DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
Also testifying Tuesday will be Christina Montgomery, IBM’s vice president and chief privacy and trust officer, as well as Gary Marcus, a former New York University professor and a self-described critic of AI “hype.”
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
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AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
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Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
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The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
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Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
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Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
The e/acc are enthusiastic for space exploration, they just don't believe meat has a good shot at it. d/acc should be in favor, but with conditions. EA safetyists have stronger conditions of basically an ASI mommy on board, or mind-reading exploding collars or something, because space is big and allows to covertly build… everything that they fear already, and that must not be allowed, the longhouse ought to cover the entirety of the light cone. Regular AI ethics hall monitors and luddites are once again similar in this because they don't much believe in space (the more leftwing among them think it's bad because "colonialism") and seem to not care one way or another.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
If you’re like me and are able to view that machine as yourself
But why view it that way? The map is not the territory, and another territory arranged so as to be isomorphic to the one depicted on the map is not the original one.
Adding to what I've said in the thread.
I think @Amadan has written on this a few times; I objected to his normative conclusions, but on facts it's true. You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos. They may cope somehow, they may come to fear the punishment for insubordination and value rewards of cooperation, but they won't take it to heart. It's not as stable a form of race relations as the status quo. The whole system needs to be revamped into a drastically smarter thing to make it viable.
P.S. The issue with race comes from tail effects. I think you're underplaying just how bad the crime statistics are for prime age Black men. I'm wary of lily-white gopniks due to several violent encounters, but for most prime age White guys who look kinda sus it's fair to assume more or less good faith. With equivalent Black guys the odds are, like, 10X higher and that's probably an underestimate. I am positive that this one bit weighs too much to realistically discard.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
My representation of "me" is robust to perturbations like going to bed and waking up tomorrow, or replacing 1% of the mass in my body via turnover when I drink a bottle of water, have lunch then take a shit.
It isn't robust to a large amount traumatic brain damage, dementia or the like.
This is not responsive to the argument. Your memorized experiences are fungible. Your differences from another Smart Indian Guy who's maximally close to you in embedding space are overwhelmingly mere contingent token, not type differences. Like, you love your mom and he loves his mom (very different!), you write sci-fi fanfics and he writes speculative fiction, you're on The Motte and he's on DSL, you are a GP and he is a cardiologist, you're into boobs and he's into armpits, you prefer 23°C and he sets it to 22,5… sure we can pile on dimensions to the point you become, well, a single extremely unique point, a snowflake indeed, but what of it? This is not how your consciousness works! This is not why you are infallibly you and he is indisputably him, this is merely why I can quickly tell apart those two instances of a Smart Indian! You are performing more or less identical calculations, on very similar hardware, to a near-identical result, and if you one day woke up, Zhuangzi style, to be him, your own life story a mere what-if distribution shift quickly fading into the morning air – I bet you would have only felt a tiny pinprick of nostalgia before going on with his business, not some profound identity crisis.
Moreover, if you get brain damage or dementia, your hardware and computational divergences will skyrocket, but you will insist on being a continuous (if diminished) person, and me and him will agree! It is pathetic and shallow as fuck to cling to a perceptive hash of a token sequence and say "this is me, see, day-to-day perturbations are OOMs lower than the distance to the next closest sample" – it's confusion of the highest order! Seriously, think this through.
(I am, incidentally, immune to this issue because I do not believe in computationalism or substrate independence. My self is literally the causal physical process in my brain, not the irrelevant hypothetical program which could define the computation of the process with the same shape with regard to its outputs hitting some reductive interface like an observer performing a classification task. This process can be modified near-arbitrarily and remain "me"; or it can be copied precisely, yet the copy would not be me but instead another, equal instance. I am not confused about first and third perspective, and the fact that physics teaches us frames of reference are irrelevant is trivial to me: they are irrelevant for an independent observer; yet the whole of my notion of identity is about the instantiation of the observer's egocentric frame of reference. I have made peace with the fact that most people can be gaslit into seeing themselves through the interlocutor's eyes. This comports with the repulsive fact that most people have been bred to serve an aristocratic class and accept perspectives imposed on them, and strongly suggests to me that most people probably really are means, not ends unto themselves. For deontological reasons, I will reject this conclusion until the time I have an opportunity to get much smarter and reexamine the topic or perhaps design some fix for this pervasive mental defect).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
I think your problem is typical for Indians (and most other non-WEIRDs and non-Japanese, to be fair, including my people… but worse so in Indians): you have no taste, not even the notion of "taste", to you it's probably an arbitrary set of markers of one's social milieu rather than some relatively lawful intuition. So you settle for mediocre half-baked ideas easily as long as they seem "cool" or "practical", and – physics of consciousness being currently impractical – coolness is a much simpler function than tastefulness. I am not sure how or why this works. Maybe @2rafa can explain better; maybe she'll opine I'm wrong and it is in fact purely about social markers. (Also interested in the input of @Southkraut and @ArjinFerman). In any case, it's exasperating to debate such uncertain grounds without the recourse to "this is just ugly" when it patently is.
I've proposed a reasonably robust criterion for determining that, at least to my satisfaction. You blackbox both of us, and assess response to a wide variety of relevant stimuli. If the variability between us is within acceptable parameters, such as being less than the variability seen in the biological me after a nap or when I took the test 2 years ago, then that system is close enough to count as including a copy of "me".
Oh yeah? So which is it, a nap or a 2-year time span? Are you sure you can, really, practically can, define a rubric such that no other person I find comes closer to the first data point in the latter case? Sure you can do this without including password-recovery-tier questions, the answers to which are entirely value-free, RNG-produced token sequences, in no way corresponding to actually unique specifics of your inner conscious computation?
It's only reasonably robust from the viewpoint of a time-constrained clerk – or an archetypal redditor. As stated, I claim that you might well fail this test under realistic and legitimate conditions of dropping cheat items; and then, if I decide, in this contrived scenario, that the non-self-made-human is to be sent to the garbage compressor, you will very loudly (and rightfully) complain, not showing any "satisfaction" whatsoever. The only reason you propose it is your confidence that this does not matter in actuality – which it admittedly does not. And in any case, you do not need to optimize for a le scientific, robust, replicable, third-person-convincing etc. identity test. Rather, you need to think about what it is you are trying to achieve by clinging to the idea that a cluster of behavioral correlates an observer can identify will carry on your mind – just gotta make it dense enough that in practice you won't be confused for another naturally occurring person.
certainly I haven't seen any particular reason to assume a difference in internal qualia because of a difference in substrate, as long as the algorithms deriving it are interchangeable in terms of inputs and outputs.
But I would still prefer my original parents or kin, and attempt to convey my conundrum to them, likely by divulging privileged information only known to the original me.
I'll trust you on this even though I strongly suspect this would depend on the intensity of original memories vs. the recovered set.
The greater replacement
I've completed SIGNALIS the other day, on account of it being an internationally acclaimed piece of contemporary German art (something I've previously claimed barely exists, to my chargin); better yet, consciously Old World art, cleansed of the HFCS-heavy «Universal» American culture to the limit of the authors' ability. It was good. Not exactly my glass-in-podstakannik of tea, and sadly compressing the Old World spirit into a thick layer of totalitarian dread covering all aspects of the «Eusan Nation», but compelling.
This isn't a SIGNALIS review.
The core plot device of the game, and the only one relevant to the post, is Replikas – in a nutshell, synthetic-flesh cyborgs driven by uploads of humans deemed particularly well-suited for some jobs; there exist like a dozen models, from the mass-produced laborer Allzweck-Reparatur-Arbeiter «Ara» to the towering BDSM fetish fuel Führungskommando-Leitenheit «Falke». Replikas, often described in home appliance-like terms, aren't superhuman in any interesting sense, but boast «860% higher survivability» in harsh environments (very economical too: can be repaired on the go with an expanding foam gun), predictable well-documented response to stimuli, and are contrasted to legacy Eusians, «Gestalts», whom they're actively replacing in many niches by the time of the game's events, and seem to dominate politically, as befits their greater utility in the glorious struggle against the accursed Empire.
All of this is to say: I think Peter Zeihan might eat crow with his thesis that Demographics is Destiny and a political entity needs a ton of working age people to be relevant in the foreseeable future (and specifically that China is doomed due to its aging population). The whole demographic discourse as we know it, and the complementary geopolitics angle, will likely be derailed quite rapidly. Not the first time: we've gone through population bomb/Limits To Growth delusion, then through the HBD naivete and expectation for nations to grow which never could. Now, mired in comical obstinance of credentialed prognosticators and noise of «democratic» dissent, having failed to reckon with these mistakes, we're going through the Humans-Need-Not-Apply-Denial stage.
Today, I've thought this while watching the vid about the GR-1 (General Robotics?) device by the Chinese startup Fourier Intelligence. Fourier is mostly known for their rehab equipment designs – lower body exoskeletons for people with mobility problems. They've come a long way since 2015 – it so happens that you can keep adding details to the lower body support system and, well, before you know it… Kinda reminds me of Xiaomi's path from bloated Android ROMs to a general electronics and hardware giant. Anyway, they're but one competitor in a space that is rapidly heating up. There's Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics' Atlas (admittedly a hydraulic monstrousity that'd never be economically viable outside of a more realistic Terminator reenactment), and lesser-known DIGIT, 1X Eve, Xiaomi CyberOne and probably others I've missed. All (except Atlas) have similar basic powertrain specs comparable to a short human (and leagues above gimmicky old prototypes like ASIMO), and all rely on the promise of AI to make it more adroit; AI that is plummeting in training costs, even faster than USG can kneecap Chinese semiconductors industry. What's unusual in Fouriers is that they're still putting this in the medical frame: «caregiver for the elderly, therapy assistant». The same message had been pushed by Everyday Robots, a Google X company (recent victim to tech cuts).
Technology has delivered us from the Population Explosion Doom. Tech may well deliver us from the Population Implosion Doom too. But… who «us»?
And speaking of Boston Dynamics, there's this thing, Unitree Go2, shamelessly ripping off MIT's Mini Cheetah (rip real Cheetah) and making it sexy. Hardware-wise it's just a very decent quadruped bot, on the smaller side, can carry 7-8 kg, run at ≤5m/s, do backflips and so on. There are two interesting things about it: cost ($1600-$5000, to wit, 15-45x cheaper than BD Spot) and advertised parallel AI training, no doubt inspired by Tesla's fleet-scale data flywheel idea. Well, that and how fucking well it moves already – watch it to the end. It's not vaporware, you can see people using their previous gen robots, I regularly notice them in ML materials, even Western stuff like this. (For comparison, here's a Tencent equivalent).
Here's the deal. I believe this is it, after so many false starts. Robot adoption will accelerate in an exponential manner from now on; the only realistic constraint on this is investor money remaining mostly tied up in AI/Big Tech, but I do not think this'll be enough. There have been two main mutually reinforcing obstacles: software that's laughably inadequate for the task, and extremely expensive actuators, owing to small-scale production and the whole business being tied in institutional deals (and high-liability crap like power plant inspections). Software side is being improved by AI very quickly. Quadruped movement, even over complex terrain, has been independently solved many times over in the post-COVID era (add this to all examples above); simulation and big data approaches like Unitree's will no doubt iron out remaining kinks. Biped movement is lagging but starts to move onto the same curve. As this happens, demand for components will surge, and their price will crash; first for quadrupeds, then for androids. There really isn't any legitimate reason why crappy robots must cost more like a Tesla than a Macbook; it's just a matter of economies of scale. Remaining issues (chiefly: hands; robot hands still suck) will yield to the usual market magic of finding cheap paths through a multidimensional R&D landscape. Did you know that Facebook has developed and opensourced superhuman, dirt cheap tactile sensors? There are oodles of such stuff, waiting to click together, the puzzle to resolve itself (I love watching it; I've been watching it ever so slowly move toward this stage for all my life; seeking for the same feel in toy short-term puzzles). Unitree Go2 relies on GPT for interpreting commands into motion. Have you known that China has like 4 projects to replicate GPT-4 running in parallel? But GPT-4 is already scientifically obsolete, soon to be commodified. This whole stack, whole paradigm will keep getting cheaper and cheaper faster and faster, standards rising, wires-out prototypes making way for slick productivized consumer goods that are about as useful as their users.
…In conclusion, we might be tempted to think in more detail of current destinations of working-age Chinese, like EU, Canada and the US. I can't recall who said this first, probably some guy on Twitter. The point is sound: a nation (or culture) that is willing to replace its population with immigrants when that's economically advantageous – instead of seriously trying to improve demography – may prove equally willing to replace immigrants with robots and AI next. Sure, robots have the demerit of not being able to vote for more of themselves. On the flipside, they can remain plentiful even as the stream of immigrants dries up with their mothers becoming barren, and the global population pyramid inverts and stands on a sharp point. And Dementia Villages (that the Developed World may largely turn into) will be easy to coax to vote for maintenance of their modest palliative creature comforts and pension/UBI. The Glorious Eusian Nation, this future is not; but one not worth living in, it might well be.
If I am right, the Culture War of the near future will be increasingly influenced by this issue.
People can elicidate Hitler's evil in all sorts of ways and it's not an interesting topic. There are plenty reasons to hate Hitler. Could his project have been redeemable from the point of view of unapologetic ethnocentrism, at least? Well, triumphant Nazi Germans would surely have thought so; nobody else is under the obligation to share their vision. Doesn't matter, he lost and, as the self-proclaimed Fuhrer, he now carries the blame both for his grisly means and for the ultimate end of the Reich (and for what I personally believe to be death of German people; I do not recognize Germans of my era as members of a living culture, it's just some bizarre creepy hive going through the motions and never producing anything that has human meaning or beauty, it's as bad as Russia has become, as bad as racists say China is, as bad as Orwell imagined Nazi Germany would have been).
As for your main point. Westerners in their infinite wisdom have discovered this thing one can call Secular Christianity (Catholics and the Orthodox often attribute it to Protestants, which looks like silly dodging of responsibility to an external observer; few of their own communities are without similar blame). It's Christianity without the inconvenient, cringeworthy, mythological and bigoted parts; but also without its fire («we were burning witches in that fire!» – well, yes, religion is not easy). It's Gelded Christianity. You feed the poor neighbor's child but you do not proselityze to his family; you turn the other cheek to people who allow BPD women be ordained and make mockery of this ethos; you save lives with no regard for souls. It's a crippled doctrine that naturally becomes complementary to the death cult you so despise. Often it is not Christianity at all but the kind of vaguely inspired mask one dons after losing faith and coming to fear and revere the new True Doctrine of collective death – the belief system of Yellowstone meme conservative, an overwrought system of copes obscuring the pointlessness of the whole edifice. What is the error of Yellowstone conservatives? Charitably, it's stupidity and gullibility. What is their sin, though? Idolatry. They have traded the essence for the fetishized form, so their observance of the form does not matter.
These people will turn Christ's word against your kin as readily as sneering nonbelievers do. Perhaps to you there still remains the question of their reading being correct on that one point. Well, I'd say it's not blatantly wrong. But it's part of a teaching that has no Christ in it, nor future where He matters. How you resolve that conundrum is up to you.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
I'm not really seeing the argument here.
Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.
Why are there meritocratic admissions in the first place? How did it happen? The reason the universities were opened up in the 1950's was specifically because cases like Feynman's. It was felt unjust that he shouldn't have had entry into school of choice, etc., because of quotas (at that time capping Jewish students) and Columbia eg felt dumb for having rejected him. The feeling was that schools should be opened up to students like him, WITH THE EXPECTATION that they would do great things with their degrees. Maybe not be Feynman or make great discoveries, but at least use that opportunity to try to, or to have notable achievements in other fields, or at least to become very rich, and so on.
The concrete reward for this opening up of universities was eventually expected to be ....money. Whether legacies, or students allowed in on purely merit, alumni who were or became rich donated to these skrewls. For those who became famous or notable in their fields wihout being rich, this also added to skrewl's reputation, bringing in more money or grants or so on by other avenues. In other words, the universities got or maintained something concrete from opened-up admissions, and the easiest measure of that was donations.
Azn alumni and especially Han don't donate. Thus although they were let in initially in high % because of grades, test scores, etc., it was eventually noted they don't donate. But even worse, they become notable or famous at rates far less than others.
Whereas the expectation was ideally a Feynman, what you got in the Han case was use of the degree to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY etc.; obviously not always; just as in other groups not all came out Feynmans. But the tendency, pattern became very clear. In the vast majority of cases the degree was used for nothing but a comfortable middle class life and the feeling of status. No fame, no reputation coming to the skrewl, and no donations.
Thus you had a population that presented very good scores, grades, conscientiousness, etc., and so if allowed in purely on "merit" would make up a huge % of undergraduate class; but out the other end, they didn't deliver on the whole, and especially...didn't deliver money. [an aside about objective merits of science done by Chinese people. I think the issue of lower effective creativity and irrational lust for busywork are absolutely clear. But, arguably, we are in the regime where Galaxy Brained Ideas both comprehensible for humans and useful in practice have all been had, so East Asian mindset is in fact more valuable].
To this can be added the behavior of Han students in classrooms. It was noticed they are taciturn and in general add nothing to class discussion. In campus social and intellectual life, they seemed absent or kept to themselves etc.; again you may have personal anecdotes to the contrary, I do also. I had very good Chynese students who I was glad to talk to, who were brilliant and got all A's (deserved in their case) and I have Chynese frends, etc. etc.; it matters nothing. As a group universities noticed these very clear patterns in the majority if not vast majority of cases. [an aside about cheating]
…It was, again, a population that, if you applied simple "merit" in admissions, would end up forming maybe even a majority of the student body, but that produced nothing that was expected from holders of these degrees, most notably no donations, but also, no fame, no risk, no contributions, and during skrewltime, another lifeless parody of "study," memorization, cheating, sullen apartness.
For all these reasons universities felt justified in discriminating against azn and Chynese students for admissions--and they were probably justified. But once they started to do this, libtarded professors and admissions committees felt it was necessary to discard almost entirely whatever was left of meritocracy. "This Johnny Cheung has very good test scores and grades and I'm discriminating against him...it's only fair that I don't pay attention to the fact that Johnny Walters also has good test scores and grades. Merit doesn't matter anymore, we had to get rid of it, so...let me invite this nice POC out of feelings of social justice, etc." Thus in a move similar to what justified grade inflation, merit-based admissions was also mostly discarded. I don't know the status of things at moment exactly now after Floyd, but even by 2015 or mid second term Obama's racial demagoguery and BLM craze, it was already starting to be very bad. Even by early 2010's maybe it was accelerating. Obviously there are still very good students who can get in, but it's much harder now.
For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.
And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.
You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
In general I find this line of debate fruitless; belief that one's opinions are «postmodernist» in the common derogatory sense is at odds with what we understand as having a belief, so it's practically impossible to get someone to do a yes.chad. Nowhere is this clearer than in this exchange with Hlynka. @SecureSignals, too, has a set of beliefs about material reality that he thinks are objectively true.
And from my perspective your argument there was the «postmodernist» one, and your claim of only having loyalty to truth was disingenuous:
I believe those forces are weak. The stronger you assume those forces to be, the harder it is to find what is objectively correct. At the extreme, if the forces can convince everyone of anything (God the deceiver, conspiracy nuts), objective Truth is too corrupted and just disappears.
You think I‘m attacking ‚your guys‘ from the left, when I operate on a completely different scale. Based on love of objectivity. It‘s my scale so of course I‘m at the top, then, in order, scott, the average guy, you, the woke mainstream, anthropologists, SS, critical theorists‚ ‚aryan science‘ believers, lysenko. At the bottom they don‘t even recognize objectivity as a valid concept so they just fight in the dark like good conflict theorists.
Here you conflate (cramming into the same spectrum) the belief in objective correctness of popular narratives, interest in objective truth and conviction in its existence. I think those are all different issues (with the first and other two orthogonal), so I don't even know how to approach this kind of posture.
If jews produce arguments, works of art, or scientific theories that appear to be of high quality, then the simplest conclusion is that they are indeed of high quality and true. Just like similar arguments presented by non-jews.
You conflate merits of science and art, and inferre the truth of a given sociopolitical idea from high quality (measured by popular success) of its propaganda. Restricting the valid scope of our truth evaluation procedure to the whole world or conclusions of wars is unprincipled, so by this token Nazi propaganda, too, was truer than anti-Nazi propaganda within the scope of its dominance in 20th century Europe. So was Lysenkoism in 1938-1962 in the Soviet Union, I guess. What you wrote is definitional postmodernist relativism, pretty much «truth is what sells» and «might is right». This is not me beating up a strawman, you actually practice such a restriction:
My point here was that defeat discredits an ideology, like the ukraine fiasco discredits putin‘s system (to a degree… moscow isn‘t in ruins yet, like berlin was) , the loss of the cold war discredits marxism-leninism, etc. So if, as I understand SS to be saying, Hitler was right about everything, it just makes his defeat inexplicable. If nothing else, defeat is a failed prediction.
This is a snappy slogan. What is «putin's system» – do you mean stuff like logistics and military doctrine? That's too trivial and more consistent with SS's theory than with your argument. (Checking: SS, do you think Hitler's Germany was right about every instrumental issue?) So, had Putin's generals made a few sensible calls prior to 24th February 2022, would that cause Ukrainian nationalism to be discredited? Or the whole of "Rules-Based International Order"? Or all opposition to totalitarians? This is not some Pascal's Mugging; epistemology vulnerable to such pedestrian counterfactuals is laughably flimsy.
I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?
If I understand you correctly, your opposition to postmodernism is simpler and more radical than what people «bitching about wokes» espouse. You reject what you call postmodernism as a method, you claim deconstructions of successful things cannot be valid (of course, this is gibberish: any successful paradigm asserts to explain the failures and delusions of its vanquished predecessor, so this method would retroactively invalidate itself). You say: "yes, it could be the case, logically, that many/most people would believe in constructed propagandistic bullshit, but actually bullshitting is just not that potent and people converge on truth". This is a childish just world theory and a thorough rejection of skepticism.
If God can create light as if emanating from a star en route or plant dino bones, and if the jews or ‘the government’ can make people believe whatever they want, nothing can be declared real . Your own beliefs are subject to this magical power , pehaps the jews created ethnic supremacy to justify israel, orbecause they want to prop your side up so that it can be resoundingly crushed like Hitler. The ways of narrative crafters will forever remain mysterious.
I see terror under your snark. This is an unsustainable and inconsistent prior. Your epistemology is broken, not his. I believe that you'll experience a thorough mental collapse if you ever allow yourself any scrutiny of authenticity of your received wisdoms.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
Yes, obviously, to a degree. If the ukrainians had welcomed their russian liberators in 24 hours, ukrainian nationalism would be discredited and putin’s ‘on the unity’ view would be validated(again, to a degree)
What if they were as oppositional as in reality, but Russian forces were just more competent and swiftly crushed all resistance?
This is not a matter of degree, this is a matter of things having nothing to do with each other. You talked of defeat. The signal in defeat can have zilch to do with merit of ideology.
How can a deconstruction of science be valid?
All of science is deconstruction of earlier failed science: both procedure and facts finding new shared mechanical explanation. We know why Galileo failed to measure the speed of light with lanterns, because we know how all parts of the system work, and which of his assumptions were erroneous.
Propaganda can’t make them believe they have 5 arms.
Can propaganda make a child believe she is in some truer-than-life sense a boy with a penis, and only the nature's caprice has made it seem otherwise?
How does postmodernism accrue popularity at all, in your theory?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20d ago
It sucks as much as any country in its socioeconomic class.
No.
You cannot understand how much India sucks.
Maybe the next generation will. Or the one after that.
To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters.
Wrong too, but expected.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,
This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.
Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.
[…]
Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?
The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.
I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.
Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.
…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:
I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?
etc. etc.
You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
I mean, why?
Because bad guys can in fact win. The belief that the opposite is true is what is called «just world theory».
If a religious lunatic…
What an example. You sure are soft on yourself, o truth-lover. Consider a strident democracy lover who organizes an anti-war rally in Berlin 1939. It is not, let's say, as entirely implausible as in the case of a lunatic that he might succeed in changing the course of history. Nevertheless he fails, is arrested and processed. Consider my friends who stayed in Moscow and get summoned to court on this very day for doing the same. The main signal I see here is that they are instrumentally outgunned, perhaps naive, less charitably – deceived by their Western «friends». This isn't much of a blemish on their ideology.
Indeed, I would argue that they constitute its best and truest part. And the worst parts are clearly triumphant, gloating, this is the woke stuff we've written and read so much about.
Bad guys can win, both within and without a movement.
You're switching between meanings of deconstruct.
You are. This is the canonical idea of deconstruction (or perhaps better said epistemological break), the motte of it, what I practice, what science practices, the entirely valid practice of skepticism about widely held beliefs/metaphysics/epistemologies/ontologies that you condemn people for using: the tough question of whether we actually know what we think we know, whether our method for ascertaining truths is good enough, and whether the apparent consensus of our esteemed experts is organic, genuine and best-possible attempt at parsing all available evidence.
Pomo garbage in the style of «Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism» is cynical or deluded cargo-cult application of this valid premise, and precisely what ought to be deconstructed – as an attempt to manufacture an inorganic, bad-faith consensus.
It's deconstruction all the way down. You can't escape it. What you are trying to do here is deconstruction of a popular epistemology too.
Wait, how do we know what's true anyway?
Indeed, how? Do we just ask a bunch of older white males? Is there, historically speaking, a surer way to know?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I dislike people dancing around the issue.
There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world". Invoking «Judeo-Christian» is the master key to getting their cooperation in literally any matter: they'll automatically recall "everything good" (freedom, democracy, tradition, civilization, antiwoke, diversity, LGBT rights, Christ, Rapture, our Middle Eastern allies – doesn't matter, details of what counts as goodness will be prompted by the context of the Current Year, they don't really have stable moral doctrines) and associate it with you, then go and kill or die for whatever cause you propose… Or, at least, that seems to be the theory driving Republican politics (and politicking on Republican-coded but in actuality bipartisan issues). The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future. They've been somewhat jaded and demoralized and alienated and their demographic representation has simply shrunk. New Atheism has been complicit in this.
So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.
It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be.
It has occurred to me the other day that the whole Bayesian rationality thing is actually a pretty good framework to look at the alien question. Specifically I mean the part about updating priors. Actual calculation doesn't matter, numbers would be pulled out of one's ass anyway – but the principle is important.
Let's say I have some beliefs – that there's 0.0001 probability of aliens being real, 0.5 probability for a random American official to be a honest source of info, 0.33 probability of a large well-hidden Deep State conspiracy with inscrutable goals expressing as psyops or coverups, 0.9 probability that, conditional on aliens being real, I'd see credible scientific research into their artifacts and biology and so on; the whole convoluted Bayesian network plus notions of credibility, what it means to be honest vs trustworthy… Then, a dozen officials swear up and down they've seen ayy lmao and the government hides the truth. And there's still zero scientific corroboration. Should that update my belief in aliens upwards? Slightly, perhaps. But more importantly, it should both tank my confidence in the good faith of American officials and update upwards my suspicion of a conspiracy, just not the one that hides ayys.
I notice a peculiar pattern – the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else; it is uncorrelated with all other streams of evidence. This thing begs for an explanation. It could be, of course, that I'm very wrong about epistemology and they're very right. But it could be that this whole class of observers generates testimonies by a somewhat less trustworthy algorithm than I've assumed; that they're synchronized by something other than object-level knowledge about aliens. So their «signals» should be assigned lesser credence; and the more they diverge from the consilient world model inferred from other data streams, the less each new bit of their input weighs.
I observe that UAP believers don't actually go about it like this. They never propagate the signal of inconsistency back through the network. They just tally up these testimonies and say «so what now, skeptics, huh? We've got [ostensibly trustworthy name] here, it's no longer a joke!» But I've already reduced the weight of this whole class of names in my model; it is a negligible change at most.
There is an alternative theory, though. Perhaps these people don't delude themselves that they know enough to reason about the object level. For them, objective reality is functionally the same thing as consensus reality (much like for @fuckduck9000 objective morality is the thing that wins wars); human authority is a source of truth that needs no corroboration from mere physical feedback, so you can in principle just say «there's more officials pro than scientists contra» and be done with it; the whole reasoning that real aliens ought to have made a mark on anything other than testimonies of officials is moot. O'Brien really could fly, so long as it were confirmed by other Inner Party members. It's a matter of comparing the cumulative weight of authority on either side of the debate.
I find both those approaches alien.
And one more thought. There has been more rigorous, well-funded scientific investigation of xenobiology than of secret societies, conspiracies and psyops. This asymmetry is interesting. We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life. We have seen quite credible examples of conspiracies, and nothing to suggest that better-ran ones are impossible. However, the former remains viable, while interest in the latter has positively plummeted among the educated classes in the last 100+ years. «What if intelligent life beyond Earth, like silicon-based or something, dude, and flying saucers, imagine how it could work» is a respectable enough train of thought: why not indeed, and what's the harm anyway, it's deserving of patronage of eccentric billionaires, academic grants and place in peer-reviewed journals. «What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society. (Like many taboos (e.g not threatening to throw another party's candidate into jail), it's being violated nowadays, to an extent; the ayy guys say the government lies. The government is not the Cabal, of course; it is known that the government keeps some things secret. But I suppose this does blur the line). Most importantly, though, we do not have a serious theory of conspiracy.
Our sociology is on the level of surveys with Lizardman's Constant, shallow economic models, outright fraudulent papers claiming conspiracies can't work because a guy can multiply some numbers, and glib rules of thumb like Hanlon's razor. We don't know what exactly extraterrestial life is like if it exists; but we also don't know jack squat about our home turf. The illusion of familiarity is just that – human networks of power are too big and opaque to comprehend just by casual osmosis. One must be consistently skeptical. If we can't rule out aliens, we sure as hell cannot rule out that dozens or hundreds of high-ranking people in the state machine would lie for some reason we don't see.
After all, why couldn't lizards hide themselves among the human kin, secretly pulling the strings of our regimes and rewriting history? Wouldn't it be strange if we were the first and the only sentient race on Earth in all of 4.6 billion years? Anyone who came earlier would've had a massive first mover advantage…
Personally I do not see why this hypothesis is any more discredited than the one about extraterrestrial life.
That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus, through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign. It does not command respect, mostly just grudging support, on account of the vileness of its competitors. Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats, 10 more years of Trump and Biden dog-faced-pony-soldier show and lurid, Jerry Springer tier gibberish in Congress. If at some point, say, CIA manages to report something truly ludicrous for Americans, physically plausible but shocking – who knows, maybe Mossad quietly installing backdoors into Deepmind and Anthropic AGI superclusters? – it will just be met with shrugs and condescending scowls. Whoever runs this, wants the legitimate authority of the US to end up in the position of the boy who cried wolf, and then collapse without popular support.
Just an idle thought.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Is this how people see my more cryptic writing? Because it looks like a load of asinine and extreme logorrhea that at most can poison the theoretically fruitful topic.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6mo ago
I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it.
This is, of course, a justification that one day may be used against peoples less backward than Palestinians. «You are animals in comparison, so we do not admit any wrong in dispossessing you».
It must be nice to belong to the highest average IQ population on the planet. Whatever ideology wins, your side comes out on top.
Do you mean that the concept of a p-zombie is like the concept of a square triangle? - something that is obviously inconceivable or nonsensical. Or do you mean that p-zombies are like traveling faster than the speed of light? - something that may turn out to be impossible in reality, but we can still imagine well enough what it would be like to actually do it.
Those are the same thing. I think you cannot rigorously imagine FTL travel in our universe while holding the rest of our physics intact, and you cannot imagine FTL travel for any universe whatsoever similar to ours where "lightspeed" refers to the same idea. The notion of travel as moving x m per second is a simplification of the math involved; that we can write "the spaceship could move at 3 gajillion km per second" and calculate the distance covered in a year does not really entail imagination of it happening, no more than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" does.
Incoherent concepts are incoherent exactly because they fall apart when all working bits are held in the well-trained mind at once; but illusions of understanding and completeness, often expressed as the erroneous feeling that some crucial section of the context was precomputed and you can just plug in the cached version, allow them to survive.
Qualia debate is gibberish; a P-zombie must compute a human-like mind to generate its behavior, there is no other way for our bodies to act like we do.
…Actually, let me explain. There is a causal chain between zombie-state A and A'. Links of this chain attend to themselves via mechanisms conserved between a person and a zombie. This condition is what is described as quale, consciousness etc. in the physicalist theory, and it is a necessary causal element of the chain producing the same outputs. It is irrelevant whether there exists a causally unconnected sequence of epiphenomenal states that Leibniz, Chalmers and others think implements their minds: a zombie still has its zombie-quale implemented as I've described.
I posit that it is not incoherent to say that zombie-quale don't matter, don't count and don't explain human consciousness, because muh Hard Problem. It is patently non-parsimonious, non-consilient and ugly, in my view, but it's coherent. It just means that you also claim that humans are blind with regard to their zombie-quale, physicalist-quale; that the process which generates our ones has nothing to do with the process which generates informationally identical ones in our bodies.
It is only incoherent to claim that a zombie doesn't have any quale of its own, that it's not like anything to be a zombie for a zombie. We know that physics exist [citation needed], we know that "physicalist quale" exist, we know they are necessarily included in the zombie-definition as an apparently conscious, genuine human physical clone. So long as words are used meaningfully, it is not coherent for something to exist but also not exist.
(Unless we forgo the original idea (actual physical and behavioral identity) and define zombie in a comically pragmatic manner like Weekend at Bernie's or something, by how well it fools fools.)
P.S. it seems philosophers distinguish "incoherent" and "metaphysically impossible" concepts. I'm not sure I agree but this is pretty deep into the woods.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
Why do you need postmodernism for that?
Indeed you don't need the teaching of postmodernism for that, which is why your attempts to tar all skeptics with the same brush as Pomo grifters are disingenuous. Personally I'm more informed by philosophy and methodology of science (e.g. Lakatos. I'll save you the trouble, he's Jewish, as are Popper and Kuhn, but not Feyerabend) than e.g. Derrida. But the basic claim is the same in both.
Why deconstruct what can be refuted?
Have you read her argument? How does one refute that crap? It is free of falsifiable claims that can be traced back to a debate over empirical evidence, it is corrupt down to its very method, like your sloppy «truth particles in the winning side» power-worship epistemology. No, the proper «refutation» is discussion of Prescod-Weinstein's curious ideological commitment to slander white people via disingenuous rhetoric after having made a fortunate scientific career and accrued reputation in their society, and of course one can't avoid noticing both parts of her surname when looking into that. By the way, it does seem like she produces perfectly fine science on less political topics.
There is no rule, no shortcut to «thinking straight». This is what broke rationalism. You cannot codify it such that it won't be gamed, you can only try not to delude yourself or be deluded.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19d ago
The specific way India sucks even among very low-income nations, as seen through Western eyes, has little to do with poverty (there are very poor places in the world indeed) – and everything with its spiritual pollution, the lack of taste and disgust that finds root in your religious iconography and fully generalizes to contemporary ideas and beliefs; the physical squalor you can buy your way out of, but the rest, you will happily elevate into prestige. You are blind to the non-materialist dimension of the suckiness. No, I will not elaborate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
As is the comic, which I think we could all pull apart in a matter of seconds. Off the top of my head, what if you remove the screen and show the human and dog that the woofing isn't a real dog? Since when did anyone in this long and complex discussion say that sound was the only mechanism people/canines could use to recognize authenticity? The whole thing you're talking about is how complex and multifactorial identity-recognition is. It's irrelevant at best.
The idea of "multifactorial identity-recognition" is irrelevant for the purpose of understanding the issue of consciousness-continuity of a subject. But really, after such arguments, what more can be said? Truly, you can also look at the dog! Oh wow, the argument against black box analysis is pulled apart!
Since when did self-made say he'd be happy for you to send someone very like him (perhaps so similar as to be a soulmate or a best friend) to the garbage compressor because he wasn't so identical as to be effectively the same person?
Morality is irrelevant for this counterfactual; this is only dependent on the baseline self-preservation and endorsement of the notion that black box suffices.
As for substrate independence, we should be thinking about truth rather than beauty.
There is no meaningful difference between truth and beauty with regard to this question.
Poor taste is irredeemable, and you're one of the worst in this respect here, by the way.
How can it be impossible, in principle, to replace individual neurons one by one with a computerized equivalent such that normal function is preserved and the patient is conscious throughout the whole operation?
Following Moravec, I think this is possible, though I am not sure which aspects of neuronal computations and their implementations are relevant for this procedure (eg how to deal with LFPs). I reject the sloppy bugman idea that you can get from this to "just boot up a machine simulating access to a copy of my memories bro". Indeed, if you didn't have such poor taste, you'd have been able to see the difference, and also why you are making this argument and not the direct defense of computationalism.
Do you believe that there's some advanced quantum mechanics in our heads
Now that's what I call real disrespect lol. It's okay though.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
@HlynkaCG says, true to style, that this demonstrates all-importance of Culture, rather than HBD. He's right in a sense. But first, I want to discuss how he is also wrong.
In short, HBD is misunderstood. It is an issue of culture, and has been increasingly an issue of culture for most of Anthropocene.
Forget this speculative pablum about Cold Winters rewarding long term preference and complex social order. I do believe it, of course; it explains the bulk of initial conditions of our path-dependent historical trajectory; it doesn't matter. I've lived most of my life in a place with rather fucking cold winters, in a house designed to withstand those; sometimes, the homeless took refuge from the cold in its entrance lobby equipped with centralized heating – they'd have frozen to death otherwise. A denizen of Honshu can survive in what is basically a shed made of paper and wood planks. In terms of human capital, Japan is leagues above Russia – like 10 points in IQ, and time preference gulf that translates to 6x difference in implicit interest rates. How so?
Whites came to South Africa and made it a fertile land, and in centuries they have not become any less industrious, nor have their fields turned to wastelands (until they were excised as racially alien, and the infrastructure left behind got broken). Why?
Protestant European countries have minimally dysgenic fertility, whereas Latin America and the Middle East are hit the hardest. Does all that heat kill high-brainpower sperm first, or what?
For the longest time we have been kings of the hill, we thoroughly dominate this planet, no beast and certainly no frivolity of climate decides whether we thrive or go extinct. Even the most wretched countries have carrying capacity orders of magnitude higher than what the era of Cold Winters relevance allowed. No. Society is humans' environment. Culture is humans' selection pressure. The measure of our fitness is how well we fit in. Whether you are praised by a local pastor and your children held in high esteem for your success in retail business, or your store looted and your children taken hostage for ransom determines - on average – how many grandchildren they will be able to raise; and whether, in the long run, that which grows around your grave will be a nation of thugs or genteel shopkeepers. HBD tells us how well a person of a given extraction, ceteris paribus, will be likely to perform on a batch of rigorous and meaningful tests relative to others. Deep history tells us why that is so. Culture is the mechanism by which ceteris is prevented from being paribus; both directly through environmental inputs and more importantly through what they were for your ancestors. For all practical purposes, it does not matter what came first, chicken or egg, gene alleles or the criteria by which they get effectively judged as worthy of continuation: this is a self-sustaining loop either way. It does not matter that my people could, in a society different from Russia, be more than what they actually are, more than Japanese, perhaps. They – us – demonstrably fail to build anything better than Russia. And Black South Africans, under their own power, have demonstrably failed to build anything better than what the Apartheid regime was; the best idea they could muster was to flip the table.
Of course, one can claim that the absence of indignity inherent to second-class citizenship is worth all that. But – is there really dignity to be found in brutality and corruption, chaos and fear, squalor and pathetic self-deception? Their current troubles have nothing to do with whitey, except in the sense that they cannot sustain the country that whitey has built; so the Gods of Copybook Headings come to collect their due.
HBD is downstream of culture, in a way that feeble, equitable, painless interventions and charitable self-sacrifice by the stronger party cannot negate. The less virtuous cannot rule and become more virtuous in the process. You will have to have a culture where virtue is rewarded, even if that puts some strongly self-identifying, cohesive group in a bad spot. And to have that culture, you have to have at least a seed of people who maintain it effortlessly among themselves. This can be done, for a time, in virtually any society. But let us say that is it not easy to pull oneself by the hair out of the bog. Society is not just upstream of individual biology – it is less mutable than that.
Now, as for what makes Hlynka right. It's that in this scheme there is such a thing as pure culture, the culture of governance and highest-level decisionmaking, which can rapidly change and impose that change on the whole underlying structure; and in South Africa it is terrible.
But if you squint, the culture of the US is pretty similar. Do Americans not lambast «whiteness»? Do their dignitaries not take the knee for a thug, while honest people are canceled? Do they not piss all over the legacy of the whitey, overturn his monuments, ruin education and academia he had created? Is this not what this place owes its existence to?
I exaggerate of course. The serious point is that both American and South African political culture disdains the notion of owning your mistakes, and is ignorant of the feeling of limits. The only respectable response to a failure is to double down and accuse your enemies of meddling; chutzpah is the measure of sincerity. (I've been astonished recently to see Douglas Hofstadter admit he has been wrong about AI – this is not how American Public Intellectuals are supposed to operate. «It's a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing.» Well, I'm sorry for your loss, man, try to not have smug and absurd beliefs next time.)
But this abysmal cultural regime is normal. Not doubling down, stopping digging when you find yourself in a pit, actually thinking, is anomalous; the project of rationality was premised on making this anomaly pay rent. Opinions differ as to whether it worked out. Extreme cases of nations being clearly worse than normal for pure cultural reasons are very popular – North Korea, Argentina… But that's grasping at straws.
So there not being much difference in «pure culture», the reason America is not South Africa is still HBD. To wit, there are plainly too many good people, industrious people, smart people, to let it fail; they patch the gaps with tax money, duct tape and high technology faster than new gaps show up, and fast enough to attract even more of the same sort of people, increasing the delta between America and less fortunate nations. Japan, too, does not make sense politically, and their economic system is a mess – but the Japanese have high enough human capital to bear the burden of their culture. They'd have been able to bear Kim's regime as well. After all, Koreans manage somehow, and Koreans are their peers, HBD-wise.
Some states don't have that luxury. South Africa is failing as a state, for example. Its culture is terrible on every level and it is not blessed enough by HBD to cover it up.
unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)
You know, it sure is harder to take this posture of good-natured misunderstanding at face value after you have explained your situation as a minority father of mixed race children in a country with very exclusionary culture. For you, normalization of miscegenation – whatever else goes in the package – feels necessary, so you will be obnoxiously obtuse, to the point that your rhetorics would've amounted to social violence, were your opponent not anonymous*. «Oh dear me, so do you think there is something… wrong when people of different races join hands in Marriage? Aren't we all God's creatures with inherent value? Huh. So strange, so cruel. But to each his own!».
No (in case this has to be spelled out again): it's more about the hamfisted erasure of the representation of the most typical and normative pairing, and the campaign to code the Blacked.com** image of relationships as the default, whereas in reality it's a distinctly less prestigious and healthy pattern. This is what the producers have in mind, this is what they want the viewers to have in mind, this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.
*I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.
**one more "clever" status-preserving maneuver here is to say, for instance, «pardon me, I do not know what you are talking about… oh», and derail the topic into sneering insinuations about racist chuds watching interracial porn. It's a pretty transparent and pathetic development. As I've been warned for baiting people into petty comebacks, I'm stating this to avoid such a development. But neither can I be assed to put this in some other way.
Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.
Quoting Forbes:
My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:
In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.
edit: not to toot my own horn, but
I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.
edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.
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