Imaginary_Knowledge
No bio...
User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Acceptable collateral damage. Trump's election gave us a preference cascade and stopped wokeness ascendant. I'll take that any day over optimal trade policy.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo 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
3mo ago
Forget object level considerations. There are only narratives. There are no moral facts. No timeless principles except the laws of mathematics and natural selection. Whatever is, is right.
If the right seizes power, it will have factual raw material sufficient to build a "power narrative" sustaining its rule, just like every power structure has. It's impossible to say whether Trump "is" justified: there's no objective righteousness evaluation function. What matters is that if he tries something and wins, he's able to post hoc rationalize it in a way that allows the losing side (or enough of them) to internalize the change and operate within the new power structure.
Google after all did change Google Maps to read "Gulf of America".
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Are you under the impression that object level considerations matter? We're looking at a power struggle not a high school mock trial. It's zero sum. One side will win and the other will lose. One side has a lot more soldiers. How many divisions has Roberts?
At this stage in this country's political evolution, which rhymes with the end of the Roman Republic, the executive is absolutely justified in crossing the Rubicon, just as Caesar was.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
In their defense: why do we care so much about the survival of homo sapiens qua sapiens? We're different from how we were 50,000 years ago, and we'll be more different still in 5,000, and maybe even 500. So what? So long as we have continuity of culture and memory, does it matter if we engineer ourselves into immortal cyborgs or whatever is coming? What's so special about the biped mammal vessel for a mind?
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo 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.
We're well on the well-trod path of democracies experiencing escalating norm violations that spiral into physical violence and the breakdown of traditional understanding of power divisions within the government. No country can operate solely according to a written constitution. Functional government always requires tacit understanding of proper rules and order of subordination. When a figure within the government tries to exercise merely textual or positional authority in violation of these tacit agreements, then (even if he's in the right by the rest of the law) the result is strife, unpredictability, and retaliation. Norms break down. The Overton window widens. Eventually, it widens to include physical violence, which starts with street thuggery and ends with proscriptions.
We are on Mr. Gracchus 's wild ride and there is no way off. The only thing that matters now is which faction wins. The norms are broken and can't be fixed. Sulla couldn't restore the norms and we can't either. There's no point getting nostalgic about them. The only goal now is to win.
Imaginary_Knowledge
5mo ago
Judicial power ultimately relies on popular buy-in. The courts don't have very many divisions. The energy of this moment is so intense that an attempt by courts to stop it would do nothing except damage the legitimacy of the court. A few more "Hawaiian judge" rulings and the administration will begin covertly defying the court. A few more after that, and the administration will openly and brazenly defy the court. This is a civilizational moment and it can't be stopped by some guy in a robe.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
There is a moral order
Is there? I find myself unpersuaded by assertions of morality divorced from their effectiveness in achieving real world aims. Moral statements are nothing but polite fictions for aiding collective action. If this collective action amounts to escalating protection and promotion of falsehood, of what use is the polite fiction? Democracy is "good" because it's worked (better and for longer than it has had any right to work) for solving collective action problems. Now that it's stopped working, is it still good?
Imaginary_Knowledge
8mo ago
Not unless they go full tanks in the street, which is still IMHO a slight probability. If Trump wins, the blob is defanged. They'll do literally anything to stop it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
10mo ago
Why would we distinguish these scenarios?
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
Is that a bad thing? Past me was a different person. Why should I be beholden to him? I appreciate continuity of obligations to others, but why should I feel obligated to honor past commitments (e.g. not to make a profit) that I made to myself?
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
We're also part Neanderthal. (Most people reading this message in 2024 are, anyway.) Their legacy got folded into ours. Why does their story have a sad ending?
Agreed on jitters about Altman. I'm just pointing out that the AI successor species people kind of have a point.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
A 6'7 NBA player has a qualitatively different experience from a 5'1 ballerina, but they're both humans with minds.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9mo ago
I want to do things, and I do them
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang,
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
I'm not sure any physics can answer the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?", at least not without recurring into a different "something ". This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect. I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
10mo ago
Perhaps Christianity's telescopic philanthropy was adaptive in pre-modern and early modern Europe but has become maladaptive in a globalized world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
What an awful sign for our civilization --- Trump's reversal reflects our lack to accept short term pain to achieve long term objectives. For my purposes here, it doesn't matter whether the tariffs on phones would have actually helped: what matters is that Trump believed they would, that he was the duly elected head of state, that imposing tariffs was within his legitimate authority, and that he had a majority in the legislature as well.
He still couldn't do it. If he couldn't, nobody can. And if our societal time preference really is this high, we are fucked.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
You know why the Fed could do that? Because no one could fire Powell, and no one elected him.
Correct. I don't think our own problems get solved until we have an executive with unchallenged personal authority and immunity to firing.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
It applies at all scales from the family on up. Still, there is a threshold of distance between A and B in genetic space below which A and B perceive each other as partners and beyond which they perceive each other as competitors. All white Europeans are inside the genetic similarity threshold.
I'm not sure I'm getting my point across. You're still talking about the object level impact of the tariffs. I'm talking about the ability of the state to translate will into action when the action involves short term pain.
Did Trump have a sincere change of heart? Did Dimon convince him on the merits of the ineffectiveness of the tariffs in achieving his stated goal? Or did Dimon instead point out that Trump wouldn't last long if he kept doing this even if it was good for the country?
It looks to me like a chunky soup of unnamed elites was unwilling to suffer these short term consequences and blocked Trump despite their having no formal authority and Trump having all the formal authority. That they were able to do that is what doesn't bode well for the country.
How are we supposed to solve the problems with elder care and entitlements if we're unable to endure pain? It tells me we're going to just give up the Pacific the first time the Chinese sink an aircraft carrier. It tells me we're in for another episode of high inflation, because every other inflation solution involves pain. A man or nation that cannot endure pain is weak and not long for this world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
It doesn't matter whether they would have helped at the object level. What matters is Trump believed they would and had the mandate of the people to exercise his judgement in making policy. We just can't get stuff done. Yes, I'd have been hungry without breakfast yesterday although I had it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Small process node lithography is dual use
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
If we can make a phone, we can make AI killbots. If we can't make a phone, we can't make killbots. The Chinese can make both. They will win the next war if they have killbots and we don't, and it won't even be close.
We need domestic electronics manufacturing capabilities. All the pain-free ways of building them have failed. Tariffs might have worked. They probably wouldn't have, but they might have. And we didn't give them a chance because we cannot endure short term pain. That means we're fucked.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Yep. And each time power changes hands, even more norms will become irrelevant. The process will escalate until there's one final undeniable rupture of the old system and a new one emerges.
So why risk the other side winning? Why wait? The rupture is inevitable. We're inside the event horizon of political chaos. The only thing accomplished by adhering to the remaining rules is risking ultimate and permanent defeat. Better to act decisively, now, and win.
There it is: a casus belli for ignoring the supreme court. Trump has the perfect narrative: he needs to keep the country safe and the court is letting philosophy and activism stop them seeing it. SCOTUS chose violence by trying to override what is obviously executive branch prerogative. Now all Trump has to do is find his cojones.
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