Crake
Protestant Goodbot
No bio...
User ID: 1203
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
9mo ago
You're talking about using a theoretical technology to prop up a civilization that is, by your description, not functioning. It is unlikely, but beyond that, not a good outcome.
Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.
Then let the civilization collapse. If the civilization collapses, then we would return to the original ecosystem we evolved for, and the problem would be gone. If the requirement of maintaining our current high level of technology is raising children as orphans via institution, then wouldn't it preferable to abandon high technology and start over? What about high technology is so great as to be worth this trade off you offer.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
I think a large contingent of people at the parties I go to drink that much at parties but don’t drink much at all other times. It’s definitely binge drinking but I don’t think it’s that unusual. Alcohol use disorder sure, but it’s common at parties in my experience
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Yeah it's pretty nice on the inside but why build a beach house in San Diego (assuming you're super rich)?. San Diego is beautiful, but California makes it illegal to own the beach itself. If I had unlimited money I'd want to put my beachfront property in places where I can keep the riffraff off my sand. How am I supposed to enjoy the beach and the surf if the paparazzi (or just randos) can legally come onto my beach.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Right but despite it being added for that reason, it became a tool that allowed twitter to privilege certain people while claiming that they were largely impartial.
They attached benefits to verified users that gave those users a substantive advantage in the twitter agora over other users. Then they preferentially gave verification to users with the preferred left leaning (or at least non-challenging) politics, thereby amplifying the voices of cultural figures on the left over everyone else.
They used verification to launder this advantage and cover the political preference it represented. They could defend giving advantages on their platform to some people and not others by saying "well that person needs verification and that other person doesn't" or just "we're not sure if that person needs verification, but it's in the pipeline to be considered". The requirement for verifications were opaque and allowed them to pick and choose at will who got these advantages and refuse to give any explanation for who got them.
If the purpose of verification was just to prevent impersonation then the rules could have been made explicit. However that would mean that a lot of people who are outside the overton window - but not so outside the window as to be deemed bannable - would get verification, which twitter didn't want.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
I know lots of bootcampers at fang companies making more than 200k.
They were the most talented of their classes but they made it.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Can anyone here recommend a specific translation of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics? I read it in college and want to reread it, but when I look at the different editions, I don't know how to pick. Any suggestions from someone with a more extensive philosophy background?
Thanks!
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Yeah but that only helps people with ideological dietary restrictions. It actually is bad for allergy sufferers because legumes are one of the more common allergies. Peanuts and soy being the obvious culprits, but legumes in general being fairly common.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Does it change your mind that DradisPing already said the source of their claim was their recollection? To me that strikes me as enough of a final answer. The other relevant factor for me is that this fell under the election fraud penumbra which in my mind tends to have too many of these types of claims uncritically presented.
Those are both good points. I think you're right that you have justification for posting a top level post about DradisPing's response and are not breaking etiquette.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
That doesn't sound like an insane tactic. Making things uncomfortable for gun owners who have accidentally committed a small offense still makes things uncomfortable for gun owners. How does it not make sense?
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
How could you teach someone how to think without introducing a frame that also teaches them what to think. How to think is a slightly larger space than what to think. But both are indoctrination.
People need a foundation of knowledge that doesn't derive from every individual having to reinvent the wheel, intellectually, but that doesn't come from people's mere curiosity.
I agree that you need to do that to create functional people, but it's still indoctrination. The unfortunate truth is that you need to indoctrinate children.
You need to uncritically build that foundation in people, as an authority figure; from first principles.
First principles are, by their nature, arbitrary. Actually, that's not fair, they aren't arbitrary, they are selected because of their relative usefulness. But they cannot be more or less true than other first principles exactly because they are first principles.
Biblical Truth: Everything the bible says is true. The bible should used as the decider for any dispute. Is a first principle.
The law of non contradiction: "Not both A and not A" or "¬(p ∧ ¬p)". Is another first principle.
There is no way to show that one is fundamentally more true than the other, because they are first principles. You need to use first principles to evaluate the truth of a statement.
Therefore, all education is indoctrination. In many ways, but at the very least in terms of first principles. Which is already going to account for a lot of indoctrination.
Decision making and instrumental intelligence aren't connected for everybody. Most people don't make decisions based on thinking, they are followers of one kind or another. They follow traditional rules, or what the boss tells them, or their priest tells them, or they mimic what the people right next to them are doing. This is totally normal and probably essential for society or any kind of human organization to work.
But those people can still be smart. Even if they will never have an independent thought about what they should do, they could still be incredibly talented scientists or technicians. And we want those people. If you were the boss, you would want smart followers. It's stupid to say "why would we care if a bunch of instrumentally smart people died because they were told to walk off a bridge" - we should care because they have useful skills to put to work. We should try to stop their leaders from telling them to walk off bridges.
I don't think it would even be good to live in a world were everyone thought deeply about what they should do. Such a society would probably be incapable of cooperation at scale.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
Doesn’t seem like whether it is an empire or hegemony matters for this option. Won’t both an empire an a hegemon both find themselves in a dangerous situation if they abandon their dominance?
Can you define what the difference is? Are you saying that an empire is more unipolar?
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
I don't think that is what I said but I am trying to follow your point. morality is an evolved shared thing. It often stops the strong from imposing on the weak. Again, I don't see why that requires it to be objective. It is a cooperative custom.
Regardless of what justice is the strong will impose on the weak. Different cultures will evolve different customs to limit that. Limiting the strong being cruel to the weak seems good to me and also seems to be selected for in the evolution of morality. I think it is a blessing that that tends to happen.
might is not the only factor, culture and argument can affect things certainly, but maybe in this context you would see that as might too. People who can make convincing arguments or manipulate their peers will impose on those who can't
The first post in this chain said that morality is subjective not objective. Which I agree with. morality is crucial but not a material fact. It is based on inherited axioms that are evolved.
The response to that post that I replied to argued that that position leads inexorably to nihilism. Which I disagree with. I believe I can have a substantial moral position while recognizing that it is relative. The post I replied to said:
I think moral relativism collapses into nihilism -- or, if we don't like that word, moral non-realism -- because a principal purpose of ethics is to provide a means of challenging the whims of the powerful with an objective framework, or else justifying their power. If you believe everyone can just make up their own morality and it's exactly as real as yours, you have no means for challenging any perceived mistreatment, or even waging any culture war. To put it bluntly, you have no justification for condemning the Holocaust, because the Nazis were just following their own morality in which the Jews were vermin polluting the land of the volk and that meant they got to kill them. The primary purpose of morality ceases to exist in a puff of logic. That, to me, is a non-real morality.
I don't see why morality can't do the things he wants it to do while being relative.
If I think that the Nazis are bad, which of course I do, I can fight them. Recognizing that my morals are not materially more true than their's doesn't stop me.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
I’m confused. Where does he actually state the non warm up problem? Was it edited?
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
I'm interested, I replied to spookykou, can you tell me if I am misinterpreting you? https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/168128?context=8#context
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
The long-term homeless are unsympathetic to you. The progressive movement considers them far more acceptable than Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, so long as they're far enough away that they don't get robbed personally, and sometimes not even then (insert bike comic here).
That's true but not an argument against what I said, unless I misunderstood the comment I was replying to.
The comment above me said this
Identity politics is and always has been a tangle of relative snap judgments. Not just as a matter of multiple axes, but because those judgments change day to day and with the charisma and decisions of the groups being judged. Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.
My read on that was that it implied that if a group acted badly, "unsympathetically", then the progressives would stop supporting them. If "unsympathetic" is referring to what the progressives think is unsympathetic then the above statement I was replying to is tautological, right?
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.
Interesting, that's fair. That isn't what I've assumed that term means. I'm going to use software as an example to describe the different concepts and keep them in the same domain (plus I assume that RAT terms are often informed by software given their demographics)
You're saying the "progressive stack" is referring to an implicit hierarchy of groups in order. That's fair and is implied by the term stack. Metaphorically similar to the stack as a software data structure.
I've always interpreted it be referring a selection of active beliefs. Not implying a hierarchy, simply a set of useful tools being used by for a purpose. Metaphorically similar to a set of software tools that are being used by a company. eg one software engineer asking another "What stack does your company use" - "Oh, we use MEAN: Mongo, Express, Angular, Node.js"
The second usage, the one I have assumed, being used to imply that the beliefs held by progressive are primarily determined by their heuristic usefulness, instead of their logical compatibility. And also not implying hierarchy.
I may be really misinterpreting here, I'll look at how it's used more carefully.
This is obviously a very very low priority nitpick, but the current favicon is bad. Obviously not worth pulling meaningful resources to fix, but when it is possible I would say that just a bolded M in any bright color would be an improvement from the current version.
You can generate a letter based favicon easily from somewhere like this https://favicon.io/favicon-generator/
I'm not saying that the product will be good, but I think like a black M on a grey background might still be an improvement.
I'm not brave enough to actually select a font though.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Why? If anything, I would argue that if you don't think your principles in at least some sense apply universally they're not really principles at all.
Well this becomes sort of circular. You ask if I don't think my principles apply universally, and I suppose they do, but as I said my principles are against proselytizing to aliens. I don't think there's anything inconsistent there.
I think my preferred ideology and policies, like almost everyone does, would improve people's lives
I think being allowed to live in a society free from aliens who do not share your worldview trying to actively indoctrinate you into their way of thinking would improve people's lives.
I am definitely not so incredibly confident in the content of my own cultural practices, that I think that everyone would benefit from following them.
Maybe? But I don't care. Homophobic political cultures are inferior to those which are not and if their political culture gets 'invaded' then hurrah.
Yeah, I'm not interested in conquering other countries in order to convert them, by war or otherwise. Ideally we could all live well enough alone. And it seems obvious to me that a culture that is as conquest hungry as you are (or the west is) should be regarded with suspicion. That's how this thread started I think. Why would anyone try to compromise with someone who you know has no respect for you and is only accepting it as a temporary tactical action. The only reason someone would make that compromise is if they have no other choice, which is probably the case in this specific example. But it's a compromise in bad faith.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Do you see some creepy aspect in the story about American Evangelicals spreading their views on homosexuality in Ghana? Or is your only problem with it that you disagree with them?
The second one. I think evangelicals spreading their views in Ghana is bad, because I think the views being spread are bad. I have no particular issue with people trying to convince others of their viewpoints more generally.
I am with Arjin. My values are such that all proselytizing is suspect to me. Anyone who is proselytizing to those who are far away is very suspect. It's gross to try and impress your ideology on people far away.
Can you explain why you strongly disagree with that? Successful proselytizing is hegemonic, borderline colonial. It's clearly an invasive action by one culture on another. Especially in the case that theres a strong power difference between the two groups involved. Clearly that does apply in the case of western institutions trying to cause change to singapore, right?
How would you even stop this? Should Singapore not be allowed to participate in the global internet, because maybe they'd see things that would change their views on LGBT people? Does the Singaporean internet need to be censored to ensure their present social values are maintained forever and ever? Is it bad to show people ads depicting LGBT people as normal people if such ads convince people that bans on sodomy are wrong?
I don't think this conversation is only about government policy. Cultures and institutions within those cultures are clearly going to attempt to spread their ideologies. But I can say that that is morally bad, even if I don't want to ban communication between cultures which would be impossible. Cultures and institutions that are more aggressive about proselytizing are dangerous, immoral, and not to be trusted. For the obvious reason that they are going to try and covert me, or my people. Definitionally that is something I wouldn't want. It is hostile.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Totally fair.
You may not value this as highly, in which case you would prefer stricter gender roles.
I don't, and so yes, I do.
But there's more to said about it. I, like everyone born in America, was raised to believe that freedom and self-actualization were great things to have. My default starting point agreed with you exactly. It's only over time that I've come to question it. I said:
Why though? How has the reduction of the strictness of roles that modernity has brought on improved things for people?
I think that my question already kind of accepts that we have more freedom to determine the course of our lives. I just question how much that is actually worth. I live in a wealthy blue bubble. The people I have known in my life have more freedom and ability to self determine than almost anyone on the planet, and yet most of them are not very happy. Happy isn't the be all end all, but I'm not sure they are very fulfilled either, and that is the end all.
Now I think that the good life would be to live in a small village, raised by a shoemaker to make shoes, and to make shoes for people who need those shoes. That sounds more fulfilling. I know that comes from a place of incredible privilege to be able to want that, but I do.
A yearning for the meaning provided by being someone raised to make shoes for a town that needs shoes is probably behind the obsession to make and purchase expensive artisanal good that all of the hipsters in my circles have. But it can't be the same because the artisanal shoes aren't needed the same way, and also you have to be essentially independently wealthy to afford the lifestyle of making shoes for hipsters or of buying those shoes.
But putting away the shoe fantasy. The reality is that suicide is up, sadness is up. The people I know don't seem to enjoy their freedom all that much. With all of this freedom and actualization around me, why do I end up spending so much time with people who complain about everything? Everyone seems to know the answer. It sucks living in an atomized, commercialized society. We want to be part of something. Or, from a more leftist perspective "late capitalism is bad". Fair enough that seems to be true.
I'm not sure that end result can be avoided if liberty/self determination are put as highest goals. I recognize this is probable well mined already on the motte.
What are your thoughts? If liberty/self determination are making you feel really fulfilled and happy and super interested to hear about it. I don't feel like I hear that very often here, or in my real life, honestly.
Elias point isn't that Africa would be harmed by COVID without massive lockdowns, he was disputing the implications of your game theory claim. And I agree, I think your argument doesn't work at all.
You called aggressive lockdowns the cooperative move, which implies that aggressive lockdowns would lead to a better outcome if everyone who could make that move did. But this is not true. The only way widespread aggressive lockdowns could lead to a better outcomes is if it resulted in COVID being entirely eliminated.
Elias' point is that there are many players (countries) in the game who are not capable of making the move you call cooperation. Even if every country capable of long lasting China style lockdowns actually did implement them, the virus would have plenty of reservoirs outside of those powerful countries. Many regions on Earth simply could not maintain strict lockdowns, so the virus would remain there. As you point out, those regions would not have particularly bad outcomes, as they are generally young, but that doesn't stop the virus from spreading there, it only lowers its death toll. So eventually, the powerful countries capable of strict lockdowns would remove those lockdowns and the virus would quickly return, spread from the reservoirs in poorer countries. Exactly what happens to China when it lowers it's guard would happen everywhere else, COVID would rip through the population, a population that is notably now more vulnerable to the virus because the strict lockdowns they've endured have prevented anyone in the population from developing natural resistance from surviving an infection.
The game as you are describing has these features:
-The cost of "cooperating" is extremely high.
-The benefit of cooperation only occurs if almost all players cooperate.
-A large portion of the players in the game are not capable of choosing to cooperate.
That is a game where choosing to do what you call "cooperate" is strictly the wrong choice. And in a situation where the cost of choosing to cooperate is borne by vast numbers of real people, it is not at all a benevolent choice as cooperation usually implies.
As the virus cannot be eradicated by strict lockdowns, all that can be achieved is delaying the inevitable deaths from the virus - this a fact clearly illustrated by exactly what happens to China when they reduce their anti covid protocols. Maybe you could argue that at least for the period that strong powers are maintaining strict lockdowns there will be a lower potential for the virus to evolve, but this is still simply delaying the inevitable. Eventually the lockdowns will have to be loosened, the virus will rip through the mostly unexposed populations, and we will be back to the exact same place we started. At which point the virus will start evolving and spreading as normal.
The only case in which strict widespread lockdowns would make sense is if the major world powers decided to essentially invade the entire world and impose lockdowns on the countries that couldn't otherwise afford to implement them. Something that would be unthinkably expensive and difficult, and also would be incredibly bloody and evil.
Covid lockdowns have a place, and that is when a local area's hospitals are overwhelmed. At that point, strict localized lockdowns make sense in order to buy time for the hospitals to deal with their current patient load and maybe accumulate more resources for the future. But strict wide lockdowns do not make sense for covid, and viewing them as a benevolent move doesn't make sense when a large portion of player simply cannot choose to cooperate.
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