domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
34m ago
I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?
Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)
I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.
P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.
I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.
P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.
I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.
I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
37m ago
Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
38m ago
· Edited 4m ago
I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.
Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.
roystgnr
40m ago
As has long been theorized [citations from various sources, three known to Ølvira; the theories cited are of long standing and nondisprovable] the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms, or [hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores. - "Twirlip of the Mists"
Soteriologian
47m ago
I have a position that satisfies me: as long as you can support yourself independently, without the subsidy of others, feel free to procreate with whatever disability you want.
But if your disability causes a drain on those around you, then no, you should not be permitted to try to produce children with the same disability.
wayfarer
51m ago
but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion.
nitpick: if job is so horrible that noone sane would agree to do it, then your choices include
- improving job situation
- relying on few insane people
- leaving it not done
- slavery
For example ancient world mines tended to be absolutely horrific, and at least partially it was unsolvable without technological progress. Aztecs were fans of human sacrifice and it is quite hard to get volunteers for that, especially at scale that Aztecs believed to be necessary. Also, bunch of deviant sexual practices.
But all of that is not really applicable in modern world or widely considered to be evil. I guess if you look hard enough you will find people going "actually sex slavery is fine and laudable" and meaning it, but...
kky
56m ago
I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.
OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.
So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
Fair, though I don't think this quite matches the pattern I was looking for, since it sounds like they had to almost be coerced into testing and made it clear beforehand that they would not actually care about this outcome. I guess it would be hard to contrive an actual example where someone wants testing but would make a point of keeping a child with Down's - maybe if they were trying to filter for a less politicized condition, like sickle cell anemia?
roystgnr
1hr ago
I don't think there was anything explicitly in the text to that effect, but it's at least a really good fan theory.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
Why am I getting vibes of renowned author Dan Brown?
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I have very mixed feelings about the topic, but the debate over gene therapy and cochlear implants in the deaf community is at least philosophically interesting. On one hand, functional ears are a blessing and it makes sense to heal people where possible, but on the other it's not wrong that this effectively implies the destruction of a legitimate cultural community built around the disability. Neither answer feels fully satisfying to me.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1hr ago
The requirement applies to at least $1.9 billion that states rely on to cover search-and-rescue equipment, emergency manager salaries and backup power systems among other expenses, according to 11 agency grant notices reviewed by Reuters.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.
The requirement is the Trump administration's latest effort to use federal funding to promote its views on Israel.
The Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees FEMA, in April, said that boycotting Israel is prohibited for states and cities receiving its grant funds.
I've followed the politicization of FEMA grants through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program which overwhelmingly goes to Jewish organizations. The recent Israel supplemental bill included a $390M increase to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program with $230M available through Sept 30, 2026. Schumer is pushing for an additional $500M bringing potential 2026 funding to $730M.
The timing of this is interesting also because it's in the middle of a significant back-and-forth between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson had Candace Owens on his show, where Tucker accused Fuentes of being a fed. To justify that claim, Tucker said that Fuentes accused Carlson's father of being in the CIA which was a fact that Carlson claimed to not know until his father's death in March.
Tucker also gave a line of criticism of Fuentes that Tucker himself gave in nearly exact words to Pat Buchanan in 1999.
How does this tie in together? Where is the pushback against the clear Israeli influence in the US government supposed to come from in the Right Wing? It's only coming from Fuentes and DR Twitter. Stuff like this gives Fuentes credibility regarding his criticisms of Israeli influence- it seems Tucker Carlson is trying to ride the fine line between providing an outlet for criticism of Israeli influence among the Right Wing but still gatekeeping Nick Fuentes from going further mainstream.
Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity
Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:
The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.
As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.
Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.
Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.
Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.
faceh
1hr ago
Hard to analogize, but I could think of it like how humans can curate a garden or similar patch of earth to be more orderly than random nature, and constrain where and how the plants grow by application of fertilizer, pesticide, water, herbicide, etc. etc.
And we humans like to combat weeds that would otherwise outcompete and choke out the rest of the plants.
If there are higher dimensions that we can't successfully perceive let alone access, a superintelligence might be able to hide machinery or mechanisms or in there that do the curating along strictly defined boundaries to keep certain variables in certain regions within specific bounds. From the "plants" perspective they can't perceive this interference other than noticing some other areas growing faster or slower than they are.
If there was a superintelligence that wanted to prevent weeds overrunning the galactic garden, they might set up a portion of the garden were plant growth is constrained and slow, and have a process in place to spray a massive does of weedkiller (which also takes out 'good' plants) on any sector that gets overrun.
We, as plants, can't really understand how the herbicides work but the effects would be quite observable.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Agreed on all counts.
You get this pre-leftist strain of environmentalism combined with such a feudal, reactionary setting.
Prescient indeed.
No_one
1hr ago
Classical liberalism is unsustainable, probably inherently because espousing it means leaving yourself defenseless against parasites of liberalism, such as various forms of communism.
And no, you can't simply declare 'we won't have nice people and nice things in my liberalism' to avoid the progressive cancer.
So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias. Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else. Same as e.g. the brief window of political sanity in farming civilization while people who survived thru civil wars were in power.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.
...
Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.
...
Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.
I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.
faceh
1hr ago
I don't recall any explicit statement of it, other than maybe some of in-novel forum poster speculating out loud.
But literally every other piece of it was sort of set out.
-
Superintelligences exist, and are in fact common/inevitable in the higher zones. They could easily squish any lower-level civ if they cared to.
-
Superintelligences occasionally disappear after transcending into something even higher in existence.
-
Superintelligences can set up all sorts of long-term plans and have hidden mechanisms in place to facilitate those plans (specifically, how the Blight used the Skrodes).
-
Every time the Blight arises it tries to eat the entire galaxy, and thus only those Civilizations in the slow zones would be 'safe,' so the creation of the slow zones was presumably a failsafe to keep malicious intelligences from ever 'winning' fully.
-
Finally, the Countermeasure does have a way to expand the slow zone on demand, although its obviously a very difficult, involved, energy intensive process, so it wouldn't be done arbitrarily.
It definitely resembles the concept of reformatting or otherwise partially wiping a hard drive to remove a virus that has managed to infect enough files that a simple hunter-killer program won't do.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
At least in this case I think there is an added political dimension of reluctance to update the model: "You were happy enough to overestimate [measurement] for my opponent last term, and now you want to publish lower estimates, maybe even underestimates on my watch. Are you trying to display partisan bias?"
In addition to the value of "we've at least measured it consistently for the last century, even if there are known issues with it it's easier to fix those in post", which also has some value.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
I understand how that makes sense in-universe, but my objection is that makes no sense in the real world. I see no viable mechanism by which a real ASI could pull that off IRL, without simply forcing everyone into a simulation it controls. As I've said in a reply to @TitaniumButterfly, not even God can make 2+2=5.
It is a good conceit for a story, but it doesn't apply to reality.
erwgv3g34
2hr ago
Its a hell of a vehicle to create tense action scenes showcasing cool-looking scifi military materiel vs. equally cool-looking fantasy creatures.
Now I wonder what a movie adaptation of Leviathan would look like... Hey, wait a minute, there is an anime adaptation! I did not know this; I'll have to check it out.
I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.
The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with
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