Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been.
I'd be interested for someone much more qualified than myself to make the steelman for US intelligence being quite competent, actually. We rarely hear about the successes, failures are isolated incidents that cause major scandals and garner a lot of news coverage. It's 'common knowledge' that the US government is massively incompetent. All of which leaves me itching to make a contrarian take.
US intelligence publicly told everyone that Russia was about to invade Ukraine weeks before it happened. My recollection is that people on this very board laughed at their stupidity and incompetence. Early in the conflict, the Russian military was so riddled with American spies that we knew exactly when and where they were going to strike. We had a spy so close to Putin he was sending photos of the papers on Putin's desk, which we extracted in 2017. We used to have major sources high up in the CCP, although I have no idea what the current situation is like.
This is just the stuff that gets leaked to news orgs. Who knows what goes on behind the scenes? And how can you expect to make an accurate assessment of their capabilities by looking at the tip of the iceberg that's visible to the public?
to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
It's remarkable to me how often the comparison to 9/11 has been made here and in the broader conversation, yet nobody has ever bothered to carry that thought through to it's conclusion. Yes, the direct analogy where hundreds/thousands of Americans/Israelis were murdered by terrorists in their home countries is obvious. But why stop there and leave out the fact that the next twenty years saw a massive belligerent overcorrection and self-destructive wars abroad? Wars that nobody, even conservatives who presumably voted for Bush twice and raked Obama over the coals for being soft on terror/homeland security, will currently defend? It's all too easy to see a future where Israel will regret the actions it takes over the next few months as the entire nation is baying for Palestinian blood.
The local growing consensus around what is effectively genocide is also a mistake. Your personal DR pro-HBD/white supremacist bubbles are blinding you to what the normies think. If Israel 'does a genocide,' as people here have been saying, they're finished in the eyes of normies for at least a few decades. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy inherent in a nation and people who spent decades saying 'never again' will have changed their tune to 'never again, to us.'
The funniest thing about this entire debacle has been the overnight dissolution of the standard battle lines. Suddenly pro-Palestine leftist protestors flashing swastikas at Jews are shoulder-to-shoulder with stormfront White Nationalists. Center-left/center-right politicians and normies are largely united in condemning Hamas, hypocrisy around military aid and foreign interventionism be damned. Even here, there's a consensus that 'the media' is biased trash written by subhuman retards who were too low-IQ to code or do STEM in college, but half the comments claim they're bought and paid for by our Jewish overlords whilst the other half accuse them of institutional capture by pro-Palestinian leftists who will propagandize every civilian casualty due to a righteous freedom bomb dropped by the IDF. Neither bother to do a cursory check of the NYT cover page which would largely falsify both claims, but there's also nobody left to push back or call them on it.
Lest I be accused of being a dirty Muslim-loving commie anti-semite, I made the conscious decision to do my best to ignore Israel/Palestine over a decade ago after watching protestors rage at each other on a weekly basis at my college campus. Obligatory Hamas bad, rape and murder of civilians bad, what happened to innocent civilians in Israel was an atrocity, by all means go decapitate Hamas. But be careful in how far you go in the heat of the moment.
Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism.
Good. Why should I shed a tear for the passing of ethnic favoritism in my home country? I'll take national unity over sinecures and in-grouping based on religion anyday.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.
Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?
I won't able to comment on most of your post objectively for obvious reasons, but I'll at least try to answer some of your questions.
Downtown Montreal is full of taller buildings, but definitely seem like they stopped building after 1970s. Seemed to coincide with the first French language laws?
It coincides with with language laws as you note. It also coincides with a terrorist group kidnapping and murdering government officials and a couple dozen incidents of bombs in mailboxes in Montreal. Then the two independence referenda in 1980 and 1995 really drove the nail in the coffin, with the second referendum to separate from Canada failing by 1% of the vote (50.58% remain versus 49.42% leave). The voter turnout was a shocking 93.5%. It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction. The premier went on television after losing the referendum to say the following:
"It's true we've been defeated, but basically by what?" Mr. Parizeau asked in his concession speech. "By money and the ethnic vote."
But I suppose I'm veering into dangerous territory. Back to the story.
The 60s and 70s were a boomtime for Montreal, when they had the world expo as well as the olympics resulting in a lot of new major infrastructure like bridges, the metro system and an artificial island/amusement park. Probably other things I'm ignorant of.
The factors mentioned above also led to a steady bleeding of educated anglo professionals. It's difficult to get exact numbers, but about 250,000-500,000 seems in the ballpark]. This isn't insubstantial in a province with a population of 8.5 million, and the impact is again probably heightened by the fact that these were many of the wealthier residents.
Which brings us to the next point...French people were probably right that Anglos fucked them over economically for decades if not centuries. Some of my family members in my parents generation would casually make comments about how they were too stupid/uneducated to perform the better-paying jobs anyways. They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true.
Which brings me to my last point, it absolutely has been a rather gentle ethnic cleansing. Most of my family and friends have left, myself included. Those that remain speak french professionally. The laws that were passed would 100% be unconstitutional in the US, hell, they're unconstitutional in Canada too but when the Supreme Court struck them down Quebec basically said fuck you and nothing happened. I guess they didn't want to [deploy the army again] and/or spark another referendum. Francophones scoff and say anglos are just whining about having to learn French, when after all, they need to learn English. But it's more than that - it's feeling distinctly unwelcome at every level of government and society, it's an inability to integrate into social groups as you point out, it's the French Karens who report you to the language police for speaking English in the workplace (if you have a public facing job).
All that said, if this was the cost of national unity, I'll still take it. It seems to have worked; desire for independence is much lower in the younger generation.
You mentioned the schooling language thing. Seemed like you either have to prove you already got anglo schooling or go private school to avoid French schooling. Seemed like more choice before.
You can only go to an English school if your parents went to an English school in Canada. There used to be a loophole where private schools were exempt so that all the French elites could send their children to English prep schools, but it was closed relatively recently. The Anglo school boards are bleeding students hard and downsizing, closing or giving half their classrooms to French school boards. In other 2-3 generations I expect they won't exist assuming nothing else comes along to kick over the game board. McGill could have been a great college if they hadn't been repeatedly kneecapped by the French government trying to promote UDM and UQAM.
From a self preservation aspect for their Francophone culture, language, and identity, these policies all seemed to work. And Im impressed they work so well...Overall: impressed by the choices made there and the results. Seems like something other places that wanna strengthen their cultural identity can learn from. It would probably work if they have the will to enforce similar cultural / language rules and the unity to endure the economic costs.
Quebec is propping up their population with immigration. Back-of-the-envelope math seems like it's 2-3 times the rate of immigration in the United States, although not sure how illegal immigrants change that picture. You're conflating culture with language, however. Quebec seems worse at assimilating immigrants than the US - they may speak the language, but I don't think most of them share values and they largely stay within their ethnic groups.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point. Bringing top-tier scientists to the US, keeping them here and convincing them to buy into our system should be a national priority. That being said, depending on precisely what you mean, I disagree with:
The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people.
Chinese intelligence services are clearly targeting Chinese-born nationals who have joined firms doing cutting-edge work not only in defense but any economically valuable industry:
Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.
In the life sciences, it's relatively easy (or was relatively easy, once upon a time) to win investment from Chinese VCs but you might notice a Chinese firm doing the exact same thing as you materialize soon afterwards. Unfortunately, it's difficult for me to find quantitative data on the subject to convince you that it isn't a witch-hunt, but it certainly seems quokka-ish to imagine that the Chinese want to play fair in this one single economic arena - particularly given that their stated goals say otherwise.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
What comes next?
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.
I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:
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Huge increase in the amount of data available
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Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones
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Significant increases in education levels
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AI
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Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list
All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.
For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.
The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.
Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
What do you all think?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here?
Virtually nobody is satisfied with the moderation here, but for a plethora of different reasons. Which probably means it's as close to optimal as we can get.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of respect for all the new people who decided to be mods.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
This is a feature, not a bug. The problem was that we tried to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
The strength of our system is it's inherent antipathy towards totalitarian control or abuse of human rights in the service of some end, however well-intentioned we think that end may be. The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world. The fact that the American people doesn't have the stomach for re-education camps, massive censorship and generational occupations of foreign countries is again a strength rather than a weakness. We shouldn't try, and we should actively prevent other nations from trying where the realities on the ground allow.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
What you're describing seems unlikely to work without resorting to heavy-handed authoritarian policies like forced labor - what will you do when you offer subsidies to Amazon to hire people from low-income households, and nobody takes you up on the deal? Not to mention in some ways your program already exists considering that many low-wage workers are already heavily subsidized by the government.
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty, but sacrificing the ideals the West was built on to become China-lite is not worth it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up.
I had a longer post written, but I just don't have the heart to argue about wokeness anymore. So here's an abridged version: I've been through two biotech companies at this point, so I've had exposure to maybe 60-70 young scientists who should be at the peak of their idealist phases. PhD and postdoc at some premier institutions in the USA. I've asked around, and a grand total of zero people at either company have read any serious amount of science fiction. A couple fellow PhD students did, the CSO at the second company mentioned having read Dune and a Game of Thrones in high school, I doubt any of the faculty I interacted with did. Most people don't read at all. All of this makes me sad, and lonely.
There are plenty of highly profitable activities given the existing incentive structure that do virtually nothing to move the needle scientifically or in terms of actual benefit to society - go make another monoclonal antibody to some target people haven't tried yet, or shuffle around different combinations of checkpoint blockade, or make another oncology small molecule that extends mean progression-free survival by three months. You'll probably make a boatload of money if you get a lucky pull of the slot machine lever.
So, yes. Definitely agree that we've lost the ability to dream big and be ambitious in the right ways. Don't know how to fix it when I need 7-8 figure investments to do even basic projects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I'll preface this by saying I agree with the concerns around GoF research and that it is a real problem.
Now, to add some context: This is the preprint in question.
Don't trust '100% mortality' hyped up by a news org, it's the equivalent of hack tech writers claiming '100% cancer cure rate' in some mouse model. You can get '100% mortality' with a high enough dose of relatively benign rhinoviruses that just cause colds in humans. In this preprint, the authors infected with 500,000 PFUs (plaque forming units, supposedly one PFU = 1 virus). This may not bring much comfort to people, but the LD50 of a mouse-adapted stain of COVID is 1000 TCID50 (similar to PFUs), or two orders of magnitude lower. It's hard to get a direct comparison, but here's another paper reporting an LD50 of 1000 PFUs in ferrets.
You're probably not going to die next year of GX_P2V infection. Beware articles in the New York Post throwing red meat to the base.
I don't have time to do this topic justice, but as for 'banning GoF research' - this would not have been classified as GoF research under most paradigms. Wild virus isolates were passaged in cell culture; this is simply how you propagate virus for study. Generally, propagation in vitro attenuates viruses and makes them less pathogenic, modulo some cases (admittedly similar to this one) where you may pass viruses adapted to one species in cells from another.
We produce a lot of vaccines and gene therapy vectors this way, although even those examples contain multitudes. Maybe you want a carveout for very well understood processes that we've been doing for years, but you'd have to think very carefully about crafting it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Not to keep ragging on you, but does it give you any pause that your proposal massively advantages your own community in terms of political power while disenfranchising those you dislike? Are you impartially proposing something that would better society or do you have a fairly significant conflict of interest?
It would be like me proposing that only people with advanced degrees could vote and rationalizing it in technocratic terms about how we're the most capable, intelligent, whatever parts of society. A master's degree gets you one vote, a PhD gets you 5, people with dual degrees (MD/PhD, etc) get 10, whatever. Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
12d ago
Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
Are you suggesting that the existence of Ukraine is an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO? The fighting today may center around the east, but the Russian invasion was clearly aimed at decapitating the Ukrainian regime and either installing a puppet government or annexing it outright. If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
Since you seem concerned about the right to self-determination of Ukrainians, let me ask you which course of action better serves that goal - arming them so they can defend themselves, or paternalistically telling them 'Sorry, we've all decided your cause is hopeless, now you have to take peace on whatever terms you can get it. Good luck!' People below have argued that Boris Johnson (and presumably the US was on the same page at the time) sabotaged early peace talks - I'd agree with them that this was bad, and Ukraine should be able to choose for themselves - but others have linked polls showing strong support among the Ukrainian public for the war.
As for your language about Ukrainians just being our hapless puppets that we carelessly throw into the meatgrinder, I feel like you've fallen for Putin's narrative. The west has a propensity to believe that they are the only actors on the world stage with any kind of agency; see the oceans of ink spilled about how the west is solely responsible for every conflict and humanitarian crisis in the past 100 years whether they've been directly involved or not. The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
Lastly, for those complaining about the atrophied defense production capacity of the west and shipping money off to Ukraine: two thirds of the 60 billion is earmarked to be spent with American defense manufacturers. If your goal is increasing defense manufacturing capacity in the west, how would you do it if not spending money on domestic defense manufacturing?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.
The infant mortality rate was 46% a scant 200 years ago. Presumably it would reach that again in the absence of modern medicine and sanitation. Literally every demographic is heavily dependent on government and corporate spending.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Hilary had all of those as well and lost just the same.
Define democrats winning in a 'walkover' and conditional on Trump being the republican nominee I'll take the other side of that bet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.
My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ.
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Seconded, as well as the mods doing God's work, as ever.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
If you're retiring in your prime, maybe. More Boxer less Napoleon.
The path of least resistance for talented people is DINKing your way to FIRE at 40 and maybe getting a golden retriever or a couple of cats. Playing video games, smoking weed, phoning it in at your job (if you have to work) and taking a couple months of vacation a year.* I know an unfortunately large number of people who fall into this bin.
This is very much not the behavior we want to incentivize. We need people to do the hard work of having children and raising them well - or perhaps more realistically, decreasing the financial and social burden, but that's another story. We'd all be poorer if Elon Musk had spent his 20s/30s blitzed in Ibiza doing lines of coke off hookers, or whatever it is fun people do at raves. The American frontier wasn't tamed by childless, unemployed scions of wealthy families, good times create weak men, insert your preferred aphorism about rich, lazy fucks here.
*I'm not so tedious as to argue that vacation itself is immoral, but c'mon. Everyone should try to accomplish something worthwhile with their lives, everyone should see what their body is physically capable of in their prime and we need to cultivate a sense of ambition and civic responsibility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
I still enjoy them. When getting into a topic I'm completely ignorant of, I'll just walk down the relevant stacks, grab books that catch my eye and skim a few sections or pages. I often find tangentially related books that I never would have otherwise if I had just searched 'Chinese history,' say, on Amazon. This was particularly valuable when I was a child and ended up with a cornucopia of books on the wild west, the Yukon and California gold rushes, the world wars, etc., none of which I even knew existed at such a young age. I feel much more nostalgic about public libraries than school libraries so this article doesn't evoke much of a reaction, but the thought of losing the former feels like a gut punch.
I also still use them to study or work if I'm not at the lab/between jobs. IMO, nothing beats a quiet, secluded desk buried in the middle of the stacks for focus.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.
Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
Don’t take her outbursts personally. And don’t hold them against her. They are, after all, completely out of her control. Remember, it’s the hormones talking - and crying for no apparent reason. Avoid pointing out her moods, too. Though she’s powerless to control them, she’s probably also all too aware of them. And chances are, she’s no happier about them than you are. It’s no picnic being pregnant.
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Subject: Trump MORTIFYING loss
This is incredible:
Since Donald Trump announced another hateful, divisive campaign for President…
THOUSANDS of Democrats have stepped up and chipped in to our Defeat Trumpism Fund to ensure he NEVER returns to power.
For that, I’m so grateful.
But my team just alerted me that we’re still 2,403 gifts short of our goal before the End of Week Deadline.
I don’t want to beg, but this couldn’t be more important. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a statement Monday morning. If we CRUSH our goal before this deadline, we’ll show Trump, Republicans, and the ENTIRE country that our Democrats have what it takes to defeat him and his MAGA allies once again. So I’m asking you to be one of the final 2,403 Democrats I need to chip in so we can start organizing to DEFEAT Trump and every last one of his extremist allies. Please, will you chip in $15?
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand.
The null hypothesis is that very few people care about these books, not that there's a government conspiracy to stop you from reading dangerous ideas and tend to their happy flock of sheeple. The fact that someone is willing to spend 200$ on a rare book does not mean that the market will bear the printing of tens of thousands of new copies of said book.
I can find a bunch of books that fit your methodology, but unfortunately didn't make your list; do you think Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story being out of print means that TPTB are terrified you'll start rioting if you read about the sex lives of teenagers in the 80s? Birds of Britain has some pretty women I guess. Maybe if you read Promise me tomorrow you'd think poorly of Nora Roberts, and we can't have that. Here's a couple dozen more you can add.
Then of course there’s Nabarkov’s Lolita (1955)… Which yes, is a Barnes and Noble “Banned book” but 1) It is actually banned in several countries and 2) It will still make you squirm, its the story of a man sexually abusing an underaged girl told in 1st person, it has been on my to-read list forever, ever since Christopher Hitchen’s praised its black humor in an essay I read years ago, but I’ve yet to get around to it.
Not to pile on other people saying the same thing, but I literally borrowed this from my library a year ago for a book club a decade ago. You aren't missing much.
Yet, I don’t know about you, but the Siren song of forbidden knowledge is too much to resist. I dug through too many dusty rare book libraries looking for lost or evil works…
I'm genuinely curious - broadly speaking, what do you think you've learned? If you were trying to sell me on your favorite book or two from your list, what would they be and what do you think I'd gain from reading them?
I believe what you're describing could happen. The closest analogy I can think of is companies black boxing equipment to prevent you from working on it yourself:
Or someone posted the crazy story about the trains in Poland. I'm too lazy to find their writeup on TheMotte, but hopefully this reddit post will point you in the right direction if you missed it.
That being said, you're conflating congress and private industry under the umbrella of busybodies:
Tech companies have a clear profit motive to force you to buy their software, same way that John Deere has a clear profit motive to stop you from repairing their tractors when they can charge you 800$ to plug in a wire themselves. They're not afraid of you shitposting about your waifu LLMs on reddit, they want you to buy the latest and shittier version of Windows, Now With More Advertisements And Less Functionality. It's the Suits, not the HR and DEI consultants.
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