RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who is already horrified that "hand off power to AI Overlords, ever" is even an option on the table. No, actually, if we're in a fantasy realm where we manage to control AI growth so that it gets stuck on the super-but-still-human-level-genius, I'd actually prefer for us to just ... stay there. That doesn't mean that it can't grow, just that we don't allow it to grow faster than the speed at which we are increasing human intelligence. I don't want to live, or my children for that matter, in a human zoo under the thumb of incomprehensibly smart AI Overlord irrespective of how nice those Overlords are. Period. At that point, we might as well go extinct for all I care; We already don't matter anymore anyway.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
4d ago
We're literally talking about theoretical civilizations far beyond our tech level, though. If you think speculation is pointless that's your prerogative, but limiting oneself to current "boring" understanding makes as much sense as, say, upon hearing of the possible existence of snakes for the first time, presupposing they must be bi- or quad-pods, since all the mammals you have seen so far are.
It seems absolutely physically implausible, and the possible properties of a synthetic supernova are barely even conjecture. If pigs could fly, stars could be blown up on demand, and that would surely be very impressive.
No offense, but your opinion (let alone level of confidence) goes, ironically, against our current understanding. After double-checking with google and AI, current consensus from theoretical astrophysicists seems to be that it is probably possible to trigger a supernova, but we don't know a practical way to achieve it. In addition, most scientists neither believe we know all possible types of natural supernovae, certainly not completely different unnatural possibilities. Which stacks the deck in favor of "probably possible in some fashion" further.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
4d ago
It doesn't seem physically implausible for a supernova to be triggerable by targeting the star in some fashion. Such an "unnatural" supernova could even be more destructive than a regular one, and regular supernova can already be dangerous to life in nearby solar systems.
Then there's stuff like nanites that can just scourge arbitrary areas, etc.
I agree it may be impossible, but it's really hard to tell with our still rather limited understanding (and, arguably, intelligence).
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
4d ago
If I remember correctly, the canonical dark forest theory assumes an attack on the scale of supernovae or larger, eradicating entire solar systems anyway.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
FWIW, I've had the situation where I was deep in a thread in a back-and-forth with someone, and then upon checking on it later, I find that someone downvoted every post of the other guy, but did NOT upvote mine, giving the impression that I did the downvoting. If I see that, I'll usually upvote the other guy afterwards, but you need to notice it in the first place.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
I'll also add my two cents that I've always felt like I'm supposed to enjoy FF games due to their genre, extensive worldbuilding and high production quality, but for the most part always stopped playing them somewhere in the middle due to the combat system. It always gives the superficial illusion of difficulty and diversity but is in practice gimmicky and one-dimensional. FF7 was no exception.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
I hate Platner and would not be surprised if he really did, but Democrats somehow manage to drum up convenient rape allegations against just about everyone the moment they become inconvenient. The allegation itself is just yet another he-said-she-said, and as far as I can see, the "she-said"-part is not even incompatible with both getting drunk and not communicating well.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
ER is good, but it's functionally DS4. If you haven't played DS2-3, you can get those first instead.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
10d ago
I'm still in camp bowling alone. The trend clearly started far earlier, and in most western countries the TFR was already far below replacement before smartphones even existed.
That said, the bowling alone thesis is not at all at odds with the smartphones thesis. The point is very simple: Thanks to material progress, we depend ever less on each other. Thanks to entertainment tech, we can have ever more fun alone, without any friction or any need to compromise. Then we get systemic changes, like pensions, which moved your personal obligation to either create or find a heir to be taken care of in old age, to instead an impersonal system that implicitly penalizes having children. It doesn't exactly take a genius to realize that a system which impersonally provides everything for everyone will probably be more lonely than one which requires you to work together just to get by.
I'm not saying we need to burn it all down or whatever, but we need to think more realistic in terms of trade-offs.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
11d ago
Usually I take the other side in this debate, but I think there really is such a thing as a victimisation crisis. It's true that it's both predictable and depressing that the left is only capable of seeing it through this lens now that men are both complaining the way other groups do and now that there is more-or-less incontrovertible evidence that they're getting shafted.
But it's really, genuinely bad for a society when everyone sees everything in a oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, and even worse when we have some many different axis of oppression that just about anyone can claim victimhood and be sorta kinda right.
A society is imo working best if it is primarily centered around rewarding production or else giving a basic safety net and claims of victimhood are frowned upon and need a high burden of proof. A victimhood culture invariably creates competition around being victimized, which has awful incentives.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
13d ago
FWIW, germans are also ultra-careful with cars and get easily angered by even the tiniest scratch, which, in their view, needs to get removed ASAP and the guilty party has to pay for it no matter how disproportionate the cost/benefit ratio. It's just what you do.
That said, touching another car is I think considered merely careless and if no scratch results, there is no problem. But I wouldn't be terribly surprised that some boomers would start loudly complaining. Again, it's just what they do.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
14d ago
I don't perfectly remember the discussion since it was just some talking while simultaneously looking after our respective kids, but I think his intention was something like this: Asylum seekers get direct access to the job market from day one and some modest welfare. As time passes and they don't find work by themselves, they get reduced welfare and increasingly pushed into shitty jobs with shitty pay. Some % will still not start working and at some point they get shuffled into obligatory state organized work with minimal welfare. I told him this is basically work camps, he bit the bullet and said yes, he would support work camps if he gets unlimited asylum rights in return. And then elaborated roughly as I explained, that work camps are better than turning away asylum seekers at the border etc.
Yeah, I also was quite surprised when I found out that one of my most stridently left-wing friend, a palestine supporter no less, is in favor of work camps for asylum seekers. His logic is simple: War is horrible. ANYTHING is better than war. However, we can't even afford our current asylum scheme due to excessive burden from welfare. Turning away asylum seekers is in his opinion horribly unethical no matter what, and any kind of basic sanity check has an intolerably high false positive rate (for example, anything that requires an ID punishes people who may have lost them while fleeing, while ironically being easier to produce for pure economic immigrants who can organize their move as they want). So the conclusion is straightforward, better to let them live in shitty conditions and force them to work than abandoning them.
It's pretty internally consistent, and not entirely unreasonable imo. As the economy and the social situation in Europe gets worse, I think we will see an increase in this style of tough-minded leftist thought. I don't really trust them to not devolve fully into communist-style totalitarianism, though, so it's not something I'm looking forward to.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
14d ago
I've shortly talked about my experience with relationship counselling here. I'll agree with everyone that finding the correct person is by the most important, though I disagree somewhat on the gender. Most important is imo age (they should be older), personal life (they should be in a successful relationship with kids) and political leaning (specifically, as little noticeable as possible).
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
17d ago
FWIW, I also instantly clocked it as at least partially AI writing. Though I agree that it looks mostly like someone using AI as a helper as opposed to full AI, which is fine by me.
As an example this sentence and the follow-up: "So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are: ..." This sounds exactly like what Chatgpt would write when I ask it to give me counterarguments to some random idea I had.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
18d ago
If a player is always really noticeably stoked before games but one time he isn't, what does it say? The problem imo isn't information, it's incentives. Betting for your own team has good incentives, betting against your own team has horrible incentives. There may still be an argument to outlaw the former as well and give him a slap on the wrist, but treating them as if they are even in the same ballpark makes no sense.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
19d ago
That's not quite what I mean; Asian women are naturally more neotenous, so once you spend enough time with them, this just becomes normal to you. European women are naturally less neotenous, but this also feels normal if that's what you're used to. The uncanny aspect comes from combining both in a way that doesn't work naturally. Though I agree that it's sometimes not just combining them, but outright turbocharging it.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
19d ago
It's a korean game though. Asians already are more neotenous than caucasians on average, and the women even moreso. Back from when I was doing my PhD, my supervisor was a tiny asian women in her 30s who easily could pass as underage. She sometimes had problems ordering beer at the pub for us. Several of the other PhDs were also asian girls in their 20s and some of them looked downright pre-pubescent when judged by european standards. Once you internalize this, the uncanny aesthetics of animes, chans, asian videogames etc. imo make a lot more sense: It's basically a projection of what european women would look like if they were as neotenous as asian women + some minor other asian characteristics often considered attractive. Basically combining all attractive features of european and asian women into one person, as judged by asian men.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
21d ago
First, barbarians doing barbarian things has always been the case. You can read up on plenty of stories of this or that place getting ravaged by this or that tribe, which frequently has some kind of relationship with Rome that would nominally require them to not do so. Frequently they even plundered other roman allies. The reasons varied, both for why the tribe was doing it and also why Rome was tolerating it.
Second, if Rome really wanted to make sure that the allies kept the promise, they'd in fact have to crack down on them regularly, or at least threaten to do so. Can you imagine the US invading Israel and going all decimatio? No? Then don't expect them to feel bound by a piece of paper they didn't even sign.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
24d ago
I do have one friend who is some kind of commodity trader and who considers finance at least occasionally negative-sum. He's mentioned examples like, wars have been good for his business, and some financial instruments and the way they are used are in his opinion clearly designed for extraction as opposed to efficient allocation.
And this is at least for me the main worry: Finance is simultaneously complicated and opaque as well as important enough that it seems to me trivially easy for them to just become an extractive middlemen, and even if the state attempts to plug loopholes, they'll probably always be a step ahead. Needless to say, I consider the state itself the same kind of problematic extractive middlemen, which means they are in practice natural partners in crime instead.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
25d ago
If I were Ukrainian I would be much more concerned about being forcibly bussed to the frontline where I might very likely die to a drone
Any system that wants to survive will occasionally need to defend itself. Doing that entirely through voluntary service has extremely bad incentives & selection effects - you sacrifice your strongest supporters, who die for the benefit of precisely those people not willing to defend the system. Conscription for everyone solves this issue. It's ugly, but makes sense. The only workable alternative I can see is highly prestigious and well-paid elite military service, but that is not nearly enough in an existential crisis.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
25d ago
... yes? That seems like a very reasonable minimum expectation. This is insanely dystopian, imagine being forcibly conscripted, then your gf just goes away and gets a new bf somewhere else, and everyone you talk about this to just goes "Well, what should she do, have no sex?". And it happens at scale.
This is complete insanity to me, men are expected to literally sacrifice their life for their country if needed, and having even the most tepid minimum expectation for young women is considered unacceptable. And then people are surprised that many modern men refuse military service.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
26d ago
Disagree. Teaching currently sucks pretty hard because of culture. Students come in with a mindset that they deserve whatever degree they're going for, and it's your job to get them there. The university admin doesn't care about standards, they just want you to pass as many students as possible bc it's pure $ for them. Politics is still dominated by boomers who believe that more years of education automatically means people get smarter. As a teacher, absolutely every incentive pushes you towards just passing everyone while barely even bothering to go through the motions. Which makes the students become even more cynical & entitled: If even plenty of the teachers clearly don't care, why should they?
Likewise, it's pretty hard to miss this development, so the opinion of teaching among faculty goes down. Less people WANT to do teaching, so the only ones doing it are those who get it pushed unto them, which further erodes the quality of the teaching.
It's a pretty impossible doom-loop consuming the universities. The only exception are electives, which are organized by genuine researchers for the purpose of selection, which means that they actually have an incentive to care about standards.
The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
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