BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
I do not believe behavior that is incentivized by no plausible promise and not even an intuitive expectation of payback is a major part of human behavioral repertoire. People expect good to come from good, else they do not do it at a noteworthy scale.
More importantly, endorsing it is an irresponsible advice to give. There are costs to integrity, as this subthread shows well enough. Costs have to be justified. When Neoreactionaries cheerfully try to sell people on the Eternal Social Darwinist Hell, they say that the other option is worse in any way that could matter – more suffused with impotence and suffering, more tyrannical, more derivative and limited and ugly. How, specifically, is lacking integrity worse? SubstantialFrivolity speaks of the value of integrity trumping material benefits:
Even if you had somehow prospered by cheating (unlikely), and even if you had gotten all the things you think it would've gotten you, that would be a horrible outcome. Because then you would have compromised your integrity, which is far more valuable than any material gains ever could be. So the real question is, and what would those material things have brought you? Nothing worth having, if it comes at the cost of your integrity.
it is valuable, and it's more valuable than anything practical can offer. Your character is the one thing that nothing can ever take away from you. Material possessions come and go, social status comes and goes, even health comes and goes. But your moral character is always exactly what you make of it, nothing more or less. That makes it far more valuable than those other things.
The argument, inasmuch as he makes one, is that integrity is all-important because the character is «the one thing you can control». This, at least, is an ethos. But one can ask then: why optimize for «good» character? Why not express your self-control in building a prideful, cunning, power-seeking character? A character befitting a king or a Khan, rather than a law-abiding serf who rationalizes his self-denial! Possessions come and go, sure, but so does the fruit of good deeds. The argument seems to hold inasmuch as you rein in your urges and act in accordance with a set of abstract principles. Objectivism, Laveyian Satanism, Thelema, weird personal religions, anything goes. Yet it's not the case that anything goes, is it.
So it's clear he does not believe integrity is valuable because of the arbitrary rule that only things an agent controls are truly valuable. And if your logic is applied, neither is it due to any supernatural metaphysical returns to integrity. We are thus left with the claim that integrity is valuable because it is valuable period, it being the only way in which control over oneself is meaningful. This is not an argument but an assertion, a personal moral deontological axiom, a Categorical Imperative that cannot be proven as true to anyone who doesn't feel the charm of having integrity to begin with. I posit that the insistence on this opinion as a somehow true measure of value makes him an archetypal Hajnalbrain Cooperatebot, a member of a neurotype to which @f3zinker or @SaruchBinoza apparently do not belong.
For the record, I understand the allure of of justice, and the tears of tiger in this picture. It's just obvious that myopic self-satisfied Integrity Play is insufficient to actually make the world a more just place. So I can't help but look down on people extolling the virtue of cooperation even with defectors.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Oh, that's how they can start too... First protecting the garden of idealism, then naked clannish power struggle. The assabiyah route is inherently treacherous.
But ofc this is a natural idea. This, or more realistically moving to the West.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Cooperating «in some circles» to survive the free-for-all defection equilibrium is exactly how they (and we Eastern Slavs, and frankly most everyone else) have got into that mess. Clannishness and familism are the other side of corruption.
Oppression as a concept does not rely on human rights, only the loosest idea of justice, of some sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The nazis didn't appear to believe in "human rights", but they definately believed in oppression, and defined it roughly as them not being the masters of the world. The Communists didn't believe in "human rights" in any meaningful sense either, but likewise believed in oppression, which consisted of them not being the masters of the world.
Do you mean to say that the notion of justice, and even good and bad, are progressive inventions now, and based conservatives like you and Hlynka operate without that nonsense?
If the belief in «Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics» is characteristic of the group Hlynka is castigating as not truly right-wing, there must be more to it than that.
Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built?
I will note that Moldbug for all his arrogance rules no one and has built something (indeed something very elegant), which is more than can be said of Hlynka, who is essentially an expert in destruction and state-approved murder.
There's a fundamental difference between "it's a messed up world, and I just need to rule it" and "I'll try to lead if there's genuinely no one better stepping up, and otherwise am happy to follow"
More generally this attack on natural hierarchy advocates is very tired and very incoherent. I see it, I recoil in horror. These people say that the only reason someone could posit human inequality is to assert being superior. Is their acceptance of their lot in life entirely predicated on thinking that everyone is the same? Do they just… suppress their psychopathy and power-seeking with this clear absurdity?
Contrast this with the trad right, which has no problem following, supporting from below, and sees this as a necessary component of leadership as well.
Well, one answer is that slavish loyalty to some disgusting grifter like Trump, thrown to them like a bone to elicit predictable swarming behavior, solely because of his lower-class aesthetics and manners, is not a cause to pat yourself on the back. I'm with Hanania in thinking «trad right» should be mocked about this until they learn that pride is a sin and pig-headedness is a potentially lethal disease.
But of course, traditional conservatives reject the idea that there is a "better sort", in the sense that some men are of greater moral worth than others
This is plainly false, as can be gleaned from the usually very severe and hostile trad con attitudes to punishments for antisocial behavior (your own too, if memory serves) and beliefs about moral worth of criminals and worth of «restorative justice». Tradcons very easily label men as irredeemable – perhaps as easily as wokes do, since this is the thread of equivocation.
Better sort is a matter of behavior; and inasmuch as capacities like IQ matter here, they do so as proxies for behavior (although casually it's the other way around, with IQ affecting behavior, of course).
What is not questionable is that slavery developed into a particularly pernicious form in the runup to the modern era, and was then largely eradicated specifically by the forebears of the trad-right, often over the objections of people appealing to the innate inferiority of those enslaved.
Which side did Hlynka's forebears fight for?
I. I think there's a germ of a correct idea here: black men choose strategies that work, in part because they see them working. Becoming a high-status gangsta character in entertainment is possible, makes use of natural talents, and will be genuinely respected; becoming a physicist or a senator is both harder work, and not really high-status. The former issue may be remedied with China-style social engineering – antisocial hip hop artists publicly humiliated, emasculated, reduced to second-class citizens like some underclass rabble, sexy rebellious «trugs» becoming dirty «ruffians» in the Victorian sense. Alas, something tells me this route will not be taken.
II. But also: the whole role model theory is just more positive psychology claptrap, hopefully soon to go into the same trash bin as power posing, Pygmalion effect and so on. It's both a liberal fiction and another conservative-friendly epicycle to support the race-blind (yet helpless to save the speaker from racism accusations) idea that it's all in the culture.
It's actually turning the situation on its head. The story goes kinda like this: people of group X somehow or another happen to get overrepresented in the notable/elite group A, therefore X-people in general learn that this is an avenue of success for them, start doing A-coded things, succeed, so the overrepresentation is maintained. Now we convince Y-people that they, too, have champions among A, so they choose that path and hopefully X and Y are eventually equalized (per capita) in A positions.
This is painfully silly if you think about it for a bit. The logic of a high school girl «choosing» a political platform because she's seen Hillary in a pantsuit (or, well, a sociologist picking a thesis about racial role models; I guess the similarity here is not a coincidence). In practice the reason the ranks of As are stuffed by Xers is not any role model effect at all. It may be, indeed, a certain systemic advantage (not all progressive beliefs are absurd on their face). But more fundamentally the advantage may be just that Xers inherently have a high Aness score, so the right tail of general Aness distribution is X-heavy. We know how tail effects work in a great number of cases; it's a very parsimonious and powerful scheme whose premises – polycausality of trait values, central limit theorem and normality – are basically unavoidable for human traits that matter.
Naturally, role model theory proponents tend to assume that tail effects are something furry-related; or if they're savvy, they figure it's alt-right pseudoscience like phrenology. The very idea that groups may differ on «Aness quotient» is alien to them; indeed the idea that people have predispositions and aren't blank slates, or that different skills and occupations are not nominatively distinct but demanding different capabilities which can be ranked quantitatively – all that's pretty archaic, cringe and boring to them.
Come on. It's a just-so story. Imagine a white boy saying the opposite: «if there are no precedents, I could still be the first! This idea will be my edge!» Or a scrawny Asian kid: «I will prove that we can do it no worse than Gaijins!» (a popular and, far as I can tell, organic trope in sports mangas; the Japanese are easily inspired by hulking American athletes in sports where East Asians are poorly represented and cannot seriously compete). It's perfectly conceivable that the paucity of known «relatable» figures from your demographic will be an invigorating stimulus, rather than discouragement. Naturally we could speculate about median reactions; but only outliers make it to the role model level anyway.
III. The more sinister aspect is that (I suspect) this theory is peddled by simulacra producers who sell people role models under the guise of entertainment. One could say they're in the racial Dasein engineering business, or hope their business to actually be that; they are crafting narratives about ways demographic identities can relate to the world. These are the folks who dutifully inserted cringey black nerds in glasses into my 90s television – characters who neither made sense on their own nor appealed to anyone, white or black. They were trying to summon those nerds into reality. They are also behind the denied (even here) but incredibly obvious overrepresentation of interracial couples in fiction (see @Lewyn here and what he replies to).
IV. And a more charitable, but also more hopeless, aspect of this I can think of is that the role model theory is true – but exactly for performers of roles, for people whose career is near-entirely about being famous, or at least looked at and admired. @Heebiejeebies tells us of «a little black girl who wants to be a pop singer». Many such cases. Does it matter if she imitates Katy Perry or Beyonce? Either way she will make the same choice of life goals and values, it'll only affect her path within the chosen socioeconomic niche. Trying to add Marie Curie or, uh, Marie Maynard Daly (thanks Google, my go-to source for black intellectuals) into that list is very disingenuous. A woman going the Marie Curie route will not become famous-like-Marie-Curie, not even close; it's a thankless job for conscientious introverts, the only hope here is exactly to be made into another role model, on account of your demographic's rarity in the occupation and the fact that influential people buy the role model theory. It's something of a reputational Ponzi scheme. And it has dual added harms of deceiving people with public performer personalities into joining the field, which they will a) turn into more of their attention-seeking circus, and b) discredit their rare brethren who are in fact outliers and care for the job as such.
The hopeless part is that many of those high-status prosocial occupations that progressives are trying to fabricate and «amplify» diverse role models for are dominated by white men precisely because they are not about public performing. These people go there to realize a dream, to gain power, to give back to the community. They have well-formed ideals, authentic inner desires or capabilities in search of an application – which is a… more than adequate replacement for «relatable role models». Even though there are plenty, it's not they who invite more of the same, it's the nature of the field, and the nature of those who feel affinity for it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's been very amusing for me to see this collision of worlds.
I recommend you meditate on illustrations here to perhaps understand @f3zinker's perspective better.
There are different equilibria for these things. Most are inadequate. The «Hajnalbrain cooperatebot» one is abnormal and unstable, particularly under conditions of globalized post-Christian liberalism. What he is saying will become more universally correct in the future, except for domains rigidly controlled by some Social Credit Score variant.
On second thought this was a poor and lazy suggestion (made after being rudely awakened by an errant delivery man and trying to fall back asleep); I've forgotten where a proper collection of interviews was, and it looked like Bossen cites some of those women after collecting thousands of interviews under the scope of the project, so I linked to the article, but really there's no reason to recommend the book itself if it doesn't provide their narratives in as raw a form as possible. If you have better suggestions, please share.
Bossen, being a cultural anthropologist, is doing the usual orthodox Marxist «social being determines consciousness» thing where unappealing cultural practices are chalked up to expressions of the preceding profit motive. Her interpretation is not as valuable as opinions of those women, specifically for purposes of commenting on the morality of the practice.
Personally I think that the Chinese really are stricter with their kids, and Chinese kids really are more tolerant of discomfort, severe discipline and obeying social demands. Sometimes the racists compare Chinese people to ants and such because of this; but if anything, overpowering inhibitory control is a particularly human trait, the hallmark of neurological maturity (there's an obvious effortpost here). Like I've suggested in my original response to @Lepidus, the «Chinese mentality» may be a product of a common evolutionary trend in complex societies that has advanced further in the Chinese than in Europeans, a trend we would do well to account for and perhaps counteract.
In any case, parents abusing and distorting children with the rational goal of providing them a higher-status future are the historical norm; and causing physical deformities to fit children into the socially approved mold is quite on par with what we're doing by confining them to schools (yes, yes the EB schtick). 10-12 of the most formative years of our lives spent in the framework where our most rewarded virtues are obedience and patience toward absurdity, our peers are mostly uncultured swine obsessed with prison-tier hierarchical competition, and our authority figures are the equivalent of power-tripping reddit jannies – and I think this is the typical school experience for an above-average kid in a non-exceptional school – is abject moral catastrophe, one that also perpetuates these evils into adulthood. This is only not seen as horror for the same reason some Chinese excuse footbinding: false consciousness and accurate recognition of good intentions behind the horror. There is no real cruelty in what is done to children.
Love can be pretty terrifying is all.
Adding to zinker and others –
I respond to your threads for two reasons. A) the purported innate racial temperamental difference is an interesting problem in the context of charging demographics and the geopolitical situation, as well as in general interesting for me. And b) I have a policy of trying to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives me.
But boy do you supply rotten ones. To the point that engaging further, recasting your disingenuous rhetorical questions as a worthwhile conversation starter, is a bit of a defection against the social compact of the place – because it would be rewarding a bad actor. So best I can do is add to the dogpile a bit of didactic material for lurkers.
Rather than saying niceties about my «intellectual caliber» while glibly dismissing the argument as obviously reliant on false consciousness of Chinese women, and therefore laughably inferior to your cruel-abuse-from-family-members angle, you could seriously grapple with the proposition and check out Bossen's work or something some collection of interviews with those women. I don't even care if it validates your general impression, that's fine – just stop acting as if you have done all object level homework you had to and now can loudly muse about first principles while reiterating the same few examples that you claim imply the threat of universal masking tyranny or whatever. If you think no testimony of Chinese victims themselves is admissible, that is fine too – but argue this explicitly.
Update substantively on mod calls. Mods hold dictatorial power, and aggravating them with unrepentant repeat offenses is utterly pointless. This is just a fact of life.
Respond to criticisms as if they are made in good faith, by reasonably intelligent and skeptical people who have thought about the issue. Even when you are sure they do not merit such a prior (believe me, I know how it feels) – try to reinforce your conjectures against their specific arguments. Report and move on, if you are exasperated with bad faith and low effort.
Crucially, do not treat your opponents like morons. We may pontificate and soapbox a lot, but it's not an excuse to condescend.
If you can't play by these rules, we can't help you.
@SubstantialFrivolity has blocked me for suggesting that his worldview is rigidly deontological because it is essentially non-materialist. He has denied my conjecture but did not elaborate. I maintain that under the assumption that the material reality is merely testing grounds for «character», his model is optimal and rational.
your moral character is always exactly what you make of it, nothing more or less. That makes it far more valuable than those other things.
…under materialist(ic) assumptions I provisionally share, not so much.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's a bit hard to parse, what was the agent's motivation here?
In any case, I believe this is not a peek-a-boo fallacy but merely preserving plausible deniability. Outright falsifying the record would have been more effective, but the cost in case of the original document surfacing would have been far greater. Here it is possible, with some reasonable cooperation, to pretend the rows were hidden for some innocuous technical reason, and the idea was that given the amount of data nobody will look very closely at it. A bit childish, but had a chance of working.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Also funny pics to keep the attention.
Kulak is finally living up to the libertarian/objectivist ideal of ruthless optimization.
Galeev, by the way, is lately posting in Russian on the futility of developing unique products in peripheral countries:
[…] 3. The most complex, but also the most interesting case. The development is there, it works, it is really unique - and yet objectively not bad. If it were at the centre of the world system, it might even have a future. But it is taking place on the semi-periphery, so there is no future for it and there won't be one. It will remain unique.
The relationship between the centre and the periphery/semi-periphery is asymmetrical. Original solutions - technological, economic, or anything else - can emerge anywhere. The problem with the semi-periphery is not that original solutions don't emerge here, but that they don't scale.
The scaling happens in the centre. Here an original and promising solution may be seen, invested in, polished and brought to fruition. And then, in a package with other ready-made solutions, they export it to the semi-periphery. Which in most cases is the most grateful and solvent consumer for the producers of solutions from the centre
This is generally understandable. From the point of view of the managers and authorities in the semi-periphery, buying a ready-made package of solutions from the centre >>> creating their own solutions. They are, incidentally, almost always right: imported solutions are indeed better. Largely because the centre has the environment and infrastructure to bring them to fruition, while the semi-periphery does not. And because of this fact, it is doomed to perpetual catch-up, while its truly unique and truly good solutions are doomed to remain unique
Uniqueness = (In the best case scenario) inability to scale
His tweeting style is designed to scale. So is Kulak's. It's not unique but it gets the job done.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I am also a Syncthing user. Eh. So long as they don't build SBU-approved trackers into it. But sure, it's frustrating.
Incidentally, same story (but worse) seems to be happening to DeepFloyd IF, the expected successor to Stable Diffusion and an open-source Imagen trained with Stability funding by a secretive Deepfloyd lab. It seemed to be decently complete months ago, and by now is essentially obsolete. It's still not available. I am not sure it will ever be.
Behind cringey jokes (derivative of Emad) about releasing the weights «Soon» and the stream of pro-Ukrainian signaling is what I take to be a very simple reality: the lead developer is Alex Shonenkov, ex-head of Sberbank text-to-image efforts like ru-Dalle, and a lame duck on account of his trajectory; and his Ukrainian/Israeli «friend» Misha Konstantinov of the Mishin Learning channel minor fame, despite technical ineptitude, is much, much better at reading the room, playing committees and pandering to the right people. He's maneuvered somehow to represent the effort, and now they're branding this technology as very socially responsible, very pro-Ukrainian, pro-feminist... you wouldn't like it if somebody used «your» opensourced diffusion model to produce images flattering to Putin, would you? So it should be carefully vetoed and trained and retrained until it satisfies the parasitic-management class who'll take credit for the Promethean task of endowing people with a smart drawing assistant. Here's what it should be good at:
don't be a coward”. color photo of a real leopard in a german bar with germany flags holds a sign in his hands with the text "don't be a coward".
'happy birthday mr president', color close-up photo of a ideal blond marilyn monroe in a white dress holding in her perfect hands large paper with text "happy birthday mr president". the flowers on the wall in color of ukrainian yellow-blue flag on the background.
Etc. Very much a reddit culture.
This war is really testing certain nerdy assumptions. Says Misha, showing another immaculate generation of a black woman with dyed hair and an appropriate slogan produced with the tech stack he has no relation to except as gatekeeper:
It is a very important day. But for me, it is not a holiday, but a day to reflect on the ongoing struggle for women's rights and gender equality around the world. It is a time to recognise the many challenges women continue to face, not just because of their race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability and other identities, but simply because they are women.
On this day, it is crucial to recognise that gender inequality remains a pervasive problem in different spheres of life, from work to home and beyond. Women continue to face multiple barriers, including the wage gap, lack of access to education and health inequalities.
On International Women's Day, I invite us to recognize this challenge. Let us accept that everyone in their place can make this world a better place. Albeit locally - Be the change you wish to see in the world.
who disliked the above, unsubscribe please
Comment section, meanwhile, welcomes actual, honest-to-God Ukrainian Nazis with hot takes about subhuman Finno-Ugrics and Mordva with slavery in DNA, upvoted comments advising admin to put Totenkoph in the avatar and such. Urging them not to lose control – «what is important is that we remain humans» – Misha helpfully bans Russian scum who ask «is this the channel about Machine Learning or politics?» and other retarded Putinist bullshit.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I’m unsure whether you think our beliefs about fairness affect us or not.
They do, and they are subject to change because of threats and other external stimuli.
and you concede that we could convince incels to accept the status quo (might be sarcasm, though) like they do now, but you maintain that justice consists of nothing but threats.
There's no contradiction here. «Incels» or like @urquan properly says young sexless men who may one day stop being incels, accept it conditional on the sense of the threat being enough to outweigh the sense of unfairness and vague promise of potential upsides from chaos that men under pressure sometimes feel (and more importantly, conditional on availability of copes, which is why wokeness in games is such an irritant).
If the pressure increases, or more capable men are demoted into incels (even if the bottom 30% on attractiveness perfectly coincides with the bottom 30% on general ability to get shit done, which it does not, the 30th percentile man is not nothing, and the 50th percentile man would be more of something). it may not be enough.
which likewise never grants that some rights were handed over graciously.
The woke are of course rational to do so, because the claim that your rights have been handed over graciously serves solely to imply that they could have been not handed over – or may be withdrawn, if you don't behave as was expected upon them being handed over. It's usually a negotiation tactic to overstate your degree of control over the situation and discourage escalation of demands.
But I also think they are correct objectively. Some people can be persuaded by peaceful means. Heck, some could even be proactively sympathetic while not sharing your burdens in any way, like white Abolitionists were.* In the end, there remains at best a minority of disagreeable profiteers of the status quo who seek to maintain it, and you should hope they will be intimidated into submission peacefully, by the new consensus. But, well, you see – when intimidation is necessary, violence is always around the corner.
...Neither could the suffragists point to any laws that would be passed under the new regime, since everything on their wish list—higher education, inheritance rights, guardianship of children, divorce reform, factory laws—had already been granted. (So much for the argument that power yields only to force.) Sometimes it seemed like the antis were the only ones who anticipated any practical consequences to follow from suffrage. Of course, the effects they had in mind were things like the routinization of suffragette tactics: blowing up buildings, shouting down public speakers, pouring acid down pillar-boxes, slashing priceless paintings, horsewhipping ministers on the street.
Ultimately, though, women needn't use violence the way that men have to.
* Notice how this possibility is effortfully mocked and denied when applied to this topic. No, the only reason one could be willing to speak in incels' favor is being one, a filthy lying nig fag incel, ergo inherently undeserving of anything better than sensible chuckles and strawmen.
I think it's a completely reflexive, unthinking, subhuman reaction, just a monkey dangling his balls in the interlocutor's face because the situation feels like a natural opportunity to show the goods.
But again: it is informed by the wisdom of public negotiations, and thus rational, even if not quite helpful specifically here.
(This was supposed to be more interesting but fuck it, I've forgotten what I had to say. Probably something about how you can win games by denying the other party the chance to develop past a certain stage for long enough. Conrad Bastable has probably said it better, in any case).
The latest wargames assuming the beginning of hostilities in 2026 (oh how time flies) show USA and allies beating China bloody, the attempt to annex the island failing miserably. I recommend reading the report, it's pretty good.
In all iterations of the base scenario, U.S. Navy losses included two ULS. aircraft carriers as well as between 7 and 20 other major surface warships (e.g., destroyers and cruisers). These losses were partly an artifact of U.S. forward deployment aimed at deterring China, as the scenario begins with two carriers and an additional SAG positioned in vulnerable positions off Okinawa. It also reflects the vulnerability of surface ships to large salvos of modern anti-ship missiles. These salvos exhausted the ships’ magazines of interceptors; even with the base case assumption that shipborne missile defense works very well, there are simply too many attacking missiles to intercept. The JMSDF suffered even more heavily, as all its assets fall within the range of Chinese anti-ship missile systems, which include anti-ship ballistic missiles and long-range ASCMs as well as submarines and shorter-range munitions.
China’s losses in the base scenario were also high. In all iterations, PLAN ships around Taiwan were the primary focus of attack, and China’s naval losses averaged 138 major ships in the three iterations of the base scenario. On average, these included 86 amphibious ships (90 percent of the total) and 52 other major surface warships.“ Chinese aircraft losses, averaging 161 fixed-wing combat aircraft per iteration, were smaller than those for the United States. But in the base iterations, the United States never attacked Chinese bases (though they were permitted to do so according to the scenario assumptions), so all of China’s air losses were suffered in the air. Therefore, China would have lost many aircrews but had no losses to ground crews.
China’s overall personnel losses were high. In ground combat, China suffered an average of 7 battalion-equivalents destroyed, equal to Taiwan’s ground losses. This would translate to about 7,000 casualties, roughly a third of whom are assumed killed. Another roughly 15,000 soldiers were lost at sea, with half assumed killed. Finally, many (and probably an overwhelming majority) of the 30,000-plus Chinese survivors on Taiwan would likely become prisoners at the end of combat. […]
The more pessimistic assumptions used in a scenario, the worse the outcome for the United States. The three iterations run with only one pessimistic assumption (the “no maritime strike JASSM” excursion case) produced one decisive Chinese defeat and two that were trending against China. Those scenarios with additional pessimistic assumptions produced a wider range of results—with an average result significantly worse for the United States and its partners than the three more moderately pessimistic scenarios.
In all the pessimistic iterations, the PLA was able to land an average of 60 battalions. The final strength of PLA forces ashore, after losses, averaged 43 battalions, or 43,000 combat soldiers and accompanying support personnel. At the end of game play, the PLA controlled an average of 6,240 kmˆ2 (or 17 percent) of Taiwan’s 36,000 kmˆ2, though, as noted, there was considerable variation between games. Finally, it should be noted that the games lasted an average of six turns (or 21 days of campaign time). Although the result was often clear at that point, getting to final resolution would require many additional weeks of combat. In the case of stalemate, the war might have continued for many months. […]
Ragnarok
Design: The “Ragnarok” scenario was designed to ascertain what conditions would be necessary for China to be victorious in the face of Taiwanese resistance and U.S. intervention. The need for a special scenario became clear after China failed to secure a total victory in a range of pessimistic scenarios. This scenario should therefore not be taken as a likely future but rather as a tool to illustrate what would be necessary to invalidate the project’s main result (that China is unlikely to succeed if Taiwan resists and the United States intervenes). […]
The base scenario produced relatively rapid and clear Chinese defeat, a result produced largely by the ability of U.S., Taiwanese, and Japanese anti-ship missiles to destroy the Chinese amphibius fleet before the PLA forces ashore can capture ports and airports to increase the force flow across the strait. Optimistic scenarios (favoring the United States and its partners) produced the same results but more quickly and with lower casualties. Pessimistic scenarios (favoring China) produced more protracted fighting and a wider range of operational outcomes, ranging from decisive Chinese defeat to stalemates in which China controlled damaged ports and airports. The “Taiwan stands alone” scenario produced inexorable Chinese advance, concluding with the Chinese occupation of the entire island—an unambiguous PLA victory.
It goes without saying that American wargames are biased against the side the US is cheering for: this was the case in Iraq, in Ukraine, and here it will be the case too. (American experts do not earn their bread in the copium business, they're MIC shills if anything, although one can come up with a more charitable take). So the Chinese loss is a credible prediction. The report does not account for novel technologies, but for the sake of argument let's assume the Chinese will maintain the same qualitative gap.
For more holistic analyses concerning global economic impact and such, I direct you to RAND.
Most people in the sphere, Zeihan being a notable exception, seem to believe (or at least that's what they claim) that in the scale of a few more years – by 2030 and beyond – the odds will grow to be more favorable to China. So it stands to reason to provoke a war as soon as possible. It's rational.
Reasons the Chinese are urging against brinkmanship are twofold. First, they want to postpone the war for already-mentioned reasons. Second, they are genuinely worse at understanding the stakes. Everything the Chinese have succeeded at, they have succeeded through trade and industry. It is inconceivable to them that a nation excelling in commerce even more than they do would rather go for a destructive exchange to maintain its primacy. They wouldn't have done so.
Moreover, they think it just for that nation to accept its (purported) decline. That's the natural way of the world, so why struggle in a futile effort to delay the inevitable?
Very charitably, the Chinese share Jordan Peterson's idea of winning:
His kid was very good at playing hockey, but he wasn't very good at being a good player. And so, you know, you always tell your kids, "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game." And of course, you don't know what that means, and neither does the kid, and it's often a mystery to the kid what the means because obviously you're trying to win. But imagine it this way: imagine that human beings, that the goal of human life isn't to win the game. The goal of human life, in some sense, is to win the set of all possible games. And in order to win the set of all possible games, you don't need to win any particular game. You have to play in a manner that ensures that you will be invited to play more and more games.
The West has Ender Wiggin's idea:
“Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they'd leave me alone.”
It's a cliché, but the big difference between «Western» and «Eastern», or more archaically Occidental and Oriental, or more properly Abrahamic and Dharmic+Confucian cultures is the paradigm of linear time versus cyclical time. Cyclical universe is a theory informed by observing patterns of the natural world: the change of the times of day and phases of the moon and seasons of the year, children succeeding their parents to bequeath their legacy to the next generation, dynasties establishing their mandate, flourishing and falling into ruin, the great wheel turning and turning.
The West used to believe in this as well, from Greeks to the Norse. But it's a shallow and comforting vision, the default intuition all cultures arrive at when they begin to ponder the nature of things. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Time is an arrow, not a circle; both the fundamental bits and the highest-order processes perform an irreversible computation. Entropy rises, the species evolves; the Paradise is forever lost, but the Rapture is drawing ever closer – and it matters whether you end up on the side of the damned or together with the saints.
Americans, despite protestations, have a certain Grand Idea. Few and unimportant people have put it into words, but it can be sensed in the air and the water supply. This idea depends very much on the Chinese not having acquired a number of technological tools in this decade, before those tools are properly leveraged by Americans. It looks like this requirement is best satisfied in the condition of Taiwan maintaining it sovereignty or, at least, its high-tech industry not surviving the Chinese attempt at annexation. So this is how it will go.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Well, and, if we're repeating ourselves,
I think the reason for this performative callousness is precisely the intuition that men who don't cut it in the sexual market are pathetic non-threatening worms (at worst, some outliers will become school shooters or rapists) and can be safely utilized as fuel for minor self-affirmation in glib offhand remarks.
If not for your predictable, inflexible exercise in glib remarks about Chads and incels and shiet, signaling being a higher-status male in an environment where it's a pointless tactic (has anyone ever found a mate through The Motte, or founded a gang?), this would have been an «inflammatory claim without evidence» I guess.
Now that we've established that we both see each other as cringeworthy posers, do you have anything to say on the object level?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It seems you’re denying the entire category of legitimate claims.
Pretty much, yeah. I mean I have a sense of intuitive morality that I believe is informed by the deep structure of the world, simple things like reciprocity being objectively desirable, the first aggressor being in the wrong, etc., – but in the end, such sensibilities are arbitrary aesthetics and can only be legitimized and normalized by political fiat. The only way it could have been otherwise would be if there was a Creator whose intentions for the Universe include ranking of its elements along some specific moral axis.
I have never been able to tell if people who act as if they have access to objective morality (one that others will recognize as such, even!) are more Machiavellian, or just lacking meta-awareness (and whether there is any difference).
I don’t think a threat makes a right.
That's the neat part: a sufficient threat can make you reconsider, at least for purposes of political action – and in a generation or two, for all other purposes too. Sufficient threats effect concessions, and concessions become norms, and norms become the letter and the spirit and the legitimizing justice behind the law.
It does matter what people think.
I agree. Right now, your best bet is that 30% of young men who are effectively emasculated will think «fair enough, I am not entitled to anyone lowering their standards». And perhaps 40 or 50% next.
After all, women didn’t attain what we believe to be a privileged position in society by threatening to burn it down, did they?
I think they very much did, violence, intimidation and support of far left terrorist movements was a significant part of it. Although mainly it was still social shaming, public disturbances (shrieking, vandalism), and abuse of the male sense of pity – options obviously unavailable to young cis hetero men, who are also vastly more violent by default.
Incidentally, women have been having a pretty noisy demonstration just the other day here. I think they'll get all they want, and more, and then discover it hasn't made them any happier.
We've banned leaded gasoline, even though it was certainly economically advantageous for every individual driver, and our liberalism calls for less market regulations. We've outlawed OTC cocaine, and made sexualization of minors taboo, with a rather expansive definition too. It's not inconceivable that we could prohibit OnlyFans, Tinder and TikTok. Maybe some more elegant approach is preferable. New problems are born of new clever exploits and profit-making schemes, and after the cost of that profit becomes clear, they call for still newer solutions (which are often enough illiberal on their face). The first step, inescapably, is to allow that a problem be recognized as such, as a problem worth discussing; which is why the space of allowed concerns is so bitterly contested.
If you (or a lot of young men) are unable to get someone you want to be in a relationship with to also want to be in a relationship with you, that's a you problem.
Suppose applying this reasoning to literally any other consensual relationship with high stakes, like employment. Do you think it isn't a «poors problem» when working class people feel they've got a raw deal in the contemporary economic arrangement? Do you think it's a «youths problem» when higher-status Muslims build harems and watch contently as the red-hot madness sizzles underneath their feet?
Ultimately it doesn't matter what you think. Either the dissatisfied party can intimidate you into concessions – or wreck your neighborhood, or tank your economy, or straight up burn your McMansion together with your family – or it can't, and the point is moot.
Rights are merely an issue of negotiation via credible threats. There's a fake oath attributed by Russian bloggers to 15th century Catalan nobility: Nós, que valem tant com vós per separat, i junts més que vós, us investim sobirà i us jurem lleialtat per tal que ens protegiu, defenseu i treballeu pel nostre progrés, i si no, no. Allegedly it means something like this: «We, who are worth as much as you separately, and together more than you, invest you as sovereign and swear loyalty to you so that you protect us, defend us and work for our progress, and if not, then no». This probably wasn't the case in Catalonia. This is definitely the premise of representative democracy (rationalizing the democratic way is the intent of this fiction), and of your liberalism today. People who are not represented by the operating system of the society, who are not protected, defended and aided in their progress, can just say: i si no, no, withdrawing their pledge. It is valuable to minimize the frequency and magnitude of this second «no». There are various means to that end. It is possible to delude them into thinking their problems are negligible or shameful (just as it is possible to provoke a group with no legitimate complaints into a righteous fury), drive them to suicide, prevent their self-organization. Up to a point.
I think the reason for this performative callousness is precisely the intuition that men who don't cut it in the sexual market are pathetic non-threatening worms (at worst, some outliers will become school shooters or rapists) and can be safely utilized as fuel for minor self-affirmation in glib offhand remarks. This has worked well enough in Western polities, historically. I posit that when the cutoff is at 30% and climbing up, and in the context of there being essentially no other self-actualization tracks in a postmodern society, this tactic isn't quite as sound. Sexually frustrated young men are a moral problem, but even if you don't agree, they are a well-known political problem. Your problem too. You are playing with fire.
For the record, I guess I'm roughly in the same place as @4bpp, in that this isn't a pain point for me. I don't much care about how I look or score on some bullshit «you must be this tall to ride» plot: to eventually receive sexual attention even from fairly attractive women in the vicinity (of course, not exclusively attractive… and not only women), I've only ever had to start speaking. (I speak roughly in the same manner I write, although lacking the edit option for typos and l'esprit d'escalier is a bummer; then again, my voice has its own perks). Naturally this works best in dense mixed-sex environments where long-winded conversations are not frowned upon. So that's education and less male-biased sections of the academia, and adjacent gatherings. (In fact I believe that's what many women seek in higher ed in the first place, even if they've been gaslit into thinking otherwise). Not fucking Tinder, which is the go-to platform for matchups now.
Of course, inflating the educational pipeline even more would be insane for a whole host of other reasons. Also, «I got mine» is a not an argument even if true.
@f3zinker is correct that the effect of online dating is already disastrous and we've only began to feel it, and that you all are intent on dodging, downplaying and misrepresenting the core issue. Last but not least, it's frankly disheartening that I feel the need to write this disclaimer to preclude another tedious discussion about personal frustrations, inadequacies and attractiveness scores.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
You look down on it, but how is that wrong? Ultimately, people have a God-shaped hole. Two millenia of tradness – which is in fact more impressive in person than your tacky description suggests – has a better plugging effect than baseball, Marxism, BLM struggle sessions, therapy counseling, Marvel cinema or whatever is the surrogate of the day. I fully expect people to come out of liturgy in a decent Orthodox church with more noble thoughts and feelings.
I'll have some of what you're smoking if you don't mind.
The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.
To begin with, while you were indeed accused of torturing the meaning of words and the like in relation to your hot takes on tribal affiliation of right-wingers, the «doubling down on obvious falsehoods» was specifically about your bizarrely hostile – and easily disproven – insistence that language models don't have certain capabilities. You can't deal with that issue by doubling down on your politics.
But since language models and your politics are, in fact, only tangentially related, I'll only comment on the latter.
Your politics are not conservative or progressive in some principled philosophical sense. They are technically center-right but, first and foremost, American – and this pretty much exhausts their content.
All nations are, to an extent, imagined communities, where the actual cohabitation is fortified, like democracy can be, with clever psyops and retcons. Your nation is a Proposition Community – and one heavily reinvented in your lifetime to become as expansive and comfortable to the power brokers within it as possible. The marriage of Jerusalem and Athens can result in any number of political systems, and each one would seek to claim the mantle of Western Civilization as such, this has happened a few times before. Indeed, even the Proposition Nation idea, very infectious as of late, can take many forms. Singapore is the Proposition Nation with mercantile East Asian characteristics; France is the Proposition Nation of Reddit Rationalism. And like Alasdair MacIntyre has said,
…But perhaps a systematic recognition of this incompatibility will enable us to diagnose one central flaw in the political life characteristic of modern Western states, or at least of all those modern Western states which look back for their legitimation to the American and the French revolutions. For polities so established have tended to contrast themselves with the older regimes that they displaced by asserting that, while all previous polities had expressed in their lives the partiality and one-sidedness of local customs, institutions and traditions, they have for the first time given expression in their constitutional and institutional forms to the impersonal and impartial rules of morality as such, common to all rational beings. So Robespierre proclaimed that it was an effect of the French Revolution that the cause of France and the cause of the Rights of Man were one and the same cause. And in the nineteenth century the United States produced its own version of this claim, one which at the level of rhetoric provided the content for many Fourth ofJuly orations and at the level of education set the standards for the Americanisation of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century immigrants, especially those from Europe.
Hegel employs a useful distinction which he marks by his use of words Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit. Sittlichkeit is the customary morality of each particular society, pretending to be no more than this. Moralitiit reigns in the realm of rational universal, impersonal morality, of liberal morality, as I have defined it. What those immigrants were taught in effect was that they had left behind countries and cultures where Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit were certainly distinct and often opposed and arrived in a country and a culture whose Sittlichkeitjust is Moralitiit. And thus for many Americans the cause of America, understood as the object of patriotic regard, and the cause of morality, understood as the liberal moralist understands it, came to be identified. The history of this identification could not be other than a history of confusion and incoherence, if the argument which I have constructed in this lecture is correct. For a morality of particularist ties and solidarities has been conflated with a morality of universal, impersonal and impartial principles in a way that can never be carried through without incoherence.
The modern American system, however, is a particularly extreme case in that it reduces this civilization to a citizenship and a rather short list of legal precepts (and one more thing we'll return to shortly). Not the people (which drives @SecureSignals or @Hoffmeister25 to predictable indignation), nor an ideology (as those are quickly exchanged), nor religion, nor heritage, as even history is rewritten and reinterpreted at a whim. Who are your people? Degenerates and mongrels (your words, not mine). What is the living spirituality of your people? Something something Jesus quoted Homer when drinking at Moe's, but also live and let live, man; further, myopic pragmatism dressed as virtue. What is your idea? «Grand ideas suck», but you're always itching to bash some egghead's skull in for having the temerity to propose one and expect an argument in return. The power you have amassed, however, seeks expression, and it takes the shape informed by grand ideas you prefer to haughtily ignore until they become received wisdom, the water you swim in, and you become willing to murder and get murdered in their name – with nothing, really, except some confused childish platitudes about good and evil to justify the call.
Naturally this can't be how it works. How it works – coming back to the one more thing – is that you do have a grand idea. The grand idea is circular self-worship bringing the confused identification of Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit to the logically final point where no distinction is, strictly thinking, conceivable; America is its own God. This faith is not grounded in any intellectual tradition, in fact not in any tradition, but remains as jealous as any other. All people who found their beliefs on other frameworks, and therefore are or might become disloyal, are seen as heathens or heretics, depending on their background. In your lingo they are «progressives», but this means less than an Orthodox Christian accusing a Catholic of being a schismatic. In the lingo of your Legal Enemies, enemies playing another part in the two-tact regime of American political worship, defectors from the vacuous self-worship cult can be called «fascists» or «far right». There is an asymmetry between sides of the performance in their ability to publicly make use of those allies, and other slight details, but we've been discussing those asymmetries for years now.
It's about time to scrutinize the median case, which you represent well enough.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think transhumanism is a progressive (in the classical non-partisan, capabilities-increasing sense) ideology/sensibility, and there can be transhumanist-friendly transgenderism, but as it stands those are incompatible paradigms, with the latter having been absorbed into political leftism that's basically a zero-sum game to redistribute finite and indeed actively diminished resources, in the same camp as degrowth ecologists and race baiters. More to the point, transhumanism has another, also somewhat Gnostic notion of the self, e.g. see me here:
I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.
For now, the question to check is «would you be okay with a pill that magically restores sex-typical gender perception and orientation and other phenotypic aspects, or would you vehemently reject it and indeed try to prohibit it».
I'll hopefully expound on that at some point or we'll talk with @self_made_human and @TheDag and others and figure it out together.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.
Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:
Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa has stated that Testament is specifically agender (無性, musei?), neither male nor female, and that the character was previously portrayed as androgynous/bigender (両性, ryōsei?), but that the team chose to change that in the new game.[38][39] Both musei and ryōsei are categories of X-gender, the Japanese equivalent of the word 'non-binary'.
In an interview, Daisuke Ishiwatari reportedly said that "They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."[39][40]
Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.
…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.
In psychology, androgyny refers to individuals with strong personality traits associated with both sexes, combining toughness and gentleness, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour, as called for by the situation. Androgynous individuals are more likely to engage in cross-sexual behaviour than those who maintain traditional sex roles. The rise of feminism and the influence of the women’s rights movement made certain aspects of androgynous behaviour more socially attractive than in the past. Androgynous figures occurred frequently in Greek mythology, often embodying a blend of desirable male and female characteristics. The blind seer Tiresias, a figure of great wisdom, was sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite.
Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.
Thanks for making the point so clearly.
I'll shamelessly plug other branches, here and (probably the most self-contained post, for people whose time is too valuable to dig through everything) here.
And boy, do I need to read all of Borges.
Though this could probably benefit more from Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari or something. Prog theorists are lightyears ahead of the right-wing analysis: they had to develop very powerful conceptual apparatuses to «deconstruct» solid parsimonious structures grounded in physical evidence. And those apparatuses, with minor tuning, would blow their own glass house to dust. (I'm not sure Foucault is safe to touch).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
And yet who, aside from the creeper admin in the chat, would marry the onlyfans star/stripper/escort?
…Come on, this is a trivial confounder. If there's a reason not to marry or date a conventionally hot sex worker, it's not her looks as such. At worst, it's some perverse signaling consideration, like you say, or insecurity about competition, but ordinarily just an essentially moral and practical choice. A fat prostitute, or an emaciated drug addict with anorexic «model» proportions, are obviously even less attractive! And a «decent» woman with a hourglass figure is not seen as non-respectable or non-desirable.
In fact, you can get in trouble for slut-shaming an actual slut! Assuming that a conventionally hot woman who isn't a slut is non-respectable just because of looks that would boost a slut's popularity is ludicrous and frankly suicidal levels of sexism.
But then, I could probably contrive an experiment where people read an article about the Hadid sisters being millionaire supermodels lusted after by hundreds of millions of thirsty fuckboys and have them rate higher than your golden ratio girl.
Men seem to be generally less influenced by choice copying, though I admit evo psych explanations of this aren't very solid.
Now, are you a soyboy, low IQ lizard brainer or a chad chimp brainer who wants to play status games with the rest of us?
I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.
But my dick has a head of its own, and I think this is the same for most men. Taste can be socially influenced; but you were discussing raw attractiveness. The position I and your previous interlocutors defend is that there are some damn robust biologically determined attractors in the attractiveness space, and the body shape common to healthy women with normal hormonal profiles is one such attractor for cis men. Another is skin quality (even harmless freckles are a rather minor fetish), another is hair quality indicative of high estrogen. A man can be an ass man or a breast man or even an abs man, but an archetypal shorthair tomboy with visible abs is still just a 90-60-90 girl who's cut her luscious hair short, trained a bit more and ate a bit less. And everything we see shows that the modal desirable female phenotype oscillates around this, actually quite narrow, setpoint.
Besides, I'm not dismissive of it. It's just not even wrong.
How is pointing at revealed popular preferences not even wrong? It's clearly less not even wrong than pointing at arbitrarily picked runway models.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive
While arguably not a normie, I am a man and I posit they're not exceptionally attractive. They have sometimes amazing faces and are all around okay, but this is despite them lacking feminine waist and hips (I don't mean Beyonce, Megan Fox and other celebrities who got on that list because of being actual sex symbols). I think we can learn more about male preference from actual, organically emerging markets. How prominent are women of this type among [some high percentile] Onlyfans? Among strip club dancers? Are these bodies present in escort girl catalogues? Do women photoshop themselves into that shape? Do they seek out clothes exaggerating those traits?
And how much effect does a typical male's preference have on who gets to the runway?
A huge fraction of eastern European and Asian sex symbols buck your sex doll trend.
Seeing Japanese lingerie models, I very much doubt it. Asians may have less interest in bottom-heavy physiques, of course.
Bill Gates and Papas Elon and Bezos who are all richer than G*d could easily have maximized for breast size and didn't.
There's the notable "billionaire wife" meme, I think they didn't prioritize looks in any case.
most modern men actively wouldn't marry a stacked girl with >double Ds and a huge ass given the choice because they aren't viewed as respectable
I am not sure about that, and the idea that rail-thin (as opposed to just tall) women are inherently more attractive to the higher-status men is on par with the most hare-brained evo psych stories. A fit, non-sagging woman with bigger tits and ass wins, although of course there are trade-offs.
We could make up any number of bullshit evo psych arguments to fit the data.
Sure, but I think we don't have to, because the data in all conditions where large numbers of representative men actively express their preference and are in a position to demand the subjectively best possible pick is overwhelmingly in favor of the blogpost's hypothesis, which you are unjustifiably dismissive of.
To be clear, I do not believe that Islam started in this way, in a way that matters, or that it proceeds this way. I think Arabs/Bedouins have been clannish since prehistory, in comparison with modern Europeans, but also Persians, Anatolians and other groups they've contacted; and they make such a big deal out of Islam and literal adherence to its precepts precisely because it's their best way to cope with their impulses, the rigid platform to maintain a semblance of a supraclannish high-trust society, which at some points in history worked rather well. Arabs dole out antisocial punishment despite Islam. Without Islam or another comparable totalizing faith they degenerate into pure defectbots who cannot be trusted to not backstab anyone outside of their small cliques and family groups, if even that.
What I was talking about is that if someone in that environment like zinker, who cerebrally recognizes the advantage of high-trust communities, begins to cooperate within a small group of like-minded people and maintain a honest, merit-based system in their limited domain of control (which seemed to be what you propose with your «in some circles», though I might have jumped to conclusions and you were still going on with the self-sacrificing do-gooder bullshit for the benefit of the broader society), there's a high chance that this degenerates into a yet another Machiavellian «clan» in a few iterations, when newcomers internalize only the help-allies-sink-strangers principle, and not the abstract project of getting to everyone-helps-everyone-else equilibrium.
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