I think in normal circumstances, where the conflict is over land or resources, this would be a good framework.
The problem is that this is a religious, sectarian and ethnic war. Jewish holy writ considers Jews the chosen people and all others somewhere between subhumans and animals, to the point where when someone appeared claiming he had come to save even the subhumans and animals, they got the Romans to stick him on a cross.
And on the other side you have Palestine, not really Palestinians in the way the West thinks of them as citizens of a country, but the extremist wing of Islamic hardliners that have supporters all over the Middle East and are aligning their struggle with the destiny of Islam. Who also consider it divine will to murder non-Islamists and take their land, wealth and women.
What's the ZOPA in this case? Israel considers attacks on their country existential in a way that's hard for liberal-democrat live-and-let-live Westerners to truly understand. 9/11 gave America PTSD for a generation and that was a few planes and a building. Netanyahu has basically said nothing is off the table and you can expect Israelis to basically support whatever tools and methods he needs to sweep the Gaza Strip clean of Muslims. And Hamas and their supporters explicitly set out to kill as many Jews as possible and to claim tribal victory (with other goals, like throwing a rake in any potential Saudi-Israeli collaboration, drawing America into the quagmire at a moment when war materiel stocks are critically low, further destabilizing the Pax Americana being incidental). They are broadcasting their success. Killing Jews on camera and parading their hostages and victims on social media is like catnip to half the Muslim ME that has explicitly wanted Israel gone or at least curbstomped into being not a major player for generations, and acts as a recruiting tool for them (look what we can do!).
clo
1mo ago
You'd get less pushback if you said this out loud. Especially since nothing about this argument you think is so difficult for people to understand is not regularly discussed on this forum and the limits of utilitarianism are commonly understood even by the people who espouse it depending on their utility functions.
Stop going after specific people and go after arguments. This passive-aggressive bullshit is something I expect from Americans, but as someone who tells us all frequently about how he is a member of the warrior caste, your snide jabs and thinly veiled sneers are irritating in the extreme. If you want a fight on the internet, you can get one quite easily without having to resort to these sneers where you pretend to hold yourself privy to some secret of the universe all the stupid rationalists don't get. Nothing is new under the sun, not least of which the things you think other people don't get or haven't considered.
I spoke plainly, before the server reset, about fighting ecological x-risk and climate change by nuking India, and by attachment, any other nation with significant growth potential, with the express goal of making sure that no country ever industrialized again. I was pilloried and given mod warnings, but I was still allowed to express my opinion.
By comparison, "cui bono" is barely even an argument. If you want to speak plainly, then you tell us. You tell us who benefits, and then we can see if that's true in the long or short term. Personally, I have little faith in the ability of anyone at all to plan for long term outcomes, especially if the outcomes are distributed over other people.
While I am no fan of alarmism and I think Yud is a clown, I am struggling to understand this mental block you - and others - have whenever it comes to the dangers of AI.
You seem to feel the need to understand something before it can kill you. There are plenty of things in this world that can kill you without you understanding the exact mechanisms of how, from bizarre animal biology to integrated weapons systems.
There are plenty of things in this world with proven - not unproven - capability, that regular human beings can use to kill you. An AI that demonstrates no more capability than regular human beings can kill you, as well as potentially a large number of other humans - and this is only with the methods my stupid animal brain can come up with! It doesn't even need to be particularly smart, sentient, conscious, or even close to AGI to do so. It could be something as simple as messing with the algorithms that have an outsized disparate impact on large amounts of everyday life.
And that's without even considering the things that bare-ass naked-ape plain old humans could get up to with a force multiplier as big as AI!
There are massive amounts of x-risk from regular people, doing regular things, fucking up, or intentionally doing things that will cause an untold amounts of suffering. Some people consider regulated research on viruses or prions extremely dangerous! Is it a failure of imagination? Do you need to know every chess move Magnus Carlssen makes before believing that he can beat you at chess?
clo
1yr ago
Then why do you have difficulty believing that someone - or something - of similar intelligence to him could figure out that you are going to attack him with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, pay private security, and pre-emptively deal with you beforehand?
We're not even talking about superhuman capabilities, here.
clo
4mo ago
Exceptional steelman of trigger warnings.
I finally understand. They're more easily understood as a way of gimping everyone else to make the triggered person feel more powerful.
clo
6mo ago
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
I want to engage, but I think doing so would be largely pointless given that the conversation seems to be entirely about semantics and a misunderstanding of terminology.
I got about four sentences in before I realized that you're taking a remarkably reductive view of things and then basing whatever argument you have on that reductive view.
Modern society is only "in love with Darwin" to the extent that people believe they are going to outcompete the ones that will be eliminated by evolution. If you've read the last couple of weekly Culture War threads, an actually interesting topic has come up in the pile of black tar that's the HBD debate; the popularity of rejecting the conclusions of HBD because it posits you can't improve your life beyond what your genetics have preordained for you.
Evolution doesn't care who (or what) it kills. It just kills, and those left behind get to go on. What would you do, if someone told you that you've been naturally selected out of the gene pool and you're doomed to no bitches?
We in many cases actively fuck with evolution because the implications (and actions taken on behalf of those implications) are frequently obscene. Our modern society protects the weak, the infirm, the elderly, and even with the massive advantages enjoyed by intelligent individuals who can leverage their intelligence in first world societies, the first world is essentially reproducing below replacement.
The future belongs to those who show up. All else is word games, dross, arguments, bullshit. To make it worse, we have no idea what might be evolutionarily advantageous and everyone who thinks they do is probably lying to you, subject to recency bias against timescales completely irrelevant to evolution, or self-selecting themselves not to die. If tomorrow some cosmic entity beyond our comprehension snaps its fingers and kills every person who was not born blind, the blind will inherit the earth, who gives a shit what the people with 20/20 vision managed to do.
clo
1mo ago
I don't understand this example. Are you implying that a sane authoritarian government would exert their power to ban the burning of hydrocarbons for heating or cooking?
How is that in any way sane, especially if they don't have the power to stop other countries from doing it? Unless you are advocating for this sane authoritarian government invading all the others and maintaining this ban through force of arms, in which case it makes more sense, but still a fair ways away from 'sane'. Doing so would require the development and manufacture of weapons at scale, which unfortunately requires large amounts of hydrocarbons.
clo
1mo ago
The point is not uncontroversial, because if you're going to blame all those atrocities on intelligent people, you can't get away with being selective about it. Intelligent people gave us the semiconductor, the refrigerator, the printing press - although whether the printing press was ruinous for humanity is a matter for debate in some circles.
There's also a very good argument to be made that you can attribute the atrocities you listed to a lack of intelligence.
Animals live short, nasty, brutish lives, and I think their inability to outcompete, outproduce and exterminate everything else within reach is a matter of capability rather than need. The historical record of nature tells us that they frequently hunt, feed, and reproduce to excess, and when biomes change over time go extinct or ferociously exterminate and outcompete those occupying similar ecological niches. As far as I know, humankind is no different, we're just better at it.
Your last paragraph is typical-minding and an attempt to establish consensus. Please check your consensus at the door. There are people who take these arguments seriously, including yours, and if I took your argument seriously I'd seek the mass extermination of the human race within my own means.
Or, you know, I'd just go around trying to lower the intelligence of the human race by introducing heavy metals into the water supply.
Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers.
I know we do our best to not typical-mind around here, but goddamn, when it's staring you right in the face and they are telling you exactly what they think, to deny it in this manner is like watching someone deny the walls they're walking into. From the suit alone and the tireless, documented efforts of the NBCFAE, it's clear that the competency and effectiveness of air traffic controllers mattered less than if they were African-American or not.
I remember TracingWoodgrains' attempt to try and start an offshoot of The Motte he believed needed to exist with "less of a right-wing slant". I remember thinking that the attempt was idealistic, misguided and naive at the time. It's nice to know that he hasn't changed that much. I wish him all the best, but when the leopards eat his face I won't be at all surprised.
Overthinking it.
Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.
Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).
If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.
Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.
No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.
I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.
clo
7mo ago
Why wouldn't you believe (or pretend to believe) something that isn't true if there are such massive benefits to be accrued and such huge incentives for doing it?
Try looking at the stock market sometime. Do people really believe that a nothing EV maker in Vietnam is worth more than Ford?
clo
1yr ago
He, uh, cited the study you're talking about? Through HuffPo, but - if you're not going to read the link, then sure:
The evolution from "enhances sexual attractiveness" to "doing it for yourself" is definitely a regressive step, and by regressive I here mean "regressing to age two", but it's the next step which reveals the presence of a neurosis: recruiting science as a justification for behavior: "Study finds makeup makes you appear more competent." Can't wait to read about that study in a Jonah Lehrer book. Ugh. So here's the evolution of feminist theory, take notes: "I want to look better" to "I want to feel better about myself" to "I want people to think I am better." Madness.
The further clue that the problem is not gender but... you... is that you find this pseudoscience while you are browsing the internet, i.e. it is your entertainment, your free time; your leisure time is spent justifying a behavior you can't not do. "But I wasn't looking for those articles, I just stumbled on them." Exactly.
Alone is not a pleasant person to read most of the time. His brain works in mysterious ways, and his material is intentionally acerbic because it's meant to make you question yourself. The point about makeup is completely orthagonal to the point about how power works in society, narcissism, and pornography (the general theme of pretty much all his writing).
clo
1yr ago
for the sake of argument, your first point could be applied to just about anyone who is a net drain on the economy, like old people, unhealthy people, or disabled people.
clo
10d ago
This is not my experience, or my read of the 4chan video.
The 4chan video is sophisticated race-baiting and trolling of a sort I expect from the chans. It is specifically designed to incite anger, disgust and revulsion, an inflammatory piece of content in search of an audience. This is incredibly consistent with the standard 4chan MO, which largely boils down to trying to get a reaction. As this behavior is now widespread across the entire internet and it becomes harder and harder to shock people, they have to try harder to get a reaction.
To put it shortly: Gawker and their ilk turned trolling into a clickbait business. And then clickbait proved to be not really all that profitable, in the end. What are outrage merchants to do except escalate?
I don't think people are mostly good. I also think power law is universal and those who don't strive lose to those who do. People who don't think this is true have not lost hard enough yet, or are sufficiently isolated from the consequences of their losing that they don't notice those who are losing. I think the latter is one of the great tragedies of human civilization, and the more divorced from reality the elite or ruling caste get, the closer disaster gets (c.f. Marie Antoinette).
clo
1mo ago
Power accumulates. You want to be on the winning team, no matter who's winning. Expect everyone to 180 at the drop of a hat if the other team is winning.
Instructive recent case: citing national security concerns, Chinese governments and state-backed companies enacted policies banning Apple phones from the workplace.
What happened was that even companies without ties to the government with nothing in the way that could be realistically be construed as a national security concern attempted to do the same regardless, and made a point of doing so publicly, believing that by doing so they were demonstrating their allegiance to the government.
clo
6mo ago
Definitely! As soon as they become the world leader militarily, economically, culturally, etc. while still allowing their population to vote.
clo
1yr ago
Had they not promised the moon, I think the game would have been received much better. Also, it was broken on consoles at launch, so there's that. Most of the discussion not being about the game's writing frustrated me, because it's really quite something.
Honestly, as fine as the main story is, a few of the smaller side quests in the game have writing that haunted me for long after the game was over. Dream On in particular actually stopped me in my tracks near its resolution and had me thinking about the right course of action in a way I haven't been challenged by any piece of media in years.
clo
1yr ago
There are a wide variety of brutalist solutions you can apply without resorting to guns.
clo
1yr ago
I don't quite know how to put my thoughts in order given the vitriol of your response. On the surface, I agree with you.
But there are plenty of societies that aren't authoritarian hellholes that somehow don't have this problem. As well as plenty of societies that are authoritarian hellholes with decaying or depreciated social fabric/lunatic homeless.
I feel like the logic here doesn't quite hold.
I am not quite sure what it is, but I think it's something unique about Americans that makes them believe shared social anything is inherently a scam, or for suckers. A scam because it won't work (despite many examples of it working) or for suckers, because how dare anyone else benefit from something they pay for (because people paying for something they won't partake in is by definition, being a sucker). Then again, the game America as a country plays better than anybody aside from basketball is socializing their failures while privatizing the gains, so maybe it's genuinely cultural.
clo
29d ago
That's because this is what winning looks like.
Someone once said power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that disadvantage people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
Here's my version: power is demonstrated by the ability to entirely avoid, or even remain entirely ignorant of, the negative consequences of your actions.
The losers have to eat shit. They also get to see the winners shovel it at them even if it is completely by accident.
clo
2mo ago
This is not unique to modern western democracy, nor are powerful Jews the only one taking advantage of the hierarchy of everything. You are describing power. Power has not changed in thousands of years.
clo
11mo ago
I think the truth is somewhere in between.
There are unique advantages and drawbacks to both, but if you are a credible and accredited scientist working in a high-value field such as medicine or AI, I would say the US still offers more money and opportunities. Quality of life is, in both countries, exceptionally dependent on where you go. There are places in both the US and China that I would not want to ever visit, or even pass by, without a heavily armed personal escort that would suffer no repercussions for shooting bystanders.
People is a tossup. I think in America the variance is higher, it's a culture and society that says one thing and does another and lionizes exceptionalism of all sorts. China tends to squash everyone down into the same paste by design.
Food is again, exceptionally dependent on where you go.
I definitely do think the attitude towards foreigners has gotten significantly worse in China over the last decade and a half. 2013 China and 2023 China are, for foreigners, quite different.
Good riddance. I have been reading Hlynka for years and while he had a lot to contribute and had a viewpoint very underrepresented and definitely worth having on this place, he got worse and worse as time went on.
The rule that I think is most important for this forum is listed immediately underneath "be kind". Make your point reasonably clear and plain.
The thing that I despise the most about this place is the weaselly nature of some posters on an anonymous forum on the internet. What is the point of implying something or putting words into other people's mouths? Hlynka went from contributing viewpoints and arguments to making poorly veiled sneers at other people, accusing them of believing things that they say they don't believe. In the worst cases, this came across as propping up the weakest version of opposing arguments and gaslighting behavior in the extreme. I lost count of how many times I saw him say something to the extent of "you say you believe one thing, but you actually believe another, I can tell." He should have the intelligence to know when he is being baited, and the ability to separate the bait from the true believers.
What are you supposed to say when he implies someone is an an anti-semite in response to a fairly well-reasoned argument about, I don't know, HBD? (To hell with the HBD argument, by the way, it's the same fights over and over.) Whether they're an anti-semite or not, the point of this place is to address the fucking argument instead of doing a snarky driveby. Who does he think he's convincing? If the person is a genuine anti-semite who believes in Jewish space lasers and Zionist control over America, what the fuck is the point of implying someone's an anti-semite out the sides of your mouth? Is it intended to make people discredit the argument because of who's making the argument? In which case, that behavior is well enough represented outside this place and I don't want to see any more of it.
The thing is, I don't know what he hated more, the people who baited him or the true believers he found abhorrent.
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