Imaginary_Knowledge
No bio...
User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
9d ago
Thanks, I think.
Imaginary_Knowledge
15d ago
A Google L8 can pull down 1.5M per year in liquid comp. Would it be so crazy to pay politicians similarly to reduce any temptation they might have towards corruption?
Imaginary_Knowledge
15d ago
When gradual, principled change becomes impossible, only blunt instruments remain. The last dutifully considered major policy the US was able to enact was the ACA 15 years ago. Governance since then has consisted of rule by fiat: sometimes the executive; sometimes the court. Doesn't matter. We're burning hard won norms for temporary positional advantage. Nobody really believes in the system anymore.
In this environment, a genteel and thoughtful reform of the H-1B program is impossible. It's as if Trump were some Ringworld Pak protector trying to stabilize a long-neglected world and, finding all the usual maintenance and repair mechanisms broken and almost all the stationkeeping thrusters stripped for frivolous reasons like ago by reckless people who didn't know the damage they were doing to their home, has to use the crudest and bluntest instrument imaginable just to stop the immediate problem.
What you're describing is acceptable collateral damage we have to incur to make the immediate crisis stop.
Imaginary_Knowledge
15d ago
Even if it gets reversed, the beneficial uncertainty it's introduced will remain and chill immigration a bit. It's still a good thing. The revolt of the public continues apace.
Imaginary_Knowledge
20d ago
It imposes real costs on them. Their power depends on propagating their memes. Now there's more friction to their doing so.
Okay. I'll grant it's cancel culture. So what? Cancel culture is a weapon invented by my enemy. This is war. We did not ask for this war. We did not instigate it. For fifteen years, they have been bombarding us with a terrible new weapon against which we have little defense. Cancel culture has in large part forced us underground. We won recent political and cultural victories only with great sacrifice, and then only barely.
Now my side has seized an enemy battery of this weapon and have figured out how to wheel it around 180 degrees and fire. Our shots seem to be hitting their marks. Should we stop? Why? Would our refusing as a matter of ethics to fire our commandeered battery against the enemy prompt them to have any mercy in January 2029 if they win? Why would we think they would? Why, after all this time?
This war, while memetic not kinetic, is nevertheless total, absolute, and existential. The people being targeted now are enemy combatants. They (often literally) wear and uniform and wave a flag. We can rebuild polite norms after we win.
And you know what? That's a shame. It's a shame we have to rebuild anything. War is always messy. But like I said, my side didn't choose this.
Imaginary_Knowledge
23d ago
It took 200 years of misbehavior from both the Protestant and Catholic camps to convince everyone to stop the pointless destruction and establish the norms we call freedom of religion and the Peace of Westphalia. Imagine one side or the other stopping early and not fighting back after wringing their hands over abstract principles! The abstract principles come out of peace negotiations. First, you have to either win or fight to a stalemate. We're not even out of the opening phases of what will be a long, brutal war.
Imaginary_Knowledge
24d ago
Sanctionproofing is impossible for such a small country.
Does the normal calculus apply to Israel? Yes, it's a small country both geographically and population-wise, but it's behaving like one with a deep arsenal. Does Israeli leadership perceive the US as a backstop, allowing them to take military risks no country its size ought to be able to take? I am uncomfortable about the degree to which US politicians praise Israel (see https://instagram.com/reel/DKjnZmtPcGE/), and it seems like Israel has every reason to believe that when push came to shove, they can use the US military to win.
Imaginary_Knowledge
25d ago
Half the Internet is glowing today. Practically every commentator is just barely stopping himself writing an explicit call to put all the leftists against a wall. The "glowing" bit is really part of my point: embedded in the term is a blanket and universal taboo on political violence, and it's not obvious to me that there ought to be such a taboo.
Imaginary_Knowledge
25d ago
It's said over and over that violence doesn't help, is always wrong, and is "almost never productive". I sense orthodoxy doth protest too much. Violence, especially tit for tat reciprocal violence, is probably more effective than commonly admitted: there's just this tacit understanding that if you admit it, you open the gates of hell.
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
Imaginary_Knowledge
25d ago
Okay. So the question stands: at what point can one segment of society justify a war against another? The answer clearly isn't "never". It's also pretty clearly not "defend against individuals on a case by case basis and reserve violence for imminent personal threats"
At some point, the totality of circumstances justify, even demand, a war, yes?
Imaginary_Knowledge
25d ago
In a war, do you need to show that each and every soldier you neutralize presented an imminent danger to you personally? Is there a legitimate concept of a movement or an ideology as a whole presenting a grave danger and justifying violence against any of its adherents as self defense?
Imaginary_Knowledge
25d ago
Serious question: at what point is political violence justified? At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community? I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies, but at some point, practical and moral concerns ought to overtake an abstract commitment to the rule of law, yes?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
If so, then one is justified in extraordinary and violent action. The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
If not, why? So as to not to break the state's monopoly on violence? To reap the civilizational benefits of settling disputes with words not weapons? After exactly how many presses of the "defect" button do you, too, press "defect"?
And after what point does insisting that people who've experienced "defect" after "defect" continue to play "cooperate" become itself a form of evil, of gaslighting, of denying people their fundamental dignity?
I'm not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but as I see parts of the Internet seething and roiling, and as I see other parts of the Internet gloating, and as I see it all spill over to real life --- the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight --- I have to wonder whether we're at one of those points in history at which it is less moral to follow man's law than to uphold God's law.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1mo ago
very deep breath
Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies isn't doing orthodox historiography any favors.
- But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face
Some people care about the truth for its own sake. Insisting that people accept untruths unquestionably offends them even when these untruths are directionally correct. Civilization depends on these people.
Suppose one of these people believes you when you say Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. He investigates the matter just as he would, say, 19th century British rolling stock or Pokemon exegesis. He discovers something that appears inconsistent. He asks about it. And then, unlike in his entire previous experience, he finds his questions generate neither indifference nor answers, but hostility and outright censorship. He comes to understand this subject is a third rail.
What you don't appreciate is that this person doesn't then back down and go back to obsessing over trains. He seeks understand why this subject is a third rail. He finds Irving. He finds internet witch dens. And he comes to understand, rightly or wrongly, that the entire narrative is bullshit.
Is that the outcome you want? Shutting down investigations into "well, how many actually died in the gas chambers?" out of a paranoid sense of a need to exert narrative control makes the whole narrative unravel.
That's where we are now. A lot of people doubt not only the six million figure and the gas chambers but the whole fucking story, and it's the fault of people who used every dirty wordcel trick in the book to prevent truth seekers doing their thing.
And you know what? That's a damn shame in the case the holocaust narrative is mostly correct, because it plays directly into the hands of its perpetrators. Good job.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Actually, official censorship of Holocaust revisionism is a good reason to suspect that the official narrative is flawed in some way. That's how censorship works: censors lose any credible claim to the intellectual high ground.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
It's very simple: when the pro-vaccine side began censoring, they lost all credibility. I don't care what these alleged studies say. I assume they're poisoned and discard them, because the people publishing them used the state to censor anything contrary.
There is nothing they can say to me that would prompt me to read their work much less change my mind on the vaccine
Imaginary_Knowledge
4mo ago
The gas chamber narrative is epistemic violence. It uses force to stop ideas moving from my mind to my mouth. I can't express that I find it implausible. And the force is applied for two reasons, both of which I think are legitimate and fill me with rage:
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Allowing the public to question one aspect of the Holocaust narrative would undermine the whole premise, and since that premise is a central part of our faith, the epistemic violence is acceptable collateral damage.
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Point deer, make horse: forcing people to mouth absurdities in public outs people who value integrity over loyalty; these people are potential traitors to the regime, making the epistemic violence acceptance collateral damage.
(Let's assume for now that it's false but not possible in polite company to deny it. You can substitute any of the other narratives we're forced to mount (e.g. blank slate theory) in the above without changing the structure of my argument.)
For my part, I turn the whole thing around. Overturning of the structure of society is acceptable collateral damage in making the epistemic violence stop.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4mo ago
One rule of thumb which never, ever fails is that any claim you can be arrested for questioning is false. It's been like that through recorded history. Why would gas chambers in WW2 be some singular exception to this otherwise completely reliable rule?
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
After the Iraq affair and 15 years of State department media psyops, I don't trust a damned thing they say anymore and don't see why I should believe that Qadaffi did these alleged atrocities
For starters: alignment is easy; instrumental convergence doesn't actually happen even in very smart models; and neuralese is a myth.
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
What makes you think there are huge unrealized wins in unknown algorithmic improvements. In other domains, e.g. compression, we've gotten close to the information theoretic limits we know about (e.g. Shannon limits for signal processing), so I'd guess that the sustained high effort applied to AI has gotten us close to limits we haven't quite modeled yet, leaving not much room for even superintelligence to foom. IOW, we humans aren't half bad at algorithmic cleverness and maybe AIs don't end up beating us by enough to matter even if they're arbitrarily smart.
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
And it's hard to imagine anyone sincerely believing the purpose of the dog-TV system is plastic licking. Maybe I'm sanewashing it, but ISTM there's a logical and useful way to understand POSIWID:
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Let there be a system S, an agent with control authority over the system A, and some outcome X that A claims S is to produce
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Observe that S falls short of ostensible goal X
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Let B be an action that A can take to make S produce more of outcome X at positive ROI
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Observe that A does not execute action B
Given the above, e must conclude based on A's failure to do B that A's purpose for S is not solely X. Maybe B is not actually positive ROI because we lack an understanding of its true costs. Maybe A is retarded and doesn't understand that B is available to him. But, if we assume B is positive ROI and that A is a competent actor, what alternative do we have to concluding that A is optimizing S for some unstated goal Y, not only X?
Yes. Or more specifically, he demolished the retard version of POSIWID then claimed victory over the nuanced version. That's wrong and called strawmanning
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
Sure, but what grinds my gears is laundering subjectivity as objectivity by speakers asserting that moral facts that just so happen to support their position. It's good and right and honorable and beneficial to have an opinion and express it. It's dishonest and annoying nonsense to present an opinion as fact, and no statement about morality whatsoever can be construed as a fact.
Thanks. Could be worse: you could be South Korean government IT.
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