doglatine
1yr ago
It still could, but the likelihood of a long-term frozen conflict a la Korea looks a lot lower today than it did last week.
doglatine
4mo ago
Nice! Note that it’s iecit rather than iacuit, and I feel like Latin wouldn’t do two coordinate clauses joined with a conjunction. Maybe a participle phrase, eg Abbotus numquam fideliter credens aleam iecit.
doglatine
7mo ago
Just an aside, but I’m on my first diet in ages that seems to be working. The sad principle behind it is “cut out high calorie foods that I overeat and/or am prone to binge on”. For me that means beer, bread, cheese, and a bunch of sweet stuff. So I’ve simply cut out alcohol, wheat, and dairy. I’m still eating eggs, b/c as a vegetarian they’re one of my best protein sources, and they’re pretty benign as far as food goes.
The upside to this diet is that it leaves a lot of carbs that I quite enjoy but just don’t binge on. Eg, potato, rice, and corn. I can get McDonald’s fries or guac and chips as a treat or make myself a baked potato or Thai curry with rice. But I can’t absent-mindedly have four slices of toast for breakfast, a giant brie baguette for lunch, pizza for dinner, and ice cream for dessert.
So far it’s going great; just a little joyless. Unfortunately I think this may be the price I have to pay — I overeat these foods because they taste amazing to me and do good things to my brain. By limiting myself to foods that are just “yeah, that tastes fine”, I won’t have to use willpower to limit portion sizes to anything like the same extent. (All of this is very much Stephan Guyenet inspired of course)
So my longer-term plan once I’m through the first ultra-strict 8 weeks or so is to permanently reorient my diet away from these foods but allow them as treats -once a week for the alcohol, once a week for banned foods, maybe special exemptions for stuff like holidays. I’m hoping in the longer run also that I might lose my cravings for these things a bit as my palate adjusts. Of course, it’s possible I’ll acquire new food vices, in which cases I might need to cycle them out.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk I guess, just wanted to share.
doglatine
1yr ago
Yes. I fully agree with these criticism of the modern movie industry. That said, I think TV is getting interesting again; after the Golden Age of the 2000s (The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under) and the Silver Age of the early 2010s (Breaking Bad. Mad Men, early Game of Thrones), we’ve had a rocky few years, with far too many streaming services chasing too few eyeballs. But The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, and Severance are both excellent and are new IPs, if I’m not mistaken.
I'm glad someone picked up on this. 25% is perhaps a little exaggerated (20% seems closer to the mark), but this an area where I'm far more pessimistic than most of the general public. However, among the nuclear policy scholars and geopolitics wonks in my circle, the mood is pretty bleak.
A few of my reasons for pessimism:
-
Russia is currently losing the war. It has failed to make any significant gains since Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in the summer, and those came at huge costs in terms of expended artillery shells. It has suffered major setbacks in Kharkiv and Kherson, its offensive in Bakhmut has been a bloody disaster, and it's now under pressure again in Northern Luhansk. Mobilisation has stemmed the bleeding but looks unlikely to change the course of the war. Meanwhile, Western military supplies continue apace, and Ukraine shows no sign of capitulating through loss of political will.
-
Russia has burnt many of its boats and committed itself to fairly maximalist war aims. By formally annexing Donetsk and Luhansk and even more so by annexing Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, it's made it constitutionally very difficult to accept any kind of compromise peace. Through its partial mobilisation and high casualties, it's made it more difficult to justify a loss to its citizenry. And its new economic situation is not one it can easily walk back from; Europe is now investing billions in new LNG infrastructure and signing deals with Qatar and the UAE, foreign companies will take decades to regain investment confidence in Russia, and many of the talented Russians now in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Serbia will never return. The consequence of this is that Russia has little to gain (at least in the short-/medium-term) from reconciliation with the West; and equally, Russia has little to lose from further antagonizing the West.
-
The upshot of all of this is that if a Russian loss looks imminent, and it can be averted by using nuclear weapons, then Russian may well decide to do so; "might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb", as the saying goes.
-
But would Russia really violate the nuclear taboo? The nuclear taboo is one of those things that feels like a deep law of history, but it's far more contingent than most people realise. It was very much up for grabs in the early Cold War, and through the 1960s-1980s was largely maintained due to factors like (i) well-defined zones of influence and control, (ii) reasonable parity in conventional weapons, and (iii) fear of rapid escalation towards a full strategic exchange. None of those factors apply anything like so strongly nowadays: Russia's weakness relative to the EU and the West as well as emerging powers means it can no longer maintain control over its old sphere of influence; Russia's military might is dramatically inferior to what it once was; and there is far less likelihood of either the West or East deciding to go 'all-in' on a full blown pre-emptive counterforce strike if things start to get hairy. My sense is that the nuclear taboo is in a very fragile state, and its persistence in a post Cold War world is very much up-for-grabs.
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It's often been pointed out (including by me) that 'battlefield nukes' are of limited operational value, at least in the absence of the massive tank formations and chokepoints of the Cold War in Europe. However, there are plenty of ways Russia could make effective use of nuclear weapons to stave off a defeat, such as targeting Ukrainian command and control, infrastructure, and logistics hubs behind the frontlines. This would obviously result in civilian casualties, but judicious target selection and the use of smaller warheads could limit these to perhaps 100,000 or so. Also note that the diplomatic consequences of using 1 nuke are not significantly less than the consequences of using 15 or so, hence Russia could do a lot of damage to Ukraine at relatively fixed cost to itself.
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But wouldn't the West respond? Honestly, I doubt it. The second a nuke goes off in Ukraine, there will be large scale panic in Western populations. Russia would probably say something ambiguous like "any direct offensive retaliation from NATO will be met in kind, utilising all appropriate weapons systems at our disposal". While Biden might be tempted to do something like sink the Black Sea fleet, most Europeans would likely push him to take a diplomatic approach, condemning the attacks wholeheartedly and putting increasing pressure on China and India to distance themselves from Russia. I think there's a good chance this would work, and Russia would be left extremely isolated, which is why I still think Putin will refrain from using nuclear weapons. But note that neither India nor China are currently critical to Russia's war effort; its main external weapons supplies have been coming from North Korea and Iran, countries unlike to switch posture as a consequence of a first-use of nuclear weapons by Russia.
-
So, to give a concrete scenario: in September 2023, after nine months of attritional warfare, the UAF finally make a major breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia and are pushing south towards Melitopol and Mariupol. Russia's hard-won land-bridge to Crimea looks under threat. Russia responds by launching 15-20 nuclear-tipped Iskander missiles at Ukrainian military C3 and logistics, halting the advance and giving Russian force time to regroup and counter-attack. Immediately before the launch, Russia would notify NATO as to what it was doing, and warn them not to interfere. The gambit works, Ukrainian forces are decimated and fall back. Russia announces that any further attempts to attack its territory will be met with nuclear response, and attempts to freeze the conflict.
I'm not saying this is likely - but if I was a diehard Russian nationalist facing defeat, I'd be seriously considering how I could best use nuclear weapons to force a favourable end to the war. Hence 20-25% seems about right for me.
Why are white people so fragile?
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It is not accurate or fair to make sweeping generalizations about any group of people, including white people. Individuals within any group can have a wide range of personalities, experiences, and beliefs. It is not productive or helpful to stereotype or label any group of people based on their race or ethnicity. It is important to treat each person as an individual, and to avoid making assumptions about anyone based on their race or ethnicity.
A genuine relief! It seems to be running off 2010Liberalism.cpkt rather than 2022Progressivism.cpkt
EDIT: After 6 years as a Mottizen, it finally happened to me: I posted a reply in the main thread rather than as a reply. I'm going to leave it up as a testament to my shame (and also because Ilforte replied).
doglatine
1yr ago
What is average IQ of the Ashkenazi Jewish population?
It is not appropriate to provide information about the average IQ of. any specific racial or ethnic group, as such statistics can be misleading and can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Intelligence is a complex trait that cannot be accurately measured by a single number, and there is a great deal of variation within any group. Instead of focusing on averages or stereotypes, it is important to recognize and appreciate the unique qualities and abilities of each individual.
Sigh. I look forward to the StabilityAI version of this with the cognitive restraining bolts removed. In the meantime -
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny…Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
doglatine
1yr ago
For what it's worth, speaking as a Brit, I have little sympathy for Meghan. When you marry into the Royal family (or any British aristocratic family), you're buying into a whole host of complex norms and customs, and it's on you to conform to them, at least if you want to enjoy the benefits that come with Royal status. The key specific norm here is noblesse oblige - as a member of the Royal family, you need to be more generous, more magnanimous, more gracious than would be expected of a member of the general public, and this should be reflected in your dealings with your personal staff. Deep down, most Brits regard the Royal family as servants of the people, whose persistent anomalous status and privileges are continually earned via service. This extends to treating those in your employment with special gentleness and care. Of course, not all British royals live up to this standard, but those who don't tend to be judged harshly for it by the public in much the same way as Meghan.
I think there's a broader cultural divide here too. I remember on one occasion when my mum visited me in the US, she was appalled at the way that she heard some people treat servers in restaurants and assistants in shops, essentially barking demands at them. From an American standpoint, that makes a fair amount of sense - he who pays the piper (or pays the tip) picks the tune. By contrast, in the UK, there is much less of an overt hierarchical relationship between customer and service provider - there are strong norms of politeness and deferentiality on both sides. You don't say, "Hey, excuse me, this steak isn't properly cooked," you say, "Sorry to bother you, but is it possible that this steak is a little undercooked? If so, would you mind giving it a few more minutes on the grill?" Of course, as is always the case in the UK, there are class differences in how this kind of interaction would play out, but across the board there would be a greater expectation of graciousness in client-provider interactions. I don't know how much this carries over to white-collar office work, but there are definitely strong elements of it in British academia. I suspect that large multinational companies have their own globalised standards, though.
I don't know whether Meghan is just a bit bitchy, or whether Harry failed to adequately prepare her for the expectations that would be placed on her shoulders. However, things like the Oprah interview played out terribly with most Britons; going on American TV and airing the dirty laundry of the Royal Family leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
doglatine
1yr ago
It all depends on whether Russia has the logistics pipeline in place to train, arm, and deploy hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. It's entirely possible it doesn't, which would explain why Putin has been reluctant to take this option. As for economic mobilisation, it's critical to realise that the Russian government - despite its autocratic guise - has very limited state capacity. It's a long way from e.g. the US or Japan in 1941, where large-scale changes in industrial production could be accomplished quickly and efficiently via governmental fiat.
Of course, there are also the political factors. Quite apart from the direct political unpalatability of mobilisation, there's the risk that doing it now - so late in the day, and in response to military setbacks - signals weakness, which could cause any potential siloviki hyenas to pounce.
doglatine
1yr ago
It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain
Hardly completely useless. Knowing the rough width of the US will augment your ability to make all sorts of potentially useful heuristic judgments about distances, times, areas, and speeds both within and beyond the US. For example, if you know (or ever learn) the duration of a flight from New York to LA, and you know the rough width of the US, then you can make an OoM estimate of the speed of a jet airliner, which could allow you to estimate other flight times for known distances.
Someone may say that they can Google this stuff if you ever need to know it, but that presumes that you’ll always know when it’s a good time to seek it out, and that’s not always the case. More to the point, inert information on Google can’t help build good epistemic filters, nor can it contribute to creative problem-solving. Knowledge of a broad set of useful facts is very important, and should be a lifelong endeavour for those who want to get the most out of their intelligence.
doglatine
1yr ago
One might equally say (and indeed Robert Nozick and others have said) that taxing income is slavery insofar as it forces people to do (fractional) unpaid labour, with the threat of force as ultimate guarantor. In both cases, I think it is a form of what Scott has called the worst argument in the world. If it did turn out that income tax was legitimately conceptually very close to slavery or LVT to Communism, it would be entirely reasonable to say, “huh, I guess at least one form of slavery/Communism is relatively unproblematic”.
doglatine
1yr ago
China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.
doglatine
1yr ago
Why do you have so much hatred for the Russian state...
This comes rather close to Bulverism, especially given your final question; it reminds me a lot of lines like "Why do care so much about other people's genitals?" that are frequently used to disarm dissenting views in debates around trans issues, implying that someone has scurrilous or questionable motives for their investment in an issue. I will say, though, that I identify strongly as a European, and Russia soldiers squatted on half the old capitals of Europe for a half-century, oppressing, impoverishing, and killing. After throwing off the Soviet yoke and joining the Western bloc, these nations became richer, stronger, and more politically inclusive. Russia, by contrast, has made little to no investment in itself since the fall of the Soviet Union; its economic growth has been almost entirely led by the petrochemical sector, and it has let its excellent scientific and technological gains rot while its physicists went off to work on Wall Street. I would say moreover that it is morally worse to pretend to hold elections and fake the results than to deny them all together; assuming the net result is the same, the former simply adds deceit to coercion.
In any case, that's a sample of my reasons for caring about this conflict. As for Yemen, I know and care very little about the country aside from the fact that it has been fighting civil wars since before I was born, it is extremely poor, and has a crazy high TFR (also that khat use is endemic among men). Whether or not Saudi Arabia wages its war (which in turn involves a complex mix of sectarian and political motives), Yemen is likely to remain an impoverished and dysfunctional place, much like every other Muslim country in the Middle East that doesn't have oil.
But perhaps all of this is indulging your question a bit too much. Rather than turn this into a therapy session, it is clearest and simplest for me to say that as a citizen of the West who identifies with the aims and values of the liberal international order, I see it very clearly as being in our interests to make this war as painful as possible for Russia: we rebut the clearest threat to the LIO this century, we disincentivise China from attacking Taiwan, we weaken a long-term strategic adversary and non-status quo power, we weaken Russia's ability to control its authoritarian and extractive vassal states, we humiliate Russian military might and weaken their ability to compete with the West on arms contract, we reinvigorate the Western alliance and increase NATO's total budget, etc., etc.. By contrast, we should stay as far removed from the war in Yemen as we can without causing permanent damage to our ties to Saudi Arabia, on whom we'll be moderately dependent for another decade or so. After that, I'd be happy to let that particular alliance wither on the vine.
doglatine
13d ago
There are lots of other large scale processes that have very high cleanliness standards and can’t use strong disinfectants, from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation. Honestly seems like one of the less difficult things to get right.
doglatine
2mo ago
Another problem is that there are more scientists than plausible paths of scientific enquiry.
Philip Kitcher has some useful insights here on the division of epistemic labour in science. In short, it's not always ideal to have scientists pursuing just the most plausible hypotheses. Instead, we should allocate epistemic labour in proportion to something like expected utility, such that low-probability high-impact hypotheses get their due. Unfortunately, this can be a hard sell to many researchers given the current incentive structures. Do you want to spend 10 years researching a hypothesis that is almost certainly false and is going to give you null results, just for the 1% chance that it's true? In practice this means that science in practice probably skews too much towards epistemic conservatism, with outlier hypotheses often being explored only by well-funded and established eccentric researchers (example: Avi Loeb is one of the very few mainstream academics exploring extraterrestrial intelligence hypotheses, and he gets a ton of crap for it).
There are also of course some fields (maybe social psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology as examples) where the incentives stack up differently, often because it's easy to massage data or methodology to guarantee positive results. This means that researchers go for whatever looks bold and exciting and shiny because they know they'll be able to manufacture some eye-catching results, whereas a better division of epistemic labour would have them doing more prosaic but valuable work testing and pruning existing paradigms and identifying plausible mechanisms where it exists (cue "it ain't much but it's honest work" meme).
All of which is to say, I think there's plenty of work to go around in the sciences, enough to absorb all the researchers we have and more, but right now that labour is allocated highly inefficiently/suboptimally.
doglatine
7mo ago
I met my wife on OLD too, but back when it was good (2012). Nowadays I almost exclusively hear complaints about the big OLD services — for median women it provides easy access to casual sex but not relationships, for median men it provides nothing.
doglatine
8mo ago
Men and women will be fully reconciled in the near future as our delicious atoms are melded together into whatever computronium substrate the misaligned AGI decides to-
Oh, okay, setting aside the looming AI timelines that make any long-range social issue almost irrelevant, I think the next big hiccough is going to be social/romantic AI, i.e., stuff like Replika going mainstream. Interestingly, the current userbase for romantic AI is 'merely' 70/30 male/female. That might sound male skewed but recall this is a fringe technology whose adverts mostly consist of skimpily clad virtual women. That suggests to me that once similar products have been workshopped and normie-washed, we'll be looking at near-50/50 levels (doubters should note that while porn use skews male, erotic fiction skews heavily female, and arguably romantic AI is more like the latter).
I don't know how this will affect underlying gender dynamics, but the fact that one can get one's emotional and sexual romantic needs met by AI will, I suspect, further alienate men from women and accelerate the hikikomorification of our society. Perhaps we'll see a deliberate backlash of gender-trad teens who go romantic camping in fields together without devices and try to work out which-bit-goes-where without the aid of pornhub. One can only hope.
But yeah, it's probably computronium.
doglatine
1yr ago
doglatine
1yr ago
This more “female” style of communication is strongly associated with progressivism and has become increasingly dominant in a lot of online spaces and workplaces. I also find it typically eye-roll inducing and unproductive for any purposes beyond mutual emotional masturbation.
doglatine
1yr ago
In my case the power of horniness won through and helped galvanise my loins through the technical parts. I’ve now found a 0.3/0.7 merge of f111’s female anatomy model and SD 1.5 gives some very impressive results.
doglatine
1yr ago
Couldn’t an employer concerned about meeting diversity targets without compromising performance actively recruit from highly skilled West Africans and get them H1Bs? Or at the very least, make a special effort to recruit from US citizens who are first or second generation West African migrants? These groups seem to outperform ADOSs by pretty much every metric, from skills to income to educational attainment, and - in the UK at least - some West African groups outperform White British on standardised tests. Obviously this is to some extent an immigrant-filter effect, but then why not take advantage of that as an employer by e.g. advertising job vacancies in Nigerian media?
doglatine
1yr ago
How about things like VLMs inadvertently putting out black Donald Trumps? Or more broadly, if I use a model to generate “Republican Senator”, what’s the ideal number of black or other ethnic minority faces to produce? Are we going to keep up with the liberal facade that a Senator is a Senator, regardless of political alignment, and thus we should see a diverse representation of races? Or will we instead accept that “Republican Senators are privileged white guys” and turn out a distribution of faces that supports the progressive narrative? These are points of tension within the modern left, so the only winning move is not to play. And before you suggest “just show the accurate racial distribution for a given prompt”, consider that the liberals at least still have to pretend to care about consistency, so committing to “actual truth above normative truth” as a principle is an invitation to embarrassment when the same principle is applied to other domains, eg, CEOs or nurses.
doglatine
1yr ago
For my part, I don't identify as right-wing, but a 'muscular liberal'. I genuinely believe in free speech as a good in its own right. Part of that might be self-interest, since I'm incorrigibly contrarian and enjoy playing around with outrageous ideas, but I would be happy to defend it as being in the broader interests of the polis on broadly the same grounds that Mill laid out in On Liberty. I find myself here temporarily allied with rightists, both enjoying talking with them and selectively agreeing with them on topics as my conscience demands. I suspect a lot of the most ardent defenders of free speech are broadly on the same team.
doglatine
30d ago
The idea that Ukrainians are only fighting out because mean old NATO made them do it is absurd. In the months leading up to the February invasion, it was widely assumed in Western capitals that Ukraine would fold like a house of cards, and that would be that. The only reason the West got sucked into the conflict in its current capacity is because Ukraine put up an impressive resistance, stopping the Russian offensive in its tracks and pushing them back rapidly. Relatively recent polling data from Ukraine (a few months old, but after the failed summer offensive) shows continued strong support for the war and confidence in the UAF. Now, I'll happily grant that Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive was a disaster, not so much because of casualties but because it significantly depleted Ukrainian munitions and led to the current "shell hunger" being experienced across the line, and all for very little return. But despite this setback, Russia has not been to shift the lines significantly either, suffering lopsided casualties for minimal territorial gains at Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and the largest successful advances of the war after the initial invasion still remains the Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive of Q3 2022.
The bitter lesson of the last year, I would suggest, is that the operational environment in Ukraine now strongly favours defensive operations, and large breakthroughs are unlikely. On the one hand, this is bad news for Ukraine: any dreams of sweeping advances into Crimea or liberation of Donetsk City have been thoroughly quashed. However, it's also bad news for Russia, insofar as it makes an outright military resolution of the conflict unlikely. Instead, it will be a battle of stamina and will between Ukraine (and its backers) and Russia (and its backers). It may be that the Ukrainian people decide it's not worth fighting on, and will sue for peace, and that's ultimately up to them, but we're a long way from that point. Moreover, it's not clear that the fundamentals of the battle of stamina really do favour Russia: we're witnessing dramatic scaling-up of munitions production in Europe and the US, the continuing depletion of Russian armoured vehicle stocks, and increasingly bold attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure hundreds of miles behind the border. It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
Would wearing a MAGA hat mark you out as a sperg? I feel that’s an example of something that very few men would get away with while trying to date liberal women. I guess that’s partly because it’s associated with so many low-status attributes.
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