magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here.
I think this is a much-longer bow than you need to draw to be opposed to RFK being in charge of vaccines. Because, y'know, he might defund or ban them, which would very directly suck.
Also, remember that Twitter replies will skew in favour of opposition, because there's a thumbs-up and no thumbs-down.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
Well, you're certainly demonstrating the classic failure mode of utilitarians, who struggle to conceptualize or deal with conceptual infinities and start doing irrational things on the basis of existential dread spirals.
No, the Chinese are not about to try and cold-rush Taiwan, or try to start a war via blockade that would be publicly jumped on by both US political parties for electioneering purposes. No, there isn't any particular grounds for panic-buying resiliency goods beyond the universal basis to have a stockpile for emergencies. No, the nukes (and the satellites) are not about to fall.
You are doomposting. Go back to bed and sleep it off.
You have the right to ignore my warning if you so wish. As I said, I might look paranoid in a few days.
(In case I don't, though, no memory-hole for you.)
magic9mushroom
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9mo 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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10mo ago
(if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in)
Ding ding ding. Or at least, I'm far from convinced that a lot of things called "communist" are bad in all circumstances. There's more than one thing that gets called "communism" by laymen, though.
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Communism-proper - what the Marxists call communism. Note that the Marxist nations have never claimed to achieve communism; the USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the PRC claims to have "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Communism, as the Marxists define it, is a state of enlightenment where no government or money is necessary because people want to help each other. Communism does work on small scales - as the name suggests, communes - where Dunbar's number is not exceeded and rare exploiters can't hide. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism would probably also work with minimal shepherding due to abundance. Genetically engineering humans for greater altruism would probably also work. Outside of those three cases, this is in opposition to human nature and can't work - even Marx TTBOMK thought this would take a very long time and some sort of change in human nature to happen. With regard to policies that attempt to move things in the direction of communism outside of trying to create those cases, point out that loads of people are greedy/lazy/evil. If that doesn't work, then yeah, I think you are back to "tell them to shut up and take it".
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Command economy, partial or total. In other words, decide how much of X gets made and what attributes X has by some means other than "what will maximise profit for the makers of X?", for some or all values of X. I think there are some very real gains to be made in this area. Controlled obsolescence, for instance, is entirely a product of a capitalist system, as is modern predatory advertising, as are the predatory features of social media. I also think the losses could be made less severe these days than they were in the 20th century, because we have these nice things called computers to crunch economic numbers for us. There is a big skill-dependence, though, so while trying to command the economy is IMO not inherently dumb, many specific attempts to command the economy are dumb, and they can be opposed on their individual merits.
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
Crap. Hope they reverse course; it's not actually that unlikely given the politics of Big Tech. I'd appreciate an offramp less horrific than "WWIII destroys half the hardware and fucks everything with soft errors" and less dangerous than "we get live rogue AI".
magic9mushroom
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19d 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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5mo ago
I'm not sure how this relates to my post. I was mostly talking about 2016 wrt Putin helping Trump (the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial).
As for propaganda, I'll just say that I've had a couple of instances over the years of mistaking RT for Western conservative thought, whereas this has never happened with Chinese media TTBOMK. And there are incidents that are frankly embarrassing like the Fourteen Demands.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled; what they say is apparently not significantly correlated with the truth and you should ignore it", that's a solid argument and one I'd actually mostly agree with.
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled, and we should chop them up into little pieces", well, I don't accept that argument for a variety of reasons, but ultimately that's a matter of opinion; there's logic to that position and it's been taken before.
If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours. There are definitely some liars among the Democrats, but less than you might think.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
Can I just ask, for the record, exactly how big the pile of skulls you want to build is?
Are we talking thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Tens of millions? Presumably not billions since, uh, not that many Westerners.
(Disclaimer: I am definitely in a glass house here.)
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
AI waifus are nice and all - I'd just like to make sure they won't brainwash and kill their users.
magic9mushroom
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1mo 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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3mo 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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7mo ago
As I said, call the liars liars. But target discrimination like this is important, damnit. It's the point of that rule, and it divides discourse from rhetoric.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.
The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
Part of the issue I have with Trump is that if he goes senile or has a stroke, but does not clinically die, he's unlikely to 25A himself and it's not immediately obvious that Vance and his cabinet would dare to invoke 25A section 4 given their voter base's immense personal loyalty to Trump (cf. "Hang Mike Pence").
Of course, this mostly matters to me because my P(WWIII) is high; outside of that scenario, it's not as big a deal.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
There’s no reversing that.
Fully, no, but I'd be interested in statistics on what the racial makeup would look like if the 20 or 30 biggest cities got deleted; my eyeball says they tend somewhat more minority (especially black).
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
And so is the capitalist economy, but it has fewer, just like a reinforcement trained LLM is going to have fewer bugs than a hand-crafted one. And when we're in the economy bugs mean poverty.
Social media has caused a depression epidemic so bad suicide's a notable cause of death and torn the politics of half the West asunder by serving up Shiri's Scissor for clicks. Offshoring manufacturing has left the Chinese with a significant strategic advantage. Over a percent of US GDP is thrown down the drain on advertising, plus whatever's lost to obesity as a result of that advertising, plus 4% on the bloated financial sector.
Yes, the USSR sucked at command economy. But you've got to admit that cybersocialism hasn't actually been tried (aside from Project Cybersyn, which was never fully implemented AIUI before Pinochet shut it down and AFAIK seemed to work okay - also we've many orders of magnitude more computing power than the early 1970s); you're basically asking me to take it on faith that it'd necessarily be more terrible.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
To be fair, "not being Biden/Trump" goes a very long way. I'm grudgingly hoping she wins, although my not being American has a lot to do with that (my main concern as a non-American is fitness to lead the free world in the moderately-likely WWIII, and Trump's both old and too egotistical to 25A himself immediately plus comes with a free fifth column due to TDS). Would definitely prefer Vance over Harris, though, because SJ ideology puts question marks over Harris' ability to do the needful in WWIII (e.g. "if a war with China goes nuclear and the PRC is run out of nukes but refuses to surrender, do you have the will to call their bluff, call up the stockpile, and go full countervalue on Chinese cities, or will you sit there refusing to order nine-digit deaths while they use their cities to build more nukes to throw at you?" - I'd trust Vance and Trump to pick option A but I'm not sure about Harris).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Crime rate back then was much lower, largely because cops harassed no-gooders in the exact way you consider scary and atrocious.
You are putting words in my mouth. What I consider scary and atrocious is the use of such powers to set up a police state.
I said in my original post that it does depend on definitions and that not all definitions are sufficient to allow this exploit.
Exploits like this are involved in a reasonable amount of slides into one-party states. The Le Pen conviction and the retaliation against Elon Musk for buying Twitter are obvious recent examples (though the latter one failed).
magic9mushroom
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5mo ago
And this was a major error. Better that the civil service change political valence with elections than it become a power bloc of its own which remains aligned with one side regardless of who is in power now.
I don't think it was necessarily an error in and of itself. Neutral civil services are a thing. Even Bush had far less issues on that front than Trump, and TTBOMK it did great for the first 100 years or so. It's a problem when polarisation and especially educational polarisation are very strong, which they often aren't.
magic9mushroom
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5mo ago
Uncontroversial (this is the correct spelling, btw), as in "the Mueller report lays out exactly which Russian military units did it on which days".
The Mueller report does not allege that Trump asked for this.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
That is actual, literal treason.
He just said he's not a citizen (below), so I don't think he can be a traitor against Britain.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
As I said, it is inarguably true that if you’re up in arms about immigrants assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an Irishman like Conor McGregor does so. But the reverse is also true: if you’re up in arms about an Irishman like Conor McGregor assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an immigrant does so.
This isn't the modus ponens/modus tollens reversal. This is the converse.
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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