naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
This past week I was surprised to encounter vast quantities of weapons-grade op-ed copium in the form of media "explainers" telling me why the Irish referendums "modernizing" the government's approach to women and family, to everyone's utter shock, failed by the widest margins in Irish referendum history.
Of course, I had never even heard of these referendums. Which shouldn't be too surprising, I'm not Irish (nationally or by heritage) and I don't spend a lot of time reading international news or watching international elections. But also apparently "everyone" (by which I mean: leftist journalists and politicians) was so completely certain this particular bit of de-Catholicization of the Irish legal system would sail through easily, just like same-sex marriage and abortion did in 2015 and 2018, no one felt the need to belabor it.
"All politics is local" surely applies; apparently even many groups that supported the referendums did so with noses firmly held, while some groups one might think naturally aligned with the proposals opposed them on the grounds of technical issues rather than supporting them for having the right "vibe." Everything I've read so far seemed quite anxious to assure me that this is definitely not a conservative backlash and in fact purely a problem with language, which leads me to believe the government has already decided it will simply re-tool and try again until the voters fall into line. (As seems to be the way with political movements everywhere--though it still makes me smile to ruminate on the way Brexit happened despite repeated attempts to get the voters to recant, it seems a keen exception to the rule.)
I would be interested to hear from others closer to the situation, of course. Were these referendums just another symptom of woke America's cultural colonization of Ireland? Or are there perhaps real, specific legal problems being caused by the current language, which the government hoped to solve through these failed proposals? I have not been able to find any news stories detailing any positive case for the referendums beyond "this is so old-fashioned and sexist." Which to my mind explains the failure of the referendums entirely: cui bono? If your only argument is "I'm bothered by the language," then it's easy to think the government probably has better things to focus on...
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Paul's humanitarian preoccupations drain his will-to-power, whereas in Nietzsche's conception those things are overcome by the Ubermensch. Leto II becomes that ultra-aristocratic figure who transcends morals and directs the evolution of mankind at his will. Paul embodies the humanitarian Messiah, Leto II is the ultra-aristocratic God Emperor.
Yeah, you've definitely got it exactly backward. Remember, the Übermensch is the "man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength." Paul is undoubtedly strong, but he is ultimately self-regarding; he doesn't want to be the one to save humanity, he doesn't want to pay the price, so--he doesn't. Leto II does direct the evolution of mankind "at his will," he doggedly (one might say "slavishly") pursues the Golden Path, which is not his choice but merely the product of perfect prescience. Leto II us ultimately unfree. Arguably this is also by choice, so you could argue that he is also a kind of Übermensch, and I'd maybe buy it. But to say Paul had "humanitarian preoccupations" seems like a mistake; Leto II was the one who framed his own death as a gift to his species.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@mitigatedchaos's original comment:
You can literally just say "it's OK to be black," and dare them to repeat "it's OK to be black." You can put up a sign saying "it's OK to be black" next to their "it's OK to be white" sign.
The reason progressives objected and called it "fascist" rather than counter with "it's OK to be black" is that if they agree that "it's OK to be white," this establishes a point of leverage on them. Progressives want to discriminate against people they deem "white," and that's not subtext, that's just literally the thing that they do. That's what is logically entailed in the combination of the words they say, and the very obvious, glaring, material reality around them. The 'progressive' view is that this will work to close racial outcome gaps somehow. (In general, they haven't actually checked.)
When progressives say what amounts to, "Google has too many whites and asians as a percentage of its staff; this is a problem (that needs to be solved)," the only reason it isn't explicitly a call to fire people for their race is because Google is so profitable that they could hire the difference to do nothing and still make money. At any normal company, with normal revenues, it's a demand to fire people explicitly for their race, to meet numbers that the attacker just made up based on crude demographic estimates that likely don't even match the surrounding area.
But if it's OK to be white, then it isn't OK to do this sort of "corrective" discrimination.
If the target agrees, then later, when they attempt to pull this again, someone can say, "Didn't you say it was OK to be white? So shouldn't this mean it's wrong to discriminate against them?" Progressives objecting to "it's OK to be white" is about this, not about genocide. That's one key reason why they didn't just use the cheap and obvious fork "it's OK to be black" to demonstrate for all on-lookers that the IOTBW guys were genuine white nationalists. (There's also "don't give them an inch!" tribalism, the mechanics of which I could go into, but bottom line, they can't do the strategy because they're not liberal on race - exactly the thing the strategy is supposed to reveal! IOTBW would have just caused confusion back in 2003.)
Leverage is a big factor in the treatment of "Black Lives Matter" - notably, rightists actually did respond with the fork "All Lives Matter" and have it loudly rejected.
Leftists want to get leverage so they can force concessions, rightists don't want leverage established on them. And sure, part of it is that rightists don't want to spend money, and part of it is that rightists don't want to endorse "race conscious" policy, but part of it is also that rightists can't actually give the thing being demanded, because they can't close group outcome gaps - not through any morally acceptable means. This is part of what made "Black Lives Matter" such an effective slogan at the time, only discredited later by the rise in (disproportionately black) homicide victims - as part of the racial peace, Republicans didn't want to unnecessarily antagonize racial minorities in America, and that meant not going out of their way to spread demographically unflattering information. That's the kind of gap Folam3 discussed for right-to-left attacks elsewhere in this thread.
I was reading a bit about the slow-moving disaster in Haiti today, thanks to Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier's declaration:
Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us. If Ariel Henry doesn’t resign, if the international community continues to support him, we’ll be heading straight for a civil war that will lead to genocide.
I'm only vaguely familiar with the events that got Haiti where it is--unchecked rise in gang power, assassination of the President by "foreign mercenaries"--Columbians and Haitian-Americans--apparently hoping to win contracts under a new regime). Apparently Haitians are now in general "angry" with the U.S.:
What I hear from people when they talk to me is that they want a Haitian-led solution to the crisis. They want Haitians to take back control.
Because I am hopelessly pedantic, the thing that bothered me most about what I was reading was the notion of "genocide." Now, this is of course a loaded and often contested word. What most people mean by "genocide" is the extermination or perhaps only expulsion of a race or ethnicity, at minimum within certain geographic boundaries. But the internet tells me that Haiti is 95% African, and almost all the rest "mixed European-African." Furthermore:
Nearly all Haitians speak Kreyòl Ayisyen, with French being spoken by the small group of educated people. . . .
And from Wikipedia:
Catholicism (65.9%)
Protestantism (19%)
Other Christian (9%)
No religion (2.75%)
Spiritist (2.7%)
Other religion (0.65%)
So I'm left wondering--what's the "genocide" on offer, here? Is the Haitian gang leader threatening to just... murder everyone? The French speakers? The Protestants and/or Catholics? The infinitesimal population of non-blacks? The country has spent basically its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, prompting academics to for some reason describe its history as
an absolutely remarkable story of successful anti-colonial resistance, a classic case and indeed the original case that has inspired many post-colonial and anti-racist theorists ever since
and
worthy of a Homer or a Tolstoy, or . . . a Tolkien
It would probably be double-pendantic to point out that the inhabitants of Haiti are colonizers, for all their ancestors were brought there on slave ships; descendants of the island's earlier inhabitants are still reportedly out there--just not in Haiti. I say this in part because I have a lot of problems with "colonization" rhetoric, and Haiti helps to illustrate some of the central absurdities. But more than that, I want to drive home the idea that there doesn't seem to be an ethnic minority for Mr. Barbecue to cleanse.
It's possible he intends for "genocide" to simply mean "lots and lots of killing," but of course--he seems to be the one threatening to do the killing.
Civil war, I understand. Military-versus-gangland would be ugly in a so many ways. And given Haiti's history, I can even understand why "international interference" is a sore spot, despite the fact that Haiti seems to do much better under the rule of others than it does when left to its own devices. I am also aware of the urge some readers of this post will doubtless feel to start talking about "magic soil" or the like. But when it comes to Barbecue's prediction-slash-threat of genocide, I find myself quite at a loss. Whose race or tribe ("genos") is supposed to be under threat, here?
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING.
I wanted to post this over at /r/slatestarcodex but it's obviously CW material and surely someone should bring it to Scott's attention, as it wins him quite a large number of prophet points I suspect...
NPR reports that these American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers.
And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.
The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.
Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.
That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:
When stuff like this happens, one of my first reactions is to reflect on the fact that everyone gets forgotten eventually. Some of us get statues or scholarship funds or university chairs carrying our name or likeness a little farther into the future than might otherwise have occurred, but the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" was always destined to go away someday. Roads and schools and landmarks get renamed, statues are left to crumble.
And yet I concur with you--this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. But it can't be because they are ending the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" that I had never heard of and could have predicted would eventually vanish anyway. I have wondered in the past whether similar cases bothered me because I didn't approve of the deliberate social engineering that tossing things down the memory hole reveals, but I find even that objection does not quite do it for me. I find that I'm not in principle opposed to people making the world over in their own preferred image, provided they do so within certain rational constraints. So I wondered if I should simply chalk my discomfort up to personal political bias, but this felt wrong, too--for example, I found myself bothered by the tearing down of Confederate statues even though I am not from the American South and had no other discernible reason to favor their preservation by reason of political bias.
At present the best I've managed to come up with is that I am bothered by the publicity of destruction. That is--what would have happened if the ALSC had, beginning last year, simply not mentioned the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" to anyone ever again? Simply conduct business as usual, and if asked by anyone about the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" respond only that the Award was "undergoing some conceptual reorganization in hopes of better-serving our community, but while we workshop it we'd love your participation in some of our alternative programs" or something.
Of course, they don't do this, because someone decided that they would get more attention (=dollars) with a press release on their "core values of diversity and inclusion" coupled with a prima facie sacrificial offering to signal sincerity. If you look very hard at what's happening, it's the memetic equivalent of sacrificing sick animals and weeds instead of the firstling of the flock--there's no real sacrifice taking place here--but the gods of social justice are so far pleased. This is probably because it establishes a precedent, so when they come calling for greater sacrifices--how long before the residents of Seattle demand to live in a state that isn't named for a slave owner?--the practice of signaling your allegiance by tossing things down the memory hole in a way that also alienates you from the Other Tribe has already become so ingrained that no resistance to such demands remains.
Both ideas and people fade, but it is one thing to lose your struggle against time, and something else entirely to be thrown into a volcano by someone trying to prove their loyalty to Moloch.
I am not an ornithologist. I'm not even a bird-watcher. The closest I've ever come is snapping an occasional photo of a bird that catches my attention. These changes have nothing to do with me... except, of course insofar as they represent the continued burning-down of the contributions of "my" culture to humanity's broader understanding of the world. The active removal--dare I say "erasure?"--of the past, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the present.
(But mostly, I'm once more astonished by Scott's peculiar prescience...)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I was saving it for Transnational Thursday!
You could at least provide me with links. *pouts*
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...
Now, hang on.
At this point, my problem as a moderator with "HBD" discussions in this space is that people are far too quick to resort to shorthanded arguments either way. Part of writing to include everyone is writing to include people who aren't already marinated in decades of internet debates concerning (respectively) "the real and charitably-interpreted science of human group differences" and/or "the historic use of 'Science!' to excuse the oppression of disfavored human groups."
Of course, I can't realistically require every poster to relitigate past issues in microscopic detail in every single post. But right now I think I am seeing the opposite problem more often, where the discussion history between community members is functioning as unnecessary conversational baggage.
I'd really like to see more discussion and less axe grinding, I think is what I'm getting at. You get a lot of leeway as a valuable member of the community and, frankly, as a past moderator. The bans you're eating are not because of heresy against the sociopolitical dogmas of Bay Area Rationalists (of any particular tribe). They are because you sometimes decide that a certain argument is worth burning through some of the goodwill you've accumulated over the years. I have definitely been there and done that. But you're doing it a lot lately, and that is a trend I'd like to see reversed.
I am not mod-hatting this comment as a warning. I am mod-hatting this comment because I am speaking as a moderator, here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@FCfromSSC's original comment:
The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. I gotta say, this is certainly one of the more amusing search results, at least in its initial form.
It's interesting watching people here try to figure out what the response is supposed to be. Is it that it's weird to post pictures of other people? No, memes exist, that can't be it. It's wrong to edit pictures of other people? Nope, memes again. It's weird to post pictures of people to make fun of them? Nope, people of Wal-Mart, faces of meth, mugshot collections, and about a million other examples. It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look worse? These pictures are edited to make them look better, though.
Bonus points to the people claiming the objectionable part is politicizing the non-political. I welcome you to 2024, and wish you well in your recovery from long-term cryo-stasis.
So I guess we're down to "It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look better as an implicit criticism of the way they've chosen, of their own free will and for their immediate, personal benefit, to publicly present themselves." But at that point, why not just speak plainly? This is criticism, and people don't like their ingroup being criticized, and they especially don't like criticisms encapsulating a hostile value system presented in a witty fashion by their outgroup. People are objecting not because there's some well-established general rule or value being violated here, but because they don't like having their ingroup's behavior critiqued by their outgroup, and they don't like seeing their outgroup's values expressed, no matter how anodyne the expression.
One option, as @To_Mandalay demonstrates, is to try to exaggerate the critique beyond all reason.
Everyone knows the people behind "it's okay to be white" are /pol/acks and thus everyone knows that what "it's okay to be white" actually means is "I want to ethnically cleanse non-whites and possibly do a full-out Turner Diaries style genocide."
...And this attitude is how we get FBI investigations of "It's ok to be white" flyers on a college campus. The problem is that social critique is a game of subtlety, and treating what is, on the surface level, an extremely mild critique as though it's actually a straight declaration of genocidal hatred just makes one look unhinged. Likewise, it seems to me that the critique here is less "you're a whore and I hate you" and more "you're a whore and you don't have to be." Those two statements are pretty clearly not identical, and the bite of the latter seems, to me, undeniable.
The game-theoretic-optimal response, as with "it's okay to be white", is to simply ignore the issue entirely. The reaction is half the point, and it's the only half containing achievable value, unless you think people are lying when they say that the clothed versions of the pictures legitimately look better. Unfortunately, the social reality we've constructed disproportionately rewards handwaving freakoutery. I suppose we'll see if tribal discipline can beat the implicit reward structure. My bet is that it can't.
And of course, the search goes on. To_Mandalay is correct, I think, in that the hate is really there, and it yearns for expression. This version made me laugh; the ai race-swap-children filter someone else posted in the thread just made me feel sick. The distributed search continues, and the search results accumulate.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@RandomRanger's original comment:
and are actively making the planet less habitable
Have they read the IPCC reports? The planet is going to get marginally warmer over a century which is harmful but not a major problem. I ctrl-Fed 'existential' and there's no such risk in the reports, except to low-lying islands and even then it's manageable. See the Netherlands and their erosion of the North Sea. At any rate, there used to be jungles in Antarctica, we're still in an ice age.
Everything we do makes the planet less habitable from a certain point of view. More habitable from another. Mining rare earths uses toxic acids, releases radioactive materials, industry requires pollution. Drilling oil means oil leaking. But without oil and without mining we're going to starve in enormous numbers, we need fertilizers, mechanized transport and industrial agriculture to survive. If we suddenly lost access to fossil fuels tomorrow, that would be an existential threat to civilization, perhaps even humanity.
Team Blue's responses have not been very helpful either, there are a bunch of these phoney climate conferences where billionaires, celebrities and world leaders fly their private jets to places like Dubai, where the poor countries ask the rich countries for free money and everyone clever acknowledges that they're not going to cut emissions to reach a 1.5 or 2 degree target because it spells death for national prosperity. Blue's been sabotaging nuclear for decades now along with geoengineering, these people apparently won't accept the efficient, progress-based solutions. The harm is not serious enough to justify the cost of preventing it in this particularly silly way, just like how fertilizer runoff into rivers isn't severe enough for us to not use fertilizers.
Anyway, why should A give up coal when B will just burn more and take the profits instead? Team Red may not know what Nash Equilibria means but they at least understand the concept. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament also only come from the left wing of politics, something about competitive game theory escapes them.
Team Red’s lifestyle also requires huge amounts of public infrastructure and foreign entanglements
Defending Saudi Arabia /= invading Iraq or Iran. America is a rich country, a diet of meat and V8 engines can be sustained on American resources, especially if they were competently managed. America's post-91 foreign entanglements make the price of energy rise, they're supremely counterproductive - sanctioning Russian, Venezuelan and Iranian energy exports, sanctioning and invading Iraq and creating a giant mess, bombing Libya into chaos, now this Israel-Yemen farce in the Red Sea. States naturally want to sell their oil, if the US just wanted cheap energy all they'd need to do is prevent anyone monopolizing energy supplies by invading other countries.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?
I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.
This is probably related to what you're talking about here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
27d ago
Given
only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors
And this
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors.
It looks like you're trying to say that if Flavor1 goes with Topping1, a two-flavor combo should not include a Flavor2 that also goes with Topping1, and also Flavor2 should not have Topping2 that could be paired with Flavor1. You have presented the following combinations as permissible:
- Vanilla: ChocChip & WhipCream*
- Mint: ChocChip
- Caramel: ChocChip**
- Strawberry: ChocChip**
- Coffee: WhipCream
It's not clear whether "ChocChip & WhipCream" is considered a single topping, or two separate toppings, or a distinct topping from ChocChip or WhipCream alone. The precise details of Caramel and Strawberry are also vague: is it only Strawberry that only gets ChocChip topping in "more specific combinations," or also Caramel? The "only in some more specific combinations" also seems to strengthen the idea that one legitimate topping is "ChocChip & WhipCream" as distinct from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, such that there does not appear to be any way to know for certain what constitutes a permissible topping combination for Strawberry (and, maybe Caramel).
My inclination is to agree with @PutAHelmetOn that Vanilla can be eliminated, since the two toppings you've mentioned both go on Vanilla, so adding a different flavor to vanilla doesn't add any topping possibilities--assuming the only two toppings are whipped cream and chocolate chips, which seems unlikely (and is never stated by you) but there's no further information given on the matter. This appears to hold true even if "ChocChip & WhipCream" is a distinct topping from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, since presumably adding ChocChip to "ChochChip & WhipCream" won't count as adding a topping by adding a flavor.
Since Mint, Caramel, and Strawberry are all identified as ChocChip (with some asterisks), the obvious thing to do is combine one of them with Coffee, identified as WhipCream. Mint-Coffee would most easily and obviously fit the bill, but it's not on the list. Of the two non-vanilla options, Mint-Caramel and Caramel-Coffee, Caramel-Coffee seems to be the easiest fit, assuming Caramel is not part of the "latter" flavors intended to include ChocChip "only in some more specific combinations." If so, Mint-Caramel has the same presumptive problem as Vanilla: both flavors take ChocChip topping, even if some further combination requires it.
And all this depending somewhat on what the "more specific combinations" actually are, of course, but that information isn't provided, but... the way you've written the problem, Caramel-Coffee appears to be the only plausible answer. It's just that the whole rest of the problem seems to hint at the existence of further helpful information which you have for some reason neglected to provide, which anyone actually applying for an apprenticeship would certainly make it a point to know. For example, if Strawberry only gets ChocChip in combination with Banana topping, then Vanilla-Strawberry would work despite the ChocChip overlap--but this is also moot given the possible answers, since none of items A-E include Strawberry at all. But this reasoning also works for item B, Vanilla-Caramel, if Caramel is indeed among the "latter" flavors in that sentence and the combination in question includes some third unmentioned topping.
That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?
People occasionally ask whether the ratsphere is just reinventing the wheel of philosophy (my response then). I suspect that EA is similarly reinventing the wheel of non-profit profiteering.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but so far all I have to show for it is a scattered mess of loosely-connected (as though by yarn and pushpins) thoughts. Some of them are even a bit Marxist--we live in a material world, we all have to eat, and if you aren't already independently wealthy then your only options for going on living are to grind, or to grift (or some combination of the two). And the Internet has a way of dragging more and more of us into the same bucket of crabs. AI is interesting stuff, but 99% of the people writing and talking about it are just airing views. MIT's recent AI policy briefs do not contribute any technical work to the advancement of AI, and do not express any substantive philosophical insight; all I see there is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking. But it is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking from top researchers at a top institution discussing a hot issue, which is how time and money and attention are allocated these days.
So for every one person doing the hard work of advancing AI technology, there seem to be at least a hundred grasping hands reaching out in hopes of being the one who gets to actually call the shots, or barring that at least catches some windfall "crumbs" along the way. For every Scott Alexander donating a damn kidney to strangers in hopes of making the world an ever-so-slightly better place to live, there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista. And I say that as someone with several liberal arts degrees, who works in academia where we are constantly under pressure to grift for grants.
The cliche that always comes to my mind when I weigh these things is, "what would you do, if money were not an issue?" Not in the "what if you had unlimited resources" sense, but like--what would the modal EA-AI acolyte do, if they got their hands on $100 million free and clear? Because I think the true answer for the overwhelming majority of them is something like "buy real estate," not "do more good in the world." And I would not condemn that choice on the merits (I'd do the same!) but people notice that kind of apparent hypocrisy, even if, in the end, we as a society seem basically fine with non-profits like "Black Lives Matter" making some individual persons wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. I can't find the link right now (but I thought it was an AAQC?) but someone here did a Likewise, there was a now-deleted deep dive into the Sound of Freedom guy's nonprofit finances posted here a while back, and he was making a lot of money.
So if you want to dig in, the 2020 return is here and the 2021 is here.
As far as most concerning stuff, there is a pretty large amount of money flowing out to Ballard and his wife. $335,000 of salary to Ballard in 2021 and $113,858 of salary to his wife. These aren't super eye popping numbers, but it is a pretty high amount.
The second thing is that they seem to be hoarding a lot of cash. They have like $80 million cash on hand, and are spending much less than they raise. This isn't inherently an issue if they're trying to build an organization that's self-sustaining, but it does mean as a donor your money is not likely going to actual stuff in the short or medium term.
Speaking of that actual stuff, they don't seem to spend most of what goes out the door on their headline-generating programs. A pretty big chunk of their outflow is just grants to other 501(c)(3)s, which is not something you need to be spending millions in executive compensation for. As best I can figure, in 2021 they did just shy of $11 million of grants to other nonprofits. It's a little tricky to suss out their spending on program expenses versus admin, but they claim for outside the US a total of just shy of $8 million in program expenses.
Legal expenses are also very high (at over 1.5 million). Not sure if they're involved in some expensive litigation or what is going on there. Travel is also really high at 1.9 million, but given the nature of their organization, a good chunk of that is likely programmatic.
Now it looks like, even if maybe he did (?) save some kid(s) from trafficking along the way, it was mostly a grift? Anyway, the point is, stories like this abound.
So it would be more surprising, in the end, if the rationalist community had actually transcended human nature in this case. And by "human nature" I don't even mean greedy and grubbing; I just mean that anyone who isn't already independently wealthy must, to continue existing, find a grind or a grift! As usual, I have no solutions. This particular case is arguably especially meta, given the influence AI seems likely to have on the grind-or-grift options available to future (maybe, near-future) humans. And maybe this particular case is especially demonstrative of hypocrisy, given the explicit opposition of both effective altruism and the ratsphere to precisely the kind of grind-or-grift mentality that dominates every other non-profit world. But playing the game one level higher apparently did not, at least in this case, translate into playing a different game. Perhaps, so long as we are baseline homo sapiens, there is no other game available to us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
Six months or three years can also be exceptionally damaging to a kid who is confused or being taking advantage of by others, be they teachers, peers, or otherwise. The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me. To talk casually about "buying" time for children to deceive their parents strikes me as deeply misguided.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role. If I ever had a child whose teacher presumed to know better than me what was best for my child, that would not be a problem to lightly overlook. If this involved core aspects of my child's identity, I would seek that teacher's dismissal. If it involved my child's sex and sexuality, I would be willing to burn through substantial personal resources to impose serious and lasting costs beyond mere dismissal. I cannot imagine a reasonable and loving parent feeling otherwise. There is nothing so special about transsexual activism as to exempt it from these feelings, and that is why transsexual activism continues to be a catastrophically losing issue for Democrats who swing at that particular tar baby.
I understand that some parents are wrong about what is best for their children, and that some parents are abusive, and so on. But this does not meaningfully distinguish them from teachers, who are also often wrong, abusive, and so on--and teachers have less reason to love children and see to their best interests. As Aristotle notes in the Politics--"how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato's fashion!"
I have seen enough cases of ROGD, as well as the results of decisive parental action against ongoing ROGD, to believe that the evidence of my own eyes is that schools should absolutely never conceal relevant facts from parents. Not for six months; not for six days. Better that a few children face harsh discipline at home, than many be subjected, with the aid of government actors, to the (often, lifelong) suffering brought on by politically popular social contagions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@100ProofTollBooth's original comment:
and to keep on rejecting other anti-scientific ideologies that spring up in the future.
I know this wasn't your intent, but that sounds like scientism. Furthermore, any reading of basic epistemology will show that "science" isn't the Master Truth Substance that exists in the popular conception. Science is far, far more about an ongoing process of discovery and discernment than a universal record of unimpeachable facts.
As @WhiningCoil's excellent posts in this thread point out, rationalism was and is the attempt to Science All The Things (including emotionally influenced human thinking). I would say that, taken to its extreme, it leads to the Effective Altruism shenanigans (self-delusion, and self-absolution for deception and worse offenses) or the often paralyzing over examination of outlets like LessWrong and SSC. Don't get me wrong, I love reading Scott's 10,000 word posts just as much as most Mottizens, but you have to admit that the RAT community discourse can quickly devolve almost to the level of "depends on what the meaning of "is" is".
Rationalism's core flaw, in my opinion, is that you're trying to debug the firmware with the firmware.
"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with." - Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
Humanity just hasn't found out how to "debug" the brain. Various religions try to do this by focusing on transcendental exercises and appeals to divine intervention (prayer, meditation). I give them credit because they, at least, often state explicitly that you can and should do these things, but you're not going to ever truly "succeed" while still remaining a human on earth.
Rationalism does a sneaky thing in that it admits no one can actually think "perfectly" yet self-ranks ahead of any other way of knowing by kind of gesturing towards "science" and "better thinking." The retail version of this is companies and people who say they are "data driven." Bayesian inference is the real eye roller here. People who "update their priors" surely don't have a record of all of their priors to understand the system of thought that led them to their present situation. Those that do are fall into the trap of hyper-over-examination and probably fail to make any decisions of consequence in life.
When people (not you) worry about "science deniers" - it's just a very shiny "boo outgroup." The irony of ironic examples here is, in fact, COVID. All of the people who really care about people who are vaxx-suspicious are also probably double masked outdoors in 2024. There's bidirectional "science" denial, but one group's direction is bad and my group's direction is good.
So, what's the cure? Doubt. I've written before about how negative emotions are utterly misunderstood and undervalued by modernist thinking. Guilt is bad because it makes you feel guilty and it's really only a social construct or something, whatever, keep having an affair! Disgust is wrong because you aren't appreciating differences in cultures, you colonist! Doubt is bad because you should just "Do You" and believe that "the universe" will take care of the rest. Believe as you feel!
Well, no. Use doubt as the road to humility. "Here's a bunch of shit I truly believe down to my very bones and I'll literally DIE for it ..... but, shit, I could be wrong" is a far healthier way to go through life than just the first part of that sentence.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games.
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’
But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I disagree with Nara's complaints about Fayed Rutha, wanting a fair fight (or a minimally unfair fight) feels very in character as a major motivation of his in the books is wanting to prove that he his better than everyone else
In the book in his duel with Paul, he's got a drugged blade and a hidden poison needle. He also accuses Paul of "treachery" when he realizes that Paul's crysknife is naturally acidic--to which Paul responds dryly, "Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade." Feyd-Rautha's response is rage:
Feyd-Rautha matched Paul's cold smile, lifted blade in left hand for a mock salute. His eyes glared rage behind the knife.
Feyd-Rautha doesn't seem to want fair fights, even minimally. He just wants to prove that he's better than everyone else, by winning by whatever means necessary. He even gloats about it (quietly) to Paul during the fight:
"You see it there on my hip?" Feyd-Rautha whispered. "Your death, fool." And he began twisting himself around, forcing the poisoned needle closer and closer. "It'll stop your muscles and my knife will finish you. There'll be never a trace left to detect!"
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@gattsuru's original comment:
Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality
There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight.
Me: I refused to turn on my AR glasses & see the barista as an anime fox otherkin spirit. Her glasses flagged that my filters were off.
It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion.
There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress.
There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way.
In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities.
And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them.
That's just not some fundamental part of technology.
As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours.
Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)].
But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it!
Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here.
Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available.
There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use.
From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there.
Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony.
Who cares?
Block these sites in your uBlock Origin so you won't see that shit in your searches.
If you want others to have a clean internet, feel free to share this post!
Download this extension to simplify your BDS commitments. PalestinePact automatically scans products on all major websites and blurs them if they are linked to the BDS list. and By refusing to exit the Russian market and continuing to pay their taxes there, some companies are implicitly supporting the war in Ukraine. This extension identifies their products while shopping online so you can boycott their products.
And, perhaps worse:
There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't?
To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru.
The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear.
But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected.
St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility.
I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite.
As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet.
I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet.
And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"—so asketh the last man and blinketh...
"We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men! ...
No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane,"—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
"We have discovered happiness,"—say the last men, and blinketh
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
The ruling is absurd, but the Constitution is pretty clear that states get to decide how their elections are run, including their national elections. The only Constitutional caveats are that Congress can weigh in on Article I elections (legislators), and that the states must be structured in a republican way (i.e. representative democracy). Here are the (partial) instructions for Article II elections:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
If Colorado's legislature (or its sometimes-mouthpiece, the state court) says Trump can't be on the ballot, then Trump can't be on the ballot, and from a Constitutional standpoint, that's the end of the story. One Constitutional way out I see here is maybe a Fourteenth Amendment complaint of some kind, but the conservatives on the court are likely to be leery of that, and the progressives on the court will simply refuse to rule in Trump's favor no matter how much they may need to torture logic to get there.
My primary hesitation is Chief Justice Roberts. He is a pragmatist to the core, and may just oppose the chaos that would result: a likely domino-effect of progressive states using this ruling to (definitely) eliminate Trump from their ballots and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process. I could see Roberts relying on "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" from the Constitution with precisely the intent of preventing political chaos, but in doing so he would do pretty direct harm to the plain language governing Article II elections.
I'm less acquainted with any federal election statutes that may apply, but prima facie I would bet cautiously against this being overturned--on grounds that Roberts, as an establishment man, may find his distaste for Trump encouraging him to affirm the strength of Article II. This would be a victory for establishment Republicans as well as a victory for Trump haters. But I can imagine Roberts imagining the electoral chaos of an affirmation, because that result would make the 2000 and 2020 elections look tame by comparison; faced with such a vision, he could very well flinch. So I would expect Trump's team to work that angle hard--assuming there are any competent lawyers remaining who are still willing to represent him.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@FarNearEverywhere's original comment:
A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare
Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface (though at every level in every job and situation in life, there are indeed little tin gods who love exerting whatever scrap of power they possess) but the person making the "appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
I don't have a fancy label for them unlike Mr. Aaronson (Dr. Aaronson? Professor Aaronson?) since I don't have the creative big intellect he undoubtedly possesses, but every bureaucrat in a public-facing role (indeed, every worker in a public-facing role) has encountered them at some time.
The people who rock up late after the deadline for submission, without the necessary paperwork or supporting documents, who didn't bother applying and want you to fill it all out for them, breathless because they dashed here at the last minute. The ones who want an exception to the "rules and regulations" because, well, they're just that special and exceptional and their case is unique and not at all like the other fifteen people waiting in line, that they are holding up for the past hour because they've been arguing - sorry, I mean "making appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
(I would also venture a lot of people here have been stuck in line behind such a person).
The fact that what they want is against the regulations, because they don't qualify? Irrelevant, and besides, have you no compassion for their special, unique case which should get an exception?
The fact that they had three weeks to get this done, and showed up half an hour after the cut-off? Not their fault! They have busy, important lives unlike you, minor official of no consequence, hence being such important people, they deserve an exception!
The fact that if I accept their application, I'll have to do the same for everybody else who also does not qualify? So what, that's nothing to do with them.
The fact that (1) this is against the regulations and (2) I will get into trouble with my boss, my boss's boss, and the department head? So what? That's not their problem. Why are you being so unreasonable?
The fact that I have explained three different times, in three different ways, why your application is defective? Ah, here we go again with the "same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare".
Clearly, the fault cannot lie with me, Important Busy Smart Person With A Life And Impactful Job. It lies with this blankface who is hiding a contemptuous smile as they tyrannically wield the power entrusted in them to make others miserable. Yes, that must be it!
As I said, I don't deny there are people who won't budge an inch because they like making others squirm. But the 'blankfaces', be it in public service or private businesses, often are not doing this to spite you. We'll like to help, we want to help, but we can't because (a) oftentimes the ability to exercise initiative has been deliberately stripped from fears of setting precedent (if you do this, then all the other applicants/clients will want the same, and will go to court to force us to treat them the same - and yes, this does happen) and in order to keep costs down (b) you are the one genuinely at fault because you don't have the necessary supporting documents. This may or may not be your fault, but if the regulations say "must have proof of identity", I can't take your application just because you show me a crumpled envelope with an address on it.
Often times, other people are at fault - I've mentioned on here before when I assisted in processing student grants, and one award was held up because the parents were in a pissing match after the separation and the father just would not provide three lines of notified statement that he was not paying child support. There's nothing I or anyone else can do there, much as we really do want to help.
Aaronson strikes me as the kind of guy who takes things personally - if there's a holdup, it's not because "well, there are screw-ups in systems all the time", it's because that official there wants to tyrannise him just like the Nazis against the Jews and he's going to be dragged off in chains if only that guy could do so, it's because he's Jewish, he knows it:
I almost wanted to say to the police: where have you been? I’ve been expecting you my whole life. And I wanted to say to Dana: you see?? see what I’ve been telling you all these years, about the nature of the universe we were born into?
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.
We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.
At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.
I think you've done a fine job, and clearly an effortful one. Don't let grumpy comments dissuade you from this sort of thing.
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