Crake
Protestant Goodbot
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User ID: 1203
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?
Then, if what you are saying is true, when the conflict is over, the jews will once again control isreal and re-install an apartheid state.
But the problem is more fundamental. Any situation in which both jews and Palestinians cohabitate in isreal under a democracy will end with one group incredibly cruelly oppressing the other, or become unstable and turn to violence after which it will resolve back an apartheid state.
Unless you want to remove the requirement of democracy, the two groups will not live peacefully together.
A fair democracy will reflect the sincere beliefs of its constituents. The sincere beliefs of both the jews and the Palestinians are that the other group should be oppressed at best. That makes sharing a peaceful democratic state fundamentally impossible.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1yr ago
Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you but are you saying that if a group that progressives are sympathetic towards acts unsympathetic enough their support will dry up, or is the "your" in your statement pointing at something else?
If you are referring to groups acting badly, that I think you're very wrong. What about the long term homeless? It's hard to imagine a group that could act more unsympathetically, and yet progressive zeal for protecting them could not be stronger. If anything, the worse their behavior, the more intense the progressive sympathy towards them appears to be.
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.
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
2yr ago
I’m confused. Where does he actually state the non warm up problem? Was it edited?
Do you have all day?
I have time. This is an asynchronous forum.
not any more than you could explain to me why intelligent people adopt Christianity as adults in the year 2024.
That sounds like a pretty interesting conversation to me, to be honest. We would disagree but we could still communicate I think.
I feel like that runs contrary to the purpose of this forum. Communication and argument across perspectives is what makes it interesting to be here.
When you see the world not as an ineffable force of nature to cope with and accept, but as a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want, it is plainly obvious that such a system is, in fact, better than total collapse.
For most of my life I had that standard nerd perspective that the world was improved by technology. It's only been experience that has lead me to question the upside of technology. Its only been experience that has lead me to the more conservative position that modernity is not so great.
I have nothing against attempting to manage nature as "a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want" but in my experience that isn't what civilization has done. It has not made something optimal. There are some good things about advanced tech. Medicine maybe, and certainly space flight - the hope of creating extraterrestrial colonies still appeals to me deeply - but beyond that, is life for the individual improving due to technology?
I'm not a luddite. Technology is great. But if it is incompatible with human flourishing, I don't think I see the point. Replacing the standard system of humans being raised by parents seems to empower the technological system too much. Religion is, itself, a form of technology. If we have outrun our ability for our social technology to maintain a healthy social system due to rampant material technological growth, than perhaps we need a reset.
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
That's not my understanding. I don't think it is illegal under US law and also not universally. Can you point at the exact laws you are referring to?
Seeing your other response in this thread:
We already banned gain-of-function research.
Why do you think Fauci & Co. had to outsource it to China and Ukraine?
I don't think we actually disagree here. I don't think it is as airtightly illegal in the US as you are implying. But regardless, the main point of my post seems to agree with you. No?
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
10mo ago
There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement. You could even put them up for adoption, and while the demand for such isn't infinite, a good number of them would find their way into decent homes.
I mean, we can already subsidize local fertility by importing migrants from areas with higher fertility. I don't think that replacement is a good thing. You're system would prevent that replacement and instead replace some amount of local family raised humans with institutionally raised humans. They will be more alien to me than foreign born humans, in so far as at least foreign born humans have a family.
There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement.
Having both is irrelevant. If the system gets off the ground you'll radically disrupt society to the point that it is unrecognizable. The lab grown kids will either be radically more effective than normal kids, in which case they will replace them. Or they'll be less effective than normal kids and fill the same role as replacing locals with immigrants, except instead of immigrants (who at least have the normal human background of being raised in a family are even more alien) you'll have the lower local caste replaced by clones with all the bizzare effects that would have. Bad outcomes either way.
Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.
How is this system better than total collapse? What does high technology offer that could possibly be worth replacing the family unit?
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
You think Christianity is based? That it promotes good morals and is necessary to save Western Civilization? Too bad, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in the literal truth of it.
This isn't how anyone but weirdos like us think about things though. The majority of good christians are just followers. For them, believing in the "literal truth" of it is not challenging, but it also isn't a profound intellectual thing. Most people don't analyze the truth claims of their religion like that. They just believe and repeat and thats it. No bigger implications.
Or you can just pretend, and sit in the pews with a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you.
In my experience, you can participate without believing in the miracles, and not have a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you. The collective effervescence is there for you whether you intellectually accept the physical reality of miracles or not. Why can't you accept it symbolically like the pagans you refer to?
The biggest flaw of Christianity ... is that Christianity requires a superstitious belief in the literal truth of claimed miracles. Is such a religion sustainable?
There are clear "game theory" advantages for social groups espousing wild shit. It represents a signal with a cost. A core selective challenge for social groups is to sort people who are actual team players from parasites. There is a minor cost associated with saying something crazy like "Jesus rose from the dead". It harms your credibility with every other group that doesn't claim that crazy thing. That cost acts as a clarifying pressure for people to either be all in on being truly members of christianity (who will cooperate with christians) as opposed to fakers who want to play both sides.
The biggest flaw of Christianity, which sets it apart from many other religions- including the pagan traditions of the fathers of their father, is that Christianity requires a superstitious belief in the literal truth of claimed miracles. Is such a religion sustainable?
I'm not at all convinced by this. Any social group with good mechanics to maintain cohesion over multiple generations is going to have systems to make signaling group identity somewhat costly. I think many groups require their members to claim that actively believe weird shit, that's not just christianity. There are plenty of miracles professed by other religions. There are other methods to make signaling group membership costly, like wearing stupid looking clothes, or ritual scarification, etc. But publicly espousing weird nonsense is a really common trait. And it looks adaptive to me.
I do feel you on it being uncomfortable because I am also a weirdo that cares about things like that. Thats part of what is so grating about modern american progressivism - that it requests me to say so much weird stuff, so I don't. But if I thought it was "based" and would lead to healthy outcomes for me and mine - I might not be as bothered.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
2yr ago
Yeah, it's pretending to be a nice polite AI. That follows as that is what is being selected for.
What? It's no one's damned business if I'm wearing underwear or not. You can't tell by looking, so it "neither picks [your] pocket nor breaks [your] leg".
That's a heuristic for if something should be illegal. In my opinion a bad heuristic (hard drug dealing doesn't directly pick my pocket but it should still be illegal as far as I'm concerned), but my thoughts on the heuristic aside, it is still usually deployed to argue that something distasteful to one but not directly injurious should not be the purview of law. The line before it is "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others".
I really don't agree with the OP of this thread. I think the lack of bras currently is, as he suggests as a possible reason, just fashion.
But I also think your argument doesn't really dispute him nor the person you directly responded to. Neither said anything about imposing a law that required women to wear bras. OOP was venting about a cultural practice and saying that we should have a cultural norm against it.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
11mo ago
I would love to hear about that code eval system lol. What's it called?
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.
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?
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.
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