ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
19hr ago
How much do you think those vibes influence an honest-to-God terrorist?
Quite a bit. If someone who's disaffected by The SystemTM comes to believe that murder is a good path forward, then they might just do it.
Celebrating political violence and not punishing it is the easiest way to make it more attractive.
They have about as much connection to the actual risk:benefit calculation as tea leaves do.
Broadly correct. What do you think the connection between the actual risk:benefit calculation and the decision to go terrorist is?
ulyssessword
21hr ago
I’d say there’s a categorical difference between protests, even ones that turn into riots, and bombings.
I can definitely see that lone-wolf vs. crowd-based violence is different, but they blend together enough to be judged in the same breath.
One particular person chose to throw a Molotov cocktail. The fact that he was within a supportive crowd at the time may have helped him make that choice, but I don't think it caused the desire to appear from nothing. Similarly, the "crowd" couldn't offer concrete support from home, but they could still offer moral support and encouragement.
Were there particular cases you had in mind?
No, explicitly not. This is a 100% psychological/sociological question because that's what drives people to act. If the vibes say you can get away with murder, then people will act like they can get away with murder, and (occasionally) commit murder. The ground truth of conviction rates only matters as far as it changes the perception (and prevents second offenses, I guess). Preemptive arrests are similar.
ulyssessword
23hr ago
most multi-unit buildings require a key, and guests have to be buzzed in.
Is that an actual barrier, or a polite fiction? I've definitely seen people follow others into apartment buildings, or enter as people are leaving, or bypass the lock in other ways. I don't think it's a substantial barrier on the scale of an assassination.
ulyssessword
23hr ago
No "but" there, that's in line with my point: Violent political attacks on the Left are an attractive option (literally: the option attracts people). If you can do a bit of doublespeak to hide what it is, then that's even better.
ulyssessword
1d ago
The ICE attacks have been groups, and they're awfully close to outnumbering those lone-shooter attacks.
ulyssessword
1d ago
people actually regularly got away with attacks in a way that they don’t today.
How are the "mostly peaceful" protestors doing these days? Perhaps more important: What's the perception of how they are doing these days?
A few early arrests might get people to change their tune, but that would require:
- the first few attacks happening regardless
- the government actually trying to fight against politically-active criminals on the left, and
- them succeeding, and
- that knowledge spreading
It might fizzle out, but I'm not as optimistic that it's simply dead in the water right now.
ulyssessword
1d ago
Seven years is pushing it for "these days", but I'll have to take it given how rare they are overall.
ulyssessword
1d ago
An anti-Jewish/anti-Israel shooter could be from...the right these days.
Examples? Most of the anti-Jewish violence I've heard of is Palestinian-aligned, which is a left wing cause. Oldschool antisemitism (like the Nazis) still exists, but it doesn't have nearly the same prominence as the rest.
ulyssessword
1d ago
The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit.
That's fine, so long as it stays "a few kids on college campuses". Let them vote on a single set of criteria for admission, scholarships, hiring, and promotion, and I bet they'd change their tune real quick.
The same process that puts racially-preferred students will be used again in hiring, and the top merit-based grad will be placed at the same level as the top diversity-based grad (or more likely: The top pure-merit grad will simply lose out to the top combined-merit-and-racial-preference grad). And again when it comes to promotion time: The top performer will be placed at the same level as the top racially-preferred worker.
It might be beneficial to pull the ladder up behind you, but I'd be very, very wary of doing it, even as a maximally-cynical move. The people ahead of me might start getting ideas and pull the ladder up behind them, and I'd be left behind if I can't climb faster than the trend spreads.
ulyssessword
4d ago
It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well...but this argument surely has some legs to stand on
What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.
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I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.
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Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.
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Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.
They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.
ulyssessword
6d ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.
I don't find that hard to square at all. Immigrants are adding to the labor pool more than they're driving job creation, therefore "taking jobs" is accurate on its face. Same with net tax payments vs. receipts (I assume).
As a current resident, the first-order effect is that it's harder to find a job and the government takes more from you while giving you less in return.
Option 2: One immigrant gets a job, brings in half a dozen family members, and receives welfare to pay for their needs.
Option 3: Fraud. There is no "except when", just "while simultaneously"
Option 4: Immigrants drive down wages of the industries they work in, to the point they qualify for welfare while doing a previously-high-paying job. No locals are willing to do the job that cheaply, which just justifies the need for immigration! Instead of one immigrant stealing one job, it's the entire immigrant workforce stealing (and degrading) an entire job sector. (This one's the most dubious IMO).
ulyssessword
7d ago
How cold is your house??
If you don't want to go full parka, then get a blanket (possibly heated) and drink tea. There's also a surprising amount of difference between sitting on a fuzzy couch and sitting on a chair.
It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.
In what way is "you can be justifiably stabbed for saying that" not an infringement of free speech? The only thing I can think of is that it might not be covered by the Second First Amendment of the US.
EDIT: off-by-one error
ulyssessword
9d ago
One underrated aspect of books/articles/etc. is that they can give you something to argue against. Say what you will about the accuracy or the eloquence of its arguments, AI 2027 does make claims, and they are coherent enough to argue against. It may be a low bar, but it's one that so many commentators fail to reach.
ulyssessword
9d ago
ulyssessword
11d ago
ulyssessword
12d ago
In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years.
A bit of a tangent, but this is something that almost every study/article about anything skips over: Are those differences of opinion correct? Old, rich, educated, white people in safe homogeneous areas trust their neighbors more than young, poor, uneducated, non-white people in unsafe and diverse areas do. To what extent is that because the people they're interacting with are more trustworthy?
The findings are presented as psychological phenomena, but they only put a negligible amount of effort into arguing that the different trust scores are internally-driven instead of rational responses to different situations.
ulyssessword
15d ago
Yeah, at that point, you'll have a hard time waging a war that's chemical-free (SMBC).
ulyssessword
16d ago
He linked to two of his in-depth responses to different Unikowsy articles, both of which you read and responded to. Why would you think this one is any different?
ulyssessword
17d ago
Heck, with authors you can even go as far as "writes under the pen name of". For example, here is a mirror to "JK" Rowling.
ulyssessword
17d ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone
ulyssessword
18d ago
You are in an extreme bubble if most people are looking for overtime.
Maybe a bubble, but I don't think it's extreme.
See here (1995 PDF): 27.1% of people want more hours, and 6.4% want less. Or here (federal workers only): 42% are working part-time due to family responsibilities or "other", while 58% are due to work not being available, working a second job, or going to school. Here says 39% of workers would take a 1/5 cut to hours and pay, which is the highest I've found.
Also, the full-time comparisons use a baseline of 44-ish hours, not the nominal 40 (or 38.6 if you count two weeks of vacation). People are succeeding at finding overtime, and therefore not looking for more than the current amounts.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Nope, the closest thing to a real counterargument is a distance-to-horizon calculation that forgets that the other side can be above the horizon too. I believe that you can see Newfoundland from Cape Breton (and vice versa), but it's not really thanks to the CBC for that. I had to recalculate it myself and I tried looking up more pictures as well.
ulyssessword
19d ago
we just shorten the work week!
Who's "we"?
If it's the government, then how? Currently, they can set incentives like full-time benefits at X hours per week and required overtime pay for >Y hours (X=30, Y=40 currently, IIRC), but they aren't anywhere close to banning work (outside of a few edge cases like long-haul trucking).
If it's the companies, then why? They'd have to pay four sets of benefits, rent four workspaces, run training four times, have single-path tasks take 33% longer, and have meetings with four people instead of three with a 30 hour workweek and 120 hour weekly workload. If they're early adopters, then they'd also attract people looking for reduced time commitments compared to the standard, which is horrible negative selection.
If it's the employees, then who are they? Most people I know look for overtime, not temporary layoffs or unpaid time off. That suggests that their optimal work week is above 40 hours given their financial needs and time commitments. Heck, some people take multiple part-time jobs (which sounds horrible) because they want to work more hours than one job can provide.
If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.
I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.
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