DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
Right now right-wingers are more indignant about the clear bias in charity shown to parties of the bike conflict, to the point that the wholly innocent party got royally screwed.
My read is that, rather than just downplay the teens' actions on the object level, in that scenario right-wingers would be busy protesting asinine federal hate crime law proposals, dealing with accusations of genocide and wrapping their minds around novel concepts like «stochastic induction of miscarriage»; and we would be fuming over twitter threads from ethnic studies Ph.Ds shoehorning that episode into some chattel slavery history crap with pregnant black mistresses forced to work in the fields.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
LEDs aren't strictly superior to good incandescent light sources. At their peak, in the last few years, they are competitive. I don't mean longevity or efficiency or safety, they certainly beat the hell out of previous technologies in these terms. I mean color rendering index, smoothness of the emission spectrum (most importantly the prominence of blue peak) and flicker-free luminance – properties that make for comfortable, natural light. CRI is defined as a fraction of color rendering that an incandescent gives. There's a nice Russian website with a database of those and other measurements, creatively called lamptest.ru. The best LEDs have CRI=99. Cheap ones are more like 93 now, and 80 yesterday.
Incidentally, office-tier fluorescents could go as low as 60-something.
There are alternative measures and some debate, of course, but the gist is this: sometimes you walk into a store or an exhibition or some other venue where electricity cost is an afterthought, or just a bitter clinger old-timer's home, and you notice that it's easy to see things, even though the nominal luminous power is weak and tinged with yellow. That's because there are powerful incandescent and probably halogen lights installed, and your retina is hit with continuous color gradients it had evolved for. It's almost as pleasant as sunlight, and as bittersweet as a scent bringing back childhood memories.
It's like wireless earbuds or earphones. Sure, after trying out a decent pair, you wouldn't want to get back to tangled cables and the microphone effect and the need to lug the audio source around. But every once in a while you plug in your electrostatic planars into an amp, or just 4BA+DD buds into an old laptop –and remember what it was like before convenience outweighed the taste for fidelity one could mistake for snobbish pretense.
Or one could think about our computers, and their embarrassing latency despite undeniable improvement in computing power.
Grandpa might still remember the thing with transistor radios and what they had superseded.
And so it goes all the way to Socrates and his warning against committing knowledge to written medium, that gets in the way of learning by heart – which in his mind was identical with true understanding, and it's frankly pretty compelling once you think about the compromise inherent in retrieval transformers.
I'm not sure if people had voiced the same opposition to speech.
But I digress. In exchange for convenience, we grow used to a slightly inferior experience at the core of the activity, some accidental detail that made it wonderful, and stop noticing it, and begin to find it amusing that some eccentrics still fiddle with the obsolete. The experience of few such transitions may be what makes people so averse to accept the next new thing, even when it is plainly superior across the board.
There are of course other such studies, the one @curious_straight_ca linked is perhaps the best. Oh, regarding the objection about non-representative sample, this just in – looks like it doesn't matter very much.
But what of it? Suppose you technically prove your point, then the other party just pivots to explaining it away with extra racism or legacy of redlining or something, or casts suspicion on your sources (just like that, or with a link to motherjones or something) and demands arbitrary amounts of corroborating evidence; at some point you run out of studies suitable to respond to a specific contrived attack, and the other guy wins, despite the preponderance of evidence. Or, to be precise, you lose the instant you allow yourself to be dragged into the game, because you're not even a player – it's a breakout game for progressives, and you're the wall they throw gotchas at, and compete in who breaks through in the fewest number of moves.
You could just as well say, for example: «I reject your premise that poverty causes crime. It is silly. Of course criminal inclinations cause poverty. Demonstrate that we should assume otherwise» (this is what I honestly believe. People seem to imagine, probably due to media, that modern criminal lifestyle in an affluent country begins with scrappy Dickensian ragamuffins making ends meet or other such nonsense).
Most likely he'll flame out, but if not, you may have a taste of how it feels to be the sovereign. Because, as Moldbug has said in a rare moment of lucidity – sovereign is he who chooses the null hypothesis.
"We aren’t ‘denying’ there’s a lot of powerful Jews and that many Jewish groups wield great influence. We just don’t give a fuck because that tells you next to nothing about anything important." - Haz
Next to nothing is still something. Contrary to HBD-informed opinions popular in rationalist circles, Jews are a people, not just a sample with higher IQs, like Ph.D holders. Accordingly, they have such as thing as Jewish culture. Some assert it's the culture of hard work, curiosity and striving for justice, or whatever. This is not borne out by research. However, this culture does have a lot of exclusive content. For example, it has the notion of chuzpah, a peculiar moral failing and occasionally strength:
Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, which renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display. …"that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."
Disregard for consequences befalling others aside, chutzpah has many faces as a general cognitive-strategic attitude. Chutzpah is the hope that you might be a miracle worker and the belief that «there is a crack in everything», as the Messiah wannabe Leo Cohen sang. Chutzpah is extreme rules-lawyering, the denial that laws of Nature and Nature's God are ontologically different from laws and customs of men. Chutzpah is first-order utilitarianism when you're really sure that you have noticed the skulls and divined the golden road betwixt their piles. Chutzpah is having your cake and eating it too. Chutzpah is paying for something with nothing squared, tokenized collateral of your own futures, crypto farts sniffed by friendly SEC regulators, in the name of giving well. Chutzpah is Harry Yud-Potter gaming every challenge via Time Turner, and Unsong's Karma Houdini of a moral lesson: Comet King overdosing on selfish sinfulness to go to Hell to recarve the Universe without the facet of Evil. Chutzpah is whatever the fuck Yevno Azef was doing and what had caused Lavon affair and guided Soros and Berezovsky and Sacklers and keeps Netanyahu in power, and so on and so forth, permeating the book of history. Chutzpah is hacker's mindset, «one weird trick» praxis, cheerful «high decoupler» insanity of the Ratsphere that begets Sneerclub, and the antithesis of the entire edifice of traditional Christlich, Hajnal line, Western civilization – that is built on predictable cooperation and law of equivalent exchange, viscerally felt as truth.
Arguably it was necessary to kickstart modern finance and enable centuries of sustained economic growth. Maybe it's a mental trait needed to transcend this local optimum and pull humanity kicking and screaming into the era of post-scarcity. But in practice it's more about callous exploitation, «X affair» and «Y-gate», broken lives and burned trust and destroyed roads to better future.
Yes, it is «condemned». Except by Alan M. Dershowitz (who just got settlement with regards to that Epstein sex trafficking stuff):
“Chutzpah” is rich with what Dershowitz characterizes as the essential quality of Jewishness-- rachmones , which Dershowitz defines as “the Hebrew-Yiddish word for compassion .”
Dershowitz, for instance, is currently championing the cause of Jonathan and Anne Pollard, a pair of American Jews who confessed to espionage on behalf of Israel, and he noisily condemns the fretfulness and timidity that some Jewish leaders have displayed toward the Pollard case, the “ sh’a shtill (keep quiet) mentality” of an earlier immigrant generation.
“The time has come for us to shed our self-imposed second-class status . . . and rid ourselves of our pathological fear of offending our ‘hosts,’ ”…
“The byword of past generations of Jewish Americans has been shanda --fear of embarrassment in front of our hosts. The byword of the next generation should be chutzpah --assertive insistence on first-class status among our peers.”
And he had enough pull to cancel one condemner, at least.
As one lives, one starts to notice this peculiarity, even without familiarizing oneself with Jewish self-reflection. It's just as glaring as high IQs if not more so. But it's more costly to point out – although of course even the IQ stuff can get you slammed hard if you don't spin it just right, that is, with enough chutzpah.
Fortunately Coindesk can cancel a black guy for a Hot Take about Jews in the FTX case. Unfortunately, Coindesk (apparently Jewish-owned) isn't above casually taking shots at other broad demographics who allegedly dominate the industry. This kind of particularism is a major factor behind one of the oldest prejudices in the world – one could say, one of the oldest stereotypes. That's what, three special features already? And you can take issue with zero of them.
But, really, all those righteous noises are beside the point for a common man. The point is: on the level of personal decisionmaking, do your beliefs pay rent?
Like they ask you in the Russian prison: there are two chairs. Say, you're a normal rationalist, it's mid-2022, and you want to use an exchange to park some of your crypto in a token. So, there are two major exchanges.
-
One is a shady operation that started in China and is ran from Singapore; it has «no headquarters» because «decentralized ethos», can't officially operate in the US and is investigated by DoJ on allegations of money laundering and tax evasion. The owner's parents were lowly teachers and he used to work in McDonald's. The company shared data with the warmongering Russian government. Their token chain is a centralized mockery of Ethereum. Really i's a run-of-the-mill scammy crypto gig that grew a bit bigger than others.
-
The other is ran by an «ultra genius and Musk-like doer builder», math wizard of finance, born into the family of Stanford Law School professors, endowed with the citizenship of the freest nation in the world, praised by mainstream media, tradfi players and public intellectuals. He cut his teeth in Jane Street. He testified and lobbied for crypto before Congress, promising to actively cooperate with regulation. He's proudly inspired by Peter Singer (Unsong: «The kabbalistic meaning of “singer” is “someone who tries to be good.” This reading we derive from Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who explored the depths of moral obligation. Singer called the movement that grew up around him “effective altruism”». His chief advisor is the author of the book «What We Owe The Future» that extols precautionary principle against catastrophic risks on the astronomic scale and timespan. He finances EAs. He's a vegan. He Has A Savior Complex – And Maybe You Should Too.
The first guy's name is «Changpeng Zhao» (赵长鹏).
The latter's is «Samuel Bankman-Fried» (סם בנקמן פרייד).
You're a rationalist, that is, supposed to win. So you shut up and calculate expected value using available priors, and known red flags.
Using only knowledge provided here, whom would you rather entrust with your money? And what would an Antisemite do?
Or rather: what would a crypto-rich Antisemite do upon learning that the champion and savior of crypto is now called Samuel Bankman-Fried?
I rest my case.
…Every few years there's another shande far di goyim, another fractal garbage fire that leaves one speechless in its boldness, instigated by some highly educated, well-connected, too greedy, too horny, too crazy or otherwise too-clever-by-half rich Ashkenazi Jew, a chunk of humanity's wealth wiped out by supreme chutzpah. Another cohort gets singed by the flames and starts noticing patterns, and wondering if there are things which do not leak but are equally beyond the pale. Another round of purges and suppression unfolds, «network contagion» and «spread of hate» are again «checked» by well-funded orgs of extremely concerned people. That cohort learns their lesson, and learns to keep it private too: they now have a prior to trust hyped-up Jews somewhat less, and they know that the only socially acceptable comment on this topic is along the lines of Haz – lest you be branded a bigot and destroyed.
But they'll obstinately overlook credentials, connections, persona and reputation and prefer shady Zhaos and Semenovs and Muchgians to Bankman-Frieds, baffling and disgusting newcomers who pay attention.
So it goes, round and round. It's one of the world's oldest, ugliest prejudices, and we'll sooner figure out all laws of Nature and secrets of Nature's God than learn how to extinguish it for good.
Well, maybe Effective Altruists will build a Singleton with SBF's loot, and it'll find some clever one-and-done solution, but I hope not.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide. It's easy to support this on generic libertarian or even (trans)humanist grounds; the state and society are, ideally, not entitled to deny people their exit rights.
What's more unpleasant about the situation is that this libertarianism is very skewed by what one could call «Cheems mindset» or perhaps medical ethics. We don't have a legally enshrined freedom of form and being: we have only freedom of diminution, freedom to make yourself something lesser or avoid some medically recognized pain at some cost, rather than modify arbitrarily.
You can get feminizing hormones and antiandrogens much, much easier than you can get T (unless you're an FtM trans with «dysphoria») and HGH. You can get euthanasia but not euphoretics and not any serious research into cognitive enhancement. Some claims to the pressing need to change are recognized and affirmed; others are laughed out of the room (imagine incels petitioning for state-mandated masculinization treatment).
It shows that this isn't really about freedom, but rather about some blind and selective idea of compassion. The sort that's grounded in the notion of humanity which doesn't seek to grow, only to stop suffering. It's not the sort of humanity I want to live together with; hopefully there'll be an answer superior to the euthanasia booth.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Similarly to @BurdensomeCount , I couldn't care less about Tolkien's racial canon. It's the same thing as always happens, too. Sure, it's funny how we used to do blackface for historical accuracy – and now fantasy peoples, some outright inhuman and extraterrestial or extradimensional, ought to possess diverse ethnic identity signifiers of the population of United states. It might also break immersion for fans who are serious about history and deep lore of fantasy settings; I can respect their plight… to roughly the same extent as I respect artists annoyed by the deluge of AI-generated kitsch. Literally First World Problems. Tiny violin. Etc.
But. You know, little things like that do more than break immersion in a specific media piece. They break the whole illusion, jerk me awake. They redpill me (speaking of which: Wachowskis may believe they were making Gnostic allusions to the trans condition, but of course it's the other way around, they came within an inch of understanding Gnosticism through their sexual turmoil).
These little things remind me that I am an adult, a boring mature specimen of a murderous ape in the world of murderous, lying, boring and terribly clever apes, and not a neotenic Eloi in some enchanted Consumerland beholding le epic stories of adventure. Little things together form a pattern, the conspicuous and unalterable watermark of tropes that The Greater American Empire leaves on assimilated «IPs» and «franchises», on myths forging souls of those eternal children in the Pure Land of the West and beyond. Those tropes teach you to complete sentences.
Ultimate, irredeemable scumbags and punching bags are… white men.
All happy families or relationships are… either colored or mixed-race.
The one good white father figure, if he exists… dies a martyr, willingly, to make way for hot-blooded folx of color, often his adopted children ushering in a new era. He is not to have any white heirs of his own, certainly not decent male ones (it's okay to leave a daughter though).
The colored girl is… brilliant and self-assured, sassy yet competent.
The monsters are… gentle victims of exploitation and harassment (by elite whites).
And a bunch of other similar edifying pieces on what a Decent Person ought to expect, diligently repeated.
(Yes, I've watched Black Adam and a few Foundation episodes. Big mistake. Alita also comes to mind. And The Good Place. And even that Puss in Boots 2. I suppose the overhyped Spiderman is of the same mold, given his creator's stated beliefs).
You cannot escape. This pattern is to American movies (and games and cards and fan wikis and whatever) what the text of the Roman Missal is to Requiem by Mozart or Verdi or whoever else – the spirit and the essence, the Truth that is to be learned even as fanciful capeshit and fantasy plots change by the season. White and black, black and white, and then all colors of the extended Pride flag, the drill is spinning-spinning-spinning and it makes me sick for I cannot stop seeing the shape these colors carve into reality, even as low-effort rubbery CGI and glossy illustrations and clever game mechanics and inane bastardized narratives dance on its edges. When exposed to this absurd vision, I am not being entertained; I am being lectured through a tedious post-Hajnali quasi-religious morality play, and a sloppy one at that, boilerplate written by humorless Cathedralites who expect – for sound reasons – to elicit childish excitement with their mass-produced baubles sweetening the pill.
I'm either too old for this shit to be distracted by baubles or too wretched to appreciate the profundity of its moral lessons. But I'm just right for manga, somehow. Now as dozen years ago, I find chapter 88 of Medaka Box quite profound. More so now in fact, given that it talks of a similar disillusion I hadn't been keenly aware of back then.
They'll lobotomize the Japanese too, won't they? The process is well underway. In another dozen years, odds are we'll have all the creative means we could imagine, and nary a creator. Only sermonists.
Despite apologizing, Bostrom is attacked still for reiterating he believes in IQ gaps and “handwaving” about eugenics.
The eugenics angle comes from the infamous Timnit Gebru, among others.
Curiously, Gary Marcus (famous for his poor critiques of mainstream machine learning, and vague advocacy for neurosymbolic approaches) is also at risk of cancellation in a similar manner now. He has angered the same Timnit Gebru and some other ladies by not mentioning a diverse enough list of names of (mostly misguided, in his opinion) AI researchers in his recent interview with Ezra Klein (see decent commentary) – and for having a backbone, but only barely (but still more than Bostrom; always pitiful to see scared autistics)*. One of Gebru's allies has provided an exceptionally apt formulation of woke logic of power:
if you want to be an ally, it means not being defensive when you get called out
To wit. If you challenge our accusations, in whole or even in part, you are erasing our lived experience/silencing marginalized voices/perpetuating the iniquity etc. and are an enemy of progress, as expected of a privileged old white cisheteronormative dude (and to think we gave you a chance to prove you're different from that ilk!); thus you shall be destroyed. If you kowtow and acknowledge our accusations, you cede your moral agency to us, and as an ignorant, oafish «ally» with his heart in the right place who strives to do better, you will have to unquestionably assist us in struggles to come.
Or to quote Land's 2013 masterpiece again:
Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-progressive mastery of American providence has become uncontestable, dominated by a racial dialectic that absorbs unlimited contradiction, whilst positioning the Afro-American underclass as the incarnate critique of the existing social order, the criterion of emancipation, and the sole path to collective salvation. No alternative structure of historical intelligibility is politically tolerable, or even – strictly speaking – imaginable, since resistance to the narrative is un-American, anti-social, and (of course) racist, serving only to confirm the existence of systematic racial oppression through the symbolic violence manifested in its negation. To argue against it is already to prove it correct, by concretely demonstrating the same benighted forces of social retardation that are being verbally denied. By resisting the demand for orchestrated social re-education, knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’ only show how much there still is to do.
Or in terms a child would get: heads I win, tails you lose.
Gary, when this happens I think the right course of action is to say, “thanks, you’re right”, and do better next time. There’s no shame in getting out of one’s own way.
I did! And the attacks on me continued.
Note the smug Domingos.
Bentham's bulldog is also guilty of dancing to their tune: what's the point of quoting Mother Jones as a gotcha? Whom is this supposed to win over? (Incidentally, here's a good refutation of that article.)
Some people say that wokeness is a religion. For the narrow circle of true believers, perhaps; and for conformists of little faith who go by Cuius regio, eius religio, arguably; but it's also much cruder than that. This is wokeness in practice, and it is not some cute alternative belief system from the academic hothouse that is poorly compatible with our philistine mores, but the cold logic of school bullying, the tactic of muggers who goad you into a rhetorical pitfall where you'll willingly part with your possessions to not get «rightfully» beaten, the dialectics of a Russian prison heart-to-heart with your rectum at stake. This is naked power-seeking, two-bit hostility of chronically defecting bad actors who think it clever to ignore plebeian rules of coexistence; systematic social parasitism and predation. And the proper reaction to this is what a tattooed thief-in-law would get for trying to quiz and then rape a law-abiding citizen in public.
Of course these people are not the problem. The problem is – to loan a page from their book – the «moderate majority» which isn't willing to recognize their epistemic terrorism for what it is and support actual victims. It would be perfectly reasonable for Marcus to reply with some variant of «oh piss off you psychotic witch» – except his own academic environment would disown him for it, rather then murmur «indeed, what the hell». He is, after all, presumed to need the status of an «ally» that these people have taken upon themselves the authority to assign; he can be threatened with its revocation. Gebru is higher-status than a mere professor emeritus who is a meritless superstar in his own right. Jeff Dean could politely defend her firing, but Jeff Dean is a crucial figure in an existentially important project for the world's premier corporation. Can Bostrom's clout measure up? Like everyone in this network, he's a lame duck after the fall of FTX, and he's probably irrelevant from now on.
For my part, I'll say that if these people define racism as a belief that black people have lower average IQ than other major population groups, then okay, I'm racist. If they define racism somewhat more rigorously, as a belief that black people have lower IQs for innate genetic reasons, I'm still racist: the evidence is just overwhelming. If they ever wish to destroy me for those views, it'll be useless to attempt to backtrack like Bostrom tries to do with his talking from both sides of his mouth.
If they ever attempt to convince others that this implies support of racial discrimination on my part, all I can do is recognize this as unjustified malice that does not merit charity, and insist in turn that their political platform has no place in a polite society.
° Says Bostrom:
I think for people interested in the societal consequences of genetic medicine, or in the ethics of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, selection, or engineering, or in human enhancement ethics more generally, either on the side of pro or con, we are more likely to improve our collective understanding and wisdom and by open-minded and thoughtful engagement with the arguments and the existing literature, rather than by name-calling or sloganeering—let alone by idiotic and offensive emails like the one I wrote 26 years ago, and for which, again, I truly and sincerely apologize.
There's nothing to think about, though. As of January 2nd, and in following with the NIH barring data access for political reasons, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium has updated their restrictions on reusing their data. Now they've included a prohibition on using their PGS/PRS/GPS for prenatal or preimplantation genetic testing: «Investigators may not use these data to develop any type of risk or predictive test for an unborn individual».
My opinion of Dennis Prager is roughly the same as Norm Macdonald's one of Hitler. And freedom of speech etc. etc., no disagreements here. However, here I must say that I understand where he is coming from (except the «If the Holocaust is a fabrication, Americans died fighting against nothing particularly evil» part – come on man, just pretend you give a fuck about tyranny and, say, mass killing of Slavs). It feels strange to put into words what a Jew has apparently failed at conveying to a sympathetic another.
The point is as follows. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is not just a sacred cow nor an academic sticking point. Six million – considering the incentives of researchers such as perceived immorality or danger of lowballing, maybe a biased estimate, but still close to the center of mass of my a priori model – is near the totality of Jews that had been living by that point on the territory controlled by Germany. As Praeger says,
Beginning in about 1941, the Nazi regime dedicated itself to murdering every Jew — man, woman, child and baby — in countries it occupied. Eventually, more than six of every 10 Jews in Europe were murdered.
Them having been killed, whether via gas and those absurd shower contraptions like mainstreamers insist, or indirectly via starvation and neglect, like some revisionists effectively tell it, regardless of proportion by method or nuances of timeline or sensational claims about particular cruelties, indicates the successfully pursued intention of a complete eradication of a people wherever possible – an intention one can derive from arguments in Hitler's magnum opus already. This clear intention is the main reason I feel disinterested in investigating revisionism (although I know that the mainstream can get stuck on asserting blatant lies, as the case of HBD shows). And, therefore, it is qualitatively different from killing hundreds of thousands, like in some vastly scaled-up impulsive pogrom. It was, indeed, a genocide, and it means that, were the Axis successful in its ultimate political program, it would have been the end of Jewry globally, the final death of Israel.
Jews, in my experience, have stronger sensitivity to existential threats than European peoples, to an extent that, I suspect, they cannot quite believe the difference, and mistake fringe right-wing white identitarian groups for «mask-off» evidence about the sentiment pervading, mostly subconsciously for now, the totality of the race. Must be an unpleasant mental space to inhibit. But they're still the sane ones in this relationship; and Europeans are abnormal by the standards of humanity, too liberated from the longhouse ethics BAP despises so, too collectively autistic and ethnically suicidal to recognize and feel viscerally what makes a genocide so «particularly evil».
Perhaps, as an autistic person, you're closer to white Gentiles in this regard.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
The difference is that the poem is good.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Unsurprising. According to the NYT feat Steve Sailer, Jews obviously dominate only as University Presidents, at 56%, less so as heads of news and media companies (36-40%), and across the sample of powerful positions the NYT has gathered make up merely 13%, which given what we know about IQ disparities probably indicates systemic anti-Semitism. Consider this also an endorsed alternative to your work (in the future, please attach CSV at least, when you're talking about 414 data points and aggressively demanding a quantitative analysis).
Seriously though, I do suspect that this methodology is wrong, much like counting ML papers and SOTA results on synthetic benchmarks can create the impression that the US is lagging behind China (indeed, «The China-US AI research gap has continued to widen, with Chinese institutions producing 4.5 times as many papers than American institutions since 2010, and significantly more than the US, India, UK, and Germany combined»), while in reality not a single Chinese paper is of any consequence and Google alone, with a few dozen major papers, is running circles around the entire rest of the planet, with OpenAI and Meta in tow.
Goldman Sachs is not bigger than JPMorgan Chase, but it aggressively defines standards and pushes ethical guidelines for others to follow; it may be that David Solomon, or whatever he represents, has higher agency than Jamie Dimon. And do you seriously say that the CEO has 1/10th of the power because there are 9 more executives listed? Does Xi have 1/7th of the Standing Committee's power?
To be fair, he could have even less. Structure matters. Maybe it's like the difference between the LA Times and the New York Times: «...the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. [...] It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.» I suspect it's not a coincidence that Sulzbergers guard their turf so jealously while the LA Times is ran more like a regular business. (In the same vein, what is interesting about Goldman Sachs is not its current CEO but the historical predominance of Jewish executives, and the often clannish nature of their succession. GS is not merely a property).
BlackRock, meanwhile, this «industry leader in environmental, social and corporate governance» that issues moralizing letters to its clients, is not even a bank, has pitiful assets by bank standards and can mainly brag of «assets under management» ($10 trillion of them, though) and thus doesn't make it to your list with its diverse leadership.
It may work the other way around too. Like Churchill has said once, «...the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews.» This is an unsubstantiated, qualitative judgement of a savvy well-connected operator, that no counting of raw beans could check – how do we know if Litvinoff truly was more powerful than Tchitcherin? His rank doesn't indicate that! Kushner, too, didn't outrank Trump, nor does Blinken outrank Biden, yet the former has bragged of defining Trump's policy in the Middle East (one of the few parts of Trump's presidency that have been allowed posterity) and basically running the whole show, and the latter is perhaps more influential still. And someone like Pompeo is a purebred Gentile, but his beliefs about the supernatural primacy of Israel, uhh... Ditto for Pelosi – does it matter if she isn't as Jewish as Schumer?
Now, how do we develop a proper methodology for apportioning relative power of groups in a principled way? I admit it's hard, but I think this involves what Moldbug is going on about with his reformalization. We evaluate individual actors as moved by others or actively moving them; their interpersonal relationships and their career obligations to organizations with unambiguous and hopefully self-admitted allegiances; we chart trajectories leading people from the crib to powerful positions; and thus reveal a network of influence.
Necessarily, this is going to give off crazy vibes – so nobody decent will bother. Certainly couldn't be me!
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I think crypto isn't dying, it's being killed, and its killers have names like «Sam Bankman-Fried». You don't get more centralized than this goofy fuck pontificating on regulation while misappropriating your funds to help out his buddies. It's dressed-up anarcho-tyranny. FTX was scarcely any more legitimate an institution than 2014 style exit scam exchanges ran by Eastern European anons, but the impact is vastly greater precisely due to those pretensions of being the responsible backbone to the system. It doesn't matter that he has the markings of a trustworthy radical bro and signals the «spirit of crypto». What matters is what he does.
SBF was either grossly unethical, beyond incompetent or conspiring with the incumbent powers; seeing his EA affiliations and apparent nonchalance in the wake of the disaster, I believe the latter is very probable and hope not just crypto but EAs get the spillover reputation damage they deserve.
We do not need more Bankmans. We have TradFi already, @2rafa and@BurdensomeCount are doing their jobs there just fine, it has more than enough reach in the society. The whole point of crypto was to establish from first principles an alternative, trustless transaction ecosystem they are not involved with. Roon is another sellout to EAs, but he puts it well:
i've been too anti-crypto so i'll say that i've always liked the piratical create new legal/financial system ethos of it all. towards 2021 end, what we actually saw was the 11th noncollateralized algorithmic stablecoin (ponzi) or people remaking normal apps with worse technology
the problem was always that the good use cases for crypto require random people in poor countries without extradition to build insane free market cypherunk neal stephenson network states and instead we got harvard graduate institutionally backed money grabbing nonsense
Crypto, as conceived of by Satoshi, is intrinsically incompatible with the USG hegemony, and with people like SBF as its champions; it was one of the few non-hopeless attempts to challenge the singleton and increase the richness of potential outcomes. Villain League leaders (Russia, China, Iran etc.) reveal their lack of vision, or complicity, in not throwing their weight behind it.
More generally.
You've asked me the other day:
What does moving past this sweet spot look like in practice? Are you saying the goal is to make us terrified of the incumbent Western state actors, so much so we lose the will to resist?
Adding to those posts: I think that this, in part, will be implemented as the infantilization of the populace framed for midwits as interdependence in modern economy, and the disappearance of people with «fuck you money».
Ironically, it may look like the spread of practices typical for the super-rich down the social strata, but with one significant nuance: as your dependence on connections increases, your own agency and ability to decide whether someone else is connected does not, and indeed it degrades. Thus, a two-class system emerges: people who are connected and people who connect. Even the extremely rich plebeians, like Kanye, are but leafs of the graph; every link between them and the world with which they can affect it can be trivially snapped with or without a formal cause by even the lowest member of the patrician class, who is, in turn, able to fall back on an antifragile support system working on informal «understandings». Plebeian wealth is tied in contracts that can be canceled unilaterally if they misbehave, their social capital – on platforms with censors and politruks, hosted on vulnerable servers owned by people either terrified of another set of politruks or agreeing with them; their money in banks, ran by Bankmans, or in cargo-cultish meme assets like Bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet. We are being made into perpetual children, evaluated, tested and judged by the nebulous Adult Society, granted good boy points, credentials and access tokens which can be revoked at will.
If the realization of having been made into such a child is not terrifying, I don't know what is. My belief is that people gloating at the troubles in crypto, such as the Hacker News audience, are domesticated to the extent they cannot feel this terror and instead skip to obedience instantly, eagerly swallowing the bluepill cope about interdependence, regulations, «consequences of speech» and such. Maybe that's the historically normal mentality for a plebeian.
In any case, Crypto was our shot at resisting this atomization and subjugation trend. But it got infiltrated, discredited, devalued and now is being brought to heel, because, as I always say, social technology >>> technology.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Is this how people see my more cryptic writing? Because it looks like a load of asinine and extreme logorrhea that at most can poison the theoretically fruitful topic.
What i always found frustrating with the mainstream progressive view of this matter is that they seem hell bent on blaming Men for this problem.
Nothing new, we've been discussing this a lot recently. Like I said the last time: «The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD. ... [from the progressive point of view] It can't be that the solution lies in any conceivable change to female behavior, except even more emancipation, even greater triumph over toxic masculinity.» A small update:
CNN reports on South Korea breaking its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate:
The national statistics body reported Wednesday that the fertility rate, or the average number of children expected per woman, fell to 0.78 in 2022 – down from 0.81 the previous year.
South Korea’s birth rate has been falling since 2015 and the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time in 2020, a trend that has continued since.
In 2022, the country recorded about 249,000 births and 372,800 deaths.
Experts say the reasons for these demographic shifts across the region include demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, changing attitudes toward marriage and gender equality, and rising disillusionment among younger generations.
But despite the economic factors at play, throwing money at the problem has proved ineffective. Last September, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol admitted that more than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years.
The South Korean government has introduced various initiatives such as extending paid paternity leave, offering monetary “baby vouchers” to new parents, and social campaigns encouraging men to contribute to childcare and housework.
But experts and residents say more support is needed throughout a child’s life – as well as change on several deep-rooted social issues. For instance, South Korean society still frowns on single parents, with IVF treatment not available to single women.
Couples in non-traditional partnerships also face discrimination; South Korea does not recognize same-sex marriage and regulations make it difficult for unwed couples to adopt.
I believe these stupid remedies can only change things at the margins (at best; how many lesbian Korean couples do you think will have more than 1 child? how many even are there?), will flop, and South Korean nation will continue to age and die off, at the annual rate of 0.23% now, 0.75% in two decades. This effortpost by @gorge suffices to show that doubling down on feminism to solve this is an implausible tactic which can only convince people who would advocate feminism and broader progressivism in response to any problem from high interest rates to unaligned AI. But what is not clear is: how many of those suggestions are made by women? Or by men keeping emotional reactions of unserious women in mind when they do analysis? I think the answer is «most if not all».
Peter Thiel has opined once to the effect that female enfranchisement has made capitalist democracy impossible. He later defended himself with a series of excuses about the specificity of his complaint, but I think it does make democracy non-viable in many other senses too. Indeed I believe that democracy, as commonly implemented, only works in the first place with very specific samples of mostly Western populations; it's an exception, not the rule.*
The problem here is that democracy is largely about bargaining, and women – speaking in generalities, of course – bargain in all markets with the assumption that they can get the price down to zero, if not for the greed of the other party. They are even less interested in object-level constraints than men; they insist that their preferred arrangement is objectively fair and true even when it's clearly no longer viable, and will shoot down any arrangement that includes what they understand as redistributing some of their powers back to men; and they will demand of men to aid them in shooting it down; and men will be proud to assist, because being of use to women is the measure of their worth. Ultimately this is just a product of what Doolittle calls female magical thinking:
Causes and Evidence of Female "Magical Thinking"
THE SCIENCE:
\1) Conflating what they wish for with what is and what is possible.
\2) The general tendency of women to confuse what is Desirable/Undesirable with what is True/False. Or, more directly, stating their wants are truths of the world, rather than just wants of their own.
\3) The universal tendency (demonstrated in this video) of women to engage in NAXALT/AXALT: Not all X are like that, All X are like that, or more precisely, to ignore a distribution to justify an outlier, or to use an outlier in order to falsify a distribution.
These --XALTs are both forms of denial. In other words (get ready) the woman's cognition evolves to justify her feelings and NOT adapt to existential reality.
Why? They are exporting satisfaction of their emotional demands onto others: MEN. (Yes really).
This is the science, and it's exasperating. Why? We no longer use older sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts to cause women to self-regulate their magical thinking.
And their magical thinking evolved in order to generate demand from men to satisfy them .... in exchange for affection and sex. Sorry. :(
Yes, I cringe at his presentation as well. We don't get to have our edgelords obsessed with reiterating copybook headings be smooth communicators: all such people are safely employed at fitting unworkable but politically attractive solutions into powerpoint presentations.
But perhaps I'd not have cringed so hard if I were even less concerned about women rolling their eyes.
It's hard to say what the solution could even look like. Doolittle gestures in the direction of older women who used to throw some cold water on the delusion of girls, keeping the tendency of demand inflation in check. I suppose this is the sort of cultural ability that is non-recoverable once it's been lost.
* This isn't to say that e.g. authoritarianism works «better» elsewhere, in whatever meaning of the word. It may be that many societies are in terminal decline, like a human with multiple organ failure, and have no workable regime option to save themselves. Their democracies will result in inane populism, either progressive or reactionary, and their reactionary populism will bring forth a literally catastrophically incompetent rule – like Turks have recently learned, perhaps to a good effect we'll see in May elections, perhaps to no avail.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
My rule of thumb for HackerNews with regard to wrongthink is: if the username looks like a real name, then opinion discarded – at best, it's some sellout mid-career manager with a reputation at stake, in fact he's likely posting not out of genuine interest but only to neurotically reinforce his reputation, a highly compensated yet politically powerless peasant quaking in his boots at the thought of angering the HR Inner Party cat lady sovereign – if she were to check and see him being the first to stop the applause. At worst, something lobotomized and ChatGPT-like, impervious to logic.
If it's some random alphanumeric string or witty nonsense, that's perhaps a hacker or at least a thinking person, and worth a read.
jasonhansel
Website: https://jasonhansel.com
I'd said only that he expressed sympathy for neoreactionaries, and the above Twitter thread proves my point.
...
HideousKojima
The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?
Case in point.
Compared to TheMotte it's markedly worse, for the aforementioned reason of HN being a good boy pageant rather than a pseudonymous discussion forum of people selected for having issues with orthodoxy. Fundamentally it's the same because there is no penalty for trotting out the same two-bit, long-discredited gotchas (muh «race boundaries are nebulous», «the Irish were dumber, checkmate» etc), therefore no progress is being made and, indeed, there is a regression in cumulative knowledge with attrition of the best. Then again, no community of notable size satisfies this criterion – as far as these topics are concerned.
Scott's wrongthink in this case is so anodyne I think it's more interesting that Topher Brennan (incidentally the gender theorist Ozy Brennan's, nee Franz', husband and father of her child – guess some people just never get over their inferiority complex) believed it to be a decent attack vector, and judging by those discussions it is giving some people enough to work with. I doubt they even read it – they just skim to confirm that on the level of sentiment he's pro-HBD – and therefore definitely pro-racism, and likely pro-white supremacy and Nazism to boot.
Confirmation bias works the same way for any belief system – with pizzagates and voter frauds just as well as with suspicions of progressives. You need tremendous social capital to merely earn a hearing from a person, and not an adversarial sentiment classifier.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
This wasn't an attack on your attitude, which if anything is refreshing in its boldness and consistency. Even an explicit Varna system where our neo-Brahmin Judeo-Hapa CEOs are recognized as spiritually (and racially) superior but are also expected to fulfill certain paternalistic prosocial obligations befitting their greater capability would be preferable to the current having-the-cake-and-eating-it-too arrangement, where Whites both underperform and carry the inexhaustible moral burden of transgressions, real and imagined.
Note, however, that in the West you feel noblesse oblige towards, and intend to save, «the West» as an abstraction and a communal cultural legacy. As you have indicated many times in the past, ignorant, wretched lower-to-middle-class Anglos can only inspire an almost-genocidal contempt on your side. You justify this by pointing out their unmerited pretension of equality. Fine. But if we compare values, they are, on average, superior to the median member of your nation (if not your lineage) in all respects one could care about – work ethic, intellect, honesty, fucking cleanliness – except maybe knowing their place; they provide the substrate for your flourishing; and they are not afforded the opportunity to lord over those lesser people in their countries, nor do they seek it – as opposed to their, or rather their upper classes', forefathers of the Colonial era. And indeed both in the US and the UK they calmly accept even the political leadership of your kin; a situation unthinkable in any South Asian nation, no matter the respective merit.
In my eyes this largely redeems their superficial arrogance, and brings the ball back into your court.
I wonder how black people will feel if this is what kills Kanye and not...y'know, going against the strongest racial partisan preference in the country.
I think they'll feel fear when they see that even their strongest champion (well, one of the strongest) is a powerless commoner, someone to be dragged through the mud and forced to apologize, in this scenario. It'll be a reality check of sorts, like what happens when Kadyrov's folks come to you to discuss your penchant for talking smack about Chechens on the internet. Thought you're a tough guy, huh? Thought we're powerless pussies? Surprise, we are the tough guys and you are the pussy; now display to all that you acknowledge that, and then hopefully we won't have to deal with really tough and much meaner guys than you in the future. It's a normal Asian practice of group self-defense, in fact it follows inevitably from the logic of honor culture. It permeates Israeli foreign policy and Jewish activism and it works well.
This happens to Black Americans and to other groups from time to time. How much has changed since 1996, really? Granted, some things have changed: for instance, we don't have Norm any more. Nor TV programs where his sort of routine, the gentlest, most plausibly deniable criticism of overreaction, the court jester's hint to the king, can be aired.
If we dispense with the individual will and look at this through the faux-Jungian lens of collective group unconscious, Kanye or Nick Cannon going off the rails in different directions is collective Black America testing and learning the boundaries of legitimate aggression. White people are anemic, weak and undefended – soft, allowed targets. Jewish people are so unallowed you'd best not even acknowledge you can distinguish them from Whites unless you're trying to offer some compliment – and this is, of course, one hell of a reason to learn to distinguish them.
In support of mistake theorists and against outgroup reification
There's even more drama in the AI art sphere than before. Actually multiple dramas, all around Stable Diffusion, as is customary now. Artists on Twitter are threatening class action, half-seriously rallying around Greg "by greg rutkowsky, trending on artstation, 8K" Rutkowsky, Palmers and others; Danbooru is being slowly purged of content on takedown requests, in the wake of NovelAI SD-based image generator release (drastically superior to earlier stuff, and allegedly tracing over whole pictures); StabilityAI Discord has banned Automatic111, a hero and pillar of the community, the developer of the leading UI, due to him being an asocial Russian asshole implementing means to handle the recently leaked (by a third party) NovelAI models and allegedly stealing like 20 lines from their proprietary code, apparently to placate NAI and send a message to future pirates and business partners about Emad's priorities; Voldy denies the theft and counter-accuses NAI of copying his prompt-weights code without license; Stability staff/mods, it is claimed, have taken over a community subreddit by guile, to no comment from higher-ups (update: Emad magnanimously agreed to concessions); Emad keeps postponing the release of an improved 1.5 citing great responsibility and «tweaks to handle extreme cases» which is taken to mean «castration on dataset level». It looks like another Open-for-profit company has been revealed as an embrace-extend-extinguish scheme, and we will have to learn, after all, to pool resources on our own. Or maybe it's all catastrophizing by excitable FOSS fanatics. The situation develops rapidly.
…But I'd rather leave the drama discussion to @Porean, seeing as he's posted it first, and talk about something less spicy. After interactions with Hlynka here, I want to share an observation about conflict theoretic lens and unhelpful labeling of the outgroup – such as artists on 4chan /ic board calling AI users «pajeet».
This has to do with Emad's origins and the racism-tinged contempt for «soulless tech bro nerds» pervasive among the 4chan creative intelligentsia, of course (the Twitterati attack soulless tech bro nerds as such, without racial qualifiers). No equivalent prejudice against South Asians exists in Russia. So, there AI users and people arguing in favor of this tech are labeled «neuroschizo». I wonder about other sectors of the Internet.
Yes, singular «pajeet», singular «schizo». It's not just a meme. They (well, many of them) report it to mods as such, they whine about a sleep-deprived obsessive fanatic who keeps pestering them in their strongholds (a not-so-implausible scenario, but clearly wrong in this case). And I posit that this is Indicative Of A General Failure-Prone Tendency Of Conflict Theorists, who have a powerful presence here. I have ridiculed Scott's Conflict-Mistake framing myself. But the core objection – namely that the Conflict model is evidently true, as well as people's willingness to lie in service of their terminal goals – may be a cognitive poison pill.
Anonymous imageboards have been a mighty forge of internet culture. What is often underappreciated is how strong they are pound for pound, in terms of active user or post count – even the biggest 4chan boards are like a middling subreddit or Discord/Telegram chat. Why is that? Freedom of expression, lack of reputation and all that jazz, you know it. But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space. By stripping identification and the complexity it can carry, they allow – nay, force – individual voices to be associated instead with archetypes of groups, in every individual interaction. You cannot be a token, like on Facebook or what have you: everyone is a type, but which type, depends on the mood and the topic. This inflates the effective population size to parity with a big society where full connectedness is impossible and knowledge about others must spread by rumors and vague stereotypes. It makes boards a self-running, accelerated social experiment. (admittedly this theory needs more polish)
Anons know, of course, that they are few in number (although a Legion). And they can see that people are pretty stable in their quirks. And they are aware that people can lie when it serves them. So they overcorrect into reifying recognizable opinions as marks of an individual or at most a small coherent group. Someone sneering at «Chuds» comes, in /pol/ mythology, from some specific discord – and needs to be reminded that he «will never be a woman». On /ic/, someone explaining how latent diffusion works is… «cool story pajeet».
It's an experiment that represents, at small scale, the superstitious nature of network age paranoia. In larger communities, the same assumptions are applied on group level. Everyone who disagrees with me is a Russian bot! Except if I'm a Putin loyalist, then it's gotta be ЦІПСО, Ukrainian propaganda division (that's what I am these days, according to many of my compatriots). If you're an American Right-Winger, it's some sort of GloboHomo WEF talking head. If you're a good progressive, it's probably a Fascist representing a unified anti-Lib front.
This is psychologically comforting for a few simple reasons.
First, such a problem is very legible and simple. There's no structural reason for the thing that oppresses you to exist and be the way it is, no grandiose system of incentives, just malign will of a finite set of human actors, fallible flesh and blood with a self-serving narrative.
Second, it's surmountable. Calling the enemy out is half the battle; getting him banned is another one fourth, after that you just gather up the boys and attack his turf. The hostile group is not representing the majority of the population (usually is puny), is easily identifiable and kinda ridiculous. Maybe just one weirdo, a «pajeet» or «chud» at that.
Third, and most importantly, it excuses ignorance. You can plug bananas in your ears because conflict theory predicts that the enemy will lie, or try to deceive you while not technically lying, to demoralize you. And why would he keep investing effort into that, coming up with arguments tailor-made for you? Of course because his onslaught isn't really going according to plan, in part, precisely because people are not falling for it! That's what those artists think too. AI proponents are lying collectively to break their spirit; they just need to wait it out while the pajeet runs out of steam; they don't need to adapt.
They're wrong.
It's unhelpful to have a dead wrong model of the conflict they really are in. One big and obvious reason: because it precludes communication with people who are different but not the enemy and are trying to help – or at least negotiate. In trying to not be a 0HPLovecraft-style quokka, such a conflict theorist ends up being simply a myopic rat, destined for being made marginal and obsolete. The great discovery that counteragents might lie is a point of a wholly unreasonable pride of a certain brand of reactionaries. It's also a source of a delusion as damaging as the inability to conceive of bad faith.
Tl;DR: Conflict theories have a failure mode or reifying the opposition, that can lead to cognitive closure and lack of response to arguments. The very assumption of bad faith, without extra precaution, bootstraps the development of theories on how bad faith propaganda is being delivered to you, for what reason and by whom. From then on, truth is ever harder to find. People should remember that, when assuming they can see through the opponent and dismissing opponents out of hand.
Ukrainians despise Navalny and his loyalists. They justify this with his Crimean position ("not a sandwich", a poorly developed milquetoast – from the Russian perspective – proposal to establish mutually agreeable conditions for a transparent do-over referendum on leaving Ukraine for Russia; which would of course have yielded an overwhelming "yes" from Crimeans, and would be illegitimate as per the Ukrainian law). But from what I can tell, this isn't the crux. They're only interested in allying with Russian "opposition" that supports AFU and advocates for the dissolution of the Russian Federation, to wit – regionalist activists (predominantly ethnic minorities); they consider any unified state dominated by ethnic Russians in anything like current borders an existential threat that would soon enough regress to the mean of infringing on their sovereignty under any rule. I believe this is the tacit consensus in the most concerned neighboring states, represented by Anna Fotyga in the European Parliament and other Western patrons of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.
Anyway, Navalny was, although ethnically at least half Ukrainian or something more complex, completely at peace with the continued existence of a Russian state (or more cynically – not interested in diminishing his potential domain), and thus an example of the "Russian democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins" problem, as they put it. He was hated, and Budanov may be affirming Putin's narrative purely to encourage his compatriots, reaffirming that there's no common cause with the Russian opposition (to wit: "the war with Regular Orcs is not going badly enough to seek compromise with the Cuckold-Orcs, whom we loathe as much if not more").
Or whatever, he likely doesn't have any special insight into this case and Ukrainians make up intel a lot.
On the object level, I think it's plausible Navalny died "naturally" after months and months in the punitive isolation cell; it is a known torture/slow execution method. But also, he could have been offed as a gift to Bastrykin, who wanted him to die a great deal (there are such rumors that he asked for permission to commemorate his 70th anniversary) or as an early event in the upcoming elections.
People treat Putin as a highly rational, intelligent and well-calibrated person, but he's basically a psychopathic, out-of-touch grandpa who's got too high on his own supply. He's weird and he treats murders as a funny occasion, arranges them to happen on Special Dates, probably giggles when he gets the news. "But what about sanctions for Russia? What is the benefit?" Get real. Because he's playing a game.
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
11mo ago
Burgers?
…A bit off topic but this made me think that second-rate economists, utilitarians and other autistic behavioral scheme enjoyers who can't tell the map from the territory have poisoned the water supply somewhat.
Humans respond to incentives and pursue goals, but humans are not, by and large, maximizers (EY and SBF are I guess), they're behavior- and thought-executors. It may be the case that even generally useful AI agents are hard to build any other way, although some folks try. The rational economic agent is a spook, a simplified model; not in the sense that a real Rational Economic Agent is hairier, biased and makes mistakes when generating rational plans, but in that it's literally a sketch, fundamentally dissimilar from the real issue even if convenient for some analyses. Implicitly thinking that people maximize stuff is almost as boneheaded as imagining that a 130 IQ person has 130 grains of intelligence or something, it's a profound misunderstanding about the ontology on which the debate is premised, its terms are defined and measurements are done.
With that in mind, my answer is boring. People writing this army recruitment strategy (Stonetoss really is a genius) are not maximizing recruitment KPIs. They're not maximizing trans representation in the battlefield either. They're doing what they feel like they should be doing in their life, given their background and norms in their social circle. «It's called being a decent human being», you know? They're not grey-haired generals (but on this note, even Milley is mocked by tradcons, isn't he?) – they're part of the same HR/veryonline/Moldbuggian Cathedral mental blob that controls and molds the lion's share of labor pool for people-oriented jobs. They're what the military thinks is the safest bet in this dire situation of volunteer shortage; they're professionals. And professionals try not to fall behind the times. It's 2k23, so you've got to empower and platform trans women and women of color, what's the problem?
Now, certainly the recruitment may not go all that well (it may go well in the long run too: perhaps trans soldiers will prove much more useful in our transhuman augmented future). But anyway, who knows if an underwhelming harvest is due to aversion to the trans stuff (and even if it were, what are you suggesting they do – commit trans erasure over some KPI bullshit?! They'll walk out and cancel your family if you're unlucky) or just because those simple to a fault cisheteronormative Nebraskan boys already feel like they're doing their part of valor and sacrifice working and paying taxes – instead of flipping out and shooting up some symbol of their hopeless cultural subjugation by the smug coastal Elves who make those ads.
Well, @sodiummuffin said it better.
What do we do? We marvel at the fact that Emil's up on Twitter and his website is not given the Kiwifarms treatment.
Interracial rape is understandably a great cause for flame war in the US, and also not something I care about. My model is mainly that black people are all-around more impulsive, more criminal, more violent and more tribal; the specific distribution of the impact of those differences is downstream of contingent factors like relative population densities, laws, housing, policing etc.
That said, @Gdanning's analysis (Kirkegaard's sources discuss the question too) reminds me of another politically incorrect and statistically literate author, La Griffe du Lion, whose website is even more of a marvelous fossil. He has developed a model of ghettoization/white flight based on selective victimization of non-blacks by blacks. It seems to comport with anecdotal reports like that man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas and with the graph in Emil's piece.
Anyway, Crime in the Hood, November 1999:
… However, as a neighborhood turns black, this factor could increase black-on-white violence at most by a factor of 3, and then only when a neighborhood is virtually all black. The observed level of white victimization is much too high to blame on general tendencies of blacks to be violent. A more important reason is simply that blacks prefer white victims.
The best and most complete evidence comes from the Justice Department. Its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) canvasses a representative sample of about 80,000 Americans, from roughly 43,000 households. From this survey, a picture of crime is painted by its victims. The last full report of the NCVS was issued in 1994. From it we learn that blacks committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites. In the same year, whites committed 165,345 such offenses against blacks. Despite being only 13 percent of the population, blacks committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Less than 15 percent of these had robbery as a motive. The rest were assaults and rapes.
The asymmetry of interracial crime goes still deeper. More than half the violence committed by blacks is directed against whites, 57 percent in 1994. Less than 3 percent of the violence committed by whites is directed against blacks. Population and NCVS statistics reveal that in 1994 a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In the city, the races live mostly apart from one another, so that the most convenient victims of thugs are others of the same race. Only a hunter's mentality could account for the data. Given a choice, a black thug will select a white victim. Ironically, so will a white thug.
[…] Equation (4) gives the probability that John will be victimized by a white in a given year. It shows that to a high degree of approximation, the risk John faces from whites is not only independent of neighborhood size, but also neighborhood composition. The probability that John is attacked by whites in a given year is the same no matter where he lives. It is simply equal to the per capita number of violent incidents perpetrated by whites in a year. We tested this approximation, setting N = 1000 and pW = 0.0279, the value obtained from the NCVS. Over most of the range of racial composition, the approximation, Φ_W_ = pW = 0.0279 agrees within 2 figures with the accurate expression (3) as seen in the table below.
[…] We have modeled violent victimization of whites in a racially mixed neighborhood. Our model is based on data collected by the Justice Department and reported in the NCVS. It paints a bleak picture for whites. As a neighborhood turns black, violent victimization of its white residents begins immediately. At first the risk is small, not much different from its previous all-white level. However, by the time the neighborhood reaches the half-black point, every white family of four has better than a one in three chance of being victimized within a year. Two factors account for black-on-white violence. 1) Blacks are 3 times more likely to commit violent crime than whites, and 2) black thugs prefer white victims, selecting them 64 times more than white thugs choose black victims. Most of the risk faced by whites, results from the predilection of black thugs to prey upon whites. As a neighborhood becomes overwhelmingly black, the risk curve for whites rises to ominous heights. In the last stages of transformation, the likelihood of a white being victimized within a year becomes a virtual certainty.
The measure of «systemic» power that progressives like to talk about – systemic racism, patriarchy, etc. – is an ability to make outcomes that hurt your outgroup look like they follow from natural, inevitable processes, long in motion through no living person's fault. Some things are genuinely this way; others are only made to assume this form. For example, by making unwarranted promises of miracle solutions, and suppressing public awareness of and interest in more feasible alternative routes for so long that they become technically obsolete or politically unfeasible.
As you can note, this article is over 23 years old. People not yet born then have formed strong political opinions. We haven't progressed even on talking points. So I don't think there's much to «do» about it all. Like Yevgeny Ponasenkov said 8 years ago: «If you couldn't do it in a 1000 years, what are 20 more to you? Look, Russia can develop normally and it's not about 20 or a 1000 years, a lot can be done in a single year, if there's a honest admission that we were making mistakes here and there, and now will follow another path. Okay? Only – not «our special path», in the ditch, with empty shops and towards 1937. There exists the history of Civilization, everything there has been tried, conclusions proven, we are buying everything from there now – cars, phones, clothing, food… and all mistakes are also on display there, you only have to not replicate them. That's all. So we need to admit: yes, we were mistaken, no, we will no longer search for our special path that doesn't exist, we're going forward, in the correct, Western, so to speak, direction». You know what Western direction we took.
None of this was exactly unanticipated before La Griffe either. Black impulsivity, criminality and tribalism are factors that have been known for centuries; the intuitive solution is: high priors for black proclivity for antisocial behavior, therefore unequal treatment, either by segregation (cheap, only protects whites) or in the manner of policing (medium, somewhat protects blacks) and state-mandated upbringing (very hard, actually helps them).
But after a few generations grow up on a steady diet of mocking the very premise of the problem, it doesn't matter what facts you show them: their thought trajectories cannot exit the basin where this problem can be divorced from white people problems and where solutions which do not amount to doubling down on total society-spanning surveillance exist. «All rape should be investigated and the culprit found», indeed. We have a discount on CCTV systems with integrated gait recognition!
Well with any luck I'd still be aware that as a middling Orban-esque character I'm almost infinitely better at maintaining my grip on power and installing my cronies throughout legacy institutions than at positive social engineering, and would have outsourced the task to someone smarter. I'd have weaved the problem into unimpeachable bipartisan causes (Oh no, The Health Crisis of older motherhood! A poor careerist woman had IVF implantation failure, how tragic! We need a round table, a National Infertility Strategy!) and created a think tank, building its backbone of pronatalist anticredentialist people like Bryan Caplan. We'd investigate prior art in a principled manner to account for costs and tail risks – from Ceausescu Romania to Kazakhstan to Iran to Israel to Japan-Korea-China, and from the national level to specific denominational sects, castes, villages and families.
But assuming we go with my current understanding that stops roughly here and here. My goal would be to set processes into motion that will be indifferent to my own removal; and I do not have any faith in doing that via the legal system. Unpopular laws will be overturned or worked around. Stealing the argument from the ML discussion, legal procedure is the smiley mask the shoggoth that is the society wears; when it assumes an alien enough shape, the mask will shatter anyway. Our goal should be changing the shoggoth.
I also do not buy the economic story at all. I hear it most commonly from upper-middle-class highly educated people who are the least stressed economically (consider the attached Moscow meme, no translation needed Edit themotte failed me with attaching it, here you go); and those few of them who have ideological commitments to large families (far-right Pagans, Old Believers, for example) easily afford as much. Others strive to imitate the lifestyle of those prestigious classes anyway and sacrifice fertility for that; but they wouldn't have if low fertility were coded low-class. Therefore I also do not expect great returns from redistribution of money or formal status (that can otherwise be bought, and will be goodhearted with more interventions). Generic amenities for secular families with children can be cribbed from France and Nordic states, they're sufficient. Stuff like defunding education, on the other hand, is not feasible. Housing stuff depends on local specifics. @wlxd and @f3zinker among others propose sensible programs.
I think this is almost entirely a cultural issue, and there are low-hanging fruit which are only left untouched because of their high political cost – the problem is not one of unfortunate unaligned incentives but one of malice, albeit emergent, and it must be fought with malice. When you say the Cathedral cannot be dismantled, you mean it'll restrict my moves to ridiculous boomer economic flailing that doesn't offend their sensibilities. Even your eugenic diploma scheme is hard to implement. Well, that's totally hopeless then, so let's discuss low-hanging cultural interventions, as if we could fund and recruit semi-talented people for making documentaries, running influence campaigns, dominating the local Fox News equivalent at least.
The crucial fact is that the society still quietly despises and looks down upon childless women over 30. There's some pity to it, but also condescension; it's a suppressed sentiment but an instinctive and thus easy one to rekindle, leaving aside the political animosity of those women and their allies – a formidable force, to be sure, but the TERF case shows it's not unbeatable on its own. Now your argument is that almost every woman eventually marries and has a child, and it's rather single-childlessness that's the problem, but bear with me. First, the later the first birth happens, the lower is the probability of children №2+. Second, this is but the beginning of the slippery slope.
The specific way to rekindle the sentiment is ideally a product of my think tank's research. Broadly it's easiest to initiate with conspicuous worry. The idea of a single woman should be subtly made problematic. Not strength but «resilience», not independence but «coping with adversity and loneliness», not healthy at every size but «fat women are women»; no pet parent but «emotional support animal user» (we can provide one from the shelter! Broken humans and animals can heal each other!). The whole feminist rhetoric and those nauseating stock images with grinning pantsuit ladies must be associated with indomitable will in the face of chronic illness and disability. Brightly smiling cancer and HIV survivors – speaking of which, maybe we should publish a tacky book about surviving rape and abuse, leaning into a superficially scientific idea that such degrading experiences in school explain a proportion of promiscuity and unwillingness to have a traditional family. Special Olympics champions, refugees; we should wear the spin doctor's hat and the skin suit of an ally. Women love to pity themselves, so with any luck they may be hooked before we start pounding on the off-putting aspects of the framework. They also love to shit on each other – so graduating from the support network into the group that can express condescension from above will be in high demand, if this works well.
The other part is similarly patologizing the whole host of modern liberal copes. The way natalism and familism are coded low-class is by emphasizing old age, backwardness, poverty, bigotry – and showing bright, sexy, nimble, educated urbanites who don't even have to douche for anal in contrast to them. This... isn't really an accurate portrayal of reality. We could do a devastating job just by cherry-picking some cases to burn archetypes of failure into the collective consciousness. One of the cruelest Russian movies I know is Dust; it's just a realistic (i.e. not poisoned by the feminine and political partisan narrative) portrayal of an incel with no future. We could do similarly here for people who are properly integrated into the atomized social framework that does not reward childhood, building on the foundation of imageboard memes and shorts by, say, MilleniaThinker (1, 2). There's plenty enough to mock, and to contrast with (partly imaginary) haughty multigenerational familial clans, with proud mothers who do not have to keep desperately putting on a teenager face to stay relevant at 45; the media is just constitutionally incapable of touching it.
A separate line would be anti-education propaganda, basically mockery of the extreme K-selected strategy that Asians excel at and everyone else is stupidly aping. Unfortunately saying that heredity is all-powerful and Caplan has it right is impossible, but showing the immiserating, nervous rat race nature of credentialism with something like DeBoer's argumentation, and happy families who've given up on that, is perhaps workable. Seeing as I'm a populist: a program of guaranteeing access to public schools with a focus on Law and Order rather than expenditure could be popular. It could be cheaper to just rebuild neighborhoods around a few such exemplary schools, and invite only people interested in the natalist project.
And again, populism... even more extreme would be to take a lesson from Israelsi and play up xenophobia. It seems that the sense of demographic competition, fear of replacement, increases fertility. But Western media is very intent on persuading people that the replacement doesn't happen and if it does that's a good thing. Challenging this directly would be hard. Maybe import some Pakistanis to dispassionately report on grooming gangs, show in HD how a vigorous, growing tribe takes control over a dying village, beats the local cops into submission, how their cackling children cast stones at some sentimental old-timey grandma, bent by age, whose only child has gone to the big city? Too mawkish, you might say, and sure it is, but it's not like normies understand nuance.
A more ambitious project would involve increasing the prestige of some state-friendly yet not utterly hollowed-out religious denomination. That's for the next generation, when germs of this strategy blossom, perhaps.
I'm arguably biased but I think debate overviews are unrealistic. This debate is too vast. At this point, collected rebuttals and pointed papers are the best way to appreciate the state of discourse, as if seeing ocean in a drop of water. So, on top of what you've been already given, a few high-profile samples:
Some anti-HBD:
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Kevin Drum, Here’s Why the Black-White IQ Gap Is Almost Certainly Environmental.
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Ewan Birney, Adam Rutherford etc, Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer
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Marcus Feldman, Jessica Riskin, Why Biology Is Not Destiny (only implicitly HBD-related via generic hereditarianism)
And some responses:
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"Cremieux", Resolute Ignorance on Race and IQ Courtesy of Kevin Drum
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Emil Kirkegaard, The Bird paper, and hereditarian predictions
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Bryan Pesta et al, Debunking Giangrande and Turkheimer (2021): Every Dogma has its Day
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Razib Khan, Nick Patterson Responds To Feldman And Riskin’s NYRB Piece (likewise, implicitly HBD-related)
Collections:
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Ancient but decent, Steve Sailer's Race FAQ
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Old but good, a dearly departed effortposter on Fallacious or Otherwise Bad Arguments Against Heredity
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Somewhat fresher, a collection of Twitter Threads by Paolo Shirasi
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Once more Kirkegaard, Unfinished Wikipedia FAQ on IQ etc.
Additionally:
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again Kirkegaard on Why the race and intelligence question is still not resolved
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Europeans and recent cognitive evolutionreferences -
Old archive tracking the purge of politically incorrect thought.
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Recent example of one of the authors linked above, Pesta, getting purged
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Razib Khan on an implicitly anti-race-and-IQ editorial in Nature Human Behaviour
Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Well, we've got confirmations of genetic differences, and there's more censorship, and most of the big guys in the debate died. The scientific question received a political answer.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I think I explain it well enough. I can try to explain again from first principles. Power is asymmetry of control between agents. Power of women specifically is the power to tank any political project they don't like (say, one increasing men's rights) and shut down a discussion they don't favor (say, one casting women in unflattering light) with a gratuitous refusal to compromise or engage in good faith; the essence of this is captured in twitter catchphrases like «this makes me feel unsafe», or in your behavior toward me here. It is power because it reliably, irrespective of merits of each case, extracts sympathy out of women and out of men, producing a predictable asymmetry and skewing outcomes. This power is an active application of the well-known "women are wonderful" effect, which is in turn explained by evolutionary dynamics created by parental investment inequality, which you have already alluded to (but which, in modern society, doesn't necessarily hold outside of the context of gestation).
The premise of my «misogyny», or actually my argument about there being no realistic solution to undesirable societal effects of feminism, is that women (except members of retrograde religious societies), with you being an apt example, feel entitled to behave this way toward interlocutors, for good reason, namely that «the society» simultaneously encourages this self-serving mean-girl behavior and pretends it's compatible with the authority of an adult.
I will opt out of substantiating the link between feminism and adverse effects discussed (disproportionate, growing inability of young men to form relationships, high divorce rate, low TFR, etc.) because, again, I think the effortpost by @gorge, linked above, suffices as an introduction.
If I were to propose anything like a plan to «impose responsibility» on women in the intended sense, it'd be not so much about me being in control of your womb, «sex for meat» and other blatantly hostile potshots you ladies have come up with, as about nationalism and extended families, in following with the only example of a large, prosperous secular society without those issues that I know. Naturally I also know this cannot be engineered. 2rafa's plan, on top of being hardcore, is also unworkable, at least not in a democratic society.
Its entirety: «Whatever happens to @Twitter, new social platforms need to center trust and safety from the outset, or risk being subject to the same fate. In the meantime, **@elonmusk has put Twitter on deathwatch. It didn’t have to be this way.**»
I suppose there is some plausible deniability here, but when Twitter is «dying» because they coerce advertisers to leave it... It is a threat. Or rather, an admission of hostility.
Have they ever reported a decline in anti-semitic posting? Antisemitism works like Shepard tone. And there have been so many false reports from ADL and their affiliates about increases in... right-wing extremism, attacks on trans people, anti-semitism, whatever, I have little interest to check again.
In any case, the very premise is illegitimate. Even if expectations of reduced censorship under Musk lead to more unhinged posting, this does not justify their actions.
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