curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
14hr ago
Thanks for posting, I liked reading it.
Social stratification seems unlikely, analogous to predicting only the rich will have advanced computing technology, meanwhile they use iphones and gpt4-turbo just like we do.
I think the hormone balancing part is very confused, intelligent people adapt their behavior to circumstances in complicated ways and hormones don't just generically modify behavior because it has to coexist / interact with the former
In general, concern about this sort of thing past a few generations is kind of obviated by AGI I think.
There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment. The tradeoff is more caning vs weeks. I'm not actually sure it's on the pareto frontier. Time in jail sucks in a way you can't shrug off, it's burning time you never get back, whereas pain is just pain, it goes away.I think a most people would just shrug off the pain and do it again, unless the pain was bad enough it corresponded to a lasting injury. (And then you get into things that aren't just 'not-progressive' they're just 'obviously evil' from the usual perspective like using medical science to create a drug that causes extreme pain without permanent damage!)
I think swiftness and consistency of enforcement is much more important than the kind of enforcement, anyway. Even if organized retail theft had no punishment at all, cops just grabbed you, returned the stuff, and dropped you off an hour away, it'd quickly stop because there'd be no benefit.
curious_straight_ca
15hr ago
The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world
Is it? It it good, for the millions of hungry and displaced Sudanese, that it's not administered by a western government? It's worth thinking carefully about. Sure, re-education camps and censorship are not great. But you named empire, more generally. Even given the authoritarianism, you'd probably rather live in China than in Sudan. It's easy to say you value freedom, but how many lives should be sacrificed on that altar? Africans would probably be closer to freedom, in a positive sense, if the transition to self-rule had happened in a more orderly fashion, or not happened at all. And those with power in Western countries like you do not find re-education camps appealing, and so probably wouldn't implement them.
curious_straight_ca
15hr ago
Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.
The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.
curious_straight_ca
15hr ago
Perhaps government actions are often arbitrary? Maybe the person who did the former has different values, and has a different job, than the person who did the latter?
curious_straight_ca
15hr ago
Please explain to me how the existence of a single "government affiliated kids BDSM club" is evidence they don't want people "making and distributing porn independently of party control"? Homemade, freely available porn gets billions of views every day on reddit and twitter, and of course there are many dedicated porn sites.
To be explicit, your reasoning is deeply flawed and your conclusions are nonsensical, it's like a rdrama comment. It's the 'one single coherent actor is behind every single news headline that annoys me and that thing is the PedoNazis' theory of politics
curious_straight_ca
16hr ago
Obviously something else happened! Industry, newspaper, modernity, computer. And yet. Is it so implausible that the prophet that spoke to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden with love has something to do with progressivism? And is a break with "savagery"?
curious_straight_ca
22hr ago
They're saying that ideas latent in Christianity, deeper currents that Christianity just represents an early emanation of - caring more for the downtrodden, poor, and weak than the strong, caring more about peace and salvation than greatness and power - are to blame for 'cucking Whites'. And that returning to Christianity won't solve that core problem. So this doesn't rebut their argument at all.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
No. The claim that lifting and combat sports make you politically right wing is just untrue in my experience. It seems true in online communities with beliefs that encourage both lifting weights and right-wing political beliefs, but if I exclude that from the anecdotal sample of people I know and control for background there's not much correlation.
You've given us a picture of poverty. Is this painting social realism, a realistic and detailed study, or is it a cartoon collage of unrepresentative impressions?
Jumping straight from two YouTube videos to a diagnosis of social ills is, you'd think, a bad sign. What blows up on YouTube selects hard for being interesting, surprising, and generally stimulating. Youths stealing cars and livestreaming it, that's interesting! People who make decent money but waste it all embarrass themselves, pass the popcorn, not representative.
Evidence? What policies, which people? The second youtube channel certainly isn't an example (the guests seem to make about average income and just spend poorly, hardly 'sucking endless resources'), and the former are just a particularly newsworthy example of teenage criminals.
$350/day is not at all representative of the money the govt spends on illegal immigrants per day, you know about it specifically because it's shockingly high (and that's money spent on "services", not money transferred to them), so it's not really a useful way to understand how unfettered illegal immigration is "strangling poverty-stricken America", considering it's specifically in NYC.
This is the idea behind things like the EITC and work incentives!
There's something to the idea that a strong state should directly attempt to change the culture in the culture of the criminal underclass, but there's little in the way of good diagnosis or treatment here, "make them go work at amazon" isn't enough, the youth already have plenty of financial incentive to do so.
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