magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
After remembering the "6 million was not enough" people, I concede.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
You make a reasonable point, but I think we might be getting into a self-contradictory hypothetical here; a country willing to do this would not be a country in the grasp of SJ.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I wasn't actually being hyperbolic when I said "depopulating"; I was suggesting slaughtering the entire population of the Houthi-controlled areas, which would presumably stop the attacks. Although, if it's only hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, I retract my claim of that being "definitely" the lesser evil; we are talking like 20 million people, after all.
Obviously, I would very much prefer a third option, assuming one exists.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.
Indeed, you do not have real power. Your goal should therefore be to get real power, and it mostly looks like the easiest way there* is a coalition with liberals. Liberals don't like cancel mobs, though.
If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.
Indeed, this does not suffice. But that's not what Scott or I are suggesting. We're merely suggesting that you retaliate in an asymmetric way that does not burn the commons - not all retaliation does!
*Well, the easiest reliable way there. The easiest way there is to wait for WWIII to incinerate your enemies for you, but that's not guaranteed to happen.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Israel retaliated on Sunday, bombing and incapacitating Yemen's largest port in a massive air attack which employed U.S. made F-35s. This is the port through which Yemen imports most of its food. It is devastating to Yemen, and by far the largest escalation so far.
It's absurd that Israel is the only place with the guts to flatten the Houthis. Like, come on, this is literally a country which has decided to engage in generalised piracy; they are effectively at war with the rest of the world. Depopulating the Houthi areas would plausibly be worth it to end this craziness, and definitely would be when you consider the deterrent effect; there may be better options, but even this one beats "sit back and let the barbarians come in the gates".
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Weatherman was less than 60 years ago.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Don't blindly assume demographic trends will continue forever. WWIII would upend quite a few of them, and it's looking more likely this decade than it has since '91.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"
Here's perhaps a better analogy: somebody keeps screaming at the top of his lungs and disrupting things. Which is more useful: screaming back at him, or handcuffing and gagging him so he can't scream anymore?
Scott is suggesting doing the latter, breaking the teeth of the cancellation monster by throwing HR ladies and others in jail until they stop executing the will of the mob. This is not rolling over and playing dead; it's in some ways an escalation. But it's an escalation that accomplishes something and which doesn't burn the commons.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Do note that there is a difference between "I wish somebody would assassinate Trump [in the future] [rather than not make an attempt at all]" and "I wish the guy who tried to assassinate Trump [in the past] had succeeded [rather than attempted and failed]". I've little sympathy for the first - that's direct incitement to terrorism - but significantly more for the second.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while.
The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago. Didn't really teach them much; academia promptly generated reasons that it was totally different when they did it.
This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot
Scott's proposal is along the lines of "co-operate, and also hire a thug to hold a gun to defectbot's head and blow its brains out if it continues defecting". I don't think this is an especially-exploitable strategy.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Havana syndrome is fake, right?
People are starting to think it might be real again (at least partially; obviously there exist psychogenic cases).
The dubiousness is pretty much my point, though; you couldn't have this kind of wide-open question if microwave weapons left obvious fingerprints, because they'd be obviously there or obviously not.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Novichok isn't a great example here because "looks like an accident" was not on the design objectives list for Novichok; they're standard nerve agents - AChE inhibitors - and those have distinctive symptoms. You examine a Novichok victim, you can immediately identify him as "killed by nerve agent"; you can't tell exactly which nerve agent from a cursory exam, but that's not happening naturally so it's obviously funny business.
There are ways to fake natural causes, though, at least to a cursory exam; Havana syndrome suggests microwave beams are hard to detect as foul play, for instance. So the point stands - Novichok's just not an example of it.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I'd burn your ChatGPT summary; there are some dubious parts to it:
- "who they believe have used it against them for years" - the "they believe" fnord is ChatGPT's addition
- "stating that it would be [...] morally questionable" - he mostly shied away from making that point
- Scott's mention that it's good strategy to actually get power before beginning the abuses is totally omitted
Given all of those it's likely -EV given the read-everything nature of theMotte.
Also, checking your quotes section:
"So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what?" "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food."
These are taken from the same post, but are quoted separately with other stuff in-between.
"We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged."
You took this one out of context; Lizzardspawn is basically in agreement with Scott, with only maybe a bit of ex post facto added to the stuff Scott literally suggested should be illegalised.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Do you have a full transcript of Cheatle's testimony on hand?
(If you do, you might want to link once to it rather than several times to individual soundbites.)
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Orthodox MIRI believers are in no position to act like they have any privileged understanding.
The simple truth is that natsec people are making a move exactly because they understood we've got steerable tech.
https://www.beren.io/2024-05-15-Alignment-Likely-Generalizes-Further-Than-Capabilities/
Sorry for taking three days to actually read your citation, but you aren't exactly making this pleasant. Now I've read it, though.
Short version: Yes, the neural net will definitely understand what you want. The problem is that at high levels of capability, strategies like "deceive the operator" work better than "do what the operator wants", so the net will not be trained to care what you want.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes.
I think there's one clear nonsense point there, which is the connection drawn between "Trump found guilty" and "Trump is bad". Under the circumstances, Trump being found guilty should be a null update about his character. There are many excellent reasons to hate the guy, but this one - i.e. "if you can find a kangaroo court to convict someone of a crime, that makes him evil" - is obviously bananas; even divine command theory has question marks on it, and this moral precept amounts in practice to "tyrant command theory".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
I've been of the opinion for a while that Trump having a heart attack would be net-good, although this is not entirely for culture war reasons (part of it is just that he's too old to be POTUS in a term that might include WWIII).
However, on the one occasion I did mention this on theMotte I did also mention that this doesn't apply to murdering him (which, as you say, would end Badly).
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.
I think there's a distinction elided by the word "competence" here.
Skilled immigration being hard reduces (average) individual competence. DIE reduces institutional and societal competence, because those institutions and society are using false models of the world. Being upset at one (either one) does not necessarily imply being upset at the other.
I will also note that it is possible to believe that something is important and also believe that it is outweighed by other important things in certain specific cases. The obvious case with regard to skilled immigration is "skilled immigrants from the PRC are considerably less valuable to Western countries than one might expect from their level of skill, because a large chunk of them are sleeper agents either by brainwashing or by having family in the PRC that can be used for extortion".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
There is a difference between petitioning the government to pursue X policy and telling random people to do X by criminal violence. It's co-ordinated vs. un-co-ordinated meanness. The obvious analogy is that asking the government to keep or re-introduce the death penalty for murder is totally legal, but putting out a Craigslist ad for the Bay Harbor Butcher is conspiracy to commit murder.
With that said, there does seem to be some movement; I notice that people saying "it sucks that Crooks missed" or equivalent (which is not direct incitement) seem to be getting hit, which does seem unusual.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
- I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
Wasn't it proven that the vaccine was intentionally delayed to come out after the election in order to spike Trump's chances? Like, Zvi mentioned this, and if anything he's got TDS; he's no Trump shill.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
California has little relevance here; the party that illegal immigrants will likely vote for has the state locked down anyway, and even 200% turnout wouldn't give California more HoR seats or Electoral College votes.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
I disagree. If we say that an assassination plan has at best a 70% chance of success, statistics suggests two of those events drop noticeably in probability because you multiply them (now suddenly you're under 50%) if you have the same chance both times.
I wouldn't consider that to be "that much". It's certainly way higher than if you assume the likelihood of the second plot succeeding to be equal to the chance of an arbitrary assassination plot succeeding - the chance that a single loaded die of unknown loading rolls two sixes in a row is greater than the square of the chance that a loaded die of unknown loading rolls a six, due to correlation.
Much less, if we're talking about a single plan/event that would kill both of them at once - that's way harder because they don't get together very often in the same place without way more security than normal (such as in the White House or in a foreign country with other heads of state).
A refutation of this sentence would be an infohazard. Discount the lack of such refutation accordingly.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Ford was never Speaker; as you say, though, he was appointed to fill a VP vacancy, and then succeeded to the Presidency.
It's the actual Speaker-succession and Prez-pro-tem succession that are bonkers nuts (well, they're not bonkers nuts under ordinary circumstances, but they'll never be used under ordinary circumstances because of the aforementioned capability to fill a VP vacancy; they'll only be used in a crisis, which is exactly when they're bonkers nuts).
There's a hilarious scenario here.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
It could be better; the Speaker of the House succeeds if the President and VP are both assassinated and is frequently of the opposite party (and after him, the President pro tempore of the Senate). Restricting it to executive-branch members only would solve that, since they're all guaranteed to be on the same side (also, the procedures involving the Speaker and Prez pro tem succession are hilariously dumb and would cause a ton of chaos if they actually saw use).
Sure, double assassinations are harder than single ones, but not by that much.
The probability of Russia vs. USA in a non-general war (i.e. US is not attempting to invade Russia) going nuclear is importantly different from 1. It's nowhere near 0, but it's not 1 either.
Also, Threads is pessimistic regarding a near-future nuclear war. Nuclear winter is mostly a hoax, and to the extent it's not it's outdated; modern arsenals are considerably smaller than Cold War ones. Yes, if we get to the 2030s and SALT/START break due to Chinese exceptionalism, we could get back to Cold War levels, but that's not happening this decade.
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