domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2m ago
Fair points.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
10m ago
"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.
You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?
(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
12m ago
Thanks! Yeah already follow Lyons (he's Orthodox btw!) and the Wyclif guy looks interesting. Subbed to him.
BahRamYou
14m ago
True. And warren buffet and Trump are both famously big fans of regular coca cola, which i assume is just the same for them as it is for anyone else.
Lets conpromise and say, there are some experiences universal regardless of income, but others really require money. And my opinion is that a fulfilling life in modern western society really does require some rrasonable amount of money. Theres a thin libe between "free spirited hippy" and "miserable homeless bum"
Dean
Flairless
16m ago
If you're speaking metaphorically, you are directionally correct, though so time abstract I can't take any real position. If you're speaking literally, the reason your concept is an exaggeration is because drones are no more immune to the concept of cost-efficiency and opportunity costs and geopolitical balancing than anything else.
But, again, the context is so abstract there's not really much to disagree with.
5434a
19m ago
a convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs?
Tautologicallly because they're destructive, but ulimately because the thing they destroy is the benefits offered by the drug. Users end up dependent on drugs simply to return to where they began.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20m ago
Thanks.
What about EMPs?
As mentioned, this might be possible. AFAIK - which isn't very far, I'm just an armchair theorist with a very cursory knowledge of physics and engineering - meaningful EMP requires some pretty big explosions to generate, so you can't just sustainably deny a large area. Even assuming that someone will invent a sustainable, powerful large-area EMP, then it will only delay the development towards ubiquitous, scalable, autonomous drone swarms. EMP hardening through metallic shielding will make drones heavier, slower, more expensive and easier to spot and target, but they will still be exceedingly useful and powerful and nobody will be able to afford not using them.
I'd expect hardened and unhardened drones to be used simultaneously. You deploy both, assuming that enemy will probably not use EMP, but just in case they do you have the hardened drones to continue the mission if the unhardened one should get fried. If they do not, then the cheaper and more agile unhardened ones can complete the mission while the more expensive and cumbersome hardened ones hang back and don't risk themselves.
EMP also comes with the caveat that, well, EMP doesn't discriminate. You will shut down your own unhardened electronics as well as the enemy's if you use it. So it becomes necessary either to employ a lot of hardening, which is expensive and heavy, or to accept that EMP is a weapon of last resort that will harm yourself, or somehow synchronize the EMP with a sort of hunker-down protocol of your own drones in which they retreat into prepared shelters before the pulse and reemerge after. The latter obviously doesn't work for stationary electronics.
And in the very long run, who knows, someone might just develop hardware that doesn't rely on classical electronics at all. I absolutely expect someone to grow organic CPUs at some point.
Or strikes at drone control centers?
Drone Control Centers are a relic of our transitional age, in which you need a horde of humans to babysit a small number of drones that they manually control in real-time. The drone "control center" of the future will be a command-and-control drone flying slightly behind the frontline drones. At most you will have, let's call them "drone doctrine programming centers" sitting safely at home, in which the missions and rules of engagement are defined before being handed off to the drones themselves. EMP may not be viable as a general countermeasure to drones, but jamming is already used to great effect - but radio jamming can at most prevent drones from communicating, not from operating autonomously. This massively reduces the value of real-time manual drone control (as done today), while the autonomous drones of the near future are only affected in their ability to share information with each other (via radio; other means still work) while retaining the ability to operate individually.
The gist of all this is that there will be no sufficently good reason to have big control centers in one place in striking distance of the enemy. Maybe some operations will require a human operator to observe through the drones' eyes as far as possible to make judgement callls, but I'd guess that those will be increasingly rare as more and more authority is transferred to the drones themselves for reasons of practicality and scalability.
Rov_Scam
25m ago
That's pretty much how I feel about all of Adobe's so-called Neural Filters. The only one that really adds anything is the one that colorizes black and white photos, but even that's kind of pointless, because other than as a cool gimmick there's really no need to colorize old photos. People still shoot black and white! This is why some of the AI seriously fails to impress me; it has no imagination. For instance, if I see a low-resolution image of a person's face, I can't make out a lot of details, but I have enough experience with faces to imagine what those details might look like. It might not be accurate to life, but at least I can do it. All AI "upscaling" does is smooth out defects. It doesn't have the imagination to add plausible detail. I'm not going to be able to zoom in enough to get a realistic image that shows the texture of hair or skin, just smoothed-out AI slop that isn't much better, if any than simply resizing the image. It also doesn't do dust and scratch removal any better than the existing tools, which are mostly useless and nowhere near manual removal.
quiet_NaN
27m ago
Now, I am pro-choice and also one of these much hated Singerians who think that babies do not have more of an intrinsic right to life than other mammals of similar cognitive capabilities.
However, I also recognize that society really values babies, to the point where having surplus babies which nobody can be arsed to take care of is not a thing in the Western world. Thus babies have a large instrumental value.
I think if you have a fetus gestated to the point where it is viable outside the womb, with a skull and everything, then there is no way to get rid of it without giving birth to it or some surgical intervention. Killing it will not change the fact. Thus, it seems reasonable that society would ask a woman that she does not kill her pregnancy at this point.
Weekly relationship advice thread go, this time I'll be the starter surprisingly.
Through an extremely unlikely chain of circumstances, last year I acquired an irregular interlocutor on one of my hobbies, shortly turned regular interlocutor, and over a ~year eventually tangled and mutated into a basically full-on long distance relationship because it turns out there are girls on the Internet, even in the most unexpected corners.
It's... not going well. Being a resigned ex-rat wizard a decade out of RL practice is setting me back a lot, and I am physically feeling my lack of social experience, recently more than ever when we are having fights nearly every day. I increasingly feel we are not speaking the same language, as it were - specifically, it turns out despite proclaiming myself a vanillachad I am really bad at displays of affection when I can't be physically present, and not only can I not make them sound natural but I can barely make them come out sometimes, because to me they always sound like empty platitudes even when I genuinely mean it, and I fear them being seen as such. My anime-protag-tier obliviousness to signals and shit is also not serving me well here, because a woman genuinely being romantically attracted to me is uh, a novel experience. As I understand there is a lot of frustration on the other side because I've been oblivious to it for a long time, and I internalized it properly very late. I can only hope it's not too late.
I sense we are approaching critical mass, and despite the repeated emotional damage (on both sides) I am determined to try and salvage this. I'm not sure how bullshit/placebo the idea of the five love languages is, but it seems like a useful heuristic here to couch what I see as my main problem - as in, me being a pretty stereotypical nerd/sperg/techie who never expected to actually have a fallible human heart. I sincerely wish to Actually Change My Mind, for reasons not limited to romantic ones, but it does not come easy even in what I consider an almost best case scenario (I genuinely wonder how she puts up with my sperg shit for this long).
How do you deal with "language" mismatches in relationships? Is it possible to learn someone's "preferred" language, or more generally properly internalize displays of affection so it comes more naturally? (e.g she obviously needs compliments and affectionate words but it doesn't come naturally to me, I'm more of a stoic/silent/protective type which doesn't translate well to LD) Is my difficulty with it a sign of autism something else, like platonic attraction, since I'm led to believe it should come naturally if you truly capital-L Love someone?
Corvos
35m ago
I mostly think of the Economist as 'that magazine which is read by my friends who think that running a country would be easy if you could make everyone take an economics course'. It's Oxford's PPE degree between glossy covers - that particular arrogance engendered by a very wide purview and not-quite-deep-enough subject knowledge.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
39m ago
Man, just got back in the gym (once a week) doing some basic compound lifts, and holy crap it feels amazing! I've been doing calisthenics for a while and kind of thought I was getting into shape, but it's crazy how much more efficient the gym is. Highly recommend for folks if you've been putting it off.
What helped for me is deciding not to commit to a whole big schedule, just going in and doing squats, bench, RDL, shoulder press, lat pull downs, and some seated rows. I can knock it all out in like ~45 mins which is nice, and doable once a week. Hopefully it's a generally balanced workout routine, I got it from Gemini so... who knows?
Corvos
40m ago
Scholar's Stage though he mostly focuses on running a professional China centre these days.
NS Lyon? Apparently now discontinued.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
40m ago
Not bad! I think we are generally on the same page, hah. Personally I simply see religion as a higher level of rationality - while materialism may work on some level, humans still inherently operate in the world on a symbolic frame. To ignore the symbolic frame entirely is foolish.
That being said, I personally think the symbolic frame is the higher level of reality as opposed to the secular materialist one. But that takes a bigger leap.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
48m ago
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Wow, this paragraph was extremely chilling. Good job.
we're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones.
Didn't think about the different type/level of drone but it makes a lot of sense. Again, chilling!!! But kind of cool.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare.
What about EMPs? Or strikes at drone control centers?
kky
49m ago
If we're talking dating in specific, the eternal challenge is that, like a job search, you have nothing to show for it until you have something to show for it. It's a binary; zero or one, success or failure. There's no obvious progress, it just doesn't work until it does work.
...Except that's not true, as far as I've been able to tell. The most romantically gifted men, starting from puberty or even before, don't see things that way, as evidenced by their actions. I'm talking the playboy type, casual and friendly and involved with women without any aggressive need for sex, natural at swinging that into a relationship when and as he pleases. He keeps score in a totally different way: by how he enjoys talking to women, being friendly or flirting or something more as the case may be - and if it isn't anything more, who cares? He's already on the board. And, as a matter of fact, those are the elements of cross-sex engagement that form the foundation for actual dating, the awareness of what women are like socially developing into a sense of what excites them and how to win their hearts. Put another way: imagine your average kissless virgin were to happen to get a girlfriend. Wouldn't he struggle massively until he was able to fill those same elements back through his experience with her? Wouldn't he have trouble satisfying her romantic needs, keeping her excited and attached, and even interacting with her on the banal dimension of the everyday? Even if you can skip the tutorial, there's no replacement for the basics. And obviously, the same applies to women, just in a different form. And I don't think that's just true of dating. Every one of the seemingly binary outcomes in life actually have concrete elements that constitute the potential for the correct outcome. The job search is a good example: people who are really, really good at careerism are always cultivating their contacts, they enjoy networking, they get a kick out of an interview just to learn what a certain place is like. And, in fact, that is the baseline for finding a good job and navigating upwards in it. Even trying to beat Magnus has concrete prerequisites - to have any chance at all you need to be at least 2500 ELO, for example, and that in turn requires you master the various basics of chess, and so on and so forth, and whether or not you get remotely close to your goal is of course founded in your native talent but also in how much you can appreciate and pursue those lesser accomplishments. And, for what it's worth, I think that merely becoming quite good at chess can be a great outcome, even if your initial goal was foolishly to score a point off of Magnus Carlsen.
So much for the practical side. How about theory?
Deciding on what to pursue and why to pursue it is the unsolvable question of life. Some things we get more or less for free, like basic drives for hunger, sleep, etc, and some things we get socially, like the sense that a girlfriend or a white picket fence should drift into frame at some point. But what exactly one should do, what marks success as distinct from failure, is inherently a value judgment and has no absolute scientific answer. Of course, that doesn't stop people from waffling about evo psych or some such if it's their wont, but we all know about the naturalistic fallacy. But knowing what your destination is, even in a rough and sketchy sense, is an absolute requisite for navigating life. Imagine the captain of a ship who does not know where he is going or what he hopes to do when he gets there. What would the point be of such a voyage? He stares across the horizon not knowing if open sea or visible land is preferable; he adjusts the steering and the rigging not knowing if he should go this way or that or faster or slower; he comes across a beautiful island or a vibrant port and stares dumbfounded, even coming in to dock briefly, but soon leaves again as he has no idea what to do there; and in the end, he develops a sense that storms are to be avoided because of their unpleasantness but little else. But a captain who has a goal, even a vague one of "find what lands there are in this direction and what they are like," is grounded and guided in his ventures, even where his knowledge and ability might be vague. He can learn and adjust as he travels, become a better captain, and eventually have something to show for it.
And this sense, as it applies to life, is one of the central pillars of the old liberal arts education: the aesthetic. Aesthetics, the sense and study of what is beautiful and what is not, is the fundament for all subsequent judgments. When we say we want a good life, what I believe actually obtains is that we want a beautiful life. We want to be surrounded by what is beautiful and meet, to have the cadence of our lifestyle bear a harmonious rhythm, and to have our life story tell itself a lovely tale. But telling the beautiful from the ugly requires some education. In the old days, this was done (for the common folk) through repetition of folktales and religious extracts or (for the elite) through explicit indoctrination into a specific tradition. This, I think, holds across the entire world, as a pattern. But these days this story is weak. Postmodern perspectives refuse to judge beauty if they do not actively attack the beautiful. The common folklore is shared through advertisements and popular media, and peppers vague platitudes into the central message that the good life involves a credit card. Finding the right thing to do is harder.
But, of course, it isn't impossible. The prescription is simple: engage with art, especially older and more spiritual art, and decide on what is beautiful enough to pursue. Just imagining that one is obliged to find a girlfriend is insufficient. What does a romance mean, what kind of woman does one want, what kind of man does one have to be to be a partner to that woman, and what kind of woman would want the kind of man one would have to be to be a partner to the kind of woman one wants? And given that, where might she be found, approached, attracted? That's the real question for our imagined incel. And even then, the answer doesn't have to be concrete. A failed search for the East Indies can instead yield the West Indies, although I guess that's not really a positive analogy for the ladies in this scenario, given what happened next. But a lifelong pursuit of the aesthetic and a vague goal to motivate can help one hone in on a real set of goals, something real to accomplish. And that accomplishment has to start with the notion that there is something worth accomplishing.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
51m ago
If war becomes increasingly technological, as seems the trend, we can expect a re-feudalization of our politics produced by this basic military necessity. Not in our lifetime, of course, but soon. Mass politics is necessary to get masses of men into the field in an age when how many men you can put in the field determines who wins. This five hundred year cycle of "democracy" has really been the political concessions necessary to get large numbers of men into the army.
Wait so you're saying that we'll see less democracy as technology increases, and the need for manpower decreases?
And yeah I do agree corporate power is highly concerning. Especially that of AI companies. We'll see where things shake out I suppose.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
52m ago
Is he supposed to be Tim Dillon?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
54m ago
I love you and @BurdensomeCount's fun elitist views. Not elitist in a negative way, and you both seem to really mean it! It's quite enjoyable.
What are some of the last few good blogs?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
56m ago
Eh, I still think in general while yes an extremely good liar can pull it off, it's much harder on average. Perhaps if you get all of your news from one person it is riskier.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
58m ago
I voluntarily took a pretty big paycut to avoid gibs. Admittedly, I am not exactly of a pure heart here, as I was enjoying said gibs for quite a while, but I claim partial credit for eventually refusing them.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
Unfortunately
I broadly agree with your linked post. But I think the damper that drone warfare puts on power projection (conflating this with interventionism for now) is only temporary. Big miltiary bases won't be necessary for gunboat diplomacy when the drones are smart enough to deploy themselves from shipping containers, or fired to the target location via cruise missile, or just creeping from home to there on solar power. And if boots on the ground are strictly required, then it's still our drones versus their drones. Drone-on-drone warfare will be a thing, and I find it entirely conceivable that you will have military bases surrounded by dozens of miles of drone-patrolled perimeter, or entire towns kept free of enemy drones by flooding them with your own technologically superior drones, which can then be occupied by your human troops.
Please disagree with me on this. The topic is fascinating, IMO. I've been waiting for decades to see this stuff happen and it seems to finally be just around the corner.
georgioz
1hr ago
Except that every single number you can think of related to marriage or motherhood is going to shit. Just name it: divorce rate, support of abortions, childlessness rate, age at marriage/first child, rate of single mothers and everything else. I can even grant you that "society expects" something from women - except they don't listen and do their own thing apparently.
I think that "a person who is in the US despite having no legal basis for being there" is as much a non-central example of a criminal as MLK is.
If the Trump administration only deported non-citizens without a residence after they had served a prison sentence -- i.e. the kind of people who are central examples of the criminal category -- I think most people would be okay with that (not the wokes, though).
However, the framing of "political opponents" by the parent poster is as misleading as "criminals" in most cases. The median deportee entered the US without any visa. I would consider this a purely civil matter. If an administration decides not to maximally enforce immigration law against them, that is not letting criminals roam free. However, if another administration then maximally enforces immigration law and deports them, that is also not bad per se.
But just as there have been cases where Trump has deported people after they served a criminal sentence for homicide, there have also been a few high-profile cases where his administration revoked the visa status of political opponents -- which turned them into illegals -- and then deported them. The latter is bad and they should feel bad.
However, this only applies to Trump opponents without a US passport, which means that most of Trump's domestic opposition is safe from that.
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