VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
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User ID: 411
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Yup, that's all plausible. Best I can say is that it isn't inevitable.
The real problem here is that by branding himself as a more effective purveyor of the Trump agenda he alienates himself from anyone who explicitly voted against the Trump agenda in the previous 3 elections.
I mean have you seen DeSantis's very first campaign ad when he was running for governor? He is committed to the Trump agenda in broad strokes and there's no undoing it (although he can still play around the edges). And he has proven that he's electable in a swing state nonetheless.
Besides, what else would a GOP nominee run on? Back to the Romney playbook of calling to defund social security? Trump won where Romney lost in part because his agenda is more appealing to the electorate than the traditional GOP agenda.
For the Republicans to win in 2024 they would have to flip either Pennsylvania or Michigan.
This is a general argument that it's hard for a Republican to win, not a specific argument that Trump is better able to do it than DeSantis. Trump won those states in 2016, but he lost them in 2020 after they had seen what Trump is like in office.
With Trump beating the election fraud drum a journalist is bound to ask him directly whether he thinks the election was stolen, and unless his answer is an unequivocal "No" his chances at winning the general are pretty much sunk.
This is not that difficult, really. Responding to this journalist during the primary: "Trump says the election was stolen, and a lot of good people are in jail right now because they believed him. But he never came through. He never showed up with evidence, not with all the power of the executive branch at his disposal. His own Attorney General said he was wrong. The best he can do is complain that he was victimized by Joe Biden. Well, I'm a doer, not a complainer. My record shows that much. I promise you that Joe Biden will never steal an election from me." And then in the general, give the same answer but leave out the last three sentences. It's really easy to pivot from that question to hitting Trump for failing, for letting himself be victimized, for failing to even keep the support of his own cabinet. That kind of answer projects strength to the GOP without coming close to participating in Trump's election denialism.
Trump's whole winning shtick in 2016 was that he's a winner, that he knows how the game is played and can out-play the Democrats, that he'll be too busy winning to worry about their political correctness and BS. But now he's a loser and a complainer, and the best that he can argue is that Joe Biden victimized him, that he got swindled and played by Sleepy Joe, which undermines his whole shtick. It's totally doable to call him out for that without getting dragged into the object level of whether Trump was right in his complaints. It just takes a modicum of political talent, which DeSantis has.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Yeah, I think OP has it backward and the Dem interference would be directed toward securing the nomination for Trump. But OP (somehow) thinks Trump is more electable than DeSantis.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Yeah... I agree with OP's premise that Democrats are likely to try to intervene in GOP primaries, but disagree about which candidate they hope to prevail.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Other than a couple of unfortunate Canadians, I believe that China treats foreigners well. I've visited China a few times and all levels of law enforcement treated me well.
Were you publicly protesting Xi Jinping's policies? Seem a bit apples and oranges if not...
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
It might. Trump could run as an independent, and has threatened to do so. He does really like attention and he'd get a lot of attention if he did this. The media would certainly do its utmost to keep him in the spotlight if he did.
On the other hand, he really doesn't like losing, and I'm not sure that all of the attention would be worth living a year-long slow-motion loss.
Essentially what I'm saying is that that hypothesis gives us very, very little evidence towards anything and so even if we are in a simulation we can reason as if we are not.
Obviously not, since your posture leaves you confused why we aren't apparently in a grabby civilization, and mine solves that. The simulation hypothesis doesn't provide a lot of concrete advice, but it does solves some anthropic dilemmas such as the Fermi Paradox.
Namely, your conclusions rely on an assumption that other universes similar to ours are also being simulated
It does not, in any respect. Already said this several posts up: "This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer."
I totally agree with you that the best possible outcome is one in which Trump has an epiphany and stands aside for DeSantis, or failing that dies in his sleep of natural causes. But I'm not so bearish as you on the scenario where DeSantis challenges him and beats him.
DeSantis has been holding his tongue about Trump for the past 2 years but once he's in a competitive race Trump will eat him alive if he doesn't fight back. If he's going to go after Trump he actually has to go after Trump without worrying about offending his (Trump's) base.
I think there's a play where he respectfully criticizes Trump's failure to enact durable change while in office, and contrasts it with his own agendas in Florida. The kind of criticism of Trump that fails in the GOP primary is arguing that Trump's agenda is no good. What hasn't been tried is agreeing with Trump's agenda but arguing that another candidate will be better at executing the agenda. "Mr. President, you said you would build a wall along the entire Southern U.S. border, but only X miles were actually built. I will get it done. Look what I did with Disney, with racist indoctrination in schools, with forcing sanctuary state governors and sanctuary city mayors to declare states of emergency because I sent them a fraction of the illegal immigrants that Southern states have to deal with every day, etc. You signed an executive order to review the use of critical race theory in federal agencies. But Biden immediately revoked that order, so it accomplished nothing. By contrast, I passed a state law banning the teaching of critical race theory in school, and giving every parent the ability to enforce that law themselves with private lawsuits. No one can undo what I achieved there."
Trump is bound to spend countless hours bemoaning the theft of the 2020 election, and such bemoaning is really off putting to anyone who isn't already on the Trump Train. If DeSantis agrees, or even equivocates on this (i.e. saying that certain things were suspicious) then he's completely sunk himself in the general election. At that point he's just another MAGA election denier regardless of what his other positions are.
Again, I think there's a way to thread this needle by attacking Trump's effectiveness without weighing in on his claims directly. Criticize Trump for being victimized, for failing to produce evidence, and contrast with the election work DeSantis has done in Florida. "Mr. Trump didn't deliver. He never came up with the evidence to back up his claims. Governing means doing your homework. In Florida, when we got wind of XYZ elections issue, I did ABC to enforce blah blah blah. We got it done. Mr. Trump says he is a victim, that Mr. Biden robbed him. But the buck stops here. If I'm the nominee, I guarantee you that Biden will not be able to steal the election from me."
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Counterexample: It'd be a lot shadier if democrats purposefully won trump the nomination because they expected him to lose the general election. It's both risky and it feels more of a hack to vote for someone you don't actually want.
This is basically the strategy they used in 2020, intervening in GOP primaries to advance Trump-style candidates knowing they'd be easier to defeat in the general (which they were).
in 2024, I expect vast swath of Democrats to coordinate in reregistering as Republicans and voting with Never-Trumpers for a particular non-Trump candidate in every state
It almost feels like you're laying the groundwork to cope with a Trump loss in the 2024 GOP primary. The Democrats would much rather run against Trump in 2024 than against DeSantis. Trump largely failed to advance his agenda in four years, he antagonized the Democrats into increased turnout, he offended everyone in the middle by trying to steal the 2020 election, and (crucially) he already demonstrated that Biden can beat him. DeSantis turned a swing state blood red, won it by twenty points in a cycle where Trump's nominees were failing left and right, demonstrated competent governance against COVID and hurricane disasters, and successfully prosecuted the culture war using the levers of executive power.
If you want further evidence that the Dems would rather run against Trump, look to their shenanigans in the 2020 cycle. They were supporting Trump's own nominees and fellow election denialists over more traditional GOP politicians. And it worked; Trump's guys generally lost.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I don't know that anyone's claiming it's illegitimate, but there is something a little... hardball about it. We aren't talking about voting for whoever you think is the best candidate in the other party's primary, we're talking about voting for whoever is the least electable candidate in the other party's primary, in the hopes that you'll coerce your opponents into nominating someone terrible who will then lose the general election. It may sound far-fetched, but the Democrats did it this cycle and it worked.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Is there any evidence that these kinds of shenanigans have changed an election outcome?
Also, as a Democrat I'd love if Republicans temporarily switched registrations to vote for who they thought was the better candidate
They'd switch registrations to vote for who they thought would be least electable. Think Marianne Williamson, not Buttigieg or Klobuchar.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I don't think we can draw any meaningful conclusions based on the hypothesis that our current layer is a simulation
You're the one claiming the Fermi Paradox has merit even in a simulation.
The argument that "our simulators must be simulating something similar to their reality" is I think pretty weak
Yes, I know. Are we even having the same conversation? Two posts up I said "This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any."
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
If our current layer is a simulation -- and the simulation hypothesis says that we are -- then the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful.
Here was your original question:
Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”
The Simulation Hypothesis demonstrates that we are likely not in the bottom layer of reality. If this universe is real, then it looks like we'll soon be able to (and likely will) simulate a large number of sentiences, which means it would have been massively coincidental that our indexical experience was located in the "real universe." This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer. This suffices to dispatch your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox.
If the Fermi Paradox is even meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then the answer is that we probably were born (simulated) into a grabby civilization at or near its peak. If the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then it has been resolved. Take your pick, but either way your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox isn't paradoxical anymore.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Yeah, but you obtain that result only because you're limiting your consideration to the Milky Way. Why so provincial? There are superclusters out there! Geological timescales are large, but the universe is seemingly infinitely vast. The total wealth a future civilization will be able to claim depends entirely on when they start and how fast they expand.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside
Agreed
which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that
No, this is where I disagree. You are claiming that a grabby civilization at its peak will simulate more experiences that appear subjectively from within the simulation to be part of a grabby civilization than that do not. But why? You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
The object level really doesn't matter at all here. As I said, there's plenty of fodder for the mainstream press to write one scandalous story after another, leaving CFAR/MIRI completely radioactive. The reason they haven't -- truly the only reason -- is that CFAR/MIRI doesn't matter enough to be worth their while to do it. But they would, the instant it achieved apparent success anything like FTX did.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not. It may be that bespoke single-player experiences better fit the designs of the simulators, and grabby civilizations in their prime aren't the most useful backdrop for those experiences. Or it may be that the simulators are our own descendants trying to learn more about their pre-grabby past.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Check this shit out (hat tip @DaseindustriesLtd). I don't know the objective truth behind the accusations, but there's more than enough grist for CFAR/MIRI to get absolutely dragged by the mainstream press if they had anywhere near the public prominence or power that FTX had.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Maybe there's something deeply wrong with the core philosophy of crypto? FTX is EA's one big scandal
FTX is EA's only big anything, because nothing else EA has done has captured mainstream attention like FTX has.
My sense is that EA does not lack for scandals (CFAR and MIRI are basically walking scandals), they're just not big enough to be interesting, and it feels kind of unsportsmanlike to publicize them, because they're basically all about maladjusted misfits hurting themselves and one another.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Yeah, there's a pretty simple answer to how a vegan could be fat: carbs.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”
The Simulation Hypothesis has an answer for you: we were.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
The President does have significant executive authority, and it can be used to advance an agenda even in opposition to the legions of bureaucratic lifers in DC. DeSantis does this in Florida on the regular; it can be done, but it's hard, and Trump didn't do it.
The Fermi Paradox basically says, isn't it weird that the universe seems so easily colonizable, yet hasn't been colonized? The Simulation Hypothesis says, no, that isn't weird, because once you agree that we're in a simulation, the best that the Fermi Paradox brand of anthropic reasoning can demonstrate is that the set of simulations that our simulators are running does not make it overwhelmingly likely that we'd find ourselves in a simulation where the skies are filled with grabby aliens. No paradox left!
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