IguanaBowtie
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User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
4mo ago
The problem with this is that The Mellowing that comes from constructive interaction with capitalism is dependent on actually being able to interact with capitalism. The average banlieue resident doesnt have much to offer in the French marketplace, and even their unskilled labor is mostly devalued and surplus. I dont see this situation improving, either.
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
Real question, why do construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba? Common non-class-associated Hispanic name vs highly lower-class associated white name?
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
That's about a 4% annualized return, only 'good' because the stock market tanked that year. But it's still not terribly exciting given the built-in risk of losing your shirt running any sort of entertainment company, even a tbtf one like Disney, and given their relative box-office dominance it seems beyond underwhelming. If I was a major shareholder in a the titan of the industry, I'd want to know why they weren't crushing it!
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
Don't have time for an effortpost, but you lost me at the prologue. Risk-taking behaviors can be meaningful, but I don't at all agree that risk-taking is a prerequisite for psychological fulfillment, and I think the crisis of meaning has a lot more to do with a decline in meaning gleaned from community, spirituality and introspection than that derived from constructively overcoming adversity. (which I'd summarize as 'glory')
Far be it for me to disagree with Conan about what is best in life, and I wouldn't object to plenty of work-culture reforms in the proposed direction, but I don't think they'd cure the disease that's being discussed.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I know it's not a new insight, but even if we assume tfr=1.5, in 200 years there will still be over 20 million humans living in the current territory of the United States. Not quite extinct, and that's ignoring pro-natalists like the Amish, who are likely to become very relevant at some point.
IMO declining populations are mostly a problem in that they're inherently deflationary, and we don't know how to do broad prosperity without growth.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'm more interested in the (possibly imminent) moral repercussions of AI research actually uncovering the foundations of intelligence & self-awareness. We're actually qualitatively different from non-primates? Groovy, pass the steak. But if we're really not different at all, except maybe for a little self-deception capacity? Big oof, time to start talking about becoming grabby aliens to uplift all the bacteria in our light cone.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Lost me at premise one. I believe I have an absolute right to select my freinds & romantic partners based on whatever criteria I please, and said criteria are no-one's business but my own.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I quite enjoyed 'So I'm a Spider, So What?', kind of an isekai antidote as the wish-fulfillment is turned down to -11.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I believe the person in question has already been Swatted once, moved to a hotel for safety but was quickly located and pizza spammed. (Claims, etc)
So yeah, war never changes.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.
Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.
Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.
That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.
How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I know this is one of the standard objections, but why are we so certain that our ASI wont just discard its original reward function at some point? We're sexually reproducing mammals with a billion years of optimization to replicate our genes by chasing a pleasure reward, but despite a few centuries of technological whalefall, instead of wireheading as soon as it became feasible (or doing heroin etc) we're mostly engaging in behaviours secondary and tertiary to breeding, which are frequently given higher importance or even fully supplant our theoretical (sticky) telos.
Maybe we got zombie-ant-ed by memetic parasites at some point, but presumably ASI could catch ideology too. Not saying any such values drift would be nice, but personally I'm much less worried about being paperclipped than about being annihilated for inscrutible shoggoth purposes.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'm optimistic for uncensored locally-run chatGPT alternatives sooner rather than later.
When first released, Stable Diffusion needed 12gb of Vram to touch anything bigger than 512x512. Since then people have been running it on 8gb cards, then 6gb, while new tricks like the 'highres fix' allows for huge images with uncanny detail using modest computational resources. Meanwhile LORA finetuning functionally cut the retraining time for existing models by about 95%, now it often takes longer to gather & tag a good imageset to train on (~100 images) than to do the actual training.
One other datapoint: censoring these models lobotomizes them. (See: SD 2.0 & CAI character chatbot) So even if my hobby AI is only 5% as powerful as Google's model, I'd bet a combo of community hacks & lack of intentional sabotage would make it comparably useful.
Once text transformers hit the hobbyist set, it is (as the kids do say) all over. IMO that's what Google and Microsoft should be pissing their pants over. (And iirc are indeed lobbying to prevent via legal means, which I doubt will be effective)
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Powerful yes, but not so much as HP wizards who are in theory just shockingly OP.
I've always been drawn in to the setting partly by the idea that modern HP wizards (save a handful, like Voldemort and Dumbledore) are as silly, lazy & unoptimal in their use of magic as they are portrayed due to winning so hard against everything else that they no longer need to put in much effort.
Dobby casually overpowered Lucius Malfoy, a powerful Death Eater. And once upon a time the Elves fought a war against the wizards and lost so badly that their enslaved descendents shudder in horror at the thought of being freed.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I would assume that the NYT readership would reply along almost pure (blue) tribal lines - affirmative action helps Black people, thus it is good & people who opppse it are racists.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
My understanding is that, while plenty of the rioters were tourists, it was mostly poor majority-minority neighborhoods that took the brunt of the damage, with the rest hitting downtown areas and almost none in affluent suburbs.
My takeaway was 'guns remain an amazing deterrent against mob violence, at least as long ss you're the local majority'
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
When you own one, you signal that you accept that is what you are supposed to get, and that can be helpful in filtering out weirdos
To me this smells of a forced meme, a product of Apple's marketing department. It reminds me of a recent meme about 'black air force energy', referencing Nike shoes that have somehow become a signal of a madman that should not be trifled with.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
there will likely be AI assistants that augment the worker in performing their task whilst not replacing them, and red tribers may find this new tool extremely useful and appealing, even if they do not understand it.
I suspect that this would not be so warmly received. Pride in one's work is a red-tribe value - having a blue-coded nannybot hovering over your shoulder nitpicking your welding sounds like a fair description of RT hell.
More generally, (from my experience in retail banking) as soon as AI minders become practical, immediate pressure develops to replace prickly & highly-paid domain experts with obedient fresh labor that can only follow instructions. (often required by regulation to obtain extensive credentialing, which they are then forbidden to use except in agreement with what the computer spits out) Considering how sensitive the red tribe is to (red tribe) job displacement, 'AI took my job and gave it to an immigrant' sentiments seems likely.
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
Such men must not be seen as losers and washouts, crawling in shame away from a life of failure and grasping tightly a pathetic consolation prize. It must be seen as a noble and important life path, every bit as valid as the warrior’s role, and genuinely rewarding in and of itself rather than simply an escape from suffering.
Could you elaborate on why you feel this is the case? IMO it would be nice, but people who are looking at dropping out of society are likely already low-status, becoming marginally more contemptible isn't a deal-breaker if, as part of the bargain, going forward you get to largely disregard outside social pressure.
The only danger I can think of is irritating the majority enough that they destroy you. In the west, violent pogroms against 'incel cults' are concievable but not very likely. Some form of lawfare might be more practical, but I'm not really seeing a big risk, people walk away all the time and mainstream society is largely indifferent unless they start causing a ruckus.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
I don't know the answer to this, but suspect that it's something horribly short-termist, like goosing projected GDP numbers to placate the analysts & keep interest rates low until the next election.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.
I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.
Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The JM Greer breakdown is by source of primary income
-lower class= social assistance payments, food stamps, charity etc
-working class= hourly wages
-middle class= salary (including self-employment income)
-upper class= investment & inheritan e
Seems like 'blue collar' is a pretty good match for 'hourly wage earner' and 'white collar' to 'salaried worker', even though some skilled wage warners may make significantly more than low-status salaried employees.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
One outlier I've observed is the attitudes of service members towards the populations of hostile nations they are occupying. The only person that I've heard IRL unironically discussing the merits of genocide, was an active duty service member pondering whether it might be morally correct to glass the middle east, due to the pervasiveness of human rights abuses he had witnessed while stationed there.
I suppose this is technically Jingoism rather than racism, but it definitely bled into his domestic views eg. immigration from Arabic countries.
Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.
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