magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
Australia's doing worse on a couple of metrics (gun control and free speech, although we're not at European levels of hate speech laws), but a lot better on a bunch of others. In addition to what @AshLael said (no cities degenerated into chaos!), our politics are also far more stable; another civil war is unthinkable here.
I'd put Australia first on that list of five countries in terms of my preference to live in; the USA would probably get second, because Canada and the UK have serious problems of their own and India of course is a third-world country, but seriously Australia's not that bad.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
The notion I hide my power level is absurd.
I mean, in one sense, sure. Everybody who pays any attention to you knows exactly what you are, and your very username is a coded reference to it.
In another sense... well, I did actually take a look a while back, and you do seem to have made a very consistent attempt to retain one last shred of totally-implausible deniability. You always slide around the accusation of being a neo-Nazi - you never deny it, but you've never actually confirmed it either. And in this very exchange, you have slid around the accusation of wanting the Jews dead; you didn't confirm it, and you threw shade at @Amadan for presuming it, but you carefully didn't actually deny it either.
So the scouter on you reads 8950 instead of 9001. Yes, certainly, 8950 isn't very much lower than 9001, but you are still hiding those last few points of your power level for some reason (the most charitable such explanation being that there are legal ramifications to you saying the magic words).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
AI has a lesser problem of enabling dictatorship and a greater problem of rogue AI. In foot-race terms, the lesser problem is that there are other competitors, and the greater problem is that the finish line has landmines under it strong enough to blow up the whole track. As such, until and unless the mines are removed, "sprint harder" is not a solution; if the landmines are set off, you're still dead regardless of who did it.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
Just for the record, going to someone's userpage by clicking on their handle does, in fact, allow you to see everything that person's posted on theMotte. Also, theMotte is small enough that some people (though not me) do read basically everything.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.
The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
I think the steelman basically looks like "Trump was living in Trump-world where there is massive fraud, and in Trump-world his actions were justified because the alternative amounted to the end of democracy, so it wasn't unvirtuous for him to try it though it was correct for him to get slapped down".
magic9mushroom
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11mo 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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1yr ago
If we fight now or in the near future I believe there is a high chance of defeat and that brings the whole house of cards down.
No. The USA has way more nukes and better ability to deliver them. The PRC's not catching up that fast.
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
This is a topic I really, really don't want to talk about or even think about, because it's one of the abysses that gazes back and keeps me up at night and also it's radioactive. But I'm already thinking about it and I just went through the entire thread of this top-level post hoping in vain that someone had already said it, so I guess it falls to me to explain the HBD-MRA model of patriarchy and its downfall.
Assumed: HBD, or at least the points of which that men are physically stronger than women, and that women are better at social - in particular covert manipulation - than men. For the latter part, also that women care more about safety than men.
The outcome of this in prehistory and most of history is explicit patriarchy that is somewhat more equal than it looks. Explicit female domination or excessive implicit female domination doesn't work because in extremis men would defeat women physically and rape and/or murder them (and in prehistory, of course, mass abduction and rape of other tribes' women was reasonably-commonplace), but women do better than it looks like they do because of course they do, that's what happens when you're better at covert manipulation and the primary drivers of culture. This was stable.
It went from stable to metastable at some point. Obvious potential contributors include the development of firearms, the immense increase in state power relative to personal power, and democracy + women's suffrage giving women an equal explicit share in that state power. I say metastable, rather than unstable, because there was still the social pressure toward not-being-a-feminist encoded within society and enforced by women at least as much as by men. This maintained the explicit patriarchy for some time, but only against relatively-small disruptions. When a large disruption came along, in the form of the 60s/70s counterculture, the social chaos allowed the "women are better at manipulation" effect to take over society entire. Thus, we get the current system, where there is some explicit pretence of equality but implicitly and even to some degree explicitly the deck is massively stacked in women's favour. This is also stable; rapist revolution on small or large scale is impossible because of state power, and now with both women's material incentives and individual social incentives pointing toward feminism, they aren't likely to steer the culture away from it.
The place where this model gets horrible and abyss-gazey is if you consider a patriarchal society better than a matriarchal one - most obviously to me, if you think that safetyism and its accompanying administrative bloat is strangling our ability to achieve anything, but also if you think that the matriarchal mode's oppression of men is worse than the patriarchal mode's oppression of women, or indeed if you think that matriarchy is incompatible with maintaining replacement fertility and thus with a society that isn't necessarily parasitic on others (I'm not convinced of the latter two, but obviously a bunch of people in this thread are convinced). Because then, according to the model, the only way to fix it is to undo some of the factors that made the matriarchy mode a stronger attractor than the patriarchy mode. And, well, I enumerated the options there, or at least the ones I can see, and the possible ones suck (particularly since - as even Dave Sim noted in his infamous essay - the sex differences in these things are statistical trends and not 100%-accurate stereotypes; revoking women's suffrage would very definitely be unfair).
Like I said, I try not to think about this; I would basically rather stick my head in the sand and hope for a miracle (space colonisation and genetic enhancement both seem vaguely like they might organically lead to solutions, although the latter has its own terrors). But you asked, and I ended up reading your post because of the mod-queue thing (this one wasn't there, but I always look at context), and I'd hate myself more for self-censorship than I would and do for spitting it out. So here you go.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
There are lines that one should not cross though the heavens fall, and those arguing against crossing those lines do not thereby assume culpability for the actions of others.
Zvi Mowshowitz:
Have democracy and civil rights been dramatically violated? Oh yes, no one denies that. But you know what else prevents you from having a functional democracy, or from being able to enjoy civil rights? Criminal gangs that are effectively another government or faction fighting for control and that directly destroy 15% of GDP alongside a murder rate of one person in a thousand each year. I do not think the people who support Bukele are being swindled or fooled, and I do not think they are making a stupid mistake. I think no alternatives were presented, and if you are going to be governed by a gang no matter what and you have these three choices, then the official police gang sounds like the very clear first pick.
MS-13 literally has a motto of "kill, steal, rape, control". Do you think they treat their sex slaves better than Bukele is treating them? When your choice is "do X, or state failure and warlords do X anyway", you need to be exceedingly-invested in not personally sinning, to a degree that I'd argue is selfish, to pick the latter. This is not to say one should not look for third options, or try to create them, but no, do not actually let the heavens fall.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
"AI safety" needs to focus less on what AI could do to us and more on what people can use AI to do to each other.
Skynet is still the greater problem, both because even an AI-enabled human tyrant would still be pushing against entropy to remain in charge and because the vast majority of humans want a future with lots of happy people in it, while AI samples a much wider distribution of goals.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
Okay, fair play, you at least didn't get anything horribly wrong in this one. It wasn't good, but you didn't get the basic premise of your article fatally wrong.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Google "Chopped Man Epidemic" for a vantablackpill.
I did, and 100% of the links are videos. I tried watching one of the less-terrible-looking videos, and it was still terrible; it started with a "preview" reel that was clearly just there to inculcate feelings of "WTF is going on" in order to maximise watchtime.
Could you summarise for people who don't feel like dipping their brains in the brain-hacking engagement-optimisation industry?
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
Eh, when talking about specifically "autistic nerds" (i.e. like 1% of the population), there are certain caveats on that. Autists typically have retarded* co-ordination, and the top end of the "nerds" (i.e. aspie savants) sometimes get accelerated. A 13-year-old boy with garbage co-ordination against a 14-year-old girl isn't such an uneven match.
*I use this word precisely; adult co-ordination is usually normal, but it takes longer to get there.
magic9mushroom
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11mo 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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2mo ago
You said these:
[I reject] the assumption those arguing against human-rights violations are somehow responsible for anything that can be attributed to not committing them.
There are lines that one should not cross though the heavens fall
I responded to those, because they sketch out a policy which I think to be insane (i.e. "one should let the state fail rather than take the gloves off").
This is The Motte, where you're supposed to "always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed". Either defend your claim or retract it; don't deflect and yell at me for responding to what you plainly said.
Bonitas non est pessimis esse meliorem. (Being better than the worst is not goodness.)
I think you're misinterpreting me here. My point here was that if the only way to stop MS-13 from imprisoning sex slaves in abominable conditions is to imprison MS-13 in slightly-less-abominable conditions (which also stops a bunch of other crime), the latter option strictly dominates the former.
magic9mushroom
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5mo ago
uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves
It's more complicated than that. Current reactors are not breeders and as such throw away most of their actinides unburnt (and cannot use thorium); after accounting for fixing those inefficiencies (which are avoidable, just not currently economic because uranium is cheap) and for mining thorium as well, you can do about x300 on that. And that's assuming we can't harvest the uranium in seawater, which is like x20 again.
Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient).
This article is low-quality. Everyone keeps forecasting that LLMs will hit a wall, and then they don't.
Aside from maybe pandemics, I expect trendlines to get scrambled by some combination of WWIII and AI before these come into play.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition.
Ukraine has lasted for years because Ukraine doesn't have nukes and doesn't have any way of getting rid of Russia's nukes, thus preventing false alarms leading to Russian launch (and because there is still significant deterrence against Russia using nukes proactively).
Direct war between the USA and PRC is completely different. You'll be lucky if it lasts six months without nuclear exchange.
Admittedly, this still means most Taiwanese die because Taipei/Tainan eat Chinese nukes, but you're assuming your way out of reality thinking that a Taiwan war would last for years.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids?
For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom, a lot of conservatives consider "exposing kids to transgender ideology" and "sexualising children" to be basically the same thing. This is presumably why they're combined here. But they are clearly hostile to pornography itself as well.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
After all, he could still end up in jail.
I don't think that one would be enough anymore - not on its own.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
I will note that since mechanisation, you kinda need militia to have tanks and MANPADs in order to provide a credible deterrent to tyranny. This isn't a reductio ad absurdum; that's colourable. But that's where the goalposts are.
(I am armed up to the extent of the law in Victoria - i.e. I have a compound bow - but this isn't to FIGHT THE POWER. This is as a moderately-unlikely contingency in case of the police failing to control cannibal looter mobs subsequent to nuclear war. Cannibal looter mobs are much easier to fight off than SWAT.)
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.
Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.
A major crux for me is P(WWIII) combined with P(Trump goes senile at some point in this coming term).
Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire. The other half will be discredited by having weakened the West and invited the challenge to them that resulted in WWIII. In-office representatives might try to fight a desperate rearguard to preserve malapportionment, but that's super-doomed. And then the Serious Business tools - constitutional amendments, impeachments, and so on - start getting handed over to the conservatives while they're still hopping mad (even more mad if a malapportionment rearguard had to be crushed). At that point I'd be more worried about White Terror than about Thermidor failing.
Trump being old and too much of a Trump to resign or 25A himself, though, might worsen the Western death toll.
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
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