ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
2yr ago
Publicly stated opposition, at least. In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities. That tendency is even stronger when they're e.g. choosing anonymous donors from a sperm bank.
ThenElection
9mo ago
On balance, I think he likely did it. But Cole's specificity raises some skepticism of his testimony for me. Would a murderer actually mention those details?
Not impossible, and I don't have a strong mental model of jailhouse confessions and what motivates them. But I can equally see the police thinking "this guy obviously did it, so we should intentionally leak these details to Cole to make sure we get him."
Novel behaviors emerge out of collections of components. Locusts are harmless and even helpful when in their solitary phase, but subjecting them to enough density induces a far more destructive gregarious phase by a cascade of social and physiological changes.
To take a human example, I don't really care if someone does fentanyl alone in the confines of their own home. I guess it's sad if they die, but that's their life. But allowing large groups of fentanyl addicts to congregate and use together has damaging consequences far larger than the damage they inflict on themselves.
Unless you're a hyper-individualist, it's perfectly coherent to say it's reasonable for the government to regulate destructive collective behaviors while otherwise taking a hands off approach to individuals.
ThenElection
10mo ago
We gave the USSR food for physical sustenance; China gives us cheap backdoored trinkets and TikTok for spiritual sustenance. We have willingly made ourselves subservient.
ThenElection
11mo ago
She is also a candidate able to campaign without stepping on her own feet (too much). If she's asked about abortion, she knows and is able to segue into Trump wanting raped 12 year olds to die giving birth. And, furthermore, she knows not to divert the question to the scourge of illegal immigrants rapists, which is... Not a topic Democrats should be focusing on.
ThenElection
1yr ago
All taxes are distortionary.
Hate to be that guy, but land value taxation (or really taxes on anything that's inelastic in supply) doesn't have that problem. Probably the most compelling argument for it (plenty of arguments against it, as well).
ThenElection
1yr ago
Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.
I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?
ThenElection
1yr ago
Has a political movement focused on encouraging ethnogenesis ever had a good outcome? I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.
I also mean more than the politics of historical fascism (though those have always had disastrous outcomes). Maybe European nations in the 19th century, in a kind of turning peasants into Frenchmen kind of way? Perhaps, but that was a gradual process taking centuries and itself caused plenty of disasters. Many Eastern European nations would have had a better 20th century if the pursuit of minor identities hadn't torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the most common outcome is for ethnogenic movements to just fizzle out: see pan-Slavism.
ThenElection
2yr ago
China's reliance on imports of food and oil are vulnerable to a tit-for-tat retaliation from the West.
True, but Taiwan is even more dependent on those things and vulnerable to economic coercion. And much of the world is dependent on Chinese trade: South Korea's and Japan's supply chains are deeply rooted in China, and a blockade of China would send them into spiraling into depression. (Making the blockade leakier helps them, but also defeats the purpose.) If it came to some kind of long-lived stalemate, there would be a lot of pressure to wrap things up, even on terms favorable to China.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Among my abandoned Substack drafts
Can you share your Substack? Wasn't aware you had one.
ThenElection
2yr ago
The group in question here is lesbians, though, not heterosexual WUCW. It's not a coincidence that political progressivism has started policing who lesbians have sex with and not the broader group of WUCW.
ThenElection
2yr ago
No one's vote materially influences outcomes. A Democrat in Idaho has every bit as much influence as a Democrat in California.
If a Republican likes living in California or a Democrat likes living in Idaho, why should they uproot their life to be governed by people who happen to share their party affiliation?
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
ThenElection
6mo ago
Code is a nearly solved problem, and I regularly see the leading models create correct output on the first try for things that haven't existed before, so long as you give them a reasonable spec.
That "reasonable spec" bit is a pretty big caveat, but the coding portion can be fully automated even today.
Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)
There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.
ThenElection
10mo ago
For California in particular, I think more electable Republicans. Less crazy Democrats would be good and probably closer to my actual policy preferences, but having a single party system itself seems to lend itself to bad governance (at least in the context of American politics). Moderates and extremists will have different policies and spar with each other, but they close ranks when there is corruption or something that could affect the reputation of the party as a whole.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Looking through her Tweets, I'm thinking she's in on it (or at least just farming engagement). Says she isn't into politics, most political thing said being that she stands with Israel, references God a fair amount, seems to like Elon.
It seems she's some kind of digital content marketer/entrepreneur.
ThenElection
10mo ago
His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.
What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.
ThenElection
10mo ago
I like it.
Bringing in Lakatos, liberalism/capitalism and communism both have hard cores (their central principles--free markets and property rights vs class struggle and state ownership), along with belts of auxiliary hypotheses and heuristics (policies and praxis). People can adopt either, and both can be used to model the world in a coherent way. What makes them different is whether they name new problems and generate new, useful hypotheses for answering them, except instead of knowledge it's human flourishing.
Communism is more or less dead, but liberalism is a zombie. Still motile, but unspeaking. So you have people grasp for old programs that have failed but do no worse for the person grasping than the currently dominant program.
ThenElection
10mo ago
I am skeptical about the judiciary changes happening: if Democrats win the Senate and the Presidency, the court "reform" (I agree it would be bad, and I'm pretty content with the composition of the current court) is a much bigger lift than simply appointing new justices. In fact, I'd say that Trump winning actually increases the risk of judiciary reform over the next decade, if he replaces one or two of the Democratic justices and Democrats feel increasingly desperate and hopeless. If court packing is going to happen, electing Harris or electing Trump just shifts it a couple years forward or back.
As far as immigration goes, neither Trump nor Harris will do much to change the existing system. They'll take different rhetorical approaches and make some marginal changes, but both will more or less maintain the status quo. The constant stream of millions of illegal immigrants is just too critical for the lifestyles of both Democratic and Republican donor classes to allow for any real action to be made. You'll still see roughly the same number of immigrants in the US regardless at the end of their respective terms.
The only place I see a substantively different choice of futures is foreign policy, particularly China. Who's better to avoid a war with China? This is not obvious and requires some guessing: Harris is a sock puppet for the existing foreign policy establishment, while Trump's approach is (charitably) more personalistic. As much as I dislike the foreign policy establishment, they provide predictability. Major wars break out when one side doesn't correctly predict what the other side will do; if everyone can predict what will happen and the costs to each party, it greatly increases the likelihood of managed transitions that don't go kinetic. A war with China will hurt the economy far worse than cherry picking all the worst policies from each candidate, so that ends up being one point in Kamala's favor for me.
ThenElection
1yr ago
It was tongue in cheek (not obviously enough so, apparently).
ThenElection
1yr ago
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Accept is the key word that needs some refinement. Migrants are entirely free to try to change society in their image. Their host society is entirely free to say "lol no." So long as both non-violently accept the outcome of that negotiation, it's all above board.
The issue many rightists have is that their host society instead goes "meh, just let me have my McDonald's, reality TV, and video games, and you can do whatever you like." That's arguably a bad outcome, but it's entirely on the natives for allowing the situation to develop like it did.
ThenElection
1yr ago
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
That includes people who are on Social Security. If you scope it to Millenials and younger, I think the average is around 10.
More options
Context Copy link