Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think youre missing an important part. The whole conversation the idea describes goes more like this:
A: "We shouldnt do Y, that would imply we should also do X, which is bad"
B: "X will never happen, it would be totally safe to do Y"
Y is done, X happens
A: *angry*
B: "Obviously its good that X happened, its good for the same reason Y is good, are you really such a backward bigot that you think even Y is bad, or are you too dumb to understand consistent principles?"
Your third scenario is not a case of the pattern at all, because the "X will never happen" isnt used to assuage. Your second scenario might be, but I think youll find very few examples of conservatives using it that way. They just dont get enough wins for that.
As for the first example... well somewhere in between those two totally different people saying these things, the X did in fact happen. That would be very unlikely if noones mind changed. So propably there is a significant faction who made the switch in-one-person.
But thats not particularly relevant. The point is that you shouldnt believe the "X will never happen", and waxing about how totally sincere the liberals are and how mean and unsportsmanlike it is to say theyre not doesnt change that.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to a dataset of four populations sampled evenly: the three primary colors (Red, Green, and Blue) and Black illustrate a near-ideal dimension reduction example.
Note: colours are represented as RGB, from 0 to 1 instead of 255.
Although PCA correctly positioned the primary colors at even distances from each other and Black, it distorted the distances between the primary colors and Black (from 1 in 3D space to 0.82 in 2D space).
No shit. What this means in terms of genetics is that if you have 3 source populations A B C, and A and B are relatively genetically similar, say only differ on 100 allels, and C is very different from them, differing on 1000 allels, and then you do PCA on various populations that are mixed out of those, the PCA plot wont tell you that A and B are similar. It will only tell you the relative admixtures of A B C in the sampled populations. Of course, this is often exactly what you want.
Its an especially bizzare complaint since the "allel distance" can already be calculated from the raw data, and represented easily, without doing PCA or anything of that sort.
Box 1: Studying the origin of Black using the primary colors
Same dataset as before, except they change the relative sampling frequency of the colours, and show that this can change which primary colour black is closest to.
The problem here is that the author seems to think that black "should" come out an even mixture, but it isnt. Genetic mixture is weighted averaging, and that even mixture would be (1/3, 1/3, 1/3), a darkish grey. Black cant be any kind of mixture of the others. In all these plots you see a pyramid rotated to various angles.This is not a "near-ideal dimension reduction", that would look flatter in 3D. In fact you could also make it so that black is outside the triangle of the other 3, dont know why he doesnt show that.
What this tells us genetically is that a plot of n PCs can only depict the relative admixture of n+1 source populations. If there are more, youll only see those n+1 most important to your sample (ideally, if the others dont matter very much), or rotations between that (less ideally). So you do often need to look at more than 2 PCs, but if the samples are actually admixed from a few sources, you wont need very many.
Also notice that the shift in relative sample size needed to create these changes in the example is multible orders of magnitude, and the more "reducible" the data is the more drastic they need to be.
Based on this we get:
Reich et al.44 presented further PCA-based “evidence” to the ‘out of Africa’ scenario. Applying PCA to Africans and non-Africans, they reported that non-Africans cluster together at the center of African populations when PC1 was plotted against PC4 and that this “rough cluster[ing]” of non-Africans is “about what would be expected if all non-African populations were founded by a single dispersal ‘out of Africa.’” However, observing PC1 and PC4 for Supplementary Fig. S3, we found no “rough cluster” of non-Africans at the center of Africans, contrary to Reich et al.’s44 claim... This is an example of how vital a priori knowledge is to PCA.
You could also tell a priori knowledge was used because youre shown PC1 and 4. Someone looked at more than that and chose to show you these. This is also why its dumb to show you PC1&4 from his replications with changed relative samplesizes: If you looked at more PCs (and probably not many more) youd find a combination that replicates Reichs plot or something similar, because again youre just rotating your perspective on the same shape. (Or not, see below.)
Also if you read the Reich cite (I recommend if you have access (arrr), its only 2 pages), youll see its primarily about integrating PCA with other sources of information, and that plot is an example. Also also he seems to have done the PCA on Africans only, and then plotted the others into those PCs, whereas the author is doing PC on all of them.
Box 2: Studying the origin of Black using the primary and one secondary (admixed) color populations
Following criticism on the sampling scheme used to study the origin of Black (Box 1), the redoubtable Black-is-Red group genotyped Cyan.
The RGB for Cyan is (0, 1, 1), which is again not a mixture of previous colours. Black, Blue, Green, and Cyan might be mixtures of 3 other colours that lie outside the RGB space, but thats still 4 source populations.
Pretty much the same goes as I said for Box 1.
This is where i stopped reading.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.
Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.
From a purely biological point of you foo and bar are propably pretty similar. Both are a person having AIDS. If this is accurate, the relevant difference between foo and bar is moral, not biological. Both involve getting infected with HIV, but in the foo case, the effected person is sexually oriented towards getting infected and participated willingly, and so its fine. In the bar case, the effected person is unwilling, so its bad.
So, should your purely apolitical taxonomy of mental physical disorders classify foo as a mental illness, or should it refuse to classify bar as a mental illness?
When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say. Now, he doesnt seem to know this. He thinks that:
There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.
But thats not how it works. If tomorrow the Ministry of Hide-tanning decides that whale skin is hairless, you might insist that it obviously has hair, I mean look at it (possibly with some magnification). But they could just as well say "Well, there are facts on each individual point - whether they hold water, whether they resist against the grain, whether theyre made of ceratin, etc. But theres no fact to the matter whether theyre hairs."
More generally, "X falls in category(set) Y" and "X has property Z" are isomorphic - everything you can express in the first form, you can also express in the second, and vice versa. If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things.
The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.
That propably means they (were made to) go too fast. If you can sound out the text, and you can understand speech, then you can understand the text. If you try to go very fast and throw every letter out of working memory as soon as you read it, thats bad. The teacher should make you repeat each word after you finish it, without looking back at the text, and same for sentences. Eventually youll learn to read fluidly just from practice - but better to read non-fluidly before that.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
minimalist 30 minute
My condolences. Seriously though, how early do you have to get up for that?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?
And if you could say it out loud and you just dont, thats somehow cooler? Because the point of themotte is that there is a way to make a claim overtly. All the cases I can think of when some "darkly hinting" got popular in ratspace is when "You wouldnt understand it even if I said it out loud, because its so hard to explain and/or understand" like TLP or the meditation guys.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support.
And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ?
The 80s were the inflection point of an economic change, where now the number of salaried jobs increases as the people in the city increase. In the old days, a city would be built around a resource, often a trade route, that had some absolute size of economic surpluss to be extracted. There were jobs for the people extracting it, those brought people in, then there were jobs for services for those people, which brought more people in, etc, but this would taper off quickly and the population stayed limited. Then with industrialisation, you could create surplus anywhere. But you still need food as an input for the workers, and initially that still limited the growth of the cities by how far it could (afford to) be transported. But eventually, technology became so good that its now basically irrelevant where a city is. Really only container ship access matters, and thats a matter of if. ~Noone who has it is physically blocked from expanding it. Now, the best place to run your generic company is in the biggest city, and so it the best place to look for a job, and the only price that can go against it is that of the space.
If you solve this by just building ever more, the result is maybe ten gigantic cities in the whole world (plus small mining towns scattered far apart). And that might be the most efficient thing to do in some sense, but housing still wont be as cheap as it used to. Things just want to clump together now, and they will always want a bit more.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
as she seems to treat things like poachers as a limitation on the capacity of humans, instead of a chosen activity of humans
In retrospect, I should have included that as one of the cathedralising signs.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think poor people care much more about separating themselves from even poorer people then about getting to be with the richer people. Horrible-to-be-around-ness also follows the power law.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
It seems that, "casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach," is interpreted as "shame" or "pressure".
I think that can be a reasonable interpretation. Depending on what kind of autist you are, you might not relate to this, but theres a state where people believe that they have lost an argument, really lost and not just because of some stupid tactical error that they can fix, but also not believe they were wrong. They will agree that youre right, and that they should do X, but also obviously not want to do X, and not really do it. In that case, if you keep bringing up the argument to them, that is generally considered bad manners and a kind of social pressure. Basically its a bit as if ordering them.
Now you can propably see why the rationalists wouldnt like this kind of norm, and I grant them that theyre propably consistent in not applying it, but it does take some protection away from people.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
At this point, reading
an articlea comment like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be.
The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted.
So I checked your points against both the latest 7 top-levels in the thread 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and my memory of popular comments.
Extreme (emotional) Decoupling.
Not true of any of the top-levels. Some popular comments are like this but some are also earnest presentations of a situation that doesnt fit any mayor narrative, or being vocally angry at the outgroup.
Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty
Not true of any top-levels nor of popular comments. Long arguments tend to make their points in more detail rather than make more points. Including multible examples for something. Adding visceral details to a situation youre asking people to consider. Countering first-order objections. Even just repeating yourself in different words. Very long comments mostly invest in parallel rather than serial argumentation.
Literature references.
Not true of any of the top-levels. Occasionally in popular comments.
Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus.
True of one of the top-levels, and I would guess a similar rate for popular comments. I think the author of that one top-level is ESL and that probably contributes. Then again so am I, so maybe comments that dont seem pretentious to me (or my own) do seem that way to natives.
Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through?
Not true of any of the top-levels. Popular comments are sometimes very long and a struggle to get through, but its not clear that they could be effectively shortened into a list of references. The last multipost I remember is this, if you want to try at compression. Its also built around a literature reference and has a pretty decoupled premise, but its doesnt seem bad to me.
...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read!
OK I think at this point there are two people doing this and only one of them where you actually find it annoying.
Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
Depending on how you count it, up to 4 of the top-levels. Id say one of them is mainly about that. It seems hard to avoid criticising academia, MSM, HR, or government in CW posts, and "normies" doesnt restrict the description very much. I think this is actually a bit less common/intense in popular comments.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Huh. I do none of the things you listed, and cant really think of any replacements either. It doesnt feel difficult to me, and indeed not even like Im resisting the tentacled grasp of technology or anything. Its just... sort of how things play out. I dont think this has made my emotional states more different from those of normies. It feels weird to read this in the tone of "we as a society" rather than maybe "I might have a bit of a problem".
I can’t find the limiting principles.
Most people just dont actively seek out ways to adjust their emotion, they just drink their coffee in the morning and their beer on friday night and stuff like that because those are just kind of what you do, and leave it at that. Thats pretty effective at preventing you from becoming unrecognisable in your lifetime at least.
Part of me thinks that this is enhancing me, making me more human
And part of me wonders if I even know what real is any more.
This seems like youre just saying real because its kind of the most generic word and you dont know better how to say what you have a problem with. I think this is much less about particular tools being "over a line", and more of a worry that tinkering will turn into (or indeed, inescapably already is) true optimisation, and where that might lead you. That maybe, if you were given enough options, you would end up making yourself not so human. Not for any failure of will, but because there genuinely seems to be no argument against each step.
And then the problem of others...
I mean, that paragraph sounds a lot like stereotypical stoned thoughts, irrespective of the mood organ path that got you there.
Yes, but its a thing far-lefties write about and thats kind of it. Can you remember a polititian being accused of Antiziganismus by a relevant opponent or a major newspaper? Now compare antisemitism, racism vs MENA.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
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.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think it reflects a lack of familiarity with the world of academic philosophy.
I think your comment reflects a lack of familiarity with the Cthulhu discourse Im trying to address. Admittedly it doesnt have a canonical name or good reference link. But a good example here would be Benthams defense of homosexuality. When he wrote that, it wasnt a new culture war thing either. But eventually it was.
I don't think it's fair to call this a utilitarian piece.
And here too, we can return to the above example and see that many of those who would later advance the issue were not especially utilitarians, but still employed a broadly similar reasoning turning on similar facts, from deontological or humanistic backgrounds.
I also agree shes not making this argument because its gaining mainstream currency. My point it about what its intellectual history would look like, if it were to gain mainstream currency, and what this tells us about evaluating the relevance of things like the Bentham example to the intellectual history of our current politics.
Im sorry how contrived this looks if you dont know who Im trying to talk to.
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.
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