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magic9mushroom

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

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joined 2022 September 10 11:26:14 UTC
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User ID: 1103


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
magic9mushroom


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


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

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 10 11:26:14 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 1103


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
							
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It was @CrispyFriedBarnacles who brought up the topic, not Questionmark. But thanks a bunch.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just saying: it's not much of a benefit that Israel helps out with Near East conflicts, when we would have avoided both Afghanistan and Iraq had the US not been allied to Israel.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Third, this place is far more upvote-happy than downvote-happy. If you do manage to somehow drop into the Downvoted Realm, quite frankly you're probably on the edge of getting banned anyway.




I'm not sure what the threshold actually is, but I'm pretty sure "posting pro-SJ stuff civilly" will generally get more downvotes than upvotes (though the ratio will be significantly better than if you're actually being a cock).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If Trump had the ability to identify and the motivation to use people who could control the executive, he wouldn't have failed so badly last time. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can be rational and value someone else's life higher than your own.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


fresh and daring and revolutionary




I think part of the issue is that SJ to a fair degree hasn't actually realised that it isn't a counterculture anymore, so it still thinks SJ is fresh/daring/revolutionary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm saying that "SJer spots gay molestor, doesn't report it to authorities because doesn't want to appear homophobic" is a real thing but not nearly as common as conservative media would have you believe (though much more common than SJ media would have you believe), in both cases because it's highly politically inconvenient for SJ.


"SJ journalist hears about gay molestor being arrested, doesn't report on it to the public", that's basically standard practice. But this isn't as directly harmful; the molestor is in jail whether or not we know about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this...




I feel kind of dirty saying that you of all people are too optimistic, but... have you forgotten about the doxxing mobs that go around phoning HR departments?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So e.g. somebody who mostly only gets involved in Ukraine war threads, but does so in a sense of "trying to figure out what is going on" as opposed to "kill Putin now!!1!" copypasted 100 times, would be fine?


I'm not a single-issue poster of either sort myself, obviously, but if I were of the former sort then what you put in the OP might have chilled me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Rules before Governance (AI edition)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And I see the LessWrongers cheering and declaring victory at each new headline.






His acolytes seem to think "well the worst of both worlds at least gets us part of the world we want, so let's go for it".




I think this is more that a lot of the LWers had (incorrect) priors that the world would never listen until it was too late, so even insufficient levels of public and government reaction are a positive update (i.e. the amount of public reaction they are seeing, while not currently enough to Win, is more than they were expecting, so their estimated likelihood of it going up enough to Win has been raised). I'm open to being disproved, there, if you have a bunch of examples of LWers specifically thinking that national governments racing for NNAGI could possibly end well.




But anyway, even if you believe the people who brought us the Wuhan Institute for Virology have got it all covered, then you still have to worry about all the other countries in the world.




Sure! Like I said, I think that instituting a full global ban on large NNAI will probably require war at some point. But most countries do not have large nuclear stockpiles, so this doesn't necessarily mean a nuclear WWIII with X * 10^8 dead. I think the latter would probably still be worth it, but as a factual matter I think it's fairly likely that the PRC specifically would fall in line - while in theory a party machine can be made of AI, the current CPC consists solely of humans who do not want to kill all humans.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Rules before Governance (AI edition)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you're making two separate arguments here and not distinguishing enough between them.


    

  1. 

    You think that letting governments build high-powered AI while shutting down others' access to it is a bad idea.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    You don't like Eliezer Yudkowsky and those who follow him.
    

    3. 



The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI. Indeed, his proposal of threatening and if necessary declaring war against governments that try is the direct and inevitable result of taking that idea extremely seriously - if you really want to stop a country from doing something it really wants to do, that usually means war. And he's fine with interpretability and alignment research - he doesn't think it'll work on neural nets, but in and of itself it's not going to destroy the world so if people want to do it (on small, safe models), more power to them.


So it's kind of weird that you set up Yudkowsky as your bugbear, but then mostly argue against something completely different from the "Yuddist" position.


As an aside, I think you're wrong to say that pursuing Yudkowskian Jihad will necessarily end in WWIII with China. The PRC has actually started requiring interpretability as a precondition of large AI deployment, which is a real safeguard against the machine-rebellion problem. For all that the CPC is tyrannical, they still don't actually want to kill all humans; they cannot rule humanity if they, and humanity, are dead. I won't pretend; there will probably be some countries that will attempt to cheat any international agreement not to pursue NNAGI, who will have to be knocked over. But I think there's a decent chance of achieving Jihad without a nuclear war being required.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				ISRAEL GAZA MEGATHREAD IV
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Could you make the title normal rather than ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? It's a bit eye-grabbing when browsing the main page.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, the key attribute here is the monotony of it. As he notes, n=1 isn't really enough to say much because the pairing is not exactly unknown. It takes a good memory, a reasonable amount of exposure to modern Western media, and some level of political awareness to, as you put it, "notice". Most people don't have that. TheMotte concentrates those who do, but it's still not everyone here.


As it happens, @George_E_Hale has just admitted that he's not exposed to all that much of this.


Some charity would be nice. Even a reasonable amount of SJers haven't noticed this sort of thing; I didn't until somewhat after I left.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Depends what sort of threat you're talking about.


Bigger GCR? Yes, definitely.


Bigger X-risk? No. Pandemics can't kill off humanity because they'll die off before population density reaches 0. Biorisk is definitely #2 on my list of X-risks this century, and in the same order of magnitude as #1 i.e. AI, but that's Life 2.0 risks - synthetic biology that's not a human pathogen but whose replication destroys something humans need (e.g. a synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate, has better carbon-fixing than RuBisCO, and can't be digested by the aquatic foodchain, which would pull down the atmospheric and then biospheric carbon into useless gunk on the seafloor and thus cause total crop failure).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So we already have one example of an extreme leftist position that was pushed out of the overton window only to return far stronger than before, apparently with the assistance of liberals with a no-enemies-to-the-left policy. Why will this be any different?




The usual argument for abolishing the AoC is about individual freedom. That's very much not an extreme leftist position; it's an extreme liberal position - a libertine position.


SJ is sometimes called "the successor ideology" because it grew out of liberal culture but is not liberal itself. The direction you go from moderate liberalism to get to SJ is at an obtuse angle with the direction you'd have to go to get to abolishing the AoC. And I say that as someone who wants to lower the AoC.


Does SJ memory-hole stories about gay molestors and occasionally enable them*? Yes. That's because they're optimising too hard on "accept gay people" - to quote B5, "conspiracies of silence because the larger ideals have to be protected". It's not because they actually support child molestation in and of itself.


*The conservative media amplifies this for the exact same reason the SJ media suppresses it i.e. it is highly politically inconvenient for the Blue Tribe narrative. It's not actually as common as reading conservative media would lead you to believe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Abbott numquam iacuit aleam et habuit fidem before.




I mean, the Texas Republicans are the obvious spark for an actual Boogaloo (as opposed to a Jan-6-level joke), and I've predicted before that they're reasonably-likely to go open rebellion if the election's fucked with.


Wouldn't have expected something this early, but it's possible Abbott wants to demonstrate to the voters that he'll secede if the election's stolen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Russian army has barely managed to take the relatively small parts of Ukraine that it currently controls and simply does not have the strength to take on Poland's military in open combat while at the same time fighting Ukraine.




You're replying to something JJJ explicitly noted he wasn't saying.






I don't also expect Putin to invade Poland tomorrow (or this year, or anytime before Ukraine situation has resolved one way or another)






But yes, would be pretty stupid to invade a NATO country. Sure, there's the fig-leaf of Wagner/Belarus, but Article 5 still gets invoked, Wagner/Belarus get swatted like a fly (unlikely that they could beat Poland anyway, to be honest), and still no-win for Russia.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Note the word "force". "If you put a gun to my head and demand I ally with X or anti-X, I pick anti-X" =/= "I am, IRL, allied to anti-X".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Feral Aryan Femininity: Blonde Women as Bioweapons
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh yeah, obviously selecting on randomly-assorted groups isn't going to get very far. But that's not super-relevant to HBD questions since human prehistory did not consist of randomly-assorted groups.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think his point is that yelling "DON'T THINK ABOUT ELEPHANTS" at the top of your voice on every street corner is going to make people start looking around for elephants.


I think that assuming this to be intentional is in violation of Hanlon's Razor, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


As we saw with COVID, that's an exception that can swallow most of the rule.




The various censorship on that was aimed at "misinformation"; AFAIK they rarely alleged deliberate lies. There's definitely a huge issue with trying to police misinformation, but if you can prove that someone's deliberately lying I see little issue.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We don't know for certain that people in hunter-gatherer societies also don't feel some sort of alienation with the labor they do.




IIRC when they tried explaining depression to hunter-gatherers, the hunter-gatherers straight-up thought the idea was absurd.


I don't think all the West's problems come from this, but this is very definitely a big part of depression.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


38% does not constitute majority ownership, which would mean that whatever perceived exploitation there was would have been mostly the product of native Slovaks




38% of property doesn't equal 38% of businesses. If indeed the non-Jews owned basically all the land, then the Jews would have owned more than 38% of businesses (assuming, again, that one can trust the 38% number).