I think this is a false equivalence. Crime stats are about broad groups, not individuals (e.g. "Black men in America"). Even if you are a black man in America with a lived experience, it is impossible to have the lived experience of all black men in America as a collective whole. Thus, you can use lived experience to say "I have been victimized by a police officer," and most reasonable people would accept that, but you cannot use lived experience to say "all black men are victimized by all police officers."
But inflation is about the experience of individuals, not groups. No one is out there saying that inflation disproportionately affects Muslims because the CPI is racist (OK I'm sure someone somewhere is saying that, but I don't care.) A single individual can experience the effects of inflation on their personal food budget without needing to make any claims about the experiences of others. An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.
Moreover, the same government agencies that purport to measure inflation have a pretty big incentive to say that inflation isn't a problem, since inflation reflects badly on the government that signs their paychecks. Not only would we expect them to downplay inflation, we've watched them do it in real time with claims about inflation* being low where inflation* is calculated to exclude food, rent, and education.
Sunshine
6mo ago
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
Sunshine
6mo ago
No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
Sunshine
4mo ago
I don't think the ancestral homeland part actually matters. What matters is just whether someone is willing to take them in.
If Israel had existed at the time, the worst of the Holocaust probably could have been averted, because it is true that the countries of the world refused to accept the Jews. But the flipside of that is that if there had been any country willing to take them the worst of the Holocaust could have been avoided. It didn't have to be Israel.
And if any country had taken them, that country would probably be more powerful in the present day as a result. Let's say all the Ashkenazis who would have settled in Israel all immigrated to Canada (historically some tried this and were turned away). Today Israel has a population of only 9 million, and many of them aren't descended from Holocaust survivors. You could pretty comfortably put all of Israel inside Canada without bothering anyone. Israel and the Canadian province of Quebec have about the same population, but Quebec is 70 times the size of Israel. Canada's population would be about 10-20% higher today.
This feels like an argument for having open borders, but it's not. Is it even a good thing to live in a country with a higher population? Actually, my main point is just that it doesn't have to be your ancestral homeland. What matters is that any country is willing to take the refugees in.
Sunshine
4mo ago
Slavery was abolished in England in the 12th century, replaced by serfdom, and then Elizabeth I freed the serfs in 1574. Some English people practiced slavery outside of England but on the island itself there was no institution of slavery. It's clearly not a purely technological issue.
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers. Slavery is just a way of giving the rich a larger share of the wealth at the cost of stifling economic growth.
Sunshine
3mo ago
Fans can switch to a better show if they don't like the one they're watching, but PR executives and social media managers have to find some way to defend whatever show they work for.
Accusing your critics of being some form of -ist is just another part of the standard playbook now. No sane company would shy away from using this highly effective tactic just because the show they're defending is actually bad.
Idpol can defend a bad position just as well as it can defend a good position. Is it any wonder that so many people with indefensible positions resort to idpol?
A lot of people are saying that Google's engineers must be pretty stupid not to have noticed this before release.
What if they aren't? What if they did this on purpose?
I propose a Straussian reading of this whole affair. Google engineers who have a problem with wokeness can't speak out against it. The only acceptable criticism is the 50-Stalins criticism, that we haven't gone far enough, that we need more wokeness. So I think this is a 50-Stalins-style protest. I think it's a deliberate act of accelerationism to highlight the absurdity of trying to apply this style of heavy handed censorship to AI.
I think Google's engineers are protesting their leadership by giving them exactly what they asked for, and everything that comes with it.
Sunshine
2mo ago
I agree with your premise but I disagree with your conclusion. I think it's too far of a jump to say this:
what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society
The fundamental flaw with any line of reasoning that puts agency into "educational and social institutions" is that it assumes way too much competence from those "educational and social institutions." The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments do not comb the web to identify thought-patterns that might move society in a dangerous dangerous direction so they can neutralize them with insidious social engineering campaigns. The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments read their Facebook feeds and uncritically absorb whatever their (overwhelmingly left-wing) social circles are talking about.
Accept this premise: Andrew Tate is a Bad Influence on Young Men.
Put five 30-60 year old out of touch midwits in a room and tell them to brainstorm a solution. By 'solution,' what you actually mean is some vaguely pro-social program you can announce to make it seem like you're doing something - the question of whether the problem can be solved never comes up. Also unmentioned are the question of whether the framing of the problem is useful, or even whether the problem exists in the first place. The metric of success is the amount of positive attention generated divided by the cost of the program - or likes/dollar, if you prefer.
What you'll get is something like, "Let's make our own influencer to be a positive influence and counter out the negative influence."
Sunshine
2mo ago
As far as I can tell this is exactly what Israel is trying to do with the whole "We're going to flatten northern Gaze, so everyone who lives there should grab whatever they can carry and walk south" strategy.
Gaza is dense and Israel is small. I don't think there's physically enough room to sequester the Gazans in isolated reservations. That strategy worked for the Americans with the Indians, but America is huge and full of open space. The most effective tool of separation is a hundred miles of empty land, populated by nothing but rodents and without so much as a shed to hide behind.
If Israel had their own equivalent of Utah in which to banish their problematic religious nuts, they wouldn't have this problem.
I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.
Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward?
Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.
Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.
Sunshine
2mo ago
I'm talking about individual selection, not group selection. The exact result will vary depending on what kinds of battles you end up fighting throughout your life, but in general being courageous increases the individual's reproductive chances, not just the group's. If you flee the battle then you can't partake in the spoils of war. If you flee the battle, you may survive but the victors will steal your wives and daughters, and the next generation will be more like them than you. Thus, courage spreads even if cowards are more likely to survive.
Also, it must be said, the vast majority of violence throughout human history has been small-scale. For the majority of battles that most people have participated in, one man's individual courage does make a difference on the outcome. Skirmishes between groups of 20 men were far, far more common than battles between groups of 20,000.
Short answer: The two-party system. I think there are young people in the USA who would vote for AfD but who wouldn't vote for the Republican Party. The Republicans suck in a lot of ways and are shackled to interest groups that make them unappealing to most people under the age of 40.
I think there are also a lot of young people in the USA who would vote for a far-left party in a parliamentary system but who have strong objections to voting for the Democrats - lately we've seen a lot of pushback from this bunch over the Israel-Palestine issue.
I think the Trump strategy is to gamble everything on a big win in the upcoming elections. It's a bit reckless, but it's not stupid. The border issue is hurting Biden with the voters. The Republicans had a choice between a temporary compromise now or a better chance to win enough power to get everything they want in 2025. They chose to go for the win.
You call his decision self-serving, but from a game theory perspective that's the whole point. Trump is inseparable from Trumpism now. If he doesn't win and get rid of his enemies then he'll spend the rest of his life on trial or in jail. For voters who call their representatives Republican-In-Name-Only, it makes perfect sense to support a candidate who can't back down and retire to a comfortable life of wealth and influence.
Military aid to Israel is not actually about justice, though. Politicians prefer to pretend that their acts of rational realpolitik are justified, but they make their decisions based (mostly) on strategy.
The west in general and the USA in particular have several key interests in the region, like the Suez Canal. Israeli intelligence and military power are useful leverage on those interests. Back when he was a senator, Joe Biden famously said Israeli aid is the best investment the USA makes and that if Israel did not exist, America would have to create it to preserve its interests.
I don't know the full extent of what Israel's intelligence services do for the west because they obviously don't advertise it. We know that they have one of the largest and best-funded intelligence services in the world. Whatever it is they do with that money, Joe Biden clearly thinks the USA is getting their money's worth.
Since all of this stuff is top-secret one of the only things I can point to is a joke from an old British TV show. Yes, Minister and its sequel series Yes, Prime Minister were infamous for portraying the government of Britain so accurately that the actual government thought the show's writers had a spy on the inside feeding them stories. Yes, Prime Minister once did a joke about the British Foreign Office hiding strategic intelligence from the PM, and the Israeli ambassador passing that same intelligence to the PM in a secret meeting.
That's just a script from an old TV show, of course. But it's not like Mossad is going to come out and explain what they do for the governments of the west in exchange for all that money. All we can say is that whatever it is they do, the governments of the west are apparently satisfied with their performance.
Sunshine
8d ago
That depends on what you mean by 'succeeding.' Trump went into his first term with no plan for how to staff his administration. As I see it, the main goal of Project 2025 is just to work on that stuff in advance so that if Trump wins another term he won't have to start from scratch the day after the election. Will it revolutionize the US government forever? No. But at least this time he'll have a list of names he can draw from to fill government positions with loyalists.
And they don't really have to be competent. It would be an improvement over the first term if the bureaucracy was just not actively working against Trump's administration.
I can't reply to the deleted post, so I'll reply to this instead: What is the deal with the recent trend of top-level posts being posted and then immediately deleted?
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