doglatine
7mo ago
If Rubiales is guilty of anything here (besides plausibly being coked off his face), it’s of a failure to “read the room” and adapt to the etiquette of high status individuals in his communities. In some cultures, he’d be quite appropriately excoriated simply for shaking hands with any of the female players. In others, an affectionate mouth-to-mouth kiss would be appropriate between him and all the male players.
As it is, social forces have been rapidly moving towards a new set of norms that emphasise female bodily autonomy to the exclusion of unsolicited signs of warmth and affection. Rubiales was going slow in the fast lane of cultural change, and got rear-ended for his slowness, stupidity, or arrogance.
doglatine
7mo ago
I mean there’s this whole thing.
doglatine
11mo ago
With traditional Christian-values inspired conservatism, yes. But most conservatives here are of the Nietzschean post-Christian kind, which is much less fussy about the sanctity of life and much more comfortable with humans differing in intrinsic value. And yet even people in the second camp have to make the proper prostrations to liberal pieties.
doglatine
3mo ago
Couldn’t Abbot announce that state law enforcement would prevent federal agents from making arrests of guardsmen in that case? Obviously it would be an escalation but seems like there’s a whole ladder here with progressively more extreme rungs for both players.
doglatine
8mo ago
Agreed. Under his old alias he expressed explicit support for ideas that are so far outside the Overton Window that even Putin or Xi Jinping wouldn’t publicly endorse them (even if they carried them out in practice).
doglatine
6mo ago
FWIW I like your answer a lot and I don’t think preventing violence against Israel would be unattainable for a Gazan leader with a strong enough power base. I’m thinking here of Kadyrov in Chechnya. You’d want to start by finding a smart powerful and mercenary figure within Hamas. Give them enough money to build up their power base, bribe minor players, have major rivals killed. Give them weapons and allow them to build a Praetorian Guard of elite Hamas fighters who live like kings and get all the chicks. Develop very strict internal messaging norms around Israel and violence — general calls for a unified Palestine one day are fine, but no direct exhortations to violence. Make it so that anyone who fucks with you ends up dead, and anyone who works with you gets money and women.
This shouldn’t be politically impossible. Everyone is responsive to multiple social incentives and these in turn can be influenced with money. It will just take a lot of time, money, and finding the right people.
doglatine
7mo ago
doglatine
2mo ago
Not an expert on this by any means but I have seen some encouraging results on in vivo (as opposed to in utero or in vitro) gene editing. Here's a sample paper discussing the state of the field. There's also a further question whether in vivo gene editing for intelligence would produce the kind of behavioural impacts we care about; as far as I know, that's an open uncertainty.
doglatine
11mo ago
Remind me about this if I haven’t replied or posted next week! Not ignoring your nice question at all but will need to find 30 mins to do it justice.
doglatine
5mo ago
Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”
doglatine
10d 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.
doglatine
4mo ago
Yes, well put. I don’t think the “woke establishment” has a good play here insofar as large swathes of the vanguard progressive movement are actually anti-Semitic by normie standards, while large swathes of the journalistic, financial, and political leadership of the movement are themselves Jewish and many of them feel betrayed by the wider left in the wake of October 7th.
I see two main possible outcomes. Either the leadership reins in the vanguard and has an anti-semitism purge as per Starmer in the UK. The effect of this would be disillusionment in the vanguard and a sense of betrayal. Many of the most passionate and/or psychotic progressives will splinter off. Alternatively, if the leadership is too weak to rein in the vanguard, then a lot of powerful Jewish Americans will splinter from the woke fringe (a la Luciana Berger in the UK), probably mostly flocking to centrist Democrat spaces.
Either way, it’s not a fight that can be brushed under the rug.
doglatine
4mo ago
I'm coming late to this fantastic post, and most things worth saying have been said, but one issue no-one's tackled: how will AI affect all this? That might sound tenuous but I think it's potentially significance. We're on the cusp of -
- Vastly more accessible/effective homeschooling and self-education via AI tutors
- Massive skill equalisation for low- and mid-level white collar work
- Likely evisceration of large parts of the Blue Tribe base
- Easy creation of reasonably smart AI media/propaganda bots
- Emergence of new more salient axes of disagreement splitting society down the middle (e.g. pro-tech/anti-tech)
doglatine
8mo ago
Their backstories rhyme, but Yang is playing to Grey Tribe superegos. Ramaswamy is a next-gen populist, a Shift to Trump’s Puzzle.
/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.
In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.
This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.
But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).
I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.
So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.
First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.
Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..
That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.
doglatine
3mo ago
Before I even clicked, I knew this would either be NileRed or Action Lab 🤣
doglatine
11mo ago
Bing Chat largely doesn't have this problem; the citations it provides are genuine, if somewhat shallow. Likewise, DeepMind's Sparrow is supposedly extremely good at sourcing everything it says. While the jury is still out on the matter to some extent, I am firmly of the opinion that hallucination can be fixed by appropriate use of RLHF/RLAIF and other fine-tuning mechanisms. The core of ChatGPT's problem is that it's a general purpose dialogue agent, optimised nearly as much for storytelling as for truth and accuracy. Once we move to more special-purpose language models appropriately optimised on accuracy in a given field, hallucination will be much less of a big deal.
doglatine
1mo ago
100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
I think /u/Quantumfreakonomics has it right. Despite ostensible public morality being deeply Christianised and emphasising our treatment of others as the polestar of morality, our deeper human concept of virtue is deeply bound up with the concept of personal excellence. A straight man who is failing to be attractive to women is failing in the same way that a slow cheetah or weak oak is failing, namely lacking in the distinctive strengths associated with his nature. Yet because of the deep penetration of Christian and (especially) non-conformist Protestant values into modern Western society — exacerbated by wokeness, a Puritan project in all but name — most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Instead, that impulse has to be sublimated into the ethical vocabulary of slave morality, with lack of excellence being converted into lack of morality. The only spaces that call out this male weakness explicitly tend to be those that have explicitly embraced modern master moralities (in however confused a fashion). That’s where you’ll find sexually successful men making fun of incels as weakling feminised soyboy beta cucks etc.. Most other people are thinking that, but lack the self-awareness or honesty to say it.
doglatine
9mo ago
Anyways, shoutouts to this whole debacle for rekindling my fear of women, and quenching my fear of missing out.
This kind of stuff is only really a major problem with a very specific western, educated, secular, metropolitan, young, trendy demographic. Unfortunately, most people here fall into many of those same baskets. However, there’s no reason not to branch out. I’ve been urging people here for years to broaden their dating horizons. Dating across class and education boundaries never worked for me, but I’ve had great romantic relationships with women from Russia, Japan, and Pakistan, and my wife is Filipina.
doglatine
7mo ago
That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.
Hanania is far and away my favourite US politics blogger right now. This piece somehow managed to be both hilarious and insightful. He manages to describe Republican primary voters in a way that should to any rational reader code as contemptuous and disparaging, and yet he comes across like he's giving a purely descriptive analysis. Potentially the American Dominic Cummings?
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