BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think my reasons are justified for years now, and you have not appropriately expressed remorse for your terrible faux-rationalist rhetoric back on reddit before continuing it here, so I'd rather you start making arguments in good faith than I stop reminding people of your track record. By the way, putting on a layer of patronizing Brahmin politeness improves your performance somewhat, but not by a lot, I suggest you leave it for your workplace.
the way to argue against it
There is no need to argue against a vacuous truism that something is "true" if we assume an arbitrary classification system where it is true; only an infertile mind of a pedant can be satisfied with such an argument. I of course agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in principle some people can recognize whatever as beautiful, even a slum filled with diseased drug addicts where one gets to read Scholze's papers. And Wittgenstein masturbated to mathematical problems in the trenches of World War I, after all. But the reason we know of this fact is precisely that it is unusual, baffling. Your preferences, if those are your preferences indeed, are marginal, thus prioritizing them would be unsatisfactory to most people; you're free to put the opposite hypothesis to a democratic test and, I'd expect, get the same result as here in any group except self-selected minority of mathematical ascetics.
Though there may be something more here. Naturally this ties in to your general theme that white people ought to welcome being replaced by "elite human capital" like yourself. White people did not think to implement a filter for compatible aesthetic preferences, even as they demanded professional merit and some minimum of adherence to the letter of the law; so now there'll be a marginally greater tendency for their habitats to approximate the noisy, debased squalor of the subcontinent, complete with galaxy-brained equivocation excusing this. Too bad.
Adding to what I've said in the thread.
I think @Amadan has written on this a few times; I objected to his normative conclusions, but on facts it's true. You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos. They may cope somehow, they may come to fear the punishment for insubordination and value rewards of cooperation, but they won't take it to heart. It's not as stable a form of race relations as the status quo. The whole system needs to be revamped into a drastically smarter thing to make it viable.
P.S. The issue with race comes from tail effects. I think you're underplaying just how bad the crime statistics are for prime age Black men. I'm wary of lily-white gopniks due to several violent encounters, but for most prime age White guys who look kinda sus it's fair to assume more or less good faith. With equivalent Black guys the odds are, like, 10X higher and that's probably an underestimate. I am positive that this one bit weighs too much to realistically discard.
I won't nitpick at the optimal street-crossing policy.
You know, this reminds me of a certain article by a Russian emigre that I've lost, about his experience in Netherlands, I think. The gist of it was: «These people are Calvinists. They are not religious, they laugh at religion, but they are essential Calvinists; Calvinism has reached their bone marrow and the root of their tongue, it is in their gait and their gaze and the way they shake your hand. They are genuinely modern, tolerant and open-minded. You are free to be Russian, Muslim or gay, or even all those things at once. So long as you live and breathe like a fellow Calvinist in all respects which matter, they won't give you any trouble».
Ignoring kinship is a white thing. It's not generic human decency.
Your proposal is identical to «let us assume only white people exist, and the morality of white people is the objective morality; then we needn't deal with the problem of race. Just divide people into good and bad, where good = white». Many people want to move into the Netherlands. Vastly more into the US. For many of them, race means something. For a growing proportion of Americans, it means the world. They won't just accept that being a good white person is the pinnacle of generic human existence.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
My local gym has this clever machine where you step on a lever and get some of your weight offset (up to 50 kg). I'm not sure if it has any utility, but I see people using it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I believe it's supposed to be the «normative bound», that is, a man is ideally slightly prettier than an ape but not by too much as that'd be suspiciously gay.
@TheRealMcCoy you probably heard that from me, sorry if I was unclear.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
30% that it's legit but a dead end in the sense that this whole line precludes higher currents, 60% that it's outright a fraud or some error motivated by wishful thinking, 10% that this is the beginning of a successful line that ends in viable high-temp superconductors in <20 years.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor. (Btw, @2rafa, despite listening to OSTs often I just dislike Zimmer's music and Zimmer personally, but then again I'm not very into Wagner and all that Teutonic BS either). Thinking back on it, you might just find some aspects of the German character amiable. After all, Berdyaev did say in «Religion of Germanism»:
Germans are least of all materialists, if by materialism we mean accepting the external world as material in its objectively real composition. The whole of German philosophy has an idealistic direction and materialism could be in it only an accidental and insignificant phenomenon.
The German is neither dogmatist nor skeptic; he is a critic. He starts by rejecting the world, by not recognizing the externally, objectively given existence as a «critical reality». The German is physically and metaphysically a northerner, and the external, objective world does not appear to him illuminated by sunlight, as it does to the people of the south, as it does to the Romance peoples. For the German, the primary sense of being is, first of all, the primary sense of his will, his thought. He is a voluntarist and an idealist. He is musically gifted and plastically artless. Music is still a subjective spirit, an inner state of mind. Plastics is already an objective, embodied spirit. But in the sphere of objective, embodied spirit Germans were able to create only extraordinary technology, industry, militaristic tools, and not beauty. The tastelessness of the Germans, which appalls in even the greatest of them, even Goethe, is due to the transfer of the center of gravity of life to the inner tension of will and thought. On the side of sensuality, as an aesthetic category, the Germans are not at all acceptable or tolerable. And in the life of feeling they can only be merely sentimental.
A true, deep German always wants, having rejected the world as something dogmatically imposed and critically unverified, to recreate it out of himself, out of his spirit, out of his will and feeling. This direction of the Germanic spirit was determined as early as in the mysticism of Eckhart, it exists in Luther and in Protestantism, and is found and grounded with great force in the great Germanic idealism, in Kant and Fichte, and in another way in Hegel and Hartmann. It would be wrong to call this direction of the Germanic spirit phenomenalism. It is a kind of ontologism, an ontologism of a sharply voluntaristic bent. […] This consciousness is very taut, always disciplined and organized from within, from its own depths, in which lies the foundation of the Germanic will, the strong will. Such a consciousness is imposing but aesthetically unappealing. And it must be said that the tragedy of Germanism is, above all, the tragedy of excessive will, too possessive, too intense, recognizing nothing outside itself, too exclusively masculine, the tragedy of the inner celibacy of the Germanic spirit. It is a tragedy opposite to the tragedy of the Russian soul. The German people are a wonderful people, a powerful people, but a people devoid of any charm.
But, of course, Berdyaev spoke of German intellectuals – mainly as they appeared to him in written media. This would be as naive as judging Anglo Dasein/Umwelt/Weltanschauung by their stiff-lipped Victorian hypocrisy.
I knew normal Germans. To ask of normal people, even Germans, to be satisfied with just this is, at best, a ludicrous demand for universal ascetic monasticism; more likely it is mere cope. You can call math beautiful all you want, but math remains a niche, inaccessible (no, condescending popular renditions don't count) realm, and it doesn't have remotely the dimensionality to saturate human experience for any but the most obsessed, broken specimens. We are physical beasts, homeostatic machines connected to the world through a multimodal sensor array and burdened with demanding natural priors with narrow optimal response ranges, that ensure we can't stop caring about what happens around us. We are grounded in reality, so for our own sanity we should see pleasing sights on the ground level – pleasant faces, buildings, furniture, plants and so on. And in terms of intangible art, it need be grounded in baseline human experience as well – thus, even videogames with narratives touch us more than the most contrived category theory wankery; and the capacity to produce such videogames says more about the people's cultural capacity than having some Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Some Germans can into math. Great. Math isn't about Germans, though. Math isn't about humans at all. And Germans know this as well as I do.
Suggesting a person take refuge from the squalor of the material world in the work of Peter Scholze is as ridiculous and cruel as telling a hungry person to contemplate some 19th century still-life paintings of peaches or whatever; a person who wants sex to embrace the holy love of Virgin Mary (and we know that this just ends in pathetic perversion). Speaking of, the best mathematicians I interact with have high libido, they seem to need lots of intense, dirty sex. (For more traditionally creative types this needn't even be said). They also care vastly more about art than I do, somehow – some fantasy book series, musical performances, and yes, even video games.
Humans are humans, they are not spirit engines for contemplating toy imaginary structures. With this «what even is beauty, ackchyually» you deny us our humanity. And I suspect you do this to excuse the expropriation of control over the physical world from people who do not satisfy your elitist cerebral standards.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Not backwards at all, but it's a bit more complex. Facebook users are just not very interested in Twitter-like offering without Twitter network, they can converse between themselves just fine on Facebook; nor are Twitter users interested in Facebook people who don't have Twitter. Everyone has already self-sorted by preference. The only delta Threads has is the meme about rocket man bad.
X is the new product Twitter's trying to transfer users to.
This far it's just a new logo (and optional URL) for Twitter, it's not transfering me anywhere and I expect further changes to be built on top of the same network instead of some separate thing.
geohot mentioned it as something to improve when he interned at twitter but nothing big happened.
People burn out quickly under Musk. Geohot burns out quickly even without Musk. I don't expect anything from him, but search will probably be improved within a year.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
the services you can access through super apps (food delivery, taxis, chat, online shopping, payments) already have extensively developed infrastructure and stickiness
But I explicitly do not mean that pedestrian stuff. Copying WeChat is not a viable strategy because WeChat is a copy of what the West has. I mean aggregating social media/research services iPhone very much does not provide, and cannot, because they will only exist in that form thanks to a protocol leveraging Twitter data.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There are different perspectives on that. He definitely plays fast and loose with definitions of ideas to say he published «basically the same thing» first, or that later inventions follow «trivially». He also is genuinely an author of a ton of seminal papers, and Americans (Canadians too) don't like to admit his priority. I'd say he's personally smarter than the Turing Award trio, though this is only relevant to the previous topic.
He also tries to redistribute credit on behalf of the dead, so that's not only about personal ego, charitably speaking.
Isn’t that the straightforward point of the gyges story?
The point of Gyges story is that, as I have said, «morality does not exist and does not differ from conventional etiquette in some substantial objective sense». It is not a singular real thing that exists outside us, it is an arbitrary system of behavioral guidelines that differ between groups and individuals. In the same post, I give my perspective on what we have learned about subjective morality and its difference from mere etiquette since Plato. Like most people, I have subjective morality that is essentially intuitive and deontological. Greeks, in Plato's cynical imagination, believed that «the best is to do injustice without paying the penalty», such was their intuitive internal moral compass, with prosociality a burdensome etiquette indeed. I live millenia later, and my idea of the highest good is different, because I am a product of biological and cultural selection pressures rewarding other priors; i have internalized a version of prosociality to a certain extent. I am not closer to some objectively established moral truth on account of this, I'm just me, doing and perpetuating what I like for contingent historical reasons. I could collapse those philosophical complexities into do's and don'ts – and I do, when speaking to children. But if being actually mush-headed and deluded about this fact is a criterion for admission into the Goodbot Society, instead of being attacked as a defector… Well, then I can only despise goodbots harder, see them as even more of immature cattle with heritable neural crest defects, and, against my better judgement, wish them more abuse at the hands of actual defectors – who delight in mouthing mawkish falsehoods, and who reshape your moral code as they see fit through revolting identity-coded morality plays that you myopically mistake for entertainment and education.
We can pick a yardstick like game-theoretical performance (assuming utility can be compared between agents) and compare moral codes with that as our source of objectivity, but this would depend on evaluation conditions; people can argue persuasively that even antisocial punishment is rational, and thus good. The issue with selecting game theory itself as one's moral truth is that you'd need widespread near-omniscience to get out of some horrible local minima, while defection-heavy heuristics remain robust (as do cooperation-heavy ones, while conditions are not horrible). Maybe there exists a perfect solution that maximizes winning across all environments even for avg 100 IQ humans dealing with incomplete information about reward scheme and unknown number of sophisticated defectbots in the environment. I do not know it, but even if it did exist, it'd only be objectively correct given our arbitrarily selected (but very handy) benchmark; and for me asesthetics matter about as much. Truth, of course, is also a matter of aesthetics.
This should clarify my position enough.
Although I’m on the record condoning the murder of any and all authority figures in nazi germany, so if I was who you think I am, we don’t even disagree on that
Good. Hopefully you realize that I take seriously what you say about your methodology for evaluating «signals», not as an edgy maximalist posture (even though you throw that in too). I know people who blithely speak and live by your code where success at attaining power justifies itself, and consider them being alive and unbothered my personal failing, as well as collective failure of my civilization.
I think you could benefit from adopting a less subjective view of morality
Well, here's what I think: you can admit that you are indeed no better than Nazi authority figures, or admit your «signals» methodology is laughably bad and does not result in nice conclusions like conventional Western morality as you want it to so should be ditched; or, indeed, just stop.
so I’ll make this the last time we talk
Good luck.
What if it was not ‘rigorously, formally proven’ but useful nonetheless
Existence or nonexistence of objective morality is fundamentally a question that transcends expedience. Consensus morality, habitual or intuitive morality, game-theoretical morality are different.
And when people like you tell me they will
When did I tell you this? But of course I did not, you choose to interpret my words about objective morality as proclamation of total absence of moral code. Why? Because you're pissed about being torn to shreds on this anon forum, along with your half-baked moral philosophy. Grow up.
You wear a defector badge
This is of course gaslighting. I do not. I just believe you are an immature coward who's unable to admit his errors of reasoning. This is no grounds to lash out like this and try to save face.
and when you inevitably get defected against, you’ll presumably see that as a vindication of your worldview
Christians believe that "defecting" against me constitutes adherence to their "objective" morality. People like you defect against others because you worship power and are devoid of any human moral feeling. Your position that you express in this debate is one of a gleeful oprichnik who asks his victims "if you're so right, then why do you stand against the wall? Should have cooperated harder, eh?".
I wouldn't have killed you for peanuts, but for freedom – absolutely. It is my regret that I never did kill one of your kind, as a matter of fact.
Do you twobox newcomb?
It's a stupid intuition pump. If I am in a world where Omega can exist, I onebox. In our world, both boxes will be empty at best.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The question is, does Musk have a plan for a super app? Or is he just flailing around with half-baked ideas trying to turn a profit on his unfortunate purchase, like his ridiculous tweets indicate? I'm not sure at this point.
But if there is a plan, X could well work – better than expected given its network effects, I mean, it's not like people can realistically leave for mastodon or Threads lol. «Everything app» like WeChat with its extensions is tacky; but it needn't be, that's just the worst of Chinese culture, failure of global synchrony and principled execution. Musk just needs to deliver something that makes Twitter's UX of yesterday (well, the day before) obsolete in people's minds. I initially thought he'd build it independently when his bid falls through, but he was not allowed to have it fall through, so here we are.
Twitter (or X now, I guess) is loved, like old reddit was, so people don't want it to change. Unlike old Reddit, it already was changed for the better (editing, longtweets) and can be substantially improved again (Ugh, DM chats). I have many gimmicky ideas but, to begin with, it has godawful search – and that's exactly what Musk's xAI thing can help with (though I suppose Igor Babuschkin wouldn't be too interested in that). For starters, just implement decent embedding search to eat www.perplexity.ai before it gets going. And while you're at it, why not make the whole of Twitter into one retrieval-augmented generative canvas, including outgoing links, a collective exocortex in the style of Roam Research (rip)? And indeed, ride the tiger: allow people to traverse a continuous generative surface, while also making it a tool for discovery of like-minded humans; eat dating apps as well. Tiers of users, different scrolling limits can be seen as a prelude to this compute-intensive paradigm shift.
Of course, the cringier outcome is more probable.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I maintain that the KPI Putin effectively optimizes for is genocide of the Russian people, so he will keep antagonizing other parties far beyond what he can realistically afford.
Right now there's nothing in these boomer noises about ancient borders and «gifts», just populist machismo, playing up the sense of historical insult, showing he's boss for the internal audience. However, he will send military to kill some Poles if that can cheaply advance his goals. This is likely to happen, even: the world needs to see that Russians are subhuman, «not even real Slavs», and get crushed by Poles 10 to 1. Why that is necessary is beyond me, but it's been foretold.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=65zOlQV1qto&t=1854
Looking back at it I've read too much into his words. I do think it's a possible interpretation though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
«Logically coherent» is still a rather weak ontological status. People may try whatever, I just don't think they can succeed, and they certainly cannot positively convince each other (me included) that they have.
in practice, denial of objective morality is used to dismiss every morality out of hand as equally worthless as any other moral system
Denial of objective morality is objectively correct and a prerequisite for any non-deluded attempt at negotiating social norms. It is exactly because there is a single shared objective reality (presumably) that we can discuss our distinct interests in common terms, instead of immediately concluding that the only solution to disagreement is brainwashing or genocide.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."
Here comes the year 2000.
The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.
Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.
Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr 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
3yr ago
No. There is no contradiction. «Objective morality» might be a logically coherent idea/concept (I actually think it is, but that can plausibly be due to my lacking intelligence). I still believe it's not a thing that factually exists in our Universe; and even if it does, it could not be satisfactorily established.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I might have misspoken. Let me put it another way.
Consider the quote from Dostoyevsky by @Harlequin5942 (I would translate it more literally, but no matter):
For the same reason, the parents will have to sell the younger son into bondage or the ranks of the army, in order that he may earn more towards the family capital. Yes, such things ARE done, for I have been making inquiries on the subject. It is all done out of sheer rectitude—out of a rectitude which is magnified to the point of the younger son believing that he has been rightly sold, and that it is simply idyllic for the victim to rejoice when he is made over into pledge. What more have I to tell?
Sure, you are right. Virtue not only takes effort, it to a large extent is just a consistent, directed application of effort. But – for the scope of the argument, what is the difference between having the power to sustain effort and the challenge being relatively effortless? Between having the power to lift a weight, and that weight being slight for one's shoulders?
«Unvirtuous» people know the score, they know the required investment and the theoretically optimal payoff matrix. They just fail to keep up, and so give up. Inasmuch as this is due to them facing extra temptations and so on holding them back, that can in principle be rectified through top-down cultural intervention (though as I say, it is hard to reinvent a nation; you folks tried a few times, and patted yourself on the back for succeeding… in Germany and Japan, only to walk away in embarrassment and confusion from the Middle East). But in the end, some people, and peoples on the average, just find the required effort too much.
And it works the same way for virtues and abilities. I argue that recognizing the unequal distribution of innate ability is necessary, not only to tailor interventions and temper expectations, but to be kind to people, to be able to forgive them their shortcomings.
Speaking of, you like to accuse HBDers of thinking that education is wasted on black children. I don't know if you've ever taught; millions of Americans do, and they all have to face the question of education being mostly wasted on some children. The thing is, teachers who ignore or deny innate inequality end up having to choose either to hate themselves, the society, or children who fail to achieve whatever skill level they think their teaching ought to make possible.
This latter mindset is pointless, except to make the naturally able feel better about themselves – after all, they try too, and they achieve more, so supposedly they tried harder and are morally superior for this reason.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think the idea of objective morality might be coherent. There may not be such a thing in practice, or it may not meaningfully distinguish human moral systems, but if it were revealed somehow that there exist logically watertight rules by which our object-level beliefs can correctly unfold into preferences, having something to do with what a preference means, then there'd be a way to say that some preferences are objectively wrong, in the sense that a person could not have legitimately arrived at them and is just spouting confused nonsense that conflicts with his own ultimate priorities (which would presumably be shared between agents, because there is only one objective reality to have beliefs about). As you say, a given moral system can be logically incoherent; this just takes it to another level.
Source: getting high
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
«But doctor…»
That's exactly my journey over a decade ago, Watts to Metzinger. I think he's basically correct.
Germans definitely have individual giants. Schmidhuber is probably more impressive.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Utility, being unitless, is not comparable between agents.
Yes, but, well, this of course throws the apparatus of game theory out of the window and reduces your argument to "everyone's looking for something" or less than that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It has occurred to me the other day that the whole Bayesian rationality thing is actually a pretty good framework to look at the alien question. Specifically I mean the part about updating priors. Actual calculation doesn't matter, numbers would be pulled out of one's ass anyway – but the principle is important.
Let's say I have some beliefs – that there's 0.0001 probability of aliens being real, 0.5 probability for a random American official to be a honest source of info, 0.33 probability of a large well-hidden Deep State conspiracy with inscrutable goals expressing as psyops or coverups, 0.9 probability that, conditional on aliens being real, I'd see credible scientific research into their artifacts and biology and so on; the whole convoluted Bayesian network plus notions of credibility, what it means to be honest vs trustworthy… Then, a dozen officials swear up and down they've seen ayy lmao and the government hides the truth. And there's still zero scientific corroboration. Should that update my belief in aliens upwards? Slightly, perhaps. But more importantly, it should both tank my confidence in the good faith of American officials and update upwards my suspicion of a conspiracy, just not the one that hides ayys.
I notice a peculiar pattern – the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else; it is uncorrelated with all other streams of evidence. This thing begs for an explanation. It could be, of course, that I'm very wrong about epistemology and they're very right. But it could be that this whole class of observers generates testimonies by a somewhat less trustworthy algorithm than I've assumed; that they're synchronized by something other than object-level knowledge about aliens. So their «signals» should be assigned lesser credence; and the more they diverge from the consilient world model inferred from other data streams, the less each new bit of their input weighs.
I observe that UAP believers don't actually go about it like this. They never propagate the signal of inconsistency back through the network. They just tally up these testimonies and say «so what now, skeptics, huh? We've got [ostensibly trustworthy name] here, it's no longer a joke!» But I've already reduced the weight of this whole class of names in my model; it is a negligible change at most.
There is an alternative theory, though. Perhaps these people don't delude themselves that they know enough to reason about the object level. For them, objective reality is functionally the same thing as consensus reality (much like for @fuckduck9000 objective morality is the thing that wins wars); human authority is a source of truth that needs no corroboration from mere physical feedback, so you can in principle just say «there's more officials pro than scientists contra» and be done with it; the whole reasoning that real aliens ought to have made a mark on anything other than testimonies of officials is moot. O'Brien really could fly, so long as it were confirmed by other Inner Party members. It's a matter of comparing the cumulative weight of authority on either side of the debate.
I find both those approaches alien.
And one more thought. There has been more rigorous, well-funded scientific investigation of xenobiology than of secret societies, conspiracies and psyops. This asymmetry is interesting. We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life. We have seen quite credible examples of conspiracies, and nothing to suggest that better-ran ones are impossible. However, the former remains viable, while interest in the latter has positively plummeted among the educated classes in the last 100+ years. «What if intelligent life beyond Earth, like silicon-based or something, dude, and flying saucers, imagine how it could work» is a respectable enough train of thought: why not indeed, and what's the harm anyway, it's deserving of patronage of eccentric billionaires, academic grants and place in peer-reviewed journals. «What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society. (Like many taboos (e.g not threatening to throw another party's candidate into jail), it's being violated nowadays, to an extent; the ayy guys say the government lies. The government is not the Cabal, of course; it is known that the government keeps some things secret. But I suppose this does blur the line). Most importantly, though, we do not have a serious theory of conspiracy.
Our sociology is on the level of surveys with Lizardman's Constant, shallow economic models, outright fraudulent papers claiming conspiracies can't work because a guy can multiply some numbers, and glib rules of thumb like Hanlon's razor. We don't know what exactly extraterrestial life is like if it exists; but we also don't know jack squat about our home turf. The illusion of familiarity is just that – human networks of power are too big and opaque to comprehend just by casual osmosis. One must be consistently skeptical. If we can't rule out aliens, we sure as hell cannot rule out that dozens or hundreds of high-ranking people in the state machine would lie for some reason we don't see.
After all, why couldn't lizards hide themselves among the human kin, secretly pulling the strings of our regimes and rewriting history? Wouldn't it be strange if we were the first and the only sentient race on Earth in all of 4.6 billion years? Anyone who came earlier would've had a massive first mover advantage…
Personally I do not see why this hypothesis is any more discredited than the one about extraterrestrial life.
That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus, through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign. It does not command respect, mostly just grudging support, on account of the vileness of its competitors. Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats, 10 more years of Trump and Biden dog-faced-pony-soldier show and lurid, Jerry Springer tier gibberish in Congress. If at some point, say, CIA manages to report something truly ludicrous for Americans, physically plausible but shocking – who knows, maybe Mossad quietly installing backdoors into Deepmind and Anthropic AGI superclusters? – it will just be met with shrugs and condescending scowls. Whoever runs this, wants the legitimate authority of the US to end up in the position of the boy who cried wolf, and then collapse without popular support.
Just an idle thought.
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