domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
How much do you think the average prospective parents care about hair color, and coarsely, height? I assume for the latter it isn't "Will be 74 inches tall", and most parents aren't looking to start an NBA team accidentally. I see how it could happen, and why that's concerning, but it seems IMO likely that at least one of (1) nurture matters more than straight genetics here, (2) most parents only have strong preferences against major genetic ailments, and even (3) IQ-linked genes may have negative externalities when all selected for at once (many such debates around).
I think this also assumes ubiquitous IVF, as opposed to the "conceived in the Riviera" approach considered in Gattaca.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
3d ago
State-specific.
KMC
3d ago
I guarantee that she considers herself black, and doesn't consider herself white.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
Well I took the bar exam this week. It sucked, but it's over.
UBE or a state-specific one?
faceh
3d ago
There's a hypercapitalism argument for it, I think.
If we can get them to inject their dollars into the system and saddle them with a requirement that they must stay productive for years and years on end to service their debt, in theory the system captures more of the value they produce than it otherwise might.
And its even BETTER if they eventually get married, and now their husband's productivity can be siphoned off to service her debt too.
That is, people who aren't smart/informed enough to use their debt load wisely are probably never going to make good decisions with money, so maybe it's better than they hand a decent chunk of their salary over to their creditors in perpetuity, since the creditors can at least invest it more wisely.
I despise this argument line, but I can see why some might support it, EVEN aside from egalitarian concerns.
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
I’m genuinely curious as to what the Chinese Communist take on this will be.
On the one hand, this could very well be their golden ticket, not just out of their apparently terminal fertility/relationship-formation doom spiral, but to an entire population of superhuman Han Chinese who could utterly mog the rest of humanity in every single human endeavor—and if this race of Übermenschen is ushered in by the CCP, they will effectively have an eternal Mandate of Heaven. This has been every Chinese ruler’s wet dream since the time of Confucius, if not earlier.
On the other hand, the CCP has not looked too kindly on past attempts at human genetic engineering; see, for example, how they threw He Jiankui in prison for 3 years over his CRISPR experiments. And of course, the very idea that individuals may have innate differences that cannot be attributed to their environment is utter anathema to Marxist orthodoxy—whence Lysenkoism in the Stalin era. Now, my sense is that the (post-Mao) CCP wouldn’t force the scientific establishment to kowtow to politics the way Stalin did: they know that that way lies the ignominious end of China’s ascendancy on the global scientific stage. But at the same time, they really are true believers in Marx, Lenin, and Mao to an extent that most western commentators don’t fully appreciate.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
Wolfe
I remain ever thankful that I stumbled upon a copy of Shadow & Claw at a comic book store when I was in my early 20s and bought it based upon the name and badass cover. Any book store that doesn't stock a copy in the scifi/fantasy section is immediately suspect.
RaiderOfALostTusken
3d ago
Your story feels like one of my favorite Mr. Bean bits where he has to write a test - down to the material neurosis to the doing the wrong test. I'm sure you've seen it but if not
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
So again yes I would suggest that those ideas would in fact have spread absent academia, because race particularly is a fundamental issue within America.
Absent academia those ideas look more like the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, and less like Robin Diangelo and other NYT bestsellers.
To borrow from an esteemed set of cultural artifacts, the psychic energy would be the same 35 foot 600 pound twinkie, but wouldn't select the same form of the destroyer.
You absolutely do not need a high status institution for this. It's noticed because it is true. Previous actions have in fact shaped the present. It doesn't require high brow thinking to realise.
It takes a certain kind of mind that didn't exist before to think maybe people shouldn't be policed or punished based on race.
Letting people die for "health equity" is so high brow it's left the head entirely.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
In reading some responses to yutes asking why Ozzy was such a big deal, I noticed the answers tended to follow the grug/midwit/genius bell curve.
faceh
3d ago
It would be nice if the incentives were aligned to teach the nerd some toughness that he is capable of learning along the way,
but it shouldn't come at a cost of putting thugs ahead. That would be a perversion of what I believe a society of legal adults should look like (i.e. it shouldn't look like a hunter-gatherer tribe).
I would certainly make the point that thugs will commit thuggery whether or not we give them the license to do so or not. I think the reason we want to toughen up the nerd is so they are capable of embracing ALL of the responsibility we might expect of an adult, including coming to the defense of their community if a bunch of thugs band together and try to take the things they feel they're being denied.
So yeah, we might want to have a test that exclude thugs from certain legal rights... but the larger question there is what do we do with them after the test, they're still around, and still able to act on their preferences, even if our legal system doesn't recognize their status.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Yeah, but everything's illegal in New Jersey. And there's a loophole:
As used in this section, "cloning of a human being" means the replication of a human individual by cultivating a cell with genetic material through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual.
Note the "and". If you can skip the egg stage, you can clone away.
sammysoccer411
3d ago
What's any large company (say, over 10,000 people), in any other field than tech, that you positively like? If you're like me, you'd struggle to name one.
The issue here is that human psychology is wired for dealing with people. We like people who are strong and make the right 'I am your ally' sounds, and dislike people who fail these regards. The root of these instincts is evolution--the proto-humans that used these metrics to make the right intra-tribal alliances reproduced--and are thus deeply, deeply, deeply, wired.
An emergent property here is that people tend to really dislike those they find ingenuine. People whom make 'ally' sounds but don't follow through are not just enemies, but resource pits too. In my personal experience, I would say people dislike the ingenuine even more than they dislike pronounced enemies, although a citation is definitely needed here.
A large company can never make 'ally' sounds for too long. The charismatic founder must eventually leave, and profit incentives forever whittle away at any mission state, and there are too many employees for any consensus-making, so eventually all corporations must land, politically, in some spot between 'wishy-washy' and 'generic corporate positivity'.
But does this dislike make corporations 'evil'? I don't think that's entirely fair.
Corporations are amoral. They will always do exactly what leads to greatest increase in stock price, or their c-suite will be sued for not doing so. Amoral might not be 'good', and amoral is very dislikeable, but amoral is not evil.
What, for many, is fantastic about big tech is that it's a true 'nerd meritocracy'. This might be where the reverence you're seeing comes from. Most high-paying fields outside of tech place a high premium on social skills (sales, business, finance, politics, law) or else are not true meritocracies (academia, also law). For the smart but less socially-inclined, big tech broadly is high-paying (strong) and wants to hire people like you ('ally').
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
Remember just because academia creates a term for a thing it doesn't mean that's where it came from.
I might be low human capital an idiot but this sentence is sailing over my head in whatever point you're trying to make. How is creating a thing not where it came from?
Streetcorner shizos don't come up with multisyllabic nonsense like "cisheteronormativity," you need the carefully nurtured Ivory Tower Hothouse kind. Gotta be real smart to be that dumb, as the saying goes.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I confess I'm pessimistic here. If I had my way we would just declare this whole field a crime against humanity and end it there, but the human race has generally been pretty bad at putting genies back in bottles. We mostly managed the first time with eugenics, but we may not a second time.
I don't have a whole lot to say about the Scott Alexander article either other than that this is another of the sporadic posts that remind me that, while I like some of his writing, I occasionally need to remind myself that he is, for lack of a better term, a moral alien.
marinuso
3d ago
We've had screenings for things like Down's Syndrome for a while, and we do not (in general) oppose abortions in those cases. Even countries that ban elective abortions completely tend to allow it in cases of malformation, which Down's Syndrome would count as. And then you just try again. This doesn't seem too different in concept, just a lot easier and more flexible. In this case, too, the only people who don't do this are certain religious people. The genetic material is still coming from the parents, they're not actually making 'designer babies' or superhumans or anything of the sort.
We're not getting Gattaca. The problem there was that they put DNA tests everywhere in their society. That's the dystopian bit. And who would have anything to gain by doing that?
I don't think we are even functional enough as a society. If we're getting a dystopia, we're getting "Brazil". (With perhaps some shades of "Demolition Man".) We kind of already saw this during Covid with the half-working tracking apps and the like. Both in the fact that the government's attempt at oppression frequently hurt random strangers by accident while not even really dealing with the actual dissidents, and in the fact that the general populace mostly just shrugged about it all.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
It's not clear to me if that's their current net contribution (given the ages of immigrants today) or their lifetime net contributions.
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic. My gripe is really that romantasy is being claimed as fantasy and is polluting IRL conversations on good fantasy books. But you sort of gave some ammo even to the hyperbolic argument. I love Joe Abercrombie, and I think Mark Lawrence is a good author. Neither of their earlier books are particularly woke. Some could even claim the opposite but as you pointed out they definitely have changed. And these are at least the upper echelon on fantasy authors. I went into the bookstore recently to grab "The Murderbot Diaries" and in that sci-fi/fantasy section I couldn't help but see how many slop authors or romantasy books absolutely filled the shelves. To the point that I had a hankering for some Steven Brust's Taltos and it was not there, crowded out for books on Fairy Magic Academy and R.F Kaung's tired racial rage disguised as historical fantasy. They had the more mainstream famous ones of course: Dune, GoT, Cosmere, and Kingkiller (Despite Rothfuss being too far up his own ass to ever finish it.) But not the greats: Pratchett, Erikson, Bakker, Wolfe, Brust, Gemmel, Cooke, etc...
Maybe I've gotten too old (figuratively, I'm in my early 30s), but I definitely remember roaming the wilderness of the library, in my youth, picking up weird, zany, interesting fantasy books based on the covers and the synopsizes, and them having actual quality and being enjoyable non-sloppy, non-political reads.
Edit:
Age of Madness trilogy (Joe Abercrombie)
I want to push back on the claimed wokeness of this one a bit, I read it when it first released, in 2021 so forgive me if my remembrance of the details are murkier. First off, the hyper-competent female character is literally a robber-baron sweat shop owner who is in a forbidden love affair with her stepbrother (The urbane prince). She is in no way portrayed as good person or even super competent (The whole riot arc in the first book?) since her "father" (Head of the CIA) pretty much runs the country and lavishes everything on her. I don't remember the young (18) country lord being racist. An arrogant bigot: Yes. He's also just a homophobe not a closet homosexual. Yes, his retainers were gay, he has a nasty reaction to it, but I don't remember ever thinking he was secretly into the retainers in any other way than a platonic male bonding way. The urbane, metrosexual, openminded prince gets the shit end of the stick by an astounding degree even if you end up rooting for him. He also bumbles through a lot of stuff and is essentially the trope of rich wastrel sons being useless. The whole burners/breakers plot is clearly mapped to activists being absolutely shit, not really wanting a functioning society and also secretly being funded by the head of the CIA to take down the big banks (Who are also trying to control society). And not in a way that maps onto our political climate neatly.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
When I took the bar exam I was curious about the whole proctor situation. I mean, who takes a job that works four days a year? They were all elderly and obviously retired, but I thought that maybe they worked for some kind of proctor service where they would occasionally work whatever exam needed proctoring. But then I asked one of them and nope, they worked two days in February and two in July. I then talked to the guy who was reading all the instructions and looked to be in charge, thinking that he might be a professional, but no, he got the job after someone saw him in a community theater production and thought he had a good speaking voice.
So for the New York thing, I do remember them talking about what would happen in case of an emergency, but it was more like a fire or something else that would cause the building to be evacuated, and they emphasized that that had never happened (I guess they'll have to change that language now). I can't remember if they said anything about medical emergencies, but they did emphasize that the test would not stop for any reason. A friend from law school whom I took the test with (in February, the day after a snowstorm) said that because the MBE is published only twice a year all states have to administer it on the same day to prevent the answers from getting out. Even beyond that, there are logistics concerns that make it really inconvenient to postpone anything, and there's a need to reassure students who have been stressing out about the test for months that things aren't going to be delayed and the test will proceed as normal regardless of what happens.
So you have proctors who are given very strict instructions, with no one from the Board of Bar Examiners present with the authority to grant exceptions, and you get situations like this. It seems like the proctors weren't given adequate training in how to respond and they doggedly stuck to the rules. To be fair, I don't know if yelling was the best response on the part of the students; I think a more appropriate instruction would be to quietly inform a proctor, with the main guy making a general announcement that there has been a medical emergency and EMS has been called. It said in the Reddit comments that Connecticut and Florida kept EMS on hand to deal with these situations, which seems like a good idea. Also, there was some mention of students deliberately not helping because they were worried about the test. Fuck that, if someone is going to die, having to retake it in six months isn't the end of the world.
While we're on the subject of bar exams, I had an idea when I took it called the Mount Everest of Lays. There may be more difficult situations to get laid in, but I haven't though of one that has the same combination of a necessarily limited time frame, situational inappropriateness (without being too inappropriate), and theoretical availability of women. The idea is getting laid on the evening between the two days of the bar exam with someone you met at the bar exam. The strategy would be to finish early, then hang around the room where they let you keep your stuff, waiting for an attractive member of the opposite sex to come in. You'd have an instant entree for conversing with a stranger, seeing as you both finished early. Then you'd see if she wants to go to lunch, or grab a drink, depending on whether it's the morning or afternoon session. Lunch would be ideal, because it's low-commitment and would allow you to establish a rapport before you asked her out for drinks later. Either way, after the first day of the exam you ask her for dinner and/or drinks and try to make your move.
It goes without saying that most people are incredibly stressed by the bar exam and invest a lot of time into studying for it. But it's also true that pretty much anyone who knows about prepping for it will tell you that you're better off not studying the night before the test, because after studying for two months you need to relax and not get too stressed. You can use this to your advantage since she might not have anyone in town to hang out with and distract her, and you can press the fact that she needs to relax all the way into bed. I will concede that this is an exceptionally low-probability play, but the theoretical framework is there. When I took the bar exam I finished early both sessions but didn't get the opportunity to hit on anyone. That's how I imagine it would go for most people.
Another fun bar exam story: One of the guys I was sitting next to was a little older and obviously neurotic. The rules specify what you're allowed to bring in with you and he had exactly everything you're allowed to bring in with you, including a plastic baggie filled with Certs or something like that. I rightly assumed that this guy was a bit more anxious than the average test-taker. Shortly into the exam, he consumed one of the Certs by biting it in half. I chuckled at the thought of quietly asking him to knock it off since it was keeping me from focusing on the test, which was guaranteed to make this guy feel somewhat ashamed for his minor breach of etiquette. A few minutes later, I noticed something else.
The Pennsylvania Bar Exam includes a practical component where you're given materials and asked to draft something—a brief, a motion, etc.—based on them. Every test prep service says that component should not be started until all the essay questions are complete, as it's really easy to get lost in the project and use up an inordinate amount of time. I glanced in his direction shortly after the test started and noticed that he immediately started on the practical section. Uh oh. I glance over again periodically to see where he's at with it. Every time he was still working on it. An hour in and he's still working on it. Two hours in and he's still working on it. Finally, with like 45 minutes to go, he finally starts on the first of three essay questions. I finish about ten minutes early and leave. As I'm walking to lunch, I break out laughing at the prospect of having stayed until the end to see how he finished. As I left he was frantically scribbling the beginning of the last essay. I wondered how he'd react if I had said "Man, you started the practical part first. BIG MISTAKE! You're gonna fail, dude.
I mean, seriously, how could a guy who is this neurotic not know that you save the practical part until last. Even starting it first, how could he be that oblivious to time management? Either way, had I actually said that, and made the earlier remark about the Certs, I probably would have put this guy on full tilt for the rest of the exam, and would have risked him having a heart attack and I probably would have failed myself after taking the time to render aid. Then again, for all I know he's been repeatedly failing the bar for the past fifteen years because he still hasn't figured out that you don't do the practical part first, and I could have tipped him off early and saved him a ton of trouble. Then again, the opportunity to get laid, how ever infinitesimal the chance, is worth more than causing unnecessary anxiety for laughs.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
3d ago
It is pretty well-contained on Boardgamegeek. I avoid the political boards, and find less politics on the rest of the 'Geek than I do almost anywhere else. I recently read the CGE-bashing threads on Rainbow Gaming because they stopped doing guided tours of the Bedlam mental hospital 100 years ago, but the mods are good at keeping the board gaming forum and the mental hospital separate.
The culture that is Boardgamegeek needs to keep politics out of the main boards because there are a lot of conservative-leaning groups in board gaming - you have the grognards, a lot of Zoomer barstool conservatives, and the Mormons (The LDS Church encourage board gaming as a morally healthy way of keeping kids off screens). At the very least you need to grognards and the People of Hair Colour on the same forum in order to be the go-to place to advertise the big miniatures-based Kickstarters.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
That is a fun fact!!!! It should be EVEN MORE ILLEGAL THOUGH! Nah joking, but not surprised.
It is surprising to me that cloning has been more legislated than trait based embryo selection. I suppose the wedge was IVF and selecting against major health issues like sickle-cell anemia, and now that wedge is being used to just push things open to full blown selecting for IQ, height, hair color, etc.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
You'd think we would at least have a discussion as to whether this should be legal or not
Fun fact: In New Jersey, cloning a human is in the same category (first-degree crime) as murder.
No_one
3d ago
Yeah.
Ivy league schools now have 'optional' video statements.. https://www.ivycoach.com/the-ivy-coach-blog/college-admissions/video-prompts-on-college-applications/
Man, do these people love to discriminate. Would be very funny if Feds mandated something like race/sex/background blinded tests and they could pick only based on test / essay results..
The first issue is that you're comparing the actions of an authoritarian dictatorship to those of a liberal democracy. If incontrovertible evidence came out that Putin had Prigozhin, such as the meticulous documentation you suggest, what do you think the repercussions would be for Putin? How would they compare with the repercussion faced by an American president facing similar allegations and similar evidence?
I don't think Putin would face much repercussions at all. How would that compare to an American president? Hard to say, and it probably depends on the president. Trump would probably be hung from a lamp-post, but Obama or Bush? There was already a case where Obama sentenced an American citizen to death, with no due process, and the execution killing his underage son, and there was zero repercussions for him. Or take MKULTRA, where we had incontrovertible evidence that the CIA was conducting experiments on unwilling American citizens, no one faced any charges for that either.
Prigozhin launched a rebellion against the Russian army during the middle of a war. This is not controversial.
Yeah, the reason why I took Prigozhin as an example is because it's so obvious and glaring, but the point I was making was different. If you had to convince a Putin supporter invested in believing it was an accident, that it was, in fact an assassination, you'd be having a hell of a time. He'd be doing essentially what you are, and characterizing any skepticism of Russian institutions as a "fever swamp". Any frustration or futility you'd be feeling trying to convince such a person is essentially how I feel about any attempts at making me take western "Liberal Democracies" seriously.
Now that intelligence agencies have been added to the mix, it's unclear to me if the theory is that the intelligence agencies had him killed to protect the powerful men who were being blackmailed, or if he was killed so he wouldn't reveal the existence of the honeypot scheme.
Either way, the whole scheme was a curious one, in that it evidently didn't target anyone in power, and seemed to serve Epstein more than any of the alleged targets.
Keep in mind that the person that "added them to the mix" was Alexander Acosta. This is the entire rub of the story, and much stronger evidence than anything you bring up.
The most reasonable explanation for what Epstein was doing, if it wasn't a honeypot, is that he was a whoremonger, USA's very own Petyr Baelish (although that might be an unfortunate comparison as he was a bit of a glowie himself), and as long he was providing company and entertainment without drawing attention, everyone involved was content not to ask too many questions, and just enjoy things. The problem is that he did draw attention to himself. His little prostitution ponzi-scheme came as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the inner-working of that industry, outside, maybe, of just how much throughput Epstein has managed to achieve single-handedly. Which, I suppose, was his downfall, as the sheer scale of it exposed him. The police ended up with enough evidence to lock him for life, and possibly to chemically castrate him on top of that, if they wanted to. An open and shut case, if there ever was one, and if that's how the story ended, I wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.
But, of course, this is not what happened. Somehow he got away with a slap on the wrist, and the seven zillion clerks that had to process all the paperwork didn't find it appropriate to mention anything to anyone (which is where "it would have to involve practically everyone in the Department of Justice!" argument so bizarre). This alone is one of the biggest corruption scandals I have ever heard of, and even now, for some reason, we're talking about everything else about the case, but not it.
Anyway, a few years pass, someone digs out the papers, and it turns out there's more than enough there to hang him with all along, so the authorities go for another try, which is when he dies in suspicious circumstances, exactly as pre-predicted by the fever-swamp conspiracy theorists. Acosta gets asked why did he let him off the hook so easily, and he says "I was told the guy belonged to intelligence".
So let's say it was a suicide, what would I expect to happen with Acosta if this was all completely innocent happenstance? Oh, I dunno, something like his ass being set on fire in a way that would put Russiagate, J6, and all the Trump scandals to shame. What did we get? "The government has investigated the government, and has found the government free of any wrongdoing (other than Alex being a bit of a silly goose)". "Uh... did you follow up on that intelligence thing?"... "oh yeah, we asked him but he can't remember anything specific, nothing to see there!".
Absolute banana republic clownshow.
And the people who have been named...
Please, the man was operating for years and years. Even if it was a run-of-the-mill whorehouse, it certainly served more than the handful of people that were named.
I took it back in the stone age before the UBE, so mine was state-specific as well. From what I hear, the UBE seems pretty tame compared to the days of the state-specific wild and woolly bar exams. Hopefully yours didn't have too many curveballs.
More options
Context Copy link