campfireSmoresEaten
No bio...
User ID: 2560
I don't consider Israel's assassination of the leader of Hamas on Iranian soil a big escalation. It seems like just the normal thing to do with terrorist leaders.
Edit: also, I think the US Government might continue to supply Ukraine indefinitely, as long as the voting public doesn't actively oppose it. It's not like we live in a direct democracy where every voter has to actively re-up on the decision to arm Ukraine once per year, it's more delegated/technocratic/deep-statey than that. Whatever words you want to use to describe it.
As much as I don't trust the unelected bureaucracy about some things, this way of making the decision seems fine to me.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
Are you sure Kulak is a man? I've listened to the Kulak podcast and it's a woman's voice. Voice changer? Just a very convincing fake voice?
I was very surprised, but I guess some of the essays are about subjects which a woman might theoretically be more likely to write about than a man.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
"A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning."
Could I have a source? Even if nothing concrete?
Here are two articles about PEPFAR (EDIT: one of the organizations for which funding has been paused) that I think are worth reading.
https://brendonmarotta.com/4454/pepfar-plans-to-end-infant-circumcision-in-africa/
tl;dr: PEPFAR is responsible for an unknown but very large number of botched circumcisions in Africa, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
https://brendonmarotta.com/4475/pepfar-to-experiment-on-african-children-with-the-shangring/
tl;dr: An article about them moving from a circumcision device with an unacceptable rate of botched circumcisions to a new device with an unknown rate of botched circumcisions.
Any circumcision on someone who cannot consent is a human rights violation. I realize some of PEPFARs other tasks are praise-worthy, but I cannot possibly support an organization that engages in this sort of unnecessary cruelty.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
Everyone likes free money, right? Building houses is good, having kids is good, paying less for life saving medications is good, taking power out of large landlords hands is good. But maybe trying to apply emergency price gouging laws to non-emergency situations is not so good. Maybe write a law that you have to lower prices when things are good as quickly as you raised them when they weren't so good. What are Trump's plans?
Are you familiar with the Econ 101 arguments against price controls?
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.
How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI? Have you not thought about that? I think that you are thinking "AI can either be aligned to human values or not. Sounds like 50/50."
In fact, aligning a superintelligence to human values is extremely difficult and extremely unlikely to happen by accident. Human values are a very small slice of the possible spectrum of minds that could exist.
It kind of feels like people vastly overrate the degree to which they understand the arguments of AI doomers. Like they're just going by a few tweets they read. Twitter is not a good way to full understand a contentious subject.
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
The benefit is fewer wars and more stability, which helps everybody.
Plus more military bases I guess. Better to have one somewhere than to need one somewhere and not have one.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
I played a boardgame called Dune: Imperium for the first time recently. It's a worker placement game. And it vastly surpassed my expectations. I could see myself getting obsessed with it and sinking a lot of time into it.
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
A Japanese guy went to a stone skipping competition in the UK and won. Japanese people are really good at anything fun and quirky (quirky in a good way). They've got moxie!
There's also Kobiyashi, the competitive eater. It wasn't just natural talent and determination, he studied competitive eating and found out that he could eat more hot dog buns if they were dipped in water.
And in the 1920 Olympics (or some year, I forget) Japan won a bunch of swimming medals because they built a glass-bottomed pool and set up film cameras along the sides to analyze different swimming techniques. And they apparently made some discoveries which were adopted by everyone four years later.
Etcetera etcetera. I'm surprised you're surprised!
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
Is Ozy really that bad? Can you link me to the blog post?
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
It does seem like kind of a strange choice to introduce her with a massive ad-blitz where she asks for money so prominently.
Shouldn't that come later? Isn't it weird to ask for money in an ad that costs lots and lots of money?
Just nit-picking.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
It kind of feels like a race:
Will conservatives get fed up with the behavior of the federal government first and decide that the rules for the distribution of power as they stand aren't working anymore, or will all the conservatives die out first?
The thing is that as progressives go further to the left, they create more conservatives. It could even be an equilibrium, if the new conservatives don't get cynical until they've been conservative for a while.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
Too many eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust to be fake. Too many of them don't seem like the type to exaggerate, even if some of them were unreliable. Not plausible that they could all be lying. Also too high a proportion of people died whose names we know and whose life history we can track with certainty to be an accident.
The thing that makes the path forward plausible is people acknowledging the problem and contributing to the solution, just like any other problem that requires group action.
I don't think you actually live your life this way. You're just choosing to do so in this case because it's more convenient / for the vibes.
Think of every disaster in history that was predicted. "We could prevent this disaster with group action, but I'm only an individual and not a group so I'm just going to relax." Is that really your outlook?
If there was an invading army coming in 5 years that could be beaten with group action or else we would all die, with nowhere to flee to, would you just relax for 5 years and then die? Even while watching others working on a defense? Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort? Is the word 'altruism' such a turn-off to you? How about "honor" or "pride" or "loyalty to one's people"? How about "cowardice" or "weakling"? Do these words shift anything for you, regarding the vibes?
Edit: I'm not trying to be insulting, just trying to call attention to the nature of how vibes work.
People do pro-social things not just because of the fear of punishment for not doing them, but because they understand that they are contributing to a commons that benefits everyone, including themselves.
For the record, it wouldn't be that hard to solve this problem, if people wanted to. Alignment is pretty hard, but just delaying the day we all die indefinitely with a monitoring regime wouldn't be that hard, and it would have other benefits, chiefly extending the period where you get to kick back and enjoy your life.
Question: Are there any problems in history that were solved by the actions of a group of people instead of one person acting unilaterally that you think were worth solving? What would you say to someone who took the same perspective that you are taking now regarding that problem?
And the "Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort?" question is worth an answer to, I feel.
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
What is your argument in plain English?
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
But then there would be a huge retaliation from NATO that would make NATO's support for Ukraine look rather restrained by comparison (and maybe it kinda was).
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
There's nothing special about German manufacturing that can't be replicated at much lower cost in China (and with much stronger network effects to boot).
You might be right, but I wonder how sure of this we can be? Is there any reason why this might not be true?
I guess one thing I can think of is that China apparently can't copy TSMC or that Dutch Lithography company. Not yet anyway. Although I realize that's a somewhat different story.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
The mobile app costs half what the game costs on steam. Hmmmm...
What a grotesque thing to say to someone! I wish I could tell lynka that since I care about Classical Liberalism (or whatever it's called, I'm not attached to that label), it's important to me that I try to persuade people of its utility and morality. And the best way to do that is by being considerate of others, both in terms of not saying cruel things to them and in terms of actually considering what they have to say.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
My experience is that most people don't have a good enough understanding of how housing costs work to point blame at anything other investment funds for high prices.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
Are Pakistani girls noticeably genetically distinct with regards to looks? Or is it just like saying white Canadian women are hotter than white British women?
So we have two questions, and we should probably focus on one.
- Is the problem real?
- Is there a way to contribute to a solution?
Let's focus on 1.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
What do you mean "no actual evidence that the problem exists"? Do you think AI is going to get smarter and smarter and then stop before it gets dangerous?
"Suppose we get to the point where there’s an AI smart enough to do the same kind of work that humans do in making the AI smarter; it can tweak itself, it can do computer science, it can invent new algorithms. It can self-improve. What happens after that — does it become even smarter, see even more improvements, and rapidly gain capability up to some very high limit? Or does nothing much exciting happen?" (Yudkowsky)
Are you not familiar with the reasons people think this will happen? Are you familiar, but think the "base rate argument" against is overwhelming? I'm not saying the burden of proof falls on you or anything, I'm just trying to get a sense from where your position comes from. Is it just base rate outside view stuff?
campfireSmoresEaten
5mo ago
The j6 pipe bombs could have been planted by a foreign adversary, couldn't they have?
campfireSmoresEaten
11mo ago
There are serious ethical concerns with this approach.
I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."
More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc
More options
Context Copy link