sulla
7d ago
I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.
Well the Zizians also found it hard to argue against murderous force on principle, and instead ran a nice empirical experiment for us. It turns out it’s a bad idea.
sulla
7d ago
Well sometimes in traffic the left lane moves slower than the other lanes, even when there is no jam and the cars are just tightly packed.
sulla
8d ago
- Yes
- No, rolling stop is fine in many cases for stop signs or right turn on red
- No, a large truck and a sports car do not have the same safe operating speed
- No, when there is traffic all lanes should be utilized.
- Not if it’s a safety hazard
- No
- Yes?
sulla
16d ago
In my opinion this was a disasterclass by Musk and extremely embarrassing for him. He didn’t like the bill… fine. But to completely burn the bridge with Trump after already burning the bridge with all Democrats? Unhinged behavior.
When king/arch-merchant alliances turn sour, the king always wins and the arch-merchant ends up dead or bankrupt. I would have expected Kekius Maximus to remember his Roman history better.
sulla
1mo ago
Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market.
He can’t even into Bayes. There are many thousands of raccoon-dog stalls in China. There was exactly one BSL-3 lab in China. There was exactly one lab studying GoF on human coronaviruses.
sulla
1mo ago
I agree that it is fundamentally just a lazy attempt to apply a negative label to people the users of the term don’t like. It’s like “the left are the real racists.” It’s supposed to be a “gotcha” but it doesn’t really work in practice.
sulla
1mo ago
The problem is Russia feels like it can simply win outright, at this point. Therefore, to achieve a peace that reflects the current EV of the war, Ukraine has to accept a deal that is worse than the current status quo. They will never do this, so the most likely outcome is a complete victory for Russia.
sulla
1mo ago
Eliezer disappeared at the height of his power and influence. He could have been much more impactful on AGI development but he was too tired from writing a fanfic and being a micro-celebrity. He relegated himself to side-character territory at best.
sulla
2mo ago
“The purposes of some systems is what they do” there I fixed it. The slogan is usually used to imply that the nominal purpose of a given system differs from the true intentions of those who design or perpetuate the system. This obviously happens sometimes.
To his point, while it is often a worthwhile hypothesis or heuristic, it is not a self-proving statement. You can’t prove a system is corrupt by design just by observing that it is corrupt.
sulla
3mo ago
I’ve noticed a similar effect among boomer conservatives. Many feel somewhat left behind by the Trump administration. As Trump shows that you can “just do things,” their decades of being “beautiful losers” looks more and more like cowardice and less like principle. Losing is deeply rooting in their identity.
They have a hard time letting go of the idea that the best you can do is ride on top of the train yelling “slow down!” You don’t have to let the liberals drive - you can actually go in any direction that you want.
There is also an aspect that they genuinely believed the post-war consensus/“boomer truth regime.” Now that the right is definitively away from this and winning, they… still believe what they always believed. The fact that they believe this things because they were manipulated and coerced into believing them does not make it easier to change their view.
The Republican Party now belongs to the youth who “get it,” not the boomers who don’t. This is the problem that the Democrats have. Their boomer ideology is in the way out and their youth ideology is an unserious version of communism. They seemingly have no good plays available.
sulla
3mo ago
Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was
I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)
Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.
sulla
3mo ago
Trump’s plan:
- Invoke insurrection act to send troops to the souther border
- Secure the southern border
- ?????
- Hitler: Orange Edition
As usual these fears don’t make any sense. This is not Rome, invoking the Insurrection Act does not confer Trump the title of Dictator. It wouldn’t expand his power beyond the southern border.
sulla
3mo ago
Out of context though. This was supposed to be a friendly press conference, with negotiations to take place in private, but Zelenskyy tried to leverage it as an opportunity to negotiate and lecture Trump and Vance. After 40-ish minutes Vance lost patience with Zelenskyy’s stunt.
I think Trump would have handled it better alone but Zelenskyy sabotaging the press conference was a massive diplomatic mistake.
sulla
3mo ago
The 10 minutes at the end were not the whole meeting. It was 50 minutes of “Putin is a terrorist” and “no concessions to a killer” from Zelenskyy. Trump and Vance’s frustration boiled over in the end, even if it seemed unprovoked in the shortened clip.
I felt after the Lex interview that Ukraine will become part of Russia. Zelenskyy is completely blinded by his hate for Russia and Putin and his desire for revenge, to the point that he cannot accept the reality of Ukraine’s losing position.
Ukraine’s only hope is that Trump is able to break Zelenskyy. Trump claims that Zelenskyy is already begging to be let back in. But I’m not sure it’s possible: Zelenskyy may be too courageous/stupid, which will spell the end of Ukraine.
sulla
3mo ago
Sure, but the Impoundment Act is pretty clearly written and very likely constitutional. It's not a regulation or a norm or a gentlemen's agreement.
The truth is, nobody knows if it’s constitutional. It’s something we’ve agreed not talk to about for the past 50 years. We may get the opportunity to find out.
sulla
4mo ago
In Ben Franklin's 1729 pamphlet A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, he observed that true wealth consists of the ability to command labor. This framing positions wealth as almost inherently a positional good. While it is not true exactly, it is true that currently 100 inch flat screen TVs, infinite food, and dishwashers can't replace the benefits of human laborers to do your building. And clearly, it is impossible for everyone to pay others to do more labor in aggregate than they themselves are doing, as the demand would be eternally greater than the supply.
Humanoid robots have the potential to break this bottleneck for the first time in history. The true promise of industrial society - to eliminate the positional nature of wealth - will become a possibility. It will happen gradually, then all-at once. But above all, it is happening soon and 99% of people are not mentally prepared, or are in denial.
sulla
4mo ago
He is not engaging in causal analysis at all, he is criticizing Ukrainian leadership for not making a deal. This is literally his next sentence. Trump is not a guy who speaks precisely, you can’t read so deeply into his throwaway comments.
sulla
4mo ago
If it will empower a Democrat president, the Democrat president could have just passed a similar order. Not a big deal.
sulla
4mo ago
Do American on The Motte feel that the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances?
Not at all. We just want Europe to get its shit together, economically, culturally, and its military. Europe is like the burnout older brother who was once promising but now lives with your parents, spends all day in the bar, and has threesomes in his childhood bedroom with hideous women. And worse, he thinks this makes him cultured.
I perceive Europe as completely unable to innovate, unable to produce good art, and unable to defend itself. It’s so pathetic it’s not capable of being a threat. There is at most some hope that Trump can give Europe a kick in the ass and make Europe at least “get a job.”
This is all vibes based of course. There are some more concrete complaints about EU overregulation, but I would say many American conservatives feel great contempt towards Europe.
sulla
4mo ago
I have more to say about Ziz's horrible decision theory framework. From zizians.info:
The theoretical basis for Zizian social conduct is Yudkowsky and Soare's "functional decision theory". "Functional decision theory" is designed as an answer to Newcomb-like problems where the actions of others are conditional on which decision theory an agent uses. In normal English, it's about situations where the environment will change depending on who you are. The classic example is a choice between two boxes full of money. The first box has much more money in it but only if you're the sort of person who will take that box and leave the other behind. Functional decision theory says the solution to this problem is to choose a strategy which responds to this situation by only taking the first box. It asserts an acausal theory of decisions, where you do not make choices between outcomes but choices between strategies. Instead of saying "now that I'm here I'll take both boxes" an FDT agent says "I know I only get to be here if I one box; so I'll one box".
In Zizian thought this concept is expanded to justify behavior that would make a Sovereign Citizen blush. Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you. (Associated phrases: "nosell"; "collapse the timeline";)
It is superficially compelling, however, everyone can sense that something is not quite right about the argument, and it's this (among other problems) - For functional decision theory to work, it has to be possible for other parties to infer your strategy/"policy". In Newcomb's paradox, Omega is capable of inferring your strategy through advanced technology or magic. In the real world, other people have to guess based on your words or actions.
So option one is to make a verbal commitment: "If you cross me in any way, I'll kill you!" But there are some problems:
- Problem 1: They don't know what you mean by "crossing you," so you have to get more specifically. Maybe "crossing you" means "making you pay rent" (as was apparently the case). So you're going to have to be more specific: "If you make me pay rent, I'll kill you!"
- Problem 2: That's illegal, and will earn you at least a restraining order. So you have to stay vague, but if you're vague, then they will not know your strategy.
- Problem 3: Almost nobody uses the "never surrender" strategy, and for the most part, if somebody tells you they are using this strategy, they are lying or exaggerating. Especially if they are keeping it vague.
So your own real option in action - That's right, for somebody to be convinced that you will kill them, you're going to have to kill someone else first. But we face the same basic problems as above:
- Problem 1: If you kill somebody, but keep it secret, then other people still won't know that your strategy is murder. So you are going to have to do it openly.
- Problem 2: If you kill somebody openly, you are going to jail, and you will not have the resources to retaliate against the entire government.
So you are still screwed. Either you keep your strategy a secret, so nobody believes you and crosses you anyway, or you exercise your strategy openly and go to jail (or get killed in retaliation by someone else).
If you are still committed to this strategy, you are essentially forced to live the life of a mob boss: Other people kill and take the fall on your behalf, and even though everyone knows it was you, it can't quite be proven in a court of law that you were responsible. It is a precarious situation to be in, to say the least. Maybe Ziz is in this zone now, but it doesn't seem to going very well.
Lastly, even if somehow you execute the above perfectly, you still have the problem that nobody sane will want to associate with you. Most people actually don't want to be around people that will murder them if they make a mistake that is perceived as a slight.
sulla
4mo ago
Ziz is like a real life Light Yagami, except instead of punishing criminals he murders everyone who doesn’t support trans vegan communism, and instead of having an all-powerful Death Note he had three trans friends with a fake samurai sword, and instead of being Japan’s top student he’s an internet schizo.
His game theory is retarded. Five trans cultists aren’t going to successfully terrorize hundred of millions of landlords into giving tenants free rent, or 7 billion people into becoming vegans, or whatever. They aren’t going to respect and fear the almighty Ziz for his game theoretic commitment to murder, they’re simply going to call the police, or simply shoot him and his companions. Even having a game theoretic commitment to murdering anyone who slights you will mean that only psychotic people are even willing to hang around you, and greatly increases your chances of ending up murdered or imprisoned.
Parvini is a true radical who wants the system and the established elite gone, so he's long bet that Trump's return would herald "the woke being put away" and "back to fresh prince".
This is the crux of it. “The regime” acting sane and governing well (or at least incrementally better) is actually an L because governing well is better for the regime in the long run and helps maintain its stability. He would probably insist the regime wanted Caesar and Pompey was a jobber.
A serious risk of using murderous force.
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