JulianRota
10mo ago
I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.
It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:
It's okay friend, your views are welcome here! We will read them and discuss them with you. You don't have to blow anyone up!
Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.
The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?
JulianRota
10mo ago
That's the question indeed. Should we take anything from the fact that we aren't getting the names and career histories of any of the people responsible for these events? If there were WASPs behind any of them, do you think they would be immediately named and publicly fired to demonstrate the organization's commitment to "reversing structural racism" instead of obscuring the details, brushing the events under the rug, while insisting that we have no idea what's going on but it's definitely not a competency crisis due to diversity-based hiring practices?
JulianRota
11mo ago
It's popularly used IME to refer to the overall campaign of extermination against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Some were killed in concentration camps and death camps by gassing, others by mass executions, and others by starvation or over-work. I haven't heard of it used to refer to the Roma who were killed as well, or to Slavic POWs who also died in large numbers, though were never sent to death camps.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Well that's... both interesting and disturbing I guess.
It does seem like a lot of the best content is gone from Reddit. There's still some decent stuff sometimes, but it seems like it's buried in a mountain of garbage.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I got -5.38, which apparently makes me
Toe-in Rat, 50-70th percentile. You probably play board games, know what prediction markets are, and maybe occasionally read a blog or two. Not really a full-fledged rationalist, but their world is next door.
I suppose I do occasionally read a blog or two. I don't have any interest in board games. I know what prediction markets are, but don't have any particular desire to participate.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I did watch both The Wire and We Own This City. I enjoyed WOTC, but I think it's definitely a step behind The Wire.
IMO, part of what made The Wire great is it showed the good and bad of everything and everyone. Some cops are dirty or assholes, but others are good police, working hard to take bad people off the street. The urban drug dealers might be being subjected to some level of abuse by the police, and sometimes actually do good deeds, but they really are murdering people in their own neighborhoods by the dozens and employing children to sell basically poison on the streets. Some of the parents in these neighborhoods are good people trying to get by in a tough neighborhood, while others are willing to sell their childrens' food for more drugs or demand that their children become drug dealers to bring in money for them while they do no work. Criminal defense lawyers are of course necessary, but damn sure they knowingly pocket a whole lot of drug money, help out with money laundering, and basically request people to be murdered.
WOTC over-focuses on how bad the GTTF and a few specific cops are and basically ignores everything that caused them to be that way. Okay, they're corrupt and abusive, but most of their targets really are drug dealers, and we don't get to see what other bad stuff these drug dealers do. Arresting actual bad guys who don't want to go to jail is necessarily violent and unpredictable, but if you show the police that they will be randomly fired and prosecuted for any violence that doesn't go perfectly right, then of course they'll start refusing to do anything. But the show pays no attention to this dynamic and just portrays the cops as lazy jerks for not wanting to get out of their cars. The Feds are of course perfect angels trying to root out the evil police corruption, but who cares that they aren't really doing anything about the 300+ murders a year and rampant drug dealing.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Thanks, this sounds more like how I was thinking about it. Like, maybe the algorithm can, or at least could, make okay decisions if it had all of the information. But then isn't actually gathering all of the information and getting it into a form that could be entered or written down somewhere like 80% of what doctors do anyways? I'm not sure if it matters how good the algorithm is if any professional could have already made the best practical decision before they even would have been able to enter all of the information into some system anyways.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I posted most of what I was able to find. If you know more or better, I'd be interested to hear that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I couldn't say about 1400 specifically. I'd say I basically think that many aspects of these traits were at least present in sort of a prototype form at least as far back as that. As in, not necessarily openly embraced by the notional leaders of nations, but often present in the mid to upper layers of the societal elite. Stuff like the Enlightenment and Reformation didn't magically appear out of nowhere. I'd note that Columbus was able to secure funding for his voyage despite being completely wrong in his calculations about the size of the Earth. Did anything like that happen in China? I expect they had the resources to do such things, but if they have, I've never heard of it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Yes. There are professional Soccer leagues in America. I'd bet money that the number of blue-collar workers attending any of their games is effectively zero.
JulianRota
1yr ago
How sure are we that it was an actual explosion though and not a high pressure burst? I would think they'd look fairly similar to the untrained eye. I'm not sure anyone with serious expertise in distinguishing these things through whatever types of sensor data we have to examine deep underwater events has weighed in. God knows there's no shortage of actors and commentators who'd love to declare that it's definitely an explosion and definitely caused by whoever they hate the most.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't really know, and that's my point. It's hard to know what information about what could happen to trust and how much. What I'm saying is that I have a feeling that we're basically screwed, and whatever is going to happen will just happen. I hope it isn't too bad.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I guess I'm somewhat lucky in not having many issues with serious or chronic pain. I did get my wisdom teeth removed, and I don't think I was prescribed or took anything particularly strong for that, but I don't recall very clearly. I had to get a root canal a few years ago, and I do remember that hurting pretty badly the next day. I had been prescribed Tylenol with Codeine, which I took and worked pretty well at dulling the pain, but left me pretty zonked out. Definitely not something I had any interest in taking if I wasn't in serious pain. I think I only took that for 1 or 2 days, and the pain was mild enough after that that I didn't bother.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Perhaps that was a bit over-stated. I think it has a little truth, but more qualified, like that something that vaguely resembles that may happen to like a single-digit number of people, not anywhere near even a whole number percentage of everyone who's ever possessed such content. And "coming to the attention" would look more like far-left activists being majorly annoyed at you for some reason and digging up things you've wrote or sold somewhere to make a case about how bad you are. It may not be super common, but such things occasionally do end up becoming prosecutions, often including an extra step passing through a "mainstream" activist group.
If you're looking for an actual case, the best example that comes to my mind is Paul Miller. His prosecution was on weapons charges, for laws that are pretty commonly flouted and rarely prosecuted on their own, reportedly at least partly thanks to the prompting of the ADL (though he wasn't exactly doing himself any favors either). None of the documentation mentions any particular radical literature, though it would be a little surprising if he didn't actually possess any.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Have you been prescribed facial corticosteroids by a dermatologist?
Yes I was, and I have kept using it and getting fresh prescriptions for I think like 15 years. They kept talking about "skin thinning", but nothing noticeable happened to me. They kept making me try other things, but nothing else worked (I don't remember most of the things they got me to try unfortunately). Personally, I'd rather take my chances with "skin thinning" than live with terrible itchy flaky skin on my face. I actually found that chart I linked when I was thinking about trying to order some prescription stuff from one of those sketchy overseas places that doesn't need prescriptions because I was getting seriously tired of them trying to push other things that didn't work on me. I didn't go through with that because all I could find was the ridiculously strong class 1 ones that might actually do something bad, but it did give me the idea to try the weaker OTC class 7 stuff since it's basically the same thing, just less potent. That seems to work, so I figure I both solved my problem of keeping my skin decent without dealing with annoying dermatologists and also somewhat went along with their fears by going with a weaker non-prescription version.
Obvious disclaimer, I'm not a doctor at all and haven't examined you, if you follow my example you're doing it at your own risk. I'd say try it for a week though with the OTC stuff. If it doesn't work, you're no worse off. If it works a little, consider trying to get some of the stronger versions by prescription. If it works great, then you get to decide if having something that actually works is worth possible long term risks of skin thinning. It sounds like mainstream medical advice hasn't exactly served you that well anyways.
JulianRota
5mo ago
In my opinion, the first "good" / exciting part is the stolen credit card deal, which on my Kindle shows as page 67. It's a bit of a slowish start, with the exciting bits gradually getting more common as the story goes on. I wouldn't be surprised if some people would rather skim his long-winded explanations of things. But I think there's plenty of crazy and exciting stuff going on by the final third or so of the book.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Haven't read Anathem, but I did really like Reamde, Seveneves, and Cryptonomicon.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Oh hey. I might have checked it out, but that was a little short notice, I'm just reading it now.
JulianRota
6mo ago
Maybe we're getting a little far off topic here, but this is touching on one of my bigger general concerns. Many of our problems do seem pretty big. To be specific, I'm talking about things like how much control near-monopoly tech companies and national mega-corps are coming to have over our lives, specifically retail and news and entertainment media, how much influence a united and stable Russia, China, etc are able to wield over world affairs, etc. I'm not so sure that a United States with the Federal gov effectively throttled and the many State governments ascendant would be better able to deal with these issues.
JulianRota
6mo ago
Can we do the same for everyone in all those foreign nations that we allegedly don't know anything about who cries out for American intervention every time they pick a fight with their neighbors and get in over their heads? I'd be more than happy for us to pull out of NATO, the Pacific, etc, and best of luck to all of the nations there dealing with China and Russia without us.
JulianRota
7mo ago
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I don't think I could use a ChromeOS device as my only PC either. But I've been surprised that the list of things I want to do on a primary PC that I can't do on it is pretty short. Web browsing is nice of course, but so is programming in any language I've used, messing with Docker images and K8s admin, most CLI and Linux tools work fine, etc.
The $300-range practical devices can be nice, but personally, I'm too turned off by the low quality screens and performance compromises. I got a somewhat pricier one with a nice screen and pretty decent performance. But at least there are plenty of options at all levels of performance and quality now.
The combo of first-party desktop environment with officially supported everything and best-in-class security, plus an officially supported full Linux environment where everything works, is pretty competitive in the current laptop market.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I think you have to start by deciding on the OS.
If you want Windows, you have a bazillion options. Windows 10 is pretty decent IMO, though I don't have much experience with 11.
If you want MacOS, then your options are obviously constrained to Apple hardware, where the choices are pretty easy. I don't think you really need to be a part of Apple's online ecosystem, even though they highly encourage it. The hardware is certainly nice, though it isn't cheap.
If you want Linux, then you probably should check carefully for good hardware compatibility before you spend money on anything, as near as I can tell, good-quality drivers are still extremely hit or miss, especially with regard to webcams, microphones, wifi, bluetooth, video cards, efficiency and battery life, etc.
I often speak up for ChromeOS on these things - I use it for my primary personal laptop. Not many people think of it as their first choice, but it can do everything you mentioned just fine, and runs quite well if you buy decent spec hardware. Local OS security is top-notch, and there's a built-in and officially supported Linux that runs command line and X Windows apps. Google is probably tracking you, but at least they're the only ones.
Sure, you could do that, but what's the advantage over conventional hardware? I can do all of those things just fine with any ordinary computer and off-the-shelf accessories and software that has been available for years. The only really new thing that this device has is the immersive VR experience. That's cool, but I don't see how that gets you anything for creating content.
I don't think that's the case. Keyboards and mice have been dominant because they are very easy to use. Sure, it's not easy to type 100wpm with good accuracy, but pretty much everyone can type 10wpm. Typing 100wpm isn't that useful outside of stenography anyways. Typically the limiting factor is how fast you can think of more meaningful words of text or working lines of code to type, not how fast you can physically type them. In fact, I'd bet that whatever the solution VisionOS uses for typing (we haven't seen that yet, gee I wonder why that is, you'd think if they have an awesome solution to getting text from the user's mind to the device they'd have shown us), it's less intuitive than a keyboard. How much skill does it take to get 10 correct wpm into a VisionOS document versus a regular computer with a regular keyboard?
And that's before we get into things like, how easy is it to read text or data off of a physical page while typing it or something loosely based on it into a VisionOS document?
More options
Context Copy link