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f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
3hr ago
I'll stop pointing it out even preemptively the day people stop saying " I don't want to be big, I'm okay with your size". That's not a compliment!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
I urge caution on taking Zeihan seriously. He's very charismatic, I watched one of his talks and the talk about rivers and geography was quite interesting.
But is he actually right? The man was predicting 'collapse of China in 5 years' for about the last 20 years. He's been predicting 'America number 1 as the rest of the world collapses' for ages. And that's not the world we're seeing. His core thesis wasn't just wrong, it was the opposite of what actually happened. It's not 'America retreats inwards in splendid isolation as everyone else fights, world sea trade collapses along with China', it's 'American relative power is diminishing as China, Russia, Iran work together to pressure and undermine the US world order, which America bitterly defends'.
Whenever you see Zeihan you should think 'what if he's just completely wrong'. And I think he's wrong specifically here too. If we're talking AGI by 2027 or 2030, then demographics doesn't really matter. War may well delay AGI but AI is now a part of military development. China has their robot gun dogs. Israel has their AI targeted airstrike program. Everyone wants the targeting and sensor edge. High-tech wars are won by sensors and software and AI is clearly important for both. China has Made in China 2025, high-tech development to develop new industrial forces. The US has the CHIPS Act. The race is on!
Population aging starts really mattering by mid-century. It already has some effect of course but how could it severely slow AI development, which is happening on the year-to-year level? And there are clear counter measures to aging-induced malaise. People can reduce the consumption of the old. Nations can reintroduce fertility. It's really not that hard. People naturally want to have children. It's only that vast cultural energy goes into suppressing this urge - TV, movies, memes and so on all create an expectation that young men and women should spend their most fertile years in higher education and work, not raising children. It's a cultural issue that needs a cultural solution.
Affirmative action for parents in the workforce and education. Glamourize parenthood. Return to traditional marriage, encourage devout religion. Anything but these measly subsidies.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
3hr ago
The vast majority of homicides are straightforward to solve: the motive, the weapon or even the perp himself are obvious or at least limited to a manageable subset of all possibilities.
Let's say you have a well-dressed man with no wallet or phone found shot in a dark alley. It's obviously a mugging gone wrong or a disagreement over purchasing some vice. You round up the usual suspects, they all have alibis. Maybe some traveling crew? You check all out-of-state plates seen last week in the neighborhood, all are boring civilians.
Okay, stage 2. Maybe it's a hit made to look like a mugging gone wrong? Again, you check the usual possibilities: infidelity, business troubles, money troubles at home. Nothing: the victim was a midlevel manager in charge of a boring department, kids are too young to plot against him, no signs of being gay or having a mistress.
You've hit stage 3: psycho killers. While muggings gone wrong are so common that you have a solid solution template, the template for catching psycho killers is very limited: get all other unsolved homicides and start looking for something in common. Any other similar victims? Similar weapons? Similar circumstances? If there's a match, go through every single detail again and try to find a connection.
Sometimes it's something actionable: you have three similar homicides, you trace the bus routes at each location and find out that there's a bus stop you can reach all three locations from (true crime story from the 90s!). Sometimes it's something obvious and not very useful.
Homicides you solve at stage 1 are cookie-cutter, the biggest challenge is doing the paperwork right. Homicides you solve at stage 2 are "interesting". Homicides you (usually don't) solve at stage 3 are fucking frustrating. However, they are a tiny minority of all cases. It's better to centralize this capacity as much as possible (now matter how heart-rending violated and butchered schoolgirls can be) and concentrate on stage 0: minimizing the number of stage 1 homicides that occur.
They'll be fine if they browse TikTok instead of reading books
Agree with most of it except for this. Tech screwed me up real good as an adult, and I grew up around it's more mundane forms. TikTok feels like techno-crack in comparison. Go outside and play with a stick, kid.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
4hr ago
It's a beautiful day in rural Kanto and I'm off work today and have had several Sakurao gin daisies, and so I regret to say that cannot write a coherent response worthy of your post.
But I will say that your points are well taken and I can't disagree with any of it... except that I swear I've seen tits in manga magazines marketed towards teenage boys. I know the more intentionally titillating stuff you're mentioning, and it wasn't that. But maybe I just mistook the market for the comic I was reading, I dunno.
Felagund
4hr ago
Stew is pretty good, as are chicken pot pies and similar, I like burgers (especially with bleu cheese), steak is great (if that counts), roasted potatoes are great. Buttered bread can be quite good, depending heavily on the bread. I do like (American) Mexican food a lot, but I would choose Western foods over most of the other things you listed. And I don't know of any rival in desserts, though perhaps I just haven't really looked.
Hyperion
4hr ago
But the Corded Ware culture, the common ancestor to all European peoples and languages, did originate from that part of Europe.
That's not true. The Greeks and Albanians are from late-Yamnaya/Catacomb culture people, the Basque still exist and there are Uralic and Turkish people as well.
Not to mention how much of the ancestry of these groups isn't from the Yamnaya or Corded-Ware culture people. Or how much of a mongrel race these Indo-Europeans groups were in the first place.
You just pick and choose what facts you want to fit your narrative.
Tollund_Man4
4hr ago
Both far left and far right would likely agree on official policies of banning books and jailing opponents of the regime,
Sure, but they probably wouldn’t agree on which books, and which opponents.
Felagund
4hr ago
Hyperion, Men At Arms (Pratchett), the exchange between the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch and the Lutheran theologians in the 1570s (in Latin and Greek, since that's what's free online, so it's slow going), Fear and Trembling.
Felagund
4hr ago
Is anyone planning to write something on the European Parliamentary election? I would have no idea what I was talking about if I tried. It looks like France just dissolved government and called snap elections as a result, so that, at least, is of note.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
4hr ago
Why is everyone on this site struggling with this so much?
Because there are things that women do to men that are more inherently destructive (in the same lopsided manner as this) due to men and women being different, yet no such uproar is heard when this happens.
When one notices that, one tends to stop caring about "vulnerable women" and switch to "if you want equal rights, you can take equal lefts". Either both genders get special protection from the things [that the other gender does] that will affect them most, or neither do; to do otherwise is not justice.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
Convincing a woman to give you her hand (as it were) or selling yourself on a lifetime commitment to one female? Or something else?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
Because I don't really like point-by-point replying (My own points were not one-to-one matching my interlocutor's) I'm going to throw out just a couple thoughts.
Porn in weekly magazines is marketed to men, as is the sexy manga. Kids' and teens' manga like Jump/ジャッンプ isn't without somewhat titillating pics, but there are no tits, depictions of la petit mort, etc.. That grown ass men read comics for porn is weird. No argument.
Organized crime yes definitely has its hand in porn. As much as I mourn that our planet has shit like Onlyfans, at least yes, the girls fucking dudes on pornhub linking to their OF accounts are probably freelancers the yaks can't touch (cough). Studio porn, you are either funded by or you are paying off the yaks. You can't even sell tchotchkes on Sanjo bridge without a visit from your friendly neighborhood chimpira, who are yak stooges waiting to move up in the ranks. Pay your fee and you're probably fine.
Are there porn freelancers selling DVDs? I bet no. I do not have the ability to speak with absolute certainty but I myself have no doubts. But who sells DVDs these days? I guess some do. Certainly the love hotel porn channels don't make their porn in-house. And sure, girls who have dubious scruples regarding porn must be legion. I think the main thing is the typical Japanese girl is more attractive and has a better body than her age mate in, say, America. I can't imagine it was always so, but hey I shall not fat shame. <-- Quote me and enjoy me.
As for what constitutes sex, I don't know, if your definition is "in love with each other" then probably not many Japanese past a certain age are having sex. I was rather conceptualizing sex as coitus, as dick in vagina with the requisite thrusting. I apologize for the crudity of this post but someone recently wrote on the Motte that they wanted more naughty words. So fuckin here they the fuck are.
Where were we? Is Japan porn-sodden? I won't necessarily say no. Maybe for me living here it's this is water, this is water, the sex is water, etc. It's not impossible. I just think there's lots of weird porn out there that's not Japanese as well.
AmrikeeAkbar
5hr ago
As tech advances, won't it take fewer people and less resources to "close the gap" to AI? Say Silicon Valley is on course to reach AGI in 20 years at current R&D rates. If Silicon Valley in 10 years has shrunk to half its current R&D rates, you can still hypothetically get to AGI, it would just take longer.
Tenaz
5hr ago
The counterargument is that your mind was created by purely external forces, so even if "you" are making decisions as of the present, you never got to choose who the "you" is that is making those decisions.
That said, I agree, I just didn't want to get into that when my point was more limited.
And spending a ton of money on an expensive masturbation habit rather than just trying to talk to girls and get in their pants seems pretty dysfunctional to me.
They're the same picture, it's just that one takes longer and isn't 100% successful just by applying resources to the problem.
(Marriages can be this too, come to think of it; if the groom pays the bride's family, that makes it prostitution by definition with the father as the pimp. And that's also the traditionalist answer to the "having a daughter is the ultimate cuck" copypasta/one-sided observation.)
There are adult establishments plainly visible in every Japanese city I've visited, most conbinis have a swimsuit/gravure magazine section right next to the kids' magazines, weekly manga magazines aimed at middle and high schoolers often have topless women in them, and the "adult" section in bookstores and DVD shops is often only demarcated by a flimsy noren curtain that obscures almost nothing (or better yet, just a line of tape on the ground that says 18禁止, lol)
That's true for most major cities in countries where that is legal, a good chunk of YA fantasy is focused on blood, booze, and boobs, and Western kids just type "pornhub.com" in the browser (complete with 'line of tape on the ground that says 18+', which only stops the ones that wouldn't have a problem seeing this stuff anyway).
AmrikeeAkbar
5hr ago
Apologies for the lateness of this reply; I go through long stretches of inactivity here. Maybe both geeks and sociopaths can be driving growth concurrently? At any given time, in any given movement, you can have participants along the whole spectrum of motives. Its probably also true that some movements have "better tech" than others; they're more likely to take root and have lasting impacts. The various Abrahamic monotheisms come to mind as movements with really strong tech. If anything, its probably that the better the underlying idea, the more status to be gained by getting in on the ground floor.
fmaa
5hr ago
It's debatable whether quantum physics is actually contradictory with determinism, but aside from that, I don't see why randomness is any worse than determinism. Either way our actions are ultimately governed by external forces.
I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the materialist position to call these external forces. Your mind is the processes in your brain, these processes not violating the laws of physics doesn't make them external.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
5hr ago
Someone posted this in ACX comments: https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/normalize-mediocre-parenting
It's a bit of a hot take, but I agree with the central point: you are not a failure if you don't provide your kids with the best possible childhood that kickstarts their adult life. They'll be fine if they go to a desegregated school and a land grant university. They'll be fine if they browse TikTok instead of reading books. They'll be fine if you spend 15 minutes on them every day instead of 2 hours. They'll be fine if you spend less money on them and they get bullied for "being poor".
fmaa
5hr ago
You are positing an ability significantly stronger than reading/writing minds. The mind is not a closed system, so 100% accurately predicting behavior would require simulating not just the brain, but all the external stimuli that brain receives, that is, their entire observable universe down to the detail level of their perception.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
Full beards or scruffy Hollywood shadow meant to drive the women wild?
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
5hr ago
Northern cuisines are bland in the same way Chinese people look the same: you can argue about the definitions, but there's a grain of truth in there: Northern European cuisines are built around things that keep well: cured meat and fish, fermented vegetables, root vegetables, fruit preserves. Manchurian and Dong Bei cuisines are not exactly explosions of taste either.
A reinvention like the New Nordic cuisine basically goes all in on rare dishes and ingredients that maximize flavor and unusualness.
Tenaz
6hr ago
we would be able to identify numerous specific people who we would have actual scientific proof will only contribute to society in highly negative ways, and we'll have to decide what to do with those people.
Sorry to fight the hypothetical, but I really doubt many people like this exist. Let's say you possess a computer capable of simulating the entire universe. Figuring out the future of a specific bad person based on simulations is only step one. After that there are a practically infinite number of simulation variations. What happens if he gets a concussion? If he gets put on this medication (which we can also perfectly simulate)? If all of his family members come back to life and tell him in unison to shape up?
This is godlike power we're talking about. The ability to simulate a human means the ability to simulate that human's response to any possible molecule or combination of molecules introduced in any manner. If there is even a conceptually possible medication which may help this person then this computer--which we've established can simulate the universe--will be able to find it. Ditto for any combination of events, up to and including brainwashing and wholly replacing their brain with a new brain.
The interesting question to me is not whether these people can be "saved" and made into productive citizens. In my opinion that's a foregone conclusion. The question is at what point this turns from helping someone into forcing them against their will into an outcome their previous self would consider undesirable, and whether doing so is nevertheless moral. I think not--you may as well create new people rather than modifying existing ones drastically, and do with the existing ones as you will.
Would we eliminate them? We could lock them away for life, but that's expensive, should we bother if we know they will never reform? Also our current criminal justice system in most of the first world locks people away for a pre-determined length of time when we prove they did a specific bad thing. It's rather a departure to be saying, our mind-scanning computer says you'll always be bad, so we're going to lock you away for life, or do actual brain editing on you to make you act right. Definitely can't see that one going wrong in any way.
To engage with the actual question you're asking--what do we do with people who are just innately bad?--I definitely think locking people up is fine morally. These simulations are supposed to be infallible after all. If you feel like you need some justification to lock them up, just use the simulation to contrive a scenario where they do a non-negligible amount of harm but don't actually kill someone, and then lock them up after they've done it.
Overpopulation was one of the reasons why the revolution happened. Cities used to be population sinks, but Russian cities weren't big enough to absorb surplus peasantry. A large supply of industrial workers meant that the price of labor was low, turning the proletariat into literal incels, since the only housing they could afford was not a room, but a single bunk.
Forced land redistribution started even before the Bolsheviks took power, they were the one smart enough to legitimize and endorse it (Decree on Land). The resulting yeomanization of Russia bought them about ten years of goodwill, until peasants started switching to cash crops and fodder from wheat.
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