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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   26612 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Another day, another man engaging in auto-auto-da-fe. While the stellar minds of the frontpage Reddit debate if it is QAnon or TDS that make a person set himself on fire, less stellar ones dug up his manifesto, where he places Trump and Hillary on the same side, and Thiel and cryptocurrency at the heart of it all. Points for originality. Not many points, but some points. But this is only the background for a comment which I read in the thread, one of a thousand semantically identical ones over the years.

It sounds incredibly plausible that the term "conspiracy theory" and flooding the field with flat-earthers, bigfoot hunters, extraterrestial anal examination enjoyers, and the rest, is itself a conspiracy designed to discredit people who ask questions about Kennedy assassination and Mkultra by conflating them with kooks and schizos. But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.

And maybe it's a typical mind fallacy, but another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world. It is not the world I believe in. I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite. I know that I'm not as intelligent, as connected, as fortunate in the circumstances of my birth as them, so there is literally nothing I can to in mitigation, not to mention that malice aggravates the feeling of injustice so much more than bad luck, when something horrible happens. This world I believe we live in, the world of conspiracy theories that are true, is without a doubt not the more comforting one of the two.

I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite.

This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.

positive-sum

Positive sum in terms of who's system of values? You may have a system that you think everyone should share, but not everyone shares it.

In some other value system, your most positive contribution to the world might involve immediate ritual suicide, to spare the rest of us the effort.

For a less extreme version, someone else's value system might have an axis that does not exist in your system, maybe including such things as "souls" and "afterlives" and suchlike. They might make decisions to de-prioritize improvement in your shared dimensions, in favor of improvements in a dimension that you think is imaginary. (Ritual purity laws might be a good example here.)

It's positive-sum in terms of material resources, which is what I was responding to given the OP's message.

I agree that not everyone shares the same system of values, with some diverging or even outright conflicting. For some, like Nazism, military conflict is required, but that does not necessitate "elimination of large masses of populations". Just some humiliation for the Holocaust and other crimes. For most others, persuasion will suffice. Communism was defeated simply by capitalism existing as a viable and better-seeming alternative. The great thing about democracy and the modern world order is that it heavily emphasizes persuasion as opposed to force of arms to solve ideological disputes. I'd prefer to keep it that way.

Material wealth can be positive sum because we can add to it in discrete components.

Social status is innately relative, and as a function of that is innately zero sum. The lower classes have more absolute wealth than they did in 1800, but they don't have more status.

That just begs the question what social status is. I think ranking is too poor of a definition and instead esteem should be considered at least as an important part of ones social status. Then social status trivially isn't a zero sum game, as we for example could increase the total trust in a system, taking for granted that 'trust afforded' is a component of ones esteem. For example imagine a group consisting of a 1:1 split of gentlemen and Criminal Scum (tm) compared to one that's purely gentlemen. Hopefully I don't have to belabour the point of how the amount of trust and pleasant behavior are different for each group, and how the amount can be increased by decreasing the ratio of Criminal Scum (tm).

I think the closest to zero sum is attention, but even believing that to be zero sum can be likened to believing that material wealth is. Of course there is some maximal bound on both of them, but I don't believe we are anywhere close to saturating the amount of attention that can be given and not either it's quality.

But given that you believe that social status is innately zero sum, how do you think adding people to a system interacts with status? Is the amount diluted or is average kept (per person)?

"Scarcity doesn't exist" is certainly a position, but I usually see it from the people far to the left of the leftmost motte poster. Because you sound like a techno-optimist, let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?

let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?

Humanity is thousands if not millions of years away from achieving Dyson Sphere tier technology. Your argument here is the equivalent of saying we should ignore life-extending medicine due to the eventual heat death of the universe. Maybe at some point in the distant future that will become relevant, but for now it's unabashedly a good thing, just as it has been for the entirety of human history. And who knows, maybe at that point in the distant future we'll be able to pull energy and matter from nothing.

But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.

I have seen it in action with family members, mostly harmlessly, and seems best explanation of what is going on (in general reasonable aunt complaining about masons controlling substantial part of catholic church - while being controlled by Soros who also runs entire EU).

I think your aunt is picking up on the quite reasonable to point out fact that a CPA(or anyone else who uses a spreadsheet to make decisions) with dictatorial powers would make better object-level decisions for the organization than the current pope and most of his appointees. And what that's missing is, of course, the enormous amount of internal politicking going on where individual and group actors within the Catholic Church might have conditions which benefit themselves which are drastically different from benefit to the Church(the organization) as a whole, along with lots of true believers in the spiritual side of things making decisions off of what amounts to pure ideology, plus bog standard corruption.

I suspect that this is a very generally applicable and that it explains lots of jewlumminati-type conspiracy theories; organizations can easily become irrational actors.

I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.

I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof.

Well, you often get "it is OBVIOUS", "lack of proof is proving strength of conspiracy" or "please view this 2h long youtube video".

What now?

First of all, the person who makes a positive claim is the one obliged to provide evidence. This is simply elementary logic. Negatives cannot be proven, so it’s not on me to prove that no conspiracy happened, it’s on you to provide some evidence that there is a conspiracy.

Second “it’s obvious” isn’t evidence. If it’s obvious, proving it should be easy.

Third, I don’t accept YouTube as a source. Find me a newspaper or other print source so I can check on the facts presented.

And doing this in family setting typically irritates another person much more than ignoring their comment about shadowy conspiracy.

Often dismissing it out of hand rather than demanding proof is much better strategy.

Jack Chick theory of politics.

another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.

Fully agreed regarding relative sentiment. I never quite understood why this default hypothesis is presented as something scary – but for the purpose of stating a paradox, to signal cleverness, and also support for the status quo and high-status groups.

Malice is inherently and obviously threatening. Perhaps "the scary thing is nobody's in charge" folks see it as witty because they're not accustomed to fearing malice of others. Or they have a strong intuition that an orderly technocratic world is preferable, no matter its ultimate morality? In any case, quite alien logic.

I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.

If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.

On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line.

I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent. In my experience, the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports. If your proverbial skill points were more intellect than charisma, you might get shit from your buddies about it, but I really doubt the framing of the highly competent being routinely bullied.

Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.

I was never physically bullied in school, but I was an outcast. This was in the 2000s.

I'm not going to share my IQ or anything like that, so I guess you'll have to take it on my word that I'm pretty smart, in college I was an outstanding student. And maybe it's questionable that I'm "competent," though that depends on what skills exactly you're measuring. But the point of the meme is not that future Presidents of the United States with outstanding charisma are being shoved into lockers, it's that geeky kids who would make good researchers, programmers, or professors are. Those are people who do, indeed, have deficits in some areas, though they are capable of being highly successful in certain socially desirable niches. My teachers throughout my schooling told my parents I was capable of great things; my peers did not think so.

The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me: I'd make jokes, and they wouldn't get them (my teachers sometimes did, though), I'd make references, and they'd go over their head; I also kind of had a Hermione thing going on, and I assure you that the feeling where students don't like the teacher's pet is still alive and well. The first day I went to the local gifted education program -- and then a selective high school program filled with smart people -- were the very first times in my entire life I felt like I belonged, people laughed at my jokes, people were interested in what I had to say.

The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together. The sorts of assortative social connections that allow people to find others they get along with and relate to are often not present; insofar as they are, it's exactly the sort of cool kids table vs geeky kids table vs goth kids table vs drama kids table stuff the comment you've replied to is talking about. If you go to a school which is a greater reflection of broader society -- so, like, a 100 IQ mean -- it is statistically incredibly likely you'll relate intellectually to very few members of the student body. Perhaps you went to a school located in an unusally well-off section of your community?

I would actually say you have a point in such a situation -- in the selective high school program I attended, I do think there was an observable correlation between a person's intelligence, popularity, and charisma, though there were also many niches where people of various interests could be successful. I recall having several friends who were, to put it bluntly, mathematical geniuses with little charisma.

I'm not sure either side of the story, like @Primaprimaprima indicates (dude, why are we so similar?), tells the whole story of what's going on. I think it's also notable that everything, including IQ, is correlative, and sometimes these correlations break down -- sometimes there are people with high verbal intelligence who suck at fractions (raises hand), or people with incredible endurance who can't bang rocks together, or people who understand computers from the boot ROM to the hyperscaler who can't remember to do their taxes, or people who are incredibly charismatic but lacking in prudence. Everyone, reading that sentence, had at least one real person pop into their head. Maybe someone they know, or at least someone they've heard about. We can talk a lot about correlations, especially when discussing broad social trends, but the core argument for liberalism has always been that correlations break down when talking about the individual. I think school experiences might be one of those situations.

The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me:

Makes sense. That was my experience as well. I think that social skills are like athletic skills or martial arts- no matter how smart you are, you need other people to practice with. And it helps a lot to have partners who are roughly around your own level. That's why so many smart kids turn out a bit socially stunted and awkward- they can't "think themselves" into having genuine peer social connections.

See for example: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/a-tale-of-two-teenagers

The social isolation and lack of friendships experienced in gifted children produced by the discrimination and isolation to which brilliant minds are subjected is generally confused as a disorder of lack of sociability. Gifted children no longer experience this situation of isolation by being relocated to specialised centres where they live with their peers (other gifted children).

...

The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together.

On the other hand that does at least give people a measure of humility. I'm worried about the real upper crust of people who are born into wealthy, talented families, got the genes for high intelligence, and then sent to selective schools where they only ever met other high-iq privileged kids. It seems like a sort of breeding ground for entitled assholes- the "Davos Man" who has absolutely no idea what an average Joe is like. For example Bill Gates was sent to a wealthy prep school for middle school, wealthy and ratified enough to have a programmers club in the 60s when that sort of thing was very rate. And obviously that's a huge competitive advantage for someone like Bill Gates, but... he did turn into a bit of an asshole, taking over software monopolies with manic win-at-all-costs, crush-my-enemies energy and only much later in life did it seem like he finally had a change of heart and started to reflect on his actions a bit.

I actually found my experience at the selective high school to be more humbling than the alternative -- while I was rarely intentionally elitist towards other students in the younger grades (typically I felt inferior to them), there were definitely a few times where I was like that. Going to the selective school put me in places where I wasn't the smartest guy around. I even met some people who were more intensely elitist than I had ever dreamed of being, who looked down on anybody who struggled with things they found easy, who couldn't even get along with the very smart student body because they thought themselves better even than them. I went from the top 1% of students to the top 20%. Being not the smartest guy in a room helped me understand my limits and be more empathetic toward people not as smart as me. If I hadn't had that experience, I do wonder if I would have turned out like the "I am enlightened by my intelligence" guy.

I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent.

Sure, partially. But it's not entirely wrong. The idea didn't just come from nowhere.

I feel like I've seen an overcorrection in recent years away from the smart = socially awkward myth and towards a new myth of a pure linear spectrum between blonde-haired-seven-foot ubermensch math PhD star athletes on the one hand and sickly frail developmentally deficient chronic failures on the other, which is also not an accurate model of reality.

I'm intelligent and I was bullied pretty severely in middle school, up to and including physical assault. Things got better by high school and I had multiple friends and a decently normal social life, but I was never fantastically popular.

the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports

Not sure how we're defining "good at sports" but this point in particular doesn't match my experience at all. The stars on the high school football and basketball teams tended to be C students. Professional athletes in most major sports don't strike me as particularly more intelligent than average, at least compared to people who directly make a living off of cognitive skills.

In general the biographies of great thinkers show enough of what today we might label "sperg" behavior to make me think there's a legitimate pattern here - Newton, Kant, Wittgenstein...

The past truly was a different country. The Marty McFly archetype didn't come into being for no reason.

There’s a soft and hard version of this thesis though. It’s like Cummings writing about how he was surprised, upon becoming the PM’s chief adviser, that there was no secret management room where the competent people were actually running things, even if he disagreed with their ideology. There was nobody in charge. Now, you can say that he merely wasn’t privy to the actual deep state or whatever, and that’s a legitimate theory, but I’ve heard similar sentiments from other powerful people and I don’t believe they’re all lying.

Some people, often those one wouldn’t necessarily expect, and sometimes those one would (‘retired’ Obama is one) truly do wield large amounts of power, but even they’re not really in charge.

I actually consider the viewpoint of:

another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.

inherently scary and threatening. There is plenty of doublethink and celebration paralax going on.

It is a very implausible claim on the face of it.

Things happen for a reason, and in the world there are various groups with different agendas that they coordinate for their goals at expense of others, is simply an unshakeable fact.

J. Edgar Hoover saying the mafia doesn't exist is scary, because the mafia obviously exists and he is covering up for it. There isn't a reading where it is productive to focus upon the comfort of the mafia not existing, just cause Hoover says it doesn't exist. It isn't a realistic scenario. Nor of course can you blame everything that happens on you, on the mafia being behind it, but it is nonsense to come with an understanding of reality that disminishes the mafia.

When people claimed that there was no communist conspiracy, and like people here who do it with the contemporary version of this, promoted weakmen kooky scenarios of communists putting fluoride in water supply, and comedies pushed the meme "Communists are out to get our bodily fluids", and were hating on those who opposed it as right wing extremist lunatics, that was scary. We had communist sympathizers who opposed valid opposition to communists, and painted reasonable vigilance as inherently ridiculous. That is dangerous and a society with no defenses should be afraid of how things are going to degenerate towards.

A reasonable precautionary attitude and suspicion is protective. And I find a society that has a pragmatic, intellectually wise attitude towards precaution and recognizes the things it must focuses upon, to be a more comforting one. Basically, the people who are dismissive are not actually promoting a more comforting vision, but their very action of dismissing valid problems is threatening, and often a result of them sympathizing if not outright belonging in particular factions that are accused of coordinating to screw over people. The meme of a very tiny cabal is unfortunately false, because influential aspiring factions try to recruit others and do have supporters.

There isn't' a scenario where the CIA, or George Soros, or ADL and others like them representing actual factions aren't t doing plenty of nefarious things, or groups like Epstein's don't exist. Or that things like biological weapon programs of CIA, or that it is possible that covid itself might be the result of such research, are inherently ridiculous claims. The scenario we are dealing with is the one where people are covering up for them and worse vilifying those who do oppose and care as lunatics, or as extremists.

To further give my take, and don't misunderstand my tone here as implying you think otherwise, because I am more explaining my understanding than disagreeing with you:

Now, this isn't to say that any kooky claim is legitimate. Criminal conspiracies are real, and nefarious factions that might or might not fit within the definition of criminality, definitely exist without a shadow of a doubt and we know this. This doesn't mean moon landing is fake, or aliens are here. Just as we know this, we also know flat earth is nonsense. There are simply plausible claims, and implausible. Just like people who promote flat earth theory are promoting something which is nonsense, it is also credulous to be dismissive of opposition to genuine factions and pretend it is ridiculous.

In fact it is a strategy, infamously promoted by Cass R. Sunstein to flood the field with kooky conspiracy theories, to disminish suspicions on 9/11 and other issues. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585. So they both promote both implausible takes, but also to try to create weakman scenarios with real factions, like George Soros, or like the communists I mentioned. And then people are going to focus on the more sensationalist, kooky, weakman at best scenarios as a strategy of supporting the actions of genuine factions like the CIA, people like George Soros, groups like AIPAC and ADL, or even factions like cultural far leftists, or cliques of influential billionaires like Bill Ackman, etc. Or try to spin legitimate opposition as ridiculous.

Nobody is in charge is just an excuse to cover for the people with power and their actions. There are always people with influence doing things because they decided to do them. Even inaction is a decision, and someone must be held accountable for the direction things are going. It is also a promotion of lack of standards and servile attitude towards elites, and decision makers in general (which can include a decent share of the public on some issues) and even for mediocrity. Good governance requires accountability and holding people up to a standard.

I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations,

And that's why I'm dooming on AI. Because enough people aren't psychopathic enough and causing a genocide isn't that easy if all you have is a handful of conspirators.

Meanwhile, in the real world, it took giant totalitarian states to do anything, years of effort. AI systems will however make it much easier to pull off a conspiracy or develop a lethal agent.

They'll also make it much easier to detect anyone trying to do either, but doing so is costly and paranoid so the conspiracies will have an edge. Also, gigadeaths, if it didn't involve just 3rd world getting killed would crash the economy and destroy the supply chain. I think the Venn diagram between "non delusional genocidal wannabe world masters" and "wants to live in ruins, relying on scavenging spare parts" contains exactly zero people, and the former category is also very small too.

We have only one that could probably genocide, and it's in a superpower competition so no matter how feisty they might feel, just doing an actual genocide is pointless. Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

No, what's happening is basically just chaos+information overload and stress. Schizos of a certain sort are liable to act out in such an environment.

There's a good essay on the guy who killed himself here.

Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

...Is this sarcasm?

In my opinion, convincing someone to kill themselves or forcing them to kill themselves is morally the same thing.

If you are really going with "China depressed Uyghur TFR to 1.2", is suppressing their religion as being "genocide" then what's going in most of the world is also genocide. Religion is gone, TFR is in the crapper, no one is doing anything about it. The preferable solution is 'import people' to replace the dying out population.

What's true seems to be that a large % of their young males are in labor camps, there are anti-melee weapon measures everywhere (metal detectors, plastic shields, batons), there's a shit ton of police everywhere, much of them Uyghur. Strict surveillance, with people having to have tracking phone apps on.. (link worth reading, it's by a highly disagreeable person with no sympathies for either Uyghurs or Leninists.)

Which again, not nice, but unless they're getting worked to death on low rations, still not genocide. And with Chinese labor costs being as they are, I doubt they're not feeding them properly.

Now, not nice at all, but it's a just another case of 'fucking around and finding out'. Uyghurs failed to rein in their radicals, said radicals killed a couple hundred Chinese in machete attacks, caused the ongoing clampdown. Surely you remember the headlines? There was the big riot in the capital, then a half dozen big attacks in the following years.

I think you're overfitting different phenomena into a limited number of buckets. All of the following are true (IMO, of course):

  • The self-immolator is probably schizotypal and connected a lot of dots that aren't connected.
  • There are many schizotypal conspiracy theorists that believe very weird things about the world as a result of their lack of reasoning ability and overly aggressive pattern matching.
  • Some people lean towards conspiracies because randomness bothers them.
  • Some people lean towards conspiracies because humans have a tendency to pattern-match and attribute causality. They're not bothered by randomness, they're just not very good at understanding it, so they see intentionality everywhere.
  • There are substantial conspiracies that actually exist, including those by intelligence agencies, big corporations, non-governmental organizations, and more.
  • Some of these conspiracies will include trying to discredit people that notice what's going on.
  • There probably isn't a shady cabal that secretly controls everything - the most powerful people are probably the people that appear to be the most powerful people.

This set of positions allows plenty of space for some pretty wild conspiracy theories to be true without needing to add unnecessary moving parts to my understanding of the world. The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.

The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.

Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?

There has been no evidence up to even the level of the coup against the Mosaddegh government (ie. not a particularly high bar) that the CIA planned or executed any of it.

I had read this guy's blog before he got famous. I believe his main theory, the one he's held most consistently, is that Bitcoin is literally a vast Ponzi scheme concoted by some financial cabal intent on using it to crash the global economy. As a theory, it's not that much odder than your standard conspiracy theory stuff; what made it slightly notable enough to get my attention is that usually "there's a big financial cabal there trying to crash the economy for nefarious purposes" are pro-crypto and think that crypto's a tool to combat the financial cabal, not the tool of the financial cabal. As such, he didn't seem "crazier" than your average conspiracy guy; YMMV what the baseline of craziness for that crowd is.

That said, his manifesto and pre-suicide entry offer hints that he had been developing into a crazier direction (I suppose getting into the whole conspiracy milieu can't help), so when you get someone who is going down a slope that way and the somewhat notorious Aaron Bushnell immolation, well, that's what you get.

He believed The Simpsons was sending coded messages about an impending global totalitarian government. That’s much crazier than average.

Back in the time when I encountered the blog, he wasn't rambling about The Simpsons, unless I missed something. That's precisely what I was referring to, he has been spiralling to the crazy direction quite fast before his final act.

Kind of seems like you believe in some shadowy cabal keeping you down because that helps you make sense of your life circumstances and gives you someone to blame. There is no actual conspiracy against you, it is just the banality of the human culture machine that grinds on with or without you. The world isn't zero sum, we've proven that by elevating humanity to heretofore unimaginable heights. There is no conspiracy against you.

Nice bulverism.

Not as a reply to that particular poster, but as a general elaboration. My life is pretty carefree. But since 2020 I see what life will be like for everyone really soon, and since it's being steered there by agentic actors, the only escape is death before we get there.

I think the accusation of Bulverism is unfair. 'Me and people like me are being oppressed by shadowy, unnamed forces' is impossible to falsify. The onus is on you to prove it. If you can't or won't do that, then speculating on why you might believe that there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations is a reasonable thing to do.

It turns out that naming the forces and pointing out their actions and advocates does not actually convince anyone. No level of evidence is sufficient for those who would rather sneer.

Why are you putting something I didn't say in quotation marks as if I did? And then, to add insult to injury, actually quoting me. You'll find that the text in italics is eminently falsifiable. If you want my prediction to be more concrete, then here: by the end of the century human population will be smaller than at the start of it, and an overwhelming majority of the remaining humans will have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms, both in absolute terms and relative to what those at the top will enjoy.

by the end of the century human population will be smaller than at the start of it

So you are predicting... Two billion dead by the hand of the cabal if they start today?

an overwhelming majority of the remaining humans will have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms, both in absolute terms and relative to what those at the top will enjoy.

This is already the case, so it's not much of a prediction.

Ordinary humans already have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms in 2024 than in 2000? You and I have very different definitions of far less. We are not living in pods, eating bugs, and owning nothing yet.

Certainly the median human has "far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms... relative to what those at the top [enjoy]," and by "those at the top" I mean you and me.

The cabal seriously needs to pick up the pace, population is increasing every day and the century is nearly a quarter over.

You're misreading me, two times in a row now. The existence of wealth gap is trivially true and is no prediction at all. I'm saying that it will grow monumentally in 2100 compared to 2000, and also, this part you're completely ignoring for some reason, the absolute value of available energy and freedoms for a common person will be considerably lower in 2100 than 2000. And no, I'm not at the top even if I'm in a position to be a lazy layabout with internet and hookers, and if you're posting here, I assume neither are you. How many banks do you own?

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I think it was pretty clear from the context that the first part was a summary of your views. Plus, I did literally quote you later on with a far stronger claim.

Your prediction isn't predicting all that much. Birth rates are plummeting and have been for decades. Global births peaked in 2016 and the world's TFR is about to fall below replacement. That the global population will shrink significantly is mathematically certain.

The second part is stronger (at least the 'absolute' part if not the 'relative' part), but seems very unlikely to me.

However, we weren't discussing whether or not the average human will be poorer in 2100 than they are now. The discussion was about the 'malicious, intelligent, competent agents'. Who are these agents? Where is your evidence for their existence and motives? What would you accept as falsification of these claims?

And I think I was pretty clear that I sneer at your summary of my views as a strawman. As for what I would accept as falsification, it is simple. Flourishing of common people, rather than death and immiseration. No pods, no bugs, no fifteen minutes cages.

Well, we don't live in pods, nor do we eat bugs. I'm not sure how being able to walk to work counts as a 'cage' but whatever. Falsified, I guess?

But you haven't answered the key question. Who are these malicious actors? What evidence do you have for their exitence or motives?

Why is it consistently missed that this is my prediction for the future? Yes, we don't. We will. Unless we die, or I'm wrong.

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Another C.S. Lewis apologist in the house?

C.S. Lewis apologists generally don't believe the only escape is death.

You did not approve the filtered comment you're replying to, nice moderation there.

Reacting to the shadow on the cave wall, I don't hold Lewis, or any other religionist, in any esteem at all. He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.

We can't control who gets filtered, and the only sign in the new-comment feed that someone is filtered is a small, greyed-out icon. We try to unfilter them as soon as possible, but it's easy to miss and sometimes we do.

He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.

Among his many other virtues, his prediction of the trajectory of the sexual revolution was pretty on-point as well.

Don't be a dick.

When we (mods) read comments on the main page, and not by looking in the comments filter, it's not always obvious that a comment we're replying to is currently in the new-user filter and thus not visible to anyone else.

I'm confused. Did Epohon advocate for death as an answer to a question or did he use the term "bulversim"? Why not both?

So the term which is common in political discussions is his invention. Two good things about him, then. Hitler invented autobahns or something.

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