curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Isn't it? Trump, 50 R senators, and a R majority of the House could pretty much immediately nuke the filibuster and repeal/revoke all of that. They're not going to, and that's, depending on your perspective, the checks and balances working, or the checks and balances failing, but they could.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Understand that for the last fifty years the administrative state has run amok with functionally no checks.
Can you give a specific example of this you think is representative? I think there are a lot of possible criticisms of government bureaucracy, but they are very 'checked' by congress and the courts. Courts limit or grant power to agencies all the time, and Congress for the most part creates them and grants them any of the power they have. Agencies can't do most things they want to do, and they have to work within the complicated game the courts and legislature and president present them. That's the checks and balances doing their thing. The output is obviously not ideal, but 'bad outcome' doesn't mean 'no checks or balances'!
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
(I meant to do a bigger post about this but never got around to it) Sure, Hegseth is a "warfighter". He's still not qualified, though. I'm not talking about cheating on his wife, and cheating on his second wife, both of which blatantly violate the UCMJ, and although that's already very selectively enforced, this really can't help. Nor am I talking about his reported alcoholism (also a UCMJ issue), which many sources had claimed led to him being forced out of leading a veterans organization. Nor am I talking about allegations he abused his wife, nor allegations of sexual assault (which I don't think had enough evidence to be worth considering here anyway). All of those are modifiers - things that might make you not hire someone who you'd otherwise hire. It's just, directly, his lack of experience. Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions. There's just no strong reason to pick him instead of many other very qualified candidates. Fox news host?
I agree with criticisms of Biden's Lloyd Austin pick - he's obviously a diversity hire. When you pick the best black person, instead of the best person, you'll get a worse person, and in critical leadership positions that matters! It'd matter even without HBD, with which the best black person will usually be significantly worse than the best person. But, if you believe that, that it's very important to pick the best person, how do you get Hegseth? Austin was at least qualified:
Shortly after brigade command, he served as Chief, Joint Operations Division, J-3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. His next assignment, in 2001, was as Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADC-M), 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia. As the ADC-M, he helped lead the division's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[9] Leading the fight from the front, Austin traveled the 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad in his command and control vehicle. The division reached Baghdad and secured the city.[14][15] Austin was awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third highest award for valor, for his actions as commander during the invasion.
On December 8, 2006, Austin was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.[17] In February 2008, Austin became the second highest ranking commander in Iraq, taking command of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I). As commander of MNC-I, he directed the operations of approximately 152,000 joint and coalition forces across all sectors of Iraq.[18] He was the first African American general officer to lead a corps-sized element in combat.[15] Austin assumed the mission during the period when the Surge forces were drawing down. He expertly oversaw the responsible transition of forces out of the country while ensuring that progress continued on the ground.
Austin became the commander of CENTCOM on March 22, 2013, after being nominated by President Obama in late 2012.[37][38][39] Austin was preceded as CENTCOM commander by General James Mattis, whom Austin would later succeed as secretary of defense. In his capacity as CENTCOM Commander, General Austin oversaw all U.S. troops deployed and major U.S. military operations around the area of Middle-East and Central and South Asia. The area consisted of 20 countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon.[40]
Whereas Hegseth 'served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as civil-military operations officer' and then 'returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain' in Afghanistan. And then went into politics, and then became a Fox News host. All that should be respected, but qualify you to be secdef?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms
If average American political consumers started writing walls of text here, we would (and should) start moderating them. Doing the same to AI is fine.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I think the chance is nonzero because Trump's sometimes unpredictable, but it's quite unlikely. The US has the technical ability to do it, sure, nobody outside can stop us. But it's a terrible idea politically. Just the deaths from Afghanistan withdrawal - which was a popular campaign promise - seriously hurt Biden, sending American troops to die to develop waterfront Gaza property will stop appealing to voters when Americans start dying. It cuts strongly against the 'no foreign wars' wing of the new GOP. It sounds like yet another Iraq or Afghanistan. Nearby Arab countries hate the idea, rightly recognizing it taking in millions of Gazans as a serious threat to their security and even sovereignty. And I don't think anyone other than Trump or Kushner in American politics really want it.
And all of that's a pity, because, if implemented competently, it's a great idea, and one of the only things that could properly resolve the conflict, and lead to a good outcome under liberal values. Move almost all of Gaza's population to a new area where we've built a bunch of buildings and control security and the flow of goods in and out makes suicide bombing and terrorist resistance a lot harder. And then, without a civilian population, you can obliterate whatever of Hamas remains underground with less collateral damage. Israel's Arab population proves that, whatever their average IQ, Palestinians aren't destined to be economically net-negative, so if the culture of the new settlement was managed well enough it could become self-sustaining economically reasonably quickly. This would all, of course, involve truly massive expenditures of money and manpower, and also something existing America would fail badly at if they tried, but if one really, really cares about the plight of suffering Gazans or Israeli victims of terrorism, it's the best solution. It's very unfortunate to be forced out of your ancestral homeland, but it's less bad than just dying or perpetual conflict. This is also plan moldbug.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This is the thing I usually say about moderation, but - the problem with most AI posts isn't that they're AI, it's that they're bad. It is, in principle, possible to use AI to help you write interesting posts, I saw a perfectly good one on Twitter written with DeepSeek recently. But AI makes it much easier to quickly spit out something low-effort and uninteresting, so people do a lot of that.
The thing is, it's fine to have a rule that says 'no bad posts'. Indeed, the 'avoid low-effort participation' rule works for this purpose. So I don't think we should discourage AI overall, but just discourage using AI to make bad posts. And similarly, if someone's posting thousands of words of vacuous text every day, mods should feel free to discourage them even if it's artisanal hand-made text.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This article presents yet another explanation
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
It's something I've heard from people who work with classified information. I'm not advocating for all that to be declassified, because it's hard for a very large bureaucracy to make precise per-document decisions about what should and shouldn't be secret, so it makes sense to classify more rather than less. But it does mean that "USAID has classified documents" isn't something you can really draw inferences from like OP did without a lot more information.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
But he undid the canada+mexico tariffs before they went into effect! I don't see how that's showing he's willing to eat the consequences.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I don't understand the claimed contradiction.
So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.
I do not see any claims that Rubio being director is illegal. Sen Andy Kim claims "This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress.", and I agree that significantly changing or removing it might be illegal, but not Rubio taking over.
Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material?
A lot of very unimportant things are 'classified'. A very small percent of 'classified material' are things that'd be genuinely bad if they got out. I don't think this is significant. The DOGE people accessing classified USAID information thing is probably similarly insignificant.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I think if anything it conveys he'll back down in exchange for small concessions to avoid hurting markets? Like he could have just said 'hey, commit to doing this trade deal or tariffs go on in a month'. Instead we got this.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
The basic problem Trump/Musk have is that trying to defund government agencies you dislike isn't new. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to prevent Nixon from doing it, and the Supreme Court upheld it. If Treasury stops sending the checks, which they will imo, they'll just get enjoined and then resume sending them. More details: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/simulating-doge, he thinks SCOTUS will uphold the Impoundment Control Act if it comes to them and that seems reasonable to me.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This doesn't meet the effort standard for a toplevel post imo. No links, no analysis.
As far as I can tell nothing Canada or Mexico have agreed to is particularly meaningful. Mexico seems to have already had 10k troops on the border. And Canada's fentanyl czar isn't a win because we don't have a Canadian fentanyl problem. I thought the fentanyl stuff was supposed to be a pretext to renegotiate the trade agreements Canada and Mexico are supposedly screwing us on. That hasn't happened yet.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap
Where did you get this idea from? I don't see any strong reason to assume this will fully happen within the next decade, or that the funding for the PEPFAR replacement will be as large as PEPFAR currently is. It might happen, but it also might not happen. And in the meantime, a lot of medical treatment won't be provided.
don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.
Because he was making a political joke on twitter. Please read his twitter bio: "I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns." He's made plenty of complicated arguments about EA on his blog. People are holding this tweet to a much higher standard than they would any other tweet because they really want to own the libs, but it's a fine tweet.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism
We spend around 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid. Scott is not saying we should give infinite money to foreigners. He is saying we should give a modest amount of money to foreigners. You inferred the infinite part.*
I do not think right-wingers are at all reasoning clearly about this. Like, Scott made a tweet. It was, in fact, a funny tweet. That tweet was not primarily designed to be a political argument. It was designed to be a joke. A joke around a political argument, one related to his position, sure. But it's still a joke.
His twitter bio says:
I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.
He, in the comments, endorses claims that you should care about your family members more than others, and that more of our budget should go to American citizens than foreigners. He clarifies that the tweet was meant to be an analogy to PEPFAR.
I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments. If they were saying "We should not send foreign aid to Africa, because this leads to more of them living, which is bad, because they are below average human beings and it's good for natural selection to operate on the species, and this is worth their suffering", I think that's a coherent opinion, one that Scott would have a complicated philosophical disagreement with. But they're not saying that. They're responding like Scott's asking them to let their child die for one in Africa. He's not
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Now is in fact the best time to post some LLM junk, given nobody'll read it! Asking an LLM to make a post for you just does not pass the effort rule.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
No source that unironically refers to the situation in Gaza as a genocide deserves to be taken seriously (so that throws Pasha's entire contribution in the bin).
"Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." and "Be charitable." are both rules for a reason, taking seriously the things people who disagree with you say is necessary for the kind of discussion we want here.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Peak oil
Solar and wind + batteries are providing an increasing fraction of our energy consumption, including things that used to require oil (electric cars). Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.
Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks,
Even if this is true, it's a solvable engineering problem.
we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars
There's a ton of lithium on the planet. The cost of mining it varies, so the cost of cars would go up if all oil disappeared, but that's not societal collapse.
Climate Change/Environmental Degradation
Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios. Even if 1 in 10 of the places on the planet people currently live were rendered uninhabitable ... they can just move, that wouldn't come even close to threatening civilization, much worse has happened.
Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture
A 50% IFR and rapidly spreading pandemic is theoretically possible, sure. But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.
Birthrate collapse
This one's actually a problem - technology can, and has, lowered fertility rates faster than evolution can raise them. AGI's coming sooner though!
I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
literalbanana from twitter has a more developed version of this argument against the way people interpret the placebo effect here: https://carcinisation.com/2024/11/13/a-case-against-the-placebo-effect/
I think that most measured 'placebo effect's in studies are of this type, but there's also a thing where people claim to feel medicine working in ways it actually isn't, or feel herbal remedies work, that was closer to the origin of the idea of the placebo effect and isn't just bad statistics or a simple trick
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I don't really think this meets the effort bar for toplevel posts. Give us background on what Patriot Front is, and avoid things that are just dunks like 'great replacement ins't happening fast enough', and 'based on apparently ... nothing?'.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
The style he writes in combined with the place it was cut off was confusing - he's not saying almost everyone's currently zero marginal product, he's saying that'd be true after AGI
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
The thing it's easy to miss when you read about eye-popping crimes in the news every few days is they're still very rare. Disaffected youth who've been expelled, people who've posted online that they kind of want to shoot up school/congress/whatever else, outnumber people who'll actually do that by like a thousand to one (I don't have a legible source for this, but I think it's intuitive). This isn't like shoplifting or selling drugs, where most of the crimes are committed by people who commit many crimes, and 'round them all up' is an effective approach - to actually prevent random incidents like this, you'd have to involuntarily commit a lot of people. And I don't think the tradeoff is worth it, especially since dying from terrorism-ish homicide or school shooting is much rarer than "normal" homicide, or getting hit by a car, or the many other reasons people die.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
The post doesn't, like, say anything? I went in expecting to see some argument that some nameable factions, groups, or at least twitter usernames hold some incorrect views, in ways related to nameable outside influences. Instead he just say that the current right are mouthpieces, and have been neutered, by interests. It's all fake. All a psyop to suppress the real right wing. Whatever that is. He links a few substacks, none of which appear to address this.
It's the kind of thing anyone can agree with. All the other guys are captured, and that's why they disagree with me. And in exactly the same sense it's uninformative and useless. Even if this was true, you couldn't do anything with it, without naming what tendencies are bad and who's funding who. 375 likes is a lot for substack though!
Also, if you're gonna ban evade, can you at least make more interesting posts?
I think there's still a significant meritocratic element left in the military! And that's not just credentials, those are roles he occupied where he did command a lot of people.
I wouldn't have complained if they'd picked, like, a very successful founder/CEO to modernize the military. That'd be great, actually. Instead they picked a Fox News host. "hopefully has innate competency" ... isn't very convincing tbh
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