Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
The mirror image of this article, alleging insane beliefs by key liberal figure, could easily be written by a social conservative. I am not one, but it's quite easy for me to imagine a version of this which swaps out Zelensky's approval rating for e.g. beliefs on trans people, which many social conservatives would regard as "incapable of separating truth [that men are men and women are women] from fiction". I don't, so I will let someone else write the actual mirror image article if they want to. Regardless, at a minimum I think most would agree that regardless of right or wrong, beliefs about trans people are more politically profound and important than incorrectly claiming low approval ratings for a specific figure. This is the entire problem with Hanania's current routine. From the perspective of conservatism, there's plenty of low human capital liberalism, they just have the added benefit of sometimes getting to smuggle it through academia.
Tophattingson
14d ago
theoretically nation-agnostic
I vaguely recall an ISDS case I can't put a name to where Canada banned some chemical ostensibly on environmental or health grounds, but in practice because this chemical was produced by and imported from the US, and the government wanted to favour domestic manufacturers who produced something similar but not identical which was not covered by the ban.
This obviously raises the question of why US tech companies don't just ISDS everything. And I suspect the answer is that since American-style free speech is a threat to the ruling parties of many countries, rather than just the bottom line of a few specific corrupt figures, that Canada would not permit itself to lose an ISDS case against e.g. facebook.
Tophattingson
14d ago
The steelman argument I've seen for these tariffs being retaliatory is that the regulatory schemes of many European countries (and, presumably, Canada), particularly for the big US export of digital services, act as de facto tariffs. This argument is described here by what I believe is a critic of Trump: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-tariffs-big-techs-new-tool-against-eu-regulation/
The weakness of this argument is that the retaliatory tariffs are too disproportionate and untargeted for this. And then the counter to that would be that since the countries involved lack anything like the US tech sector, the US can't retaliate with proportionate and targeted tariffs.
Tophattingson
14d ago
Killing a bunch of random people is not really a good way to achieve any goal, unless your goal is just that: to hurt and kill others. The reason to want to do that is typically anger and resentment.
While it is the case that terrorism is ineffective, the modal European government response of utilizing the threat of terrorism to create the appearance of acquiescing to political positions they wanted to take anyway on e.g. Blasphemy can easily create the wrong impression. Their terrorism is effective because they're on the right side, not because it's terrorism.
Tophattingson
16d ago
I didn't claim that Twitch Plays Pokemon actually beat the game with random inputs, just "very-close-to" random.
I think claude is also barred from #1 because I don't think the software interface ever gave the power to hold down A, B, Start and Select simultaneously (assuming that's the combination you mean). The description of how it works only refers to button sequences, not holding multiple buttons at once. As for #2, performance so far suggests that Claude will struggle at this in pretty much the way you'd expect the actually random input method to also struggle, because it's one of the few segments of the game that can't be cleared with button mashing.
Impressively, I don't think the original run of Twitch Plays Pokemon ran into any notable glitches, despite the game being so buggy that many of them are plausible occurrences during casual playthroughs.
At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.
A dog (and humans) playing a digital chess game generally won't have the option to play an illegal move and lose by doing so. The pokemon-playing LLM has already been given a similar advantage by not getting disqualified for invalid moves like "remove batteries" or even "throw the gameboy across the room" because such commands will just get ignored by the software interface.
This reminds me of a very good joke:
A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "
The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."
Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.
A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.
We have had AI that can beat you in chess 20 out of 20 times since the 90s. Not only did this AI not become AGI, but it is also now very much recognised as a dead end of development even for chess AI.
Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.
From OP's description it's not actually clear that Claude plays Pokemon at a level that's much above buttonmashing, and there's strategies that are both superior to buttonmashing and also not intelligent (to name one, a biased buttonmash).
Tophattingson
18d ago
Indeed, and all the sabre rattling and criticism of what it claims is right-wing extremism by the current government must be understood in the context that this is also a government that not only funds extremism in support of it's supposed enemies, but is legally obligated to do so by it's own institutions.
Much of this is, however, just two-tier. A hypothetical opponent perceived as right-wing, like Russia, probably wouldn't be protected in this manner by our courts. But good luck defending Taiwan from Communists, to name one example.
Tophattingson
19d ago
The attitude in the UK is similarly bizarre. The government, other blob parties, and supportive institutions have become foreign policy hardliners in a context where those same governments have, at every opportunity over the last 30 years, adopted policies that weaken the UK's ability to fight against a peer power. And I don't just mean in strict military budget terms here. They can increase the military budget right now and this won't improve the situation because the current circumstances make effective utilization of a larger military budget impossible. I mean policies like:
- Outsourcing. Relying on foreign, China-centric supply chains for industry is silly.
- Green energy. Tanks and jets don't run on batteries. Frack to Fuel Fighters.
- Legally empowered NIMBYism. How are you going to build the factories and bases for all this?
- Judicial power and rulings. Why build a munitions factory if you'll get sued over rare spiders? Why fight Russia if you'll get charged for shooting them?
- Weapon Bans. Legal access to firearms would both mean more experienced citizens and a potentially stronger occupation resistance. Instead the government is floating bans for kitchen knives with pointed ends.
- Nationalism. Nobody has found a way to make effective modern armies other than nationalism, and usually ethnic nationalism at that.
- Lockdowns. Shrinking the economy over a cold does not win wars.
- Immigration. This does not turn into military manpower. More British Muslims joined ISIS than are in the British Army.
- Two-tier laws. Dispossession of the demographics most likely to serve in the military is a terrible idea.
- Coffin dodgers subsidies. Why fund pensions or the NHS at the expense of the 20 and 30-somethings who are actually going to fight your war?
A UK that has a small military but is prepped and ready to re-arm and oppose Russia is a UK that looks very different from the UK we actually have. More importantly, it would be an image of the UK that our current government would despise. Cynically, the government isn't genuinely interested in defence, they just see sabre-rattling over this as a good way to go after domestic dissent.
Tophattingson
19d ago
The Korean War had about 1/10th the manpower deployment, 1/10th the expense, no rationing, extremely limited factory conversion, no conversion of civilian vehicle production to military, no massive naval buildup, and two fewer uses of nuclear weapons. Sure, when the US fought in Korea it was a no holds barred fight relative to what would come later, but they were still throwing punches pinky finger first rather than putting the entire industrial weight of the US behind it.
Vietnam has an obvious appeasement moment in the Paris Peace Accords followed by the accord-violating 1975 offensive, where the US pretty much deliberately allowed South Vietnam to fall to invasion. You don't even need to get into the rest of the war effort and whether the US didn't commit enough resources, the 1975 offensive is too obviously appeasement in the face of an ally being invaded.
Of course, this is not an argument for escalating the Korean or Vietnam War. There are plenty of good reasons not to, do not think of this as me saying the US should have turned the Chinese border into a belt of cobalt. But every argument against escalating the Vietnam or Korean war has a 38th parallel in not escalating the Ukraine War, but when you do it there, it's suddenly the Munich Conference.
As for nuclear weapons, Russia still has them. If appeasing a nuclear power is Munich in 2025 then it's also Munich in 1965.
Tophattingson
20d ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
I always find it strange that appeasement is compared to the lead-up to WW2, and never to the repeated appeasement given to Communists throughout the Cold War. First in letting Stalin conquer Eastern Europe including betraying Poland, whose independence was the supposed purpose of WW2 in the first place! Then in the Berlin Blockade, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in China, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Angola, and in Finland. In fact, between the Greek Civil War of 1946-49 and the invasion of Grenada in 1983, at no point did the US dare to deploy a decisive amount of force against any Communist opponent, even though from a sheer balance of military force perspective the west could have steamrolled North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba etc in a total war situation.
The result of all this appeasement... Is that the USSR lost.
Tophattingson
22d ago
The thing about making hyperbolic, propagandistic statements (abortion is murder!) that are intended to be taken metaphorically
I think most firm opponents of abortion would reject the idea that their claim that abortion is murder is meant to be hyperbolic. You could argue that they don't truly believe it because if they did they'd also treat those seeking abortions as they would someone attempting a murder, but that's just arguing that they're insincere or inconsistent, not hyperbolic.
Radical feminists who proclaimed that "gender is a social construct" helped create the transgender movement that would later turn on them.
Radical Feminists believe that the transgender concept of 'changing gender' reinforces the socially constructed gender norms they seek to destroy. A trans woman, from a rad fem perspective, is a man putting on an overt, almost offensive stereotype of what society believes a woman to be. One does not follow from the other, they are actually incompatible ideas.
Tophattingson
23d ago
Using a book that was not written by Popper, or referring to anything written by Popper, to figure out what Popper thinks is a bad idea. Adorno is not Popper.
Tophattingson
23d ago
No, Popper's analysis is centred on critique of Plato and historicism, the idea that history is controlled by historical laws that can be used to predict the future. He links racialism to this as a theory of history that proposes that a certain race is destined to inherit the Earth, but it's not centred on this.
Tophattingson
23d ago
Popper is pretty much as opposite a Critical Theorist as it's possible to be. He's a frequent source for arguments against Critical Theory, even.
Tophattingson
23d ago
It's easy to just accuse your opponent of "not being prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument."
It's also easy to say 1+1=3, but this doesn't mean we should throw out all of maths. They are obviously wrong. European governments imprison people for hate speech. They do not imprison people for supporting hate speech laws.
Tophattingson
23d ago
When Popper says intolerance here, he means intolerance of disagreement, not hate speech. Hence "but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols". This isn't just random padding but Popper is describing what exactly is the difference between what he views as tolerance and intolerance. And it has nothing to do with hate speech. In his view an intolerant philosophy is one that:
- Rejects rational argument
- Rejects all criticism as illegitimate
- Advocates violence against opponents
- Aims to suppress other philosophies
That progressives decide to misconstrue this to make themselves the benefactors of the paradox is their fault, not Popper's. He'd recognise a desire to suppress whatever is deemed to be "hate speech" as intolerant, rather than those accused of hate speech.
Edit: Looks like this was already pointed out below.
Tophattingson
23d ago
Many of the victims of Progressive "openness" will be quite surprised to hear our current system be described as an "open society" and their negative reaction to being dispossessed by it as "closed".
Yes, I have no idea why the author is trying to bring Popper into this. It does not help the argument being made. Popper would disagree with his theory of history having a "long 20th century". Popper would also reject a zealous anti-fascism crusade. His "paradox of tolerance" would in fact have you tolerate Fascists until they throw the first punch, and not tolerate our current brand of anti-Fascists because of their demand that we're not allowed to hear the argument of Fascists ("they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"). This isn't some weird reversal of meaning, as much of The Open Society is dedicated to going after Marxists, not Fascists. Marxists that were at the time quite happy to use the language of opposing Fascism to install their regimes across Eastern Europe.
There's no need for these complicated models of who's meant to be "open" or "closed". That just gets you stuck in a doom loop of why "open" institutions seem to love "closed" stuff as long as the closed stuff looks left-wing. The situation is more easily modelled as left-wing institutions being biased in favour of left-wing policies regardless of what those policies are.
Edit: Also how do you mention zealous self-professed anti-Fascism without mentioning that Russia's claimed reason for invading Ukraine is a hysterical accusation of Fascism directed at the Ukrainian government? Then again, this is a weird contradiction that nobody ever wants to notice. Neither those who support the current thing, who have the uncomfortable job of trying to distance themselves from the wrong kind of anti-fascist, or those opposed to the current thing, because it makes Russia look like it suffers from the exact same derangement as the west.
Tophattingson
23d ago
Applying the department's rules on classified information is a free space, you do it by doing nothing.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Stalin was definitely worse than the Tsar, but it was a difference in degree not a difference in kind.
I disagree, I think there is a difference in kind between authoritarian and totalitarian governments, because they have different strategies of repression.
The ideal authoritarian regime has an ideal authoritarian citizen. One who is disinterested in politics, disinterested in ideology, disinterested in who rules them, and simply lives a normal, private life as a disengaged citizen. While those close to the regime, such as the military and bureaucracy, need to be kept specifically loyal, the wider public only needs to be kept not actively disloyal. They can even hate the regime if they want, as long as they don't actively threaten it.
The ideal totalitarian regime, however, has a different ideal totalitarian citizen. One who is actively interested in politics, ideology, and who rules them, all aligning with the current regime. It is not enough for you to be disinterested. You need to support the party. You need to actively promote it's beliefs. You need to hang the propaganda posters inside your home. And, eventually, you need to rearrange your entire private life in service to the regime and whatever ideals it believes in.
Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome,
Republican Rome had very weak democratic institutions because the narrow franchise of the Centuriate had more power than the broader franchises of the Tribune of the Plebs. There is no equivalent to this stratification in the US. It's never going to be a good analogue for the US backsliding because the starting points are so dramatically different.
As for the other examples.
Tsarist Russia was heavily authoritarian, and the Bolsheviks made it totalitarian. It was no longer enough to be a disinterested peasant doing your own thing.
The German Empire was a hybrid regime, authoritarian compared to France or the UK but not as authoritarian as Russia. The Nazis also went totalitarian. So there was democratic backsliding here (or really, more of a yoyo, as it went down during WWI as the country became a de facto military dictatorship, up during the "Golden Twenties", then down again before diving off a cliff).
Japan is also an example worth listing, with the Taisho Democracy being undone mostly by the May 15 incident.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I obviously didn't sit in on this talk, but when someone says "Universal Human Rights" in reference to the UN, they probably specifically mean the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a specific document.
To bring it back to "competitive authoritarianism": I am not at all surprised that two social scientists swimming in the liberal-left bubbles of Harvard and U-Toronto would fail to consider how their abstract terms for "competitive authoritarian" techniques instantiate from a conservative perspective. The specific examples you bring up may have not even crossed their path
As always on the topic of authoritarianism, I have to beat my usual drum. It is unlikely for someone to swim in a bubble so enclosed that they wouldn't notice the covid-related authoritarianism. It is exceptionally unlikely if those bubbles are US academia rather than red state small towns or Sweden. More likely is that they agree with that particular kind of authoritarianism.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Saying that 48% of the US electorate are "radical leftists" is more controversial a statement than saying radical leftists are anti-American.
I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.
But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.
And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.
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