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Notes -
Burgers?
…A bit off topic but this made me think that second-rate economists, utilitarians and other autistic behavioral scheme enjoyers who can't tell the map from the territory have poisoned the water supply somewhat.
Humans respond to incentives and pursue goals, but humans are not, by and large, maximizers (EY and SBF are I guess), they're behavior- and thought-executors. It may be the case that even generally useful AI agents are hard to build any other way, although some folks try. The rational economic agent is a spook, a simplified model; not in the sense that a real Rational Economic Agent is hairier, biased and makes mistakes when generating rational plans, but in that it's literally a sketch, fundamentally dissimilar from the real issue even if convenient for some analyses. Implicitly thinking that people maximize stuff is almost as boneheaded as imagining that a 130 IQ person has 130 grains of intelligence or something, it's a profound misunderstanding about the ontology on which the debate is premised, its terms are defined and measurements are done.
With that in mind, my answer is boring. People writing this army recruitment strategy (Stonetoss really is a genius) are not maximizing recruitment KPIs. They're not maximizing trans representation in the battlefield either. They're doing what they feel like they should be doing in their life, given their background and norms in their social circle. «It's called being a decent human being», you know? They're not grey-haired generals (but on this note, even Milley is mocked by tradcons, isn't he?) – they're part of the same HR/veryonline/Moldbuggian Cathedral mental blob that controls and molds the lion's share of labor pool for people-oriented jobs. They're what the military thinks is the safest bet in this dire situation of volunteer shortage; they're professionals. And professionals try not to fall behind the times. It's 2k23, so you've got to empower and platform trans women and women of color, what's the problem?
Now, certainly the recruitment may not go all that well (it may go well in the long run too: perhaps trans soldiers will prove much more useful in our transhuman augmented future). But anyway, who knows if an underwhelming harvest is due to aversion to the trans stuff (and even if it were, what are you suggesting they do – commit trans erasure over some KPI bullshit?! They'll walk out and cancel your family if you're unlucky) or just because those simple to a fault cisheteronormative Nebraskan boys already feel like they're doing their part of valor and sacrifice working and paying taxes – instead of flipping out and shooting up some symbol of their hopeless cultural subjugation by the smug coastal Elves who make those ads.
Well, @sodiummuffin said it better.
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