fishtwanger
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
14hr ago
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
fishtwanger
1d ago
fishtwanger
1d ago
I think @JTarrou called it a year ago - Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. After he goes down, every future populist leader will know what's waiting for them.
fishtwanger
1d ago
Do you think Virginia's non-consecutive-governor rule has an effect on their ability to make lasting change?
fishtwanger
2d ago
Together they fight crime?
fishtwanger
4d ago
There's at least some text from big names in the github from the TotsNotBlueTriberJustUsingTheirAssumptions, and not much explicit red triber, but that doesn't exclude the porque no los dos.
I was vaguely assuming that the Red tribe didn't want to paint targets on themselves, that this particular clan of the Blue tribe is addicted to their word-salad obfuscatory approach, and that the Grey tribe is genuinely upset about the corruption of the process. (For versions of R/B/G that are closer to conservative/leftist/liberal.)
For whatever reason, most of them seemed to feel it in their interests to frame the conflict as about moderation policies and formal structure. The quote about hypocrisy being "the tribute that vice pays to virtue" came to mind when forcing my way through some of the tortured language used by the mod team and their supporters. Also something Tolkien said about evil not being able to create, only twist.
fishtwanger
4d ago
Given the timeframe you're looking at, it's probably not this ACX article, "Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade", but that has a link to "Respectability Cascades", which might be it?
Yeah, it's strange. I got curious, so I decided to poke around in some of the links gattsuru provided. There's talk about toxic governance, but very few specifics. And I've seen stuff like that, and I know it can be hard to make a truthful list that would convince an outsider. But still, it feels weak, a lot of words talking around issues, from people who can't or won't come to a point.
One part, about banning one person (JR), seemed to be a controversy over whether a defense contractor (Anduril) should be allowed to sponsor the project, with the losing faction being "NATO defense contractors are what prevent Russia from conquering Ukraine and the rest of the world", and the winning faction being "defense contractors kill people and are icky and we don't want their name near us" (various positions were put forth, but I can't come up with a coherent charitable interpretation). One thing that jumped out was that the mere fact of his applying to become a Board observer was treated as a problem. And what really got my attention were the comments by people speaking in support of him that were "flagged by the community and temporarily hidden".
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from-github/44114
That led back to this earlier thread (also linked to by gattsuru) where JR was opposed to reserving a board seat for a woman. The conversation went as expected, these days: he's out of step with the progressive majority.
And those led to this Reddit post, where JR says goodbye in a fairly professional manner:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_unable_to_return_wish_you_all_the_best/
But the Reddit comments had links to a bunch of stuff, including this (somewhat overheated) explanation, which is solidly culture war, and which apparently got the authors banned immediately:
https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_evidences_experiences.md
And then this bit of aftermath, again mostly notable for the attitude of the moderators and the content of the flagged comments:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/delroths-muting-in-the-moderation-matrix-room/44090
I still can't figure out what side of the culture war the people fleeing the project are on, and that's probably intentional.
fishtwanger
5d ago
This all looks too pessimistic. Perhaps some of that is due to the politics involved; if some moron in some government declares that we'll switch over to artificial meat by 2030, yeah, this seems like a realistic picture of the problems. And lot of the vatshit spewed by the companies seemed like it was an attempt at extracting money from activists, progressives, and progressive-controlled governments. I agree that this field is unlikely to make anyone rich in a non-graft-related way, any time soon.
If we take politics out of the mix, we're still in the early stages. Of course this stuff will have to be grown in sealed containers, from clean ingredients, and the more the process can be automated, the better. But we're barely at a point where we get good reliable results, let alone at a point where we can think about ramping it up to industrial scale. If R&D has a chance to refine the process, maybe it'll pan out eventually. But if there's political pressure, then I bet it will fail spectacularly, and maybe give the entire field a bad name for years to come.
fishtwanger
7d ago
Don't worry, I know the nutters are real. It's just that I'm going to have to try hard to not get carried away with this cool new explanation that you provided. :-)
fishtwanger
8d ago
Around a decade ago I saw a report that some research group had produced vat-grown ground beef, and made a burger. At the time, the theoretical cost was $50 per burger, and it apparently tasted mediocre. But I have hope that America's engine of innovation (given time and effort and lack of government regulation) will improve quality and bring down prices until it's competitive. One of these decades. crosses fingers
fishtwanger
8d ago
I'll file this away as an unconfirmable theory, then. :-)
fishtwanger
8d ago
I... was making a joke about the problem of getting new members to this forum, if we're deliberately not making it easy to join.
But OK, if we can get the makers of virtual boyfriend (or girlfriend) app to insert hypnotic suggestions to follow the "Courtesy" rules in the sidebar, that'd be a major win for humanity. Heck, even "don't be egregiously obnoxious" would go a long way toward making the Internet usable again.
fishtwanger
8d ago
What aspects of linguistics interest you? I'm afraid I don't have much advice for how to get into it as a hobby, but maybe some of this will help. Overall, my main recommendation would be to start learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, in parallel with whatever else you try. No matter what you wind up doing, being familiar with IPA will probably help you later. And it can be fun (or frustrating) to try to make all the funny mouth noises at will.
You don't mention books, but if you did, I'd recommend starting with John McWhorter, who also does the podcast "Lexicon Valley". He's probably best known here for his political commentary, but he's also a linguist (studying creoles, which are super cool), and is a shining counterexample to the depressing trend of linguistics professors being bad writers.
You might check out the Language Log blog, which is by a couple of linguistics professors who mostly post random linguistics-related things they find interesting. The most prolific of them specializes in Chinese, so that's a focus, but you can search through the archives and probably find a few entries on just about anything. If you poke around and find yourself fascinated by something, that's a good sign!
From an academic perspective, I'd tend to divide linguistics into a few categories. First, there's the core disciplines, things like phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These are usually a combination of describing how languages work at that level (as best we can), and the Chomskyan project of uncovering the underlying structure in the brain. This latter aspect should currently be going through some serious upsets, with the new ability of LLMs to generate language, and I wonder whether it'll even be a going concern in 20 years. (Also, sign languages are an important variant to consider, being fully formed languages themselves.)
There's also historical linguistics, which was the focus of the field before Noam Chomsky came along. This is stuff like reconstructing proto-Indo-European, and untangling changes in non-Indo-European languages. It's almost like a puzzle, except you're often missing half the pieces.
There's specializations and extensions of linguistics into other fields, like linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics (I love this, despite having to deal with sociology), child language acquisition, language formation, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, and so forth.
And there's field research. All the other fields require data, but this is where data comes from. The most prominent type is going off into the middle of nowhere (often Papua New Guinea) and spending 3 or so years documenting the language (and culture, etc.) of an isolated tribe of people before their language and culture dies out completely. But it can also involve stuff like finding examples for the Oxford English Dictionary, or working on an OED equivalent for another language. Linguistics has been dominated by English speakers for the last half century or so, and by Europeans before that, so there's almost certainly good work that can be done by anyone in a different part of the world.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind as a description of the field, from my experience a few decades ago.
fishtwanger
9d ago
Last I heard, that was the generally accepted theory, but like pretty much everything in linguistics, it's always being poked at.
fishtwanger
9d ago
and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.
Oh, that's where this comes from! I've seen Chinese people complaining about this, but I never understood why it was a thing that the Koreans did, and it always struck me as bizarre.
fishtwanger
9d ago
Yes, moral foundations theory. It's not the most grounded theory, because the foundations were largely eyeballed from initial data and then expanded based on feedback and discussion, instead of being chosen by some sort of factor analysis. And if someone does enough research on this to put it on solid ground, "three" and "six" are probably not what the result will be. But they're good enough for a shorthand.
The original book is interesting. It's dated, because it came out shortly before SJ hit, and it didn't anticipate SJ at all. But it's prophetic, because its thesis explains exactly why SJ is the way it is. And then there's the last section, which isn't talked about much, but which strikes directly at the heart of the rationalist project. It suggests that our capacity for rational thought is actually a capacity for rationalization and rhetoric, evolved to help us form strong coalitions with other humans, to help in intergroup competition. And that it's entirely incidental that this also happens to allow us to think rationally about the world, although it might be inevitable (as long as the simplest model is also correct). Which has some implications about LLMs, too.
fishtwanger
9d ago
It reminds me of the theory that young children form a creole language based on an adult pidgin.
fishtwanger
10d ago
In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation),
To poke slightly at this one aspect: perhaps the movement started in the 90s and early 00s with adult 3-foundationers, but because of institutional capture, a generation of 6-foundationer children grew up influenced by this ideology (instead of the more natural-to-them 6-foundation traditional conservatism), and they fleshed it out into a full 6-foundation system of its own.
fishtwanger
10d ago
Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
I can't say about Korea, but in China there's a whole Thing about buying houses, and who pays, and who owns it in the marriage, and who gets it in the divorce. It's like someone took America, realized that we're all sappy romantic meme-infected morons, and solved for the equilibrium. Which turns out to be a ruthless financial battle of the sexes.
If Korea has gone further down the Neo-Confucian gender-role rabbit-hole than China, combined with the same Western personal freedom as long as you don't marry, no wonder it's such a nightmare.
fishtwanger
10d ago
Where do I even go in 10 years?
We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).
I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.
But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.
fishtwanger
10d ago
You seem to be reacting very strongly to something, and I'm not entirely sure what, but we might be closer than you think.
By "nature documentary", I mean that although we happen to be following one little fellow around with our camera, and building audience identification with him, the choice of subject is either largely arbitrary, or selected after-the-fact when we know who gets a result we're interested in. But there's many of these potential subjects operating at any given time, with various degrees of success. If we only follow the stories of young stags who win the mating contest, or successful leaders of movements, or successful startup founders, we don't get a complete picture of the lifecycle, and can fool ourselves into mis-attributing the amounts of ability, tenacity, opportunism, and luck that are required for success. And to the degree that the OP's goal is building a theory of what happens, I think it's important to look at all the angles.
But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.
On the one hand, at the level of the individual, of course there's free choice going on. But on the other hand, from the perspective of the potential organizer, it's all statistics, at least after the first few dozen people, and setting aside "whales" or important benefactors. It's treating the people as just another natural resource lying around, under-exploited, like an oilfield or an ocean or a bunch of horny dudes. Individual horny dudes obviously make choices about whether and where to spend money on naked Internet girls, but to the naked Internet girls they're a non-uniform resource which gets exploited as appropriate. (Attention being roughly proportional to revenue, as I understand the market dynamics?)
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together.
That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with.
I think this is the core of the misunderstanding? I can see how that looks a lot more naive and idealistic than I meant, and it looks like the mention of Lenin failed to set the tone. A herd of wild cattle is a powerful force, but if you can manage to round them up and brand them, they're all going to be eaten (or otherwise exploited).
To rephrase a bit, I think that when there are a mass of people desiring a particular type of change, that presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to recognize and exploit this unfulfilled desire. It's not always the first who succeed; sometimes later ones will do it better. And the nature of the desire is important, in that the presented "solution" needs to cater to it. I suspect that people who come up with an ideology and then look for converts, are going to be less successful than people who find a group of potential converts and then come up with an ideology that makes them want to join (Hitler's path, IMO, although he was a part of the group himself), or people who just start improvising and don't care what they say as long as it gets crowds to cheer their name (Trump's path, IMO). Marxism is something of an exceptional case, but I think this model can cover it.
I haven't read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", but from what I've seen, it describes that middle approach (the Hitler one). Sure, it talks about doing everything to help "the poor", but ultimately it's about constructing an organization with yourself as a leader, and acquiring power, and the choice of ideology is completely irrelevant. The organizer may even think that they're doing it for the benefit of the people (and it's probably more effective if they do believe this, on some level), but it still boils down to "find an untapped source of power, and build an engine that exploits it", in the sense of a deck-builder card game. On the one hand, I do care about having good cards, but on the other hand, they're just pieces of cardboard that help me win the game. Maybe the solution I propose is "equal pay for equal work", or maybe it's "gas the Jews", whatever gets my power-base motivated. If the leader is just out for power, from a certain perspective there isn't a difference.
Is that sufficiently cynical? :-)
fishtwanger
10d ago
Stage 1 and 2 seem to imply that all movements start with elites, who are not themselves a natural client. I'd prefer a more market-style reading, where the niche exists first, and may be filled with a variety of solutions. But as in a nature documentary, we choose to follow a particular entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that allow them to make money/gain power in the niche. They may not be the only one exploiting the niche, so there may be competition. And they may have found the niche by being part of it themselves, as in Paul Graham's advice to build something you want to use. And there were entrepreneurs before them, and there will be some after them too.
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together. And as Lenin discovered, an ideological vanguard is a great way to do it. And if you want the movement to persist, the mass of people should never actually be satisfied, which was one of those criticisms of consumer capitalism that can easily be repurposed to describe the slippery slope of activism.
fishtwanger
12d ago
This is like a guy who has an old car that barely works, and every time it breaks down he patches it up just enough to keep running again. He doesn't have some hidden Freudian motive about "preferring to not have a reliable car", he'd actually like to have a reliable car, but he can't think beyond the immediate moment. If the car is capable of moving, he gets distracted by Twitter or rebuilding his computer or trying to get a complete set of Michael Whelan covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories, or whatever. Only when smoke actually starts coming out of the hood, or the clicking noise gets too annoying, will he spend a bit of time to tinker with it.
I'd say...
He's T. Gracchus if they manage to keep him out of power this time, and cut his political career off in some way which seems illegitimate to the right. (Which is what I weakly predict, but you're better off listening to the markets than me.)
He's Marius If he becomes President again, and puts it down after 4 years, but keeps being a kingmaker in Republican politics for the rest of his life, hobbling the right wing by his compulsive thirst for publicity/glory.
He's Julius if he becomes President, possibly staying in power more than 4 years, but then gets killed.
He's Octavian if he becomes President and stays in power more than 4 years, and makes it stick. "First Citizen" is too on the nose, but maybe "President Emeritus" would work? The perpetual Putin to the elected Medvedev. Sure, he's a Representative and Speaker of the House, and also a Senator and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and most of the Cabinet, but that's totally normal for the greatest politician ever!
Or it could go some other way. Mostly I think the T. Gracchus resemblance is about what happens next. The next right-wing populist to successfully run for national office will know what they're up against, and if they're smart they'll plan for it. And maybe it's Trump, and he gets to be Marius, too.
(Was January 6 a symbolic journey to the underworld? There was a shaman and a human sacrifice...)
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