Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I have not noticed any particularly sharp decline in the usefulness of reviewers. I find Metacritic to be pretty accurate in terms of overall quality as long as I control for which genres I like, e.g. an action film with an 80/100 on Metacritic is something I'll almost certainly enjoy since I like action films, whereas a Coming of Age Drama with an 80/100 is something I almost certainly wouldn't enjoy since I don't like those types of movies.
If you're looking at individual reviewers instead of aggregators, it's important to find a reviewer with a taste profile that roughly matches your own. I have a few for video games and they've consistently given me good recommendations.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Indigenous people are treated as special snowflakes that were untainted by conflict and aggression until corrupting white people arrived. In reality, they're like any other people on the planet albeit they were less technologically advanced and had fewer written records when they made contact with the West. Warfare was just as common as it was anywhere else at equivalent tech levels, so the people we met could more accurately be described as the "penultimate conquerors" of the places they were living. For a while after colonization, history proceeded in the same way as in almost all conquered areas, i.e. the conquerors tried to consolidate their hold through aggressive policies of assimilation and resettlement. Eventually though, white guilt became a dominant moral force which led to the reservations system in the US. Reservations of today are mostly just fronts for rent-seeking where individuals (who are often quite assimilated to the dominant US culture) get paid their racial spoils for having the correct genealogy.
As for building power plants, that should be viewed more as an issue of the reach of eminent domain, i.e. how far you can take "public interest" of broader society to inconvenience individuals living there. It'd be really annoying to have to move if the government wanted to build something near where I live, but I also appreciate living in a society that has interstate highways and the like.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I really notice that when playing older games from the "golden age" of PC gaming in the late 90s to mid 2000s; they are often more mechanically complex and have much more complex plots than modern titles, simply because that is something players appreciated at the time and appreciate less now.
What games are you playing these days? I've noticed the polar opposite, that games are getting far more complex and intricate today. I can't name a single game released >20 years ago that reaches the complexity of modern EU4, and even mainstream games like Destiny 2 have way more build variety and moving parts than shooters back in the 90s or early 2000s.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Destiny 2 is anything but niche. According to this MMO population website, it's within the top 10 most played MMOs (currently number 7 at time of writing).
EU4 is more niche but is still fairly well-known. It's typically within the top 50 most-played games on Steam.
Both of these points are sidetracks though, because OP's post wasn't comparing the CoD of today to the CoD equivalent of the 90s. Why would you? If you want in-depth games with complex mechanics, then you should be looking for those specifically, and modern gaming has way, WAY better options in that regard than the 90s or 2000s.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I think today's forever games are less engaging, though, because people engage with their complexity mostly by learning "the meta" that someone else discovered by rote. The standard advice given to HOI4 newbies is to watch five hours of tutorial videos that teach you how division templates and combat calculations work. In the 90s you would dive into a game and parse it for yourself.
It's true that it's basically impossible to have secrets in video games in the age of the Internet. People claimed up and down that Sonic was a playable character in Smash Bros Melee, and the rumor persisted for years, but in these days it would never gain traction. Similarly, easter eggs for most games are thoroughly well-documented to the point where if you want to know the secrets of a major game, it's typically just a Google search away. However, this applies to playing old games in the present day as well, as their secrets are just as exposed to the Internet as the secrets of modern games are.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The Internet has effectively outsourced tutorials for some games. Some of this is a natural progression of some games being so complex that watching a Let's Play is the most efficient way of learning. On the other hand, some of this is just lazy devs knowing fanmade wikis will document enough stuff that they think tutorials are a waste of time.
That said, I disagree on the characterization of modern gaming being a dichotomy of ruthless complexity vs braindead simplicity. There's plenty of games in the middleground. The Total War games are one example. Slay the Spire is another. Terraria is yet another, although it's certainly an offender of the "outsource the tutorial to the wiki" phenomenon.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I also got a message from that guy. What a wierdo.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Relationships are built on propinquity, which is just a fancy term for "general nearness". The closer you are to someone in terms of likes, interests, physical location, etc. the more likely you are to have a strong relationship with that person. Of course no two people are identical, so you can't abandon relationships just because of a few disagreements. However, the wider and more important the disagreement, the more likely it is to cause issues long-term.
I could date a person who had different political opinions than me, but the wider the disagreement, the less important politics would need to be for that person for me to consider it. If I had the prospect of dating an authoritarian wokist (which is basically the polar opposite of my views), politics would have to almost be a non-factor for them for the relationship to have good long-term chances of success. If their political views were exactly the same as mine, I'd be fine with them being obsessed with politics.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Most of this is just because Russia decided to impale itself on its revanchist delusions. The US had made no serious efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and showed every sign of being content with the frozen conflict status quo in the Donbas, but then Russia tried to flip the table over but ended up hurting itself in the process.
They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
Germany absolutely deserves the L here. France and Germany have always been a bit jealous of Anglo hegemony over the collective West, which is why they make periodic calls for "strategic autonomy". But instead of Germany building up its military, it instead decided to do the stupidest possible option of bankrolling an ardent enemy of the EU and becoming massively overreliant on Russian gas with barely a whisper of "what could possibly go wrong". Sensible analysts knew it could become a liability, but Germany proceeded full-speed ahead anyways, despite countless protests from a succession of US presidents and other foreign leaders.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency. Hearing people strawman capitalism as "it requires infinite growth", then equating it to a cancer cell, is one of those braindead arguments on par with "if you don't like gun control, why don't you just move to Somalia???"
Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again?
Some financial innovations have been good like ETFs, while others have been bad. Careful regulation is better than becoming a Luddite and trying to stop all financial advancements entirely.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The stock market prices in expectations, so if a company misses its earnings prediction then its price declines relative to the profitability that market participants presumed the company had. It doesn't crash to zero. A stock price that declines for a week is not a death sentence. Furthermore, blue chip stocks (the ones that have grown very large and bought out many competitors) are not expected to grow exponentially ad infinitum; people buy blue chip stocks for steady rates of return, typically either from dividends or stock buybacks. So no, this "companies expect infinite growth in a non-infinite universe" argument really doesn't hold up.
That said, there are arguments to be made that many companies have time-horizons that are too short. Everybody wants to get rich quick, which has led to stuff like companies underfunding R&D budgets and taking on massive amounts of debt in order to finance stock buybacks.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I'd wager most of it is simply from the decline of monogamy. In the West, both men and women are regressing to their biological sexual imperatives where men want to have sex with lots of women and women want to clinch commitment from a high-value man. This creates an adversarial relationship with many people left out in the cold: low-value men are rejected by most women outright, high-value men have a huge abundance and can treat women like sentient fleshlights, and women in general target the top quintile of men who treat them as disposable goods, or else they have to brave the lower quintiles full of "creeps". The best soothing balm for the battle of the sexes is simply being in a healthy long-term relationship, as it's hard to have a war when all the soldiers are fraternizing with the enemy. But the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships.
There are other more minor factors, e.g. the Internet has let people delve into their niche interests harder than ever, which has led to men and women dividing from each other more. I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college. I didn't make a conscious effort to weed women out of my life or anything, I just focused on the things I was most interested in. I do interact with women a bit at work, but modern white collar environments are completely sterile so that hardly counts for much. In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.
There's also the impact of third wave feminism implicitly branding most men as latent rape machines and red-pill/incel communities treating women like drones, which also doesn't help.
But yeah, it's mostly declining monogamy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Doing a lot of personal research and writing articles about a topic you're interested in is great! But obsessing about a particular author simply because they're the ones making the argument, isn't. In fact, it's pretty much anti-rationalist to attack the author instead of the argument. Spamming posts with hyperbolic clickbait headlines like "Scott Alexander has WOUNDED Rationalism with his Ivermectin article!!!" does little to improve Alexandros' actual argument.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I've said it before back on Reddit, and I'll say it again here: This guy seems to have a solid point to make about the efficacy of Ivermectin, but he keeps sullying it with personal attacks against Scott Alexander. He very clearly has an axe to grind against Scott, which is why he uses hyperbolic titles like "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!". His work has a great amount of light, but he adds a bunch of unnecessary heat either out of resentment towards Scott, in an attempt to clickbait, or both.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
And this is what Alex had to say about it to which you made no reply whatsoever: Obviously I can't be held accountable for other people's opinions in the comments. This is not a standard Scott would pass either, so the fact that it is being raised here feels like isolated demands for rigor.
Alexandros explicitly endorsed ("Liked by Alexandros Marinos") many of the disparaging comments I was talking about.
Cite a source for your claim.
I searched Google for "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!", and nothing came up.
It's the article I was responding to on Reddit, which I linked up above. The official title is "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." In other words, according to Alexandros, Scott was so catastrophically negligent that he wounded Rationalism in its entirety. Combine this with the accusatory nature Alexandros' article, and it comes off like Alex wants to tarnish Scott's legitimacy beyond his Ivermectin take.
Does it appear that you can read the mind of Alex better than the rest of us? A far more plausible theory, if I were to engage in the same rhetoric, is that this community has a handful of members who hold Scott Alexander to be their darling, leader, or authority and thereby get upset if anyone fairly and squarely criticizes his opinions with valid points that cannot be refuted rationally.
If you're implying I'm a blind Scott fanboy then I categorically reject your assertion. Scott's just a smart guy who approaches a variety of topics from a rationalist perspective. Nothing more, nothing less. He's certainly capable of making mistakes, and the fact that he hosts a list of them is part of what makes him unique. He benefits from critiques like everyone else.
The issue with Alex he mixes good criticism, i.e. "here's where your analysis is wrong, and here's the stats to back it up", with bad criticism, i.e. "rationalism wounded" and other such nonsense attempting to draw meta-level conclusions on Scott's credibility from limited object-level events.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
But it doesn't actually say that Scott wounds rationalism
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
Sadly, the rationalist community’s biggest contribution to pandemic discourse was to assist in shutting down a promising treatment
The damage rationalists have done to pandemic discourse darkens my heart.
his essay is still there, & its impact on "independent thinkers" permanent.
If even rationalists are responding to your careful analysis and argumentation with vague notions of tone and "bad faith," it suggests to me that they don't have a rational defense of their position. Whether they are or not, they appear to be acting as if they are wounded.
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
In earlier discussions on art AI, I expressed significant skepticism in AI generated art for two reasons:
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There was little proof that NSFW images could be done well, which was where a large part of online art commissions come from, and which indicated that there were likely some issues related to being able to get images of things you actually wanted instead of just taking whatever the AI would generate for you. Copying a human face in a portrait-style setup is one thing, but capturing bodies in various sexual positions without ending up with a cthuloid mess of dicks or at least falling hard into the uncanny valley is quite another.
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The lack of stability, i.e. that it was hard to create a character or theme, and then change little bits of it at a time, e.g. create an image of a person eating an apple, and then also being able to create an image of that same person sitting and reading a book.
The things I've seen on /hdg/ have pretty convincingly proven to me that issue #1 has been solved, or never existed in the first place. I've seen some pessimistic takes that it requires tons of time and 98% of it is garbage, but the fact that random anons on 4chan can generate the level of quality I've seen means AI art has advanced quite a bit more than I thought it had.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
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What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
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What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
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What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Russia hasn't used much of its airforce because it doesn't have robust airforce capabilities, and isn't really able to conduct enough SEAD to get through Ukrainian air defenses consistently. It's used planes in occasional situations, and there are multiple confirmations of them being shot down.
At this point, Russia has used basically all of its conventional assets. Assertions that it's holding a bunch of stuff back (e.g. best units, best tanks, air force, etc) are not credible.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.
You act like the West is a monolith of support for wokism, but there's no reason a country couldn't be a conservative, Western, capitalistic democracy where the voters simply reject the excesses of the left. History and economics shows this is one of the best setups a country can have, actually.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
"Tankies" in the traditional sense barely exist any more. However, there's still plenty of generically pro-Russian Westerners. They tend to be right wing as other comments have pointed out, and they simply go through mental gymnastics of interpreting Putin's "denazification" of Ukraine as actually the complete opposite, i.e. it's it's a holy crusade against leftist elements, in particular immigration, feminism, and transgenderism. I have no idea how they resolve the cognitive dissonance between their own interpretation and Russian state narratives.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The pro-surrender side which says the West and Ukraine need to capitulate ASAP to avert a nuclear war, really, really needs to address the problems that incentivizing nuclear blackmail this way are guaranteed to have. I've seen plenty of articles and posts like the one you listed, and none of them get into this issue despite it being extremely important and despite it being brought up as a response to basically every one of these articles. It's getting aggravating at this point. It's not like there are no responses at all, but the pro-surrender side just blissfully pretends like the issue doesn't exist and that nobody has even thought of it before.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. Are you implying they don't think acceding to nuclear blackmail will have any major implications for proliferation? If so, they should state that explicitly and give some evidence to back their claim.
Concerns over AI art continue to be vastly overblown. Such art is only really threatening things where the graphic design budget is next to $0, e.g. stuff like placeholder art or stock images. AI art continues to be terrible at generating pornographic images where a lot of freelance artists' requests come from. It also has trouble maintaining a coherent style across multiple images, so needing a set of themed images becomes problematic. Some of these issues might be solved in the near term... or they might not be. Remember that people were extremely gung ho about the future of stuff like motion controls and VR in gaming, and they thought that just a little bit more time and investment would fix the major issues. These predictions have not panned out, however, and both technologies remain a gimmick. You should likewise be skeptical of claims that artists are going to be out of work en-masse any time soon.
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