domain:bracero.substack.com
cjet79
3d ago
Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?
Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.
The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.
striker
3d ago
Agree with this, for sure. When I say “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach”, I don’t at all mean you should be thrown off the platform. What I do mean is the platform has no obligation to algorithmically promote what you say to other people on the internet.
The people who follow you is an interesting question, and a much thornier one for Internet user preferences.
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There’s too much content, and we “follow” too many accounts, for reverse-chronological content to work. If it ever worked, it certainly cannot work now, with AI helping everyone pump out 10x to 100x more content and content variations than before. So there’s just too much. Some sorting algorithm is required but…
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I hate the algorithms. They act like crack and plug me in intravenously (figuratively speaking) to the brain-rotting content I can’t stop myself from consuming. I know I am better off without the algorithms (as they’ve evolved in 2022-25). In 2016-21, the algorithms brought me interesting, heterodox ideas and content, and I was psychologically and epistemologically better off as a result. That has flipped since 2022 on almost every platform. (YouTube seems to be an exception.)
striker
3d ago
Algorithms are supposed to personalize your feed so that content you're interested in is shown to you
This is obviously wishful thinking. We don’t own the algorithms. The tech companies that own the platforms own the algorithms. Companies operate in service of shareholder value. Therefore algorithms are constructed for the set of events, circumstances and behaviours that creates most shareholder value. Definitely not for you or me, no matter how many “For You” tabs you see.
The point stands. You can say whatever you want. No media / social media company is obliged to take that and bring it to one or a hundred or a million other people.
Also – and this is the most important point of all - having the freedom to say whatever you want is good, because you might win someone (or a whole society) over to your way of thinking. But if the opposite happens, and someone or society decides you’re a crackpot and they don’t want to hear from you ever again, that’s okay too. The one who listens has as much freedom as the one who speaks.
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, and the immediate obvious question this raises is, "Did this idea propagate to me because it has an advantage in the realm of ideas, or because it has an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas?" I could embrace hubris, declare that I'm the one who won't get zombified if bit, the one where when I complain that the umpire's strike zone is too big when my favorite baseball team is on offense, it's because the ump's zone really is too big, the one that can truly reliably judge this idea as "better," not merely "better at propagating itself." In which case, I suppose just shutting down all opposing opinions and enforcing it with an iron fist seems like a pretty attractive solution. Of course, there's the issue that the idea that this is a viable solution could have propagated to me because it's good at propagating itself, even if it isn't actually good. And if I'm wrong on that, then my attempts to crush my enemies could be disastrous. So I'm cynically motivated to open up this idea to criticism, so as to tear away its weaknesses, harden its strengths, and make it more capable of crushing my enemies when implemented.
But also, if I decide that it matters to me that the ideas that I propagate are actually ideas that are better, not merely ones that were better at convincing me, then I should open up these ideas to quite a lot of criticism, certainly at least within the ballpark of what I would judge as "too much," because the fact that I already believe these ideas means that I can't be relied on not to underestimate how much criticism is warranted.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Kind of. Compare "life" to a game though...
- You only get one chance to play, with permadeath. That means you have to be really, really careful and avoid taking risks.
- No fast travel. It takes forever just to get anywhere
- There's only one server and way too many players, so all the best stuff has massive queues
- It's been running a long time, so a lot of stuff is dominated by powergames and guilds who started long before you were ever born
- Completely OP, some stuff is just way better than other stuff, and if you choose wrong you're screwed
- Tons of trolling and toxic players who never get banned
- Most of us never get to fight or rule anything. We're just stuck grinding at a boring job
- Tons of random luck
I don't know, someone needs to revamp this "life"
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3d ago
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
You should certainly make an effort to study philosophy then! It's right up your alley. (The tradition of philosophers tearing down Platonic ideals goes back to at least Plato.)
TeknOShEeP
3d ago
Engage maximum cynacism mode! No nukes are needed. In fact, nukes are overrated. Two squadrons of B-52s can drop the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb via conventional ordnance, except those can all be individually targeted down to an arbitrarily precise degree as smart bombs, and so are actually far more devastating. 80% of Iraq's oil is clustered in the southeast, you just blow any civilization near them off of the map, occupy the oil fields, and declare a 200km buffer zone between your occupation area on top of the oil fields and the rest of Iraq. Anything or anyone that enters the buffer zone will be destroyed without warning.
Literal robbery? Absolutely. But perhaps more humane in the long run that the almost quarter-century clusterfuck we have now.
07mk
3d ago
You discuss school and jobs, but I don't think any of that applies to entertainment media. Yes, it's usually good that we force children to go to school. It might even be good if we were to force adults to go to work, even ones that are independently wealthy or happy enough to subsist on welfare. But entertainment media? We currently have no way of forcing adults to watch certain pieces of media that we think would be good for them. Adults have pretty free choice - today more than ever - to seek out entertainment media as they wish, and though "high art" stuff are very very niche, they're still a significant niche.
This indicates that people actually seek this stuff out voluntarily. Where I see gen-AI being a boon for this is that we can have far higher throughput of art that is considered "good" by whatever "high art" standards are held by people with taste and discernment and [whatever characteristic that true connoisseurs have], and also for far more custom artworks that provide exactly the right amount of challenge to enrich someone's life without being so challenging as to make them shut down and reject it.
And building on that, there's also the fact that it's quite possible to train AI on media that makes people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I'm glad I did," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, and there was nothing about it that piqued my interest, so I decided not to check it out," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I regret doing so," as well as many other combinations of similar concepts. And I don't see why some near-future gen-AI couldn't generate media that creates reactions similar to the first one while avoiding the latter ones fairly consistently.
faceh
3d ago
My generalized advice for finding a friend group: learn to fight.
That's your best chance at finding physically fit, socially active, yet potentially nerdy male friends out there. 28 is a fine age to start. That's where I found the core of my current social group.
Online friend groups can be great but you really need to be having gatherings in physical space, where a woman can actually see you in person and you can actually monopolize her attention for a while if you want.
I'm speaking as someone who has had to completely rebuild/reform friend groups like half-a-dozen times over the years, and may have to do so again soon, since most of the dudes in my current group have gotten into stable relationships and... predictably, are putting less time in being social. And the guys who are still around are, unfortunately, the ones who've had bad luck with women.
All that is to say that it will work, but you might have to be the guy who does most of the hard work up front.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
If your doctor's office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one.
Mine uses Medical Brain.
Corvos
3d ago
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, your ideas bring true can (from this perspective) be a significant disadvantage because you cannot dress them up as prettily or make them as appealing as someone whose ideas are all lies.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
3d ago
Relabelling an unpopular idea rarely, if ever, works. The fundamental problem is that free speech, called by any other name, is no longer popular. If you doubt this fact, find whatever the most incinidary post of the day made by a [left/right] aligned person is, then ask a [right/left] aligned group if said speech should be "platformed".
The reality you have to operate in now is one where free speech, is deeply unpopular, insofar as said speech is something inflammatory that the reader is outraged by. The slogan you so despise is just people broadcasting their honest, genuine intent: "there should be consequences to speech I disagree with".
BahRamYou
3d ago
So, as someone who once wanted to be a professor but gave up on it because I'm a white male with some non-woke beliefs and the whole thing seemed hopelessly rigged against me... is there any chance for me to go back into academia now and get a position? or is it still just clogged with way too many grad students chasing way too few tenured positions, and the whole system rigged in favor of woke types?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility
How does that work? Under what population parameters?
07mk
3d ago
Correct. So those who are against free speech on the basis of conflict theory are openly admitting that they don't believe that they have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And people are absolutely allowed to believe, "My ideas are bad, but it should win over the good ideas anyway, and I will make it so through smashing the skulls of the proponents of the good ideas." But I don't think that's something they actually believe. I think they actually believe that their ideas are good, i.e. have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And I think their behavior indicates that they're deathly insecure about this belief and are deathly fearful of what might happen if someone checks.
faceh
3d ago
Funny, one large reason I post is to poke holes in 'mindblowing' arguments or to just point out some glaring counterexample that demolishes up a convenient narrative if acknowledged.
I've come to learn that the way the world 'really' works is messy and on the fringes is quite unknowable, and I've come to gain an instinctive skepticism towards anyone who claims to have a insight that explains large, abstract phenomena.
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
How many folks on the motte are into "emotional work," or self improvement, therapy, etc?
I have found a lot of value in practices designed to get you in touch with your emotions like somatic emotional meditations, loving kindness meditation, and even some IFS style stuff where you say loving things to yourself in the mirror, etc.
Unfortunately, being a relatively conservative Orthodox Christian, I find it quite difficult to explain the benefit of these practices to others in my social circles. I'm admittedly a relatively recent convert (in the last few years) but I do take the faith very seriously.
Anyway, just curious if other people here are open to this sort of thing?
felipec
unbelief
3d ago
We should tabboo both "freedom of speech" and your proposed "Open Ideas." The contention in these debates is that we have an obligation to forebear from certain courses of action in response to certain speech acts by others.
But humans need words to communicate -- and apparently so do other rational agents. It's nearly imposible to talk about empathy, mass formation psychosis, rent-seeking, woke ideology, frequency illusion, etc. without using these words.
Did I breach an obligation to A by these actions?
That doesn't depend on either freedom of speech or Open Ideas.
07mk
3d ago
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.
I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.
oats_son
3d ago
I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.
There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.
felipec
unbelief
3d ago
Interesting. I tried the same, but the earliest I could find were comments from 2010, and it's the same thing: people were already using as if it was part of the Zeitgeist, but no source.
This reminds me of cargo cults. People suddenly start repeating some dogma with zero understanding why it's there in the first place.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
I think what he means is that the place is perfectly open to Google CrawlBot, and how many AGP antisemites can there be in the world? Between your posts here, and the rest of your Internet fingerprint, you might get got like Light Yagami.
Some of us have come to terms with it, even as we maintain a fig leaf of plausible deniability, but he might not be ready for it.
TheDemonRazgriz
3d ago
Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.
I don't agree with this mistake/conflict categorization, but if you are going to use it, what I'm saying that mistake theorists don't seem particularly interested in understanding what freedom of speech was supposed to be either.
It's not possible to move forward when neither side is interested in reframing freedom of speech to what it was supposed to be.
Personally I think we're going to see (are seeing) a bifurcation in those who are hopelessly taken in/addicted to the AI's sway, and those who do see it more as a mere instrumental affordance for achieving certain goals, that they can still turn away from to enjoy real world activities and interactions.
I don't know which of these groups will end up being larger, but I'd bet that the AI-vulnerable are around 60% of the U.S. population.
This is a very nice dream, and maybe for a brief period of time it will be possible, but alas we are all but training data for the model so by running such a business via their systems, we'll be teaching the system how to run the businesses without us. I don't see how it ends up any other way.
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