mitigatedchaos
No bio...
User ID: 1767
mitigatedchaos
7mo 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
1mo 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.
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
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?
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
7mo 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
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
30d 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.
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?
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
8mo ago
Unlikely to be resolved, because loan rates will differ by ethnic background because college completions differ by ethnic background.
mitigatedchaos
8mo 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
1yr 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
9mo 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
8mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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.
mitigatedchaos
9mo 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.
"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
1yr 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
1mo 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.
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.
You can do micro vehicles like golf carts that travel only 15-20 mph, which are small and cheap because they need less padding for deceleration. They can even have mounted temperature control systems. Since road capacity is proportional to road width, and golf carts use about half a lane's width, they can have a much higher capacity, and also much smaller parking.
The problem is that a golf cart is a low-security vehicle and the point of US car-dependent suburbs is to exclude judgment-proof defendants by excluding anyone who cannot afford a 20-year mortgage or maintain a $5,000 piece of capital equipment. Any attempt to build a city that excludes judgment-proof by other means will be deemed to have disparate impact, and even if it could be done the mechanisms won't hold intergenerationally.
More options
Context Copy link