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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had
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the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions
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several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)
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undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them
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profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends
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pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.
...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.
The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).
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4d ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
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4mo ago
"I have no sympathy for people who are not fully on board with my team" is about the coldest take you can have in the culture war. I, for my part, hope Trace will still be at it in 10 years, showing that there is a way to survive without submitting to either of the two tyrannies of unreason.
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
My favoured conspiracy theory is that the main utility of this is somewhat similar to mafia initiation rituals: the participants know that everyone gets a nuclear level of dirt on everyone else, which establishes a level of trust that would otherwise be impossible among the powerful and eccentric crowd that is the Who's Who. Every member of the group is incentivised to cooperate with every other member of the group, at least to an extent that nobody feels sufficient spite and desperation to trigger MAD. (Imagine an Epstein Islander were to go to jail for the rest of their life for securities fraud, and felt that the others could have pulled strings to prevent this.) That most men would not exactly be repelled by sexual attention from 16 year olds is just a nice plus that makes recruitment go more smoothly (and perhaps allows participants to deceive themselves that they are just reaping the fruits of power, rather than entering a death pact). On top of that, shared experience of transgression probably builds a feeling of camaraderie.
It's worth noting that corresponding rumours from Europe (the Dutroux case) involves girls that are much younger, corresponding to Europe's lower social and legal age of consent (as American national politics operate according to California rules). This is also consistent with the illegality being the point. (Perhaps Europe's patronage networks are less effective than American ones because fewer men are actually into sexual attention from 8 year olds, creating a recruitment problem for the web of trust!)
The association with, and cultural memory of, secret satanic rituals might just be a holdover from when those were similarly grounds for automatic cancellation no matter how powerful the person engaging in them. The weakening of cultural Christianity, under that theory, necessitated switching from Satanism to underage sex. If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.
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1mo ago
I was a PhD student heavily involved in TAing at a US university until a few years ago, and I could see the in-class assessment solution getting beaten out of us in real time. It started with greater and greater fractions of students demanding special arrangements (extra time, open-notes, retries (with new questions that we had to design) if they didn't like the outcome) with the backing of the disability office, and culminated around the COVID years with students sending us open letters with change.org petitions attached to them about how [blob of slick therapy-speak] meant that in-person exams were discriminatory and inequitable. I recall a multiple-evening all-hands emergency session where the TAs helped our beleaguered principal instructor thread the needle and craft a response that minimised the likelihood of him getting dragged through the town square following the spirit of the times, and around then the remaining holdouts I knew of gave up and switched to homework-only scoring. Many academics, especially at the high-profile US schools, like teaching; few of them like it so much that they would jeopardise their research career to take a stand on how it is done.
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7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
I think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.
"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.
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8mo ago
Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy. Sure, they sometimes stumble upon true and interesting statements - perhaps even quite often, like a blind chicken, granted the leisure to peck at the yard all day because the farmer will spoonfeed it three times a day anyway, finding a good number of grains - but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence, hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out. Take, for example, the argument about incest towards the end. Stripped of its whoa-dude lingo, what's left of it seems to be some argument along the lines of:
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Marriage restrictions serve the point of creating the framing conditions for an economy where fathers sell off their daughters in return for other spoils. Sure, nothing wrong with that, because creating arbitrary systems of rules is cool in my books.
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However, you don't need to ban mother-son incest to enable the above economy!
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Some people say that there might be other reasons why incest is banned, such as biology. But that's nonsense! Farmers inbreed their plants and lifestock all the time, so how can it be bad?
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Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest. It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Disassembled in this way, the argument is clearly lazy and stupid. Human communities differ from the charges of a farmer in relevant ways - a farmer can breed 99 unviable monstrosities that he will promptly cull and 1 sort of viable semi-monstrosity with a desirable trait that can then be isolated in subsequent generations. The semi-monstrosity does not need to be healthy or fend for itself, because the farmer can just coddle and feed it until it is old enough to be crossbred with a healthier specimen in the hope of selectively getting rid of the deleterious traits only, at negligible cost to the farmer; neither the culling nor the coddling of the mutant impose any cost on the community of other farm animals/plants, because they don't really have a community or obligation to look out for each other; and neither of them will meaningfully resist their culling, introducing the choice between violence and dysgenic load, because the farmer is presumed to have an effective monopoly on violence.
This is not a particularly difficult counterargument to the counterargument to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom that the lowly students must compete with each other to understand, which a Continental Philosopher is supposed to project; and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something. Maybe some other student could help him out by writing a longer Lacanian tract expounding on how he doesn't get it. Who would side with some beta nitpicker over the chad sage who has his own (surname)-ian adjective as a lemma in the Collins English Dictionary?
If the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art?
I have little doubt that the Eisenmans of the world would go for this if they could get away with it.
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9mo ago
I understand your frustration here, but it seems manifestly true (from my perspective as an academic, albeit not in the humanities) that the academic priesthood of the SJ establishment has appropriated Marxist vocabulary as well as a fair amount of concepts (whether they use them correctly or not) and generally sees itself as the rightful inheritor to labels including "Marxist", "leftist", "socialist" et cetera, and they only disavow them as part of a slippery routine when their opposition tries to put a name on them (see relevant Freddie DeBoer post). At some point it just seems impractical to not go along with the self-identification of the overwhelming victors - almost as if you insisted that no major modern branch of Christianity were actually Christian, though of course it's not a perfect analogy since we are not in a setting where Christians protest whenever members of other religions pejoratively call them Christian, even as they happily identify with the label among themselves.
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3mo ago
Reading the comment sections in German papers during the past weeks, I am starting to genuinely feel a little afraid. The general population, or at least those who bother to comment under those articles, are positively hysterical, in a way that I imagine a deadbeat limerent live-in girl/boyfriend who refused to see the writing on the wall and wound up being dumped and dumped on the street with no plan B in short order would be. If it were an individual, this would be a point at which I'd call in a welfare check on them lest they harm themselves. Tropically, this would be due to emotional discombobulation or a line of thought like "He loved me, right? He still cares enough that he wouldn't just let me die, right?". Following this schema, I would not be surprised if they soon started floating a spontaneous deployment of European military, fueled by some vain hope that surely even Trump's US would turn around and step in before France/Poland/the UK goes in and outright loses (which is a distinct possibility, because I don't see immediately available European capabilities even just making up for US intel and Starlink if those are withdrawn, and a European mobilisation would surely be enough to convince even Putin to escalate at last). The comment sections would cheer right up until the point where they get draft letters themselves, and depending on what happens between now and then even beyond.
Of course, it could be that for all of Trump's seeming randomness, the whole plan was actually signed off by someone in the State Dept who went above and beyond on the "how can we make Europe contribute more" assignment and is now waiting for just that to happen.
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4mo ago
I think left-wing sadism is easily overlooked when making the comparison because it is comparatively less physical than right-wing sadism. Right-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) revel in seeing their outgroup and its avatars deported, imprisoned and beaten; left-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) instead want to see theirs humiliated, smeared, robbed of their culture and symbols and denied even the words to lament it. It is hard to see things like the famous "gamers are over" blitz in gaming media, or the myriad of remakes and sequels of beloved retro franchises with LGBT characters of color and subversions of the original message, or the actual outgroup avatar humiliation conga that was the Joker sequel, or all the teardowns of statues and removals of names, as being motivated by anything other than a sadistic impulse - confirmed then beyond any doubt by the volume of "lol incel tears" posts that the backlash inevitably attracts.
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3mo ago
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders.
Why do you figure it is this way around, as opposed to Brussels just being a fig leaf that would let politicians point and say "we had no choice, it was ordained from above" for unpopular policies that they themselves actually wanted all along?
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3mo ago
Is it so hard to imagine that it might be the first one, and he simply fumbled? One thing that it is easy to forget, or might get lost in translation, is that Zelenskiy is not a strong politician. I still remember when I saw his address to the Russian people, which he released when Russia first invaded, and realised just how little he fit the mold of any successful or competitive politician archetype in the Eastern Bloc (or elsewhere). He does not have the cold judgmental mien of old-school apparatchik types like Putin or Mishustin, nor the artificial boorish anger of the People's Tribune types like Zhirinovsky, nor the slick scammy '90s businessman aura of Medvedev or Poroshenko; instead, in that particular moment, I really couldn't see him as anything other than a tired middle-aged Slav who got interrupted during a shirtless solo grilling session at his dacha by a bunch of thugs with baseball bats. Next to hawkish Russian Telegram channels gleefully posting mugshots of gentle-faced Ukrainian pilots to declare them "annihilated", this was probably the saddest moment of the early days of the war for me.
Everything he has done seems consistent with having the best intentions at every turn while fate takes improbable turns from bad to worse, but not having the cunning or foresight to plan further than one step ahead, nor the latitude to assert himself over the multitude of forces that are constraining and threatening him, nor even the people skills to see through or even just resist all the natural politicians* that he is forced to play ball with, nor any superhuman mental fortitude. Unfortunately, almost everyone either subscribes to the Western propaganda picture of him as a brilliant Churchillian leader, or the Russian propaganda picture of him as a wily actor wrapping people around his finger. He is not the former, and even though he is a former actor, the quality waterline of acting in the Eastern Bloc is very low (and Russians are probably blind to this). In this light, I would propose that he simply misjudged - everybody probably told him that Trump tests your mettle but ultimately respects nobody more than a tough negotiator, and between 8 hours of jetlag and three years of ducking around in bunkers and not knowing when you will be hit by a Russian missile or shot in the back by your underlings, he just may have been understandably too out of it to read any warning signs that this was not working out after all and stop himself from digging in deeper.
*Western politicians are scary. Almost every real-life interaction I had with one felt like a Voice of Saruman moment.
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10mo ago
I'm trying to figure out on what proportions this actually describes your beliefs, amounts to an instance of trying a different belief on for size, and is an exercise in tricking the resident contrarians into vigorously defending the polar opposite viewpoint. Either way, the statement about fewer riots at least seems baseless - I actually happened to be in London in 2010?11? when the minorities were rioting, and it still looked more serious than the pictures we are seeing now.
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4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I think there is a class of "sex pest" that has always been around, which is men who are hyperattuned towards what is popular with women and optimise their personality and social strategy around charming and bedding new partners. They only become "pests" in that their handling of partners, once bedded, is essentially consumptive - rather than trying to build a relationship, they just speedrun whatever sexual acts they feel amount to having "used up" the sexual partner (often by maximising extreme/degrading acts, which register as conquest milestones), and then move on to the next.
This is not to say they don't believe/inhabit the personality they arrived at by optimisation - much like Mr. Beast is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the YouTube algorithm, the pump-and-dumper is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the female attention algorithm. It's just that any attendant preference structure remains strictly subordinate to the "conquer more women" terminal value. The actual manifestation depends on the fads of the day: in the '40s, it could be a dashing young GI, an Elvis-like character in the '50s, a philosophical druggie rogue in the '70s, ..., or a soft-spoken feminist alpha nerd since around 2015.
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7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument? As far as I can tell, it's really the core scissor statement of the mainstream-left-versus-alt-right divide in Western countries. People on the left side seem to hold it to be so self-evidently true that you cannot disagree with it in good faith, while it is in equal measures self-evidently false to the point that good-faith agreement is inconceivable to those on the right. I personally always have figured myself broadly closer to the left than the right (if perhaps coping that the race/gender collectivism social justice movement is a temporary aberration), but with one's position on this statement now being treated as a shahada by both sides I find myself driven into the arms of the right wing simply because the left-wing position strikes me as too insane to accept. Unless "democracy" really is code for "whatever my allies want", how can you justify iterated statements that amount to "giving the majority what it keeps voting for is a threat to our democracy"?
If anything, it seems to me that the opposite sounds plausible: democracy as I understand it is threatened by political insiders collectively pulling all stops to prevent giving the majority what it wants, even if this requires wrecking a considerable amount of systems and societal machinery as collateral damage. What is actually the notion of democracy that is imperiled by the right, rather than the left?
(To forestall a possible line of argument, I do find it plausible at this point that, say, the German AfD, if it got into power, would engage in some sketchy reprisals against left-wing institutions, such as pulling funding from nonprofits. Even if on its own this would be a concerning move, I find it hard to put causal blame on them for this, given that the other parties were openly saying since day one that they would sooner ban the AfD than let them get into a position where they could implement their voters' preferences. Something like pointing a gun at someone and then saying that you were right about them being violent all along when they try to wrestle it from you.)
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11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
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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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
On what basis do you figure that Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014 due to "not being ready", as opposed to still holding out hope that they could achieve their objectives for it (at the time, they openly angled for a reintegration of the DPR/LPR with the rest of Ukraine under a federal model that would give them a veto over any future attempts to realign Ukraine with EU/NATO and away from Russia) in a cheaper way? If that was the case, Ukraine rushing to go nuclear would have surely just expedited the invasion before Ukraine was ready to defend itself (per the European assessment), and moreover might even have resulted in much more limited Western support as the narrative work to make general populations accepting of proliferation had not been put in yet.
rule-based world order
Rather than using the propaganda term that has a flexible interpretation, could you explain what the specific type of world order you are wishing for is? Is it just the "US playing world police"/pax americana model, where major wars are only to be started with US approval (under threat of US support for the defender) and we have to trust that the US will mostly remain sensible enough to not approve of wars that create too much trouble for us Western forum-goers? As far as I'm concerned, that trust had been long eroded by the wave of terrorism splashing everywhere from their own Middle Eastern misadventures.
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4mo ago
But — could you describe how immigration harms you personally?
Not the poster you are responding to, but there are some cities in Europe now where, if I go outside, I am mostly among young men who are dressed and act to signal capacity for violence, have strong ingroup bias among themselves, and communicate (often exclusively) in languages that I have little to no knowledge of. I think it is appropriate to be on one's guard in such a situation, and to adjust one's general course of action to take the attendant risks into account; and I think that this adjustment should count as a personal harm.
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25d ago
What happened with your post? I found it kind of hard to read in an "am I getting a stroke or is sleep deprivation finally getting to me" way from the start, but then halfway in it seems to reach the point where words are actually unambiguously rearranged out of their proper places, like in
The interpersonal exit veto (I won't be dissuaded) has a lower barrier to execute than Move to Canada. Lana's collection of ideas, beliefs, ailments, and suffering in were normalized, grown, and reinforced in she spaces sought out.
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5mo ago
politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism
...
Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Well, there's a natural modus tollens to consider when looking at the modus ponens there. It was expected that Latin-American immigrants would not stop voting in Latin-American politics after they came to the US. Now they're voting for Trump. Did they actually stop? Or is Trump actually more similar to Latin-American socialism than we expected?
It's kind of a matter of internet dissident lore how leftists cling to their mythos of being the anti-elite underdog and champion of the small and oppressed, even as their creed becomes the faith of rich and noble Brahmins yearning to defend their privilege. Perhaps more attention is due to how this is reflected on the other side - are rightists clinging to a mythos of being the noble elites of word and deed seeking to protect their rightfully earned place at the helm, but actually becoming the ideology of bombastic People's Tribunes promising to bring down the enemy elite and distribute gibs to their socioethnic clients? With some squinting, is the promise of Trump (imagined and played up by fans), distributor of free tendies, rewarder of loyals, crystalizer of traitors, not quite similar to that of a Perón, Bolsonaro or even (with identification filed off) Evo Morales?
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4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Yeah, it seems like a shallow argument. I stand by the comment I left below it -
I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.
The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.
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".
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4mo ago
· Edited 4mo 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.
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4mo ago
It's an entirely new way of organizing labor in society
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.
It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.
This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immanentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)
Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.
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