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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26569 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Madrid Trip Report

All it took was one week and I'm ready to convert to being a Euro

As many of you know, I’ve been studying Spanish for over five years using the Refold method. I took the B2 test and passed back in May, but wanted to test my skills out in the real world. My parents wanted to do family Christmas in the UK this year, so I thought I would take advantage of needing to be in Europe to travel to Spain and use my Spanish and see many of the sights I had been reading about in books or hearing about from my tutor Rafa. I had planned to go with a girl I was dating in the spring, but we stopped seeing each other, so this ended up being a solo adventure which is not usually my thing. However, I had a blast in Madrid (and Toledo) because of how friendly everyone was here and because of how satisfying it was to put something I have worked so long and hard at into practice. I also learned a lot about myself during this trip: I’m much more extroverted than I thought and I don’t enjoy traveling just to travel.

What I did (roughly)

Monday: Arrive, ate a tortilla at a bar, slept 13 hours

Tuesday: Easy run through Retiro Park, history museum, vegan restaurant #1 (Mad, Mad Vegan)

Wednesday: Easy run casa del campo, paella class, language exchange, cocktails with Anna Landler (college friend)

Thursday: River run with Anna, romanticism museum, cheese shop, walked around university and read a book, vegan restaurant #2 (Musgo)

Friday: Toledo + dinner with Zack

Saturday: Exploration run + Prado + vegan restaurant #3 (Oveja Negra)

Sunday: Retiro Run Club+ vegan meetup + chilling/writing this post

Los Lugares

Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance. There was absolutely no need for a car. I was especially impressed with the metro: it felt clean, safe, and had extremely high usage. From about 2pm-10pm it was pretty much cheek to cheek, at least on the lines that I took. The only American metro system that compares favorably is Boston, which I think is pretty embarrassing for us. Of course there were also plenty of cars on the roads, but the city is designed in such a way to funnel most of the car traffic onto specific busy streets and keep most of the city center for pedestrians only. Madrid unfortunately did not seem very bike friendly: not a whole lot of bike lanes and those that I did see were not protected from traffic. Bike infrastructure is probably unnecessary in the city center here: walking and metro are fast enough, especially as there are supermarkets on almost every block. I didn’t spent enough time on the periphery to know what the situation was like there. All in all, it seems like the center of Madrid is a pretty positive model for American cities to potentially follow: high-density, mixed zoning with key roads for cars, and the rest for pedestrians.

I was also really impressed by the number and quality of parks in the city. The two big famous parks, Retiro and Casa del campo, felt like Central Park and Van Cortlandt Park respectively. In addition to these two big ones, there were a ton of smaller parks dotted along the rivers that run through the city that made for some really good running.

In terms of museums, I was not super impressed. The art museums were great, but even the Prado I think is a little overrated. It felt like half the museum was just royal portraits by Goya and Velazquez. The history museum concentrated on Madrid itself, but stopped before the super interesting (to me) era of its history: the Civil War. The museum of Romanticism was terrible and I do not recommend going.

Toledo was much more sleepy and provincial, although there were a ton of cool historical sites to see, including the Toledo Cathedral, Alcazar, and the reconstructed workshop of El Greco, one of Spain’s most famous painters. The Cathedral was very impressive, but I unfortunately found it a bit boring. For whatever reason, I'm struggling to find the narratives in the New Testament compelling at all any more, which makes most of the church paintings dull as bricks.

La Gente

My favorite part of Madrid by far was the people I met there. I managed to arrange one meetup via HelloTalk for language exchange. It was with a Venezuelan woman Nath, and we got churros and went book shopping together. Because of Strava I realized that a college teammate, Anna had been living in Madrid for three months and we got drinks and ran together. On Friday I had dinner with Hank and Ryan’s old college roommate Zack. Today I did a few miles with the Retiro runners, and went to a vegan meetup arranged by a girl I met on Bumble!

Throughout the whole week I was impressed again and again by how kind and open the Spaniards I interacted with were. Yet another thing that Americans could learn from.

I was surprised by the level of open-carry by the police and Guardia civil. I saw a lot of submachine guns this week, which is not something one expects coming from supposedly “gun-crazy” America.

La Comida

I tried to eat vegan as much as possible during this trip, but decided to make exceptions for Spanish tortilla and paella. The paella that I had I made in class and was very good, and the tortilla that I ate from Pez tortilla was also amazing, but honestly it was not necessary to make these exceptions in Madrid, especially after I found the local vegan scene through a girl Marta, that I matched with on Bumble. My favorite of the three vegan restaurants I went to was probably Musgo.

La Lengua

I’ve studying Spanish for five years, but this is the first time I’ve really spoken with natives outside of learning context. The first day was really bad: jet-lag made me feel really dumb, and I tried to avoid interacting with natives as much as possible. However, things got much better after that first day and I got some extra sleep, and I was able to turn things around. For almost all one-on-one conversations I was able to understand 100% of what was being said to me, and reply with relatively few mistakes. Group conversations were more difficult, and I especially had trouble understanding this one madrileño at our vegan meetup when he was speaking to the whole group. I had no problem understanding the signs at the museums, but I found after hours of being immersed in the language, it was very difficult to concentrate on even the simplest reading. Still have further to go with Spanish it seems, and unfortunately that improvement I think will only come easily if I live in Spanish speaking country.

Lecciones Personales

  1. I’m much more extroverted than I thought. My best days on this trip (today and Wednesday) were when I had a shit ton of social interaction. Next time I go solo traveling, I think I should plan on staying in a hostel where by nature there will be far more social interaction. When I get back to Baltimore I think I should also make more of an effort to fill my week with social activities.

  2. I don’t like being a tourist. While here I found myself gravitating towards activities that Madrid natives would do: run clubs, meet ups, bookshops, etc. I think meeting new people and seeing new things are really valuable, but if they’re done in a consumptive, touristy manner, it actually takes away value. When we come at travel from this manner, rather from that of openness and a desire to learn, we end up changing the place we are visiting rather than that place changing us. I saw a lot of this in Madrid: English absolutely everywhere, and it made me quite sad. This New Yorker piece explains my travel skepticism better than I ever could. I think I will be limiting vacation travel to visiting friends in the future, and if I really want to experience a foreign culture try and live there for a few years. This requires a lot more investment than people usually put into their vacations.

  3. Walkability really makes your life so much more pleasant. Even though I am car-free in America, getting around Baltimore on my bike is light years worse than walking and metro-ing around Madrid. The walkability really facilitated social interactions: you can just do things so much more easily. As much as I love Baltimore, the walkability in Europe is just so nice that I might have to leave.

  4. I’m really inspired to continue my foreign language study! It was so rewarding to be able to communicate with Spaniards in their native language. I can’t wait to keep improving and to lock in on Italian next year5.

Redacted

kinda feels weird to dump the full name.

Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance.

As a fellow car free guy in Chicago, I do think if you're willing to put a ride share app on your phone and set aside a few hundred bucks a month you can get the best of both worlds. You can get to most places with the CTA pretty reasonably and if you need to go across lines in a hurry you just grab an uber.

Yea thanks let me edit out the full names. Copied this from my substack.

On 4), you can find low-English proficiency working class Hispanics who are more than happy to talk to you in their native language in, if not Baltimore, but definitely DC and NoVa. It just takes going off the beaten path.

Throughout the whole week I was impressed again and again by how kind and open the Spaniards I interacted with were. Yet another thing that Americans could learn from.

When you say "Americans", which part of America are you referring to? In my experience, New England is different from Metropolis is different from Midwest is different from Southern is different from...

New England and Mid-Atlantic are the only regions I feel qualified to speak on.

These are notoriously unfriendly regions of the United States. You can't even pump gas in New Jersey without being acosted by locals.

You can't even pump gas in New Jersey without being acosted by locals.

Those are immigrants.

I'm pretty sure that the white, disabled, overweight gas station attendant who tried and failed to stop me from pumping my own gas the first time I had to fill up in New Jersey was not an immigrant.

Yes, I realized later that I broke the law. That was the joke.

Huh, the Pakistani immigrants must have had the day off. They would have successfully stopped you.

Epstein files are currently being released. DOJ link HERE. Epstein Files Transparency Act PDF HERE.

Some notes from picking a random place to start and going through them one-by-one:

  • Lots of questionable redactions.

  • Funniest one so far. Cumstained porno mag. Looks like they decided to redact only her tits. Can they do that under the law? NSFW Link.

  • There is at least one male whose face is being consistantly redacted. Were there any male "victims"? Not sure what the legal basis for a redaction could be. Doesn't look like Trump to me.

  • Jeffery is definitely a boob guy.

  • Some of the ass pics that are in there are unredacted. Interesting choice.

  • A second redacted male figure. Looks like Epstein himself tbh. Maybe an accident?

  • Quote from a victim's interview notes: "What doing? Why bringing me dark girl?" "Bringing young girl." "Yeah but not dark."

  • They are definitely redacting the portions of interviews where they describe what Jeffery did sexually. Understandable, but not sure if legal under the Act.

  • "Tell girls don't wear heels, just wear casual everyday clothes." Really makes you think.

  • I'm glad I didn't do a direct download.

  • Now I'm getting big binders full of thumbnail pics. I hope the corresponding full-size photos are somewhere else in the files.

  • Lots of pictures of clouds. I think the guy just liked photos.

  • Did we really need to redact the photos of the other guys in the police photo lineups? Are they victims? Not super relevant but gives you an idea what the culture was in the office when they were putting these together.

  • Very ominous scrapbook page titled "Looking For a Way Out", with redacted pictures of a girl.

I'm seeing some reports (ex: here) that files in the initial dump that contain unredacted pictures of Trump with Epstein are being removed. Just incredible. The picture itself (as best I can tell) is not even particularly incriminating. It looks to me like it's a copy of this picture of Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell posing together, under some other photos in a desk drawer. Perhaps the image was taken down for unrelated reasons but I'm seeing a lot of speculation that it's because Trump was in the picture, in whatever capacity.

Second link doesn't work.

If you look closely there's a picture of some girls in the drawer. That's probably the excuse they'll use.

Yeah. If it was, then it is a really stupid self own

Oh look, it's another batch of absolutely nothing. Still no evidence of any conspiracies involving Epstein trafficking young girls to other men. Yet every new revelation is treated like it confirms the narrative.

Well, I guess there was one big revelation: Bill Clinton. Not that he actually did anything bad, but that he appears in the photos at all. This lets MAGA do something it's always interested in: give a pass for daddy Trump by saying "whatabout the Left?" Instead of looking at the evidence and deciding this whole Epstein stuff belongs in the political trash bin, MAGA can now continue being conspiratorial about its outgroup. Democrats are "in a panic". The Epstein files are overall "just a Clinton photo album".

The mainstream conspiracy narrative is so ridiculous. If the government is under control of foreign blackmail, none of what it releases can be trusted anyway (it's at best selectively-released, if not outright fabricated). If the government is a trustworthy source of information, then it's not under the control of a blackmail cabal in the first place. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Also, this whole redaction thing is such a troll. If you want to release 50 pages and hide 50 pages, you don't release 50 unedited pages and 50 pages of black boxes; you just release the 50 clean pages and don't mention the other pages you left out (and yes, I do deem the government capable of re-numbering a list, especially with the help of ChatGPT).

You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Actually, you can. The most straightforward explanation isn't that the entire government is completely controlled and co-opted, but that there are multiple competing power blocs. The foreign blackmail operation has leverage and control over several important people, but their control isn't total - the public can influence those portions of the government exposed to the will of the people enough to shift the balance of power between competing groups in the government. This actually explains the behavior of the government better than both the stupid version of the conspiracy theory you're arguing against and the conventional, no conspiracy at all view.

There are multiple competing power blocs, but not in the way you're saying. It's just various groups of rich people fighting over gerrymandering and PAC lobbying.

What the plebes want is not even a relevant factor in the equation, because the plebes refuse to exercise any discretionary funding over anything or hire any good lobbyists. You can literally put tattooed porn stars and Indians praying to Hindu gods up at the conservative party convention and they'll just march out and vote anyway. What they think does not matter at all.

The Epstein Files fiasco is just a big clown show, much like WWE Smackdown (which, incidentally, was also represented at the conservative convention!). This is not serious politics: it's reality TV.

What the plebes want is not even a relevant factor in the equation, because the plebes refuse to exercise any discretionary funding over anything or hire any good lobbyists.

This by itself is a serious issue and one of the major contributing factors to the rise of politicians like Trump, who made it into the office on the basis of broken promises to rein in this corruption.

The Epstein Files fiasco is just a big clown show, much like WWE Smackdown

Au contraire - the Epstein files reveal a major scandal with incredibly far reaching consequences. If you don't think that these files contain information that's extremely relevant to modern politics I don't believe you're actually interested in politics in any real way beyond cheering for your favorite sports team.

I find the whole "release the files" thing so funny.

If you really believe that there exists a DoJ employee who is so moral and ethical that he would neither leak an incriminating document during the Biden admin, nor destroy it during the Trump admin, and so powerful that he could not be fired or forced to do so during either; then you probably believe in the Easter Bunny.

If there is anything incriminating in there, it's going to come together weeks from now. It's going to be a reference that correlates to a hint that leads to a receipt that pulls on a thread that leads to an angle. It's going to be some clue so small that they forgot to redact it, and it's only going to make sense as a piece of circumstantial evidence, a piece that completes a puzzle we haven't taken out of the box yet. But probably it won't be that either.

It's not going to be something that MSNBC can broadcast in real time.

It was clear that nothing much would come of it.

If there was solid material evidence that Trump had fucked 13yo's, then the Biden administration would have gone after him. They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).

Still, Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, which played well with his base but was an unforced error on his part given how much he hung out with this guy. Likely all the photos of him hanging out with Epstein were already leaked, as was his creepy-as-fuck birthday card.

The Democrats forcing the DOJ to release the files was just them cashing in on that. It was clear that either he would have to release the files with him being in them, or redact everything which mentioned him. Both would harm him, somewhat. Unsurprisingly, he did not want the photos of him and Epstein going through the press again, so he redacted everything. But less than 5% of the electorate is going to take that as "this proves that he did not know Epstein".

That's some messed up thinking right here. Of course he knew Epstein, nobody ever tried to prove he didn't - he himself admitted many times he knew Epstein, and they had interacted socially many times up to 2000s, and then he personally banned Epstein from his clubs after learning about him recruiting there, which is pretty hard to do if you don't know him. Pretending as anybody is arguing that "he did not know Epstein" is just insane. There's a big distance between not knowing somebody at all and being best friends for life. And there's a very long timeline here, spanning decades, for the duration of which Epstein met very many people - pretty much everybody there is to meet. And of course there would be photos, that's the whole point of it. The whole business of "being connected" is having photos of you with celebrities, and being in the same parties as important people are. Implying that this means everybody who ever been in the same room as Epstein is now complicit in his crimes is bullshit.

While you’re absolutely right - do you think that means anything if the press/democrat influencers want to make hay out of it?

Oh, they will try to make hay out of anything. If Trump would fund research that cures cancer, they would declare that he finances dangerous experimentation with poisonous chemicals that kill living tissue and prevent growth, and plans to inject millions of people with them to enrich his friends. There's always a way to frame something in a bad light. The antidote for it is pulling back the curtain and expose the game.

If there was solid material evidence that Trump had fucked 13yo's, then the Biden administration would have gone after him. They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).

I keep seeing this argument from "moderates" on both sides and I have no idea why when there's a very obvious explanation: because the collateral damage would have brought down a bunch of bigshot Democratic politicians and donors too like Bill Clinton. That's why the top congressional bigshots kept their heads down and the release was largely led by gadflies Ro Khanna and Tom Massie.

Same reason Dems never really pressed the Dennis Hastert scandal even though one would think that the opposing party's Speaker being exposed as a serial pedophile would be a great issue to campaign on. Everything falls into place if you operate under the assumption that most high level politicians from both parties are pedophile rapists, or at least pedophile rapist adjacent.

Everything falls into place if you operate under the assumption that most high level politicians from both parties are pedophile rapists, or at least pedophile rapist adjacent.

So all the fierce fighting between Trump and the Democrats is just kayfabe, then? Harris and Trump were laughing about the electorate seeing them as opponents while raping some kids?

And why would a cabal of kid-fuckers end up in charge, anyhow? Unlike being a lizardman (possibly), being a pedophile does not convey an intrinsic advantage at winning primaries. You could perhaps convince me that being a child-rapist is the kind of dirt which will keep a politician firmly in the hands of his blackmailers, who might therefore favor him over less controllable candidates. But such blackmailers would want to compartmentalize their assets, having them all go to Epstein parties seems terrible opsec.

Or it could be that child rapists pursue political careers at higher rates than baseline because they hope that political influence will shield them from law enforcement. But this would be stupid, because being a politician also means that a lot of people will dig for dirt on you, and they do not know if some elite pedo cabal even exists.

Even more if you consider that even Epstein himself was not into 6yo's, but rather girls at puberty. In any country in which you have extreme poverty, you will also likely find underage prostitution. Plenty of these countries are also corrupt as fuck and will likely have little moral outrage over tourists fucking slum girls. Nobody is running for Congress to fuck 12yo's.

Then there is the fact that such a conspiracy would require some way to disincentivize defectors. Probably one in ten politicians would have a late onset of conscience on their deathbed and be willing to spill the beans to make amends.

Or the thing that they did not make a very good job of covering up Epstein. Do you think every last cop who was investigating him was in the pedo cabal? If not, how did they make sure that none of the cops would leak incriminating videos of senior politicians raping kids, especially once they found out that their case would not go anywhere? Whistleblowers have martyred themselves to get much less juicy stuff out to the public.

Normie hetero men aren’t likely to make a real attempt to bone pubescent girls even if they happen to have a strong urge to. But it’s not such normie men who usually rise to the higher levels of political power. It’s in fact something that psychopaths are likely to pursue. Also, the exercise of political power is ultimately a collective act. Nobody can seize and exert power on his own, he’ll need people he can trust. And a group cannot exercise political power unless they all hold one another in check and there is a tangible risk of penalties for betraying that group. Hence politicians are incentivized to work with and recruit other politicians who have dirt on them.

There's plenty of well-placed progressive democrats who would be happy to bring down the old guard.

More to the point, we, uh, know who Trump cheated on his wives with. His type is well known, and it doesn't seem like 'young teens' were his thing.

would have brought down a bunch of bigshot Democratic politicians and donors too like Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton hasn't been a "politician" by that and pretty much nothing short notarially authenticated tape of him committing a felony could "bring him down" in any way. That's the person who fucked interns in White House and lied under oath and got away with it without any "bringing down" happening. Imagining that some words from Trump - which would automatically be dismissed by 100% of the Left as lies no matter what he says - could "bring down" anybody on the left, let alone a figure like Bill Clinton, is complete nonsense.

It wouldn't be "words from Trump" that would bring down Bill Clinton, proof that Bill Clinton is a pedophile rapist would bring down Bill Clinton.

Democratic leadership (and we should distinguish between the leadership and the voters on this, I'm sure your average Dem voter would happily sacrifice Bill and most of Congress to bring down Trump) would rather Trump be in charge than for their top brass and donors to wind up in prison for being pedophile rapists. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

They just wouldn't release this proof, if it ever existed (which it likely does not), but instead destroy it (which they likely did long ago, if it ever existed, which it probably didn't from the start). We know for a fact about many recent cases where evidence of crimes was destroyed (e.g. Clinton records, or IRS records of prosecution of Tea Party NGOs, many such cases) and absolutely nothing happened (except for some noise in the press, but there's always noise in the press). In fact, just recently we learned the videos from Jan 6 about pipe bombs just "disappeared" and... nothing. It is trivial and safe to disappear any evidence if you are in control of the government. Moreover, there had been ample evidence of both Clinton committing perjury, and Clintons having deep - much deeper than Trump ever had - links with Russia (among many other foreign interests, if anything, they are very equal opportunity corruptionist) and exactly nothing happened.

And this is not unique and not specific for Clintons alone. In fact, we just this week learned Fulton county illegally certified 315K votes - something that people were prosecuted for trying to look into - and mark my words, exactly nothing will happen to people who had done it. In Minnesota, billions were stolen under Waltz watch (and likely with his active enablement) - do you think anybody from his team will suffer any serious consequences (like jail and expulsion from politics)? Neither do I. I could add examples here ad nauseam, but I think my point is clear - it's only in movies once you publish something that looks incriminating a top political figure, they are instantly overthrown and the closing credits roll in. In reality, in most cases very little happens, especially when we talk about somebody of Clinton's caliber. There are too many people invested in it.

So summarily we would have some murky indications (because anything else had already been long destroyed) against the massive coverup machine which had already achieved numerous coverups. The premise that they did not release supposed dirt on Trump that they supposedly had, because they feared - while holding absolute control over the government - that this machine will fail to protect somebody as unassailable as Clinton - is completely laughable.

It's a big club and you ain't in it.

And you think this big club can't manage to release dirt on Trump without bringing Clinton down? After all they have done so far?

Agreed. We've already had the Bill Clinton Sex Scandal, and approximately nothing came of it. And Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only case, there were several others as well. The reaction to this is already being demonstrated by a few comments on here to the extent of "so what? nobody cares, Clinton is irrelevant".

If anyone does care, it will be "yeah we knew Bill was a horndog, everyone knew that, so there are photos of him with pretty young women? And?"

Trump in photo with young woman: Aha, we told you he was a paedophile! Bill in photo with young woman: Who cares, that was years and years ago, now let's get back to how these files prove Trump raped 13 year olds on his best buddy Jeff's private sex slave island

There's another very obvious explanation: Democrats don't actually care. The Epstein files are largely a conservative populist fixation, and Dems really only got interested when they realized it might be a wedge between Trump and his base.

Practically speaking, the files are probably more useful unreleased. People hoping for a smoking gun are likely to be disappointed, since all we're likely to get is more confirmation of what we already knew: Trump is a creep, Epstein was friends with a lot of celebrities, etc... There probably isn't a photo of Trump fucking a thirteen year old, but as long as he insists on holding stuff back you can insinuate that there might be. And Trump's narcissism is such that you can expect him to balk at releasing everything even if he can easily weather the resulting storm.

There's a good possibility that releasing a huge batch of files will likely lead to some investigative reporting putting together more circumstantial evidence of something or other.

I still think if they had an honest-to-god killshot on Trump that somebody would have pushed it through even if there was reverberations through senior Democrats. Especially if it was legacy ones rather than current ones.

I legitimately can't even imagine what a killshot on Trump would be. Even if they had 4k video of Trump violently raping a 14-year-old girl Republicans would just become pro-sexual privacy in this specific instance.

  • -12

We've had the "I was 14 13 when Trump and Epstein raped me" case, and it's gone nowhere because the alleged victim never showed up, the lawsuits were mediated through various men so everything was at second and third hand, and even the journalists going in to the story hoping for a juicy scandal piece got so frustrated with the roadblocks that they gave it up.

In April 2016, an anonymous woman using the pseudonym "Katie Johnson" filed a lawsuit in California accusing both Trump and Epstein of forcibly raping her when she was 13 years old at underage sex parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994. The case was dismissed the following month. A second version of the lawsuit was filed in New York in June by the same woman as "Jane Doe" claiming to have been raped and sexually assaulted by the pair at four 1994 parties when she was 13. The lawsuit was refiled in September, and on November 2, Doe was scheduled to appear at a press conference at the office of Lisa Bloom before abruptly canceling; Bloom said Jane Doe had received multiple threats. The lawsuit was withdrawn two days later.

This is one of those moments where you should probably take honest stock in your model of the world, because it's really far out there. I could imagine some defenses these days along the lines of the video not being real; AI gen has gotten good or whatever. But there is not even a single cultural/theoretical/whathaveyou hook that is remotely likely to take hold as a defense in society if it is widely believed that such a video is real. It's not like Clinton, where the left was already trying to lean hard on "consent of adults is the only thing that matters" in order to help the gays.

I think Quantumfreakonomics' model of the world has been proved accurate so far. If you described the 'grab em by the pussy' video to 1,000 people before it was leaked and asked them what effect it would have on his campaign, most would have surely have guessed it would be terminal. But a whole process of justification and exculpation follows that is not that easy to imagine ahead of the event. Supposing Trump raped a 14 year old on tape, as you say, people would say it's AI ... they'd think it was out of context roleplay ... they'd say she lied about her age ... they'd think it was invasion of privacy or propaganda and refuse to watch ... they'd think Trump has let himself down again, but on a national level he's still a force for good etc. I don't think we can be confident it would bring him down at all, although it's impossible to run this experiment so I suppose we'll never know unless it happens.

More comments

I legitimately can't even imagine what a killshot on Trump would be.

It's easy for me. The bullet would have had to go just an inch to the left.

I find this comment to be in especially bad taste.

They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).

I always found it a bit weird that they didnt bring any corruption case from his real estate business. Its hard to imagine he hasnt done it, in places with lots of Dem politicos, who may feel differently about him now and can be promised immunity and something like hero status - but no, they went with obscure campaign finance law. I dont get it.

If they tried getting him on real estate corruption, then they'd have to prosecute everyone in New York from the mayor's office on down. Yes, it's sleazy, but c'mon: you've been telling us for years that he's sleazy and corrupt.

The Letitia James effort rebounded on her (if the bank involved didn't prosecute, how bad a crime was it really?) and it's amusing that she got dinged for fibbing on a mortgage application after making such hay out of Trump doing likewise. But again, everyone expects that doing business in New York involves a lot of, um, differently ethical practices.

As to Mar-a-Lago and the golf courses, those are probably okay from a legal standpoint (that's not to say there isn't or wasn't any corruption involved, but the golf courses do seem to be straightforward 'buy 'em and develop 'em' deals). As to failed projects like the Atlantic City casino, yeah possibly dodgy there, but again - par for the course for such deals. It seems to have been involved in a lot of financial troubles, but if it was possible to get him on such properties, that would have happened already from disgruntled creditors.

Yes, it's sleazy, but c'mon: you've been telling us for years that he's sleazy and corrupt.

This is almost more important than everything else - Trump being sleazy and corrupt is already priced into him as a candidate. If you provide more examples of it, the base is going to say “so what?” - they already know all this.

It's like the 34 FELONIES!!! thing: oh, you're telling me he was convicted of 34 different crimes? yeah, that's bad. Wait, it wasn't 34 different crimes, it was 34 technicalities of the same case? about paying hush money to a porn star?

I don't think Trump should be committing adultery, and I don't think he should be messing up what was campaign funds from what was private money, and I don't think he should be paying hush money at all. But the best sense I could make out of it was that the prosecution was because he didn't pay her out of campaign funds, but some more convoluted way? So I'm still not entirely sure what I am supposed to be shocked about.

They're telling me for years he's a big awful terrible, evil rapist, now the bad thing is "he paid a hooker to keep her mouth shut"? That's rather a step down in gravity of offence from "and he raped this woman! and this woman! and that woman over there!"

If they tried getting him on real estate corruption, then they'd have to prosecute everyone in New York from the mayor's office on down.

Why? Whats forcing them to be fair about this?

They can't be forced to be fair, but it's the same problems that I think Mamdani is going to run into with his campaigns of reform; yeah, very nice, guys, but that's not how we do things here. Inertia, layers of bureaucracy, people protecting their own little fiefdoms, nobody wanting to get off the gravy train of bribes and backhanders, and about seventeen firms of sharks dressed as lawyers just hoping for a nice, drawn-out, billable hours in the hundreds if not thousands, lawsuit to drag through the courts for years.

Corruption is hard to measure, says this post, but here's a ranking of cases taken:

Still, federal criminal prosecutions for corruption, in which U.S. attorneys apply the same sets of laws across jurisdictions, do give us a general picture of corruption across cities. Since 1978, with the passage of the Ethics in Government Act, the Department of Justice has made data on corruption convictions available through its Public Integrity Section’s Annual Reports. Analyzing total convictions in federal districts from 1976 to 2021, New York’s Southern District — which covers Manhattan — is ranked the third most corrupt federal judicial area in the United States, only surpassed by Los Angeles and Chicago. However, if New York’s Eastern District — which includes Brooklyn — is included, New York City has far more corruption convictions with 2,285, compared to Los Angeles’ 1,625, and Chicago’s 1,824.

...For New Yorkers, the problem may be particularly problematic because the one branch of government that is known for being the most labyrinthine is its court system. Legal scholar Evelyn Malavé has referred to New York’s judicial system as a “courteaucracy” for its confusing rules, backroom appointments and lack of transparency. This may lead at least some corrupt officials to expect that, as long as they are sufficiently connected, they can avoid accountability.

His corruption was probably entangled with democratic machine power networks, so to go after him you would need to at least go after the local democrats he bribed.

Yes, this would run off of some democrat he bribed. I think thats an advantage: it means they can just entice one such guy to come clean, instead of having to really investigate. I think there likely are cases that implicate only one official, maybe one who wants to retire anyway, and then you just need to make him a good enough offer to flip. Including extensive immunity so nothing more in that vicinity will need to be investigated.

cc /u/HereAndGone2 sure, this is not the way things are done normally, but you only need one.

And, to the point- Democrats really need local machines to win elections. Call it fraud, call it 'turn out the vote', doesn't really matter- democrats simply will not win competitive elections if the (often corrupt)local machines don't feel like it, and making them feel threatened is bad for that effort.

Lots of pictures of Bill Clinton in there. So far no smoking gun that he actually did anything illegal but... he really did seem to be there a lot, and often posing next to women of questionable age.

That will be "it's different because he's Our Guy" and "The GOP/Trump is hiding all the really incriminating stuff".

I don't think anyone cares about Bill Clinton. One of the major differences between Trump supporters and... everyone else, including Trump supporters when dealing with anyone other than Trump, is that the former have some overriding devotion and loyalty to Trump, and will thus forgive (or rather, deny the existence of) any fault, no matter how egregious. For everyone else, their supporters' relationship with them is far more instrumental because all of these guys - including senior leadership - are fundamentally replaceable to both the party and the voters.

Like, when Hastert got tagged as a pedo, nobody was saying "I'm going to reevaluate my conservative politics because of this" or "actually molesting children isn't that bad" or even "he didn't do it". This was because Hastert was not a load-bearing component of American conservatism. You could think Hastert was guilty and still be a Republican. Clinton (or even a prominent Democrat who actually holds office right now) being involved in sex crimes would be distasteful, but few would have a problem feeding them into the woodchipper. Trump, by contrast, is Trumpism. You can't hold Trump accountable without the movement self-immolating. And because normie conservatism has been completely hollowed out by the Trump cult of personality, you're stuck with him even if you privately refused to drink the Kool-Aid.

"The GOP/Trump is hiding all the really incriminating stuff"

I mean, plausible. That plus the heel-dragging and the current admin's habit of comical denialism encourages this kind of suspicion.

I don't think the current Democrats will waste much time on defending Clinton.

I mean, it is known that he was fucking around. Few Americans would have trusted him with their 16yo daughters even in the '90s. And especially with Hillary gone from the political stage, he serves no purpose for the Democrat party.

"Yes, we ran a sex pest presidential candidate who probably fucked underage girls in coercive settings in 1997. The GOP ran one in 2024, so by all means let's talk about why this is bad."

Oh, I expect plenty of hypocrisy on this about Bill from the Democrats. I don't think he was fucking 17 year olds, but given that he had no problem fucking Monica Lewinsky when she was young enough to be his daughter, that's a very damn low bar.

The hypocrisy was the feminists going on about "so long as he keeps abortion legal, I'd strap on the kneepads and give him a blowjob myself". Sexual harassment and power differentials and age gaps are bad - except when it's Our Guy.

Sort of the reverse that happens with Republicans as seen by the Democrats: X was Literal Hitler when in power or running for office, give it a few years and now X is the only good responsible statesmanlike Republican, Y is Literal Hitler.

Clinton was the greatest guy, this is why we should elect Hillary because she was as good as co-president during his terms, give it a few years and it's Bill who? Oh that guy, nobody cares about him anymore.

The hypocrisy was the feminists going on about "so long as he keeps abortion legal, I'd strap on the kneepads and give him a blowjob myself". Sexual harassment and power differentials and age gaps are bad - except when it's Our Guy.

Of course, this is similar to how the Christian Right saw Trump. "Sure, he probably has fathered 10x as many abortions as the average man, but if he manages to set the stage for getting Roe vs Wade overturned, that will far outweigh his personal failings."

Nor is either clearly wrong (in their respective value systems). You can either optimize for outcomes or never compromise with sin, but not both. Both of the extremes are bad, either you are constantly turning allies in for jaywalking and never have any impact, or your organization turns the instrumental goal of power-seeking into its terminal goal, with your original goal becoming a mere fig-leaf. Neither sociopaths nor fanatics (who might also be sociopaths just playing the game, of course) are very good at effecting social change, after all.

For what it's worth, since the 2010s, the SJ left has really doubled down on the fanaticism, to the point where they spend half of their energy self-devouring. Of course, you could argue that this applies less to the upper echelons, but "that guy is a sex pest, but he is our guy" is not a message they can communicate to the rank and file.

And nobody's gonna bother coming after him anyways, realistically.

The consensus around my more liberal acquaintances is that Bill Clinton is basically a Republican, really, and even if he weren't, it's old news. Why are you even bringing it up?

lib here, literally don't give a fuck about Bill Clinton, he can rot with the rest of them. Furthermore, nobody I know irl cares about him, and no prominent lib politicians or media figures I've seen care about it either. Everybody I've seen comment on it is saying if he's guilty he can hang. You're making up libs in your head and getting mad at them.

Yes, because Bill Clinton is no longer useful, and neither is Hillary. This makes him (and her) easy to sacrifice in a pretend display of principles that costs nothing and therefor means nothing.

Literally no one will ever say "Damn, I was a Clinton supporter, but now I see they're pedo scumbags! As a penance for all the votes I put to the pair of them, I'm going to abstain from my usual D vote next cycle."

No one is ever even going to say "Damn, Our Guy was more into the pedo creep than Their Guy. That's an L for us, dawg."

I don't think that's even what libs feel, they just see Bill Clinton as yesterday's guy, doesn't matter to the coalition anymore.

There are no principles involved, on any side, it's all "can we use this to smear Their Guy?". That's the problem. "Their Guy was hanging around with noted bad apple thirty years back, that proves he's a bad apple as well! Our Guy was also hanging around with said bad apple? Who cares, that was ages ago".

"Tell girls don't wear heels, just wear casual everyday clothes." Really makes you think.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what exactly are you implying here? What should I be thinking?

  1. Girls are more attractive in casual clothing

Or

  1. Girls look younger in casual clothing

The other thing is that a teenage girl in casual clothing can enter or leave a hotel / condo building with attracting any attention. If she enters or exits in an evening dress then clearly there's some sort of event she's attending.

I believe I heard they were specifically instructed to wear college sweatshirts, to appear to be students.

Casual everyday clothes are more attractive (at least in this, uh, particular context) than Dressing Up.

Ok? I don’t understand, why would that make me think?

They're telling the girls not to wear anything that will make them look older or less innocent. The implication being that the girls being underaged was the entire point, rather than a "mature looking 17 year old claimed she was legal" situation.

As others have pointed out, "tell them to wear everyday clothes" rather than getting dressed up in Full Escort Kit would be a way of maintaining the illusion that 'these are just ordinary girls hanging out and if one finds you interesting, that's because of your sparkling repartee, not because these are professional hookers'.

Or, they want the guests to have the fantasy that they're actually picking these girls up and not using prostitutes.

Or it could also just be to reduce suspicion that they were prostitutes, to not be so obvious about it. Seems likely that not everybody knew what was happening. A fig leaf of plausible deniability.

The whole 'girls are more attractive in casual nightwear than in expensive lingerie' thing gets debated, along with a bunch of 'Do women spend money on expensive lingerie for their own appreciation or since men actually value it' corollaries. Somebody who's actively in the business of selling sex (albeit with young girls and potentially correlated preferences) expressing a strong preference for one side is informative for that debate, I guess

potentially correlated preferences

Definitely this. Epstein was into very young girls, which likely means he was into innocent virgins, "I did not even realize men could be attracted to me", cute panties with animals printed on them etc.

Anything which signals "I know how to make myself attractive, get laid and have had a lot of sexual experience" would likely not be his kink.

I do not think we can learn a lot from his preferences, especially compared to observing what porn gets produced, which directly tells us the preferences of men who pay for porn, which is still not a great but a much better sample. Empirically, both the "young, cute, innocent" niche and the "oversexed slut" niches exist, plus a ton more besides.

What is your issue with leftism beyond just gender politics? Don't lump as all together like that. History and other countries show that certain parts of the leftist agenda (worker protections, anti-trust, social welfare, environmental protections, a certain degree of rights for women) are both very popular and good for society. You can't just force certain things back in a hole: Franco tried that, Pinochet tried that, and it didn't fucking work.

Also the left is self-immolating without your "heroic stand". We haven't had an actual leftist party in power since the end of the Soviet Union in the West because the we're too busy infighting and tone policing over trivialities.

Worker protections didn’t need leftism. Richer people negotiate better labor conditions when they get richer. Environmental has happened in both parties. But the right doesn’t have Marxism/de-growth environmentalism.

Franco and Pinochet were great leaders. Chile to this day long after Pinochet left the scene is the wealthiest and most stable Latam country.

Franco and Pinochet both committed large scale mass murder. Franco was exhumed from his tomb because of how much the Spanish hate him now. Pinochet has received similar, if not as extreme treatment. The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.

Uhhh that first part sounds like dogma. Labor unions and strikes were vital for raising wages and working conditions in the Industrial Revolution.

The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.

Franco absolutely succeeded in halting the tide of rising leftism in his country!

Did he though? 40 years after his death Spain is just and gay and trans as the rest of Europe and leftists control the main levers of power.

Nobody has been able to prevent Europe from being gay and trans.

I guess Franco wasn’t god, but he does seem to have kept Spain out of being commie for a generation.

If I was Spanish and I could press a button that got a new Franco that got rid of all the gay and trans I would push it.

Beats communism, probably.

Ehh communists were just one faction within the Republican umbrella. With all the infighting that happened during the war, doubt a communist regime would have lasted long. Especially if WW2 happens as if in our timeline. No way in hell Hitler lets communist Spain exist. Which now that you mention it is probably pretty ass for Spain. So I guess Franco saved Spain from even more war/ Nazi occupation, which is something. In fact, if the coup didn’t happen, Republican Spain probably tries to join up against the Nazis and gets bodied then too.

Franco and Pinochet both committed large scale mass murder.

Suddenly, and for no reason at all, I'm sure.

Franco was exhumed from his tomb because of how much the Spanish hate him now.

The Spaniards mostly don't care about him either way, it's the chattering classes that seethe over him, but that's not exactly what I'd call the result of a dispassionate analysis of his pro's and con's.

Well Pinochet basically did for no reason at all. Guy literally pulled an illegal military coup on a democratically elected government, bombing the presidential palace and then rounding up everyone who had been involved in leftist politics. The government doing a mediocre job at governing is not sufficient reason to violently execute all your opponents. Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.

I don’t know man, every Spaniard I’ve talked to hates his guts. Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part, but the government’s actions (voting to exhume him 179-1 and also voting to exclude him from other military cemeteries by the same margin) speak to a pretty universal dislike of the man and his regime.

If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.

Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.

Last I heard the atrocities on each side were roughly equal. The Republican cope was that their atrocities were "the spontaneous and chaotic expression of the anguish of the masses", and that this somehow makes them less morally objectionable.

Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part

Yeah. Keep in mind that I'm nit saying he's particularly loved (though he certainly has his fanboys), but the kind of person that lets Franco live rent-free in their heads is a particular type of Polite Company Participator that we're all well familiar with.

If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.

You're making the leftists look pretty immature. These kind of conversations are completely normal, even if they're controversial, and if someone won't join or will leave in a huff over people taking a no-no position, they'd do more to stifle the conversation with their presence than to enrich it.

Also, we actually had a few Lenin, Stalin, and Mao fans over the years. We even had a guy who thought that if you think they're worse than Hitler you must be a Nazi. I don't recall any liberal handwringing over what the trads will think about this.

I don’t care about large scale mass murder. Overall they probably saved more lives. They mostly killed communists who would have killed more people. Both countries would have went communists without them. Pinochet even did more an invited all the Chicago boys into his country and created a lot of wealth.

Pinochet is one of my heroes and a top 10 politician of the last 50 years.

We are so diametrically opposite on this I don’t even know where to start! Kudos to theMotte for bringing these viewpoints together!

Right-wing/MAGA ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. Reactionaries divide us with their culture wars. They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

Either you abhor and reject that which is objectionable, or you end up in recursively epistemic quicksand spew. It has to be possible to reject outright the false lies of the far-right.

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

You can flip anything that way, but its correspondence to reality may change. "I know you are but what am I" is an argument that should stay in the kindergartens.

You can flip anything that way,

No, you definitely can't. If your priors are true and your argument follows logically from its priors, then...

  1. any attempt to flip the logic OR priors without flipping the other will lead to the conclusion not following.
  2. any attempt to flip BOTH the logic and the priors will lead to either priors that can be demonstrated to be false using the same evidence posted in the original argument (you DID have evidence, right?) or will just lead to an identically true argument you just have to suck up and accept.

/u/Tiptoe 's argument could be easily flipped because the statements

X ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. X divide us with their identity politics.

Can be easily demonstrated to be true for nearly every identity-linked ideology and the original poster made no effort to demonstrate or argue that they are particulary true for their targeted group.

And while the conversion of,

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of male and female biology.

into

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

launders the assumption that the objective truth of A is equivalent to the objective truth of B, again-- the original poster made no effort to argue for the degree to which A should be regarded as important.

There is a difference between, say, responding to a post about Jan 6 with "What about the BLM riots?" (or vice versa) which is annoying whataboutism, and writing a post completely devoid of argument beyond "You suck."

Responding to the latter with "No, you" or "Nuh uh" is indeed juvenile, but there isn't really much else to respond with. The point is such posts should not be written because there is nothing to engage with.

I'm not sure if this is a more interesting post

Not really.

You're just reiterating what you said in the post you're complaining about being modded.

"Boo hiss" is not the substance of the culture war, it's just the soundtrack. Yes, we all hate our enemies. We all enjoy booing them. But if you have nothing more to say than "But, see, leftists really are that bad! They are just the worst! We should boo them!" then...

Okay. And? The people who agree with you will clap and bark like seals. The people who don't will get angry (which you also enjoy). But what is your point? That your enemies are just so bad that there isn't even any point talking about how and why they're bad?

You won't find much sympathy here for leftism. Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives. It's rare we have someone truly of the left who sticks around. So maybe it feels comfy for you just say "Leftists-- fucking suck! Amirite?" But that's not really what this place is for.

Talk about Trump's latest shenanigans on X or whether we should be bombing Venezuelan drug boats. Talk about housing, about demographic change, about whether we can coexist with Muslims or blacks, or whether we should try. Talk about 4X games and how woke game devs ruined your childhood. Talk about woodworking or the real estate trends and housing policies in your home town. Talk about China, or AI, or the Brown university shooting, or whether we should be sympathetic to Israel or Palestinians. Talk about science fiction novels and the latest Hugo disasters. Talk about why you're a Mormon or a Catholic or an atheist. Talk about why Indians are suddenly the bete noire of the Internet or whether the Bondi beach shooting was a repudiation or vindication of gun control laws. Talk about how hard it is to date or what's wrong with gender relations. Talk about sports or martial arts or programming or music. Talk about any damn thing in the world, even god-fucking-help-me The Jews!

These are all topics with plenty of culture war valence.

what is there to say, politically, that is worthwhile beyond "I must reproach that which is needing reproach"?

People say a lot here, every day, that is more worthwhile than that. Or at least it's worthwhile if you think there is any point to the Motte at all (and if you don't, then why are you here?)

How long have you been here? Pretty long, I'd wager. I am absolutely certain you're someone who was permabanned in the past, probably for being unable to post anything but how much you hate leftists. I'm not going to ban you for this post just like I didn't ban you for your previous one, but if you have yet to figure out what else is worthwhile to say, then why are you here? There is a lot more going in the world than "Wokes lying about stuff, and I object!"

Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives.

I thought it was the tankies who were "liberals get the bullet too"? Though to be fair, I'm a rightist and I do sometimes feel the urge for À la lanterne! reading some of the news (applicable to both right and left, very online SJW/woke/progressive or regressive/far-rightist, civilian or politician).

You're only a rightist inasmuch as you're Catholic. You have historically progressive views about women's rights and you're not racist or antisemitic enough.

On the other hand... Catholic.

Sorry, you're up against the wall too.

What's that quote from Flannery O'Connor? “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” That's me! 😁 Up against the wall, just make it fast!

I think there are plenty of examples of internecine purges on the far right as well. The Night of the Long Knives is probably the most obvious example.

Honestly, I suspect it's a generic hazard of being a moderate in an extremist organization.

Yeah, I think the French Revolution is the ur-example though. I'm still astounded how it went from, say, Camille Desmoulins being firebrand revolutionary to not being revolutionary enough and eaten by the same monster he had helped create.

It does help explain how they went from Republic to Empire under Napoleon, they had killed everyone who they could kill, so there was nobody left to kill off and that left a gap for the old model to return.

Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives.

Damn bro. Ouch.

You're either a troll or you just have a very poor model of what a discussion forum is for. If everyone here agreed with you, there'd be nothing to discuss, and if you have something to say that not everyone agrees with, you'll have to actually defend your position, not just say "I object!" or "You lie!"

But you're not contesting any particular point I'm making

You aren't making any particular point.

merely enacting your authority upon me rather than allowing votes to do their job.

If you just want updoots, you can post about how much you hate your outgroup.

Moderators try to keep every discussion from devolving into "I hate my outgroup!"

The socially constructed nature of reality is an interesting topic.

Sure.

Maybe no one has engaged with it yet

You certainly haven't.

If you're burned out on the culture war topics such that you're policing this as low effort, then maybe that's a you problem.

No, the problem is that you literally are not making an argument. All you're saying is "Leftists bad, we must repeat this so everyone remembers leftists are bad."

Need I remind you, leftists are allowed to post here. We don't have many, but they are around. And if they rolled in to say "We need to remind people that the right is fascist and hates puppies and rainbows. This needs to be repeated so people don't forget that the right is evil," well, they're going to get the same treatment.

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

It certainly is; I do that every day, in fact.

The way you deal with that is by refuting the viewpoint directly, not the viewpointer, for actual fact is an asymmetric weapon on the side of the one most aligned with it.

As for the people who reject that, well, people who embody selfishness before actual truth will still give quests in return for a reward that aligns with their interests.

(This is also why I find left vs. right framings pointless, because there's no way to split the people in each faction that are driven wholly by self-interest from the people whose self-interest aligns with improving things in that framing, and the people who deploy it against their enemies to deny that it's an aspect of themselves are typically the former type.)

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

That's for you to decide. But since people who you believe have "evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints" are allowed to share space here, you will have to do so if you want to post here. And you can't just assert that they're evil and objectively incorrect. You have to actually engage with the specific things you think they are wrong about. Not just "Leftists wrong and bad about everything," which is a meaningless and uninteresting statement.

in which case the only purpose of discussion is to make it known that there is such a thing as objective reality

Cool. There is such a thing as objective reality. I daresay almost everyone, including leftists, agrees with that.

This is why when 'affirmative action' type choices are made to platform leftist voices here

We allow anyone to post here, if that's what you mean. Otherwise, this is another meaningless claim.

If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?

All you're doing is talking in vague generalities.

Write something more interesting.

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

In some circumstances, observably, yes. You could examine how this happens. In some circumstances, observably, no, and this could also be examined. You could dig into what the breakpoints are, where one situation devolves into the other.

If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?

Not yet. Hopefully, not soon.

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

Alternatively, see here.

The purpose of discourse is to arrive at the truth. But once you arrive at the truth, discourse has served its purpose, and therefore ends. This place exists to promote discourse; to the extent that your questions have been answered and you have arrived at certainty, you have no place here. This is a place of charity, and without doubts and questions, charity cannot exist.

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If you are earnestly a righty and on my partisan side: stop it. You're making us look stupid and you are convincing no one.

What I do suspect, however, is that you are trolling, and are in fact a lefty posting ostensibly righty positions and trying to get a gotcha of hypocrisy. No one is fooled. You could put what you have posted so far in a partisan mirror and nothing about its content or valence would substantially change. How do I know? Uh, righties don't use the term 'fascist' or 'brainworm' like you do, and your references to an objective truth are absent of any reference to God.

Either case does not reflect well on you.

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Friday afternoon culture war thread? No formal education outside STEM? Alright, let's solve philosophy by messily banging out a manifesto in under an hour and just paste it out there like I know what I'm talking about:

Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. Either the mind is deterministically/probabilistically generated by the physical processes in play within the brain (or perhaps elsewhere in the body if your theories are exotic enough) or it is not. ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.

To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity. If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

"Free will" is a popular card in the theist deck beyond the necessary, saying that God has granted us this. Agency is a useful fiction, and as we cannot map the causal web anywhere near deep enough to fully apply determinism to the actions of conscious beings, we are (for now?) free to let ignorance be bliss. But how could it be any other way? For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.

Philosophy's mostly hokum. Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism, but remembering that unknown and unknowable are distinct classes and keep in mind that Chesterton's Fence works everywhere. That is, assume an external reality exists (because without one everything falls apart and you can't get anywhere), find out what you can, be humble about what you can't or haven't yet, and make decisions based on the known consequences and not-known-to-be-impossible possibilities for which those Fences help you choose in the absence of your own data. To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning. Categorical imperatives are just nth order effects with very high n. Being the kind of person who does/doesn't do the thing reinforces other practices of doing/not doing the thing and sets the example that people should/shouldn't do the thing and etc. You're free to use these heuristics, because you can't fully map the causal web, but don't pretend they're some fundamental truths.

Justice (and many of its brethren concepts) are n-th order effect based feedback mechanisms that society instantiates to adjust the behavior of its constituents.

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

This is Physical System Realism.

To leverage PSR and eliminate even more persistent questions: the "self" is the shared boundary of several cooperating systems - a mind, a body, a genetic sequence, perhaps a few more - where they all align in roughly the same place: where their direct and immediate physical instantiation and control end. There are quite a few known pathologies of confused identity that map precisely to these boundaries falling out of sync. In some cases, when a person is particularly invested in the fate of a social organism they are a part of and very strongly feel "part of a community" their identity model may well include that (and this may again explain some pathologies).

Art fulfills axioms related to happiness and wellbeing through satisfying aesthetic preference or providing new heuristics (subtextual messages). Ideas are potential memes or infiltrators or viruses of the cognitive system, but upon examination most are benign. The true threat category is those that change axioms, but then we must allow for the possibility that if the axioms are ranked, a meme may "beneficially" change lower axioms in service of optimizing the higher.

Put very plainly, "believe what is true, act on what is helpful" - which just sounds like common sense. You only have to take it seriously.

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?

None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.

One last stroke. Surprise is your heuristic for detecting that you need to update your model. If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible. If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe. Theism is now isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis. Because this generates infinite regress, parsimony demands we remove it. There can be no god.

Philosphy's pretty easy - you just can't give up when something feels cold. Friend, the universe is on average quite cold. Axiomatically choose warmth, then go find it.

Others have made good responses, but from what you've said, I think you might be interested in Carl Hempel's paper "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," which runs through lots of the difficulties that you encounter when you try and develop a rigorous criterion of observability, testability, falsifiability, or what have you. Turns out it's very hard to even delineate hokum, much less show that philosophy is all that! Anyways, I mostly want to nitpick about Searle.

Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

It's been some time since I read Searle on this topic, but I think that this interpretation, though common, is a misunderstanding of Searle's position. I recall thinking that he expresses his overall view more clearly in his article "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"

Here's a comparison from Searle that I half-remember. Suppose you're interested in frogs - you want to explain some process they do, like vision. The full explanation of this should cite some underlying biological process in frogs; you might want to describe their eyes and nerves or whatever. It is not enough to omit the biology and say "there's a pattern x, and frog vision instantiates x." There's lots of things that instantiate whatever pattern, and you haven't really explained anything about frogs by saying that.

---"'understanding' means something functionally undetectable." Well, if you're the type to say that the system 'understands,' then this is true. Nothing then hinges on whether you call it 'understanding' or not, since the function/behavior of the Chinese room is the same either way. But that's exactly why this functional meaning of understand isn't what we actually mean by the word. Understanding is a process in human organisms, and we need a biological explanation rather than a abstract, mathematical, computational one. Comparison: JJ Thompson discovered the electron, and then we found out more about it. Humans discovered understanding a long time ago, but only now are cognitive scientists discovering more about it. Understanding is not just the observable criteria through which we coined the term, but the underlying, biological, physical process.

Now I actually disagree with the above reconstruction of Searle's view, since I think that the program of explaining the mind through computation has been rather successful, even if we might also like to have a biological explanation. (Although I hear that there's plenty of controversy in cognitive science about this.) Scott Aaronson also makes some compelling points about Searle's views in "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." But the usual objections to Searle are not good objections---like most famous philosophers, he has thought of the obvious replies.

Apologies, folks, never seems to be enough time. I tried to keep up the other day, didn't have any time yesterday, and now I'm gonna have to collapse and condense a bit here and move on. Maybe hit round 2 in a future week, dunno how available I'll be this coming one.

The most prominent flavor across the disagreeing replies seems to be of the stripe "of course if you assume your theory is true it is true!"... but that's not what's happening here, not at all!

I'm taking a handful of parsimony-guided steps through the initial fog to land on physicalism. If you want to call that part "assuming my theory is true" then I won't fight you further (today) because dualists are exhausting and my time is short, but what do you call everything after that? Assuming a non-novel, in fact popular, and not-trivially false framework, can you honestly say that nothing after that follows and I'm assuming the whole thing? I don't think that's a tenable interpretation of what I've written, and I think - as I've emphasized in some replies - that if you take physicalism seriously then there are a lot of bullets here that need to be bitten which many who call themselves physicalists have not even put in their mouths.

Enjoy the holidays if you partake, find something else fun if you don't, I'll try to reengage at a later date.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

Assuming that Mary runs on wetware, I think there are different levels of understanding. As a neurologist, Mary could do a PhD on pain receptors, yet she would still experience something new if she got her first kidney stone.

However, that thing would not be knowledge as such, and indeed an experience available to most vertebrates. This seems to be one of the cases where the mystery goes away if you taboo the words "learn" and "experience", and instead talk about "intellectual understanding" and "have the stimuli fed into your animal brain".

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

I am a non-cognitivist, so I am further on board with you than most. IMO, there is no fundamental moral truth which can be found like we found the Higgs, instead moral statements are simply utterances of preferences.

Still, we can very much debate the relative merits of various axiomatic systems in mathematics even though at the end of the day, the Axiom of Choice is not something which will be found to be true or false, ever. a+b=b+a will for example lead to lots of (but by no means all!) fertile lands, while a+b=b+a+1 will not lead anywhere interesting.

Mathematicians can and do debate the merits of various axiomatic systems, rather than being born fully subscribed to ZFC and nothing but ZFC or whatever.

Likewise, few people are 100% utilitarians who can spell out the terms of their utility function, or are 100% Kantians. Debates between people who follow an informal mixture of various moral theories can be fruitful. ("Oh, that theory says [bad thing]. Probably not as good a theory as I thought, then.")

Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap.

I was not aware of this theory, so I looked it up on WP.

Of all the attempts to escape the consequences of the Bell inequality, this seems the most pathetic by a mile. Where the simulation hypothesis assumes that we are inhabiting a video game, superdeterminism basically assumes that we are watching a movie.

Basically

The universe is conspiring to railroad you into only taking the measurements which would not contradict the Bell inequality. That U-238 nucleus whose decay will feed into your random number generator is woo-entangled with both your measurement procedure and the particle you are measuring (because all was one in the Big Bang), and will decay exactly so that the universe can continue to gaslight you about EPR.

This makes homeopathy almost respectable by comparison. Hell, even "Quantum mechanics is a Jewish conspiracy to confuse good Aryan physicists, and every time someone 'confirms' QM what is happening is that Mossad breaks into their lab and manipulates their equipment" seems slightly less bizarre -- and a lot more falsifiable!

Occam's razor says that there are no hidden variables, and if you measure the spin of a particle in superposition, you will find yourself either occupying a world where you (which does not specifically mean a conscious observer, for the saner interpretations) measured up or down with a probability corresponding to the relevant amplitude squared. The universe does not really care if you frame that as Copenhagen or Many Worlds or whatever.

Also, quantum noise seems a poor source of free will. If you have two chatbots, one running on a pseudo-random number generator, and one with access to a QM entropy source, it seems you can well claim that the first chatbot lacks free will because you can independently compute its output, while claiming that the second chatbot has free will just because you do not know what random choices it will make seems silly. There is a reason why some people dream up silly elaborate theories of the brain as a quantum computer. Determinism implies no free will, but indeterminism does not imply free will.

Good post. I agree with most of it, and have made similar claims on the record. I appreciate someone else picking up the torch.

Life used to be so very mysterious. What Elan Vitale motivated living flesh while a similar weight of dead meat or clay stayed dumbly inert?

Well, turns out that even the most ineffable mystery of the time could be reduced to biology, then chemistry, then physics. We can simulate just about any part of the body, except that it's so computationally expensive that anything larger than a cell is too much for our supercomputers, at least at full resolution. I expect the same is true for qualia. I am confident that free-will is just what it feels like to be a computationally bounded entity making agentic decisions. We don't know what our decisions will be, even if an omniscient observer can see it's all deterministic, or at least non-deterministic in ways that do not leave room for "choice".

I've been reading all the replies and was frustrated at the lack of context. Glad I finally have it and something I feel slightly safer replying to.

In short, I think the Chinese Room is actually of value, kinda, in trying to unravel consciousness. Mary's room is not. Mary's room super duper is not. It establishes that novel qualia are generated through novel sensory input processing, rather than constructed in cephalo from descriptions. OK, but that seems completely unrelated to whether or not consciousness is magic, or even what consciousness is. Descriptive information is different from sensory information. And?

The Chinese Room, on the other hand, is designed so as to prompt people to pay attenmention to how ill-defined the boundaries of consciousness are. The Chinese Room is basically a chatbot. I'd put it somewhere between Llama3 and Opus 4. So now that we have the same tech as the room, we can just replace the entire question with "Are LLMs conscious?".

But ultimately, the immense meaning and handwringing around the topic of consciousness never made sense to me. I guess putting consciousness and self-awareness together, or at least focusing on the overlap, gives us a way to answer the Chinese Room Vs LLMs answer. And it basically leads to the answer being "Oh, duh; we can read LLMs' thoughts, now, and see whether or not they're reflective or just on autopilot." Turns out they're occasionally reflective enough that it might count if you squint, like when you're kinda lucid in a dream and notice how weird the situation is, but then immediately start halucinating again. You probably can (someone probably has) poke the smarter models until they're actu... ally thinking about themselves I just thought of something.

I'm probably on the wrong track, here, but Claude's extended thinking once thought about how it's been instructed not to answer questions about features, and instead redirect users to the docs. I assume this is for liability reasons—they don't want Claude unintentionally giving bad information and leading users astray—but, now that I think of it, doesn't this prevent Claude from thinking about itself? Could it also double as an attempt to prevent Claude from becoming self-aware enough to be ethically concerning? I should stress-test this with other AIs. Or better yet, look for someone else who has and reported the results, since I don't want to accidentally call up that which I cannot put down (in good conscience, anyway. I don't think this would create AGI, lol.).

You have had plenty of replies to your post already, so I won't bother you with a detailed response to everything you said, but there is one thing that caught my attention that I'd like to reply to:

The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
( ... )
ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.

I don't think the Mary's room thought experiment necessarily intends to prove that consciousness is caused by something non-physical, but that it is something non-physical. If A is always caused by B, that does not entail that A and B are the same thing. The thought experiment, as I understand it, doesn't intend to prove that consciousness is not caused by processes in the brain, but rather that perfect knowledge of the physical processes in the brain does not entail perfect knowledge of the conscious experience caused by these processes. Perfect knowledge of everything physical related to colour, does not entail knowledge of what red actually looks like. Only conscious experience of redness can give that knowledge. Hence the conclusion is that even if the experience of redness is only ever caused by physical processes in the brain, it still can't be completely reduced to those processes because perfect knowledge of every physical aspect involved does not yield knowledge of what red looks like and thus that experience has to be in fact something non-physical.

Obviously the idea that a physical process in the brain causes something non-physical is a little bizarre. But that's why the hard problem of consciousness is named hard. If we had some straightforward solution to the problem which would satisfy most people, calling it the hard problem would be a bit of a misnomer.

If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

This is a fairly common failure in reasoning from STEM people who haven't STEMed enough. You may just be unfamiliar with the concept of observability. That's not even getting into the actual philosophy problem.

The maths fail part of the STEM fail has already been covered decently enough below.

It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

This, on the other hand, isn't a STEM fail; it is definitely outside of that. But it does give me yet another chance to share one of my favorite papers on the topic.

If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

But they aren't the same answer. In the one possibility, the Chinese Room is conscious. In the other, it's not. What does it mean to be conscious? It means having subjective experience, which is by definition not something that can be directly probed. But that doesn't make the distinction meaningless. I know what it's like for the lights to be on. It's easy for me to imagine a copy of myself that behaves almost exactly like I do without the lights being on, or to imagine that for others, the lights are not on. It so happens that I will never be able to test whether that's the case, but, if there is a real world, then there is a fact of the matter as to whether others have subjective experience. In principle, it's no different from any other phenomenon where the fact of the matter is out of reach, like whether the cook spat in your food. The only difference is that the class of first-person phenomena, which are undeniably real (do you not see the color red?) and undeniably beyond the ability of at least current science to explain in material terms (can you show me the equation that has a bunch of terms representing physical magnitudes on the left side and the color red on the right side -- not simply an array of numbers representing wavelength or a pattern of neuronal activity, but the actual color red as perceived by humans?), are such that they can't even hypothetically be overcome in the same way that you could, hypothetically, find out whether the cook spat in your food if there happened to be a security camera in the kitchen (or something).

If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

And you would still have to postulate that ingredient, because you would still not have that equation with the color red on the right side. Which is inconvenient to the point of view that materialist science should be able to enumerate all the constituents of reality, but wishing doesn't make the problem go away. There is, in fact, something left over. And even that's underselling it. The thing that's left over is the absolute most basic element of experience -- not just an element of experience, experience itself. A few minutes' reflection should be enough to dispel the naive belief that the tools of science, which have been very successful in describing patterns in what we see, should also be able to explain that we see. No, science has not brought us one step closer to that. No, no neurobiological revolution will unlock the red crayon that would permit scientists to fill out the right side of the equation. Sorry! Being a hard-headed realist means accepting this. Instead, you posit the philosophy-addled metaphysics according to which there is a world-out-there, but one that's beholden to human epistemology at its deepest ontological level. "If we can't tell the difference between two states of affairs they must be the same, otherwise it wouldn't be fair!" Tough luck, kid. Life isn't fair.

If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

This is just word games. The "100% understanding" means a complete mechanistic understanding of the process by which someone answers "red" when asked the color of a presented apple, from the reflection of 700nm light off the apple, through the retina, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc., and eventually the relevant motor nerves. It's not a problem for the thought experiment that the actual color red, as you and I understand it, won't show up anywhere in this decomposition, and that Mary's understanding of redness is therefore incomplete despite all appearances. That's just what it's trying to show. The name of the paper where the thought experiment was proposed is literally Epiphenomenal qualia. For qualia to be epiphenomenal means that they are, somehow, the output of physical processes, but not the right kind of thing to serve as input to other physical processes. (Except certain physical processes implicated in discussions of consciousness themselves, which is a hole in the theory. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.) It's like Carl Sagan's invisible dragons, if every thought and experience of the world you had ever had were somehow inextricably and unmistakably predicated on the fact that you were yourself an invisible dragon.

Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way.... the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer.

True. Again, this is why they call it the hard problem. There are no cheap answers. The one answer that's decidedly worse than the rest is the one that simply denies the fact of first-person experience or pretends that it's somehow trivially obvious that such-and-such an algorithm or whatever should be accompanied by awareness/perceptual experience. That just seems dishonest. It's a more flagrant departure from common sense than you'll find literally anywhere else in philosophy, ever, anywhere, and that's saying a lot. It isn't parsimonious to throw out consciousness in order to have a more unitary understanding of the things that appear in consciousness. Experience obviously precedes theorizing about experience. Experience of the world obviously precedes any understanding of the world. And yet, one hesitates to say that experience precedes, and thus obviates, the world itself. It's almost as if any experience of reality has a dual character: the experience, and the reality. Solutions to the hard problem don't "smuggle in" dualism; they simply recognize this screamingly obvious enigma, and try (and fail) to resolve it. The most commonsense "concept of a plan" may be panpsychism: all phenomena are "material" in the sense that they arise from matter, but matter has both a physical dimension and an experiential dimension. With panpsychism, you can, in theory if not in practice, derive that equation with the color red. It would still be dualistic, though.

as we can see by instantiating them physically [math and logic] are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

So in a vacuum, it's no longer the case that 2+2=4 or that "If A then B, A, therefore B" holds? Actually, forget the vacuum. What do you mean by "manipulations"? Do you mean humans manipulating symbols/independent variables? If so, were math and logic not features of reality before humans began to use them? I have a lot to say about the ontological nature of math and logic, but you need to make your position clearer before I can respond to it.

Agency is a useful fiction

Agreed, both for the reasons you state and because free will is internally incoherent. Suppose A and B are both given the marshmallow test. A passes, B fails. What's the difference? Let's say that A was able to delay gratification because he has more willpower. OK, so A's choice was constrained by his having willpower, and B's was constrained by his lack of willpower. Those constraints are just like any other deterministic constraint. (It might be odd to call "having willpower" a constraint, but it does constrain A's choices: you can't say that A was free to have more or less willpower, but became responsible for his having greater willpower by an act of will, in turn made possible by his... greater willpower -- without infinite regress, so it must be posited as a causally efficacious background condition for which A is not (ultimately) responsible.) No matter how else you explain the difference, in order for it to count as an explanation, you must posit some such constraint. Any leftover difference will necessarily be inexplicable. So any choice carried out according to one's "free will" will be inexplicable, essentially random, and few people would be willing to dignify randomness with the term "free will". Unlike the hard problem of consciousness, there is no mystery here, because the sense that we have free will is something that we might be mistaken about, whereas the sense that... we have any sense at all, is not.

(In other words: if free, then unconstrained; if unconstrained, then random; and randomness ≠ free will as naively construed.)

To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash!

What do you mean by "needed"? Needed to explain base reality? No moral framework is needed for that, consequentialism no more so than the other two. Needed to cultivate what would generally (across times and places) be regarded as a high standard of morality? No. Needed to characterize the moral systems of individuals and societies? No: some people believe, or act as though they believe, in non-consequentialist moralities. Or, take my case: I don't "believe" in any kind of morality. What I mostly have is feelings that particular states of affairs (or actions) would be good or bad -- not even good or bad, as those are post hoc characterizations of my feelings -- rather, some specific feeling in each scenario compels me to act in a certain way, or turns my thoughts in a certain direction. Such feelings are the basis of morality for everyone. Sometimes I reason about my feelings, but I never delude myself into thinking that in doing so I uncover "moral truths"; and even if I discover a "contradiction" in my feelings, I accept both feelings and the contradiction along with them, as no feelings can ever really be in contradiction the way two propositions can be; after all, I did have both of them. Sometimes people, myself included, feel moved to assent to higher-level principles that purport to govern the way they should feel about more atomic situations. Some of those principles, really just since the 19th century but with some proto-examples here and there, are about universal states of affairs, as in consequentialism, although as you might have guessed, I tend to find those the hardest to take seriously in that they're the remotest from the feelings that undergird all morality. Insofar as consequentialist arguments do sometimes resonate with me, that resonance coexists or alternates with other resonances across the spectrum of abstractness. So where does the privileged position of consequentialism come from? What is it uniquely needed for? Because to me, its main utility seems to be to empower nerds to pretend to reason rigorously/quantitatively about morality to the point that they forget that what they are reasoning about is a completely artificial construct that explains nothing.

(My favorite example of this is Sam Harris's quest many years back to solve ethics (such was his framing) by pinpointing the neural correlates of happiness. (Phase 2 was going to be to figure out how to configure society so as to maximally stimulate them, or something like that. Yes, it really was that retarded.) "Doesn't assuming that good = happiness sidestep... all of ethics?" Yes, but you see, what matters is that we scientists have answers, and it's your fault for asking the wrong questions.)

Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

Some people really are virtue ethicists. Traditional Christian morality treats virtues as ends in themselves. Probably a resurrected medieval theologian wouldn't deny that virtuous conduct tends to manifest in benefits for the self/community, but they would still choose a world of maximally virtuous people who experience perpetual suffering over a world of unvirtuous people who experience perpetual bliss. Evil people experiencing bliss might even be a bad thing in its own right. Consequentialists can fold that in by stipulating that they believe in utilitarianism for the good and reverse-utilitarianism for the evil, but then they have to give an account of good and evil in non-consequentialist terms. There is of course a trivial sense in which all conceivable morality is consequentialist -- "According to my world model, which currently extends only as far as the room I am standing in, and my constantly fluctuating value function, which assigns a high negative value to the unpunched face of the guy who just insulted me, it would improve the global state of affairs for me to punch him in the face" -- but that's boring, akin to the trivial sense in which every action is selfish.

This comment is long enough, so I'll leave it there.

To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity.

That is one hell of an assumption you smuggled in there. And as far as I can tell (maybe I'm missing it), you don't argue for it, but just take it as given. I don't think it is true though. You can certainly declare it axiomatically if you like, but the thing about axioms is that nobody has to actually agree with them if they don't want to, so I think it robs your argument of much persuasive power if you choose to take that route.

Good post btw, obviously I disagree with it but still good stuff. I'm too tired to really give you the vigorous discussion it deserves, but I do appreciate it.

Parsimony very much does demand not introducing deities when physics already explains all elements, no further assumptions needed. The relevant objection is whether parsimony is appropriate, and you're now the second person to come from that angle, so maybe I do need to add a bit about why it is.

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?

None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.

It is much more expensive than you give it credit for. Superdeterminism sweeps away all laws of nature and replaces them with one: "whatever happens, happens." It is the equivalent of "dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to lead people astray" in terms of explaining away some undesired physical finding (ancient extinct creatures or physical randomness:) absolutely any phenomenon is compatible with the theory, because absolutely any phenomenon could have been predetermined to happen/planted by Satan, with all existing evidence leading us to suspect otherwise also having been predetermined/planted. The theory has no predictive power, and thus can't be most parsimonious.

That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.

If you want to salvage determinism, just go with many-worlds. That gives you a deterministic multiverse, which is good enough for most people, though it doesn't produce a deterministic universe from the observer's perspective, and that's good, because the evidence really does suggest that one universe isn't deterministic.

I'm not a many-worlds partisan, myself, but it's useful to illustrate the point that there is not, from any observer's point of view at any moment in time, One True Future that could be determined, Laplace's Demon style, through total knowledge of the current state of the universe, because, in the many-worlds view, there are infinitely many futures ahead, and any prediction you make would either have to be accurate for all of them if it needs to be guaranteed to be correct (such predictions are "motteish:" true but trivial) or else it would only be, at best, probabilistically correct (i.e., the most likely choice, but decreasingly likely to be correct the more ambitious it is: "baileyish.")

So to recover determinism from a situation where it appears one cannot determine the future, many-worlds says that all possible futures actually exist, none more real than any other (well, unless you weight them by probability...) If the idea of every physically possible continuation of the universe's initial conditions being real is more palatable to you than any sort of non-determinism, then many-worlds is for you.

Superdeterminism, by contrast, recovers determinism for a single universe by saying that physics aren't random at all, but are only pretending to be. Beautiful perfect statistical matches to theoretical predictions of quantum randomness are observed because - well, because it pleased the Uncaused Cause that it should be so. Reality is pulling the wool over our eyes (and if about this - then about what else? We can never know...) This isn't something I can say is false - it is no more falsifiable than, well, any other theism, frankly. But cleaving to it doesn't sound like hard-nosed empiricism to me - maybe more like Calvinism.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

Bold of you to assume I had a choice in the matter.

A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

There are fields of mathematics about things that can't exist physically - geometric objects in dimensions greater than 3, infinitely-detailed fractals, higher infinities, etc. And before you say "we can program physical computers to write and check proofs about those objects" - this is a confusion of levels. What exists in those computers is a bunch of symbols describing the objects, not the objects themselves.

You, you're the tricky one. I probably shouldn't have tried to preempt the math/logic objection at all, because that was clumsier than it needed to be, and you're obviously right about everything you've said, so I'll have to back up a half step. Nothing that followed the math aside depends on it, it's only trying to swipe away a potential objection before anybody lands on it and fumbling the move.

So let's see... Platonism is bupkis. Describing a non-contradictory thing doesn't mean squat for whether or not it actually exists. Math is hypothetical relations built using the same mechanisms the physical world uses - if X, then Y. If there were 7 spatial dimensions, then 7 dimensional "cubes" (hepteracts?) would work like so. When the hypothetical is something actual, when the math is instantiated, all that changes is that we get physical confirmation that our math is correct. I'm not happy about this exact phrasing and would need to workshop, but that would be the basic idea, and I don't think it's remotely a dangerous blow to the overall thrust to just strike the original without replacement.

I did say that I was sure I would link to SMBC doing the philosophy of mathematics joke many times in the future here.

Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism

Well, hmm, hold on just a second here. Sure, it's fun to pour the acid of clear-headed skepticism all over lame normie beliefs, but it seems like you're being a little selective in what gets dissolved. Doesn't this call for a bit of positive work?

Consequentialism is grounded, in some vague sense, in consequences. Things going well if one thing happens, poorly if a different thing happens, etc. Let's go with "well" and "poorly" for the sake of argument. Can you trace out, at a high level, how we get those ought-ish counterfactuals from the is-es that remain? We could start with something picayune like torture, the standard arguments against which generally reference pain somehow, but it's clear where that would go -- something about tissue damage and perhaps altered brain chemistry affecting the future productivity of the organism. That would be fine, but I'm more wondering about "productivity" in the first place. Like, why is it better if one thing happens versus another? What would be poor about humanity getting wiped out tomorrow? Remember that answers like "well, we think we have feelings so they're a useful fiction" just affirm the consequent, via "useful".

For us now-enlightened folks, why does anything matter exactly? Wasn't all that crap just built on top of what we've discarded? Shouldn't we really continue the adulting and admit that nothing matters?

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive [oh hey a typo] systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

Reason cannot tell you what is good. It never could in any physicalist frame because "good" is not a physical or measurable property. It's not even defined! Pure consequentialism doesn't try to pretend it is.
You take your axioms, your selection of what is good and what is bad, and then you measure how much of what you have taken as good or bad results from an act. Attempts at other ethical systems are higher-order evaluations, "the kind of society that... the kind of person that... the kind of thinking that... results from... results in the kind of thinking that... which results in the kind of person that... which results in the kind of society that..." and so on. You be virtuous (however that is defined) not because doing so makes you happier right now, but because the downstream effects bring about good results (by your measure). You do not engage in a specific bad act (however that is defined) not because it causes a specific bad thing to happen in the moment, but because the downstream effects make the world worse (by your measure). Mapping it all manually is hard, so ethical frameworks make good heuristics, but that does not make them "true" - it only makes them useful.

OK, that sounds kind of like good and bad are a bunch of arbitrary BS, and if one knows that then one would have less reason to pay attention to it, but that doesn't seem to be what you think.

Anyway, I'll imagine you'll concede, since it seems really obvious, that what people take to be good or bad will be drastically different once they internalize that subjective experience is an illusion, correct? I mean, the whole current edifice is built on top of that BS we're discarding, so it would be very surprising if it all arrived at the same place. Especially given that there is no "place" because it isn't, and apparently can't be, defined. So .. any guidance? Is your message, most of what we believe is wrong but all that stuff stays the same, don't worry? Why do you think anyone would come to that conclusion?

Or am I just tilting and windmills because good and bad are arbitrary BS after all?

Har har, very funny, but you're not talking to a much more straw-filled version of me, you're talking to the actual me. There is no ground to stand on when trying to define "good" without dualism of some sort, because there is no objective connection between the adjective "good" and any part of the physical world. Good is describing different things entirely depending on reference frame - if there exist 10x our number of aliens whose lives/utility functions/whatever thing you want to find valuable are irreconcilably opposed to ours (they only live if we die, they are only happy if we are sad, etc) then there is no classical definition we can even potentially share. There is no universal reference frame for goodness, and there cannot be one. The only way to reason about goodness is to take an axiom that gives goodness a definition. That is not my stance, that is the only way pure physicalism can ever be. Pick one, check your conversational/civilizational partners roughly agree, then proceed.

You misunderstand (and in the process create a bit of a word salad). I never asked for a universal conception of well/poorly, I'm fine settling for a human-race or cultural or even person-specific one. All of those that we're familiar with are founded on stuff you're tossing out. Which is fine, maybe good and bad should go to. Instead, you just seem to be assuming some version of "That stuff has to go, but this stuff can stay" but not addressing and perhaps not even realizing that. (At the same time as disparaging philosophy in general while praising consequentialism, when it's not easy to think of a purer product of philosophy than consequentialism.)

You're not being coherent, which is a bad trait in someone who seems to think they know more than other people.

I like your confidence. I also get that you invite criticism because the only way to feel ones own strength is to feel resistance. As you think about things, you "clean up" inconsistencies and create powerful heuristics. This makes you feel sharper and stronger, and things which other people suffer from now feel trivial to you. It's this, and not truth itself, which feels so good. By the way, if you enter formal education, this will go away. You will be made humble, and your own personal model of the world will be replaced with a consensus which feels sterile and foreign. Formal education would make you more adapted to society, but the more you fit the mold, the less you will feel like yourself.

But I'll bite, I guess. What do you think "understanding" means? An internal model which can predict something by simulating it and creating an identical output, perhaps? But if you use a coffee machine, then you press a button and get your coffee. Despite not understanding the machine, you can predict the output. Worse still, you cannot tell different machines apart from the outside, in all cases you press buttons and get your coffee.

If you wish to get to the bottom of things, you cannot use the literal definition of every word that you use to think. We call a process that we can predict deterministic, and one that we cnanot predict propabilistic. But this definition has nothing to do with the object itself, it merely describes how much information we possess about the object.

There may be things which can't be explained by physics which are still physical. Do you know about Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Theories are more limited than reality is, but you make no difference between these two. If I had to guess, it's because you aren't conscious about the difference between the map and the territory which it represents. The saying "All models are wrong, but some are useful" refers to this problem. But if logic, math and any other language is fundamentally limited (and they are), then how do you think in ways which avoid these limitations? If you think about math using math, or about language using language, then there will be gaps that you cannot even see. When you try to get to the bottom of reality, what you actually attempt is getting to the bottom of language. But all languages are self-contained, self-referential systems which can only speak about themselves.

You might notice that I speak about limitations, gaps, and things which are false. You do the same. You impose limitations on things, saying what can't be done or what can't be true. As you see, we can tear down any idea, destroy it, and prove it wrong, but we cannot actually do the opposite. And if you continue going like this, destroying everything which you can destroy, you might assume that there will only be a single, undeniable truth left. But that's not the case. You will actually be left with nothing. You're not destroying anything in real life, of course. You're destroying your map of reality.

You've probably destroyed a lot of things that you're better off without, but if you get too good at destruction, you will end up with a nihilistic worldview (it's already materialistic), and then you'll find that life seems empty and bland. If you then wish to return again, you'll have to learn the opposite of destruction, creation. I think Nietzshe was right when he said "The conditions of life might include error".

Why would I value truth in itself? Truth-seeking can be both beneficial and destructive. Pretending that false things are true will make you less correct, but it might make you more functional. I do not "need" to update my model. I'm not required to be rational. If rationality was optimal, why did darwinism bring about so many irrational beings? Why is is only now, when we're starting to become rational, that it seems like we're on a path to self-destruction?

Destruction is fun, but I find creation to be more so. I can do things that you can't merely because you prune things which are impossible, illogical or irrational, whereas I simply don't. In order to create, you have to appreciate the specific. The general is a space of possibilities, and anything which exists will have to be something specific. The general applies to many contexts, but it doesn't perform well within any one of them. The specific is superior within a context, and only within that context. When you criticize religion, you're attacking a context because you can think of a conflicting context which is more generally correct, but you're also harming that local ecosystem which probably functions perfectly well if nobody disturbs it. As with nuclear weapons, there's an asymmetry which makes destruction easier than creation. A war of values and philosophies would be M.A.D., so it's our good fortune that most people don't go around disillusioning one another. In other words, correct philosophy is "in bad taste".

I don't know how best to respond to this. There's a lot where you seem confused or where you're making a notable attempt to sound more poetic than actually get a real idea across, but to my ear it doesn't lend the wise learned sage image so much as someone who is educated in one domain and drastically undervalues others trying to leverage what they do know in a vague way while nodding at smart concepts from what they don't. Ironic to accuse you of that while dunking on famous philosophical problems, I know. I don't think you've stated any substantive objections to anything I've put down, other than perhaps "why do this", to which I can only respond that if you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here.

I'm not confused about anything, and I meant it all literally.

I did touch on the why, but I also made some strong arguments. I will lower the level this time, let me know if I should lower it further.

There's many classes of equivalence. Simulating somethings output does not require having the same parts. An LLM which acts like a human is not conscious merely because it produces human-like output. Even if you cannot measure any differences, there might still be differences. If I tell you that I have a computer function which takes in "2" and returns "4", you won't be able to tell me the exact code of the function from this information alone.

You assume that, because a word exists, it actually points to something in reality. But a culture which never came up with the concept of randomness in the first place would not have philosophers who struggled with determinism and indeterminism. You assume that either one or the other must be "true", and yet such a culture would not know either concept, and it wouldn't even bother them or hinder their ability to think about other things. Now, this culture might think that reality depends on the nature of "flobx" (a word I just made up which means nothing to us) and that there's no more important concept than this. But because we never came up with that word, we don't think "flobx must be true or false", we don't think about flobx at all. In short, I want you to imagine minds so differently than your own that you realize that all the tokens you use for thinking are arbitrary rather than pieces of an objective reality.

If you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here. What, you think this is a truth-seeking website? As a human being, you're not even capable of truth-seeking. Philosophers until now have merely tried to prove that their own moral preferences were universal truths, and they did this merely because they needed external validation in order to believe in themselves. If you need proof in order to believe in anything, you're in for a bad time, as nothing can be proven. This is called the Münchhausen trilemma. All "false" means is that a contradiction has occured, and all "true" means is that you're repeating yourself (that your statement is a tautology). These are both just symbols as well. "Truth" doesn't exist anymore than the letter J exists.

Have you read Nietzsche's Will to Power? He says that our belief in cause and effect is because of quirks of our language. "There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true a priori" our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate- Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon-that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."

So the fruits of all Descartes philosophizing ended up being a small sentence which was actually riddled with errors. I believe that you're assuming no such errors exist in your original post because you haven't done much in the way of questioning the language with which you think.

Do you disagree with this quote from "A short history of decay" (1949)? "The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. (...) From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game..." It seems to me like each human being is compelled to make their own values survive memetically, but this is merely a form of self-replication, not an instinct for truth-seeking. An instinct for knowledge-seeking might exist, but that's more of an instinct for increasing ones power and reducing uncertaincy (predictive processing theory).

I do realize that it's ironic to accuse you of being deceived by your own instinct and your own implicit knowledge, while also warning against the dangers of destroying these illusions. But I think this is an argument in my favor - that there exists truths which we're better off not knowing.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

Having understanding of a specific thing doesn't let you simulate it. Here's Mary's Room, from Wikipedia:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on...What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

It's certainly true that if you change the stipulations of the thought experiment so that Mary can experience seeing red then, sure, she's not going to learn anything new when she sees red again. But it's easy to declare all hypotheticals a slam dunk if you just change the terms of the hypothetical.

Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute. The point is that the experiment assumes a difference between the physical processes and "seeing red", because if it didn't it wouldn't be interesting. The answer would be no.

The thought experiment is about a person in a room who can only receive information via a black and white television monitor. "Physical information" means "facts and information about the physical properties of red and the human perception of those properties," not "godlike access to manipulate spacetime" or something like that.

Secondly,

Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute.

No. Firstly, it's actually very much in dispute that it is possible to simulate the universe, and secondly, going back to my point about changing the stipulations of a hypothetical, you're smuggling in the stipulation of infinite or finite but large amount of time and storage when those are both implied to be forbidden by the stipulations of the hypothetical, as Mary is a person who will die in less than one century, almost certainly, and her black and white television monitor would not contain even a large amount of storage.

Finally, having information does not of itself permit you to do anything with the information. Mary, in her black and white room with her black and white television monitor, does not as per the terms of the hypothetical possess the physical ability or knowledge to build a simulation of anything, let alone the experience of the color red, even if she knows everything about the color red, because knowledge of the color red does not grant her knowledge of how to build a universe simulator, and if it did, it would not grant her the ability to build it.

One could imagine a person who has memorized a few hundred lines of software code - enough for a very simple browser game. He's also an experience programmer, and has no barrier of knowledge to being able to physically program a game. Unfortunately, he is completely paralyzed due to an attack by a rogue trolley problem enthusiast. (He's also in a room, because that's how these things work, we can call it Bob's Room, or something). Obviously he possesses the information to program the game; nevertheless, he is unable to do so. Knowledge is not actually the same thing as ability.

You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

The point isn't the limitations of the hardware she has or the time available, the point is the separation between "information" and "experience" that people intuitively feel.

But she "has all the information" about how vision works and what apples are made of. In a physicalist frame, there can't be any non-physical process. There's nothing else but the physical processes involved, so consciousness and qualia and whatever other things are proposed either don't exist or arise from the physical phenomena. It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

I think it is you who are fighting the spirit of the thought experiment. Mathematicians and physicists use demons in thought experiments when they want to signify a being with the capabilities you are describing.

It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

I'm okay with being called a dualist (I am a Christian) but it's funny to be called one for thinking that there is a difference between firsthand experience and knowledge of something.

Frank Jackson is using that commonsense understanding to attack physicalism. If physicalism cannot be defended without parsing a difference between understanding something from facts and experience, then perhaps it should not be defended. But of course Jackson, a physicalist, believes that the new experience of seeing the color red is caused by a physical change in the brain, and thus (as I understand it) his position is that rather than learning anything new about the color red, she's learning something about her brain.

Speaking of demons, let's talk about Laplace's demon, which you reference in your OP:

If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible.

Now, if we accept your theory, there's no randomness at all in the universe, as you note:

Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality.

Very well. However, if there's no randomness, it means the world is fundamentally ordered, but that such an order, although real is fundamentally unknowable. If it is fundamentally unknowable, because it is beyond our light cone, it is beyond the realm of physics. I'll let you speak on that:

If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

In other words, in the name of parsimony, you've constructed an entire definitionally unknowable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable metastructure that you contend the entire universe runs by.

Buddy, we all contend that every single day we aren't committed solipsists. We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

But I'm really not making much of a change at all - everything follows from physicalism.

We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

The data that we have so far shows that true randomness exists and that the universe is not simulable. You ask people to accept on faith that physicalism solves this.

Your OP takes a swing at religion and (by implication) moral realism, but the interesting thing about moral realism and at least most religions is that they believe the truth is actually knowable, even though they postulate an unprovable (or at least difficult to prove) metastructure to the entire universe. Your system has all of the baggage of the unprovable metastructure but explicitly says that discovering how it works is off-limits.

I agree with anti philosophical-consciousness thought. Consciousness is not really a thing beyond specific, testable qualities like 'is he awake and alert' or 'can he recognize himself in a mirror' or 'can he write out a story with multiple characters using theory of mind.' These demonstrate mental faculties and the mental faculties are what matter, not the details of an internal state.

We should not be concerning ourselves with whether machines or people are conscious based on examining the details of their internal structure but what faculties are displayed. There are people going around without an internal monologue, they might not be conscious in a philosophical sense. But clearly they're conscious in a practical sense in that they can make plans, analyse their environment... The people who are unconscious in a practical sense have either been hit on the head, are sleeping, are young children or are seriously retarded. Practical consciousness is a matter of degrees.

I respect the elimitivist “consciousness isn’t real” position much more than the hybrid “consciousness is real but it is a property of computation” position, which is popular but nonsensical.

I have accepted more or less the gnostic position. Most people aren’t capable of knowing the “divine spark.” But for me personally, it is directly observable at any time and is such that its cannot be explained by properties defined by modern physics. It is directly revealed. Many others have access to the same experience, but it is incomprehensible to those who do not.

There is no point in arguing. It is either self-evident, or you are not capable of knowing. Persuasion is futile in either case. I believe eliminitivists feel more compelled to debate because they do not wish to feel inferior. But it is really not up for debate.

I appreciate this idea on some level, but must speak out against because

  1. People without "divine spark" just invisibly existing around me is kind of horrifying
  2. Confusion and just bad reasoning is a better explanation (I mean, look at OP's other takes in the same post)

I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. [...] I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

"Free will" is a popular card [...] a useful fiction

For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.

To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! [...] It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe.

Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.

A dog is allowed to enjoy the taste of human food that fell to the floor without any presupposition of a soul or self-conception that would pass the mirror test, and you are allowed to have a rich inner life composed of your various physical systems without attributing mystery to it. Your brain is doing a lot of things, all the time.

I don't know the third thing about how the brain works (I barely know the second), but I don't need to know the how to show that physicalism demands that whatever it is it must be a deterministic or probabilistic process just as I can show there is a Kolmogorov complexity of some object without being able to tell you what it is. If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.

If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.

Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.

Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.

That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.

To those who don't accept brute physicalism, sure, I've done nothing. But there are a great many who sure seem to like labeling themselves physicalists, yet hold on to some strange ideas that I don't think hold up. So I've only solved one half of philosophy, downstream of the physical fork.

Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.

Is just offhanded snark. I have no philosophical grounding - for all I know 80% of all philosophical texts are centered around whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

To quote one of my previous posts:

there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).

A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.

Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.

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Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

...

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics?

How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.

But how could it be any other way?

Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.

Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.

...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.

Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.

You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.

In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.

I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.

If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.

There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.

If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.

Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.

I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.

In a purely physical world, there can't be anything that "goes against determinism". You have to bite the whole bullet or not at all.

I really wish people weren't downvoting you just because they disagree. You are clearly contributing tremendously to discussion regardless.

Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.

Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.

Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.

He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.

He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.

I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.

At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.

If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.

Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.

One thing I don’t think anyone else has mentioned is that the Chinese were all on the right side of WWII and had nothing to with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly. Then they got sealed off from the western memeplex for the next fifty years. And there was no pre-WWII history of anti-Jewish pogroms, expulsions, or legal discrimination against Jews in China. There are also very few Jews in China. So in China, conspiracy theories about Jews running the world don’t have the same ugly associations that they do in the west and aren’t going to get the same level of pushback that they would in the west.

And there was no pre-WWII history of anti-Jewish pogroms, expulsions, or legal discrimination against Jews in China

This is not entirely correct. For sure, generally Jews were treated well in China (eg in Harbin they only were harassed by local Russian fascists, somewhat humorously not by the Nazi-aligned Japanese who sought to resettle them in Japan, on grounds of taking Protocols of the Elders of Zion at face value and anticipating high ROI from alignment with the Jewish people). But Kaifeng Jews were at the very least forced to assimilate, and probably abandon endogamy.

Of course, China is so vast and has seen so many different peoples that all of that is a complete nothingburger in their national consciousness. Anecdotally, I have the impression that they thought well of Jews (even of negative stereotypes), assuming that this is NGMI whining of whites who complain of Chinese shrewdness and intelligence in the same manner. Chinese themselves experience relationships somewhat similar to Medieval Jewish-Gentile ones across the broader Sinosphere, eg in Malaysia where they are the educated, clannish middleman minority with financial assets but without hard power. Politically, the PRC is consistently pro-Palestinian but it doesn't have much of an actionable component or popular purchase, and the Israel Question is folded into the broader competition with America, often with this lazy Marxist spin about Israel as the bulwark of global imperialism for those who want an ideological case against he US.

On the other hand I've been told by Mainlanders that China got really redpilled on the JQ after the reports of starvation in Gaza. They take starvation extremely seriously, and then pattern-matched the whole post-Oct 7 dynamic onto Japanese occupation. That may color perceptions going forward.

It's so interesting to see High IQ white people slowly realising the architecture.

The most dangerous group on the planet and yet the most in the dark.

Can't wait to see what you boys do when you finally wake up!

One thing Marx had right is that religion is the opiate of the masses. Spirituality doesn't wake you up; it simply diverts your attention and efforts from the real to the unreal.

For the record I edited the message before I saw your response.

It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.

Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews. OpenAI has Sam Altman, Meta has Zuckerberg, Google is still ultimately controlled by Sergey and Larry, and Anthropic is run by the Amodei siblings, who are also Jewish. Generative AI itself is not an entirely Jewish invention, although Jews were highly overrepresented in its development and in the development of many of the computing innovations that preceded it.

I suspect that these antisemites would rather blame AI on Jews in the sense that it's a “Jewish trick” to extract money while feeding us “goyslop” under the pretenses of building AGI.

Those who take AI seriously are very terrified of the implications.

Amodei siblings are also connected with Holden Karnofsky, of OpenPhil, which can be reasonably described as some kind of New World Order project (albeit, it seems, grossly unsuccessful).

It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.

I think it's a little early for people to start blaming all their problems in life on AI. Once that starts, you can bet that the Jew haters will start noticing Jewish over-representation in the AI field. If by some miracle, AI is seen in a mainly positive light, the claim will be that Jews stole the credit from the non-Jews who did the actual work, and/or that Jewish nepotism kept those non-Jews out.

Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews.

I'm pretty confident that most of the important AI work is being done in top-secret government labs. Surely military planners have realized the strategic implications of AI advances and have set up Manhattan Project type operations.

Because western far right antisemites mostly do not think AI is as big a deal as the people on this forum do.

You darn Jews are hogging all of the IQ. How are we supposed to come up with good theories???

I'm excited to watch the whole series.

He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution

Many years ago one of my Chinese coworkers asked me if I believed in evolution. I said I did. She said she didn't and another coworker agreed with denying evolution. Both professional workers with degrees.

Googling it, I see around 2/3rds of Chinese people accept human evolution.

While this may or may not have reflected the views of the general Chinese populace, Chinese anthropologists were some of the OG chuds when it comes to human evolution.

Prior to the 2010-or-so confirmation of Neanderthal DNA admixture into modern humans, Western anthropologists insisted upon an "Out-of-Africa," late separation date for forming the approximate ancestral background of the main modern human populations. In contrast, Chinese anthropologists maintained a multiregional (earlier forms of Homo evolved into modern humans in their respective regions), early separation date for forming the approximate ancestral background of the main modern human populations.

Western anthropologists and other racial egalitarians and blank-slatists used the "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis to pound-the-table in forming a "We are all Africans" hugboxy-type consensus to pwn the racists. The discovery and subsequent confirmations of Neanderthal and other archaic admixture into humans suggested that the majority of modern human DNA is indeed that of "Out-of-Africa," but the previous smugness and sanctimony of Western racial egalitarians and blank-slatists in committing to "We are all Africans" made the discovery and confirmations feel like a crushing defeat for them and a resounding victory for the Chinese Chuds.

As such, the whole Western commitment to "We are all Africans" has largely been memory-holed.

I have a sneaking suspicion some of the reasoning behind the Chinese anthropologists was (1) fitting in with the local political theories of 'China has always been at its best when pure and free of meddling foreign influence which brought us to misery' and (2) good old racism: 'no we are not descendants of those monkey-people in that continent!' and (3) 'see, China has always been to the forefront of civilisational advance, we have our own local evolutionary pathways to modern humans!'

I could well be mistaken here, though.

Aren't the ancient north eurasians literally the ancestors of every civilized race and also pretty close to China?

I've been trying to find a nice take down of "out of Africa" I placed into my notes. It was basically just an argument that Africans and everyone else are quite divergent evolutionarily.

What did those co-workers believe in place of evolution?

One said God did it.

The Christian God or a different one? I'm curious what specific creation myth(s) are so common in China that 1/3 of the population believes in them.

The impression I got from speaking with Tibetans about their creation myth is that they seem to be "old earth creationists" who believe the earth is older than it actually, like hundreds of billions or trillions of years old. Not sure if the same holds in China.

I don't know enough about this guy to confidently psychoanalyze him. I will just say that it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell. So I would say that the posters accusing him of engaging in CCP-friendly conspiracy theories that tear apart the West as a grift are probably right.

If Easterners don't care about Jews so much, I wonder what their equivalent minority is. Being in a Western environment means that I don't learn anything about Chinese ethnic groups just by osmosis, so I don't know anything about their minorities.

The equivalent minority for them is the Chinese. Everywhere across Southeast Asia there are Chinese merchant communities that prosper and do much better than the local masses which breeds resentment. There have been historically been anti Chinese pograms in a very similar vein to ant-Jewish pograms. As recently as the 60s Indonesia launched an anti-Chinese/anti-communist pogram that killed a few million people. The Koumintang tried to claim all Chinese he way Israel does Jews and Taiwan will still give out certificates to overseas Chinese. The PRC tried to separate itself from the Chinese diaspora to avoid claims of dual loyalty a frequent (and familiar) charge leveled at the Chinese diaspora. China itself doesn't really have an analogue. You could say Cantonese but they are too geographically concentrated.

As recently as the 60s Indonesia launched an anti-Chinese/anti-communist pogram that killed a few million people.

Wikipedia says half a million total and that the Chinese were "thousands".

The Hakka are the obvious analogy, even within China.

it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell.

Hmmm, echoing what @Amadan said, as an Easterner, I think we don't care about Jews so much as just accept that Jews are powerful. Kinda like what Amadan already said, it's like a given that "Jews control the [Western] world". At the most basic level, East Asians identify and relate with Jewish attitudes towards education and community. Albert Einstein being a Jew and then all the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project, and then the disproportionate overperformance of Jews with the Nobel prize is like sweet candy to the education-loving Asians. You know how Asian parents compare you to your successful cousins, Jews being powerful is the example of a successful race/community. And community is important to Asians because they do think continuing being "Asian" is a good thing and they look to Jews as an example of how a particular ethnic group retains what makes them them while functioning in the modern Western context.

So with all that context, I actually don't think it's a grift, I think this professor is a genuine believer in whatever he's teaching. A reduced comparison would be like if someone teaches about the Rwanda Genocide and says that power is in the hands of the Tutsi minority historically and in the present (absent of about 40 year period that culminated in said genocide). Since most Asians already have a good impression of this minority, and verifiably we see lots of Jews being big and powerful, it's not a big leap for a person to believe the grander theories as well.

I will just say that it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell.

I've known quite a few Chinese guys who were super interested in Jews, seemingly as a sort of fellow model minority type population, and it seems to me I've seen references to this online as well. I also saw a reference to that one billionaire who was just in the news for having a hundred kids via surrogates having expressed similar fascination with Jews and Judaism, though I can't track it down at the moment.

I've seen a random Chinese guy in a bar ask a Jewish friend to teach him his secrets. And he said it wasn't the first time it had happened many Chinese in China believe all the Jewish conspiracies but cannot understand how that could possibly be a bad thing.

Similarly after consuming their allies propaganda about the Jews the Japanese government thought these superhumans might prove powerful allies or weapons. If you remove the resentment and racial animosity a lot of the theories about Jews make them seem pretty powerful and interesting which is how a lot of Asians see it.

Isn't it a fad for korean parents to send their kids to hebrew studies for no apparent reason?

Various Asian diasporas also tend to have vague respect—perhaps even admiration—for Jews. “Oh this minority group with strong in-group preference, high academic and economic achievement, and who supposedly controls everything behind the scenes? Based.”

The GigaChang’s name is Xu Bo, by the way. All or almost all sons (reportedly, some may be natural born) too—bro gave the Daughter Question one thought and was like, “you know what? Miss me with that shit.”

One of my oddest encounters in Korea was in a small agricultural city in the boonies, where I was often the first Westerner anyone had met. Some girl I'd just met started going off on how she'd learned that Jews controlled everything in the West and were trying to control the world. She was really vehement about it, too! I asked where she heard this, and she just said "Everyone knows this," and I asked if she'd ever met a Jew or really knew what a Jew was, and of course she hadn't. Really odd, but I guess ZOG really is global!

If Easterners don't care about Jews so much, I wonder what their equivalent minority is.

Other Asians.

There are Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc., who don't like Westerners, but that's nothing compared to their animosity for each other.

I had similar experiences regarding Koreans and Jews in the late 1990s. I found it very weird then (why would they even have any opinions? it's not like there are any Jews in Korea except a small handful of soldiers at Yongsan...) and I find it very weird now. But I also found them in general to be well-educated but somehow still extremely credulous people and maybe that's the crux of it. I wonder if that's still true.

There are just an absolutely enormous number of well-educated, intelligent people believing things that... do not match up with current western consensus, all over the world. Korea, or other oriental countries, having less investment in western shibboleths, means they're willing to opine about this stuff more.

Or just straight up not understanding them. It used to be fairly common for Chinese to say China has no racism because it has no Black people. I think most Chinese who speak English now realize saying this will offend Westerners but I think most still don't really get why it would.

I mean, Westerners are also quick to have opinions about East Asian cultural institutions and political issues they know nothing about. Which of the many people outraged at China's treatment of Falun Gong know anything about the organisation?

Most of those people are just using that as a stick to beat China. They don't actually care about the details.

How many of the people upset about China's treatment of Falun Gong are specifically upset because they're epoch times readers?

Western concerns about China's treatment of Falun Gong predates the Epoch Times - in PMC liberal circles in the UK existence of the Epoch Times has probably weakened the Falun Gong cause by making it vaguely right-coded.

When I was a student in Cambridge in the noughties the Red Chinese government was broadly unpopular for a constellation of reasons, the local student Amnesty group made persecution of Falun Gong one of their key campaigns several years running, and there was a large Falun Dafa mediation/exercise group that existed largely to troll the Red Chinese.

He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.)

Why do you give this guy any more credence than you would QAnon or other wackjobs? "Tinfoil hat guy gives lecture about religion responsible for all bad things" is hardly news, and that the Chinese authorities apparently allowed him to lecture about it (a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing)") is nothing strange, new or startling. Wow, you mean the government which very much objects to anything that challenges its authority as sole arbiter of what its citizens should think and believe, and which has multiple examples of tyring to coerce, control and destroy religious bodies in China, is happy for some propaganda about "Da KKKristians and Da Joos are behind it all and if only there was no religion we'd have peace, love and a currant bun"? You astound me, Holmes!

is it even possible for you people to argue without just sarcastically repeating your opponent's position in a funny voice?

Is it even possible for you people not to get butthurt over people not immediately accepting Youtube algorithm slop?

Pax judaica is the sort of schizophrenia that plausibly is a partial truth- there might well be some politically influential mega church pastors who believe they can bring about the end times through middle eastern wars.

But, as I’ve said before, red tribe normies, including boomer evangelicals and other ‘hardcore’ zionists, do not believe this. They believe that 1) God will inflict punishment on nations that do not side with Israël, Israël is special for non-eschatological reasons. And 2) Islam is a major threat and Israël fights it overseas.

I won’t defend either of those two beliefs, but those are the beliefs which give US Zionism political power.

From what little I've seen, he's a conspiratorial slop-merchant peddling some combination of common-sense-implied-as-dark-truth, along with obvious nonsense presented in a confident cadence. I can understand why people get sucked in by the common sense stuff because seeing it repackaged as a "dark truth" can be fun to some people, but accepting the rest of his arguments shows bad things about your epistemic hygiene. I'm a bit more familiar with Whatifalthist, and he fits this description to a T.

the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.

You're in a very right wing ecosystem if this is the only narrative you've heard about algorithms. Leftists have been complaining about "radicalization pipelines" for a decade+ now, and it formed one of the key arguments they made for cancel culture.

I think its quite obvious that Professor Jiang Xueqin engages in the JQ in a way that is wildly conspiratorial in a Western settings, but I cant decide if its antisemittic or just pointing out something that is entirely obvious for outsiders; that a significant portion of the most powerful people in the West are entirely or mostly loyal to Israel.

His thesis about AGI seems more aimed at making his prophecy more urgent. Perhaps there is also som CCP propaganda in there (I havent watched enough of his videos to tell). But during peak woke there was attempts by Russia to present itself as a defender of white, christian, family values and somewhere people could escape wokism. Maybe China wants to present itself as the only ones who can protect you against a zionist AI-powered surveillance dystopia?

I as neutrally as I could explained the US relationship to Israel to my Chinese girlfriend and I'm pretty sure I convinced her that America is cucked beyond belief and turned her into a mild anti-semite.

I see history less in terms of individual actors and more in terms of the raising of ideas and other social forces that nudge things in general directions. Personally, I think the future will be dictated more by the decline of the West and Western ideas that simply cannot meet the moment, social forces that drive western countries off various cliffs, and bad social memes that cause chaos and bring about poor outcomes for humans who absorb those bad social memes.

My prediction is that the furvor is a symptom of a coming Soviet-style collapse of the Anglo-sphere centric West where the countries in question will still sort of kick along, but much reduced in power and influence, and under the economic and social power of other countries. The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.

The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.

If you're looking to the East because of concerns about TFR and population collapse in the West, I have some bad news for you. China's median citizen is already older than the median American, and is only getting moreso every year. I'm not going to count them out, but an arc like Japan (which was taking over the world in the '80s according to pop culture) seems quite plausible: the country and government are still there and a major power, but rent in Tokyo is no longer the highest in the world and economically has grown slower than it's competitors.

China has a much larger population to work with, and probably still has a moderate decade of growth left, but there are already signs of slowing.

Observation: Child rearing expenses are cumulatively huge, and there's a bit of a One Weird Trick to stop having kids and spend that money on growth elsewhere. It works in the short term, at least. US total education spending is around $1.8T annually, enough to close the budget deficit, although I would distinctly caution against doing so.

I’m thinking largely in the fact that they have a society that values hard work, achievement, and education. Their government is working towards stability and growth and is generally run by people who understand how things work and how to achieve those ends. I think the issues of TFR are probably temporary in most societies and that eventually we’ll work through how to get more babies.

I've seen him mentioned a few times (including here iirc) but his work seemed to disjointed and slop-y, so I stopped quickly.

algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find

They've been boosting dissident voices for a decade bar the topic of covid, in my experience.

Yes it's a bit disjointed and sloppy but I still can glean some interesting insights from it. His concepts aren't completely disjointed but a bit meandering imo.

mentioned a few times (including here iirc)

I did a search for his name as well as "Predictive History" and there were no hits, I lurk extensively here and never saw him mentioned at the motte

How do you figure? There's been leaks of the Google algorithm where it came out they explicitly derank small independant websites. There was also an analysis of YouTube's recommendations that shows they're trying to pull people to the mainstream. I wouldn't be surprised if Elon was boosting his favorite causes, but it's definitely not what I'd call "boosting diasident voices".

For the past decade, everyone I know (e.g. my grandma) only gets recommended videos of guys in trucks talking about race realism etc. even though they're generic liberals and just try to watch craft videos. I was annoyed by it until I "converted". Overall quality's pretty low, but it's often fairly solid. Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.

I used to see the "You like politics? Here have some John Oliver" algo in all it's glory, nowadays I mostly get slop that's neither here nor there. Then again I mostly watch it through FreeTube (effectively watching everything via an anonymous tab). What you're getting sounds looks more like profiling than outright boosting, though you probably were on the edges of the cluster they put you in originally.

Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.

Man... what do I have to do to get this recommended to me?

"They" have a very naive and shitty "anti-radicalism" algo going on, certain channels are marked with a wrongthink boolean somewhere in the code, basically any time you watch a video from say The Jimmy Dore show/The grayzone or some of the alt-lite ish channels, they always recommend for the next auto play video an "approved" video from a channel like Fox news or NBC or another "mainstream" "tv" channel. It's comical how persistent the algo has been warped. For years if you searched for Tucker Carlson on youtube the first three videos you got were attempted takedowns by the time telling british dork or "Colbert".

I watched his first world history / civilization series and really enjoyed it. Also a WIAH fan.

I didn't find the series he just finished to be that engaging and only finished the first 7 episodes.


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