magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
That's still incredibly flawed to assume reading through my limited postings on a single website make you meaningfully less of a stranger who does not know me or what I believe/have previously done.
100 posts would be enough to get a decent start on a picture of me. Not a complete one, certainly - even a hypothetical person who'd read all 35,000+ posts I've made on the Internet still wouldn't know everything, and I'm the sort to randomly admit to crimes if they're relevant - but it'd be meaningful.
magic9mushroom
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10d 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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10d ago
TBQH, I was actually one of the volunteers rating some of your posts in this thread, and one of them (four upstream from the one I'm replying to now) I did actually rate as "deserves a warning". Not so much because of the amount of heat (which was quite high), but because you went cross-thread to keep after CBNOS. There's this bit explicitly in the rules:
Please remember that you can always drop out of a conversation, ideally (though not necessarily) with an explanation; if a user follows you and harasses you, report them.
...which is intended to reduce yelling matches via giving an escape valve when somebody can't be civil anymore. I use that valve now and then, which is part of why I have zero warnings here. When you go cross-thread to keep after someone, you're jamming that valve.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
· Edited 11d ago
Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion, presuming you can avoid the traditional leftwinger meltdown and flounce-out when you realize that other people are going to continue to be allowed to argue back.
No, I think people with that view do indeed tend toward liberalism.
The mistake is in assigning the word "liberal" incorrectly; social justice isn't liberal, it just (in the USA) has been wearing the word (and Officially Designated Intellectualism) like a skin-suit.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
· Edited 11d ago
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Some further thoughts:
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theMotte seems like it's kind of intended as a place for people to play on simulacrum level 1, not level 2 where you're telling lies to children to make them behave in the way you've explicitly reasoned about without (yet or ever) being able to do that explicit reasoning themselves. @Amadan am I barking up the wrong tree here?
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I think "prison conditions" is much less susceptible to Ozy's argument than torture, because prison conditions up to a point have at least one tradeoff that is always in play i.e. expense. Like, at one end of the Pareto frontier you are basically Auschwitz, enslaving everyone who can/will work and incinerating those who can't/won't; this is maximally cheap (indeed, potentially cheaper than free) and also horrifying (though not maximally horrifying; you're not doing "rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into your clothing, and not in that order" because holy shit that's a lot of extra work). At the other end, jail is basically a hotel, with maintenance; this is maximally nice, but also horrifically expensive due to all the stuff that gets broken or stolen (raising the cost well above the already-substantial cost of a hotel that can actually kick people out). Nobody can currently afford the good end; if you look back in history a lot of societies couldn't afford better than the horror end (though as you look back further, you don't have incinerators or scalable oversight, so this starts to tend more toward "summary execution, (mass) unmarked grave" which AIUI was nearly omnipresent in prehistory). Thus, any "though the heavens fall" seems like an obviously contingent principle which for most values of "okay" that modern Westerners accept would, if applied to a pre-Black-Death society, not work; you'd be overthrown if you tried to implement them by a) peasants starving from your taxation and/or b) other elites trying to avoid a) in order to save their own skins, and if you somehow weren't overthrown then the law-abiding populace dies in plague from undernutrition and the criminals either escape or starve. You are thus, in a sense, always talking price, in a way that doesn't play nice with injunctions; you can argue that 2025 El Salvador is wealthy enough to comfortably pull off better conditions, or you can argue that it's importantly not at the Pareto frontier ("these conditions are worse than death; summarily executing them all would be more humane" is an example of such an argument, because summary executions are cheaper than any prison where the inmates can just sit around) - and the reason I'd not have commented there is that I literally don't know enough about the particulars to participate in either discussion about this case - but if you think there's a one-size-fits-all correct answer you're committing the just-world fallacy.
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You will note that I haven't contradicted the claim that there are things worth letting the heavens (literally or metaphorically) fall to avoid, because obviously there are such things even for a first-order utilitarian; the heavens literally falling is not maximally bad, and the heavens metaphorically falling (e.g. WWIII) is generally less bad still, so it's worth WWIII to prevent the Earth being destroyed and it's worth the Earth being destroyed to prevent Allied Mastercomputer.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
This is a better argument, and if you'd been plain about this rather than engaging in hyperbole I'd not have chimed in.
magic9mushroom
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12d 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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13d ago
I can now draw a 75-lb. compound bow, although I can only manage a couple of draws right-handed (left-handed is easier). So that's what, 6 months from when I started out with noodle-arms? Practice makes progress, as my Mum would say.
magic9mushroom
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13d 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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14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
You missed #4: the journalist is a lying piece of shit and the sources do not exist. This wouldn't be my first pick, but it is a possibility.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
To be clear; I'm anorexic (in the proper sense); I don't get hungry*. Obviously, this largely negates the "ate too much" side of the coin.
*I recently discovered that I can get cravings for specific foods; when I started training with my bow, I started getting meat cravings, presumably because I needed protein to add muscle.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
This is certainly what I do - weigh myself every couple of weeks, if my weight's gone up stop eating lunch for a few days, if it's gone down start eating dessert for a few days. Hadn't heard the name "Hacker's Diet", though; it seems kind of too obvious to need a name and I kind of thought anyone who's actually at target weight would be doing it.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
· Edited 20d ago
That seems greatly distinct from what he said; "Trump is running on vibes and obsessions rather than means-ends reasoning" is a theory of mind, and an analogous statement is true of many people (at least in a lot of situations) regardless of whether it's true or not in this particular case - this is the simulacrum levels 3 and especially 4.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.
I will say, having my net worth in term deposits (because I'm a pessimist, if largely for other reasons) has served me well this week.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures. There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.
Yes, the Flight 93 scenario is the norm now which makes it far harder to pull off a lookalike, but some defence in depth isn't crazy.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
Far bigger economy and military (aside from nuke count, which is rapidly rising) = far more credible threat to depose the US as hegemon.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
By landmass, Canada is the second-largest country in the world, after Russia.
No, it's not. The USA and China have more land area than Canada (although not by much).
It comes out second on total-area calculations because of its very large territorial waters due to its many lakes and vast coastlines.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
I figured I'd better ask because, well, it's not like Trump can't order a nuclear test, and it probably wouldn't even be the most shocking thing he's done this year (though ordering a nuke used in anger would). Hell, I'm not even sure it'd be a bad idea, if only to check that they still work.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
Not always. Yudkowsky's example of "if the world will end in ten years, and you know this, this won't help you make money" holds water. Things shaped similarly to this also tend to be hard to make money from, due to difficulty collecting winnings and/or spending them; being a nuclear doomer might mean that I'm unusually well-equipped to survive a nuclear war, but I haven't figured out a way to actively profit from it.
There's also the famous (or perhaps infamous) saying, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Frauds tend to go up and up and up before they come down; knowing they're fraudulent without knowing the exact timing of said fraud's discovery means you might not be able to hold out against the margin calls.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
I'd split hairs to some degree regarding manufacturing vs. marketing, but I'll admit to a flub there.
(I'm not at 100%; I've been doing a circadian rhythm loop-de-loop the past, uh, two? three? days. I think I've been up for nearly 24 hours, though I'm barely even sure of that at this point. Might try and sort this out after some sleep; I don't think attempting it now would be productive.)
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well?
Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.
To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).
There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones.
With respect to smartphones: yes, I'm a Luddite. Zvi's made the case at length regarding the depression epidemic. Also, since I know you don't like SJ, and it's pretty obvious that smartphones helped it nucleate by bringing normies and, well, women onto the Internet, the only hole I can currently see through which you can maybe wriggle out of damning them for that would be to claim that (smartphones helped the alt-right more than they helped SJ ∩ the rise in culture war temperature from amplifying both sides is outweighed by the differential).
The literal iPhone i.e. Apple smartphone also has a business model heavily based around fashion cycles. Fashion cycles are waste, pure relative-at-expense-of-absolute.
Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it).
I'm generally of the view that this beach can tolerate wooden shacks but that building multi-storey brick buildings on it is asking for trouble.
The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.
To be clear, "building a society on those" =/= "having those in existence". The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke.
Wait, are you being literal or metaphorical here? If literal, could I please have some further reading?
It was Ozy's, and it's "The gradual supplanting of the natural by the just". I think your (mis)quote actually represents Rats as a whole better, though, because, well, Ozy's word choice hits a point that Scott's explicitly decried.
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