instead blame America for provoking Iran into doing it
Because America did.
Many parties were consulted -- Israel and the Gulf states.
I'm sure. Israel is the only ally America actually treats like an ally.
As far as I'm aware, the Gulf states were not consulted and were previously against war with Iran, though they are now more worried about Trump pulling out than keeping going. "AP reports that Gulf leaders have become discontent with the United States’ handling of the conflict and have expressed anger over the absence of prior notice of the operation."
You know who else makes the stuff Iran makes to keep your civilization alive? Russia. It's OK to get into fights there, apparently.
I don't think that. I'm British. The chances of Russia getting anywhere near threatening us are tiny, whereas the economic shock from the American-led sanctions crippled our economy for the foreseeable future. I'm not going to argue that we were doing well before that, but I saw the change from being a rich-ish country to a poor one in real time. We are now simply incapable of meaningfully militarising.
When it comes right down to it, America is the one who went in and started killing people and blowing things up. Without consulting anyone, without giving a shit about the rest of the world, Trump just decided 'I'mma kill these guys now.' Months after he made noises about attacking Europe to steal Greenland.
America isn't going to keep the seas safe on its own.
In my lived experience as of this month, the safest thing for the seas is for America to stay far, far away from the Middle East, or at least to give Trump some sleepy pills.
It's not that I don't get what you're saying, it's just that this is after a barrage of contempt and thoughtlessness from America and I'm tired of being friends with the big aggressive guy who keeps getting into fights with the people who make the stuff my civilisation needs to stay alive. The massive cope that it's secretly some kind of 4D chess to teach us a lesson makes it 10x worse. If America were actually in really serious trouble as a result of outside aggression, we would do what we could to help our ally if asked, and I hope the reverse is also true. But right now Europe is in very serious difficulties that can't be overcome by just 'getting a clue', we need time and space to find the will and the means to recover, and being friends with America is giving us the opposite of that. I'm quite happy to kiss and make up with Iran, and get some oil in return, and I don't see what UK interests are threatened by that.
In general, we would prefer to get American 'help' when we ask for it. As a wise man once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
I see high dose or regular usage of psychedelics as carrying an unavoidable risk of both causing a sudden snap and also a risk of "opening" your mind to a degree that I'd rather prefer not to open, mostly due to the risk of my brain falling out.
No argument there. I toyed with the idea of taking psychedelics but didn't because I've been blessed with a fairly good brain and it's about the only advantage I've got, plus looking at most shroom-takers gives the impression that most psychedelics seem to produce the experience of profundity without the real thing. That said, I don't get the impression that it's a one-way slippery slide to madness for most people, more "Pacifist gets in a couple of fights and learns they aren't much fun but there are worse things and gets a bit of confidence".
I don't want to relitigate the usual atheism-religion debates, but if you want to explain what made you change your mind, I'm genuinely curious and want to hear it out.
My thoughts on religion will disappoint you, I suspect. Broadly, I was working in a prestigious research job & field in my mid-twenties and a few crises of faith came to a head simultaneously:
- I had been a globalist, pro-immigration, feminist and pro-LGBT (by my standard) Gray Triber. The experience of deindustrialisation, bake-the-cake-bigot LGBT activism, white-male-tears feminism and the immediately-pre-Brexit political environment made it clear to me that I had been very wrong about where these movements were going and about the social and economic consequences of the actions I had supported.
- Without going into too much detail about where I was and what I was doing, I had a good chance to come into contact with some of the brightest minds in the country, including several leading Rationalists/Transhumanists, and they were kooky as hell. One told me breathlessly that the universe was made of math. Not 'described by', literally made from. Many others were simulationists. There was also a consensus that we were not conscious and that free will did not exist, which charitably did not seem true from my personal experience, and also that the proper goal of all our work was to recreate the world such that all carnivores could be replaced by herbivores, thus ending all suffering. Without exception, they regarded themselves as cold, clear-eyed realists, but the only genuine non-kooks were the ones who just downloaded the latest Good Person memes directly into their brain and never thought at all. In short, it seemed clear to me that Rationalism and Transhumanism had very little to do with rational thought as I defined it.
- Research, especially in more rigorous fields, is not like other kinds of work. Over and over and over again you have the experience of believing something about the world, coming up with an experiment that you really believe from the bottom of your heart should work, and finding out that you were wrong and the world just isn't what you thought it is. You also get to see your professors, the top people in their fields, be wildly wrong and deluded and totally unable to see it. You also also get to see and experience first hand how much of 'The Science' is the result of a student being told by a delusional professor that they need to prove X or the funding will dry up, and doing whatever they can to prove X while still being able to sleep at night.
- I studied moral philosophies, mostly Stoicism and Existentialism, and found them mostly helpful in terms of describing 'how' to live but with a vast chasm where the 'why' was. "Because I choose to," is a deepity. When you are actually looking for an answer, there's nothing there except childish just-so stories for Stoicism and literally nothing for Existentialism.
In short, all of the old gods I had worshiped were broadly dismantled in front of my eyes. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that meeting top Rationalists and finding they were nutters proves that all Rationalists are, or that there is nothing good in Rationality. Nor am I now unable to believe anything published in a scientific paper, or any such nonsense.
But.
I was no longer able to treat the things I had believed as being obviously true. Looking at them from the outside, as instantiated in people I didn't much like, tracing them through the historical record, seeing why people came to believe them, it was much easier to see that (in my opinion) they were largely self-coherent belief structures that had become accepted for often-contingent reasons and sometimes had fairly clearly delineated bounds. For example, empirical science is definitionally limited to the material world, and more practically its effectiveness seems to be limited to broadly the 'hard' sciences where observations made about the system don't affect the system (excluding things like social sciences) and you can design valid small experiments without excluding the vast majority of relevant factors (so big chunks of stuff like nutrition, behaviour, politics, economics etc. are also out).
I read some theoretical physics, I read some CS Lewis, I talked to various people and eventually I decided that if there was no one belief system that was obviously correct, then ultimately it came down to my choice. And if it was my choice, I decided to choose a belief system that produced the kind of people and things I liked as opposed to ones who gave me the creeps, might get me a girlfriend with the same kind of preferences, and gave me hope instead of existentialist depression.
In the end I never did 'find God', I just chose to hope that the churchy people were right. In one sense there's nothing rational about it, in another sense looking at my options and choosing the best I could see feels like the most rational thing I could have done. I certainly don't regret it.
It seems to me like a pretty good shot that there's something very broadly God-ish out there - the world came from somewhere and all of the theoretical physics doesn't give any more plausible answer AFAIK - but there's nothing to say that He/She/It is still around or has anything to do with Christianity. I hope that one day God Himself will stop by and give me the good news in person, but otherwise I'm just choosing to have hope and live this way. My experience has been that the Catholics are right and that turning up to Mass every Sunday does a lot more for one's faith than sitting in one's bedroom and fretting. It's just group psychology, yes, but what could be more rational than using psychology to hack your way into a happier and more pro-social mindset, when the alternative is IMO worse and doesn't even manage to be rational?
Like I said, you'll probably find this disappointing. There's not really an argument there, let alone hard apologetics. (Most but not all apologetics is pretty terrible and written to make believers feel smug and clever. I'm going to classes for Confirmation now and they're awful.) But that's what happened, as well as I can write it.
Corvos
2hr ago
Also true. Humans like natural, fractal patterns. I'd like to make a 'living' ubuntu desktop where all your windows are carved in foliate / acanthus patterns.
A month ago, Europe had an energy problem. Now, thanks to America going in without even the slightest thought for the rest of the world and setting fire to everything, we have a looming energy catastrophe.
OP is arguing that this is good, akshually. I think not. Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. Even most Americans didn’t want this!
I am prepared to believe that America has a 50 year feud against Iran after the hostage crisis, but somebody who thoughtlessly gets in fights and wrecks all your stuff is not a good friend and him saying, “well, why’d you put your stuff there?,” afterwards will not make him so.
Corvos
3hr ago
Because there's so much of it, I guess, and you have enough room that houses can be spaced apart and fire doesn't spread. The Nordics and the Swiss do it too, in the countryside.
Corvos
5hr ago
There is an assumption here, that if the EU hurts more than the US from this, then the US "wins". I would think, that if both sides suffer otherwise avoidable losses without directly gaining anything in return (the idea that the EU would become more aligned with America from this is uncertain to say the least), then both have lost. The populations of both are worse off than they otherwise would have been, and their standing relative to other powers (Russia and China) has weakened considerably. And this is assuming there are sides to begin with. The very notion assumes an adversarial relationship between the EU and the US. Something that has largely not been the case before Trump.
Precisely. Personally, reading this comment makes me want to ally with China. "Ha! I burned down your house! That'll teach you not to build with wood!" is not the kind of relationship with my hegemon that I want.
What software/framework are you using for creating/orchestrating agent systems? I tried smolagents for a while but my results were clearly less good than just formatting my query nicely and giving it to a normal LLM.
Enough people I trust are getting good results with agents that I want to look into it more, but would very much appreciate any advice you can give.
Corvos
11hr ago
It’s given us some pretty good usernames, though :) I liked @FarNearEverywhere.
Corvos
21hr ago
You may well be right, but FWIW there is a lot of genuine respect for Poles from other countries that maybe wasn’t there before. Not just militarily, they’re often seen as very serious, very capable people who’ve known real hardship and don’t get fooled by trivial griping. One of the best engineers I knew was Polish.
Corvos
1d ago
FWIW the easiest two ways to get replies are:
- end your post with a question
- post something that is mildly controversial
You wouldn’t be able to get an actually woke person to agree with any of that prescription, though.
I don’t think it’s stable to build a society on top of true believers and then expect them to stay docile and go along with the kayfabe.
Same is true on the right. Attempting to appeal to right-wingers in the UK whilst clearly acting against their desires and their self-perceived interests has destroyed the 200 year old Tory party only five years after they got a genuine landslide.
Corvos
1d ago
Really depended on where you were. I was at a university and it was stifling. Militants took over my student union and made seats for every minority under the sun until they outnumbered representatives of actual students, and anyone who objected was unpersoned. There were the ‘how not to be a Taoist’ (really, Apple?) workshops. The endless complaints from female colleagues about all the white men they had to put up with, apparently oblivious to my gender and skin colour. The girl who went trans, putting me at serious risk of being thrown out if I ever forgot myself and used ‘she’ for the squeaky voiced 5ft ‘man’ sitting next to me. The manager at my first tech job who hinted that I hadn’t been promoted because of my failure to give sufficiently woke answers to an HR training quiz.
Above all there was just the fear. The knowledge that if you put a single foot wrong you were dead, a decade of university and research work just done in the blink of an eye.
It was bad. I’m glad it was better for you.
Corvos
2d ago
Interesting. It's not at all what I heard from my father who is big on the Wine Society but admittedly less pedigreed. His contention was that price still pretty much equals taste since so many people take an interest in these things and the feedback is strong. Personally I can't say either way. My experience has fitted with the scale I gave you but that's maybe just the marketing. I'll try and look into it some more.
Corvos
2d ago
The contention is that:
- being inclined towards hard work
- being able to sustain doing hard work
- being able to get an output from that hard work that justifies it
are not actually factors under your control. In short you cannot "choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work". You are or you aren't, depending on genetics and early life and other stuff that you can't toggle on and off.
Not entirely sure this is true, I've veered both ways.
Makes it less cutting, at least. I know I'm not a Duke, all I have to do is look out of the window at the huge lack-of-tracts-o-land...
it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.
Do you think so? I was always under the impression that it was broadly an inverse-log:
- under 10GBP is going to be awful unless you select very carefully, and even then the result is going to be petrol-ly
- 10-20 is perfectly acceptable
- 40-50 is very nice, actually interesting enough to reward shutting up for a bit and paying attention to the wine. I got 50 GBP Chateauneuf du Pape for the family for Christmas.
- 100 is going to be good and really special and worth paying attention to and remembering
- greater than 100 and you're really wasting the extra money unless you have a very refined and educated palate, and even then I suspect the enjoyment is going to be broadly intellectual
I've been given the super-duper nice wine before and it was indeed lovely, especially when it was set up as part of a proper tasting and you were told what to look for, but I'd never consider it worth the money for my own table unless I was replacing what I took out of the family cellar (alas, this is true money territory) or deliberately showing off for some unfathomable reason.
I'd think the old me was, in an important sense, partly dead. Not fully dead. That option beats true psychosis and definitely beats real death.
FWIW as a former atheist transhumanist and having had it happen to me, that's really not how it feels. I used to believe some stuff, now I'm more doubtful about that stuff and prepared to believe some other stuff. I'm sure you've changed your mind on other things before, it doesn't feel any different from that.
Identifying with a very particular memeset* about the nature of the universe and your place in it so strongly that you cannot conceive of a version of you who believes something different and is still you is a little unhealthy, I think. It can produce a rather clenched-up and self-protecting attitude towards the world (not in a Freudian sense!), and a set attitude of rejection towards trying things that could turn out to be growth or at worst short-lived and mildly-embarrassing fads.
In short there are worse things in the world than letting yourself try a little woo, especially since IMO transhumanism as it actually exists in the world already contains plenty of woo that is made more dangerous by the appearance of being cold and rational.
Disclaimer: none of this is an attempt to convert you to my religion, or any religion. That's not my place, for many reasons. In any case, please forgive me if I have overstepped.
*I refer to transhumanism and more specifically to the very particular pride that comes with thinking, "I am smart enough to see the world like it really is and brave enough to take it head-on without the lies other people tell themselves, and one day we'll fix all the stuff that's rubbish about it."
Glad to meet a like-minded (lesser) gentleman, haha.
FWIW I think 'lesser' is doing a lot of work here, the only people I've come into contact with who seemed to have the 'furniture' attitude in modern times were on the order of a Duke. Most people below that take some interest in the help, although perhaps with varying levels of performativity and enthusiasm.
Corvos
2d ago
"Are you planning to help me?"
"YES."
"When, exactly?"
"ER. WHEN THE PAIN IS TOO GREAT TO BEAR."
"..."
"I REALISE THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER YOU WERE HOPING FOR."
RIP Terry Pratchett.
Corvos
2d ago
They gated ‘queue next video’ and ‘play in window’ as premium features too. Netflix gates the latter even if you are a paying customer on the lower tier.
No idea. Personally, I think it's both a fait accompli and very much not my problem. Sooner or later every country that can will have nukes, because it's the only way to make sure that people like Trump don't roll over you. This invasion may have pushed Iran nuclear weapons back 10 years, 20 years, or maybe not, but between them America and Russia have guaranteed that in a hundred years there will be nukes all over IMO.
Believe what you like, but I believe we'd do what we could in good faith. If 'what we can' isn't enough for you, please stop crashing our economy.
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