mitigatedchaos
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User ID: 1767
You misread the post as referring only to elite college admissions, when actually it refers to incidents like race-based medical rationing based on a "white" vs "everyone else" system which is scientific racism much less sophisticated than conventional race science, major outlets referring to the existence of asians in engineering departments as a "problem", and explicitly race-based debt relief that had to be shut down by the courts. These are all mainstream, center/left-of-center sources.
This is just what ideas like "white privilege" theory and "race conscious" policy mean.
It is true that Republicans were opposed to Democrats in 2010, but this change, kicking off around 2014, is wildly disproportionate to what the Republican Party actually did.
This view is irrational. You are treating your tribal positions as the default.
The Democrats are a party of irrational, tribalistic, collective, intergenerational ethnic grievance, as seen by use of terms like "BIPOC" that make no sense as a scientific category. Their proposed interventions have no beneficial effects, and they have abandoned the modest evidence for modest success they used to have for their previous policy set in 2010.
This makes me immensely more comfortable with the manipulation of procedural outcomes to prevent the Democratic Party from gaining more power and resources than I was in 2010. Republicans playing hardball with the Supreme Court was apparently necessary for me to keep my human rights, as seen by the recent rolling back of "corrective" racial discrimination programs.
The Democrats could simply have some frank conversations to break their coalitional interest deadlock instead of doing this weird racialist nonsense that has even less backing than conventional scientific racism. They're not obligated to be, somehow, as inconceivable as it was from 2008, literally color supremacist.
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.
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
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
2yr ago
Please see my response here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42541?context=8#context
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
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?
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.
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.
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
11mo ago
Personally, I think you're overestimating the rate of progress by underestimating the implicit amount of compute in "the majority of all public digitized text produced by humans," though I could be wrong. (The big thing is that the space of logical statements is unlimited, but most of that space is low/zero-value in practice; human-written text is rich with human intentionality, which helps rapidly reduce the possibility space to something more manageable.)
What I've been looking for is a replacement for UBI, based on the likelihood that it may create a dependent class who see no other means to get more money aside from politically agitating for a higher UBI, which meant it could get wildly out of whack relative to actual production levels.
Basically, looking at the AI revolution, in theory, if you could always subsistence farm, you would almost always be better off for the existence of it (assuming it doesn't wipe you out with superstimulus, etc etc), but without that you could be outbid on rents for land and materials, resulting in loss of basic life support and zero surplus to buy things with.
Thus the target for redistribution emerges: redistribute land and material rents (tuned for neutral population growth on an inherited basis), and allow a build-up of wealth in the form of capital, and everyone is better off for the high production levels but people can still get rich. If the AI-users aren't using lots of land or materials then you don't get much passive income (if any), but you're not blocked from supporting yourself. If the AI-users produce ridiculous amounts and start renting out huge areas for country estates, then you capture those rents from that increased production and can go live in an apartment without issue.
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
I agree, Deepseek-67B is a match for llama2-70b, in my experience.
Additionally, based on my experience, both Deepseek 67b and Nous Capybara 34b based on Yi-34b are much better politically - I don't just mean in terms of conditioned responses, although that does make llama2-70b not useful for fiction writing, but rather there's an element of strategic thinking missing from llama2 that doesn't show up even in "uncensored" versions, as if it's missing from the training data.
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
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.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
I'm not discussing most other plans at this time.
In the meantime, the mainblog will soon be shutting down for a six-month hiatus.
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
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
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
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
Not interest rates - the number of people getting the loans in the first place. Should have clarified that.
It has similar political problems, which is why the college loan situation in the US is unlikely to be resolved. Libs have proven willing to accept a higher non-graduation rate and higher debt, but probably won't accept a difference in how often the loans are issued.
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.
"I don't understand why anyone would want a private park," is a fair summary of your position, IMO.
But I think that says much less about "middle-class Americans" than it does about you, your own priorities, and your ability to assess others.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.
The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
That depends specifically on the resource type being allocated.
Basically you can store value in whatever resource class is not being allocated in this way. For instance, if every citizen receives an allocation of land or energy rights, you can store value as ownership of factory equipment even if you don't own all the land the factory is on.
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?
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