Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
19d ago
Your example of a shave is actually already in the right ballpark.
I guess I disagree? I can see why youd think that, if youre going by an "objective" metric of similarity, but by that metric a 5 year old will always be more similar to another 5 year old than a 50 year old - and yet, we often recognise relatives on pictures where they were 5. For the sense of "do you look like the same person", things that naturally vary over time such as hair length are much less impactful than ones that require surgery.
Humans are usually quite resilient here. I would expect to see dysmorphic or dysphoric reactions in someone already quite mentally unwell
I mean, I think Im mentally well. But the reason I got rid of the beard is that it still felt uncomfortably a year in, so it doesnt seem crazy to me that such visual changes would stick around as well.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
20d ago
Aside from the transhumanist discussion (and, yknow), why the masseters? Isnt a wide jaw good for men, when it isnt just fat? Youre the one that learned anatomy, but I think thats the masseters we see here.
Besides adverse motivations, have you considered adverse psychological reactions? I at one point shaved off an about fingerlong beard all at once, and afterwards I felt like my head was ridiculously wide. It was quite a strange experience: I tried to check sizes and proprotions in just parts of the face and it would just... fail... and pop me back into the bigger picture where its ridiculously wide. I knew it was my face in the mirror, but it didnt feel like my face, and thats not a good experience. I resolved not to look into mirrors for a while to not feed that thought, and it was gone after a week or so. I dont entirely understand what happened, but this was from a fairly normal and minor change in appearance, and Id worry that a real plastic surgery would be worse and maybe stick around - fortunately nothing to do there. (If it matters, I definitely look better without the beard, and not just because the "haircut" it had was terrible.)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
20d ago
Or maybe it's a bit more of a body horror thing where you're uncomfortably aware of the chance of the piercing catching on something and causing a horrible accident.
Yes. I get visions of something tugging on them really hard. I dont like tattoos either, but those arent uncomfortable to look at.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
20d ago
Its possible to do all sorts of things safely, if you pay good attention and limit the load/volume accordingly. But those limits might be too strict to progress with, which is obviously not good and will lead typical lifting personalities to break them eventually. And for what, if you dont compete on strength?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
20d ago
I understood you to be talking about the one-shot?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
21d ago
Even with AI aid, I dont think anyone would bother with this. You know something about biochem, and I know something about numerics. By the time you have the compute to simulate without any experiment all considered molecules reliably enough to not have a catastrophic error in one of them, you have long ago cracked all encryptions ever made, found the vaccum instabilites if there are any, etc. Why bother with even grey goo at that point?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
21d ago
These kinds of goals are special cases that we wouldnt expect to arise consistenly without a reason. Not touching the universe outside [radius] is a constraint, by default you can achieve a goal better by not being so constrained. Even your examples dont really work; a conservationist might still need to expand to protect empty space from other, non-conservationist expanders. The paperclip simulator might still get more data centers to simulate even more, etc. Its possible to construct an example that works on purpose, but its not the general case, and even if it were, its would have to be overwhelmingly likely, because it only takes one to become visible.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
21d ago
In the "support continues" scenario, are you expecting last years level of aid for the rest of the conflict, or the previous baseline?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
22d ago
I think the population that does something like this, in any direction, is small and mostly male.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
23d ago
anarcho tyranny
What do you mean by that? As I know it, anarcho tyranny is when you use punishments that only respectable people care about, which combined combined with certain doctrines about self defense or legal uncertainty forces them to endure crime that you do nothing against. That doesnt really make sense in your sentence.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
24d ago
"Work" can mean a variety of things. It can be "does this reduce the average persons chance of death". But the version thats needed to justify mandates is a systemic/herd immunity effect that has failed to materialise even in 90%+ vaccinated populations.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
24d ago
Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented
I think they were wise not to do that. It would have opened up the whole issue of various more-or-less official requirements for getting this vaccine they hadnt pronounced safe yet, and the actually-existing controversy was peanuts compared to what that could have been.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
Somewhat of an aside, but I have found Taleb supremely frustrating - he sounded like a typical "empirics bro" making wild in-principle-statements as if hes disproven mathematics, which I rounded down to "dont be too confident in your models". It took a completely different branch of thought for me to learn about the problems of infinite variance for decision theory.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus.
Interestingly enough Spengler (himself a math teacher) had this as one of his illustrations of the difference between classical and faustian mentality. I have found this to be a great unintentional illustration of the idea.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
25d ago
Did any of them have children or were planning to?
No, but thats more to do with other demands on their time - an idea found in normal rationalism as well, though obviously not as serious/demanded. Ive talked about it before, but the zizian doctrine blows up even independently of the values.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
26d ago
Overlap with the Zizians, for sure.
I dont think those are exterminsationist, or even anti-natalist on principle?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
26d ago
Anyway, I think Bryan and Scott suffer from the glaring weakness many elites/intelligentsia have and don't even notice. They aren't exposed to the direct impacts of their own policy ideas or the ACTUAL outcomes of their thinking... I note the same thing about Bryan's stance on open borders.
Are you gonna explain how they are insulated wrt their parenting ideas?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
26d ago
Christian nationalists believe they will succeed because God is on their side. You may not accept these reasons as being valid, but they are very real and compelling reasons to them.
I suppose if you think that gods commands are entirely unrelated to how he chose to create the world, and will win out purely through some kind of direct intervention (but still you do have to fight with maximum effectiveness for it to happen, any moral scruples and you lose), it would lead to this strategy. But I dont think this specific version just is christian belief, and that its appealing to some ideologues precisely because theyve internalised not believing in a natural order.
all they can do is encourage the development of a civil society that wants to be socialism/christian, etc. The strategy is sound. The reason that it's not done by everyone is that it's hard and requires patience.
You dont think the establishment tries to maintain a civil society that wants them?
Hitler sums it up in Mein Kampf
Im not saying those tactics cant work - someone is always gonna win. And a brief look at his neighbors and historical context suggests it wasnt just random either. There are propably some ideosyncratic positions of the Nazi party that that won only with them, because Hitler was a great speaker, but the general direction seems to derive from broader factors.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
27d ago
Im not talking about "principles", per se. "Burn it all down so that my ideology can inevitably emerge from the ashes" is an asymmetric method as far as Im concerned (though usually not a very good one). Content-agnostic methods are those that, definitionally, everyone can use. If youre ideology is in any way related to how society works, you should have more options available to you.
Another way of looking at it: Yes, christian nationalism is in a very weak position. That means if you only use methods that everyone can use, you should expect to get crushed, since theres a winner-takes-all effect to this, and youre not really any better at it. Why do you think you can win?
Now the reasons why your original tactics don't work in defiance of your ideology in the first place..?
I think if your tactics dont work, its generally in your interest to have a think about why.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
27d ago
10 years ago we won with a drag queen, yesterday with a countertenor. Double gay, yes, but also in some sense balance restored.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
Permanent neutral status for Ukraine (like Austria)
Im still surprised by this. Our neutrality has always seemed to me like it gained the Soviets little. Anything to say about this from your end?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
To the proponents of the "woke right" idea: have you seen any equivalent to "checking your privilege"? As far as I can tell, responses to Minority people participating range from "all hail the great based one", over not treating it any different, to "dont believe that niggerfaggot". But not any specific demands.
Id also like to see your best examples of struggle sessions. I expect this to be less objectively determinable than the above, but worth discussing.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
I would make the argument that Gramsci's tactics are, by their nature, apolitical: and they are successful enough that even his most hated ideological enemies have adopted them because they are effective and they work.
If the best methods for advancing your values are completely content-agnostic, then I think theres something wrong with your values. More commonly, people think its must be the best because theyre swimming in modernism, where everyone thinks this because to claim otherwise would be like the naturalistic fallacy. But if, like a christian nationalist presumably does, you actually believe youre in alignment with the natural order, shouldnt this manifest itself in some useable way in real social effects?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
28d ago
On the other hand, a chick who's down to lie to others for my benefit could mean she's ride-or-die for me. Similarly, a chick who's down to take from others and give to me is based and good.
Its on a second date. Unless youre a gigachad, you should assume she does this for people shes second-date-familiar with, possibly less. (A similar logic applies to early sex)
Second, while "willing to lie for you" is a benefit, its also important to be wise about it. I wouldnt go do this myself if you brought it up to me, and Im similarly not excited about her thinking its a good idea.
I agree that an AI can track the "same person" thing just fine if its trained that way. But if you understand that metric, then why do you think shaving is a similar size change to surgery? Or did you already have some kind of plastic surgery that it saw through?
No, Im very sure the discomfort is a tactile thing. Thats certainly how it seems to me, and in terms of the timeline, it was only quite a bit later, looking at photos, that I thought it had looked stupid. If Id thought that ahead of time I just wouldnt have grown it out. Again, said beard got to over 5cm, because I hoped it would feel more like headhair once long enough. Ive had short beards since, and the difference between comfortable and uncomfortable lengths is not particularly visible.
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