fmaa
2yr ago
He literally states his goal in the article:
I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
fmaa
2yr ago
I didn't say "lots of people", I said "basically everyone actually living in the countries involved". (including security analysts, politicians, pro-Russia people etc.)
Motteposting does have a point, though. Putin's literal words don't actually convey worry, but are also clear bullshit. Therefore more significance should be given to their negative valence, which does indicate worry.
fmaa
2yr ago
The problem with this narrative is that McFaul and Person omit crucial context about those statements that totally undermines the conclusion they draw from them. First, while the statements they quote make it sound as if Putin had no problem with NATO expansion, he made it very clear even at the time that he thought it was a bad idea. For instance, in the same November 2001 interview they quote, Putin also said that he didn’t think that expanding NATO “[made] any sense” because NATO had been created to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and “there [was] no Soviet Union anymore”, so NATO expansion wouldn’t increase anyone’s security. Similarly, during a press conference in 2004 with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then Secretary General of NATO, he stated that “Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed” and repeated his view that it wouldn’t increase anyone’s security, but strangely those statements and many others like them didn’t make it into McFaul and Person’s article.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single person in the Baltics who thinks joining NATO didn't increase their country's security. The only difference of opinion is that some soviet Russians living in the Baltics think this is a bad thing, stopping Putin from restoring their rightful place as part of the Russian Empire.
fmaa
2yr ago
While this excerpt has relevance as a list of specific failings, it does have the caveat that repeating remedial training is the smarter option compared to getting shipped to Vietnam.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think that for many people's moral intuitions, the severity of a crime is how much negative value it brings other people, but the "scuminess" of a crime is at least partially the ratio of this value lost to the value gained by the criminal.
By this measure littering feels worse than some forms of theft.
fmaa
2yr ago
He has succefully marketed EVs as sexy instead of lame
This one is interesting because of how little it actually took. A large part of it was just making a regular ass sedan at a time when other manufacturers were making their EVs conspicuously ugly (so you can show everyone how much you care about the environment).
So little, but apparently impossible for those existing manufacturers.
fmaa
2yr ago
It is a massive benefit of the abundance of industrial society that it can support and reward obsessive outliers in their pursuit of human achievement.
fmaa
2yr ago
Yes, the 4-1-5 horseshoe was exactly my point. 2 feels like a failure of test taking ability in the context of an anti-woke test, phasing out AA is more naturally a "talk less about race than currently" option. 3 is possible, though it is a fairly noncommittal stance and the original test was on a 4-point scale.
fmaa
2yr ago
I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.
fmaa
2yr ago
There are Goodhart's law problems with historical torture. Regardless of its usefulness at extracting information, torture has always been excellent at extracting confessions. So any organization rewarded based on confessed criminals/spies/traitors caught will find torture very effective, regardless of how little it actually serves their purported goal.
fmaa
2yr ago
You could offload a significant portion of the price-setting burden to professionals by inverting the system. Have purchase offers go through the government land registry, and base the land tax on the highest offer rejected in the past year or something.
Offers unanswered in some time are rejected by default, and you have a somewhat fair system to assess land value for tax purposes where the owner isn't forced into regular active price setting or having to sell for a previously committed price.
In such a system purchase offers would presumably need collateral or preapproved mortgages to ensure against frivolous purchase offers.
fmaa
2yr ago
While I sympathize with this making the game worse, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the platonic ideal of competitiveness is the natural one, and the one that actual humans consistently gravitate to without verbal communication is the unnatural one.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think it's quite inevitable that when taken seriously games with more than 2 sides end up being more about politics than what the game is explicitly about (unless it is explicitly about politics). Even without throwing the game, any action or inaction can affect the balance between the top players.
The options are finding a gaming group that won't make casual games about politics, one that enjoys the politics, or playing games with 2 sides.
Pretty much the only games I can think of that people play seriously (read: professionally) with more than 2 sides are gambling games like poker and mahjong. And I'm fairly sure they are rife with collusion scandals.
Viewing aging as a problem to be solved is already essentially transhumanist. But then you go on and call a problem "early knee failure", implying there is a proper time and place for knees to fail. The transhumanist view is that there isn't one. The aesthetic preference of whether the ideal knee is one that looks like your Platonic knee but never deteriorates, or part of a cyberpunk monstrosity that allows leaping over buildings is a minor quibble within transhumanism in comparison.
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