RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
They can and do change over time. But it took centuries and very specific conditions to change one specific English culture to another English culture, an enormously complex process with unpredictable results. Trying to do something similar with Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan in a few decades is a much bigger ask.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
freely and willingly choose religious warfare
I was reading a history book talking about Episcopalian death squads running around killing Presbyterians in Britain, in the 17th century. About half the book is a game of musical chairs where various sects are persecuting eachother, none of them even that distinctive besides the Puritans who just hated fun... totally different mindset to today.
Likewise, just the other day, I was reading on twitter about how Sunnis were bullying Shia and Sikhs in British 'multi-faith prayer rooms', hiding their prayer books and similar. How they'd treat others were they in charge is pretty clear, they're pretty pushy even as a minority. You don't want to be Shia in Saudi Arabia. There are some actual differences in nationality for this, so it's more explicable.
I think it'd be funny to tell social liberals sanctimoniously 'read more and educate yourselves about history!' but it wouldn't work.
it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.
The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.
Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Instead the oil rights got bought largely by China IIRC. The US military has essentially been securing China's energy imports.
(And the '''grand strategists''' in the Pentagon/State Department blob never got purged or anything, they're still around)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man
Maybe in an arena with rules and social judgement for men who beat up women. Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic, good chance they start with a sucker punch or are in some cluttered space where technique is less relevant and both sides are improvising.
80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.
I agree 100% regarding weapons and avoiding fights. My point is that the sex that gets men to carry heavy things has no place in a fight fundamentally and should avoid it wherever possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Trying to wage war against computing is like waging war against guns, you are sure to lose. Personally I don't see any way out of this mess besides a miracle. Our civilization really struggled with baby's first game theory of 'avoid mutually assured destruction.' We still haven't cracked down on gain of function viruses. What chance is there that we can manage superintelligence properly? Maybe actions right now will turn out to be vaguely helpful by some unknown method but my expectations are very low.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Even if things go well and the plebs do get scraps off the plate, how do we subdivide that amongst ourselves? X was an armed burglar, Y kicked puppies, Z posted mean things on the internet, ZA was a really nice guy, ZB is from a historically marginalized group... I think we're being too rosy-eyed about resource distribution. If we're carving up the lightcone, we can also reproduce fast, clone ourselves, use up superhuman amounts of resources. We might drop down to subsistence quickly (by immortal standards). What if the people born in simulation demand fleshbags share the wealth they're hogging with inefficient resource use?
We might have extremely toxic discourse like 'Alice worked 10 hours a day as a nurse and is poor as fuck, Bob bought bitcoin in the hopes of buying some child pornography and is a millionaire' except it's NVIDIA shares and scaled up immeasurably, such that Alice's whole bloodline is born into poverty for the rest of time because she took on student debt and never accumulated capital?
There are all kinds of resource-distribution problems that deserve consideration. I think that this is something we need to be thinking about beforehand. Most important of course is not letting psychopathic men/machines exterminate the rest of us but even the lesser problems of wealth distribution have already seen tens of millions butchered!
I think we need a strong consensus on distribution of power, to prevent a singleton.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Has AI actually done any of those things?
The Nvidia AI chips in Russian missiles, performing autonomous targeting to bypass jamming, per my links.
Also, per the chip article, some do work and that's the key part? It's easier to simulate a chip design and check if it works than to design a chip with superior performance.
I think the trend is pretty clear. Right now AI is causing some unemployment, producing some economic gains (mostly concentrated in big tech), adding some military gains. I expect this trend to continue and accelerate as the tech gets better and adoption improves.
Where is the evidence that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? Reminds me of the Yes Minister quote about thousands of new staff being hired to deal with the chaos caused by the labour-saving computers... but we don't seem to see increases in employment amongst AI adopters.
People are willing to pay vast amounts of money for obviously worthless things on a regular basis - NFTs are one infamous example.
NFTs aren't useful but people certainly did value them, it's just a novel subgenre of art/signalling good. I personally don't want to buy a bored ape or ugly abstract paintings, a CS GO knife skin or an extremely expensive watch that's functionally inferior to my Casio but I accept they have some kind of value. Anyway, people aren't buying AI because it's classy to have (indeed, its gotten pretty low-status), they buy it because of its utility, convenience, cost-efficiency.
it will dwarf the distributional aspects
But if AGI happens, then ASI is right around the corner? If AI can produce excellent personalized media, surely it can make better AI? If ASI is in reach, all resources available will be tapped to reach it first.
Distribution is of utmost importance! The distribution of power will be wildly upset. AGI cannot be considered like any other technology in history, it's an actor rather than a tool or a method. AGI, by definition, means a mass-producible high-quality person-in-a-box equivalent. That alone is an unprecedented achievement. ASI is a mass-producible superhuman being. Better to think about summoning forth demons or djinns or faeries, it's vital to cleanse all economic preconceptions.
Economics assumes peaceful competition and the rule of law, unchanging and clear distinctions between capital and labour, a world where 'labour' can add value to the economy... It's not the right tool for the job.
AI thus far has not caused any unemployment
This just isn't true. Big companies are sacking people because of AI. Chegg, Salesforce, IBM, BT Group, Morgan Stanley... More are freezing hiring for juniors. Why are so many artists complaining about AI if it's not costing them anything?
Where is the reason to think that AI is so militarily and economically significant at all?
Modern warfare runs on software. The logistics chains, communications, intelligence-gathering and analysis, sensors communicating with eachother to guide missiles over 1000s of kilometres, electronic warfare... all of it relies on an extremely complex base of computer code that nobody really understands that well.
AI improves that. If your drones can't be jammed because they're autonomous and can find targets on their own, that's a critical military advantage. If your radar software gets optimized by some black-box AI to counter whatever arcane modification the enemy made to their jamming software, that's a major military advantage. Optimization of complex systems in unintuitive domains is a strongsuit of AI. See AI-designed computer chips, Google has been doing that for a while. Modern AI systems are also useful for controlling high energy plasma in fusion reactor chambers, predicting the weather (obvious military and economic significance) and countless other complex domains. Cyberwarfare is another obvious domain where AI is relevant: spear-phishing, reconnaissance, actual infiltrations...
If you can quickly process huge amounts of satellite, infrared, aerial, sensor data to provide firing coordinates to your forces, that's a major military advantage. Not to mention fast translation of signals intelligence... There just aren't enough analysts to cope with all the data that militaries can scrape up.
Facebook is making billions and billions from its AI-optimized advertising, as are other big tech companies. Consumer-end text and images are just the tip of the iceberg.
It's not just 'producing crap text'. The text is valuable and useful. Domain-specific programs are valuable and useful. General text-generation (which is capable of doing advanced cyber tasks like writing kernels or performing cyberattacks) is valuable and useful. I can tell it's valuable and useful because people are paying billions for it!
Nvidia products are killing people at the front in Ukraine right now. Hell, an AI found me these links.
https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/russian-lancet-3-kamikaze-drone-filled-with-foreign-parts
In conclusion, it's obvious and straightforward that AI is hugely important. That's why the great powers are racing to develop it, why the US is anxious about China getting AI chips, why the megacorps are investing hundreds of billions in it. The worldview of the AI-believer is simple and makes sense 'powerful technology - big investment - widespread use' whereas the AI-doubter is mired in weirdness 'mostly useless technology - big tech just throwing money down the drain for some inexplicable reason - no widespread use once you ignore most of the use'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Hmm, that's a good point. They sort of were but on the other hand, they were always bad at boats, textiles and siege warfare, (until the Mongols got quite good at siege warfare). But that technological inferiority obviously didn't cause them to be militarily inferior, even pre-Mongol.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Is BJJ actually relevant in a combat scenario though? Grappling is pretty cool but what good is it if you're just getting pummelled by a guy with longer reach and more muscle-power? In an actual fight, you're allowed to strike, you can do anything you want, you actually are trying to hurt the opponent.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Getting cucked by your girlfriend's stepfather or stepfather-figure has got to be one hell of a villain origin story.
Only course open to you at that point is to sleep with her mother and assert dominance.
Also, good old-fashioned eugenic sterilization would fix this. As you mentioned in that thread, it makes zero sense for capable, civilized attorneys to be out-reproduced by these lowlifes. Only progressive taxation and the welfare state can achieve such an unnatural outcome.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Why men are more politically inactive
??? Politics has always been a principally male thing? Roosevelt, Reagan, Trump, Mitterand, Blair, Putin, Xi... In political theory, there's Rawls, Hayek, Schmitt, Sartre, Foucault... Some women emerge: Thatcher, Merkel, Rand, Hilary Clinton but not as many as men.
Women are more likely to sign petitions for social movements but its men who actually implement politics in so far as they riot and overthrow governments. Jan 6th was overwhelmingly male as were basically all of the revolutions in history.
Men are the agentic sex, they're more likely to do good or evil, killing themselves, killing others, creating new things, implementing large-scale plans or reforms (Deng Xiaoping, Gorbachev, Ataturk, Rao in India's market reforms, Keating in Australia). Again Thatcher is the only woman I can think of who made big changes...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
We could've installed a more effective puppet government and that would've worked. The Soviet puppet govt outlived the Soviet Union! Really not that hard to administer basic justice and secure a power base.
Realistically the US and co weren't going to do that or win because of these political factors you've identified - because freedom and liberal democracy was the goal. Would've been far easier to install a friendly govt that doesn't shelter Islamist terrorists. The bulk of the people we allied with were either feeble or corruptible, they were willing to give lip service to democracy or whatever they thought we would pay for. That's the problem.
Also I think the political value of murdering child rapists is underrated. That was the Taliban's original source of legitimacy, that was their starting mythology, hanging paedophiles from a tank barrel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators,
That is what he said. Translators are included as part of this pool but do not make up the not the bulk of refugees.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
I'm talking about the Afghan military and well-connected associates of the old regime, which would presumably make up the bulk of those who got away. There may well be many decent people, translators amongst them. Generally, the population of Afghan refugees as a whole is badly behaved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Yeah, it's of course open to observation and review. I just get the sense that sub-Saharan Africa tends to be structurally vulnerable. HIV was bad, Africa hit hardest. Leninism was bad, Africa hit hardest (at least the communist bloc could develop industrialized societies and largely escape subsistence agriculture).
Whenever anything bad shows up, Africa is usually hit hardest. Whenever anything good happens in Africa, it's usually squandered somehow (Nigerian oil revenues, Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues, black South Africa and Zimbabwe's inheritance of infrastructure and capital). Botswana's diamonds are the major exception but even so, the country is still HIV-ridden and mired in subsistence agriculture. Whenever anything good happens in the rest of the world, it struggles to reach Africa except for European enclaves like South Africa, despite a great deal of investment.
An earthquake in Haiti will be catastrophic, merely damaging in the Dominican Republic... that's the trend I see.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
The Afghan 'collaborators' were often drug-ridden, totally undisciplined, shamelessly corrupt, traitors and/or child rapists. These are the guys who gave us green-on-blue attacks. That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.
Plus the average Afghan refugee in the West is one of the most rapey and ill-mannered refugees.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
I can see the point the article is trying to make (US tariff policy is pretty dumb, populism has its bad and overly conspiratorial elements) but also disagree a lot with how it makes the point:
Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.
It is not difficult to see how this difference in view creates a state of affairs that can, in turn, be exploited for political gain in a democracy. The expert view on punishment tends to percolate out, influencing the behaviour of educational elites (and others who are inclined to defer to expert opinion). This gives rise to a set of views and practices among those elites, such as permissive parenting, abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a less punitive approach to crime, and opposition to capital punishment, which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority. This in turn leads the broader public to think that certain persistent social problems, such as juvenile delinquency or urban disorder, are a consequence of various institutions (not just the criminal justice system, but schools and parents as well) having become insufficiently punitive. The solution, from their perspective, is an exercise of straightforward common sense – all we need to do is “get tough” with offenders. The resistance of elites to these obvious truths is a sign that there is something wrong with them (e.g. they have been seduced by “fancy theories,” become divorced from reality, etc.).
Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.
We tried the less punitive approach to crime and sure enough crime has soared since the low-points in the 50s. It's self-evident that if you get rid of the criminals, they can't do any crime. Whereas, if you let them out onto the streets after 30, 40, 70 arrests, they're fully capable of setting random women on fire in a subway.
Europe is run by elites much more than America and they've fucked everything up bigtime. Very smart, sophisticated people in the EU and yet they've managed to crush innovation and industry with their tax and energy policies, neuter the strategic relevance of Europe (historically, the strongest player in the world). British governance has been horrendous. Judges wrecked Birmingham's garbage disposal system. The Ajax armoured vehicle is so useless it's making soldiers sick, it's actually causing casualties to the operators. HS2 bat tunnels. Police clearance rates have fallen to negligible levels in fields like theft.
Elites are often terrible at actually governing, see also the painstakingly meritocratic Confucian officials who led Qing into national disaster.
There's a role for elites and genuine need for expertise but by no means should they be trusted unconditionally to have even a basic level of understanding of their 'areas of expertise'. It could just be Lysenko/Freud/humours theory garbage. If your doctor starts talking about the balance between bile and phlegm and fails to cure you with the leeches, it's very natural to get suspicious of him! That's what populism is, even if it doesn't necessarily know better. Elites need to do better to regain the social contract where they get status and wealth, in exchange for good leadership.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
Is there even a single instance of an indigenous (by which I mean tribal when Europeans showed up, not organized states like Japan) people actually advancing to the technological/military frontier without getting colonized? I find it unbelievable that the Iroquois could become a major power, just because of all the catching up they'd have to do in statecraft. They were behind the Aztecs, who themselves were far behind the Europeans or Asians at this point. There's zero chance they can control international trade because 'native peoples' were vastly inferior at sea to Europeans or settled peoples, for obvious reasons. They'd need to develop a seafaring culture first and that takes time.
Ironically, this is also orthodox Marxist thought (I am not a Marxist). Marx was dead against the idea of revolution in Russia. No revolutionary conditions he said, not enough industrial workers, improperly developed, not enough capitalism. You can only move onto socialism after completing capitalism, he said.
The Czech instructor, a veteran of peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Yakub (name changed), was most interested in drones. Together with him, "Eighteen" decided to conduct training: Czech paratroopers were supposed to storm the positions of the Ukrainian military. The "maviks" were supposed to help them defend themselves.
"After their first assaults, Yakub approached me, says: "Do you hear, can we remove the "maviks"?" – says the major.
In the photo, a military man in camouflage controls a drone in the field. He stands on a path amidst dry grass, holding a control panel, and a small reconnaissance drone hovered in the air in front of him. Around — autumn nature: trees with yellow and green leaves, gray-blue sky with clouds.
"Why, Yakub?" – he asked in response.
"But you just draw us very quickly with your maviks, and we cannot approach you, you find us on the approach to your positions", answered the Czech instructor.
"I say, Yakub, unfortunately, we are preparing for war".
Crude translation but this is pretty brutal. I swear I've been reading articles like this for the last year where the NATO trainers go 'drive around the minefield lol' or similar. Nothing seems to be learnt, it's very slow going. Later in the article they say 'oh the Ukrainian command never said anything was wrong with our training, we totally include drones' but it's always the military officials talking, not the soldiers journos are speaking to on the ground. It is warming me to the '140 million population Russia poses a threat to 600 million population Europe' idea we see so much.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
With a highly ordered religiously enforced nuclear families they were alright
I agree that this is an empirically valid effect. But even in the late '50s it was the same old story - 10% of the population, 60% of the crime.
https://x.com/1776General_/status/1965505815366004743
Probably it's one of those multicausal clusterfucks so common in the social sciences. Parentless households, soft-on-crime policing raise crime. Forensics, modern surveillance, wealth increases and aging population reduce crime. Nevertheless, there remains this vast gulf for as long as statistics can show us. State disincentivizes having a second parent in the household, blacks hit far harder than whites. Soft on crime policing? Black crime rate rises higher than white. Drugs emerge? You know the drill... The big story is that base-level difference.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
In reality the modal church of 100-200 years ago is so far removed from the modern modal church
IMO the modern modal church isn't too Christian, nor does it have any real political effect in so far as it's Christian. Christianity in the West seems mostly to be another thing that progressives have eaten.
If we look around, we see lots that's against Christian dogma. Over a billion abortions since 1980, more abortions than all those who died in every war in human history. Marriage is not really 'till death do us part' anymore, marriage has been annexed by the state. Cohabitation before marriage - very common. It's judges and lawyers who control marriage (straight or gay) and divorce, the church only provides a venue and music. Pornography is in full bloom. Pride parades are in full bloom. Greed and materialism, superabundant. Self-promotion and narcissism on social media. Sabbath breaking. Blasphemy. Gluttony and excess. Sloth. Need I go on?
My main experience with church was Catholic Jesuits, not anyone terribly based or trad. But the trad don't seem to have done much. What have they accomplished? Poland, Russia, Africa... maybe Christianity really is influencing policy and values there. In the West it seems to be old people, ritual, progressivism and a pale shadow of its former power.
Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.
This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.
Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.
If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.
The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.
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