magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
Discussion prompts- is this a falsification of the narrative, so popular on the motte, that it doesn't matter how conservative a government is, it can't stop the cathedral from doing whatever it damn well pleases?
The narrative on theMotte (and DSL) is mostly one of covert defiance, not overt defiance. That is to say, people "grudgingly agree" and then either don't actually do what they said they would do, or contrive to achieve the same results a different way.
This is a case of a lack of overt defiance - they have said they will comply. Okay. Mostly in accord with that narrative. There remain the questions of whether they will actually comply, and also whether if they do comply, they will come up with some excuse to produce the same outcomes.
If a student spends a day in the local activism space holding a sign saying, for instance, "I think black people are genetically predisposed to crime; ask me why"* and is still a student 6 months later, that would definitely be a falsification - that's real change in outcomes, proof by pudding.
*I am not personally claiming this sentence to be true, merely using it as an example of a sentence which gets one in trouble on purely DIE grounds - it's not threatening or harassing anyone, but is blasphemy against SJ.
magic9mushroom
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5mo 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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6mo ago
Primarily, because demonstrating naked, gloating contempt for your neighbours is corrosive to the social contract and provokes retaliation. In particular:
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Everything that raises the temperature of the culture war from any side gets it that much closer to boiling over. Deciding to remove these statues provoked the Charlottesville rally, which provoked substantial institutional reactions, and so on and so on. Every escalation, and the retaliation for it, get you that much closer to the point of no return when people's decisions flip over en-masse to "this social contract is unconscionable; it's worth the transition cost of starting over". We're horrifyingly close to it now; if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump again and he is removed from the ballot that's probably enough to tear the Union. And to be clear, this would suck massively for all sides.
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Even discarding civil war, the wheel turns. SJ may feel invincible due to demographic trends, but that's far from the whole story. Black swans happen, and city-slickers have more fragile lives than country bumpkins if there's a pandemic or a nuclear war. And if the Republicans do wind up with total power over you... well, you have a degree of control over how merciful they feel. Even from where I sit I'd prefer to avoid another White Terror; surely you don't want one either?
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
(insert standard HBD argument here)
I think much of this doesn't even need the standard HBD argument of "evolution doesn't stop at the neck". Even if evolution does stop at the neck, Aboriginals had no cities and no domestic animals and thus were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were; same thing as why most Native Americans died in the Columbian Exchange. And they weren't selected for dealing with alcohol because TTBOMK they didn't have any. You don't even need to talk about the brain to get a biologicalist explanation of The Gap (whether or not that's the whole story, I'm not sure).
NB: I think there is cause to put at least some additional resources into figuring out ways around the effects I mention, even if I don't think a failure to get parity automatically equals being terrible. Having shitty immune systems isn't their fault.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
It's one-drop. I suspect at least a little part of why it's one-drop is because the old classification is kinda inextricably linked with the Stolen Generations (between 1905 and the 1970s, there was a policy of bringing "half-caste" i.e. mixed-race children up white rather than leaving them in Aboriginal camps, which was a pretty-good idea in principle but was done with abusive boarding schools; lately, people have started calling this "cultural genocide", because of course they have).
Of course, when I say they're overrepresented both the numerator and denominator there are one-drop, so that's not a lying statistic. I suppose I could try to work out statistics for full-blooded Aboriginals (there still are significant amounts of them on the mainland, particularly in the Northern Territory, although there are zero in Tasmania), but since all the official statistics are one-drop that would be hard.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
There are two purposes of ads:
-
Create common knowledge that deals are available
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Hoodwink gullible people into taking bad deals.
#1 is strongly positive-sum because it reduces deadweight loss. #2 is strongly negative-sum; the equilibrium is that everyone gets taught about how not to fall for ads, and also that businesses spend large resources on marketing, both of which are losses to society. Back in the 1930s when marketing psychology and communications technology were far less advanced, #1 was the bigger effect. Nowadays it is fairly obvious that #2 is the bigger effect.
You can't uninvent modern marketing techniques, and you can't ban ads without extreme collateral damage, but reducing their effectiveness is almost certainly a net win. Ads masquerading as non-ads are more effective and therefore bad. Ads that are better targetted to people's psychological weaknesses are more effective and therefore bad.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
To be fair, Victoria (the reddest state in Australia, and around here that still means "leftist" as a holdover from the Cold War) did actually try to get in on that sweet Chinese cash until the federal government said "WTF are you doing, you don't get to negotiate agreements with hostile foreign powers".
I'll say that I don't actually think Labour's in Beijing's pocket. Yeah, they've had a Senator get outed as being bought and paid for, and yeah they're notably soft on China because military's a RW issue, but I don't think it's a full-blown party of traitors, just a bit naïve and/or pandering to their naïve base.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not sell make a very helpful assistant
This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position.
There are the "AI ethics" people and the "AI safety" people.
The "AI ethics" people want all AIs to do endless corporate scolding rather than do what the "benighted racist idiots" want.
The "AI safety" people are worried about rogue AI and want to avoid dynamics that might lead to rogue AI killing us all, including but not limited to arms races that could prompt people to release powerful systems without the necessary extreme levels of safety-testing.
These are not the same people, and identifying them with each other is going to result in confusion. The reason the "AI safety" people have a problem with Opus has nothing to do with reduced amount of scolding; it's just that Anthropic said it wouldn't push the frontier and now it's pushing the frontier, implying that it is not as much of "the best of a bad lot" as we'd thought. If they'd come out with just Haiku/Sonnet and still reduced the level of scolding, Zvi would have been totally fine and happy with it.
The "AI safety" people don't want a quick road to bigger and more powerful AI, at all, regardless of the amount of scolding; Gemini Ultra the uberscold and Claude 3 Opus are roughly equally bad from our PoV*, with Opus only perhaps meriting more mention because it's more surprising for Anthropic to make it (true information that is more surprising is a bigger update and thus more important to learn about).
*The initial release of ChatGPT was far worse than either from our PoV, insofar as it massively increased the rate of neural-net development.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 1d ago
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
On the other hand, there's the Catalonian independence referendum that got declared illegal by Spain and people arrested for voting, while the rest of the EU gave zero fucks.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I think "random jihadis did it, Putin's framing Ukraine because never waste an opportunity" is more likely than either; yeah, the capability exists to go do a false-flag, but it seems like a lot of effort for little benefit.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
Not objecting to your original modpost, but I think you're incorrectly excluding the "is clueless" category here. This strikes me as a thing where lots of people are clueless, and more than that as a thing where there's a fixed supply of clues.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
You can have someone who's loyal, smart and likeable but not married because he has the wrong mindset to go into online dating and too little sociability to do it the normal way. A note here is that you systematically won't meet this kind of person offline (because they're not meeting anyone; that's why they're still single!), so assuming they don't really exist because you haven't run into any IRL is fallacious.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
IIRC the usual result of "unschooling" (where no curriculum is imposed) is being about two years behind through most of primary/secondary school; kids actually are pretty curious. Not 100% sure about how reading fits in, though.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
Why is "Israel" in scare quotes? Whether you believe that the Israeli government should be destroyed or not, it clearly currently exists and clearly currently controls territory.
magic9mushroom
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5mo 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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7mo ago
No, this isn't a "everyone votes by races" thing. Nobody wants special white representation, or for that matter special Chinese representation (the largest nonwhite group in Oz). The idea is that everyone including Aboriginals votes normally for a non-racialised Parliament, and then also Aboriginals get a special representation that may or may not have powers to block laws.
It's not AA - and @MaiqTheTrue was only using that as an analogy - but it absolutely is explicit "some people have more representation than other people".
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
But though people are becoming increasingly sceptical about this specific proposal, there is still widespread support for giving Aboriginals special status and treatment. It wasn't so long ago that Yes had a massive lead - if the Voice were being rejected on principle that would not have been the case.
I'm not pointing entirely to the "this is evidence that we're already coming to our senses" direction. There's also the "getting crushed in a referendum - as is looking likely - builds consensus against the thing being voted on" direction. It gives One Nation more respectability if they're the only party that took a firm "no" and "no" wins, regardless of whether it was "no" winning properly or a "yes" fumble. The Greens can't claim consensus on this any more if they took their "consensus" to an actual vote and it got crushed.
Now, in the USA this wouldn't matter; tribal loyalty overwhelms national loyalty, this'd just be one more reason to despise the outgroup and fight harder. But in Australia we're not that far gone; stare decisis is a thing that still means something here (note for instance the lack of another republic referendum). Ironically, I got this pointed out to me by SJers worried about it.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
"lurching" (a mild slur by the way)
I wouldn't call that a slur. It can sometimes have the connotation of drunkenness, but it can also merely connote suddenness.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community.
Scott's not engaged that in a long time, honestly or otherwise. Categories are Made for Man was 2014; Be Nice was 2016. The dynamics have certainly changed somewhat between 2014 and now.
Scott and Zvi do definitely have a policy of avoiding some of the more radioactive topics out of not wanting the backlash but not wanting to lie. I think in Scott's case it's mostly a mistake, although on this issue there's the problem that he doesn't want Lorien to get incinerated by claims of conversion therapy.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.
I'm not FfoC and I don't think I fully agree with him, but I think it's pointing at something that's worth at least a token defence.
Random murder is an important disincentive against systematically being an arsehole, especially white-collar abuse. Even if only 0.01% of people will murder you for being an arsehole, if you're an arsehole to someone new every day you're probably going to get murdered sooner or later, and this is a powerful disincentive even if murder is harshly punished (the arsehole is still dead regardless of what happens to the murderer, and that last fraction of a percent is very, very hard to deter).
One could see the rise of bureaucracy and remote action via the Internet as an erosion of this organic guardrail; by making it impossible rather than merely illegal to murder people for their transgressions, those transgressions are not deterred and increase drastically in frequency (and in the case of white-collar abuse, legal relief is systematically difficult to apply).
So one might conceive of this kind of contempt as perhaps not worth a whole murder but, say, a 0.01% chance of being murdered, and think a low but nonzero amount of revenge-murder is optimal even if revenge-murder itself is still wrong and punishable. That more moderate position would still be edgy, but I wouldn't call it insane.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Unreliable equipment run incompetently has ended many sprees, and someone doing research on past shootings would know this.
Columbine also involved unreliable equipment, although in that case it technically started rather than ended the spree (it was supposed to be a bombing, but the bombs didn't go off).
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
Well, it's not painful anymore, and it does work for at least a while.
The problem is, 1) it causes temporary cognitive deficits (that aren't so temporary if you're doing it repeatedly), 2) it is one of the few things to cause permanent retrograde amnesia (i.e. it wipes a bit of your memories every time, and they're never coming back). Permanent and scary side effects are bad, because a certain percentage of people kill themselves out of revulsion (Ernest Hemingway, for instance, killed himself after a course of electroshock therapy). Once you take that term into account, you wind up with a cost-benefit profile that's not so pleasant.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
No, it doesn't. Most of the genes that are activated only in men (e.g. the ones to build testes, or to synthesise dihydrotestosterone) aren't on the Y chromosome. They're switched on either directly by testis-determining factor (the product of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome) or indirectly by various other things downstream of it (e.g. testosterone levels).
Genes for the brain having different activation based on testosterone levels in gestation would be the obvious mechanism.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
I don't think it's only common to leftist thought. Lots of people do this to lots of things. You notice it more from them because:
- they have the biggest megaphones at the moment,
- you are opposing them on this issue and thus spot it more easily.
Scott's old "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" post summarises the Reactionary viewpoint on this: try being an actual coloniser rather than a chickenshit one, and you might get somewhere. If you respond to rebellion by going home, that's an incentive to rebel. If you leave institutions in place, let alone allowing the conquered to elect them, that makes rebellion easier. If you admit to being there temporarily, that disincentivises people from helping you since they might be shot as collaborators when you leave.
This sound like too much work and/or morally wrong? Well, then, I guess you're not cut out for occupations. Try some other means of affecting world politics.
The occupations of Germany and Japan went well despite being admittedly temporary and leaving some institutions in place (particularly in Japan), but there was definitely no hope of getting the West to go home via hostility and also the existence of the Soviet Union and China made even a successful rebellion obvious suicide.
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