astrolabia
5mo ago
Islam seems like it's in a much better position than Christianity, at least to me. They have the highest birth rates, advocate for their own interests unapologetically, and have a long history of punishing and assassinating critics and opponents. This causes lots of internecine strife, but I predict these traits will allow rapid expansion within the West.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
astrolabia
8mo ago
Interesting thesis. Perhaps this is part of why some people find things like kids, homeownership, getting degrees, getting promoted at work as meaningful, since those all fit in between "easy" and "almost impossible".
I've read the book and seen the movie, and while they're very different, it's still not clear to me in which sense the Starship Troopers movie is a parody, except that the director claimed it was. It seems to me that this is just a fig leaf to justify having directed an effectively pro-fascism movie.
I think by "ethnic spoils", OP is referring to the situation where most ethnic groups use their influence on government simply to deliver more resources to themselves. The word spoils here is used only in the sense of resources, as in "to the victor goes the spoils". India, Brazil, Iraq, Lebanon and most other multi-ethnic democracies have fairly dysfunctional governments in part because each politician is supposed to only serve their own ethnic interests.
Wokeness in Canada elevates this kind of activity to a virtue, and e.g. in job searches, it's considered a positive to have advocated for your own race's interests politically or institutionally. This is one way to show "commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion".
astrolabia
3mo ago
I agree that some people were overly certain about the consequences of the PATRIOT act. But I would still rage teary-eyed against government overreach even if I were merely worried it would lead to tyranny, because once the government is totalitarian it's very hard to come back from that.
Also, in that time there have been various counter-movements, such as Snowden's, that pushed back against mass surveillance. But that could have easily not happened, and plus the state has presumably hardened itself against the next Snowden since then.
astrolabia
5mo ago
the longhouse ought to cover the entirety of the light cone
Close, but I think the argument is "if your longhouse doesn't cover the lightcone, you can expect your colonies to spawn their own universe-eating longhouses and come knocking again once they're much bigger than you." Then the options become: Our shitty longhouse forever, or a more competitive, alien longhouse / colonizers to come back and take all our stuff.
As far as I can tell, our only hope is that at some scales the universe is defense-favored. In which case, yes, fine, let a thousand flowers bloom.
astrolabia
2mo ago
I think this is a reasonable point of view. On the other hand, I could imagine visibly destructive commitment to the truth could still pay outsized dividends if powerful people, e.g. Elon Musk, noticed someone going against the grain and then trusted their advice more. Didn't this kind of happen with Peter Thiel and Michael Vassar?
astrolabia
2mo ago
I have nothing to add, but just wanted to say that I appreciate the writeup since I am in a pretty similar situation to you (pre-adderall). I actually have a stash that a colleague gave me, but haven't experimented with it yet because I'm expecting pretty much exactly the outcome you've had so far. Maybe the solution is to just take it on Fridays only?
astrolabia
1yr ago
I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.
The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.
astrolabia
10mo ago
I agree with most of your post, but isn't the default "For You" tab on Twitter already the "TikTok of text"? It is also happy to show you viral posts from people you aren't following, and also to not show you boring posts from people you do subscribe to. Famously, accounts with millions of followers that people feel like they should follow, but whose posts don't get much activity, often have many fewer views per post than a hit from an unknown.
So it seems like Twitter (and to a lesser extent, facebook) is already adopting the TikTok strategy.
astrolabia
6mo ago
To be fair, when I started learning math + stats, I found the use of greek letters intimidating and confusing, especially rarely-used ones like ξ. Of course there's nothing wrong with them besides their unfamiliarity, but I try to start with English letters in my own math writing and only reach for greek letters when I'm running out of those.
astrolabia
7mo ago
So they'll eat their own, but then continue to operate mostly the same?
astrolabia
1yr ago
Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.
To the extent that these different people actually have a different worldview, this must seem really subversive. Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.
astrolabia
8mo ago
I'm curious about what makes your life a living hell these days. I went through a similar "fun believing period" (not as intense as yours) that was very rich and rewarding. And losing that life was painful. But I guess now I see it partly as withdrawl from a "spiritual superstimulus".
I'm sure you've heard the arguments that God is perfectly shaped to fill the hole in our hearts because the memes evolved to. Kind of like how porn is optimized, now that I think of it. In any case, after a while I re-equilibriated emotionally, and now moral non-realism is just priced in, and doesn't depress me any more than say, being mortal and fallible does. Plus, I don't have to hear terrible philosophical arguments from people I otherwise respect as often.
astrolabia
1yr ago
It's really, really hard to pin down a grown man in a way that he can't get out, hit you, kick you, bite you, etc., without hurting him.
astrolabia
9mo ago
I mostly disagree. Almost everything in the world can be influenced to some degree or with some probability. If you dedicated the next year to it, you could probably shut down that puppy mill, or somehow make them a little less profitable.
Picking battles is absolutely necessary, and happens whether you choose it or not. I think that's a better approach than trying to divide the world into "under my control" vs "not".
astrolabia
8mo ago
With more acts like this there will be more pressure to limit immigration.
Maybe it's just learned helplessness, but I can't imagine the Canadian federal government ever reducing immigration. It's never happened in my lifetime. Even when they shut the borders due to covid, they made up for it by granting free permanent residency to almost all foreigners who happened to be working in Canada.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that my naive model of the world would have predicted a reduction years ago, and I don't have a good model to replace it with.
astrolabia
6mo ago
I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.
astrolabia
1yr ago
until the public reaction is so bad it demands a crackdown
Do you think this is realistic? Why hasn't a crackdown been demanded in L.A., even though it's apparently much worse than the TTC already?
PPC-style actual law-and-order conservatism is still completely verboten amongst all of my Canadian friends and colleagues.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I think the conventional wisdom is that having only one big mass firing is much better for morale and productivity than more smaller ones, provided you can convince people that there isn't another mass layoff on the horizon. The idea being that if you have rolling layoffs, everyone stays in short-term, back-stabbing, cover-your-ass mode permanently, because they never know if they're being eyed for layoff.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly. I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?
As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?
And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.
astrolabia
5mo ago
My p(doom) went up again when I realized how hard it is for governments to remain aligned with their citizens. As a simple example, they can't seem to raise a finger against mass immigration no matter how unpopular it is, because it has an economic justification. See also: WW1. Replacing humans throughout the economy and military is going to be irresistable. There will probably be another, equally retarded, culture war about how this second great replacement is obviously never going to happen, then not happening, then good that it happened.
TL;DR: Even if we control AIs well, humans are going to be gradually stripped of effective power once we can no longer contribute economically or militarily. Then it's a matter of time before we can't afford or effectively advocate for our continued use of resources that could simulate millions of minds.
astrolabia
6mo ago
I have a pretty much identical outlook to you, including the kids thing. The biggest question on my mind is which kinds of futures we could plausibly aim for long term in which humans not crushed either by competition or the state.
I agree that slave-owning and the civil war is a good example of a right that took a lot of destruction and kicking and screaming to take away.
I guess I'm thinking of basically everything that happened post-civil rights. Straight white men, and white people more generally, now aren't allowed to form their own clubs, be praised as a group, or advocate for their own cultural traditions or interests in almost any way in the west, and I think that change happened without much serious pushback.
EDIT: Sorry, I guess I didn't address your qualifier 'people who have spent a long hard time and earning it'. Are these individual people, the same individuals who did the fighting? If not, does building a civilization count as earning it?
More options
Context Copy link