aqouta
No bio...
Friends:
User ID: 75
aqouta
2mo ago
Alright, no one else is so I'll defend inheritance. It's not about the rights of the heir, it's about the rights of the deceased to decide where their fruits go. Defending meritocracy, especially from a libertarian angle, doesn't commit you to preventing a person from doing with their earthly possession whatever they want in the last moments of their lives any more than it commits you to finding the person who would be the best CEO of amazon and installing him against their will and the will of the board.
Is the act of giving your wealth to someone who hasn't earned it meritocracy maxing? Probably not. Is having a system of ownership that incentivizes those with the most merit to earn as much as they can because they love their kid and want to pass on wealth to them merit maxing? Maybe, arguably. But it's also the pro liberty thing to do and libertarians are perfectly reasonable in coming down on the side of allowing inheritance.
aqouta
2mo ago
It sounds like grazing rights are exclusive, just the ownership is held commonly by the townsfolk and the excluded members are non-townsfolk. A passing cowboy would be deprived.
aqouta
2mo ago
Circling back around because I do enjoy a little bit of what are essentially economic thought experiments. In your world where we do away with ownership what is the model of production for semi-complex goods? Presumably we'd still have like pencils and paper in the world you envision. Who is working in the pencil factory and why? Who is working with sanitation and ensuring human waste is properly processed, the hands on parts of the job in particular?
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others.
This is why proposing an alternative is important. Because I really don't think you can have a system free of deprivation. For any finite item, say my nail gun, its use necessitates depriving someone else of its use at least for the duration of my use. You can certainly create systems that minimize deprivation but its existence is a brute fact of the universe. And I'd go so far as to argue that our systems of free exchange and property rights actually does a pretty good job of minimizing deprivation in practice through enabling growth.
In fact, the alternative is sticking us in the nose, which makes the fact that most people act clueless about it (whether they are or not) all the more ironic. One minute (not 10, JarJarJedi) is all it would take for a relatively intelligent person doing nothing more than looking for the logical compliment to deprivation to realize what a very familiar alternative is.
I'm afraid it is not sticking me in particular in the nose and would appreciate a more explicit spelling it out. If you want to say communism or whatever you can just come out and say it. We entertain much more fringe positions here from time to time even if there are those who jeer rightly or wrongly you'll usually find some interlocutors willing to approach in good faith so long as you're clear and not too unpleasant about it.
I really don't care how thousands of years of use has convinced us that ownership is useful or what "problems" it "solves" -- problems conceived of in the same paradigm where ownership was conceived, characterized by thousands of years of staunch neglect and refusal that it's all about deprivation. "Usefulness" is beside the point. War is universally considered useful, too. How is that relevant to the fact that it's obscene, horrific, and destructive?
This is a really unsatisfying answer to people who have to actually live in any of these proposed worlds. It actually matters quite a bit if you don't have an alternative because we rely on ownership as a foundation to this very complex world full of wonders that we have built.
Have you ever considered the fact that ownership is the right to deprive? You might spend a little time ruminating on that.
Yes, I have thought quite a bit about this kind of thing. My conclusion is that the ability to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number.
Oh, really? No, not at all. How does the fact that there aren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic we're sailing, or the fact that I can't tell you where there's one with room for you, have any bearing on the fact that the ship is going under? No one owes you a solution. Are you just going to stand there until someone gives you directions or leads you by the hand? It's up to you if you want to use that as an excuse to refuse considering facts that are right all our faces.
I don't see us to be sinking in any meaningful way. Society is more prosperous than any time in history. So yes, I will need some kind of assurance that your plan to meddle with these fundamental axioms of society isn't going to be really really terrible before I sign on. It could be like slavery where we really are better off without it. Or it could be like the need to consume calories and expel waste that we really just need to make peace with.
What could possibly be an alternative to predicating entire societies on the principle of deprivation? No idea?
Genuinely just coming up with childish noble savage myths about how native Americans live in 90s era cartoons. Why are you so resistant to actually describing what you're after?
aqouta
2mo ago
[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8
[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024
> Be me
> Load entire thread into a text to speech app
> Surely no one would just dump incredibly long naked links into the motte dot org.
> go upstairs to fold laundry
> oh a naked link, that's fine, how long can it be
> literal minutes later go downstairs to make this comment.
Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
aqouta
2mo ago
It's a curious problem I think. I am against most of that stuff being taught in school but the whole "teach the controversy" thing must have some limits. What would my enemies do with this veto? I'm not so sure the opt out is the correct thing to demand, the battlefield should surely be the curriculum itself.
aqouta
2mo ago
Yeah, almost certainly a resolution problem, models are trained to work with pretty specific width/height ratios and if you throw them off things get ugly.
They're per capita gdp is still much lowe, it's not chips to notice that it's catch up effects. China didn't even contain the most productive Chinese people. Do you think deepseek is still ahead?
aqouta
2mo ago
I'm going to need a source for China out innovating us. Certainty they benefit from igniting or copyright and I'm not of the camp that thinks they don't innovate at all. But out innovate us? And China does have IP law.
aqouta
2mo ago
As someone with a lot of networth in Nvidia I'm happy about this and if it were put up to a vote of the shareholders I'd vote to not sell these chips to China. We absolutely don't need to hand them the rope that the intend to hang us with.
aqouta
2mo ago
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act.
There are more groups than the normies and the kind of people who are engaging in the China vs US threads on X. I'll note that when I have the misfortune of making the algorithm think I'm interested in China related politics I am fed some truly outrageous sludge both from anti-china hawks and mao apologists all slinging the hottest takes they can think up. There's a dynamic there and I fear you may be being misled about what smart Americans actually think on this subject. Things like the three gorges dam posting strike me more like apes pounding their chests at a rival than the thoughts of serious people.
Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US.
I would hesitate to draw much inference from what the guy who clearly doesn't understand trade deficits thinks about the ability to win a trade war. Yes yes, to my great shame this idiot was elected to the highest office of the nation. I understand that this is what might be called a bad look. I'm just saying that him in particular being smuggly confident and wrong about some subject shouldn't really be taken as the opinion of thinking Americans. Thinking Americans, when they want to speculate on an Achilles heel on China are more likely to come up with the birthrate issue, the inflated housing market or the general issues of having a state substantially run by the kind of guy who can make people who bring him bad news disappear. These are all arguable points but they're not "these people are racially incapable of defeating us".
I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Most of what I've noticed when the topic of Russia comes up, and it's really fallen quite a distance out of focus, is that people are mostly talking about Putin in particular and not Russians in general. It's described as "Putin's war" and if people are feeling spicy they might bring up the oligarchs. Maybe it's a hold over from narratives of us spreading freedom but usually if we believe a country to be headed by a dictator we mostly feel bad for the citizens and pour most of our animus into the dictator. Deep in our cultural outlook we still believe if we got rid of the corrupt leadership that either the people would immediately thank us or the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd embrace us as friends.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
The scooters on sidewalks was more noting that things tended to be trending in the improvement direction as far as orderliness goes.
aqouta
2mo ago
Depends on where you draw the line at for poor really. Wealth is a lot swingier than weight, you can't in a single evening consume enough calories to be the equivalent of gambling away your life savings. If by poor you just mean they are low wage earners with minimal skills for upward mobility then it is not their "fault" that they're poor. Although maybe having minimal skills could be thought of as a fault in some sense, usually we use fault to mean a problem with conscious decisions but it could also mean just having a unfortunate qualities. If someone is poor because they gamble away 20% of their paycheck and carry credit card balances then yes it's their fault.
aqouta
2mo ago
There is a kind of motte and bailey going on. The motte criticism of CICO is that it's actually very difficult to calculate exactly how many calories are exhausted per second of exercise given how many variables go into such a thing and it's also difficult to calculate how much food is able to to be absorbed by an individual's digestive system therefore we can't calculate out the exact to the calorie differential. The bailey is therefore it's impossible to just consume less calories each day until you find the equilibrium where you're losing weight. You absolutely don't need to have an exact measure of Calories in and calories out to make sure the sign of the difference is negative and the broad tools of calorie restriction will easily allow you to flip that sign to negative. We can't make sure it's -500 and not -485. But this swing aren't even that large as things average out.
aqouta
2mo ago
Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
aqouta
2mo ago
You can't even fathom why people would be ideologically committed to their country not being consumed by Russia?
aqouta
2mo ago
The Dissident Right picked it up recently, and I've seen it around, but it's usage isn't terribly common.
Interesting, maybe it's just the examples being used but it screams leftist to me.
aqouta
2mo ago
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
I think they won't be anarchism. Plausibly trade secrets if the field lends itself to them. It's not just the complexity, it's also the risk element. Anarchists would do well to remember that the basis of private property to begin with is guaranteed by the state, intellectual property is special case of private property which can be deconstructed in much the same way. Can you build some things without a state protected right to own your tools? Sure. Can you build large scale projects? Maybe, but it'll be much harder than if you can rely on the police to prevent people from riding away with your tractors.
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant
Patreon exists within a context where IP law exists. Most large scale projects for media are completed outside of patreon, in fact the vast majority of media spending operates under traditional IP law frameworks.
Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to produce some small scale projects. I'm saying you're going to have orders of magnitude less resources deployed. much fewer life saving drugs.
I'd love for there to be a realistic alternative to IP law, and as an improvement I think IP should have a much much shorter life span. But replacing it with nothing will cost us a whole lot and you're just hand waving that loss away.
aqouta
2mo ago
at least, commensurate to how often it's used
I can count how many times I've heard it used on one hand honestly. What sub community is it actually used all the time in? I would assume it's a kind of death of the author but applied to systems thing, which is mildly useful.
aqouta
2mo ago
You're talking about things that can be done by a single artist for the most part here. Simple media products with little to no logistics necessary and practically no risk. You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
aqouta
2mo ago
You're going to inevitably end up in one of two separate outcomes here.
-
A substantially less is invested into these searches for new tech
-
As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
As it sounds like you want to do away with patents entirely option 1 seems very likely. And this is all very naive about the risk of these attempts to discover new tech not panning out. Every individual hospital is really going to become expert in which new drugs to invest into during the research stage? No, they're going to developed specialized companies.
aqouta
2mo ago
Tariffs weren't really a huge deal until last week. They were generally considered bad policy with a couple edge cases and much of America's presence in the world was preaching free trade, which in practice meant no to low tariffs. Trump's hallucinated list of tariffs imposed on us notwithstanding there was bipartisan consensus that they were bad policy outside of very specific targeting. When the bear wakes up from its long hibernation and begins mauling people it is unsurprising that bear related discussions go from very rare to quite frequent.
aqouta
2mo ago
IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage.
Why would you even need such a right if IP didn't exist?
aqouta
2mo ago
Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.
You're just asserting this without providing reasoning despite it being the entire crux of your post. I know it's not reasonable to expect you to prove a negative but you could have at least demonstrated some engagement with the arguments those of us who think it's very possible near term have put forward. You can at least put into some words why you think AI capabilities will plateau somewhere before openAI-grade researcher. How about we find out where we are relative to each other on some concrete claims and we can see where we disagree on them.
Do you agree that capabilities have progressed a lot in the last few years at a relatively stable and high pace?
Do you agree that it's blown past most of the predictions by skeptics, often repeatedly and shortly after the predictions have been made?
Are there even in principle reasons to believe it will plateau before surpassing human level abilities in most non-physical tasks?
Are there convincing signs that it's plateauing at all?
If it does plateau is there reason to believe at what ability level it will plateau?
I think if we agree on all of these then we should agree on whether to expect AI in the nearish term, I'm not committed to 2027 but I'd be surprised if things weren't already very strange by 2030.
Then it's good the 2027 claim isn't projecting out decades.
More options
Context Copy link