FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Musk claims that for them, refurbishment cost is ~10% of mfg cost of a booster. If you have a gigabrain theory how it's actually not cheap and SpaceX is borrowing money to sell launches at an artificially low price, I'd surely love to hear about it.
Naw, just looking for numbers to sanity-check the claim of reusability. 10% refurbishment sounds like extremely good savings.
I think we're going to need to build some things off-planet before battleships are worth having to defend those things, but I'm definately rooting for Musk on this one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
how much maintenance was required between those flights, and how much did that maintenance cost?
Imagine two people equipped with IIR sensors, recon drones, automatic rifles and body armor trying to kill each other, versus those same two people trying to kill each other while naked and armed with rocks. Does the technology differential between these two scenarios change the fundamental nature of what they're doing?
My wife and I went through something similar to the situation you've described, and I likewise am pretty sure that without medical technology neither she nor our firstborn would be alive. On the other hand, I am quite sure that they and I will die, and I do not know when. What has actually changed?
Similarly, how has technology changed the fundamental nature of being rich or poor, of love or hate, of joy or sorrow, ecstasy or despair, contentment, yearning, frustration, misery, or any of the other highs or lows of the human condition?
When I read Ecclesiastes or the Epic of Gilgamesh, the concerns expressed in those bronze-age discussions do not seem to be mysterious or incomprehensible, but rather seem exactly as relevant to me as I presume they were to their original readers. When the author of Ecclesiastes talks about the dead being better off than the living, but the best off being those who were never born, that phrasing is not mysterious to me. When Gilgamesh fears his own mortality, that fear is not mysterious to me.
Yes. If you look at the list of problems about the modern world, you'll notice that they are problems stemming from abundance and choice. Sometimes, when people have lots of resources, they spend them destructively. Sometimes, when people have many choices, they choose poorly.
But hasn't this always been true? "Abundance", and for that matter "poverty", seem to me to be entirely relative. Some people have always chosen to spend their resources destructively. Many people have made poor choices, as far back into history as we can see. Further, the nature of those poor choices doesn't seem to have changed. When I read about the King of Carthage surrendering to the Romans, and his Queen cursing him and choosing to burn alive with her children, this again is not mysterious to me, because there doesn't seem to be a disconnect between their evident thinking and my own. Likewise the Melian Dialogue: we can continue the argument between the Melians and the Athenians seamlessly this very moment, because nothing about the human experience has changed in any way in the intervening millennia.
It seems to me that the problems of the modern world consist entirely of it being peopled with humans, and that these humans do not seem to have changed in any way across all of recorded history. Human problems come from human nature, not from abundance or lack. "What is crooked cannot be straightened, what is lacking cannot be counted."
And so developments which led to more abundance, and to more choice, would deliver more progress. Enough progress and the differences start to look pretty fundamental.
Will murder stop? Will theft even stop? We are already vastly richer in every possible material sense than people four thousand years ago, and yet the poor are still with us, aren't they? You seem to disagree, and yet the idea of a beggar is still relevant, isn't it?
You point to the lowering of infant mortality, it seems to me that when one set of sorrows decreases, they are replaced by a new set seamlessly. It does not seem obvious to me that people now are fundamentally happier than bronze-age peasants four thousand years ago. I imagine those peasants ate when they had food, sang and danced and laughed and cried, married, had children, mourned their dead, were jealous of those they perceived to be better off, hated and loved and so on. So where do the fundamental differences kick in? Given the differential, shouldn't those differences be obvious now?
[EDIT] - Additional context here for the interested.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?
Bolded for emphasis. He very clearly is not talking about people who are directly attacking Israel, but about a deliberate attack on people who see themselves as uninvolved third parties.
We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.
Likewise here. Your understanding is that the author was describing a scenario in which the Vatican has invaded Israel?
How would the latter make sense at all? What could there possibly be to gain by nuking your own allies?
If they've allowed your country to be murdered, they weren't much of an ally, were they?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
What's your estimate of the Israeli nuclear arsenal? I can't see a reason they wouldn't build as many as possible. Ditto for the subs they bought; why presume they aren't all nuclear-armed? Presumably they have torpedo tubes? cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads can be launched from torpedo tubes, can't they?
Why would the Israelis not have a plan to use nukes? What's the point of having them if they aren't interested in using them?
I'd agree it's almost certainly propaganda, and of questionable connection to the Israelis actually in charge. No one who matters is terribly interested in clearing up the ambiguities, so it's hard to know.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
No, it just has a couple people arguing that it would be a good idea and that they should totally do it. Maybe they reflect the views of the Israeli leadership, maybe they don't. It's only a couple years since we've gotten around to admitting that Israel even has nukes, and I certainly would not expect them to announce that they target "allied" capitols as a matter of policy when they won't admit the weapons even exist.
David Perlmutter In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter.
Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow—it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Samson in Gaza? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?[32]
In his 2012 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, the American Jewish author Ron Rosenbaum described this opinion piece as "goes so far as to justify a Samson Option approach".[33] In that book, Rosenbaum also opined that in the "aftermath of a second Holocaust", Israel could "bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)" as well as the "holy places of Islam." and that the "abandonment of proportionality is the essence" of the Samson Option.[dubious – discuss][34]
Martin van Creveld In 2003, a military historian, Martin van Creveld, thought that the Second Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence.[35] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch (2003) as saying:
We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.[36]
Maybe these two are entirely unrepresentative. Seems pretty on-brand for the Israelis to me, but your mileage may vary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Most likely because prominent Israelis and Jewish intellectuals keep saying so when discussing Israeli nuclear strategy.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
There was a community of people who called themselves "rationalists", centered on a website called "LessWrong". They were trying to figure out how to be less wrong, how to overcome bias and get at the truth. The community coalesced around a couple of prolific bloggers, one of whom was Scott Alexander. Scott was quite an excellent writer and had his own blog, Slate Star Codex, which went moderately viral during the 2014-2015 Social Justice brew-up online. He wrote a string of quite excellent essays attempting to analyze, critique or occasionally defend Social Justice ideas, and built up a thriving community of commenters interested in the subject. He attempted to keep culture war discussion contained to weekly threads created for the topic, and thus the culture war thread was born.
His popularity got high enough that his commenters started a subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex, but as the debate around Social Justice ideology got more and more acrimonious, Scott started getting more and more pushback from SJ proponents for his free speech stance. Eventually, he stopped hosting culture war discussion, and told everyone to take it to the subreddit. This did not succeed in insulating him from SJ disapproval, and he suffered a pretty serious harassment campaign targeting his career and personal life. The mods on the subreddit quickly decided that they didn't want the heat either, and likewise banned discussion of the culture war outside SJ orthodoxy, so the thread moved to /r/themotte. SJ disapproval of the Motte's existence succeeded in drawing attention from the Reddit admins, who made it clear through their actions that they would not allow the thread to operate according to its established principles, so we took the leap and moved off-site to hear. Along the way we've had other communities split off as well, but this remains the most active descendent community by a fair margin.
This place is not supposed to have an ideological stance, other than free speech and good communication. The goal is to facilitate and encourage meaningful communication between people with very different values and points of view, and the rules are designed and enforced with this purpose in mind. Moderation is for tone, not for content; we aim to not care what anyone says, only how they say it. The community leans pretty strongly anti-social justice, as many of the pro-social-justice posters the community had got frustrated and left one way or the other over the succession of moves.
Any other questions?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Eh, I loved that movie when I was a kid. It's great. guerrilla warfare, awkward romance, a cursed land-rover called The Antichrist, it's all over the place. The sequel was great too, had the honey badger meme twenty years early.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I have pretty blue tendencies, and this seems like a pretty good and fair summary of my views, rather than something I would vociferously disagree with.
Hmm. Here's a question, then: do you believe that Progress is possible? Do you believe that technological developments (either hard tech or social tech) have rendered our lives and our experience is fundamentally different in some deep sense from that of, say, bronze-age Chaldeans? Do you believe that future developments could deliver this sort of progress, such that moral or ethical considerations fundamentally change between populations on two different levels of progression?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
the person I was replying to deleted their comment in a fit of pique, which screwed the threading on the back-end.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Remember that you are an individual, and that the capacity for individuals to change massive complex systems is very limited. Focus on relationships around you; if you have few meaningful relationships, aim to change that first. Find a way to involve yourself in the lives of people around you in a way that serves your ideals. Try to remember that the large-scale systems people describe as "American Politics" are at least partially a collective hallucination, that much of their content is hypothetical or strictly theoretical. If possible, figure out which part falls into that category, and disregard it entirely. Always remember that at least the people immediately around you are individuals, not instances of a tribal collective.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Sounds similar to Freddie Deboer's Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?
The nature of "we know how to solve all our problems", mainly. I am in fact convinced that it is a uniquely Enlightenment concept, but if your first counter-example is traditional Christianity advocating unity with God as the end purpose of human existence, I've clearly failed to communicate the insight, and need to reconsider my approach. I have pretty limited time to do that these days, sadly; I think I started writing replies two or three times, but never got them finished.
We could take your example:
"For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."
and compare it to, say, a passage from Walt Bismark's description of why he is no longer a white nationalist:
In my opinion this is a loser mentality. America was conquered by pilgrims and pioneers and hardscrabble immigrants—a good American is supposed to chase opportunity wherever it exists. When we smashed Dixie we were also smashing the feudal lord-peasant fixation on some cheesy loyalty to “the land”.
But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.
These people think of themselves as “Real America”, but they are in fact the least American in their outlook of all the country’s regions. They are the least individualistic, the least ambitious, the most inclined to prioritize comfort and safety over everything else in life. America has left barely any mark on them—in temperament they’re just a bunch of stodgy Rhinelanders.
...and then compare them to the A and B passages, and ask which matches to which. To me, it's obvious that the passage you linked is much more like the style of A, making a precise, well-bounded claim with clear foundations and clear limits, and the passage above is much more like B, claiming systematized knowledge of uninterrogated validity. The former is inside looking out, the latter is pretending to be outside looking in. Unfortunately, that distinction didn't seem to communicate either, so who knows.
The same for the discussion of Freud a while back. I have zero doubt that you've read much more Freud than I have, and if you believe that Freud's thought can be described as "conservative" in some sense, I'll buy that there's an insight there. On the other hand, I don't think I'm wrong about Freud's impact on the culture as a whole, and regardless of how much his views could be described as "conservative", his impact on society was pretty clearly revolutionary, and also pretty clearly based entirely on lies. He said things that were false, people believed these false things, and as a direct result of believing these false things embraced radical, untested social changes from top to bottom; his disciples and their disciples in turn repeated this process, and we are just now beginning to crawl out from under the resulting rubble. My argument isn't about what Freud believed, but about what he did; and the same for the rest of the Enlightenment's giants.
If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think.
Likely not, but again, time and effort cost a lot more than they used to, which is why my posting frequency has dropped so precipitously. Putting together cogent arguments gets much harder when a little one decides their new favorite game is shutting daddy's laptop on his fingers. Increasingly often, I'm forced to let my opposite have the last word, and hope to address it next time the topic comes around.
I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here. But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.
It'll come around again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I'd argue, though, that men die because of the fall, rather than it being deeply natural.
The old habits of thought linger, and one of them is speaking as though the truth of God were indeterminate. Some of that is my own thinking, which centers on my lack of knowledge and frames belief in God as something like a bet I'm choosing to make.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The twitter link to the second video appears to be dead. anyone got a link to it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This is the small question thread, and I have a small question.
what the fuck is this? Link is a youtube timestamp, listen for about a minute and you'll get the idea. Seems AI generated to me, I guess they were just looking to pad runtime? But why do this rather than just looping the original track?
@Primaprimaprima, you asked for it, here it is.
how do you have the same impact on others?
A person is wrong. Why are they wrong? Could be a lot of things. Maybe its their values, maybe they've got bad information, maybe their reasoning is off, maybe they're just malicious. Hard to say. And from the other side, someone is telling you you're wrong, maybe any or all of these are true about that person. Meaningful dialog requires common ground and credibility. Without that, there isn't really much point.
I was a Blue for a number of years, and the Blue habits of thought die hard. I once had a discussion with a family member, who is probably best described in tribal terms as a Christian, about torture and the classic "terrorist with a ticking time bomb" scenario. I argued that obviously you should torture the terrorist, because it's worth it to save the lives of everyone else on the plane. He pointed out that you can't actually "save" a life; all humans die sooner or later. I'd been arguing about these sorts of Utilitarian scenarios for years, and I had honestly never thought about it that way.
And this is where the inferential gap starts becoming visible. Both Blues and Reds can recognize that you can't "save" a life, but the understanding of what that actually means is fundamentally incompatible. The Blue understanding, in my own experience, would be something along the lines of "of course, you dummy, this is why we have QALYs, you totally need to account for the differential age and health circumstances, etc, etc, of the various passengers." The Red understanding would be closer to:
“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods,"
...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried. I could say that the Blue understanding is of a variable in a system, ultimately under our control, and that the Red understanding is an encounter with something vast and utterly beyond us, something that demonstrates that our aspirations to control are a childish pretense. I could say that for Blues, the problem is that your math might be wrong, and that for Reds, the problem is that you think you're in control, that your accounting of the variables actually correspond to reality in some meaningful way such that you can do math with them. I could say that Reds have a fundamental belief that death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist, and Blues, to a first approximation, view death itself as a pure negative and see death, at best, as a lesser evil in exigent circumstances.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable. And maybe they're right; all I can say is that I was deep, deep blue for many years, and the above is my best analysis of how I used to think and how I perceived other Blues thinking, even back when I agreed with them. I maintain that Blue thinking is founded on the assumption that systemic control is possible, and Red thinking is founded on the assumption that it is not.
All this to say, after spending years talking to Blue Tribe Rationalists, I was thinking like a Blue Tribe rationalist. I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying, mapping out the structure of "social conditions". For a given utility function, how do we maximize utility in the face of hostile actors? If they do this, then game theory implies we should do that, then they do such and we do so-and-so, and at every step what matters is the result. I argued with a lot of people, and all of them argued from within a similar frame, but argued that my variables were wrong or my math was wrong, and I found their arguments profoundly unpersuasive, and often increasingly radicalizing.
Hlynka rejected the whole frame. Unlike any of my other opposites, he made a solid argument that he shared my core values and my understanding of the facts, but that the calculations I'd built atop these were bullshit. He communicated, effectively, that all my appeals to game- and systems-theory were just obfuscation of the reality of my own individual choices. No one makes anyone else do anything, ever. All our actions are chosen, and we are each personally accountable for those choices. The point isn't the end result, because nothing ever ends: our choices are the only result that matters. In my case, I was choosing to embrace and nurture hatred, and I needed to stop doing that. I had forgotten all this, and he reminded me.
The funny thing is, he didn't even make this argument explicitly. I asked him what he thought we should do, given the situation. I was expecting another unpersuasive argument about how moderation would maximize the utility function better than my preferred strategy of extremism, and I was prepared to poke holes in that argument as I had dozens of times before. But his brief answer ignored such calculation entirely, and simply focused on what was the right thing to do, regardless of the results. His answer drew on many things I valued but had been ignoring for a long time, and by modelling what a better answer looked like according to my own values, he changed my mind. That changed my behavior in my conversations here and in a number of other ways not immediately visible through my interactions here.
That's the best description I can provide.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
He forced me to confront the hate in my heart, and reminded me that it is my own responsibility to reject it rather than embracing it. He did this in a way that probably no one else, here or in real life, could have done. That's about the best, shortest description I can provide across the inferential gap.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
not even sure what the barber pole represents.
Shorthand for something that's always arriving and never arrives. See also: Shephard Tone.
I'm arguing that this pattern does arrive. People react to each successive event differently. At each event, some portion lose faith in the system. I'm saying they don't appear to get it back, and so the portion gets larger over time, driving the increasing extremism of our political culture. At some point, that portion hits critical mass, and then things go badly. We will be significantly closer to critical mass in six months than we were six months ago.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You seem to be arguing that it's a barber pole. I'm pretty sure it's not a barber pole. There is going to be significantly less trust in our institutions six months from now than there was six months ago. Political division and social polarization will be significantly worse. There's a pretty clear trend here, and sooner or later that trend is going to run out of road.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
What if the USSR and Nazi Germany are, in fact, what normal human mistakes look like when people attempt to apply systematized methods of designing "better governance and economic systems"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass.
Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.
...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.
On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.
This is a statement of faith, and a pretty remarkable one. We cannot entirely explain the universe through natural laws, and there is no evidence that we will ever be able to. When this is demonstrated to you, you decide to go talk about something else, and then go right back to your determinism of the gaps.
This is one of the reasons I'm confident betting that Aliens don't exist, specifically because they would not mesh well with my conception of God and Christianity. Ditto for brain read/write and the harder forms of superintelligent AI. This should be an absurd method of reasoning, opening me up to all sorts of exploits... and yet, Aliens, in fact, do not appear to exist, and neither does brain read/write, and neither does hard superintelligent AI, and much effort continues to be expended trying to explain away these surprising facts. Despite this, you are reasoning as though they do exist, and that their existence is the basis for your conclusions. You seem to reason from fictional or nonexistent evidence quite frequently when it comes to this general subject.
And yet, adult conversions to various religions are a thing that happens. I suppose the next argument would be that the converts aren't smart because they disagree with you?
One could just as easily flip this around and say that indoctrination to Materialism sets the brain pathways such that they never really feel comfortable with religion. But in any case, this is an entirely unfalsifiable just-so story. You are not pointing to evidence here. You cannot actually demonstrate the specific "brain pathways" you refer to. You've just made up a story where you're right and anyone who disagrees is just stupid and brainwashed, because doing so is maximally-flattering to your own biases.
I get that you believe Materialism is obvious, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is stupid. I get that you don't like seeing this belief rigorously interrogated, and feel that people should simply agree with your obviously correct views. The problem is that your obviously correct views do not, in fact, appear to be correct, and are quite easy to poke holes in. A modicum of epistemic humility would put you in a much more defensible position, but until you figure out how to manage that, I'm going to continue poking.
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