cuwurious_strag_CA
No bio...
User ID: 190
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Not what your post was about, but as a response to the claims of 'climate anxiety' - destroying the planet or something - there's scott's post https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids or the much longer and more detailed book-length report from the EA forum, "Emissions are likely to be lower than once thought", "The amount of carbon we could burn in a worst-case scenario is also much lower than once thought", "The amount of carbon we could burn in a worst-case scenario is also much lower than once thought", "Average living standards will probably continue to rise", "Direct impacts fall well short of human extinction", "Indirect risks are under-researched but now seem fairly low", etc. It still claims climate change is bad, but clearly implies it's not one of the worst problems 'humanity' faces.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
"They were punished lightly by almost any historical standard" is worth noting. (but @ "perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating", J6 rioters were more enthusiastic trump supporting republicans with some Q people, as opposed to altright or 'new right' or neoreactionaries, afaict)
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience
Wrong in both ways, imo? EAs are very emotionally moved by the dying african children, generally. Hard to argue for with a source, i guess. Closest I can try - EAs like Alexander Berger (open phil co-CEO), for instance, donated a kidney to someone he'd never met to help save their life. That doesn't feel like an action you take with 'absence of emotional salience'. Another one would be the strong moral sense EAs have about how important their work is, to the point that burning out of EA because it was totalizing / took over your life is a somewhat-common issue. (although I would not argue that's a criticism of EA itself.)
But - every large movement that's ever had strong 'emotional salience' combined with strong moral teachings has had many, many prominent figures who have broken those teachings or done other bad things. Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, etc. Christians, progressives, conservatives, people of any other group - commit crimes, scam all the time. Sam doesn't say much about utilitarianism/EA other than 'some of its followers often do very bad things', which is true for any set of morals. One can say utilitarianism/EA isn't necessarily better at preventing misconduct than other belief systems, but one can't say it's worse, absent ... any evidence of that - and it never claimed to be better, just that donating money to starving children was worthwhile. And if you compare the outcomes to other crypto exchanges that've collapsed (there are many) - hundreds of millions to 'effective projects' + crypto scams versus ... hundreds of millions to luxury goods plus crypto scam?
"I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience" is compared to " Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point", yet
The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place.
How can you seriously claim this "lacks emotional salience"? drowning child you are personally causing to die? really?
Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought
christianity, again, doesn't actually stop this from happening. christians constantly "sin". plus, utilitarianism/EA contests your deontological claim about what "we ought" to do, and effectively, the local wholesome 'feed the homeless' drive really does just save fewer lives than malaria nets, so how on earth is the former more christian?
I think half of the 'EA isn't morally salient' claim comes from things like - donating lots of money made from facebook stocks to global health charities. In one sense, it's incredibly technical and complicated, and isn't a group emoting session around an altar - more like a spreadsheet of estimated disability-adjusted life years saved. But even given the deep philosophical problems the spreadsheet has, the money is still going to global health causes, and the EAs seem to care emotionally about the recipients.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Really? You don't have a prior that someone with this disposition is ipso facto an unserious person and therefore temperamentally unsuited for high office? Because I certainly have that prior.
"prior" is obviously from bayesian statistics, where you update a "prior" distribution with new information, producing a "posterior" distribution. The "prior" may be that most people who go to night clubs or get drunk with models are unsuited for high office. But that's just a prior - she already is PM, her actions and history tell you enough about how good of a PM she is that that prior distribution doesn't matter much. In bayes-terms, you have enough new information about her, instead of her being one of the hundred million people who go to clubs or get drunk, that the "prior" doesn't mean much and bears little resemblance to the posterior - but even that's kind of a distraction.
But even that prior doesn't really make sense, tbh, can you try to justify it more?
Russian performance in the war doesn't exactly scream competence, so it would be surprising, if they pulled something like this off, so deep in NATOs turf.
Why would russian competence at large-scale mobilization or logistics or strategy have anything, at all, to do with their competence at an individual sabotage mission? If russia was, say, Chad in africa, you'd expect them to be related - but russia is clearly capable of maintaining nuclear weapons, spy satellites etc, and the failures of the war don't necessarily suggest they'd fail at that. That doesn't have much to do with anything.
No idea if anyone did it, or who, at all, but that approach isn't useful.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The unpredictability and variability of the stock market over multi-year time periods is well known though, the argument is it averages out over multiple decades and significantly increases, because you're reallocating resources to investment instead of consumption etc. a multidecade graph of spy (just google spy) shows many, many 3-year periods that are down overall!
A coordinated effort? By whom? Why?
There are more issues with the constant sexualization of women. One is that it fucks up your ability to trust people. How can you know when someone is genuinely interested in you, or is faking it?
If sex exists, at all, then this will be a problem for women (and rich/attractive men, and in business, and many other places). It has nothing to do with some idea of 'sexualization'. E.g. - does the hijab desexualize women?
Two, there will absolutely be people that will ignore your other qualities in favor of sex
How is this even a problem? If you're emmy noether, people won't ignore your genius in favor of sex. If they're ignoring said qualities - it's usually because they would anyway.
Additionally, I don't think most women really understand just how invisible you can feel being a man - on almost every level. Personally, I think this affects us in a really deep, underlying way
This is a common sentiment - but, what? I'm male, have friends, do a variety of things at work and outside of work, am never invisible, nobody I interact with IRL is really invisible in any sense. Yeah, I'd be invisible if I was unskilled, uninteresting, unfunny, etc - but that's good, and an interaction or conversation without any of the former would be empty and worthless anyway.
I can say for myself at least (and I think a decent number of other men) that being horny can feel like you're being 'tricked' by your own body
I mean, if sex was worthless, you would be tricked, but it's just a selectively advantageous, mostly fair evaluation of the usefulness of having children.
There's a power that you feel a woman can unilaterally hold over you in a way you can't hold them, which can lead you to doing foolish things
Women also often do ""irrational"" (making a sex/sexual desire-related mistake isn't any more or less irrational than making a normal "intellectual" mistake) things over men, and also very strongly desire men in certain contexts, so there isn't really a stark difference here
I think every woman understands that they intrinsically have value.
Well, every man also just-as-intrinsically has value, in the sense of labor. Almost any man, or woman, can get a job and be paid. There's value! And society and the state respects this in all sorts of ways. Or just being buds with other men of equivalent value / status / whatever. There's also welfare! There are multiple senses of 'value', indeed a sense for every possible activity, desire, and these aren't directly comparable. Just saying 'men have value, women don't' is, at best, an imprecise metaphor, and at worst just wrong. Also, people treat women better because of a combination of the biological role of women and universalism - if we go back to Rome, is it really fair to say that "women intrinsically have value, whereas if you're a man nobody cares", given the severe difference in legal status between the two?
the flip-side, as a man, you are essentially worthless until proven otherwise. Nobody cares
Yeah, but almost all men can prove otherwise in plenty of contexts, so this doesn't really matter.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help? Pair that with the frequent overuse of antipsychotics. And the life-denying nature of most of the 'therapy' treatments - convincing someone that, actually, self-care via burgers and 'live, laugh, love' is the true purpose in life to avert suicide isn't that much better when the person was, in part, depressed due to the initial (true) hollowness of that.
(Obviously, the person who euthanized themselves in the OP didn't have anything resembling a good reason to do so. But grandparent's suggestion that 'if you want to kill yourself, just do it' has some merit - one's instinctive desire not to is just evolutionary knowledge of how useful & powerful life is, and abandoning that should require understanding and confronting that personally, at least)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
archive.org should have a premium subscription that makes your requests take <200ms i'd pay at least 100/month for it
this shows "12395 Fashy Goys" (i.e. reddit subscribers, the reddit skin lets you rename it, often subs do themed ones) . Although from browsing said spaces for a while, there are a lot more people that who are alt-right or similar overall.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
one of the most boring profession in existence
Elaborate? Programming is very varied. People are different, but while I can see a physics grad disliking copypaste webdev stuff, most physics people I know find something like neural net interpretability or datastructures or programming language design interesting? (not really specific suggestions just illustrating)
Also, a physics degree is good evidence that you're very smart and capable of doing complex work, and a variety of employers that pay well look for physics grads (although often for coders).
Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?
The million normal / below-average people who jumped on crypto not because of an interest in decentralization, experimental financial systems, or more practical applications for cryptography, but because the number went up and it put money in their bank account. Someone's buying and bagholding all the shitcoins after the bots and traders pump them.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The person's claims, to the extent they're coherent at all, are a combination of: "the left wants to do medical research on fetuses" - nobody on 'the left' cares - "planned parenthood is incentivized to cause more abortions because they get monetary compensation for selling fetuses" - when you combine the frequency of said tissue donation and the compensation, it is not relevant to their bottom line.
This is probably the most complete deplatforming anyone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet has ever experienced
Statements like this usually aren't true. I guess if you take 'deplatforming' to mean only this very specific context, but consider how 'freedom of speech' was a much less-held value anwyhere in something like the 18th or 19th centuries than it was either today or in the 20th, and consider the regular 'censorship' (and the sort of censorship might vary a lot) of newspapers back then, worse has likely happened. Josh could just be put in jail!
I believe that KF has significant value in the culture war for the red team
KF focuses on the most degenerate, spergy, and loud creatures on the internet, though. While what's wrong with kathryn gibes or chris-chan is related to what's wrong with 'the left' in some senses i guess, there's a lot of difference - and learning more about the bizzare and retarded exploits of the recurring characters is genuinely useful, by characterizing the ways human action can go wrong and can be surprising (which is arguably why it's funny), seeing 'crazy ugly trans person threatens suicide, posts newest medical mishap' doesn't do that much to characterize progressives or trans as a whole. So ... what does KF actually do for the red team, exactly? That people are willing to directly make fun of individual weak, stupid, degenerate people directly, and can see examples of others doing so, is valuable in a sense - but how does this translate directly to a 'red win', whether that means more R votes or neoreaction, and how is it different than past magazines or communities doing something similar (which did not translate to wins)?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Race realism, killing the civil rights act, and 'tough on crime' without slurs is going to polarize more than that with slurs?
When the seams of angry young men are mined out
"angry young men" aren't really an independent class and that doesn't describe most of the specific things driving people to the far-right - but taken literally, no they won't, because every year a new 1/100th of the population is born, and a new 1/100th turns 18!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women. (in current modern conditions, upon which that depends very finely. no idea if hunter gatherers masturbate or how often, etc). Or they'd just torrent it. A better argument would probably be directly against masturbation as opposed to for banning it.
Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself
Why isn't this also true of masturbation? It orients one towards women because it's images of them!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Reminds of a graham factor article arguing something similar, that the US is ineffective at catching criminals because of civil rights/due process protection and thus needs more severe punishments.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
it's a copy of the reddit feature to send someone a wholesome validation mental health support / suicide hotline phone number, to use as a joke. from the rdrama codebase. doesn't matter
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts
They aren't any moreso than anyone else - there are a lot of poor drug addicts, being smart doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a drug addict, and the high levels of intelligence require a lot of randomness / non-additive genetic variation / other unknown (non-shared-environment) factors, so children of the smartest aren't as good on average, even though they're still smart. Coming apart at the tails etc, once you've milked all you can from currently-existing additive variation you can only get a lot better with something else.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
And the argument "The CIA/NSA are malicious and spying on everyone" are often expounded by sane people, but "The CIA/NSA put a camera in my bagel" isn't, and "death con 3" seems more the latter than kevin macdonald or ron unz
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?
It sounds like you're referring to CBT here? Freudian psychoanalysis isn't really this. Notably, freud still "works". Also, EDMR works. At least freud, while absurd, is complicated, moderately-interesting in its absurdity, but EDMR seems like something out of scientology. And scientology's methods would, probably, succeed in a RCT just like cbt and edmr do.
Which begs the question - do CBT's claimed methods of changes of thought processes actually do anything, or are they just scientific sounding gloss to the same combination of social pressure and faux friendship as two hundred years ago? "the only reason why cristal therapy and angel therapy are not psychological therapies approved by the APA, is because they are lacking evidence of their efficacy. But this lack could easily be fixed if we really wanted to." - if crystal and angel therapy really do work as well as psychology, surely that's an indictment of psychology.
If you expect 'evil' to mean 'they are pushing diversity because they want to undermine western civilization, the truth, beauty, God, country, mankind, and everything, because they are hitler satan nazis', then ... nobody is like that. Obviously they think what they're doing is good and will benefit their friends (and, because they are progressives/universalists/etc, "their friends" mean everyone). Everyone has all sorts of good-sounding, and even partially true, motivations - hitler, so did stalin, so did pol pot, so did the mongols, etc. Even active malice against something like jews is justified by their claimed subversion of truth, beauty, the race, etc. And if that's evil, it's evil because ... of what it causes, not some clear and obvious property of 'evilness'. (It can be justified that certain subgroups of the population are poisonous and toxic, need to be locked up and kept away from untainted people - for all sorts of infections diseases that was literally true. And, it can even be true as a matter of "inborn traits" - wild animals! So you can't just categorize that as 'evil, because that's what evil means'.) The "crazy person who wants to kill everyone and destroy the world because he is mean and hates the innocent joy of diverse babies" villian archetype exists because he's the simplest character to cast the "brave resistance poor weak underdog" against, and because the universalist claim is that killing people is bad, so people who do it do so because they want to kill everyone. If your enemies are evil (which they can be), it's because the effects of their actions are bad, not because they "intend" to be evil. So, they're stupid and they're evil, not one or the other.
Like, what does the 'evil', in the sense in which it's opposed to 'being mistaken', take on what the woke execs / writers are doing look like? What is it that they intend, maliciously, to happen as a result of casting more black people or showing off sassy strong independent women?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Yeah, but those people shouldn't do that. KKKILL_ALL_blahblah doesn't actually do anything, or affect anyone, it really is just text, and one can just laugh or ignore it. It genuinely doesn't matter!
And... it isn't about a generic, reasonable sense of how harmful something is, there's clearly a larger, disproportionate factor - reddit banned /r/waterniggas for the soft n-word, and /r/legoyoda for vaguely racist memes, but still has /r/opiates, /r/cocaine, /r/heroin, /r/meth, etc. And - this isn't even entirely left-coded, /r/ageplaypenpals got taken down despite being entirely fictional because p*do stuff is considered to be terrible while something like /r/rapekink, despite describing things like likely-fictional (although "All stories here must be actual events told by the person with the victim's perspective" is in the sidebar) "rape-bait".
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I would not be overly surprised if they found themselves in a situation where Scott and 10 other high-decouplers uselessly decry this new trend of EAers embezzling for malaria nets
The entire EA forum is filled with people saying 'this is bad and evil and disgusting EA would never support this we made a severe mistake in blindly trusting SBF we deeply apologize we must be very careful to make sure this doesn't happen again'. And those posts are now the top posts of all time on the EA forum. They're also explicitly saying things like 'utilitarianism taken too far can look like this which is why we endorse pluralism and moderation', and they've said things like that beforehand. So I don't think the 'allergic to 2nd order effects' criticism applies!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid.
Isn't that to be expected, though, don't they have the same for the flu?
The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate
But the military has had vaccine mandates for a variety of vaccines for centuries?
In general, if something mandates a flu vaccine, mandating a covid vaccine too is expected. So that'd also explain colleges.
Anyway, his mistake was taking a bet saying 'all mandates' (what criteria) when he meant 'most mandates', there are many cities / states / countries / institutions, and many of them have very slow bureaucracies or processes, so even if all of them intended in some sense to repeal something, one might stick around for a while.
Given that twitter is headquartered in the US, china censoring 'discourse' in the US would be a defcon 1 national security event and something the media of all colors would be all over, elon seeming to be a patriotic american, and china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us, I don't think this is a large threat. It probably won't happen - and even if it did, the response from the US, including the "sjw bluechecks", would be significant.
More options
Context Copy link