magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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10hr ago
Cracking open my hardback of *If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (for the first time, actually; I originally read it as a pirate PDF because of Australia getting the physical book late):
Even if you feel desperate, we caution against acts of violence and destruction. We don't think they work. Unlawful behaviour just makes it harder for the political forces trying to set up the sort of international coalition that could actually un-write our fate.
He suggested state violence, not terrorist violence, and has made that quite clear in his writings. He admits elsewhere that he would go out and be a terrorist if he thought it would actually work, but also notes that he does not think it would (in, I believe, every such mention) and that the bad PR would be counterproductive. I don't think that that constitutes culpability in terrorism. If you advocate for the reintroduction (or continuance) of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, and some fuckwit hears that and blows up the local prison, I don't think that's your fault; allowing fault to attach for something like that is BETA-MEALR-levels of safetyism.
(To be clear, I am in 100% agreement with Eliezer on this point; I have spent a long time idly considering how one could go about fixing the AI problem via terrorism, and while over the years I came up with some plans that might have an effect, I can't see any way to actually execute those plans with realistic levels of resources for a terrorist organisation.)
If they later give Ziz et al the EA equivalent of a tenured university position, or platform people that say (paraphrasing) "yeah I wouldn't do it personally but it's a good thing," so on and so forth, yes, they should be blamed.
Jack LaSota belongs behind bars for life; you'll get no argument from me. I will note that none of the Zizians' kills were actually in service of broader-Rat goals; most were of people who got in their way in some fashion (witnesses, cops), and while there were a couple with some ideological backing (both parents of one of the Zizians, and the Zizians' landlord), opposing "transphobes" and landlords is really more SJ-aligned than Rat-aligned. Hence, while there probably are some fuckwits who'll praise them, I'd expect them to mostly not be Rats on purely-banal grounds.
magic9mushroom
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13hr ago
A massive increase in executions would certainly decrowd prisons without needing to decriminalise anything, and @Southkraut did implicitly include this via "non-prison punishments", although I'm not sure @Celestial-body-NOS would be up for that.
(Personally, I think it's at least worth considering for prison gangs, since imprisoning them apparently hasn't stopped them committing violent crimes.)
magic9mushroom
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14hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
HBD is not really my area of expertise - it's questionable if it's anyone's, given the extreme political distortion of the field for at least the past two centuries - but:
I'm very sceptical of claims of recent large evolutionary changes. There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation (of course, this wasn't a change in them; rather, Old Worlders were massively selected for better disease resistance than the prehistoric norm).
I'm more open to claims of difference based on long timescales - the divergence of Homo sapiens sapiens within Africa (note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia), and the hybridisation with other human subspecies (all non-Africans have about 3% Neanderthal admixture; the Austronesians of Maritime South-East Asia and Oceania have very large Denisovan admixture, sometimes over 10%; there may be some admixture from another subspecies in sub-Saharan Africans).
So from where I sit, this basically leaves only two groups with major question marks over them due to long separation and/or different subspecies makeup from most of humanity - the sub-Saharan Africans (including differences among them), and the Austronesians including Aboriginal Australians. These areas have been notoriously-far behind for most of history, so my best guess is that both of these question marks are probably negative in terms of cognition. My wild guess, if I have to give a number, would be 3-5 IQ points on average; not enough to swamp individual variation, but noticeable on population scales. As noted, though, probably some variation within Africa, and of course there are massive effects from nutrition.
Indians aren't far from being white with dark skin; the gene flow through Persia was always pretty significant. East Asians are more different, but are still basically Eurasian (there's detectable Denisovan admixture, but it's orders of magnitude smaller in China/Korea/Japan). Arabs are white except to the degree they've had recent sub-Saharan African admixture, which is usually minimal AIUI. "Hispanics" are heterogeneous; usually they're some mixture of white, Native American and sub-Saharan African, although the proportions vary drastically and many are outright missing one or two of those components. Native Americans can be treated as North Asians with shitty immune systems and don't have the question mark. Those with substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry have some portion of it (proportionally; do note, of course, that one-drop classification is a pile of shit, as generally everybody has a tiny bit of everything - the human race has never been fully sundered, and the most recent common ancestor may have lived within the span of history).
Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think slight statistical differences in cognition merit massacre or explicit discrimination in everyday life. They're still human beings, and the bell curves have massive overlap! About the only policy choice where I think my opinions are significantly influenced by this is the native birth rate vs. immigration question in First-World countries, but I should note that there are other, non-racist, reasons to prefer native-borns (native-borns get put through a better education system, and there are also cultural-continuity issues with massive importation from Third-World countries that are not secular, liberal, stable democracies, particularly with salad-bowlers around sabotaging assimilation - and in the case of the PRC, there's an outright security risk from those who've been through its education system and/or have family in Mainland China as potential hostages).
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
You don't even run into non-trans SJ busybodies about the trans issue? "Allies"?
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
You know, I have a very hard time believing that a heterosexual male (that is, a member of the sex responsible for a good >90% of indecent exposure arrests and unsolicited photos of their genitals sent to people they barely know) has wholly innocent reasons for inviting a female person to inspect his genitals within an hour of meeting her, even if he has maimed said genitals beyond recognition.
We could always take the Brave New World/free-love-hippie view of "the sex taboo is bad actually, sex is a fine topic of casual conversation".
(I am mostly sold on that view, although I'd like to see it studied a bit more before rolling the full system out worldwide.)
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I didn't say that all SJ inquisitors are trans
And from a non-trans person, if someone is annoying me with their pet hobby horse, I might be free to say "Give it a rest, come on," or if that would be overly aggressive for the situation, I would at the very least only suffer a smirk and a snort if I were to roll my eyes. But with a trans person... Tag.
*scratches head*
This is what pegged my Wrong on the Internet instincts, because the people I've met on the "Tag" end of things haven't been trans.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Tag.
I think the category you're basically talking about is "social justice inquisitors". This is a real category, and it is not unreasonable to be angry that hostile inquisitors exist and one must (in many areas of life) hide from them to avoid massive retaliation. But not all social justice inquisitors are trans (indeed, my understanding is that most aren't), and not all transfolk are social justice inquisitors - the correlation's positive and even large, but it's not 1.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
I mean, Chesterton's Fence in its original form refers to something that was put up with a purpose but whose purpose has been forgotten. Technically, that doesn't apply to things without telos, but the basic conservative principle underlying it does. The lack of greater-than-OMG-available-energy particle collisions on Earth doesn't seem to be purposeful, but I'd still recommend against ending it until one knows what will happen (doing it in space would appear safer).
The conservative principle here actually is satisfied in the case of "substantial excess of women"; male mortality from combat has reached very high levels in the past, such that there have been large female excesses without apparent issues. This is why the objection I made was a purely "it looks like the political consequences of this could be dystopian" one, because doing this with women's suffrage would translate to full political matriarchy, where values that are mostly only held by men are totally shut out of policy, and AFAIK that is unprecedented with perhaps some hunter-gatherer exceptions. I suppose the social justice movement does try its best to centre women's values, so it's kind of a prototype, but it's not a full society, and it's not exactly reassuring.
(I hate staring into this abyss.)
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
My point was that this adds on to the list of shit Hitler ruined for Germany and Germans.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe.
From a German nationalist point of view, East Germany wasn't all that bad compared to the rest of what Stalin did - the annexation of Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland, with the entire German population of those regions expelled. There are plenty of Germans today for whom the land of their ancestors is forever gone.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Aboriginal children were taken from remote locations and forcefully taken to the cities to be educated. This largely impacted children with European admixture.
It was specifically targetted at the "half-caste". I will note that characterising them as "Aboriginal children" (which, to be fair, essentially all Reliable Sources do because of course they do) is actually quite dubious - the kids were just as white as they were Aboriginal, and leaving them where they were (i.e. Aboriginal tribes) would also have severed them from their white cultural heritage.
The actual way it was done was pretty shitty, but the idea that hey, maybe raise the half-and-half kid in the half with an actual civilisation? Not really objectionable.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Unless the argument is there are no native beasts of burden, period.
There are no native beasts of burden in Australia.
There were megafauna when the Aboriginals got here. The Aboriginals killed them all.
(I will note that "not trainable" does have some legs as an idea; the Australian megafauna was marsupial, and hence less intelligent. I'm not aware of any prehistorically-domesticated marsupials, although only the South Americans would have had the chance to try and even then not for all that long given how late it was settled.)
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
If we have ASI, all the motivations for this are moot. Crime is impossible, disease doesn't exist, everyone lives forever. Or everyone is dead, women and men alike.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
The law of one price is strong, but the question is whether those crappy jobs would pay more (to attract US citizens) if illegal immigrants were not available.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one.
Being involuntarily celibate is a current state, not necessarily a permanent one. I imagine a non-negligible chunk of them would kill themselves if they somehow knew that they would never have sex/kids (I'd strongly consider it), but that's not actually a thing you can know for sure.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Remember, men provide, women select.
If less providers, selectors don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a seller's market). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier, so the political power of selectors increases (a buyer's market). This is socio-economics 101.
@Bombadil is concerned, AIUI, about the possibility of a majority-feminist democracy removing a bunch of legal rights from men. You're using economic theorems that are founded on the assumption that both the buyer and seller are free citizens - that they have the option of walking away status quo ante. A slave can't walk away; his master (or, I suppose, mistress) can unilaterally torture him if he does not accept the deal, which tends to make his bargaining position pretty awful (and let's not get into the abuse of psychiatric drugs to remove his ability to refuse).
I personally, upon reading @Testing's OP, had more immediate/prosaic concerns, although still based on the "one person, one vote" point; the sex disparity in attitudes to liberty is huge (note that it mostly persists even for Red-coded oppression; this isn't just an artifact of the majority of women being Blue Tribe), and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
It'd be a bit tricky to do that via gamete selection.
Also, I seem to recall we've had a few people here make such suggestions; whence your confidence?
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
I mean, "the civil defence sirens went off" would be a bit hard to link but, during a crisis, would be a pretty-good sign that it's not a hoax. (Seeing a mushroom cloud would be an extremely-good sign, but I suppose you could attach a pic.)
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
· Edited 11d ago
Yes, but that wasn't an assassination. That was a guy shooting up a bank because he was tripping on magic sunglasses. Also, it wasn't real.
EDIT: Though, to be fair, this guy did seem to want to kill a lot of people, not just Trump.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
The amount of celebration there seems pretty minimal. Huge amount of false-flag accusations and jokes, but not much celebration.
(This makes sense, even from a maximally-uncharitable view. They might be deluded enough to think that Trump getting shot dead would be good for them, but it's obvious that a failed assassination attempt wouldn't benefit their cause.)
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
In theory, yes, but the amount needed to kill everyone exceeds the amount of nukes that have ever been built.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Haven't seen that.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
Who is "she"? I don't see any women mentioned in this chain.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
It's not that hard to survive a nuclear war, though location's rather important. I'd expect a number of us to survive, particularly me.
That said, you'd expect EMP to sever communications and power grids, so it would indeed not be up for long.
I'd agree with lactose tolerance and should probably have included it; skin colour isn't all that recent AIUI (I believe Native Americans are a lot more uniform with latitude than Old Worlders, for instance; I'm also not 100% sure whether Neanderthal admixture might have played a part in introducing the light-skin alleles, though certainly there's been selection before and since). @SkoomaDentist I'm not fully convinced on alcoholism resistance; there's a fair bit of evidence, enough to make me seriously consider the possibility (though I'd be mostly suspecting livers rather than brains, at least for this), but I haven't yet seen a smoking gun (have there been wide-ranging studies on Aboriginal liver function? I think you could trust universities to report that accurately).
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