WandererintheWilderness

WandererintheWilderness 12d ago · Edited 12d ago

But this poor family made a terrible decision because they've been lied to about reality their entire lives.

They made a brave decision without realizing why it was brave, i.e. there's a lot of danger involved. That doesn't make it terrible. Had they walked into it with open eyes, it would have been admirable. Insofar as it's not their fault alone that they had a poor understanding of the odds they were facing, sure, they're entitled to some sympathy when things turn out poorly in a way they never anticipated; but not infinite sympathy.

Picture a guy who signed up to be a firefighter because he'd observed that everyone admires and compliments firefighters. One day, things get bad, and as he's being roasted alive in an out-of-control inferno he whines: "man, I thought this job was going to be all about rescuing cats from trees and collecting praise just for existing! I'd never have signed up if I knew it involved actual peril". If the fire dept's recruitment drive genuinely downplayed the hardships and hazards of the job, sure, he gets a degree of sympathy from me for the injuries he sustains. But once he starts saying "no one in their right mind should ever become a firefighter! it's a terrible idea! you could be horribly injured! stop praising firefighters and encouraging people to join up!", no, sorry, gotta stop you there. You have a right to be a coward, everyone does, I'm not a firefighter myself - but you can't start preaching cowardice as an ideal. That's wildly antisocial.

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WandererintheWilderness 12d ago

"Invasive species" is strong language, to be fair. Yes, African-Americans were brought over to the US, but this was a few centuries ago and by now they're as native as the rest of the immigrant US population.

Well, the metaphor was about the small scale, about white couples adopting black orphans. The idea is that the singular black child is "invasive" in the gated environment of the white family's hearth-and-home. An ugly sentiment, but not really historically falsifiable either way.

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WandererintheWilderness 12d ago

While unquestionably a horror story and about adoption, I don't think this is the kind of "adoption gone wrong" the thread is about, which focuses on cases where the adopted kid turned out to be 'bad seed' no matter how much nurture was applied, and consequently wrecked the innocent adoptive parents' lives - not the other way around.

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WandererintheWilderness 12d ago · Edited 12d ago

Well, yes. But ultimately the problem is people forming their worldviews based on fiction instead of balancing their intellectual diet with non-fiction or, better yet, first-hand experience of the real world. It's a problem as old as Don Quixote, and I don't think the correct lesson to take from Don Quixote is 'how dare those irresponsible poets fill their ballads with giants, virtuous knights, and loyal servants? we need more books about windmills and scumbags to fix impressionable readers' sense of reality'.

(Granted, biases might still cause writers to limit themselves to a particular kind of man biting a particular kind of dog. But that's a whole other conversation than one about realism.)

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WandererintheWilderness 12d ago

While there are obvious political-correctness-related reasons for this, you do have to consider the 'Dog Bites Man' angle. I wouldn't want detective shows to reflect real crime statistics, because most of the homicides making up those statistics are boring and obvious. 'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.' Right. Not exactly gripping drama. When it's an intelligent, wealthy man hiding a dark secret using an intricate fake alibi - then you have good drama, precisely because it's unusual relative to the real world.

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WandererintheWilderness 21d ago

Plus, most of the Internet is liberal-aligned by default, why would they be specifically drawn here? I imagine those who do are attracted by the quality of discourse, if nothing else.

Kinda. Out of places where I can go and find people who disagree with me and test my mettle against them, it's the one with the best quality of discourse.

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WandererintheWilderness 21d ago

I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable?

Mainly, it's a kind of test I put myself through. I want to believe true things; I want to be sure that, where my beliefs and the consensus align, it is because the 'PC' position genuinely seems correct to my best judgment, not just because it's what everyone else in my bubble is saying. Thus, I find it useful to get into civil arguments with dissidents and contrarians so as to regularly confront myself with their best counter-arguments and, having faced them with open eyes, reassure myself that I still just don't find them convincing at all.

Secondarily, insofar as I believe my opinions to be correct, and that it's better for other people to believe true things, engaging with my opponents is a chance to change some minds and - essentially - "redeem" some of them. Bodhisattva-style. But this is more of an ego-stroking, self-congratulatory justification and if I'm being dead honest, most of the actual motivation is coming from the first thing. Helping people see the light on the margins is more of a positive externality.

(Also: I guess I do have a few points on which I differ from the, like, bog-standard Blue Tribe catechism. But there are many individual subjects where my genuine opinions involve nothing I wouldn't and haven't said in the presence of the most mainstream leftists you can imagine, and I still get into Motte arguments about those, so I think the point stands.)

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WandererintheWilderness 22d ago

"Boaty McBoatface" winning the online naming poll tells you nothing surprising about the crowd, or how polls work, but it does tell you something surprising about the judges (they're very hands-off). What's interesting about the grok stuff isn't that people would try, or that the untampered-with algorithms would comply - it's that the enormous filters and correctives most AI companies install on those things didn't catch the aberrant output from being shared with the users. Either the "alignment work" wasn't very good, or it was deliberately patchy. Hence culture war fodder.

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WandererintheWilderness 23d ago

Seems to me a natural and healthy part of the human psyche, actually.

It might be healthy for the species at an evolutionary level, while still being bad news for your life prospects at the individual level (and for the prospects of a community if all its members are pre-selected for abnormally high scores on that trait).

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WandererintheWilderness 25d ago

This only holds for climate scientists trying to come up with new global models. Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.

(It's the difference between "AI risk researchers" who come up with yet more convoluted thought experiments on how to do timeless bargaining with omniscient gods, and "AI risk researchers" who are actually creating code to interpret and control what's going on inside neural networks. I can see why someone would be fed up with the former, but the latter is actual expert work that needs doing, and - so long as they sub-optimally remain a package deal - justifies the existence of the overall field.)

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WandererintheWilderness 25d ago · Edited 25d ago

And if the Earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis

Come on. It would suck for far more than "penguins and polar bears". It'll suck for the current balance of worldwide agriculture, it'll suck for coastal population centers, it'll suck for vast swathes of land that are already near the threshold of unlivable, and, oh yes, it'll suck for all the currently temperate areas which will inherit the latter's status as the arid "well, you can eke out a living there, I guess" hell-holes. This is true even if you're correct about global warming opening as much hitherto-frozen land for settlement up north as it will ruin further south. We'd be looking at a major reshuffle in what countries control what kind of territory and resources, which may not favor the West much. (Indeed, odds are it wouldn't: we'd been dealt a good hand already, to the point that some view sheer luck of the draw on Europe's local climate as, if not the secret to Europeans' worldwide success, then at least a crucial prerequisite. We can really only go downhill.)

Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I spoke of "global implications" and why we need climate scientists. I agree that the Earth getting warmer isn't x-risk. But there's far more to whether a crisis is worth averting or mitigating than whether it'll literally wipe out humanity. (Particularly if we're talking about a specific country's incentives rather than Homo Sapiens's as a whole.)

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WandererintheWilderness 25d ago

Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.

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WandererintheWilderness 25d ago

Why don't you think that climate science is useful science?

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WandererintheWilderness 27d ago · Edited 27d ago

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell to have voted for the 1986 amnesty earlier in their careers

I did mention the "geriatric forebears"! Three out of these four people are in their 80s. The sole exception is a sprightly 74. These are no longer the people on whose trustworthiness the party's long- or even mid-term trustworthiness depends. They will be dead or in care homes long before they get the chance to recant on any deals made in the 2020s. This is what I meant by "no longer relevant".

Does that mean we can put any discussion of reparation to rest too because there's no such thing as group responsibility for past sins so long as you run the clock long enough?

Well, that doesn't follow. I wasn't talking about holding the son accountable for the sins of the father, but about the pragmatic question of whether the son is or isn't committing the same sins as his father today. The thread was discussing Republicans' ability to trust Democrats as a practical issue - that's not the same thing as granting that Democrats may be sincere today, but refusing to negotiate as punishment for past defections.

All of which said, yes, I do in fact believe there's no such things as group responsibility for the sins of past generations, and that "reparations" are a bad idea. (If some groups today are more disadvantaged than others, they should receive help proportionate to the extent to which they are disadvantaged. But there's no reason the distant descendants of their oppressors should be uniquely responsible for providing that help, and it shouldn't be regarded as something "owed" to the disadvantaged descendants of the oppressed, except insofar as all citizens are collectively responsible for the welfare of all other citizens - which applies just as well to someone whose family was ruined by a freak meteor crash twenty years ago as by slavery or segregation. I really dislike the justice-based/"punitive" framing.)

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WandererintheWilderness 28d ago

So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.

Does it? The anti-HBD side as you define it could just as well say that the pro-HBDers have gone quiet because their guy is already god-emperor, so they no longer need intellectual grounding to "construct systems of white supremacy" instead of getting on with oppressing non-whites directly.

(Of course, I don't believe either side of the meta-debate.)

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WandererintheWilderness 28d ago

This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides,

Yes, yes it would. A majority of historical wars were genocidal in intent; wanting to exterminate your enemies is in fact an extremely common motivation for warfare, and if it's not what you start out wanting, you sure want it once the bastards have butchered thousands of your lads on the battlefield.

A lot of the confusion about Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia comes from the relevant countries and their advocates protesting that they're not engaging in Unprecedented Evil Behavior, just fighting wars like they've been fought for thousands of years. And in a way, they're right! But "the kind of wars our ancestors have been fighting since the Neolithic" is in fact what we've been trying to ban out of existence once and for all, because they sucked. There is an under-discussed gap between people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the World Wars were anomalies, we need to ban the sort of thing that went on in WWII to ensure we only fight normal wars like we had before", and people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the scale of the World Wars showed that we urgently need to ban a whole lot of things that had been rampant in practically every war until that point, but never made quite so starkly obvious in their horror than when they were implemented on an industrial scale".

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

WandererintheWilderness 1mo ago

But realistically we shouldn't weigh it against the total suffering that obesity creates; we should weigh it against the amount of obesity-caused suffering that shaming can alleviate. Shaming isn't completely ineffective, but it's not very effective.

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WandererintheWilderness 1mo ago

This is true if we're talking about a smart, tech-aware dictator. But your original post wasn't talking about people who expect a smart tech-driven dictatorship. It was talking about people who expect Trump to go President Joker and round up all his enemies in unmarked vans. I think the recent protestors' behavior follows a rational strategy within that framework - whose likelihood relative to "Trump continues to be more bark than bite" or "Trump becomes a smart dictator" is, of course, questionable, but that, again, wasn't the question.

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WandererintheWilderness 1mo ago

Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith

It's evidence of bad faith on the part of the Dems of 40 years ago. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr 's point re: "legislation from 40 years ago" is that the people at issue are dead (or at any rate no longer relevant), and you can't read the minds of people today based on dirty tricks pulled - consciously or otherwise - by their geriatric forebears half a century prior, even if the current scions are nominally waving the same flag.

I guess the question becomes whether you can meaningfully talk about "a movement" behaving in bad faith in the sense you describe. I guess you can gloss the internal turnover as just what it looks like when "the movement" "changes its mind", and still analogize to the bad Newcomb solution. But I don't think it creates much light to try to talk about "bad faith" when describing the external behavior of a movement without any reference to the conscious experiences of anybody in the movement, whether sincere or otherwise.

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WandererintheWilderness 1mo ago

Sensible, but that means no plain-clothes operations.

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WandererintheWilderness 1mo ago

they’re not only doing everything possible to make sure they’re on the list, but fighting back in ways that simply don’t make any sense

The goal is to make it impossible to enact the disappear-protesters step of the plan by having too many protesters on the list, most of whom are manifestly not worth the bother of disappearing. The harmlessness of the protests is the point, both in and of itself (in that it'll make a regime that tries to make them out to be dangerous rioters look ridiculous) and because it makes them an attractive position for more and more people to join.

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