MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I mean I’m able to predict that I don’t know those things because in that case, it’s a known issue for me. I’m also not exactly up to speed on a lot of other topics, including things that I think I know. And if everyone around me has the same blind spots and misbeliefs about a given topic, the chances of something getting on the screen that’s obviously wrong to an expert, or even a layperson interested in the subject goes up quite a bit.
I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t know much about the law. Most people don’t. The problem is that because of the popularity of legal shows and crime dramas, most people think they know the law. Any draft readers will have the same ideas about the law you do. And so it gets into police and crime dramas where most people think that’s how the law works. Any knowledgeable lawyer or even anyone who’s been in a real courtroom knows that the courtroom scenes of most crime dramas are bunk. Jury trials don’t work that way, at all. The lawyers are not allowed to pontificate as they do in crime dramas. The rules of what kinds of evidence and testimony and questions you can ask are far stricter than what TV has taught American audiences about criminal law. It still shows up on TV every week.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I’m suggesting that killing somebody outside of a state of war without due process (with the exception of self-defense) isn’t part of the enlightenment western tradition. It took a long time to get there, and we’re still working to get there.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I don’t think he’s talking about simply handing the land over, but instead the right of conquest, which is and always has been how things work without a powerful overseeing government to enforce other rules and rights. Absent a power willing to enforce your right to a patrimony, the only other option is to be strong enough to enforce your claims. I don’t think that’s a moral claim in either direction, it’s simply a statement of fact that there’s not really a way to prevent a stronger group from taking your land, your stuff or anything else they want without someone strong enough to stop them.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I disagree. If you’re making a top level post, at least some effort should be required. Merely posting “Thing happened, so what happens next” under a link to CNN.com is really good as a top level post. Make a point, any point. Talk about how old Congress is. Talk about the political process of choosing her replacement, and the likely candidates. Talk about the implications for some piece of legislation. But drive-by posting is exactly what’s against the rules here. I’m not even asking for length — just that you put more though into it than just hitting the new post button and spamming.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
Except that a consent that isn’t really clear and can be altered or withdrawn on a whim without even having to make it clear to the other person is simply unfair to that person, especially if it can have very serious consequences for the other person. If I can get your life ruined for a mistake, I don’t see how it can be fair that I not give you clear communication about when I don’t want you do do something. If I will shoot you if you come into my yard, I’m at th3 very least an ass if I don’t tell you that if you step on the grass you die.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
Yes, and I’d agree that in cases where what our experiments show breaks down that I don’t have a problem with putting a bookmark there and saying “we don’t yet understand this part” or something similar. If the data shows a problem as recognized by people working in that field, then sure, I’d trust them to understand the problem and what it implies and what kinds of solutions make sense in that particular breakdown point. On the other hand, breakdowns of specific theories in specific circumstances doesn’t issue us a blank check to put in whatever speculative ideas we particularly want to believe in. We know about relativity, even if we don’t understand it perfectly I think it safe to say we understand a lot of it. Our physics is good enough to be useful in 99% or more of ordinary interactions to fairly high degrees of accuracy. We’re talking about edge cases, and yes they’re important, but it seems like using edge cases to imply that we don’t know what the laws are, when we have a pretty good approximation of those laws, and they work well enough to predict the existence of phenomena long before we can detect them by simple observations. In fact we predicted the existence of black holes long before we ever saw one and we knew quite a bit about their behavior beforehand.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I hesitate to say people have rejected science, as I said above, to the vast majority of people who don’t work in the sciences, or know people who do (and to be honest the same could be said of most academic subjects) they don’t understand it at all. They’re not rejecting a subject they don’t understand, they’re rejecting narratives and a “priesthood” of The Science. They don’t know the work of science, they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand the arguments.the reason for anti-realism and anti-science is that once you lose your trust in the basal religion of you society and suspect that those you trusted to explain the universe are either ignorant or untrustworthy.
I think some disciplines tend to over-theorize, especially astrophysics and the like. Most of the stuff about the ultimate structure of the universe are basically no more empirical than any cosmology invented by any ancient religion. There’s no direct experiment or observation that could conceivably show air castles like String Theory or Multiverses to be reality. There have been no observations of dark matter or dark energy. All of these things might be true, but we have no data, and no empirical evidence of any of it. It’s mostly based in mathematics. Mathematics that was based on other observations, but mathematics. And I think the honest answer to these sorts of ideas is “we don’t know”.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
Laws on who can be on the ballot do vary by state, especially for third parties. They have to have a given amount of support, and I think in some cases you can’t be a felon.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I’m kinda there as well. As a hobby, I think it’s interesting to read and attempt to do philosophy. I also think reading, watching, and analysis of media is interesting. The academic fields are generally fart sniffing exercises producing little worth the money spent getting into it or the people who do it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
It’s good for very very basic stuff. But it encourages bad habits, and also creates the illusion of progress.
What Duolingo teaches is pattern recognition. You see a phrase in English and then pattern match it to whatever language you want to learn. This does work for very basic stuff — stock phrases, greetings, vocabulary. The problem comes when you’re unable to use the word banks, and worse need to generate a sentence not specifically covered by Duolingo’s course. You want to tell someone to do something? It’s not really covered in the Chinese course, so too bad. You need to say that you plan to do something next week, or that you’re thinking about doing something? It’s not covered in the pattern matching.
The second problem is a false sense of progress. It’s designed to feel like progress. To feel like learning. This is their business model, to be honest. They’re not selling “you’ll be able to read a newspaper in your target language,” but “you’ll finish the course and know enough stock phrases to feel smart.” It’s actually perfectly possible to be able to pass a lesson without being able to read the language. You just have to more or less recognize the shapes of the words or the hanzi or kanji or whatever. If you learn to recognize 你好 as “hello” that’s good enough for Duolingo— even if you have no idea what the word is. You can get pretty far that way. At least until you want to use it in a conversation. You’ve “learned” a lot of words and stock phrases, but unless the person you’re talking to sticks to the script and you don’t want to say anything off script it’s going to be a problem.
Finally it encourages a lazy attitude to learning a language (and other skills as well). You cannot learn if you’re not focused on the project. Fifteen minute sessions is far too short to do any deep work or meaningful practice. And this is exactly the gamification model. Just casually do a problem a day and be a math wizard! Spend two minutes a day and learn Spanish. It’s not possible to learn complicated topics without putting in the work. And for any topic that includes the logic of the system — something Duolingo and other gamification apps skip because it’s boring to learn grammar or to learn the axions of math or the laws of physics. They’re necessary, but it’s memorization and drilling until you get it, so it’s boring and left out because people won’t keep using the apps if you include boring stuff.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I don’t think it reasonable to call the average person stupid in the sense that they’re incapable of learning it. Most have never actually been taught to think in that manner, and as such lack the skill set. Part of thinking well is the toolset, and part of it is being able to (and choosing to) read widely enough to make good use of the tools in that skill set.
Education, at least in non-elite American schools is not built to create thinkers. Nobody funding the schools or hiring the graduates cares if they can think (and other than the cognitive elite type jobs in high level stem, thinking is a net negative as thinkers are hard to control). As such the system is set up for mostly rote learning— what the classical education model calls grammar. Memorize and recall, perform mathematical equations. That’s all well and good, but that’s not going to create a thinker. There’s the next step where kids learn to understand why that works, or to learn to apply what they’ve learned, and to analyze texts, equations and problems to understand what’s being done and why.
Absent that, most people developed proxies that mostly work. Finding a “priest” type who you trust on a topic, trusting a given set of sources, using the canonical list of fallacies, or trusting the guy in the argument who sounds like Spock. Those sort of work most of the time, provided those you’re trusting are honest and knowledgeable. The trouble is that it’s not hard to know the tricks most people use as rationalist proxies and positioning yourself to appeal to those instincts.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I’m not sure that it is sustainable. We’re spending billions a month on propping up the Ukrainian side. Given a lot of other needs at home, I don’t think you can keep doing that and still maintain power in a democracy. The public isn’t opposed to independence for Ukraine, but they’re also not nearly as engaged as they were a year ago. A year later I would expect even less interest. If some other crisis comes in, I would expect there’s going to be a formidable anti-war backlash.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
He’s still a civilian who is not trained in radar, has no idea how anything works and wouldn’t be able to tell what he’s looking at. I wouldn’t want him looking at radar either.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
The problem I have with the Prussian model is that it’s pretty much a failure at teaching people how to approach problems and solve them without having to be hand held. If anything, I think it actually teaches people not to think.
In a typical Prussian school, the students sit at desks while the teacher lectures on some subject. They’re then given worksheets on the specific material to drill the exact thing the lecture covered. These worksheets have no problems that reference anything outside the lesson given, and only very rarely ask for application of the material or anything going above and beyond, or requiring the students to reason from facts given to a logical conclusion.
Science and math classes are taught much the same way. The students have “lab” classes, but even up to senior in high school (or possibly non-majors science courses in college) nothing done could be called an experiment— they’re at best demonstrations of something already covered in class and of course you have to get the right results. So students graduate with really weird ideas of how science works — mistakenly believing that science is a set of knowledge something like psychics belief in Akashic Records. The science exists and people in lab coats know The Science and so on. Except that science is a process of trying to figure things out, it’s discovered by seeing something and trying to prove yourself wrong on that front. Mathematics is a system for describing the universe and a tool for figuring things out. Most people don’t understand that because the Prussian system isn’t interested in having kids do experiments.
What classical education does, is teach, in every subject is how to think. How to take apart a text and understand it, how to think and argue logically, how to ask questions and find answers to them. They learn how to seek truth rather than simply waiting for the authorities to hand it to them. And I think, especially with AGI teed up within the next 20 years, the future belongs to people who can think, invent, and lead, and those who only learn to repeat the same things their teacher told them are correct answers will be lost in a world where the only jobs humans are doing are original creative thinking jobs. They haven’t been taught to do that, and learning later is very difficult.
I think the exact subject matter should be brought up to date for the twenty first century, but the method works and has produced the greatest thinkers of the last several centuries.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I mean yeah, cultures change. That doesn’t mean that there’s no current culture or clash between American folk culture and the type of culture the elites want us to adopt.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’d add a fourth which is that the entire thing feels coercive from the bottom. It’s always couched as “of course this is just human decency” and with accusations of various forms of bigotry— the implied threat being that “bad things might happen if people found out you’re a bigot”. And increasing needs to perform, especially as connected to schools and jobs, again is coercion from the bottom-view. As are the incessant training modules that nag about privilege to a working class that knows it’s not true.
The truest meme I’ve ever seen was a 4chan meme. The left side is a kid with an old outdated computer in his bedroom, and this is labeled privileged white male. On the right is a very large skyscraper with a corporate logo, and this is labeled the oppressed. And this is what I think is driving the wars. It’s the sneering at the lower class that’s driving the rebellion. It’s a way to punch down at those poor stupid people that aren’t good enough to be elite like them. Their stupid backwards religion, their stupid folkways, their sexual prudishness, and their stupid, backwards desire for autonomy are proof they’re unworthy. It’s not like even if they agreed that a Yale graduate would actually want to get to know an auto service tech from Georgia. But being able to sneer at him makes this class hatred much more socially tenable. It’s not that he ugh works with his hands, no. It’s that he believes in crime-think.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think a rational decision in any realm of geopolitics is one in which your side gets more from the actions it takes than it loses.
From the perspective of the USA and the West in general, the big issue isn’t Taiwan as Taiwan, but acces to the chip industry it houses. Other than that, it’s not important as a political entity. If Taiwan didn’t house the chip industry, it’s just another small country in Asia, perhaps a free market powerhouse economy (like Hong Kong was) but not special enough to warrant blood and treasure to safeguard it. As far as geography, I think defending it would be almost impossible. It’s too close to China to keep navy ships close enough to Taiwan to plausibly protect it from China without being close enough to China to be provocative. Which brings up another problem— you’d have to either fully commit to going to war over Taiwan before the invasion starts or you’re going to be too slow to respond to do anything about it.
From the perspective of Taiwan, it’s only really got two options. First, be valuable enough to the West that the West is willing to commit to war for their freedom, or slowly negotiate a peaceful resolution ceding control back to China. As an island, even if it’s plausible to hold off an invasion proper for a time, the ability of China to keep supplies from reaching Taiwan would mean this simply delays the conquest and prolongs suffering. So, more than likely the best option for a free Taiwan is in keeping the chips being made exclusively in Taiwan. Allowing manufacturing of Taiwanese chips outside of Taiwan erodes the only strategic advantage they have — being a supplier of chips the West cannot do without and doesn’t want China to have.
From the pov of China, there are two reasons to want Taiwan. First, it’s really close to the mainland and friendly with Western countries, making it a potential problem for Chinese trade and territorial ambitions. It would be like Cuba was to the Americans in the Cold War — a place that could easily be used as a forward base if their rivals wanted to invade or attack (Taiwan is closer than Cuba). The chip manufacturing is also important to China as it could then control even more global commerce via chips that are used in almost everything from pcs to washing machines and even military equipment. Third, it’s a public relations tool to reunite all Chinese people under CCP control as a happy family. The Chinese have always considered Taiwan a province of China. Making that real would be a major feather in the cap.
what’s interesting here is that the Taiwanese and the West are somewhat at odds over the chips. It is in Taiwan’s interest to keep everything in Taiwan because that’s the thing that’s going to make the West care enough to risk lives and treasure fighting against China — and it’s probably going to be a much steeper cost than anything we’ve done in the last 30 years. China has a modern military, modern equipment, and millions of soldiers. This isn’t Iraq. And if they do go to war, there’s another problem in that a lot of our goods, from clothing to manufactured products are made in China. Which means that a lot of consumer goods will be embargoed if we do go to war. This loss might make it difficult to fight the war and will almost certainly erode support for the war. For the West, getting manufacturing of those chips outside of Taiwan eliminates a problem of having to go to war with the country that makes most of the world’s manufactured goods.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think his main criticism of modern liberal democratic systems is exactly that no one actually has skin in the game. His suggestion that Pelosi or anyone else put on workboots to clean up their district is pointing out that in modern liberal democracy, the entire system is geared specifically to prevent the buck from ever stopping and as a side effect to promote short term thinking.
Monarchy did manage to avoid these problems as if you destroyed your fief there’s nothing of value to pass on to your child. No prince would be happy to find that they were inheriting a fief with its own map of human feces. In fact this alone would probably make the king fix those problems long before they ever got that bad because he doesn’t want his son to rule over garbage dumps and hobo camps. Monarchy has other problems— it lacks the ability to effectively gage public sentiment. But on the whole, the skin in the game generally prevents problems from getting too bad because the ruler’s fate is tied directly to the fate of his state.
This fact alone makes me a bit more sympathetic to monarchy or monarchy with a parliamentary system. Having a personal stake in the outcome is critical to good decisions.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the rot is going so deep that I’m not sure there’s any way to save the West. It’s basically illegal to question certain things, or to oppose certain ideas, and I’ve yet to see anyone mainstream even grasp how serious the problem is. It’s not going to be fixed, I don’t think because as soon as the state can Devine the purpose of you entering a space (for example going to UCLA while conservative) with only the good will of those who oppose your ideas to keep you from violating the law. And honestly, if putting up flyers is now a hate crime, I just… how much freedom do you have to lose before you say something?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I mean without the reference to a verse I have no idea what Bibi is supposed to be claiming. The rest of the statement sounds like pretty much any politician during a war “we will win by working together”. I mean if you know what he’s quoting here, I’d be interested, but unless it’s actually talking about genocide I think it’s a bit inflammatory to use an article that talks about the genocide of the Palestinians without a direct quote of whatever the prophecy is supposed to be.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
We didn’t have to imply that we were interested either. Had we said no Ukraine would have been better off because they wouldn’t have been invaded. The war buck stops with us because we kept this going.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
What Orban says keeps me up at night simply because he’s right. And what’s really scary is that I don’t think either side can back down. We’re giving Ukraine everything, and talking about even fighter jets. If we give Ukraine everything and they lose, that’s a serious blow to the credibility of NATO as a protector of the current international order. I think this is why China is supportive. If we can’t defend Ukraine, why would we be able to protect our Asian Allies in Korea or Japan? If we can’t actually protect Ukraine despite billions in sanctions and giving the most powerful weapons we have, what sane country is going to trust us to be their defense or to protect their trade or solve their disputes? And without that perception, we lose a lot of power. If you’re not looking to NATO as much for defense and trade protection, why do you care what they say?
And given that neither side can afford to lose, I fear an out of control escalation. NATO leaders know that their power will be diminished by a loss, that’s why Ukraine keeps getting more and more weapons, more advanced weapons, etc. they can’t afford to lose, especially after investing heavily in Ukrainian victory. Putin likewise can’t lose (though I think there’s a fig leaf in that if he gets Donbas in a peace deal, it’s more than he had to start with, while for NATO anything short of the 1990s border is a loss). It’s just not a situation that either side can back away from.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I find all the propaganda around Ukraine to be weird just in how often it’s being sold as various tropes of sci-fi, fantasy and anime tropes to sell various forms of support for the war. Dehumanizing people in wars is definitely normal, but there’s just something creepy about the way that the war is sold.
Russophobia has been a trope of western propaganda since well before the Cold War. But they were never “orcs”. And there were varying ways of saying “just the military,” even if that part never really made it to the homes of the working class. Not only that, but the rapidity of shutting down Russians in the West (or suspected Russians) and insisted on inane changes (Kyiv may well be the technically correct transliteration of the Ukrainian city, but until 2022, nobody in the West cared about the spelling). Russians were banned from public life, or permitted only if they took special pains to denounce their home country (including rather absurdly, opera singers and dancers) Russian themed restaurants were shuttered. Likewise, Ukraine has been lionized as all kinds of things, Zelensky was memed as Captain Ukraine, Miss Universe featured the contestant from Ukraine dressed as an anime angel with fully articulated wings and a sword.
The issue isn’t just dehumanization, which has been happening, but the extremes and contrasts are such that talk of peace and real politik become impossible. If Ukraine is Marvel superheroes and Russia is orcs, how do you sell negotiations? How do you prevent escalation? How do you have sober conversations at all. And what does it say about the seriousness with which we’re taking a war if we’re discussing it on the level of action movies and genre fantasy? It seems in the past, even if we were dehumanizing the enemy, we were at least aware that it was a real war, against people, perhaps barbaric people, but people, with real weapons being deployed against real cities with real people in them.
This is a problem because without taking the war seriously or acknowledging that people are dying and cities are being destroyed, there’s a risk that this conflict escalates to much higher levels, going from being a US-Russian proxy war into being a full on world war, potentially even a nuclear one.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I think ultimately this is a self correcting problem. People cannot effectively run systems that they don’t understand and have no experience with. A bunch of lawyers and other elites who have no idea how food is produced won’t be able to make food production safer, healthier or more efficient. A NTSB director who doesn’t understand how an airplane is produced cannot hope to make good safety rules. Sooner or later, such problems will become obvious and either the liberals will learn to think like conservatives or will have to invite conservatives into the inner circle.
We already have this in the form of the Amish and Mennonite churches. They have their own German dialect, rules, and dress code. But I don’t think you could completely wall off a community unless you cut off technology.
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