Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
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User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?
Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Came here to post this. Rescinding PhD offers is throwing-toys-out-of-the-pram tier malicious compliance: and their decisions of who to cut will likely be based on which student they think can most convincingly cry in a CNN interview about how Trump crushed their family’s dreams of escaping poverty through studying hard.
It’ll damage the university in the long run and it would be much easier for them to cut administrators, but there’s a Principal-Agent-Problem here where the it’s the Admin department who decides what cuts to make and they’re sure as hell not going to be making them in the Admin department.
And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.
How is it “fair” that 1950s Chinese communists who despised America, get to send their grandchildren to occupy (and profit from) the top 0.1% of prestige occupations in America, which is the patrimony of the very 1950s Americans they despised?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
7mo ago
Russia is not winning the war because it is taking and may keep territory in the Donbas, it is losing the war because Russia itself framed the war not as a conflict between itself and Ukraine
Ok, question: did Shogunate Japan lose the First Imjin War? They occupied Korea, but by your logic they lost because Hideyoshi had once told his retainers that his ambition unironically included “world conquest”?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
Can you give three examples of their fresh bold takes on policies which Dems usually tiptoe around?
How are they on the JQ?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
Can you imagine Ben Franklin telling politicians they don't have to accept the result of a vote because the Pennsylvania Gazette wrote absurd lies about the candidates?
No, but I can imagine 2017 Democrats yelling “not my President” ad infinitum, and trying to impeach on tendentious grounds for an entire term.
Vance gave the right answer here. He should have refused to certify the election - not because he had just cause, but because he who does not fight fire with fire, specious lawfare with specious lawfare, is a sucker.
They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth.
As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too anti-white
I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too pro-white, insofar as fifty years of argument-by-connotation has given us the meme of “Minorities good, majorities bad”, and therefore calling nonwhites the majority and whites the minority is not a linguistic change that the Cathedral is going to condone.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas. …However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6.
This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?
At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.
It also seems like an effort of sophistry to avoid the question of “how to get Republicans to accept the election results” by playing around with definitions until the people with legitimate reasons to distrust the election don’t count as Republicans any more, ergo dusts hands job done.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?
This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.
Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.
They actually aren’t, though.
For one, there’s the halo effect: i.e. it’s natural for humans of both genders to assume that a person successful in one field is also successful in another. So ‘success as a leader of men’ will prejudice women positively towards such a man on other axes, and ‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically. I’ve been reading a history of Italy lately, and this is pretty much Berlusconi’s entire (winning) strategy both in politics and in Bunga Bunga.
But we don’t even require such a Fully General Argument as the halo effect to demonstrate the thesis - assessing it in detail also makes it seem like there’ll be general “popularity” skills rather than gender-audience specific ones. Being a good conversationalist, being extroverted, openness to new experiences, gregariousness - all traits which will improve one’s success both as a leader and as a lover.
I don’t dispute that some traits like “Autistic knowledge of Gundam anime” is male leadership material in specific (one might say contrived) situations, like choosing a team captain when entering a Gundam trivia quiz, but in the vast majority of cases, Chad gets both the girl and the crown because both genders want the same thing.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?
If a man is sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a leader of men, he is also sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a fucker of women.
because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly.
I think your overall thesis is wrong because I don't think that preventing the lower strata from reproducing will actually improve the wellbeing of the next generation.
There has been much talk of "elite overproduction" previously: the proposition that much of the political malaise of the West lately (and, indeed, Ancient China before any of its periodic civil wars) comes from an oversupply of big-brain literati and an undersupply of prestige jobs to keep them from formenting revolution. Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage. If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity than just letting the Dalits keep reproducing more Dalits.
We live in Omelas already. We need those miserable children. They cannot be excised from the makeup of society. Improving the objective quality of the lower strata will do nothing to improve their actual life-satisfaction and may even be counterproductive, because it'll not improve their relative economic condition but it WILL make them more resentful about it, and better at throwing pipe bombs at the higher strata.
If anything our best course of action is to Brave New World epsilon semi-moron them to be WORSE.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".
As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.
Elections in Texas are rigged because:
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The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
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The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
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Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"
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It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
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And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
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It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show
...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
If they manage to grapple the booster consistently, then we can talk about “inaugurating a new era of space”. But one lucky catch does not an industry renaissance create. And tbh I’m not even convinced that catching the booster is actually that reusable. Sure, it LOOKS more reusable than a smouldering crater on the landing pad or a rusting wreck on the seabed, but is it really? Given how anal the FAA is about testing each sprocket and screw a trillion times, I’m dubious as to whether the inevitable damage caused by just the Working As Designed rocketry stuff of having 15 tonnes of liquid methane lit on fire inside it will allow (physically or legally) a booster to consistently fly for a second time.
I really want my consumer moon vacations, but I’ve been burned so many times before by spess hype that I’m kind of a doomer at this point.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2yr ago
Bodycount is meaningless metric.
What an interesting hypothesis. It'd be a shame if someone were to... test it.
Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?
The answer may surprise you! (Lolno, it won't surprise anyone)
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?
Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.
As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.
If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.
"The government has jet fighters you can't fight them with handguns" is a favoured rhetorical flourish of gun-grabbers anywhere, and it is factually incorrect. AK-47s beat thermonuclear weapons. Because you don't have to kill their army to make occupation untenable, you just have to kill their tax collectors.
I accept that in the post-AGI world this is less clear though, simply because everything is less clear in the post-AGI world. I'm sure the AGI knows that the best way to clear out freedom fighters is with biological weapons, but the government should beware of Principal-Agent problems here: is the government's AGI really trying to help the government put down an insurgency, or is it trying to Kill All Humans?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Women are more than half of our population but research on women’s health has always been underfunded.
He didn't say (or at least you didn't quote) "underfunded relative to men", he just said "underfunded". Is it not that he could have been speaking in an absolute rather than a relative sense?
*DISCLAIMER: I actually believe that his words should be seen as tribal applause lights and so fact-checking them is missing the point, but there you go.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Foolishly I got my news on the opening ceremony from the BBC, who make no mention of any problems or embarrassments at all, and just breathlessly report it as the greatest show on earth.
I would have expected the Anglos at least to be Francophobic enough to tell the truth, but apparently globohomo must not be embarrassed. The Party is always right!
I feel like your model of the situation can’t explain why Daniel’s discord mods resigned en masse even after the truth came out (so there was no way they still did believe the allegations). What is your explanation for their behaviour, if you think the parties in this situation were choosing sides based on what they believed to be true (rather than what they believed to be expeditious)?
Playing that anecdote as an Uno Reverse card won’t work, as a sufficiently motivated counterparty will just respond with “He wasn’t fired, he was still in the academy and drawing a salary, therefore he wasn’t suffering discrimination”.
As a practicing academic myself I wish I’d be able to spend more time on my research by getting banned from my teaching workload, teaching fucking sucks.
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