erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1hr ago
There is also the issue of verification; even if you agree that women whose birth control failed are more deserving of an abortion than women who are chose to take the risk, how the fuck do you check that a pregnant woman was habitually using birth control? If you just take them at their word, then any woman who wants an abortion will just claim that they were using condoms they bought for cash at the gas station.
The only way to split this baby is probabilistically; say that a woman who has sex with birth control is accepting a 1% chance (or whatever the failure rate is) of getting pregnant, and if she happens to lose that gamble, sucks to be her. But she knew what she was getting into, and only 1% of conscientious women will be affected, so our policy of not allowing abortions for anyone is 99% similar to a policy of allowing women whose birth control failed to have abortions; good enough.
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!
Duly noted, Speaker Johnson. Since the program is not for me, I have no reason for wanting it to exist. Burn it to the ground. And never vote for Mike Johnson, or for any other politician who is fine with gibs for single mothers but God forbid a young male should get some.
erwgv3g34
9hr ago
Why is this all pony literature?
The question is not why; the question is, why not?
But if you absolutely need a non-pony option, try The Number by NothingnessAbove.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
I memorized a few poems for English classes in high school. "Eldorado" by Edgar Alan Poe, the balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet, the suicide monologue from Hamlet, The Canterbury Tales prologue in the original Middle English. I've forgotten the Hamlet, but I remember the other three.
On my own, I memorized "A Verb Called Self" by Chatoyance and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling.
It's a neat trick, but not very useful. A better use of your time than playing video games; a worse one than cleaning your room.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
That she personally made sure to kill off the last remnant of her late husband? No, I don't.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
From "Why We Need the Double Standard" by the Dread Jim:
Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. Therefore we should guard eggs, not sperm. What this means is that it only needs a small number of badboys to render a very large number of women unmarriageable. Thus curtailing male badboy behavior is not going to succeed. And if we restrain prosocial well behaved upper class men from being badboys, the girls are going to get their kicks with Jeremy Meeks and Muslim rapeugees. Restraining male behavior results in upper class women fucking men low IQ men who live on towel folding jobs, petty burglary, drug dealing, and sponging off their numerous high IQ high socioeconomic status girlfriend, men whose careers are not going to be adversely affected by a few rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraint orders. The lawyerette does not fuck her fellow lawyers, she does not fuck judges, she fucks Jeremy Meeks. If we let upper class men be badboys, if we stopped afflicting judges with rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders, at least she would be fucking judges.
The problem is that law and society strengthens shit tests against well behaved, respectable, affluent men, but has limited success in strengthening shit tests against Jeremy Meeks. She fucks men against whom rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders have limited effect, because they can pass her shit tests, and you, even if you have a nicer car and a nicer hotel room than Jeremy Meeks, cannot. Plus the police and the courts just don’t seem to be pursuing rape charges against rapeugees, perhaps because of disparate impact.
All these laws have the effect of holding men responsible for female bad behavior. It is a lot more effective to hold women responsible for male bad behavior, because women, not men are the gate keepers to sex, romance, and reproduction. If you stop some men from behaving badly, women will just find men you cannot or dare not deter.
The problem is that we need to guard what is precious, guard eggs, not sperm. We need to restrain female sexual behavior, not male sexual behavior.
First, we need to change the social order so that the lawyerette fucks the judge instead of Jeremy Meeks. Then we can address the much harder problem of preventing her from fucking either one.
From the comments of "The Reactionary Program" by the same:
One pin can pop a hundred balloons. We have to control female sexuality, not male sexuality.
If you try to control male sexuality, that just means that uncontrollable anti social males father a large proportion of the children.
Eggs are precious, sperm is cheap. You guard what precious, not what is cheap.
And from the comments of "COVID Public Service Announcement", idem:
If a thirteen year old is permitted to wander where she pleases, she is going to be pleased to wander where someone can “rape” her. It is not the janitor that is the problem, it is the thirteen year old girl unsupervised. One pin can pop any number of baloons. We need balloon control, not pin control.
If you execute or castrate ninety-nine fuckboys, but miss underclass fuckboy number one hundred, who has nothing to lose and whose high time preference means he does not care about the consequences, he gets to spoil a hundred nice girls.
Whereas if you lock up and marry off ninety-nine girls, but fail to control girl number one hundred, you get ninety-nine happily married wives and one fallen woman.
erwgv3g34
13hr ago
Request: Tech ninja's of The Motte, find the non-paywalled version of the above.
I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.
From "What if drone warfare had come first?" by Scott Alexander:
The scene is the Oval Office. Three of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GENERAL HAWKE, GENERAL STEELE, and GENERAL RIPPER, are meeting with THE PRESIDENT. The meeting has been a long and exhausting discussion of drone strikes, and they are reaching the end.
PRESIDENT: I think we only have one more matter left to discuss. As you know, I have recently been worried about the moral cost of our drone war. So many lives lost. So many civilian casualties. I tasked DARPA with coming up with a new type of warfare, one which will end some of the troubling moral quandaries with which we are forced to wrestle every day. I believe General Ripper has been briefed on the results?
HAWKE: Mr. President, once again, I object to this pie-in-the-sky project. Drone warfare was good enough for our ancestors and it is good enough for us. The Romans used surgically precise ballista strikes to assassinate Hannibal without harming the Carthaginian populace. Abraham Lincoln used guided hot-air balloons to knock out top Confederate officials and keep this country united. Literally hundreds of people died in World War I before the British were finally able to kill Kaiser Wilhelm with a carefully-aimed zeppelin. To abandon drone warfare now for some untested new project would be an insult to their memory!
PRESIDENT: General Hawke, I appreciate your concerns, and I promise I will not be overly hasty to embrace these new ideas. But I'd like to hear what General Ripper has to say.
RIPPER: (interjecting) Guys!...Guys! Guys, listen! This is going to be so awesome. Listen to this! We take hundreds of thousands of people...guys, listen!...we take hundreds of thousands of people, give them really really really powerful automatic weapons...this is going to be so awesome...we take hundreds of thousands of people and give them really powerful automatic weapons and put them on planes and give them parachutes and drop them into our enemies' cities and then they just start shooting everything BLAM BLAM BLAM until our enemies run away and we're like HA HA HA HA HA THIS IS OUR CITY NOW and then we win!
STEELE: What the hell, Ripper?
RIPPER: No, listen, this will totally work! We take hundreds of thousands of people. We can use young kids and poor people and minorities, because we don't have to pay them as much. And then we give them really really big weapons. Like, not just the kinds of guns hunters use. Not even the kind of guns we give police. Guns that just NEVER STOP SHOOTING BULLETS! You can just swing them in a big arc and it will leave an arc of bullets everywhere and anyone anywhere in that arc will be dead! It will be SO AWESOME!
HAWKE: Ripper, are you mad?
RIPPER: Guys, think about it! You're Ayatollah Sistani, or Mullah Omar, or one of those motherf@*kers. You're having breakfast in your house one day when WHAM! A hundred thousand American teenagers and minorities RIGHT IN YOUR CITY with guns that never stop shooting bullets! There are bullet holes in your walls and in your gardens and now they're shooting your water supply and your power plant and everything. Do you think you're going to keep having your f@*king breakfast? Or do you think you're going to start waving an American flag and get on board with American policies like, right away?
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, frankly your idea seems at best ill-advised! Just to take one of many objections, we'll never be able to gather a hundred thousand Americans in secret. Ayatollah Sistani will hear about our plan long before we can surprise him.
RIPPER: And what could that motherf@*ker do about it?
STEELE: Well, he could get some Iranian teenagers and minorities, give them these super-guns of yours, and have them lie in wait for our teenagers and minorities outside his house.
RIPPER: Oh my god that would be so awesome! Because we have more technology, so we could have better guns than they do! And we're richer than they are, so we could hire more teenagers and minorities! Right? RIGHT? So everyone would be like BLAM BLAM BLAM with their super-guns and there would be this huge fight and in the end we would win and get that sunavab*tch anyway!
PRESIDENT: (horrified) You realize what you're suggesting is the deaths of dozens of Americans and Iranians, right? Maybe even hundreds!
RIPPER: No, look. It would be okay. Listen to this. We would come up...we would come up with this new philosophy where once a teenager or minority got a super-powerful gun from our enemies, it would be okay if we killed them. Because if we didn't kill them, they might use that gun to shoot us.
HAWKE: But they're only doing that because otherwise we would...I can't believe I have to say this...otherwise we would parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah.
RIPPER: I KNOW RIGHT? We're going to parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah! THEN EVERYTHING'S GOING TO GET BLOWN UP AND IT'S GOING TO BE SO COOL.
STEELE Everything...blown up?
RIPPER: Oh man I totally forgot this part! If we just have the super guns, people might hide inside buildings, right? And then we couldn't shoot them and then the ayatollah wouldn't have to agree to do everything we say. So...ohmigod you guys are going to love this...we take cars, right? And we cover them in armor and put giant caterpillar tracks on the bottom so they can drive over walls and sh*t. And then we put HUMONGOUS GUNS on top of the cars. Guns so big they can BLOW UP WHOLE BUILDINGS. And then we just KEEP BLOWING UP THE CITY until the Ayatollah agrees to do everything we want.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Uh, Secret Service? One of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has started acting really weird. Maybe you could stand outside the door and, uh, monitor the situation?
RIPPER: And then! And then we have these planes, right? And we arm them with lots of bombs, and we fly them over enemy cities, and...
HAWKE: Oh, thank goodness. You're starting to see sense and admit that the old ways of drone warfare are right after all.
RIPPER: No, it would be totally different! Because, get this! There would be people in these planes! We'd train them at special schools and whirl them around in centrifuge until they were able to work at 5 g-forces without passing out. Whirl! Whirl! Whirl! And sometimes they'd bomb our enemies, and sometimes our enemies would shoot them down and they'd get captured and we'd have to send in special teams of super-spies to rescue them before they got tortured and told our enemies everything they know!
STEELE That's...horrible!
RIPPER: And instead of trying to only target high-profile enemy leaders? We'd have a special rule that they couldn't target high-profile enemy leaders! They would have to hit power plants and dams and weapons factories and...
PRESIDENT: Weapons factories? Wouldn't those explode if bombed?
RIPPER: OH yeah. HUGE explosion! BOOM! And then when everything had been destroyed from the air, we could send in our hundred thousand teenagers with super guns and they could send in their hundred thousand teenagers with super guns, and we could send in our cars covered in metal with caterpillar treads and they could send in their cars covered in metal in caterpillar treads and then it would be all BLAM BLAM BLAM for WEEKS AND WEEKS and we win would because we would both kill each other and destroy each other's cars but we're bigger so we would have more of them and the Ayatollah would have to agree to do everything we say.
STEELE What if he doesn't?
RIPPER: We could kick him out, and say okay, city, you're part of America now! You're following American laws! You fly the American flag! And then America would be even bigger! And we could take their stuff too, like if there was any oil in the city, then it would be our oil!
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, this is highly unorthodox but I am going to have to relieve you of command effective immediately. This so-called "plan" of DARPA and yourself appears to be no more than the rantings of a deranged and homicidal lunatic. Your request to further develop this new type of warfare is completely denied, and honestly you seem to have so little regard for human life or the rules of warfare that I do not want you anywhere near our nation's drone fleet.
STEELE: Wait, I just realized something. Maybe this isn't about having little regard for human life. Maybe it could even help preserve human life?
PRESIDENT: (skeptically) What do you mean?
STEELE: Think about it. Nowadays, our drone controllers plan strikes from the safety of the Pentagon, never knowing the horrors of warfare, never seeing their victims as real people. But imagine what would happen if we did war Ripper's way?
HAWKE: What would happen?
STEELE: All our teenagers and minorities would see the looks on the faces of their victims as they got shot. Reporters would go into the cities and televise the devastation that our cars with armor and humongous guns had caused. People would come back traumatized, and we'd see them and understand their trauma and with it the trauma of warfare.
PRESIDENT: And?
STEELE: And we'd only need to do it once. Think of the hundreds of people who died in World War I, Mr. President. Think about the waste. If we had done things Ripper's way, the Allies would have encountered the Germans. They would have realized they were human beings just like them. The people in the capitals would have had to think twice about sending their young men off to die just because they wanted to play stupid games with the balance of power. And they would have thought twice. They would have said "No, this is horrible". Instead of those hundreds of zeppelin-related casualties, we would have had both sides pull back from the brink of war, and join together in their common humanity. It would have been a War to End Wars.
HAWKE: It would never have happened that way.
STEELE: No, perhaps not. Perhaps we should go on with our drone strikes as usual. Keep killing hundreds of people. But perhaps one day we will regret not taking hundreds of thousands of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, arming them with guns, parachuting them into our enemies' cities, and having them shoot things until our enemies agree to do whatever we say. Maybe it will end up being the only truly virtuous mode of warfare, the only one that preserves our inherent humanity.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Yes, I'm sorry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seem to have gone insane. Would you mind terribly coming in and escorting them out?
The Secret Service comes in and escorts the Joint Chiefs of Staff out. The President sighs and starts taking care of some paperwork. A few minutes later, MS. WELLS, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, comes in.
WELLS: Mr. President? I'm sorry to disturb you, but a question has come up. I know you authorized free health care for everyone in the nation, but the doctors are wondering whether it's okay if they buy examination tables made of solid gold. Something about it 'adding a touch of class to the clinic'.
PRESIDENT: Sure. Tell them to go ahead. We have more tax money than we know what to do with these days anyway.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
How many normie churchgoers actually understand that orthodox Christianity requires them to believe that Jesus is literally God, as well as being the son of God? I honestly don't think it's that many.
From what I can tell, even Catholics do not, on average, understand that they are supposed to be asking saints to pray for them rather than praying to the saints, or that the church considers Genesis to be non-literal, or that divorced women are not supposed to be having sex with men other than their ex-husbands. The priests know, of course, but somehow it is never their most pressing concern to make these things clear in simple, straightforward language to their flocks; probably because they can intuit how well it would be received.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Doesn't seem terribly important to the average Christian experience? I bet if you questioned normie churchgoers who had never seriously studied theology about the exact nature of the relationship between God and Jesus, most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so. Trinitarianism is something you can only come up with after reading too much Aristotle.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
...okay, fair. DataPacRat has some weird fetish for people becoming body parts of other people (limbs, organs, etc). He really needs to stop; nobody wants to read that.
Yes, it will drive up wages, but those wages will buy less, because there are less workers to produce goods and provide services. As long as each person produces more than they consume, each additional worker makes us better off.
There are two big hiccups:
-
"As long as each person produces more than they consume"; is this true? Illegal immigrants are generally not eligible for welfare, but they drive on public roads, use public libraries, illegal immigrant children go to public schools, etc. There are also negative externalities, but Latinos are much less criminal than blacks, and Latinos get rid of blacks, so it's probably a net positive.
-
Housing. We have insane zoning policies that forbid us from simply building enough housing for everyone. Per pigeonhole principle, if you have 100,500 people but only space for only 100,000, then 500 people must be homeless and the remaining 100,000 will spend all their spare money bidding up the rent to avoid being homeless. If you deport 1000 people and get the population down to 99,500, that would make a huge difference.
(Of course, would be better to just build more housing, but there wasn't a build more housing candidate on the ballot; there was a deportation candidate)
In increasing order of wordcount:
- Friendship is Optimal: "Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. Hanna has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies. And Princess Celestia will follow those instructions to the letter...even if you don't want her to." [39k words, complete]
- Luna is a Harsh Mistress: "When Celestia banished Nightmare Moon, she didn't go alone, but with her loyal army. Now they're trapped in an alien environment, with tensions high and the air running out. If they don't work together, their princess will soon be alone after all." [230k words, complete]
- The Moon's Apprentice: "Twilight Sparkle failed her entrance exams for Celestia's school. Worse, she is a danger to both herself and others, resulting in her magic being suppressed. Dreams crushed and now one of the weakest unicorns, a nightmare comes to her." [412k words, complete]
- Message in a Bottle: "Humanity's space exploration ultimately took the form of billions of identical probes, capable of building anything (including astronauts themselves) upon arrival at their destinations. One lands in Equestria. Things go downhill from there." [514k words, complete]
- Changeling Space Program & The Maretian: "The space race is on, and Chrysalis is determined to win it. With an earth pony test pilot and a hive full of brave-but-dim changelings, can she be the first pony on the moon? / Mark Watney is stranded- the only human on Mars. But he's not alone- five astronauts from a magical kingdom are shipwrecked with him." [797k words, complete]
- To the Stars: "Kyubey promised that humanity would reach the stars one day. The Incubator tactfully refrained from saying too much about what they would find there." [948k words, ongoing]
Anything by Greg Egan or Andy Weir.
DataPacRat: S.I., Extracted, "FAQ on LoadBear's Instrument of Precommitment" and Singleton, Friendship is Optimal: X-Risks are Magic
Glowfic: "but hurting people is wrong" (Thellim is from dath ilan, a version of Earth where everyone is Eliezer Yudkowsky, and her world has a ton of innovations that are absent from ours but which do not rely on different physical laws)
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Arianism makes a lot more sense than Trinitarianism, though; it is the radical notion that God and Jesus share the exact same relationship that every other father and son do, instead of some not-even-wrong word salad about substances that is so incomprehensible even its adherents admit it's a mystery. If I was convinced that something like Christianity was true but was not really clear on the details, I would become an Arian, like Isaac Newton, or perhaps a Mormon.
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
A lot of rationalist fiction is fanfic where nobody in the source material ever tries to take over the world by rules lawyering or minmaxing despite it obviously being possible. The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"? The better stories go out of their way to explain why this hasn't happened before and give the hero an equally smart villain to keep the plot interesting.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
What, you mean Earthfic? At that point, you are better off just reading biographies of great scientists and entrepreneurs like Richard Feynman or Elon Musk, or nonfiction books about cognitive biases and economics.
From "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience. Medical science can extrapolate what would happen to a human unprotected in a vacuum. Fiction can make you live through it.
Probably the biggest difference between fictional settings and reality is that fictional settings are almost always constructed in such a way that large effects do not require large capital investments, the way they do in our world. Requiring that things get done by a research team in twenty years instead of by a hero in one minute kills the fun.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Somebody over in the old country asked for rationalist podcast recommendations. I had a nice list ready to go, but Reddit keeps deleting my comment as spam no matter what I do. So for lack of a better option I'll just post it here:
- The Methods of Rationality Podcast
- Rationally Speaking
- The 80,000 Hours Podcast
- "#25 – Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do"
- "#32 – Bryan Caplan on whether the Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders"
- "#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs"
- "#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news"
- The Bayesian Conspiracy
- Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot
- Dwarkesh Podcast
[1] https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rationallyspeakingpodcast/rs135-9.mp3
I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.
But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.
The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.
Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.
Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
For the unaware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6yN2H3--1aw
There are immigrants and then there are immigrants. Mexicans are pretty harmless. But open borders means taking in every random Indian, African, and Arab that wants to come in; that's a problem.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
I liked it. It was like an old-timey teletype news wire.
At a minimum, redemption requires that you admit you were wrong, that you stop doing bad things, and that you work to fix the evils you have done. Aella has done none of this.
You are courting death, junior.
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