faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
I think television news broadcasts are uncool in the same way banks are, though not in the way that trees and grass are.
My impression of normies, and particularly of the type of normies that exhibit "woke" sentiments, are usually pretty anti-establishment, despite the establishment trying to pander to them. So my judgement about banks is mostly driven by the idea that banks are about as "establishment" as you can get, and when the establishment starts supporting your ideas, you need new, better ideas that the establishment is not willing to support to prove that you are not one of them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
I cannot capture the prevailing mood of the movement better than they did themselves in destroying and discarding a statue and replacing it with "black is beautiful" - they made the world uglier in a small way and told us that it was beautiful.
I think it is more like "this statue says that equality and justice is important to you, but we judge that to be a lie, and we will prevent you from having nice things that imply that equality and justice are important to you for as long as we do not think that the world is just".
Still a destructive mindset but I don't think anyone was trying to say that the spray-painted plinth was more beautiful than the statue, just that nobody can have nice things until all of the perceived injustices of the world have been corrected.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides 6 million Jews and 3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are
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13 millionSoviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc),4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular) -
1 - 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians
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Hundreds of thousands of Romani people (credible estimates vary widely but at least 130,000 total)
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Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
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Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
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How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
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Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
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Okay, how about if the people you murder are people who might hypothetically be able to organize resistance to your invasion?
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If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city.
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
I, Paul Blobel, swear, declare and state in evidence:
- I was born in Potsdam on August 13, 1894. From June 1941 to January 1942 I was the commander of Sonderkommando 4A.
- After I had been released from this command, I was to report to Berlin to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich and Gruppenfuhrer Muller, and in June 1942 I was entrusted by Gruppenfuhrer Muller with the task of obliterating traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were that I should report in person to the commanders of the Security Police and SD, pass on Muller's orders verbally and supervise their implementation. This order was top secret and Gruppenfuhrer Muller had given orders that owing to the need for strictest secrecy there was to be no correspondence in connection with this task. In September 1942 I reported to Dr. Thomas in Kiev and passed the order to him. The order could not be carried out immediately partly because Dr. Thomas was disinclined to carry it out, and also because the materials required for the burning of the bodies was not available. [...snip due to character limit, full text available here ...]
- According to my orders I should have extended my duties over the entire area occupied by the Einsatzgruppen, but owing to the retreat from Russia I could not carry out my orders completely....
Blobel's last words were
Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those who murder me.
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
The number of people who are estimated to have come in during the last 4 years is comparable to the total prior illegal population.
I expect this statistic double-counts people, because I find it quite doubtful that the median length of time that people have been living here illegally is 4 years or less (which it would have to be, if more than half of the people who are currently living here illegally came in the last 4 years).
I don't dispute that Biden's immigration policy was bad BTW. I specifically dispute the claim that before Trump I illegal immigration was not an emergency, but between the end of Trump I and the start of Trump II, it became such an emergency that it now requires resolution within months, and so we must set aside rule of law and due process concerns.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I don't know if the grant application is public but here's the NSF page on the award, which has more details including the abstract and resulting publications.
Resulting publications look like real science with plausible important implications for medicine, not ideologically captured garbage:
- Tonic extracellular glutamate and ischaemia: glutamate antiporter system x c regulates anoxic depolarization in hippocampus
- Naked Mole-Rats Demonstrate Profound Tolerance to Low Oxygen, High Carbon Dioxide, and Chemical Pain
- Phenylpropanoid-enriched broccoli seedling extract can reduce inflammatory markers and pain behavior
- Pharmacokinetics of Injectable Meloxicam and Buprenorphine in the Naked Mole-Rat (Heterocephalus glaber)
This is exactly the sort of foundational research I want my tax dollars funding - low immediate commercial value but potentially massive positive externalities.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Tuskagee was a spit in the bucket compared to what's happening, not to mention George Floyd, or MeToo. If you can link to making that s sort of argument about these cases, I'll believe that you actually made this argument in good faith.
Huh, apparently reddit is more of a tire fire than I thought, because I definitely made the "what exactly do you hope to accomplish, how does what's currently going on accomplish that, and are there any downsides to normalizing looting unrelated businesses and homes in response to injustice" point during the 2020 riots. But apparently it's been memory-holed. IIRC it was my second most downvoted comment ever.
I've got quite a lot of "measures to contain covid have costs as well as benefits, and I've seen no evidence that the benefits exceed the costs and quite a bit of evidence of the reverse" of you're interested in that.
Honestly though, you will probably not have much success modeling me as "on your side" or "against your side" - I would like to grill, and I object to moral busibodies who get between me and my grill with their schemes to make society better. And I especially object when those schemes aim to solve tiny problems that affect a few thousand people in a country of hundreds of millions, or when those schemes obviously won't help with the problem they're supposedly trying to solve, or when the cure is clearly worse than the disease.
If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".
I very much expect that was one of the planned-for contingencies, yes. I would not be shocked if she had explicitly put numbers on the probability it would come to that, and already made a decision on what she would do in that contingency.
I think you're modeling her as "typical 36-year-old woman who happens to exist in bay area rationalist circles" and I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".
See her post stating that is not just true, but too obvious to say that you should cryonically freeze yourself when you die, on the off-chance that you may be revived in the future. I think the set of people who can earnestly write that post and the set of people who object to having another woman carry their baby to term, on a deep enough level to not even consider the question, have very little intersection.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
You have to dehydrate it first, but jerky is in fact flammable. We're not talking about a single body, we're talking about a pile of bodies with fuel and accelerants at the bottom.
SecureSignals keeps coming back to the assertion that "pile a bunch of bodies on a grate, put wood and accelerants below them, and ignite" is not a viable way to burn bodies, and that it is not viable because burning bodies is a strongly energy-negative process, as evidenced by normal cremations taking a lot of fuel. This would actually be a pretty good knock-down argument against the reliability of that testimony if burning bodies was in fact strongly energy-negative.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
I'm probably using a non-standard definition of normies. I'm not sure there is a standard definition of "normie".
The context was "to a normie, banks are just these things that are part of the environment", which was in the broader context of "to someone inclined to be woke, banks are uncool", so I was figuring we were operating under a very broad definition of "normie" that included "woke" people.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
How is the government in question distinguishing "cooperators" from "defectors" here, such that they are specifically taking the stuff of "defectors"?
If "defector" is a broad enough category, it might still be better to take only some of their stuff rather than all of it, even from the perspective of a government that only cares about obtaining resources for itself.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
I would say "more attention than puberty blockers", because the number of affected kids is much higher. Something caused a massive uptick in either the experience of dysphoria, the reaction to dysphoria, or some combination thereof. I think "social contagion" is a thought-terminating non-explanation here. To reduce the rate of trans identification, I think it would be worth looking into what generally leads to discomfort with being embodied (as that seems to correlate extremely strongly, and also seems to be much more common than it used to be).
Of course, if you don't actually care about that and your main objection is to "point deer say horse", that is perfectly valid. But in that event I also don't take statements of concern about puberty blockers at face value, and will discount your policy suggestions in that area accordingly.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
By my assessment, poorly. In the sense that we will all be poor if things continue this way.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
He also campaigned on making America great and prosperous.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Or have translations made for every language, etc.
Or build tools to allow everyone to translate anything into their native language. Technological solutions to social problems are great!
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Possible. My guess would be that if you took each user's comments over the past year, you would see minimal change in the decouplishness of that user's comments over the year, but if you looked at comment volume by decouplishness the fraction of comments by low-decouplers has increased substantially over that same year. Though I have not actually run such an analysis -- if anyone does, I'd be super interested in the results.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
What happens if there's a crisis and the bulk of the population is economic migrants?
Empirically national solidarity seems to increase when there's a crisis. Unless the crisis is economic, I suppose - if lots of people moved to your country because of the promise of prosperity, and then your country started doing worse economically, those people might go seek their fortune elsewhere.
But yeah, losing the possibility of national solidarity based on centuries of common ancestry is a cost, at least for places where that was ever on the table. I expect the benefits are generally worth that cost, especially in a context where you can only control immigration and not emigration, but it is a cost.
So if I'm understanding correctly, your claim is that, for most things that evolutionarily psychology predicts, most people would make the same predictions?
If so, I think I buy that for a lot of things (e.g. "people intuitively value their immediate family more than their distant family, and people who look like them more than people who don't) though definitely not all of them (e.g. I expect evolutionary psychologists to have very different views on infanticide than the general population).
I imagine there's probably one particular claim that evo psych makes that you're thinking of here, but I'm actually not sure which one. Evo psych makes kind of a lot of claims and many of them are outside the Overton window.
Because "women are capable of lying about rape and domestic violence" is not actually a claim evo psych makes (except in the very general sense of "strategies that involve deception are adaptive sometimes"). Most people won't agree to that in an internet argument because they expect that "are capable of" will be treated as "mostly do" or some other similar "gotcha". But that's not a matter of not admitting it to themselves, it's a matter of not admitting it to a hostile internet rando.
which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group.
Ah, I see how what I wrote looks like that. I was gesturing more towards "bay-area rationalists are a very unusual culture with nonstandard beliefs, and she has bought deeply into those beliefs, and she occupies a fairly prominent position within that culture".
A central tenet of those beliefs is something like "fuck the natural state of things, fuck stodgy traditionalists, fuck the people who sneer on anything which seems weird to them. We can do it better because we are very smart and we are willing to do weird icky things if a cost-benefit analysis says it's worthwhile". I would not describe this strategy as "highly competent" so much as "high-variance" -- when it works it works great (see the number of bitcoin multimillionaires, calling out COVID as impactful very early) but when it fails it fails spectacularly (see SBF among quite a large number of other less prominent things).
I expect someone who buys into those beliefs to be far more willing than typical to accept something "weird and icky" like surrogacy if it gets her what she wants. And also I think it just may be a lot less universal than you think for women to crave the miracle of being pregnant and giving birth specifically, rather than craving the miracle of having her own offspring. (For reference, even outside of the rat community I've heard the topic of maybe using IVF come up a handful of times, and I think surrogacy came up in every one of those conversations).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2yr ago
Ah. That'd do it. Thanks.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
So literally some takes from 5 years ago and a different account, which, if I'm correct about which name you're implying guesswho used to post as, are more saying "in practice sexual assault accusations aren't being used in every political fight, so let's maybe hold off on trying drastic solutions to that problem until it's demonstrated that your proposed cure isn't worse than the disease".
Let he who has never posted a take that some people find objectionable cast the first stone.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
It's not that you should care about this dude. It's that you (presumably, given your comment) live in a country with a legal system that primarily makes decisions based on precedent, and "this one weird trick lets the government sidestep due process requirements" is a terrifying precedent to set.
If the "administrative error" argument actually stands up in court, that is.
You are not the main problem here, no. Although I don't know who you're referring to as someone who both substantively agrees with you and also engages with difficult questions (rather than e.g. changing or dropping the topic when challenged and then coming back with the same points a week or two later).
Edit: or at least I don't consider you to be the main problem. I don't speak for everyone.
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