domain:forecasting.substack.com
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Indeed, that's certainly a component and it is most charitable to attribute failure to that.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
no martyrdom necessary
I overstated, then. I think your definition of moral principle requires a willingness to be martyred, literally or metaphorically (say, career, social life, tolerating being the acceptable target of hatred, etc), and exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly.
It's just that if the benefits dry up
There's a significant gap between benefits drying up and 'costing you dear,' though.
Let's take two moral principles that I think we might agree the average "normie liberal" of 2008 could have been said to hold: free speech is good, and racism is bad. As it turns out, both of these were quite ideologically constrained for most people- only some free speech is good, and only some racism is bad.
On one hand, I still think both are good principles to have. On the other, holding them in the social climate of the last 15 years makes one into something of a punching bag. If saying "free speech is good" plays a role in making it so academics and journalists have no repercussions for calling people that look like me cancerous goblins that made deals with the devil, my willingness to think free speech is good dwindles rapidly.
Does this mean that my thought of "free speech is good" is not a true moral principle? So be it, it's not a moral principle. I think it is good in theory but the tradeoff cost can and has been reached.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I remember reading years ago about a survey someone gave to Christians and atheists, asking them what they find to be the most compelling argument for either side. It turned out that the most compelling argument for atheism, as rated by atheists didn't rank all that high for Christians, and the one rated by Christians wasn't all that compelling to atheists, and you saw the same patterns for arguments for Christianity. So what is the steelman argument for atheism? The one rated highest by atheists, since that is presumably what made them lose their faith (as that was in the times when people were Christian-by-default, rather than atheist-by-default), or the one rated highest by Christians, as that is what they consider the most challenging for their faith?
You asked for me to defend these arguments to the best of my ability, and that would indicate that answering in the mode of a Christian giving the best argument for atheism would be ok, but my best argument for the ideas you outlined might contain assumptions that you disagree with so deeply, that you want recognize my defense as defending your ideas anymore. On the other hand, without these assumptions, I won't find these defenses particularly compelling, so how much of a steelman are they then? Still, the best of my ability sounds like I would have to be the one to find them compelling, so this is the perspective I'll be taking, while trying to preserve your core premises as best as I can.
The kinds of arguments that I find the most compelling on these issues are ones that acknowledge that certain things happened that got us to where we are now. Regarding your first point, this would mean reformulating the part about unapologetic racism being suddenly more visible. There was plenty of unapologetic racism before Elon bought Twitter and changed the rules there, what changed is that the list of acceptable targets was expanded. The other part of the argument, about corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country is pretty straight forward. It's not sustainable for pretty much the same reasons why unapologetic anti-white racism turned out to be unsustainable. "We don't have to live like this, we can respect each other and work together for the common good" sounds like pretty good deal to me. It's most compelling version is liberals like TracingWoodgrains LARPing as Lee Kuan Yew, even if I don't find them credible. If concessions are made about the things that went wrong in the past, and I get assurances that skulls will be cracked and kneecaps will be broken to set it right, or better yet I get to see some gesture-of-good-faith kneecappings firsthand, I might indeed be compelled to drop the hammer on internet racists from - roughly speaking - my side.
Regarding your second point:
How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
That sounds like it's mostly an empirical argument, correct? If so, that's probably the easiest case to argue. If you look at Vivek / Elon / H1B-Gate, such strong pushback would have been hard to imagine even as recently as Trump's first term. The ideas might not be completely dominant on the right, but they're definitely not fringe anymore either.
Your third point is the most difficult to argue, because it requires the acceptance of several premises. First, did the strategic advantage of the US stem from the smartest and most ambitious people coming there, or did they come there because of American strategic advantages? As an americanized by media Europoor, that saw a bit of your country, I can tell you this isn't just a chicken vs. egg thing. My experience of America is that it has (or used to have) an entire culture conducive to making things happen, that you won't find anywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the UK, where you might get but a glimpse, but not more). I better not get into that too much, because the more I talk about it, the more it will undermine the core premise of your argument, and you asked me to argue for it.
The second part you have to argue is that the US is indeed losing it's economic advantage. That's the part I'm quite open to. A fellow motte-poster made the argument a few times that China's culture is adapting to enable the kind of cutting-edge innovation that was typically associated with America. Again, quite compelling, and all the denials feel pretty cope-y to me.
With the third part we start running into problems again, as you have to show that it's the lack of openness to immigration that would be responsible for the loss of the strategic advantage. I haven't really heard an argument for that, not even an unconvincing one, and I drawing a blank trying to argue for this. I can say what would convince me if you could demonstrate it: if you could see countries like Canada, that imported millions of immigrants, suddenly zoom past it's previous economic performance, that would make a very strong case for your argument.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Incidental contamination isn't impossible -- they're usually Cobalt, but Cesium has gotten into the scrap metal supply before -- but yeah, accidental food irradiation release seems more plausible. In turn, it's weirder, though: while there are some types of food irradiation involve just slapping raw and open product through the processing line (eg, fruit), for seafood specifically the norm is to pack the food first and then nuke the hell out of it. It's not great to have it on the wrapper, or maybe the original packaging is getting opened and the product repacked in ways that would get the material onto the food, but it's a weird bit compared to everything else being discussed.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1hr ago
We've had the same issue with Hlynka
Funny in hindsight, given that OP was revealed to be a Hlynka sockpuppet recently. Not sure if you saw.
07mk
1hr ago
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
So, those timelines are so extremely long, we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them may will die along the way as they encounter these unknown unknowns, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing.
Iirc he starts from the premise that spheres are an extremely inefficient shape to extract mineral resources from, compared to disassembling a planet into asteroids and having space drones mine them.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
Well, the actual sentence was:
There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.
It's a bit broken, but I interpreted that as roughly
"There might be friendlies in there, but the time and (expected-value) expense in lives of going in there outweighs the value of saving them."
There's a saying that "the exception proves the rule", i.e. if you note that no X are not Y (contrapositive: all X are Y), then this implies the existence of X that are Y. This is not how formal logic defines things, but most people consider it implicit in common parlance (indeed, one of the most common exact-words tricks is to violate this convention). And certainly, even in formal logic, saying that all X are Y does not imply that there aren't X that are Y. Hence, it's not saying there's nothing... saveable? Good? ...in there, just nothing worth the cost of saving.
Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.
Well, I mean, not quite nobody.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
The work to intentionally contaminate some shrimp is going to bring plenty of scrutiny. That’s like preparing to hijack a plane by carjacking an 18-wheeler.
Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes
What are you worried about? Volcanism or impactor would certainly spare Mars. We'd need to be extremely unlucky for a gamma ray burst to take out either Earth or Mars, but for both getting hit, we'd need to be absurdly unlucky. What else? Close-by supernova? I think we ruled out most candidates, there are no geriatric stars in our direct neighborhood.
The first two candidates certainly could end human civilization on Earth, but they usually only happen every few tens of millions of years. On such extreme timelines, it's unlikely humans would still be around, just from an evolutionary view. Also, humans being the cockroaches of the mammalian class, we'd probably have a pretty good chance to survive a minor event, at least as a species (if not as a civilization). After all, we eat everything and live everywhere.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth.
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
So, those timelines are so extremely long (and as such, the probabilities of an extinction event in the next couple of hundred years), we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I.
The presence of German culture in the US was pretty much forced out of the popular consciousness in two waves in the 1910s and 1940s for obvious reasons. It used to be a common language, even with German-language newspapers. Somehow the folks that get very upset about "destroying subcultures" never notice that example. You can still find bits and pieces around: Oktoberfest and such, and amusingly in elements of polka in Norteño music.
roystgnr
2hr ago
There's a famous legend about Henry Ford trying to engineer cars this way - if the car you buy has ten parts that might wear out, but in practice only nine of them ever fail, doesn't that mean you probably paid too much for an over-engineered design on the tenth?
If the lifetime of your car (or your body) was actually strictly determined by a L=min_i(L_i) formula, in fact, evolution would have a really tough time improving that - once you get L_i = L_j for some i,j, you can't improve L by improving either component, but only with a change that improves both at once. I think evolution is helped here by the addition of uncertainty - even when something like "heart failure kills people before cancer can" was true at some point in some average sense, there'd still be individuals getting lucky with their heart or unlucky with cancer and so cancer-fighting mutations would still give non-zero fitness improvements.
Perhaps a more subtle problem is that evolution doesn't care about the longevity of your body, only the fitness of your genes. By the time your biological mortality is really catching up to you, you're supposed to have a few kids and a bunch of grandkids running around, and from the point of view of an allele's frequency your life is only worth approximately as much as two of the former or four of the latter. So if age has made your body a significantly less efficient carrier of the genes you share, then evolution would be happy to put you out on an ice floe (as in a somewhat less mythical metaphor) rather than let you drag them down with you. Not only do alleles that reduce mortality become less useful in the face of different causes of death, but also in the face of other causes of weakness!
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
No, that doesn't follow. You can still exercise good faith, ie trust that people's stated moral principles as real unless proven otherwise, no martyrdom necessary.
To put it another way, it's fine to hold moral principles that do bring you material benefits as a bonus. It's just that if the benefits dry up, and you give up on the principles, then we can state pretty confidently that you never held them for moral reasons in the first place.
thejdizzler
2hr ago
Yea certainly! I've been very excited about nattokinase recently. This is a compound found in the Japanese fermented soybean dish Natto, that has been shown to reduce plaque by up to 99%. Been trying to get the parents on it with little success. I myself take it daily.
faceh
2hr ago
Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
This does sound like a problem that can be solved via pharmacueticals, some chemical that breaks up the plaques (without hurting other cells), and removing the plaque from the blood would probably involve filtering (possibly via an external device?) and reintroducing it.
It sounds more like an oil change type problem, rather than an engine swap type problem.
johnfabian
2hr ago
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.
thejdizzler
2hr ago
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
Corvos
2hr ago
High-risk high-reward strategy is to build up a clear list of cases where his behaviour lost the company money, either directly or in missed opportunities, and then take that list to the level above him once it gets big enough and explain how you or a different person could increase profits. I've seen a friend do that to great success, but you need to have a good reputation yourself plus a willing superior and a very delicate touch to make it work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
pbmonster
2hr ago
I don't know about acceptable ways that can be used right there, in the moment, in a social situation, that go beyond giving the target a death glare and maybe clenching a fist in your pocket
With enough verbal intelligence, you can also get away with quite some veiled ridicule or malicious compliance, while maintaining enough plausible deniability that shouldn't get your parents called. We had a class clown that got very entertaining when angry... I'm sure it made him feel better (especially in public with people laughing), although raising your kids to be obnoxious little shits might not be exactly advisable.
roystgnr
3hr ago
I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?
I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.
Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.
faceh
3hr ago
Is this considered an actual symptom of 'aging' wherein its inevitable as one gets older? I mean, do we see old people without much plaque as often as we see them with it (Yes yes, accounting for the survival of such persons to old age).
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Immigration is one of the issues where I tend to be more in agreement than not with the "anti" side.
Which is why I think your fist-pumping for "fuck yeah faster harder" accelerationism is ill-considered.
Because if you think future Democratic administrations cannot open the borders more than previous ones did, I think you're in for a world of disappointment. And that is frankly what I expect to happen.
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