muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
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User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
The problem is that the majority of voters are over 40 and don’t care for or want internet freedoms
I don't think it is about age like that.
Many <30 year olds, also many under 40, are comfortable and happy with the idea of censoring people who say anything they don't like. That is the online experience they grew up into. They expect that any forum with "free speech" is unpleasant, nasty, brutal, without any pretense of civilized community norms, and that the overall experience will make them angry. They expect that any good, nice public discussion place has effective mod team, that the spammers and obvious trolls are removed, and preferably is not public in the first place. And when you have got into habit of banning and censoring trolls, it is just so convenient to remove people of wrong political opinions or speaking in the wrong emotional register or who otherwise make for an unpleasant experience. Every form of communication they have lived and breathed has been like this, and when it is not, they will complain.
(The perception is not helped by the fact that after the meek and agreeable people have adapted to the perceived consensus, only the disagreeable odd ones out remain to rebel against it. After all, you need a pretty weird personality to be willing to tolerate the social censure or be oblivious of it until the banhammer hits. And today the disagreeable rebel scoundrels seldom have the wit, elegance or strong moral character.)
I hazard a guess the proportionally largest number of classical "I disagree with what you say, I respect / defend until death your right to say it" free speech idealist is to be found among those who remember the time before internet or got the early internet of 00's and its optimism never left them. Today, it is 2024. Those people are old and rare. Stress on the word 'rare'.
The first part was is that the youngsters like censorship. The second part, anti-censorship was never too popular in the first place. Turns out, among their own generation, principled free speech idealists were in the minority. Vast majority of people in every generation nod along. Free speech and free press used to be part of the package of approved ideas. Today it is much more contentious.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Anyone relate?
I am in the bottom quantile of unfun quartile of people I know. From what I can observe, cjet79's advice sounds about right, as it includes many things I don't regularly do, and seems to include stuff socially adept, well-adjusted people apparently do.
I can anti-recommend things that I do a lot: lurking and occasionally posting on this forum, related areas on internet, most of the internet really, reading econometrics journals and books that were likely reviewed in the Economist.
I have no citations nor will to dig them up (=> what follows is not a high confidence claim) but my gestalt impression of the argument "details of parenting don't matter as long as minimum standards are met" comes from studies that measure parenting and quite generic statistical measures of education, income, or perhaps questionnaires about life satisfaction on 1-5 scale. I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
My recollection is that Hermione's liberation front was viewed as a misguided (we see that not all elfs would adjust as well as Dobby), but the slavery system is not obviously good either.
I think that particular plot element was one the many elements of satire or should I say cynicism in the series. Remember the first chapter of the first book, almost as if penned by Roald Dahl? The world of Harry Potter is not nice: it it is unkind, uncaring, in general, quite drabby in the British kind of way. Not just Muggles, but it is often the overall undertone and outlook of Wizarding World, too, while it has more bright spots. (At least for Harry. But consider Snape.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".
He's a bad match for Star Wars.
I agree he wasn't a good match, but "rule of cool" wasn't the reason. Star Wars is a space opera conceived as "WW2 fighter planes, Jidaigeki, and Wild West, ... IN SPACE." In other words, rule of cool. None of the rich details of the exotic universe make sense, they are there because they look cool. Lucas wanted to cast a Japanese period drama samurai star as Obi-Wan Kenobi because of "how cool that'd be". Consistency is maintained in OT and prequels because of inertia and involving a single auteur whose vision of "cool" didn't change too much.
Hiring a "rule of cool" director was a good idea. The mistake of was that Johnson's brand of cool was different. Hiring a director who worships "canon" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it can work for some time, but eventually it will result in milking the original vision empty, producing soulless merchandise.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
So I gather your professor has not ever fallen in romantic love? Or ever experienced philia, love of friendship? In my experience, starting it is not exactly amenable to conscious control or choice. The best one can do is to choose people one hangs out with (as it is difficult to love someone who you have never heard about but only in very abstract sense of "love").
Secondly, the "proof" proves too much. There are other immutable traits for respective hypothetical partners, such as relative age difference, or permanent mental handicaps.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
In great power politics, the wars are sufficiently rare that anomalies also count. (The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were anomalous in their scale. WW1 was, again, anomalous.)
Predicting the outcomes of wars is unpredictable business. Before the 1st Gulf War, very few people knew for certain it was going to be a quick, decisive victory against inferior conventional force. If American strategy calls for small wars in the Middle East or quick decisive naval wars in Asia, what Washington is going to do when faced with an adversary who is perfectly aware of the American strategy and thus presents something that is neither?
And anyway, the current nuclear stockpiles are a fraction of what it was in the 1980s. During the Cold War, the end-of-the-world thought stopping does-not-compute aspect was heavily colored by fiction and propaganda. After the nuclear exchange, a world will end, but the world will not.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
If they caused all the messes in the first place, should we really gonna trust them to fix the latest one?
Do you have a proposal how it should be fixed, then?
I can understand a position of a libertarian who argues that municipal fire brigade ought to be dismantled, and people should buy insurance of private fire-fighting companies: two alternative, realistic solutions are presented, and their respective pros and cons can be weighted.
Arguing against state enforcing border control on the grounds that they are going to mess it up is different, because without border control, the end result is no migration control at all (not much different from the mess-up). Unless you have a plan for private migration control.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
That would be evidence that humans achieve something by torture. However, that something is not necessarily the exact information that is needed.
In pre-industrial Western countries, use of torture was often doctrinal to obtain not information, but confessions of heresy for the sake of the soul of the guilty. It was quite popular and quite widely applied! Then many death penalties also involved torture, because, uh, reasons? Whatever the reason was, it wasn't just 18th century French, the Romans also had reasons for torturous punishments (ditto for Hammurabi).
I wouldn't simply shrug off the possibility that yes, humans quite like torturing and killing other humans for "fun", and rationalize it. It likely has some reason, maybe something to do with warfare and establishing a domination hierarchy (but which is not necessarily the same reason humans say to themselves).
Speaking of military intelligence, I thought the oldest and most reliable way (even today) to obtain enemy's secrets is to pay agents with money and luxuries. Or that is what Sun Tzu suggests.
The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out,760 tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed.761 Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.
It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.762
It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.763
Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.764
The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy;765 and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy.766 Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Very true. Another data point: Very few people today know or care about the hot 1896 political question of bimetallism, which gave occasion to "the greatest political speeches in American history" that enraptured the DNC.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Why would I believe the paper that starts with a generated introduction had a real experiment behind it, and the results section was not also generated by an LLM?
The only thing keeping the science honest is the replication of experiments. If it is very cheap to describe and publish experiments that never happened, but running a real experiment to verify is costly, why would anyone try to replicate any random experiment they read about?
Unless someone comes up with a solution to reorganize the Science (or the eschaton is immanentized), I think the medium term equilibrium is going to look like even more weight given to academic credence-maintaining networks of reputation, less weight to traditional science (publishing results and judging publications on the merits of their results).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
Then the only remaining option is to either look outside the internet or stop relying on teachers.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Scattered thoughts.
In favor of your thesis: There was something going on with the Western music during the Enlightenment. Mozart was a contemporary with the enlightenment. Beethoven started his career moving to Vienna right on cue with the War of the First Coalition.
Against: There was a great deal of unequivocally bad music, too. It was an era that produced Portsmouth Sinfonia (transgressive and subversive, but of the kind where you stare at the subversion too long).
Written by the victors: Did the adults in the 1960s music like the music that now gets called great? Did they think they were seeing a peak in art, or where they scratching their heads why nobody is making new subversive Lindy Hop. (I once met a guy who lamented how the big band exited the popular consciousness when rock become ascendant, and thus, last of good music died.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
I have been upgrading my priors to the effect "more shocking the video, higher likelihood it is AI generated", but this is not shocking enough.
If I were to guess, it is something mundane, and the tables have turned and past stereotypes have become a funhouse mirror: these days it's the Chinese who come from such a well-ordered society that they amaze Westerners with their ability to stand in line waiting for their turn.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Where are they?
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Obscure internet forums / platforms are by definition obscure. To hear about them here, one needs to be lucky: (1) someone who knows about such a place comes here and (2) wants to share a link here. Rationalist sphere was quite special in their mission to evangelize rationalism and reach out on the internet; not every discussion group has such objective. (I'd imagine such groups should be careful where they recruit.)
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Agreed with this and this: the elites have offline and not-public platforms.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I'm assuming the newspaper isn't a well-regarded one or a very professional one.
Undersells it a bit. It appears Nya Dag is not "not well regarded" in the sense NYPost is but maybe more in the sense of Alex Jones.
Now that doesn't need to be an instant "boo", but one should consider that even with reputable newspapers, just that it made it to a newspaper doesn't make thing necessarily a credible nor true. The journalist should be expected to show that they did the legwork to prove the veracity of the leaked documents. The newspaper does not claim to have done anything besides receiving images of report that has "RAND" written on title page.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The Illiad (or so I am told) starts with an argument about status symbol sex slaves, but contemporaries didn't consider sex slaves "grimdark", they considered it normal part of life and reality of warfare; the narrative is much more interested in how angry Achilles is when Agamemnon takes his sex slave. Achilles, his anger and everything else that unfolds are the exceptional thing worth telling a story about. "Grimdark" parts are environmental background noise to the signal.
So back to modern storytelling. Are the "grimdark" themes of gross violence or sex or both something we consider normal in our the society? Not really, I hope. And the uninspiring "adult" stories do not insert it as a background noise, but it is often supposed to be the centerpiece of drama.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
"Need" is a strong word. There are plenty of people willing argue that the US really didn't need to intervene in WW1 or WW2 or Korea or Vietnam or station Elvis and other assorted troops in Germany or doesn't need to defend NATO either. Generally, superpowerdom has been considered a prize worth the costs. Perhaps stakeholders in Washington decided it is longer worth it. But that is secondary to my argument.
I think it is mistake to infer that Ukraine is a niche scenario. It used to be a niche scenario (for couple of decades) partly because the US was the uncontested superpower. Starting a large-scale war that the US might notice was considered a bad idea. Ukraine is what a contested hegemony looks like. Putin made a calculated move presuming that the West overplayed their hand supporting the west-aligned Ukrainians and would not / can't supply Ukraine. And perhaps the Washington stakeholders decide, they won't. Same goes for Taiwan, and any other piece of territory previously under their hegemonic protection. It would imply the US will fight only unaligned small countries, not other great powers. The implication for any Middle Eastern or other small country is to quickly align themselves with any of other ascendant great powers so that they are not unaligned small country no longer. Probably the US would be fine. Isolation worked okay for China for a quite long time. But it is an admission of making an exit from the great power politics.
Second, it seems unwise to think only terms how Taiwanese or any other military situation would develop today or in 5 years' time while making decisions about having manufacturing base (development timescales counted in decades). Concerning Taiwan: Who knows what the future of naval combat looks like? Everyone thinks so when they enter a conflict. Afterwards, someone has always been surprised. (Nobody plans to start a long protracted shooting war. Usually everyone plans for a decisive victory.) No matter the specifics, or if the US sits out, it is not a good look for the US power projection capability if it so happens that during the first months of mid-to-large-sized regional war in Asia everyone, including China, both shoots up and shoots down more equipment than the US produces in one year. Perhaps again, the US will be fine after the first such war. But when there has been a couple of such wars, and China has learnt how to improvise and develop and learn?
Third, to make nuclear red lines believable you need to draw conventional lines much earlier. To draw a conventional lines, you need conventional forces and the support organization for them. If you have fewer conventional forces, then the lines you draw need to be proportional to forces you have. Suppose given points one and two, Washington decides to forgo both the superpower hegemony and large conventional forces to keep it. Do you still wish to keep Monroe doctrine? Perhaps, Mexico and Canada?
When Argentina tried to take Falklands, everyone knew the UK wouldn't waste nukes to keep the islands, and they didn't. Suppose they never responded conventionally, either ("Royal Navy was too costly, PM Hacker kept only the Trident"). Couple of decades later, someone is prone to have a bright idea to take yet another inconsequential far-off nominally British island territory ("let's conquer Bermuda for tax reasons, they won't nuke us for that like they didn't nuke Argentina"). The other islands would seek another overlord if they can help it. Perhaps the UK probably would still defend the Isle of Man or the Hebrides, because it is closer to home, but who will be sure? And if their general readiness to fight appears to be nil, and nobody thinks they would start shooting back, how much their threat of nuclear Armageddon is? Nuclear strike doctrines were developed during are when the Cold war belligerents had a large standing armies ready to shoot, and nuclear strike was yet another escalation beyond that. But if you won't fight conventionally? Psychological threat of nuclear annihilation looks more credible after you occasionally demonstrate willingness and capability to go to war in the first place.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's a sign we're close if so many are leaking through the cracks in the hallowed peer review process.
I think these cases demonstrate the "peer review process" is not and was not working very well in the first place, and to the extent it was working, it was because of the remaining scraps of integrity among people writing and submitting manuscripts. Thus the reviewers didn't have to do much serious reviewing, like reading all of the manuscript and thinking about it.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
On part of the promise surely works: You can still run your own instance and federate with those instances that want federate with you and build your own social net. However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that decentralization is not sufficient for freedom. Imagine a school cafeteria where you have freedom of association -- but the ruling clique can also say that loser nerds are not welcome to sit in their table.
modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it
"Bespoke crafting" sounds true, that is how the hardware has been ordered for past few decades, but at the same time, it looks like such mode of production is not working very well when put into a test of a large-scale war (Ukraine). What seems to count is the ability to mass-produce hundred to thousands of missiles, thousands of cheap drones, and millions of artillery shells. Nobody seems to able to produce hundreds or thousands of tanks and airplanes, but if either side possessed such ability, it might decide the war.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
I’m not really sure I want someone who would have trouble setting up a home router making internet policy or other technology policies because they don’t understand how this stuff works.
I am not certain the comparison is favorable to young people. Let's imagine your average 70-80 year old who started their corporate career in their twenties: born in 1954-1944, started their career in 1974-1964, retired at 65 in 2019-2009. During their career nearly all job that involved paperwork got electrified and then computerized: they have seen electro-mechanical typewriters, teleprinters, faxes, calculators, sevral generations of copying machines and printers, DOS, pagers, MS-DOS, email, web during the dot-com boom, dumb phones, remembered several phone numbers, and used all major popular versions of Windows and Office and Excel until Windows XP (possibly Windows Vista, 7, 8, even 10 depending if we are talking about average 60-70 years who retired in early or late 2010s). And that is a median office worker. During their free time, they have bought analog TVs, read magazines and newspapers that had be bought and distributed by mail, sent mail by themselves, visited library that had physical card catalogue system that got computerized several times over, switched their sound system from vinyls to cassettes to CDs to (maybe) MP3s, bought a car that didn't refuse to start because of a failed firmware update, and when driving that car, navigated with paper map instead of spoon-fed directions, and quite likely tried to set up VCR at least once.
Uncharitably, the average 20 year old is more used to touchscreens than keyboards, does not know what is "file path", possibly not even what is a "file"; is lost if the document they need is not listed in the Word "recently opened", or is asked to install software not in app store.
More importantly, I believe the 20 year olds are much more susceptible to "fish don't know about water" myopia than the grandpa who remembers who things used to be. Assuming the grandpa is not demented.
Granted, the optimal person probably is someone 50-60 year old (they probably actually set up that VCR most often).
ETA: The point about VCRs is that it was more complex thing than any router setup I have done in the past 5 years.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2, and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance.
I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?
I see two, no, three possible thought process that are not too alien to me.
Maybe I don't believe terror bombings are ineffective. It is difficult to judge whether extreme measures are truly ineffective, especially if you view some forms of violence positively and/or iare distrustful of progressive-liberal-coded research findings. I can imagine that a military commander, especially from a less Westernized military culture thinks that tough, aggressive, brutal measures are the effective measures, thinking the findings suggesting otherwise are mistaken or just outright liberal propaganda to serve the liberal sentiments.
Second explanation draws from banal realities of bureaucracy and greater number of civilian targets. The boss demands that important targets are hit. Successfully hitting hardened military targets may be difficult, especially after you have already sent missiles to all permanent military targets you knew of before the war, several times over: either are already destroyed, difficult to destroy, and-or the enemy found new locations. Hitting mobile or relocated targets requires current and correct intelligence of their whereabouts, which is slow and expensive. So maybe shoot some missiles to a school building (high chance of success) and dress it up as a critical infrastructure or troop location or important demoralizing terror attack in a report to the superior. This will be good for you as long as the superior will not reprimand you for terror attacks (or reprimands are not worse than reprimands for inaction or for failed attempts to hit the enemy HQ bunker hardened against nuclear attack).
Third: pure vindictiveness and vengeance (not necessary proportional) in retaliation for strikes and crimes by the opponent (real or perceived, recent or past).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
It's the idea that attempting to convince someone that they should date you (or otherwise change their sexual preference/behavior) is inherently wrong and abusive.
I don't understand in which situation it would be right either.
There is a mating dance: flirting. Either party can gracefully back off. Usually, "attempt to convince" sounds a bit wrong kind off approach, no room for graceful exit or positive atmosphere afterwards. I suppose you can have a playful argument with flirtatious undertone, but it sounds a bit too much like a thing that works in a TV script but not in a real life. People can become distracted by the argument. (Big romantic gestures are a bit similar. Maybe one could pull it off, but one should be aware that attempting to initiate a 19th century courtship dance in a different time and place where likely nobody knows how to respond, it just might not work.)
In most situations, person doing the convincing would usually make a fool of themselves. If they appear to hold some leverage (social, professional or otherwise), or person being convinced is a bit too meek, it can become quite creepy and manipulative.
I view "sometimes my money goes people I don't like" as a price for participating in an economy. If I buy free-range eggs from a farmer, what I know of their political beliefs? And that farmer probably has to buy crops and stuff from some other people I know even less about. If I buy a Big Mac, the profits will be diluted to countless stockholders after the suits have taken their cut. As a whole, people who profit from my Big Mac have not a coherent opinion.
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