BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
There's a lot of fuss with «certified OSes» and an attempt to force a Linux distro Astra, and a few others, on state employees and those working with «personal data». This is the entire list of «sovereign software».
In practice it penetrates to the most manageable ones, like doctors (who got locked into a distro+some database management tool, and constantly rant about the way this system freezes and crashes like it's 1999; I am not sure which part is more to blame. You can also hear about the kickbacks involved in its development). Others, bureaucrats and such, are still content with Windows; at least it's not pirated XP from VovanUltraCDrepack now. I don't think common people are more Linux-literate than in the West.
We have good web infrastructure though. VK at its peak was qualitatively far superior to Facebook, and holds its own even now. Yandex ecosystem is probably peerless, Amazon < Yandex.Market, Alexa < Alisa. Tinkoff Bank app has no serious competition. Telegram isn't legally «Russian» of course, but that's where it began and the spirit is the same; you're free to compare it to Whatsapp (which has been copying features, as of late).
Euros seem to take American dominance as a given, a function of wealth and talent, and do not appreciate just how unreasonably they underperform in the IT domain.
I'm being a little facetious though. Europeans have a number of good services and great distros. Chiefly, KDE – my pick whenever I'm not using Mac. It's a shame this isn't a bigger deal. The talent is there; and the market, the Regulatory Superpower can provide.
To be clear, that this will be/is being said whether or not Ellisons are Jewish, because Sam is and people assume they are too, and there is quite a bit of explicitly Antisemitic content being posted in relation to these events. I assume that MIT Department of Economics faculty do not take kindly to it; and as good liberals they are also driven to tar all attacks against their own with the discrediting Nazi brush – especially when the situation lends itself to it.
No idea if reaching out to Greenblatt is actually in the cards. The situation keeps getting sillier, Forbes has basically labeled her an alt-right figure:
In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. [...]
The now-deleted blog, called WorldOptimization, is unsigned but a close associate confirmed that it was hers. In it, she wrote that "the sexual revolution was a mistake" and that she believed “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers." She also mused about race science, in one post saying the "genetic differences there are massive" when it comes to Indian people from different provinces and castes — which has become a source of discrimination in Silicon Valley. And at the top of her list of “
cute boy things” was “controlling most major world governments.”
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
So many of America’s problems, arguably even large aspects of the culture war, are the product of a culture in which traditional class systems that have worked for thousands of years around the world have been replaced by economic stack ranking, leading to desperate competition and resulting in often bizarre or hard-to-predict consequences via things like elite overproduction.
And so many of America's strengths.
What I'd give to see a European operating system or a dingy social network that can compete with Russian ones. Or, hell, a decent internet banking application.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
No. Humans are fallible and inconsistent irrespective of this logic, but that's a separate issue. By this logic, precommitment to utilitarian moral calculus plus consequentialist decision theory is definitionally incompatible with credible promise of context-agnostic rule observance, regardless of generic fallibility in practice; a perfectly rational and consistent Singerian reasoner would not be perfectly trustworthy, whereas a perfect Kantian would be. And in fact a perfect Singerian would be much less trustworthy than the normal issue, because he'd see more loopholes and opportunities to rob Peter for helping n>1 Pauls without second-order complications, and would consistently opt to pounce on them. In practice, all humans, even Singer I guess, are partially deontological too, and have moral compunctions that rely on things like habits and naive empathy, not to mention the fear of getting caught.
I believe that the difference between doctrines in theory indicates the direction one would practically skew in.
And in a comparative sense, a human-who-claims-to-be-a-consequentialist can precommit to anything just as much as a human-who-claims-to-be-a-deontologist
...Yes, people can deceive.
large EA orgs, and large orgaizations of claimed utilitarians, seem to organize better than comparison orgs of normies in charity or philosophy
I am not at all sure if EAs organize better in some measurable sense than old school charities. They're very likely better at minmaxing specific interventions, and have had a growth spurt lately. But e.g. The Giving Pledge seems like a much bigger deal. And anyway, Eigenrobot and Hanson argue that Charity is not about Helping, so it may be that old charities have been organizing very well, for their purposes.
other than a few scattered examples of the word chutzpah, which of course has equivalents in many languages
«Of course». Well, that's about what I expected.
The late Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish," wrote that chutzpah means "presumption plus arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.
This assertion of exclusivity itself sounds like chutzpah, ironically, but I'd rather believe this expert than you. Very many words do not have exact equivalents in other languages, and there are such words which do communicate a great deal about the culture and are only properly interpretable in its context – usually according to native speakers. For example, according to Vladimir Nabokov, «No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause...». An argument can be made that it's just depression plus a bit of narcissism, but that in itself communicates an important shade of Russianness (expressed both in our literature and suicide rates). Grozny, too, does not have an «equivalent» in modern English (but is evident in the Russian attitude to command chains).
Nor does chutzpah. Sapir-Whorf is wrong because it confuses cause and effect: much like evolution increases the density and diversity of receptors most vital for the species, a language develops finer distinctions to address things most relevant in the people's cultural and ecological environment. You know, Inuits have a trillion words for snow. Swedes have their Lagom – and their perfect taste. Jews have a ton of concepts that others have either not grasped at all, or found novel. Why do you think loanwords even exist – because they sound cool? Because native speakers narcissistically claim they mean something special?
I don't seen any argument that chutzpah is special
Except all arguments made by all Jews who've ever written on the topic, I suppose, starting with Rabbinical scholars cited in Wikipedia. Do you assert, say, that Catholics recognize the right of an individual to haggle with God? Do you not see how that is different from «courage, mettle or ardor» some Gentiles assume «chutzpah» refers to?
Or consider Bernar-Henry Levi, «The Genius of Judaism», speaking audaciously of what I believe can be seen as the intellectual foundation of chutzpah:
The idea of the wager, the sublime leap into the unknown of a Pascal who, tired of flitting between the computation of probabilities, pleasant diversions, and the silence of infinite space, decides to scale the wall toward the sound of the voices that he hears sighing in the shadows, to go faster than the music of the spheres though he is resigned to never knowing their ultimate secret, and even to travel beyond the light of the most powerful human understanding (his own) that the century had produced but that, despite its power, understood nothing: his wager took him beyond all that and, in a single bound, propelled him to the summit of creation and its end. But what could be more different from a Talmudic effort that never offers itself freebies, that skips no steps or rungs on the ladder, that forgoes no audacity of thought and will be satisfied with itself only once it has arrived at the end of the end of what it can think (not believe, but think)?
You pooh-pooh my examples. Care to show how they are unrepresentative, or point to a qualitative study of some rigorously defined form of chutzpah per religion or ancestry, say, comparison in rates of complex swindles and heists and exploits, adjusted for SES, perhaps? (Who would even have the boldness – if not chutzpah – to propose it?)
Look, this is very boring. I get it: Jews can be casually discussed as being special in positive ways, both well-evidenced and speculative (IQ, talents, «work ethic»), but cannot be special in negative ways (except ones that are compliments in disguise, like «excessively curious» or «too much empathy»). This is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, and all opposition to it is supposed to be defended with the rigor of a philosophical treatise, lest it be taken as evidence of a severe moral defect; while its affirmation can be as intellectually lazy as yours. «Of course there are equivalents».
But I'm not a Westerner and feel entitled to point out the obvious. There aren't.
would a non-Jewish fraudster like Frank Abagnale be a truffatore in the Italian tradition
Maybe he would. I, for one, agree that chutzpah, understood in line with my posts, is the correct term with which to label his actions. Or rather, the stuff he has asserted he had done, but apparently did not. Lying about being a cool sexy clever fraudster (but a harmless one! All victimless, baby!) to get book contracts, on the other hand, is not chutzpah – it's just, like, sad. It's telling that you have not reached for a less controversial example.
I'm curious now, do you even have any? Something on par with Soros or Madoff or Epstein or SBF or Bibi's scheming, if possible. Do provide it, before you leave.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I've no doubt they are frustrated, and that there's lots of gossip, and unwillingness to actually allow those losers influence projects one cares about. But I am also 100% sure nearly everyone in those circles, at least outside one's private quarters, only blames hostile external forces for this meltdown – haters on Twitter, scamming crypto bros, Changpeng Zhao, maybe even journalists. This is just how institutions and senior academics reflexively attribute blame, in my experience.
Private conversations have impact. But what people say in public matters for which decisions they will be able to endorse.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I admit I do not have any definitive reason to believe that they are, but Sam is; and the general pattern of association, occupations, credentials, the whole attitude and math-nerd-girl-geeking-out-about-moral-hypotheticals angle, makes this a priori likely. Anyway you can strip the Jewish aspects from my post – most of those lines do not hinge on it, Gentile academics are similar.
Contra @orthoxerox I don't think their appearances are much of a clue, Ellisons don't look distinctly Jewish in my book (in the way e.g. Zelensky or Yudkowsky do) – Glenn can easily pass for an Anglo, his wife for a Southern European, their daughter for a not very attractive product of such liaisons. The surname is also not definitive.
But maybe I just have poor Jewdar, miscalibrated in one or the other direction.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
For what it's worth, I do not endorse the "external locus of control" attack on Lesswrong. I am not familiar with the scholarship of Barbara Fried, but (going by the abstracts) @gattsuru and @sodiummuffin aren't shitting you when they say this isn't what Eliezer and his followers preach.
There is a strain of no-free-will demagoguery associated in academia with certain progressive political propositions; it's very loosely related to Consequentialist ethical theories (only in the sense of the corollary «well, we'll have to increase the odds of behaviors we like without much hope to shame people into them») and Utilitarian moral philosophy, and perfectly independent from the newfangled Singerian Rationalist/Effective Altruist cluster. If Barbara Fried also agrees with Singer, she arrives at that through some path not advised by Lesswrong sequences.
There are many different sets of people and many traditions in the group you distrust and lump together, and they have differences in their beliefs on many dimensions which are invisible in the sketch a disinterested layman can observe at a glance.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Sorry to be a killjoy but I don't believe this is what's happening (though there are American academics here, they should know better). Everyone is a hero of one's own story. And on top of that, academic elites are a highly conscious class as a whole, a guild on the level of a discipline, and a mafia on the level of a department. They are intensely clannish, prize loyalty over reason, and are largely incapable of taking responsibility or seeing things from the perspective of strangers. It's always the children, the profane masses, who are wrong. Doesn't matter if this is about replication crisis or collapsing an entire financial ecosystem. It is natural for an academic to fail precisely in the way he teaches not to, and to refuse to acknowledge it, appealing to his authority in the domain. Even more natural to excuse allies for the same. If anyone is disappointed, it's people who were already critical.
This is how I see it (modulo tone which I admittedly can't mimic well enough):
– Glenn... I was so sorry to hear about Caroline. Is she doing okay? If she has time, I can refer her to Pasternak, he's got an opening after getting rid of that crazy piece of shit. He's a real pro.
– Mr. Ellison, you should know we of the Nth Lab always have your back! Do not blame yourself and don't listen to those vile haters on the Internet! Tell Caroline we looove her!
– So G, I'll be blunt, this is a valuable life lesson for the kids. They got into a seedy market for criminals and tried to turn it into candy. Sounds nice, doesn't work like that – some things, some people, some communities are just rotten to the core, no point even trying to help. Yellen says they'll slam this crypto stuff with regulations over the next year and it'll die at last. And uh, you've other things on your mind, but just an advice: they should lay low now, maybe come back to Jane Street for a few years. Okay? Anyway, don't beat yourself over it, they'll come out stronger on the other side.
– What an awful situation. This ugly cunt Zhao, or what's his name, will rot in jail for what he did! I think she should go and set the record straight, even if it's stressful. What about an interview with The Economist?
– Ugh, so many Nazis have crawled out of the woodwork, on Twitter and other places... But you know how they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. I've called Jonathan and there's an expert group forming to bring attention to those fuckers and put heat on the platforms.
– Caroline and Sam, you know how I've always thought about them, both brilliant kids, very talented, real doers. I've told you on Sam's Bar Mitzvah «that boy's gonna make a splash», and he sure did. It's such a great thing they met. A terrific project, too!. Losers love to see great people stumbling, so there's all this noise. Bah, everyone makes mistakes. I am sure Sam's going to get back on his feet and they'll do many more amazing things together. Just don't lose heart. Don't you and Caroline dare let the bastards see they're getting to you, you hear? It wasn't her fault.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I don't harbor much love for Caplan nor do I agree a great deal with his proposals (and e.g. his debate with Scott wrt the economic incentive model of mental illnesses was... asinine). It is not clear how he resolves this issue. Probably he accepts the fundamental premise of increasing utility, particularly in the narrow sense of multiplying total material/financial wealth, the domain where this framework is most applicable; but as a libertarian (and not-wholly-insane-person) he balks at the generalized conclusion where even intentional murder becomes justified.
Alternatively, he may disapprove of Singer's remarkable openness on this topic.
Caplan is in fact anti-Singerian on this issue, whatever his other faults or positions. Here, @VelveteenAmbush has linked to this piece where Caplan demonstrates Singerian logic:
Most strikingly, Singer and Lazari-Radek apply this doctrine of secrecy to bite the bullet of the Forced Organ Donation hypothetical:
One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.
We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.
[...] We may be influenced by the consequences of inviting children to question the justification for obeying moral rules, and if the consequences are going to be sufficiently bad, we may condemn those who, like Socrates, encourage the young to question the basis of morality.
From this perspective, the same obviously goes for morally immature adults. Which, for a strict utilitarian, probably sum to 99%+ of humanity.
To repeat, in our debate, Singer disavowed his early extreme view that everyone who fails to donate all of their surplus wealth to the global poor is a wrong-doer. But he did so with no hint of an explanation. He definitely didn’t distance himself from utilitarianism or any of the factual premises behind his original argument. Given his explicit endorsement of esotericism - and his hard-line stance on the Forced Organ Donation hypothetical - the conclusion that Singer is feigning moderation for the greater good isn’t merely probable. It is all but certain.
The point is roughly as you say: utilitarians are only honest inasmuch as it is strategically expedient in a particular case. They cannot credibly precommit to a rule, for the simple reason that their prime directive is increasing utility; in a hypothetical scenario where they receive compelling evidence that breaking a rule would achieve that end with no cost-prohibitive second-order effects, they are ethically bound to break that rule. Of course, they can counter that deontologists are equally vulnerable to inconvenient hypotheticals (Kant's axe-wielding murderer), if not more so; but it is what it is. A utilitarian can, at most, say «I will not defect against the conventional morality to opportunistically increase utility, so long as I am not double dog sure it won't backfire». They couch it in different words: Yud says that only God gets to be a naive utilitarian (tbh based), Scott inserts his fretful caveats, Kelsey Piper has another set, @fozz appeals to sustainability in iterative games (an argument that's vulnerable to simple rug pulls) and Singer says, essentially, that the better breed of humans get to be our secret masters, our empathy-filled shepherds (or as Chesterton would've put it, omnipotent moral busybodies. I wonder what Lewis or Dostoyevsky would have made of it).
But that's what it amounts to: means justifying ends with the ends being greatest good for the greatest number, doing as much diligence as possible given the situation; and praying that you're not too high on your own supply or on performance-enhancing drugs to miss a critical hole in your too-clever-by-half plan, or a whistleblower.
P.S. I modestly propose a improvement on ethical dilemmas, to put a finer point on the real issue. (Probably this already exists in the literature).
You're a surgeon, you have five patients, you can kill one for his organs to save four yadda yadda. The twist is: you have an intern who's a deontologist. Luckily, the intern has a well-suppressed but rapidly lethal condition, let's say diabetes or epilepsy or extreme allergy, that allows you to easily cause her death (e.g. by swapping available insulin with saline, or releasing your pet Asian giant hornet you secretly keep for this exact scenario) and claim innocence.
A) Assuming the intern will discover and ruin your plan otherwise, do you kill her before the operation begins?
B) You may kill the Neurological Patient on your own, but you'll need the intern's help to finish all transplantations in time. If you let her go home, you'll be able to obscure the paperwork, but two of your beneficiaries will surely die. If you solicit her help, she will inevitably check medical records of all patients involved later, discover that the Neurological Patient had a trivial condition and, given your skill, was unlikely to die without your intent, figure it out and report you, causing a scandal, sending you behind bars and preventing all possible future utilitarian transplantations, perhaps not just in this clinic but globally.
Again, will you DO IT or not?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I precommit not to watch the sex tape, nor discuss Bankman's intimate life, beyond what has been said, unless it has clear relation to the central issue.
Bankman's actions, for all their clown world texture, have been serious and highly damaging to a large proportion of people I care about, and he (together with Kelsey Piper and other do-gooders) keeps doing damage and saving the face of the project I believe has largely motivated his actions, which is to say, EA-directed centralized «global governance». It may be that he'll be deemed a hero in the timeline where they succeed. And even if this accusation is unfounded, he is not a kid but a major scoundrel.
I refuse to let this devolve into a parasocial relationship with wacky awkward «polyamorous» autistic microblogging celebrities.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
He seems to just be very chill. Maybe it was the drugs making him jittery, after all. https://twitter.com/psyopcop/status/1592977107281666049
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
We had large protests years ago, to no avail. Bluntly, we shouldn't have bothered with protests at all. They are an instrument of negotiation within an already-mature democratic polity where the power has not separated substantially from the populace, and within its Overton window at that. They do not work against an entrenched, well-armed and competent (at this sort of thing) regime, and Russia routinely devolves into a state with such a regime. What we should have bothered with instead are kamikaze drones, and setting siloviki houses and cars on fire, like Ukrainians do with Kremlin appointees. That had worked once – for good or for ill. And crypto would have helped, but for the unwillingness to seriously try – because it's the only reliable means to transfer value untraceably over long distances, that's available to commoners and not just mafia.
I'm still kicking myself about it. Hopefully other people around the world take notes.
@crushedoranges speaks of serious no-nonsense men who don't fiddle around with crypto and, when totalitarianism approaches, take out cash etc. etc. Very cool – in a decade they'll be as weird as crypto enthusiasts if not more. Governments promoting Central Bank Digital Currencies, and nice organizations coordinating deplatforming on Paypal and other centralized platforms, will see to it. And you'll learn, too, that banknotes are unhygienic (do you want to kill granny?!), wasteful, enable criminality and so on; and seeing the cost of resistance and hurdles to financing and lobbying it, it may be that you'll learn to very sensibly repeat this received wisdom.
In my opinion, those serious men with their unwillingness to master even layman-friendly tech are fetishistic LARPers of a bygone era, coelacanths who exist solely at the sufferance of their regime and are unable to mount any organized resistance; as an untraceable means of exchange crypto is strictly superior to cash, allows more freedom, and for anyone with half a brain and serious concern about coercion the implication is clear.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
there's video of SBF jittering in his chair like a crackhead
Honestly I think a big part of that is Sam knowing his accounting is fraudulent and he's about to be fried, and desperately putting up a front of a weird whiz kid who's got it all under control.
… Two elderly superhumans were competing for the presidency of the planet's foremost nation, USA: a 70-year-old schemer with obvious signs of sexual-pharmacological degeneration, and a 70-year-old demagogue, showman and professional bankrupt who had never been in politics before. […]
For a European, any medicine is poison: an evil which treats an even greater evil. This has been the basis of European medicine since antiquity. It is clear that no Europeans will take pills without a great and pressing need, especially if those pills affect the inner sanctum of man - his psyche.
Americans gobble up drugs by the handful, since for them they are not poisons but enhancers and dietary supplements. By the age of 50 an average American has enhanced himself to the stage of psychopathy, and then it gets worse and worse.
Sick burns. We're all living in America, though.
I've heard it asserted that European boxers were disgusted upon learning that Anglos do weight training to prepare for competitions. Those are supposed to be games, vigorous festivals of bodily perfection, causes for joy – the opposite of dreary displays of a peasant's work ethic or a merchant's cold numerate chase after marginal returns. Or something. Well you know how it turned out, and the role performance enhancing drugs play in competitive sports now. Moloch whose dumbbells are (mumble mumble), I guess. But don't the stunts of modern champions look positively superhuman? Don't those playful Chads of the all-natural era seem scrawny next to the optimized contemporary giants?
This jealous amazement underlies general American obsession with finding some edge, and specifically Silicon Valley fads like mindfulness meditation, diets and training routines, ADHD medication, microdosing LSD and now weirder prescription stuff. (A guy called Sam doing EMSAM, seriously?) The most egregious case was probably Serge Faguet. Like Sam, only on a much smaller scale, he crashed and burned thanks to his miracle enhancements (he had the bright idea of visiting Russia with LSD and amphetamine in his luggage). The most incredible bit of his story wasn't drugs – it was using fancy hearing aids without indications. To hear more than others.
All that being ridiculous enough, what is your actual objection? I may be wrong, but it seems you'd take issue with PEDs whether they work or not, regardless of their safety profile and side effects; they disgust you viscerally due to their inherent effect.
My hypothesis is that this is your lack of chutzpah talking. Fair play, equivalent exchange, no weird tricks, not trying to get something for nothing, not getting carried away with hypothetical astronomic returns, not gambling, not doing crazy drugs – those are reasonable defaults to avoid failure modes like St. Petersburging oneself, setting the community on fire or summoning Cthulhu. But like I've argued recently, chutzpah, the brazen rejection of those defaults, and pursuit of narrow unorthodox openings, can be instrumental for actually transcending the status quo. Sometimes it works, and works so well we've come to depend on it with all of our engineering and science and finance; it is reasonable, then, to ask if practicing it in a certain manner is justified in a specific case. This is a question of specifics.
Unfortunately, the specifics with current psychoactive drugs are pretty dismal even if they don't make you outright crazy. The brain is… complex; effects of any molecule peppered onto its mechanism are crude and untargeted. Using drugs to improve one's already healthy cognition is equivalent to using Curves in a graphical editor to «enhance» a picture, or naive transformations of sound: good enough if you have shit taste or sensory deficits, but it only destroys available information; wipes out subtle differences of pixel values by banding them; clips audio tones; reduces precision of inference; discretizes and roughens your thoughts. Across the multidimensional space of mental contents it erases the lion's share of possibilities and, may Allah forgive me for such mawkishness, the depth of human soul. It may work well enough in a predictable environment like school or the workspace of a linear worker, where prioritizing the few legible, measurable features the Boss cares about is a sensible trade-off. If you make high-uncertainty decisions, you may find that «production velocity» isn't as valuable as seeing clearly the road your'e on.
Drug enhancement does not disgust me any more than the normal condition. It is more noble to struggle against the limitations of human condition than to accept it. «Baseline humans aren't that cool» is something any transhumanist feels viscerally and seeks to remedy.
It is, however, prudent to acknowledge when you're being greedy and petulant in denying that the tech isn't there yet.
Or, well, that your scam is going tits up and you'd do well to liquidate it before collapsing the entire market.
It's interesting, you know – how short Russian memories are in comparison. That Pan-Slavic project is utterly forgotten, literally nobody gives a shit about affirming superiority and patronage over Slavic «brothers». In the last century, there's a meme used to delegitimize Ukrainian/Belorussian independence, following from the earlier «Great Russians» vs «Little Russians» distinction (though this refers more to relative sizes of groups than to anything else). Anyway, I don't think it applies to Poles.
They are disliked and mocked for a) being highly interpersonally hostile, impulsive, provocative and pugilistic in the manner exemplified by soccer fans; b) being sore losers of history who have never made peace with losing their own Empire and chance at exterminating Orthodox Eastern Slavs (like we're ones to talk, yes), retconners of history, and leaders of the «butthurt belt» (accused of being «American lapdogs» etc.) and c) being absurdly, to a comical degree, haughty, racist and assuming some aristocratic posture vis a vis Russians (spamming psia krew!, an insult aimed at lower classes in the highly stratified premodern Poland), despite the aforementioned lower-class aggression and comparably humble historical background (that is, peasantry and serfdom) for the majority of the population. One can say Russians are bitter that they don't get to LARP as nobles, having embraced their lowly descent under communism, but a round-headed red-faced plumber from UK does, and shits on Russia unconditionally, including on aspects vastly beyond his cultural milieu.
Cue generic insults and pompously citing old poetry.
An average Russian is entirely ignorant of events like the Massacre of Praga, to say nothing of more mundane aspects of history and economy, and has doubts whether Katyn was truly a Soviet doing («but anyway, those stuck-up officers deserved it!»).
Nevertheless it seems to be recognized that much of the semi-deified Russian cultural elite had Polish descent, and that Poles have great culture, on par with Russian one, in ways Russians themselves prioritize. We can't very well deny liking Lem or Korczak or admiring Sienkiewicz in the more sophisticated circles or Sapkowski in simpler ones. There's the perception, correct one I believe, that Poles will not reciprocate and will pooh-pooh our own greats.
Ultimately I think Russians do not feel connection to the broad Slavic identity, being more interested in GeoPoLitIcAl relations, do not conceive of Slavs as something coherent enough to summarily look down on or up to, do not seek validation of that ethnic club and especially do not think about Poles in the context of Slavs in general. Poles are just Poles.
The only true right-wing republican's gradual return to the loving breast continues apace.
(Nevertheless, upvoted, for comedic value and because pedos are, indeed, very bad publicity for the cause of freedom).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
piracetam and phenibut
prediction markets
Are you for real?
No, I need crypto to move assets out of an authoritarian country, to buy actual illegal drugs and VPN and bulletproof servers, to fund people doing unapproved research and in the extreme case, assassinations. I cannot rely on «lobbying politicians» who can easily score political points with the 95 IQ hoi polloi by throwing them some witches or saying they're «thinking of the children» or some such. No polity is deserving of my trust and vulnerability.
Societies with very well tracked money tend toward tyranny since Spartan times, and tyranny tends toward tracking of money streams; your approach is entirely dependent on trusting democratic procedures, but that is obviously impotent past some points of no return which are easily reached. This clown world logic of «let's force people to do everything in the public sphere instead of running underground, then they will negotiate a better equilibrium» is either naive or just a cynical cover for totalitarianism with extra steps. Likewise for its variations – let's disarm people so they become more active in civil politics and such. Let's prohibit medicine to promote healthy lifestyles while we're at it.
In reality, the absence of privacy, freedom to change one's state, and tools of personal agency such as weapons and means of exchange, reinforces the dominance of incumbent players, by shortening the feedback loop. It takes away the chances of small players to prepare something and come to the table with solid counteroffers, and rewards them for just shutting up and accepting the mainstream position, wherever it originates.
negative externalities from crypto are too severe and damaging
I believe that the emergence of domesticated peoples who can trust the polity is already a massive negative externality of economies of scale and organized state violence, and a dangerous step towards the eusocial attractor. It's incomparably worse than a little crime and some modest waste of electricity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I don't really use rdrama, too cool for me. Just heard this from Trace and other regulars.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Baltic states are similar in seething.
Poles can make their own case just fine. But just for the record, the Soviet arc was only the last stretch of long Polish-Russian relations that... didn't go in their favor; other peoples on the outskirts of the Empire, like Finns, did not suffer as much, or for as long, did not resist as hard, did not get suppressed so brutally.
The most salient fact is that Poles exist at all. It's not clear when this tendency began to develop, probably can be traced to the emergence of szlachta class. But one could say Poles have survived as a people on the merit of their unusual reserves of spite and ability to produce national champions greatly devoted to resisting conquerors – Russian and Germanic empires were very eager to assimilate them, and had been making progress in this direction. They have also produced a strong and somewhat retconned self-concept («The Christ of Europe» idea, J. Conrad's self-serving bullshit about impeccable Western-European and not-Slavic creds of Poles one can see in his correspondence, unbelievably good lyrical narrative exemplified in Konrad Wallenrod, and the history of resurgence of national sentiment even among assimilated Poles after its release)...
Anyway, the fact that Poland could mostly reassemble herself, after so many false starts and upsets, on the basis of Nationalism and Catholicism, is an atypical historical turn and a testament to the strength of Polish national identity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
But that happened over non-NATO territory; if killing NATO member states' citizens wherever qualified, we'd have had constant wars due to random deaths of tourists and the like.
Also, the Dutch are still working on the case, and I think they'll get their due eventually (some speculate that the continued survival, despite his criticisms, of Girkin/Strelkov is because Putin wants to buy some reprieve with surrendering him to the Dutch or Hague as the true instigator of the war and also the commander directly responsible for the MH17 incident). There has been substantial, multinational economic response as well.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Thanks for high praise, hah.
Well, they do. In lesser venues, writing a lot (writing little is beneath me), and on unconventional topics too, is enough to get the diagnosis (unless it's rdrama and they call you a cute twink instead?)
By the way, there are estimates that SZ is overdiagnosed by 500% in Russia, so I could have received the same diagnosis from a shrink. In my real interactions with them this never happened; but then, I never tried motteposting at shrinks.
And hey, manifestoposting (which long posts can pattern-match to) is robustly associated with schizo and paranoid traits.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4yr ago
Yesterday there have been talks between Foreign Intelligence Service head Naryshkin and CIA's Burns in Ankara.
But the US official, who spoke to the Reuters news agency on the condition of anonymity, said: “[Burns] is not conducting negotiations of any kind. He is not discussing settlement of the war in Ukraine.”
“He is conveying a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia and the risks of escalation to strategic stability,” the official said.
Today Russia kills (allegedly; confirmations and details pending – maybe it's another AA intercept gone wrong or whatever; though frankly wouldn't change in terms of culpability) some farmers in Poland, finally making progress towards *CredibleDefense's Article 5 memes.
I am not sure if those events are connected, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were. Anyway, expecting retaliations in the form of, oh I dunno, cancellation of my residence permit. Probably, hopefully, not explicit WWIII yet.
Condolences about the dead civilians, if this is confirmed. While this war as a whole is grossly irrational on Russian part, attacking Poland certainly sends it to another level of idiocy.
Incidentally, just the other day I saw a burly Polish man just randomly fuming in public before Turks about how much he hates Russians (Germans too) and Russian language, to the point he wouldn't talk to his (Ukrainian I guess?) GF in Russian, despite that being the only language they both know well, their English being broken (Polish and Ukrainian are highly mutually intelligible though). Guess he wanted to provoke someone. The degree of loathing was just incredible and on par with Azeri-Armenian tension. Poles sure are patriotic and raring to go.
That's because it is a Twitter thread. A very good and thought-provoking one, in my opinion – those conjectures are no wilder than a typical paper published in anthropology, especially if we remain aware of things left omitted from the narrative; and the influence of rapid microevolution is ridiculously underestimated in the respectable literature, despite the obvious implications of the breeder's equation and quick ecological changes and differential shifts in fertility and mortality.
Naturally, it still shouldn't be accepted at face value.
@doorstuckdoorstuck are you Uriah or are you just straight up copying his work without attribution with the intent of running a social experiment? If so, I hate to spoil it, but you could at least refactor it a little.
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