OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
11d ago
idk man, it's kinda weird to uphold a magically trans'd 13 year old as a shining example of wholesome trad right wing romance.
As I understand it, Malfoid is not in-character trans. The idea of Malfoid is that the character of Draco(nia?) Malfoy was always female in this universe.
In that context, I mean, Harry Potter is famously kind of conservative if you think about it. Harry Potter is a story about a boy discovering that, unbeknownst to him, he was born into aristocracy, and inheriting a full ride to Eton or Harrow. He is then trained in and formed by these traditional, elite, European institutions, displays exceptional loyalty to them, and fends off and defeats a populist revolt led by a strongman.
Add in the romantic fantasy and is this not a fantasy about a better world, associated with the past? One of benevolent authorities, traditions, and meaningful struggle to defend something good? In some of the fantasies the OP links, the role Malfoy plays is to uplift Harry - to, however sharp-tongued she may be, encourage him to dress well, practice his manners, and generally become a worthier man.
You don't see how any of that could be interpreted as wholesome trad romance?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
If smart people trend towards X and dumb people trend towards Y, and everything else you know about it is equal you should go with X.
All other things being equal, that's a reasonable heuristic. If the only things you know about X and Y is that smarter people go for X, then it makes sense to tentatively go for X.
I would suggest, however, that this is only a loose heuristic. I think most people implicitly do something like that anyway - if we don't know about an issue ourselves, we tend to go with the opinions of people we trust.
That said, if you have come to a conclusion yourself, independently, and it turns out that some dumb people also hold that conclusion, I don't think that should cause you to worry.
The last point I'd suggest would be that 'smart' and 'dumb' are not always easily measurable qualities. Most of the time you don't have the ability to stop a conversation and administer a bunch of IQ tests, and while intelligence is surely real, the cultural construction of intelligence is unreliable. In practice "go with what the smart people think" is a heuristic that will encourage conformity with your society's visible intellectual elite, whether that's scientists or priests or natural philosophers or Marxist bureaucrats. It's too easy to think of scenarios where it would hush up much-needed dissent.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
In the hypothetical A obviously. But reality isn't that hypothetical and in the real world better reasoning skills will tend to result in more accurate answers. This is the literal point of reasoning after all. Smarter people will tend to be more right than dumber people are.
In that case, then what is the point of considering the hypothetical of "right for the wrong reasons" versus "wrong for the right reasons"? The former can only be right by accident, and the latter can only be wrong by some sort of mistake. Wrong reasons will inevitably conduce to wrong answers, and right reasons likewise to right answers.
Don't you just, at this point, reduce to "good and smart things are good and smart"? Well, sure, but that's not much of an insight.
In the post I was responding to, you suggested:
Even if you think homosexuality or people taking cross sex hormones is an immoral act and you have a strong argument for it, it doesn't change that most opposition in the group is from the low IQ reason of "ew that's gross" or "my fantasy religion book said that's bad".They aren't using your supposed better argument, they're using a stupid one.
Okay, so, let's rephrase the hypothetical a bit.
Group A, which is small, holds position X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group B, which is also small, though larger than Group A, holds position anti-X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group C, which is very large, holds position X for poorly-thought-out reasons.
Should Group A therefore recant position X, and switch to anti-X? Why?
From the position of Group A, maybe Group C have accidentally or arbitrarily landed on a correct position. Is that a reason to turn down Group C's support? I can't see any inconsistency in Group A allying with Group C, and perhaps also aiming to better-educate Group C.
Alternatively, Group A might theorise that there's some deeper, hard-to-express wisdom that is being expressed by Group C, even if Group C are incapable of rationalising it or expressing it. This is the argument you get in The Secret of Our Success, or what concepts like the wisdom of repugnance are getting at. In Catholic theology, this is also called the sensus fidei - the people as a whole may not be able to competently express a doctrine, but they have an 'instinct' for its truth. (A famous example of this is that most lay Catholics cannot define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but they have an instinctive, inchoate sense that Mary is special, or in some way set apart by God for a holy task.)
Maybe you buy the idea of some sort of pre-rational folk wisdom, like SooS or the sensus fidei, but even if you don't, I do not see how the existence of Group C constitutes a reason for Group A to reconsider their views. Even if Group C picked a position completely at random, from Group A's perspective, they got lucky and picked the right position. It's certainly not evidence that position X is wrong.
You used the example of social conservatism, but I don't think you have to read this in a partisan way like that. Your post, following Hanania, seems to be written assuming that the intelligent elite will always trend liberal (for some unspecified definition of 'liberal') whereas the masses will be conservative, but that doesn't seem to empirically always be the case. Even on the example he used, sexuality, the masses have switched sides and now the opposite seems to be true - in the West nowadays, position X is pro-LGBT, and it's Group B who are anti-gay. (The intellectual gap is visible as well! Group A, the intellectual pro-LGBT camp, are now the ones who've dived into queer theory and trans liberation and family abolition. Group C, the masses, are the ones who say 'sure, let them marry, don't care one way or the other'.)
But generally and more broadly, it is true that there are sometimes liberal or progressive positions embraced by the masses, while smaller intellectual groups are against them. I don't think you can universally generalise. The masses adopt all sorts of positions - maybe sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes through being honestly persuaded, maybe sometimes due to messy, organic cultural revolution - and I do not consider the fact that the masses hold a particular position to be an argument against that position.
On the individual level, of course you should always try to hold your positions for the right reasons. That goes for everyone. But the existence of large numbers of people who hold the same position for the wrong reasons should not invalidate your reasons, nor cause you any kind of intellectual crisis.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
One of the big reasons being that social conservativism even if it has the right answer will do so for the wrong reasons.
I find this an odd argument, particularly if you care about truth or morality?
Suppose we have two groups of people, A and B. Group A generally finds right answers, but for wrong reasons. Group B generally finds wrong answers, but for right reasons. Which group would you rather be in?
I feel like there's a reasonable case that Group A is preferable. The right answers are, well, the whole point. I would rather be in the group that's not eating sharks or getting cyanide poisoning. Even then, I think the Secret of Our Success model is a bit too patronising - the shark and manioc examples are cute but sound too much like "they did something sensible but for bad reasons, whereas we know the good reasons now".
But what makes a reason 'right' or 'wrong'? If a certain type of reasoning generally leads you to right or good answers, doesn't that in itself make that type of reasoning right? The slogan used to be that rationality is winning. The process that gets you to the right answers is the right process, surely?
I do think that good reasoning and bad reasoning exist. A guess that randomly lands on the right answer is not epistemically virtuous; likewise a reasonable hypothesis that nonetheless turns out to be false is not un-virtuous. High school science teaches that Democritus came up with atomic theory, but firstly he didn't really, and secondly Democritus' atoms aren't really any more sensible or reasonable a guess than Thales' water-based theory. Good reasoning ought to reliably, in a manner better than random chance, lead to good results. Likewise we might think that good reasoning ought to, in some way, logically relate premises to conclusions, though even that might just be a result of the observation that logic positively correlates with reasons that lead to good conclusions.
However, in a case like this, if Group A are using some sort of black-box reasoning that regularly leads to good conclusions, and Group B are using a different black-box that regularly leads to bad or wrong conclusions, I would suggest that maybe we should look in Group A's black box. Maybe there's something inside it that works. Good reasoning is reasoning that regularly produces good conclusions.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
You've mis-used the word 'trivial'. All those arguments you've made might be true, but none of them are trivially true. They all depend on contingent claims about the world. Any claim that is meaningfully evidence-based cannot be trivial.
At any rate, I read Scott as clearly concerned about time frame. I do not think he is talking about abstract possibilities. Yes, the word 'forever' is in that passage I quoted, but he is plainly talking about short-term technology policy. His view, as far as I can tell, is that we need to 'solve the alignment problem' while creating 'AI' in the immediate short term, or else not make 'AI' at all, and he views the latter option as some sort of permanent stunting of human potential.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I don't actually think 1-5 are all obvious, but my point is that you responded to my criticism of my Scott with points that are in the 1-5 area.
Do I think that people are actually going to stop making LLMs? No, I don't. If I had to bet, I'm in the camp that sees LLMs as a 'normal technology'. I think they will exist, more use will be made of them, and that the uses found will be moderate and not that interesting. I think both the doomers and the singularitans will be disappointed.
The point that I made that you took issue with was that it is ludicrous to say that if we don't make LLM-based 'AI', we're '[consigned] to a permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave'. That is absurd. If we don't pursue that technology, we're not even locking ourselves out of artificial intelligence, much less locking ourselves out of civilisational maturity.
The Babel example was meant to be evocative, not an argument as such. You're an atheist, fine, whatever. Scott made a comparison from Judaism so I felt it was within-bounds to reply with another comparison from Judaism.
With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead.
Fifteen years is short term.
This is one of the weird things about the debate to me - the absurdly short timelines everybody seems to be approaching it with. From my perspective, Scott and the 'AI pause' people are basically one subgroup of accelerationist AI-enthusiast arguing with another subgroup of accelerationists. Five, ten, fifteen years, that's all still the short term. That is the immediate future. Medium-term for me means 'within the next hundred years or so', i.e. within the lifetimes of people alive today, and long-term means after that.
Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Bots have a lot of users, but dislike of the technology is steadily increasing, especially among younger generations, the people you would expect to be the most tech-savvy and most open to new tools.
I don't realistically expect a revolution to destroy it all, but I do think people are underestimating how much it is loathed. Bots are mostly being pushed from above - I was irritated this morning to read a story advising 'AI avoiders' to ease themselves into using 'AI', even though an 'AI avoider', by definition, doesn't want to use it! If the best we can do is impose a kind of social stigma around using bots, or at least carve out the idea that it's legitimate for people in the public sphere to refuse this technology, then that's still something worth fighting for.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
You're leaping up a tower of assumptions here. Let's go in order:
1: A greater intelligence than humans is possible.
2: An artificial intelligence greater than human intelligence is possible.
3: Humans are able to create an artificial intelligence greater than our own.
4: Language models are a viable means by which such an intelligence might be created.
5: It is possible that humans might create such an intelligence via language models in the short to medium term future.
6: It is desirable to create such an intelligence.
7: If we fail to create such an intelligence in the short term, human civilisation will be permanently stunted or developmentally limited.
Scott asserted 7, and in return, I asserted that 7 is an insane position. You have responded to me by asserting something in the range of 2-4.
Let me make some other suggestions. It might be possible to choose not to make super-intelligences via LLMs now, but to do it in two hundred years, or five hundred years, or on any other timeline you like. Or it might be possible to make super-intelligences via some other, non-LLM means. There's no reason to think that LLMs specifically need to be used to conjure up super-intelligence right now or else the human race has no future.
I'm also inclined to challenge him just on the grounds of goals and values. He mentions 'civilisational childhood or an early grave'. Well, what would constitute 'civilisational adulthood'? What is civilisational maturity? He's making a value judgement. Suppose I don't think that technical or computational capacity is identical to civilisational maturity. That just seems implausible on the face of it - and certainly I don't believe that the worth of a civilisation or a people should be measured linearly and quantitatively like that. On the contrary, in individual humans I think that maturity involves a capacity for self-control and restraint; if that applies also on the civilisational level, then one might argue that civilisational adulthood would involve the ability to choose not to go down a path that we judge to be unwise.
In Scott's response, he says that thinking of an AI as all-powerful would be shituf, which is a sin. Firstly, that's not what shituf means, and secondly, arguably the whole point of shituf is that it's not sin for a Gentile. Shituf is an ad hoc attempt to be merciful to Gentiles who hold opinions that, in Jewish eyes, are not properly monotheistic. (I consider this to be grounded in a mistaken understanding of the Trinity, but I do appreciate the attempt to extend grace.) But if we're going to invoke the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, Scott and Pinker both being Jewish, I might suggest also considering another story in the Torah.
I cannot help but read that statement about 'civilisational childhood' and picture someone standing in front of a half-built tower reaching into the heavens and explaining, "If we stop building this tower to heaven, we are consigning ourselves to permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave."
Tolkien's reaction to the news of the atomic bombs was, in Letter #102 (9 August 1945):
The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I'd say that I lost some respect for both of them through this argument, but to be honest I don't think I ever had much respect for Pinker. The ignorant and strawmannish Enlightenment Now really ended any sympathy I had for him as a thinker. Nonetheless, Pinker's letter to Scott was courteous and concise; I think you can tell that Pinker is a better or at least more professional writer.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous - there's an awful lot of citing Omohundro and Hinton, and after a while one starts to think that that's because he's only got a handful of people, and is shocked and appalled that anybody disagrees with them. Scott does land some real hits on Pinker - the RAND study mistake is an embarrassing mis-step by Pinker - but also avoids some of Pinker's stronger arguments, and sets up his own straw men.
I'm not particularly interested in nitpicking many of the specific disagreements, especially because plenty of them leave ample room for both to be, in a sense, right. Pinker is correct that 'intelligence' can't be modelled as a single variable; Scott is correct that nonetheless it is reasonable to talk about 'intelligence' in a general sense.
What stood out to me, personally, was the way that the mask came down a bit, and setting aside all disputes about facts, Scott is dedicated to normative commitments that I think are repulsive, or frankly insane. Consider:
My biggest worry about AI right now (aside from the doom, of course) is that, exactly like with global warming, all of this prevaricating will come back to roost. Once it becomes obvious to the average person that AI really is a big deal and really is dangerous - and I am no longer sure this moment is in the future - we will have to choose between two visions. One vision, which I’ve tried to help lay out in Plan A, is to rise to the challenge, give scientists the time and resources they need to solve the alignment problem, and enter the future with confidence. The other vision is to simply ban smarter-than-human AI forever, consigning us to a permanent civilizational childhood or an early grave.
I'm sorry, but this is lunatic. We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted? What? He's got some sort of science fiction eschatology in mind that seems both absurd on the factual merits and, perhaps more importantly, morally blinkered. While I did always know that Scott had some of those bizarre transhumanist beliefs (and I'm certainly not a convert to Phil-Torres-like conspiracism), it is, at least, a useful reminder that he approaches the whole issue of technology from a bizarre starting point that I cannot sympathise with.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
The first sentence here made me think it was some sort of Latin rite Catholic lesbian bar.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that 'Western Mass' means 'Massachusetts', and I am still disappointed, because this story could only be improved by the inexplicable involvement of the Catholic Church.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
I work in aged care.
The only significant use I have seen for it at work thus far is listening to and transcribing conversations in meetings, like an automated secretary.
Management also set up a policy bot, so you can ask the bot about the existing policies on such-and-such procedure, and it will search through the intranet and tell you, but thus far it does not seem to be widely used.
For the most part I think nobody knows what it is. All the doctors and RNs I talk to make their own judgements, and find the idea of outsourcing patient welfare decisions to a computer terrifying. Personal care workers and lifestyle workers have no use for it. Residents mostly have no idea what it is. I appear to have been identified by a few co-workers as relatively tech-savvy (you help people log in or troubleshoot a computer problem a few times and suddenly you have a reputation...), so there have been a few cases where I have reluctantly explained to people what ChatGPT is and how you use it. In practice I try not to encourage its use, though.
The most visible use of LLMs or bot-generated content I see at work, as I've commented before, is via YouTube slop. We have large televisions that can access YouTube and sometimes use them to play music, classic movies, church services, the news, or anything else residents might be interested in. Search results are increasingly polluted by AI-gen content, and sometimes YouTube automatically rolls over to them. This is a regular if minor frustration for care and lifestyle workers looking for good shows or playlists.
I probably can't generalise from my field, but if I had to guess, I'd say that for most jobs 'on the ground', which require either interacting with people or interacting with real, physical things, AI/LLMs/bots remain a solution looking for a problem. I know my case that the site manager is quite technophilic and is intrigued by the potential for AI, but thus far the use cases just don't exist.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated.
I don't think this is true. I think people dislike the auto-generation itself. The simple test of this would be that you can show somebody a text, ask if they enjoy it, get a result, and then reveal to them that it was bot-written and watch them get angry.
I'm willing to bet that if you ran a study where you gave the same text to three groups, where you tell the first group nothing, tell the second group that the text is written by a bot, and tell the third group that the text is written by a human, and then ask them all to rate the text, the second group would rate it the lowest.
Maybe that's irrational, in the same way that people will prefer hand-made or artisanal objects to machined objects, but if so it's still a highly predictable irrationality.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
I do like some (but not all) of Scott's writing, which tends to be very long, but I can easily understand how someone who learned by reading Scott would come to conflate length with wisdom.
For what it's worth, this isn't meant to call out self_made_human, whom I have nothing against, and at any rate certainly isn't the worst example of this trend.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
Since when was AI ever fun? Or at least LLMs? I've seen fun things with pre-GPT chatbots, I guess, but LLMs have always been mediocrity machines.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
If you've ever signed out of YouTube and erased all your device history, and looked for anything fresh, it's amazing how much bot slop there is everywhere. Try 'revenge stories' or something for a particularly egregious look at the genre.
I've been a cynic/pessimist/skeptic about 'AI' here before, but one thing I think it will do a lot of is spam, and unless filter technology keeps up and matches it, I think there is a very real chance that platforms like YouTube become genuinely unuseable within the next few years.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
There's a lot I don't like on the Motte, but when it comes down to it, I would rather hate a post written by an actual human than I would engage with anything written or polished by a bot.
I was not particularly a fan of the This Is Going To Hurt review, which I thought was a bit meandering and over-long. The best book reviews are punchier than that. Still, judging from the past book review winners, ACT readers have very different taste to me, so maybe it's in it with a shot. But again, I'd prefer a meandering ramble from a human than something by a bot.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think if you had asked even the most ardent American patriot on 9/12/01, “Do you think we should invade and occupy Afghanistan for the next 20 years?” he would have looked at you like you were crazy before answering “No. We’ll just bomb the shit out of them.” We could have gone in, bombed whatever we felt like bombing, taken out the Taliban leadership, hunted down al-Qaeda without letting Pakistan know, and left.
No, I don't think you could have. I think that's the same kind of 'hard man' fantasy that gets you Trump saying they should just tale Iraq's oil or whatever other nonsense.
Pragmatically, the question is whether just bombing Afghanistan and leaving would meaningfully contribute to fighting al Qaeda or global terrorism, and the answer there is "no". Sure, you could try to take out the Taliban leadership and then leave, and what do you think happens in Afghanistan after that? Just blowing everything up was not a solution.
Politically, is that something that the US could viably have done, considering domestic pressures, the ideological and cultural mood in the country, and the international situation? I do not think it could have.
As for wounded pride, I suppose I just agree with the old adage, “war is politics by other means.” If the offense is great enough, war seems like a pretty reasonable response.
I think that killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people over twenty years is neither a reasonable nor a moral response to September 11, all the more so because the the majority of those casualties had nothing to do with September 11.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
I also do not consider 'mended our wounded pride' to be a valid objective for a military operation.
I was thirteen years old. I remember being at home, and my parents came up to me, with very serious expressions, and told me there had been a terrorist attack in America.
I was confused. I was not confused by the attack - I was confused by why they were telling me. A terrorist attack in another country? Aren't those very common? World Trade Centre? Never heard of it. Is three thousand a lot, relatively speaking?
After some more time had passed I did figure out why it was a big deal, but I remember that in the first moments, my reaction was to be surprised that people were acting as if it were a big deal. Mum and dad never told me about random news events in other countries before. My first reaction, therefore, was to get on with what I was interested in, without having any emotional reaction. It was the same kind of story, to me, as "many dead in earthquake in India", or "Russian separatists bomb city in the Caucasus", or "civil war breaks out in Latin America". I heard it, went "oh, okay", and that was it.
Over the coming weeks I did realise its importance. I remember thinking that the real crime of the hijackers wasn't killing such-and-such number of Americans, but rather making America afraid, and now America was going to make the entire rest of the world afraid in revenge.
Though I am a bit ashamed of teenage-me's initial response, I am proud that my teenage self then immediately opposed both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11, or to make the world safer from terrorism.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
You know that your problem is still that every time you are asked for specific examples, all you have is a cherry-picked list of incidents across centuries or millennia, most of which on examination are innocuous.
If you repeat it often enough, it will not thereby become true.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Then why are you so shocked that antisemitism is growing among Whites as they become aware of the cultural mechanisms that have vilified White identity and engaged in strong activism against it?
In America, aren't whites the least anti-semitic racial group, at least if you don't count Jews themselves?
There isn't actually a great awakening here. Statistically, as I understand it, blacks and Middle Easterners are the most anti-semitic racial groups in the US, and Asians mostly just don't care.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Do Christians also have to reject their god? Are you a "Christianity is a Jew-cucked slave morality cult" white nationalist? Or are you a "Judeo-Christianity is a Jew lie" white nationalist?
The short answer is yes. I have beaten my head into the SS wall before, and he does hate Christianity as well.
You may notice that his criticisms of Judaism all apply to Christianity as well. He accuses Judaism of being 'slave morality', which is a far more traditional critique of Christianity. He's moved on to repeatedly attempting to use the Divine Name in a mocking way - that's as offensive to Christians as it is to Jews. Now, as you can see down-thread, I think his real objection to Christianity is that Christianity is 1) uncomfortably Jewish, and 2) an obstacle to some sort of white identitarian politics. If you could produce a Christianity that is purged of either any link to the history of Israel, and its resolutely non-racial orientation, I think he would drop his objection to it, but, well, that has been tried in the past.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
'Serving himself' is not a clear category. Cain was obviously self-motivated in committing the murder, but he was not benefitting himself in committing the murder. The phrase 'serving himself' could cover either.
To recap a little, my position is:
Firstly, it does not make sense to describe the murder of Abel as an act of 'redistribution', or as 'socialism' in any meaningful sense. No material goods nor the distribution thereof were involved. Cain did not believe that Abel was 'stealing' anything, or that Abel's possessions were obtained unjustly. The motive for Cain's murder was envy. He acted out of hatred. Abel did well, Cain did poorly, and out of resentment Cain murdered his brother and then sought to pretend otherwise.
Secondly, Cain's motive had nothing to do with 'self-preservation'. No defense of Cain's actions along those lines is viable. Cain was not defending himself or his interests, or protecting his posterity, or making the evolutionarily optimal decision. Abel's life in no way threatened any of those things.
The fact someone else [generic: "your brother"][2] does something better than you does something to you. You invested for no reward. You feel robbed and you feel angry[3].
Congratulations - this is correct. Abel did better than Cain, and Cain felt envious, angry, and wrathful. But of course the point is that Cain was wrong to feel that way. Feelings are not self-justifying. See Jonah chapter 4. God's repeated question to Jonah is, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
So what is the point of this sophistry about redistribution, socialism, self-preservation, or evolution? The first murder was not about any of those things. Okay, I understand that now you are retreating to a more subtle point - that the psychological tendencies that underlie and motivate Cain's murder are also present in the motivations for socialist politics today. But 1) I think you should have made that point more clearly above, 2) that argument that socialism is based on envy is commonplace in conservative politics and you do not need to drag in Cain and Abel to make that point, and 3) any political position, socialism included, is held by an immense number of people for an immense number of reasons, it's impossible to fully peer into any individual's heart, and human motives are always irreducibly mixed. Envy, pride, resentment, etc., are ubiquitous and present among the adherents of pretty much every political creed imaginable.
Bringing up Cain is just a combination of bad biblical exegesis and bad political analysis. You were responding to Pongalh's correct point that socialists believe that natural resources are a kind of common heritage that should not be privately owned with a non sequitur about Cain and Abel. I think you should try to speak more clearly.
This is a tiny nitpick, but, er...
Half-blood?
Is Harry even half-blood, by wizarding standards? His father James was a pure-blood from a good old wizarding family. His mother Lily was muggle-born, but was a wizard herself. Harry is the child of two wizards and therefore is surely pure-blood?
My rough understanding of the terms was that pure-blood means two wizarding parents, half-blood means one wizard parent and one muggle, and muggle-born means two muggle parents. Wiki tells me that the term is more restrictive than that and having any non-magical ancestors in your immediate family background removes you from pure-blood status, but as it notes itself, almost all wizards have at least a few non-wizard ancestors around somewhere. Is the muggle-born Lily too close for Harry to count?
The Malfoys are snobbish and old-fashioned and I'd imagine that, from their perspective, James Potter did something at best scandalous by marrying a muggle-born, so they can still dislike Harry. The Malfoys are, in canon, horrible people prepared to hate even pure-blood families if they think they're too sympathetic to muggles. The Weasley family is pure-blood, but they are poor and they don't act with decorum, so the Malfoys hate them too. One gets the impression sometimes that the Malfoys just hate everyone outside their ingroup, and blood status is just an excuse.
Still, I notice that in Philosopher's Stone, when Malfoy first meets Harry, he is polite at first and tries to invite Harry into his own, 'superior' social circle:
Harry then stands up for Ron and this appears to sour their whole relationship, but the point is that Malfoy knew who Harry was, presumably therefore knew of Harry's ancestry, and yet clearly made this invitation for Harry to hang out with him and enter his company. He does this while also verbally attacking the Weasleys, whose blood is impeccably pure, so I think there's more to the Malfoys' mindset than just "pure blood good, muggle blood bad". It's all wrapped up with class, wealth, behaviour and deportment, and so on.
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