curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Come on, are we really supposed to believe that every new account with only a few past comments that makes a post about some dissident right current thing, from the perspective of a liberal, who definitely disagrees with the thing he's posting, and that always writes with the same tone, are all unrelated? This doesn't happen for any other topic.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Ok I clearly should've written more than one sentence. Yes, that is what I meant, and we should also restrict the president's pardon power to not apply to their relatives.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
something can be 'ridiculous' as a result of its content, not its social context
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask
it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes, and it's very reasonable and useful
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Okay but we're putting the heavy drinker or the cat in the position of commander in chief of the United States military! That's bad. Like, if the surgeon operating on you is drinking a 'normal amount' at 2am the night before, you should be concerned about that whether or not he's a mormon.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't understand your argument - military spending isn't socially useless because you'd get invaded if you didn't do it, it's directly useful for the security of the world. There's no action we could take to get to a 'better' world without military spending. (Also, power and the ability to use force are good.) Whereas you could just ban crypto.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
... look, if I wanted to see posts like this, there are hundreds of thousands of them on crypto twitter. I come here for a higher standard of quality, and your post probably breaks the 'low effort' rule.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
IMO memecoins are significantly worse than expensive collectibles because they allow, and the community encourages, normal people who aren't that smart or careful with their money to put in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions into these coins, and then to attempt to dump your bags on other people who are more gullible and less quick before the price drops. And the creator's taking a cut of all that.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on
I mean, subtle people can take different positions on different parts of the trans issue. One part is - are "trans" people really, in any sense, "actually women" - are they typically male or female in terms of psychology, the "brain"? Are they literally "women trapped in a man's body"? Even if not, do they at least have strong and deeply set desires to be the other gender, such that not satisfying them inevitably leads to pain and suffering?
And another part is - even if you don't believe any of that, even if you think it's just a weird social phenomenon caused by something like the modern social environment being inhospitable to real masculinity, lack of exercise for youth leading to low testosterone, xenoestrogens - you can still believe that the kind of person who thinks they are trans should transition, and live as a woman. Because it's the best option for them, or because they want to.
I think Scott probably is concealing, or at least being evasive about, some beliefs in the first category. But I think he's solidly progressive in the second. (I'm anti on both, even though I find most anti arguments generally bad)
Also, there are a lot of trans people in the rationalist community, so I think Scott has a lot of trans friends, so given his previously stated aversion to conflict believing or stating those people aren't their claimed gender, or shouldn't be trans, is something that might be tough, if he was otherwise inclined to believe that.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
The minute, or hour, after he posted it was definitely a good time to buy SOL. Now ... probably still is a good time, but not necessarily because of Trump, more because the momentum in the crypto ecosystem seems to be behind it.
But this entire exercise illustrates how, IMO, speculative cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum, socially useless activity that should be at least shameful, if not illegal. Your profit on SOL or BTC isn't coming from 'transforming the financial system', it's coming from the kind of people who are buying Trumpcoin. That's not to say that cryptocurrency overall is bad, blockchains are cool and the current crypto financial system has a lot of advantages over tradfi by virtue of being native to modern tech, but that doesn't justify the speculation.
Donald Trump launched a shitcoin!. Trump Memes - $TRUMP - on Solana. It has a market cap of $5B, comparable to actual company $DJT, and a fully diluted value of $29B. For those who are unfamiliar, a 'shitcoin' or 'memecoin' is a term for a tradeable token that lives on a blockchain, like Ethereum or Solana, that doesn't make a claim to have value or future profits, and whose price relies on a large number of retail traders who think it'll go even higher, or that it's funny. Trump Memes joins coins like Shiba Inu, Fartcoin, Pepe, and Dogwifhat, and is now #4 for market cap. They function to redistribute huge amounts of wealth from gullible crypto enthusiasts to the token developers, smart traders, and people who happen to see it first. And, of course, 80% of all Trump tokens that exist were allocated to the coin's developers, locked up for some time period.
FT: The president-elect of the US is promoting a shitcoin?
Is this good for crypto? It doesn't hurt to have a friendly President - Trump and his team were embracing crypto, planning crypto-friendly executive orders, designating it as a 'national priority', and even seriously considering a 'strategic bitcoin reserve'. It might be bad, in the long run, though - it's the perfect setup for the next Dem administration to crack down on crypto. Or even a bipartisan crackdown, especially once Trump is too old to be politically relevant, or just dead from old age, and the grip of his personality over the Republican party is gone.
And, what a thing to do a few days before your inauguration. As much has people do irrationally hate Trump, I kind of buy the liberal claim that, because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else. Joe Biden's done a lot of bad things, but if he blatantly scammed his supporters for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the response from his allies would be a lot stronger!
I don't like the impersonal process-oriented bureaucracy, the expert elite, the oligarchy behind democracy, whatever you call it. They are hypocritical, corrupt, dysfunctional, whatever else. But they're not infinitely that. Society still more or less works. If the alternative (whether that's just more MAGA candidates winning elections, or a moldbuggian new regime) is concentrating power in strong individuals, and this is the kind of individual that smart right-wingers - empirically - chose to concentrate power in, is that really better?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
rule-by-executive-order
Because EOs are just not that powerful of a tool. They don't override laws, and there are a lot of laws constraining agencies.
The other stuff doesn't have much to do with democracy? It's bad policy.
It seems to me that there are a lot of actual threats to democracy, and this does not even come close to topping the list.
If we assume the election fraud claims are false, Trump attempting to invalidate an election against him is worse than that other stuff? Democracy is a tradition, of peaceful transfer of power every so many years, and Trump tried to break it!
(It is reasonable to not like democracy. It did, after all, give us Trump twice, punctuated by someone too old.)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The big issue is the co-occurence of the 1/6 riot and the fake electors thing and the attempt to get Mike Pence to not certify the election. I agree it wasn't a real risk to democracy, but if you believe the continuation of democracy is desirable, that should be concerning, when it looks like the leadership of a major party isn't invested in following election results (yes, this depends on a judgement that election fraud allegations are false, imo they are, and we've discussed that to death and they're just not very smart), and is willing to play along with admittedly feeble attempts at violence. (And if you believe democracy isn't desirable, the childishness of the half-assed attempt to overturn it shouldn't be exciting either)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
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.
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