mitigatedchaos
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User ID: 1767
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
I don't think ethnic conflict theory will ever go away, because there's a share of the human personality space that are susceptible to it.
However, we are currently rolling out the first generation of commercial gene therapy. If we can postpone the next identitarian push until 2044, it will likely be happening in an environment where people default to the idea that genes can be changed. In that case, if something is genetic, that doesn't mean someone's entire line of descendants are doomed to suffer from it indefinitely.
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
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.
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
Flattening out the distribution of realized traits has similar problems to flattening out the distribution of underlying genes, as I'm sure you realize.
Additionally, what the genetics industry actually detects will be what they pay to detect, so there could end up being a reduction in underlying genetic diversity even if there are many variants with the same overall outcome naturally.
We just sequenced the genome for the first time around the year 2000. We haven't actually been at this that long.
IMO, it should be given another 30 years before categorizing it with commercial nuclear fusion in terms of 'indefinite' difficulty.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Nah, it's as someone else once said - Republicans defected on a game show, Democrats burned down the set.
Republican obstructionism is not even in the same ballpark as, "Literally every institution in the country must discriminate by race, based on my racial revenge fantasy, without any evidence that this will work, forever. By the way, I'm going to post in major medical journals about how your race should be 'eliminated'."
In my view, as a response it's completely unhinged. I'm closer to thinking the party should be legally dissolved at this point to force a reboot of their coalition than I would like.
I'm prepared to give the Republicans almost anything they want, because "merit is white supremacist" is incompatible with industrial civilization in a way banning abortion is not.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
I believe that's likely to be a future issue and cause a split within the contemporary left coalition as genetic technology improves, resulting in a shift in the makeup of the coalitions.
I have proposed the term "Biosocialism" to cover "the elimination of genetic inequities that are an obstacle to the formation of a global, classless society." Governments have an insurance-like incentive to reduce genetic diversity, and markets are also likely to be a homogenizing force, meaning that this is likely to be a future conflict. I think we might want to get a solid body of theory set up first, so that we're in a better position once various aspects of the genetics industry undergo political polarization.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Personally, I think it's interesting to see how other people respond. He responds to my Tumblr posts in this manner quite regularly.
Right now gene therapy is mostly focused on severe monogenic disease, either crippling or lethal disease, where the high price and potential risk are worth it.
When it comes to health, such as heart health or lifespan, in general, between { strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, strongly positive } gene variants (as subjectively defined - I am not making an "objective" ranking), I would expect relatively few { strongly positive } to exist. { weakly negative, weakly positive } will be somewhat difficult for the industry to detect, and if each gene editing operation incurs risk and expenses, are likely not to be targeted until later. { strongly negative } should be easier to detect, has a stronger moral and political case to support it, and is likely to be funded by governments for insurance-like reasons in combination with political reasons.
I think we should expect a lifting of the left tail of the health distribution, rather than much of a boost at the high end. There are natural limiting factors in that the more edits someone makes, the farther away the kid is from being "their" kid, so it's likely that relatively few people would pursue something as radical as DNA synthesis, at least around 2050. Beyond then, it's more difficult to predict. There may also be ideological manias around 2050 that might distort the response.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Should note that for the record, I answer all requests from the left to silence the HBDers with "you first; show that you're serious about not supporting 'racial consciousness' and 'corrective' racial discrimination," so realistically I don't expect to take any actions to silence HBD discussion during the next 10 years.
Only people like tracingwoodgrains have moral standing to even make the request, and they're not powerful enough to make it binding at this time.
"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.
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.)
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
11mo ago
that was part of the critique of the appeal to realism.
If you're doing that approach, make that it's a critique of sticking solely to the "realist" framework clearer next time.
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
I feel it's the other way around.
It's strange to make the argument without providing the numbers. If the number of deaths is something like 1%, then that makes the argument stronger, and if it's 50%, the country is facing a demographic collapse even if it wins.
You provided a bunch of intermediate nodes without anchoring them to the particulars of the situation. The absence is conspicuous, as if the argument were deliberately structured to avoid providing the number.
What percentage do you think it is?
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
Should I assume this means that you don't know?
I want to judge for myself. What is the number?
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.
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
The question was not rhetorical. What's the actual percentage? "Not enough" isn't specific enough.
mitigatedchaos
11mo ago
What percentage of Ukrainian men aged 18-35 are dead?
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Haha no, I was never ever going to go to Harvard. I'm just sick of being blamed for things that aren't my fault (and if they pass unqualified personnel the blame will still continue!), and I don't want to be operated on by unqualified surgeons.
I didn't complain until "progressives" decided everything in the whole world is my fault and that "merit" was "white supremacist."
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.
mitigatedchaos
2yr ago
Please see my response here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42541?context=8#context
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.
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