TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
No bio...
User ID: 616
I'm sure others have seen this, but AutoGPT is here, a framework that lets instances of GPT call other instances of GPT to create complex task chains with no human input. In other words, it lets GPT instances prompt other instances to complete projects. Only about a week after being released, the examples are staggering.
This is an example of BabyAGI automating a sales prospecting pipeline, something I can say from experience normally takes a typical sales rep at least half a day to do. We can already automate it, and pretty well. This type of thing wasn't possible a week ago.
There are all sorts of other examples, and it's clear that massive automation is happening. I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years. If not sooner. The question becomes - what do we do about it?
The standard liberal answer is Universal Basic Income, and many on the left seem to think it will just magically appear once the government realizes the economic power of AGI. Problem is even if we get the buy-in from the political class, the implementation of UBI is not a simple undertaking! The funding, distribution, and potential impact on inflation alone are going to cause monstrous headaches and take years to work through. Plus even if we do have UBI, the potential of widening income inequality is insane, as those who own and control AGI technology stand to reap substantial profits, further concentrating extreme amounts wealth in their hands.
Another solution, favored by some conservatives, is to focus on retraining and upskilling the workforce. While I get the general direction here, I highly doubt a retraining program could possibly be enough to counter the rapid pace of automation. Furthermore, not everyone will have the aptitude or desire to transition into highly technical or specialized fields, which may leave a significant portion of the population without viable employment options. "Learn to code" just doesn't hit the same when software devs are going to be replaced as well.
Even if we get lucky enough to have both UBI and massive retraining, it may not be enough!
Why not get the government to throw some cash at massive infrastructure and public works projects? We could take a page out of the 1930s New Deal playbook and create a boatload of jobs in all sorts of industries. I've rarely seen anyone discuss this, but it may be necessary as it was during the Great Depression. Plus, it'd boost the economy, help repair our public infrastructure, and maybe even help tackle climate change if we invest in green tech. We could even turn this impetus towards space...
Last but not least we've got the potential impact of automation on mental health and societal well-being. We're already in the middle of a Meaning Crisis. As we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to perform jobs and soon everyday tasks, we've got to ensure that people are still able to find purpose and meaning in their lives. This probably won't be what we've traditionally looked to, such as the arts or writing, since AI is already making that irrelevant.
Perhaps we will finally realize the importance of community in our lives and to our happiness, and start adding economic numbers and frameworks to those who create social goods. Have the government fund people to run local meetup groups, or help their neighbors with tasks, volunteer at old folks' homes, etc. It's a bit of a bludgeon solution right now, but we could refine things over time.
At the end of the day we all know the rise of AGI is going to be a shitshow for a number of reasons. I've outlined some potential solutions or stopgap measures to prevent the breakdown of society, but how does the Motte think we can navigate this change?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
The recent Georgist uprising in the rat-sphere seems to be spreading outward, and gathering steam if anything. Lars Doucet, who wrote the original ACX post that blew up, is now releasing a book called Land is a Big Deal which summarizes his writings thus far.
There was also a major takedown of Detroit land assessment practices by a major land parcel data collector, ReGrid that dropped a few days ago. Major takeaways:
- Property tax assessment is widely variable - some houses have *double* the tax burden of identical houses literally across the street.
- Landowners tend to have far better valuations (i.e. pay less taxes) than homeowners, probably because they have more time/incentive to protest valuations.
- Poor taxing and tax foreclosure in Detroit are likely a large part of why the city has fallen on such hard times in recent years.
In addition, some fairly mainstream political candidates such as Chloe Brown who's running for Mayor of Toronto, seem to be gaining steam. Land value tax is a large plank in her platform.
I got interested in land reform through the original series of ACX posts, and frankly I'm surprised how interesting the problem is and how overall neglected the topic seems to be. Even extremely intelligent and well read folks I talk to about it are surprised when they learn that land value is usually just pulled out of thin air - the industry standard is to just take 25% of the purchase price and not give a shit about location or any other factors, which seems bizarre upon a critical review.
I've seen some discussion about Georgism/LVT here, but curious if anyone else has been following this?
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.
There are plenty of posts in the CW thread lamenting the takeover of modern TV and movies by 'wokeness,' I figured it might be interesting to look at another area, namely sci-fi novels.
The Hugo Award is probably the most well known science fiction writing award, having existed since 1953 and helping to launch many famous authors' careers such as Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and many more. Unfortunately, the quality of this award, among others, seems to have gone sharply downhill recently. Specifically, they are becoming overtly political and focusing primarily on female and POC authors.
This phenomenon started back in 2014-2015, and has received massive backlash since the genre of speculative fiction (science fiction + fantasy) is overwhelming male, and seems to select for high systematizers. There have even been organized voting campaigns against the political skew of the Hugo, predictably shut down hard by the social justice camp.
I was recently looking for a new sci-fi series, and stumbled upon Ancillary Justice, a sci-fi novel that won the first so-called 'Triple Crown' of Sci-fi, the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Despite never having heard of the other two besides the Hugo, I figured that should be a good enough endorsement of the series. I was wrong.
The flaws with this first novel, as I only read about a fifth of it before quitting, are numerous. The basic premise is that the main character used to be an Artificial Intelligence who ran a starship, and communicated/perceived primarily through captured human bodies, called Ancillaries. She (the AI) was betrayed, and now is stuck in a single human body, plotting revenge. Why a super powerful AI needs to take over human bodies is never explained, but we'll chalk it up to suspension of disbelief.
This former-AI-being, despite having lived for over 2,000(!) years, is laughably incompetent and emotional while still managing to come off as a flat character. Starting on a backwater planet called Nilk, where she has been living for almost twenty years, she consistently manages to piss off the locals by mis-gendering them. This is because, as the author takes pain to remind us, the Radch Empire which she came from has one singular gender (or doesn't care about gender, it isn't clear) and the default pronoun is 'she.' This odd convention leads to such beautiful passages as (emphasis mine):
"She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt."
This inconsistent gendering is constant throughout the novel, to the point where it's difficult to trust the gender of any character. You literally have characters introduced using female pronouns, only to find out two chapters later that it was actually a male character, the former-AI-turned-SJW just failed to correctly gender them!
Despite the fact that this is beyond frustrating from a reader perspective of trying to visualize the characters, it makes literally no sense given the world building. You're telling me that a millenia-old AI, who has explicitly spent centuries studying human expressions, culture, and communication, is so incompetent they can't correctly gender humans in a society they've been living in for twenty years?? Keep in mind this mis-gendering literally threatens the main character's life at multiple points. The amount of mental gymnastics required to suspend my disbelief at this point was far too much.
And yet, despite this inane premise (and the fact that according to many other reviewers, the book never gets better, there's barely any plot, and the AI's scheme for revenge is utterly flawed) this book received massive amounts of praise. Not just from the sci-fi establishment, but more general institutions too such as NPR, and various other celebrities. They somehow try to turn this confusing writing style into a good thing because it encapsulates a 'poignant personal journey':
It won't be easy. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate — no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages.
Now you may ask - why does this matter? Unfortunately, as many know here, awards are a zero-sum game. Speculative fiction, especially fantasy, is entering the main stream with hits like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Right now we already have issues of adaptions being too focused on social justice narratives, even though many of the underlying works were popular due to their gritty, realistic, and often misogynistic worlds.
Writing fiction is a brutal career. Amateur authors often spend literally decades building a name for themselves, so short story magazines, awards, and other ways of gaining notoriety and funds are extremely important. If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically. Writers who can't write woke fiction simply won't be able to support themselves.
When it comes to modern entertainment, science fiction novels especially have been one of the last bastions of male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing. It seems that where the genre goes could be an important bell-weather for the future of the culture war in entertainment.
Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:
When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.
Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.
We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.
Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.
We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8mo ago
A Look at Shame in Modern Society
Shame is in an interesting place in modern society. On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc. This understanding has come from recognizing that a lot of the time, these feelings can make their conditions worse, thereby leading to increased suffering.
At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other. This is not a new concept, as Emily Post pointed out in her etiquette books. She talked about how the point of manners is to consider and focus on how the other person is feeling, and not to focus exclusively on your own desires.
I think the absence of this benefit of shame is why so much of modern society is characterized by vitriol and name-calling, etc. These are often symptoms of a deeper issue. A lot of this has to do with the norms of acceptable discourse online, where anonymity can sometimes contribute to a lack of empathy and understanding. It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way, even though there is a lot of social utility there.
How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?
Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?
Do we need to return to aristocratic training and virtues, making sure the elite at least have a legible, shared set of manners they can use to discuss fraught topics with each other?
Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.
Where do you, dear reader, think that our society should go with regards to how we incorporate shame into our culture?
Silicon Valley Bank crashed just a day ago, and many folks in the VC/startup world are freaking out. I’ve seen predictions that 50-100 different startups will go bankrupt over the next month. This could cause a contagion effect and lead to worse effects, although I’m skeptical of a major economic collapse as some doomsday prophets have discussed.
Apparently the bank was mostly into mortgage backed securities, which lost a ton of value due to the Fed’s precedented* rate hikes. I don’t know enough about finance to confidently hop on my soapbox here - @BurdensomeCount may have a better idea of what’s going on.
As this collapse mainly affects very left coded super technical folks, I don’t expect many on the right to shed tears. That being said I do think this speaks to a larger issue of growth in the economy as a whole. Tyler Cowen has famously backed the stagnation hypothesis, or the idea that overall production has been slowing down.
Tech startups have recently been the major sector looked to for economic growth, especially with all the AI/LLM hype. This collapse not only will slow the industry but shows a marked incompetence from this growth sector which may cool investment there in the future.
How can we sustain economic growth without the recent massive gains from Silicon Valley technology?
Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now banning restricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?
Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.
On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.
Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
Not sure if this is better for SQS but - What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism? I am especially interested in claims that aren't health-based, as I know quite a few very intelligent and well-sourced vegans who have thoroughly convinced me that most health based claims are false.
I'm not a vegetarian myself but I'm reasonably convinced that I should be one, it's more of a moral failing on my part that I eat meat, not a logical stance.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
9mo ago
Interesting article! Thanks for linking.
I've heard these comparisons, and as I've mentioned before I'm extremely bullish on the social contagion hypothesis for the majority of mental illness cases. It's an especially pernicious problem because once an illness becomes too 'saturated' like anorexia has been, the cultural cachet of the diagnoses plummets and the fad moves on. All that's left is hordes of people with broken lives and nothing to show for it.
I'm convinced that the modern world's turn away from religion is the main culprit here. That being said, I've been an agnostic for most of my life, so I don't think anyone is necessarily to blame when it comes to turning our backs on old religions. Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
6mo ago
There seems to be an idea around many open discussions forums that the left has captured many cultural institutions. This perception seems so persuasive because certain leftist thinkers coined the idea.
While it’s undoubtedly true that many major institutions lean left, it’s also a convenient dodge from the right wing or conservative side in the culture war allowing them to avoid self criticism. In fact it seems that almost any time folks question why right wing values are not more represented in popular culture, the knee-jerk response by conservatives is that the left has captured institutions, so there’s no hope. When the reasonable point is asked as to why this state of affairs can’t be broken by right wing institutions or a similar capture by the right wing, I haven’t seen a good answer.
How has this state of affairs come to be the default? Why did the right lose institutions, and why is there so little discussion about how they can realistically take them back?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
9mo ago
There's been a ton of bashing of immigrants and the idea of assimilation here recently. Lots of doom, not a lot of hope or true attempts at understanding. I'd like to briefly outline a positive case for immigration and assimilation, looking at three major groups throughout history.
First we have Rome. Famously Rome is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, empires an lights of civilization in the Western world. In many ways the Pax Romana and the heights the Romans achieved paved the way for the modern Western order. The United States' governmental system is in large part explicitly modeled on the Roman system.. How did Rome achieve so much success? Many scholars believe it was their ability to assimilate new peoples into their culture, and make them productive members of society. There's even a word for it: Romanization. (Or if you prefer, the less politically correct 'civilizing of barbarians.')
Going from their example, we have the many great and powerful Islamic empires. Now before everyone spouts off about how intolerent Muslims are, I agree. For many historic reasons Islamic states nowadays are the opposite of an immigrant loving place that's open to assimilation. Ironically, some scholars claim that:
How can the current state of political violence in Muslim countries be reconciled with the often-invoked tolerance of the past multicultural and multireligious Muslim Empires? One way to address this conundrum is to distinguish between toleration and tolerance. The former refers to the modern institutionalised protection of religious, ethnic, and gender differences through the rule of law, while the latter implies organic mechanisms specific to communities to accommodate differences.
From this perspective, Muslim Empires were tolerant, while modern-day Muslim states lack toleration. The past tolerance expressed itself in the regulation of the local religious diversity under the purview of the Islamic judges (qadis).
There's a lot of definitional games here, but Muslim empires were certainly notable for assimilated other 'People of the Book', i.e. Christians and Jews, which even their contemporary Christian states thought was insane. Many Muslim empires were much stronger than European nations at times, especially during the so-called Dark Ages.
Finally, we have America. I won't rehash this too much, as I think it's practically inarguable that America is a nation founded on the principle of immigration, religious freedom, and has levered it's ability to assimilate masses of immigrants to become the greatest nation in the history of the world.
The point of all these examples is to say that yes, immigration is difficult. And yes, modern Western nations may not be in a perfect spot to assimilate immigrants, there are many flaws with social programs and how immigration works currently. I'll concede all those points.
However, I think the reason immigration and assimilation is so attractive to so many intellectuals lies in the potential! If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world. The tail benefits of successful immigration policies are massive.
It's a major mistake to sneer at modern issues with immigration and say it's a doomed project when so much of our culture exists because of cultural plurality.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
For the folks here who talk heatedly about trans issues - I want to pose a thought experiment. Let's say it's the year 2300, and people can quickly, cheaply and painlessly switch their sex from male to female, and vice versa. There are no long term side effects, and it's as simple as going to buy a pill from the corner store.
On top of that, fertility issues have been handled, babies are grown/raised by artificial wombs and many different types of family structures are available with parents being able to choose what works best for their preference. Gender and sex can play a role if needed, but only for those who wish to have traditional families. It is not socially stigmatized to raise a family with two women, or two men, etc.
If this all were the case, would you have issues with people transitioning genders/sex still? If not, at what point along the line do you think it becomes okay to freely switch?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
One worrying trend I've been seeing in the modern world is the social outlawing of any form of permissible contact between older people and children. It seems that with the obsession modern western society has on children's sexuality, all of the sudden the default position when an adult interacts with a child that isn't related to them by blood, is that the adult is a sexual predator.
Especially on the motte there have been a lot of recent concerns about 'grooming,' which as a thread below mentions is an extremely muddy and useless term. In my opinion it should be tabooed from these discussions.
This issue becomes especially salient when you look at the rise of internet addiction issues, and the mental health/suicide problems that come along with it. Many kids go to internet forums like this because they don't have role models or guides they respect in life. They end up forming parasocial relationships with internet celebrities that are probably more likely to be predatory and harmful to the child, as if the habit of going on the internet all day isn't bad enough.
We as a society are losing vast amounts of illegible knowledge every day as older people die, exit the workforce, or suffer cognitive decline. There are many areas where 'book smarts' can't teach you everything, especially when it comes to emotional issues or social issues. The rise of inceldom, trans, and other social movements primarily focused on social issues of young people are a prime example.
My question is: How are adults supposed to offer guidance to children in the modern world, especially adult men? There are numerous stories of a child's father having the police called on them because people think the father might be a sexual predator, in this environment why would any man risk the reputational and legal risk of mentoring a kid?
Is it worth losing any realistic relationship between the young and old because of vague fears of sexual predation? Does the current hysteria even help sexual predation, or does preventing children from having good role models make them more insecure and vulnerable to bad actors?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
I'll go ahead and guess: it will look explicitly and seriously religious.
To me the social history of the last few decades, and indeed the last few centuries, is that of a hollowing out and lack of seriousness in religious practices and traditions. While there have been revivals here and there, the overall trend has been to become more and more secular as modern 'philosophy' and science becomes more powerful. When Descartes completely threw out Aristotelean formal causes, and claimed the Mind was totally separate from the body and physical reality, he unwittingly destroyed the way humans made sense of the world and each other from time immemorial.
At this point I'm convinced that modern philosophy, specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society. Either we will destroy our societies through increasing social fragmentation, or the transhumanists will get their wish and change the fundamental way human beings interact with each other to paper over the problems of a materialist philosophy. Perhaps both will happen.
Either way, Social Justice has become such a force because it attempts to fill the gap left by the absence of sincere religions, and just like previous 'isms' and secular ideologies, it is doomed to fail because these sorts of religious systems just can't work in a materialist universe. For better or worse, humans need to believe in purpose and meaning beyond dead matter in order to cohere together in large social groups. If we can't have that, well, we will burn it all down.
Personally I think Christianity will rise again to rule the day, at least on a religious level. It has died many times before and come back from the grave - that motif being the mythological bedrock upon which the entire enterprise is founded is no coincidence. The primary, hidden strength of Christ's gospel is the fact that it gives hope in the darkest of times, and promises a renewal and escape from death.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
What video games are people playing?
I just finished the Outer Wilds after picking it up on sale, and wow, that game was incredible. The ending actually made me cry, something I haven't experienced in a video game in almost a decade.
I usually don't go for narrative driven/mystery type games, but Outer Wilds is truly in a class of it's own. I've heard Return of Obra Dinn is similar quality, as well as Disco Elysium, so I'm curious to check those out.
Some of you may have read Scott Alexander’s recent post, Book Review: The Geography of Madness. The couple of paragraph summary is:
A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too.
Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something related to the penis or witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it.
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit that will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%,” you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing.
The thrust of Scott’s argument is that humans have an amazing propensity to change their subjective experience based on their beliefs. Here, I'm not talking about rationally held or carefully reasoned beliefs, but deep-seated beliefs that aren’t easy to change, even if you know for a fact they're irrational. Typically, these beliefs seem to be formed through social or cultural channels, and once formed, they can be very difficult to change unless your cultural narrative also changes.
This idea ties into other work on the placebo effect and the ways it shaped our culture, for instance, John Vervaeke’s take on shamanism. The basic idea being that shamanism was highly advantageous from an evolutionary perspective because it allowed groups of humans to harness the placebo effect to overcome illness and manage social problems.
In short, despite the rational pretensions our culture has, our irrational beliefs have extremely strong effects on our perception of pain and other subjective experiences. However, an important nuance is that no cultural disorder is 100% ‘in your head;’ on the contrary, these disorders are very real and can have strong physical effects.
Some of the big examples that Scott gives, and some I think might be (mostly) culturally mediated, are:
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Anorexia
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Post-traumatic stress disorder
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Anxiety
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Depression
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Gender dysphoria
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Chronic pain
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Long Covid
Now, based on the bent of this forum, many people might be tempted to jump on the gender dysphoria issue. While it’s certainly a loud and vibrant battle in the culture war, I’d ask that we instead focus on other problems. In my opinion, if this thesis holds true, then gender dysphoria is a red herring.
The evidence clearly suggests that we are inflicting massive amounts of pain and suffering on ourselves through our cultural beliefs and practices. The fact that so many of our cultural problems - from overdose deaths and suicides to chronic pain and crippling anxiety - are unforced errors is truly shocking.
Think about it - one fourth of the adult U.S. population experiencing chronic pain? That's a staggering number, and it seems largely due to the fact that we have been conditioned to believe that our pain must have an acute physical cause. We've been taught to view pain as something that must be cured with medication or surgery, when in fact many cases of chronic pain can be alleviated by simply changing our beliefs about it.
The truly shocking revelation here is that so many of our cultural problems - massive amounts of overdose deaths, suicides, one fourth of the adult population experiencing chronic pain, crippling anxiety causing young people to retreat from society, and many more issues - are clear unforced errors. We are inflicting this pain on ourselves.
If this theory is true it may very well be one of the most important and impactful frameworks with which to view the issues of post modernity. We wouldn’t need endless medications or miraculous scientific breakthroughs - we could already have the power to end massive amounts of truly pointless suffering.
ETA: is another perfect example of this type of illness.
From a personal perspective, I can attest that this theory confirms my priors. I’ve dealt with chronic pain for a decade and have long suspected that it was mostly psychosomatic. Even with this realization, it is a difficult battle to fight. Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.
So many of us in the rationalist community focus on object-level reasons as to why our society may be stagnating or why we have so many cultural problems. At the end of the day, it turns out that our beliefs themselves may be throwing us into a twisted, absurd, and horrific self-fulfilling prophecy.
It may be time to stop assuming that the causes of our problems originate directly from the outside world and update to a view that many more major problems could be solved if we simply change our cultural beliefs.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
5mo ago
To bring up another post from last week, I'm going to go ahead and repost @justcool393's piece on the Sam Altman/OpenAI/Microsoft situation, since she posted it a few hours ago and right before the last thread went down.
Here's her writing:
Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.
I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.
The OpenAI board has hired Emmett Shear as CEO. He is the former CEO of Twitch.
My understanding is that Sam is in shock.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.
In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.
Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.
Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology
Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
I'm reposting here because I'm convinced, like many other residents, that the ongoing drama of who controls AI development has far reaching implications, likely on the scale of major power geopolitical events. If not ultimately even greater.
To add a bit to the discussion to justify reposting - I think many of these discussions around AI Safety versus Accelerationism are extremely murky because so many people in secular, rationalistic circles are extremely averse to claiming religious belief. It's clear to me that both AI Safety and Accelerationism have strong themes of classical religion, and seem to be two different sects of a religion battling it out over the ultimate ideology. Potentially similar to early Orthodox Christians versus Gnostics.
Alternatively, @2rafa has argued that many of the E/Acc (effective accelerationism) crowd comes from bored technocrats who just want to see something exciting happen. I tend to agree with that argument as well, given how devoid of purpose most of the technocratic social world is. Religion and religious-style movements tend to provide that purpose, but when you are explicitly secular I suppose you have to get your motivation elsewhere.
We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.
Anyway, clearly the technological battle for the future of our civilization continues to heat up. The luddites seem out, but may have a surprising last hour comeback. The woke/political left leaning folks seem to be strongly in charge, though the OpenAI scandal points to trouble in the Olympian heights of Silicon Valley AI decision makers.
Will the Grey Tribe use AGI to come back and finally recover the face and ground it has lost to the advancing SJW waves? Who knows. I'm just here for the tea.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8mo ago
This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:
Young adults are afraid to have children, because they can’t possibly imagine adding some to the life they currently have. New parents are isolated from most of their previous friends, as their paths suddenly never cross again unless they too have kids of their own. Children compete within their age group at schools, never having a chance to either mentor someone or have an older mentor themselves. Teenagers have no idea what to do with their lives, because they don’t know anyone who isn’t a teacher or their parent. And everyone is afraid of growing old because they think that the moment they stop going to the office they’ll simply disappear.
As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?
Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.
Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
10mo ago
Circling back on the crypto FTX fiasco, Noah Smith has a new piece out theorizing, what happens if crypto just dies? Unfortunately it's paywalled so I couldn't read the whole thing, but I have been wondering this myself. More and more crypto exchanges have been dying off, especially over the last couple of years. FTX seemed to resemble one of the last exchanges embodying the spirit of crypto, and now it's gone.
By spirit of crypto, I mean the original cypherpunk, decentralized idea of a currency that operates outside the bounds of the State. As @aqouta and others have mentioned, big exchanges like Binance are actually more centralized, and if they continue to grow they can easily be incorporated as organs of the existing State apparatus.
As someone who has always been wary of censorship and centralized power, especially in light of the recent escalation in terms of woke social norms being shoved down everyone's throat, this is troubling to me. Both the right and left seem to care less and less about the overreach of the powers that be - in fact folks like Tyler Cowen think that the main difference in the 'New Right' is that they are more trusting of elites.
I'm curious for takes on either side of this issue. If you don't think we have anything to worry about with regards to State power, why is that so? Do you just think that with the rise of the internet/technology States are impotent, or is centralized power a good thing?
If you disagree with the premise above, then how can we work to push back on centralization? Especially with the rise of powerful tools like LLM and the rise of AI, is there any hope for the individual classical liberal ethos to survive the next century?
With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.
If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.
According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.
My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.
I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
If we could uplift dogs or other non-sentient animals to sentience, should we? There's a Rick and Morty episode where they uplift the intelligence of a pet dog, who goes on to uplift all other dogs and lead a rebellion against humans. Theoretically the idea is that if humans and dogs had the same level of intelligence, the way we treat dogs would be inhumane.
While I agree with the statement above, obviously there's a vast gulf between the intelligence of humans and every other form of life we know of. If we accept the premise that once we have the technology to uplift dogs we not only must treat them different but have a moral imperative to uplift all dogs, we get into dangerous territory. Essentially as soon as we become capable of increasing the intelligence of any form of life, we must. This sounds like a bad idea, especially since at a certain point we may lose out to other forms of species that have evolved to kill us. (Mosquitos, insects generally that are hard to kill but venomous/diseased enough to kill us.)
Assuming uplifting other species is even possible, I wonder how this would change our outlook on how we treat animals today. Personally I am not a vegetarian, totally fine with pets, although I do find the state of factory farming today pretty dismal, and think we should treat animals we eat better. As someone's flair here says, how far will we last until we have to become outright speciesist?
Not sure if folks here keep up with crypto much, but over the weekend FTX had a liquidity crisis and agreed to sell to Binance. This is pretty huge news - FTX was one of the bigger crypto exchanges known for buying out other flailing firms that had crises. This may lead to a larger spiral within the crypto economy. @aqouta curious for your take here.
Also as some folks here may know Sam Bankman-fried of FTX wealth is one of the three major funders of the Effective Altruism movement. Given the circumstances of this bailout, it's likely that FTX was sold for an incredibly small amount - if Binance didn't help them with the liquidity crisis they almost certainly would've fallen to $0 value. Unfortunately this means that the money EA has been pledged/receiving from SBF is going to dry up. I'm curious to see if the EA movement can weather this storm, as they have been rather aggressively growing and it looks like they've been betting on this funding being in place for a long time.
Time to add some wild speculation - Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, is Chinese. Now that Binance owns FTX, they are clearly the dominate player in the crypto space, or at least positioned well to become the dominant exchange. I wonder if this shift will cause China to reconsider their decision to make crypto illegal? Or is it too much of a risk to state power?
Update: This definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
Looks like the Supreme Court is finally getting around to challenging affirmative action. Of course we don't know what the ruling will be, but with the decisions so far I'm hopeful they strike down AA, or at least put a dent in it.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger deal as I haven't heard much buzz about it from my liberal friends. According to the article, 74% of Americans don't believe in using race as a factor in college admissions (although that question and whether or not Affirmative Action should be struck down likely have far different approval rates.) It may be a Roe situation where they really don't care until one of the sacred cows is gored because they believe in their own invincibility. I'm curious if AA does get struck down, will we have the same reaction as Roe?
I'm sure some people will be upset, but do you think liberal states will start changing their constitutions to allow race filtering for college admissions? Or is the political will for AA just gone on both sides of the aisle?
With the release of the recent Barbie movie, the old gender debates on the internet have been reignited. (Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet, might pen down my thoughts once I do.)
I recently encountered another article by a heterosexual, middle-class woman discussing how we can assist young men in discovering their masculinity. The piece, confidently titled map out of the wilderness, repeats the narrative tropes that countless similar works in journalism tend to focus on.
Does it argue that men are disoriented because women are no longer subservient? Indeed. Does it accuse men of falling for 'destructive' ideologues such as Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert whose political ideologies aren't personally favored? Yes. Does it claim men are discontent because women wish for them to behave more femininely? Absolutely. Does it state there's a lack of 'positive masculinity?' Oh, for sure.
To credit the writer, Christine Emba, she does highlight some of the more sinister issues that venture slightly beyond the bounds of conventional discourse. She openly criticizes feminists and women in general for refusing to assist men, citing an instance where Obama was chastised for attempting to help boys, and thousands of women denounced him in protest.
What prompted me to respond to this article was a moment of blatant self-awareness by the author, who admits when reproached by a man that she doesn't want to be intimate with men who heed her advice (emphasis mine):
Yes, dear writer, you recoiled in acknowledgment. If you, a talking head opining on this topic, felt this way, consider the reaction of those numerous women with lesser self-awareness when they encounter these feeble, effeminate men.
However, all the discussions around gender roles, sexual relations, power dynamics, and 'incels' are missing the real issue. They're distractions, veils obscuring the core problem.
At the risk of being cliche, I'll reference Nietzsche's most well-known line:
Why has this single paragraph echoed throughout recent centuries as one of the deepest and most frequently reiterated explanations of modernity's moral crisis? Obviously, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't imply we've executed deicide in the literal sense. What we've done is obliterated any transcendent reason for existence. There is no apparent reason why young men should exhibit concern for their neighbors, work towards self-improvement, curtail their desires, or even make an effort to contribute to society.
For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?
Regardless of the religion you choose, these systems provided us with a motive beyond primal, materialistic pleasures to care. They provided us with an aim to pursue. Most importantly, they offered us a social framework within which we could strive collectively with others and receive commendation for our benevolent deeds.
Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.
Returning to Ms. Emba's proposed solution, she states that men need to experience masculinity by:
This, she asserts, is 'Constructive Masculinity.' Let's look past the glaring issue that it's a woman attempting to define what masculinity should be - the question remains: why?
Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.
Of course this problem is applicable to far more people than just young Western males. This lack of meaning, lack of purpose, is at the core of modernity's societal problems. It waits like a tiger in the shadows, seizing us in our moments and weakness and pulling us into a black pit of despair, nihilism. Emptiness.
When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?
How will you cleanse your hands of blood?
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