I consider it more of an "incompetence theory", which should always be at least somewhat plausible to anyone familiar with how often even experts screw up. The real conspiracy theories were in the vein of purposeful release scenarios, engineered bioweapons, etc.
This was the weakman that media put forward as the representation of range of lab leak theories to tar them all as wild insane conspiracies, so that all the "sane" people should accept zoonotic origin as the only truth. Accepting any potential lab leak - even "innocent" one - would torpedo the whole "believe the science" shtick. Careers of scientists were damaged, social media accounts were banned and people were canceled just for mentioning "lab leak", there was no space for nuance. So let's not pretend that we had anything approaching to reasonable debate on the matter. This is what I mean that "they pulled it off".
How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
We do it by politically organizing our communities to vote our candidates into power, who will then abolish systemic structures and usher forth a better world, everybody knows this you dummy. We stand on the right side of history, oppression will be defeated and all the people liberated. In the meantime using critical thinking and calling out centers of power who benefit from their unjust privilege and who perpetuate injustice is us doing the work. Remember, the question is not: Did racism sexism take place? but rather How did racism sexism manifest in that situation?
You see, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
Sure, but it is still incredible that they pulled it off. According to this, there are around 40 thousand wet markets in China. What is the chance that the novel coronavirus will naturally emerge in the Huanan wet market that is just 10 miles from the only lab in China that is studying bat coronaviruses? This fact alone means that lab leak theory can never be considered a "conspiracy theory", especially among journalists who must be skeptical about this level of coincidence. If there is let's say a situation where a politician randomly wins in a lottery shortly after suspicious contract decision or that people working in nuclear power plant suffer radiation poisoning from source supposedly unrelated to the reactor they work on - journalists should immediately mark this as potentially very juicy story worth putting some effort into.
The prior is just too strong, which is exactly opposite to usual conspiracy theories which start with weak prior and try to conjure evidence to boost the likelihood of some unlikely event by presenting chain of circumstantial evidence boosting the prior into plausible posterior. Lab-leak is exactly the opposite situation, even in presence of strong counterevidence it can at best be marked as a paradox - something that seems obvious but is in fact completely different. And even in the case of zoonotic origin, I would for instance find it very likely that some corrupt lab employee or a janitor sold dead infected bats from lab on the wet market instead of incinerating them. It is at least as plausible as the alternative, that a bat not native to the region travelled hundreds of miles into Wuhan with some additional not observed complications like some undetected pangolin in the whole chain. So in the end, it could still plausibly be a leak due to insufficient security procedures in the Lab and thus definitely not conspiracy theory.
In fact this whole story has completely different effect on me by virtue of lowering my trust in the system - how many supposedly zoonotic origin novel diseases we know about from our past - that may in fact be result of careless or otherwise dangerous bioresearch? Whole COVID origin can be part of some other conspiracy theory as an indirect evidence, that blatant things like this happen and that we cannot trust governments or WHO etc.
Getting rid of Biden this late in the game is simply not a winning move.
Maybe not, but Biden winning may not necessarily be a winning move either. There are people - republicans and democrats alike - who genuinely think that having a president with dementia may be severe national security threat. Presumably politicians are supposed to win for a reason, not just for the sake of it.
georgioz
2mo ago
Eventually we're going to be killing off addicts faster than we are producing new ones, even if the overall rate of addicts doesn't change.
Why? If addicts reproduce faster than the rest of the population before they die due to OD, and if addiction is heritable, then we will in fact not be killing the addicts off faster than we are producing new ones. That is my argument: susceptibility to addiction is related to overall susceptibility to impulsive behavior including things like having unprotected sex, forgetting to take pills and other risky behavior related to fertility.
georgioz
2mo ago
Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.
georgioz
2mo ago
and the final third feel dangerous addictive desires in addition to pain relief and are prone to addiction and all the resulting issues if other factors in their life line up right/wrong.
This may roughly correspond to estimates that 27% of Chinese males were addicted to opium as aftermath of opium wars and wide availability of the drug. To be honest, I do not get the whole idea of how decriminalization of drugs will be so fantastic with these and other natural experiments during 19th century. There was a reason why newly discovered drugs got banned in the first place.
georgioz
2mo ago
I would be not so sure. I listened to some podcast where they had good data which supported a dysgenic effect thesis which boiled down to the fact, that getting pregnant is in modern times just another one of larger cluster of female risky behaviors ranging from having many sexual partners, having unprotected sex, being more prone to substance abuse etc. Remember, all it takes for evolution is for people to reproduce. It is "perfectly okay" from evolutionary perspective to have mother of three overdosing in her early twenties only for her offspring taken care for by welfare state to likely face similar fate.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
I think anybody can tell that it was the intent, at least according to the link you provided regarding the NAGPRA Act itself:
These regulations provide systematic processes for returning Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). The revised regulations streamline requirements for museums and federal agencies to inventory and identify Native American human remains and cultural items in their collections.
Between funerary object, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, I think anything goes since cultural patrimony is synonymous with cultural property. And I would emphasize the word cultural is by now long hijacked by the Left: as in cultural studies or cultural sensitivity or cultural racism or LGBT culture and others. The word cultural in this context is one of the archetypal examples of "we share your language but not your dictionary", similar to words like inclusion or diversity. So if you hear something like culturally relevant teaching you cant translate it as woke, probably explicitly as a vehicle to pose as a protector of oppressed native peoples to gain power.
So yeah, I guess the exhibition curators and museum directors are now scared shitless as they probably know what is coming their direction - if they do not immediately overdo at least by factor of 10 of any measure they think is reasonable.
One "theory" I heard was that recent history in the West - and to some extent also elsewhere - basically revolved around baby boomers, partly due to the fact that it is such a populous generation but also due to the fact that so many ideas got discredited as a result of first and second world wars.
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The forties and fifties were the times when boomers were born, it was a time of rebuilding, family stability and security.
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Sixties and seventies were the times when boomers were young adults full of rebellious energies, experimentation with sexuality and drugs and all that. It was the time of peace movements and mass refusal of military service in the name of communal love and peace and almost teenage ideals.
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The eighties and nineties were the times where boomers really came of age, it were the times of risk taking yuppies that proudly destroyed the old stuff in order to unleash creative destruction of this new tide of success hungry urban professionals. It is interesting to see that exactly at the time when boomers were in their most energetic years was also the time the society suddenly discovered that individualism and self-reliance is to be promoted. It was also the time where the society really leaned into gym culture worshiping this youthful vigor, it was the time of Gordon Gekko and Mitch Buchannon.
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The Aughts and Tens are the decades of solidification of the previous achievements. At the same time it is the time of bailouts and growth of assets but also the time of glorification of all the ethos and views of how boomers see themselves, as paragons of Civil Rights virtue who carried the torch of progress forward. But maybe right now we should cut back on some of the stuff and strengthen our social security, healthcare and we should also do everything possible in order to save octogenarians from deadly virus. If the price is incarcerating pre-teen kids in their homes, that is the price boomers are willing to pay.
Now take the aforementioned with grain of salt, but once you see this it is kind of hard to unsee. Boomers collectively seem to have quite a grip on our societies to the extent that they literally shape the cultural lense of how society views itself for over half a century at least. One can even better see it if one for instance looks into statistics of average age of let's say US government officials. The first Baby Boomer president was Bill Clinton born in 1946 who became president in 1993 and we are going to have a president either born in 1946 or 1942 in 2024.
georgioz
3mo ago
You may have your own metric of what is "efficient", I use markets and capacity to produce at scale. You may use different idea of what "efficient" means including efficiently satisfying your aesthetic need but then we are not discussing the same thing. Slave plantations were able to produce more cash crops for cheaper compared to other types of agricultural production, that is why they emerged in the first place and it did not matter if it was French or Portuguese or English or Dutch or later Americans being in control, all of them were running slave plantations despite being of different religions, cultures, languages etc. Playing word games of what it means to be efficient does not change the economic incentives.
georgioz
3mo ago
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
georgioz
3mo ago
As others said, I do not think Israel is particularly destabilizing force in the region compared to all the alternatives. Historically you have all types of conflict in the Middle-East including religious and sectarian strife, ethnic strife, ideological strife between monarchies and republics and socialist revolutionary states as well as tribal and all other types of conflicts. If anything, Israel has quite cordial relations with some of its neighbors like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, which is obviously the reason why somebody sees an ally of my enemy as his enemy.
In fact the civil war in Yemen is a proof that Israel does not have much to do with instability in the region as it is generally viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran where Saudis are actually propped up by western aid in this conflict. So now what - should US and EU depose the Saudi dynasty and establish the country as some direct protectorate to ensure flow of oil and secure Red See and straight of Hormuz?
georgioz
3mo ago
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers.
This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
However in the real world there's almost always an option to wait and collect more data, and whether you want to exercise it critically depends on the difference between "it's a 50/50 chance based on observing 100 coinflips" and "it's a 50/50 chance based solely on the prior I pulled out of my ass".
This also ties to the longstanding discussion regarding calibration confidence of 50/50 predictions. One problem with 50/50 prediction of binary event (as in the post) is that it is equivalent language. If you say that you predict "50% chance of tails" is literally the same thing as you saying "I predict 50% of heads" because it is literally the part of the same observation of "I predict 50% chance of heads and 50% chance of tails" that accounts for everything.
This is also well known weakness, you can really pad your prediction capabilities by adding many 50/50 predictions which you phrase as binary - such as that bitcoin will have value greater than X before January 1st 2025 (Yes/No) or that you will get married etc. Just formulate 1,000 such independent scenarios and literally flip a coin to assign yes/no answers and you should do well.
georgioz
3mo ago
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
georgioz
3mo ago
Mass immigration is only one angle of change with late stage demographic transition. You can apply the same logic you apply to immigrants to demographic collapse. Some things:
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Dysgenic effect of this demographic collapse. The population that is more likely to have children in modern context is population that is more likely to be prone to risky behavior. We are talking about teen mothers, people who also are more prone to addictive substances and so forth. It also makes huge difference when it comes to regional birth rate difference as well as various subcultures: for instance orthodox vs secular Askhenazi Jews in Israel.
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The structure of post-collapse population is impacted in very important way. If you will have 15 million South Koreans in 2100 their median age can be close to 60 years. I is far worse than just having small population, it means that small number of working age people will have to take care of so many unproductive ones. Even if everything that you say is true and we will have some sort of robot revolution, this whole affair will impact the underlying political structure. I do not think that democracy as we know it can thrive in a situation where over 50% of the population is literally living on government dole or its equivalent.
Nevertheless I think you and Kevin Dolan are agreeing here. Birth rates are "not a problem" as long as some societies somehow will find a way to organize economic and political life so that people don't need to work and everybody will get what they need and want - as if this "don't work and get rich" is somehow a novel idea. I think in that case you just solved the people bottleneck by making people obsolete, as easy as that.
Agreed, I recently tried to understand the current Tigray War in Ethiopia and it is such a clusterfuck that some factions are allied to each other but at the same time they are also allied to enemies of their allies which makes them enemies in ways that can easily make your eyes water. All in the midst of ethnic, religious, tribal, and of course personal allegiances shifting constantly. Not to even talk about regional and international spillover.
georgioz
3mo ago
It was a secession from the The British Empire combined with revolution that overthrew the monarchy and installed Republic as a form of government. And it is not without historical parallels - for instance 1848 is known as a year of revolutions but these were equally inspired by nationalism such as in Italy or Germany or Hungary or Poland where calling it as secessionist/independence struggle against empires of the day can be equally valid.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sorry, it was just bad writing. It should read something like "Hypothetical person identifies as nonrestrictive ...". It is common to use "I" in hypothetical examples in my language but maybe it seems weird in English.
georgioz
3mo ago
Ultimately, polyamorous is broadly understood as the opposite of monogamous, and monogamous refers to a relationship model, not an orientation or proclivity.
I slightly disagree. Opposite of monogamous is non-monogamous as there are more models. There are different types of non-monogamous relationships such as for instance polygamy or polyandry which I viewed differently from polyamory. Also for monogamy you can have various models ranging from lifelong commitment that can even carry beyond death of your spouse to serial monogamy including hookup culture.
What do you mean by "relationship model"? I just googled polyamory and this is how it was defined:
Polyamory is a form of ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy that involves having romantic or sexual relationships with multiple partners at the same time. Ethical, or consensual, non-monogamy describes relationships in which all parties are aware of and consent to practice non-monogamy.
Yeah, to me that is about right in terms of how I thought about polyamory. It describes "relationship model" as that of open relationship, it also explicitly says that it is non-monogamous and also that it is practiced. I do not get the "identarian" argument here - to me polyamory can also mean that both partners openly and consensually bang other people. Also to me what Aella pushes can also be viewed as an identity - I someone can identify as nonrestrictive person although his partner never expressed any desire to fuck other people other than him. But he still may hate even a thought of him putting some restrictions on his partner hence he identifies as polyamorous despite him and his partner both living in exclusive and committed monogamous marriage for over 80 years now.
Plus this "identity" vs "relationship model" distinction is not as smart as it seems. A different example I saw somewhere recently are attempts at redefinition of gay/lesbian identity as something akin "sexual model" mostly in order not to offend trans people since "same sex attraction" as identity can be a thin ice to skate on nowadays. Supposedly saying "I enjoy fucking vulvas" is viewed as more hip in some spaces. It is not as if it is your fault that vulvas are attached to females, that is just a coincidence and it definitely does not tell anything about your "identity" and especially its relation to archaic concepts such as biological sex (as opposed to non-biological sex I guess?).
What exactly is the strawman in my argument? That progressives in general believe that there is a thing called privilege, that it manifests itself not necessarily in any particular situation or person (e.g. that somebody is sexist) but that it manifests itself in systemic ways? So yes, the fact the somebody has more privilege - e.g. they are white woman as opposed to black woman - it does not mean that no sexism or racism takes place. Maybe the thing about the revolution is a little bit too on the nose, but in the end it is closer to the truth: the fact that there are women in managerial position in our company is not the issue, the systemic sexism (AKA patriarchy) is the issue.
Or let me put it this way: do you think it is strawman to think, that "run of the mill progressive" believes that there is such a thing like systemic racism or systemic sexism (AKA white supremacy and patriarchy) respectively and that it is present and can be detected in mundane situations like workplace interactions? Does run of the mill progressive believe in privilege in context of gender or race? If not, what does run of the mill progressive believe in this area?
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