DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Autistic people are far more likely to be trans or furries.
I wonder if they are. Didn't look this way decades ago (of course there were no above-ground furries). Obvious enough but I think we'll come to look with horror at this blasé liberal acceptance of really weird and historically recent sociosexual patterns as innate traits that «just exist», like there exist left-handed people, paranoiacs or, well, gays – and that somehow just coincide with vulnerability to getting tricked and bullied, cartoonish literalism and over-systemizing mindset, and inability to read nontrivial social cues. We may discover something simple and nasty, though I'm not sure what exactly (probably not transmaxxing).
Oh, and I think the theory that explanation for the explosion in high-functioning autism cases themselves as something that «just used to be suppressed» will be also revealed as total bullshit, and moreover a deliberate coverup by people who knew better, in the way AGP stuff is desperately covered up right now.
Maybe I'm stunted, but I think this is an essentially elementary school bullshit, on the level of pulling girls by their braids (does anyone still do it?) or calling boys/girls gross: confused flirtation going too far. To the extent that adult American women are sincere in saying that they're less afraid of a bear, they're stunted too; unfit to be citizens, literally infantile, living in an egocentric world where "beliefs" are merely transient activations of the underdeveloped brain, means to coordinate physical wailing and flailing to get gibs from the infinitely caring environment. Admittedly this is an adaptive mode of reasoning in a spoils-based society, so long as you belong to the correct caste.
But I presume they aren't sincere, for the most part, and just do not care about contents of their words or the impact on too serious men. So it's signaling and taking jabs at men.
Few great comedians are women, but on average women are impressively adept at wordplay and deadpan sarcasm, in my experience.
Now as for men and their daughters, this is more obviously pure signaling to fit into the stereotype of an overprotective macho. No one's actually leaving anyone in a forest with a bear or a stranger, so it's a cost-free signal.
This is all trivial. The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction. Remember, many Americans are in fact retarded, paranoid, schizophrenic, pathologically anxious etc. – a middle-class joke that's presented as consensus can have real impact. Is [functional] 85 IQ enough to reliably distinguish ubiquitous mean-spirited kidding from common sense, without it leaking into world-model representations? Is 80? 75? The true distribution is not Gaussian, there are lumps on both tails, and plenty of outliers.
Beyond this straightforward utilitarian concern for unwell people and their close ones, though, I'd say the problem of normalizing casual deadpan sarcastic misogyny is the same as with any other kind of mistreatment, and the appropriate response is the same as we see high-agency minority groups provide to politically incorrect smartasses. It is perceived, correctly, as the beginning of a slippery slope towards rhetorical superweapons and physical discrimination. In a degenerating culture like the modern American one, defending your personal and your collective identity's honor is in fact the sane attractor; it's unsustainable for some subpopulation, even if it be all men, to be all sticks-and-stones-but-words stoics, and others be of the "if they don't fight back this means we can hit harder" persuasion. (I'd go so far as to say that you can't be a stoic period; stoics are simply cuckolds with extra steps, just like their hero Marcus Aurelius was a literal cuckold. But that's beside the point).
My (obvious) belief is that it's not really acceptable but there's little that could be done.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
In a nutshell, for those who really want to understand, I don't have time for arguments or careful framing with all the references:
The Israeli army has dropped 6000 bombs since the start of the war, and a report from the army says it's about 4000 tons. I first estimated from at 1000 tons, using a typical 500 lb bomb size I saw somewhere, but I may have been wrong about that. The argument works with both the 1000 ton estimate and the 4000 ton estimate.
According to Wikipedia about 4000 tons were dropped on Dresden Feb 13-15, 1945 and casualties are estimated at 25,000 to 100,000. I believe that the fact that Gaza has less than 2000 casualties shows - in this comparison - that Israel bombs selectively, on buildings and targets known to be Hamas-related. Surely sometimes mistakes and innocent casualties happen. The Dresden development was apparently (can be verified) much less crowded than Gaza.
Further, I have come across the following convincing evidence that we are nevertheless trying to avoid civilian casualties: 1) a general warning at the beginning of the war telling residents of different neighborhoods in Gaza which areas to move to for safety; 2) although we announced that we were eliminating the need to practice "knock on the roof", in some cases it has been documented in recent days, the army seems to be using it according to circumstances; 3) there have been examples of calls/texts to residents of a particular high-rise before a missile 4) we have not just sent a warning to residents of northern Gaza to temporarily move to southern Gaza, but are expending considerable effort to make them aware of it, including thousands of fliers in Arabic printed and dropped from airplanes.
People who find a moral equivalence between thugs entering a peaceful village and killing everyone in the streets and in their homes, women, the elderly and children, and the army bombing terrorist targets in dense urban environment and, despite considerable efforts to avoid it, killing civilians in the process, are scum.
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
Shylock may have his pound of flesh but only if he doesn't spill a drop of blood.
Israel may defend itself, but only if no civilian is harmed.
In other words:
Shylock does not get his bond.
Israel may not defend itself.
Only abstract rights for Jews, and no "Christian" love.
We can't have that, can we?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
I think people won't care. Or rather, leftists who visibly care will discredit themselves. Like, there's talk of international opinion, but what do you do concretely? Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages? And while a true ethnic cleansing is not out of the question, more realistically they'll simply permanently occupy Gaza and turn it into an actual open air prison, whether after the hostages are recovered or after the stream of atrocities decreases the public tolerance for giving in to hostage tactics.
These events certainly drive home the point that Hamas is the best Palestinian ruling party that Israeli hawks could have had, to the point that intel leaks leading to this disaster should be investigated with an eye for 4D chess (nothing will be found though). This obviates the conflict over judicial reform, demonstrates to Haredim the necessity of cooperation with the secula authority and the military, builds up the momentum for war with Iran, generally accelerates the mode collapse into a far right ethnonationalist society.
From the more mainstream Palestinian side (such as there is), I think escalation now is motivated by the ongoing legitimization of Israel in the rest of the Arab world. They don't have much time left for this silliness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Yes, it's a pretty funny and thought-provoking image really. Black people in it represent competent, essentially Western population, the neo-French (despite crude physiognomy); the legacy French are reduced to smug monkeys thoughtlessly going through the motions, grooming in their effete manner. Unpleasant as it might be for some, it's very different from your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits. Assuming that Blacks surpass whites in those regards, would that image even feel bad for an average believer in the République? Or would he go «eh, why not»?
I wonder how we should understand the author's intent and conception of good and evil.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
8mo ago
The «[if we did it,] he had it coming» attitude is already almost as bad as if Indian state involvement gets confirmed.
I don't predict but weakly suspect that in 10 odd years Western progressives (if they still exist and aren't distracted by the extreme escalation of conflict with China, of course) will think about the Indophilic rhetoric with «fellow/largest/ democracy|«biggest/youngest English-speaking nation|Superpower by 20XX» etc with the same disdain they now express for that kind of stuff applied to Israel or (relative obscurity aside) Turkey or Azerbaijan. The vegetarian smiles of fast-talking wonks will become associated with repulsive alien menace as much as inarticulate, idiomatic Chinese saber-rattling is today. Charisma, managerial acumen and geopolitical alignment are important but can only go so far when there's a billion-strong and swelling mass of dimwitted hubris beneath, bolstered by a populist regime.
India is not Western, not liberal, not a democracy, and not on the track to become more of any of those things (unlike, say, Ukraine, flawed though it is). I don't judge. Were I more friendly to Indians, I probably should have.
Surely some blacks (and even more of their diverse progressive allies) do. But that reflects badly on those people, seeing as whiteness – as per the infamous Smithsonian definition – is basically just being a decent person (or at least a non-troublesome employee), whereas Affirmative Action is never just affirmative action, never just redistributing the pie of prestige; it carries costs that may measure in lives.
Specifically Hanania cites the story of King/Drew aka «Killer King» Medical Center in Los Angeles, created in response to race riots and operated by representatives of «black community». The overall impression he seeks to convey is one of absolute fraud and profanation in service of ethnic prejudice; incompetent, criminally insane and malicious people playing doctor, giving up halfway and playing longhouse; callously watching deaths of their patients; covering up tragedies with an attitude that'd be chillingly pragmatic if it weren't also naive and self-defeating due to their stupidity. When, in defense of Affirmative Action, Justice Jackson argues – duplicitously and libelously – that black babies have a higher chance to survive in the hands of black doctors (implying that they risk death in the hands of non-blacks), it's precisely mitigations to Affirmative Action fiascos of the King/Drew type, removing high-risk babies from hands of low-skilled doctors, that make her argument superficially plausible.
Right-wing ideas on Culture War topics usually have at least three tiers of radicalization (iceberg meme.jpg). Tier Zero is Hlynka or Sowell-style conservative critique of raw denial, where problems with the default liberal narrative exist but may still be plausibly excused by pure social mechanics – liberals are just wrong about which ones. Tier One is where HBD, sex differences and such innate factors are recognized, but only myopically: people stick to the defensible, scientifically rock-solid motte of standardized aptitude measurements, merit, and economic optimality. Tier Two is where science is thinner, but subtle effects add up to extremely ugly conclusions. This is where you understand, among all else, that it's never just about IQ or SAT; that a great share of MtFs are not «women in man's body» or «men deluded about being women» or even «perverts» but something far more problematic; that… but it's stagnant due to most people chickening out earlier (after all, even in the tiniest niche there'll be crazy people dedicated to sniffing you out), thus rife with esoteric bullshit and self-serving ideology, and can get you banned even here. This isn't thebailey,org, after all.
But There's a Tier One and A Half. It's what you conclude once you allow yourself to think about implications of Tier One for even a little while.
IQ is meaningful because the complexity of everyday life is g-loaded. Conscientiousness and lack of bias are meaningful because tradeoffs of every line of work test human character. Abandon those measures or their solid proxies, and the demerits can compound, until catastrophic tail events become the norm and the civil structure collapses like South African power grid.
It doesn't take much. The society relies overwhelmingly on Swiss Cheese defense: the simplest way to prevent disasters is to use cheese types with small holes. Affirmative action makes the holes in the cheese bigger. An unqualified nurse injects more sedative than needed. A careless doctor doesn't check it in time. A corrupt supervisor doesn't pick up the early signs to remove them, then covers up the fatality. A racially motivated activist excuses the track record by saying whitey don't pay up enough. You create a bubble of horror where there was none.
I am not sure about Hanania's playbook. He flirts with banal racists and disses conservatives for not embracing the strong points of progressive paradigm. It may be incoherent. But his political intention seems simple. I presume it's just delegitimizing those horror-creating processes and mainstreaming opposition to them, so that the world where progressives win will be livable. To that end, he will troll and dunk and do whatever, but he won't swear fealty to any political team that's playing house instead of instrumentally shaping reality.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Putin keeps bumbling along and attempts to replace Shoigu with an even more incompetent and unpopular yes man, but he proves unable to control the Russian army.
I love devarbol Shoigu-posting.
Putin: pathetic, afraid, hides in a bunker, an international war criminal
Shoigu: chills in the palace in Tuva, does woodworking, afraid of nothing, even of the goblin-looking guy with a person army who promises to kill him, hasn't done anything wrong
People have a lot of discourse about "Putin will remove/will not remove Shoigu" and reasons for it but why do they assume that Putin can remove Shoigu in the first place?
There is a schizoid Kremlinology point that Shoigu can be actually more powerful than Putin (at least he is politically older for sure) and hence all the current stuff.
The role of Shoigu in the political system of Russia is far weirder and more important than you normally get from any news about him (just this incompetent clownish guy), but he is one of the few people who took Yeltsin into the government and is still in power, for example.
The official theory is that Shoigu is the reincarnation/avatar of this person, they talk about it in his personal museum in Tuva.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
It really is fine, I would never be able to care about such offenses (barring brain damage), or, hopefully, even intentional offenses from people like you or Ranger. I just dislike the quantum microtubules thing – it's tasteless too, after all; just adding a layer of pseudo-empirical woo to postpone responding to a relatively compact philosophical challenge.
give one good reason for why substrate independence can't work, especially if we can simulate neurons at the molecular level
I do not have to give you any reasons because your position, in its decisive dimensions, has zero empirical content, it is just metaphysics – of a tool who has first-person experience but cognitively is conditioned to process himself through the master's pragmatic point of view. Well, that and geeky masturbation about (irrelevant, surmountable) difficulties of computing this or that. My metaphysics is the opposite, I start with asking for a reason to believe that computational equivalence even matters, because this is about me, not about some external function. I exist for myself. Do you exist for yourself? What does it mean to exist for oneself? Can you even conceive, in a purely hypothetical way, of the possibility of a distinction between you existing for yourself, and "something that simulates you" existing for myself, but not for itself? Not a strict p-zombie, perhaps, but something whose internal experience is different from the experience it computes, in a way that does not remotely hold for your current implementation? In my experience there is a qualitative and insurmountable difference between people who can and cannot, so I'd rather not invest into debating you, and just have fun the way I feel like.
You started with outsider-oriented rubrics to test similarity between two black-box behavioral generators compared to a years-old exemplar (in x years every molecule changes etc. etc. as you say, and I just call bullshit on the idea that you're more like yourself in 70 years than like another similar guy of your age, but anyway it's irrelevant); then retreated to increasingly fine-grained circuit equivalence in white boxes; now you talk about molecular simulation which will necessarily, overwhelmingly capture neurocomputationally redundant content. This is commendable: you at least have some remains of a normal-person intuition that your consciousness literally is your brain and not some equivalent of it with regard to some interface or observer. But you cannot come to grips with this intuition or wonder if it corresponds to something coherent.
Some can. In the words of Christof Koch, whose book The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed I've mentioned a few times: «The maximally irreducible cause-effect power of real physical computers is tiny and independent of the software running on the computer… Two systems can be functionally equivalent, they can compute the same input–output function, but they don’t share the same intrinsic cause-effect form. A computer of figure 13.3 doesn’t exist intrinsically, while the circuit that is being simulated does. That is, they both do the same thing, but only one is for itself. […] Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is causal power upon itself, not computation. And here’s the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself or others, cannot be simulated. Not now, nor in the future. It has to be built into the physics of the system… This is true even if the simulation would satisfy the most stringent demands of a microfunctionalist. Fast forward a few decades into the future when biophysically and anatomically accurate whole-human-brain emulation technology—of the sort discussed in the previous chapter—can run in real time on computers.13 Such a simulation will mimic the synaptic and neuronal events that occur when somebody sees a face or hears a voice. Its simulated behavior (for instance, for the sort of experiments outlined in fig. 2.1) will be indistinguishable from those of a human. But as long as the computer simulating this brain resembles in its architecture the von Neumann machine outlined in figure 13.3, it won’t see an image; it won’t hear a voice inside its circuitry; it won’t experience anything. It is nothing but clever programming. Fake consciousness—pretending by imitating people at the biophysical level».
A pragmatist says: what should we care about that! My causal power is that which… something something inputs-outputs, so long as the function describing this transformation is the same, surely it is preserved! A pragmatist more invested in the conversation would add: why, I've cracked open the book, and it seems this all depends on some weird axioms in chapter 7 and 8, kooky stuff like consciousness exists intrinsically, for itself, without an observer, about why accept them and not a much more convenient (or rather, observer-oriented) approach? Also, why not Dust Theory?
Koch's specific technical justifications have to do with IIT, which is substantially flawed. In time, a better theory will be developed. But I don't think one needs a theory to just see how confused the metaphyics of a Tool, of someone who cannot throw out the entire baggage of External Observers, is. One only needs taste. I do not hope nor intend to rectify your taste, you're free to revel in it, just as I am free to think it repulsive.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
Every weapon given to them prolongs the conflict by X amount
I believe you vastly overestimate Russian resources. The war is absolutely winnable for Ukraine + Western aid combination. If Ukrainians were more directly assisted or given even more advanced long-range toys, it'd have been winnable quickly. But alas, nuclear blackmail (increasingly non-credible) and so on, so they'll keep throwing men into the grinder, getting closer to the objective very slowly and at a staggering cost.
You know, there's the issue with the proposal of distant appeasers which isn't well understood, I imagine. You still live in 2022, if not in 1980s like some Chomsky. But this is late 2023. The war has not just eroded Russian credibility as a military power or a rational agent in the international arena, screw that – it has eroded the credibility of the state itself. It has become a clown show worse than any pro-Western transgender performance. Yes, muh "Ukraine is corrupt shithole failed state" is a cope, Russian rule has become an unambiguously worse option, and not only for nationalist reasons as it could be believed in 2004 or so. The thin, see-through veneer of "based traditional Orthodox white nation" or whatever, which still held for some delusional people, has cracked. It's a feudal absurdity that puts patriots in prison and has to cowardly assassinate near-successful insurrectionists after loudly pardoning them, an ostensibly democratic and by all appearances authoritarian polity where some Muslim warlord's fat son pummels insufficiently obsequious citizens and law enforcement sticks their tongues into their asses, as we put it, a superpower of wounded soldiers forgotten on tarp under the sun, propagandists who don't even try anymore, every promise broken. It cannot credibly offer you prosperity or freedom, but also cannot guarantee you peace and stability. It is no longer capable of bribing anyone into obedience, not even the most naive Eastern Ukrainians of Russian descent who have survived the last two years.
It is virtually politically impossible for Ukraine to give up on restoring at least 2021 effective borders, and for the West to give up on Ukraine.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
king von being a serial killer (no, seriously)
What the fuck. His rivals are about as bad.
Following months of controversy surrounding his alleged involvement in King Von's death, Quando released his sixth mixtape, Still Taking Risks, on May 7, 2021
Quando Rondo publicly remained silent on the incident until two weeks later, when he released his song "End of Story", which was assumed to be a reference to Von's song trilogy, "Crazy Story". In the song, he recalls the shooting and addresses his involvement.[39] In the song, he again states that he was defending himself and even shows support for his friend Timothy Leeks, a rapper also known as Lul Timm, who was charged for the murder of King Von.[40] In April 2021, Quando denied that the song was a diss toward Von, and claimed he did not know that Von had songs with that title.[24] Despite receiving strong criticism, Quando has continued to publicly support Leeks.[41][42]
I knew about 50 Cent, XXXTentacion, Tupac and so on but this level of systemic childishness drives the point home finally. It seems «hip hop stars» live with anime or RPG levels of disregard for mundane rules-based reality, fighting and killing each other and being let go by the guards after some modest cooldown, to compose a memorable «diss». America really is the land of endless possibilities.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
IQ
You surely know but BAP isn't too keen on HBD and IQ-focused discourse; or rather, his notion of evaluation methodology, «racial hierarchy», desirable qualities and perhaps even the mechanics involved are all entirely different from the Sailerite school of thought (which is why I'm pissed when everyone on the dissident right is rounded up to a Nazi; no you fools, at least appreciate the vibrant diversity of other doctrines which are every bit as irreconcilable with yours, it's an honor to be hated from so many different angles!). And it's not about Nordics as such, he preaches exactly what it says on the tin – Bronse Age mindset, bodybuilders on horseback.
It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.
I dislike the phrase "techno-solutionism" but it ought to be recognized how much of our "not worse off" depends on outracing the decline. Opinions differ as to how sustainable that is. I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor. (Btw, @2rafa, despite listening to OSTs often I just dislike Zimmer's music and Zimmer personally, but then again I'm not very into Wagner and all that Teutonic BS either). Thinking back on it, you might just find some aspects of the German character amiable. After all, Berdyaev did say in «Religion of Germanism»:
Germans are least of all materialists, if by materialism we mean accepting the external world as material in its objectively real composition. The whole of German philosophy has an idealistic direction and materialism could be in it only an accidental and insignificant phenomenon.
The German is neither dogmatist nor skeptic; he is a critic. He starts by rejecting the world, by not recognizing the externally, objectively given existence as a «critical reality». The German is physically and metaphysically a northerner, and the external, objective world does not appear to him illuminated by sunlight, as it does to the people of the south, as it does to the Romance peoples. For the German, the primary sense of being is, first of all, the primary sense of his will, his thought. He is a voluntarist and an idealist. He is musically gifted and plastically artless. Music is still a subjective spirit, an inner state of mind. Plastics is already an objective, embodied spirit. But in the sphere of objective, embodied spirit Germans were able to create only extraordinary technology, industry, militaristic tools, and not beauty. The tastelessness of the Germans, which appalls in even the greatest of them, even Goethe, is due to the transfer of the center of gravity of life to the inner tension of will and thought. On the side of sensuality, as an aesthetic category, the Germans are not at all acceptable or tolerable. And in the life of feeling they can only be merely sentimental.
A true, deep German always wants, having rejected the world as something dogmatically imposed and critically unverified, to recreate it out of himself, out of his spirit, out of his will and feeling. This direction of the Germanic spirit was determined as early as in the mysticism of Eckhart, it exists in Luther and in Protestantism, and is found and grounded with great force in the great Germanic idealism, in Kant and Fichte, and in another way in Hegel and Hartmann. It would be wrong to call this direction of the Germanic spirit phenomenalism. It is a kind of ontologism, an ontologism of a sharply voluntaristic bent. […] This consciousness is very taut, always disciplined and organized from within, from its own depths, in which lies the foundation of the Germanic will, the strong will. Such a consciousness is imposing but aesthetically unappealing. And it must be said that the tragedy of Germanism is, above all, the tragedy of excessive will, too possessive, too intense, recognizing nothing outside itself, too exclusively masculine, the tragedy of the inner celibacy of the Germanic spirit. It is a tragedy opposite to the tragedy of the Russian soul. The German people are a wonderful people, a powerful people, but a people devoid of any charm.
But, of course, Berdyaev spoke of German intellectuals – mainly as they appeared to him in written media. This would be as naive as judging Anglo Dasein/Umwelt/Weltanschauung by their stiff-lipped Victorian hypocrisy.
I knew normal Germans. To ask of normal people, even Germans, to be satisfied with just this is, at best, a ludicrous demand for universal ascetic monasticism; more likely it is mere cope. You can call math beautiful all you want, but math remains a niche, inaccessible (no, condescending popular renditions don't count) realm, and it doesn't have remotely the dimensionality to saturate human experience for any but the most obsessed, broken specimens. We are physical beasts, homeostatic machines connected to the world through a multimodal sensor array and burdened with demanding natural priors with narrow optimal response ranges, that ensure we can't stop caring about what happens around us. We are grounded in reality, so for our own sanity we should see pleasing sights on the ground level – pleasant faces, buildings, furniture, plants and so on. And in terms of intangible art, it need be grounded in baseline human experience as well – thus, even videogames with narratives touch us more than the most contrived category theory wankery; and the capacity to produce such videogames says more about the people's cultural capacity than having some Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Some Germans can into math. Great. Math isn't about Germans, though. Math isn't about humans at all. And Germans know this as well as I do.
Suggesting a person take refuge from the squalor of the material world in the work of Peter Scholze is as ridiculous and cruel as telling a hungry person to contemplate some 19th century still-life paintings of peaches or whatever; a person who wants sex to embrace the holy love of Virgin Mary (and we know that this just ends in pathetic perversion). Speaking of, the best mathematicians I interact with have high libido, they seem to need lots of intense, dirty sex. (For more traditionally creative types this needn't even be said). They also care vastly more about art than I do, somehow – some fantasy book series, musical performances, and yes, even video games.
Humans are humans, they are not spirit engines for contemplating toy imaginary structures. With this «what even is beauty, ackchyually» you deny us our humanity. And I suspect you do this to excuse the expropriation of control over the physical world from people who do not satisfy your elitist cerebral standards.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
Recently someone asked about that time when I translated Vasily "Vatoadmin" Topolev's overview of 20-year intervals in the 20th century, here it is:
Writing about current events is tough, so let's do some minor league historiosophy.
Many people may know that Andrei Amalrik wrote the book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" in 1969. He was only seven years wrong, it turns out. But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980, but Hélène (incidentally, born Zarubashvili of Russian-Georgian aristocratic émigrés) is still alive and even became secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.
Far fewer people know what the forecast itself was. Amalrik believed that the USSR would collapse as a result of war with China. In reality, the USSR collapsed after six years of consistently improving relations with China. Carrère d'Ancoss expected a mass Islamist uprising in Central Asia (as in Iran). In reality, the Central Asian republics were the last to leave the Union, after not only the Baltics, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, but even after the RSFSR and the BSSR – that is, when there was no Union at all. But who remembers that now?
Paul Samuelson is considered one of the most illustrious economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote his famous textbook, which was used for decades by students all over the planet in their economics 101 course. Samuelson believed that by 1990 the USSR would overtake the United States in gross domestic product. Then he shifted his forecast a bit: by 2000.
In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy (no, not a relative of the president) published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (translated into Russian a couple of years ago). The book brought Kennedy worldwide fame – he described the change of the dominant powers over the course of 500 years. Except that the first cover of the book had a picture (https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780517051009-us.jpg): the Briton John Bull coming down from the top of the globe, the American Uncle Smith standing on the top, but a bespectacled Japanese sneaking up behind him. Kennedy believed that American domination of the world would be succeeded by the Japanese domination (he did not actually say it that explicitly, but it was easy to notice). In the real world, a few years after the book was published, Japan was hit by a severe economic crisis – some offices in downtown Tokyo became 100 (yes one hundred) times cheaper, and the nineties were labeled "the lost decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades)" by the Japanese themselves.
Everyone knows that the brilliant Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a brilliant book called The Grand Chessboard. Only no one has read it. But I have. The main idea of the book is that the power that controls pipelines in Central Asia will dominate in the 21st century. Brilliant. Who even remembers these pipes now, even against the backdrop of the global energy crisis.
In July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised soldiers that they would be back from the front before the first autumn leaves touched the ground. And the Kaiser was not alone. That the outcome of the war would be decided in the first months was the opinion of wise generals in all the general staffs of Europe. The French, based on the Franco-Prussian experience (you know that bit, the fight between two democracies?) believed that the outcome of the war would be decided in the first month – and have had a hundred thousand men felled in the Ardennes in a narrow area over four days, throwing them in pointless attacks on the German machine guns. The Russians threw two newly mobilized corps, in which half of the soldiers remained in sandals, on Königsberg – and the East Prussian disaster happened. The Austrians, too, threw their dressy – the prettiest uniforms in the world! – toy-like regiments to the Carpathians, where they were ground to dust in a few months by the harsh Siberian, Cossack, Grenadier, Guard and other select regiments of the Russian army.
In this light, let me remind you of an old idea of mine. We will scroll through the twentieth century, 20 years at a time.
So, let's start on January 1, 1900. What does the world look like?
World politics is defined in three capitals – London, Berlin, St. Petersburg.
The British, after the Boer War, are the world's pariahs. They have very bad relations with literally all other great powers. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, they even banned the British delegation. India is once again preparing for a Russian invasion.
France is sandwiched between the British and the Germans. The former can easily take her colonies, the latter can defeat her in a one-on-one war. The most militarized country in Europe. When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.
Germany is the European leader. The world's most advanced science – soon Germans will be raking in handfuls of Nobel prizes. The best universities in the world are not Harvard or Oxford, but Göttingen and Heidelberg. A mighty army. The world's second largest navy – thirty years ago there was none at all. Berlin is called the "Electroburg"; it's the most progressive and cleanest city in the world, kind of like Singapore today.
Russia has tremendous industrial growth, the highest in the world. The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange will reach a peak this year to which it will never return, not even by 1914, after the Stolypin reform. There are plans to build a huge fleet by 1920, with only battleships counting 50. Korea, Manchuria, and Persia are gradually turning into Russian colonies.
China, recently defeated in a war with Japan, seems determined to modernize along Japanese lines. Although right now the country is in an extremely deplorable state, China is genuinely feared. Both in Russia [ru link reddit'd], and in America [for good measure], and everywhere else. Kaiser Wilhelm paints a picture [] in which the Archangel Michael calls upon all the nations of Europe to go to holy war against the Asian hordes. Somewhere near China lies Japan, which has yet to receive much attention. The King of England and the Tsar of Russia call the Japanese macaques in their correspondence.
The U.S. is already very rich, but it is almost invisible in world politics. The American army is ranked by the German General Staff on a level with the Portuguese army. The American navy has only five small battleships. Unexpectedly, the Americans went to war with the other "weaklings," the Spaniards, and although they won, they ended up with an endless guerrilla war in the Philippines. All in all, simmering somewhere on the periphery.
Scroll to 1920.
There is no such thing as a Chinese empire. The Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires are similarly non-existent. In place of the Russian Empire there is a giant bloody stain. Germany, cut off from all sides, is steadily teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. All of Europe, down to Poland and Romania, is now dominated by France. The British Empire is even larger than it was in 1900. The U.S. has become a great military power. Wall Street, swollen during the war, turned from a peripheral financial center into a competitor to the City of London. Japan began to build its empire, suddenly becoming one of the world's great powers.
Fast forward to 1940.
The U.S. is still trying to get out of the Great Depression. France as a state simply does not exist, unless you count the mysterious entity centered in the resort town of Vichy. Russia, torn apart by civil war, was replaced by the giant Soviet Union. Germany, recently humiliated and defeated, has now conquered almost all of Europe. The British, recent triumphators, are preparing for a German landing and hiding from German bombs. Japan has already conquered a good half of China and is not going to stop.
Another turn of the knob and we go to 1960.
The U.S. has experienced a decade and a half of frenzied economic growth. The country is bursting with exuberance. U.S. military bases are spread across the globe. The Soviet Union, which many had already given up on in 1942, has recovered, has rid itself of the worst features of totalitarianism, is preparing to send a man into space, and is competing equally with the United States in the most sophisticated fields of technology – lasers, atomic, space, aviation. Germany and Japan are now almost the most peaceful countries in the world, especially since both are de facto occupied by U.S. and Soviet troops. Italy, until very recently one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has also suffered terribly after two years of warfare on its territory, is showing the highest growth rate in Europe and will soon overtake even Britain. Fewer and fewer territories remain of the British Empire, which was supposedly victorious in World War II, and those too will soon be independent. France is a great power again. Germany is experiencing its economic miracle. The Shah of Iran is determined to use petrodollars to turn his country into the most developed and enlightened in the Middle East.
And we are already in 1980.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.
Fully agreed regarding relative sentiment. I never quite understood why this default hypothesis is presented as something scary – but for the purpose of stating a paradox, to signal cleverness, and also support for the status quo and high-status groups.
Malice is inherently and obviously threatening. Perhaps "the scary thing is nobody's in charge" folks see it as witty because they're not accustomed to fearing malice of others. Or they have a strong intuition that an orderly technocratic world is preferable, no matter its ultimate morality? In any case, quite alien logic.
The golem joke is of course starting to show its age; I think David Cole did it best 2019.
I remember once commenting on the thesis of NRx, to the effect that «Cthulhu swims left and left, until He crashes into the shore of New York to be slaughtered» (@2rafa later recalled it in a context vaguely similar to today's). But now, this seems to be happening in earnest. I've observed a few ordinarily peaceful, very liberal Jewish academics who openly threaten they'll remember leftists who've been cheering for Hamas in the wake of this catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, many Jews who've been on board with the identity-driven, anti-white/male progressive rhetorics and policies so long as they did not cross the line of cheering for gleeful murders of their own people now have began to «truly see». It all has happened before, of course – multiple times even, from the «wow Stalin a psycho actually!» in 1937 to neoconservatism to the stuff that Sailer pedantically documents; but I think the demography is currently ripe for a permanent phase transition of Diaspora Jews to a more conservative platform, in following with the younger, more virile and now morally redeemed Israelis.
I might be wrong but that seems to be what the excellent Crémieux hints at, too:
An interesting detail of this war was that Japan probably would have lost were it not for the efforts of a single American banker.
Jacob Schiff was an important proponent of American railroads and he ran numerous major corporations, like Wells Fargo, Union Pacific, and Equitable Life Assurance. He was also Jewish.
Schiff's advocacy on the part of Jews was renowned. He actively fought to combat anti-Semitism at home and abroad, while bankrolling Zionist efforts. One instance that drew particular ire from him was the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, and more than 500 suffered other injuries, including the destruction of more than 1,500 homes.
…Or in other words, Jews were being scapegoated for economic downturns. In the town itself, there's evidence that public officials also cooperated with the rioters, enabling this tragedy.…
Schiff had developed a hatred for Russia due to this and several other incidents, so when he saw the Japanese and Russians engaging one another, he offered his help. And help he did!
Schiff floated $200 million in bonds to provide Japan with the modern equivalent of more than $7 billion in war backing. This was equal to about half of Japan's total expenditures during the war and, accordingly, when Japan won, Schiff was lauded. He would go on to receive the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from the Emperor Meiji himself.
Or as the TabletMag has suggested some time ago:
If the Jews committed an incredible moral and cultural sin and deserted en masse to the GOP, exactly how would the Democratic Party ever win an election again?
Jews contribute two-thirds of the money and probably provide 80% of the political energy in the Democratic Party. So you can’t eliminate them, but you can subordinate them. And I think that’s what’s going on here.
The Jews will continue to support progressive policies, but they’ll be subordinated. Some of their places will be given away in the name of justice. The majority of Jews who remain will be made to feel insecure and therefore work really hard, really, really hard to prove that they are adequately woke and not Zios—which is a word David Duke invented and that progressives have now picked up.
Because, even those Jews who say they really don’t like Israel might be crypto Zios. They might be practicing their Zionism in secret. So they have to work really hard to denounce Israel and even to abandon traditional forms of Jewish belief and practice.
In fact, they have to abandon reality entirely, so that LBGTQ Jewish organizations can affirm that Saudi Arabia is friendlier to gay people than Israel.
Well I think that's a pretty bogus forecast. Democrats will continue to win elections. They'll just have to jettison this whole pro-Hamas wing, because after all this graphic stuff, acting in a sufficiently anti-Zionist manner will become a bit too much for any Jew with a modicum of self-respect, and doing politics in the US on the platform «We hate Jews, Jews hate us» is not exactly a winning proposition.
One can hope that, as with Stalinism, some loathsome policies concerning gentiles might be abolished as well.
EDIT: here's Noah conveniently spelling out that Stalin after 1937 bad
But the bloodthirst pouring out from leftists in the streets and on the internet suggests that there’s a deep sickness in the Western leftist movement. It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. And even if you do think that our modern definition of “war crime” is too restrictive, and that killing large numbers of enemy civilians is an acceptable way to force a belligerent to throw in the towel, it’s still repugnant to joyfully cheer that slaughter, and to march side by side with those who advocate genocide.
… In any case, don’t let my analytical tone hide my moral disgust here. People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice. This episode is going to show a lot of Americans that the leftist movement contains, at the grassroots level, a lot of very inhumane, bloodthirsty people. Ultimately that revelation will hurt the movement in the eyes of progressive Americans, draining some of the goodwill it built up over the last decade.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
It’s simply not Lind's job to represent this truth. Lind is representing a class of people. Protecting both its class interest as well as its dignity, at the very least.
I feel deep disconnect with Lind and with what appears to be your beliefs. It is not, in fact, good to lie. It is worse to congratulate yourself for your lies on the basis of some is-ought confusion. The self-servingly populist, paternalistic – no, probably even maternalistic – posture of a portly mother hen shielding her simple-minded salt-of-the-earth «electorate» from «shock jocks» with their nasty statistical tables, which Lind adopts, is despicable; hypocritical, condescending, emasculating and evokes every sadistic impulse I have. So it's a bit hard to engage in good faith.
But, just to remark on one strategic detail.
Merely pointing at The Bell Curve and HBD as a truth can’t qualify as just another feather of truth in the cap of HBD folks. In the words of Eric Turkheimer, this truth could rival the atom bomb.
Turkheimer at al (see e.g. the discussion about HBD trutherism as x-risk factor here) imagine themselves arguing from a place of wise pessimism: they cannot let this infohazard be mainstreamed, the risk of degenerate social developments from its implications in people's minds is too great, thus white lies are necessary. Naturally, this is optimistic about the counterfactual development in the condition of HBD denialism. But more than that, this is wildly and irresponsibly blithe with regard to eventual failure. That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch comes to mind::
Why do you so want to kill all the poor, Sir?
I don't want to do anything of the sort! But I think it's important to know if it would help.
Of course it wouldn't help that, the computer says it wouldn't help, so we're not doing it!
That's why we're not doing it?
What?
That's the only reason why we're not doing it? …Bloody hell, now I'm offended. Shouldn't have asked you to run that through – it turns out if it had come out positive you'd have started work by now! Here I am, blue sky thinking amongst friends, and I didn't realize it's only cold-hearted pragmatism that's keeping you from pumping gas into Lidl! Just because a computer says that killing all the poor will help the economy doesn't mean I'm going to do it. It's morally wrong and that's why we can run it through the computer because we know whatever it says we're not going to do it, that's the page I'm on an, are you going to burn the book?
Sailer gibes at liberals for the attitude mocked here, and I believe he's literally correct about a fraction: the predilection to High Modernist social engineering schemes plus callousness toward muh inbred Flyover Country hicks and badly hidden fear of «urban youth» (or what's the term now?), if reinforced with a theory of biological differences between groups, would make at least a minority de facto genocidal. But the rest are just making a foolish mistake. Pegging your ideological commitment to a contingent practical fact which does not inform that commitment is bad praxis; is egoism. Do you just double down in on rhetorical suppression, burnishing your Respectable Person creds in the process and hoping it never fails? What if it does and you've cleansed the debate of any principled opposition to that which you're trying to prevent? Your side gets routed. I won't go so far as to say that «anti-eugenicons» create a self-fulfilling prophecy, modern Americans at large really won't be willing to «kill all the poor» or some such. But they are sowing the seeds of chaos and conflict greatly surpassing the current culture war, and they cannot credibly take responsibility for those seeds never sprouting; indeed they cannot even legibly discuss the issue.
I've been observing the AI safety debate lately, and it irritates me there as well: in contrast to doomers with their bizarrely abstract takes on «the space of Optimization Processes in full generality», many AI optimists only have weak arguments contingent on minutiae of engineering and overconfident physical estimates, like «the brain is near Landauer limit already» (it's not, Yud is 100% right it's OOMs from the mark). E.g. George Hotz seems to believe we shouldn't air strike datacenters because AI just can't get that much smarter than George Hotz, certainly not soon. He'll crumple like tissue paper when this is falsified. The creationism debate comes to mind as well.
Denying facts is morally wrong and strategically wrong. You can only do that when your side is so overwhelmingly advantaged, there's no point to caring. Well, this is the case sometimes.
Probably not for American anti-immigrationists, though. Good luck proving to some Vivek Ramaswamy that, since Sailer is a poopyhead and HBD is not true or at least not handshakeworthy, America shouldn't grant citizenship to millions of qualified third Worlders.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
I think the idea of objective morality might be coherent. There may not be such a thing in practice, or it may not meaningfully distinguish human moral systems, but if it were revealed somehow that there exist logically watertight rules by which our object-level beliefs can correctly unfold into preferences, having something to do with what a preference means, then there'd be a way to say that some preferences are objectively wrong, in the sense that a person could not have legitimately arrived at them and is just spouting confused nonsense that conflicts with his own ultimate priorities (which would presumably be shared between agents, because there is only one objective reality to have beliefs about). As you say, a given moral system can be logically incoherent; this just takes it to another level.
Source: getting high
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
I've been meaning to write another update on AI but not sure if anyone still cares.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Hanania says:
I don’t think that the HBD crowd has enough respect for the power of this taboo. Many would give up on the whole idea of objective scientific inquiry before accepting race differences in IQ as immutable.
But that's exactly what has happened, no?
Anyway. I believe that there are very few people writing cogently and effectively on any given topic, and they all know each other, so the bulk of discourse is advanced essentially by conspiracies. I think there's some Discord group where Hanania, Karlin, Yglesias and other such edgy dorks hang out. I suspect that some time ago – maybe around Scott's disappearance – they've concluded that the right is doomed politically (for reasons Trace describes with regard to the GOP) and just decided to cut their losses, concocting some compromise vision and rhetorical tradition. What we observe now is a product of that covenant – bloodless, by-the-letter, superficially reasonable essays that may feel very fresh to a tired culture warrior, but also make flimsy arguments that prove them having engaged in a bit of lobotomy as a gesture of goodwill to the liberal-progressive hegemony they wish to be forgiven by.
Rather than this schlock, I'd rather read Hanania's Discord messages.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
I think Israel will do just fine with «if you kill your enemies, you win» logic.
As Netanyahu (easily an intellectual and moral peer to those founders) has said five years ago:
PM Netanyahu: Shimon aspired toward peace but he knew that true peace can be achieved only if our hands strongly grasp defensive weaponry. In the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, there is a simple truth: There is no place for the weak. The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
I don't much care if all this stuff is true and I suspect Americans won't either. Certainly not Republicans, unfortunately. Red anti-intellectualism or, perhaps, anti-smartassism is real; you'd better be able to own the other guy in a debate, but you cannot make it look as if you're showboating at the expense of your diploma-less audience. Ben Shapiro with his quick debate bro tongue is Facebook meme material, not POTUS material, likewise for a clever, dweeby man like Vivek. He needs edge other than apparent competence and sharpness, or #1 and #2 to do themselves in.
It'll be funny if he makes it, though. Imagine Vivek vs Kamala (as Biden declines further): total Brahmin victory. A tiny (there are, what, 2 million Tamil Brahmins?) subrace bred for verbally justifying their authority in a casteist society seize political power in an antiracist democratic society. What could be more surprising?
Edit: Wiki on his drug adventures
In 2015, Ramaswamy raised $360 million for the Roivant subsidiary Axovant Sciences in an attempt to market intepirdine as a drug for Alzheimer's disease.[31][39] In December 2014,[40] Axovant purchased the patent for intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline (where the drug had failed four previous clinical trials) for $5 million, a small sum in the industry.[32] Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015, and said his company would "be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry."[32][39] Before new clinical trials began, he engineered an initial public offering in Axovant.[32] Axovant became a "Wall Street darling" and raised $315 million in its IPO.[40] The company's market value initially soared to almost $3 billion, although at the time it only had eight employees, including Ramaswamy's brother and mother.[32] Ramaswamy took a massive payout after selling a portion of his shares in Roivant to Viking Global Investors.[32] He claimed more than $37 million in capital gains in tax year 2015.[32] Ramaswamy said his company would be the "Berkshire Hathaway of drug development"[3] and touted the drug as a "tremendous" opportunity that "could help millions" of patients, prompting some criticism that he was overpromising.[32]
In September 2017, the company announced that intepirdine had failed in its large clinical trial.[32][41] The company's value plunged; it lost 75% in one day and continued to decline afterward.[32] Shareholders who lost money included various institutional investors, such as the California State Teachers' Retirement System pension fund.[32] Ramaswamy was insulated from much of Axovant's losses because he held his stake through Roivant.[32][40] The company abandoned intepirdine. In 2018, Ramaswamy said he had no regrets about how the company handled the drug;[40] in subsequent years, he said he regretted the outcome but was annoyed by criticism of the company.[32] Axovant attempted to reinvent itself as a gene therapy company,[42] but dissolved in 2023.[32]
In 2017, Ramaswamy struck a deal with Masayoshi Son in which SoftBank invested $1.1 billion in Roivant.[32] In 2019, Roivant sold its stake in five subsidiaries (or "vants"), including Enzyvant, to Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma;[43][32] Ramaswamy made $175 million in capital gains from the sale.[32] The deal also gave Sumitomo Dainippon a 10% stake in Roivant.[44][43]
While campaigning for the presidency in 2023, Ramaswamy called himself a "scientist" and said, "I developed a number of medicines."[32] Although his undergraduate degree is in biology, he was never a scientist; his role in the biotechnology industry was that of a financier and entrepreneur.[32]
In January 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant Sciences and assumed the role of executive chairman.[43][44] In 2021, after he resigned as CEO, Roivant was listed on the Nasdaq via a reverse merger with Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition vehicle.[45] In February 2023, Ramaswamy stepped down as chair of Roivant to focus on his presidential campaign.[32][46]
Ramaswamy remains the sixth-largest shareholder of Roivant,[32] retaining a 7.17% stake.[47] Roivant has never been profitable.[45]
etc. I'd say this is not worse than I expected but it's certainly not the miracle success story you've painted. If anything, I'd say it calls for investigation.
it seems to me that you were suggesting that, whatever the ultimate nature of this reality is, it is therefore the only coherently conceivable reality
Not exactly. I am saying that there is only one way a reality exactly like this can conceivably work, and «our reality but with laws X» models are incoherent in the final analysis, only saved by our failure to be scrupulous; this applies to casual hypotheticals and to scientific theories alike. It's basically a tautology.
But this simply strikes me as a failure of imagination.
From my perspective, it's more like failure of suspension of disbelief.
Instead of the universe being governed by simple law-like equations, you can imagine it as being governed by a massive arbitrary state table instead. At each time step, the universe simply transitions from one state to the next. The contents of each state are arbitrary and have no necessary relationship to each other; the only regularity is the continual transition from one state to the next.
Ah yes, Dust Theory.
I believe that this kind of universe cannot exist nor even be rigorously imagined, because there is no legitimate content to these notions of «governance» and «transition». What is transited, exactly? How is this set distinguishable from an unstructured heap of unrelated elements, self-contained sub-realities or just bit strings? It's not, but for the extraneous fact that there in some sense can exist a list or a table arbitrarily distinguishing them and referring to them as elements of a sequence (naturally, all such lists would be of equal status). But this does not governance make. You can think it's coherent metaphysics, but I claim you're wrong. The continuum of states exists as the rule of transformations over some contents. It's sophistry to say «well the rule is that there's no rule, only sequence».
In any case, the merit of dust theory or Ruliad is some Neutronium-man to the actual debate we're having. I don't need to concede remotely this much. A world of crayons or Newtonian physics or P-zombies is of course never argued to be an arbitrary sequence of bit strings, the (malformed) idea is that it is a continuous reality like ours, supporting conscious minds, with lawful state transitions.
I'm concerned that this may be circular reasoning. Sure, if qualia just are defined as the casual chain of your brain states, then yes
It's all circular reasoning, always has been. But, more seriously, I think the circularity is on the non-physicalist side. Consider:
Many definitions of qualia have been proposed. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc."
Frank Jackson later defined qualia as "...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes"
We know physical differences between kinds of information accessibility, expressed in medical terms like anosognosia and others. It is a fact about the world that need be included in any serious further theorizing. (In principle, you do not get to restrict the set of facts considered and then claim your model is «coherent» because it dodges contradictions).
We, therefore, can point (for some special cases, point very well) at the brain correlate of the delta between sensation «just happening» with no accessibility to the person and sensation «being felt» and say «lo, this is a qualia», citing the first definition. Its implied conditions are satisfied and this has nothing to do with circular insistence on physicalism, only with recognition that physical reality exists; this thing exists in it and is available to the zombie, even if it is not available to «non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul».
If we circularly define quale as something that is not purely physical, then of course this delta can't be a qualia, but I think this would just be special pleading, not some fancy equally valid theory.
We can coherently imagine this
I don't think you can but whatever. What do you do with existing zombie-quale, then, do you just say they don't matter or are fake news? I've covered that already. This is a coherent theory… in a sense.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
Wojak is at the Republican primary, standing in the corner, his feet hurt, I bet they don't even know how I've transcended simian instincts.
Way to prove him correct. Did you feel clever when writing it? Or did you feel Based?
This is just dumb, Hanania is arguing against a cartoon Republican he just made up in his head.
No, he is not. In fact he isn't arguing at all. He is trying to normalize shaming of Trump loyalists as low-status, trash, unserious Republicans, to divert the remaining talent to a candidate with better chances – both of winning the election and of prosecuting a desirable policy.
We still have tons of Trump loyalists even on this relatively sophisticated sub, for all the good this loyalty has done for them. Hanania is very mean, sure, but his meanness is sensible. What would it take for them to abandon Trump, if his demonstrable political ineptitude, lack of gratitude or respect for his base, ugly and self-defeating tantrums, immaturity so pronounced one has to suspect it's affected etc. – did not?
I think he's correct that it's only humiliation of Trump as a man. But it doesn't really matter. The sad truth is that very many people do not even have a simian idea of political worth. It only matters for them whether voting for Trump is Based or Chringe.
How does this work? Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
…Is what I wanted to say, but it seems that, even irrespective of European squeamishness, the law does not stipulate that refugees can be turned down on these grounds.
Pretty neat.
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