quiet_NaN
15d ago
This is a good test, but it only tells us that the Founders were fine with the destructive power of grapeshot in civilian hands when it came with the costs and portability, etc of a cannon. A fragmentation grenade will have a similar destructiveness as grapeshot, but it will also have much-increased portability, will be easily concealed and vastly cheaper, and can easily operated by a single person. So the trade-offs for society are very different.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.
Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.
The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.
To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.
Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)
I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend.
While I do not know the specifics, based on priors I would guess that this involved a suspected gang member being at risk of imminent deportation to some El Salvador mega prison. As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
--
I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations. One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it. Or that they meant 'state of the art military firearms, in perpetuity', because surely nobody would beat any tyrant today with flintlock rifles. Or even that they meant weapon systems to wage war in general, from man-portable antitank weapons to stealth bombers and nukes.
Previous case law has extended 2A to cover cartridges, revolvers and semiautomatics, but not automatics or explosive weapons. As far as the original purpose of the second (to enable the population to resist a tyrant like the US did during the revolutionary war) is concerned, it is very much moot. If the tyrant fields a tank, then the Americans owning what is currently legal for them to own, AR15s or no AR15s, will lose very badly in a direct confrontation. To give them the firepower to even have a fighting chance against tanks or airplanes would also give them the power to effortlessly take out school busses or jumbo jets, and this is a trade-off which few people will favor.
It should also be pointed out that the current SCOTUS has been otherwise quite Republican-friendly. They overturned Roe (which to be fair was always a stretch) and they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president. I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
I think that there are two distinct groups which value high house prices.
One group are investors. At the end of the day, they profit from the fact that land is in limited supply, and people have been moving towards cities for centuries, thus steadily increasing demand. The proper way to fix this is a Georgian land value tax. If any value you gain from owning land is 100% taxed in perpetuity, then the intrinsic value of the land for its owner becomes zero. (Realistically, one would impose taxes which would increase towards 100% over a few decades, so present-day investors might still reap 20 years worth of rent or so. This is certainly more than the kind of people who invest in goods with perfect supply inelasticity deserve.)
The other group are home owners who would prefer to stay apart from less wealthy people for good or bad reasons, the (home-) NIMBYs. While I am not very sympathetic to the NIMBYs, I can sort-of see their point. If you bought a house situated a quarter of an hour drive from the city half a lifetime ago, you have every reason not to be happy if the urban sprawl swallows your neighborhood and your suburban home gets surrounded by high-rises. Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
I think that the dynamic between these two groups is not always the same. To complicate things further, landowners generally also own the buildings on their lots, and depending on the type of building their rent could increase or decrease with further urbanization. If you own a hotel building, you will likely be more enthusiastic about urban development than if you own single-family homes you rent to wealthy people.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
Take for example the IUEC. From WP:
The IUEC forbids modular construction of elevators, preventing the kind of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world, leading to higher elevator costs in the United States. The union limits entry of new workers into the field, and has constrained the ability of firms to use new technology to streamline elevator production in the United States.
Data indicates that elevator-related work is the highest paid trade in the United States, with a median wage $47.60 per hour in 2021.
See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):
Smith estimates that a new six-stop elevator that costs $170,000 to install in North America would run $60,000 or less across the Atlantic. Operating cost differences are even steeper. New York City guidelines advise affordable housing developers to budget $7,500 for annual elevator maintenance, with private housing operators in New York and Washington quoting similar numbers. This is several times European costs: one German firm, for instance, offers midrise maintenance contracts for about $450 per year.
I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
Rather than fear that the AI will work, the fear seems to be that management will buy into the hype and fire everyone, regardless of whether it works or not.
I think that this is justified. There is a reason why tropes such as the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert or the Boss from BOFH exist. In a lot of non-tech companies, non-technical people are in charge of IT management. Often, this attracts a certain sort of people. "We are using tech from a decade ago and it is working okay for our needs" is no way to bedazzle the board or future directors. While IT might be best seen as some more complex version of plumbing which should be mostly unnoticed by the users when it works well, your average head of IT has delusions of grandeur which go well beyond that of the head of facility management.
For example, anyone who understands the basics of the blockchain will immediately notice that it does not offer anything interesting to 99% of non-scammy enterprises. Luckily, your IT manager can count on the probability of a board member understanding what the blockchain is to be very small, so they can sell a fairy tale of the block chain being the future of IT, point out how people got rich from bitcoin, and how there is money on the street just waiting to be picked up, and it with their plan United Dairy Producers Inc will get a slice of the cake. And they can also depend on consultants popping up who will happily sell them some repackaged open source blockchain software.
While blockchain might serve as a baseline for "empty hype", AI certainly has a non-zero potential for most corporations. But unlike the blockchain, there is no decisive first-mover advantage for adopting AI tech for non-tech companies, if your archenemy Dairy and Cheese United adopts some tech a year ahead of you, it seems unlikely that they will bankrupt you in that time because they just reduced their accounting costs to zero.
quiet_NaN
18d ago
On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
Citation needed.
I think that "tens of millions of dollars" is not a good measure for potential savings. A more appropriate way to look at savings would be to consider the fraction of the total costs of the company.
Software consultants and vendors of enterprise resource planning software have been plaguing advising all kinds of businesses since the early 90s. I find it very unlikely that there is any sector which could save ten percents of its costs by just using Excel. Stuff like electronic inventory management or customer relations databases are standard for pretty much any business larger than a lemonade stand.
The lowest-hanging fruits left are probably more on the order of 1% of the total costs, and I think that it is reasonable for companies to be wary there. Consultants have been known in the past to overpromise and underdeliver, and that shiny ERP solution which is supposed to take care of all of your software needs might end up being a software hellscape which requires an expensive specialist to run and only does half of what you want it to do.
I will grant you that in large organisations, departments often become fiefdoms whose bosses employ a lot of people simply to show how important their department is, not because they are needed. But for most organizations, these oversized departments came to be long after the invention of spreadsheet software, and at the core they are indicative of a political, not a technological problem.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
It looks like we both agree that if Unikowsky had posted his article directly on the motte under a new user account, that would have been fine.
What we disagree on is how much introduction should be required when a motte user quotes a source. My position is that as I am already reading takes from random persons on the internet, if a source is not contextualized (or I do not trust the poster's contextualization of the source), I will simply treat it with the same level of skepticism I would have for a new motte poster.
I have a similarly dim view of people who link to long youtube videos for supporting context in lieu of their own arguments.
Total agreement here. They are the worst.
(Second worst are links directly to twitter threads, which depending on how Musk is feeling might only show me the first tweet and tell me to create an account.)
This suggests the OP is conducting a bait-and-switch argument, using Unikowksy's position as the opening bait (neutral observer on deportation process) for the concluding switch (deportation is a part of Trumpian oppression that must be resisted).
I browsed a bit through the substack, and it seems that at least 50% of the articles are Trump/CW related (and generally Democrat-leaning), 10% are about LLMs in judicial processes, with some other legal topics being sprinkled in here and there. The main difference is that while @sockpuppet2 with his Mecken quote points out that the deportees deserve due process even if they are as guilty as sin, the substack focuses more on the fact that many of them might not actually be Tren de Aragua, but simply people with unrelated tattoos.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".
I was thinking more about people who had already decided to do something which pisses off the CCP, like joining Falun Gong or campaigning for human rights.
Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!
From my understanding, the problem with Chinese students spying is not that they get their hands on highly classified projects. The problem is that they get their hands on a lot of much less sensitive projects which then give China a competitive edge.
It is likely that the CCP is already sponsoring the odd fake dissident, but more for reasons of infiltrating the international dissident community than in the expectation that the US will put them on a highly sensitive project.
But the average Chinese student is not some deep cover super spy, but just some average person who is required to do a bit of snooping on the side. "We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.
There are plenty of subfields in STEM where industrial espionage is not a concern. Pure mathematics or theoretical physics might be subject to someone stealing your paper drafts, but not industrial espionage per se. Likewise, civil engineering.
"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP" is not a super-hard concept to grok. Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship (not that any would do so now before being naturalized in the US) on any research projects which the CCP might be interested in.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
Who is Adam Unikowsky and why should anyone trust / care about their explanation / characterizations of a contemporary culture war topic filled with bad and bad-faith explanations / characterizations?
That is a fully general counterargument. Quite frankly, if you do not like to read opinions on culture war topics by people who may in fact not be 100% neutral observers, The Motte might not be for you.
If you bother to click on the substack link, you will find that Unikowsky did for example link the court document detailing the procedure.
Sure, not every claim is backed up by evidence of that level. But if your suspicion is that detainees were generally verbally advised to get their lawyer to file a habeas petition and inform ICE of their intend to file, it is up to you to write or link an effort-post detailing how in the time period in question, tons of immigrants served with AEA 21-B filed a habeas petition, with links to their cases and everything.
From my own priors, I think that the story as presented -- the Trump administration engaging in malicious compliance to get a few more immigrants out of the country before the courts stop them -- would not be very surprising.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
So it seems that the Trump administration has decided that having already proven its worth as a weapon of the Culture War in the deportation process of Hamas apologist Mahmoud Khalil and international Harvard students.
But this time, they will use it for freedom of speech, for US Americans specifically.
[F]oreign officials have taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.
Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States. It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil.
First, let me get out of the way that I like the US conception of free speech, generally, and agree with Yassine Meskhout that deporting even Hamas fanboys is wrong.
Second, I will notice that jurisdiction of speech acts in the internet is hard to define. If I tweet something offensive to country X while physically residing in country Y, then I think that country X generally has the right to coerce the relevant platform to remove that content, and if that fails coerce local ISPs to block that platform. I might or might not agree with their specifics (depending if it is CSAM or someone calling Kim Jong Un fat), but generally every jurisdiction does that. It is also not in dispute that some speech acts by someone in country X will lead to criminal proceedings against them in that country. Furthermore, as far as country X is concerned, it might reasonably care very little from where the offensive message was sent, as long as it was received in country X. If you send a bomb threat to the US, the US will very much not declare your act out of their jurisdiction just because you were not physically in the US when you did it.
As long as you stay out of country X and do not piss them off sufficiently to get extradited, this will not matter in practice. However, if you visit countries after you sent them speech which broke their local laws (e.g. using public social media posts), you should generally not be very surprised if they will judge your speech act by their laws.
Often, there might be higher standards than "the offensive message was receivable from country X". If you deny the Holocaust in Social Media in Korean while in South Korea, and later on travel to Germany, you will likely get away with it, because the impact of Korean tweets in Germany is generally very small. (If someone adds Germany subtitles to your Holocaust-denying TikTok, things might get messier.)
(Lest anyone thinks Germany is a special case, let me assure you that it is not. If you fuck with the Mouse through any speech act which violates their US copyright, or step on Elsevier's toes, you will have a bad time as soon as you set foot in the US.)
More problematic is the case when country X decides to either prosecute someone for a speech act which was done exclusively in country Y or leans on a platform to censor a speech act worldwide. But in the end, social media companies are generally international, and can decide for themselves in which countries they do business based on their bottom line. Nobody is stopping a pro-free-speech US company from telling country X, "fuck you, block us if you want, we are out of here".
With that out of the way, I think like all the Trump visa restrictions, this one is going to be incredibly petty. It will not change how officials will treat US platforms. I also predict that it will be applied more broadly than the stated "foreigner tries to censor US-only speech on US platform".
quiet_NaN
21d ago
when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz
Minor nitpick: the verb to post implies either authorship or perhaps editorial publishing. The appropriate verb for Nate Silver's behavior is to link, or perhaps to tweet about something.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
- Put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan
Let me stop you right there. With the benefit of hindsight, the revival of the Taliban was already a forgone conclusion when GWB invaded Afghanistan. Within the US RoE, there was no way things could have gone differently. The US stayed for two decades -- easily a generation -- and the democratic state collapsed as soon as they left. They could have stayed for another generation and the outcome would have been the same.
(This is not to say that the retreat was well done, but that the alternative -- pouring resources into Afghanistan to keep the Taliban out of power forever -- was not worth it either from a geostrategic or an EA perspective.)
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I would argue that basis of the political system of Rome, the patron-client relationship, was already as corrupt as any mafia by our understanding. Basically, if a rich patron family sponsored a political campaign for the scion of a client family, the expectation certainly was that the scion would use his office to further the interests of his patron. Perhaps not always in the most blatant way possible, but a magistrate who one day decided to make decisions on their merits for the Roman people only would certainly be seen as a disgrace to his family.
This was forever the issue with land reforms: whoever gave land to the masses would by Roman convention become their patron, and thus gain enormous political power.
Now, there is obviously a difference between having a long-standing client family and just buying a consul with cash, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. A platform to stomp out corruption (as we understand it) in Rome would go as well as a platform to abolish the navy in the British Empire.
American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.
Trump II is different from this. Sure, all the anti-immigration stuff is purely ideological, and if you count the personal ego of Trump as part of the ideology, a lot more of his squabbles are also non-corrupt. But all this tariff back-and-forth seems like it was mostly for the purpose of ripping of the stock market, and the airliner thing was on a "we do not even bother to pretend otherwise any more" level.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
-- Has not fathered any children with women who were not his wife at the time.
-- Has not had a divorce with a mother of a child of his before that child turned 16.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
2 . Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
I think that a bisexual woman can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a man, just like a man who has a thing for red-haired women can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a brunette woman.
7 . Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
I would argue that the correct unit to measure student loan debt is "years till payoff". Presumably, in a well-earning profession, you can pay off your student loans in a decade?
8 . 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Why? Most of the women who want to start a family will be closer to your threshold of 30 than 18. Why would you care how many guys she fucked when she was 3/5th of her current age? Why not also care how much Sailor Moon she watched when she was 12?
I mean, if during the last year, she has sucked off twenty random guys in some club bathrooms while drunk, then there is some argument to be made that she is likely not ready for the kind of relationship you have in mind. If the same thing was a decade ago and she had sex with two boyfriends since then, that paints a very different picture as far as her suitability is concerned.
Or is this more of an illegible aesthetic preference for sexual purity? Call me a horny guy, but I would rather settle down with someone after both of us had 20 partners than if we had zero partners.
As a guy, it took about zero willpower to stay under your limit, but I can tell you that if I had gotten the median number of sexual advances a woman will get before turning 30 things would look very differently.
Realistically, your limit of five will not select for women with few sexual partners, it will mostly select for women who are willing to lie about how many partners they had.
Notable criteria I omitted:
- Political affiliation
Realistically, this is a show-stopper. Perhaps it was different three decades ago, but today it is. I would happily stay single for the rest of my life before I would stick my dick into either MAGA or Hamas fans, for example.
- Drug use
This phrase covers a lot of spectrum. Probably 90% of the population are at least occasional drug users. Of course, there is a vast gulf between "not a teetotaler" and "addicted to crack".
- Sex work/Onlyfans
If you are selecting for less than six lifetime sex partners, I do not think that you will have a lot of OF models left in your pool. While I am sure that there is the odd virgin on OF, it does not really strike me as a hobby for the purity-focused religious types.
(OT: If I start a line with 2., the preview will turn that into 1. Do we really need the editor to count for us? Relevant quote: He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.)
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Hot take: this does not really belong in the CW thread because it is not controversial. Nobody seems to be contesting that Trump has done most of the above. His defenders mostly claim that this is normal politician behavior.
Most congress critters are sponsored by big companies in their home state and certainly do their best to help these companies afterwards, sending the gravy train their way etc. Some go beyond that and do a bit of insider trading on the side. Only a few are open about taking money from foreign interests with an implied quid pro quo.
Allow me a metaphor. Except for a few (Bernie Sanders?), every politician farts in the whirlpool. There are certainly quite some who occasionally pee in the whirlpool too. But Donald Trump has just removed his trunks and taken a jumbo-sized shit in the whirlpool.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
The threat is existential.
No, it is not. If the Taliban party had just gotten a majority of the votes in New Mexico, then I might be inclined to agree that your country faces an existential threat. But this does not happen. The only religious nutjobs getting elected to Congress are self-identifying as Christian, and even they do not pose an existential threat.
Sure, given current demographic trends, at some point in the future the non-hispanic whites will be a minority. But this is not the end of the world. I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
Since you beat the Brits, you had perhaps two conflicts which might be called existential: the civil war (in retrospect, the outcome was over-determined, if not in the 1860s, then in the 1900s) and the cold war (which was more of a threat to the world as a whole than to the US specifically).
Anyone who wants to tell you that any current political thing, be it Dobbs, immigration, Trump, Social Justice or whatever poses an existential threat to the US is very likely wrong. (The AI doomers at least have a plausible pathway in mind, though.)
quiet_NaN
23d ago
You are correct 99% of the time. Most of the time, the duty of a soldier is not in doubt, it is obeying the (non-atrocious) orders of the leadership of his country.
Put simply, as long as the President, Congress and the SCOTUS are on the same side, the military will follow their orders, and any attempt at civil war by other parties will go extremely poorly.
However, you could also consider what happens in a constitutional crisis. For example, on J6, Trump was still the commander of the military, and he could have tried to deploy the marines to "stop the steal". If you then rely on the civilian leadership, things would get hairy, because the commander of the US military is the president. However, US soldiers do not swear simply to follow the orders of the US president. Instead, they swear:
I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In a constitutional crisis, the US military is sworn first and foremost to uphold the constitution, and famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says. (Within reason. If five SC justices decided to rule that one of them is in fact legally the president, and ordered the marines to occupy the White House, the military leadership might follow their own interpretation of the constitution instead.)
This "of course the military will follow the civilian leadership", which you take for granted, can be taken for granted in the US (after the civil war, anyhow), but historically seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as far as democratic states are concerned. In Weimar Germany, when the democratic leaders were asking the military to help with militants which attempted a coup in some cities, the reply was "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- we do not shoot our own. Spanish fascism started as a military coup, as did most military dictatorships in the Americas. "Military leadership decides they don't like election results" is a very common failure mode of having a military.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
Are you saying that the SJ left has not been very successful with their strategy of going through the channels and enshrining DEI into federal law, and leave the enforcement to the justice system?
There are places where the best way to enact change is to pick up an assault rifle and form a gang. The US is very much not such a place. Instead, you want to cooperate with existing institutions to get the behemoth of the US military on your side.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.
Here, seconded by another gray/blue-leaning Mottizen. I will not pretend that I would not be happy if Trump dropped dead from natural causes, but the erosion of political standards inherent to his assassination would not be to the benefit of anyone who likes peace. (Besides, I think a dead martyr Trump would be a great boon for the MAGA cause, while from what I have seen so far this year, a live Trump who might even insist to run again in 2028 is much more of a mixed blessing.)
That being said, the prime example for the left applauding a political murder is not Trump, it is that UnitedHealthcare CEO. I have to confess that while I am against murder as a policy, especially when it is unlikely to solve the underlying issue, I am also not particularly upset about that one. A drug dealer can at least defend himself by saying that he is simply serving the forces of the market, while someone offering health insurance to employers is serving a twisted parody of a market mandated by US law and kept in place through continuous lobbying efforts. So sure, I am slightly less sympathetic than I am to some homeless person who gets stabbed by a psychotic homeless, or whatever the median sympathy murder is. Mostly, it is a distraction, what is wrong with the US health care system can not be fixed by shooting any number of CEOs.
I will grant you that it is hard to measure the real level of support for that killing by the average person on the street, but left leaning social media generally rejoiced.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
Why would the Democrats want to start a civil war? Most of the smarter ones are probably aware that Trump is unlikely to manage to turn the US into a Fourth Reich or Gilead. They can just chill out till the mid-terms and hope that by then, the repercussions of Trump's tariffs will have hit the median voter. Nor will Trump manage to root out wokeness in his term. Sure, things are unfortunate, but not unfortunate enough to defect against the US political system which has served them well for decades.
The only way in which right-wing militias would matter is if every branch of the US military decided to sit out an open conflict. I do not see that happening.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
There is only one relevant military power in the US, which is the US military.
While a majority of the ranks might support Trump, most of them likely do not believe that the 2020 was stolen and would be willing to shoot fellow citizens to right that wrong. I also think that most officers will support the constitution as interpreted by the SCOTUS, a sentiment which will also have some popularity with the enlisted men and women.
The right-wing militias are obviously different, but for the most part they are just cosplaying. They might have a lot of small arms, but when faced with tanks they would fare very poorly. A proper civil war requires somewhat like parity in weapons, either because the domestic stockpile is split between the factions or because foreign powers are providing arms.
The worst outcome I can see for the US would be something like the Troubles. Now, the Troubles were bad, but they were very far removed from being a full civil war. There is a difference between 3500 people killed and more than 650k people killed (like in Syria).
I think that likening the rationalists treatment of AI to the anti-finasteride crowd is a bit unfair to the former.
Now, AI has been a theme with rationalists from the very beginning. It would not be totally unfair to say that our prophet wrote the sequences (e.g. A Human's Guide to Words) as an instrumental goal to be able to discuss AI without getting bogged down in pointless definitional arguments. That was almost two decades ago, in the depth of the AI winter.
Scott Alexander wrote about GPT when it was still GPT-2, it was the first time I heard about it. It is fair to say that AI is the favorite topic on LessWrong, with Zvi minutely tracking the progress with the same dedication previously allocated to COVID. Generally, the rationalists are bullish on capabilities and bearish on alignment. But I feel that Eliezer's "dying with dignity strategy" haha-only-serious April's fool is overconfident in a way which is not typical of LW. In practical terms, it does not matter much if you think that p(ASI) is 0.15 and p(doom) is 0.1 or if you think they are 0.95 and 0.9 respectively.
We do not have a comprehensive theory of intelligence. We have noticed the skulls of the once who have predicted that AI would never beat a chess master, succeed at go, write a readable text, create a painting which most people can not distinguish from a human work of art and so on. This does not mean that AI will reach every relevant goalpost, reverse stupidity is not intelligence, after all.
We are in the situation where we observe a rocket launch without the benefits of any knowledge of rocketry or physics. Some people claimed the rocket would never reach an altitude of more than twice its own length, and they were very much proven wrong. Others are claiming that it would never reach 1km, and they were likewise proven wrong. From this, we can not conclude that it will obviously accelerate until it reaches Andromeda, nor can we conclude that it will not reach Andromeda.
Wrt the AI 2027, the vibes I remember getting from browsing through it is that it mostly Simulacrum level two, and came across as the least honest things which Scott ever co-authored. The whole national security angle is very much not what keeps LW up at night -- if China builds aligned ASI, they have a whole light cone to settle. What will happen to the US will just be a minor footnote in history. But the authors recognized that their target audience -- policymakers in DC -- will likely be alienated by their real arguments about x-risk. By contrast, national security is a topic which has been on the mind of the DC crowd for a century, so natsec was recruited as an argument-as-a-soldier.
More options
Context Copy link