Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
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
1mo 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.
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
1mo ago
Any other incentives people can think of?
I think it's kinda "I want to get Biden reelected", but as a kind of epiphenomenal second-order effect. Even if you are not a leftist ideologue, you may perceive that your superiors / friends / funding board members are leftist ideologues, and you suspect you will get more social capital (or actual capital) if you tell these people what they want to hear, so you cherrypick your metrics in order that they show what these people want to hear, and, lo, "Statistics show the economy is doing great actually".
There was an opposite-valence situation in the UK a year or so ago, where the economic indicators were good but all the leftist journos were going "How can the economy be good under this Conservative Brexit government, they must be gaming the metrics somehow"?! Perhaps the civil servants who staff the Treasury Department / Office of National Statistics are just good at statistical brown-nosing, whatever country it is and whatever party's in power.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.
By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.
My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".
I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review.
And videogame journalists have the whole game to review, but a recurring feature of videogame reviews is that the reviewer obviously played a game with 100 hours of content for about 2 hours and then wrote their assignment.
People are lazy and cut corners in their jobs, c'est le vie.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo 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".
The run-of-the-mill progressive does not consider striving and can-do attitudes an important part of success
Yeah, it's this. The median progressive thinks that "a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality" is a bad-faith rhetorical device drempt up by right-wingers as an excuse to cut welfare. The progressive solution to black and/or female underachievement is affirmative action and redistribution, not inculcating a culture of grit and determination. Self-reliance is suspicious, not laudable, to them: believing yourself to be master of your own fate is heterodoxy to the left's no-man-is-an-island axiom.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical?
I'm pretty certain it's this? I get the sense that mass incarceration + deprogramming + filtering out fifth columnists would be about a million times more expensive than just shooting everyone. And also wouldn't work. Western governments at least try to filter their immigrants for "not psycho killers" but lo and behold, you still get machete beheadings and trucks of peace every other month on the streets of London & Paris.
Say what you want about just making political undesirables dig their own trench and then shooting them en masse in the back of the head a'la Katyn, but that is at least affordable.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Not particularly easy to get through state legislatures, though. To actually pass an amendment it doesn't have to be popular with normies, it has to be popular with politicians.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials.
This only kicks the can down the road, though. Whites can squeeze out one extra generation of PMC jobbing by jobbing specifically as agitators for their own replacement, but when their children come up against a hiring agent thoroughly steeped in the parents' propaganda, there'll be no cushy jobs for John Jr.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo 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.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
He was in the equivalent of a supermax prison.
...in a country with a smaller economy than Italy's (notorious for losing mafia bosses from supermax). Russia can't afford to secure its jails from determined infiltrators.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr 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
6mo ago
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
The countries that actually influence US policy prefer to direct the golem rather than render it inert.
It's really not any worse than various progressive ideas that are currently being pushed by academia
Exactly. Someone who believes the Earth was created in 7 days, 6000 years ago is substantially less dangerous (and, indeed, I would argue is substantially less delusional) than someone who believes whitey's oppression of minorities is the source of disparate racial outcomes.
EDIT: Apparently the new speaker believes both, so, heh, touché.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future
Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.
But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.
And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.
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:
-
The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
-
The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
-
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 :^)"
-
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
-
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
-
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
3mo ago
Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair
I think your examples of "the left policing their own" are not examples of that at all. Both of these are better understood as examples of the Israeli lobby policing US speech, not as examples of the mainstream left policing its own extremists.
Mapping the Palestine question as a typical intra-left issue and then generalising it to infer that the mainstream left is broadly reining in the extremists is a bad model. More convincing would be some prominent examples of BLM types or authoritarian covid-safetyists or mass immigrant activists, getting overruled by moderates. But I don't think you're gonna find 'em.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing
I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.
I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
Because it’s a man’s fault if women his own age refused to date him when he was younger?
Well... yes? The implication is (both from a broad feminist narrative and in this specific case) that if you can't get dates from women your own age, this is because they can see the red flags of your unsavoury character. The solution is therefore to Be Better and self-improve until women your own age DO want to date you. The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.
t. Man dating a woman 13 years younger than him right now.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
He was reading a book on the subway. He knew the definition of the term feminism. He moved (even with a smile) when he stood in the way of someone at the bread shelf at Kiwi. He apologized for interrupting someone.
This is a list of things that women have told you were the things that charmed them.
I hope you can agree that a person may worry she'd be thought of as superficial were she to admit (to herself or others) that her thought process was "He was jacked and dressed like he's rich".
As described by Robin Hanson in Elephant In The Brain, what we think are our motives are rarely our actual motives. Add on to this the social opprobrium that may come from admitting certain motives to others, and self-reported testimony on this topic becomes highly suspect.
He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.
This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:
if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation
...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?
We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?
I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence
When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says
...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.
"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?
The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.
If Klaus Schwab and his more successful attendees don't want this future, it's only because they haven't played out their own beliefs far enough in their own heads, not because it's anathema to them. It will be their intent if it's not already; they just haven't game-planned that far. This is precisely why the rightoid memes are believed - because they're credible, because they're consistent with what we know about these people, because they're coherent with the visions of the future which they have stated publicly.
Trying to tar belief in these conspiracies as "embarrassing" is just shaming tactics, and you'll not "tut tut how gauche and low status" me out of them by making irrelevant points that Klaus Schwab himself is kind of a loser (to the extent that a man with a million dollar salary can be a loser). Yeah, he's not in the Illuminati, but his opinions are representative of the heads of government that come to his ski resort, who are.
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.
More options
Context Copy link