mitigatedchaos
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User ID: 1767
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
On August 12th of 2023, I made a post criticizing Hitler's behavior, titled Re: The National Body, based on Bryan Caplan's reading of Hitler's book indicating an ideological system that believes in the inevitability of Malthusian total war. In a later post on February 24th of 2024, responding to an anon that said I came off as New Right, in addition to describing a 2x2 matrix of outcomes for genetic engineering, I also wrote,
Hitler apparently thought the world was going to be consumed by Malthusian total war, and that the only thing to do was to win. However, in many developed countries the fertility rate has been below replacement since around 1973, or for about fifty years as of 2024.
World War 2 started in 1939. Hitler killed millions of people. 1973 was a mere 34 years away.
There are some reasons to believe that the force of envy, which is as old as humanity, will overwhelm the ability of the production system to sustain itself, and the political ability of the defenders of the production system to protect that system. However, treating that as a certainty makes little sense.
Until very recently, it was effectively not possible to alter genes in an adult. This meant that, effectively, the only tool available was reproductive coercion. Acknowledging that a problem was genetic meant that it was "unsolvable," and that suffering was "inevitable." Because the use of reproductive coercion was so obvious, an elaborate system was set up to suppress information about genetics... but despite this, the study of genetics continued.
Current liberal responses to the use of genetic engineering technology are tainted by the belief that the technology is "science fiction" and may never arrive, and thus someone proposing it may be engaging in discursive maneuvering to "trick" the liberal into supporting human suffering with a fake hypothetical.
We don't actually know how influential liberals will respond when the technology arrives for more than just a handful of monogenic diseases. The idea that they will completely oppose the technology is an assumption, not a fact.
And perhaps more importantly, you never present a solid alternative course of action, and I do not, in fact, have anything better to do.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
If HBD is such a dangerous position that it cannot be allowed to be popularized, either because it will be used against the working class, or because it will be abused by the working class - then the broad spectrum suppression requires policing the left flank that attempts to do "corrective" racial discrimination in the opposite direction, so that race can be maintained at a lower standard of relevance for most people.
This is where the Turkheimers and Linds of the world have, in my opinion, really fumbled the ball. I think there are a sprinkling of people who are both anti-HBD and against the "corrective" racial discrimination advanced by the 'social justice' ideology, but they don't seem to have enough power to enforce this view at this time - except, perhaps, for the Supreme Court.
If we're going to be casually racist and speak loosely,
I get what you're talking about, the slice of Chinese pop cultural output that I've seen seems more referential and less sophisticated than what I've seen elsewhere... from Japan. For Korea and Singapore, I think they may have industrialized too quickly, and for China Communism probably damaged the novel culture-generating power that China would have had, and put it below what they could have reached. It probably also damaged the population's behavior, as it seems to have done in Russia.
I still think this vibe would be there without the Communism and if industrialization had occurred more slowly, but there might be a greater perception of comfort and a greater willingness to lean back and experiment.
The success of the Europeans since the 1500s has been a bit psychologically destabilizing for everyone.
Asians are at least on a better footing here in that they're the only ones that can really challenge the Europeans on the footing where they're most impressive - large modern industrial nation-states with sophisticated warfighting systems.
But for others, it's been so upsetting that BENs and WS envision Europeans as some sort of unstoppable psychic warrior race, and I just don't think that's an accurate characterization. If we're being loosely racist, low epistemic standards - they're the galaxy brain race, the Willy Wonka of races, high variation in ideas, and they've been making everyone else put up with their wacky ideas for the last 5 centuries, and sometimes that's been very beneficial, and other times it's been very hazardous. Asians (China especially) may have come up with similar ideas 3 millennia ago, but didn't necessarily apply the same intensity or combine them with industry. (Like, I'm surprised that it's not an Alt-Right meme that "East Asians are the Control Group.")
If people stopped feeling threatened by Europeans for 10 minutes and thought "what are these guys actually like?" they would notice that Europeans are Wonka, notice a bit more of how their ethics distributing stack works (for instance, UMC-W attacks on WWC), relax a bit, and ask themselves how they can use this to build up national wealth. In like 100-200 years, the Europeans may be seen like a Tumblr sexyman.
And to the credit of governments throughout East and Southeast Asia, many of them have shunned the "Revenge of the Third World" model in favor of peacefully building up industrial capital through exports to the United States - even Vietnam, who the United States dumped millions of tons of bombs on in living memory.
(Edit: It should go without saying, but like 90% of "whiteness" theory or "white supremacy" theory content is just the unstoppable psychic warrior race hypothesis. One has to be a bit paranoid to think that "2+2=4" is somehow "white." A lot of this stuff sounds weird because it's superstition.)
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
If someone is actually smart and self-aware, and then bans all research into like, aircraft development for some reason, then they will integrate the knowledge of that ban back into their information system.
If you ban aircraft research, then you know that you do not know aircraft capabilities, and will adjust your thinking accordingly.
Failing to reintegrate their information control back as uncertainty is not an argument in favor of Democratic governance.
Not going to get into specifics, but beyond a certain point, the kinds of things you can hypothetically achieve through population selection are things like a reduced crime rate (which can also be achieved through simply imprisoning criminals for doing crimes), and increased quality and quantity of material goods and services (with declining marginal returns - the next 1,000 sqft of house provides less value than the first).
Japan and Singapore are both known for their low rate of crime, high rate of production, and reproductive sterility.
In other words, as the moral price of population selection rises, the theoretical returns decline. Certainty of returns is also reduced, and quite frankly, could you trust e.g. contemporary Canada to run such a program without trying to use it to shut down dissent?
Declining returns, high moral prices, substantial uncertainty, questions about misuse of power... this sort of consideration favors limits on tactics.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Ah, but there are consequences to being unable to make any deals with the opposition. Each day Democrats further retroactively justify Republican obstructionism during the second term of the Obama administration.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Alternative to UBI:
Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.
When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.
This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)
In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Unlikely to be resolved, because loan rates will differ by ethnic background because college completions differ by ethnic background.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
A transhumanist setting doesn't mean that bodies are free, or that body swap surgery has zero recovery time.
You can probably come up with something by working with those frictions.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
The different moral development theories as commonly discussed (Kegan, Kohlberg) seem to have some common ground in an arc of { social morality, formal morality, post-formal morality }, usually around stages numbered 3, 4, and 5, depending on how people are charting it out.
You can think of this as team sports morality ("I'm a Democrat, and our good ingroup believe X") which can turn on a dime (social morality), principled morality that's trying to integrate moral intuitions into a formal system (this would be your conventional philosophies like Utilitarianism), and finally a sort of intuitive recognition that low-dimensionality constructs (like Utilitarianism) are insufficient to contain the whole of morality (for post-formalists).
The transition between each stage involves significant intellectual investment. This motion can be painful because it looks like the old principles falling away into meaninglessness and leaving nihilism.
It's not that Democrats didn't believe in free speech at all. Rather, most political types including most Democrats are social moralists, not formal or post-formal moralists, so they take their orders on their appropriate beliefs from those higher up in their social hierarchy, and then attempt to act on them locally.
2008 American liberalism was a fairly well-hedged ideology overall, so when Democratic leaders pushed for principles like free speech and procedural protections for those accused of crimes and so on, and Democratic social moralists embraced these principles locally, the Democrats as a whole looked a lot smarter than they actually are. The quality of their overall thinking has declined significantly due to the much worse epistemics of Social Justice, and many Democrats are wildly miscalibrated right now.
When I say that we should rebuild philosophical or political liberalism from a perspective of epistemic limits, what I mean is that many liberal principles are similar to prohibitions on economic central planning which is practically problematic due to limits on available information and computational power, but most current liberals don't know this and thus lose interpersonal arguments to "care/harm" types (who use conflict theorist epistemology) because their support for freedom seems "arbitrary."
By developing a philosophical framework which roots liberal principles in limits to information and personal morality, a kind of opposition to "cultural central planning," a new generation of intellectuals could be trained and gain an advantage in the coordination for the defense of liberal principles.
I'm just going to throw this into the ring because, skimming the comments it hasn't come up yet, but it fundamentally changes the game.
The first commercial gene therapy received FDA approval in 2017. More received approval after, and more are in the works.
In 2000, it took over 10 years and $2B just to sequence a single genome. Now, sequencing costs are under $1,000. Genetic engineering is no longer science fiction and is now a real (but expensive, at around $500,000) technology. All that is necessary is that the industry continues to advance at this pace for another 20-30 years, and the situation with genetics will be fundamentally changed.
Most libs, even most very smart libs, have not heard that genetic engineering is now a real technology, or have not internalized it into their world model. Like many of the contemporary far right, they are stuck in a despair trap based on genetic fatalism. They are convinced that if something is genetic, it cannot be changed except through bloody methods.
Only once genetic engineering becomes as routine as heart surgery, hitting two degrees out on people's social graphs, will they automatically realize that it's a thing and start to understand the implications. However, smart liberals could potentially understand the situation early if someone told them. If so, they might be peeled off the SJ coalition.
If we're going to get genetic engineering tech in 30 years anyway, then heavy moral investments in either "corrective" discrimination or social darwinism don't make sense at this time; at the very least we'd want to see what genetic engineering can't do first before we go all-in on either left-racism or right-racism.
The old WW2 theories of inevitable Malthusian total war were upended by TFR of developed countries falling below replacement around 1973, a gap of about 34 years.
Edit: Gonna be honest here, I'm actually surprised you guys haven't noticed this and started including it in your maneuvers. In 2013, Scott wrote,
How many more centuries do we have in which natural selection is going to be the main force shaping our genome, as opposed to genetic engineering or transfer to nonbiological life? Maybe one, if you’re really pessimistic?
In 2014, he wrote, "Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable." Yudkowsky and Scott are the leaders of 2012 era Rationalism, and while Yudkowsky didn't have a lot to say about this, it's a pretty straightforward interpretation that Scott's position is that we should hold the line until something like a broad spectrum genetics industry comes online. This would then be sort of the 'default,' unspoken Rationalist position.
I'm embarrassed to admit that though I was aware of CRISPR, I wasn't aware of the 2017 gene therapy until 2023 (I found out around the time Doom Dance was released). Is it just me and (by extension) the people who read mitigatedchaos that noticed? Should we assemble sources and ask Scott to write a follow-up article?
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Guns matter if the state isn't completely unified, which is plausible in a civil war scenario.
Additionally, once a civil war starts, foreign powers may ship in heavier weaponry to their preferred factions. Guns buy time for this to occur.
You're thinking in terms of Walmart shooters, who are individuals with low human capital reacting in a way that they find self-satisfying, but which lacks tactical or strategic sense. I am not going to discuss the "correct" use of guns in a civil war scenario, but in the event it's more than a very small rebellion, the violence will be directed by significantly more competent individuals than Walmart shooters.
The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.
These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.
In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
To have a real "conversation about race" in the United States would mean the US Democratic Party coming clean that they don't know how to close more than a small fraction of the race gaps and have been implicitly lying to their constituents for the better part of 30 years. They will never do this, as it runs counter to their electoral strategy.
When Democrats say the phrase, they mean publicizing and focusing on racial issues without acknowledging this, so they can unilaterally morally lecture Republicans and put all their coalitional baggage on Republicans instead of addressing it.
Right-wingers using the phrase know this and are throwing it back in their face.
mitigatedchaos
10mo ago
Yes, terminating competing land claims if there are no survivors, but not terminating land claims if there are survivors, encourages leaving no survivors.
Thus de-extinction - the land claims return even if there were no survivors.
Dividing up the country doesn't work.
- American leadership aren't willing to enforce borders. They want cheap labor (or votes). After dividing the country, how do you make that stick?
- Smart black Americans don't strongly want to live in a black-only area, but would rather live in the same areas, and work at the same institutions, as their mostly-white (the country being majority white) peers. These are the people you would need to run and staff the institutions that would run a "black" region.
- The "white" region is likely to out-earn the "black" region even if it's just a matter of size and population. Given the above two points, they are likely to begin brain-draining the "black" region of talent, reducing institution quality, reducing production power, reducing earnings, reducing tax revenues.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
TheAgeofShoddy writes on Twitter,
The argument has been that there is something inherently superior, both morally and practically, about migrants- they were more willing to work, more entrepreneurial, willing to make due with less, more in tune with American values, more patriotic (somehow), thus more deserving.
That’s easy to believe when you’re comparing an idealized migrant to the worst assumptions you harbor about your domestic enemies; less so when comparing actual human beings, their needs and strengths and frailties, against all of your most cherished assumptions about yourself.
If the argument now is that migrants may be a net burden but there’s a duty of hospitality, then it is fair to ask how long such an obligation lasts and how far it extends. If the answer is “only so long as it hurts my enemies” then bussing will continue until morale improves.
The fundamental point is that the assumption of innate migrant superiority to current Americans, and therefore of a greater debt which the state owes to migrants relative to those who constitute it and pay for it, must be broken. That is the source of the problem and the fight.
And this is just one front in a larger war over this point. I could re-write this thread and replace “migrant” with “Ukraine” and have to edit very little, because the same principle is at issue: a belief that the government owes moral duties to everyone but its own people.
It is, in one sense, about resources; but core it is about whether democratic government is responsible to the people of the states which elect and empower it, or whether it is responsible both to and for a free-floating set of idealized moralized manias.
That is one of the great questions of our time.
I happen to overall agree - the dominant contemporary US left position on immigration is very much about avoiding having a serious discussion over how much it costs (currently, it is argued that it is free), and what means are acceptable to prevent immigration (currently, almost none) and keep it within some level.
About the only ones moderately serious about this are libertarians, who propose "no welfare" and "upzone everything" as answers, which at least fits the economic considerations, but fail to consider the political economy in a world where social programs fail to converge group outcomes and demagogues are eager to weaponize ethnic tensions.
The current position helps Democrats to keep their coalition together, but it's an obstacle to necessary reforms - which also fits the overexpansion of universities and student debt, Left-NIMBYism, and the general amount of reputation management conducted by Democrats in and outside of the party.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
So, what view would I suggest? A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality. There's some honest people on either side who have been swept up in the drama, but in terms of the direction of the energy which drives the whole debate, this is what lies underneath it.
In the left-wing view, resources are by default abundant but production is fixed, so whoever has more than another must be "hoarding" it. It seems pre-agricultural. (Trees still grow fruit even if no one shows up to harvest it.)
In the right-wing view, resources are by default scarce, but production is highly changeable. This view is more industrial or agricultural. (Fields lie empty if no one plants for the next harvest.)
"Right-wingers want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes" presumes that they fundamentally believe in left-wing ideas but are just hoarding out of greed. That's not a symmetric view at all. It's just the left-wing view.
If everyone has the same economic production, but Italians are stealing a share from Frenchmen, then Frenchmen receiving a larger share will just make Italians worse off. If Frenchmen have a lower economic production than Italians, but Frenchman economic production increases, then the total output of the economy rises. Italians bid more for highly inelastic goods like land, but more elastic goods like potato chips or microchips may become cheaper, and depending on their preference the Italians may be better off overall.
It's a bit more complicated than this, but the big question is the same as it was 20 years ago - if you can make a social program to converge racial outcomes in the US by about 50% (putting e.g. black income around where hispanic income is now, which is about where white income is relative to asian income), where is that program?
In one sense these critiques have some merit, but in another sense they were broadly deployed in a way that was effectively "men are assumed to be wrong by default and aren't allowed to respond in their own defense," and that applies to every other category they were used on. Subsequently they were also used very hypocritically - stuff like "eliminate whiteness" was normalized in prestigious publications even though saying that about any other race would rightfully be perceived as a threat.
It basically just nosedived straight into tribalism; as a result, I don't think we can treat these discussion norms as legitimate, at least not until they're applied more fairly to humans generally rather than based on identity groups. We need a show of good faith that that's something that the left-wing can realistically achieve, rather than the natural slide downhill of this kind of norm that we would usually expect.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Biden would have been a moderate if he left in the Trump EO against racial scapegoating. He didn't. His administration have embraced "race conscious" policy, and the only thing preventing it is Republican judges. "We must discriminate against white Americans in every aspect of society" is not a moderate policy.
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
That's part of the Trump joke.
All they would have to do is stop lying to each other so much and govern like they care about the country, and he'd be non-viable. All they would have to do is flatter the guy a bit and they could get plenty of legislation.
But they won't.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
The position of the left-wingers is that countries have no moral right to exclude any immigrant that isn't literally part of the Taliban or ISIL, and that all complaints about practical matters such as housing are actually just a cover for ethnic hatred, and that no measure for immigration enforcement is acceptable.
In what way is it unacceptable to make them bear the full burden of their position that housing and other resources are free and materialize the instant an immigrant shows up?
Why should they not be made to take all unauthorised migrants in the entire country? They volunteered.
Sanctuary cities are free riding, and to correct the incentives this should be fixed.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
The actual escalation was a 10-year push to legalize racial discrimination against the country's ethnic majority, with no evidence that this would do any good for society, or ever stop.
This is an Iraq War tier screw-up. If Democrats were facing an actual world-historical political genius instead of a WWE character, they would be utterly fucked.
All of these actions are meant for one purpose - to avoid necessary reform.
Back in the 1970s, it was still early, and the exact amount by which the racial gaps could be closed was still speculative, so implying that they could close the gaps was speculation rather than a lie. As late as 2010, they still had relatively serious academics like Roland Fryer, or people studying lead exposure, who were able to show some modest results, and they weren't trying to do "race conscious" policy, so they didn't need the higher standard of evidence that explicitly racial policy requires.
Since then it's been wall-to-wall accusations like "there are too many white and asian men at Google" based on numbers that are completely made up, and attempts at racially discriminatory institutional and government policy that has to be stopped by the courts.
They have been lying to their base since 2014 about what is feasible for them to accomplish, and expecting everyone else to just take the heat.
January 6, a political riot following a year of weaponized political rioting, is not important. Democrats either do not believe that Donald Trump poses any significant risk of a fascist takeover, or they believe that being racist is more important than avoiding risk of a fascist takeover. If it were otherwise, they would simply stop being racist.
If you think you're facing down an ultra-fascist, then you capitulate to moderates and give in to their demands in order to push the potential fascist power base below 50%. You do not double down on weird HR-ified collective inherited racial guilt for the majority of the population.
Russian disinformation accusations are irrelevant. Russian collusion accusations are irrelevant. There is no reason to believe either of them from a party who are so desperate to be racist for no other reason than to selfishly gain and preserve power. Again, the stuff they support is not based on science. Kendi and DiAngelo are not scientists. Collapsing all of race into "W vs BIPOC" doesn't even match regular stats, it's just nasty in/out racial coalition politics.
If you disagree, then you can explain how this garbage, which would be recognized as far right if it were occurring in the other direction, gets stopped.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
If the room is suicidal, then it takes someone who actively refuses to "read the room," and doesn't give a shit how impolite that is, to reject suicide.
Does that impose selection effects? Oh, yes.
The Bush administration were neither anti-racist enough not to bomb Afghanistan, nor racist enough to conclude that development of Afghanistan would require imposing radical social change, but in an uncanny valley where liberal democracy is perceived as the natural order of the universe, so American interventionism is morally cheap.
Western elites are stuck in group think because, reasonably enough, none of them want to be the guy to break the perceived inter-ethnic peace and cause a massive conflict. To get someone willing to point out that Haiti is a massive ongoing disaster, we had to search very far outside the typical distribution of politicians.
Thus, you are having the undignified experience of being rescued by a professional wrestler.
His intervention is better viewed as a lucky chance, to be exploited, than a done deal.
What we're probably going to have to do is rebuild the philosophical basis for liberalism from a stage 5 (post-formal) moral perspective, focused on epistemic limits and epistemic humility. Conventional philosophical liberals are having trouble explaining why their principles exist.
It's unclear what the Democrats will do if they win, because they can't promise anything as they have almost no more positive-sum, or even zero-sum, gains to make. Almost everything they do from here on out, unless someone in the Democratic coalition actually acts as a leader and e.g. shuts down the Left-NIMBYs and greenmailers, is negative-sum, and against a particular ethnic group and sexual identity.
If Trump goes to prison, but Democratic leadership shut that negative-sum behavior down and can manage to just be normal for 20 years, then I think there are few consequences to them for jailing Trump.
But they've put so much effort into avoiding necessary reforms and avoiding having tough conversations, that it's hard to believe that they'll suddenly act like mature leaders governing the nation in the broad national interest.
If they don't shape up, the question is just how much abuse bright young cis heterosexual males (of left-discriminated-against racial or ethnic categories) are willing to take before they decide to organize for their own advantage, just as Democrats tell every other group to organize for their own advantage.
A lot of paranoia within Social Justice seems rooted in the understanding that these men really aren't organizing for their own interests right now, but would be a powerful force if they did so in the future, and thus wants to weaken this category based on an implicit theory of inevitable identitarian conflict, rather than pursuing a more peaceful solution which avoids creating incentives for conflict.
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