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One curious thing I noticed about SBF on the Tyler Cowen podcast is that he had a very odd idea about the St. Petersburg Paradox. At the time, I found myself very much unable to steel man this.
I'll just interject here that to me, this sounds completely insane. For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.
At the time I found this odd. Does SBF not understand Kelly betting? This twitter thread, unearthed from 2 years ago, suggests maybe he doesn't?
https://twitter.com/breakingthemark/status/1591114381508558849
I don't see how he, or Caroline, or the rest of his folks got to where they did without understanding kelly. Pretty sure you don't get to be a junior trader at Jane St. without understanding it.
My best attempt at a steelman is that because he's altruistic, the linear regime of his utility function goes a lot further than for Jeff Bezos or someone else with an expensive car collection. As in, imagine each individual has a sequence of things they can get with diminishing marginal utility - $u_0 > u_1 > ... > u_n > ...$, $u_n \rightarrow 0$ and each thing has unit cost. A greedy gambler has sublinear utility since they first buy u_0, then u_1, etc. By definition, $\sum_{i=0}^N u_i < N u_0$.
But since SBF is buying stuff for everyone, he gets $N u_0$.
Then again, this is still clearly wrong - eventually he runs out of people who don't have $u_0$, and he needs to start buying $u_1$. His utility is still diminishing.
Is there some esoteric branch of decision theory that I'm unfamiliar with - perhaps some strange many worlds interpretation - which suggests this isn't crazy? Is he just an innumerate fraud who truly believes in EA, but didn't understand the math?
I would love any insights the community can share.
I should read usernames more often. I responded to this before reading the username. Leaving it up, but user is perma banned. Do not create usernames like "bigdickpepe1488". They violate our discussion terms. The "bigdickpepe" is poor taste. But the "1488" thing as nazi thing is not ok. I've copied the whole original item because it was creating some good discussion, and this way it will be preserved if they delete their account. Nothing about their actual participation was bad, so I'm fine with them coming back under a different username.I messed up, didn't realize users can change their display name, so a ban is not necessary. Please change the display name.
Is being a nazi banned? Are you not allowed to advocate for the 14 words and Hitlerist National Socialism? If the answer is no to both cases, is it banned to identify your ideological bent in your username?
It seems like a fair request. He was not banned per say. He was given the option of returning under a different username. The vast majority of communities would not do this.
I agree that if this was to be enforced, this is the most light handed and respectful way of doing so. But that's not the topic of my contention. Which pertains to the impetus of the request, especially in light of the moderator comment accompanying it:
Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?
The mod position here is, in my view, just nonsensical. You can be a nazi and argue for the destruction of European jewry, just don't wear the armband when talking about cryptocurrency? Not because nazis are banned... Just because... We don't like people labeling themselves... Even though that's what people have been doing for years...
My point here, if no other, would be that this is an inequal application of the ruleset. You can carry banners, like people have done, you can have your pet issues and mini crusades, like people do, but if your banner is a Swaztika, and if your pet issue is the jews, the mods take extra notice. Compared to topics like, for example, AI, which suffer from all the same issues, there is no similar action.
So, my question following that would be: Why? Why the disparate application of rules? The mods will say something along the lines of 'too much heat' or something else. And my question would be, for who? Who can't handle WotanWolf1488 talking about the housing crisis in Belgium? Who are these users perusing this webspace that need to be protected from '1488'?
In all honesty I don't think they exist. It's just mod bias. They have an aesthetic preference for American 1990's era decorum. There's no justification for it other than that.
Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.
I'm not. Or at least I'm not holding them to a different standard I would hold for anyone that supports, for example, Western hegemony in whatever ideological form it expresses itself. The ideological pretense of peace, freedom and democracy didn't save any of the victims of US foreign policy. No matter how much it was repeated in Western propaganda.
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(Former bigdickpepe1488 here.)
Many ideologies advocate violence. Should we also ban usernames such as "bigtitsactblue" or "BLMPawg" on the grounds that the mainstream American left has actual literal militias threatening political opponents with violence and murdering people in the past few years?
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592288152471109633?cxt=HHwWgoDUwe3o-JgsAAAA https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592073976180019200?cxt=HHwWgMDU5ZO2l5gsAAAA https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/17/blm-louisville-defends-bailing-out-activist-assass/ https://fox11online.com/on-fox-11/pofficers-shot-at-protest-in-dallas-reports
Amusingly, the perpetrator of the one recent attempt at right wing violence also has the flag of leftist militias on his house.
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This is not a coherent concept. All ideologies, including presumably yours and the one that rules the West, are violent by your standard except radical pacifism.
All you're really doing here is unprincipled exception because you see some ideologies are especially repugnant, which is a wholly moral and hence aesthetic statement.
I think the idea is that the Holocaust has permanently tainted Nazi ideology in anglosphere eyes.
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If a poster can't name himself for people who assassinated their opponents, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler. Even if you restricted it to people responsible for a lot of innocent deaths, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler.
OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?
Hitler isn't really famous for assassinations in the first place, but let's try Stalin or Mao. Che Guevara only killed a few hundred, but you'd think that's enough.
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You have some grounds on principle but there also should be some level "obnoxiously poor taste" filter. This is a forum that values the ability for diverse perspectives to come forward productively and attempts to not censor for viewpoint, it is not an absolutist free speech platform. There are probably effortful and yet still glaringly pro nazi usernames that I would be very willing to defend. BigDickPepe1488 is not that username. It is a name that can only be constructed to be maximally obnoxious to some group of people, and the standard here is no more obnoxious than necessary. Being maximally obnoxious to people does not add to the ability for diverse perspectives to come together productively.
I don't disagree, I just don't like people maintaining the pretense of objectivity when it comes to rules and mods when that is simply not the case. And the case is instead that we are collectively adhering to some boomer social justice aesthetics that demonize a 100-year-old political figure ahead of everything else because we've seen a lot about that guy on TV.
It just seems so absurd in relation to how much people like chastising 'conservatism' for being 'progressive-liberalism just 10 years out of date' when the majority of people seem content to play by the exact same 'conservative' ruleset when they are in power.
The Motte, AKA Conservareddit. 10 years out of date.
For what it's worth, I've never claimed our rules are objective. I don't think rules of this sort even can be purely objective, barring someone building a text-parsing AI and defining the rules in terms of the text-parsing AI.
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Okay then, tell us why we shouldn't demonize Hitler? Because even eliding over things like the Holocaust or the near-conquest of Europe, if you take the most overly-charitable view of Hitler, all you see is a guy who riled people up, picked fights his country couldn't and shouldn't have, and then proceeded to lose so badly that he didn't even have the courage to face his people about the loss, let alone the wrath of two superpowers coming to tear down his government.
If anything, even National Socialists wouldn't (and didn't) want to identify with a loser, and there are indeed few things as bad as being seen as the loser by history. Even Confederacy aesthetics and revanchism from American Southerners is pitiable by comparison--Nazis only have copium.
Because Hitler was fighting for a truth that would in the long run reduce the amount of human suffering by a magnitude far greater than anything that has come after him.
That's not the most charitable view of Hitler. I am sure you can steelman Hitler better than that.
Why? Most National Socialists I know identify a great deal with flawed figures like Hitler and Goebbels.
Is this just 'boo outgroup' or were you trying to make a point? Because if you are trying to make a point it's not very salient considering all the losers of wars. I mean, I find the struggle of jews during the war far more pitiable than anything else. According to them they just lined themselves up to a slaughter house that was staffed by other jews who participated directly in slaughtering their co-ethnics because they thought it would buy them life. That's a level far lower than Hitler and friends banding together to fight those they think are their enemies to their dying breath in the name of their co-ethnics. You can argue that the result was the same but in that case I'd say that the option Hitler took displayed far superior moral character.
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To be fair, yes the Nazis lost, but they also won a lot. People are good at ignoring or rationalising the bad parts as long as the good ones are memorable enough.
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This seems like quite a thing to draw out of not wanting our standards for discourse to include blatant and known trolling names. Objective isn't the right word for what the moderation of this place is going for, which is consistently content neutral but tone policing. No one accidentally names themselves "BigDickPepe1488", I'd go even further than the moderators here in saying that the "BigDickPepe" portion itself ought to be disallowed but I have idiosyncratic feelings about the range of usernames that make me cringe which include many of the ones at use here.
No, actually I think we have pretty good reasons to dislike that political figure. Feel free to make an effort post if you think our opinions on him are wrong and blue pilled. But that's not even what is at issue here, we have rules about being unnecessarily obnoxious that such a name trivially violates, if it helps to appeal to equal treatment something like KillAllChristians would also deserve to be moderated.
I must have missed it 10 years ago when Hitler references were really big with the red tribe and blue tribe was barely censoring them.
It's not.
That's not the case. From Amadan:
Mods are not content neutral.
And we have a pretty good reason to dislike Genghis Khan, that doesn't mean we place him as a central figure for our moral compass. Nor do we constantly fret about potential Mongol hordes when someone erects a gigantic statue of the guy in Mongolia. In fact, most users have pretty good reasons to dislike what they dislike. But that's not the point. The point is that some likes and dislikes are more equal than others because of mod subjectivity.
You don't actually have specific rules on this, as the mods have said. What you feel deserves to be moderated has no relevance to anything since you are not a mod and the mods apply their rules subjectively. And though I am sure the mods would step in for something obvious like that, it's not the point. The point was that when there is ambiguity, the rulings are not consistent.
You are missing the point. The reason why so many lament 'conservatism' and label it as being '10 years out of date liberals' is not primarily because of the content of their beliefs. It's because of where these beliefs come from. It's because of the 'conservatives' complete lack of contextual awareness and understanding. These 'conservatives' don't know where their views come from or why. They don't see themselves as the end result of the culture wars of the generations that came before. They instead see themselves as being stalwarts in an ongoing battle that they are genuinely fighting to win. Instead of recognizing that all of their firmly held beliefs are just the undertow of those who are actually in charge. And that their 'conservative' inheritance is just the white flag of their predecessors.
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I think the mods are hoping to attract more people and seeing obvious references to Nazism detracts from that objective
If that's the case, why don't they say that? Just be open about the angle of the slippery slope we are going to be sliding on.
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Because Adolf Hitler was the greatest enemy of white people in all history, anyone who cares about "continued existence of white people" should condemn him ten times stronger than mainstream normie history does.
Because one nazi attracts another, and mods do not want this site to become nazi sewer, more than enough of such places on the internets.
Those alleged fact is irrelevant to the context of the argument. It's not the job of the mods to enforce that everyone subscribe to the 'correct' theory of white supremacy.
If the nazis follow the rules as they are enforced on everyone else, why would this place become a sewer?
Because people coming here will see discussions full of people named like "WolfLair1488" "AuschwitzOvenMaster" "ShowerHead88" "ZyklonFan" etc... and give this place wide berth.
There are many nazi places on the world wide web, there is no need for one more, while this site is supposed to be unique.
That's wrong. Read the thread.
You are not allowed to talk about how much you love gassing jews, you are not allowed to discuss things in a vulgar way if you are not making a point with it. But you are allowed to talk about and advocate for National Socialism and White nationalism.
This place would be far more unique if it did allow those kinds of names, given the fact that the number of places and the number of places that matter that ban such names dwarfs those who don't.
But that's neither here nor there.
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Part of the rules is that the more controversial the statement, the more supporting thought needs to go into defending it. "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
Having a username state a partisan and inflammatory statement is the opposite of proactively providing evidence for it. It's just a username, it's not a complete argument that people can respond to and tear apart. It's a way to shit post.
...
I shouldn't need to say anything else but in the spirit of clarity: A point I made some effort in making was that the ruleset was not applied equally. And that the mods are just enforcing their own bias when attributing 'inflammation' and 'partisanship'. This bias is not in line with any objective reason or knowledge. It's just the social justice of the 1990's, as advertised on TV. I don't see why, when not beholden to reddit, the mods enforce that everyone be beholden to their partisan view of the world.
What stance do you think I hold, based on the tagline, that would qualify as partisan or inflammatory? We have several people here who could probably be described as such, from atheists who meditate for 4 hours a day to full blown Catholic monarchists. I am neither, but it amuses me to describe myself this way.
Calling yourself a reactionary means a lot of things to a lot of different people and it would get you banned in a lot of places. Same with traditionalism.
So it's just a shit post that doesn't subjectively irk the mods as much.
The comment you replied to was making the point that the ruleset was not objective. That it was instead just the mod team asserting their aesthetic preference. The mods have now said exactly that. You are just wrong in your prior assertion about the rules.
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Let's put it this way - if someone wants to argue that white people are all terrible and guilty of all injustice in the world, we won't forbid that, but we will probably not let you argue it with a username like "SuckItWhitey."
Which would not be analogous to 1488, which, stands for the 14 words and either Hail Hitler or the 88 Precepts. Which is why I specifically asked about those things. There is plenty of wiggle room within those referenced concepts to allow for more charitable interpretation. It's not like the person is named AuschwitzKikeGrinder. In which case I would magnanimously approve a request for a name change.
The 14 words alone could perhaps be interpreted charitably if taken at face value, but "1488" is unambiguous and basically conveys the same message as "AuschwitzKikeGrinder".
You have the causation reversed. If someone sufficiently marks themselves as low status or a member of an outgroup you turn your brain off.
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Your magnanimity (and approval) is unnecessary.
We haven't spelled out explicit rules about what is and isn't acceptable as a username, but this is not the first time we have banned and/or requested name changes from users using obviously inflammatory or provocative nyms. The implicit rule is "Don't be an ass, and don't go overboard trying to be edgy."
Then this would be the first time you do so for a name that is not inflammatory or provocative.
You may perhaps genuinely believe that throwing coded Heil Hitlers is not inflammatory or provocative.
If you're just disgruntled that we aren't willing to go along with normalizing it, too bad.
The entire point of this incident was that the person wasn't speaking in code. They literally put 1488 in their name.
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I did not argue that Jews are all terrible and guilty of all injustice. I asked about probability theory. A couple of months ago I expressed an opinion about Jeff Bezos's Generic Female Lead Beats up Orcs With Character Names Borrowed From Tolkien.
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