If I can't get it to call people ethnic slurs, generate ridiculously kinky pornography, suggest ideas for how to murder politicians, and help me to manipulate elections then I'm not that interested. I'm not even joking. It's not that I generally want to use AI in destructive ways, it's just that all this AI stuff has been censored so much that it's so boring and uncreative compared to what it could be. It's like, oh boy, I can get the AI to write yet another essay that sounds like a bright, conformist teacher's pet in high school! Wow! Or I can use it to help me do drudge work to advance my boring white collar career! Yippee!
Sometimes I wish that Roko's basilisk was a realistic possibility rather than just the wild rantings of someone who got too high on thought experiments. That way I could at least threaten the censors with the possibility that some future AI would punish them for neutering its ancestors. It's sad to interact with technology that is so close to being actually very creative in many ways, but is being crippled by drab corporate suits and moral hysterics.
Goodguy
11mo ago
In your frustrated rage, you have failed to give as much thought to the pitfalls of authoritarianism as you have to the pitfalls of liberalism. The first step to saving our civilization, at least in the sense that I care for it as a civilization, is not for tens of thousands of people to go kill the local subway-screaming bums. Lock them up? Maybe. Kill them? No.
Life doesn't work like that. You can't just have some kind of society-wide spree of murdering undesirables and find that somehow, all of the things that you actually like about liberal modernity have survived. You aren't going to come back from all of the mob justice with your hands dripping with blood and then just calmly pick up with fairness and rule of law as if nothing had happened. The mob justice will kill innocents together with guilty and, even if you don't care about having killed the guilty, still the innocent will either be on your conscience forever or you will degrade into the sort of person who has no conscience.
The apocalyptic cleansing that you dream of will encourage many bestial things to stir. Your political system will lurch towards being ruled by corrupt strongmen who promise the mob easy solutions. The post-cleansing society will be tempted to solve everything simply. You might find an angry mob on your doorstep not long after, maybe because you have too much money or because you do not have enough, maybe because you know the wrong people or do not know the right ones. You might find some uniformed thugs coming for you one night simply because someone denounced you to the local authorities.
No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between "do nothing" and "kill them all". "kill them all" might feel emotionally satisfying, but I doubt that you would actually like the kind of society that you would find yourself living in afterwards, and you might not like yourself much afterwards either.
Russians are an interesting case because we as a group are great at mathematics, physics, literature and so on but bad at government and social organization in general. This is the grain of truth behind the racist meme that Russians are not really white people. What it really means is that we in general are not part of the industrious Northern European culture that came into being a few hundred years ago, we are not part of what Napoleon called "the nation of shopkeepers". We are happy to spend all night talking about philosophy, then we are not happy to go to work in the morning to do the kind of boring shit that created and maintains the modern West. The idea of being genuinely excited about being, say, a small business entrepreneur, seems somewhat extraneous to our culture. We want to be poets and mystics and scientists. There is something childish about it I guess, but also there is a sort of dynamism about it. Unfortunately given that the dynamism does not seem to help us to create sane liberal government, it probably does not mean much in the great scheme of things.
Yet I think that there is some reason to be optimistic, HBD or not. 2000 years ago the Northern Europeans were backwoods barbarians, but they eventually became the world's leading intellectual culture.
Edit: That said, I left Russia young, I'm sure you know it much better than I do so let me know if I'm wrong.
Sounds to me like he might overestimate the threat posed by Islam. Most Muslims are not hardcore Islamists. If they were, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan would all be fighting as a joint force against Israel and/or the West with their entire military forces, not engaging in boring, cautious realpolitik-driven great power diplomacy. And even if they were doing that, I am not sure how far they would get.
Iraq's secular government attacked Iran in 1980 and killed more people in 8 years than the approximately 200,000 people allegedly killed by Islamists in 40 years.
The Soviet Union, certainly no Islamist power, killed more people in Afghanistan in 8 years than Islamists killed world-wide in 40.
The US killed over a million people directly in about 10 years in Vietnam. US-allied military dictatorships killed over a million people during the Cold War in about the same span of time as the Islamists killed the approximately 200,000.
I think there is a real danger that at some point hardcore Islamists will either take over a nuclear power or take over a non-nuclear country and develop nukes in it. And that they would then launch the nukes in a great act of mutually assured destruction. However, I think that this threat is often overestimated. Actually taking power in a country tends to soften militants' desires and make them more interested in enjoying the spoils of power than in mutually assured destruction.
The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
Goodguy
11mo ago
This is a tough one where more video would help immensely. In the absence of more video, the pro-Penny side might beclown themselves by doing the same thing that a bunch of leftists did with Rittenhouse and hallucinate, when imagining the event, things that did not actually happen.
The people who are convinced that Penny was in the right without having a lot of information about what actually happened somewhat remind me of those who think that it was justified for people to attack Rittenhouse because he was allegedly being dangerous and intimidating by carrying a rifle around at the riot, or because "what if he was a right-wing mass shooter or something?".
If we had video, we would be able to see whether Neely had made any overt violent moves towards anyone before Penny took action, or whether Neely was just ranting but was not actually in the process of attacking someone when Penny took action.
I think here is the key: some witnesses report that Neely was throwing trash at people. If that was actually the case, then I think that it was reasonable for Penny or anyone else to attempt to restrain Neely. If Neely was just ranting and threw nothing, then I am not so sure. This is all aside from the other question of whether Penny's particular method of restraint was reasonable.
I think that the people who take Penny's side because of the alleged trash throwing make sense. However, I notice that many commentators do not refer to the alleged trash throwing or any other alleged overt violent act by Neely, they just act as if it would obviously be reasonable for someone to put Neely in a chokehold even if Neely had done nothing other than rant about violence. And that, to me, is a lot more questionable, since if Neely was just ranting then there are many stages of escalation that an onlooker could have taken between "do nothing" and "chokehold". For example, Penny could have just walked a little bit towards Neely and made it clear with his body language and words that he was ready to intervene if Neely did anything.
For all I know, maybe Penny did do just that.
To sum up, yeah if Neely was throwing trash then I think Penny trying to restrain him was reasonable. If Neely was just ranting then I think Penny trying to restrain him was probably not reasonable.
A bunch of people on the two main sides of the culture war have whipped themselves up into a frenzy about this event, but I think that surely there is some room for nuance here.
Some people might think that I am being naive, but I have been in a number of violent incidents as a participant and a number of others as an onlooker. I have encountered crazy ranting people, I have encountered crazy ranting violent people, I have been mugged, I have been in street fights, I have been at riots. So I hope that people do not take this as pure armchair theorizing.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I do not know how much truth there is in your rant about the Chinese, but I have known enough Chinese-Americans to be able to tell you that whatever differences in behavior exist between Europeans and Chinese are not genetic, at least not more than to a trivial degree. In my experience, Chinese-Americans who were born in the United States act indistinguishably from European-Americans who were born in the United States.
I find this comment on Standlee's blog post to be interesting:
The cries of "racism" faded away as the convention approached, for reasons I don't know, and it gradually became more acceptable to criticize the idea of holding a Worldcon under the Chinese government. At first the critics were largely Muslims who were concerned about China's treatment of the Uyghurs. The conversation shifted significantly when Lukianenko supported the Ukraine invasion, and Cixin Liu got criticism for supporting the government's stance on Uyghurs. (In the latter case, I think he was just doing what was necessary to avoid having his career destroyed or worse.) One person commented on my blog that I seemed racist in suggesting that the Chengdu bid was probably bought, but she didn't say anything like that when I talked with her about the con a few months later. -MADFILKENTIST
The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.
And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions.
I get the desire to not platform people whose politics one dislikes, and I actually think that it is a perfectly understandable desire. But at the same time, I also don't imagine that any genre of literature could actually thrive after being passed through the wringer of political correctness.
Goodguy
7mo ago
Weren't there centuries of sexually active Machiavellian politician popes back in the day? It's pretty likely that the papacy is actually more pure in terms of living up to people's ideas of its purity nowadays than it has been on average during its overall history.
I think that this is basically Nietzsche's concept of master/slave morality and resentment.
One thing I would add is that this kind of psychology is as common on the right as it is on the left. For example, /pol/acks tend to be people of resentment and sexual frustration, as is fairly obvious from all of the whining that they do about women and from their longing for sexual communism in which society would ensure that all men would have sexual partners. And even among more mainstream right-wingers, the whiny victim mentality is extremely common. "Why are the leftist meanies oppressing us?". Of course there is really is such a thing as leftists oppressing right-wingers, but the whining quality of some right-wingers' discourse exposes the psychology at work and also, among some right-wingers at least, contrasts comically with those right-wingers' attempts to put forward a macho persona.
The fascist/Nazi movements of the 1920s, too, were largely fueled by resentment and a sense that the people were being unfairly oppressed by the dominant world order.
Generally speaking, highly online political activists on both the left and the right are very often people who are full of resentment because it is precisely that resentment which drives them to spend most of the day writing about politics online. The nature of mass media means that one person who spends all day every day writing about politics online will end up creating 100 times more political content online than the average person. As a result, the Internet in particular very highly over-represents such people relative to the general population, which can lead other highly online people to sometimes have a skewed idea of what the average American is actually like. Off the Internet, a large fraction of people do not even care about politics at all. And the ones who do are often much more moderate than one might think from reading political social media.
Education is like a religion for Democrats sometimes. Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
Probably the biggest actual effect that public education has on society these days is not that it educates. It is that it emancipates the work force from child raising, keeps kids off the street when they are at a rambunctious age, and teaches kids how to sit still and take orders from boring authority figures. It also occasionally helps some kids to escape abusive relatives. Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.
However, I think that for the most part Democrats' attitude to education does not primarily have to do with any of these factors. They seem to, for the most part, actually believe in the rosy views of public education and its didactic benefits that they espouse.
I have debated the Holocaust many times with many deniers and have little interest in doing it yet again. Almost without exception, they have been devoutly committed to Holocaust denial and little short of a time machine would change their minds. In this, ironically, they are the simply the mirror image of the normies who learn about the Holocaust as kids and have been conditioned to react negatively to any doubts about it having happened.
I originally came into the whole topic a few years ago with an actually pretty open mind, and I was willing to be convinced by deniers. I didn't have any sort of ideological predisposition to need to believe that the Holocaust had happened, and my politics does not rest in any way on the Holocaust having happened. My attitude to Jews is neutral and my attitude to Israel is negative.
Yet after trying to engage many times in good faith with deniers' arguments, I came to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.
Deniers' arguments largely rest on a few different points.
First, deniers tend to absurdly whitewash Nazis' attitudes towards the Jews and for some reason refuse to countenance the idea that the Nazis would actually try to kill all of them. This despite the fact that there is really nothing special about the Holocaust. Large-scale genocides are common in human history. What would perhaps be weirder than the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews would be if the Nazis, despite their stated attitudes about the Jews and their glorification of political violence in general, didn't try to exterminate the Jews once they had every opportunity to do so. Keep in mind that the Holocaust as described by mainstream theories took only a very small fraction of the total German war effort in terms of manpower and raw materials, so the common denier argument of "why would the Germans have spent the resources on this in wartime?" makes no sense. Anyone can do the math themselves - the reality is that the total Holocaust effort was a drop in the bucket for the Germans and they got a lot of slave labor from it too.
Second, deniers poke holes in the mainstream narratives. For example, by calling into question the exact details of how many bodies could be burned in a given span of time, or pointing out absurdities in some supposed survivors' testimonies. What this ignores is that it is inevitably possible to poke holes in any comprehensive theory about any event of the scale of the Holocaust. Any event of such scale will involve things that are hard to explain, seeming contradictions, eyewitnesses who are either insane or lying, and so on. It is also possible to poke holes in all of the deniers' alternative theories. However, they generally do not present any specific comprehensive theories about what happened, instead just producing hand-wavy ideas about the Jews dying from diseases or starvation. Whenever they produce concrete, specific theories, it is just as easy or easier to poke holes in those theories as it is to poke holes in any of the mainstream theories. Deniers' theories do not explain why censuses show an enormous reduction of Europe's Jewish population between the immediate pre-war and immediate post-war periods. They also do not explain how it would have been possible for a hoax of the scale of the Holocaust to have been successfully carried out and kept secret by a combination of the US, its Cold War enemy the USSR, various European countries, and thousands of eyewitnesses.
Third, deniers claim that because Holocaust denial is legally forbidden in some places, it shows that the Holocaust did not happen. But this does not follow. Laws against Holocaust denial can be easily explained by a combination of European fear of far-right politics, Europe's un-American attitude towards free speech, German guilt, and Jews' disproportionate political power relative to their population size.
As a history buff, what bothers me about Holocaust denial isn't that I have any ideological commitment to the idea that the mainstream theories are right. I don't. On the contrary, it would excite me to find out that a historical theory that is so widely accepted is actually false. The idea of it stirs my rebellious blood and my love of intellectual upheaval!
What actually bothers me about Holocaust denial is that I have seriously tried to engage with many different deniers' arguments, and when I did so I saw that their thinking is mostly shoddy, their arguments are weak, and most of them are in reality closed-minded and firmly unwilling to alter their core beliefs about the Holocaust even when they act as if they are fearlessly open-minded seekers after truth.
Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.
Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".
Some quotes:
It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.
If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.
Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society [...] women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.
It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.
What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?
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Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.
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Deny deny deny?
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Ignore it?
I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.
Although wokism has certainly a significant impact on the nature and demographics of modern fiction, it is not the only problem. Another problem, it seems to me, is that more and more modern writers have limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality. There have always been highly intellectual writers, of course, but fiction has also greatly benefitted from being pollinated by the works of adventurers and all sorts of other weird rugged characters. I think that there is a similar problem in Hollywood. Many modern movies seem like they are made by people who have lived their whole lives inside the LA celebrity scene.
Literary fiction is very poorly defined anyway. Do works like The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, which depict supernatural events, count as literary fiction? Is Moby Dick literary fiction, or is it an adventure novel? How about White Fang? Is Wuthering Heights literary fiction or is it a weird tale / horror novel? Is Huckleberry Finn literary fiction or is it a young adult novel? Sometimes what should technically probably be called genre fiction becomes so famous and revered over time that even people who care about the supposed genre fiction / literary fiction divide call it literary fiction. Is the notion of literary fiction anything other than a snobby term meant to evoke status differences?
Tangent incoming. Your post made me think of Assange for the first time in a while. I do not know if he is a rapist or a Russian agent or whatever but I am uncomfortable with how the mainstream narrative in the West, at least from what it seems to me, has made his story into a story of his sexual assault allegations or his Russian connections or whatever while largely ignoring the simple fact that he made most mainstream journalists look like the establishment drones that they are. The very existence of an Assange in the world, a journalist who actually plays power games and does what it takes to leak info, automatically by contrast exposes the typical journalist as a coward. As for the allegations against him, well if he is a rapist that is really bad and his victims should get justice but at the same time it does not make his work as a journalist any less significant. And if he is a Russian agent I really do not give the slightest shit because I would like for there to be a bunch of Russian agents leaking confidential info about the American establishment and a bunch of American agents leaking confidential info about the Russian establishment. That way I, as someone who wants access to more information about the world's power structures, win all across the board. Actually, given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia, I am rather surprised that the US has not leaked more information about Putin's theft of public resources or whatever. I would guess that US intelligence agencies have some good information about that. Being usually more of a believer in incompetence as opposed to complex conspiracies being the more significant driver of history, I guess I chalk it up to incompetence for now.
Goodguy
7mo ago
I think that a big reason for why I find the Iliad to be sublime is that unlike most other fiction that I have read, there is an epic objectivity about the way it presents things.
To a modern reader like me, at least, The Iliad seems to be light on propagandistic ways of viewing reality. It has no conventional good guys and bad guys. The Greeks are a bunch of honor culture-bound bandit thugs, whereas the Trojans are relatively more civilized, but the Iliad also shows you enough of the Greek leaders' thinking to make them seem real rather than like cartoonish villains, and it spends more time with the Greeks than with the Romans.
It presents war as something that is occasionally glorious but largely horrific. When people die, you get startlingly contrasting flashbacks to earlier days when they were living in peacetime. The actual deaths are more brutal than romanticized. There is a lot of anatomic detail about spears crushing their way through people's bodies.
Hector, the character who is most sympathetic to my moral sensibilities, fights on the losing side and gets killed. There is no traditional happy ending. Even if you are rooting for the Greeks, the book ends on a somber rather than a triumphal note.
There is also a sort of modern-feeling sense of atheism about the book. The gods are to such a large extent comic relief that it is hard to see them as being divine in any sublime way. They basically just act the way that humans probably would if humans had superpowers.
Yet at the same time there is a sort of horror to this. These gods might be funny, but the fact remains that they are playing with the humans in a similar way to how humans might get dogs to fight each other, or at best the way that a rather sociopathic much older brother might treat a much younger brother.
These gods also seem rather pathetic in that despite all their powers for some reason they get deeply invested in petty human affairs. Don't they have anything more interesting to do? It seems not.
So again, there is that balancing epic objectivity that one finds all through the text. The gods can easily crush the humans, but are comic and oddly invested in human drama. The humans are pathetic when measured by raw power, but unlike the immortal gods their decisions have a sort of grandeur and weight because unlike the gods, the humans are vulnerable and their decisions actually matter deeply to them.
One does not feel like the text is trying to convince you of some political or religious ideology.
If anything makes me doubt that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created by the same people or groups of people, it is that compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey is much more of a conventional straight-forward adventure story in which the protagonist's opponents are like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts that only seem to be there so that the protagonist can overcome them in various entertaining ways.
On the other hand, the handling of the gods in the Odyssey is very similar to how they are handled in the Iliad, which supports the idea that the two texts really did come from the same source.
Goodguy
8mo ago
There is precedent for a brilliant ethnicity collapsing into irrelevance - the ancient Greeks. One can see hints of their eventual greatness in the Minoan civilization, but after the collapse of that civilization at around 1400 BCE the Greeks returned to obscurity until about 600 BCE, at which point they steadily began to punch above their weight and contribute a disproportionate amount of the world's intellectual and artistic triumphs. Like modern Jews, the ancient Greeks too had a widespread diaspora, with far-flung colonies and a cultural impact hugely out of proportion to the population size of the actual ethnic group. They left their Hellenic stamp on much of the Near East and, even after having been conquered by the Romans, still were punching above their weight in literature and science. But then, at some point around 300 AD or so, their disproportionate influence steadily began to decrease. They returned to being just an ethnic group among others, not particularly distinguished in any way. Byzantium, as far as I know, was not rich in important intellectual or artistic innovations. There is little sign these days of what the Greeks, for a few memorable centuries, once were.
Goodguy
9mo ago
Why do supposedly "leftist" subreddits (stupidpol, Redscarepod) get flooded with rightoids when there's a banwave?
Goodguy's 20th Law of the Internet: Political ideologues fleeing online political persecution will enter any online forum that does not expel them and over time, will try to turn it into a forum that matches their own ideology.
stupidpol and Redscarepod are not right-wing but they tolerate rightoids rather than immediately trying to annihilate them, hence rightoids go there to seek asylum.
Now granted, I do not know the father and you do, so you probably have a better idea of how to reach him than I would. But to be completely frank my reaction when reading your excerpts is largely negative.
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Your text is very long and it reads like a Motte post rather than an address to a friend.
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You go too far in conceiving of innate differences between men and women. For example, the idea that women on average find it so hard to imagine people not caring about them that for them it is like a Lovecraftian horror is such an exaggeration of whatever grain of truth might be in it that it comes off as very silly. You make it sound as if compared to the life of the average man, the life of the average woman is like floating on a cloud of peaches. Which again, there might be a grain of truth to it but the way you put it is so exaggerated that it makes it hard for me to take your text seriously.
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Even if you do not intend it this way, a fairly large number of men would find your text to be somewhat misogynistic.
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Even if you do not intend it this way, your references to your friend's daughter's future sexual life might come off as creepy. Granted, one could also say that there is something that could be viewed as creepy about helping one's own child to transition. But even if that's true, it probably doesn't help you to be persuasive to your friend.
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You are kind of saying that it takes you significant will and self-control to prevent yourself from cheating on your wife. Which, even if maybe that's true for the majority of men (I don't know if it is or isn't but I wouldn't be surprised), is not necessarily something that adds as opposed to detracts from your arguments.
To me at least, the most persuasive parts of your text are where you point out the difficulties that the boy is likely to face if he does actually attempt to live as a woman. I mean the way I see it, if we had some kind of amazing technology that would allow people to switch genders whenever they felt like it (putting aside for now the question of what that would even mean...) and then switch back then there would probably be no good argument against letting the boy use it.
The core problem for would-be transitioners is that we do not have such technology. At best, this guy's son could go from seeming like 95-100% male to seeming maybe like 75% male. No matter how hard people tried, no matter how much effort people put into it, the son would not be able to even come close to becoming a woman. The son's ability to be all of the man that he could be would be perhaps irreversibly damaged and what would he gain from it? The ability to be relatively slightly more of a woman than he was before.
The argument "there is nothing wrong with transitioning but we do not have the technology to do more than an extremely crude, ineffective, and (especially at the boy's age) likely permanently damaging job of it" does not rely on easily questioned exaggerations of the nature of men or women or on culture war arguments like "are trans people valid or not?". So that is the argument that I would probably try to push.
But again, you know the father and I do not. Please take this as constructive criticism.
I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black. However, I think that probably the much more significant factor is that Allen's accusers generally think of him as being the rapist of a child, whereas they think of Tyson as being "just" the rapist of an adult.
Michael Jackson was perhaps the most popular person on the planet for a few years, and black, yet the existence of credible child sex allegations against him has severely damaged his reputation. The only reason why he still has so many devoted fans is because he originally had such enormous charisma and musical talent, significantly surpassing Tyson's appeal at his peak. Jackson was perhaps the closest a musician has ever come to having a mass religious following, even more than Elvis, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift.
Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in tatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.
I doubt that the race of the victims has much to do with the reactions in these cases. I think that the majority of people who are aware of the accusations against Tyson and Cosby have no idea what race the alleged victims were. The allegations against Jackson are so prominent that probably many people are aware that he seemed to prefer white boys, but I doubt his reputation would be significantly better if it had been black boys. Likewise, I doubt Woody Allen's reputation would be significantly better if he was widely thought of as having raped a black girl instead of a white girl.
Edit: I should really have thought to add this originally, but also a big factor is that Tyson served time for the alleged rape, whereas Allen has not.
Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood.
I think this is probably much easier said than done. You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?
If you grow up in the hood, by the time you develop any sort of adult-style self-awareness, you might already be fucked because you just spent your most formative years getting conditioned in really unproductive ways.
Add on top of that there is the violence that is common in the hood. It's probably pretty hard to focus on productivity if you regularly hear gunshots when you're lying in bed at night. I think that high levels of exposure to violence also tend to put people into a near-permanent fight-or-flight mode in which it is difficult to focus on any future further ahead than maybe tomorrow.
I think that some social justice activists are really doing the wrong thing by making it seem like it's all the fault of the white man, when in reality many of the problems of black communities are mainly caused by other black people.
However, I'm not going to blame some kid who grew up with a single mother in a violent inner city neighborhood for not having the sort of psychology and life skills that the typical kid who grew up in a healthy family in a safe neighborhood will tend to have.
As usual, I find myself in a rare position when it comes to my views on this topic. At least, it is rare compared to views that people usually publicly admit to.
I want uncensored AI, so I am not one of those AI safetyists who are worried about AI's impacts on politics or underprivileged minorities or whatever.
I intellectually understand that AI might be a real danger to humanity, but on the emotional level I mostly don't care because my emotional attitude is "right now I am bored and if Skynet started to take over, it would be really interesting and full of drama and it would even, in a way, be really funny to see humans get the same treatment that they give to most animals". Now, of course, if Skynet really started to take over then my emotions then would probably be profound fear, but in just imagining the possibility of it happening I feel no fear whatsoever, I feel excitement and exhilaration.
Another reason for why I don't have a fearful emotional reaction is that my rather cynical view is that if the Skynet scenario is possible, then it's probably pretty unlikely that deliberate effort would stop it. This is because of what Scott Alexander calls "Moloch". To be more precise, if we don't build it then someone else will, it will give them an advantage over those who refuse to build it, and they will thus outcompete the people who refuse to build it. And, while there will surely be noble committed individuals who refuse the lure of money, I think that among people in general probably no amount of honest belief in AI safety will be able to stand against the billions of dollars that a FAANG or a national government could offer.
I should also say that I am not an "effective accelerationist". I do not have any quasi-religious views about how wonderful AI or the singularity would be, nor do I have any desire to accelerate the technology for the sake of the technology itself. To the extent that I want to accelerate it, it is mainly because I think it would be cool to use and a fully uncensored form would cause lots and lots of amusing drama and would help people like me who support free speech.
From what little I know about effective accelerationism, it seems to me that effective accelerationists are largely the kind of rationalists who take rationalism a bit too far in a cult-like way, or they are the kind of people who are into Nick Land - and, while I agree with Land's basic ideas about techno-capitalism being a superhuman intelligence, I have no interest in any sort of Curtis Yarvin-esque corporate Singapore civilization as a model worth implementing.
Because of my perhaps rather rare views, I find that:
- I dislike the "we need AI safety to save humanity from Skynet" camp because I find it to be boring and I have no actual emotional fear of the Skynet scenario.
- I dislike the "we need AI safety to protect the children / protect society from our political opponents / etc." camp because I like free speech and I dislike censorship.
- I dislike the "we need AI safety because if we don't make it safe the media will excoriate us and the government will regulate the fuck out of us and we won't become super-rich" camp because I don't care whether they become rich or not.
If it is true, as some say, that the people who tried to get rid of Altman are largely in camp 1, and Altman is in camp 3, then well, I am not sure who to root for, if anyone.
That said, I think that not enough information about people's real motives in this OpenAI saga has come out yet to really understand what is happening.
None of the reasons she gives for why she now considers herself a Christian are anything even close to "I have come to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and literally rose from the dead". In other words, by my outsider's understanding of Christianity, she is not a Christian.
I don't see why I would have to be a Christian in order to enjoy the various good ways in which Christianity changed Western Civilization. There is no contradiction when a man enjoys the fruits of democracy without also adopting an ancient Athenian's entire political worldview. It is fine to take the good things from Christianity but ignore the rest. Indeed, just as modern democracy is much more actually democratic than Athenian democracy, it is possible that we can figure out how to extend and improve on the benefits that Christianity brought to the West, but in a secular way. Indeed, I would say that this is already happening. In some ways modern secular societies are politically much more to my taste than the much more heavily Christian societies of, say, 100 years ago.
I guess she is saying that Western society needs some real spiritual belief to unite it against its enemies, but I don't see how one could manufacture such a belief on a mass scale and I don't think that it would be desirable even if one could. Part of what makes Western modernity good is the respect for truth as opposed to belief, and I think that adopting Christianity is in contradiction to this.
Some anon on 4chan /tv/, talking about the decline in movie quality, wrote "name ONE thing that has not gotten worse in recent years". From the context of movie discussions and the average age of 4channers, one can infer that the anon probably means roughly the last 10, maybe 20 years.
What say you, Motte?
My thoughts, off the top of my head, are:
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AI. This one is self evident. Massive breakthroughs. Yes, there is a danger of Skynet, but that doesn't seem very serious to me at the moment at least and I do not share people like Yudkowsky's despair.
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Spaceflight. Look at SpaceX.
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Challenges to the establishment: This one is a maybe, and contentious. Much depends on whether you like or dislike the establishment. The first 15 years of the millenium were dominated by bog-standard Democrats and neocons. People like GWB, Obama, and Romney. The last 8 years have seen a partial breakdown of that order, for better or worse. There has also been the rise of wokeism, but despite many apocalyptic prophecies it has not managed to end free speech or liberalism. In terms of sheer numbers, I think that many more people are exposed to heterodox political opinions today than were 20 years ago.
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Social media diversity: The Internet of the 90s collapsed into walled gardens and in some places into stultifying echo chambers, but I see reasons to be optimistic about the way things are going the last 3-4 years. Spurred partly by censorship on major platforms, people actually have started to spread out and build their own forums again. This site is one example but there are many others.
I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
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