curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
The problem there is that we would have to essentially run a full title for all land going back to patent.
Would you? If you're the state, you can simply make it so that "in fifteen years, we will switch to a central registry. If you think you have a claim to this land, contact us before ten years from now, or you lose it".
And even if not, it's a one time payment that permanently does away with 'running titles', so it's still probably worth it in the long run.
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
Uh... which wikipedia article (interesting argument, by the way) conclusively proves central developments of history aren't deliberately implemented?
Just, like, a holistic understanding of history? Like, in one sense, progressivism and liberalism were very much deliberately implemented, propagandized, and put onto the masses by the elites. But they did that because of some combination of really believing it, it being in their material interests, and all sorts of other things. I don't think there's room for 'womens rights movements exist mostly because some people (who?) wanted to do population control'
You didn't answer:
Like, are you implying that the reason liberalism and progressivism exist is that it's a ploy by the elites to reduce the global population
Which was the most important question. I strongly disagree with what I understand you to have said so far, but I still don't really understand what your core point is.
Step me through it
Most directly, they just pattern-match it to a 'thing conservatives say' and then react negatively because it's a thing conservatives say. That's most of it.
Likewise, when I react negatively to "hey, let's find a way to keep fertility rates from crashing", I think it's reasonable to conclude I don't want to keep fertility rates from crashing.
They imagine, because politics makes people insane, that you want to force women to have children and not ever have abortions and be submissive religious housewives. If you made them choose between a fertility rate of 1.2 and 2.0 they'd choose 2.0, but people generally don't have reasonable preferences about society as a whole, so they just don't think about it
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
And where do central developments of modern history come from, are they by any chance deliberately implemented?
I honestly do not understand how one can have this perspective while also having read, like, multiple wikipedia articles or a single book. It indicates what appears to me to be a complete misunderstanding of history? Like, are you implying that the reason liberalism and progressivism exist is that it's a ploy by the elites to reduce the global population? I don't get it.
I mean, it's only so long you can twirl mustaches and laughing like a me monocled villain, without people noticing.
Yeah real life isn't a movie where the villains are indicated to the audience with artistic foreshadowing.
Also the reaction to fertility concern belies them supposedly not caring about it.
This is the same bad logic as "the conservative reaction to concerns about structural racism proves they're actually racist nazis". In politics, people on all sides have a lot of insane reactions to a lot of things, often without particularly deep philosophical reasons.
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
My interpretation was just that the markets were wrong, as they are sometimes, and didn't correctly take into account different arrival rates of different sources of ballots. I don't find that surprising, markets in new / infrequent things aren't that efficient and are often wrong. The people setting the prices are human, and humans need practice to get good at things. Markets in stocks are somewhat efficient because there are many stocks and many people trading them for a long time, and even then...
This happened at the same time as the midnight ballot counting that restarted after kicking out neutral observers
I think this isn't indicative, really. Election day was a day, and a lot of things happened on that day, including dozens of claimed frauds, so the drop would've happened after one fraud. I don't think this is a particularly strong rebuttal but it's what I think
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere
Because it isn't a 'magic global trend that appeared out of nowhere', it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history, something that basically all politicians, intellectuals, philosophers have been debating for the past few hundred years? You can read historical progressives and talk to existing progressives, and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
And I don't think it is, but I don't think that's what OP was talking about. "scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the ... simulationism ... out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing ... "
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
The best evidence I have is the midnight flip is forex markets.
elaborate?
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
Ok I think that was a combination of changes brought on directly by technology (women always did a large amount of critical labor within the household, farming or making clothes or similar, cleaning, physically maintaining the household, and as technology automated that having them work made sense) and changes brought on for direct political, eg progressive, reasons which in turn was enabled by technology. I believe little of that had the explicit aim of lowering the birth rate. There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
I wasn't trying to use a specific meaning of 'physicalism', just a general sense that 'physics is all there is', but
In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical,[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.[2] It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" (mind–body dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.
this also works
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night
This kind of thing deserves a really good blog post that I can't really write. everything is like this. Every election, every mass shooting, every presidential assassination attempt, the covid vaccinations, there are always unexplainable anomalies that clearly prove something's going on, even if we don't quite know what it is. Some numbers just aren't right, the times don't line up, some things are suspiciously aligned, some evidence conveniently disappears. An election security engineer at Dominion voting systems used to be antifa. (and, of course, his last name was Eric Coomer - they want you to know it's fucking with you). The numbers don't pass the statistical tests, the dem numbers spiked at the last minute, a pipe burst and they stopped counting, more people voted than were registered to vote, a van seemed to have huge folders of fake ballots ...
The thing is, the world's really complicated. Weird things happen sometimes. Pipes sometimes burst. More often than that, people make mistakes. They do the statistics wrong (if >50% of published academic papers can do it, the substack blogger 'bad cattitude' can do it too). They see a huge change in the reported number of votes on a website and think that means the underlying was changed, when the website was just wrong. They hear a second shot, maybe a third shot.
People constantly make mistakes. I do something pretty dumb on most days. I thought it was Sunday more of last Saturday than I'd have liked to (I was pretty sick, admittedly). And there are more minor mistakes, misreading a point in a paper or blogpost or doing some math wrong or misplaying in a game. And a big problem with internet politics, and especially with what people call 'conspiracy theories', is nothing forces you to notice mistakes. You don't show up at the wrong time, you don't lose the deal, the shed doesn't collapse. You just post, and if it's interesting enough it gets likes, and then a bunch of other people hear it, and it repeats itself. And then you keep making mistakes, and you don't learn how to catch them and it builds on itself. And so a thousand different reasons why the election was stolen, or why covid's not real / is still, in 2024, literally a genocide of the disabled / the vaccine is killing a million people spread and mutate across the internet.
I'm pretty sure none of the anomalies were objectively surprising or worrisome. Every one I've dug into, or seen ymes dig into, has ended up being nothing. Not responding to most of them was reasonable. Of course some of the media, and especially progressives on twitter, was unduly dismissive for poor reasons, but that happens with everything on every side. And then, uh, the president of the united states believes the theories and tries to get Pence to throw the election to the House and j6 happens. The world sure is complicated.
It's not really a moral failing to mess up a statistical test and think the election is stolen, or at least any more than every other mistake (and tbh they might all be). But it's still unfortunate.
curious_straight_ca
9d ago
The situation is symmetric though. The union's doing this exactly because it has the negotiating power to extract profits for its members! They already make double what the average menial laborer makes and want to double it again.
Also, the margins aren't increasingly thin. Stock prices (discounted future profits) keep going up, and stuff keeps getting cheaper. The things that aren't getting cheaper are often an illusion (healthcare is more expensive mostly because we're using more of it, education's getting more expensive because ... people want more of it, and price isn't tied to anything). Housing's bad, but you can't win everything.
curious_straight_ca
9d ago
curious_straight_ca
9d ago
I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
curious_straight_ca
9d ago
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
In 2016 it seemed like we were tantalizingly close to a world where self-driving cars were commonplace. I remember people arguing that young children probably wouldn't ever have driver's licenses because autonomous vehicles would completely dominate the roads by the time they were old enough to drive. Now here we are, almost a decade later, and this reality seems further away than it did in 2016.
You can order a self-driving taxi in SF right now, though.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
The whole premise behind science fiction is that it might actually happen as technology advances. Space travel and colonizing other planets is physically possible, and will likely happen sometime in the next million years if we don't all blow up first. The models are now much better at both writing and college mathematics than the average human. They're not there yet, but they're clearly advancing, and I'm not sure how you can think it's not plausibly they pass us in the next hundred or so years?
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Their actions indicate that they don’t take the whole thing seriously.
then you would be advocating for the government to seize control of OpenAI’s datacenters effective immediately
They (as in LW-ish AI safety people / pause ai) are directly advocating for the government to regulate OpenAI and prevent them from training more advanced models, which I think is close enough for this
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public image
I don't think this is it. Investors would greatly prefer to invest in a for-profit company, and they had to hack around the nonprofit structure to. I don't remember hearing about how OpenAI had an easier time getting access to data than other AI cos due to its nonprofit status. And while they've gotten some use out of the nonprofit status, I don't think it was large enough to matter, and may have been entirely counteracted by people criticizing them for acting like a for-profit while being a nonprofit. I think they weren't really expecting how much capital frontier AI development would require, and sort of genuinely believed in the premise of a nonprofit creating AGI because of how important AGI is.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I feel like posters would have a bunch of interesting cultural commentary and tangents based on the story. It's a big story because it's drama you can gawk at involving notable people that a bunch of people already disliked, not because it's important or anything.
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
How have we not discussed the nuzzi/RFK drama yet?
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
out of the hundreds of millions of phones sold, i'm confident several have! here's one on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTjy2eFHzRc
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
$common_brand phones in general? All sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons, have taken them apart and carefully looked at the insides. If there was a significant amount of explosive material, it would've been noticed.
My phone, specifically? I don't, of course. Just like I don't know that I don't have a stalker who's about to murder me, and I don't know the CIA doesn't have cameras in my house! Both of which seem more plausible.
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
I don't think it's unsustainable, we could use solar for all our current energy consumption if we had to.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
whoops deleted
in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.
the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!
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