daezor
2d ago
Once you have permanent groups that are not assimilating you can not unring that bell and will be stuck with poorer governance forever.
The question is, didn't this already happen 100+ years ago with the aforementioned "Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen"? The Jeffersonian ideal gave way to Tammany Hall, the Mafia, union politics, etc. - so we see that that assimilation project was not successful either. Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.
daezor
2d ago
If the Indians comprise 0.1% of the crowd but they just so happen to all be concentrated in one corner of the stadium, then this by itself is proof positive that they are unassimilated. What "assimilation" looks like is for each subgroup to be evenly spread throughout the population in proportion to its numbers, which is evidently not what's happening here.
I'm not saying that this even dispersal is what causes assimilation; rather, someone who is culturally assimilated will naturally find that their circle of acquaintances (such as the people they go to football games with) is representative of the population.
(I rather doubt that anyone on Twitter is making this argument. The interpretation that the whole crowd is 90% Indian is more provocative and thus more likely to go viral.)
daezor
8d ago
Isn't astrology fundamentally opposed to leftism because it denies the Blank Slate and asserts that the most important aspects of one's character are determined (dare I say "assigned") at birth?
daezor
10d ago
Doesn't receipt paper fade over time? Something to watch out for if you're using it for important recovery codes.
daezor
10d ago
Am I, and people like me, not also people? Your thinking here is shady. You talk about people but obscure massive variance between individuals. You are universalizing too quickly.
We're talking about broad trends here, not necessarily universals, just what is sufficiently popular to be reflected in policy under a democratic system. The people on this forum are certainly not representative of the general population. Indeed, this is what I'm claiming is the formative experience of "nerds" - finding that one's own preferences are inexplicably out of step with the mainstream, and a consequent desire to place oneself as far out of reach of the "mob" as possible (which, in the present discourse, is termed "anti-democracy" or "fascism").
daezor
12d ago
186 is the new upper-bound for the smallest gap that occurs infinitely often. It is conjectured that this value is in fact 2. But you can trivially prove that arbitrarily-large prime-free sequences exist (N!+2, N!+3, N!+4 ... N!+N).
daezor
12d ago
The below-quoted replies (to combine several threads into one) are glossing over a key question, which is: What differentiates between the two factions of nerds? Again, it's not an issue of nerds vs. popular kids; it's nerds vs. other nerds. The most strident voices against techno-fascism are themselves "nerds" by any definition. Many are autistic, and will say so right in their Tumblr/Bluesky bios. (And when you meet them in person, you can tell it's true.) They have prickly mannerisms and are not exactly "people persons". They are not generally from wealthy families or from poor families. They play a lot of video games. Etc.
I've tried to capture the distinction as "computer" vs. "theater" nerds, but even that feels incomplete. Many left-wing nerds are, in fact, technically proficient and may even work for tech companies (think: Rust developer with programming socks and Blåhaj); while many right-wing nerds are well-acquainted with the humanities, art, and literature (think: this forum).
And as I mentioned, there is no obvious demographic category that explains the divide either. There are white males on both sides, and non-whites on both sides. There are LGBT people on both sides.
So, we remain in need of an explanation for why some nerds go one way and some go the other way, and in particular, why the fight feels existential to both sides, like an actual ethnic conflict where your loyalty is determined genetically and so you have to stick with it through thick and thin. But if you're a nerd and you find yourself on the losing side of the Nerd War, can't you just... switch sides?
the leftists don't hate them for being rich, they hate them for being nerds
daezor
12d ago
The new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy has been making the rounds. In lieu of reading it, here's an NPR interview.
In his new book, journalist Gil Duran argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place.
At the core of this is a middle-school-cafeteria psychodrama that remains unresolved. The lived-experience of "computer nerds" is that of being instrumentally valuable to many, terminally valuable to none. As a result, anti-capitalist rhetoric that disparages money as a source of moral value is received by them as a personal attack. The computer nerd feels deep down that his earning-potential is the only thing he brings to the table in the status game; as far as he's concerned, his value on all other axes might as well be rounded off to zero.
Therefore, the computer nerds wants nothing more than to get away from all those teeming masses with their grabby hands who want to take all his stuff and leave him with nothing. If it takes moving to one of Balaji Srinivasan's seasteads, or to Elon Musk's space colony, then so be it.
they want to build zones to escape democracy altogether
A world that they fully control, a world where no one can question their authority and a world where they can exclude anyone they don't want
Huh? Is it a zone, or the whole world? There's a big difference - but hold on. That comic is the story of nerds simpliciter, not just computer nerds. And the people most outspoken against "The Nerd Reich" are also nerds - "theater nerds" to be precise. To continue the cafeteria picture, the theater nerds are (if anything) even more autistic, more put-upon, and more bullyable than the computer nerds, while the bullies themselves (the "jocks" and "popular kids") don't even figure in to the dialectic at all. So what's going on?
I guess it comes down to the different coping mechanisms each group employs. The theater nerds find solidarity with each other at least, whereas the computer nerds have no need for each other because they have their toys to play with, which can incidentally eke them out a living independent of anyone else. But the theater nerds have no such refuge, and so, being poor in both financial and social capital, have been forced over generations to build up an elaborate alternative system of social capital which is a lot more off-putting to outsiders but seems to form much deeper personal relationships within itself than any within the computer club. This, at least, levels the playing field between the two nerd factions somewhat.
But then, if some computer nerds start getting uppity and decide to form alternative solidarity groups of their own, now this upsets the balance. I suppose the theater nerds believe there's only so much space for nerds in this world, and so any ascendancy of computer nerds will leave less for them.
Honestly, I'm really just spinning a yarn at this point. There are a lot of holes in this story that I don't know how to patch up. In particular:
- The rhetoric is mostly aimed at tech billionaires, but then why do regular codemonkeys feel the need to defend them? After all, it's not like Mark Zuckerberg has any solidarity with you, Facebook Software Engineer #83,587.
- Where do race and other conventional "categories" fit into this? The anti-fascists attack the tech world as being "white supremacist", even though the tech world is largely Asian and Indian (a fact which the actual white supremacists never fail to point out).
- Whence comes this conflation of "exit" with "world domination"?
But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do. But what are those true reasons?
daezor
14d ago
I think this niche is filled nowadays not by any specific place, but by nomadic lifestyles in their various incarnations - perpetual tourism, van life, digital nomads, passport bros, etc. But by its very nature this can only be done by isolated individuals and never as a population-level movement. And so, I would surmise, the selection process that began 6,000 years ago has now come to an end.
daezor
14d ago
Americans are not this. We traditionally have a big contrarian and rebellious streak. Genetically I came across something called the Wanderlust gene and you can find it at high rates in Americans of European descent versus the population groups they came from in Europe.
My working model is that this selection effect was in constant operation from the dispersal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans - that the more peaceable and agreeable people would stay put, while the restless and rebellious segment would press further west - all the way until the closing of the American frontier in the 19th century. And now we're all trapped in here with each other, and we don't know how to manage.
daezor
18d ago
It makes me think of the famous Iroha poem:
Colors are fragrant, but they Will eventually scatter; Who in our world Shall always be? The deep mountains of conditions [samskara] — We cross them today And we shall not have shallow dreams Nor be intoxicated.
Then we have the "Nightmares", which grow increasingly aggressive as you get closer to waking the Wind Fish. These represent attachments, which try to keep you trapped in the world of maya.
(Importantly, in the game, death is not the same as nirvana. Death just reincarnates you back into the world of illusion, and is an obstacle on your path to awakening.)
And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path? (OK, maybe this is a stretch.)
I won't go so far as to say that the game is "preaching" a Buddhist message. It just seems like its overall narrative speaks to a culture with Buddhist background assumptions, in the same way that (to take an example mentioned below) The Land Before Time is not exactly a "Christian" story, but the overall "sacrifice → tribulation → paradise" theme is one that Western audiences will understand instinctively because of their Christian background.
daezor
18d ago
It's been a long time since I played Link's Awakening, but I seem to recall it's not so much a downer ending as a "Buddhist" ending. To read it as "everyone dies at the end" is to impose a Western (Christian) lens on the story which is not present in the original.
If we're going to extrapolate a trend, maybe its that in the '90s there was more media being produced in Japan with distinctively Japanese cultural assumptions, since it was aimed primarily at domestic audiences, and the translation into English was only an afterthought.
daezor
21d ago
There is no "contract" to "violate" if only one side ever accepted it. If I hire you to paint my house but you don't do it, I'm under no obligation to pay you.
daezor
22d ago
People have mentioned the epistemic reasons for doing this (stereotypes as heuristics), but separately there is also the game-theoretic (contractualist) reason: Individualism is a social contract that has both costs and benefits. In order for a social contract to work, you can't let people get away with getting the benefits without also incurring the costs. Here, the benefit of individualism is that you don't have to get blamed for the actions of other people just because they share some characteristic with you. The cost is that you have to reject any preferential treatment you may receive from others who share that characteristic on that basis.
Therefore, if you see that members of a certain group treat each other with special preference (most of their friends or marriage partners are fellow [X]s, they tend to hire each other, they refrain from "snitching" when one has broken the law, etc.), then it makes sense to collectivize blame onto them, even as you might prefer that they join the individualist social contract instead.
- 2006: "Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!" - XKCD 114
- 2025: Computational linguists reflect on the demise of their field
The 70s may have been when the Woo Era of AI began, but (I would contend) it lasted all the way until the rise of Transformers in ~2017. It's not that neural nets and other Transformer-precursors didn't exist, but they were just one tool among many, alongside symbolic AI, and any of these tools had a seemingly equal claim to be the secret-sauce for general intelligence. In this environment, it was still the galaxy-brain-types like Minsky who could claim the intellectual highground by saying, effectively, "Well yes, that's a cute trick, but it's already incorporated as just one small part of my grand overarching paradigm..."
Of course, the reason why the field attracted so much woo (including Epstein) is because the AI was seen as a "type" of the human mind itself, and so it was thought that by building an AI we would finally understand ourselves and thereby solve in one fell swoop all the age-old problems of philosophy. We saw this e.g. with early (pre-2017) LessWrong, where Bayesianism was put forth as the ideal form of reasoning not only for a hypothetical AI, but also for you, the rational human. And not coincidentally, this was also the time when Ben Goertzel (another close Epstein associate) was most active in that sphere.
Nowadays the woo has been sidelined, not just because we actually have stuff that works, but because there's no longer much hope that AI will help us understand the human condition any better. If we manage to build human-level AI under the Transformer paradigm, we will find its workings just as inscrutable as ourselves.
daezor
30d ago
Pre-Transformer AI research had a very distinctive vibe. Chūnibyō is the word that comes to mind. It was essentially a pseudoscience, laundered behind scraps of legitimate science. A typical AI researcher would manage to get one thing working, and then spend the rest of his career extrapolating that into a vast overarching worldview that encompassed all aspects of psychology, ethics, futurology, metaphysics, etc. These experts would maintain some credibility from success in their narrow technical field, but all the other speculative stuff was really little better than the mad ravings of the contemporary "quantum crystal mystic" crowd.
This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein. His interest in science wasn't in incremental improvements, or even just making money, but in total world-shaking, paradigm-shifting, mind-blowing stuff. (This also explains his interest in genetics and biology.)
The rationalist/EA/utilitarian milieu is kind of descended from this (via the Extropian/Singularitarian movement), but it's not the same thing. Epstein would've had little interest in mosquito nets or shrimp welfare, for example.
daezor
1mo ago
I'm coming at this more from a position of ignorance than hostility, so this is a genuine question and not just snark. In what way is "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism" anything other than a massive oxy-moron? In other words, what is the ultimate goal of this ideology, and how does it not end up being a mess of contradictions?
- America has never been a Catholic country. You can argue that it has traditionally been a Christian country, but its Christianity was always Protestant, and often specifically anti-Catholic. What is the "tradition" that we'd be returning to?
- In America, Catholic=Mexican. If I'm walking through a neighborhood and I see shrines to the Virgin Mary or Saint Francis in people's yards, I know that this is (shall we say) a rough neighborhood. Do John Senior and his "conservative" followers want the whole country to be like this?
- OK, so maybe that's unfair. Catholicism isn't some ethnic club, it's the One True Faith. So, American Catholics find themselves in the position of the missionaries in 100-500 AD trying to convert pagans to Christianity. We'll just need to cut down all their sacred trees, tear down their temples, burn their heathen books, and turn families against each other (Luke 14:26). Once we've radically reinvented America from the ground up, then we can finally have the traditional, conservative society that we always wanted.
- "Traditionalist Catholicism" is still decidedly schismatic (see the recent incident with the consecration of new SSPX bishops a few weeks ago) and strongly protests against Vatican II and therefore the authority of the Church and the Pope. Don't we have a word for such people...?
daezor
2mo ago
There's also a ton of causal mechanisms:
When I saw this post my first assumption was that it was going to be about the physical effects of carrying a radio-transmitting device within inches of your reproductive organs at every waking hour, but I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Has anyone looked into this?
daezor
2mo ago
"How do you start a business?" -> "How to start a business?"
I have a distinctly averse reaction to this construction in particular (although I know I'm not supposed to say that around linguists - all dialects are equally valid, yada yada, yeah I get it). It immediately signals to me that this is yet another one of those immigrant professionals I've had to work with over the years where communicating about complex subjects is going to be a struggle, but in an illegible way that's hard to really put a finger on. I think it's some combination of:
- When I'm speaking off the cuff about something, and someone else thinks I'm wrong, I expect them to chime in to say so and explain why they think I'm wrong. In "my culture" (I would like to say "American culture", but this probably isn't true nationwide) this is how collaboration works. But if someone is a non-native speaker who's having trouble keeping up (as indicated by them saying things like "How to start a business?"), I can never really be sure what their silence means. If it's because they're in full agreement with me, great. If it's because they're deferring to my expertise, that's also fine, I guess I'm in charge now. But if they do actually have a substantive disagreement, but are quietly simmering in frustration because they don't know how to articulate it, then this is going to become a problem later.
- I can tell that this person isn't going to be much fun to hang out with at lunch or around the water cooler. Not that I expect to be friends with my co-workers - in fact I rarely mix my social and professional life - but it's still nice to be able to share glimpses of what they're like personally.
- English is my native language, the language of "my people", of Shakespeare and Chaucer etc., but for them it's just what they speak at work, yet another piece of generic international slop. Like, if you scoff at American cuisine as being synonymous with McDonalds and Coke, I feel like you've insulted my grandmother's cooking even though you probably weren't even thinking about that.
Such is the price of living in a global economic superpower, I guess.
daezor
2mo ago
And finally, the ad hoc reconstruction of certain norms and rules from 'first principles' whilst almost never acknowledging that's what they're doing. "We went through a very circuitous journey of discovery and we've wound up in almost the exact place that things started out, and we learned so many useful things along the way (that most 'normal' folks already know and consider 'common sense')! How fun!"
I have a hard time faulting anyone for doing this, because the "common sense" norms were already thrown out decades ago, long before the rationalists came onto the scene. On matters of sex, we has the Sexual Revolution back in the 60's, and now we're in a state of complete social anarchy, by which I mean that social shaming is ineffective because you can always find someone else who agrees with you. If I deign to judge anyone for their sex life, now I'm the one who's causing a problem. Even in the last remaining areas where laws are still on the books (rape and underage stuff), enforcement is spotty at best (viz. Epstein) and you'll find people muddying the waters with various postmodern-style arguments ("rape just means she regretted it later", "no actually all sex is rape", "but ephebophilia"...)
So along come the rationalists (and others perhaps), who find that since appealing to social consensus doesn't work, it has become necessary to argue every point in long-winded detail. When you're born in the wilderness, you have no choice but to wander.
daezor
4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle - In a sexually reproducing species, the ratio tends towards 1:1.
https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/the-talk-a-brief-explainer-of-sexual - "sexual reproduction is virtually necessary to evolve into a complex fully-fledged multicellular organism."
So we're stuck with this, unless you think (a) we can institute a totalitarian surveillance regime to control the number of male and female babies people have, and (b) we can transcend biology and attain the purity of the blessed machine. Me, I'm not so sure.
daezor
6mo ago
But it seems like the decline in drinking is an effect, not a cause, of the friendship recession.
daezor
6mo ago
I'd have to double check (I won't), but I believe an ever greater share of people are moving significant distances for work.
I just cited a study in my other comment showing that precisely the opposite is the case - and yet it's curious that so many people's anecdotal experience is that everyone is moving around all the time. (That's true for me as well.) There must be some kind of stratification going on.
daezor
6mo ago
These three explanations seem wrong:
- Work: People are actually moving around less than ever (and this is usually regarded as a bad thing)
- Parenting: I thought fertility was declining, so which is it?
- Break ups: How is this a new thing?
I would hypothesize:
- Affordability crunch -> people can't afford to live in cities -> meeting people requires driving a considerable distance and becomes a chore
- Or, people spend so much time working (to pay their city rent) they have no time/energy left for socializing
- Online socializing is more convenient than in-person socializing
I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not clear to me that the 19th-century European immigrants ever did assimilate, at least in the way that matters. @Opt-out says we "will be stuck with poorer governance forever" - I consider the possibility that this has already happened, that we have been stuck with poorer governance for this whole time, and that it's far too late to do anything about it. The only reason why people assume that the Irish/Italians/etc. did successfully assimilate is because nobody alive today remembers a time before they showed up. Those of us who live in big cities have just come to accept a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society.
More options
Context Copy link