burkeboi
20hr ago
The experience of tons of nations going from capitalism -> communism and communism -> capitalism is that the old boss, more often than not, is the new boss as well. Bad bosses aren't really a solved problem, assuming it even is a solvable problem.
burkeboi
20hr ago
Anyway, the problem here is that different thirsts for a person might be mutually-exclusively satisfied by different strategies. She wants several mutually-exclusive things, because the pareto-optimal reproduction strategy has to sort of multithread and jump to whichever option is advantageous at the moment.
I think this is the key point. Women (men as well) want multiple, often conflicting things in relationships. An easy example is a dominant guy who takes what he wants but who also puts her interests first. While maybe not theoretically impossible, in practice dominance and agreeability and conflicting traits, so you have to compromise on both if you only get to pick one man.
I also happen to know that women are substantially more likely to orgasm with partners who beat them than with those who don't, though I hesitate to mention it because the data is not publicly-available and I have no real way to substantiate the claim. But once you start paying attention, the pattern is pretty clear.
Whether the same man who is violent or not violent is more viscerally arousing to most women may be an open academic question. I'm unsure if it's a practical question however; as mentioned above, we pick our partners based on balancing tons of mutually contradictory desires. At least in my PMC/middle class bubble, charismatic but decent guys or 'assholes' who are within the normal realm of behavior, so generally normal guys who are less agreeable, rule the roost. It seems this may just a bubble effect though; everything I read about the underclass suggests thugmaxxing is the most effective strategy.
Overall, IME being a socially dominant man, which entails being moderately disagreeable, seems to be the dominant strategy. Being that type of guy will often get you called an jerk, since 'jerk' often just means 'you didn't give me what I want'. I think the notion that 'women desire a cruel man' does have some truth, but it's balanced by other concerns as well.
burkeboi
1d ago
While I think it is clear that women largely prefer a harsh and powerful man over a decent but weak man, with some limits on the harshness, I imagine most women would prefer a decent but powerful man over a harsh but powerful man. That being said, for a decent number of women the harshness is the point and the cruel man is their favorite. Not the funnest preference to have, I imagine.
My company also uses Claude Code, in my case including Opus. It is quite useful: if I give it a feature, then, step by step, have it create the tests to verify the feature is complete and write code based off of the tests then its pretty helpful. At the same time, I need to review all the code and say "ok, you need to simplify here. You made an assumption there that is not quite accurate, and we need an adjustment there." It has gotten more useful, and my company has a lot of solid documentation that helps Claude, but there is a fundamental dynamic of me doing the actual engineering, Claude implementing the architecture, me reviewing and suggesting changes, and just iterating through that loop. It's quite useful, and Claude has improved over the past few years, but I don't think the fundamental relationship between software engineer and LLM has changed in the past few years even with its improvements. For additional context, I work in FinTech so error tolerance is very low.
While Claude can IME make software engineers more efficient, and thus either decrease employment and/or cause Jevon's Paradox, I think actually replacing software engineering as a whole is probably AGI-Complete. I imagine with medical doctors it's a similar situation where it can let them help more patients, but the buck ultimately has to stop with the Doctor until AGI.
The core question, to me, on if/when we get AGI seems to be this: can we reach AGI through iteratively improving LLMs and adding in supporting models to fill in gaps, or do we need an entirely new type of model to reach there. If the first, AGI may be coming pretty soon. If the second, the timeline gets a lot harder to predict. I'm not confident which of the above two paths, or a different path, is what will happen.
burkeboi
3d ago
Caveat: we won't know how this war turns out until a year or more in, so this is just a very low-confidence statement.
Militarily and politically, what is the US lacking? Willpower. If the US population decided tomorrow they wished to do anything up to and including conquer Iran, the US could do it. The issue is that the US government, as a result of the population not being sold on the war, is unwilling to escalate beyond a certain point or sustain casualties or discomfort for the US civilian population. If what Rubio said was right, and the US joined in since Israel was going to attack anyway, that may have been a huge blunder; the US joining in without an immediate Causus Belli really weakened the will of Americans, as well as allies, to actually prosecute the war. If Israel attacked then Iran retaliated and attacked US bases, the US would have an immediate Causus Belli and, while likely not an unlimited will for war, a strong will for war you have to respond if your troops/bases are attacked. The limiting factor of the US right now is willpower, and events don't seem to have strengthened it.
burkeboi
3d ago
Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm always fascinated by revolutions and civil wars since almost no one actually wants to fall into them, but one step after another makes people escalate to that point.
burkeboi
4d ago
It is actually kind of interesting how different peoples' categorization of different ideologies depends on their ideology itself. Often they lump in different ideologies based upon the fact that their objection to those ideologies are the same. The modern left objects to both conservatives and revolutionary rightists/fascists since both oppose the left's egalitarianism/universalist values. Conservatives oppose both leftists and revolutionary rightists for trying to rebuild society based on abstract theories.
Liberal fascism is a snarl, but it also encapsulates a real aspect of how traditional conservatives view the world and what they find wrong about both ideologies.
burkeboi
4d ago
I come from a long line of racists. Many of my ancestors were even bigoted towards their spouses. I married a fellow non-Hajani (Mexican). Just as my grandfather held prejudice, my father held prejudice, I shalt hold prejudice and create the genetic baseline for my children, and my children's children to hold prejudice. We differ in the object of our distaste, but we shall be united by our holding of distaste.
Don't be a virgin who IQ-maxxxes or Nordic-maxxxes; be a chad who ethnocentrism maxxxes. That is the only way.
burkeboi
4d ago
The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.
One darkly humorous part of the whole China/Russia/Iran is how each of them very clearly wish they had different allies and aren't exactly shy about it. China always hedging between Russia/EU and Iran/Sunnis/Israelis, Iran originally preferring European companies over Chinese companies, and the above behavior from Russia. Rumors of Axis 2.0 are overstated.
burkeboi
4d ago
The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.
I agree with this, but only to an extent. I think that there are personality based limits to this. If I'm being perfectly honest, I went from being a progressive raised in a liberal family to no longer being a progressive once the progressive social millieu I was in started saying too many things that hurt my ego/went against my personal interests. I think a lot of transitions of people politically/socially, in modern terms often people who grow up and live in one political/social group to the opposite one, come from the politics they inherit harming their ego or going against their self interest. There are tons of historical examples where people go against their social subgroup due to a harm their social subgroup dealt to them.
burkeboi
5d ago
I suspect his 'radicalized' story is false. I've listened to the Haitian story of the podcast, including the end where he narrates the history of Haiti, and he's not exactly a Haiti apologist. He doesn't sanitize or downplay the crimes either the biracial population or slave population committed, and he never particularly emphasizes foreign depredations in Haiti's history either. If anything, once the French are kicked out he seems more sympathetic to the biracial leaders than the pure black leaders. He didn't present a sob story for Latin American independence either.
burkeboi
5d ago
This is a bit ironic, but Israel does seem to be the first modern state that I know of to actually go through, or be going through, de Maistre's counter revolution. Even with the Holocaust disproportionately targeting Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, those two groups gradually grew from being essentially charity cases of Secular Jews in Israel to being king makers with huge sway over the government and, assuming Israel is not destroyed in the meantime, on track to demographically dominate the country in the later half of the 21st century.
burkeboi
5d ago
No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.
I've been to Cuba, and it really is shocking just how horrific it is. In Latin America, there are tons of mostly indigenous villages where there essentially is no modernity since anyone with the skills to maintain it, people like doctors and engineers for instance, decamp for the cities which are often first world/close to first world. The Mexico City gdp per capita is Spain tier, for instance. Many of these villages don't even have running water. I've used a bucket with a rat larger than my cat on the wall giving me moral support, for instance. Cuba is essentially one of those villages, just on the scale of a country and with a few exceptions in the hotel zones.
I'm not sure how Communist Cuba's government remains, though. At the low level, cops literally treat you better and reduce any requested bribe if you stay in a casa particular (small house owned by an individual cuban) vs. a state affiliated hotel. They view the first as you supporting the people, and the second as you supporting the state. The party/military essentially functions as a kleptocracy; they make deals with foreign companies to run the hotels, the hotels are incredibly capitalist where poor Cubans serve rich foreigners (and a few locals) where you call each other compañero/comrade as a costume. Even when I was there, most propaganda was more of the anti-imperialist/nationalist/third worldist variety than class based variety.
At this point, I think the party/military understands, even if subconsciously, they are just kleptocrats engaged in capitalism who ideologically justify themselves on anti-Americanism. They literally show MTV in the same hotel Castro used when he first became dictator. Additionally, the revealed preference of the government is to not invest in the rest of the country, which absolutely requires infrastructure improvement, and to solely partner with foreign companies to build up tourism. The hotels are set up so that as much as possible, they import all their necessities, such as food or toiletries, rather than buy it from Cuba itself. The government relaxed the emigration laws so more people can leave. Their actions to me suggest rather than viewing themselves as communists building up a country to a bright future, they view themselves as hotel magnates who unfortunately have an entire island of poor people attached to their properties. It also helps fuel their cope that if Cuba ever liberalized, they would be in penniless exile in Venezuela or Russia at best and languishing in a Cuban jail cell/lynched at worst.
This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.
Unless something radically changes, I don't think that the Anglosphere has the stomach for mass deportations, defined as millions deported, any time soon. At the same time, you can have meaningful differences in the rate of immigration: Biden vs. Trump, Trudeau vs Carney for instance. While I don't see any plausible path where, for instance, you get a Britain with absolute minimal immigration/restrictive guest worker programs like in Japan, I still think it's up in the air the degree and type of mass immigration Britain gets. A Britain with a diverse immigrant pool and most problematic groups, like poor Kashmiris, limited is a far different place than one where you get true open borders with, for instance, the entire third world. Britain in first scenario likely is still a pretty decent place to live, while in the second scenario I'm not sure Britain the state survives it.
burkeboi
5d ago
I'm less referring to personal pressure which is brownian, and more society in general.Eg, even the most flagrant of the homos are out here fighting for ... the right to participate in the institution of marriage? Who could have predicted?
Anyone paying attention. The culture says that you are not a complete human without the picket fence and the kids, etc etc.
The first question I would have is: which society? This isn't a gotcha: it's fair to say that, essentially by the mid 20th century, the US did have a mainstream mono-culture which almost everyone interacted with consisting of big business, the government, mainstream media (not just news but things like Hollywood as well), and probably a few other things too. At the same time, you also had subcultures that had values opposing and/or orthogonal to that dominant culture. The Amish and gayborhoods being some examples. How much the values of the dominant culture dictate your life and community does very much depend on where you elect to wind up.
I think that's why the rejectionist tendency among all people is getting stronger over time; it's coming from the same place. The flaming LGBTQ types and the Incels and the Transhumanists and the fuentisimos and the revanchist communists are all reacting to social pressure to conform to a certain image or life path that for various reasons only has enough room for x = population % 10001 and everyone else can eat shit and die.
This is true to a large extent. While the modern mainstream has a more ambivalent relationship to those above groups then pure hostility, it's clear that tons of people were given expectations of what is the good life that, for varying reasons depending on the person, is out of reach for them. What makes this more dire on a personal level is really how much power the monoculture has over your life; if you're Amish, the monoculture has a limit affect on your lived experience but if you're an atomized modern, you're going to swimming against the river every time you wake up without a supportive community. When you have a bunch of people with mutually irreconcilable desires to change the monoculture, and the stakes are high for them since there is no subculture they can retreat to to compensate for any failures in the monoculture, conflict becomes nasty quickly.
burkeboi
6d ago
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
I agree with the notion that all humans do owe each other some things. Off the top of my head, non-aggression and a degree of respect for one example. I this all national identities, both ethnic and civic, are contingent on history and convenience. I don't think a global identity is any more or any less invalid philosophically than a national identity from first principles. I think that internationalism has actually had a decent amount of success both materially, pax-Americana has been the best time to be alive in human history, and ethically, most people agree in the value of the international community to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, I think nations are a Chesterton's fence that we should be careful about rapidly changing, now that they exist.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
I think the problem comes as follows: what happens when the interests of yourself/your family/whatever relevant community you are a part of conflict with those of the nation or, in this case, the human race?
Ever single nation has had to deal with that question: there are always parts of the nation that get elevated and other parts that get shafted. It can be as personal as sacrificing your wellbeing in a war for that of a nation, or as abstract/community based as your language being suppressed like in the case of Occitan vs French or your religion being seen as seditious or semi-seditious such as in the Kulturkampf in Germany or Catholicism to many regimes in France. I think the recent surge of the populist right is less about a pro-active increase in national sentiment and more about subsets of different nations feeling culturally and/or economically shafted by the recent economic and social changes in their countries.
burkeboi
6d ago
Agreed 100%. I'd go even beyond that, and say ultimately the Moldbug/arc of history meme of 'progressives always win' is a massive Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. I think one needs to consider additionally is the question 'what is progressive?' To give perhaps the most central example of progressivism/Enlightenment liberalism: the Jacobins basically trampled on every single right enumerated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, generally in a fashion far more intrusive and extreme than anything in the then recent history of the Ancién Regime. This wasn't even a case of hypocrisy: the National Convention and leading Jacobins very explicitly explained why they had to do what they did for the good of France and the revolution and, according to them, their actions were perfectly consistent with the revolutionary project. The Soviet Union was the same story on an even larger scale. You kind of get a paradox: either the Jacobins not following what was then identified as progressive principles means they are not progressive, or those rights enumerated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man are not progressive values. The necessary conclusion is that 'the left', especially over time, is actually somewhat hard to define and includes tons of social/historical dead ends.
burkeboi
6d ago
I wonder how much of the pressure to conform one way or another really depends on your bubble. In a trad Cath or almost any red tribe group I've been exposed to or a part of, you're going to get pretty open social hostility. On the flip side, LGBT subcultures by definition involve make being LGBT, or whatever subset of it that particular group is of, the normal. Progressive groups IME tend to give a lot of social support verbally and signaling wise to LGBT people, but I'm unsure what the total experience of an LGBT person would be in there. I have a wife and kid now, but in college I had an addiction to gay porn that due to drunk hijinks was known by many, and some progressive friend groups tried to recruit me into their groups when previously they were uninterested. I imagine which bubbles you are exposed to, and we are all exposed to more than one, decides how much pressure you have to conform to cisheteronormativity (to use the academic phrase).
burkeboi
6d ago
From what I've seen, IDF tactics have not been any more offensive than US WW2 tactics. One could make the argument that this war overall is immoral, or the overall strategy is needlessly extending it, and thus the civilians casualties are immoral since the war is unjust either wholly or partly. I think that's a serious argument which I'm not fully rejecting or accepting due to uncertainty.
While some Israeli leaders are talking pretty harshly, the actual conduct of the IDF is not that of a genocidal army. I'm not a fan of what I see as pro-Israeli interests distorting US policy, but I do sympathize with the Israelis since they are outnumbered in a very bad neighborhood and are dealing with a population, Palestinians, that due to both popular sympathies and the spoiler effect seem unwilling and incapable to actually stick to any halfway reasonable bargain.
burkeboi
6d ago
Overall a very solid comment. There is one particular point which I think actually goes a bit deeper into how most westerners view states/governments/counties, which I think is relevant to analyzing the middle east:
It's worth noting that at least many of the liberals I know usually tend to blame the post-WWI-ish semi-arbitrary drawing of boundaries as the "original sin" of Middle East instability. As the argument goes, there were large pre-existing rivalries and grudges, etc. but because ignorant Western boundary-drawing ignored them, yet at the same time enforced them and gave them weight, these conflicts were nearly inevitable. This is, to be sure, at least a little ironic given some of these same people are very pro-integration including internationally, but 'I think everyone can get along in multicultural societies' isn't actually a core liberal belief, it's mostly just useful feel-good messaging that occasionally gets press-ganged into a political point. (Even some neoconservatives adopted a variant of it for a while there)
I think an assumption of the liberal view, really the dominant implicit western view, is that states/countries should be commonwealths. By that, I mean states should represent both the desires of the population and act in the interests of the population. A clear implication of this view of what a country is is nationalism: if the government is supposed to represent the people, the people have to be a community/nation. This can be defined in different ways: ethnocultural nationalism in historic Germany is one way and civic nationalism in the US and France another way (simplifying things). There are other ways to define a nation as well, and most nations are a mix of definitions to a degree.
Popular sovereignty was historically not how most states worked. In general, the modern view that sovereignty came from the people started with the Atlantic Revolutions from 1775-1825. There were historic exceptions, such as many Greek city states and the Romans, but the Enlightenment is where the modern ideology proximately arrived. In both Christendom and the Islamic world, relevantly including the Ottomans, sovereignty came from god to the sovereign. The Sultan was just your boss, and unless you overthrew him that was that.
Ironically enough, this allowed a lot more cultural diversity than the commonwealth model gives. In the commonwealth model, since the nation is sovereign you have to define the nation and, to a greater or lesser extent, force everyone to identify with the nation and culturally adhere to certain national values. "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." is a great quote about this. Same with the French eradicating their minority languages in the 1800s. If the Sultan/King is your boss, you don't need to go through those steps; just pledge loyalty to them, and you can identify/care about whomever you want. The millet system in the Ottoman empire was a great example of this; the different religions basically got to live in parallel societies, so long as they submitted to the Sultan.
This was the environment that most of the middle east came from. It went from loyalty to the sovereign, be it the Ottoman Sultan, Iranian Shah, or whomever, to trying to make commonwealths out of these states. The problem was simple: with few exceptions, the peoples of the new nations hated each other way more than they had any incentive to cooperate. While you got some 'successful' nation states, like Turkey and Iran, most states really are just some subset of the population, such as Saddam's tribesmen in Iraq or until recently Alawites in Syria, basically dominating the rest. Rhetoric aside, you have the old 'separate communities united by loyalty to the Sovereign' with the sovereign being a local potentate. I'll also note that the creates of the 'successful' nation states often involved horrific violence: Turkey being the obvious example.
Tying all of the above together, the liberals are correct that much of the middle east is an example if failed nation building. The issue with their viewpoint is that it assume the nation/commonwealth model is the best and universal model, when really that's not the case. Creating a nation is hard, involves forced conformity into the national ideal, and often involves pretty savage oppression and violence. Instead of a commonwealth government, maybe the better path would be trying to find the least offensive ersatz-king and promoting them would be the best way to promote the welfare of both middle easterners and those who deal with them. Nationalism/popular sovereignty actually demands a lot of a people, psychologically, materially, and socially, and for most of the middle east it seems the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
This is a segue, but I think the lesson here also applies to the west to a degree. Many groups want to simultaneously tear down culturally the notion of a shared community, while still asking the inhabitants to consider each other as part of a shared community and act accordingly. I think this contradiction causes a lot of the political and social conflicts we see in the west today, although tbh wealth anesthetizes things over so it may remain a relatively minor deal.
I haven't been able to find data on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some types of cluster B disorders increased fertility. Obviously the selection effect in the past couldn't have been too harsh, given those disorders exist today. Also the phenomenon of BPD women being attractive if a poor choice. I have a distant family member with a similar story, except she aborted her 4 pregnancies.
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