sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
21d ago
Not all randomized control trials are blinded randomized control trials. All you need for a randomized control trial is to randomly assign a group of patients that gets the treatment and a group that doesn't. As far as I know, no long-term randomized control study of gender transition has ever been conducted, in either children or adults.
Non-RCT's are if anything even worse than euphemisms like "moderate-quality" make them seem, reading something like Scott's ivermectin post might help give a sense for it. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
No, it's way worse than that, the high/moderate/low quality ratings were based on the cited meta-study and seem if anything too lenient. Reading the meta-study, many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed", they made no attempt to measure psychological outcomes to determine whether suppressing puberty actually provided any benefit. This is the supposed single "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. And then here are the detailed explanations of why they considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
17d ago
On the other hand, people who get more sun live years longer.
Observational studies without clear mechanisms of action are almost completely worthless. Reading the study it's just the classic thing where they controlled for a handful of factors that they thought of and then declared whatever was left over the effect of the thing they're studying. Rather than it being any of the countless variations across the population that aren't included in the arbitrary list of controls. (I think Scott has a post somewhere where he mentioned how little he trusts studies like this.) For instance this is how they controlled for comorbidity:
As a measure of comorbid illness at the start of the study, we created a dummy variable termed ‘comorbidity’ to identify women who had been treated with antidiabetic or anticoagulant drugs or medication for CVD for more than 1 month.
I wonder if any illnesses not prescribed those drugs might both increase mortality and decrease sunbathing? Or general variation in health below the level of actual illness?
This is in contrast to the skin cancer risk where the mechanism of action is very straightforward. It seems like a serious failure of both science and science communication that this sort of largely-meaningless observational study gets put on the same level.
sodiummuffin
27d ago
It's only unchangeable if we allow the combination of the eugenics taboo and a lack of long-term planning to deny us the use of current technologies like embryo-selection and potential future technologies like polygenetic genetic-engineering. (To say nothing of the possible individual enhancements opened up if we manage to achieve brain emulation.) Remember the general population of whites and asians is also less intelligent than intellectuals tend to assume, because they associate with a highly selected subset. A large fraction of the population struggles with tasks like "interpreting a simple bar graph". It's also getting worse, with current dysgenic trends. Just achieving and maintaining the sort of humanity that many people already assume exists requires transhumanism, for every race.
Afterwards we can look back on the statistics about stuff like intelligence and crime and obesity and depression the same way we currently look back on 50% infant mortality rates and widespread stunting from malnutrition. Though of course the biggest leap would be curing aging, if we ever achieve that I expect a lot of the other improvements would seem like a sideshow by comparison.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
These weren't no-names or non-scientists but they were seriously and embarrassingly wrong. Imagine if we actually listened to these people, speedily cut fossil fuels out of the world economy accepting the energy rationing, economic mobilization and famines that would likely happen... only for it to be a nothingburger.
No they weren't, The Guardian just made that up. It's not a prediction, it's a brief outline of a hypothetical written by two non-scientists (both self-professed futurists working for the consulting firm Global Business Network) who specifically state that it is extreme and unlikely. The point is not that they think it is likely to happen, but that they think such unlikely but extreme scenarios should be considered and prepared for by the Pentagon.
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.
These are the steps they propose be taken:
- Improve predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur
- Assemble comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence food, water, and energy
- Create vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world.
- Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water management
- Rehearse adaptive responses
- Explore local implications
- Explore geo-engineering options that control the climate.
Notice that reducing CO2 emisssions isn't even mentioned because their scenario is so abrupt that it would be too late, rather they are talking about preparing ways to mitigate the damage and/or do emergency geo-engineering, in case an unlikely scenario like that happens.
This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world.
Isn't selection bias the most obvious explanation? Like how it tends to be the explanation for everything in education, and looking for "successful educational practices" without carefully controlling for it just tells you the educational fads in the most-selective schools.
Being normal weight correlates with traits, like intelligence and conscientiousness, that are also useful for succeeding in the educational system and getting high-status jobs. (Not always high-paying jobs, but that's because so many people want those jobs that there's competition driving down wages.) People move to the areas where those jobs are available, and they have children who inherit those traits. Left-wing ideology is popular among the educated/upper-class, so those areas are also left-wing.
This also tangentially relates to the recent blog posts about conservatism's human-capital problem, TracingWoodgrain's The Republican Party is Doomed and Hanania's Coping with Low Human Capital.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)
The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I found an article with a detailed timeline. It says that the attorney general gave officials the go-ahead for the execution at 7:56. It then says that Smith "began to shake and writhe violently" at 7:58, and that this lasted around 2 minutes. It then says he began taking deep gasping breaths and that his breathing was no longer visible at 8:08 (unclear if it was visible at 8:07 and then stopped, or if that is just when the journalist first noted it was not visible). It quotes the Alabama Corrections Commissioner as saying the nitrogen gas flowed for 15 minutes. So the most obvious possibility, assuming that he held his breath and then began to shake either when they began the gas or after he started running out of oxygen, would be that he lost consciousness in 2-4 minutes and took 10-12 minutes to stop breathing. It is also possible he began to shake before they began administering the gas, in an attempt to get the execution delayed again like had happened previously, in which case the timeline would be less clear.
The BBC article quotes Alabama journalist Lee Hedgepeth as saying that "Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.". My first thought reading this (and the beginning of the post I was writing before deciding to try finding an actual timeline), was that "total" could include the time before they began administering the gas, the time after he lost consciousness, and the time after he was dead when they still had the mask running or were otherwise doing something that the journalist considered part of the execution process. In classic "The Media Very Rarely Lies" fashion, mentioning "total" execution time after mentioning him gasping for air makes it sound like he was living/conscious/suffering for 25 minutes after they began the gas, but does not actually say so. The timeline confirms it, there was 22 minutes between when they opened the curtains at 7:53 and closed them at 8:15. So the 22 minutes includes before the execution was ordered, after he was unconscious, and after he was dead (and then Hedgepeth rounded up to 25).
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The established institutions of our society — government, academia, media, NGOs, etc. — are filled top-to-bottom with true believers who hold this as a terminal value, and it’s not going away until they all do (which is a problem, because there’s no voting them out).
This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
On the other hand, we have unique duties, shared by and asked of no other creatures, and we are moral monsters if we refuse to assent. It makes us both "part of nature" and "above nature" in a way that is full of psychological and philosophical tension -- not to mention is precisely and uniquely burdensome to human beings in particular. It seems like this point of view attacks human specialness while affirming people have special obligations. It eliminates human privileges while compounding human duties.
You could apply the same logic to babies, which most people value morally but which do not understand morality or take actions based on it.
The utilitarian answer is that there is no such thing as "unique duties" in utilitarianism, or even really "duties" at all, the whole framework is wrong. There are only choices and their results. Some choices have better results than others, so they are preferable, and this is true even if you are the only moral being in the world. The better choice is better whether it is part of your "duty" or not, and whether the beneficiaries share your sense of morality or not. You should, as a practical matter, make choices like specializing on the tasks you're good at, and taking into account the second-order consequences of helping people with the ability and inclination to help others themselves. But this is only because doing so has better consequences, not because you stopped counting the welfare of the amoral/severely-disabled/etc. when deciding which choice has better results.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.
I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups. There are ways to suppress the majority, but they are much more difficult and costly to the country than simply having them continue to live far away outside your borders where they can't readily do those things.
In democracies those tactics are mainly relegated to groups with minority political views that can't win at the ballot box, and sometimes they get their way by caring more than the majority or having elite sympathizers, but most of the time it is advantageous to just participate in the democratic system instead. This has made democracies remarkably stable compared to other political systems. Your proposal, on the other hand, seems like it would fall to a Ghandi-style resistance campaign or violent revolution the first time there was a serious dispute between the natives and the disenfranchised descendants of immigrants.
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that concluded it was probably a mixture of glue with cornstarch and baking soda (multiple sets of ingredients can do the same thing) that expands into a carbon foam when heated. It pointed out that there are now commercially-available coatings that use the same principle but are more durable/practical for long-lasting coatings, they're called "intumescent coatings", though their performance is held back because they're applied in a thinner layer.
I don't have a link to the blog post but looking at Wikipedia it links a youtuber who also seems to have replicated it. He also has some followup videos using different ingredients to make it and trying it for different things. If you want to see the commercially-available intumescent coatings for comparison this video shows them in action at 7:44. Though from what he says apparently they activate at a higher temperature, at least for the ones he tested. Intumescent coatings: A review on recent progress might be of interest.
Edit: Watching the youtuber's second video he discusses commercial intumescent coatings. Also this video from a manufacturer has some good footage in them in action.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I thought this was about a different study which went around months ago, in which a modified COVID-19 strain caused a 100% fatality rate in humanized mice. So I was going to point out that according to the same study stock COVID-19 had an extremely high fatality rate as well, so it said more about the mice than the virus. But looking it up apparently it's a different recently-published study about a pangolin coronavirus:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.574008v1.full
It sounds like a lot of things cause 100% death rates in humanized mice without nessesarily meaning that much regarding humans. Note that in this case 100% means they infected 4 mice and all 4 died.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Online polls open to self-selecting members of the public are garbage. But that's different from conducting a survey online by selecting people some other way and then giving them a link instead of a sheet of paper to fill out, which is how many surveys are conducted nowadays.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again.
Did they ever actually do that step? Is there a documented case of it actually happening? Or did they just have lower prices by being more efficient and focusing on cheap goods, and then continue to have lower prices? And for that matter for groceries specifically I don't think they tend to be significantly cheaper in the first place, they just have similar prices to any other discount grocery store.
Do Walmart's prices even vary enough from store to store to justify such a strategy? They're not always the same between stores or compared to their website (in large part due to the cost of shipping if you're looking at groceries specifically) but it hardly seems like a big enough difference to be part of some predatory pricing strategy.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.
And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day
Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Instead, he started messing around with the service itself
No he didn't.
By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.”
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.
alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable
The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.
He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.
During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the [Deus Ex protagonist], which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.
I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.
Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:
Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.
Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.
Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.
Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.
Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.
Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.
Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.
Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack
I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.
I've repeatedly encountered sophisticated repost bots making non-political posts, though never an entire thread like that. For example, I've seen bots that will post on /r/videos copying the top comment on the linked Youtube video, to get upvoted posts that are harder for Reddit to recognize as copies. In one case people noticed the comment was strange because it mentioned the year, which wasn't the same year the Reddit comment was made. That does not seem like something you would go to the bother of programming if there was no value in it. Reddit's spam filters treat accounts differently if they have an organic-seeming history of upvoted comments, so people who sell Reddit accounts want a way to create those at scale. Reddit might also treat real-seeming accounts differently when it comes up voting, so upvote-buying services might benefit from such accounts as well.
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