MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think that only works when the informant stands to lose in the face of the embarrassment. In the case of Hamas in Israeli prisons, the entire point of the fable is to paint their enemies as human right violators, thus getting international attention and support. A tale of canine anal rape helps that cause, as it would be a human rights violation, paints Israel as inhumane aggressors, and garners sympathy. It’s a cry bully tactic. Like the woman who invites a man to her house and then claims he raped her, Theres shame in being raped, Theres also power in getting people to turn the male into a pariah.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I mean sure. But it’s also true that such kids are unlikely to benefit from getting educated at a level at sigma above what a kid in that situation can achieve. And most of the fallout will harm the kids pushed into that situation.
A kid whose background and intelligence make him unlikely to stand out after university starts out kinda fucked. He was basically conned into thinking he could go to university and get a degree and get a 100K a year job doing high level office work. He owes a mortgage on the education he bought at 18 under that impression. Worse, those skills he learned are mostly worthless to him, as he’s too dumb to trade on the skills he was taught at university, but lacks education and experience on jobs he could easily do well in. Worse, years of the education system blowing sunshine up his ass have convinced him that the kinds of jobs that would be at his level.
Imagine a society that basically highly values baseball. We judge a kid on his ability to play baseball, we have every kid trained to play baseball from 5 onward. Every kid is told that he should aspire to become a professional baseball player. Then we tell the kids who suck at baseball that they can do it too. We cheat them through, maybe with a designated hitter, designated runners, etc. the kid honestly believes he’s going to play for the Mets. So he spends thousands on baseball academies, who also want him to keep buying lessons, so everyone is telling him that baseball is his ticket, that he’s good, etc. and other paths are never discussed. No “hey, maybe you should try to be an usher.” He tries, he fails, and has nothing else.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I don’t think all of the PMCs are elites. It’s mostly pretense. In fact most of them are specifically useless and don’t have the attention span or the ability to do anything that doesn’t involve “sit at de ask, stare at screen, type up summaries of work other people have done (and write it at a sixth grade level, the people reading the report to summarize the reports written by you and your colleagues don’t read above maybe an 8th grade level)”, and most of their day is taken up by pretending to work and looking busy. They are not inventing new things, they’re basically Confucian Mandarins who exist to churn characters. I don’t think most of them, if presented a problem to solve would be capable of solving it unless the method was something they already knew. They’re doing what they were trained to do at school— fill in worksheets, write book reports, follow the directions their boss told them to.
It’s true we have far too many of these people, but the reason that we have a problem is that we’ve been turning worksheets into a professional career, then invented a program that can do those worksheets.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Anything can be used as a weapon, I agree. But giving civilians the ability to shoot a hundred rounds in a minute simply gives the psycho or terrorist a force multiplier that allows him to kill hundreds before anyone can stop him. I don’t see knives or handguns as a problem in the same way because you cannot kill as many people as fast as you can with a machine gun.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think at least 3/4 of the problem here is culture. For whatever reasons, anything other than “go to a four year university” is seen as unacceptable to most people. The schools, even public schools, love to brag about kids in college prep, and the rates of kids getting into college. They have a few other courses at least around me, but they’re mostly afterthoughts— the equipment never gets updated, the teachers are barely interested, it’s seen by parents and kids as lesser than academic work. And really, most parents would at least in private consider a child who wanted to go into skilled trades as disappointing and not living up to potential. They’re embarrassed to tell other parents about it.
It might be a waste for a truly top 20% intellect to do HVAC. But for most people, it’s really a better option than the typical office drone. More opportunities for owning a business, less exposure to AI replacement. The money is respectable and the pot is sweetened significantly by the fact that instead of taking on thousands in debt for the education, you get paid to learn the trades. There are downsides, but there are downsides to everything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m generally finding success with simple rules. Like because screens are a problem, I tend to treat any digital entertainment as if it were “furniture”. My suggestion is to offload as many of those “Cokes” to a desktop computer that lives in a single room. Do the same with video — have a designated big screen that you watch video on. What this does is force you to make a decision to do those things. If you have to go to the computer room or tge TV room to use those screens for those things, you have to leave the place where you are and go to the other room, and thus have to decide you want to do that over whatever else is going on.
This is kinda how old school tech wasn’t as hard to turn off in 1990. The miniaturization necessary to make a computer portable enough to be part of your EDC wasn’t there. The TV only worked when plugged into the wall and the cable box. This you were generally tied down to a situation where if you wanted to do a chat (AIM or Yahoo Chat were around in that era) you generally did so on the big family computer, and you could not do it anywhere else. If you wanted to go outside, you had to log off. If it was dinner time, you had to log out to go to the kitchen to eat.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think most of the problems that crop up in K-12 education come from the one-size fits all nature of our system. We educate every kid as though he’s a completely blank slate, with the end goal that every single kid must go to a 4-year university program. This isn’t how any of it works. Kids, heck, adults are different in ability, temperament, interests, skills and attention span. As such, I think the model of tracking kids into paths would work far better. That kid who disrupts classes every day doesn’t benefit from the pretense that he’s going to have the potential to graduate from a STEM program or even get a 4 year degree. That kid’s future is getting on the “do not rehire” list at Walmart. The only thing happening because we insist on the make-believe that we’re throwing away a future from a kid is that the children of parents not rich enough to a private school get screwed out of their education. Put that kid into a special needs school, teach them to their ability. If they’re capable, teach them skills they can use for the work they can actually do (probably fast food or janitor jobs or something). Put the slower learning kids in a track that teaches them skills they can use, and go up the ladder until you reach the scholar level where the kids are smarter than most of their peers and teach them to be engineers or scientists or lawyers or computer programmers.
Other things that I think would help in general are uniforms and cellphone bans, perhaps getting better teachers, and going back to the basics of phonics and mathematics. Don’t pass kids along until they master their studies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I think it’s because most modern founders are really not as grounded in day to day reality. It’s almost all abstracted to a degree that often makes a person think much to theoretically about issues that have a different reality when it’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet or other abstractions. They end up drawing a map and assuming the map is the territory.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I’m more amenable to the idea that some jobs are bullshit. It happens mostly by inertia— we’ve always done it this way, we’ve always had a person to do X thing, so we still need that person doing that thing. Yes you can have value added — people doing a service oriented thing often make the experience of purchasing something a bit nicer. A food-o-mat existed in the 1950s, you simply punk in money and the food would be put behind a little door and it all worked sort of like a giant vending machine. Heck we still have actual vending machines, and you could easily create a food selling business that worked almost entirely by stocking vending machines. But you don’t lose the waitress because there’s simply something pleasant about buying something from a person who makes the experience pleasant. That would require at least some premium to the service. A consumer would have to want to pay more for a person to do that. And for customer facing roles, sure. But the same cannot be said for backend types of work. There’s no reason to pay extra to have a secretary type up your messages and emails. There’s no benefit to having a human make a spreadsheet. No one cares whether their balance sheet was created by a human. So those jobs are more at risk because they don’t get any better because the job was done by a human who made the experience nicer.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I’m not totally anti-restrictions, but those restrictions, should be either voted on by publicly elected representatives in open sessions, or be done only in extreme emergencies, and even then must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition at which point the restrictions lift. The Covid restrictions were not voted in open sessions of the legislature, nor did they have an officially declared ending condition or date. The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end. The end of those restrictions would come when an unelected government official accountable to no one outside the department decreed that the “free” public would thus be allowed to resume their lives.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think the USA didn’t so as well as we like to tell ourselves on resisting tyranny. It was months before there was any serious pushback on restrictions. And even then, it was pretty minor. We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house and having a non-remote job. We still allowed the government to — without even a hint of an end-date — to shut down public venues, close schools, close businesses (that the government itself got to decide were not essential enough to be allowed to do business at all). There were no protests for weeks or months. There were no cases of people going to those places and opening them in defiance of the government fiat. Obeying and then changing your mind later isn’t resistance. Obeying and then changing your mind when the costs affected you personally is buyers remorse. There were no members of any government in the USA that objected to shutting down until … whenever the government defined the country “safe enough.” They never thought that they were laying the foundations for the next crisis and creating the precedent that it would be allowed to interfere with people’s lives indefinitely.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I mean im not disputing that at all. My point is that absent any evidence of extraterrestrial life, there’s no good reason to insert them into our understanding of the universe. Theres no reason to posit a class of things that we have no evidence exists. They might be out there, they might not. But until we find something unequivocally pointing to extraterrestrial life existing, it’s impossible to say they exist. It’s unknown and unknowable and thus not not useful to assume.
I suspect your actual question is more about convincing me as a skeptic. To me, the proof would have to be public— a landing in a public place and filmed by legitimate news media, NASA showing images of a city on another planet. A signal of clearly intelligent origin announced by NASA or SETI. A deep space object that is clearly of technological origin and not built by humans. In short a public demonstration of evidence for life in deep space affirmed either by the event itself being public or vetted by subject matter experts and given to the public as news.
My opinion is simple, im defaulting to “not extraterrestrial life” until Theres good evidence to think they not only exist, but are capable of coming here. There are lots of potential explanations for what the reported are showing: radar malfunctions, secret craft of human origin, intelligence gathering lies to find out what kinds of technology our rivals have, poorly trained observers, a cover story for classified craft being filmed or to hide a weakness of radar. All of these would be plausible with the information we have available and what is known about intelligence agencies and individual actors in that technology and military sphere. If I can explain the data dump without positing aliens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my default explanation be “it could be aliens” any more than it would be a good idea to have my default interpretation be “it could be demons.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I think there’s a danger of too much escapism, but I don’t think it terrible that someone might occasionally dip out of hard reality for a time to rest from the cares of this world. The issue, like most other things is the degree to which it gets in the way of other things, things that benefit you now and in the future.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
Most of the insiders are unnamed, and given that they’re working various forms of espionage and intelligence, they’d be more likely than the average American to concoct a cover story, especially if the truth is something they don’t want other countries to know about.
My best be it that this is about explaining away things that are being tested by the government in ways that would make sense to other countries.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I mean if you had met a Klingon, I would think it would be hard to not mention it to someone, especially given the absolute mania in the West for stories of aliens going back to HG Wells, and through Buck Roger’s in the 1940s and so on. Add in that any scientist with proof of alien life (and it would not even need to be intelligent, just alive and on another planet) would be the winner of the highest honors science has to offer, as well as book offers, sell out speaking engagements, and be the most famous scientist since Einstein, and the fact that no one has claimed those prizes, the money, the fame, or the career security that such proof would bring is pretty strong negative evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I’ll always go back to the first important question of whether or not there’s the possibility of aliens or alien technology: if they are really aliens, why can’t we point to a signal from deep space? Why can’t we hear chatter or detect engines or Dyson spheres or other forms of building in either deep space or on a planet? In short, how are these things getting here without bases, ships or cities on another planet. We needed a global civilization to launch glorified missiles at the moon. That’s almost nothing compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to launch something like the fictitious Enterprise. Even if we grant the rather dubious idea of FTL travel, you still need advanced civilization based on at least one planet to build the ship (likely several planets linked by trade). Yet, we have no evidence of even life on other planets. Certainly no cities have been discovered, let alone solar system spanning infrastructure necessary to build our starship. Absent that, I don’t see any reason to invent concepts of aliens to explain this stuff. 1,2 and 4 require that there be a solar system spanning civilization out there. 5 and 3 don’t. And 3 would be something that the government would want to protect. You don’t want Chinese spies to know exactly which companies are producing technology decades ahead of conventional technology.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I mean I suppose it depends on the immigrants and the compatibility of the culture. Chinese secular people would generally fit within the framework of American secular culture just fine. But if you’re importing the supermen from less compatible culture groups, and allowing them to set up little ethnic bergs within your country you’ll eventually end up being a collection of incompatible cultures bound together by nothing more than a piece of cloth and a national anthem. Unless you want to jettison democracy to find a strongman to hold all of those ethnic groups and their competing interests together, you’re going to watch the thing fly apart at the speed that those groups learn to use the federal government to issue carve outs for them and no one else.
Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average. They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
The general idea is that the thing in question has an internal experience of itself. It has desires, thoughts, and ideas of its own. Like a person might have negative sensations around some task, or might think of something as good or bad. It might want something it has not been told to want. Like I have negative sensations when I injure myself.
But my issue with any of this is that it’s a question of whether or not some being has such internal states when direct observation of the internal states of another being is impossible. I simply cannot know what any other mind is thinking. I can observe it, I can ask it questions and observe the answers, but I cannot actually answer the question of whether or not an LLM has any internal subjective sense of itself as a separate being with its own wants and needs apart from whatever im trying to do with it.
But I think a lot of the reasons that modern American education fails is basically cultural. We don’t have a meritocratic culture. The closest thing we have to a meritocratic culture in America is actually select sports. The system rewards athletes who not only have talent, but those who work hard to develop that talent to high level. That system is the tryouts that athletes go through if they want to play. Nothing beyond the ability to play the game will get you on the team, and nothing but performance will get you on the field or court. Not good enough? You’re off the team.
Compare that to American education. In American education, you don’t have to do much work to “earn” a place. You don’t even get rewarded if you’re better than average. Advanced classes are often under threat because they are selective and not enough “disadvantaged students” get in. The law doesn’t mandate them, and if there’s a budget issue, advanced classes are often first to go. There’s no advantage given to tge child who is good at school, and they quite often end up bored and develop poor work ethics because they’re actually much smarter than the class is designed for, and thus they aren’t challenged, and can get good grades without having to work for them.
Minimal focus on academic achievement and discipline are a predictable result of a system designed primarily to warehouse kids in peer groups regardless of whether or not those kids are academically in the same league, have the same work ethics, or have parents who care about either issue. The parents who are trying to keep their kid chugging along despite the fact that he’s not achieving nor even trying to achieve don’t help creating the environment that rewards work and achievement. And since we elect school boards, those noisy parents mad that their children are going to fail (despite the fact that they don’t study and don’t understand the material) and demanding the standards be lowered.
The other problem is that colleges are not incentivized to be selective. All student loans are guaranteed, no matter what happens to the students after they graduate. This means admitting a kid who cannot read or do math at grade level (which is honestly a low bar) is not a problem. And since millions of relatively low achieving students can now go to college, the need to make sure that the kids graduating from high school are prepared for college or trades is really not there. They’ll graduate, continue their education and not be a problem for the school system they graduate from.
When no part of the system is punished when kids graduate incapable of doing anything productive, they don’t care if those kids achieve anything or learn the habits that make achievement possible. The school doesn’t lose anything if vast swathes of their graduates are economically useless. There are no “games” that the “team” must win to stay relevant. If they graduate an entire class of illiterates, the schools don’t close. They don’t lose anything. They still get to have the same structure. A baseball team that continues to place last will quickly fail.
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