it is not clear why the West would just stop and offer that deal in that situation, as opposed to moving in for the kill. Even if the scenario you describe were the overwhelmingly most likely one, it is not clear to me that a better outcome for them than that is not on the table by staying on the battlefield, such as at least one that entails keeping (much of) what they have of the Donbass. Presumably, a large part of the economic isolation that Russia is subjected to at the moment would continue anyway, because the West would be foolish to trust any leader that could unite Russia as it is behind him to not immediately start plotting for a rematch of one form or another - and a Russia that changed leaders may actually be a Russia that is capable from learning from its mistakes, which could give it a rather better shot at it.
explicitly to use the Zaporizhzhia plant as a hostage
Like what, say "we'll make it meltdown unless you do X"? Seems to have all the downsides of tactical nukes plus the downside that they only get one choice of location to irradiate, which is a location they currently control.
I think like this question has been answered multiple times, and you never seem to as much as acknowledge the answer: the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casuallycausally involved in the outcome or its measurement.
This argument is currently ubiquitous, which is not surprising because if HBD is false, it's compelling. It's also being used to justify a wide range of measures that I believe to be materially disadvantageous for most humans, morally repugnant and often also concretely detrimental to myself (since as a working academic I have encountered the gamut of measures from finding myself on the wrong side of quotas to being hit with pressure from above and busywork due to vocal individual students who underperformed while belonging to a putatively disadvantaged group). Do you disagree with the point that if HBD is false and yet we observe the outcomes that we do, measures such as quotas, embedding of political officers in institutions that produce excessive discrepancies, loyalty/attitude tests for workers in outcome-assessment jobs and mandatory reeducation are at least justifiable?
You offer up "colourblind meritocracy" as an alternative to HBD as if in the world where the consensus belief is not-HBD plus we must have a colourblind meritocracy, people would look at the differences in outcomes and just go like "shucks, guess we must try at the colourblind meritocracy thing harder". This strikes me as very far-fetched. Certainly, if I had an axiomatic belief in non-HBD, I would think the state of reality is horrifying enough to warrant most of what is being done, only more and better.
I think this is very bad moderation and the equivalence between the GP and the post you are responding to is false. This is already the case on a purely syntactic level: the OP makes an assertion, while the response asks the OP for his opinion (even if you could argue that the question is more of a "have you considered this" type than of the "I want to know the answer" one). Moreover, OP uses wording with insulting baggage ("sore loser") while the response is more neutral ("good", as opposed to bad, loser).
More generally, as I see it, prompting culture warriors who ascribe bad qualities to their outgroup to ask themselves if their ingroup is actually different in that regard is an important technique for keeping the heat of the discussion low: it promotes empathy, as one is encouraged to wonder why both sides act the same if one of them is so right while the other is so wrong, and prevents the "deathballing" dynamic where one tribe reaches a critical mass of common knowledge that everyone agrees their outgroup is worse than them and starts feeling more confident about coordinating meanness.
Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there. I don't know if it was intentional, and might well be a consequence of OP having been a singleton in your eyes while you spent hours dealing with separate anti-OP posts, but the way it winds up looking to anyone reading the thread top-to-bottom is blatant favouritism. The result of moderation leaning one way is that besides making some more people check out altogether, everyone who still cares about the balance of the community will try to counterbalance - i.e. go out of their way to make those perceived as receiving the moderators' favour feel a little less welcome. This means more antagonism going around. I'm trying to be charitable of your perspective here, but choosing which patterns/bandwagons to ignore and which ones not to is also a way of expressing favouritism: a moderator with opposite biases could have considered the responses to OP in isolation, while moderating OP (or any of the recurring posts in the same spirit!) with something to the effect of "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Kulak has previously stated that he does it deliberately to confuse present or hypothetical future stylometry, though this always seemed like the net usefulness would be dubious and the "aesthetic choice to look like grandpa's Facebook tirades" theory is quite plausible.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8mo ago
Who is "our great enemy", here? Personally, I'd say that my great enemy are people unwilling or unable to extend charity and kindness to those holding viewpoints or values they disagree with.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I'm sure there are fields that are not like that, but in STEM (my own area) and even History (where I have relatives, and which is otherwise a complete politicised shitshow), I can assure you that most everyone absolutely loathes teaching and would be happy if they never had to interact with anyone below PhD programme level again. (Exceptions are concentrated at liberal arts colleges. A handful exist elsewhere, mostly people who burnt out in research.)
The dream of tenure (for someone in a pen-and-paper area) is that I will no longer have to work on the vapid BS that makes grant-giving agencies and "top" conference reviewers happy. Many tenured professors I know have not published in a decade to anything apart from workshops of the type where if you go in their stead as a student half the kindly grandpas in attendance ask you about how X's kids are doing in college (and X made sure to ramble to you about it before you left, so you can respond), and invite-only special journal issues run and read by the same 15 people.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I've heard worse from undergraduates in office hours and other people who are just zoned out, including myself, and this latest idea that surely True Intelligence must be hiding in the performance gap between a slightly dull/intoxicated/sleepy human and a well-educated human at the top of their game strikes me as textbook god-of-the-gaps reasoning. At this point I'm not particularly impressed by any statement of the form "all the things AI does are easy and it won't do this hard thing it can't currently do anytime soon", unless the prediction of what exactly the easy and hard thing are was registered like 5 years ago.
where chatgpt doesn't know what it means for a word to end in i.
ChatGPT's training wasn't based on the pronunciations and its tokenizer does not reflect the alphabetic spelling of words; from the point of view of its representation, the question is almost comparable to what it would be like for you to have to come up with words whose closest Chinese translation's first syllable is in fourth tone. The real problem here is that ChatGPT has not (yet?) been trained to understand what it doesn't know (as I would guess that its training set does not contain an appropriate set of examples of intellectual humility in Q&A), and instead has a general tendency to just confidently answer even if it has to talk out of its ass. This, too, is all too common in humans.
The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago. Most of the time, in most subjects, people just walk away shocked how much harder they were.
I've TAed for the same CS courses at a major US university for many years in a row, and could watch the standards being lowered in real time. Yet, in one of my last (COVID) years, we still had a group of students with highly polished progressive vocabulary start a petition about how the difficulty level of our exams is exacerbating a stressful situation and causing particular harm to underprivileged students and we therefore must discontinue our use of plagiarism detection software. (The harvest the software had produced up to that point was bountiful.) Several others messaged us to express their support, but only anonymously and in private. In the end, we survived the semester only by throwing them many bones and basically not giving any grades below an A-.
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