GBRK
16hr ago
I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.
The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.
GBRK
16hr ago
Haha fair enough. I used to have a tv with a ui language set to french and never got around to changing it because i thought it was funny.
- ICE is not personally loyal to Trump
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
GBRK
1d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
GBRK
1d ago
I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
GBRK
1d ago
cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
GBRK
1d ago
Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?
GBRK
1d ago
I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.
GBRK
1d ago
No I haven't.
You explicitly said that the right to citizenship is a quality issued by a state. That excludes it from being a quality intrinsic to any individual.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation
There are self-consistent worldviews that include this statement and the idea that citizenship is wholly the province of the state to administer, but you can't then also imply "citizen children have a right to citizenship" without introducing new ideas that break self-consistently. For example, you said "and they need to have citizenship somewhere" but this is only true in the practical sense-- we've signed international agreements that in effect guarantee this, but if we're talking about changing how things are done in the first place, why not re-examine all the assumptions? If we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of noncitizens, we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of citizens. In the vast majority of cases we would, obviously but why take that for granted? With respect to your position about "reflecting the nation", we-- we are in effect deciding what the nation should look like. Why not decide that it shouldn't include this "indigenous underclass?"
and do what the rest of the world does.
The rest of the world is obviously terrible though. This should be self-evident from the fact that they're not america. Why would anyone want to make america less like america and more like... saudi arabia???
GBRK
1d ago
Maybe that's how the fight looks like in the next 5-10 years, but again, I think you're being insufficiently imaginative. Imagine instead a realignment so that the feuding sides are, "people should keep the sexual orientation and felt gender identity they're naturally predispositioned to" versus "we should precisely schedule changes in sexual and gender organization across several developmental thresholds to create well-behaved citizens." Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.
Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Any system that responds to external stimuli by altering itself to avoid repeating past behavior can suffer. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.
That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except a few near-human species (apes, elephants, cetaceans, etc), pets I irrationally love, and of course humans themselves. AI could be smarter than me but I'm still not going to give a shit if it suffers except insofar as it experiences specifically human suffering.
GBRK
2d ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
GBRK
2d ago
"States issue citizenship" is a good enough framing that I won't dispute it. But there a particular bullet I'm interested to see if you're willing to bite: "children could only inherit citizenship from their parents" does not imply "children should inherit citizenship from their parents." You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship. Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis, presumably to reward pro-social behavior, there are plenty of reasons why it should also exclude a particular citizen's baby from also having citizenship? That doesn't violate the citizen's rights-- nowhere in the constitution is it enumerated that citizens have a right to have citizen babies. All the relevant text is about the born or naturalized individual's rights.
GBRK
2d ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
GBRK
3d ago
Surely then you would need to assign first world citizenship to the entire planet?
In point of fact I do support open borders, so I wouldn't strictly rule out everyone else eventually getting citizenship. But citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Anyone who wants to come to America should. Anyone who wants to stay in America should contribute. The only reason to give any baby citizenship is because we assume that they will contribute to the common project of our nation. Now, I'm pretty darn sure that the median baby-- including the median immigrant baby-- is eventually a net-positive to america. But if I wasn't, I would advocate for increasing the responsibilities of citizenship until we could be confident that they eventually will be.
GBRK
3d ago
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."
We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.
thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are
Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"
That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...
A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor
A + B ⇒ C
So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)
Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.
I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:
It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,
But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.
this interesting chart,
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.
GBRK
6d ago
And that without skin in the game of some form
The children belongs, from birth, to the united states of america. They cannot renounce their citizenship without paying an exit tax. That is skin in the game. The phrase " entitling the child to benefits that might well be unavailable in the home country" is logically incoherent on its face because america is the child's home country. The child doesn't get any extra special bonus benefit for illegally immigrating-- the child is just an american citizen, and always has been, and gets no more or less liberty or responsibility than any other american citizenship.
And therefore creating benefits for the baby by necessity creates benefits for tge family that created the baby.
No. Not, "by necessity." As a practical measure. There's a difference. From the moment the child is born on American soil the USA arrogates the right to seize the child from their parents, put it in protective custody, and kick its parents out of the country. The USA doesn't usually do that because it rarely makes sense to force taxpayers to raise the child instead of its parent, but the right to do so exists, is sometimes applied, and is uncontroversially constitutional. (There are laws that limit how often the government does this in practice, but the very fact that they are laws, rather than amendments, is the proof in the pudding). Parents are not their children, and children are not their parents. Whether the parent has any right to be in the country has no bearing on whether the child has a right to be in the country-- the child's citizenship belongs to them and them alone. Abrogating someone's rights based on the behavior of their relatives is simply not compatible with an individualist, democratic state.
GBRK
6d ago
I'm aware of that-- pending confirmation that I actually understood Crowstep's position and we weren't just talking past each other, I planned to argue that assigning people special hereditary rights is fundamentally incompatible with democratic civilization and the notion that "all men are created equal".
GBRK
6d ago
The gist of your argument is, "illegal immigration is bad. Receiving the benefits of having a citizen child is good. If we link the latter to the former we are giving people good things for doing bad things. This is unjust." I disagree with the premise (illegal immigration is better than legal immigration because they have to pay taxes but don't get welfare), but admit that it's logically sound. It's also, however, missing the point. Birthright citizenship isn't about the immigrant, it's about the baby. Yes, those children benefit from schools and healthcare-- but so do the children of american citizens. Neither the child by blood nor the child by soil have a "right" to that education or healthcare, but we as a society have pragmatically and compassionately decided to invest in our children in the (well founded) hope that they will one day repay the favor. And in the meantime, we expect our children-- of citizens and noncitizens both-- to earn their rights to vote and run for office, as delimited by the laws that make explicit our social contract.
If you think that education or healthcare are bad investments, you're welcome to argue for that. If you think that illegal immigrants should receive fewer benefits for giving birth to citizen children, you're welcome to argue that too. If you think our social contract asks for too little in return for too much.... well, I'm already pretty sympathetic to that position. But that's all orthogonal to my argument that blood confers no special qualities relative to soil.
GBRK
6d ago
It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
I think you believe that citizenship is an entitlement that belongs to the parent, rather than the child, and that they distribute it according to their will. In that model, it would make sense to say that, mechanically, "giving a child citizenship" is equivalent to "giving their parent the right to make their children citizens." Consequently, you perceive birthright citizenship as a reward to illegal immigrant parents.
Is that accurate?
GBRK
6d ago
It's deeply physical.
Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.
GBRK
6d ago
Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it.
Even if I were to accept that description of illegal immigrants as being accurate, it still fails to describe the children of illegal immigrants. Babies are not rewarded by citizenship, they are entitled to it.
It's crazy to criticize magic soil when apparently you believe in magic water. Having a particular genetic sequence or ancestral tree doesn't establish responsibilities and liberties any better than touching a particular patch of soil. Actually, it is explicitly, legally worse at transmitting those things.
I know a little bit about medical billing and data standards since I work in the industry and more and more. i'm pulled toward the idea that heallthcare is so irreducably complex the only way to cut the red knot is either with completely privatized and unregulated healthcare mixed with trustbusting to break local emergency room monipolies, or by creating a single payer system empowered to ruthlessly negotiate for its own interests. Trying to have a system where a government pays for only the statistically sickest individuals (the poor and old) is just the worst of all possible worlds. (My preference is for single payer, but I have a certain sympathy for the idea of completely obliterating the pharmaceutical patent system, making EVERYTHING legal OTC, and letting God sort it out.)
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