Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
The model of the second kind was indeed a big part of what I had in mind. I wasnt aware of the changes. Around when would you say this happened, and how are the supporting organisations that dont have to take a position doing? I would love some more details; so far this sounds to me more like an accidental hiccough than the model not fitting at all.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
So the fact that it was actually just a combination of some math from the 1940s and ever more powerful general compute, and that so many roadblocks (“how will it actually understand/do X”) turned out not to be problems at all (and indeed required zero human engagement whatsoever because they were ultimately the same generic pattern matching as everything else) rankles them. That this is all that we are.
This is nothing new though. If AI is possible at all, you were always going to get it from a dovetailer. Sure, it takes a lot more compute than current approaches, but those also take a lot more compute than humans.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
The western world isn't homogeneously wealthy though.
Most of it is within a factor of 2, which corresponds to about 30 years of economic development - and the bigger ones grow slower.
And Japan is at a minimum proof that you can have a functional and affordable housing market even with extreme land constraints and a high population density if you just allow more construction.
My beef is with the claim that this is keeping the whole economy down.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Oh, Japan has lots of problems
The question is, why do the strengths and problems seem to balance out so much? If you have multiple independent factors, then the total variance sets an upper limit on the effect size of individual factors. So whenever someone says that a factor like housing or regulation or something else that some countries already get right, has a huge potential for economic growth, I look at the small variance between first-world countries, and conclude that either the factor doesnt have that much of an effect, or theres some sort of interaction effect that eats away most of the first-order-effect.
So, I found your claim that Japan actually is doing much better in the whole economy very interesting.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
-- I've nominally been a big advocate of the binary rating system (1= I'd hit that, 0= I wouldn't) and "it's all the same in the dark" when offering advice to friends on romance. All that matters is that you find her attractive enough to make love to, anything else beyond getting hard is irrelevant ego. But if I'm honest, when I look at my own life, I married the (objectively) hottest woman I ever dated, we have a near perfect relationship. And the absolute best hottest sex I've had, the best lovers I've had, have pretty strongly correlated with the societally hottest women I've been with. Maybe this indicates that sex, for me, is at some level about status, that my superego is hiding in the corner even when the lights are off. Maybe it indicates that those women had the kind of confidence that leads to really good sex. At the same time I suspect that a big reason I've been successful with objectively hot partners is because at a conscious level I'm less interested than others, precisely because of the conscious advocacy of the binary rating system.
What lead you to this opinion in the first place? It seems there would be a fairly straightforward biological reason to expect sex with hotter people to be more desired. But Jacob also reached for a status explanation of hot people seeking hot partners, without even mentioning the obvious first idea.
You remind me a bit of this, but with efficiency instead of progressivism:
Like, and I'm definitely not being 100% charitable here, reading between the lines, you almost hear, "Men want to rub their bodies against women sometimes and then ejaculate when their genitals are in the rough vicinity of that woman's genitals or other parts and crevices various and sundry. Women also sometimes want forms of this, too. There are some variations about the identities of the bodies involved, but this covers the general case. We will call this interaction "sex", and claim to be the champion of it. Now, how can we eliminate everything else that has historically made this transaction problematic, from a disease perspective, from a fertility perspective, and especially from a social / emotional / power / interpersonal relationship perspective? Once we stop permitting all that other stuff, once we heavily stigmatize all that other stuff, we will be left with 'safe sex', and we will loudly encourage it. And this is what 'sex' will mean as we march into the future, and this will be progress."
Again, I'm being unfair. But if this is someone's model of human sexuality, it's a model that has almost no room for things like seduction, and is likely wary of most kinds of flirting. It's a model that is very uncomfortable with human brains being the most important sexual organ, and of the deep pleasures of sexual tension and the role of uncertainty and imagination and play and teasing in desire.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I do identify as a "secular humanist" at times, and I think I do have a fairly solid foundation within that tradition. The problem is, that it's a fairly iconoclastic, aniconic life path.
(From the top-level)
It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.
I would say that Enlightenmentism does care this much, just about something thats not so concrete. I mean, would a normal person write stuff like this:
I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.
No, its really quite a small group that thinks like this. Even starting from the water-supply in the West, this takes years of intentionally reshaping your mind. Unfortunatly it also involves thinking that the shape of mind achieved is standard, unremarkable, characterised mainly by absences, so you dont really appreciate it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Not necessarily from the same premises. Its a more general sense that, if the Singerian argument werent valid, hers would not be either. That can be because ethical theories share machinery, because they hinge on similar questions of fact, because they draw on the same intuitions, or some other reason.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I'm socially liberal enough that no matter what the actual underlying case may be, I can justify pronoun hospitality, nickname hospitality, and access to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries. But I'm not sure if something like Blanchard's typology, or social contagion theory, or something-something autism turned out to be the underlying cause of transgenderism that the general public would agree.
So you would support hormones and surgeries for transgenderism caused by social contagion? That sounds interesting, could you flesh that out?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
My idea of life and freedom, were I to succeed in rigorously defining it, would probably be similar to «empowerment gain» in this theoretical ML paper
This doesnt do what you want it to do.
First, its defined in terms of what the agent could do in the future, not what it will actually do. So if the pothead could do something productive but had his values shifted to where he doesnt want to any more, that wouldnt limit his empowerment in the sense defined there.
Also its defined for discrete finite outcome states, and adapting it to the continuous case requires an additional parameter, most simply a measure on the outcome space which tells you how valuable granularity of control is in different parts of that space relative to each other.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
8mo ago
Acknowledging that some parents are bad and need to be treated differently from other parents is in no way at odds with saying parents should generally be trusted to make good decisions for their children. It's just that every rule has exceptions.
And how do we decide if the parents are bad in any given case? On this issue, the progressive answer seems to be "if the child says so". That is pretty close to just letting the child make the decisions in the first place. You cant really claim to agree that "parents should make the decisions in most cases", if you support overriding this default at the childs asking.
In the vast majority of cases, everyone involved agrees what to do. Saying "well in those cases we let the parents decide" does not count as parents deciding most of the time.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
So there is no dissonance in people's minds.
I meant within german progressives, or the overall coalition. As in, turkish opinions on the treatment of the armenians is something progressives would have a problem with, but is not immediately relevant here and now, so absent the loyalty conflict they could have ignored it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Sorry if this wasnt clear, Im austrian. But I think its somewhat surprising you dont hear about them in america as well. You certainly heard about the "syrian" refugees, and I would guess youre at least aware that the turks are a topic here?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Is there some sort of gross statistic that bears out this impact on the whole economy, other than your disposable income one? In terms of GDP and GDP growth, Japan looks like bottom of the first world country. The "conventional wisdom" is that Western countries are mostly the same economically.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Weren't things we call 'corruption' today, from "bribes" to "nepotism" ... rampant and even accepted among many premodern societies?
Important I think. It does seem that in the past leaders had less of a problem with their actions being seen. That could be interpreted as social norms being enforced on them better. "Prosocial" in the relevant evolutionary sense is not the same as pro-equality. Moldbug argument about unclear assignment of power being the problem.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Some suggestions for the Inbox:
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I think displaying the notified comments in context is a bad idea. When multiple people resond to one of your comments it gets unwieldy and you have to scroll around to find the comment thats actually new. Also indentation gore. If I need the context, Ill open a new tab to read it anyway.
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Opening Inbox automatically marks all as read, and theres no way to turn it off. Back on reddit it didnt do that, and there was even a button to mark them unread again. I used to leave things set to unread if I meant to respond to them later. I cant do that now and I dont have a good replacement.
Also if I have suggestions for evaluating the volunteer data, where should I make them? Some of you comments suggest you might not want it to be public knowledge how exactly you use them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
One example for what this could look like is low mutational load: Its also correlated with all the good things, including IQ, and certainly causally upstream of it. Genetic IQ enhancement in a narrow sense wouldnt fix that, and if it has any effects not mediated by IQ (it almost certainly does), you wouldnt get those, whereas currently they strongly correlate with IQ. Now, in this case, if you know about it and are already doing genetic enhancements, its easy to fix that as well. But there could be more things like this.
Basically, noone has run an RCT on IQ increases, because we havent been able to do them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I forget the quote and context completely, but the gist is that you can recognize intelligence below your own, but not above.
It actually says that it does extend above a bit:
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I have the impressions sometimes that people who rediscover non-individualistic ideology end up looking even less individualistic than those that are already there. Their conclusions from it tend to be very ant-colony-maintainance and top-down-rule, because theyre applying the same egoist materialism as before, but now from the perspective of the community instead of an individual.
This is how many people see things even after doing the first step away from individualism, and most definitely before that. So when you talk about Great Men in any context other than them already being leaders who are followed, it will sound relatively more individualistic to them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Thank you, this looks very interesting.
Ive always thought that historical incomparability cant apply to civilised peoples, precisely because they think about history. That enables them to disagree with you and your theory of history that you put them into. You cant "input sanitise" them when you put them in there, without denying that they were talking about the history that they themselves are in. And yet, here is someone who wrote a whole book about what people thought of history, asserting that incomparability. I wonder how he tries to square that.
I agree with your application of this version of progress to the Cthulhu swim, if "problem" is understood correctly: In the version I believe, what counts as a "problem" for the sake of progress in a field is determined by the field itself. Not us, or an "objective observer", looking at the state if the field and thinking something is bad, but the internal criteria that are already present in the field. I would guess that is what Collingwood means as well, but your comment doesnt make it clear to an unfamiliar reader, and it could lead to very different takeaways.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Reading the head paragraph, I hoped for something more ambitious than le hypocrisy line. I think that really only effects a small fraction of our beliefs, most of them are stuff like "the store closes at 8". There might be a case against even those sorts of beliefs, where the replacement concept issome derivative of affordances rather than S-dispositions. For example, someone "believing" that "the store closes at 8" might not thereby have any expectations about when an aquaintance working at the store is free for the evening - the "belief" only tells them when the "go shopping" option is available.
Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions.
What makes you think those are a "natural kind", other than that it fits with the point you want to make here? This idea is defined in terms of results, and sticks fairly close to them, it seems unlikely to be mechanistically important to psychology. What cases can you think of where an S-disposition causes other important psychological states, especially ones which stick around beyond the immediate situation?
Potentially nitpicking, but about a third of your examples fall under this:
Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?
Theres a sematic question if this is even inconsistent. I think the topic was called "general generalisations" or something like that.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
My point is just, people think the bundle leads to a certain kind of politics, and heres an example where it very much didnt.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I don't think "shared characteristics of Minorities" dominate the discussion outside of ethnonationalist or HBD circles.
I think many progressives would say that blacks and hispanics being poor, uneducated, and having bad relations with the police causes the kind of politics they have in the US, and potentially extend this schema to other groups.
Every people has a need for self-justification: "why do we rule this land and not you?"
"Because we started a city in a swamp with a bunch of bandits, and then raided our neighbors for wifes." - this is not quite "because we won", but it sure is getting there. Also this is coming from the greatest state of ancient europe that everyone else is legitimating themselves from.
EDIT: Actually, this is another thing that goes against the theory: All the europeans who claimed a right deriving from the roman conquerers, as opposed to "We lived here so long" - most of them until the age of nationalism, and a few persisting.
The spartans did not write much, so we cant be sure what they thought, but I think they had a similar mentality. Certainly the part where they officially remained at war with the helots would suggest it.
I dont know where I got this from, but: "Straussian reading is pretending everyone smart has always been a liberal".
So I thought the Armenian is just a collision without deeper meaning, the sort of dissonance that all ideologies have to paper over occasionally. But because the Turkey in the loop not only provides resources for the activism in Europe but still actively sets the agenda, the Germans use it as an indicator of loyalty in their conflict with Turkey, which is the actual problem. I knew euroturks have their nationalist shibboleths that they care about; I didnt notice they were still so responsive to the situation in Turkey. Am I understanding you right?
From the austrian end myself, it doesnt feel like the discourse around the turks has changed much since the 2000s. I still do have the impression that we match them into the minority pattern in some sense. Admittedly it rare to meet someone whos very serious about this without being selected for it. Certainly poking at the associated PC taboos is much less serious then with the jews. With the turks, someone "correcting" you might imply that he knows we just have to pretend to believe this - but it still is there. I can see though how that difference might look much smaller on our end then the receiving one.
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