magic9mushroom

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 1d ago

I have at least one post that I deleted because I belatedly realised that it could function as a "how-to" for a terrorist.

I would not appreciate that post's version history becoming available to all Mottizens.

(The rest, IIRC, are from me realising I misinterpreted a post on reading further context and deleting a misaimed response or unnecessary question; undeleting those wouldn't accomplish anything but I wouldn't strongly oppose it either.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4d ago

Undeleting the posts of permabanned members would cover a lot of the same ground. I'm pretty sure the admins can do it; Zorba definitely can.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

From the Red Tribe's point of view, the Blue Tribe is basically using an exploit in the rules (or rather, several; the education system's another) to generate new loyal voters. This is one of the biggest weaknesses in democracy: if there are any ways to generate new loyal voters en-masse, some arsehole will use them to take over the country.

That's why they take such a hard line on it: because if they lose this, they suspect they lose it all, forever. Hence, no surrender, no retreat, no matter the cost. A substantial amount of Reds would say that if the next Dem President would do that, then the correct response is to raze the Democratic Party so there'll never be one. Indeed, @Dean has since written a QC about Trump using available resources to roll up key supporting structures of the Democratic Party.

When enemy victories build up permanent advantages, worries about escalation go right out the window. To quote Zvi:

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. If playing it ‘safe’ with your resources means you don’t win, then it means that you die. Either don’t play, or don’t hold back.

The grand irony of all this, of course, is that this is exactly the same mentality that a lot of Antifa subscribe to; they think they've already bet their lives on the culture war and will actually be executed for sodomy/etc. if the Red Tribe ever gets enough power.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

This is now what has happened- the right overspent hard from 2016-2024, and now the left is hunting the right's institutions of social capital generation (academia, etc.)

Um, did you perhaps interchange the words "left" and "right" in this sentence? Because if you didn't I'm not sure how this makes sense.

Also, I'd say that the period of overspending social credit is more like 2015-2021 or -2022 (the extreme measures taken against Trump and Trumpists started back in 2015 IIRC; the Fair Game order on Musk was 2022-4, and was an utter outrage, but that was naked governmental force, not weaponisation of social credit).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

So... what, you're saying that people have a responsibility to prove to you that they're not secretly cackling demons?

Do you realise that universalising this attitude results in civil war?

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7d ago

What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8d ago

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

This is a failure of theory of mind.

As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.

So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO₂ might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 9d ago · Edited 9d ago

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that (potentially) can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11d ago

but in the end parents still want their kids to be successful,

Be afraid of this. Be very afraid. Immoral Mazes reward psychopathy - mean chickens. Selecting for expected income would literally be one of the most destructive rubrics possible; at least if 5% of the new generation had penis noses it'd mostly just suck for that 5% rather than dragging everyone else down with them the way that 5% being genius psychopaths would.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 16d ago

META strategies

I don't know what this is intended to mean. Is META an acronym for something? Or what are "metastrategies" in this context?

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 17d ago

You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.

Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 19d ago

That's a little bit reductive; there are a lot of things on that "or" list, some of which are perfectly fine. Deducing that I have one of the traits on that "or" list from my significant walks to the supermarket would be correct (specifically, I don't have a driver's licence; I'm absent-minded and don't think I'd make a great driver).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 21d ago

Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."

...which is sometimes a rational choice, because the penalty for getting caught is frequently less than the gains from crime. Changpeng Zhao seems to be doing alright for himself.

Seriously, more countries need to have the penalty of "all your money are belong to us" on the table for financial criminals and/or actually use it.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 23d ago

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 23d ago

Or maybe you just can't stop yourself from expressing it in maximally vitriolic ways.

He doesn't, though. AFAICS @WhiningCoil is a lot less vitriolic than SteveKirkland or Bernd.

Like, yeah, he might not be the most pleasant person to have around, but neither is @The_Nybbler. WC's not, TTBOMK, a flaming jackass who tries to drive out his opponents and claim the space.

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"He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit,"

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 25d ago

I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.

Two days ago.

Less than a day ago.

"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."

Both from @Amadan.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 27d ago

why do you have it confused?

I don't.

You said "calculate utility correctly". To calculate utility correctly requires knowing the truth. Different worldstates result in different expected utilities for the same course of action, so a utilitarian with a bad understanding of reality will act suboptimally according to his own utility metric - often wildly so. The obvious example is that genocide looks utile if you think the relevant demographic are all evil.

Hence, "lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly" = "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth".

This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 27d ago

I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome.

Inherently, no, but later-harm produces tactical voting. Worse, it produces tactical voting in a mass-producible way; political parties will figure out which full ballot by their supporters will be best for them, and push it hard. Full how-to-vote cards are a thing in Australia, but the parties don't push them all that hard due to later-no-harm.

Now, yes, later-no-harm is incompatible with a bunch of other criteria, which is annoying. But, well, impossibility theorem.

IRV among them is particularly bad for counting

I mean, yes, the O(N!) worst-case is a pain. I will say that it's not nearly as bad in practice as the worst-case; a good number of seats in Australia have [#2 > all votes other than for #1 and #2], which simplifies it to 2 buckets (and a lot of the rest have [#3 > all votes other than #1/#2/#3], which simplifies it to 6 buckets). Usually the AEC can predict this ahead of time; they do a full recount if their prediction is wrong, of course, but most seats are known within hours.

(STV absolutely always is a nightmare, though; we use it for our Senate, and it takes over a week to count. AIUI it's worse in terms of tactical voting, too.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 27d ago · Edited 26d ago

Or lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly, especially if they have some sort of bias.

I mean, this is basically just saying "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth". And, okay, this is not actually impossible, but it's not very likely, especially in the long run. COVID is the obvious recent example of people trying this shit and it blowing up in their faces.

More generally, you say "I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument". Notice that if you're not sure why somebody doesn't accept something, one of the possible answers is in fact "they understand it just fine, but there's a counterargument that they understand and you don't".

Spoiler alert: there's literally a Yudkowsky article from 2008 about this. And another. Probably others I haven't read or can't recall offhand!

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 27d ago

Also, every single Condorcet method is clone independent if there exists a Condorcet winner (which polling suggests is over 90% of elections).

Yes. There's a solid argument for some of the better Condorcet-completion methods as better than IRV, despite them failing later-no-harm. Approval is not a Condorcet method.

In terms of the benefit you get from tactical voting, it is pretty similar across the two methods (both about 10-20% of what you get in FPTP).

I... suspect you're not counting things as tactical that are, in fact, tactical. Honest voting in approval is approving everyone better than some fixed standard of goodness. This usually doesn't split the viable candidates (i.e. you approve all of them or disapprove all of them), which means your vote is fully wasted (just as with voting third-party in plurality). To make your vote count, it usually has to be tactical - to take note of which candidates are viable and choose a cutoff that splits them.

IRV has tactical voting a little bit of the time for some voters. Approval has tactical voting literally all of the time for most voters.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 28d ago

I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism.

If you are the Czar and you're the only one who needs to be a utilitarian, sure. If you need there to be lots of utilitarians, then assuming some commonality of interests lies are terrible because they cause people to calculate utility incorrectly. All moral systems are somewhat sensitive to false information, of course, but utilitarianism is particularly and notoriously so.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 28d ago

I think you may be confusing IRV and STV. STV is the multi-winner version of IRV, intended to produce proportional representation.

As for defending IRV:

Clone independence is a huge deal. It is a much-bigger deal than what sort of candidates get elected, because it gives an escape valve against leaders going corrupt (since a clone can steal their seat). Approval voting is also clone-independent, but there are a ton of voting systems that aren't.
Approval voting has a massive tactical voting problem. Specifically, an approval cutoff (that is, when you rank the candidates in order of preference, the point at which you stop approving) that does not divide the viable candidates wastes your vote. This is in play most of the time for most voters. Rampant tactical voting cases are bad because they disenfranchise the honest and principled in favour of the unscrupulous, and the world has more than enough of that. Its tactical voting problem is not as bad as plurality, but it is close. Now, of course, there is no system that never has tactical voting except for random-ballot (i.e., pick a ballot paper at random, and whoever's on that ballot wins), but IRV does much better than most in this regard; in most cases voting your true preferences is correct.
IRV does not directly advantage compromise candidates. However, it's one of a few systems that if paired with compulsory voting invoke the Median Voter Theorem, and that does tend to produce compromise candidates. I'm not sure that approval does; I think maybe it might if everyone were to vote his/her true preferences, but that's not going to happen because of #2.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 28d ago

(but then why have representatives in the first place?)

The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".

The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.

The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".

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