domain:lesswrong.com
comfortable
1m ago
Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.
You really think Crossroads of Twilight is one of the best books in the series?
HereAndGone
3m ago
That's what Sauron set up on Númenor with the worship of Melkor. And what a lot of people try to do in the world with "but surely this time I can claim the ring and it'll go okay" (be that the rings Sauron gave the Ringwraiths, who probably never anticipated that outcome, or the One Ring itself) even after seeing the disasters that happened before.
Grant_us_eyes
4m ago
It doesn't need to be better to have a devastating effect, it just needs to be 'good enough'.
HereAndGone
5m ago
Yeah, in the world as described, if he does obtain immortality, then there must still be something higher (whatever forces empower the Gu insects, the gods or spirits or just magical energies of heaven and earth) and how can he ascend to that level? The traditional tropes are about the calamities that come to test (destroy) you if you try to cultivate to immortality, and that only if you survive them all will you obtain the goal. So if our guy becomes the single most powerful being on the earth, what next? try to become the most powerful being in the universe? keep dodging the mounting and increasing set of calamities trying to reduce him to dust?
I do think if he achieved a station akin to that of Sauron, he'd be bored: yeah he's got all these mindless slaves under his thumb, but he's spent so long plotting and scheming that what does he do now? He doesn't strike me as the type to decide he'll take up tea ceremony and calligraphy and pondering the secrets of the universe (unless said secrets give him more power). The sweetness of victory is in overcoming this set of impossible conditions; once there are no more obstacles to overcome, what happens next?
FarmReadyElephants
7m ago
I suppose his point is that we rely on faith for a variety of normal human interactions. The true subjective inner state of his wife is not amenable to the scientific method, though he had grown to trust it over time. It can be a pragmatic reality, even a core belief around which he built his life, without being capable of inductive inquiry or deductive proof.
Shrike
12m ago
As I've discussed before, the Ukrainian hold on the actual nukes seems to have been pretty tenuous at best (and the idea that the United States promised them protection in any meaningful sense is false) – but yes, I agree that the Big Lesson of Current Era is "have nukes."
And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes.
I sort of doubt this, honestly, there's little appetite for even the conventional damage North Korea could do.
HereAndGone
13m ago
Oh man, you missed the best things from 2006!
"Scientists explained" the miracle, you see, that it wasn't a miracle at all. No, just freak weather conditions that happened to line up absolutely correctly for the events in the Gospels to happen like they did (the ice did not prematurely melt so Jesus fell into the water and it didn't last long enough for Peter to continue walking to shore).
Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of US and Israeli scientists.
Their study, published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), argues that salty springs along the Galilee's western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells lasting up to 200 years in biblical times.
Such "unique freezing processes" would occasionally have allowed a crust of ice to form, a phenomenon the study calls "springs ice", in patches on Lake Kinneret, as the Sea of Galilee is known in Israel. One set of such springs is found near Tabgha, an ancient settlement that is traditionally the site for the New Testament's multiplication of loaves and fishes.
"The chance that there was ice on the lake is very, very high," said Doron Nof, professor of physical oceanography at Florida State University and the study's lead author. "It's almost guaranteed during those cold periods, 100 or 200 years long, that there was one such event at least, maybe four."
I do so enjoy a good "scientists explain miracles" story, they're so comforting in their naive optimism about 'we totally understand everything becasue we're so much smarter than the stupid people back then who believed their lying eyes'.
The "Mary the virgin who was raped" story came out of something way back when in the days of the Anglican wars, when discussing the liberals versus the conservatives in theology. I can't point to a particular source because it was swirling around, but the progressive Christian set do love them some "Mary was raped" tales (ironically, adopting the sceptical views of the Talmud that Jesus was really a bastard borne out of wedlock to a Roman soldier by Mary) because uh something something patriarchy colonialism feminism something something.
The re-interpretation of the scriptures that really raised my eyebrows, though, came during the reign of the first female Primate of the Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who gave a sermon that, em, changed the focus of the story of St. Paul and the slave girl possessed by a spirit.
Now, the fuddy-duddy dumb old traditional interpretation of this story is that the girl was a slave whose owners made money from her being possessed, since she was able to tell fortunes, and that St. Paul set her free from being, you know, possessed by a demon and exploited as a money-making machine. Not so! says Katie, nope being possessed by a demon and exploited by your owners as a money-making machine was a beautiful instance of spiritual empowerment and Paulie was just jealous.
No, I promise, this is what she said. The original text of the sermon seems to have been scrubbed, so the only quotes are from traditionalists not too happy with this novel exegesis, but a sample of the sermon is this:
Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does -maybe more so!
Yes, kids, remember: if a demonic spirit wants to set up shop in your head, go right and ahead and let it do so, because that's a beautiful holy gift of spiritual awareness! Honestly, every time I look at the fruitcakes and nutjobs in my own church, something like this comes along to make me go "well at least the current pope isn't this out to lunch, thank you Holy Spirit!"
quiet_NaN
15m ago
IC’s main selling point is that it’s compatible with a scientific mindset.
In that it makes no falsifiable predictions?
Thanks to the degree that Jesus was charismatic and the degree to which his followers admired him, they created and/or realized an imaginal being called Christ
If I say that this sounds like "The Lord" and Christ are just memes (in Dawkin's sense -- culturally transmitted idea complexes which inhabit humans as hosts and spread through them, mutate and compete against each other), then I am probably misrepresenting IC. After all, a world view which would say that Christ is fundamentally only a more culturally entrenched entity of the same type as Julius Caesar, Sherlock Holmes, or Donald Duck would probably not call itself a form of Christianity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
16m ago
What damage did Israel exactly inflict on Iranian nuclear capabilities so far? All I have seen is a couple dead scientists and some bombed non-critical infrastructure near the nuclear facilities. I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do with tons of smuggled bombs/drones and local collaborators as well as unprepared Iranians.
sun_the_second
17m ago
Who said that the unity, order, design of (ii) are going to be favorable to you?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23m ago
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
23m ago
'I hate it,' quoth the hater.
sun_the_second
29m ago
If matter is more real than consciousness, then the things that intuitively matter to humans are really meaningless.
This is built on a spiritualistic premise that the only things with meaning are the ones without any grounding in the material.
HereAndGone
30m ago
most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so
You would not believe the effort I'm putting in to bite my tongue here and not be mean about the Heinz 57 varieties of American Protestantism.
But I can't just laugh about the Protestants, the state of modern catechesis nearly everywhere for the past forty or more years has been abysmal. An awful lot of "Jesus wants us to be nice because being nice is nice", much much less "here are the Ten Commandments and this is what they mean".
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
32m ago
I mean yes, I totally agree. But I notice that really the first bump of hyper-partisan politics seems to have started with the rise of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle. Before that, being a political junkie was hard work. You got an hour a day (local half hour and National half hour) of television news, a newspaper in the morning, and that was about it. Political talk radio was in its infancy, as was internet news. So if you wanted to closely follow politics, you’d have to buy in-depth news magazines and that had a time and money cost to it. Which made becoming too radical on either side of the equation a lot of work. You just couldn’t marinate in the stuff going on in Congress or what this or that political figure said.
I find, for myself, the more news I consume, the more political opinions mattered to me. Up to a point, awareness is good, and to the degree that an issue is actually important, you should be aware of it. But when news consumes you, you end up being pushed into radical thinking and anger and all the rest of it. It’s not a healthy way to live life. And I think slowing down and just doing much less thinking about politics is good for not just individuals but society in general. Most of the stuff people get mad about wouldn’t have made the news at all in 1982. What would you have heard about No Kings had it happened in 1982? You’d see a three minute story, maybe some random person saying something about “Trump isn’t a King”. You’d see another story about the military parades, maybe a couple of short “it’s good for the soldiers” statements by the brass, a brief clip of Trump clapping along to music or something. That would be it, on to other things. Maybe Iran and Israel get two minutes, as does Ukraine, and the shootings and manhunt in Minnesota. Weather and Sports. Not enough to feed on or radicalize on.
HereAndGone
33m ago
Edit: I just read your post below about Arianism - are you actually directly talking about me?
No? It was our pal the Imaginal Christian as quoted? 'Here's a bit of Adoptionism, here's a bit of Theosophy, here's a bit of....' in regards to understanding of the nature of Christ, the sense of the Bible, is God personal or a force (immanent or transcendent) etc.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
34m ago
Does it encourage productivity? More than an existing background of competition, that is. I'm trying to think of toy scenarios.
-
Case 1: You make widgets for $6 labor and $6 materials. You invest in a technology which doubles the productivity of that labor. Now you can make your widgets for $3 labor and $6 materials. Going from $12 to $9 is a 25% savings in your total costs.
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Case 2: You make widgets for $1 labor and $11 materials. You invest in the same technology. Going from $12 to $11.5 only improves your costs by like 4%, since labor costs were so small already.
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Case 3: You make widgets for $6 + $6 until the government comes in and forces you to spend $12 on labor. Now the same technology cuts your cost from $18 to $12, or 33%! Therefore, by making labor more expensive, the government has increased the benefit of investing.
Except...Your final cost with the technology is still $12. You've invested just to get back to where you would otherwise have been. Even if the government relaxes its edict, that just snaps you back to the first case. This is fine if the government has some strategic interest in adopting that technology--like with onshoring, or green new deal, or even corn subsidies--but I'm not convinced on the economic case.
if we (hypothetically) replaced all citizens with cheaper immigrants
Yes, if I was afraid of losing my job, getting the cheapest widgets would be a poor consolation prize. But that doesn't mean subsidizing me makes my labor more productive. It means that I'm asking to trade off some efficiency for other values, like security.
sun_the_second
36m ago
No, no, no, you see, it works very well if the only people that the police is gonna give a pass to are Hoffmeisters and everyone who isn't a Hoffmeister gets hit with the full extent of the law if they try to lynch the shooter.
HereAndGone
37m ago
I don't have a strong opinion on whether anointing people with oil from a shrine does something in particular or not, but still think that kind of thing is a good tradition.
Here I have to quote one of my favourite poems by Yeats, it's very short but full of rich imagery:
Oil And Blood
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
38m ago
Why is this all pony literature?
To understand the answer to this question, we must look at the historical context. In the mid-2000s, Kurzweilian transhumanism began to draw increasing criticism from within, and a group of intellectuals began to coalesce around the troubling question of AI alignment...
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
38m ago
It seems a bit sad to believe his own wife loves him only in the way he believes in God (which is to say, not at all)
This reminds me of a comparison I made recently between faith and love, apparently not well-received by the audience.
The comparison is: "I don't believe in God like the way I believe in gravity. Likewise, I don't love my wife the same way I loved her when we were dating." That sounds terrible, and it's more romantic to label the tribal-fork "love" and the properties-fork something like "infatuation."
SSCReader
40m ago
Look at what the SF mayor said about the zebra murders:
What has that got to do with the New York Times? I think I showed that the specific paper at the time is unlikely to have been trying to cover up a black man committing murder by making the story a sensation all over again 2 weeks after it happened by writing a story about bystanders not acting, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only would it have been counter-productive (they could just not have talked about it any more!), it doesn't fit with the other types of stories they were running. This appears to be more likely to be yellow journalism than trying to distract from a black man murdering Genovese.
Putting aside any morals, I don't see how you're feasibly going to make a law that allows for people to kill others easily that also doesn't inevitably end up with a bunch of people dying because "I thought they counted as a valid target" becomes an obvious excuse with very little ability to counter, and not to mention it pretty clearly violates the entire principles behind the first amendment if we start killing people over them just existing together in a public space with signs and speech. Even with self-defense/stand your ground laws which are generally easier to work off of, we still see things with murderous people shooting doordash drivers and pulling guns on girl scouts trying to exploit it.
It comes off as "I'm bloodthirsty and I want to justify it, no one will be bothered if I just shoot that guy I find annoying right?"
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
44m ago
Why is this all pony literature?
Andy Weir is a good point though. I should get around to reading one of the books; I quite liked The Martian film.
Couldn't agree more.
Moreover, politicians on both sides phrase their rhetoric around immigration without regard for whether it is legal or illegal. This creates a system that is annoyingly hostile to legal immigrants, while being uniquely welcoming of illegal immigrants.
This is where the issue comes in. Who enforces it ? There is bipartisan opposition to federal overextension. Each state operates as its own pseudo nation. Consensus is impossible. Don't even get me started on the absurd amount of power dispersed through city govts and unelected courts.
The US political system is built with paranoid protections against authoritarian powers at the center. It's gridlock taken to an extreme. Nothing gets done in the US, because everyone and their mother holds veto power. I'm not an US citizen. But, power is so dispersed, that politicians get away with pointing fingers and doing nothing. All sorts of local veto roles are elected. These roles are decided by low turnout and susceptible to political capture (Soros playbook). The US is unique in having elected state judges, sheriffs, superintendents and more for some confusing reason. If a mayor or governor has such limited control over local law, policing and education then what use is their election ?
California has been unable to build a highspeed rail envisioned 50 years ago despite throwing $100 billion at it. States can't agree on a legal age for sex. What makes you think this system is capable of executing on a nation-wide ID proof platform ?
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