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Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

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joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

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User ID: 2022

Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

					

Hello back frens


					

User ID: 2022

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Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

Isnt it weird how you never hear about the gypsies? They sure look like they count as a capital-M Minority: Very poor, very uneducated, very bad relations to the police, they even were in the Nazi camps. But in political discourse they might as well not exist. Im vaguely aware that our eastern neighbors have more of them and its more of a topic there, but this doesnt make it to me either. I just searched for it and best I found is this, from 2020. Theres sightly more in german, but compared to the media volume dedicated to telling me that Orban is mean to the gays, it might as well not exist. While I was at it I also looked for the "list of gypsies that made important contributions to science", and that actually doesnt exist. The only thing that remotely looks like a hit is this, which has three people on it: one with a possible nth-generation ancestor, and two that google isnt even sure exist.

I find this interesting as a point of comparison. Theres lots of people out there of even opposing ideologies giving mechanistic explanations of how the shared characteristics of Minorities lead to the political discourse around them, and then heres a case where it just didnt.

Interesting topic in a thread below

Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys* wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.

A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.

*"I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife."

But is the broadening of the accepted reasons really a problem? Assume for a moment that puberty blockers worked as advertised (no interference with normal desistance processes). Is there something inherently wrong with offering kids who are experiencing discomfort with their gender puberty blockers? One might argue that categories like non-binary or genderqueer don’t exist and are artificially created for ideological reasons, but if they do, I’m not sure what the issue is.

Whats the scenario here? So you have kids who have some sort of gender problem but dont want to transition, and you give them puberty blockers. If nothing changes about their gender situation, what then? Do they just keep taking blockers permanently? I mean, progressivism making people literally not grow up is funny as an idea, but probably not so funny if it actually happens.

And if you dont start out with the idea that normal development is the "good outcome", why would it be a problem if they interfere with desistance? At most you can say that trans people end up less happy. But hypothetically that could change, and the interference remain the same.

The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny, so of course people who declared themselves to be pro-trans focused on touching women and female-related terms. Trans men don’t seriously threaten men in the same way, and good luck trying to start a mens-rights movement which might be threatened by them.

There are more arguments Joyce makes for the preservation of single-sex (basically only women’s) and the dangers of allowing trans women to enter those spaces, but they’re not very interesting or worth expounding on. If you understand the argument that males tend to be more violent, especially sexually, towards females, you’ve read about a dozen or so pages in this book already.

The feminism is getting in the way of the analysis here: Men dont worry about transmen because whatever they could do was already done by normal women. They demanded to be included in previously male-only spaces, and that those change to accomodate them. But this goes back to "The only allowed reason to not like someone is that hes evil", and so she has to claim this is about violence.

Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.

Yes, but its not clear IQ 120 by itself would fix that. Genetic enhancement would be a thus-far-impossible level of decoupling between intelligence and other correlates of good outcomes, it might break currently observed correlations.

This is very much in accordance with how average German, British or Hungarian liberal will be obsessed with black people but ignore or even just dislike the (sometimes much larger) Turkish Arab or Albanian populations in their midst.

The turks do have a kind of minority politics. Its a lot less intense than the US with blacks, but they have their highly credentialed representatives that get a good bit of stage time and diversity-grants, and theyre a topic in political discussion. The mindset you describe exists and is something you might filter into as a visitor from anglostan, but its pretty niche. So I dont think the atlantic fully explains the situation with the gypsies.

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.

What do you actually hope to get from a right that embraces white identity? I understand that DR often think mainstream conservatives just dont take anti-white progressives seriously enough, but if e.g. Rufo just maximally succeded, what do you think would be missing?

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.

and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments

Is there even a difference? A new behaviour is established, gets positive reinforcement, grows.

It's enough of an issue that there's a lot of psychological screening that goes on for serious undercover investigation roles.

Yes, few people have the ability to keep their inner life unchanged when they get a lot of reinforcement in a different direction. And describing it like that, I think its easy to see how having that ability would put you at risk for a different kind of insanity.

MineCraft Quilt multiplicity people

Google is useless here, mind elaborating?

@aiislove:

This is truely strange to see. Normally its rare for an interesting comment to also get an interesting response, but this is an entire thread thats almost all people bouncing schizo theories off each other.

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.

If left and right are different versions of enlightenment philosophy, this leaves open the possibility of an opposition from outside the enlightenment. But you dont seem to think theres anything in that box. Anytime you argue that someone is not a real rightist, they are placed firmly in the "left" box. Why do you think that is?

Some suggestions for the Inbox:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

or some variety of psychopath

Can you say more about what those guys were like? Also, with all these violent dudes around, were you ever afraid of someone on your side?

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.

there’s an occasional conspiracy theory in homeschooling circles that whole word learning is intended to teach children that meaning is completely arbitrary and thus communism or gender ideology or whatever.

Im sure it wasnt designed explictly with that goal, but theres more reason to this belief than just "cause it sux". How do you think people got the idea for whole word learning, if it doesnt work? Theres various ideas floating around about explicit knowledge not being so important, things being more fluid and contextual, "patchwork" methods over systems, etc. Those propably contributed to the idea. You could attribute them to constructivism, or pragmatism, or poststructuralism, but all of that falls under "fake and gay".

See also a comment further below.

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.

I think the barberpole theory is pretty lame.

First of all, it doesnt actually tell you what new thing the upper classes will adopt. Before modernism, public art and architecture was neoclassical. If I had asked you at that time what style one could adopt to best differentiate from neoclassical, would you have come up with modernism or postmodernism from first principles? I think the best answer there would have been imitating rural peasants, but its hard to say. In practice a "style" has lots of attributes, and giving an exact inverse is difficult and also unnecessary, because anything thats different enough cam be used as a repudiation.

And "obvious inversion" is only one way this could go. Another example that certainly seems to be true often is that only the people youre signaling to can read the signals. If this is "elites compete for adulation of their peers", that doesnt explain the uglyness. It only needs to be obvious if you want to show the proles that youre different from them.

Also, theres a lot of low-class coded things that lower-class people themselves dont consider beautiful. Consider for example these very loose-cut shirts littered with branding: The people who wear these like them, and they think theyre cool, but they dont think theyre beautiful. You have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find people who e.g. wear them to a wedding. Returning to the topic of public art, I have yet to see anyone argue we should have e.g. a statue of Mickey Mouse in public square. Why not? Mickey Mouse figures are certainly more popular home decoration than classical statuettes.

So, its not given that the lower classes will even dislike it, if public buildings and art are distinctly higher-class. I dont think postmodern art is an obvious consequence of post-scarcity. Theres plenty of people floating around telling us that things shouldnt be beautiful because thats fascist: consider taking them seriously.

Why there wasn't really a fight over trans men joining isn't really the point, I think. I'm arguing that trans men don't get any privileges by acting like cis men.

Those are the same point. They dont get any privileges that way because they already had them as women. If theres any advantages to being a man, weve gotten outraged about and tried to eliminate them a while ago.

I’m reminded of a tweet:

[Image not reproduced in comment]

If youre familiar with brain-teasers, theres a certain gimmick where a puzzle isnt uniquely solvable until you get told that it is, usually by someone being said to know something or through a subtle use of the definite article. The joke in the tweet has this, too. It could be any sort of social conservatism, until the last line tells you its about race.

It's simple- look at the political and cultural power other ethnic groups enjoy by organizing along ethnic lines and fiercely advocating for their group.

I think in the modern context this success is almost entirely down to the authorities humoring them. US blacks are not such a threat that the government has to make all these concessions to them, they could absolutely turn it off if they wanted to. China does that sort of thing all the time. The "concessions" are things the elites already wanted to do. I mean, a lot of those organisations doing the "fierce advocacy" arent even run by black people. Their ethnic power is a kayfabe for progressives.

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.

people do seem to behave differently based on their avatar

As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar. I interpreted the sentence I responded to

Outside of the more out-there therians and actors, though, this can be hard to notice from the outside, and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments.

as being about long-term effects. The short-term effects are interesting, but I dont see how they would lead to the character taking over in the off-time.

Closer to the central claim, though, I think there is some difference between, for example, playing a character that is foo and doing foo, for wide varieties of characteristics. The latter probably is better at encouraging that specific action! But the former makes you think about the broader characteristics and motivations and how all those things would interact. Which, to be fair, is still a new behavior that's established and getting reinforcement. Just a different one.

I somewhat agree, depending on what you imagine for "just doing foo". If you get told what to do over earbuds, thats less dangerous than "playing a character" normally. I would say this is because in the latter case youre figuring out what to do, and that way of figuring out can be reinforced. I dont think its essential for that figuring out to involve thinking about some character.

And I think this is essentially the same way normal behaviour changes in an environment: You go in with somewhat different mood/disposition each day, and some of them get more positive reinforcement than others.

BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.

Well, obvious part is getting the regressions for (user, judgement) against various mod decisions. Getting interactions between different users is propably not feasible, but we could try clustering them. (Which reminds me, is there still any interest in this?) This could let us consider interactions between those, and help assign comments to volunteers to get a representative quorum faster. Do you think you can afford to double-check all decisions that went against the user? And there should propably be some report number over which to check approvals.

How would you document actions the system took? You wanted people to not know they had an impact, but the modlog would obviously show the action as not taken by a human, and however the modhat comments are handled would show it too.

I checked the modlog for this and have some suggestions there as well: First, bans arent robustly connected to their modhat comments. If you view all actions you can tell chronologically, but filtering for bans you dont get it. Also there apparently arent modhats for removed comments, or did I just not find them? No list of currently banned users either. I think it would also be nice if the list where you select a mod action to filter for had little numbers showing how many of each occured in the last month or so.

Also: I know how to programm in principle (coming from mathematics), but I dont have experience with git, interacting with databases, etc. How much of a time investment do you think it would be before I could contribute to dev?