cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2mo ago
Very good summary, and matches many of my feelings on the topic.
Some thoughts:
- I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's series of stories on "The Three Laws". It basically assumes away the hardest part of AI alignment "how do you enforce the rules". But then he still manages to write about a dozen stories about how it all goes horribly wrong.
- I also read a bunch of Zvi's substack roundups. That man is single handedly one of the best information aggregators I know of.
- There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work. Humans have a lot of existing "weight" in the form of capital and spread. A baby AI would not have as much weight, just a data center.
- Robin Hanson has a great critique of AI doomerists. Many of them said "AI would happen this way" and that turned out to not be the way, but their predictions still haven't changed much.
cjet79
2mo ago
It was 20k captured soldiers that were killed including some 8k officers. Which has always been a huge deal for militaries everywhere. They care way more about how their soldiers are treated as POWs than they do about much else.
Elsewhere the volume also discusses French civilians being killed by allied operations, they estimate 80-100k deaths and their attitude is kind of "this is a bummer, but we are trying to kill Hitler so it's worth it."
Also as I said before Dresden's fire bombing is also barely mentioned, 25k dead. The nukes barely mentioned combined death toll of 200k.
Death tolls are rarely mentioned anywhere in the book. It is a dry accounting of a military campaign, and the Holocaust had minimal military impact.
The Germans had experience investigating mass killings, they knew how to cover their tracks, like a good murder investigator is better at getting away with murder. The Allies also announced in 1943 that German soldiers and officers would be returned to countries to face trial for any atrocities they committed, so they gave them an incentive to try and cover it up. But even with that there is still evidence, lidar and excavations have taken place at Treblinka have found the burned up human remains and cremation sites.
cjet79
2mo ago
skimming through the volumes I didn't find many references to concentration camps. (I did find one in volume 6 that was complaining the germans would starve if too much german land was given to poland, the comparison was with how terrible the conditions would be in a german concentration camp).
But I'm also realizing how much of a nothingburger this is. This was basically a dry administrative account of the war effort. The bombing of Dresden gets a single line. Hiroshima only gets mentioned 4 times. Only one of which is to dryly mention that it was nuked.
Even finding references to London being bombed was difficult.
One of the few times the nuremberg trials came up was in reference to a massacre of polish officers that was probably carried out by the Russians. The reason it was brought up is that it was causing frictions between Russia and Poland, and Churchill just wanted to smooth over those frictions.
This is the exact quality of evidence I'm talking about with the conspiracy theory thing. "Why did this news station say a thing on 9/11 and then never talk about it again? Must be because they were silenced!" Nevermind that they were confused and scared on the day it happened.
"Why doesn't churchill mention it in his super high level summary of the war effort?! Must be cuz it didn't really happen." Nevermind that he directly mentions it elsewhere in different works.
cjet79
2mo ago
A lot of foreshadowing techniques. It takes me out of the story when I see it, because I'm strongly reminded that it is a story with an end destination in mind by the author.
Certain ways of handling characters. Death for side characters when the author wants them out of a story. Torture or horrible circumstances for a main character as a way to toughen them up or get the reader to feel sorry for them.
cjet79
2mo ago
I think I'm a little bit broken in my set of preferences for certain art forms. For a long time I've lacked the ability to understand and explain why. Video games have helped, but music might have the best metaphor, even if it doesn't apply to me.
First, imagine that there is an objective ranking for how good a piece of music can be. The ranking stands regardless of individual preferences. More sophisticated listeners who can appreciate music better will have their preferences more in line with this objective ranking.
Second, imagine you have some unique ears, and the sound of string instruments just really bothers you. So you prefer any music without string instruments.
Most of the best music includes some string instruments, so you end up not liking most of the "best" music. The best rating doesn't require string instruments, its just that it makes some things easier in the course of crafting the music. A theoretical best song could be crafted that has no string instruments, it would just be much more difficult. Your tastes end up looking very unsophisticated. You gravitate towards an amateur community of song writers that share your hatred of string instruments, and some of them are just bad at writing any songs with string instruments. They write songs that are relatively bad on the objective ranking, but it removes string instruments at least, so it becomes more tolerable than mainstream stuff for you.
Something like this has happened to me in regards to reading and literature. There are common story elements like certain foreshadowing techniques and certain character development tricks that really grate on me. And there are story settings that I dislike, mostly modern and non-magical settings are boring to me.
I've ended up in a weird spot, like the stringed instrument hater. I can only really enjoy the other authors that also hate stringed instruments, or the amateurs that can't even write stringed instruments into their music. I am probably reading stories and literature that is "objectively" worse on some cosmic literature scale, and I'm well aware that it makes my tastes look unsophisticated and "bad" to the elites of the literature world. But I can't stop and won't stop, because I have some subjective preferences that entirely override the importance of the objective scale.
cjet79
2mo ago
My full original comment:
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
Re-reading my first sentence as standalone I guess it could be interpreted one of two ways:
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, as they are now.
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, if I could not tell the difference between them and human written stories I already enjoy.
I meant it in the second sense. I definitely think the AI stories right now are a lot of hot garbage, for all the reasons you've mentioned.
cjet79
2mo ago
What you don't understand is that those 2-3 million did not die in concentration camps, if that many died at all which is highly doubtful. The death toll in the concentration camps is a small fraction of that number. And most who died in the concentration camps did so in final months of the war due to Germany being destroyed on all sides and infrastructure totally collapsing. Many died under the custody of Stalin during and after the war, and never came under German occupation in the first place. The death toll in the concentration camps was a small fraction of that number.
Eh this is why the conversation with you reminds me of other generic conspiracy theorists. It all feels very wishy washy. Like you are doing a cold reading of me, and will push as far as you can in the direction of "nothing bad happened to the jews". Just so we are clear, I still think about 6 million jews died, and that there was a mass extermination effort of some kind. They weren't just killed off as a side effect of being rounded up and put in camps where there was no food and diseases ran rampant.
I just remember seeing that "middle ground" estimate from another conversation someone had with you.
I still think Churchill was uniquely unlikely to mention "gas chambers" because he had a history of controversy around chemical warfare. He was publicly willing to use it against the Germans if they used it first in warfare. And before WWII he was caught in a private conversation advocating that gas attacks be used on 'uncivilized' people. He did publicly talk about the holocaust after the war.
Grok AI does seem to think that there are passages referencing holocaust things:
Growing awareness of a Nazi policy to exterminate Jewish communities and calls it a crime against humanity. That is in volume 4
In volume 5 churchill mentions the unprecedented scale of Nazi massacres. He mentions the liquidation of ghettos, and the use of special camps for mass killings.
Maybe the AI is halucinating. I still believe it more than you. Get me a digital copy of the book that I can ctrl-f and we can settle it for sure.
cjet79
2mo ago
I was a bit of an odd duckling growing up. I watched a lot of history channel, maybe that changed my perspective. I do not feel I learned about the war with that framing. I felt that pearl harbor almost shared equal horror and tragedy with the Holocaust. I mean I guess it was up to the teachers at the time there might be two questions on the Pacific war, and two questions on the Holocaust for the state test so they get equal billing in class lesson plans.
cjet79
2mo ago
You misread me.
Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation. My assertion is that the end result would have been much the same. It was still a horrible atrocity and large scale genocide carried out with the machinery of the state, and under the guise of a racial ideology. I believe there still would have been a push for a Jewish state, the Nazi ideology would still be viewed as evil antichrist stand in, and this alternate history world would be mostly indistinguishable from our own.
(It should be worth noting that they did not need to be rounded up. So the death rate should be compared to the general civilian population, not the general prison camp population. The choice to round them up in such large numbers was still that: a choice.)
And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power. Had this lie been 10 years ago, yes I absolutely would care, and I'd want to punish the liars.
I've self assessed this on other issues I care about. I care about communism being an evil ideology that leads to mass murder and starvation. The New York Times is now known to have had active communist agents on the payroll in the 30s-50s. And that these reporters actively helped cover up the atrocities committed by the USSR. But it all doesn't actively bother me very much. And it bothers me far far less than the errors and lies perpetrated over covid. I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.
cjet79
2mo ago
I don't really believe you in the first place, and I'm not about to scan a book I have no interest in reading.
You made it sound like they never talked about it. But they obviously have in other contexts.
They didn't memory hole this thing. Multiple world leaders basically went from never caring about the Jews and actively keeping Jewish immigrants out of their country to being willing to help them found their own nation state.
Your an unreliable source of facts for me. It's like when I used to talk to 9/11 truthers. Sometimes what they said was correct in a very technical sense, but it would lead to false impressions. The "jet fuel can't melt steal beams" was the memed example. It always took a ton of effort to tease out the truth, way more than their initial assertion.
I've seen other people go through that circus with you. I'm unimpressed. As far as I remember your alternate history basically comes down to something like "gas chambers weren't used and only about 2-3 million Jews died" which seems like not enough to even change anyone's reaction.
The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs). Those are optimal circumstances, since those prisoners are more likely to be healthy young men.
There was an estimated 10 million Jews in Europe. Giving you a nicer target like 500k (5% death rate) which assumes all Jews in Europe were captured and numbers still fall way short of the Germans running normal prison camps where they make an effort to keep people alive.
I also don't really care how mass murderers achieve their numbers. Stalin and Mao got their record breaking numbers through starvation and brutal work conditions, no gas required. They were still evil assholes that committed atrocities. The fact that they aren't condemned as heavily as Hitler is something I blame on leftist academics and media covering for the communist regimes. The Jewish conspiracy angle makes little sense to me since vast number of Jews were also killed by Stalin.
cjet79
2mo ago
He was listing the most horrible things that have happened. He considered it equivalent to Europe being a bombed out ruin and 30 million combat deaths. I don't think a plain reading of the passage ever lands on "ambivalence".
cjet79
2mo ago
The Dream, 1947 The Dream was Churchill’s fanciful short story about conversing with his long-dead father in 1947. In it he explains all that had happened since his father died in 1895. The full text is available. Referring again to the Holocaust, he spoke of the two World Wars:
“Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands…. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”8
That wasn't hard to find.
cjet79
2mo ago
It doesn't seem worth noting unless you care about the history of chemical warfare and it's supporters. Churchill had a complicated political history with chemical and gas weapons.
cjet79
2mo ago
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
cjet79
2mo ago
I don't understand why you kept putting classical liberal in quotation marks.
I'm pretty adjacent to classical liberals. It might be the second or third term I describe myself with (an-cap and libertarian being the other words). I feel it necessary to respond to your descriptions of classical liberals.
"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts.
This is a fun thing to do. I think I liked doing it before I was ever an-cap/classical liberal/libertarian. Back then it was arguing evolution vs creationism with people in myspace groups. But other people like Ben Shapiro are not classical liberals, and that is like his whole shtick. The classical liberals are also sentimental about quite a few things, Adam Smith, the founding fathers, the enlightenment, etc. So I'd call this a weird and mostly uncorrelated description of classical liberals.
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality.
I'd say that is more of the rationalist's shtick. Its again another weird description where it sorta fits, but fits other groups better, and also doesn't fit in some glaring cases. Most classical liberals will point to American and Britain in the late 1700s and 1800s as sort of shining beacon examples. They do in fact happily and openly privilege ideas coming out of those time periods.
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
The results have not been stellar, but they've also been fighting back against it longer than conservatives have even been aware that it is a problem. FIRE is one such organization. They have also carried out and implemented their solution. Classical liberals generally outnumber conservatives in the university. Ya they are both super outnumbered by liberals and the left. But the libertarianish/classical liberal guys have go on a targetted campaign to develop stellar academics and an academic support network that can allow their own to survive in an otherwise hostile environment. Do they have society wide solution for the problem? No, of course not, they don't have society wide power to even think about implementing such a thing. That is for the conservatives to carry out. But there is no point in trading one enemy for another.
Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste.
Quick aside: I hope you don't think Haidt is a classical liberal, here is a quote from the man:
"But it’s also that once I switched my research over from culture to politics, and once I began criticizing the ideas on the Left and the Democratic Party — for many years I was doing it to try to help them win."
He calls himself a political centrist these days, but I still think he is mostly a democrat that thinks the democrats went a little too far. Either way he is not a classical liberal.
There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
You are right in the first sentence. It is certainly not classical liberal. Which is why most classical liberals don't like it. Most classical liberals do not think universities should be subsidized at all. You'll find some that are sort of adjacent to classical liberals that think basic research should be funded (Tyler Cowen). But anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics can realize that education is a private good, and that private goods are handled just fine by markets. It misses the mark so badly that I can't help but think maybe you are again talking about some other group. Until I read your last few paragraphs, and you seem to have understood their actual ideology all along.
I don't know who you are reading that is calling themself a classical liberal. I'd read these guys if you want an actual example of classical liberals examining higher education: https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education/dp/0190846283
cjet79
2mo ago
I admittedly laughed when I saw the Trump in a pope outfit and a headline about what he said.
Hard to explain humor. It was just someone ridiculous doing something ridiculous.
I can also understand that plenty of people might not find it funny at all.
cjet79
2mo ago
Ha! Yeah thinking back on that cartoon, it must have been written by the nerdy stereotype that hated those kinds of guys. Johnny Bravo types in reality were pulling all the babes.
cjet79
2mo ago
I grew up in the 90's and 00's. I always had the sense that women did not enjoy sex and barely tolerated men. This somehow came up in a drunk conversation with my mother at some point and she was a bit horrified. "No I never told you that! Women like sex! Your dad and I..." I cut her off at that point, didn't need to hear more. But it feels pretty clear to me that I picked up this idea from media sources. And yet I can't point to a single particular example.
I can't imagine how things have gotten even worse since that time.
I do feel that putting the onus on parents to either raise better men or women is misplaced. I'd first turn to Hollywood or other culture makers and say "stop making such shitty culture". I have memories and can point to specific times when my parents took the right approach with me. My dad telling me that he was never willing to have sex with a woman he didn't want to have a kid with (he seemed to want kids though, so I don't know how much of a restriction that was), and him making jokes about not sticking your dick in crazy. My mother being concerned for my emotional well being after silly breakups in middle school, and her insisting on us watching a discovery channel show that was basically sex ed. Them telling their kids that they wanted grand babies, just not while we were in highschool or college. I remember them showing signs of affection towards each other, and forgiveness after they fought with one another.
TV shows and movies still managed to do a number on me, and on those around me. After all I can't count on how other kids are raised but I can usually count on them having a similar cultural soup they grew up in.
From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow. I'm happy to reward shows like Bluey that have good parental figures. But they seem like rare glowing exceptions instead of the rule.
Should we expect all parents to explain to their teen kids how Chani's love in Dune seems slightly off, or should we lean on Dennis with criticisms of the film that his interpretation of love sucks. Of course we can do both, but the latter seems fat more effective for the level of effort involved and reward expected.
cjet79
2mo ago
I only got the brief description that it was one of Biden's "moonshot" research programs. I'm guessing it just was unlikely to have payoff for learning about human cancers. Instead it was likely to have payoff for treating dog cancers, but she thought that was a bad use of taxpayer money.
cjet79
2mo ago
I think there is a degree of stickiness when it comes to trust. That institutions can be bad or against a certain party and still enjoy reputational effects for a while. I think this happened in the Obama and first Trump term when the military and intelligence agencies were still strongly trusted by the right.
cjet79
2mo ago
Scott's post begs the question though: what does he think reform of the institutions looks like? I think what we are seeing is what we should have expected.
Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.
What will it take to restore most Republican's trust? Either gutting those institutions entirely, or reforming them with punitive measures until they seem cowed and fully cooperative.
Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.
The left isn't capable of reforming institutions, just like the right isn't capable of reigning in their strong-men (and women). They need each other to play those roles. And obviously if you identify more with one side than the other you don't like having to be the side that reigns in the other. My side's honest mistakes and forgiveable excesses, are the other sides willful maliciousness and unforgivable escalations.
I recently spoke with my mother who has worked on cancer research contracts with NIH. She is a lifelong moderate Democrat (pro choice). She had spoken in fearful tones about Trump and Doge. But recently when Doge began taking an axe to medical programs she sounded pretty happy. Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb (there is some joke in there about DOGE's meme name sake, but I'm too lazy to find it). Her words were basically that they cut the things she would have cut.
I live in the northern Virginia area. I know many people who work in government. The common refrain is that "yes they definitely needed to trim the fat and slim down government, but this just seems crazy the way they are doing it". But there was an opportunity to trim the fat during the Biden administration and they didn't take it. They were too busy starting dog cancer research programs. So maybe this is the only way you cut things, with a side of bad ideas from a strongman willing to do it.
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
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