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In the last roundup about embryo selection, guy with Greek letters in his flair ThomasdelVasto said the following (emphasis added):
Much of right-wing thought is just people looking for "right-wing" language to express low-class envy and grievance. AOC-ism with extra steps. There's long been an element of that in the American Right, and there's nothing wrong with it provided it's based on actual complaints. (Working-class people were entirely justified in their anger at those judges who ordered their kids bussed into the ghetto while sending their own kids to private schools.) But ever since the first Trump campaign, prole resentment has become arguably the defining characteristic of the Right in America. It's the glue that binds together the vulgar, secular, working-class Trumpian Right and the traditional Religious Right. The tattoo-covered WWE fan doesn't want to listen to a sermon from the Southern preacher but recognizes him as a fellow member of the broad ingroup of low-class Americans who share a common inferiority complex toward urbanites with lots of education and money. While not every Right-winger shares this attitude, there's a near-universal refusal to acknowledge or condemn it. Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)
P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.
P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.
P.P.P.S. The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.
I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?
I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.
I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.
I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.
I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.
I know that this is off-topic - but can somebody explain what is this sentence structure? Is it something similar to the word literally now also having the meaning of metaphorically? So similarly as now it is okay to use X and I in all the formulations - even in those where it does not make sense - we now even upgraded to it into X and I's Y?
Here’s how I understand this tic to have originated (but do take this with a grain of salt). In elementary school grammar classes, students are admonished for saying things like “Me and Tim played baseball yesterday”. (The error in that sentence is that “me” is one of the subjects of the sentence, so it should be “I” instead.) The problem is, when the teachers correct their students, they do so by saying “it’s not ‘me and Tim’, but ‘Tim and I.’” Of course, most kindergarten teachers don’t know what a noun case is, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be able to explain to their students the precise nature of the error. Thus, many native English speakers grow up with this strong sense that “[person] and I” is correct and anything else is wrong. I know that at least for me, even a perfectly grammatical sentence like “I and Tim went to play baseball” feels wrong somehow, presumably due to this childhood conditioning. So if this theory is true, then bizarre locutions like “Elon and I’s” are examples born from hypercorrection based on this conditioning. (And hey, it turns out that the very first English example provided on that Wikipedia page is precisely this one; I actually didn’t know that when I was writing this.)
I always thought about it in a way that if the sentence makes sense with just one person, then I should use I. For instance: I went to school yesterday means that I should use My brother and I went to school yesterday. But when the original sentence makes sense with "me" I should also copy it. E.g: My mother gave me a cookie changes into My mother gave a cookie to me and my brother. I am not sure if this is correct, but that is what I use as a heuristic.
The hypercorrection makes sense, except given how English language forms it means it will actually be acceptable very soon. Similarly to how literally/metaphorically are now basically synonyms, except when they are not.
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