magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.
There's not a colourable argument that there is no good. That's just pretending the debate is one-sided. A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda. There will also be SJ-opponents among those who did not vote, and even among those who voted for Harris; if I were a US citizen, I would probably have voted for Harris simply because I think Trump is too old to lead the free world in a potential WWIII and because WWIII almost certainly implies the semi-permanent fall of SJ anyway.
The institutions are weaponised against you; that's true. Many, perhaps most, of the people there are your enemies; that's true. God knows I feel like I'm in enemy territory every time I pass a bulletin board in a university and it's plastered with SJ signs. But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs. Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
My point is that uncritically quoting propaganda like this might mislead people.
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
A U.S. destroyer illegally entered the territorial waters of China's Huangyan Island; the Southern Theater Command lawfully and according to regulations warned and expelled it.
This is the PRC government line.
Back in reality, this is one of the many islands in the South China Sea that the PRC claims but is not recognised as owning. A day prior, two Chinese ships had attempted to physically obstruct a Philippine Coast Guard ship from approaching the island. Fortunately, they only crashed into each other. Then, as often following these kinds of incidents, a US ship sailed into the waters that the PRC insistently claims belong to it (to demonstrate that the US disagrees, to show its support for others ignoring the claim, and to make the PRC look weak when they invariably do not, in fact, enforce their claimed territory).
I'm not going to follow a .cn link due to the Great Cannon, but I've heard that the Chinese media is censoring the fact that two PLAN ships crashed into each other, presumably because it's a massive pratfall. And, well, of course they're parroting the insistent PRC line that "this island belongs to China and how dare anyone else go near it". They're also falsely claiming they "expelled" the US destroyer, because they're trying to save face.
Here is an Australian article about the incident. Here is the Wikipedia article about it.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
And of course, no amount of money can save you from the true black swans e.g unaligned superintelligence, gain of function^2 electric boogaloo or nuclear war
The first, sure. The latter two aren't that hard.
The middle one requires a few million for the bunker, and quite a bit more than that if you want a bunker-ready wife (bunker-ready as in, won't break quarantine even when the government is still pretending everything's fine) and money's the only lever you have in that regard (if you have other levers, much less so). So yes, expensive, but a billion's definitely enough.
The last one is really not that hard. I'm mostly on top of that one for like $1000, although there are some things I'd be buying closer to the date. Admittedly, it gets trickier if you're in the USA, because the USA's far more likely to go tits-up in the aftermath (fallout's also a bigger deal), but "move to Ireland/Guyana/Insert Country Unlikely to be Nuked Here" is still something you can definitely do for like $10 million max.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
I mean, okay, let's run with this hypothetical.
You do progress. This undermines the basis of civilisation (this being your "if"). Civilisation "ends", by which we mean there's no stable law, the modern economy (including agriculture) disintegrates because you can't have trade without functioning laws against theft, half the population eats the other half, infrastructure disintegrates.
But that's not extinction. Humans still exist, a lot of knowledge will be retained, agriculture will persist in some less-efficient form. You'll get governments, sooner or later, as warlords put together enough force to cow people. I don't think their policies are going to be very progressive, particularly since they'll (correctly, in this hypothetical) blame your progress for the apocalypse and warlords are not known for wanting to be eaten.
Sure, maybe they'll come back to where we are now in a hundred years or so. But this doesn't seem to maximise the average amount of progress over time. Unless you think that very-recent and near-future progress is far more important than that from, oh, 1770 to 1970?
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
Without opining on the object-level question, I will point out that there is a difference between tyranny on the one hand, and civilisational collapse on the other. One can believe in one without believing in the other, and certainly the latter is pretty far from experience in the West (I mean, when was the last time a Western country had state failure? The Wild West kinda counts - although it wasn't a case of state failure so much as a state not previously existing there - but I can't think of anything more recent).
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
I have at least one post that I deleted because I belatedly realised that it could function as a "how-to" for a terrorist.
I would not appreciate that post's version history becoming available to all Mottizens.
(The rest, IIRC, are from me realising I misinterpreted a post on reading further context and deleting a misaimed response or unnecessary question; undeleting those wouldn't accomplish anything but I wouldn't strongly oppose it either.)
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Undeleting the posts of permabanned members would cover a lot of the same ground. I'm pretty sure the admins can do it; Zorba definitely can.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
From the Red Tribe's point of view, the Blue Tribe is basically using an exploit in the rules (or rather, several; the education system's another) to generate new loyal voters. This is one of the biggest weaknesses in democracy: if there are any ways to generate new loyal voters en-masse, some arsehole will use them to take over the country.
That's why they take such a hard line on it: because if they lose this, they suspect they lose it all, forever. Hence, no surrender, no retreat, no matter the cost. A substantial amount of Reds would say that if the next Dem President would do that, then the correct response is to raze the Democratic Party so there'll never be one. Indeed, @Dean has since written a QC about Trump using available resources to roll up key supporting structures of the Democratic Party.
When enemy victories build up permanent advantages, worries about escalation go right out the window. To quote Zvi:
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. If playing it ‘safe’ with your resources means you don’t win, then it means that you die. Either don’t play, or don’t hold back.
The grand irony of all this, of course, is that this is exactly the same mentality that a lot of Antifa subscribe to; they think they've already bet their lives on the culture war and will actually be executed for sodomy/etc. if the Red Tribe ever gets enough power.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
This is now what has happened- the right overspent hard from 2016-2024, and now the left is hunting the right's institutions of social capital generation (academia, etc.)
Um, did you perhaps interchange the words "left" and "right" in this sentence? Because if you didn't I'm not sure how this makes sense.
Also, I'd say that the period of overspending social credit is more like 2015-2021 or -2022 (the extreme measures taken against Trump and Trumpists started back in 2015 IIRC; the Fair Game order on Musk was 2022-4, and was an utter outrage, but that was naked governmental force, not weaponisation of social credit).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
So... what, you're saying that people have a responsibility to prove to you that they're not secretly cackling demons?
Do you realise that universalising this attitude results in civil war?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
This is a failure of theory of mind.
As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.
So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO2 might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that (potentially) can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
but in the end parents still want their kids to be successful,
Be afraid of this. Be very afraid. Immoral Mazes reward psychopathy - mean chickens. Selecting for expected income would literally be one of the most destructive rubrics possible; at least if 5% of the new generation had penis noses it'd mostly just suck for that 5% rather than dragging everyone else down with them the way that 5% being genius psychopaths would.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
META strategies
I don't know what this is intended to mean. Is META an acronym for something? Or what are "metastrategies" in this context?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.
Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
That's a little bit reductive; there are a lot of things on that "or" list, some of which are perfectly fine. Deducing that I have one of the traits on that "or" list from my significant walks to the supermarket would be correct (specifically, I don't have a driver's licence; I'm absent-minded and don't think I'd make a great driver).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
...which is sometimes a rational choice, because the penalty for getting caught is frequently less than the gains from crime. Changpeng Zhao seems to be doing alright for himself.
Seriously, more countries need to have the penalty of "all your money are belong to us" on the table for financial criminals and/or actually use it.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.
What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Or maybe you just can't stop yourself from expressing it in maximally vitriolic ways.
He doesn't, though. AFAICS @WhiningCoil is a lot less vitriolic than SteveKirkland or Bernd.
Like, yeah, he might not be the most pleasant person to have around, but neither is @The_Nybbler. WC's not, TTBOMK, a flaming jackass who tries to drive out his opponents and claim the space.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
why do you have it confused?
I don't.
You said "calculate utility correctly". To calculate utility correctly requires knowing the truth. Different worldstates result in different expected utilities for the same course of action, so a utilitarian with a bad understanding of reality will act suboptimally according to his own utility metric - often wildly so. The obvious example is that genocide looks utile if you think the relevant demographic are all evil.
Hence, "lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly" = "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth".
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome.
Inherently, no, but later-harm produces tactical voting. Worse, it produces tactical voting in a mass-producible way; political parties will figure out which full ballot by their supporters will be best for them, and push it hard. Full how-to-vote cards are a thing in Australia, but the parties don't push them all that hard due to later-no-harm.
Now, yes, later-no-harm is incompatible with a bunch of other criteria, which is annoying. But, well, impossibility theorem.
IRV among them is particularly bad for counting
I mean, yes, the O(N!) worst-case is a pain. I will say that it's not nearly as bad in practice as the worst-case; a good number of seats in Australia have [#2 > all votes other than for #1 and #2], which simplifies it to 2 buckets (and a lot of the rest have [#3 > all votes other than #1/#2/#3], which simplifies it to 6 buckets). Usually the AEC can predict this ahead of time; they do a full recount if their prediction is wrong, of course, but most seats are known within hours.
(STV absolutely always is a nightmare, though; we use it for our Senate, and it takes over a week to count. AIUI it's worse in terms of tactical voting, too.)
You need the word "hard" before "science" for this to be especially accurate. Because, well, Social Psychology is a Flamethrower.
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