IguanaBowtie
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User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
7mo ago
From https://archive.is/QMpmd#selection-1045.452-1045.744
(Harris) gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said.
Bailey: Lots of critical theory about representation. Motte: Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
I read Scott's piece as about as Straussian as he ever gets.
He lays out a long and detailed takedown of the Democrat Industrial Complex, then adds a relatively wishy-washy 'but Trump does these bad things too'. I don't think he's a secret MAGA by any stretch, but I do think that Scott has come a long way from his railing against feminism days & not because he ever had a 'come to Jesus' moment - he's just very politically canny now, and cares about what happens to his (grey) tribe. My guess is that he's predicting a Trump victory and wants to avoid himself, his family and his tribe from being targeted by anti-Trump backlash, living as they do in the heart of Blue culture. Again, I don't want to accuse Scott of dishonesty as I think he's a top 1% scrupulosity person - I think he won't be voting for Trump and doesn't particularly like the guy. I just think that the piece should be read with an eye for realpolitik.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.
It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.
*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **
**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
I'm quite whitepilled on this particular issue. In no particular order,
-This is definitely a cultural evolution issue. It will sort itself out, and not by 'replacement by the Amish' - high TFR subcultures will emerge from every group, and the ones that are also highly functional (eg, not the Amish/Hasidics/islamists) will dominate. You need to be isolated, limited in total population and insular to commit cultural suicide via celibacy and our culture is none of those. This is actually nothing to be too excited about, low TFR is a much less pressing problem than Malthusian collapse and I'm not eager to jump back on that heading.
-I'm very much not afraid of the developing world. I'm afraid for them, but probably their TFR drops fast enough that populations level out before coming to a very unpleasant head. Immigration is somewhat more complicated, but I think it is likewise self-correcting: pretty soon developing countries are going to have less surplus people and start seeing foreign poaching of their most able young people as the beggar-thy-neighbor strategy that it is. As usual this will be mostly bad for the people in developing countries (exit restrictions are bad) instead of us.
-There's definitely an element of 'making babies is extremely hard for women' that is understandable and understated. This can be broken down into 'pregnancy and childbirth suck', 'children are hard' - both are solvable!
Artificial wombs could exist quickly if there was political will for their development. Lacking them, the state could subsidize surrogacy (or outright fund it themselves), while building infrastructure for and normalizing same. Nations have experimented with communal child rearing (orphanages, kibbutzim) and the outcomes tend to be worse than nuclear families, but this seems solvable too. I'm especially bullish on AI taking a big role in this regard - even if a cold machine can never show a mother's love (#doubt), it can definitely take a big role in the baseline supervision role that parents spend a huge chunk of their time on, and be better at it too. (eg - kids at the park are much safer with an AI drone keeping ceaseless watch on them than with a parent glancing up from their phone every five minutes) Then you can focus on getting humans to provide the active nurturing - the actual fun part of parenting!
-Maybe this leads to us becoming very different that we currently are - more hedonistic, even less in touch with nature (eg: meat comes from the store), less responsible for the powerless in our care. But the same is true for every technology to some degree - suffering builds character, but we're still pretty happy about eradicating polio. Future humans aren't going to be shackled to my values, whether I like it or not, and this doesn't seem like an unreasonably dystopian outcome, especially compared to the other likely options.
-TFR is cratering just as longevity technology seems to be taking off. This is a happy coincidence!
-technological singularity more generally obviating any problem that only really gets bad 20/50/100 years from now
I'm reminded of a joke from the idle incremental game community: 'Ah, I see we've reached 1% of our target. Splendid, almost done!'
Serms like about 2yrs between 'near the bottom of human ability range' and 'clearly exceeding 99th percentile human output in any particular domain, given current levels of investment. So if the definition of AGI is 'can beat the elite four deathless' we're on track for ~2027 as expected.
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