domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Yeah, I'm sorry, even if you're right, so what? How about: it's wrong to assault little girls, no matter how "low class" they are? How about: it was insane to believe this girl, who can barely hold these tiny "weapons" in her hand, was a part of some migrant-harrasing chavette gang?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Then why did all your examples involve incidents that happened after it, and not before it?
Crowstep
2hr ago
This post feels like it could be summarised as 'essentialism was more common in the past'. Plus a degree of weakmanning. How many men really believed that marathon running would cause a woman's uterus to fall out?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
The fall of African descent athletes is actually pretty interesting. I think there's a good chance it's downstream of the increased professionalism (in both player development and optimization of tactics) of sports and the scouting pathways starting younger and younger.
I agree, it shakes a lot of deeply held Uncle Roy assumptions I was raised with! There's a tendency to always see whatever obstacles have already been done away with as resulting in a "final product" of a society, and it keeps turning out we're wrong. The same assumption is made about class in every society: the current upper class tells myths of a prior class system that was unfair and stupid that put them at the bottom, but the current system that puts them at the top is justified and logical. It's hard to critically examine assumptions about the world.
My guess is that we're also seeing assimilation, with black teens acting more like white teens. I've seen it argued that much of the purported drop in teen sexual intercourse in America disappears if looking purely at whites; the white rate has remained the same while the black rate has converged with the white rate. Life paths are probably converging in other ways as well.
Even the UFC which is still pretty chaotic in terms of development pathways and truly global doesn't have any black champions at present.
Notably we're writing about five minutes after Jon Jones retired, but it's actually notable that the UFC is pretty dominated by a really tiny global minority of central Asian athletes. I'm sure there are people who assume it is genetic, as they previously did with every other ethnic minority that has dominated a sport.
Tretiak
2hr ago
Of course people can’t see into the future. I don’t know what tomorrow will hold but I’m very confident about what it’s going to look like.
Corporations all follow such predictable patterns of behavior over time. If the future were that unknowable there wouldn’t have been people saying things like this would come long before the Adpocalypse ever happened.
Browser
2hr ago
I feel like further details will just indicate that this is a deranged Indigenous Chav v invasive Chav situation but also it's hard to come up with many good reasons for why the United Kingdom needed to import a Fatos Ali to occupy one of its esteemed council houses
SnapDragon
2hr ago
Eh. I find these theories extremely unconvincing. Boltzmann brains become super-exponentially less likely the more atoms are required to form them. An orderly pocket universe forming would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times less likely than an orderly brain on its own.
And there would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times more versions of you that had all the same past experiences, so were "you" in absolutely every respect, but were currently experiencing complete chaos.
07mk
2hr ago
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, the question becomes an empirical one, and one we know how to tackle.
I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
ICE people do not owe personal fealty to Trump.
The vast majority of them just owe him their jobs and are recruited from his most die-hard base (and are well aware they'll be kicked to the curb when Trump is gone).
As for "Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement", that's certainly a hard one to swallow.
I don't know why, other than selective perception. We have the extremely prominent examples of the Civil Rights Movement, the history of labor protests, recent protests against the police themselves...
As for 'Especially when the obvious though unstated corollary is "any time a right-wing government uses law enforcement, that counts as political violence"', this is flipped around. The use of law enforcement gives cover to political violence.
Browser
2hr ago
I feel like further details will just indicate that this is a deranged Indigenous Chav v invasive Chav situation but also it's hard to come up with many good reasons for why the United Kingdom needed to import a Fatos Ali to occupy one of its esteemed council houses
pbmonster
2hr ago
This is certainly also a possible explanation from a genetics point of view, it just means prehistory was orders of magnitude more violent than the alternative explanation would require.
It all depends a bit on rates of male intermixing between tribes, but unless sons basically never leave their father's tribes, it would require very frequent mass murder. As often as every generation. If sons never leave, mass murder every few generations is enough.
Likely, the opposite is true. Young men frequently leave their tribes to strike out on their own in small groups of brothers an cousins.
Browser
2hr ago
The fall of African descent athletes is actually pretty interesting. I think there's a good chance it's downstream of the increased professionalism (in both player development and optimization of tactics) of sports and the scouting pathways starting younger and younger.
I've read articles suggesting that American Big 4 athletes are also coming from consistently more affluent backgrounds, since those are the ones that can afford the travel leagues, the gymwork etcetera you need to get up the ranks. Even the NBA pivoting to be less centric on height and physicality plus having truly global scouting these days. Black American athletic performance was naturally gonna dwindle as the talent pool for most major sports expanded.
Even the UFC which is still pretty chaotic in terms of development pathways and truly global doesn't have any black champions at present.
Does anyone know how to get confirmation / denial from the police or prosecutors as a random nobody from another country? We might be getting a update on the Braveheart incident.
Highly sophisticated Twitter anons are now claiming that Fatos Ali Dumana has been charged with assaulting a minor:
- Police Scotland originally claimed that CCTV footage went missing but it proved that only Lola Moir had committed a crime by being in possession of dangerous weapons
- It is now claimed that this is a lie and there is proof that Police Scotland attempted to cover up the crime of Fatos and his sister assaulting the little girls
- Attached is the screenshot of the hospital record proving that Ruby Moir sustained a serious head injury (concussion) as a result of the assault by Fatos Ali Dumana and his sister
Now, this isn't new information per se, as @FistfullOfCrows pointed out "it has been alleged". I can't find the link to where I first saw the allegation, but I've seen it, and remained skeptical thinking "shouldn't there be a medical report"? Lo, and behold, there seems to be one attached to the above tweet.
Ok, it's still trivial to fake something like this, it would be nice to get some sort of confirmation from a disinterested source.... oh, look (Turn off javascript to read. I tried archiving it, but they seem to have countermeasures) a local newspaper is saying that """Two further people""", """a man and a woman""", have been charged as a result of the incident. No names are named (funny how you can dox a little girl, but somehow adults are a step to far), so who knows, maybe it's the girl's parents that are being charged, but with all the other irregularities around the incident, and the newspaper's cageyness around the names of the suspects I wouldn't bet on it.
So... does anyone know how to go about confirming / denying this? @self_made_human, you're in Scotland, would you be willing to make some phone calls?
EDIT:
I'm not certain this refutation of qualia's validity as a concept really works unless you also throw out a large portion of commonly-used language, in other words, it proves too much. "Qualia" is just meant to be a descriptive term for a phenomenon that is experienced and individually confirmable. Claims about why qualia arises and whether it is present in someone or something else are unfalsifiable and do not meet the standard for scientific inquiry or analysis, you could argue that debating that is a waste of breath (and I may even agree, actually), but that doesn't invalidate the concept of qualia.
The structure of this argument is kind of like stating that we should discard the concept of "feelings", for the very same reasons why qualia would be invalid. Or any kind of evaluative statement, really; "good", "bad", "immoral". Sometimes we just want to be able to refer to things. People aren't making testable predictions every time they open their mouths, and as such the purpose of language serves functions outside of making such statements. Hell, people even do this in the scientific world - for example debating interpretations of quantum mechanics is a common pastime among physicists, many of which are not testable and do not meet the criteria for science.
If you see something crimson, and then something cardinal red, are those "the same red" to you? My guess is that you can distinguish those colors, if they are put side-by-side next to each other, but that the associations that each color in isolation brings up in your mind are quite similar.
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, we dissolve the philosophical question of whether the qualia are "the same", and replace it with empirical one of "how similar are they". We know how to tackle that one.
Let's say you were to take a set of 500 colors, and a set of 50 random memories you have, you could rate how strongly you associate each color with each memory on a scale from 1 to 10. This would give you a 500 x 50 matrix of association strengths, which you could think of as a 50 dimensional space where each orthogonal direction in the space is how strongly one of the 50 random memories is associated, and each of the 500 colors is associated with one particular point in this 50 dimensional memory space. But those points will not be randomly distributed within the space, and in fact you can probably map those points to a 3 dimensional space without losing much information. The position of colors within this 3 dimensional space would be a fairly faithful representation of the association of colors with those 50 memories.
If you were to repeat the above procedure with 50 random concepts you know instead of 50 random memories you have, you would also get a 3 dimensional space with colors in particular points within that space. Generally, I would expect that the positions of colors in this space generated by concepts would be pretty similar to the positions of colors in the space generated by memories.
Well now let's say we repeat this experiment with the same 500 colors, and the same 50 concepts, but a different person, Bob. I would expect that that person maps probably maps colors to concepts in a similar way, as long as they speak the same language and neither you nor Bob are colorblind. If crimson maps to a similar location in your color map as it does in Bob's color map, I think it's fair to say that you see a similar red to Bob.
This also tracks with how we teach colors to our children. We don't say "red is an ineffable experience which I experience and you might too", we say "red is the color you see when you look at a fire truck, or a stop sign, or a strawberry". This provides anchors so that our children know how to bind qualia to language. We can see evidence that they really do bind qualia to language in similar ways to each other too.
Take two kids, Alice and Bob. Teach them red by example. This fire truck is red. This strawberry is red. This stop sign is red. Teach them orange by example. This carrot is orange. This traffic cone is orange. This orange (fruit) is orange (color).
Take Alice into a room with many objects of many colors. Ask Alice to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange. Note the things she brought you, then put everything back exactly where it was at the start. Bring Bob into the same room, and ask him to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange.
Alice and Bob probably both chose similar things. They both took two of their qualia, interpolated an intermediate quale, and mapped that quale back to the physical world. When they did, they got similar results to each other, implying that their qualia were similar (unless Bob is colorblind, in which case they got very different results, implying that their qualia were very different).
Tretiak
2hr ago
I was going to say as well like you, I'm not terribly well versed on this subject. But I am a geek who's read a book or 12 on the present state of cognitive science.
If you're asking me what qualia is, it's simply a catch-all term for all the features that are unique to conscious experience. Thomas Nagel's “What is it like to be a bat?,” or to see the color red or hear your favorite song or smelling chocolate or feeling angry. It's one of the last scientific frontiers in neuroscience and it's one that hasn't even been resolved hypothetically. And yes, the explanation for qualia most likely does have something to do with the inevitable physical effects of information processing. All evidence that we've amassed so far is converging on no other conclusion. But that still leaves us ignorant of a lot of the details.
That's because we can’t access the information we need to answer this question. For instance to tell what is actually causally different between a neural synaptic circuit whose activation causes us to smell dog shit rather than freshly baked bread, we need to have resolutions of brain anatomy which are still far beyond any present technology. The mere arrangement of synapses won’t be enough, and we still don’t even have that; and since the IO signal for any neuron is determined by something inside the neuron, such as (maybe?) methyl groups attached to the nuclear DNA of the cell, we’d need to be able to make a map even of that, and for every single cell in the brain, which is far beyond any present physical capability. By a long shot. Maybe AI research could get there sooner, if somehow they achieve general AI and can ask it about its personal phenomenology, but that’s also just another technological capability we presently don’t have.
But no matter how you want to look at the problem, you're still stuck needing to explain why chocolate doesn’t smell like vanilla. Why does activating one neural circuit causes you to experience a smell at all and not hear a musical instrument, or see the color red or feel lust, etc. Why does any of this happens at all to begin with? We already know what it's like to process this information without any of this phenomena. We call it our subconscious. So what makes the difference between just walking though life running purely on subconscious processes, and instead experiencing all these bizarre but also specific phenomena?
In this sense we don’t really mean by this the biomechanics of our sensory systems like I led with previously above. What's really being asked is what makes the difference between chocolate smelling like chocolate and not vanilla, people don’t mean what has to be different about the molecular receptors in the nose that distinguish between these two odors. Those don’t have anything whatever to do with what things smell like. No matter what molecule stimulates a certain neural track in the nose, that’s just a binary signal, “on or off,” that flows into the brain. At best, perhaps, it has a quantity scale. But there’s nothing qualitative about it. That wire could go anywhere. It could go to the circuit that makes you see red, rather than smell anything, much less some particular thing. And actually for some people, it does. Synesthesia is a real thing. (So why are only some people synesthetes?)
Qualia are undeniable. I don't think they can 'not' exist. Because it is literally 100% impossible that “I am experiencing a black field with whitemarkings inside it right now” is false; that it “isn’t happening” and thus “doesn’t exist.” That I am seeing letters on a computer screen as I type can be in doubt, maybe I’m hallucinating or dreaming this; maybe I am mistaken about what the sensory signals my brain is interpreting as letters on a computer screen actually signify; etc. But that I am experiencing seeing letters on a computer screen is impossible to doubt. And why that is has to be explained.
Qualia are also fictional (our brain invents them to be able to demarcate and navigate through information) and yes, their “existence” will have something to do with information processing. Because we know if you remove or numb the pertinent information-processing circuit that generates any given experience, you consequently remove the experience. And you can even cause the experience to occur by simply sticking a wire into the pertinent circuit and shocking it. So we know this is simply something that circuit does, this is scientifically established, and does differently than a circuit that doesn’t generate any phenomenological experience (as most circuits in our brain don’t) or that generates a different one than this (as all the remaining circuits in our brain do). What makes a “chocolate circuit” cause that experience and not some other (or none at all)?
One thing that often throws everyone off including the eliminativists is the completely unnecessary folk assumption that qualia are 'things'. That they're objects or entities. They are not things, they are events because the mind is a process, not an object. Qualia don’t “explain” things they are the thing to be explained. And they don’t exist separately from the physical process underlying them; they are the physical process underlying them. So the question is what is different about those physical processes, and other physical processes, which don’t generate such phenomena? That is exactly identical to the question of what causes those events of experience to occur, and to have the qualities they do (rather than others instead).
As an example, if there were anyone out there who can “experience” the difference between “324” and “325” as quantities, that logically entails that for them there is something experientially different between them. And that’s exactly what the word “qualia” means. Most of us though don't qualitatively experience any difference between such abstract numbers. We comprehend them in a computational sense that's absent any unique qualia. We generally have to work out in what way they differ. We don’t experience it directly, the way we do the difference between “two” and “three,” which are quantities we can directly apprehend in experience.
All that said, my cheap theory to offer you is that all qualia are just ways of discriminating the geometry of touch as a sense. And all other 4 senses remain subordinated to touch as a primary sense, simply generating complex mixtures of touch sensations. Complex emotions like love include psychosomatic feedback. Your internal monologue relies on the same neural circuitry you use to hear spoken voice. Touch more generally is just a way of discriminating geometries. If there were no qualia, you would not be able to discriminate between those things. And I think a summary of the evolutionary history of sensation lends support to this. One of the things pointed out in the article is how touch was the first sensation that developed. Vision later developed from the same circuitry and machinery as touch. And then smell came after that. In most animals sound is processed by touch sensors on the moving hairs of the ears. There's no inherent reason why that had to be the case, which indicates an evolutionary development: all senses ultimately go back to touch. It's also pretty well known that pain sensing cells evolved from touch sensing cells as a way to detect irritants. In general 'pain' is a touch sensation so intense that it disrupts and overloads other mental computations. Which is exactly what pain computes: an attention claiming condition report that needs immediate resolution.
I could keep going with other experiences like vision and pleasure, but it still follows the same evolutionary pathway.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
This still sounds like a vacuous concept to me.
Also, take a 4-bit adder, which is a very simple computation device.
In the first experiment, we connect it to two digital light sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. The adder circuit does its job and outputs 8, which we then bitshift to get the average of 4. By your description that means our circuit is experiencing a certain amount of light.
In the second experiment, we connect two temperature sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. Again the adder does its job and outputs 8, which results in an average value of 4. But this time it is supposed to experience temperature, and depending on the scale of our sensors, it might experience very different temperatures!
To the degree either an adder or a human neuron experience anything, what they experience is simply voltage levels of their inputs. Either system is describable perfectly well without using a word like experience.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong
TLDR: Cults and related extremist groups arise when the Commanding Heights of culture and intellect are wildly and obviously wrong about something, opening space for less respectable and reputable groups to be obviously correct. In a healthy example, the Antithesis is quickly synthesized into the mainstream; in an unhealthy example the Thesis stands rigid and refuses to budge, and a as a result the antithesis grows in power and control. Seeing that the Antithesis is correct about one thing, people buy into the whole program, and pretty soon: there’s the Flavor-Aid.
My wife and I have been on a big kick of cults lately. She’s been watching a done of documentaries on cults, running from Heaven’s Gate and Synanon through NXVIM* and Gwen Shamblin. I, meanwhile, have been listening to Daryl Cooper’s extensive podcast on Jim Jones and The People’s Temple. Cooper does a great job of contextualizing Jones within the broader left* and the culture of the time. Cooper gives us the loony fringe left of the time, and how People’s Temple fit into that cultural movement. The insane things the Black Panthers would say, and the credibility they were given. The Weathermen taking over SDS, and actually going out to start a revolution. How insane everyone was, that Angela Davis would endorse People’s Temple, and call Jonestown in some of its last days to talk to Jones and encourage his people to hold the line against capitalism/racism/etc.
But what Cooper also does a great job of is showing the racism that the Panthers and the People’s Temple and their supporters active and passive were all reacting against. He starts the work quoting extensively from Isabella Wilkerson on lynchings in the South, the resulting Great Migration to the North, and the racism faced by blacks in Northern cities like Chicago. The violence in Cicero against a college educated father trying to move his family into a better neighborhood, where he could pay lower rent and have room for the piano they bought for their daughter.** He movingly talks about MLK and Selma, and the violence that lead to the rise of SDS and the Black Panthers.
I never realized how much of People’s Temple’s work was devoted to race issues, and how much of the congregation was black. Which, in light of recent conversations, has me thinking about how People’s Temple and similarly insane groups were enabled by American racism. They were handed a public issue, in which the mainstream was quite obviously morally wrong by its own standards and factually wrong in its claims. This enabled a malignant narcissist like Jim Jones to be correct about one thing, which caused a lot of people to listen to him about other things. I think people don’t appreciate this, on either left or right, because they don’t remember that…
Racists Really Did Believe in Racism
Curtis Yarvin in a recent podcast appearance talked about recent studies published in Nature indicating significant genetic contribution in sub-Saharan African genomes from an unknown hominid species, theorized to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals. Yarvin strongly implies, though he does not outright state, that this contribution indicates that sub-Saharan African populations are other than or less than other humans, and then moves on from the point quickly. Yarvin jokes that:
It's strange because it reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy and inevitably reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy who is not a reader of Science magazine. How did he get this information? How did he know? That's the question we have to answer.
This was the outright expression of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A pretty frequent argument seen in right wing or putatively trad spaces: our ancestors knew these things, their superstitions were suppressed by a movement of the evil or the idiotic who forced us to pretend that things that aren’t true are, that the emperor had clothes, but we who can notice can look at the facts and the science and realize that they were true all along. But this ends up, inevitably, being an act of sane washing of the opinions of racists of the past. The modern HBDer like Yarvin takes a defensible compromise Motte, then declares Uncle Roy’s Bailey to be fully under control!
Much as atheist materialists try to rewrite history by assuming that all examples of religion are really cynical efforts to achieve material benefit, both racists and anti-racists of today sometimes do the same with racism. They soft-pedal the racist beliefs of American whites circa 1776-last week. HBDers sanewash their predecessors, talking about bell curves and averages and standard deviations. Wokes paint the racists of the past as purely evil, bent only on preserving their own selfish social and economic privileges through a devious and cynical set of schemes to keep the obviously equal (or brilliant) black man down. A certain breed of online dissident rightist will even buy into the woke framing, and try to sell racial segregation as a neutral social technology, that reducing diversity is necessary to conjure up social trust or something.
When the reality was, racists of the past were genuinely racist, they really did believe that the blacks and Jews etc. were inferior. And not just inferior on average within overlapping bell curves, or in specific metrics, or as a result of cultural conditioning. White racists often believed that every black was inferior in every way to essentially every white American. Consider, for a moment, the dialogue on sports pre-Jackie Robinson. The color line in sports is generally presented today as something done specifically to be cruel, to keep superior black athletes**** from getting their proper respect, to keep social lines intact. For the most part, if you ask those who created and upheld these lines, they genuinely thought that blacks couldn’t compete. The goal wasn’t to keep blacks from beating whites, it was to give blacks a League of their Own where they could compete without getting blown out by superior whites.
Before Jack Johnson, the assumption was that the greatest fighter in the world must be a white man. After all, the white man had outfought every other race, had the world in subjugation in 1900, how could it be otherwise than that he would win in the ring? Among the first great African American sportsmen, Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion of the world. He is celebrated for managing to break the color barrier, after pursuing the white champion across countries and borders trying to force him to fight, but few remember that beforehand most white experts doubted he could do it at all. Harper’s Weekly in 1910 argued that “The superiority of the brain of the white man … is undisputed by all authorities… [A] white man fighting with a negro … ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.” The same logic lead the Washington Post to argue about a hypothetical meeting between black champion Jack Johnson and white hope Jeffries “If Jeffries ever meets Johnson and is in his old trim, experts believe that ‘Texas Jack’ will not last more than ten rounds.” Jeffries and Johnson did meet, after years of intrepid effort by Johnson to bring him to the ring, and Johnson won despite a ruleset that allowed for up to forty rounds to be fought. The Grey Lady must have been worried sick after, the editors at the New York Times had openly speculated before the fight that "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” The editors had set the stakes, and Johnson had delivered. Uncle Roys across the country wept, gnashed their teeth, and searched for a Great White Hope (the origin of the phrase) who would set things right by winning the heavyweight belt. They would mostly be disappointed until the millennium, outside of Sylvester Stallone movies.
Baseball, America’s pastime, was next. I’ve written before about how important Jackie Robinson was as a civil rights figure. Today he is mostly remembered as a social hero, but much more than that he was a baseball player, a true talent hall of famer with the WAR and the .400 OBP to show for it. He was great and his greatness proved the doubters wrong. Fred Lieb felt that Black ballplayers lacked the stamina to hold up to a 154 game schedule, or the refinement to handle the professional game at the highest level. Grantland Rice said the negro couldn’t handle the mental aspect of Major League ball, while Hugh Fullerton and Cap Anson often stated they lacked the discipline to stand the strain of the big leagues. Joe Williams in the New York World Telegram argued bluntly that: “Black players have been kept out of big league ball because they are, as a race, very poor ball players[,]” and would go on to say that "The demands of the Negro often bulk larger than his capabilities.” In the Sporting News J. G. Taylor Spink said of Jackie Robinson when he was in the Dodgers minor league system that “at 26… were he white and a polite college player, [he] would be eligible for a trial with one of the Brooklyn B farm organizations[,]” while Dan Daniel said “[Robinson] wasn’t of International [minor] League caliber.” Jackie Robinson would go on to put up a purely statistical Hall of Fame career and finally lead the Dodgers to the World Series. Robinson’s performance disproved
Despite the rise of the black athlete in mid century America, one spot where whites held out until recently was at quarterback in football. Bear Bryant, arguably the greatest college coach of all time, said that “The quarterback has to be a leader, and I don’t think a colored boy can do the things we need done at quarterback;” while Fran Curci of Kentucky told the NYT that “They’re great runners, but when it comes to reading defenses and passing, I don’t think the coloreds can handle it; and an anonymous NFL coach as late as 1978 felt comfortable telling Sports Illustrated that “The quarterback position requires more thinking than running, and that’s why you don’t see many blacks there. They’re not thinkers.” There wouldn’t be any black QBs in the pro game until the 80s, and they would remain a curiosity until the 2010s. Only in recent years have we seen black QBs break out of the running QB mold (and arguably seen teams overrate black QBs perceived as Athletic over white QBs perceived as statuesque pocket passers).
I’m sticking with sports because they’re easy, and the results are statistically obvious on the field. I hope I won’t be accused of consensus building when I say that we could dig up innumerable Uncle Roys saying Thurgood Marshall could never make it as a lawyer or judge, that there would never be a great black novelist or musician, that no black man would ever reach the rank of general in the US Army, or perform heart surgery. But that would be exhausting and boring. The sporting examples are enough to prove the point: our racist Uncle Roys, or perhaps Uncle Roy’s racist great uncle Roger, weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field.
Turn again to the same topic with regards to women. I’ve often seen it said on here that until the rise of Feminism and then of TRANS, everyone intuitively and obviously knew that women were about 35-40% weaker than men, that they would never come within 20% of men’s performance in sporting events. This is, again, sane washing history. When Bobbi Gibb tried to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 (when, for context, my father was in college), race director Will Cloney rejected her on the grounds that women were “physiologically incapable” of running 26 miles. Other observers theorized that her uterus might fall clean out. This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours. This is not what Uncle Roy predicted, and to pretend that fifteen minutes is closer to “her uterus falls out” than it is to equality strikes me as odd.***** The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
This brings us back to the man himself, Curtis Yarvin. When imagining a coup-complete solution to the problems of the modern United States, Moldbug pictured the key tool to destroy his nemesis The Cathedral as an alternative truth telling service he labeled the “Antiversity.”
If you identify this as a case of circular reasoning, you are right. More precisely, it is a case of game theory—even more precisely, a coordination problem. The only way to break this cycle is to create a Schelling point: a credible and precise alternative. A red button. So this is the strategy. What, exactly, is this mysterious device? In the First Step, we do not replace all of USG. We just replace its brain— the University. With a new device we call the Antiversity, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is. Here is a summary: The Antiversity is an independent producer of veracity—a truth service. It rests automatic confidence in no other institution. Its goal is to uncover any truth available to it: both matters of fact and perspective. It needs to always be right and never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available...The power of a truth service is its reliability. It may remain prudently silent on any point; it must err on none. The thesis of the Procedure is that if we can construct a truth service much more powerful than USG’s noble and revered ministry of information, we will be able to use it to safely and effectively defeat USG. Indeed, I can imagine no other way to solve the problem. Once this device of great veracity, the Antiversity—expressing not only razor-sharp analytical intelligence, not just exhaustive learning, but also great prudence and judgment—is fully armed and operational, it is straightforward to ask it the question: chto dyelat? What is to be done? What is the sequel to the coup d’état? What is Plan B?
His core idea is that the Antiversity would present all facts, including the ones that are inconvenient for the NYT or for Harvard, the Antiversity will be correct in its statements and predictions while The Cathedral will be wrong, and that as people recognize this they will notice what is going on around them and this will bring down The Cathedral and bring in a more sane regime. I’ve always found this a compelling argument, as I find many things Moldbug said. The conflict lies between Yarvin’s prior Moldbug arguments, and his current championing of your racist Uncle Roy, in that Uncle Roy and his arguments lost his credibility by more or less exactly this process. Uncle Roy predicted that Jack Johnson would lose, that Jackie Robinson lacked the discipline to play in the majors, that women couldn’t run 26 miles, that no woman could beat any man in competitive tennis. He was wrong every time, lost his credibility, and was dismissed as a crank, his views ignored or reengineered into imaginary social boundary keeping or capitalist exploitation.
But in the process, a lot of people became extremists or joined cults. The People’s Temple, Synanon, The Weathermen, the Panthers, the Red Army Faction, SDS. Their best recruiting tool was the purported racism of the establishment, this issue on which the establishment was obviously incorrect, being proven incorrect regularly. Cult leaders like Jim Jones used the racism of society as a recruiting tool, as his most powerful recruiting tool. Jim Jones used the obviously incorrect stances of millions of Uncle Roys to convince his followers that they should look for alternate sources of truth, sources like Jim Jones. That they should trust Jim Jones in all things, and even when Uncle Roy points out all the weird shit going on with Jim Jones he lacks credibility because he was wrong so many times, and Uncle Roy isn’t even around to ask what’s in the Flavor Aid.
The cults were the flower of this phenomenon, but the fruit is our modern world, where people genuinely think that men and women are physically equal if women only tried harder, and citing simple statistics and repeatable studies is verboten, for fear of sounding like Uncle Roy. The modern absurdities are born of overreaction to the absurdities of yesteryear. We must be careful not to overstate our cases and produce yet more absurdities, circling a Hegelian drain.
Which brings us to the other great recruiting tool of the 60s-era cults: Vietnam. Vietnam was a botched abortion of a colonial war, born in deceit and confusing esoteric doctrine, carried on in lies and half measures, brought to an embarrassing defeat after extended flailing and extensive murder of innocents. The establishment was always wrong on Vietnam, and always obviously wrong, and it destroyed the credibility of the establishment when Nixon’s conversations with Kissinger made clear that the establishment itself knew that they were wrong. Nixon knew the war was lost when he reached office, and continued it out of a strategy of achieving a “decent interval” before surrender, or occasionally bombed Laos or Camdodia in a half-hearted attempt to turn the tide.
Today’s absurdity is Gaza. A carnival of cruelty, with no obvious exit strategy. Israel has never had a real theory of victory, no one has yet offered a real plan for Gaza going forward, a few Israeli cranks on the right wing will at least attempt to forward real plans for genocide or ethnic cleansing, but mostly everyone still talks about a two-state solution that will obviously never come to be. Israel will not allow any group that could govern Gaza to govern Gaza, will neither absorb Gaza nor let it go, will neither integrate the Palestinians nor murder them in numbers significant enough to achieve population reduction. Gaza is kept in desperate famine, but not exterminated; it is kept miserable but not destroyed. And the vast majority of US politicians stand with Israel, and are more concerned with campus no-no words than with ongoing physical cruelty to no obvious end.
But what the lessons of Uncle Roy and Jim Jones should teach us is that being wrong for a long time in public is dangerous. It can destroy your credibility, it can overthrow regimes, it can lead to a reaction much worse than the problem ever was to begin with. The dynamic of truth-telling as revolutionary act that Yarvin purports to espouse, is most dangerous when the regime chooses to be obviously wrong.
We need solutions in Gaza, however brutal they may be they must be logical. We need to stick to facts, to stick to truth, to stick to principles. To do otherwise creates openings for things that are worse than we can imagine.
Footnotes
*While Cooper spends a lot of time denigrating groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, people who try to deride Cooper as a simple racist clearly haven’t consumed much of his content, where he’ll quote pages of Isabella Wilkerson or James Baldwin at you. That said, I warned my wife before recommending the work to her, the one thing Cooper did that was in poor taste: he should not have tried to do various blaccents when reading primary sources, it sounds ridiculous and embarrassing.
**Places like Cicero would provide some of the inspiration to the play A Raisin in the Sun which I saw performed locally a few months ago. The play was extremely well acted, the plot orients around a similar black family who put a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, only to be approached by the Clyburne Park Improvement Association with an offer to buy them out of the contract at a higher price than they had paid originally. The conflict over whether to take the money or not results in a moving soliloquy from the male lead, in which he imagines his conversation with the whites who want to keep them out:
MAMA Baby, how you going to feel on the inside? WALTER Fine! … Going to feel fine … a man … MAMA You won’t have nothing left then, Walter Lee. WALTER (Coming to her) I’m going to feel fine, Mama. I’m going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say— (He falters)—and say, “All right, Mr. Lindner—(He falters even more)—that’s your neighborhood out there! You got the right to keep it like you want! You got the right to have it like you want! Just write the check and—the house is yours.” And—and I am going to say—(His voice almost breaks) “And you—you people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers! …” (He straightens up and moves away from his mother, walking around the room) And maybe—maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees … (He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman— (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slowwitted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee! Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh! Great white—(Voice breaking, he forces himself to go on)—Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s—we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo’ white folks neighborhood …” (He breaks down completely) And I’ll feel fine! Fine! FINE! (He gets up and goes into the bedroom)
This was a small theater, a black box set up with maybe a hundred people, so I was only a dozen feet from him as he did this. Excellent actor. But, and this actually did make me reflect on white privilege as a concept, I couldn’t help but reimagine the play as a comedy. In the script, they tell the whites to go stuff it and they move in anyway, with the consequences good and bad obvious to the audience. But in my mind, if I put money down on a house, and someone came asking to buy me out for more, I’d do nothing but ask for more money, there’s some price at which I’d absolutely take the money. Obviously if I got a really good deal to start, they’d have to really pay me out, but I’d absolutely sell to them at some price. And I’d be trying to convince them that I didn’t want to sell, and that they really really didn’t want me to live there, to pump up the price.
And this is where it ought to be a comedy, Walter Lee imagines himself getting on his knees before the White Man, degrading himself, calling himself nigger, begging; he imagines this is how he will be able to take more from the white man. When that’s the opposite of what he ought to do to get more money out of the Clyburne Park Improvement Association! When the CPIA shows up, they should be blaring the most obnoxious Negro music they can find in 1959. Walter Lee should be telling them that while he appreciates the offer, he is really looking forward to having the house in Clyburne park so he can have all his friends over for barbecues, and that he just couldn’t accept their number. Meanwhile, Walter Lee ought to be inviting all his blackest friends over to jump in and out of the apartment at random to “talk business” while the CPIA is there, hinting darkly at how the house in Clyburne Park will be perfect for their “business” and how all the customers will be able to find the house easy and park all over the neighborhood. Beneatha and Ruth should dress like whores, hell have the grandmother wander in half dressed and drunk. Beneatha’s African boyfriend Asagai*** should show up in a loin cloth with a spear yelling unintelligibly in gibberish, while Beneatha’s rich respectable colored boyfriend George will bring over a car load of his black fraternity brothers, all drunk on malt liquor, and start a fight with Asagai. In the midst of all this negro ruckus, the respectable suburbanites of the CPIA, terrified of this kind of family moving into their neighborhood, double their offer to Walter Lee, who sighs and accepts it. The CPIA YTs scurry out, and the blacks collectively break character and laugh together at how they hoodwinked the Man.
The fact that this is the obvious way the story should end, says something about my relationship with racial pride as a white person.
***I imagined Asagai in all his appearances as Barack Obama’s dad. Chicago university in 1959 is about when he would have been around. It added spice to the dialogue if you thought about Asagai later marrying a white bitch and leaving town, ditching her with the baby Barack. This isn’t strictly accurate, but Asagai as an archetype is literally Obama pere.
****Black American superiority in athletics is also rapidly being revealed as a myth. The various race scientists proclaiming it are too numerous to discuss here in my fourth footnote to an already overly verbose comment, but Jimmy the Greek has turned out to be wrong in addition to being rude. Black athletic dominance was a fact of life in the late 90s, but it peaked around the early 2000s and has been in decline ever since, across all major American sports (other than Hockey, which never had any black players). When I was a kid, it was basically understood that there would never be another white heavyweight champ outside of Rocky movies, never be a star white halfback in the NFL, never be a dominant white NBA MVP. As with the ascent of the black athlete, the decline started in boxing, moved to baseball, and has since started to show up in football and basketball. Russian/Ukrainian fighters have mostly dominated the heavyweight championship since the fall of the USSR, with the odd Irish traveler or Mexican thrown in. The percentage of black (African American) players in Major League Baseball peaked in the 80s at around 20%, and now sits at 6-7%. The percentage of black NFL players peaked in the early 2000s at 70%, and now sits just over 55%, with notable recent white stars at traditionally black skill positions like RB, WR, and CB popping up literally for the first time in decades. The NBA, of course, remains predominantly American black by numbers, but the rise of slavs like Jokic and Doncic has punctured myths, and the Serbian team took the US olympic team to the brink without a single black player. Racist myths are being punctured, here. Were I Ibram X Kendi, I would be trying to get Cooper Dejean and Christian McCaffrey on a podcast. We desperately want athletic success to be ethnic in nature, genetic in nature, but we’ve gotten it wrong every time. Basketball was once thought to be a great sport for Jews because it offered so many opportunities for trickery and deceit. But, of course, the Jews among HBD believers argue that Uncle Roy was right about the blacks, but wrong about the Jews.
*****Though this may be just be a case of appropriate username. I’m pretty sure my uterus would have fallen out if I had one.
FtttG
3hr ago
Yeah, I'm curious about that myself. The impression I get is that his TV career had been circling the drain for many years, to which he'd responded by becoming a sort of all-purpose keyboard warrior, taking to Twitter to attack all manner of people (including Kanye West, of all people) as "Gamergaters". At some point he fell down the gender-critical rabbit hole and here we are.
Perhaps the spiciest take I've seen on the whole matter came from Scott, in which he admitted that the spike in trans identification is probably a bad thing and it's worth trying to determine the underlying cause thereof - but then said that no one should bother trying to answer these questions because they'll end up ruining their lives in the process, like Linehan did. (Of course, a major contributing factor to Linehan's life being ruined was trans activists doing everything in their power to ruin it - Linehan claims that the police knocking on his door over tweets he'd posted was the catalyst that caused his wife to leave him. Regardless of whether that was the catalyst, it's undeniably true that the police did knock on his door because trans activists sicced them on him.)
To my mind, "this is a question worth investigating, but you shouldn't try to investigate it because bad actors will try to destroy you if you do" is a sensible position to take, if and only if you include an explicit condemnation of the bad actors trying to destroy people, which Scott doesn't.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.
I do not think that this will get you anywhere. At most, you can convince me this way that I have qualia. But my temperature detection circuit is nothing special, an insect might have something rather similar. Does it have qualia? What if I replace it by electronics running an identical neural network and a temperature sensor? What about a rock which gets slightly larger when it is warm?
If qualia is a useful property systems of matter can have or not have, then you automatically run into p-Zombies.
At the end of the day, I want concepts which describe reality and pay their rent in anticipation of future events. The pH value of aqueous solutions is a good (if limited) concept. I can measure it, and it will give me good predictions about which reactions will tend to take place e.g. if I decide to take a swim in it.
Qualia is not such a concept. It does not make falsifiable predictions. There is no test to determine if a dog or a LLM has qualia.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3hr ago
I read GEB in high school and it was one of the first books that turned me onto philosophy. It's not "deep", but as a popularization it does its job well.
Corvos
3hr ago
The trans people went after him hard for making a very funny episode about an MtF trans person before such things were sensitive. It's both very unkind and rather touching, but in any case the trans complex went after it hard.
At the risk of impromptu psychoanalysing, Graham Linehan has always been on the winning side of the culture wars before: Father Ted affectionately but firmly took the piss out of the Catholic Church just as it was dying out in Ireland and while neither Black Books nor the IT Crowd are exactly politically correct, everyone was in no doubt that their author was basically sound politically.
Then suddenly that got turned around on him and I think it was a big shock. All that time being a feminist and so on and suddenly the winds change and he goes from being universally feted to standing with the baddies. I can imagine that being pretty shattering.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3hr ago
They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3hr ago
The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis.
Well, no, not really.
We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.
We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.
Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.
I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.
For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)
For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.
A majority of those running athletic institutions at the time believed that it would be physiologically dangerous for a woman to run a marathon. They were literally banned from events for that reason. It's not weakmanning to point to the institutional position of the time, it's rather odd to pretend that "everyone" knew women could run marathons except all the people involved in marathon running.
More options
Context Copy link