magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Only 75% of Victorians live in Melbourne; nearly 100% of Australian Capital Territorians live in Canberra (the population figure for Canberra on Wikipedia is actually higher than that for the ACT, due to being somewhat more recent). Haven't run the exact numbers but I think Melbourne by itself voted Yes (also, a significant chunk of the No areas still vote Labour - they're leftist in the unionist/socialist sense).
But yes, I did forget Canberra.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
It's not entirely-obvious that they will get away with it; we don't have as much of an anti-police movement here in Oz (lack of a racial component helps a lot with that), and my understanding is that this kind of mass vandalism is not normal. There could well be some arrests (particularly if the protestors weren't masked; security cameras are a thing).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I'm not sure I'd call it a "hotbed", but Melbourne definitely is the most left-wing city in Australia (the inner city is the only safe Greens seat in the country, and most of the rest is Labour). And yes, the SLoV is a common protest site, though not all of them are CW-loaded (that's where I went for the PauseAI protest, for instance).
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
This is beyond horrible, this is literally declaring people suffering from a disease subhuman and cutting off their rights.
To be fair, there are cases where the right to drive is correctly revoked due to disease. The obvious case is blindness; if you go blind, your driver's licence will be revoked, because it is not safe to drive a car while blind. I think actual narcolepsy gets the same treatment, because it is not safe to drive a car while asleep.
The relevant part here is that sleep apnea is not an obvious determinant of "ability to drive a car safely" in the way being asleep or blind is.
My suspicion is that the motive for this is something along the lines of "we need to get more sleep apnea sufferers to use CPAP for their own good; this is a lever to get them to do it". To be clear, I think that that's a very dangerous sort of logic that can justify all sorts of tyranny.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Which is a form of sleeping on AI; they see it only as a tool, not as a potential adversary in its own right. Like I said, though, a rogue-AI incident would definitely fix that; a lot of my !doom probability routes through "we get a rogue AI that isn't smart enough to kill us all, then these kinds of people force the Narrative into Jihad".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
"People will die at 35 degrees wet-bulb" is very much a real problem. The questions are the degree to which this will actually start happening (probably not a lot; we're looking at something like 3 degrees warming of GMST and the tropics/subtropics will get less than that) and the degree to which people will actually stay there to get killed.
The tropics don't normally get to 35 wet-bulb, which is not a coincidence - if they did, humans would have evolved with a higher body temperature to allow survival there. The highest Singapore's ever gotten, for instance, is something like 33.6, and it's usually much lower.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I mean, wet-bulb exceeding 30-35 degrees is a thing and it does mean mass casualties if people are stuck in it.
And I'd generally expect fatalities from a USA-PRC nuclear exchange to be ~1 billion or somewhat less (I'm a pessimist on cities' ability to survive state/infrastructure failure, but consider nuclear winter to be essentially a hoax), so "something else can give higher casualties" isn't exactly a contradiction in terms. West-Russia would probably be a bit lower; West-Russia-PRC would be a fair bit higher, but still far short of "everyone".
But I think that in practice wet-bulb events will not wind up killing 1 billion+, if only because people will abandon areas prone to them.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
If it was anywhere even near sentient AI then the Feds would have taken over by now.
My impression from Zvi's infodumps is that the NatSec crowd is kinda sleeping on AI. I imagine a rogue-AI incident would more than suffice to wake them up, but that's no good if it kills us.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Link to quote source?
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
Some people argue that a nationalist maneuver towards Taiwan could hypothetically distract the population from their present woes, but I would be pretty shocked if China did anything aggressive, especially without waiting to see if a more pro-Chinese candidate like Terry Gou wins in the Taiwanese elections.
Yeah, even the invasion doomers say that they'll wait for the Taiwanese elections (for casus belli) and for the US election campaign to get in full swing (for opportunity). Besides, April and October are the best months to launch an invasion, so for this year we're basically safe.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Well I suppose that's bad news for people who want to break the law when driving, for the rest of us though it's a good if such drivers are off the roads.
The first rule in most "rules of the road" guides is something akin to "break any and all rules if it is necessary to prevent an accident". There are other special cases like "using private vehicle as impromptu ambulance", common in rural areas, which necessitate breaking rules.
In the hands of an experienced and sane driver, the ability to ignore road rules is a benefit to safety. These people do not want to lose that ability.
(Also, it is highly predictable that a system like the "active" systems here would sooner or later be hacked by terrorists or cyberwarriors and used to indiscriminately murder people by forcing thousands of cars to slam the brakes simultaneously. It introduces a single point of failure. I can't drive, but even if I could I would not feel safe driving a car that was this hilariously vulnerable.)
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Why?
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
Also, you do know that US generals were outright lying to Trump about the number of troops deployed to Syria? Does that count as open defiance?
I presume they didn't tell Trump/the public that they were lying to him - at least, not at the time - so that's not "open" defiance. That's more like the sort of thing that I called "really-hard".
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Paedophilia the sexual preference is not evil. Rape of children is evil.
I'm not particularly defending Nyberg here; she did some stuff that crosses my line. A paedophile who sticks to loli hentai, though, is perhaps pitiful but not evil.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
If all of those two million plus collectively decide that they are not going to obey, enforce, or even acknowledge any orders or appointments from Trump, what can he do himself, as one mere mortal, to compel them to obey?
If the FBI refuses to take orders from him, he declares the entire FBI fired for insubordination.
If they refuse to leave their physical buildings, he declares them to be trespassing on government property and calls up the DC Police to evict them.
If the DC Police refuse to comply and/or are unable to defeat the FBI (which I admit is quite likely), he declares martial law and sends in the troops to retake the rebel-controlled buildings.
All of this is TTBOMK perfectly within his legal authority as President.
I'm not saying Trump would have an easy time of things, but open defiance won't work (at least not without military buy-in, at which point, well, yes, a coup can override "ink on a page"). It's the cases where things just mysteriously don't happen and there's no clear culprit that are the really-hard ones.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I can only speak for myself, but it's some combination of:
- Most of their positions are fairly-well-reasoned from premises I disagree with. I think the fundamental points where I'd disagree with the anti-Semites would be "are Jews biologically inclined to be less moral than white Gentiles", "what proportion of ethnic Jews are strongly identitarian", "what degree of influence does Jewish identity have on Western policy" and perhaps "to what degree can #2 be fixed via melting-pot"; the anti-Semite answers are of course "yes"/"almost all"/"lots"/"none" whereas I tend toward "no"/"significant but minority"/"little outside of the US; significant but narrow within the US"/"near-total". #1/#2 especially are very much empirical questions that need large amounts of legible evidence to convince someone to flip; my opinions are from my illegible personal experience, not studies I can quote, and in the case of #1 I'd probably have to go out and do the study myself given how ludicrously-radioactive that question is. I've explicitly laid out my point on #3 at least once recently (although not in reply to an antisemite), and I don't recall #4 coming up explicitly very often.
- They kind of all blur together and are mostly from a couple of highly-active posters, and it can seem a bit pointless to keep engaging over and over again.
- I don't read the Israel-Gaza thread except from Quincy, which is where I presume most of such comments are. It's just not an area of world politics that interests me very much insofar as there's no obvious way for it to blow up and my preferred action is "do nothing" which doesn't require a lot of knowledge.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.
In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
As a believer in niceness, community and civilisation, I will require a great deal of evidence and reasoning before I agree to treat part of our own community with "sneering contempt". A large number of citations demonstrating that the effect you decry even exists would be a good start. You might then continue with some explanation of what benefit such contempt would have, and why e.g. making an intellectual case for liberalism would not have better results.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
Am I wrong for being hopeful that Elon Musk seems to be going for a second try into the AI space?
Depends where you stand on the factual questions.
In particular, if you think alignment is decades away, then somebody you like joining an AI race now is still -EV, as for the most part either he won't build transformative AI (neutral), or he will (and it goes omnicidal; bad). About the only case I can think of that even has an argument for "this might help" given that assumption is Zvi's 4D-chess suggestion here, and even then there are two obvious ways it can backfire (you screw up and your AI does in fact kill everyone, or you're exposed as a terrorist and the backlash hits the anti-AI movement rather than AI) so I think that one's also -EV (particularly since stupid/omnicidal people will do this anyway, like with ChaosGPT).
EDIT: I should note that I'm not accusing Zvi of being serious.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
· Edited 15d ago
Oh, not to, like, Cerebus extent. But there's a lot of Blue Tribe sneering in it for the past decade or so.
Also there's a fairly-obvious explanation for the What-If column: he started putting it into paid-for books instead. There are ads for these books at the top of said column.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
To list the two most obvious negative effects:
-
The USA currently controls global standards for a lot of things. It does so because it's the head of the Western bloc and the Western bloc has dominance. If you let the Chinese build up a bloc that has dominance, then they will wrest control of most of those, and you won't like their standards.
-
The Non-Proliferation Treaty holds because and only because of "nuclear umbrellas", particularly the US one (though the Soviet/Russian one is not negligible either). If the US nuclear umbrella is not reliable, half of its allies will start nuclear programmes because they need them to be safe from Russian/Chinese aggression. This is not good; it means less-competent nations having nukes they could lose, and it means more potential nuclear-war flashpoints because there are more actors in play.
I don't think it fails on UFO theories. The true thing is "we can't identify everything we see in the sky", i.e. "literal unidentified flying objects are reasonably common".
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