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gattsuru
2m ago
... a more charitable option is that Musk doesn't believe that entitlement cuts are possible while (even if relatively small) discretionary wasteful spending is highly visible.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5m ago
And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality
I just can't unsee in my mind Col. Nathan R. Jessup: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall." Of course, that's fiction, and as the ur-conservative in an Aaron Sorkin film, he of course went to prison. But I agree it does point to something real, and unfortunately for liberals their institutional hegemony put them in a position to purge enough of these types from positions of power and influence such that they are gone, probably permanently. And now they need to either surrender, or pick up a rifle and stand a post.
there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on
No, there isn't.
I'd be happy to know of any evidence that hasn't been discredited, if only because it'd be a first lead as to the cause of GD, but as far as I know there is no such thing. Brain scan studies cannot be used because there simply isn't enough datapoints available to produce anything but noise.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19m ago
As the ancient saying goes: post shorts.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
23m ago
My equity is only up about 100% these days, down from those pandemic peaks, but I still love my 3% mortgage.
Mantergeistmann
27m ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27m ago
Perhaps, but Moldbuggian solutions in particular seem, at least to me, more about making High Modernism more efficient — and cementing the power of technocratic Blue elites — through eliminating (the pretense of) democracy (and the Landian variety is anti-human).
The truth matters in a practical sense because bad models make bad predictions. People who anthropomorphize AI are taking an intellectual shortcut that leads them to absurd conclusions instead of wrestling with the reality of what we have created, and that's bad because it'll lead to bad policy, bad legislation, bad judicial precedent and bad morality.
Philosophy is important.
Language and mathematics has no agency, you're pressing the buttons, you're responsible. Passing the blame on the tool is unserious.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
31m ago
To actually take it seriously as something that matters in the world, including the present day; and not just treat it as a creation myth — something of the long, long ago — to serve as an alternative narrative to Genesis.
In slightly less broad terms, to recognize things like Darwinism meaning you can have telos without a (conscious) telos-giver (what makes an adaptation an adaptation?); or to reject the creationist-adjacent idea that evolution is always so "crude" and "random" that even the smallest amount of Intelligent Design will always do better (that's how you get High Modernism). Back in the last century, quite a lot of effort into AI was about trying to work out how to Intelligently Design a mind top-down, while others worked on more evolutionary, bottom-up methods like neural networks. Well, who proved more fruitful there? Or recognizing that there isn't one single "environment" to which creatures — or social institutions — adapt, but countless local ecosystems. Just as there's no "perfect bird" — only birds perfectly adapted to particular conditions in particular places — there is no single "ideal government," only governments ideal for a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular culture, at a particular time in history. (I seem to vaguely recall de Maistre having said something relevant to this point.)
It's about recognizing that the idea that some armchair "experts", with just a couple months of mental work, will necessarily "outdo" the products of evolution — whether that's the folks confident about vast enhancements without trade-off via genetic engineering, tankies who think that this time their socialist central planners will beat free markets, or Seeing Like a State-style High Modernist social engineers.
sun_the_second
33m ago
What does materialism or lack thereof have to do with being effectively agentic? If the AI is going to kill all of us the last thing I care about is whether it had free will or a light inside its mind.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
35m ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rhetoric
This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
35m ago
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
43m ago
Sorry but not everyone is a materialist. Man acts, and so forth.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
47m ago
That might be a subcategory of what I'm talking about, but not everyone goes as far into laissez-faire as they do (after all, we're social animals, and building cooperative communities is part of our extended phenotype).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
47m ago
Since other people are bragging, I also called this one.
The interesting point is what happened at DOGE. Musk didn't have to call out Trump over the budget and may pay a price for doing so, so we can reasonably conclude that he is genuinely worried about spending. But he didn't run DOGE like a man who is genuinely worried about spending - he ran DOGE like a caricature of someone who wants to look like they are cutting spending without actually doing so. (In particular, he never went after the waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare or military procurement.)
My candidate theories:
- Conspiracy. DOGE was never meant to be about cutting spending - it was always about purging wokists from the civil service and defunding the pro-establishment left NGOsphere.
- Cock-up. Musk was in effect high on his own supply as a result of spending too much time on MAGA Twitter and had actually convinced himself that the right-idiotarian theory of the budget was correct. He expected to find an order of magnitude more easy cuts (wokestupid, fraud, obvious waste and inefficiency etc.) than he did.
- Kayfabe. DOGE was meant to produce the impression of big cuts that could provide political cover for the big giveaways in the BBB without actually cutting the big popular programmes,
In the conspiracy and kayfabe theories, Musk is willing to play ball when Trump tells him that he isn't actually going to be cutting spending because his businesses benefit more than most from a friendly government. Ramaswamy doesn't because he is now an asset manager, not a CEO of an operating business.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
52m ago
You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
I mean, yes and no. The lawfare against Trump and Musk did eventually fail, you know, and mostly because of the USA's protections against that sort of thing - certainly, it wasn't because Biden and Harris decided to call it off.
I agree that there are a vast number of potential attack vectors, but the task's still not an impossible one. Constitutional rights, and literally having fewer laws, are the most obvious general directions for such efforts.
I don't think that's true. I think it failed because as bad as the US establishment bureaucrats are, the EU is just way, way worse. Where the former has a overrepresentation of progressives, the latter has an absolute chokehold.
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