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
This all has been discussed before. In short, conservatives are projecting their geopolitical worries and ambitions, but TikTok is a big deal and could be used geopolitically, with some cleverness. Yours truly, July 2020:
[...] In other words, there's an inevitable churn of social networks, and a massive geopolitical incentive to insert your offer into the queue. We could call a shifting morphing system that defines a "generation" a Schelling space - a space where Shelling points for a demographic get discovered. And while crude, straightforward propaganda would probably not work well, the person who excises certain attractors from this space can effectively forge the generation as he sees fit. Sometimes it's segregated by language and locale, sometimes not. In Russia, it's Odnoklassniki (Classmates) for "boomers" (conservative, rah-rah patriotic, apprehensive of modern stuff) and Facebook-esque Vkontakte for millenials (apolitical to liberal, smug, educated). The space at the bleeding edge of global teenage hip-ness is Twitter-Discord-TikTok pipeline, if I know my zoomers well.
Americans know this - progressive businessmen and conservative think tank analytics alike. They have profited immensely off Silicon Valley's dominance in social networks market. So now that China is trying to do the same (and succeeding! In the most valuable cohort, no less!), they are rallying to the defense of their brainwashing monopoly in their characteristically, maddeningly un-self-aware manner. And the other prong of their culture-war machine (see the small script at the page's bottom) is concerned with cementing said monopoly over domestic networks which dominate in older cohorts. Facebook is, if I'm not mistaken, what Millenials are all about. Better purge the "hate" from there. Groypers, Pepes, "ackschually police shootings are not...", all that filth. Right, Zuck?
If TikTok is banned, I expect Zoomers to retreat to Discord, and the same ADL-coordinated censorship to reach them there. Maybe Kyle expects this too. A meager price for stopping 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波, I suppose.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I agree that 0 as the initial state would be preferable. I've always thought this to be inspired by mechanics for hiding downvoted posts: if you get yourself an unprincipled hater and he goes around downvoting all your fresh comments, they instantly go below 0 and may become collapsed by default, which would prevent them from being seen (or gaining upvotes), so there's an extra 1 to start with.
Of course this is silly, you can get 2 haters, and anyway there are better solutions.
P.S. it was exciting to think you are the Ratboy Genius, but surely we cannot be so lucky, can we?
We still don't know of any drawbacks of IQ (or genetic correlates of IQ) no matter how many corrections we do; nor any interesting non-additive effects. Cognitive ability is independently causal for all of the good stuff, albeit it doesn't explain the whole of it; the common factor behind cognitive ability and good stuff (physical basis of g, apparently just high neurological and more general cellular functioning) has got to explain an even greater proportion, and this is what we'd be maximizing via IQ selection. For IQ-good outcomes relationship to be substantially explained by a confounder, it would require a very sneaky pervasive bias everyone is missing.
Would our hypothetical children who were embryo-selected for IQ PGS alone to the effect of 20 (or 40) points be perfectly equal in success to their natural intellectual peers? Indeed, it's not clear. Would they be better off – in the expected direction of less dysfunction – than the baseline, or rather, than random implanted embryos? You can bet on it.
P.S. This isn't really the best strategy for embryo selection, anyway. Gwern finds that:
selection can be made more effective by selecting on multiple phenotype traits: considering an example using 7 traits (IQ/height/BMI/diabetes/ADHD/bipolar/schizophrenia), there is a factor gain over IQ alone; the outperformance of multiple selection remains after adjusting for genetic correlations & polygenic scores and using a broader set of 16 traits.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I'm sceptical, because all this moon-shot optimism of the past has turned out very differently in reality. "Increased automation means people will have so much leisure time!" No, increased automation meant
It actually meant exactly that. People work way less hours now. (That's not even addressing the nature of work, namely that they're not working nearly as much in physically harmful and toxic environments, hell, even janitors today have less demeaning tools).
Not everything is a zero-sum game. No, really.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other
This is such a quintessentially leftist, zero-sum, all-goods-are-positional-goods, spoils-system, school-pecking-hierarchy point of view. Do you think violent crime is an unchangeable quantity that can only be shifted around like liquid in a hydraulic system, that there's a fixed supply of non-crappy homes such that only a few get to have them, that the economy just needs someone to be on obese and on welfare? That all that IQ score represents is deviation from the median rather than a noisy proxy for absolute cognitive ability, so any improvement will only produce accelerated running in place?
It reminds me of The Citadel of Ricks from that damn cartoon – which is either brilliant satire or an expression of an extraordinarily pathological world model, or both, I guess. Unironic superhumans who can individually construct physics-breaking tools and AI-powered assistants – exploiting each other, building elaborate chains of abuse, maintaining artificial scarcity, ineffectively doing menial jobs to the point of burnout, in a mockery of a dysfunctional American city.
I'd understand it if you predicted a culling, seeing as you expect AI to be economically useful. But who the fuck needs to maintain a permanent underclass that requires babysitting, armed cops and shitty schools? Would our genetically-augmented overlords invest into reintroducing lead-laced gas and asbestos walls, while they're at it?
If I am to be blunt, I think this entire line of thinking is a cope. I think people hide in this worldview from admitting that some groups they care about are just fucked up – not relatively or conventionally, but in some rigorously definable, absolute, physical, embarrassing but potentially rectifiable sense. That there are hard limits on what can be achieved with «85 IQ», which do not follow from it being 1 SD below the «100 IQ» and thus non-competitive in a market economy. Limits on impulse control, cooperation, general decision-making. And moving beyond these limits allows for building an all-around nicer society for everyone, without extra requirements for morality of its elites.
Sure, they can try to cement their advantage – though that'd require the «PMC» to coordinate far more than they've been able so far. On the other hand, the main reason to avoid falling down the hierarchy is knowing how much it sucks down there. Sucks absolutely, not relatively. Scarcity begets crab mentality. And stupidity multiplies scarcity.
There is a huge demand for horror stories about the Japanese way of life. Japanese elites are not inhumanly virtuous or selfless; Japanese culture and society are rather hierarchical. There is, I'm sure, some violence, some bullying, some crappy housing in Tokyo – just very little, relatively speaking. But there certainly are no armed security guards in Tokyo schools. It's not because the undesirables have all been tucked away somewhere on Hokkaido. It's partially, but in a very large part, because there does not exist an underclass with sub-90 IQ in modern Japan. And no one deserves to be born into such an underclass.
@Eetan would no doubt gleefully remind me that the Japanese public has no guns anyway, so those guards wouldn't have had anything to do. Well, fair point. But there's very little non-gun violence either. There's virtually no shit like this in Japan. If the demand to lay down arms and obey can be made legitimate, guaranteeing extreme safety is one of the better ideas.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This narrative is as applicable to AI, which can confer godlike power on an arbitrarily tiny elite class very soon, as it is inapplicable to genetics. Even the smartest naturally-occurring people begin substantially contributing at about 15 years of age at the earliest. This means the first generation of genetically augmented kids (or more realistically, clones of Terry Tao or John von Neumann, though we can't clone him right now) will create hype with their early performance many years before they can help advance reproductive technology beyond the level comprehensible for baseline humans, and upon maturation will be outpaced by the successive cohorts using better and, as it usually happens, cheaper tech stack. Their initial work will be public-facing too. When this whole batch begins to pay rent, literally and figuratively, access to enhancement will have proliferated way deeper than the top 0.01%.
Unless, of course, someone succeeds at banning it – for civilians, that is.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Visit your local Hillel, say you're interested in getting in touch with the tradition, talk to people there. You'll probably get some guidance and maybe even a match. I'm not kidding, I've seen it happen.
For fuck's sake, you have a hereditary subscription to a superintelligent support network for autistic nerds, might as well use it once.
Does anyone else feel like there is some indulgent aspect to posting? The whole reason I began posting on the motte was that "iron sharpens iron", but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".
I think that environments where iron actually sharpens iron and undeniable progress is made over time – big boy science, competitive sports and games – are very different from The Motte (except in the narrow sense of rhetorical finesse and ability to abide by arbitrary rules of polite discussion). As Daddy Peterson puts it, they constitute hierarchies of competence. I've typed a paragraph on leagues segregated by ability, on legible scoring, on frivolous weirdness getting weeded out and robust, boring paradigms rising to the top (think Sambo/Kickboxing/Wrestling vs Karate or Kung Fu in MMA), but erased it. We produce enough smartassing routinely.
The point is, a hierarchy of competence is an environment where you can undeniably lose and your entire approach can lose, deemed pointless and discarded. In this capacity, The Motte is broken by design. Not everyone gets an AAQC but everyone is welcome to participate, over and over, so long as they play nice; and they can bring their toys too. We don't even have a shared epistemology. We can't have one, because Building Consensus is actually proscribed by the rules. This prevents us from becoming a total echo chamber, but doesn't allow to build on our not-inconsiderable output and move beyond circular hobbyhorsing. As a generalist forum for discussions of social issues pertaining to the Culture War through rational lens (arguably a restrictive definition but one I'm happy with), it's an Epistemic Minor League in an environment where Major Leagues have been carpet-bombed and made unavailable; and it can't grow into a Major League.
You're one of the best new contributors, so it'd suck seeing you leave. But I wish you well on your journey of self-actualization.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Pretty much. Actually it's four points.
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Most of the asserted "genetic diversity" of Africa as a whole is due to peoples from ancient population clusters, which make up less than 1% of African population and are not associated with colloquial "black people". They are anthropological marvels, but frankly they're not the guys anyone is talking about. Related Razib Khan post.
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"Genetic diversity" for a given population is overwhelmingly a measure of ancestral population size and diversity of interchangeable variants that have spread by genetic drift. Out-of-Africa populations have passed through a series of severe bottlenecks, so they've shed some genetic markers we can find in African Bantus. Doesn't have much to do with anything consequential. It's like a JPG that's gone through lossy compression: there are color bands now, and less diversity of color patches or raw pixel values, but it doesn't mean the semantics of the image is altered, or that the range of any color channel is diminished, in fact the opposite can be true.
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Local adaptation can very quickly act on non-neutral loci, a few thousand years are more than enough to change a typical polygenic trait by 1 SD. We have no grounds to presume that ancestral (>50KYA) diversity explains modern diversity for groups that have evolved in different environments.
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By the same logic, yes, traits are independent products of selection. Just like all Sub-Saharan Africans are pretty dark relative to other races, they can be pretty ... fast runners, putting aside their internal ranking and their variation in toxin resistance or deep-diving talents or cricket skills.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's true inasmuch as we literally talk about "genetic diversity" in the context of anthropological research, but implications that people try to smuggle in with these words are false. I'll just quote Cochran again.
Occasionally I hear people talk about Africa’s great genetic variety. It exists: the genetic difference between Bushmen and Bantu is bigger than the difference between Bantu and Finns. A couple of thousand years ago, before the Bantu had arrived in South Africa & mixed with the Bushmen, it was even bigger: looking at ancient DNA from those unmixed Bushmen, looks as if they split off from the rest of the human race at least a quarter of a million years ago. Well before anything that looks like behavioral modernity, by any definition. Half as divergent as Neanderthals.
But the most divergent populations are small. There are fewer than 100,000 Bushmen, on the order of a million Pygmies, around 1000 Hadza. Most people in Africa are Bantu or related populations: next after that are Nilotic peoples.
And the venomously sarcastic Economists and biology:
Naturally, economists know a lot about human biology and evolution, just as civil engineers have to know about the properties of timber, concrete and steel. They have a good grounding in psychometrics, behavioral genetics, and quantitative genetics – how else could they do their job? Populations vary in traits that play key roles in economic activity and growth – in intelligence, asabiya, savings propensity, etc – you have to be aware of that variation, else whole continents would be economic mysteries. In the same way they know that those observed differences are a product of selection – which means economic historians think seriously about psychometric changes over time and their consequences, such as the Industrial Revolution. That kind of analysis helps predict where modern economic institutions can be successfully introduced, and where they cannot. [...]
Deirdre McCloskey has a new book out: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. I’m sure that there are many good things in it. But McCloskey makes a significant error in talking about genetics.
“Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE…. Any gene-influenced activity is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities – physical and intellectual and artistic – is unusually thick. …
The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black – at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. ”
So by this argument that the most cold-tolerant Africans must be more cold-tolerant than Eskimos: but they’re not. The most altitude-tolerant Africans must be more altitude-tolerant than Tibetans – but they’re not. McCloskey is thinking that a turn to free markets will make Africa rich, and that will give educational opportunities to Africans now denied them – but a fair-sized mostly-African population already lives in the United States, a population that is already much more prosperous than sub-Saharan Africans. How are they doing? How many geniuses are they producing?
The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans.
Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little). [...]
What matters is the frequency of alleles that influence a trait, not overall genetic diversity. If, for example, the variants that tend to boost educational achievement (some of which were found in the just-released Nature study) were on average less common in sub-Saharan Africans than in Europeans – says 5% less common – Africans would tend to do less well in school. Like they actually do. Now Africa is a big place, and some groups are genetically quite distinct from others. Bushmen are genetically more distant from the Bantu than the Bantu are from Chinese. Some African populations might have experienced selective pressures that were more (or less) favorable for intelligence than others. Is there evidence, either in test scores or cultural accomplishment (better than any test), that some African populations may have smarts comparable with, or better than, people in Switzerland or Holland or Scotland?
If there's something in the academic debate that can't be handwaved away, that's probably termination of your tenure. I recommend reading this and this.
I apologize for misleading phrasing. People seem to be under the impression that there is some ongoing «debate». No, the debate had been decisively won by the HBD side decades ago, on account of the opposition failing to propose any more parsimonious explanation, even one model of environmental effect that'd be up to snuff and robust to social changes or controls (that wouldn't inherently reduce the genetic component wherever it is present). The best they can do is nitpick here and there and laughably misinterpret some facts, including new facts (my favorite recent example). Admixture studies, GWAS – very cool, but for purposes of the race-IQ controversy, all these fancy new data merely confirm what was known in the 60s.
The political contest has gone the opposite way, however. Now there's an escalating mop-up and gaslighting operation. Scientists know more than ever, but do not care to integrate their knowledge into anything more than affirmation of the prestigious consensus, whereas commoners know less than their grandfathers, and care less about knowing, and flaunt their ignorance and stupidity. In the process of this mental liberation, we are dismantling the vestiges of Enlightenment ideology. Children born today will learn from show trials and grow up to inherit the world where appealing to "facts" or "fairness" or some objective "truth" will be considered inherently cringe, and only the self-affirming tyranny is a legitimate source of knowledge, for it is Based. If you think I'm exaggerating or sound like a crank, you're free to wait and see this hypothesis tested.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I don't think the "dirt-floor hut" part is very applicable to Haiti, and in fact is sort of racist. And as for Africa – at this point, hundreds of millions of Africans are, despite all their problems, not literally premodern tribal savages (who might know languages and stuff). They have nations, schools, institutions, and their urbanization rate is closing in on 50%. These mid-20th century excuses about cultural bias of Western metrics ring hollow when they are increasingly raised in the same universal West-derived culture.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I mean specifically Ukrainians in the country.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Off topic, but I want to say that this post, unlike your direct comments on the issue, made me feel sorta bad about getting a rise out of people who in my opinion have made themselves fair game with bad faith rhetoric.
You're fully correct on the object level here. There's no case against @ymeskhout that wouldn't apply equally well or much better to an unreasonable proportion of discourse in the community. If people don't want to read detailed legal commentary of Trump being {bad, again}, they can just collapse the thread (highly recommended). If they take it upon themselves to correct people being wrong/mean about their favorite politician, but find the process too onerous, they may be advised to reconsider their priorities. Elevating this to mods via reporting is just lame.
@Dean's responses, for all their characteristic argumentative quality, don't amount in substance to anything more than "I don't like it when people make a hobby of criticizing Trump here, so I'll try to shoehorn my opposition to this practice into the well-recognized failure mode of moderation tolerating incorrigible high-effort provocateurs". His own litigative tactic here is more Julius-like, if anything. Actual failings of ymeskhout that are brought forth as evidence of the Julius pattern range from trivial (editing in and out some catty remarks), to highly contestable, to apparently disingenuous (everything about failures to engage with criticism in previous rounds).
The meta level of all this, i.e. the evaporative cooling thesis and long-term consequences of flogging some dead horse, is more interesting but vague and rather hopeless for obvious reasons, and not rigorously argued, not yet at least.
I'm arguably biased but I think debate overviews are unrealistic. This debate is too vast. At this point, collected rebuttals and pointed papers are the best way to appreciate the state of discourse, as if seeing ocean in a drop of water. So, on top of what you've been already given, a few high-profile samples:
Some anti-HBD:
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Kevin Drum, Here’s Why the Black-White IQ Gap Is Almost Certainly Environmental.
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Ewan Birney, Adam Rutherford etc, Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer
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Marcus Feldman, Jessica Riskin, Why Biology Is Not Destiny (only implicitly HBD-related via generic hereditarianism)
And some responses:
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"Cremieux", Resolute Ignorance on Race and IQ Courtesy of Kevin Drum
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Emil Kirkegaard, The Bird paper, and hereditarian predictions
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Bryan Pesta et al, Debunking Giangrande and Turkheimer (2021): Every Dogma has its Day
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Razib Khan, Nick Patterson Responds To Feldman And Riskin’s NYRB Piece (likewise, implicitly HBD-related)
Collections:
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Ancient but decent, Steve Sailer's Race FAQ
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Old but good, a dearly departed effortposter on Fallacious or Otherwise Bad Arguments Against Heredity
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Somewhat fresher, a collection of Twitter Threads by Paolo Shirasi
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Once more Kirkegaard, Unfinished Wikipedia FAQ on IQ etc.
Additionally:
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again Kirkegaard on Why the race and intelligence question is still not resolved
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Europeans and recent cognitive evolutionreferences -
Old archive tracking the purge of politically incorrect thought.
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Recent example of one of the authors linked above, Pesta, getting purged
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Razib Khan on an implicitly anti-race-and-IQ editorial in Nature Human Behaviour
Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Well, we've got confirmations of genetic differences, and there's more censorship, and most of the big guys in the debate died. The scientific question received a political answer.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Your premise is not sound. Australasian aboriginals are worse off. Poorest Central Asians like the Kyrghizstani are around black level, judging by PISA results. Ditto, it seems, for lower-caste Indians, which is a group bigger than any majority-black nation. Some purely black populations score higher than some non-blacks; Igbos are stereotyped as crafty and big-brained by Africans and they do comprise a big part of those high-performing Nigerians in the Anglosphere. I suspect that Tutsi are smarter than Hutu and indeed pretty smart in general, which is why they eventually suffered a genocide, as it happens. And the lowest results for specific African nations are suspect. Anyway, someone is bound to end up at the bottom of the totem pole.
On the level of rhetoric, it can be said everyone else are overwhelmingly descendants of a single out-of-Africa migration event (hence the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere). It stands to reason that everyone else might also be close – and different from the left-behind African population – in some important phenotypic traits. Though of course in actuality Africans we talk about are almost 100% Bantu, and thus fairly homogenous.
But yeah, even hardcore hereditarians allow that with continued successes to eliminate causes of deprivation and sickness, along the lines of GiveWell/Gates Foundation, populations that currently report those absurd scores will almost converge with African Americans. E.g. here's Emil Kirkegaard, who himself believes the B-W gap in the US to be 100% genetic, citing the oft-demonized Lynn:
This estimate of the genotypic African IQ as 80 means that the average IQ that Africans would obtain if the environments in which they were raised were the same as those of Europeans would be 80. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the mean IQ of Africans is approximately 71, so it can be inferred that adverse environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa impair the sub-Saharan African IQ by around nine IQ points.
As such, we should expect African national IQs to converge to about 80 in the coming decades everything else equal. Ironically, the main factor that could prevent this is the mass emigration of high intelligence Africans into western countries, thus depriving their countries of their elites. This is what we are currently seeing from countries like Nigeria (Igbo elites).
The problem is that the gap may be more than 100% genetic, so to speak. That is, with deliberate interventions to close the gap we can raise individuals from the lower-IQ group above the performance they'd have had, given equal treatment; and on a population level, with humanitarian efforts, we may improve environments of African societies beyond the level they'd be able to sustain on their own, so new South Asian-like averages won't hold if aid program is terminated on account of its success. Still, maintaining optimal African performance would probably be a net moral (and economic) win for humanity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Well, the upper crust of Israeli political class is near-universally distinguished in military service (e.g. Bibi) or, for earlier generations, has history in paramilitary/terrorist organizations (e.g. Begin, Allon, Shamir). Seems to work out okay for them.
But then again, you never know if the overall success is because or in spite of that.
What is certain is that this doesn't make them especially avoidant of conflict. Would be interested to see if @No_one endorses their approach.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Stans have high (and increasing, post-USSR) TFR, so in the long run something may work out, but yeah, this far it only slows down the process of decline, even in Russia alone. Which is why the suggestion to repopulate Ukraine with those guys is preposterous.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Wait, Russia wants to conduct population replacement?
In effect yes. Or at least people who matter in Russia do and act on this intention. You can consider this analysis to be representative of the underpinning rationale. Immigrants are an economic necessity in the simplifying Russian economy (simplifying, to some extent, because of adaptation to uneducated slave labor), see. Russians don't want to work for subsistence wages, don't breed enough, and we sure can't entice people from nations with high human potential to come over.
Moreover, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Russia continues to be in need of foreign workers. Marat Khusnullin, RF Deputy Prime Minister, in an interview with the RTVI television channel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, emphasized that "...the lack of migrants is a great risk for the country's economy, and now is the main problem in construction. Nearly 50 per cent of migrants work in the construction sector. And unfortunately there is a low level of productivity in construction which makes it impossible to do without migrant labour in the next one to two years. Russians, unlike migrants, are not prepared to work 12 hours a day at a construction site for around 50,000 rubles at the most. The average wage makes up 25 per cent of the cost of construction and up to 50 per cent in some cases. Using the labour of migrants reduces the cost of construction. [46].
Of course, one must recognize that experts arguing for it are mostly blank slatists with leftist politics (and their sponsors are capitalists who couldn't care less about identities of worker bees), so they're not really thinking of this in terms of population replacement where populations are substantial entities. Like the late demographer Vishnevsky (also known as Rabinovich) argued,
Russia does not need Chinatowns or African villages, but a real migrant adaptation machine. [...] When there was a mass migration of peasants to cities in the USSR, essentially they were the same Africans. Yes, the language was the same, the people were identical, but very different cultures clashed. There was a system of "digestion": elimination of illiteracy, workers' schools, cultivating a desire for education. It was not always good, but it was implemented on a large scale and more or less functioned, allowing many immigrants from the countryside to master the urban culture. The authorities recognised the need for this work and allocated funds. Teachers were enthusiastic and felt they were missionaries, bringing culture to the masses, and their work was not tedious. If we managed to re-create something like this in relation to migrants, there would be a result. But there is no demand for it. Meanwhile, it would be fatal to hesitate: the larger the population of a country, the more migrants it can digest. Right now we have one hundred and forty-three million people, and when we finally recognize what needs to be done, there may only be one hundred million left.
So, if done well, there's no loss here, Russians and non-Russians are fully fungible.
And who do they want to replace their population with?
The same offer you've seen above, Central Asian Turkic peoples mainly.
I was under the impression that the country was fairly racist and slavic-supremacist.
Sure, that's what one can get from listening to Western Neo-Nazi Putin Stans and from resentful Washington "policy experts" of Baltic stock (who are, ironically, wielding quasi-woke anti-colonial discourse and Pride badges to obscure their own SS roots) alike. Or from our pal Kamil Galeev, who seeks to advance his tribe and admits gleefully to exploiting gullible Westoids by feigning admiration of their naive slogans. There's plenty of trivia to substantiate the accusation. «Russians have a slur for every nation and ethnicity they've interacted with», so popular on Twitter (who doesn't?). «Russian landlords discriminate against non-Slavs» (of course, Americans of all people know how this goes and just why the market may reward making inferences from a person's ancestry; except their supposedly most-oppressed minority is American, genetically different but of the same language and faith and comprehensive civilizational background, and not straight out of an impoverished society stuck between tradition and modernity, in the middle of a tribal conflict, rife with opiate abuse, underground Salafi mosques and ISIS sympathies). «Here's a list of a dozen minority surnames of military dead in Ukraine, this is evidence Ruskies have smuggled an ethnic cleansing into the war!» Or, like, «there was an unironic Neo-Nazi march in Moscow... just 10 years ago!» People who seriously parrot this crap are either ignorant or knowingly deceptive, just happy to get some rhetorical ammo for their preconceived attitude with regard to Russians.
In reality, Russians are about as racist and supremacist as is typical for Eastern Europe. Of course, far more ethnic Russians than Western Europeans are racist as hell, but they have about as much systemic power to act on this prejudice as Appalachian Whites. Many, especially of the older generations, are thoroughly brainwashed by the false Communist era messaging of давно поперемешались все/нет никаких русских – «we've all been mixed up long ago anyway/there aint such thing as an [ethnic] Russian» – message that fails to convince peoples with healthier ethnic self-identification and thriving diasporas. All have to respect the authoritah of «ethnics»; not a single one among well-known people in Russia is more dangerous to offend than Ramzan Kadyrov, privates serving on a strategic nuclear site can be wantonly bullied and robbed by a random local ethnic bandit, and for your average small business owner local Dagestani mafia matters at least as much as local cops. Putin tries to appeal to our schizophrenic «multinational Russian people» by saying he's a Lakh, an Ingush and so on. He sometimes courts with Russians too, saying that we should try to attract diaspora Russians even more than other immigrants. And of course there's the 'Triune Russian People' pretext for the war.
But that's about it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
All my friends from there are still alive and mostly not conscripted. Yeah they can keep going. They can triple their forces if need be.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Who are those Asiatics "surrounding " Russia you talk of — like, Uzbeks? And do you suppose the Chinese will flock to war-torn Russia-controlled Ukraine?
Russia already has very lax immigration policy and conducts population replacement, the popular sentiment among politicians is that Slavs are inferior workers and voters who think too highly of themselves. There's just nowhere near enough people in Central Asia to make it matter for purposes of repopulating Ukraine, and even Central Asians will be reluctant to say the least. I get the feeling that your model of the situation is informed by, like, 19th century racial stereotypes — Yellow Menace and stuff.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Humiliating and economically and molitarily destroying a threat to Western Europe, a major China supporter and potentially crucial resource supplier is handling a whole host of simultaneous crises. Let's stop pretending this doesn't make geopolitical sense.
The US Marine Corps can't defend feminism in Iraq and fight high intensity wars in the Pacific.
I suspect they very much can and that Chinese military will not substantially outperform the Russian one, but in any case the materiel going to Ukraine is chump change in comparison to its benefits, whether political or logistical. Everyone is upping their defense budgets; do you think it'd have been such an easy sell without supporting Ukraine?
I wish Western "anti-Interventionists" and such were honest about their beliefs, instead of coming off as two-bit dictator stans with motivated reasoning. What the US is doing now is executing a rational strategy for a soon-to-be total hegemon. This is the birth of the empire; mopping up Taliban will become trivial after these big wars with nuclear-armed sources of systemic interference are done. If you have any real criticism of Pax Americana, do make it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
One should understand that Europe's and even America's production capacities have atrophied badly over the decades.
In sharp contrast to Russia's, which is on such a fanatical war footing and so replete with materiel that it can afford to throw heavy anti-ship missiles into apartment buildings?
This is a war of attrition alright. Ukraine is not a player in this sense; its only contribution is manpower (plus publicity, such as cringeworthy woke-style attempts to cancel Atomic Heart developers and harass other random Russians online). The competitors are Russia (not even other "Authoritarian Axis" nations, which are increasingly distancing themselves from this clusterfuck) and NATO, with support form NATO-in-all-but-name allies like Japan. The question is: would NATO accept to lose to Russia in a war of attrition, with all that means for its credibility and for viability of major land grabs, or would it rather accept some upfront cost to de-mothball military production lines – that, I should note, may come in handy in a world war against China?
This doesn't look like a hard choice to me.
In the beginning of this war I've translated some Atomic Cherry posts. I think he's still very good. He predicts a major offensive by AFU in 2023, enabled by Western aid. Translation technology is good enough now that I'd rather not waste space here.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
You love this... hard-to-pin-down pattern of reasoning, and I don't love to have to keep asking you not do it. Nevertheless here we go again.
Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance, gender and race equality, .....", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith".
The explicit definition of quokka as a mental archetype is the guy who does not account for bad faith of other parties. It's not about wasting time on trolls on anonymous forums, per se. But it absolutely is about a robust mode of engagement with bad actors.
Here's the original thread by 0x49fa98. Here are the most relevant parts:
The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up
In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate. ...
The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"
Rationalists = quokkas, this explains a lot about them. Their fear instincts have atrophied. When a quokka sees a predator, he walks right up; when a rationalist talks about human biodiversity on a blog under almost his real name, he doesn't flinch away ...
The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity
I think Bostromgate is a good illustration.
Black Americans are not particularly stressed in the first place; and their problems are not explicable by being stressed out, and accordingly worries of liberals about their potential mental anguish as a result of some scientific paradigm change are on weak footing, and might just be projection born out of inability to conceive of other minds generally and engage with black people specifically.
On top of that, Science has shown that
In other words, white=cringe, black=based, in a pretty rigorous technical sense.
Accepting HBD as a valid explanation would have the benefit that, at least, such misconceptions would stop being instilled in the consciousness of Americans, generating unproductive guilt and mental disfunction among liberal white women, likely suppressing fertility and driving up antidepressant prescriptions. It would be an interesting focus area for Effective Altruists to explore, should their therapists allow it.
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