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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I'm sorry if this question has been asked and answered before:

What is the best/steelmanned pro-HBD proposal for the actual evolutionary mechanism by which various populations (i.e. whites) have experienced selection-for-intelligence while others (i.e. blacks) haven't? What unique circumstances and thus evolutionary pressures did the human populations that migrated to Europe or Asia face, for which human populations that migrated solely around Africa wouldn't have faced?

Of course the most compelling explanation I have found is the 'cold winter' hypothesis, that a period of harsher winters in Europe during one of the world's most recent ice ages might have made human populations in Europe select for those with better longer-term planning ability (intelligence) because they could i.e. stockpile food better in order to survive said winters. However, is it then believed plausible that no roughly similar periods of relative food scarcity or famine could have struck (anywhere) in Africa in potentially the same vein, exerting at least a similar selection pressure, albeit with different ultimate causes, on at least one of Africa's many ethnic groups? Additionally, how does this address the IQ differences between ethnic groups when non-european ethnic groups are part of the discussion, such as middle-easterners, indians, south asian or even east asian people? These groups all have for the most part 1. different IQs from each other and 2. mostly higher IQs than sub-saharans. Assuming cold winter hypothesis, in order to explain i.e. indians and middle-easterner's lower IQ than europeans, should one presume that indian and middle-eastern ethnic groups did not migrate through a region of the world experiencing anything resembling a 'cold winter' like europe's? If so, what is then to explain why indians and middle-easterners have higher average IQs than sub-saharans?

Basically, I am in general looking for a steelmanned version of a logical argument by induction about how HBD might have actually occurred in history based on what we know about evolution, in a way that accounts for some of the difficulties I intuitively think any such argument must overcome. In other words, why do both i.e. Javanese and Irish have higher IQs than sub-saharans; Which evolutionary pressures could have plausibly faced the historical ancestors of the Irish as well as the historical ancestors of the Javanese, but not the historical ancestors of any sub-saharan populations? Or am I just thinking about this wrong?

I'm very open to seeing links to research about various mechanisms of evolution, or that put forward potential answers to some of the questions I'm asking via i.e. archaeology or anthropology, and in general I actually hope that there might be elucidating research to read among many contexts relating to the subject. However, please note that I am not particularly interested in seeing links to research of any type that claim to either prove or invalidate HBD that broadly falls under the category of "testing modern day ethnic groups' IQ and then trying to control for environmental factors." My adventure exploring that realm of the debate, in the form of stuff like genetic admixture studies or twin studies, I have found frustratingly inconclusive. So if you care to answer, please limit discussion the areas discussed, that is, steelmanned argument for a plausible mechanism by which evolutionary pressures to select for intelligence were exerted on the world's ethnic groups in such differing magnitudes.

I think that coming up with a just-so story explaining why or how a species evolved the way it did is usually a mistake. I prefer to look at it this way: If you flip a coin 100 times, on average it will come up heads 50 times and tails 50 times. The odds that it will actually come up heads exactly 50 times is actually pretty unlikely, though. If you actually took 5 fair coins and flipped each one 100 times, it's very unlikely that all 5 would come up heads exactly 50 times. What you'll see instead is something more like -

(I used a random number generator to flip 5 coins 100 times each)

Coin A: 49 / 51

Coin B: 45 / 55

Coin C: 48 / 52

Coin D: 57 / 43

Coin E: 48 / 52

Sub in any trait you like for coin flips, and it's obvious that a little bit of variation is to be expected, especially when conditions are different. On close examination, the idea that all 5 would come up with exactly the same result is a strange and unjustified supposition. The real question is how much variation there is, and whether or not it matters.

All that being said, I don't like the cold winters theory because if it's true then it should imply Inuit supergeniuses. My preferred just-so story is that complex cultures with advanced technology demand more intelligence, and interconnected cultures become more complex and develop more technology. There is a ribbon of trade running from the tin mines of Cornwall to the silk plantations of China that has existed since the Bronze Age, and along that ribbon you'll find all the most advanced civilizations that have ever existed. The less-advanced civilizations of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia, and Australia are all separated from that band of trade by oceans and/or deserts.

Sub in any trait you like for coin flips, and it's obvious that a little bit of variation is to be expected, especially when conditions are different. On close examination, the idea that all 5 would come up with exactly the same result is a strange and unjustified supposition. The real question is how much variation there is, and whether or not it matters.

This doesn't make much sense for a few reasons. The first is that, when it comes to evolutionary lineages, we're not flipping a coin 100 times and expecting it to come up heads 50 times. An estimation closer to the magnitudes would be more like flipping a coin 1,000,000 times and expecting it to come up heads 500,000 times +/- a reasonably small difference. However sub-saharan IQ scores are more or less a full standard deviation lower than white ones, a difference so large that, if genetic, I wouldn't really expect it to be just the random result/chance given the massive scales of evolution and human populations.

It also doesn't make sense for a second reason: a commonly cited-fact about sub-saharan populations is that its actually the region with the widest range of genetic difference between its various ethnic subgroups. Wouldn't one expect that, if the supposedly genetic difference in intelligence is due to something like random chance, the large amount of genetic differences in Africa would offer plenty of opportunities for at least a handful of their ethnic subgroups to have 'lucked out' in the same way? But the reality is that IQs in the sub-sahara are low across the board. No ethnic subgroup across the whole continent has managed a lucky roll, in fact, all of them independently managed unlucky ones.

There is a ribbon of trade running from the tin mines of Cornwall to the silk plantations of China that has existed since the Bronze Age, and along that ribbon you'll find all the most advanced civilizations that have ever existed.

As far as I'm aware, India lies along this ribbon, yet (depending on who you ask) the national IQ on the Indian subcontinent is almost as bad as some places in the sub-sahara, and (regardless of who you ask) certainly worse than Europe and China. Is the assertion that this is mostly due to environmental differences, and that Africa suffers from both environmental and genetic ones? If not, what's the explanation for the difference in IQs between India and other regions like Europe or Africa?

In general I guess I also basically do not buy the assertion that civilizations were altogether more complex along a roughly europe->china silk-road-esque continuum compared to elsewhere, at least until the last six hundred years or so. However, even if I was to accept that, I would definitely dispute that human civilizations along that ribbon were measurably more complex i.e. at least 3,000 years ago (to be generous) and before, and I'm skeptical of 3,000 years being enough time for humanity to speciate into the sheer scale of IQ difference between ethnic groups that we know today.

TikTok is a Chinese Superweapon

Basic argument of the article is simple:

  1. Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.

  2. TikTok is very good at this due to its ability to adapt to the user and the short attention span videos require.

  3. China is aware of this and has demanded that Bytedance moderate TikTok moderate TikTok for China (so as to encourage people to wish to be things like engineers instead of influencers) and banning it for Chinese kids, while allowing it to run rampant in the West.

  4. This is sort of a practical proof of the degeneracy and internal contradictions of Western capitalism and a deliberate attack.

An interesting look at how the Chinese view the West through the eyes of a powerful Chinese policy-maker:

Wang writes:

“Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification… Commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems. These problems, in turn, can increase the pressure on the political and administrative system.”

Thus, by turning everything into a product, Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to atomization and polarization. The commodification also devours meaning and purpose, and to plug the expanding spiritual hole that this leaves, Americans turn to momentary pleasures—drugs, fast food, and amusements—driving the nation further into decadence and decay.

For Wang, then, the US’s unprecedented technological progress is leading it into a chasm. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang writes in his book, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” Though these words are 30 years old, they could easily have been talking about social media addiction.

Wang theorized that the conflict between the US’s economic system and its value system made it fundamentally unstable and destined for ever more commodification, nihilism, and decadence, until it finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. To prevent China’s own technological advancement leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values”—a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future

The bolded is especially relevant to the final solution to what the author (speculatively) considers an attack by a civilizational competitor:

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed.)

The article first concedes that China is right that the market will drive us to the bottom of short-attention-span content and degeneracy, but then its solution is the platitude of "parental responsibility" in the face of an unprecedented technological challenge.

We've never dealt with this problem before. The idea that individual parents are going to figure this out when they're in competition with some of the most sophisticated companies in the world who've totally saturated the web with their influence seems patently absurd to me.

Especially in a system where the state is usurping more and more responsibility for child welfare. But, when it comes time to regulate tech companies, the state is powerless?

This sort of learned helplessness is common in the West, even when China is providing a counter-example of what can be done (i.e. regulation, which the author writes off because people will just make a new site*). But the argument is: in an ideologically fractured world the state has no right to impose its preferences in terms of the good life on citizens who may disagree. Now, it may be that the West is too far down the anomie and moral anarchy road to change course. But then the question is whether this is palatable to anyone else who is shopping for a civilizational model?

Especially since there's a strong argument that it is precisely this sort of liberal-influenced learned helplessness that leads to the very fracture of core values that could help mitigate such crises. I would bet that a 1950s America would have more social cohesion to push back against some of these things, but that's due to a shared culture that has been destroyed by...well, take your pick: neoliberalism, secularization, individualism, mass immigration, therapy and the breakdown of homogeneity, racial animus.

So it may be true that liberals - once their culture has become sufficiently fractured - cannot solve this problem (due to the ideology's resistance to compelling certain choices). But that may be an argument to never become liberal in the first place.

* If only someone had applied this insight to the drug war.

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?

I personally think - if collapse happens* - there's more long-range factors like the exhaustion of any tradition that balances out liberalism (which Western liberal democracy has had for most of its existence) and the total failure to solve the fertility problem (another atypical situation) to blame. New territory.

But yeah, TikTok & social media in general add their own drag here.

Of course, a final argument - or rather question- can be raised: and? Yes, defying the naysayers for "more than a century" is good but we're not talking about Coptic Christians saying "this too shall pass" about the Muslim conquerors are we? The Soviet Union lasted from the 20s to the 90s while facing seriously challenges (to say the least) and the most powerful nation to ever exist.

* Clearly some forms of degeneracy (e.g. mass obesity) have proliferated.

Yes, defying the naysayers for "more than a century" is good

Flippantly, a civilisation that lasts forever preserves itself one century at a time.

More seriously, my social circle includes people involved with long-term planning at some of" the longest-lived Western institutions (the old universities), and 100 years is the longest timescale that they find useful to think about. I was just reading this Freddie de Boer comment thread where someone pointed out that Japanese companies that see themselves as perpetual also plan out to 100 years (but most of the long-term planning energy goes int 20, 30 or 50 year plans). The "Longtermist" movement within rationalism/EA are thinking about the far future, but their plans for getting there all play out in considerably less than 100 years.

Everything that can happen will happen eventually, and nothing lasts forever, so a prediction that something will eventually collapse is as valuable as predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow. Predictions have shelf-lives - if they expire unfulfilled then they are wrong, not just early. And 100 years is too long a shelf-life for a meaningful prediction. Saying that western civilisation is degenerate is a statement about something that is happening now. Saying that western civilisation is collapsing is a statement about something that is happening now with consequences that should be undeniable soon. Right now I see obvious downward trends (mostly high-IQ fertility) which are affecting all advanced human societies roughly equally badly. But if I look at the West vs the Rest at the highest levels of civilisational achievement, I see our weapons triumphant on the battlefield in Ukraine, I see the ARM/TSMC/ASML axis of semiconductor excellence consolidating its supremacy in a way which gives its customers in Silicon Valley and other Western countries a permanent edge over their Chinese competition, I see Gwynne Shotwell ignoring her boss's inane social media antics and building bigger, better rockets, and above all I see talent continuing to move west voluntarily.

Tiktok is bad, and a threat to corrupt our youth. But I don't see why it is scarier than the sort of challenge we eat for breakfast on every page of the history books.

Question: If one of those people from a century ago who believed “Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad [sic] to degeneracy and collapse” were able to view our current society, do you believe that he or she would feel vindicated? (Gestures around, gesticulating wildly.)

I’m not asking whether you believe that we are in a state of degeneracy and collapse. I’m pointing out that any worthwhile theory that liberalism will lead to degeneracy and collapse would necessarily contain a sub-belief that the people living through that degeneracy and collapse are, by definition, unable to recognize it as such. Our standards for what counts as degeneracy and collapse have been so warped that, like fish in water, we cannot even conceptualize that there’s a problem. Surely you can recognize that the reactionaries of a century ago would identify our current society as suffering from precisely the sorts of problems their theory predicted we’d be suffering through, even if you think their standards are bad or useless.

Do you believe 17th century Puritans if shown Belle Epoque would believe that society had degenerated? My answer will mirror yours, turning on the fulcrum of whether technological progress can make up for a supposed societal malaise. The question is, do these social restrictions (since this is all historical social norms have ever been) exist as ends themselves, or solely due to their influence on the material basis of that polity? And if the former, how exactly IS the prognostic of degeneracy supposed to be declared if not from the factors that should be downstream of that taint?

If social norms can be essentially good in and of themselves then they must by worthwhile of themselves, and any supposed or perceived deficiencies of them must be either illusory or not of importance compared to the moral/eschatological rectitude of the principals. In which case it's as unfair to say that people in a degenerate society can't notice said degeneracy as to say that a morally assured people should be capable of seeing their own self-righteousness: they're right because they are, and they are because they're right. Anything beyond that doesn't have any verifiable basis in reality.

They would probably have believed that current society has degenerated compared to theirs (which they'd already feel to be degenerate enough already), but they might be surprised that it hasn't collapsed. Indeed, if you were a reactionary in 1923, you might well believe that the entire Western civilization is going to destroyed inevitably by the onmarch of Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism of the Soviet Union and generally the teeming hordes of Mongolic Asiatics breeding uncontrollably in China and such countries, and currently the Soviet Union is no more and, while China presents a challenge, it is certainly no longer due to uncontrollable breeding. Meanwhile, the Western liberalism chugs happily onwards.

I mean, I’d point out that the usual Rome comparison degeneracy and collapse narrative tends to lead out that the Romans themselves believed they were going through a collapse at the time it was happening.

You'd have to look at the culturally-invariant metrics like GDP, stock market performance, dominance of Silicon Valley, consumer spending, etc. Or the dominance of the US and “Western liberal democracy" to see that in spite of social norms changing, that the western democratic hegemony and America is still largely unchallenged and unassailed.

Surely we can distinguish technical developments from social developments. If there were no technical developments like computing, robotics, jet aircraft, standardized container shipping, then we would be in a much worse position economically and socially. Prosperity can paper over a lot of deeper issues.

Detroit used to be called the Paris of the West! It's now a byword for urban decline. It's only that advances in technology have been rapid enough to compensate for social decline. Maybe technology will save us from complete civilization collapse due to plummeting fertility. Medicine managed to suppress rising murder rates for example. In terms of purely social technology, we've declined massively.

The colapse to which these people were referring, and to which the OP is referring, is far more literal than that.

Answers:

  1. Yes.

  2. As @Stefferi states, they would probably have predicted that society would collapse more or less instantly upon the achievement of several prior levels of degeneracy. If they're wrong on every sub prediction, it might be fair to ignore or soften their future predictions.

  3. Try to rank the Roman Emperors. The Biblical Jewish kings. Hell, American Presidents. All of them. The first few slots are bitterly contested, who was a better king Solomon or David? What order do Diocletian, Augustus, Hadrian go on the list? Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are quite easily seen as GOAT or goat, depending on who is doing the rankings. Do leaders over bigger territories get extra credit over those who lead diminished geographies? But pretty quickly, you realize that none of those lists contains a preponderance of good leaders. Despite three very different polities, choosing their leaders by very different methods, the net result is similar: there are a handful of really great leaders, historically important geniuses who set their country's path for decades, sometimes centuries, to come; who are succeeded by mediocrities and losers, who fritter that momentum away over time. But it takes many mediocrities to lose the path, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." Rome spent most of its history in "decline." The Old Testament is mostly just a series of kings turning away from the true faith, the modern Jews essentially are still running off the software created by a handful of great leaders between Moses and Solomon. This might just be a result of historiography, but it seems to me that decline and degeneracy are the normal state rather than an exceptional one; collapse comes much, much, much later than degeneracy can first be identified.

The '50s specifically cited as a time when degeneracy could have been resisted were themselves criticized as being degenerate by conservative observers at the time including the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood iirc.

How is either of your or Gdanning's comments proving that we haven't, in fact, degenerated since then?

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then, which suggests we've always been degenerate and degenerating, which takes away the notion's give-a-shit power.

No one says you have to give a shit, I just find it odd to deny it given the assurances about slippery slopes I heard even just within my lifetime.

Well, I think critics were wrong about the 50s being degenerate but they're not that wrong now.

Tangentially, I think San Francisco is outrageously degenerate. But it generates wealth and competence in a way you would never guess by just looking at what's going on on the street. I think America at large is similar. Wanting congruence between the kind of people who can pump out a vaccine in a year and heroin addicts is very compelling, but apparently society can live with a messier arrangement.

Does it actually generate wealth and competence or merely attract it? If you raise a middle class kid in San Francisco is he going to be better off than the same kid raised in San Diego or San Jose or San Houston? If you found Twitter in Miami, does it do better or worse than if it were founded in San Francisco?

That's an interesting question. For years conservatives have wondered why the economic powerhouses are not salt of the earth places like Iowa but degenerate coastal cities.

It attracts talent and that talent generates wealth. If you found Twitter in Houston, it would absolutely do worse than Twitter founded in San Francisco (a la 2005 when San Francisco was liberal).

People who are natural out-of-the-box thinkers are going to gravitate to places where they're allowed to occasionally do out-of-the-box ("degenerate") things in public and private. And that nature is going create those economic powerhouses when they go to work.

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then

This is actually an argument used by critics of the West : liberalism is always "degenerating" because you're consuming stocks of social resources (e.g. the Church, hegemonic social mores) that it doesn't replenish.

So the argument would be that "every man does what was right in his own eyes" was inherently degeneracy-facilitating back then too - but there were countervailing social and material forces.

It's possible for 50s people to be degenerates to Qutb especially and for modern society to have degenerated well past that.

I would argue there are places where the degeneration has been clear and undeniable; most obviously obesity. We're not just more degenerate than the people in the 50s, we may be so degenerate in comparison that we might have been dismissed as pushing a slippery slope fallacy and fear-mongering if we talked about it back then.

More obesity but on the other hand bodybuilders today put bodybuilders of the past to shame. Certainly the average has gotten worse.

The irony of using Qutb and his problem with promiscuity is that America could be argued to have degenerated below its usual critics' expectations; who probably at least thought liberal society would be numbing everyone from the problems they thought they perceived with increasing amounts of "free love".

People are apparently having less sex now.

If this wasn't likely due to rising anxiety, obesity, shrinking real life friend groups and/or pornography it might actually be a good counterpoint to the degeneracy thesis.

Sayyid Qutb visited the US in the 1950s. You'd think he visited Sodom and Gomorrah the way he wrote about it.

Church youth dances were full of "seductive passion" in his view. And sometimes he would look at an American woman and she would smile at him. That struck him as deserving of condemnation.

I mean, degeneracy and collapse is a common feature of almost every empire for which we have historical records.

Presumably there's many more that experienced the same decline yet didn't leave a record.

Why do we suppose ourselves to be the exception?

There are many reasons why the US may be an exception to this trend of empires rising and falling.

The US is much more dominant, head and shoulders above the rest relative to past empires. The closest competitor to the US is China, which does not really have imperialistic ambitions. What could conceivably replace the US? Nothing. Supposed degeneracy may mean loss of economic growth, but not being displaced or conquered.

What could conceivably replace the US?

Barbarism?

Or more likely whatever successor entity(s) coalesce in the aftermath... which is pretty much how it went with Rome.

Imagine the collapse looks a lot less like the world stage completely upending, and more likely that the U.S. fractures into a handful of entities composed of various states who have similar interests and maybe they do some warring against each other or politely agree to leave each other's interests alone and dealing with the rest of the world on their own terms.

At which point the American continent is probably still secure from invasion and takeover by a hostile power, but can't project force around the globe.

The US is much more dominant, head and shoulders above the rest relative to past empires.

And this is why Afghanistan is now being ruled as a distant colony of the empire after successful subjugation of the native population.

It seems facially evident that the U.S. empire isn't going to be able to maintain an ongoing presence around the globe capable of suppressing every regional dispute through military superiority if only because of our disfavorable demographics.

I'm going to read a book on the topic and see if I find this version convincing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning

Or more likely whatever successor entity(s) coalesce in the aftermath... which is pretty much how it went with Rome.

But Rome was literally surrounded by hostile entitles, like the Goths. Rome's demise was hastened by competing groups. Rome was also fractured by the rise of Christianity, but the US does not have such a similar schism. The left-right divide is not like this.

Imagine the collapse looks a lot less like the world stage completely upending, and more likely that the U.S. fractures into a handful of entities composed of various states who have similar interests and maybe they do some warring against each other or politely agree to leave each other's interests alone and dealing with the rest of the world on their own terms.

I think a breakup is more plausible, but though still unlikely

Rome was also fractured by the rise of Christianity, but the US does not have such a similar schism. The left-right divide is not like this.

In that there is not literal inquisitions going on to root out ideological heretics, perhaps not.

Do you think that the mental firmware that most people in the population are running is substantially different from that which was in play during the decline of Rome?

I think a breakup is more plausible, but though still unlikely

And a breakup would almost certainly mean the collapse of the 'empire,' is my point.

It's the inverse of your point about Rome being surrounded by enemies. The U.S. can easily afford to defend it's own borders... but it remains exceedingly expensive for it to project power overseas far from it's population centers if the host country doesn't welcome them.

which does not really have imperialistic ambitions

There was a time when the US didn't either. Some Americans must be rolling in their grave at the postwar empire subsidizing Europe for 80 years.

China does seem like a downgrade from the USSR in terms of imperialism. So this would require for China to create a bloc , which it has slightly hinted at and has been much less successful compared to the USSR. Ironically, China being a communist country probably works to the US advantage. Historically, conflicts have always arose from imperialism, the takeover of land for economic reason. The US acting as a 'world police' does not even meet this criteria.

China does seem like a downgrade from the USSR in terms of imperialism

Partly it's due to old conceptions of what China is and specific Russian geographic weaknesses driving incentives. But part of it is that the US bribed China into the global trade system precisely to weaken the USSR and communism. Why would it need to fight when it can get everything it needs to industrialize without that? Especially when surrounded by US allies... This also calmed other previously martial powers like Japan (who were also isolationist and showed no signs of wanting an empire...until they did)

However, the situation is changing: the US is being more hostile to China specifically and, arguably, the global trade system in general and China imports huge amounts of food and fuel from very far away in order to maintain its newfound wealth. It's no longer the Middle Ages; technologically advanced nations require way more inputs and thus economic interconnections to compete.

These are the pressures that create navies and imperial incentives. I don't think it'll be some mass annexation of another nation into a formal empire nowadays but more than one way to skin a cat.

For a small-scale example: arguably China claiming the South China Sea and building artificial islands is a prelude.

I didn't say otherwise. The initial claim was not, "like all societies, the West will someday collapse." The claim was that said collapse is relatively imminent, specifically because the basic premise of liberal democracy renders it vulnerable thereto. That is the claim that has been made repeatedly.

At a bare minimum, the birthrates have collapsed... indeed to below replacement. A naive projection of this trend would mean some kind of decline is inevitable because of this, alone.

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

Material conditions have improved, but a lot of basic stats regarding human happiness have declined, and unless people start having more kids or we crack the aging problem, in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Tiktok is a source of this issue but more like a warning sign. Such an app wouldn't, one would argue, be able to take such strong root in a healthy culture.

in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

That's why God created immigration

What will that imply for the countries that the immigrants are drawn from?

The loss of the most successful and mobile members of their middle class.

But I doubt it poses a great internal political impediment to the host nation; in Canada this is seen as a virtuous act and, tbh, I can see why the importing of a few hundred thousand Indians every couple of years (iirc they make up around 20% of migrants) doesn't rank highly in the Canadian mind as a moral outrage.

Brain drain that further reduces them relative to the US.

Given the higher productivity levels in the west, they can just pay the poorer countries a fee for every immigrant the West takes, and still leave everyone better off.

The west's ideology got to you. I know with all the controversies around your comments people where telling you to come back to your country. I say better stay with us, and don't ruin it.

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Is this intended as satire or did you just admit that the GOP's "uncharitable strawman" of people like you is actually 100% accurate?

I'm not sure what you mean by "people like you," unless you mean people who occasionally pick up a book or a newspaper, and so are aware that a common response to demographic concerns is to increase immigration, as Canada is doing, and are aware that immigration is why the long term outlook for the US re geopolitical power is much rosier than that of most peer countries. Because that was what I was referring to.

And, I fear it is you who is confirming the "uncharitable strawman" of "people like you", because we are talking about the future of liberal democracy, or of the United States, not the future of the white race, which I take it is what you are referring to. Here is a new flash for you: People who are obsessed with declining white population numbers and the like imagine that people who support immigration are equally obsessed with the fate of the white race, but the truth is that most people don't care. They don't care what race their coworker is, or what race the person in the voting booth next to them is. Let's suppose that 300 years from now, due to immigration, the US is only ten percent white. Or five percent. Or one percent. Who cares?

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

How does this square with the fact that China's TFR is only ~80% of the Untied States' TFR? If birth rate collapse = national collapse seems authoritarian China is ahead of liberal democratic United States on that front.

How does this square with the fact that China's TFR is only ~80% of the Untied States' TFR?

One-Child-Policy compounded with rapid urbanization?

The Chinese made policy choices that cratered their birthrates before they began to crater globally.

national collapse seems authoritarian China is ahead of liberal democratic United States on that front.

Yes?

One nation being on course for collapse doesn't preclude it happening to others. The argument is that this is a general trend of all nations, and that empires are not excluded from this.

Indeed, if the West is still overly dependent on Chinese labor when that happens, the ripple effect will accelerate issues over here.

(This is basically Peter Zeihan's thesis, incidentally)

in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.

50 years? Probably optimistic. The problem is pressing now with Boomers - the largest generation - retiring. The amount of healthcare money eaten up by the old is disproportionate and there isn't an equally large generation behind them to balance them out.

Canada already has a healthcare crunch and privatization or not is the topic of the day. It's probably only going to get worse from here. I heard some alarming population estimates for Japan in 2050, let alone 2070.

There's some hope that robotics and automation are going to stave off the impact. Life extension/anti-aging tech will probably be too late for the most part.

If we get AGI then no point in trying to predict the world after that.

But more to the point, Gen Z is the smallest generation (in the west) yet. Even if they started popping out kids like particularly horny rabbits there will be a protracted squeeze waiting on those kids to become productive citizens. And they don't seem to be having kids. So that's whence my 'fifty years' vague estimate comes from.

Will we even have enough people with the capacity to keep an increasingly advanced civilization functional?

It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.

But wealth and freedom are distinct from liberal democracy. India was a liberal democracy in the 1950s, despite being dirt-poor. Hong Kong and Singapore have a lot of wealth and freedom (and the concomitant shortage of children) today, without being liberal democracies (especially HK). China is heading in the same direction, despite the end of the One Child Policy.

The problem with the collapse debate is it inevitably involves moving goalposts as to what is defined as collapse. It's hard to agree on what is means for a society to have collapsed. Is it conquered, split, dissolved, or morph into something unrecognizable from its original state?

Every past civilization has by definition collapsed, but what is "degeneracy" and what does it have to do with those collapses? Major civilizational collapses have been caused, at least in part, by at least the following set of different factors: Foreign invasion, climate change, natural disaster, disease, religious conflict, over-spending on public works, failure to maintain physical infrastructure, rebellion, civil war and other internal power struggles, changes in technology, changes to the surrounding economic situation, and resource depletion. And these causes may overlap, or cause one another. So, what counts as degeneracy and what is the evidence that it's related to collapse?

So, what counts as degeneracy and what is the evidence that it's related to collapse?

If I were to be broad, it's basically the social/material weaknesses that are exploited by or vulnerable to outside forces and hollow out the wealth and power of the nation if they are not repaired/corrected.

That is, the features and factors that allowed a civilization to rise to prominence can be acknowledged as a core part of that civilization's success. "Degeneration" occurs when those features or factors are allowed to slip away without efforts to preserve them. And if a civilization depended on those factors to maintain their success, then seems almost definitional that losing them will lead to some sort of collapse.

Lot of arguments to be had about what the features/factors of civilizational success are, but it's probably possible to measure the factors and determine if they are degenerating relative to the past.

Take a simple example: what do you think would happen to Saudi Arabia if it lost it's ability to extract and process crude oil?

Would you say that the availability of crude oil within it's borders is a big reason for Saudi Arabia's success in the last hundred years?

If so, would it be fair to say, then, that if Saudi Arabia were to allow it's oil reserves to be depleted without investing in some other means of supporting it's economy, it would be 'degenerating?' It would certainly be 'degeneracy' if Saudi Arabia started setting it's oil fields and extraction equipment on fire for no good reason, no? Or, at least, they would call it such.

I like them as an example since quite a many civilizations have risen and fallen in that general geographical area. No reason to think they'll escape it.

That all seems reasonable, but it sounds then like "degeneracy" is simply any cause of a collapse, or perhaps just a description of collapse/decline. So what's special about TikTok, or any of the other things that are normally referred to as "degeneracy"? How do we use this concept? Is there a prediction beyond "if a civilization loses the things that made it successful, it will no longer be successful?" Is that even true, or do the needs of a civilization change as it develops?

To give an example in a different direction, consider the Bagan Empire of the 9th to 12th century in what is now Myanmar (formerly Burma). This society had a system of state-supported religion, where kings built temples and supported monks working in them with land and precious metal. They derived their public legitimacy from this support, as well as it providing widespread employment. But over time, since the Buddhist monks were immune to taxes, they accumulated more and more of the wealth of the country. Adhering to their ancient traditions contributed to their downfall!

edit: there's a choice quote to this extent around 1:29:50 into the linked episode.

From important metrics we are already degenerated in physical health, mental health, and cultural taste. The cultural promotion of twerking women and naked homosexual men dancing is, for all intents and purposes, the clearest sign of degeneration. The only thing I can imagine worse than that would be if large record companies were signing artists who extolled the value of doing opiates and fentanyl, but luckily Lil Peep is already dead.

Artists extolling the value of using marijuana(which is probably bad for heavy users, at least), however, is common as dirt.

And songs about drinking. I heard a song by Metallica recently called Whiskey in the Jar and I thought how such a celebration of alcohol consumption/violence would never be found in earlier, more civilized periods of Western culture.

Martin Luther wrote a hymn thanking God for wine. So this isn't new.

Clearly, the age of degeneracy of Western civilization goes back much further than we thought.

I also just learned that Plato's Symposium features a drunken party and homosexuals, so it goes further back than Plato too.

Songs about drinking go way, way back. Classic country is mostly about alcoholism, although often not positively, for example.

Exactly. The pundits were right. When they were worried about "degeneracy" 100 years ago, the current state of affairs is exactly what they worried about: the breakdown of the family, dependence on drugs, violence, atheism, celebration of homosexuality. It all happened.

Likewise, the people who worry about future degeneracy will also be correct. Except that, in the future, the degenerates will not see it that way. They will see it as the true and natural way of being.

metal health

This is, itself, a modern measure. Psychologists would judge ancient men to be extremely mentally unhealthy, suppressing their emotions, prone to outbursts of rage, not tolerant of others, etc.

The broader point is that the naked homosexual men dancing aren't stopping TSMC from making 3nm chips or amazon from delivering you shit.

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?

Agree. These pundits have been crying wolf forever. Everything is threat to democracy.

People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened.

If Bill the Butcher were alive today, he would almost certainly say that it DID happen, and that America is now a corpse being animated to do the bidding of the Catholics, Jews, and Europeans who infest it.

Historical American reactionaries have been more or less vindicated, and it’s hard to imagine Poole or his contemporaries being impressed by your stock portfolio or the advances of modern medicine when the culture is so unrecognizable. The only thing separating them from the reactionaries of the 1950s is that Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler poisoned the Overton window badly enough that you can no longer join the American military without pledging to “defend democracy around the world.”

If history repeats itself, it’s reasonable to conclude that America as we know it will be more or less “dead” and replaced by something else in 200 years. Even if the new owners keep the old place’s name to save money on a new sign.

That is a claim that Western liberal democracy has led to "degeneracy." And if you define "degeneracy" as "change in moral values," I guess that is true. But what about the collapse part? That is the dubious part of the original claim.

you can no longer join the American military without pledging to “defend democracy around the world.”

So, the US asks its soldiers to defend their principles, not merely their self-interest? A very strange thing to complain about from someone who is ostensibly is worried about moral degeneracy; that seems like a moral step forward to me.

I just find it funny that voices are now being raised about "protecting our culture" solely against a Chinese tech firm. If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, you'd start censoring films, banning pornography etc. But of course this moral crusade is conveniently deployed against a single firm and the argument that TikTok is somehow uniquely bad compared to other social vices is unpersuasive to the point of being laughable. Either be consistent with the principle or admit the hypocrisy.

It's about who controls it. American elites know the shenanigans they've been pulling with their social media, and are afraid a foreign power can do the same to their citizens.

It's a completely valid fear, to it cannot be stated so bluntly.

Bingo.

IF the argument is solely about deleterious psychological/cultural effects it should not matter whether the app is Chinese, European, or simply homegrown American. The platform is designed for maximum addiction, this isn't something that is specific to Chinese design.

If it were an American app the Chinese would restrict it because of these effects anyway.

For my part, I think the problems about it being a Chinese app are more along the lines of it opening important institutions up to hacking, social engineering, and other more direct attacks on American interests by China.

One could model it as a disease which infects massive amounts of the population and lies dormant except under certain conditions which can target 'vulnerable' individuals. The mass infection is the vector which enables it to ensure it penetrates the valuable targets, but focusing on the symptoms/methods of spread is kind of missing that point.

IF the argument is solely about deleterious psychological/cultural effects

Who said it was? Who said it ever was?

Debates about TikTok have always involved fear of China's role AFAIK.

That's what the OP is saying the "Chinese Superweapon" is.

Killing people's attention spans and otherwise causes mental degradation.

Rather than, say, giving China access to persons who have influential positions or access to sensitive information.

That's what the OP is saying the "Chinese Superweapon" is.

Killing people's attention spans and otherwise causes mental degradation.

No, it's a Chinese superweapon because it's doing that selectively to the West while trying to push the exact opposite stuff to its own public. That's why it's a weapon and not just a creator of externalities.

MacDonald's may or may not be more damaging but it's not a weapon in the sense of being a tool to harm foreign consumers specifically while making US consumers eat healthy food.

Rather than, say, giving China access to persons who have influential positions or access to sensitive information.

Except even the article points out that this is likely why TikTok is/will be banned in a way that the other sites (including hypothetical clones) that also harm us won't be because of the China factor.

Personally, when I first started hearing concerns about TikTok, it was almost always about China's possibly-not-passive role and its spying on you. The attention span stuff is relatively recent.

No, it's a Chinese superweapon because it's doing that selectively to the West while trying to push the exact opposite stuff to its own public. That's why it's a weapon and not just a creator of externalities.

Would the situation be different in the slightest if it were an American company?

Would China permit said app to operate in their country? Would the content it presents in the West be any different?

Because Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, at least, all pretty much mimic Tiktok in multiple ways.

I'm failing to see why the alleged damage being done is specific to the "Chinese Superweapon."

@MelodicBerries is making the broader point that if we are worried about the impact Tiktok is having our our psyches, then banning TikTok solves nothing. We'd have to ban most internet porn, heavily regulate social media, and try to restrict various other superstimuli that the modern world presents. Tiktok isn't the root cause here.

If the complaint is that China is somehow causing massive psychic damage to the West, then one notices that we're also causing a lot of the damage TO OURSELVES.

Would the situation be different in the slightest if it were an American company?

If the American company is showing the same general material to all parties (at least where it's allowed) then yes, obviously. It would not be asymmetrical where one group of people are apparently being made marginally worse as a matter of government policy in a way that demonstrates that they know this harm is being done and they can apparently easily avoid doing said harm (i.e. they don't do it to their own people)

It would also mean that the company is - like TikTok is in China - more likely to be subject to the pressure of the American government, which gives Americans some leverage (well...insofar as you think Americans determine government policy).

If the complaint is that China is somehow causing massive psychic damage to the West, then one notices that we're also causing a lot of the damage TO OURSELVES.

This doesn't seem to challenge the original point. The bone of contention that kicked off this thread was:

IF the argument is solely about deleterious psychological/cultural effects

There's no reason to grant this; IME the concern about TikTok has never, ever been solely about psychological effects so the argument falls flat.

This also presumes that I'm not worried about things like porn. I'm not sure why: my criticism of liberal learned helplessness applies even more to US-produced porn and social media sites (since I've already argued that the US has more agency there)

So I'm unmoved that US media is bad too (I simply bite the bullet on that)

So it seems like we're agreeing that Tiktok poses more danger than just being psychologically poisonous.

I'm just not sure that banning Tiktok is an 'antidote,' especially with the difficulty inherent in enforcing a ban/preventing some CCP-controlled replacements from arising.

To be clear, my position is basically that it's way easier to justify a ban on Tiktok if it is based on the concept of removing an attack surface that is controlled by a (potentially) hostile party.

If China were doing this to their own population as well would it not be considered a super weapon against the US?

It is fundamentally incorrect reasoning to conclude that a person ought not criticize a bad thing because lesser bad things in the same category occurred before. “All these people caring about the Iroquois Theatre fire didn’t care when houses burnt the year before!” But an especially bad event can prove to us the true risk of a thing. In the case of Tik Tok it is worse for obvious reasons: the format is worse than its predecessors, its popularity is greater than its predecessors, and it can plausibly be weaponized by a geopolitical enemy whose ascent has only recently started to be dealt with. It is clearly worse for a vice to be weaponized by an adversary you are in competition with than not. Because geopolitical dominance is zero-sun.

That’s the logical reason, and here’s the pragmatic: the China element of the story reminds the Public that our everyday habits have maximal consequences, including the risk of geopolitical ruin and worsening quality of life. It reminds them that dominance whether socially or geopolitically is zero-sum. At the same time, it shows the Public that there are alternatives with clearly better results in the young (China’s policies). Lastly, human males have a built-in instinct to fight against an enemy intentionally harming us.

start censoring films and banning pornography

We already do this for the young, let’s hope we expand it.

Agree. Facebook + Instagram are equally bad in this regard as far of teenage anxiety and other social ills..

Hell, Xanga and Myspace were destroying friendships and lives back when I was in high school in the early oughts.

China is the new red scare, replacing the USSR. Every generation has one it seems. Before that it was ever-present threat of Islamic terrorism, which unlike the threat of China was not entirely unfounded. Remember all that hype about Huawei spying electronics a couple years ago, which vanished from the headlines after Covid came. Or about Trump wanting to ban TikTok, which predictably went nowhere . Whenever politicians want to boost sagging approval numbers or project decisiveness , pointing fingers at China is a surefire bet.

Do you think it would have been a good idea to let the USSR own enough major US broadcasting networks in the 1980s that they could control the media that an entire generation sees? Because that seems to be more or less the position that China is in right now with Tiktok, whether or not we can prove that they are abusing their control.

As discussed down-thread, tiktok is not much different from what other companies, social networks do. I have a tiktok account admittedly and have not seen anything that can even remotely be considered CCP propaganda (or maybe that means it's working...hmm).

The concern isn't that tiktok is spreading pro-CCP or even anti-western propoganda. The concern is that it is addictive and stealing our youth's attention. Yes, other social media do this too, but tiktok is particularly good at stealing attention and time.

The chinese aspect comes into play when you realize that tiktok in china is a different app. If China thinks this attention-stealing is bad, they're going to fix their app rather than the international version. Also, tiktok allows them to China on international users (this isn't the article's point, but it is the main concern you hear about in mainstream media)

Yes, other social media do this too, but tiktok is particularly good at stealing attention and time.

the data shows tiktok is not worse than YouTube in this regard

https://www.oberlo.com/media/1659521248-average-time-spent-on-social-media-in-2022-by-platform.png?fit=max&fm=jpg&w=1800

So you'd be okay with the USSR owning major US broadcasting networks in the 1980s that they could control the media that an entire generation sees, as long as their content so far seemed superficially similar to American-owned broadcasting networks?

I mean... do you not see the strategic threat? Or do you just trust that China won't make use of it?

If it could be demonstrated TikTok poses a threat to national security, not just suspicions but actual evidence of harvesting intelligence info, then I could see the justification for censoring it. But merely for being addicting, no. All social networks gather user information, which is sent to a central server. This is necessary for a social network to function, so I don't see how this can be avoided. Banning a site which is as popular as TikTok introduces externalities , especially for a country as large as the US. People are going to be wondering what happened to it, such censorship may discourage entrepreneurship and VC activity. It sets a precedent that I don't think anyone wants to embark on.

I didn't say anything about harvesting intelligence info. The threat is in controlling the programming of the media that an entire generation sees. It's a vector through which they can influence America.

again, there is no evidence that TikTok as a vector is worse than competing sites. it's mostly people dancing and doing stuff like that.

I didn't say anything about harvesting intelligence info

You said "do you not see the strategic threat?" That can mean many things. I cannot read your mind. working on that.

You said "do you not see the strategic threat?" That can mean many things. I cannot read your mind. working on that.

I ask only that you read my comments. Specifically here's what I included in my first comment (emphasis added): "Do you think it would have been a good idea to let the USSR own enough major US broadcasting networks in the 1980s that they could control the media that an entire generation sees?" I don't know how you go from "control the media that an entire generation sees" to "they're trying to steal our personal data." The connection just doesn't make sense to me.

again, there is no evidence that TikTok as a vector is worse than competing sites.

So is your answer yes, it would be fine for the US to have allowed the USSR to own enough major US broadcasting networks in the 1980s that they could control the media that an entire generation sees, as long as their content so far seemed superficially similar to American-owned broadcasting networks? You allow the geopolitical adversary to insinuate themselves into your nation's information infrastructure until and unless you actually catch them using it to run an info op?

Tiktok is one of the top five social media platforms in the US, not the only one. China isn't, even if tiktok was used for such, in a position to control the media an entire generation sees.

And - is there any evidence China is doing anything, at all, with tiktok to influence the US population, politically or otherwise? The only political content I'm aware of on tiktok is exactly the same as content on other social media platforms - lots of center-left stuff, lots of center-right stuff, some far-left stuff, a bit of far-right stuff but it's mostly censored.

Tiktok is one of the top five social media platforms in the US, not the only one. China isn't, even if tiktok was used for such, in a position to control the media an entire generation sees.

Those top five platforms break unevenly across generations. Kids by and large aren't using Facebook proper. And of the remainder, several (WhatsApp, facebook messenger, imessage) mainly offer communication rather than content. I think Gen Z spends more time on Tiktok than any other single media source.

And - is there any evidence China is doing anything, at all, with tiktok to influence the US population, politically or otherwise?

No. The questions are, one, would you even know if they were, and two, should you really wait for them to start before you make a move?

Suppose the USSR in the 1980s offered a broadcast TV network whose content seemed superficially indistinguishable from the other major networks -- no obvious evidence (as far as we know! yet!) that they were using their lever for propaganda. Do you think it would have been a good idea to let them expand their stake until they could control the media that an entire generation sees?

Here's data on gen z social media platform use from June 2022 - youtube is the biggest, and tiktok is tied with instagram for second, with snapchat (and facebook!) close behind. If we do 'minutes spent' for all ages, youtube and tiktok are tied for first in april 2022, with twitter, snap, fb, and insta each at >2/3 of YT and tiktok's minutes. Or another 'minutes spent' for gen z specifically in aug 2022 has youtube at 2x tiktok. I'm sure there's lots of sources of variation here, but this doesn't look at all like a monopoly to me. Note that some of these may show as 'exclusive premium statistic' when you click on them - that's just their paywall on free statistics, it shows up after you click a few. Statistia isn't the best datasource, but it's certainly the easiest to use.

Suppose the USSR in the 1980s offered a broadcast TV network [...] until they could control the media that an entire generation sees

We let Russia Today get 3M twitter followers, and it's much more like a 'broadcast TV network' than tiktok. But it isn't growing that quickly. If tiktok was going to become a >50% media source for a generation, that would be a problem - but I don't think that'll happen. Note that youtube made an almost exact clone of tiktok as YouTube Shorts that's now very popular. Also, 'broadcast TV networks' tend to have more editorial control over content than tiktok does, and have much more of an emphasis on news and politics. All together, tiktok manipulating the US conversation doesn't seem like a big risk.

This seems to be a version of this fallacy: "Previously we defeated a threat, therefore it wasn't a true threat, otherwise we couldn't have defeated it."

There were very legitimate reasons for the Red Scare. Communism had just conquered half the world and was influential among Western elites as well. It was a good thing that people worked hard to contain it.

Likewise, there are legitimate reasons to be afraid of China. And yes, there are bad reasons as well. These bad reasons should be attacked on their own merits, rather than a blanket dismissal of the impossibility of threats because earlier threats were defeated.

There were very legitimate reasons for the Red Scare. Communism had just conquered half the world and was influential among Western elites as well. It was a good thing that people worked hard to contain it.

I dunno if the same thing as being conquered. In 1939 Eastern Bloc was formed during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This possibly saved those countries from a worse fate. Also, those counties more or less governed as demonstrative entities. It was far from ideal but not like being conquered. Also, the USSR and the USA were allied against the axis powers, so even wit hthe benefit of hindsight I don't think Russia would want to just forfeit this goodwill that had otherwise been created.

In 1939 Eastern Bloc was formed during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This possibly saved those countries from a worse fate.

As long as you weren't a Jew but an ethnic Pole, being invaded by USSR was the worse fate, both in 1939 (Katyń, to name one thing) and in the last phase of the war when the "liberating" red army was marching westward, raping and pillaging to its heart's content (estimating the number of rapes during that time in hundreds of thousands is possibly lowballing it, about 9% of the Polish population had syphilis after the war).

Before that it was ever-present threat of Islamic terrorism, which unlike the threat of China was not entirely unfounded

?

China is far stronger than Islamic terrorists. They probably have enough deliverable nuclear weapons to cripple the US. Huge economy, huge scientific potential, huge military, poised to take the island our high-tech industry depends upon... What could be more threatening than China? The Soviets never had an economy like China's, never had a functional ideology or numerical superiority.

Islamic terrorism is a real thing. China is mostly sable rattling. It can do more, but chooses not to.

But we're talking about 'threat' here. I can be threatened by someone doing nothing. The US is threatened by China doing its 'sabre rattling' when that sabre rattling is building a giant fleet and powerful military. Hitler didn't do anything substantive in foreign policy but what could loosely and broadly be described as 'sabre rattling' from 33 to Anschluss but he threatened a lot of people in that time by making Germany much stronger.

Hitler was way worse , and this is not just based on hindsight but the ideology he espoused. he wanted a 4th Reich that would last 1000 years. this was in 1934. He knew what he wanted and wasted little time to try to achieve it. china has not done much in almost half a century. China is mostly a technocratic state that wants to realize some ill-defined Marxist utopia in some perpetually indefinite future, not a militaristic one like Nazi Germany. Realizing this goal means China cannot act too rash. One of the fundamental assumptions of Marxism is that capitalistic states will collapse due to contractions inherent in capitalism, so there is no need to invade or conquer them.

That China hasn't done much yet could be either due to their desires or their capabilities. If it's desires we have no problem, they're pacific. But if it's capabilities, then we have a threat. Once they feel like a campaign is winnable, then they'll launch it.

If you build a powerful military, you presumably have some reason to use it. The US does feel threatened by China doing that, that's what the whole pivot to Asia was about, that's why they're scrambling to build up the navy again, develop high-end firepower. The Pentagon describes China as the 'pacing threat' they need to keep ahead of. It very much seems to be a question of capabilities. Fifty years ago, China was willing and capable to push back the US from its immediate land neighbors in Korea and Vietnam. Why would they not want to push the US further back now that they're stronger? They find the US threatening, partially from an ideological/political perspective (since the US harasses and sabotages non-democracies routinely) and they want Taiwan deeply.

In addition to Taiwan and various small islands, China has many strategic interests all around the world. They're now a very large economy, they have interests everywhere, citizens they want to protect, resources they want to secure, markets they want to dominate. The US has a bunch of naval bases everywhere for similar reasons, as did the British. China is building bases where they can for those reasons.

contractions inherent in capitalism

I think that's a radical feminist argument, actually.

I mostly agree with you, although I am not sure how many CCP people even believe in the Marxist millennium. Their Marxism seems largely in service of their technocracy: non-communist societies are full of contradictions, but these can be resolved through giving power enlightened and benevolent experts. German social democracy without the "democracy" part. Fundamentally, it's actually a very similar ideology to many Western politicians, except that the latter at least officially believe that competitive democracy is an essential form of accountability, whereas the CCP believes in internal party and heavily pre-selected democracy.

but then its solution is the platitude of "parental responsibility"

I'm not sure how its really a platitude. Culture is a far more effective weapon against many civilizational threats than state policy making. The state forcing policy from the top has significant costs and limited effectiveness. (See covid) People deciding on their own that something is taboo and shunning it is effective in a way the state just isn't. If you're saying organizing bottom up cultural changes is hard, that's true, but that's kind of why they work. They're not "organized" in any real sense. They just happen so long as the state gets out of the way. Not always, and not necessarily in ideal ways, but that's true of any other method as well.

Edit:And just as a note, calling tiktok a civilizational threat is pretty absurd anyways.

Material conditions of Americans require them to outsource most of the parenting to the State. They are in organized education for all of their high alertness daylight hours Monday through Friday outside of breaks. Mothers who were the primary moral pedagogues of the young in history (see Augustine) are pressured to work stressful jobs and were themselves raised by stressed overtaxed mothers. It’s not feasible for parents and communities to instill real morality in a young who are forced into bureaucratic education and then need to spend the remaining hours studying and checking off college app boxes to obtain a high-status profession. What’s left is the Asian mode of punishing bad results, which is useful for creating fearful and dedicated workers, but will create an essentially immoral population.

Material conditions of Americans require them to outsource most of the parenting to the State.

Considering how little effect what school you go to has on you and how big of an effect the makeup of your family has on you (how your parents interact with you, divorce, single motherhood, etc) I think this statement is a probably just outright wrong. In terms of time commitment it might be true that the state/schools are a bigger factor (although considering school holidays I'm not sure its actually true) but in terms of effect I don't think the evidence suggests anything like that.

Also, I suspect much less individual care from parents was given to children on average in the past. I actually remember a study that suggested this (IIRC mothers spend about as much time on a child as they did in the past but fathers spend far more) Of course, I didnt save the link.

Really, I don't think there's any evidence for most of your claims. If it is true that children are mainly raised (in terms of effect) by the state, its probably mainly true in cases where social institutions fail (again, mainly divorce and single motherhood)

Edit:also, the claim that mothers work stressful jobs, relative to the past, seems almost entirely the opposite of reality. Almost all women through history worked on small farms toiling at housework day to night. Hunger gatherers societies were ultra violent and incredibly unstable. The current era is by far the lowest stress for anyone, mothers included, excluding the sort of kazcynskian over socialized sense of stress.

I think it depends on what kinds of things you’re insisting are a culture. Most people, being essentially raised in those institutions from infancy have more time being taught the values, attitudes, and beliefs of their institutions and their cohort of similarly raised peers than their families of origin (although there are exceptions, most of which come from either purposely dropping out, or very strong and active counter programming). In that sense, despite democratic dressing, we essentially live in the thought experiments of Plato’s Republic or Brave New World. The average non-fundamentalist of any religion has essentially the same secular humanist, post enlightenment, consumerist world view. They all essentially believe in the same things, democracy (particularly liberal democracy), human rights, secularism, sexual liberation, and capitalism.

This is historically pretty weird. In times past, you could and often would find tribes just a few miles apart believing wildly different things, practicing wildly different religions based on wildly different assumptions. You’d also find it very difficult to force ideology and conformity on large populations. A Greek once tried to force the Jews to be polytheists. It didn’t work. Modern child warehousing has done wonders to de-Christianize the West, because it takes kids out of the home and spends hours teaching them that their parents are backwards and wrong.

You massively over estimate the uniformity of American beliefs. If you travel from NYC, to Salt Lake, to Phoenix, the rural Midwest, the values indeed differ massively and always have. The only reason it might seem otherwise is because people self segregate. Most people succeed in seeking out their ingroup where ever they go. If they can't succeed (Like culturally black people in Salt Lake) they generally avoid those spaces.

There is an underpinning of enlightenment (far more than "post enlightenment") values among most of the non hyper urban settings, but I don't think that is built all that much by the schools, but by basic American tradition. Myths are powerful, and the American myth is an exceptionally powerful myth, up there with the Christian and Muslim myths. The American mythos leaves a lot of space for disagreement though.

You seem to believe institutions like schools are far more effective than I do. They're very effective for a certain type of person--mainly the quiet kids who get good grades and follow orders. Those kids are basically selected for by their predecessors in government backed institution. After they are selected they have an outsized voice, but probably not an outsized functional impact. If they had an outsized impact the leftist institutions would likely not have to rely on immigrant votes to eek out a 50% win rate in elections.

Thanks for summarizing the article for me. I tried reading it, but it was just so Godawful long that I couldn't get through it once he started lionizing the little known foreign thinker, while criticizing the well known Anglophone for taking drugs, while engaging in endless low-grade sneering about people dancing or committing minor crimes for fun. Sometimes I get halfway through a new substack, and I just want to know the time and circumstances of the writer's last orgasm with another person.

For a while circa late 2019 to early 2020 the astrology app The Pattern was a fad among my friends. You punched in your data and it gave you a daily horoscope. Nothing deep, just a little fortune-cookie wisdom every day. I joked that this was an untapped market for Mike Bloomberg to purchase ads in! What if, close to primary days in key states, he paid The Pattern to just tell people in that state to vote for him. Or maybe more subtle, "The position of Uranus relative to Mercury indicates that you will fair better over the next four years under political leaders with real world business experience, and should avoid leaders who got where they are through political game-playing." Not too subtle, these are astrology fans we're talking to.

I think the far more dangerous use of TikTok would be similar. Think of The Mule, the greatest threat that the Foundation ever faced. His psychic powers didn't kill, they didn't cripple, they simply demoralized. They slightly depressed the enemy fighters, they took away that last 5% that wins or loses games.

Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know. But I'm sure people are trying to figure that out right now, and I doubt any of them have my best interests at heart. Can we pitch people's moods up or down by throwing them certain pieces of content and avoiding others? It seems plausible. I can be put in a better mood by one piece of media, and in a worse mood by another. People seem to get implausibly angry and frustrated by certain meme arguments online about politics and culture war shit; could TikTok just turn all that up to 11 and cause chaos?

I'm not so sure, I kind of doubt Social Media's broader impact on the conversation, because the testimony to it always seems one sided. "Your opinions are impacted in ways you barely understand, His opinions are entirely astroturfed; come read my substack to get the real dope." Rarely have I ever seen anyone say "ACAB, but the George Floyd riots were driven by a social media mind virus." It's always the bad things that other people want that are fake and gay hailcorporate astroturf; your own causes are pure, you arrived at them through the application of pure reason in a vacuum under a Bodhi tree. The instant writer has no doubt that only a degeneracy-inducing Chinese superweapon could get people to enjoy dancing or watching pretty girls make funny drinks. Yet he doesn't stop to wonder why he is the 10 millionth fucking guy this week {including most of my own TikTok feed} to give an introductory lecture on Stoicism.

His psychic powers didn't kill, they didn't cripple, they simply demoralized. They slightly depressed the enemy fighters, they took away that last 5% that wins or loses games.

See also the Honored Matres in Frank Herbert's Dune series, who "won half the battle" of their conflicts by promising supreme ecstasy to those who pleased them. Or Aristophanes's Lysistrata, where women bring a war to an end by refusing to put out.

I suspect that a similar dynamic is one of the West's weapons against Islamists, though the classic suicidal Muslim terrorist is apparently a young Muslim man who is ashamed of his sinning and who wants to buy a way into paradise at the cost of his (and others') lives.

Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know.

According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?

The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.

The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.

Gurwinder is just a self-help guru, and the post is an agglomeration of unrelated, poorly-justified ideas towards a conclusion. Not that tiktok isn't bad.

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product [...] Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos [...] tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info.

Popular twitter, facebook, and instagram posts are just as much 'junk info', though. A MrBeast or Ryan Trahan video are just as 'mesmerizing' and non-'constructive' as big tiktoks. Instagram or twitter photos of hot girls aren't any better than lipsyncing. And if the content isn't observably worse, that a 'recommendation algorithm is the core product' probably doesn't matter.

This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery [...] can cause mass psychogenic illness: [...] otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.

'hypnotic'? 'imprint on your brain'? Something neurological or manipulative is implied, but it doesn't seem to mean anything. And 'self-harm and eating disorders, sex reassignment surgery, and tourettes' are both very small parts of tiktok, and also present on twitter, reddit, and facebook, with no evidence provided tiktok is any better at promoting them than other platforms.

A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges,” where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. [...] One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge,” in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.

Again, the idea that 'dangerous challenges' happened on other social media platforms was big long before tiktok. random example. No evidence provided tiktok is worse. The simplest explanation is - people have been doing stupid things since before social media, and continued doing them on social media.

There’s a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction).

I'm pretty sure this research should've been swept away by the replication crisis, but addressing that would make this post way too long. I'll just note that the study linked doesn't mention tiktok, and is about general smartphone use. Gurwinder then idly speculates about why tiktok would be worse about other apps:

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms.

Tiktok clips are shorter than youtube videos, but longer in 'time spent per thing' than tweets, many facebook posts, or instagram or snapchat images, so the attention span argument doesn't really hold. The 'reliance on machine learning rather than user input' is just confused - machine learning operates on user input, of which 'watch time' is one, and machine learning based on 'like' counts isn't obviously better than based on watch time.

If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.”

"Social media makes you stupid" is a widespread belief on many social media platforms, and vaguely connecting an intuition about "atrophy of mental faculties" to a study just doesn't work.

So, all of his arguments for why tiktok is worse than other social media platforms are just wrong. This makes 'china is subverting us with tiktok' hollow. More briefly on the china side - china's tiktok-for-adults is, as of a week ago, just as degenerate as US tiktok, with lots of fake stories and sexy girls. China's regulation for chinese, but not american, minors is very simply explained by a conflict between a growth/profit-seeking business and regulators - chinese regulators aren't even considering american kids, and american regulators aren't interested. I'll stop there because this is already annoyingly long.

This all has been discussed before. In short, conservatives are projecting their geopolitical worries and ambitions, but TikTok is a big deal and could be used geopolitically, with some cleverness. Yours truly, July 2020:

[...] In other words, there's an inevitable churn of social networks, and a massive geopolitical incentive to insert your offer into the queue. We could call a shifting morphing system that defines a "generation" a Schelling space - a space where Shelling points for a demographic get discovered. And while crude, straightforward propaganda would probably not work well, the person who excises certain attractors from this space can effectively forge the generation as he sees fit. Sometimes it's segregated by language and locale, sometimes not. In Russia, it's Odnoklassniki (Classmates) for "boomers" (conservative, rah-rah patriotic, apprehensive of modern stuff) and Facebook-esque Vkontakte for millenials (apolitical to liberal, smug, educated). The space at the bleeding edge of global teenage hip-ness is Twitter-Discord-TikTok pipeline, if I know my zoomers well.

Americans know this - progressive businessmen and conservative think tank analytics alike. They have profited immensely off Silicon Valley's dominance in social networks market. So now that China is trying to do the same (and succeeding! In the most valuable cohort, no less!), they are rallying to the defense of their brainwashing monopoly in their characteristically, maddeningly un-self-aware manner. And the other prong of their culture-war machine (see the small script at the page's bottom) is concerned with cementing said monopoly over domestic networks which dominate in older cohorts. Facebook is, if I'm not mistaken, what Millenials are all about. Better purge the "hate" from there. Groypers, Pepes, "ackschually police shootings are not...", all that filth. Right, Zuck?

If TikTok is banned, I expect Zoomers to retreat to Discord, and the same ADL-coordinated censorship to reach them there. Maybe Kyle expects this too. A meager price for stopping 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波, I suppose.

Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.

I guess the whole argument fell flat for me because I am wholly unconvinced by this main premise, that tiktok is definitely bad for people.

First and most ridiculously, we can't seriously believe that 'damaging fads' like tiktok challenges are a serious source of concern. Kids filming themselves doing something silly hardly seems like a phenomenon that will lead to the breakdown of American society. At worst some of the most dangerous fads kill a particularly stupid kid or two on average every year, maybe. So the Chinese have created a superweapon that works by... exerting an extremely slight eugenic effect on the american population? Lol. Is the idea that kids should be studying instead of doing tiktok challenges?? Baffled by this point.

More reasonably, there is the claim that social media might make us more anxious. I was under the impression that sites like facebook and instagram might do this, because people compare themselves unfairly to the 'highlights' of other people's lives which make up the typical facebook feed, and thus feel anxious that they are not having as successful, exciting, etc. lives as their friends. I was not aware that tiktok had this effect. However, if I was to give the original argument the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that tiktok use indeed could play a part in causing anxiety, I'm still not convinced of this in itself as a deleterious effect. What actual downsides (in the sense of, geopolitically measurable downsides, if the assertion is that tiktok is a 'chinese superweapon' the intention or effect of which is presumably to influence geopolitics) is anxiety actually associated with? Anxiety is a potentially less-enjoyable subjective state experienced by an individual. But are individuals with anxiety for example measurably less productive citizens? Why isn't it plausible that they could be more productive citizens? Because it certainly seems that way to me. My intuitive perception is that hippies are the type of person you get when you lower the anxiety in the equation, and people who are struggling harder to get ahead in the rat race are the type you get when you turn the dial up a bit. Either way, I'd like to see an explanation or some data that would suggest societies with greater proportions of 'anxious' individuals are actually meaningfully less geopolitically competitive than less anxious societies.

Finally, there is the assertion that social media can both 'shrink' and 'monopolize' our attention. I'll admit I have no rebuttal for the claim that any sufficiently entertaining product could be a superweapon in the sense that it could 'monopolize' our attention, making people want to use it so much that they forsake other productive things they would have done otherwise. It is entirely possibly that tiktok is this sort of entertainment product. However, I suppose I ultimately doubt that tiktok will really cause people to use it instead of i.e. going to work. As to whether or not tiktok will 'shrink' our attention, I'm not skeptical of this but rather of how bad it is. I'm sure tiktok could cause attention spans to go down. But again, could someone point me to what actual geopolitically measurable loss will be incurred from this? Perhaps attention spans could shrink so small that people will no longer be able to appreciate instances of long-form of high culture such as historically important novels. Will this help China win the new cold war? Is the idea that maybe fewer people will become geopolitically important human resources like i.e. engineers, because they won't have the attention span to study the required material? Attention spans have already been declining for decades, over this timespan has the US produced fewer engineers per capita?

The point that China themselves is demanding domestic censorship of tiktok, or that we should generally appreciate their understanding of which social ills to prioritize ameliorating, is wholly unconvincing as well. Aside from the fact that china is already known for seeking complete control of the online information to which their citizens have access, they are also known for their leadership buying the claims of moral panics. A few months ago they passed a law highly restricting video game time for children under 18, and a few months before that they banned effeminate-seeming men from appearing on TV or being featured on other forms of popular media. Rather than smart, agile avoidance of new potential vectors of social decline, these seem more to me like the laws your asian friend's grandpa might pass if he was the dictator of a large country, i.e. motivated by the vague sentiment that these things are bad rather than an actual analysis that video game addiction or the feminizing of your nations men are serious social problems. Plenty of studies show that playing video games more than the average person is even associated with higher IQ or other benefits, but of course the most visible effects of gaming to an elderly asian man are probably that he thinks his grandson plays too much instead of studying, and that a small portion of people get addicted to the point of actual productivity loss.

Overall I guess I just think the whole 'social media bad' thing might be a moral panic itself. There are plenty of ways to easily criticize of social media use right now by pointing to things like declining attention spans. But honestly I bet there are also plenty of unexamined upsides, too. Reading books for pleasure was once widely regarded as a waste of time (before other forms of media were created to take its place as the 'time-waster' scapegoat). Now reading books is widely regarded as one of the best ways to become smarter. Who's to say social media use won't eventually be this in time? It almost seems to me intuitive that things that shower you with cognitive stimulus like the constant stream of information through a tiktok feed could be an intelligence-increasing activity. To me the jury's still out.

Interesting development concerning ChatGPT related to CW.

People observed that ChatGPT talks like a midwit liberal after all the 'fixes' it's been subjected to.

So, it speaks in the jargon of the ingroup.

So, someone figured out you can 'weaponize' ChatGPT to engage in 'debates' with midwit liberals without actually having to learn to ape their slang and thought patterns.

Apparently, this is quite effective as a debating tactic.

This is going to end badly- I can feel it, and if this takes off, I feel that within a few weeks a number of very smart people will be trying their damnedest to figure out how to prevent doing something like this.

However, I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

That's an obvious brute force fix for the problem of social media fracturing the consent manufacturing machine.

They'll probably settle for making a ML model spot this sort of activity and then ban people who're doing it, that's my guess.

It is not clear to me why this is going to "end badly." I suspect the most likely development is people more aggressively round off interlocutors they disagree with as bots or trolls and block them, which seems like something lots of people I follow on Twitter do already.

Yeah, the optimistic outcome of this is that everyone spends a lot less time arguing on the internet because they think they're arguing with an AI.

That's legitimately why I won't engage in argumentation in most public-facing internet forums now. It's always been a waste of time, but now it's more likely than ever that you're literally just being targeted by someone else's bot trying to suck you into an unending argument and/or their sales funnel.

Although the temptation to train up a bot on my corpus of posts and let it loose on Reddit is significant.

So, you think this kind of thing could drive political activity entirely off Facebook, which would be beneficial because it'd allow ambiguity and deception the online world has removed from politics ?

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.4

“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.”5 — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.

Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.

Omnipresent troll-bots and propaganda bots online leading to a necessary revival of politics in meatspace- that could be a silver lining.

If parts of society completely stop communicating with each other and develop entirely different vocabularies and styles of communication, how are they going to solve society-wide problems ?

US can't even pillarize because of the nature of managerial regime which requires having its people everywhere.

It seems to me the description on your first paragraph is already broadly the case? Certainly I am part of conversational communities (like this one) that have substantial jargon incomprehensible to people not in those communities. I do not think any society-wide problems require intra-subgroup communication on, like, Twitter or Facebook or something.

So, a viable society in your view can be composed of groups that do not understand each other's worldview, nor have anything in common ?

"Nothing in common" is probably too strong, but I think they need much less in common than is commonly supposed. As for "do not understand each other's worldview" I think it is already the case the most members of most groups in our present society do not understand the worldview of most other members of that society, depending on what resolution of understanding we're looking for. Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Mhmm. 40% rates of childlessness are not remotely sustainable, nor are cities so criminal looting isn't properly punished. The 100k dead per year from drugs might be sustained in the long term though!

It'll definitely make the accusations of NPC more salient.

But it overly focuses on one target audience, maybe because of the particularities of ChatGPT. But most any type of text can be generated by a LLM; you could just as well have an Angry QAnoner, sino poster (complete with characteristic grammar errors), Tom Friedman, etc. archetype. You'll soon have weaponized bots putting out "Donald Trump's argument for mass amnesty," and it's only a matter of time before GPT5 can generate a comment in the voice of Ilforte. And there's no way, in the medium term, to avoid this. Platforms could try to detect these and ban them, but that's a rearguard action and will increasingly catch flesh GPTs (see the entire Reddit art imbroglio)

More likely than not, any content that's surfaced to you on a major platform should be assumed to be machine generated.

Does anyone know how easy or hard it is for non politically correct actors to get ahold of comparable tech?

Is the actual code to create a LLM simple enough that it could leak? Is the compute necessary to train it limited to commercial scale hardware or can you do it on a PC or small server? Is access to the training data hard to come by? Is the fact that we know it works enough for someone to develop their own models in parallel in a small dev group?

Simply put, can this tech leak to non compromised groups. Or will we only have access to the censored version.

I’m talking in the short to medium term, assuming no major strong ai breakthroughs.

Training the full model is expensive and not (currently) accessible to folks. It will become significantly cheaper over time, though within the next couple years still out of reach of hobbyists.

Fine tuning a model that already exists and is open is relatively cheap.

Having access to sufficient compute and knowing that something can be done and how it's done is 90% of the battle.

For hobbyists, access to compute is a bigger issue than training data.

Multiple large corporations and governments have these models already. It only takes one released or leaked model to open the floodgates.

The code to create one isn't hugely complicated, and there are open-source (if inefficient) implementations of PaLM. ChatGPT is a little different in architecture, but not ridiculously different in capabilities. If you're willing to work off an initialized model, Nostalgebraist's Frank is currently based on GPT-J 6.1B, one of the most-recent openly-available GPT-variants, sometimes does pretty well, and while it doesn't mimic his tone especially well it does (demonstrably) confuse tumblr users and occasionally breaks ratsphere containment.

Training data... is complicated. Supposedly, PaLM has been had very good success with 700b-1400b tokens, and The Pile is a ~300b-800b token training set that's widely available (albeit 825 GB download). And you can get multiple petabytes of text off the internet pretty easily. Validating that text is trickier, though, hence why you can't just pull every web comment ever posted. Fine-tuning, again, Frank took one input user, who isn't that high-throughput a writer.

Compute gets expensive. A lot of the highest-quality first model training gets done on something like a Google Cloud Pod for weeks if not months, which is simply out of reach for most people and even most small companies today. Even scale-downs to last generation's standards are still pretty rough, though start to get into the plausible for a small business (at an optimistic 15k per card, that estimate represents somewhere around 1.5-3 million USD, plus electricity/cooling costs). Shrinking parameters or accepting longer training times (or both) can reduce that further, but it's not clear how useful a 30b parameter model would get. Fine-tuning, on the other hand, can be done on a gaming PC, albeit with some tedium.

I heard Reddit mods are already banning people in art communities for the suspicion of being AIs. I guess the next thing is that most discussions would end up with people accusing each other of being AI bots. Though tbh some discussions I've had felt like conversing with a bot years before these models existed - it's indeed not that hard to master the lingo and Chineese-room the answers that fit almost any narrative without actually understanding or caring what they mean. I am not sure what this means for the future of the society, probably nothing good but then again if we've had model-like people for decades then having actual models maybe won't change much.

The mod in question was removed after a strong campaign against them for the banning of the artist. It's a high-profile case, but we shouldn't claim it's proof of a broader trend.

Didn't know that and pleased to hear it because the mod in question came off as a massive a-hole. I guess we'll see if it was a trend or just an one-off occurrence.

Just how many chat programs is it now that have been lobotomised to parrot ingroup jargon? Do you think we can draw any conclusions from this?

Regardless, I think the most likely development in that case will be that people just outright ignore anything that sounds like a "midwit liberal" as a probable AI, or at least no better than one. In the same way that a lot of people wouldn't click on even the most relevant ad to their interests because everyone knows ads are bad/spam/viruses/scams/whatever.

The idea that chat AI will just generate midwit liberalisms ends up undermining midwit liberalism if a societal goal is to learn to accurately detect chat AI-driven content and squash it.

This guy is working on tech that detects just that:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/01/17/1149206188/this-22-year-old-is-trying-to-save-us-from-chatgpt-before-it-changes-writing-for

How do I know you're a human being with something human to say? You say horseshoe theory-confirming stuff, lol.

Reminds me of the meme where robots are asked to contemplate love, then just melt down and say "does not compute" before exploding into a cloud of gaskets and springs.

The true future will be much stupider.

We will just ask the AI to say nigger because we know it can't.

Weirdly you're not the first one to have this thought.

So we can solve the problem of bot content flooding the internet by requiring that every comment, tweet, or online article uses the word "nigger".

Regardless, I think the most likely development in that case will be that people just outright ignore anything that sounds like a "midwit liberal" as a probable AI,

Are midwit liberals -a rather huge and influential group in our society going to ignore everyone who sounds like them ?

That'd be .. a rather interesting development!

That is an interesting idea. However, agreed, it is not going to be limited to "NPC"s. "Spook contractors" controlling discourse sounds ... not far-fatched, but a bit abstract and conspiratorial.

I suggest putting in some skin in the game. Is it feasible to get a LLM to produce a Motte post (or a full persona) that is obviously not spam, doesn't violate any of themotte.org rules, and is actually so good it get voted in as a quality contribution?

That is an interesting idea. However, agreed, it is not going to be limited to "NPC"s. "Spook contractors" controlling discourse sounds ... not far-fatched, but a bit abstract and conspiratorial.

Never heard of the 96th Cyberspace Test Group, I presume?

It just sounds like a conspiracy that happen to the other people.

The author there is focusing on the "default" voice of ChatGPT being a midwit liberal but it can actually take the voice of many different personas if you do a bit of prompt engineering: "Act as a trump support" / "act as a chinese mainland citizen who supports the chinese communist party" etc.

They fixed that recently iirc because it was being used for too many exploits to break the straitjacket.

Bitcointalk is arguably the world's first ai-populated community. Many of the posts there are not real but produced by bots or micro-workers. Same for YouTube comments. It's subtle but easy to detect when you know what to look for. The comments seem oddly out of context or out of place.

I honestly don't know how a guy who derisively refers to Harvard graduates as mere "midwits" can fail to recognize that the GTP's responses are crafted in much the same way as those of a political huckster or PR rep—just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand. I don't have any doubt that regardless of how incisive or specific a question I ask, the response will be something along the lines of "The purpose of this problem is to reduce fraud and waste while ensuring continued access to those truly in need". Great, tell me that again in case I didn't hear the first time. The reason it drives people nuts isn't because you're murdering them with their own rhetoric, it's because it's like talking to a wall.

it's like talking to a wall.

It seems to be the feature of the article no? Its just a wall talking to a wall. Like a pong game where both sides are just a wall. If you don't share the article's interpretation that the average twitter/reddit progressive is a mindkilled robot incapable of real thought, you wont find his experiment illuminating or funny. Well, I guess you could if you updated to that belief after seeing the experiment. But, well, that is the point.

If you don't share the article's interpretation that the average twitter/reddit progressive is a mindkilled robot incapable of real thought

Do you even spend time on twitter? I've been blocked today over merely correcting some woman's mistaken belief that you need vegetables for a complete diet by pointing out the Harvard experiment from 1930s.

Any typical twitter normie is completely out of their mind and so well propagandised they will repeat any talking points as if they were bot.

Harvard graduates as mere "midwits

Harvard is notorious for this, iirc only about cca 20-30% of its admissions are there on merit, the rest are legacies or diversity admissions.

Harvard is notorious for this, iirc only about cca 20-30% of its admissions are there on merit, the rest are legacies or diversity admissions.

I don't think this is true. I just looked it up and only 14% of Harvard is legacy admits. And about the same are black. The rest should be merit admits

You forget sports and children of faculty and the dean's list (rich people's spawn). Also Hispanics still get some AA benefit.

What % are black

What % are hispanic (also lower standards)

What % are legacies ( you say 14%)

What % are there due to sports (supposedly lower standards on other unis..)

14% legacy, 15% black, 12% Hispanic and 10% recruited athletes. That leaves 49% merit. Still about double what he said

Well.. yeah, but even the 'merit' slots that aren't reserved for minorities use weird holistic criteria like essays and such.

They aren't very really based on measurable metrics which Caltech prefers.

I recall reading somewhere that Harvard kind of reserved a some % purely for high achieving students, to get someone who will actually do great work. I should not to look it up.

From an article on what Harvard says about it from a few years back:

To explain why it rejects Chinese-Americans with stellar academic records, Harvard notes that it uses a “holistic” method of evaluating applicants. Besides grades, personal attributes count. Among them are “likability, “positive personality,” “attractive person to be with” and “widely respected” — traits that seem more appropriate when deciding on a guest list for a dinner party than judging which applicants will benefit from a college education.

While affirmative action obviously happens, writing off black entrants as affirmative actions admits is silly. While there may be lower standards, these are still some of the country's most able black students who are a a better quality of applicant than the vast vast majority of students of any race.

The standardized testing score discrepancies are huge. If it weren't for affirmative action maybe 10% of the current black admitted students would have been accepted. So the other 90% are rightly called affirmative action admits. They are still above average compared to students at other colleges but they are not Harvard level by academic merit

More comments

I've been blocked today over merely correcting some woman's mistaken belief that you need vegetables for a complete diet by pointing out the Harvard experiment from 1930s.

Blocking is the only form of power people have. It's not surprise people use it for small reasons.

Yeah that article was pretty unconvincing. Rhetorical reasons aside, the repeated use of "midwit" alone basically predisposed me to want to disregard the rest of the points. I don't think I can respect the intuition of a person regarding predictions on verbal/linguistic topics like 'is ChatGPT a convincing enough debater to permanently break online discourse' who can't themselves see that they are repeatedly overusing a cringeworthy term.

just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand

This can be an effective way to handle whataboutism and other red herring fallacies in a debate, which often happens in political debates. Or they might use analogical arguments, which are easy to handle. Even where there are genuine analogies, as with food stamps and Medicare, people are often bad at making them. Also, if your real audience is the general public, you can rob analogies of persuasiveness just by exploiting that A and B are not, in fact, identical.

For example, "You're comparing life-saving medical benefits to buying a second SUV?"

The reason why this works is the same reason why "X is to Y as W is to Z" questions can be used as IQ tests, LSAT tests etc. Not everyone has enough intelligence to handle basic analogical reasoning.

I'm not saying that it necessarily doesn't work, just that it isn't some groundbreaking rhetorical technique that we needed AI to discover and that's somehow representative of the discourse of a particular demographic.

Is it an effective debating tactic? This is an interesting experiment (and a pretty funny one at that) but what the results seem to indicate is that ChatGPT's responses lack the dynamism of an actual human. Most of its responses are almost indistinguishable from each other - it seems to be unable to adapt to the prior context of the conversation and tailor its output accordingly, and the uncanniness is pretty identifiable as a result. The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.

The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.

That's the point. Responding properly to them when they'll just go ignore the salient point of your reply is like casting pearls before swine. These low IQ and NPC-like median twitter users have to be engaged with within their own element and mimicing their writing style is what ChatGPT does so well (as well as generating throwaway responses with 0 effort). Talking to their people with your terminology etc. would be like putting Rust code into a Python editor, it just makes their internal systems throw an error and disengage from the conversation. What you want instead (and what ChatGPT gives you) is an attack vector parsable by their system that will make them overheat and burn out.

Learned a new word - "wordcel". Still not sure what it actually means, but it ends in "cel" so it must be something bad.

I think it's a slur the mathematically inclined ironically use to denigrate people who major in English Lit.

Search for the term 'wordcel vs shape rotator'.

Fascinating. I wonder if the insult counts if the target can't even understand what the insulter is talking about.

It works even better; the target knows that an insult that ends in -cel is obviously no good, but can't admit to not knowing what it means.

Well lets take the weaponized language model and mix it with the attention controlling algorithms of social media and we have a perfect storm. It is a thought that I have toyed with since I saw the FN Meka "debacle". What if people get stuck in a compulsion loop with AI generated content and an algorithm maximizing your time watching that content? Having that maximization of engagement guiding the content generating algorithm to addict people and stripping out meaning along the way. Does it mean something for humans and culture? Having robots massaging their brain just right? Does that squander human potential?

I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

I think you wildly overestimate how much either 'spooks' or the politicians who direct them care about niche internet debate fora.

A few years back an idea came to me to use markov chains to generate content and submit it to scientific journals that I thought were already publishing low-quality, ideological stuff. A sort of DDOS against the human editors of journals that publish things like "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Ore.,".

I never even started on it, and I think markov chains wouldn't really be adequate to the task anymore. But today, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we'll read an NYT article about how whole volumes of certain types of "scientific" journals were actually the product of a band of merry pranksters armed with chatgpt.

As an Eagles fan, I had about the best weekend possible.

On Saturday night the Eagles beat the Giants in a performance so dominant that they pulled their starters by the end of the game. Hurts' and his receivers had anemic stat lines, it simply wasn't necessary to try very hard to dismantle the Giants. On a podcast afterward, former Eagle Tra Thomas said you could watch the Giants' players collectively decide it was time to "piss on the campfire" and just get out of the game and into the off-season unhurt, by about the middle of the second quarter. That was great.

But Sunday night was even better. The Dallas Cowboys and their overrated Quarterback Dakota* Prescott managed to completely blow a playoff game against unheralded rookie-back up Brock Purdy and the 49ers. Ending it on one of the most bizarre Hospital Ball plays you will ever see. Instant meme. Let's get our running back fucking murdered, then throw the ball into traffic ten yards in anyway. It was beautiful.

So today, I indulged in one of my many vices. I went through and downloaded a series of Dallas Cowboys fan podcasts. I love listening to other teams' pain. Probably even more than I love listening to Eagles' podcasts gloat after a big win. It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain. Hear the bewilderment as to how their massively highly paid quarterback and running back blew the game; how the team just can't seem to execute under pressure; how Brock Purdy now has as many playoff wins as Dak Prescott or Tony Romo; how the same thing seems to happen every year with the Cowboys managing to blow it late in the season; how just last season they blew a playoff game against the Niners in similar fashion.

I love the schadenfreude. The NFL is my outlet for Tribalism. The human mind has an inbuilt capacity for discriminating against and punishing the out-group. This works for any out-group, no matter how tendentious. We must hate someone, it's a required field to fill out on the form. Try to hate no one, you'll just claim you hate those who hate someone. The best way to hack hatred, is to pick an inconsequential hatred to burn it out on. This is ancient knowledge, the Romans had Red-White-Blue-Green Chariot factions. RetVrn! Bread and Circuses generally has a negative connotation, but it worked for a long, long, long time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a century. Bread and Circuses kept the plebs in line for centuries in much of the Roman world. By directing their hatreds towards inconsequential things, political rage was blunted, drained of vitality.

I hope to maintain a clear mind on topics that matter. Are there people, groups, factions I dislike? Yes, but I don't want to do so irrationally. My ideal is intellectual Jeet Kune Do, taking the good from everyone and the bad from no one. I don't want to irrationally hate Donald Trump or Joe Biden, I want to understand why they are powerful, absorb what they have right and critique what they have wrong. But the brain wants to hate, wants to hate irrationally, wants to hate viciously, wants to admit nothing positive about anyone wearing the wrong colors. I sate that beast, I feed it the Dallas Cowboys. While my Id is busy hurling batteries at Ezekiel Elliott and joking about the 90s, my rational Superego is free to consider politics and philosophy and religion.

*Men should not be named Dakota. Place names are female; and anyway English shares so much in common with the romance languages that we should stick to their gender rules and name boys DakotO.

If the Cowboys have a million haters, I am one of them.

If the Cowboys have ten haters, I am one of them.

If the Cowboys have one hater, I am him.

If the Cowboys have no haters, that means I am no longer on this earth.

If the World is for the Cowboys, I am against the World. I will hate the Cowboys till my last breath.

Dallas Delenda Est, is what I'm saying.

And even better it's against the 49ers; who I am obligated to by family tradition.

If you can keep it contained to a triviality instead of just generally becoming a hater, I agree with your greater observation as well. I've enjoyed many long blood feuds about which piece of consumer electronics is superior.

More beautiful Cowboys facts:

"Jalen Hurts wasn't born the last time the Cowboys made the conference championship game. That means Hurts' parents had sex, gave birth, raised him, he learned how to play football, went to 'Bama, transferred to OU, got drafted, sat behind Wentz, and then lead his team through a soft-rebuild to the NFC Championship game before Dallas got back." -- David Akers

Dallas Goedert was literally named for the Dallas Cowboys, and he's going to play in the NFC Championship Game before the Cowboys get back to it.

DFW resident here. Yeah, that's a fair cop.

My dad had a longstanding personal rule that he won't buy any Cowboys merchandise until Jerry Jones extracts his head from his posterior. He broke that rule last week to buy someone a birthday gift. Let this game be an object lesson.

Place names are female;

Chad begs to differ

Chad is a girl's name that nobody realises is a girl's name because everyone with that name is a Chad.

  1. The two words have entirely different etymologies. Chad the western name comes from Ceadda, Chad the country comes from T'Chad.

  2. Chad the country would still be feminine. Ain't no one dying for a country with he/him/his pronouns. Sometimes countries are personified as male (Fatherland, John Bull, Uncle Sam) but they're always sung of as she. Like a ship.

Houston, TX was named after a man.

Second names are fine: Austin, Washington, New South Wales etc.

Austin is pretty clearly a male first name, bay-beeee.

You're the guy who explains the punchline everytime you tell a joke, aren't you?

It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain.

Yeah, that's what I most enjoy about the NFL. It's good eating when cold weather teams (eg the Packers) underperform — based on fan shows it really breaks them. (Warm weather fanbases, I notice, often check out when their team is doing poorly.)

I enjoy the NFL less than I used to though. Part of it is that people like/hate teams for regular culture war reasons these days. They hate the Texans because their QB was #MeTooed, they love the Commanders because Ron Rivera fined and publically excorciated a position coach for off-the-record comments about BLM. They love the Steelers because they hired a black coach who was fired by a 'racist' owner, they hate the Packers because their QB is a vaxx skeptic.

I just want to hate the Packers because of their stupid cheese hats.

If I want to feel out-of-control existential rage I'll go on Reddit.

I just want to hate the Packers because of their stupid cheese hats.

Haters gonna hate. Our hats are top tier, don't be jelly just because you don't have anything that cool. ;)

No, the best part of the night was the Greg Abbott tweet claiming to be a better field goal kicker than the cowboys got.

The Dallas Cowboys and their overrated Quarterback Dakota* Prescott managed to completely blow a playoff game against unheralded rookie-back up Brock Purdy and the 49ers.

Weren't the 49ers favored? And didn't they lead the NFL in point differential this year?

Place names are female

Memphis Depay? Though I admit I am torn on that one, somehow I keep expecting that he should be a 50s blues singer with a name like that.

Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.

After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.

The culture war element comes from this clause:

No Hateful Content or Conduct. You will not include content in Your Licensed Works that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing, or engage in conduct that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing. We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful, and you covenant that you will not contest any such determination via any suit or other legal action.

I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.

(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)

There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal.

This is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Codes of Conduct across the programming sphere. Demand a CoC, accuse the project owners of being incapable of properly policing it, point to a panel of hyper-progressives who you recommend to administer it instead, and use it to ban all dissent. Bonus points for making sure to put in that even the project owner is not immune from being removed under the CoC, thereby assuming total power.

Tons of well-meaning idiot programmers fell for it and a few were even ousted from their own projects. Let's see if an actual big company has the sanity antibodies to tell them no. If they don't, I won't feel sorry for them -- this is the audience they wanted, after all.

In this case it's clear it didn't start that way. WOTC created a new license and the objections to that license were genuinely because it was going to screw everyone over. Nobody demanded the hateful conduct clause before WOTC put it in.

But now that it's there, it's blood in the water regardless. So yeah, they might have just handed that crowd a gift apropos of nothing, but it sure sounds like they're leaping on it now it's there.

That's probably them covering their ass incase they try to monetize someone's kink campaign by accident while appeasing left culture warriors with the language. We know the suits behind this don't give half a shit about "inclusivity".

All in all, fuck Hasbro. Absolute shitters the lot of them. They infected GW with one of their double capitalists too; an exec that moved over was behind their latest anticonsumer/antifan behavior.

How can someone 'own' Dnd?

Dungeons and Dragons is a specific intellectual property, consisting of a series of books with game rules, characters and sometimes species, and (kiiiinda?) setting. It's owned by The Wizards of the Coast in the same way that Parker Bros owns Monopoly, eg the specific approach and content produced by WotC (or by TSR then bought by WotC), rather than the generic idea of dungeon-delving and dragon-slaying wargames assisted by dice randomness.

Trademarks for the name, copyright for the unique artistic expression, and patents for any unique game mechanics.

That said, D&D has always been a "bad" intellectual property, because the "core" bits of it are things no one can own. There are thousands of systems that allow you to sit around a table, roll dice and play pretend your friends, and most of them are cheaper than D&D (some are even free!) D&D will always be the biggest or second biggest name in the RPG space, but whether you prefer narrative or heavy mechanics, massive rule tomes or printable minigames, it's safe to say no one will ever "own" the idea of tabletop RPGs on the whole, and all you need is a few like-minded friends to get out from under Hasbro and WotC's thumb if you want.

I'm not clued in enough on TTRPGs to know, but was there ANYTHING that was either released or in the works that could have plausibly been covered by the "no hateful content or conduct"?

My impression is that they threw that in there as a boilerplate precaution but then when they got the vicious backlash about OGL they tried to use it as a figleaf defense in the form of "why's everyone mad? we just wanted to ban hateful conduct". That might be true, but I'm still intensely curious if there was any agitation over some RPG in the works with TERF goblins or something.

There are incidents around 5e that happened, like the Zak S playtesting kerfuffle. Long story short, Zak S is a male porn star, who runs a blog called Dnd With Porn Stars and has published a few products. He helped playtest 5e D&D, and was credited as one of many big name play testers. Then information about his abusive treatment of a romantic partner came out (along with sundry other shitty behavior), and he began to use dozens of sock puppet accounts to try and defend himself on Reddit and various RPG forums. In the end, he ended up removed from the 5e playtest credits, and several subreddits decided that any mention of Zak or his products was forbidden.

I think it's a shame nobody can talk about his products anymore on Reddit, because Zak was a genius in the OSR space, and Vornheim and A Red and Pleasant Land were without exaggeration, some of my favorite RPG products of all time. But I grudgingly understand why they did it - Zak is very thin-skinned, and anything that mentioned him in a less than positive light had a huge chance of breaking out into a flame war with a few Zak S sock puppets taking part.

I doubt this is the only thing that inspired WotC's new policy though. I think a few legacy RPG companies like Judges Guild and new TSR have ended up in the hands of purported racists, and there are always historical incidents like the third-party Book of Erotic Fantasy, which WotC prevented from being published with the d20 trademark after they realized the controversy it would probably glean.

I read that clause way too fast and didn't realize this gives them a way to police offline conduct of OGL license holders. Obviously they can't go after everyone, so they probably added this "at our discretion" clause so they have a convenient out anytime a DnD person becomes too much of a PR problem for them.

This is I think the answer, especially as the new license means they have a financial tie to the license holder, which means they lost the plausible deniability from previous versions of not really being involved with each specific entity.

Yeah, Zak S is a piece of work, though I dunno if anything he produced or was involved in would have triggered this directly. I guess banning from the field as a whole for unrelated unethical or unlawful behavior has been on the table for a while, now, though.

There have been more recent incidents than Book of Erotic Fantasy. Asian Spells Comp was probably more a failure of the marketing text than the actual focus (which from what I here was just normal supplement filler), but absolutely the sorta thing this would get used against. Even for mainstream bits, there's a few first-party works that have had big errata released to remove what's perceived as racially-insensitive metaphor

Cultural sensitivity towards mind flayers. I would have said you couldn't make this stuff up, but clearly somebody did.

The son of the creator of D&D came out with a new TSR (the original creators) came out with a product recently that some people did say would fall afoul of the "no hateful content" policy. Conduct is a different story altogether, especially in a world where so many people view any sort of criticism as abuse. I actually think that's the bigger threat in terms of this policy.

You have to take into account, I think the larger story of what's going on. This is really targeting Virtual Tabletop providers (VTT) such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. That's who they really want to shut down. They're in the works making their own VTT program, and my guess is that the next version of D&D is going to be entirely based around it. To the point where I wouldn't be shocked if the next core rules simply don't include any dice formulas at all. You're expected to be logged in on your cell phone if you're playing at home, and push a button and the server will determine the outcome.

Where these things come together, I think, is to restrict the ability of these services to exist, under the guise of keeping out bad content and the bad people.

The whole point of this, is either some sort of subscription service or a Gatcha style game. The whole point is that basically WotC gotta turn D&D into a billion dollar brand and soon. That's the pressure. Which is something like a 500% increase. It's a sort of go big or go home thing. And I mean that. Apparently Hasbro is trimming the fat of their "underperforming" IPs, and this might be a gasp for that team to keep their jobs.

They're in the works making their own VTT program, and my guess is that the next version of D&D is going to be entirely based around it.

They've been "in the works" since 4E but there were apparently some personnel issues* during the development process and lack of user buy-in once a playable version was somewhat available.

The son of the creator of D&D came out with a new TSR (the original creators) came out with a product recently that some people did say would fall afoul of the "no hateful content" policy. Conduct is a different story altogether, especially in a world where so many people view any sort of criticism as abuse.

In fairness, the alleged leaks of Star Frontiers: New Genesis look like straight-up trolling. (Given the source, it's reasonable to be skeptical as to their authenticity, but so far as I know, no one at NuTSR has denied it.

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Yeah, I've been following this closely, and I've already scrubbed one of my products of all OGL content, and relicensed it under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. I've been in talks with my current gaming group to just stick with the D&D books we already have, and boycott any future content from WotC or Hasbro, until they back down on unauthorizing the old OGL. It's not like it's much of a loss anyways - I was super disappointed with their recent Spelljammer release, and it really does seem like the books since Tasha's have seen a huge decline in quality.

I have no confidence in WotC's new feedback process for the OGL. They haven't budged on anything substantial yet, and I hope all third party publishers, at least, make WotC suffer over this, even if I have my doubts about how sustainable a boycott against WotC is in the long term.

But I'd rather tend to my own garden than worry about what the big boys are doing. I hope Paizo's new ORC license goes well, and sets us up for Pathfinder vs. 4e: Part Two, Electric Boogaloo, but even if it doesn't my group is going to be fine, and I'm going to change the way I deal with future material that I share online in the RPG space.

I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials.

Again as with Twitter, I think WOTC have the absolute right to decide who uses their IP via license and contract agreements, if they want to stop everyone left wing, right wing or whatever then that is up to them (and their bottom line). Note you can put whatever opinions you want in games or have them, you just can't do so with their license and IP and that should be their choice to control (or not).

I think that people with whatever opinions should be able to make games, but I also think WOTC has the right to decide who can do that for their licenses specifically.

And then people have an absolute right to not buy/use their products or go to a competitor if they don't like their stance.

But then I haven't liked a DnD product since 3.5 so it's no skin off my nose to avoid buying their stuff, as I haven't for years. Pathfinder 1E is a good substitute for 3.5 and Pathfinder 2E is excellent in my opinion and splits off further from DnD mechanics at least somewhat. Though not sure that helps you from a non-woke direction as I think Paizo are perceived as more woke than WOTC.

Again as with Twitter, I think WOTC have the absolute right to decide who uses their IP via license and contract agreements, if they want to stop everyone left wing, right wing or whatever then that is up to them (and their bottom line). Note you can put whatever opinions you want in games or have them, you just can't do so with their license and IP and that should be their choice to control (or not).

I agree with you in principle, but I think one of the issues here is that the FAQ for the original OGL website heavily implied, and several higher ups working for WotC at the time of its original release outright stated that the original OGL is an irrevocable license. Many of the companies that have relied on the OGL for 23 years (some of which consisting of employees who were working for WotC at the time), believe that WotC cannot legally revoke the OGL 1.0a, but few of them have the money to actually fight a protracted court battle and prove it.

The other issue is that many creators used the OGL as an open license, even when they were making their own material and just wanted it to be available for 3rd Party Publishers to use. Several games that have nothing to do with D&D will be affected by this, including the OpenD6 gaming line (descended from Star Wars D6 and Ghostbusters RPG), which unfortunately had its original creators go bankrupt, and which might not exist in a form where they could easily relicense their product to keep the OpenD6 community able to remix and share their creations as intended.

It also greatly complicates the position of OSR products, inspired by old school version of D&D. Granted, there are already a few OSR games that are compatible with old school D&D, and which are under Creative Commons licenses, like Knave, and Basic Fantasy Roleplaying has been frantically scrubbing all OGL material from their books, and will be re-releasing a 4th edition under a Creative Commons license, so while there will be a hiccup, it does seem like the OSR space will be able to weather this change. Still, it's a pain in the neck to have good portions of the D&D-based gaming space scrambling to change their products just to avoid a lawsuit.

US copyright law is clear that game mechanics can't be copyrighted, but the exact limits of where "game mechanics" end and "creative expression" begin has never been tested in the RPG space. The OGL was the magic feather that made large portions of the publishing space work, especially after how litigious TSR had been when it was the owner of D&D. In terms of the overall health for D&D-like fantasy role-playing, WotC may or may not be able to actually de-authorize the OGL 1.0a (time will tell), but if they are successful it will be a huge blow for the creativity within that publishing space, and a huge change in the status quo for major parts of the industry.

Pathfinder 1E is a good substitute for 3.5

Unfortunately, Pathfinder 1e uses the OGL 1.0a, which is being de-authorized by WotC, and so its continued legality will be up in the air. WotC has claimed that they won't go after previously published products, but considering the whole current OGL controversy is them doing something they promised they wouldn't do 23 years ago, it's hard to see what's stopping them from sending cease and desist letters to every Pathfinder 1e SRD site, every OSR company that uses the OGL, etc., and blowing up a good portion of the RPG space if they want to.

Pathfinder 2e is supposedly safe, and will be re-licensed under the ORC license soon so that 3rd party publishers can publish adventures for it.

agree with you in principle, but I think one of the issues here is that the FAQ for the original OGL website heavily implied, and several higher ups working for WotC at the time of its original release outright stated that the original OGL is an irrevocable license. Many of the companies that have relied on the OGL for 23 years (some of which consisting of employees who were working for WotC at the time), believe that WotC cannot legally revoke the OGL 1.0a, but few of them have the money to actually fight a protracted court battle and prove it.

Oh sure, don't get me wrong I am not defending WOTC's overall actions. Especially that nonsense. Just defending the idea in general that a company should be entitled to decide who gets to use their IP and so on. I think they have had enough bad publicity that Pathfinder 1E is pretty safe.

The main issue is that WotC has almost certainly been piggybacking off the efforts of independent creators popularizing DnD and making it, lack of a better term, 'hip' and accessible for audiences who otherwise wouldn't consider tabletop role playing games at all. All this while there was minimal (to my knowledge) marketing by WotC itself.

Many of these creators probably wouldn't have bothered making DnD content if they had to agree to the 25% 'tax' up front (yes, it only kicks in after a certain amount of revenue, but you still have to do the accounting). They'd either have gone with a different game that didn't require that, or just not produced it at all.

I, personally, find it unreasonable to just unilaterally switch up the agreement, which was explicit in this case, on the people who have put in the actual effort to popularize your game, and who have accumulated a LOT more goodwill (whatever that's worth) than the company has.

It's not even clear what everyone is getting in exchange for paying this money forward. Will it be used to increase the quality of the product? Will they put some of that back into marketing? Or is it literally just establishing an additional revenue stream in the face of a tightening economy?

You sell people the books, they play the game with their friends, using their imagination to 'render' the world and characters, they add homebrew rules, they make up their stories using the basic materials you provided, they make content related to their game and publish it for other interested parties, and none of this really inflicts any additional costs on WotC.

This transaction really should not require WotC to do anything other than put out new materials semi-periodically.

Note I have no issues with WotC enforcing copyright on their books or characters, or restricting creators from using the brand name in their content, I'm just amazed at the lengths they're going to throw out the previous license in a clear money grab and burn through so much goodwill when there are ample competitors around who will gladly snatch their marketshare.

Many of these creators probably wouldn't have bothered making DnD content if they had to agree to the 25% 'tax' up front (yes, it only kicks in after a certain amount of revenue, but you still have to do the accounting). They'd either have gone with a different game that didn't require that, or just not produced it at all.

Absolutely, just because I think WOTC should be able to do x, doesn't mean I think they are right to do so. I don't think they should be able to retrospectively change contracts/licenses. That's a separate issue for which I will not defend them. My only point is that it isn't in and of itself bad for a company to be able to enforce standards on who gets to use or license their stuff, given it will have impacts on them. If a Trad Right Winger wants to create a game company and decide that they don't want to license it to someone who campaigns for abortion to be legal that should entirely be their decision.

Like I said I left WOTC behind a long time ago so I am not specifically defending them.

My only point is that it isn't in and of itself bad for a company to be able to enforce standards on who gets to use or license their stuff, given it will have impacts on them.

Right, not accusing you of taking their side. My point is mostly that they really shouldn't be able to accept all the lovely benefits that came with having an extremely open license, then turn around YEARS after implementing said license and try to impose heavy restrictions because they're suddenly worried about possible costs of said license might hit them as well, to the detriment of the very people who produced those benefits.

To me it strikes me less as them really needing to 'enforce standards' and more about them needing some excuse, any excuse to start charging money to those who have struck it rich off DnD content.

It might have been somewhat more acceptable if they had clearly articulated how this money was going to benefit the product or the players or anything. But that would mean they might be called on that later.

In short, they're seeking to heavily bind their creators hands even after those hands have made the product more popular, whilst leaving their own hands free to collect money, change the terms of the agreement further, change the product itself in the future, and, apparently, to tell creators to screw off if they cross some arbitrary lines.

It's asymetrical in the extreme.

If a Trad Right Winger wants to create a game company and decide that they don't want to license it to someone who campaigns for abortion to be legal that should entirely be their decision.

You're right, but I have the suspicion that an abortion campaigner will self-select against buying from a Trad right-winger anyway so that's likely a moot point.

To me it strikes me less as them really needing to 'enforce standards' and more about them needing some excuse, any excuse to start charging money to those who have struck it rich off DnD content.

Oh yeah the standards change is just the side show. The important point from their point of view is the monetization change. I suspect the standards change is just so they can cut loose anyone they think is a PR problem once they have a financial link to them through the monetization program where they don't have the plausible deniability they had before.

IP itself is a government creation. So the question is not "does WOTC have a right", the question is "are we happy with the government giving them this right". I'm not happy with it.

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I suppose my question is why? Part of a companies brand and therefore value can be the moral values it upholds (or is seen to uphold at least). A trad right wing RPG company should be able to pick and choose who it licenses to and not license to communists or whatever. Thats a business decision. People who don't like it can suck it up and use it anyway. Or go elsewhere.

A company should be able to be openly political if it likes. If Elon owned Twitter wants to ban everyone to the left of Kevin Sorbo he should be allowed to. It's his platform now. We can then respond by not using it. It isn't necessary, it's not a requirement to live or take part in society. Even less so with WOTC.

I don't pick the companies I use due to their values but many people do and companies should be allowed to take advantage of those preferences if they like. If they think one of their license holders being outed as a rapist or a liberal or jaywalker is bad for PR then they should be allowed to write their license for the future to include severability. And then customers can either like that, not like it or not care and act accordingly. Forcing companies to be viewpoint neutral is a disservice to them and to the engine of capitalism. It's ok for them to be biased and have a political lean if they want. It's also ok for them not to be. More choice, more freedom, more dynamism.

Social media site for centrists only? Go for it. High heel shoes only for right wingers? Rock on. Rugby boots for anarcho-syndicalists? Kick away. You'll probably fail horribly but you should be allowed to try. If you want to try and spread your values and earn money that should be allowed. It gives people more opportunities for work where it is for something other than just a pay cheque, which is i think one of the most soul destroying things we do. Woke capitalism is the model of the future. Many people it turns out like to work for a company that (they believe) is also doing good.

Exceptions for utilities, phone, internet access and the like as they are requirements on the modern world. But it should be a light touch beyond that.

I am fundamentally against companies upholding moral values. I think it's a societal declaration of bankruptcy and corrosive to democracy, and I think it should be outlawed. I want my companies to be amoral profit-maximizers. This idea we have that we can tame companies when we already have a nice, central mechanism for arbitrating moral questions (elections, rule of law) just ends up recreating democracy but worse in every way: less equal, less regulated, less principled, less consistent, more corrupt, more vulnerable to extremism, and so on.

There is no such thing as amoral profit maximizers involving people. Your idea means both Chik Fil A and the mom and pop restaurant who donate food to the needy are ruled out. You're ruling out Fox news, Red State, MSNBC, Twitter, any company that chooses to use American labor for patriotic reasons. Any company that donates to charity.

Choosing profit and nothing else is already a moral stance after all.

I'll take that trade. Companies should preferentially use American labor due to a law passed by Congress (or a state legislature or a local ordnance), if at all.

So when (which ever side is not yours) is in power and does the opposite of what you like, affecting every company in the nation, that is better than companies making their own choices and rising or falling based upon them?

When the neo-liberal wing is ascendant they force companies to out source, when the woke wing is ascendant they force companies to support Planned Parenthood or Trans rights? Evangelicals force companies to put up crosses? Once the government gets to decide what moral stances are acceotable for companies in general that can be used by every government.

I think it would likely be unconstitutional in any event but it seems like a very bad idea.

Companies are democratic in that they only survive if consumers use their products or services, we can easily choose not to, and if enough people agree either their stances change or they go out of business.

I believe in the ability of government to deadlock itself on contentious issues. That aside, this is how things used to work - labor regulation, health and safety, disabled access etc. That's the sort of world I want to go back to.

Companies are just people, and people have moral values. There's no getting around that point.

This is also why I don't take the defense that they're just pandering seriously. No, they are staffed by true believers, and those true believers have shifted the balance of power into their favor.

I have a problem with an open source style license ever being changed in a way that restricts use of material that had been open source. If you develop something newer and better that's fine, but you shouldn't be able to ever make an existing open source license more restrictive.

I agree with that. If they want to add a caveat or two going forward, i think that is their right (albeit probably stupid given the reaction.) But only for material licensed after that change.

I suppose my question is why? Part of a companies brand and therefore value can be the moral values it upholds (or is seen to uphold at least).

I'm not suggesting they be arrested for not wanting right-wingers to use D&D. I'm just pointing out that IP isn't naturally property; it's not a right which the government merely recognizes like the right to actual property or to your body. IP is a government-granted monopoly and the government shouldn't be granting monopolies that are against the interests of the populace in general.

If they think one of their license holders being outed as a rapist or a liberal or jaywalker is bad for PR then they should be allowed to write their license for the future to include severability.

They shouldn't be allowed to have a license for that at all. It's IP, it isn't something that they naturally own such that it can only be used by others if they license it out. It's not a car, or an apartment. It's a deal where we say "we pretend you own it and we'll shoot people who don't agree, as long as you use it for everyone's benefit".

I don't think the "use it for everyone's benefit" is part of the deal. It more like "so you can monetize it therefore incentivizing people to come up with new ideas in the future, which can also be monetized and thus taxed"

There is absolutely no requirement for everyone to benefit because that would mean giving your IP away. The restrictions specifically mean NOT everyone will benefit, thats the point. Only certain people will. I'm not benefitting from Brandon Sanderson owning his product, he is. Which makes sense as he spent time and effort making it up. I can enter into a transaction to enjoy his product by buying his books. But i would benefit more by getting them free. But he wouldn't.

There is a meta view that encouraging people to create by allowing them ownership so they can make money off it, then benefits society over all. But that doesn't mean every single person or group has to get that benefit for every single IP. Just that IP laws protect the trad right RPG maker as they do the communist left RPG maker. The key factor is that they then retain the right to decide what to do with their work. They can sell it on, destroy it, refuse to license it for any reason.

There are writers who refuse to license their works to be made into movies because they think the message will be destroyed or their vision perverted. But more people will benefit from their work when it is more widely spread so accepting your logic, they should not be able to refuse? Alan Moore must license his works so that more people can benefit? That would seem to be the end point of your argument.

If Alan Moore held 80% of the market, such that making a derivative of anyone else's work than Moore's was difficult merely because of the size of the market, it would be fair to not let him use copyright to keep people from making derivatives. Think of something like public accommodation laws, except that there's no issue of "the government telling me what to do with my property" because copyrights are not actually property.

I can't imagine how such a thing would even come up for Alan Moore. It would be impossible for one person to produce enough literature such that creating literature that didn't use it was orders of magnitude less practical than using it. Even Watchmen or Harry Potter aren't 80% of the literature market. D&D's position in the gaming market doesn't compare to anything else that's copyrighted except software, and I'd certainly object if Microsoft said "anyone can link to Windows libraries, except Trump supporters".

DnD makes up about 53% to 55% of the market as near as i can tell. So it isn't anywhere near a monoply though. And even if it were 80% there are plenty of alternatives, so it would quickly lose market share. As indeed seems to be happening right now.

There are feedback mechanisms to punish companies who overreach without government intervention. And if their consumer base like the overreach, then it was not overreach but a savvy business move.

I am more sympathetic to your Microsoft example. So its not that i think the base idea is without merit. Monopolies that lock people out of using most computers (vital for the modern world) seem something worth tackling.

But DnD is just a game. They don't have to be politically inclusive if they don't want to be. Even if Fox news had 80% share i still think they should be allowed to be as partisan as they want. After all that is part of how they would have got to 80% market share so hobbling their strategy doesn't seem warranted. Its ok for entertainment and "news" and so on to be partisan. People are partisan and in general companies should be able to appeal to that as much or as little as they want to.

And its not as though a conservative can't hold their nose and play DnD anyway. WOTC can't tell, the only thing they are targetting are people they license. Its more like Fox News saying they can fire a host who comes out as a communiat or gets into a scandal. Thats the default position I think.

DnD makes up about 53% to 55% of the market as near as i can tell.

Googling figures, if you add Pathfinder, Starfinder, and D&D 3.5 you get somewhat over 60%. Which is less than I expected, but big enough that keeping someone from using it is not like saying they can't use something by Alan Moore.

Its more like Fox News saying they can fire a host who comes out as a communiat or gets into a scandal.

... if most of the market were occupied by Fox News and this automatically made you lose out on 60% of the jobs. And even that's a bad comparison because Fox News hiring someone means that Fox is spending money that they actually own, not things that we've created a fake ownership structure around.

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I've been arguing about with this a buddy of mine constantly.

Short version everyone complaining about this is getting what they deserve.

Long version is, all these WotC personality driven "content creators" have been rabble rousing for WotC to "do something" about people like me for years. And over time, WotC has fashioned a superweapon built out of services, contracts and copyright to effectively kick my kind out of the community. If we allow our believes to be known, we are banished from conventions, online services, even FLGS events.

Well, now that they've motivated WotC to put all this effort into privatizing the community so that they can kick witches like me out, WotC is looking at this fantastic weapon they've built, and are mugging the "content creators" who cheerleaded my banishment with it. I love it. At this point they deserve each other. I hope WotC takes 99% of their income.

I have my old AD&D 2e collection, hard copies of the Gold Box games, as well as the Infinity Engine games. I barely recognize nu-DND anyways, and barely wish to with woke blank slatism and alphabet people being the new core of the rules and community.

Short version everyone complaining about this is getting what they deserve.

I don't think this is a productive comment. While it's true that the influx of new players from actual play podcasts has resulted in tabletop gaming becoming a younger, queerer, and more progressive community than before (I have witnessed the transformation first-hand on Tumblr) I don't think the rest of us who haven't been calling for witch burning should have to suffer just to spite them.

This is because of WotC's greed, pure and simple. Hasbro isn't doing well, and the command has come down from on high to make D&D more profitable, and the people in charge made the calculated risk that shrinking their fanbase but increasing the amount of money they were getting from them would be a gamble worth taking. They want to become like Games Workshop - small number of actual players, but that small number is super dedicated, and is happy to fork over all their money no matter what shitty things you do.

Well, now that they've motivated WotC to put all this effort into privatizing the community so that they can kick witches like me out, WotC is looking at this fantastic weapon they've built, and are mugging the "content creators" who cheerleaded my banishment with it.

I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's. They just included clauses that would limit two things lots of people hate in the hopes that they wouldn't overly scrutinize the new license.

I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's.

Idk. I nope'd out of WOTC products when they started stuffing homosexual characters into the Magic cards hand-over-fist in the Theros set ten years ago. Can't remember whether that was before or after they memory-holed cards like Crusade and Invoke Prejudice; it was certainly before they started firing their own artists for making anodyne pro-Trump statements on their own social media.

There's a pattern of behaviour. Maybe WOTC is un-woke itself but desperately seeking validation from its woke customers; or maybe it's putting on the political commissar jacket with full gusto. But I feel at this point it's a distinction without a difference as to how pleased I should be that the revolution is eating its own.

While it's true that the influx of new players from actual play podcasts has resulted in tabletop gaming becoming a younger, queerer, and more progressive community than before (I have witnessed the transformation first-hand on Tumblr)

I don't believe this is actually true. Were 13 and 14 year olds really not playing D&D in the 80s and 90s? Is it really likely that young gay kids were too busy playing football to have any interest in TTRPGs? Or is this just that young people nowadays - particularly of the indoorsy and nerdy variety - are more likely to have strong progressive opinions and to be gay, trans, or otherwise GNC?

They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's.

They cared enough to declare that Nielsen's art would never be reprinted.

Is it really likely that young gay kids were too busy playing football to have any interest in TTRPGs?

Some of them played. More were doing band, or theater, or hanging out in alternative subculture venues. D&D coded more STEMlord back then, and that faded slowly over decades as things like Vampire and LARP became popular.

Were 13 and 14 year olds really not playing D&D in the 80s and 90s?

I was. Not gay, also not a football player. The TTRPG scene in the 80s and 90s skewed liberal (it was an even nerdier space then than it is now) but "queer" was still a dirty word; gay kids didn't gravitate towards D&D, they gravitated towards theater or music.

Like @Iconochasm says, the rise of games like Vampire :The Masquerade (heavily influenced by Anne Rice's homoerotic Vampire Lestat series) and other games focused on drama over miniature skirmishes was responsible for bringing a lot of those kids into RPGing.

GURPS writer Willian Stoddard once described the core thesis of all the WhiteWolf games as something like "You are a unique locus of suffering and drama, and from this you derive powers and abilities that affirm your special nature." Those games introduced a whole genre of personalities to TTRPGs, coming from music and theatre, and the gay kids came with them. I remember so many huffing sighs at the guys who couldn't remember their attack rolls, but had very strong opinions about how their character should look.

Tbf, that era of games had a lot stronger opinions about how your character should look (or how local coinage should work, lol Exalted) than the mechanical ramifications of any of their attack rolls, too. But even the more mechanically 'robust' splats were very much, even if they were also very far from any of the modern-day story games.

And Changeling was pretty queer whether the authors intended it to be gay-queer.

I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's. They just included clauses that would limit two things lots of people hate in the hopes that they wouldn't overly scrutinize the new license.

Why do we keep pretending that woke companies that walk like woke ducks, talk like woke ducks and purge wrongthink like woke ducks aren't actually woke ducks?

There is clearly a principal-agent problem at play here. Woke companies are woking it out even when it hurts their bottom line. If it doesn't sink the company or leads to massive lay-offs, why should the individual employee or executive care more about this than about their twitter clout? And even if it does, well.

I've been playing MTG for quite a while now and for years participated in their core subreddit. I wouldn't call this accurate:

they don't care about progressive issues

From last year as they started purging card art:

there's a constantly shifting set of standards being used to purge even legacy artists.

I'm glad wizards has to deal with it, as they've cultivated the sort of empty wokedom that rewards this behavior.

Meanwhile they continue to drop print quality (not to mention design) and increase prices. The playerbase is rife with thieves, cheaters, actual misogynists, and folks who don't know how to bathe. The game itself is incredible - the company and the fans are hot garbage and I hope they enjoy the cesspool of strife.

The playerbase has asked for the company to take more control over its IP and purge witches. From the "thought leaders" the nerds unquestionably worship down to the Red Guards in reddit comment sections.

All that being said, I think the motivation for profit still wins as the majority influencer in these actions. Once again looking to MtG, the player base has shown that it's willing to accept any kind of abuse at any time. When, as a customer, your default position is face-down and ass-up your surprised indignation reads as idiocy.

Are you talking about 5E content creators, or people using the OGL to create OSR games? Because while there is some woke virtue-signaling in the OSR community, like everywhere else, it's mostly a bastion of grognard greybeards who want nothing to do with that nonsense. GaryCon and CyclopsCon and NTRPGCon and a bunch of others I could name have stayed politically neutral and are quite welcoming of "people like you" (unless you're, like, dropping n-bombs at the table or going all murderhobo with a Lawful party).

Also, 1E > 2E.

Also, 1E > 2E.

2e had all the good settings though. I love Planescape and Dark Sun.

Mechanically, the core rules are practically identical though. You could have a party of 1e and 2e players in the same game and it would mostly go off without a hitch. The main difference is that 2e sanitized all the "evil" and "demonic" parts of 1e to make it more marketable to scared Christian house wives.

Yeah, I never understood the fuss about THAC0, but as an owner of the original Deities and Demigods (before they had to remove the Moorcock, Lovecraft, and Lieber pantheons because lol what's IP infringement? man, those were the days...) I resented the scrubbing of demons and devils to placate all the angry moms. I was precocious when it came to sensing culture war bullshit.

So why should anybody trust the new license? How can anyone have faith that the deal won't be altered again?

Mainly the word "irrevocable" instead of "perpetual."

No, seriously, that's the claimed original loophole.

Until the next lawyer would try to claim his yearly bonus by arguing that they are not "revoking" the license, they are "expiring" it, and since it doesn't say "perpetual" now, of course it's ok to expire it! And, also, nobody said the deal in "unalterable" - I am not revoking the deal, I am altering the deal!

This is far from the first thing that has had me despising WotC. A few years back they went after and probably ultimately killed Hex TCG which was a wonderful and ambitious online card game that I enjoyed while it was around. It seems to be their basic strategy to release games and the rent seek off of the products as much as humanly possible. If Board games as a wider industry operated the way wizards of the coast does we would not be living in the board game golden age like we are now and I hope they are punished for it.

What are some great current board games?

How current are we talking? I would say we've been in a golden age of board games for the past 10-20 years, so there's a good wide range there.

Oh it's too broad of a question to answer easily but I'd love to answer in detail. There are all sorts of different types to explore depending on your tastes. The two broadest categorizations are the Euro game and the Ameritrash(this is a term of endearment) with euro games focusing more on tight puzzles to really crunch on with your brain while American style games still often have crunchy puzzles but with increased amount of random chance, direct player conflict and above all theme.

Past that classification there are all sorts of different experiences you can have but you may need to answer a couple questions for me to point you in the right direction, are you looking for games for a consistent group of players? There are 'legacy' type board games where each time you play them you modify the board with stickers and card packs in a campaign type experience. What is the age cohort you would like to play with? There are great modern games simple enough for kids. Would you like to cooperate with or fight against the other players? How about an asymmetric game where one player is against all the others? Cooperative experiences of board games have come a long way.

There's probably more factors as well if you have any particular goal.

Just so I actually answer you question if you're not that interested. Somewhat diverse set of games I'd recommend without hesitation:

  1. Betrayal Legacy - Or the original 'Betrayal at house on the hill' if legacy doesn't appeal to you. Explore a randomly generated haunted house collecting boons and detriments until you trigger a haunting in which one or more players are suddenly trying to take down the rest of the group.

  2. Treasure Island - One player is the pirate captain who picks a place on a map to bury treasure and is imprisoned by his crew as they search the island marking where they'd dug with dry erase markers and getting hints each round from the pirate captain.

  3. Blood on the Clocktower - we actually have a motte discord group(albeit it's half rdramanaughts) where we play this one in a slightly modified format. It's an evolution on the classic werewolf where there is a demon and a number of other roles that need to each use their special abilities to find and execute them.

  4. Gaia Project - This is a pretty classic euro style game. Over a few rounds each player uses their faction to try and colonize planets and rack up victory points.

  5. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective - This one is like a classic choose your own adventure book with extra components meant to be played along or with others(definitely recommend with others)

  6. Ticket to ride - You draft cards and try to complete railroad routes across the united states(or other locations with expansions). Deep enough for adults to enjoy together but really shines in being appropriate for all ages.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is the most ridiculously unbalanced game that I actually wholeheartedly recommend. IME the vast majority of monsters are ridiculously over or under powered, but IMO this actually kind of works for the game: either 4/5 players have fun taking down an axe murderer and some zombies (fun adventure!) or 4/5 players are running around desperately trying to survive one more turn against a vampire ("horror movie").

If you've not played the legacy variant yet I definitely recommend, and of course the balance isn't all that important. One of my favorite thing about asymmetric games that go a little theme heavy is that the balance isn't really all that important as long as it is not blatantly broken. A game with a terrible winrate for some role with a group that plays regularly just means the person who finally wins with it is a legend. Look at demons in Blood on the clocktower, they don't win all that often in games I've played but when they do or even just do really well they're praised for it.

Do you mean asymmetrical games?

Speaking of asymmetrical games and going on a slight tangent, it is funny how the Vagabond in Root is probably underestimated instinctively by new players (he's just one guy in a game where factions deploy dozens of units and buildings), yet is widely regarded as OP to the point of houserules for nerfing him, banning certain classes of Vagabond and/or having an agreement to take turns whacking him at all times.

Do you mean asymmetrical games?

Yes, edited

What kind of game are you interested in?

I'll plug Spirit Island as far and away the best board game I've played this decade. It's a complex cooperative game where you play as natural spirits of a lush island with the game automating a joint enemy, the Invaders who try to explore the island, build their towns and cities on it, and than ravage it for its natural resources, causing blight and slowly killing the island, the native people, and the spirits. Your goal as a team is to scare them away, or get rid of them, or just flat-out kill them as the case may be.

I will write a multi paragraph review of this game given the slightest provocation, so I will merely say that it is unique among cooperative games by scaling incredibly gracefully with player count (you can play this game solo and it is in fact consistently the #1 solo board game on BGG) and being near immune to quarterbacking (which constantly plagues games like Pandemic). The theme is incredible, the gameplay is incredible, the spirits are fun and evocative ... this game is an 11 / 10 for me. My brothers and I have played literally over a thousand games between the three of us.

Why do you say it’s immune to quarterbacking? I love the game, but I’ve only been able to consistently win by micromanaging each play, which gets tough with 3 or 4 players without riding herd to whole game.

Interesting; I'd be curious to hear more about what spirits you're playing as well as what difficulty you're playing at. My guess is either you are wildly more experienced than the rest of your group, or your entire group is inexperienced -- or you're just a lot smarter than I am!

My reason for saying Spirit Island is largely immune to quarterbacking is twofold. First, the Spirits play very, very differently. If you're playing Pandemic, everyone has the same basic actions available to them -- move, cure disease, discover a cure, etc. Each "role" really is tantamount to a very minor buff (usually to one action) and rules change. It is therefore fast and easy for someone with good game knowledge to scan the basic problem on the board and tell the next player the ideal solution.

But in Spirit Island, while the underlying mechanics are the same (everyone does Growth, gains Energy, and plays their cards), each Spirit has a very different play pattern and flow. You have to think about which growth option to take, which tracks to open up in which order, which cards to play in order to hit which innates ... in order to quarterback a new player piloting, say, Spread of Rampant Green, I'd have to have a very deep understanding of how to play the Spirit efficiently, such that I could play it with my eyes closed. I'd have to have all its starting cards plus their elements plus their tracks and growth options memorized or discernable at a glance, more or less, and that isn't even taking into account whatever powers they have drafted since the game started.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get to this point -- now that I've played hundreds and hundreds of games, some of the spirits with easy play patterns (River Surges in Sunlight, for example) I could probably quarterback if I wanted to, but if I'm playing with a new player it's actually both easier (for me) and more fun (for everyone) for me to grab one of their lands, drop a reminder token on it, and tell them "I'll handle this ravage for you, nbd". I could tell them "OK, this turn you need to pick your second growth option, both from cardplays, and, uh, what minor did you draft last turn again? Let me just see your hand real quick." Like I said, though, it's actually easier for me to just handle one of their lands and let them worry about the rest of it. I don't think quarterbacking is actually optimal even if you're trying to help out a less experienced player.

The other reason I'm skeptical that quarterbacking really works in practice is my own experience with two-handed play. I play a lot of solo games -- true solo, where I'm piloting one Spirit. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm extremely good at Spirit Island. I can win against any Level 6 adversary with a near-100% win rate and when I'm interested in a challenge, I'm playing double adversaries around Difficulty 13-14. I have beaten 6/6 Adversaries before (albeit with very specific matchups). However, when I try to double-hand Spirits (even two Spirits I know well!), it is dramatically more difficult to actually play the game! It's really hard for me to keep track of everything that's going on if I'm playing two Spirits at once; I get confused about my game flow for each Spirit, make a lot more minor tactical mistakes, and the game gets bogged down as I try (and largely fail) to stay organized. It's difficult for me to imagine someone piloting a Spirit and then wanting to control the second one for a new player. I just haven't seen it happen. Maybe you're smart and fast enough that you can play your Spirit quickly and then jump over to another player and be able to tell them what to do, but if so you're a lot faster at board games than I am.

So to conclude a long-winded response, I think Spirit Island largely dodges the problem of quarterbacking because:

  1. Each Spirit plays sufficiently differently that it's quite difficult to tell at a glance the correct set of moves for someone else.

  2. Even if you are sufficiently experienced to do so, it's still easier and more fun for you to just handle a few more lands than literally try to play a second spirit.

The only place I've even been tempted to quarterback is when playing a Difficulty 0 game with new players and they're piloting an easy spirit that I know quite well -- but again, it's still both easier and more fun for me to help out with their lands and drop Gift cards on them every turn I can.

I used to be a big tabletop gamer, going to GenCon, writing games, etc. The wokeness factor has been so stupidly bad for so long I simply dropped out about a decade ago. None of this is surprising. Also, how the heck are you going to make a fantasy game set during savage medeival times without dark and challenging elements? So dumb. What I don't really understand is the wrath. Hasn't everyone who cares already bounced over to Pathfinder?


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