Corvos
8mo ago
To be clear, I am speculating that a group descended by several generations from people taken captive after being conquered in war, or as the result of a successful raid, are likely to have worse outcomes than the children of the people who won those wars and committed those raids. Do you disagree?
I am not asserting that losing a war brands a group with the Mark of Perpetual Loserdom.
You are being utilitarian, I am being deontological. It doesn’t matter who benefits, it’s not a moral way to handle your employees.
To put it another way, there are many, many things that a manager can do which is in the best interests of their employer (corruption, assassination, faking emission tests) but being good business doesn’t make those actions morally acceptable.
Corvos
13d ago
The latter informs the former, though. I'm not saying they're literally too stupid to understand, they just won't explicitly think about the connection between the money they're hoping to get for the house and the money young people are spending on housing unless pushed quite hard.
Cold Turkey. It’s like a more powerful version of StayFocusd: you can block arbitrary combinations of applications and websites on your PC on a schedule or in a bunch of other ways. So lock the computer at bedtime, no Steam on weekdays, whatever.
——
Brain used to be pretty good - the infinite mindmap software. But in general the time and annoyance of making and organising notes has always been a deal-breaker for me. I scribble on PDFs and just try to read as much as possible instead. Is Obsidian that useful?
Corvos
2mo ago
One of Scott's grants has to do with the genetics of altering / removing pain receptors, I belive.
Corvos
2mo ago
People mostly take criminal actions with the expectation that they will benefit. I am suggesting that people try to smuggle much more drugs into America than Japan because they think they will be able to sell them.
If dealers keep getting arrested trying to sell this merchandise, and customers are too scared to buy it, nobody will bother shipping.
In short, I propose the causality is the reverse of what you suggest.
(I.e. the problem is not that heavy enforcement works in Japan but wouldn’t in US, it’s that American attitudes cripple enforcement.)
Corvos
2mo ago
The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke.
To be clear, I would classify both of these as malicious election interference, especially the latter. Yes, the news made its way out eventually but it was prevented from going viral. The combination of preventing mainstream outlets from discussing it and wheeling out someone from the FBI to lie about it being fake turned a legitimate and hugely damaging story into a wacko conspiracy theory. It was a close election, I wouldn’t be surprised if that and a couple of other things tipped it.
These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion.
Different people respond to different forms of media. I know people who are influenced by, say, radio vox pops even though I certainly wouldn’t.
Corvos
2mo ago
True, thanks for the pushback. I wonder how much of this is downstream of having a healthy grassroots community. The British Left, which has an extensive set of community organisations and publishers behaves on the same kind of way (see ‘the countryside is racist’) but the right mostly doesn’t as far as I can see.
(Instead they all stick their fingers in their ears and chant ‘this is fine, this is fine, everything is fine, nothing is wrong, I can’t hear you lalalalala’).
I think it came up at some point in the last six months of Astral Codex but I had a quick scan and didn't see it. I still think it's true but take with a pinch of salt.
EDIT: he mentioned it again in an article this week. See parent comment.
Corvos
3mo ago
I made an effort post describing my experiences here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184826?context=8#context
Corvos
3mo ago
I hadn’t thought about the gendered aspect but you’re right. The Swiss 18 weeks seems like a much more viable form of conscription.
Corvos
3mo ago
Fair enough. It’s a common perspective and I wanted to provide a counter-proposal.
Going to push back a bit on "the early 90s [were] the true golden age of the West". The way I remember it, there was a lot of abundance but also a deep ideological conformity and a corrosive cynicism. I remember the 00s better but I remember it as a time that was resolutely anti-ideological, such that any hint of sincerity was mocked and any possibility that we hadn't discovered the only philosophy man would ever need was almost incomprehensible. The great questions of life were regarded as solved or irrelevant.
Our current crisis is unpleasant in many ways but at least we know the wokeness exists. It's something that one can recognise when implemented, it's something that you can identify with or stand against (even if one is afraid to stand against it publicly). There is far more, and better, free thought now than there was in the 90s and 00s.
Corvos
4mo ago
Necroing this due to AAQC, but have you had any luck getting GPT-style AI to do good interpolation? I've tried, but it doesn't like bridging fields very much - you really have to push it and say 'how might this narrow sub-field be relevant to my question', otherwise you just get a standard google summary.
Corvos
5mo ago
Your scores:
- Care 75%
- Loyalty 61%
- Fairness 89%
- Authority 67%
- Purity 69%
- Liberty 72% Your strongest moral foundation is Fairness. Your morality is closest to that of a Conservative.
I guess this is right. Feels close to what I was raised to believe were classic British values. Loyalty surprisingly low.
Corvos
7mo ago
Modern monetary theory does actually lead to inflation, outsourcing your manufacturing to China is not a free win and immigration reduces wages.
To give three examples where economists sagely assured us that the obvious conclusions were wrong and then events (global inflation, hollowing out of American manufacturing, the big rise in worker bargaining power when immigrants couldn’t be brought over during Covid) made it clear that they were wrong. I’m not saying that all economic theory is wrong, any more than all psychology is wrong, but I don’t see how you can look at the history of failed predictions and see it as anything more than a very flawed science.
Corvos
7mo ago
But each person who buys a house is taken out of the pool of would-be renters, so how is the shortage worse? The number of houses is the same, the number of people living in them is the same.
don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation
How are these people better off renting rather than paying off a mortgage? If they don’t have money or documents they’re screwed anyway. A certain number of people are not going to be able to manage in either system and will either be homeless or in government housing. I don’t see how that varies between our two scenarios.
The final about needing to move house regularly is a concern for me too. I speculate that a bigger market with more buyers and sellers might make things easier in this regard but I can’t know for sure. And at least these people would be able to get a property when they settle down rather than have spent a lifetime subsidising other people’s.
Corvos
8mo ago
In evidence against myself, all government departments have now been dropped from Stonewall's list of morally upstanding employers. Various components of the NHS are still on there though, as are many quangos and all of the regional governments (NI, Scotland, Wales).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/18/stonewall-removes-government-departments-top-100-employers/ (paywalled)
Corvos
8mo ago
I’m not sure how well this would work, at least without considerable cunning on the part of the cancellers. Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true. You can still make it work by going in waves - either randomly or increasing in severity - but do cancellation mobs have the coordination and self control to make that viable?
Corvos
8mo ago
It makes far more sense in an Amazon warehouse, where what’s needed is a functional human body, than in academia, which is highly prestigious and where your output depends heavily on your specific background, interests and talent. The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.
It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.
This, or the living wage, works for me. As you say, the difficulty is getting there.
The enslaved Africans weren’t hanging around being stupid and problematic, getting underfoot, necessitating some productive use for them.
Presumably the African slavers who forced them into slavery and sold them felt otherwise.
In all seriousness, every pre-industrial civilisation relied on some system of forcing people to do back-breaking physical labour. Africa had slavery since Ancient Egypt invaded Nubia, in Europe we had peasants and serfs. Now we have robotics (lit. Workers in Czech) and machines. Soon we will have AI.
From where I’m standing, the devil’s bargain is importing an ethnically distinct forced labour class. Once you do, even post industrialisation it will be very clear who was on which side of the metaphorical or literal whip and those wounds aren’t going to heal with time. Especially when the forces that put A on top of B end up not changing.
Losing a war kind of makes you untermenschen by default. One theory for why descendants of slavery underperform, say, Nigerian immigrants is that they are the children of the people who were easily conquered and didn’t provide much utility to their neighbours.
More options
Context Copy link