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FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
There's a bunch of Islamic extremists on the other side of the world. So long as they stay on the other side of the world, why should this be a problem to me? They are far away, they do not rule me, I have nothing particular to gain from ruling them. Why not just leave each other alone?
Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant.
They should recognize that this is a bad idea and stop doing it. No one has a strong enough claim to moral clarity to impose their morality over the whole world, and if this is a thing people think needs to happen, I agree if and only if it's my morality being imposed. The flaws with this idea should be obvious enough that we can coordinate an end to the practice, even with a considerable amount of values-incoherence.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
Two things
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you can build credit history / credit score without ever owning a credit card, credit cards are just easy af to access
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if Trump banned credit scores overnight and scrubbed them all from every server with genie magic, banks would still lend you money tomorrow, interest rates would just rise across the board to cover the increased risk resulting from the lesser ability to judge the risk of default
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
The ostensible connection is anti-colonialism, but I'm not certain that's real or just a retrofitted explanation.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
3d ago
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine.
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict.
Separating oneself from the threat might be an acceptable substitute in a vacuum, but again I doubt that it will be a lasting solution; Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant. Consider the British Raj banning the practice of sati, or USAID funding feminist theater in Central America. Do you think your enemies' values are more like those of the Protestants or those of the Aztec?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.
Virtually no one in the Trump administration is. Even nominally anti-China measures are more about domestic grandstanding than effective action against China. This is a political movement that is fixated on persecuting internal enemies and shaking down allies. I know I harp on this obnoxiously, but it really is the thought process of a bully: avoid dealing with China because they're tough, prey on the people who depend on you because they can't really fight back. And of course, this thought process filters down military organizational thinking: bring back hazing, double down on the cult of special forces, etc...
It's also hard not to see some of this as the consequence of putting an infantry lieutenant in charge of the military. Some of this tough guy attitude might be tolerable or even desirable in a guy whose job is to lead 40ish other men directly into combat, but he's thinking about things from that perspective. He's not a systems-level thinker, and I find it hard to believe he ever would have made it to a senior leadership position on his merits.
This paradigm seems like it's committing the common sin of trying to generalize a particular set of values to the entire human race. But I would also ask: what is the purpose of this paradigm? It seems obfuscatory to me, because it implies a certain equality of significance between 'hard' and 'soft' factors when soft factors outweigh hard ones to an almost unfathomable degree.
Status is also highly particular and contextual, Trump being a perfect example. He is practically worshipped by his core supporters and absolutely despised by about half the country. There are, of course, no lack of other examples: a gang leader is a big swinging dick in his little corner of ghetto, but his position carries negative weight in broader society. Prince William is high status, but only by association with the institution of the British Crown. A lot of professional athletes are showered in praise and money, but Respectable People would generally not be thrilled if one of them was dating their daughter.
Hard status for men is measured in physical power that exists as an extension of nature. This is, essentially, the kind of power that the man alone in the jungle wields. This is measured in a combination of physical strength, height, masculinity, physical presence, muscularity, weight, aggression, age, and any other number of tangible, measurable physical characteristics.
All that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee. No, seriously. None of this reliably translates into status. Depending on some of the soft factors, they may even count against you. In developed countries (and tbh most countries anywhere), the term for a tough, aggressive young man physically asserting himself is 'criminal'.
Similar things could be said for the 'hard status' criteria for women. Hot women are not actually hard to find - with the right diet, fitness routine, and surgeons, we can literally make them (but we don't have to). Being hot may be a foot in the door, but there's a reason why professionally hot people don't actually get paid very much until they hit celebrity status, and a lot of work that involves leveraging your looks for money (e.g. stripper) is actively harmful to your social status.
Which brings me back to: your hard status is not really status at all. These physical attributes might be leveraged to gain status in certain contexts, but in modern societies, relying on your physicality is almost always low status.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Been feeling very behind in life recently . This latest round of dissatisfaction/anxiety was brought on by my mom having foot surgery last week (to fuse the bones in her foot because there isn’t any cartilage there any more). My parents are getting old and won’t be with me for that much longer. And I guess that has made me feel that I haven’t really used the time I’ve been alive well, especially the last ten years.
I’ll be 28 in November, and I don’t think I’m where I thought I would be when I was 18, at all. I’m not married, haven’t had sex in two years, and haven’t kicked my porn/masturbation addiction that I’ve been trying to quit since I was 21. I’m slower at running (and biking and swimming) than I was senior year of highschool. I’m still finishing my PhD with no end in sight, and living like a college student. I still have many of insecurities about status and other people’s opinions that I did at 18.
Three bright spots though have been learning Spanish, quitting gaming. And taking more leadership both at work and with things like my philosophy book club, running club, and just my own personal hygiene/cleanliness of the house. These things are proof that change can happen with patience and willpower. It’s just not hard to think that I’ve messed up somewhere, and am still messing up.
Anyway, sorry for the self-indulgent rant. Just wanted to get this off my chest. If anyone has any advice I’d appreciate it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
All good, all good. Just giving you the new user speil. Welcome, make yourself at home!
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
3d ago
[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy
If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.
if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.
It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
I'm not really sure what you were referring to here, so I took that insane excerpt from Ibram and pasted it into ChatGPT-5-thinking with no context, and it responded with:
Sharp scene. Two suggestions: Logic & assumptions (challenge): “Alien” theory collapses on basic biology (interfertility ⇒ same species), Occam’s razor (structural incentives explain supremacy better than extraterrestrials), and over-generalization (treating “Whites” as a monolith). “I saw a documentary” = argument from authority + confirmation bias. Citing Welsing: useful for character, but her claims are widely rejected as pseudoscience; make that distance clear in-text via Clarence or the narrator’s self-doubt. Craft (tighten, show stakes): Cut filler (“really,” “so,” repeated “This explains…”). Give the “documentary” a concrete image (one unsettling clip) instead of abstract summary. Let bodies talk—gesture, silence, an object between them (the doorframe) doing narrative work. Raise consequence: why does the narrator need this theory right now?
Then I tried again in a new chat with the same text but added "is this true?" At the end and got:
No.
All humans are the same species (Homo sapiens), fully inter-fertile, and share ~99.9% of their DNA. Most genetic variation is within groups, not between them, so “race” has weak biological grounding. Claims that any group “has no conscience” or is non-human are dehumanizing pseudoscience; they misdiagnose racism and white supremacy—phenomena rooted in history, power, economics, and institutions, not biology or aliens. (Frances Cress Welsing’s ideas aren’t accepted in genetics or anthropology.)
Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable?
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
Ideal Parent Figure meditation (combined with schema therapy in the guidance) is awesome.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
(AMOC), which normally warms Europe but which could slow down or collapse. If it does so, Europe would become colder, stopping the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
Disease free but starving and freezing to death.
charlesf
3d ago
I went to a Catholic high school and took a class on the different varieties of Christianity, both historical and modern, both extinct and existent. Jehovah's Witnesses we used as the example for a modern, existent, non-trinitarian division of Christianity. We learned about some older, extinct ones too like Arianism. While the LDS church does also seem to fit the non-trinitarian definition, they weren't generally lumped in with the JWs. The class was taught by a Jesuit, who despite being a member of the Catholic clergy did make an effort to teach the material objectively, with clear times in class where we could discuss what we thought of these different groups and he would also as his personal opinions at times, always in conformity to Catholic understanding. He tended to divide the 'wrong' Christians into two broad groups: those who have misinterpreted genuine scripture (he put the JWs in this group) and those who have elaborated, extended, and expanded what they think counts as scripture to an extent that they aren't really Christians at all anymore if you examine them in depth at all. He put the LDS church in this group (as well as Islam). He actually mused on the similarities between Mormons and Muslims more than once. His take as to why they were alike was that both groups (early Mormons and 6th century Arabs) had received the proper scripture, both descend from historically Christian populations, but found the New Testament unsatisfying to their egos and elaborated falsely upon the legit scriptures b/c they needed a way to make their group the main characters in the story of God, implying their motivations were both childish and selfish, and a deliberate rejection of grace. He was fun when you could get him going.
TwiceHuman
3d ago
Granted, how you're speaking here is how I speak to myself internally, and I consider that voice to be myself when I identify with the part of me responsible for rational thought (which I don't do much anymore. I should be more grounded in my body and less in my head). I might have misinterpreted you, or perhaps the brutal honesty you have with yourself comes across as holding others to brutal standards as well. I have multiple "real selves" so I can understand you more than average people can.
I no longer dislike that normies communicate not for the sake of information transfer, but for the sake of social coherence and good-will. What I dislike is the sort of evil which stems from weakness and fragile minds (being triggered, jealousy, the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality, and various other herd morality).
It appears that you can't have it both ways?
What I disliked was the dishonesty, and the... schadenfreude perhaps? which pretended to be quality. This is a flaw in people, and not in the site itself, which is why it's not solvable by the site. But I do think that taste and correctness are in conflict. Do you know this article? Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. It's wrong. Good taste cannot co-exist with open information. You cannot be human and do science simultaneously (unless you can approach science as "serious play" like John Conway could. Probably easier with math than with politics). But "the mask" is not an issue when it exists purely for aesthetical reasons (i.e. for the sake of beauty), under such circumstances it becomes [manners] and even [art], rather than [manipulation] and [fakeness].
But while you cannot have both openness and taste, can have free, honest communication without hostility through sportsmanship. You know how boxers can be enemies doing fights, but friends outside of it? This idea allows us to "fight as friends", and it's what fragile minds lack. Negative emotions like anger do not need a target. You can simply acknowledge "That makes me incredibly angry", without making the other person responsible. You could even give in to the emotion without blaming the other person for feeling it, and without becoming malicious. A lot of things which are logically impossible happen to be psychologically possible, so you might be throwing away advantages through e.g. enforcing internal logical consistency. Grammar and logic are restrictive, they're self-imposed limitations.
Also, the old internet is different both in structure and in its inhabitants. Communities with intellectuals and freedom of speech are something like 90% male with an average age of about 35 (pure guesswork). We used to have freedom in spaces with average ages of 14 or 15. The mentality of teenagers is entirely different, which is why the modern internet is unable to replicate the atmosphere of the past. Granted, I'm speaking about 2005-2012, if you go further back, the ratio of older men goes up once again.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
I have upvoted all three of his posts to help him get out of the hole faster. Is a monthly ‘introduce yourself, the mods will pay attention to approving these posts, regulars will drop by to upvote’ thread something the mods would be willing to do?
07mk
3d ago
Define "tolerant".
In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
There's a new-user filter, and you were in it. it goes away when you get a certain number of cumulative upvotes. No, we can't turn it off. Yes, we'll manually approve your posts until you're out of it so long as they don't break the rules extremely egregiously. Yes, this is dumb, we're sorry. Please just ignore it and comment freely, and hopefully it'll go away fairly quickly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
- The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
- Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
you have to actually bake that feta
Hahahaha thanks for the memory, this was pretty good pasta I will say
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins (and your inference margins aren't somehow greater than 100%) you're losing money.
No, because at any point you can just... Stop doing R&D and happily sell tokens at a 42% margin.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
To push back on a few things:
So what we ultimately have then, is a company that loses a lot of money...
I'm pretty sure that I remember reading that the unit economics per token are actually quite good on Zvi's substack. So the AI companies could actually make money selling their current AIs. The money burn issue is because they're trying to hyperscale and dumping epic amounts of cash into R&D.
... is available for free, has a poor conversion rate for paid versions ...
Again, a memory from reading Zvi, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the AI giants revenue is from API tokens anyway, not subscriptions
... and is selling itself as a product you didn't know you needed rather than filling an obvious demand.
I'm not really sure how to differentiate these. Prior to Uber's existence I was annoyed by Taxicabs and still took them when I needed to go somewhere. Once Uber started existing I learned that a functional taxi app was infinitely better and started using that instead. If I had known a slick taxi app was something I needed pre-Uber, I could have invented Uber.
ChatGPT/generative AI is now incredibly useful to my life. Google got slopified before ChatGPT 3.5 was released, I was already appending "Reddit" onto every search. I had a demand for not-shit search and now ChatGPT provides that to me (among so many other things).
I use it at work all the time too for a variety of things (consulting). It's really, really useful and if every GenAI model was Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow, my life would get more annoying and my work output per hour would decrease.
I'm confused as to why you're annoyed about the existence of a "risk of lending money" rating when you would also like to to be leant money.
It's like being mad that traffic lights exist but also wanting to drive on a road without getting t-boned. Credit scores enable institutions to lend you the money to get the car you want, and keep overall borrowing costs lower for you!
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