RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
My point is that Jews are enormously overrepresented in establishing and developing these sectors. The direction in which they take things tends to be more radical and transgressive. It stands to reason that if there weren't any Jews, then there would be much less in the way of pornography and casual sex generally. The most sex-oriented big dating apps are tinder and grindr, both founded by Jews. More lovey-dovey, long-term relationship apps like OKCupid and Bumble were founded by Europeans.
Not all horrendous ideas in the world are from Jews: Gentler for instance proudly sent orphans in Germany off to live with pedophiles and got dozens of men acquitted of molestation, Foucault campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, presumably so he could have sex with children. There was a postwar vibe that was excessively libertine, where barriers that should not have been touched were broken. The Frankfurt school had a lot to do with this attitude of course.
Immigration and refugee resettlement in the US stems significantly from Jews. The 1965 Immigration Law was introduced by Emmanuel Celler. Sure, it was passed by many non-Jews too. But consider Proposition 187 which sought to stem illegal immigration in California, which was approved democratically but then blocked by Mariana Pfaelzer.
If anything, it's worse than that. From Ehrlich's Population Bomb, a book that sold 2 million copies:
The Ehrlichs float the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, they reject the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area."
They propose a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment."
In the rest of the book the Ehrlichs discuss things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies they suggest, which they believed were not politically possible in 1968.
Who can say how much of this stuff seeped into popular culture, how many children weren't born in the West due to the influence of this ideology? The overpopulation theory and Club of Rome stuff was also influential in China:
In 1980, the central government organized a meeting in Chengdu to discuss the speed and scope of one-child restrictions.[26] One participant at the Chengdu meeting had read two influential books about population concerns, The Limits to Growth and A Blueprint for Survival, while visiting Europe in 1980. That official, Song Jian, along with several associates, determined that the ideal population of China was 700 million, and that a universal one-child policy for all would be required to meet that goal.
There is some debate about how accurate this is (other historians say the Party decided before asking scientists) but it's interesting that Maoist-era China used to be ideologically pro-natal on the simple logic of population=power. That still makes a lot of sense today. Why would they suddenly change their minds in the 70s and 80s?
It's silly in general terms to implement population control for fear of mass famine - food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth. People suffering malnutrition are less fecund. That's the regime we lived under for millennia. Population only grew like 0.1% a year or less in pre-industrial times.
But Marx was quite clear that revolution was supposed to happen in the most developed countries, countries like Britain and Germany then. Or perhaps China in 30-50 years time once it's reached the highest stage of capitalist development. That's what Xi says, that's Xi Xinping Thought and Orthodox Marxism in a nutshell. You can't skip stages, you couldn't take a semi-feudal economy like Russia and go straight to socialism and on to communism. You have to finish capitalism first.
Now I don't think this is what's actually happening, or how things could work even in theory. But that's what their theory says.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Neither of us like Yudkowsky but that's a grossly unfair and unreasonable article. I think the median motte-user would read it and be swayed in the opposite direction. How is it any better than what LeCun puts on twitter? We both agree those are weak arguments that don't engage with the substance of Yud's stuff. Yud's position makes much more sense than Ehrlich's. It's still wrong but for much better reasons.
Some casual holes I can pick:
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Food shortages are not intelligent and cannot plot against us
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Yudkowsky's argument never relied on there being no diminishing returns on intelligence ever, only that returns on intelligence were very great
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We have not been dealing with AI for millennia like we have with food shortages
Frankly I'd prefer a chad-hominem argument like 'we shouldn't take advice from a man who can't even lose weight - fix your waistline before saving the world'.
No - why would anyone trust an actor, someone who is paid to speak the words of others? I'd trust a healthy philosopher over an obese one.
Edit: Still better would be more substantive counterarguments, such as those Daseindustries has made earlier.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Why try to prevent famine when you could just have people die from famine? Why improve living standards when we could just live the same miserable lives that people lived for millennia?
Preventing famine by irrigating, storing food better, investing in green revolution tech, educating farmers on better techniques... is all great. Pre-emptive totalitarian population control and forced sterilization (by Alex-Jones-was-right-tier chemicals in the water supply) is not worth it.
Ehrlich made out apocalyptic famines to be a near-existential threat that needed massive government intervention to fix. It's not an apocalyptic-tier problem.
Finally, food supply constraints must automatically reduce population growth is on the same level as thermodynamics. There's clearly plenty of margin where population growth is possible despite having few calories per person, or low quality calories lacking in some vitamins. But a certain amount of calories must be produced to keep people alive. It's physically impossible for the population of Niger or the US for that matter to grow beyond what food supply can be found to meet it. Population growth has a hard cap in terms of food supply but for all modern countries the primary factors are things other than food costs.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
China was very hard for Japan to conquer because it was so populated. China lacked modern equipment, funds, good organization and so on in WWII. But they were capable of withstanding horrific casualties because of their high population. In Korea, China used manpower-intensive tactics to largely counter US firepower superiority, things like infiltration tactics and night-fighting. They took enormous casualties but managed to retake North Korea. In the context of a nuclear war, China's large population was advantageous since it would take many many atom bombs to destroy their large, dispersed population.
Even though there are diminishing returns to population size, there are still gains to be had from size. The bulk of China's strength today surely stems from its enormous labour force of about 790 million. If China was a country merely at US size, it would only be a bigger Indonesia and not be much of a threat to the US.
I'm not interested in sabotaging non-Western civilizations, I'm most interested in the welfare and development of the West. If aliens razed 10 Western cities and 20 non-Western cities, I'm not going to applaud them for being based, just because of that. I think some of Ehrlich's ideology wormed its way into policymakers and the media, that having children became less popular in addition to the ongoing economic trends. Shouting 'you're killing the planet if you have children' is not a good thing to do. Saying 'you should help us persuade policymakers to legislate so there are fewer births' isn't great either. Scott already stated the effects in the 3rd world, I was adding new information.
How can you say that the decline in birth rates has nothing to do with Ehrlich when you quote 'millions of sterilizations' just above? It has something to do with Ehrlich!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
This is why pornography was unknown in Christian countries of old where only handful of Jews lived, for example 18th century France and Britain.
There was not an enormous amount of pornography in France and England as of the 18th century, even allowing for their lesser communications tech. There was a broad consensus that it was bad and should be suppressed. I say 'much less' not 'none'. Jews didn't invent prostitution, homosexuality or vice. At no point did I say that.
England has a rich history of state bans on pornography, here's some of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscene_Publications_Act_1857
France in the 18th century was a hotbed of censorship. They chucked de Sade in prison 32 times and he was a nobleman!
The Romans had the office of censor, ranked higher even than dictators. He was supposed to uphold public morality, ensure that there men and women were marrying, crack down on crassness like theatre actors and prostitution. Now none of these states totally succeeded in limiting the publication of pornography but they made a decent attempt.
countries that strongly rejected Jewish ideas like monotheism and communism, for example Japan.
Yes, there was very little pornography in Japan before the US came along and abolished their old censorship laws. Japan was also a very fertile country, albeit diminishing due to industrialization. Then a Jewish woman came along, demanded that women's rights got added to the Japanese constitution... Fertility falls 50% in 10 years.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
When you discover something for the first time, that's a different process from choosing to implement it. Discovering something is value-neutral. Mass immigration (the Caucasians moving out for instance) is as old as time, as is pornography or prostitution. Censorship and border restrictions are also ancient 'technologies'. Choice is key here. States can choose to embrace censorship or libertinism, they can create people's republics or Democratic People's Republics.
Choosing is like a tug of war, where different factions compete to get their results.
As a concrete example, Jews made a huge contribution to the US Civil Rights movement. They founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, some 90% of civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-the-civil-rights-movement/
Now I don't know who invented the concept of all races being equal. It sounds early-Christian but I guess some Greek or Roman might've come up with it as well. Invention is separate from implementation. When it comes to implementing certain ideas, some groups favour certain sides.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
And they didn't really establish how they could be sure he was really gone, either! What's to stop Palpatine showing up again? In the EU series the heroes used various tactics to establish how he was capable of resurrecting and then how they could defeat him.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Body language and tone of voice says a lot that text can't convey. Without video we can't judge what was going on in any meaningful way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Cool story, I'll start reading it.
I've been struggling getting together some art for my still unborn webnovel. Turns out my stablediffusion loves giving robots huge pauldrons, even when that's specifically what I don't want, even when I prompt against it.
AI proofreading however, that's a godsend.
Well, you've given me the impulse to make it happen. I bought an expensive GPU for AI and I suppose I should get my money's worth.
I like how sometimes SD just throws up a real gem of its own accord without any manipulation but spontaneity isn't cutting it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Drag your GAN really is going viral. I saw it on Kruel's newsletter first, then 4chan (and not even /g/), now here. All in a single day. Guess that's the speed of progress these days.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Got it working now. It's fascinating how much the open source community can do, yet the heavyweights can just overwhelm it with computational firepower. Google's high-parameter models could produce readable text on demand in photorealistic images before Stable Diffusion even existed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority
Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.
Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.
In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.
More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed
The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.
As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.
I conclude with three beliefs:
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If you pay for something, you get more of it.
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Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.
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Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
On what basis is Ross Scott qualified to discuss AI risk? I know Yud isn't the most formally qualified person in the world but he's at least spent a very long time thinking about the topic and philosophy generally. What intellectual basis do random youtubers have to talk about instrumental convergence and so on?
Point blank, if he thinks AI is less of a threat than homelessness (as stated in the bottom) then he's wildly missing the target area. Look what we did to great apes - they're on the endangered list. We're basically a great ape with a bigger brain. Intelligence is enormously useful! We used it to take over the entire world in a vanishingly short timespan by biological standards. Intelligence includes communications ability, charisma and so on, basically all mental stats.
Look what we did to the rest of the Homo genus! Not a single one survives. There's some debate as to whether we murdered or bred them into extinction, or a mix of both. Either way, it didn't end well for any of our competitors.
We should not bring in any new competitors to a battle royale that we just won, especially if they possess enormous potential. Computer minds can be enormously large in physical terms, enormously power-hungry, enjoy the resources of a giant global supply chain as opposed to whatever proteins can be scrounged up on a tiny budget. Computers can run at gigahertz, they can train on huge amounts of information, self-modify... Even if we don't understand the complexity of the brain, we could stumble upon something far superior that only works if you have gigawatts to throw at it. Far better to upgrade human intelligence slowly and steadily than invite competition.
'Maybe it won't become sapient' or 'maybe it won't become superintelligent' are not risks we should be taking. Of course it's going to become superintelligent, there's no universal cap on intelligence that fits just above the smartest people in history. Why would 20 watts be the point at which there are literally no further returns to scale?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
This seems like a problem that could be easily solved with creative thinking. What if you took all the major cities and made them 'special security zones', something like airports? All kinds of arbitrary rules apply in airports, shoplifting should be easy to ban. Or send in the National Guard, send in paratroopers. There's a precedent for overruling local authorities who refuse to obey the feds on social issues.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/
Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I think I made an error in word choice. 'Discuss' is fine. People discuss things all the time. I also thought his videos were fun.
But has he read any of the papers, books, content written on the topic? I'm pretty sure he hasn't, going off the state of his flowchart. If you commit to a debate where thousands of people will watch you, you should at least have some in-depth understanding of what the other side has been saying. Robin Hanson for instance is credible, he's put a lot of thought into it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I'll shill Mechabellum, a recently released autobattler strategy game on Steam. That's not to be confused with idle games, it's a turn-based PvP game. Essentially, you lay out the configuration of your army in the preparation phase, and then watch as your robots fight it out, automatically engaging the nearest enemy like an RTS.
It's a very deterministic game, each player gets the same set of choices. At the start, you each get to choose 1 of 4 randomly picked 'characters' with a special ability (like free unlocks for air units, or +50 supplies each turn). After turn 1, there are 'random events' at the start of the turn that let you pay for a missile strike, or a global upgrade to one of your units, or give a single unit +75% attack and +75% HP... You can see what your opponent might choose and plan around it. I think that a dev lost one too many games of hearthstone to RNG BS and resolved 'never lose to chance again'.
Each turn players get more and more resources but their plans are also more revealed. Units from previous turns stay on the next turn. Generally, you can't move units from previous turns. So if I started the game by putting some single-unit crowd-control Arclights at the front, hoping to counter spam, I can expect that he'll field anti-single unit Marksmen on round 2 positioned to target them. So I could put some cheap spammy crawlers in front of my Arclight to soak up any Marksmen fire.
In between turns, you can research one of four 'techs' for a certain class of unit, giving it extra range, armor that flatly decreases damage taken per shot, new attacks, trading range for damage... Units can also be leveled up if they do a lot of damage, which gives +100% attack and HP for only half the price of a new unit.
There are also two vulnerable towers behind your lines that, if destroyed, will drastically weaken your units for about 10 seconds. So they need to be protected from enemy attack. In later turns, enemies can also come in via the flanks.
The goal of the game is to win decisive victories, where much of your army is intact. That causes the most damage to the enemy's healthbar. If you have only a couple units left, they only lose a measly 100 hp or so, out of 3000-4000. The game tends to build to a crescendo in the later turns, where each army is huge and the victories more decisive. It's very possible to turn a losing game around.
It does feel like I'm playing mind-games with my opponent, countering counters, pre-empting. Do I have enough anti-air? Are my flanks protected? Is the bulk of my army protected from nukes or bombardment with shields? What new unit should I unlock to throw my opponents plans into disarray? Am I advancing towards a nice synergy in my army?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Who voted for mass immigration?
Take the UK - since the 1990s both major parties consistently said they'd be tough and restrictive on immigration. They then proceeded to increase it while in power. https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840
The governments of Europe and the European Union make the choices, not the people. Consider how much intense opposition there was to Brexit, something that really could be considered the people's choice! It eventually happened, after a great deal of fooling around and delaying tactics. Or the many times states have rejected EU integration in referendums, only to be made to vote again or their decisions were ignored. Capital punishment was abolished decades before it became unpopular.
What is the point of democracy if the major parties consistently lie about their plans and implement their agenda regardless of what the voters want? Or if they form a 'cordon sanitaire' to prevent political representation of undesirables? Or if they manipulate the media by omission, lies, slant and emphasis to enforce ideological orthodoxy? Middle East Wars are the primary example. Russiagate is a secondary example, now that the Durham report has been released.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Say you're in a restaurant and you specifically order steak but get served tomato soup. Once, twice, three times... They say that steak is on the menu, yet keep giving you soup. Isn't this egregious? You're still paying for the meal. And it's not like they ran out of steak! You're not ordering something outlandish like unicorn fillet or dragon sausage, steak is well within the capacity of the restaurant.
If people were asking for low taxes and high spending, then sure, that's unreasonable. But it's not hard at all to reduce immigration. It's trivially easy, unless you have an enormously large border like Russia or perhaps the US. The UK has absolutely no excuse, it's an island. Don't grant so many visas, don't let people come in, expel those who do. The Royal Navy has plans to combat China in the Pacific, they should be able to secure the English Channel from unarmed boats.
Unfalsifiable, else Brexit would have falsified it.
Well the whole point of Brexit was to reduce immigration... which still has not happened. If you ask Brexit voters what they wanted, they would say they want reduced immigration.
Anyone else think that there's an uptick in gender-provocative advertisements recently? Adidas has now hired a biological male as a women's underwear model, with chest hair and a distinct bulge at the groin:
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1658934499118309379
https://www.adidas.com/us/pride (It definitely is classified as women's swimwear)
There was also that other now-withdrawn Miller Lite beer ad where the woman spends her time swearing and professing how happy she is to compost images of women in bikinis. Just recently, we had the original trans beer ad that has proven very damaging to Bud Light.
Is this kind of advertising increasing, or are people noticing it more, or am I making up a trend? I suppose one could conceptualize a waves and troughs model, as advertisers tone it back after boycotts (Gillette comes to mind as having suffered from its choices). Some have argued that Gillette took an immediate and serious financial penalty from the ad, 350 million in six months. On the other hand, there have been arguments that P&G, Gillette's owner didn't suffer in the medium term, or at least that there's too much noise to tell. They stood by their advertisement choice. Perhaps merely being aggressive towards gender roles is much less risky than promoting trans.
Or maybe the conservative response to these ads is essentially random? I never heard that Gillette made another trans ad in 2019, that all got subsumed by the toxic masculinity ad. Thoughts and theories welcome.
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