FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.
Would you mind elaborating on this? I am in the somewhat uncomfortable position of thinking that a) Superintelligence is probably a red herring, but b) AI is probably going to put me and most people I know out of a job in the nearterm, but c) not actually having much direct contact with AI to see what's coming for myself. Could you give some discription of how AI fits into your life?
My position is that "human beings who deserve to live" should be coterminous with "human beings", as otherwise it tends to contract precipitously.
I disagree. Human beings who try to kill me no longer "deserve to live". Human beings who commit murder no longer "deserve to live". Human beings on the other side of a war no longer "deserve to live", even if they aren't trying to kill me at this moment and haven't killed anyone yet. Likewise, I no longer "deserve to live" for the same reasons; if one of them shoots me through the skull, they have done no wrong.
Nor does it end there. Honorable, sane men observe the Birkenhead Drill: "women and children first", and do not recognize claims that those called to perform it are excused because they "deserve to live". In war, we expect men to obey orders, even if those orders would result in their deaths, and again no excuse that they "deserve to live" is allowed.
But this conversation started not over killing people, but over whether it is acceptable to let people die of their own bad choices. And the answer is that yes, this is entirely acceptable. It is preferable to dissuade them from destroying themselves through bad choices, but some people will not be dissuaded, and it is deeply just for people to receive the consequences of the decisions they've made. To do so is to treat them not as sub-human, but as fully human. And this goes doubly so for "well-being". Humans do not "deserve" well-being in any meaningful sense; if a man does not work, he shall not eat, as even the Communists were able to recognize. Those who engage in selfish, destructive behavior to the detriment of those around them certainly do not "deserve well-being". Even those who engage in foolish behavior can find themselves no longer "deserving to live"; if I smoke a pack a day for twenty years, that is no great sin, but it would be foolish to grant me a lung transplant, and especially foolish to do so on the understanding that I will continue to smoke a pack a day in the future.
All the above ignores Mercy, and that is because Mercy is not deserved, nor can it be mandated, only freely chosen. Attempts to implement it through anything other than individual choice are profoundly destructive to any sort of human society.
My position is that "human beings who deserve to live" should be coterminous with "human beings", as otherwise it tends to contract precipitously.
It also tends to contract precipitously when stretched so far that people forget that the consequences of our actions are inescapable. People often make choices that intentionally inject pain and misery into the world. When they do this, they often suffer or die as a consequence; this is often an entirely acceptable outcome, and sometimes a straightforwardly preferable one. Pretending otherwise, and sacrificing value to give them an endless series of Nth chances is rarely a good idea.
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
You do a disservice to the author to use this as an argument for unlimited mandatory mercy. He is right that many are too eager to deal out death in judgement, but that does not mean that all men deserve to live, only that determining who does not requires humility, wisdom, deliberation, and a leavening of mercy.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....
If you show up with a mob and try to burn my house down, I'll kill you, and I will almost certainly not be prosecuted for doing so. Is this an example of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Drivers have an elevated chance of dying or being crippled in car crashes. Wingsuit enthusiasts run a much higher chance of dying or being crippled in wingsuit crashes. We maintain an insurance system for drivers, but do not maintain one for wingsuit enthusiasts. Is this an examples of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Do you believe that choices made shouldn't influence apportionment of consequences of those choices?
A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.
Handy that we are not restricted to ultimate conclusions, then, and are entirely capable of balancing competing interests.
Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.
One of Nature's more useful qualities is that it IS. It provides a default. We can diverge from that default if doing so seems preferable, but that does not give you or anyone else grounds to demand a divergence. You do not get to claim that Nature is unjust in any meaningful sense.
there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".
Just so, though I get the impression that we differ on who Alice and Bob are, and to what degree they are culpable for the percentages in the first place.
I don't think they're founding their moral convictions on video games, only using video games and their connotations to smooth communication. It's no different than HPMOR, in my view.
I think you're underselling the phenomenon by just rounding all this off to crazy. I think it's entirely possible that Ziz and their accolytes have, among them, some significant neurological abnormalities. But it's hard to escape the impression that they're not losing their minds so much as intentionally throwing them away. They are actively taking concrete, premeditated action to undermine and compromise their own sanity, because they've bought into enough reasoning convolutions that they've committed to it being a good idea. I have some minor personal experience with cult shit, and this is definitely cult shit.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
If I see someone saving brass, I assume they're a handloader; beyond that there's no real connotation. Even if you aren't handloading, you can sell brass to reloaders or for scrap, and ammo is expensive enough that people trying to save a bit isn't prepper or miserly, just a reasonable thing some people do. What does have connotations is trying to collect other peoples' brass; that's what gets the "stingy/miserly" attitude, from what I've seen, and I think that's what's been driving the adoption of "brass goes to the range" policies. "Squeegee men" is the right model in my experience, especially because collecting brass off the floor lends itself to being mildly unsafe, since it's a divergence from the normal business of remaining stationary while you shoot in your own bay. The safety-conscious version is to use a provided broom to sweep cases down-range so people don't slip on them. Thinking about it, it's kind of an oddly-prickly area; my impression is that people kinda look down on the range for mandating ownership of all spilled brass, but also look down on other shooters for trying to hoover it up, but also mostly don't collect it themselves; the range keeping what you yourself don't capture is the least-worst option, and trying some varying method (showing up with a shop-vac, say?) would be generally frowned-on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The point of that poem is that when anyone, left or right, starts narrowing the category of 'human beings who deserve to live', they don't stop, and they are likely to end up narrowing it to exclude you.
Your collapsing of all distinctions into "deserve to live" is notable, but it doesn't seem to me that it changes much, so let's go with it.
We observe that the category of "human beings who deserve to live" can both expand and contract. Your position, then, is that it should only expand? If it expands to include a category of people previously excluded, and then things get significantly worse, we just have to live with it because no takesie-backsies?
What's the status quo for reusing the spent cases?
Generally, you can reuse them multiple times. Some guns abuse them in various ways that make reloading impractical, and some factory loads use case materials (aluminum or steel are commonly used in cheaper factory ammo) or case designs that complicate reloading, but typical brass cases are relatively valuable. A lot of modern firing ranges have rules that all brass on the ground belongs to the range, and ranges that don't often will have customers offering to collect your brass for you, or simply collecting it without your permission.
As mentioned recently, this is why I'm not a liberal any more. "human rights" doesn't trace back to a set of objective facts, it's a label intended for use in coordinating use of force, and it can and is applied entirely arbitrarily, even to the point of self-contradiction.
Liberalism of this sort is breathtakingly stupid, astonishingly dangerous, and utterly ubiquitous.
It's stupid, because it assumes order and social structure for the foundation of an argument intended to prosecute arbitrary divisions of order and social structure; it's taking a concept intrinsically designed to be applied to the margins and aiming it at the center and expecting everything to work out fine.
It's dangerous because it encourages people to initiate and escalate conflicts they can't actually win.
It's ubiquitous because it's the basic social technology our whole society runs on, and that the majority of people have no defense against.
Liberalism takes it as axiomatic that "Religion" and "Human Rights" and "Freedom" are conceptual primitives. When that turns out to be false, it has no Plan B.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Because it's a way to make concrete a claim about abstract principles. The obvious next question is "what do you think should be done about it?"
"Infant circumcision is a human rights violation" "Judaism is founded on a ritual that is a human rights violation" and "Circumcision should be banned, and Jews who continue the practice should be jailed" are three distinct statements, and it's instructive to see how far someone is willing to ride this particular train.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
From the dive I did, I'd say that sounds reasonably accurate. I linked the glossary below if you want to dive yourself. That, combined with the report on the attempted murder of their landlord and the personal accounts related to it, were more than enough to identify Ziz as ten pounds of crazy in a two-pound sack.
I'm not sure "timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory" is the term they actually used, but I'm not sure it's not the term either, and it seems like a reasonably accurate description from what I recall.
Here's the Glossary from the site linked above. I wish I'd taken the time to write more on the subject while doing the trawl, but the short of it is that Ziz is very, very clearly doing Rationalism just as hard as they can, and Rationalism is in turn doing its thing: converting human flaws into impending disaster.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Damn. I was just reading up on Ziz a couple weeks ago; a commenter here linked their blog and I spent an evening dipping into the raw crazy. Reading through their glossary, the Rationalist influence was inescapable. Pure dark-mirror Scott, and deeply chilling.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Well for starters, at least in theory, states states within the nation can cooperate on a deep level due to a common framework of duties and obligations. This significantly raises the probability of mutual cooperation being workable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
What the layman refers to as a "bullet" is actually a cartridge, which is made up of four main components: a case, a primer, a propellent charge, and a projectile (the actual bullet). Assembling these components is known as "loading". If the assembly is done at a factory, the cartridge is "factory-loaded", but you can also buy the components separately and assemble them yourself, which is known as "handloading". In addition to being cheaper, handloading also allows for a significantly higher ceiling on the quality of the finished cartridges, and also allows for the creation of variant cartridges that aren't commercially available in a factory loading.
Most serious competition shooters specializing in accuracy use handloads, and a lot of hobbyists do as well, generally for the cost savings and increased accuracy available.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I have not read Hegseth's book. Have you? Where are you drawing the idea that he is in favor of new wars in the Middle East?
Here he is discussing the war in Afghanistan. His critiques match my own well, and I detect no enthusiasm for further middle-east interventionism. This matches the interviews I've watched of him, and also matches the general attitude toward foreign wars that Trump has been hewing to since his run in 2015, which convinced me to back him. I am fairly confident that Trump will not be starting any new wars in the middle east, and I am extremely confident that he will start less wars in the middle east than Kamala would have.
I do not know where your confusion over Trump's intentions come from, but I do not share them. I've heard this sort of FUD during Trump's first term, re: John Bolton. Bolton got no new wars, and his political influence seem to me to have taken a precipitous nose-dive under Trump.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
To be clear, is the maximumally-cynical interpretation "reduced attack surface during a national election"? Because that's the obviously-correct answer to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I do not think we are going to be invading the middle east under Trump. Would it be correct that you think we will, in fact, be "going on a crusade in the middle east"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
so if you are to shoot anything more than once a year on your birthday you better learn quickly how to do it yourself.
And one of the nice things about black-powder is that you can do it yourself. You can make your own projectiles. You can make your own powder. You can even make your own gun if you want! Taking a few steps back down the tech curve in one specific area opens up a whole wealth of possibilities that would otherwise be invisible to you.
I haven't bought any guns in a while, but a black-powder revolver is one of my "someday" firearms.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Who says it doesn't?
You've misunderstood me. I'm willing to at least contemplate the idea that there isn't really anything to be done about the cartels, that the present situation is roughly as good as we can expect and that we should just suck it up. What confuses me is when I'm then told that it's very important that we prosecute a proxy war with Russia on the other side of the world, and that we need to gear up for a Great Power confrontation with China. All the arguments for restraint and toleration of the Cartels likewise appear to me to apply even more so to China and Russia, who have nukes, actual armies, and significant nation-state resources backing them.
I'm not sure you're wrong, but I would really like to see your math.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
He replied before I edited in the ISIS false flag part on a whim. Also, that was not satire. Posting such a video seems like an obviously good idea, since the morale effect is the entire point. Claiming responsibility does not, and sowing confusion seems like it would be effectively free with no appreciable downsides.
You are not offering protection, you are threatening to murder people by the dozens and post it online if they do not comply.
Come now, of course it's offering protection, and in a way the principles involved would be entirely familiar with.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
It is not obvious to me why we can't or shouldn't be, or why refraining from being so is a net-positive. That is not to say that we should begin filming Funky Towns or cribbing from ancient Chinese law enforcement techniques. It is to say that we have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs, that terror and horror come in many flavors and can in fact trade off with each other, and that this is a class of people who have pretty clearly placed themselves beyond most forms of moral concern.
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
I made a similar claim, so I'll butt in here. I think I have a fairly robust understanding of objective evils and criminal enterprises, but stand to be corrected. As for conducting our own evils, killing pirates, bandits, or other forms of hostis humani generis does not seem to me to be evil. The juice may not be worth the squeeze, but it is in fact very good juice if you can get it.
This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons were discredited because they attempted nation-building. If our interactions with Iraq and Afghanistan had been conducted as punitive raids rather than indefinite occupations, it seems to me that things might have gone rather differently. Note that this is not the argument sometimes floated that the indefinite occupation could have worked if we'd just been willing to be more brutal. Rather, it is the argument that if your goals are limited to the things violence can achieve, violence can in fact achieve them.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
I'd be interested in the bad consequences you'd predict, but I have an inkling that they might be the same bad consequences I would predict, and that you might have some reticence in discussing them publicly. Or maybe I'm way off base.
That Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
That sounds like a very hard thing to accomplish. Suppose the goal isn't to halt the flow of drugs, or even to get there to not be Cartels any more. Suppose the goal is more modest: introduce a significant incentive against notable acts of brutality. Maybe you don't run the splatter drones all the time. Maybe you just watch and wait most of the time, and then when they "make a statement" of sufficient repugnance, you "make a statement" right back, with zero prior warning or follow-on attribution, not even wreckage to identify the mechanism, zero communication of any kind beyond the bare fact of the resulting corpses.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will prices rise, or fall?
Ideally in this scenario, they wouldn't do either. The goal wouldn't be to kill the market, which you are correct to say would be impossible, but rather to modify the behavior of those participating in the market. Sure, they're willing to accept death for a chance at the good life; but maybe they can be persuaded that the sweet spot is actually a bit back from "public torture murder".
Underneath the theorycrafting and righteous vengeance and repartee, though, there's a more substantive concern: I don't think it's a good idea to foster the creation of a society where corruption and brutality are accepted facts of life. When I look at history, there's a pattern I think I see, where things go bad, evil is ascendent, and all the good people either die, leave, or are corrupted themselves. The results of this pattern appear to me to be very bad in the long term, and I worry quite a bit that this is what we have done to Mexico.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
I am all for plan A, even now.
One of the recurring arguments I've participated in over the years is whether we should ban circumcision. I'm circumcised, and on the balance I would rather not be. Nevertheless, I consistently argue that we should not ban circumcision, because while I perceive it to be a net-loss, I do not think it is a very severe net loss, and I observe that there is a significant population of my fellow citizens who disagree with my assessment and wish to retain it.
Usually, those arguing for banning it point out that it is genital mutilation performed on helpless infants. They point out that we ban female circumcision/genital mutilation just fine, and that there is no principled distinction for why we should ban one and not the other. Now, my understanding is that female circumcision is often much more damaging than male circumcision; I base this on descriptions of female circumcision on the one hand, and my own experience with being circumcised on the other. but beyond that, I note that there is not a large population of people practicing female circumcision deeply rooted in our society, so maintaining a ban on the practice is considerably less costly. I think we should tolerate the practices of our neighbors, and decline to make neighbors of foreigners with practices we are not willing to tolerate.
I think this is a pretty good way to look at things. My experience is that it is not a Liberal way of looking at things, and in fact Liberals will tend to object strongly to both ends of it. In my experience, they will argue vociferously that circumcision should be banned because it is a violation of human rights and dignity, and likewise that female circumcision should not only be banned here, but we should expend significant effort to suppress the practice abroad, since it is so obviously repugnant. They will then argue that there is no reason not to import large masses of people for whom female circumcision is a well-cemented custom, on the assumption that all that is needed is "education" to conform them to our standards. By doing so, though, they make those very standards and the enforcement of them far more fraught then they ought to be; if we're basically all on the same page, there's no reason for a massive centralized enforcement apparatus to ensure conformity, but once we're trying to mass-conform large numbers of immigrant Muslims, the same mechanisms can be turned to mass-conform Jews or Christians like myself where we run afoul of the issue du jour. And we will run afoul of it, because the "common sense values" that the centralized enforcement apparatus would be hammering people into observably undergo large-magnitude swings under timescales of less than a decade.
The standard Liberal position is that our political and social processes, things like voting, legislating, the courts, a free press, the "marketplace of ideas" and so on, are sufficient to handle arbitrary differences in values. I used to believe that. I very much do not believe that any longer. It is not enough to simply punt to "the system" to handle differences in values. "The system" is priceless, but it is in fact a fragile thing, and if we treat it like an immutable fact of the universe it will not be there to pass on to our children.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico.
You send stealthy long-loiter-time surveillance drones over mexico. You use them to ID organized Cartel activity, cross-referencing electronic intel from the NSA. When you locate a concentration of Cartel activity, a stealthy plane drops a container from 35,000 feet, which pops open at 30,000 feet and spills out a hundred small anti-personnel drones. These drones fly down to the target area and messily unalive selected targets in the strike zone, recording high-quality video of exactly who they splatter in the process. No hellfires, no demolished buildings; half-pound directional frag charges, with close range and wide-angle video record of exactly who was hit and what they were doing.
You might not even need the planes; I bet we could rig a tomahawk or a reasonably stealthy cargo drone to deliver the payload. Make a supercut compilation of the footage, slap on an ISIS flag gif at the front and back, dub in a banging nasheed medley and sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar's at appropriate moments, then upload the videos to 4chan and shrug and Who, me? when anyone asks. That's how I'd aim to do it, were I God-Emperor.
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share.
This is the actual problem, but the Cartels are sufficiently odious that cutting the grass, in the Israeli parlance, holds considerable appeal. Realistically, the goal would not be to eliminate all narcotics cartels forever, but to add selective pressure against their worst excesses. Make it clear that when they, for example, haul a bunch of people off a bus and make them fight to the death with sledgehammers, they and their bosses stand a significant chance experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly as a direct consequence.
Maybe it's still not worth the effort. I am a fairly committed non-interventionist, and there is certainly a strong non-interventionist argument to be made here. But these are in fact some of the most vile people on earth, the harm they cause is considerable, and they're right fucking there. Maybe we really do have to just put up with them indefinitely as they rape and murder and torture and poison and corrupt both our biggest neighbor and our own citizens. But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
There are literally open air drug markets in major US cities! The US doesn't have the political capacity to do it, they don't have the legal capacity and the willpower to actually wage a war on drugs (as opposed to a pretend war on drugs).
A war on drugs is much harder to wage when you must at least nominally abide by constitutional protections of the legal rights of the enemy and conduct the war through the standardized channels of the domestic justice system. Hunting the cartels would have none of these restrictions; the NSA and CIA and other alphabet soup agencies could be off the leash de jure rather than merely de facto, and there would be no need for legal entanglements of any kind. This does not make such a campaign a good idea, but if it's a bad idea, it's for reasons other than these in particular.
The first episode of Brooklynn 99.
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