georgioz
3mo 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
6mo ago
If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.
For the n+1-th time, emotions are not incompatible with rationality.
Write that to the OP.
Further, presumably @zataomm takes umbrage to arguments that rely entirely or mostly on emotion, not a claim that emotion is entirely out of place in an argument.
So do I. I do not understand why anybody should give a shit what reading some arguments made OP feel: if he is disheartened or if he hates humanity or if his hand hurts today as he slammed it against the table reading these arguments. It is tangential to the discussion and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is his incredulity with why people are emotional if somebody defends bestiality.
Which is BTW the hidden point that may have gotten over your head: the other people maybe also feel disheartened and lost faith in humanity and hate the society after reading arguments supporting bestiality. This would be equally emotionally "rational" response. So by rationally examining his own elevated emotions, the OP answered his question at least as it pertains to certain part of the outraged mob. Now I hope his curiosity is at least partially sated.
I think that all this language about how one is rationalist but one should also put numerical credences (ideally down to decimals) to one's beliefs and how one should be careful about context of information and source of my views and how in the end it should all kind of feel "normal" - it all is the usual way of how rationalists say a simple thing everybody knows in a complicated way. Man, practice some source hygiene, work on your thinking and trust your intuition a bit. On most beliefs one would be in line with majority of informed people.
Paradoxically it is always the weird shit where rationalists are touting their supposed first principle revolutionary approach, where they are espousing mantras like that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. I am talking about things like saving ants or taking drugs or defending some sexual deviancy or other defense of some weird shit that nerds really want to rationalize. Guess what, my intuition screams "red alert".
georgioz
1yr ago
The author is suggesting that GPT-4 and humanities professors have similar goals and methods, and that they are both inferior to thing-manipulators who can challenge their claims with facts and data. He is implying that GPT-4 could replace humanities professors because they are both producing meaningless or misleading content.
It was about replacement of humanities professors by GPT-4 as opposed to thing-manipluators. But it also caught the tone of your thing vs symbol manipulators. And in that sense I completely agree about GIGO.
georgioz
1yr ago
Look, in my eyes it is the same. Pickpocket gangs are basically organized as snatchers. If you detect a pickpocket suddenly 4 people around you turn aggressive and it turns to snatching/attempted snatching.
So my argument is that pickpocketing is just a developed version of snatching. But no worries, we are going to get there at least in Europe.
georgioz
1yr ago
James Lindsay has a very good presentation about it. The problem is, that it requires many tangents actually explaining certain concepts and definitions. So it for sure is daunting task, but I like his definition when you have to have system of philosophy, meaning cosmology, epistemology, axiology and sociology that is then united and directed by theology which makes it a system of religion.
Orban nationalized billions and made decision for the whole population when it comes to significant portion of their income and their wellbeing in the old age. Is this serious enough to be considered just a "nudge"? Of course the nudge itself was "small": just opt-in again, it will take you only a few seconds of your life. And if you cannot be bothered reading the fine print then we just made the "choice" easy for you by default.
If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.
I can see the difference, that is the point of the analogy that it is by definition not the same thing. My main point is that nudges use psychological tricks, they take advantage of natural laziness of people who "cannot be bothered" to make the choice for them often in matters of great importance. In that sense the choice was made for them by the designer of that option. Also it has to be said that "could not be bothered" is again just another euphemism to help with self-deception. "You see, all the people are bright and free but they have so much to do in their lives. What about we the experts help them by preselecting the correct choice for them as the default. Of course if people invested energy studying the topic, they would surely have made that choice themselves. We are just helping and increasing utility for everyone." Now that is pretense, but it is not rare for many of the expert nudgers to show their elitist upbringing by privately outright admitting that they believe people are stupid and somebody has to make the correct choice for all those dimwits.
Natives could not have been "bothered" to read the fine print or to ask for the meaning of it all. So instead of explaining all the choices and consequences clearly and honestly, the Dutch just "nudged" natives to sell their lands for a few trinkets. Who knows, maybe the Dutch thought that they are going to build a thriving trading post where natives can exchange goods and learn about the God to save their immortal souls and in general make them more civilized. They were doing natives a favor, Dutch may have them considered as too savage to be able to make their own choices. And if the Dutch profited from all that as well, this is only one more argument for applying the nudge. And as for "murders" and all that, maybe it was not the original intention of the nudge. Dutch could have not known that natives are so prone to European diseases or that they are so stiff about their tribal honor culture. It was just series of honest mistakes which sadly sometimes happen even to the very best of nudgers. Who knows, maybe all of it could have been possibly corrected by a few more well placed nudges.
Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.
I agree, however another point is how proud these people are for openly standing on one side of the conflict. It is seen as a moral and just thing to lie and decieve in order to "win". Or to be more precise and trying to walk in their shoes- in their minds it is not lying and decieving, nato really. They are doing the good work. In the past I had a thought experiment of insane Christian who decided to kill babies right after they were baptized. In mind of this Christian he is on a mission to fill the heaven with innocent souls and he is the only willing to pay the price of eternal damnation. He was the only "true" Christian who has the guts and moral chutzpah to pay the price unlike those other weakling wannabe Christians. He was willing to pay the ultimate price of his immortal soul to "do good". Of course the question is if he really is in the right or hopelessly in the wrong. For me it takes huge heaps of arrogance, narcissism and and of course also psychopathy to pull something like that off. Additionally it is a strategy that brings huge cost to oneself which makes it very hard to correct due to sunk cost fallacy coupled with consistency fallacy.
Only we now live in a society where instead of condemnation of similar despicable practices and as you say, willingness to throw away the whole game by failing to process ones behaviour through categorical imperative - we now have some new morality praising such destructive behavior. There are definitely some psychological, social and moral angles to process here and as I say I am not quite there yet to have some stable opinion on it.
georgioz
1yr ago
That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.
And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.
georgioz
1yr ago
They could become neutral. Meaning no transport of goods, no panzerhaubitze 2000 and most importantly a major diplomatic ally for Russia when it comes to diplomacy in the west. It would also throw screws into the whole sanction mechanism given that Germany is together with France the major player when it comes to EU internal politics. Even easing on some of this stuff could serve Putin very well.
georgioz
8d ago
If there are Taelons 100 million ly away from us, it is highly unlikely they’d care about us.
Milky way diameter is only around 100 thousand ly, the closest Andromeda galaxy is 2,4 million ly. Even Voyager is travelling around 1 ly/18,000 yeas so it can get to the edge of the galaxy in around 900 million years. Parker Solar Probe, which is fastest moving man-made object has ten times the velocity, so it could travel to the edge of the galaxy in tens of millions of years.
Any sufficiently old civilization - let's say tens or hundreds of millions of years old - could reasonably have a probe in every star system in the Galaxy even with our current propulsion technology with no problem and it could even explore other galaxies if it is 1 billion years or older.
georgioz
30d ago
Is it only me or are you guys also having dreams that are AI-like? Just yesterday I closed my eyes and I had literally an AI vision - the image assembled before my eyes so to speak with great detail changing scenery.
Was it always like that or am I dreaming of AI images I saw during daytime? I am not sure to be honest.
If you want to understand Identity Politics, then it is best to go to the source of Black feminist group named The Combahee River Collective and how they defined it in their 1977 manifesto
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.
This is the true birthplace of the concept of intersectionality, The Combahee River Collective was a group of black women many of them were lesbians. They connected their identity to oppression, and posited that until the least privileged are free (black, queer women), nobody is free. Of course the identity politics in this sense is abhorrent as it automatically assigns value judgement to immutable characteristics such as sex, race etc. The way to get around this is to introduce systemic thinking. You are a man and even if you do not directly and consciously engage in oppression, you nevertheless have access to male privilege and you implicitly and unwittingly perpetuate the system of power - The Patriarchy (or White Supremacy or Capitalism etc.) - that oppresses people. You will never be able to tap into the lived experience of oppressed people, you will always lack this way of knowing, but you can be an ally and center these marginalized identities whenever possible. To center here it means literally, they imagine identities being on the margin of the circle while privileged people are in the center. Marginalized people have better view of the situation having the outside view, you have to shrink the circle and introduce margins into the conversation. You will see these concept in DEI training explaining it all to you. As Di Angelo says:
This work [anti-racism in this case] requires courage and commitment to a lifelong process.
It is lifelong work until patriarchy/capitalism/white supremacy/whatever is dismantled completely. But before then you have to give power to the marginalized so that the society can reorient itself in right direction under their expert guidance to dismantle oppression. Once that goal is achieved, the marginalized will abolish themselves as they will no longer need the power and we all end up in utopia.
That is the one minute summary of generalized dialectical conspiracy theory, their weltanschaung and ideas behind that worldview. It really is quite simple if you look at it. For sure at least in the way to identify who is the victim and who is to blame for everything as with many other conspiracy theories. Similarly to those there is also a huge rabbit hole to lose yourself for a lifetime, but the general gist stays the same despite complicated sounding jargon and the rest of it.
georgioz
1yr ago
Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?
One way they may explain it is that saying "transgender woman" is a similar to let's say saying "tall woman". Of course it does not remove the problem of definition of the word woman. Which as far as I understand is then defined metaphysically, woman is somebody who "feels like a woman born in wrong body". So womanhood is metaphysical term, it is something like a soul.
georgioz
1yr ago
12/20, as a note I was really overthinking at the beginning. In the second half I just went by my guts and had a little better results. But it really seems like a random chance.
We're looking at increase in M2 from ~$15.5 trillion to $18 trillion in one quarter, then continuing up over $21 trillion in the next few quarters. The United States has never spiked monetary policy to that extent
For some reason any analysis of M2 or money supply I see completely ignores the FED policy of paying interest on reserves that was introduced in 2008 with specific purpose of sterilizing effect of quantitative easing on inflation - which is a stupid policy if you ask me, but it is what it is. Interest on reserves basically turns money supply into substitute for treasury bills and thus renders analysis of most amateur economists who like to show "exponential growth of money printing" moot.
It looks like the closing price was 60.56 on Feb 19, 2020, and then it dropped to 41.65 at the close on March 18. That is about a 33% drop.
Yes, this is the infamous COVID drop many people "bragged" about how they managed to time their shorts. Only then many of those people continued to short the stocks "knowing" that COVID will be even worse and that markets will crash completely any time soon. Except the rest of the year stocks experienced strong growth that basically erased all the losses by the end of the year and the growth continued for the whole 2021 as well. Some people lost all they gained in February/March and then some. I am strongly against timing this stuff, I did not lose the nerve during the drop - I actually bough a little bit more as usual.
PS: Your annual gain is actually a bit less -- 10.27% per this formula: 72.28 = 53.11e^(3*x)
My formula was (72.28/53.11)^(-3). It also works backwards when you calculate 53.11(1.1081)^3 = 72.262. There is of course some rounding error. Also my gains were in EUR and it benefited from lately stronger dollar. In dollar terms the ETF had around 7.6% annual return, which is more then reasonable.
It has a higher cost (0.20 %) than VOO (0.03%), but that might not matter much.
Yes, it is literally World ETF so it also holds some Emerging Markets which results in slightly higher expense ratio. But in my eyes it is worth it, no need to construct some complicated portfolio rebalancing it all the time and losing money on fees.
georgioz
1yr ago
Populism does not have to be without program or theory. One of the first recorded establishment vs populist clashes was that of Optimates vs Populares like Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome. Populists can have intelligent and well read champions and specific program like land reform, tax reform or election reform in case of aforementioned Populares.
In case of Bannon he named Sander's crowd who called for socialized healthcare, education and overall larger redistribution is one form of populism inside Democratic party, MAGA nationalism with things like subsidizing domestic industries employing workers can be used as populist strain of Republicans.
georgioz
1yr ago
I care because it is one of the many instances of how the social norms are established and before you know it, it will be your own daughter smelling around the dinner table. I am done with the "live and let live" attitude for all the craziness it brought upon us. I am now all for return of good old shaming/blaming back into town. So yeah, I have no problem calling Aella and any of her partners as disgusting people. Sue me.
So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?
I agree with the OP that this is question of conceptual core beliefs and morality. I think that what we are going through a phase where we will see what are the real consequences of of shredding the old moral principles and replacing them with what we have now. What I find interesting is that between people like Rationalists, Sam Harris and even New Left the common theme seems to be pedestalization of maximizing utils, which means something like "minimizing suffering" as the new ultimate value. The methods may be different - rationalists prefer to think about themselves as professional surgeons who know how to not get emotions in their way. They know what is moral and they will do what is necessary to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. The new left on the woke side pedestalizes compassion above everything else. They also want to maximize minimize suffering by means of compassionate justice.
I think this morality and aesthetics will bring us ruin, I do not think it is workable as a society-wide system. I agree with the OP that the whole theology is absolutely wrong, the focus on utils and compassion as the highest aim is not only wrong, but I think it is unstable as it was the result of the previous moral system.
I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.
This is a very interesting topic for me. Originally the vaccines were touted as "efficient and safe". The original promise during the first round of the vaccine was definitely as effective against spread - it was one of the main drivers for vaccination of certain number of people in order to achieve herd immunity. New York Times in September 2021 said that
Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.
It was then increased by some percentage points until the new story emerged that vaccines are only there to prevent severe risks of infection. Please do mind you, that originally due to herd immunity goal it was supposed that all people including children should receive the vaccine. Vaccine was literally touted as replacement for lockdown, there were literally "traffic light" systems where severity of lockdown was based on vaccination rate like this example from New Zealand
A high vaccination rate remains a key tool to protect people and minimise the spread of COVID-19. Getting vaccinated means you are less likely to get extremely sick or infect other people.
What followed is that the "or infect other people" part was dropped down as if it never existed. I will end here, but this level of amnesia of things that were blasted 24x7 all over the media and government communication is quite frankly astounding. And I am not singling you out, I have met people who had the same stance toward vaccine as you, where they literally replaced the latest narrative as if it was always the case. But to be frank it is quite scary, mostly because it hugely impedes any learnings from the current pandemic ranging from original designation of "COVID scare is racist" through "WHO says no evidence of human-to-human spread" through "no evidence that masks work" to "mask mandates" to "cloth masks do not work" to "vaccines make people less likely to infect other people" to now where we say that "experts" were always right.
It seems insane to me and do not even get me about "Lab Leak conspiracy" theory. Because yeah, a country of 1.4 billion is origin of novel coronavirus and it happens by chance that Wuhan - one of 100 Chinese cities above population of 1 million - was epicenter of the virus. And BTW it is also the only place in China where there is also Biosafety level 4 Wuhan Institute of Epidemiology that coincidentally happens to research novel coronaviruses. All the stellar Pulitzer journalists did not see anything there to investigate the biggest story of 21st century so far, not enough incentives to go deeper. Quite contrary: to ask questions about potential leak was deemed as conspiracy. For me it is incredible for journalists who regularly look for weak links - like politician getting donation from corporation only for year later to vote in favor of them, they saw nothing suspicious in such a huge red flag. And not only that, they were lock in step to suppress the story.
Contrary to your position, I find the discussion in former Culture War as well as here in The Motte quite valuable, it not only serves as an aggregator of things happening, but many of the phenomena described here helped me navigating real world situations regarding the Culture War like for instance those in my workplace that to my amazement started to ramp up in last year or two. Compared to that, many of my colleagues are like megafauna waiting to go extinct one way or another by stepping on some mine unknown to them. I do not share neither the loathing for denizens of this place, nor self-loathing you display here. And I definitely do not share your view on moral superiority of Scott Alexander and his "niceness" field.
Nevertheless this would probably only "devolve" into another discussion with a loser hater witch that you are no longer interested in. So I wish for you to enjoy whatever comes next. Take care.
I think we are talking about the same thing except that "physically killing themselves" is in a sense trivial matter of things like swallowing some pills, jumping off the cliff or pushing a trigger. Motorically killing oneself is triviality and almost everybody can do it in some manner comfortable with his "skillset". It of course is psychologically serious act and not everybody is capable of it - OP says that this is cowardice.
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