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DaseindustriesLtd

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late version of a small language model

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
@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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Civil war in the middle of a (self-inflicted) world war is not exactly new for Russia.


There's nothing complicated about it, Kremlinology in Karlin's manner is obsolete. The regime is absolutely dysfunctional, flailing about with room temperature IQ reactions, there are no longer any Mnogokhodovochkas and Maskirovkas, and Prigozhin is straightforwardly a warlord (with vague Imperial sympathies) who's trying to avoid getting deep-fried like early LDNR leaders who were deemed a threat by Kremlin. This kill-your-military-heroes pattern is a staple of the Russian state and its dickless-but-psychopathic apparatchik leadership over the last century, so he has no way out but up. It very likely won't work, but it very likely heralds the final episode of our very special military operation: you can't very well fight the Ukrainian counteroffensive at the same time as you eliminate your most infamous and highest-morale military company by far.


Like a hour ago I paused the rewatch of Wings of Honneamise to see Russian state TV announce live the charging of Prigozhin with armed insurgency attempt (вооружённый мятеж), yada yada mercs don't support him in this urgent moment of our struggle against pro-fascist Ukrainians. Minutes later Prig said his forces are entering Rostov. There are some noises from the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense in Moscow; probably nothing. Putin has congratulated Russians with the Day of Youth or whatever it's called. Russia, unlike Prigozhin, doesn't have any way out of this.


The details of the forthcoming decay can feed morbid curiosity of idle observers but don't matter more than, e.g., LeCun-Bengio debate on AI safety the other day so I won't follow it too closely.


As an aside, I cannot express in words my sheer contempt for everyone who's been denying the utter degeneracy of Russian power structure over the last 1.5 years, especially for people who accused me of «defeatism» and «selling out» and stanned muh based Putin The Savior of White Race from (I presume) the comfort and safety of their Western McMansions. You folks deserve whatever the GAE has in store for you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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:


    

  1. 

    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.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    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.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    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.
    

    4. 

  4. 

    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.
    

    5. 

  5. 

    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.
    

    6. 



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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Human coexistence is vitally dependent on common sense, understanding of the spirit of the community that is imperfectly captured by instructions, guidelines and laws. At its innermost core, it is something like the Golden Rule and the maxim to not squander the commons; but it's ineffable and complex.


I don't care much for formal rules and am extremely sympathetic to small system exploits like that – so long as they do not substantially interfere with the welfare of anyone who tries to use the system legitimately, and who is willing to invest into it. Squatting on rent bikes is maybe okay if you are competing with frivolous riders who will say «eh» and walk another block. If there is a motivated user who needs it and especially has already paid – give up and screw off, pronto. This kind of understanding is not obvious for everyone, which is why we need to legibly codify rules even for very small things like bike renting etiquette. But it should be recalled when we find ourselves excusing their habitual flouting that goes wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hanania says:




I don’t think that the HBD crowd has enough respect for the power of this taboo. Many would give up on the whole idea of objective scientific inquiry before accepting race differences in IQ as immutable.




But that's exactly what has happened, no?


Anyway. I believe that there are very few people writing cogently and effectively on any given topic, and they all know each other, so the bulk of discourse is advanced essentially by conspiracies. I think there's some Discord group where Hanania, Karlin, Yglesias and other such edgy dorks hang out. I suspect that some time ago – maybe around Scott's disappearance – they've concluded that the right is doomed politically (for reasons Trace describes with regard to the GOP) and just decided to cut their losses, concocting some compromise vision and rhetorical tradition. What we observe now is a product of that covenant – bloodless, by-the-letter, superficially reasonable essays that may feel very fresh to a tired culture warrior, but also make flimsy arguments that prove them having engaged in a bit of lobotomy as a gesture of goodwill to the liberal-progressive hegemony they wish to be forgiven by.


Rather than this schlock, I'd rather read Hanania's Discord messages.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."


Here comes the year 2000.


The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.


Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.


Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right now right-wingers are more indignant about the clear bias in charity shown to parties of the bike conflict, to the point that the wholly innocent party got royally screwed.


My read is that, rather than just downplay the teens' actions on the object level, in that scenario right-wingers would be busy protesting asinine federal hate crime law proposals, dealing with accusations of genocide and wrapping their minds around novel concepts like «stochastic induction of miscarriage»; and we would be fuming over twitter threads from ethnic studies Ph.Ds shoehorning that episode into some chattel slavery history crap with pregnant black mistresses forced to work in the fields.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Similarly to @BurdensomeCount , I couldn't care less about Tolkien's racial canon. It's the same thing as always happens, too. Sure, it's funny how we used to do blackface for historical accuracy – and now fantasy peoples, some outright inhuman and extraterrestial or extradimensional, ought to possess diverse ethnic identity signifiers of the population of United states. It might also break immersion for fans who are serious about history and deep lore of fantasy settings; I can respect their plight… to roughly the same extent as I respect artists annoyed by the deluge of AI-generated kitsch. Literally First World Problems. Tiny violin. Etc.


But. You know, little things like that do more than break immersion in a specific media piece. They break the whole illusion, jerk me awake. They redpill me (speaking of which: Wachowskis may believe they were making Gnostic allusions to the trans condition, but of course it's the other way around, they came within an inch of understanding Gnosticism through their sexual turmoil).


These little things remind me that I am an adult, a boring mature specimen of a murderous ape in the world of murderous, lying, boring and terribly clever apes, and not a neotenic Eloi in some enchanted Consumerland beholding le epic stories of adventure. Little things together form a pattern, the conspicuous and unalterable watermark of tropes that The Greater American Empire leaves on assimilated «IPs» and «franchises», on myths forging souls of those eternal children in the Pure Land of the West and beyond. Those tropes teach you to complete sentences.


Ultimate, irredeemable scumbags and punching bags are… white men.


All happy families or relationships are… either colored or mixed-race.


The one good white father figure, if he exists… dies a martyr, willingly, to make way for hot-blooded folx of color, often his adopted children ushering in a new era. He is not to have any white heirs of his own, certainly not decent male ones (it's okay to leave a daughter though).


The colored girl is… brilliant and self-assured, sassy yet competent.


The monsters are… gentle victims of exploitation and harassment (by elite whites).


And a bunch of other similar edifying pieces on what a Decent Person ought to expect, diligently repeated.


(Yes, I've watched Black Adam and a few Foundation episodes. Big mistake. Alita also comes to mind. And The Good Place. And even that Puss in Boots 2. I suppose the overhyped Spiderman is of the same mold, given his creator's stated beliefs).


You cannot escape. This pattern is to American movies (and games and cards and fan wikis and whatever) what the text of  the Roman Missal is to Requiem by Mozart or Verdi or whoever else – the spirit and the essence,  the Truth that is to be learned even as fanciful capeshit and fantasy plots change by the season. White and black, black and white, and then all colors of the extended Pride flag, the drill is spinning-spinning-spinning and it makes me sick for I cannot stop seeing the shape these colors carve into reality, even as low-effort rubbery CGI and glossy illustrations and clever game mechanics and inane bastardized narratives dance on its edges. When exposed to this absurd vision, I am not being entertained; I am being lectured through a tedious post-Hajnali quasi-religious morality play, and a sloppy one at that, boilerplate written by humorless Cathedralites who expect – for sound reasons – to elicit childish excitement with their mass-produced baubles sweetening the pill.


I'm either too old for this shit to be distracted by baubles or too wretched to appreciate the profundity of its moral lessons. But I'm just right for manga, somehow. Now as dozen years ago, I find chapter 88 of Medaka Box quite profound. More so now in fact, given that it talks of a similar disillusion I hadn't been keenly aware of back then.


They'll lobotomize the Japanese too, won't they? The process is well underway.  In another dozen years, odds are we'll have all the creative means we could imagine, and nary a creator. Only sermonists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ukrainians despise Navalny and his loyalists. They justify this with his Crimean position ("not a sandwich", a poorly developed milquetoast – from the Russian perspective – proposal to establish mutually agreeable conditions for a transparent do-over referendum on leaving Ukraine for Russia; which would of course have yielded an overwhelming "yes" from Crimeans, and would be illegitimate as per the Ukrainian law). But from what I can tell, this isn't the crux. They're only interested in allying with Russian "opposition" that supports AFU and advocates for the dissolution of the Russian Federation, to wit – regionalist activists (predominantly ethnic minorities); they consider any unified state dominated by ethnic Russians in anything like current borders an existential threat that would soon enough regress to the mean of infringing on their sovereignty under any rule. I believe this is the tacit consensus in the most concerned neighboring states, represented by Anna Fotyga in the European Parliament and other Western patrons of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.


Anyway, Navalny was, although ethnically at least half Ukrainian or something more complex, completely at peace with the continued existence of a Russian state (or more cynically – not interested in diminishing his potential domain), and thus an example of the "Russian democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins" problem, as they put it. He was hated, and Budanov may be affirming Putin's narrative purely to encourage his compatriots, reaffirming that there's no common cause with the Russian opposition (to wit: "the war with Regular Orcs is not going badly enough to seek compromise with the Cuckold-Orcs, whom we loathe as much if not more").


Or whatever, he likely doesn't have any special insight into this case and Ukrainians make up intel a lot.


On the object level, I think it's plausible Navalny died "naturally" after months and months in the punitive isolation cell; it is a known torture/slow execution method. But also, he could have been offed as a gift to Bastrykin, who wanted him to die a great deal (there are such rumors that he asked for permission to commemorate his 70th anniversary) or as an early event in the upcoming elections.


People treat Putin as a highly rational, intelligent and well-calibrated person, but he's basically a psychopathic, out-of-touch grandpa who's got too high on his own supply. He's weird and he treats murders as a funny occasion, arranges them to happen on Special Dates, probably giggles when he gets the news. "But what about sanctions for Russia? What is the benefit?" Get real. Because he's playing a game.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Recently someone asked about that time when I translated Vasily "Vatoadmin" Topolev's overview of 20-year intervals in the 20th century, here it is:




Writing about current events is tough, so let's do some minor league historiosophy.


Many people may know that Andrei Amalrik wrote the book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" in 1969. He was only seven years wrong, it turns out. But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980, but Hélène (incidentally, born Zarubashvili of Russian-Georgian aristocratic émigrés) is still alive and even became secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.


Far fewer people know what the forecast itself was. Amalrik believed that the USSR would collapse as a result of war with China. In reality, the USSR collapsed after six years of consistently improving relations with China. Carrère d'Ancoss expected a mass Islamist uprising in Central Asia (as in Iran). In reality, the Central Asian republics were the last to leave the Union, after not only the Baltics, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, but even after the RSFSR and the BSSR – that is, when there was no Union at all. But who remembers that now?


Paul Samuelson is considered one of the most illustrious economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote his famous textbook, which was used for decades by students all over the planet in their economics 101 course. Samuelson believed that by 1990 the USSR would overtake the United States in gross domestic product. Then he shifted his forecast a bit: by 2000.


In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy (no, not a relative of the president) published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (translated into Russian a couple of years ago). The book brought Kennedy worldwide fame – he described the change of the dominant powers over the course of 500 years. Except that the first cover of the book had a picture (https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780517051009-us.jpg): the Briton John Bull coming down from the top of the globe, the American Uncle Smith standing on the top, but a bespectacled Japanese sneaking up behind him. Kennedy believed that American domination of the world would be succeeded by the Japanese domination (he did not actually say it that explicitly, but it was easy to notice). In the real world, a few years after the book was published, Japan was hit by a severe economic crisis – some offices in downtown Tokyo became 100 (yes one hundred) times cheaper, and the nineties were labeled "the lost decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades)" by the Japanese themselves.


Everyone knows that the brilliant Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a brilliant book called The Grand Chessboard. Only no one has read it. But I have. The main idea of the book is that the power that controls pipelines in Central Asia will dominate in the 21st century. Brilliant. Who even remembers these pipes now, even against the backdrop of the global energy crisis.


In July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised soldiers that they would be back from the front before the first autumn leaves touched the ground. And the Kaiser was not alone. That the outcome of the war would be decided in the first months was the opinion of wise generals in all the general staffs of Europe. The French, based on the Franco-Prussian experience (you know that bit, the fight between two democracies?) believed that the outcome of the war would be decided in the first month – and have had a hundred thousand men felled in the Ardennes in a narrow area over four days, throwing them in pointless attacks on the German machine guns. The Russians threw two newly mobilized corps, in which half of the soldiers remained in sandals, on Königsberg – and the East Prussian disaster happened. The Austrians, too, threw their dressy – the prettiest uniforms in the world! – toy-like regiments to the Carpathians, where they were ground to dust in a few months by the harsh Siberian, Cossack, Grenadier, Guard and other select regiments of the Russian army.


In this light, let me remind you of an old idea of mine. We will scroll through the twentieth century, 20 years at a time.


So, let's start on January 1, 1900. What does the world look like?


World politics is defined in three capitals – London, Berlin, St. Petersburg.


The British, after the Boer War, are the world's pariahs. They have very bad relations with literally all other great powers. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, they even banned the British delegation. India is once again preparing for a Russian invasion.


France is sandwiched between the British and the Germans. The former can easily take her colonies, the latter can defeat her in a one-on-one war. The most militarized country in Europe. When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.


Germany is the European leader. The world's most advanced science – soon Germans will be raking in handfuls of Nobel prizes. The best universities in the world are not Harvard or Oxford, but Göttingen and Heidelberg. A mighty army. The world's second largest navy – thirty years ago there was none at all. Berlin is called the "Electroburg"; it's the most progressive and cleanest city in the world, kind of like Singapore today.


Russia has tremendous industrial growth, the highest in the world. The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange will reach a peak this year to which it will never return, not even by 1914, after the Stolypin reform. There are plans to build a huge fleet by 1920, with only battleships counting 50. Korea, Manchuria, and Persia are gradually turning into Russian colonies.


China, recently defeated in a war with Japan, seems determined to modernize along Japanese lines. Although right now the country is in an extremely deplorable state, China is genuinely feared. Both in Russia [ru link reddit'd], and in America [for good measure], and everywhere else. Kaiser Wilhelm paints a picture [] in which the Archangel Michael calls upon all the nations of Europe to go to holy war against the Asian hordes. Somewhere near China lies Japan, which has yet to receive much attention. The King of England and the Tsar of Russia call the Japanese macaques in their correspondence.


The U.S. is already very rich, but it is almost invisible in world politics. The American army is ranked by the German General Staff on a level with the Portuguese army. The American navy has only five small battleships. Unexpectedly, the Americans went to war with the other "weaklings," the Spaniards, and although they won, they ended up with an endless guerrilla war in the Philippines. All in all, simmering somewhere on the periphery.


Scroll to 1920.


There is no such thing as a Chinese empire. The Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires are similarly non-existent. In place of the Russian Empire there is a giant bloody stain. Germany, cut off from all sides, is steadily teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. All of Europe, down to Poland and Romania, is now dominated by France. The British Empire is even larger than it was in 1900. The U.S. has become a great military power. Wall Street, swollen during the war, turned from a peripheral financial center into a competitor to the City of London. Japan began to build its empire, suddenly becoming one of the world's great powers.


Fast forward to 1940.


The U.S. is still trying to get out of the Great Depression. France as a state simply does not exist, unless you count the mysterious entity centered in the resort town of Vichy. Russia, torn apart by civil war, was replaced by the giant Soviet Union. Germany, recently humiliated and defeated, has now conquered almost all of Europe. The British, recent triumphators, are preparing for a German landing and hiding from German bombs. Japan has already conquered a good half of China and is not going to stop.


Another turn of the knob and we go to 1960.


The U.S. has experienced a decade and a half of frenzied economic growth. The country is bursting with exuberance. U.S. military bases are spread across the globe. The Soviet Union, which many had already given up on in 1942, has recovered, has rid itself of the worst features of totalitarianism, is preparing to send a man into space, and is competing equally with the United States in the most sophisticated fields of technology – lasers, atomic, space, aviation. Germany and Japan are now almost the most peaceful countries in the world, especially since both are de facto occupied by U.S. and Soviet troops. Italy, until very recently one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has also suffered terribly after two years of warfare on its territory, is showing the highest growth rate in Europe and will soon overtake even Britain. Fewer and fewer territories remain of the British Empire, which was supposedly victorious in World War II, and those too will soon be independent. France is a great power again. Germany is experiencing its economic miracle. The Shah of Iran is determined to use petrodollars to turn his country into the most developed and enlightened in the Middle East.


And we are already in 1980.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Burgers?


…A bit off topic but this made me think that second-rate economists, utilitarians and other autistic behavioral scheme enjoyers who can't tell the map from the territory have poisoned the water supply somewhat.


Humans respond to incentives and pursue goals, but humans are not, by and large, maximizers (EY and SBF are I guess), they're behavior- and thought-executors. It may be the case that even generally useful AI agents are hard to build any other way, although some folks try. The rational economic agent is a spook, a simplified model; not in the sense that a real Rational Economic Agent is hairier, biased and makes mistakes when generating rational plans, but in that it's literally  a sketch, fundamentally dissimilar from the real issue even if convenient for some analyses. Implicitly thinking that people maximize stuff is almost as boneheaded as imagining that a 130 IQ person has 130 grains of intelligence or something, it's a profound misunderstanding about the ontology on which the debate is premised, its terms are defined and measurements are done.


With that in mind, my answer is boring. People writing this army recruitment strategy (Stonetoss really is a genius) are not maximizing recruitment KPIs. They're not maximizing trans representation in the battlefield either. They're doing what they feel like they should be doing in their life, given their background and norms in their social circle. «It's called being a decent human being», you know? They're not grey-haired generals (but on this note, even Milley is mocked by tradcons, isn't he?) – they're part of the same HR/veryonline/Moldbuggian Cathedral mental blob that controls and molds the lion's share of labor pool for people-oriented jobs. They're what the military thinks is the safest bet in this dire situation of volunteer shortage; they're professionals. And professionals try not to fall behind the times. It's 2k23, so you've got to empower and platform trans women and women of color, what's the problem?


Now, certainly the recruitment may not go all that well (it may go well in the long run too: perhaps trans soldiers will prove much more useful in our transhuman augmented future). But anyway, who knows if an underwhelming harvest is due to aversion to the trans stuff (and even if it were, what are you suggesting they do – commit trans erasure over some KPI bullshit?! They'll walk out and cancel your family if you're unlucky) or just because those simple to a fault cisheteronormative Nebraskan boys already feel like they're doing their part of valor and sacrifice working and paying taxes – instead of flipping out and shooting up some symbol of their hopeless cultural subjugation by the smug coastal Elves who make those ads.


Well, @sodiummuffin said it better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I actually wonder what people with opinions on Holocaust… opposite to @SecureSignals will say about all this if the evidence of fabrication becomes clearer. Were I a Jew, I'd be pretty pissed and maybe a little scared about such cynical construction of a memetic superweapon that may by association cast doubt on evidence for already recognized genocides, and tried to make clear that I strongly condemn such tactics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is this parody?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.




I would like to hear a journalist's perspective on this some day. Is it taught? Is the intuitive grokking of those rules – condemn the far-right mob, but don't explicitly spell out their casus belli, so the impression is that far-righters are just spontaneously violent – a job requirement? Am I too deep in a bubble and it's just common sense already to speak this way here and the other way around about George Floyd?


I suspect the tactic actually works – remember, 50% of people are below average, and the average ain't that high, and it's white people who are the target audience, so they just trust journalists to do a honest job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


IQ




You surely know but BAP isn't too keen on HBD and IQ-focused discourse; or rather, his notion of evaluation methodology, «racial hierarchy», desirable qualities and perhaps even the mechanics involved are all entirely different from the Sailerite school of thought (which is why I'm pissed when everyone on the dissident right is rounded up to a Nazi; no you fools, at least appreciate the vibrant diversity of other doctrines which are every bit as irreconcilable with yours, it's an honor to be hated from so many different angles!). And it's not about Nordics as such, he preaches exactly what it says on the tin – Bronse Age mindset, bodybuilders on horseback.




It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.




I dislike the phrase "techno-solutionism" but it ought to be recognized how much of our "not worse off" depends on outracing the decline. Opinions differ as to how sustainable that is. I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Low-rigor response because I think you do have to study the object level a bit to evaluate the sides.




What precisely g is?




Precisely what its definition says. As Jensen himself put it:




It… reflects individual differences in performance on tests or tasks that involve any one or more of the kinds of processes just referred to as intelligence. The g factor emerges from the fact that measurements of all such processes in a representative sample of the general population are positively correlated with each other, although to varying degrees. A factor is a hypothetical source of individual differences measured as a component of variance. The g factor is the one source of variance common to performance on all cognitive tests, however diverse.




This is the definitive blog post refuting a popular methodological criticism.


Do you mean what it corresponds to in reality? I suppose it's just a holistic brain performance index, that's also predictive of general health. There isn't one physical thing that creates g, but the sum of diverse brain factors (half of our genome gets expressed in the brain) ensures that it emerges in the factor structure of our mental abilities, conditional on similar amount of training useful for each, and that predicts both general functioning and peak achievement. It isn't surprising that our abilities are highly correlated. We have a very homogenous brain made up of extremely complex computational elements (neurons) implementing simple task-agnostic learning algorithms, so most of the complexity and variation of our basic architecture (though not specific structure acquired over the lifetime) is shared between neurons or in their generic connectivity. Random genetic errors or (non-localized) environmental insults create different perturbations of the neuronal function, but on the whole-brain level they all push the system away from its optimal regime, no matter what it's trying to learn or to perform. You're unlikely to score in the 99th percentile on arithmetic and 20th on vocabulary if your axonal conduction is shot or your synapses are too sparse or do not get pruned well or your total cell count is too low or if your cell migration was too noisy or intracellular metabolism is somehow defective. And even if you've somehow developed specific tricks to cope very well with your shortcomings in a given skill, on the population level the power of the general factor becomes overwhelming.


Much of the issue is reducible to signal/noise ratio. High-performing brains ride the edge of metastability and wrangle representations easily; low-performing ones waste power fending off chaos and lose track of the context.




The concept of heritability and how it relates or doesn't relate to genetic causes of individual or group differences. I am aware of the "books at home" example. Is that all there is to it?






Steelman(!) Turkheimer's position. No, I don't want to hear about his politics.




But it is politics ultimately: we should be super, duper, ultra skeptical of HBD-related stuff and probably censor it for good measure, because Holocaust. He is leery of political implications of HBD acknowledgement regardless of specific merits of a given study.


Closer to the object level, I think he was recently steelmanned by Tailcalled:




People might read that intelligence is genetically correlated with myopia, or that homosexuality is genetically correlated with depression, and conclude that these are due to a direct biological link, rather than due to smarter people straining their eyes reading or staying indoors more, or homosexual people being discriminated against. Yet as we saw with education, this assumption is unwarranted; phenotypic causality leads to heritability.




Or put another way: the whole causal chain between genes and outcomes matters, for it may have links that depend on contingent properties of the environment. If proven, this would invalidate our assumption about this trait's heritability in a more general case. In our ancestral environment, smarter people probably hadn't been more myopic, because there had not existed the contingent segment «smart – reads a lot – sits indoors more than others – stupid monkeys haven't yet built good indoors lighting –  not enough dopamine signaling in the retina – extended axial elongation period – myopia». It can be highly heritable, we can even find explanatory genetic polymorphisms – but the relationship disappears whenever we stop having our smartest children spend more time indoors with poor illumination. Likewise for all contingent chains. Therefore, even though everything is heritable, the first law of behavioral genetics does not mean that genetics is destiny or that people's phenotypes are molded by their genes in the intuitive strong sense the texture of their hair is.


This line of critique is pretty old, used by Lewontin etc. already, and is fair enough on its face, but assumes that some common mitigations psychometrists know about are insufficient, and it's only when it comes to proving this that we see clearly how Turkheimer is politically driven.




Roughly summarise the position of Kirkegaard et al.




Roughly:


We are living in a saturated  and humane age. Human brain development is actually surprisingly robust and insensitive to inputs that are scarce in developed economies (even if some of them were scarce not so long ago in the past), and human cognitive development mostly proceeds close to the optimal way so long as you don't severely and obviously fuck up brain development or deviate far from low-effort common sense in nurture. Thus, developed societies have exhausted reasonable interventions that target contingent hazards disproportionately affecting g in different demographics; probably all hazards that bring down g in the population at large. While some differences in positive factors remain, they're long in the diminishing returns regime for more advantaged groups, as far as intelligence is concerned; and negative factors are similarly minor and maintained not by any iniquity, scarcity or coercion but out of their free choice by people who are worse off; and the rest is completely unsystematic. There's no low-hanging fruit left. No more toxic lead paint we can scrape off walls of homes where redlined minorities live, no malnutrition we can solve with food stamps, no miracle iodine-enriched brain-enhancing diet that only upper class kids are getting, no worms in ponds peasants have to drink from, no education reform that can remove some unnecessary cultural pressure. We've optimized and homogenized our environment to the point that practically all subpopulations realize the same, very high, percentage of their genotypic potential for g that is possible at the current technological/infrastructural level, and so differences in outcomes predicated on differences in g are explained by true differences in heredity, and are not amenable to elimination via any social policy change we'd recognize as fair.


Mostly the same logic applies to non-cognitive factors that influence outcomes, if to a lesser extent.


This model is corroborated by an extreme wealth of evidence and by the complete failure to create a competitively powerful model that rejects its premises, despite nearly a century of trying to do so, generous investment and genuine desire of talented researchers. This knowledge is being obfuscated and suppressed by political means.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the course of deconstructing the argument, you have thrown out whatever meaning there was to its constituent words.


At the risk of sounding pedantic, I believe the original thesis refers to some combination of Darwinism and Turchin's overproduction of elites. It entirely embraces your claim that weak men love to have a good time. Surprise, everyone does. And your «strong men» of the bodybuilders-on-horseback mold are a bugbear, a mirage, a nightmare of confused Hollywood producers and Bay Area rationalists and wannabe "dark elves" – they do not matter and do not last, they are but foam cresting waves of history.


Is Putin a weak man? Are folks on Rublyovka weak, or their children in Western capitals? They've delivered a pretty hard time for everyone, but they sure love to live large. And what about the self-satisfied rich of the developing world, that @2rafa discusses? Are they dedicated to making the whole system more amenable to thriving, or do they find it easy to insulate their kin from the wretched masses and keep having a good time, for their time?


The adage is almost nonsense, but so is your perspective.


I'd say that good men create good times. Good men like the memorable LKY. Good in that they care at all about what happens outside their circle of immediate concern, and strong enough to make hard decisions; which some mistake for them being bad.


In good times, this error becomes more pervasive, as social mobility reaches certain sophistication and a subclass of (some would say, overproduced) elites discovers the utility of playing up those decisions' costs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				ISRAEL GAZA MEGATHREAD IV
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I liked the interview for giving a hint of just how strongly Israelis believe in the demographic dimension of history. Mainstream or not, her side will become more mainstream through their efforts at expanding their Lebensraum and effortfully breeding; and their vigor will win over tired moderates even over this purely biological growth. I'm fairly sure we will see her maximalist ambitions of a massive Israeli empire normalized in some decades. What is impossible often becomes possible when enough people believe in it.


I also think this whole war episode has strengthened my thesis that Israel doesn't depend on the US much, doesn't care for what the US thinks, and frankly isn't any sort of an «outpist of Western liberalism in the sea of barbarism» but just a powerful, autonomous civilization state on its own already.


My least favorite part is her shrill denialism here:




In a lot of these places where settlements have been developed, from 1967 to the present day, there have been Palestinian communities and Palestinian families. What is your feeling about where these people should go?






It’s the opposite. None of the communities in Judea and Samaria are founded on an Arab place or property, and whoever says this is a liar. I wonder why you said it. Why did you say that, since you have no idea about the real facts of history? That’s not true. The opposite is true. Who got this idea into your mind?






Palestinian communities have been removed from their land, kicked off their land by—




No, you never read things like that. No. There are no pictures. [According to a report by Btselem, an Israeli human-rights group, parts of Kedumim, where Weiss lives, were built on private Palestinian land; in 2006, Peace Now found that privately owned Palestinian land comprised nearly forty per cent of the territory of West Bank settlements and outposts.]




O.K. I’m a little surprised you are denying this. I thought you were going to say, “It’s O.K. to kick Palestinians off land because it belongs to the Jewish people.”






You did no homework before you interviewed me. Everything that you say is the opposite of my personality and my philosophy. You are interviewing a person, and you don’t know anything about them. It’s very strange. I’ve never encountered a situation like this.






I was trying to understand where Palestinians who live in the West Bank should go.






Why should they go? Why should they go?




etc.


This kind of DARVO-like shrieking has always rustled my jimmies, but it seems to be normal in the Eastern discourse, and will be normalized further in the future. People on the right will be begging to get the genteel progressive assimilated Jews back.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A sleep-deprived rant that may be missing your argument:


I agree with this meta-post. But, in fairness, I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalsit culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta. Half a high school debate club, half a nerd cult of reason, with very little exposure to empirical matters and gratitious amounts of speculative fiction plus a sprinkling of Talmudic education – this is our foundation. This hothouse allowed nuanced, hypothetical concepts to thrive, concepts which would not have lasted a day in a challenging object-level environment; indeed, some even become apex predators, like «infohazard». Or steelmanning. More terms and tools aren't always good; they can get reified and multiply confusion.


I don't think that arguments which get called out as «weakmanning» typically address a weak point, or a nonrepresentative point, per se. They address, and attack, that which their speaker think the other party actually believes, on basis of reasoning about their broader philosophy; specific illustrations are only for convenience. If it doesn't, at the moment, match the other party's consensus (however we establish it), that is immaterial. We can protest brining subpar evidence for an assertion about such essential belief, but it's important to know whether the assertion is meant to depend on the evidence presented.


How is «weakman» different from «the bailey»? «Steelman» from «sanewashing» or «the motte»? Those are all loaded terms (sanewashing implies the insanity of the main body of belief) and some comments offer a sensible perspective, eg @DuplexFields here. But in real scenarios each politically significant group has a wide gamut of opinions (as in, comprehensive interpretation of what the group «is about»), from the most idiotically extremist and unsubstantiated to fruitlessly anodyne to plain dumb (with tiny pockets of well-reasoned extremists); it's an exercise in futility to classify whether a particular take X' falls within the normal range for X-affiliated distribution of takes, or somewhat on its fringes (weakman) or just at the very edge of self-parody and not recognized as a legitimate variant by the consensus (strawman). (Language allows endless compositionality, so even a crazy rant can be construed as an inapt appeal to common sense.)


The futility goes deeper. Yes, there are ways for bizarre outliers to come to be which are basically unrelated to the position's essence, so strawmen do not tell us much about the big tent  or merits of its ideology, and in this vein it could seem meaningful to identify them.  But I'd argue it doesn't even matter if no such caricatures have proven existence. So long as the position is well-documented enough, it is appropriate to discuss its implications even if no proponent (again, recognized as such by the group's consensus) is currently willing to bite the bullet. And in fact this method is constantly applied to non-mainstream views.


The obvious example: consider the beeline from HBD to eugenics to racism and fascism; this is not so much a matter of historical association as it's recognition that these object-level views can be used to support illiberal policies; they don't have to, but it can work.


Consider, also, that merely a few months ago, back in the gentle age where plans like «inflating regulatory burden to obstruct AI research» were considered beyond the pale, Yudkowsky disavowed all violence in pursuit of AI risk reduction, and cranks like me were saying that utilitarianism + AI Doom doctrine imlies impossibility to trust such disawovals, that in the end AI Doomers will be willing to embrace totalitarianism. Lo and behold, now he advocates for airstrikes and worse. It wasn't the threat model that changed, it wasn't his philosophy; what changed was the Overton window, and the logic of his doctrine realigned his expressed views accordingly. Could this have been predicted by Yudkowsky?


I don't know. I don't even know if I could predict my own reaction to the invasion of Ukraine on February 23rd, 2022. But I was saying then that it probably won't happen, because it's so absurd, and I mocked Western intelligence that played up all the saber-rattling on the border; and many people who seemed to be on the same page as me then proceeded to enthusiastically support the Z operation, to the point of cheering for unhinged barbarism. It turned out that I was the fringe, not them; that the logic of our stated ideology, in a timeline like this, flows like that – just as predicted by our oh-so-despicable opponents. They were correct to interpret the outspoken outliers as signs of things to come; they were correct to dismiss me when I was saying that those strawmen or weakmen are not representative of the whole. I can steelman Russian Nationalism. I cannot redeem it.


I don't think people who can operate at many layers of abstraction are fools (and people who can't, generally can't benefit from appeals to these epistemological categories). They can understand positions fine, and they can see the distribution of voices as well as anyone, pointing out to them that this specific voice is X deviations from the median on the axis of quality or popularity is not a very good use of time. The disagreement is mainly about how a given position, adopted by a given group, works out in reality; what it collapses into.