domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
anon_
3hr ago
There are a lot of elections between now and when the childless 40-somethings die and the 3.5 tradcath kids are 18.
I at least hope that you appreciate the paradox here - that the sentence itself is a white lie or a myth if you will. But it has utility as a mantra preventing people from lying too much either to others or to themselves.
I hear ‘it’s just a white lie’ all the time now, and there are no limits and no brakes on its runaway use.
Exactly. Like some autistic rationalist "telling the truth" about some weapon of mass destruction - if humanity can be destroyed by the truth, then it should be. Right?
anon_
3hr ago
Indeed. In the fully Malthusian limit the sex ratio becomes much less important -- and as you say, maybe it's better to have a large fraction able to fight your neighbors.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
It isn't even to that level, though, at least not with the grant proposals. "By our rules we filled the grant proposals with language that favored us. Then you found that language and removed it or canceled the grants. HYPOCRITES!!!"
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
My Rules > Your Rules Applied Fairly > Your Rules Applied Unfairly.
This is "Your Rules Applied Fairly". Congratulations, the left has completely and thoroughly won! Rejoice!
What? This isn't what you wanted after all? Huh.
Tree
3hr ago
We need phrases like that because the last years have shown that if you leave people any wiggle room, they will lie every chance they get. I hear ‘it’s just a white lie’ all the time now, and there are no limits and no brakes on its runaway use. The thing I found most shocking about the woke establishment is not that they would lie (about corona, discrimination, race), but that they would casually justify it if caught. And maga/trump casually lie even more, and then deny, so there’s not even the attempt at coherence left.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
So you believe that the differential in reproduction is entirely attributable to genetics, rather than to cultural programming?
That seems unlikely, given that all those gay atheists came from long lines of heterosexual religious parents. Pew in 2019 found that among Evangelicals, only 65% of kids raised evangelical continued to identify as evangelical as adults. The cultural pull of secular society is still going to keep those numbers down.
Now you can assume that over time the forces of selection will optimize those genetics, until those numbers are pushed up further. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. Particularly, it's likely that young people will be getting a better deal from the "worldly" once they are rare enough to be worth bribing. This can balance out the genetic drift over time.
Shrike
3hr ago
It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.
If things continue on as they have for another 100 years (appropriate to your analogy) the "mature" civilizations will, like the elders of a community, only be a shell of their former selves, if anything is left of them at all.
jake
3hr ago
I think if you have two largely identical groups, where Group A reproduces below replacement and Group B reproduces in excess of replacement, Group A, from a purely materialist and natural reading, is a biological phenomenon whose function is as a genetic terminus, i.e.; here, the humans of western civ are in the process of selecting for genetic predisposition to specific rather than generalized religiosity. ("What kinds of things you believe but can't prove.")
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
Atheism offers that too, without all the window dressing.
As others have already been kind enough to point out, the mod team asks that top-level posts within the CWR thread have more to them than a bare-link. Ideally, with more substantive commentary or an explanation of why this worth time and attention. At the absolute bare minimum, quotes of the source material and your thoughts on the matter where relevant.
TowardsPanna
3hr ago
The way out of delusion and suffering, of course.
Shrike
4hr ago
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system.
I would also just add that "evangelical" continues to be much more of a signal for "right-wing" than "Catholic" and so I think Catholics are an easy place for righties to get people who agree with them on most everything without also having a religious affiliation that is listed under I AGREE WITH RIGHTIES ON MOST EVERYTHING in the dictionary. (Obviously evangelicals are more nuanced than that, but in terms of public optics I do think it matters a bit.)
As per your comment, I would not be surprised if this actually changes, and Catholicism becomes smaller but much more visibly right-wing as older generations of leaders die out (and as the left shifts to be more and more hostile to religion and away from old Catholic-friendly patronage networks). I foresee Catholic thought-leadership staffed with evangelical foot-soldiers as being a very potent coalition in the future, despite their cracks.
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
The same can be said about the truth. In a sense the sentence itself is highly paradoxical, as it by itself is also not true and just a rationalist myth - vast majority of them would prefer lies if it increased utils, as they are utilitarians. This can be even trivially demonstrated by people who refuse to tell white lies and make their lives unnecessarily harder and miserable for other people as well. I am sure that even rationalists can be employed let's say in sales or service sector and pretend that they are thrilled to serve their customers instead of telling the "truth". The only thing that the truth destroys in that case is their job prospects with no upside.
I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism. Most people - even rationalists - are not against what they consider white lies either individually (e.g. lying to Kant's axe murderer asking where your wife is) or society wide myths (e.g. everybody is equal before law, every vote counts etc). The actual sentence should therefore be something like
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be, except if destroying it would have huge cost in terms of negative utils
Which is basically in line with other moral philosophies as well - most of them like the truth unless it goes against other key values in that system.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
Meta: This is more or less a bare link.
Did you know that if you start a line with the greater-than character, themotte will show that line as a quotation? Also, most browsers allow you to mark text on websites and "copy" it by holding the Ctrl (or Command on Apple), then pressing the "C" key (Ctrl-C). With Ctrl-V, you can "paste" that text into a text field.
Using quotations and copy pasting together, you can do something like this (Click on the view source button at the end of this comment to see how it is done):
I LOVE DANGER ZONE writes:
Left-wingers tend to think of standpoint epistemology stuff, or various kinds of language policing, as a kind of consolation prize for minorities in an economically and legally subordinate position. Scouring grant proposals for non-inclusive language, pointing out microagressions, asking people to defer to your lived experience, these are tools for non-dominant minorities to begin to build the case for economic and legal equality. The dominant majority doesn’t need those things, the idea that the dominant majority would be jealous of those tools and want to use them is absurd.
[...]
I think to a very large extent left-wing culture in the US was totally unprepared for that kind of jealousy. Because they sort of thought of themselves as underdogs it was really hard to process the idea that right-wing culture contained a ton of people who desperately wanted to be underdogs in the same way, who didn’t view those things as scraps left over by the powerful, but instead thought of it as what power looks like.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
I'm not left of center, but I'll comment anyway.
Of course he's correct. Of course people want to feel like underdogs, of course they want to feel like they have their own "secret club" that the Squares In Power don't have access to. Like, duh. The right is very much not immune to this. Being the underdog lends moral credibility to your cause, it galvanizes your base, there's an intrinsic thrill to the feeling of powerlessness itself, etc.
But, and here's the kicker, all of this applies to the left too. And he's so close to getting it, he's describing everything perfectly, "for the right it's really all about their libidinal investment in their own symbolic matrix of floating signifiers, they love the struggle itself more than what they struggle for, the goal of every political cause is ultimately just to reproduce itself", and I'm nodding along going yes yes yes... but then he has to tack on, "but of course the left isn't like this at all, when we talk about microaggressions it's just a purely rational response to objective conditions of oppression, there's nothing libidinal to analyze there, no siree", and I'm like... no you were so close! Everything you were saying about the right applies to the left too, they're exactly the same in this regard.
I not infrequently have this experience when reading posts from leftists, where they're right on the ball and they're so close to understanding everything, and then at the last minute they veer off into "...but of course, we are Good and they are Evil, and that is the chasm that separates us". Their ideology is axiomatically predicated on the explicit denial of this aspect of their own psyche, so they remain forever blind to it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Generally the mods want a little more for a top level comment btw, at least summarizing the link preferably.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
4hr ago
"Wrong but you can't tell how wrong it is" seems to be worse than "wrong and you can immediately tell that it is".
This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.
In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.
Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
I"m left of center, and I'd love to help, but I read that comment about five times and I'm not sure what you're asking. It would probably have been better to write a gloss of the (article? comment?) and ask a specific question rather than post it and ask if it's "accurate". Now's your chance.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I hope it's clear that I don't consider political influence within the United States to be any reflection of the merits of a tradition. I'm in the devout rump of mainline Protestants - I am, on my typology here, definitely one of the losers. Meanwhile many of the churches that I think will be relatively strong in the future - Mormons, Baptists, and so on - are in my eyes either heretics, or borderline-heretics. There is, I think, probably an interesting book to be written on Christian heresy and its contours in America. (And not the Ross Douthat book. A different one.)
At any rate, that the Orthodox have no political influence is not a criticism of them. The position I suspect the Orthodox are in, and will continue to be in going forward, is the one from an aside in this old article:
However, [Rod Dreher's] situation is complicated. Given his own membership in the Orthodox Church, one would expect him to have quite high regard for civil society, or at least for the magistrate’s role in cultivating and preserving Christian society. That said, one astute friend remarked that because Orthodox Political Theology has such an expansive view of the power of the magistrate, perhaps Orthodox Christians default into a kind of Anabaptist separatism in nations where the magistrate is not Orthodox.
That is, the ideal Orthodox political order, historically, has been one in which the church is to some extent integrated with the state - as in the Byzantine empire, or the Russian empire. Spiritual and temporal authority are intertwined. However, when one practices Orthodoxy in a state where there is zero realistic chance of such integration occurring, Orthodox communities in practice engage in a kind of 'retreat', focusing on internal cultivation. If there is a visible surge of interest in Orthodoxy at the moment, my hope is that much of that interest relates to that question of spiritual cultivation or maturation, especially as a community, within a political order that grows increasingly impious.
I wonder if it might be interesting there to look at the experiences of Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. I know very little about that, but it springs to mind as a good case study for how to maintain Christian faith intergenerationally while living in a proudly non-Christian political order.
It is my hope, at least, that there is more of a turn towards the obligations of personal Christian moral formation. My tradition is Methodist and I have noticed, at least among more traditionalist Methodists, some interest in the counter-cultural disciplines of the early Methodists. Maybe we need more Holy Clubs. Whatever church context it occurs in, though, I think there is a desire for more rigorous moral formation among some younger Christians, epsecially the more intellectual types.
You mention the growth of a kind of 'Western folk religion'. I'm not sure how far I want to go with that. There's a sense in which there are already Western folk religions like that, especially in America, which has long had both a civic religion and an implicit set of American spiritual norms that cross multiple denominations and religious traditions. Those religions are evolving as the cultural terrain changes, but I don't think a new one is coming into being from nothing. There will be some sort of spirituality - nature abhors a vacuum, including a spiritual vacuum - but I suspect more of a modification of what is already present, rather than something brand new.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
Minor technical nitpick: I think something "open source" is carrying a bunch of connotations which do not apply to LLMs. It is a bit like if I called a CC-BY-SA photograph "open source".
To the degree that LLMs are like traditional software, the source code -- the human-readable inputs which decide what a program does -- would be a neural network framework plus the training data (most of which is crawled/pirated rather than open source licensed).
Compiling would be the process of training.
In normal open source software, almost all of the effort goes into creating the code base. Compilation is basically free, and you compile your code a zillion times in the process of building your codebase. With LLMs, training is really expensive. Nobody downloads your sources, everybody just takes your binary, the weights.
With a normal open source project, you can easily git clone the sources and compile. If you run into a problem or need the program to do something differently, you just edit the sources and compile again, and if you think your changes might be generally useful, you make a pull request upstream to start the process of getting them into the official version.
With LLMs what you git clone are giant inscrutable matrices. If you are really good, you might be able to tweak the weights a bit so that the LLM will talk about the Golden Gate Bridge all the time. But this is a gimmick, not a general improvement. If you want to actually make the model more useful for purposes you have in common with others, you need RLHF, which is computationally expensive again.
This is an important difference between how traditional open source software interacts with the users and how "open source" LLMs interact with the users. I would thus propose to use the name "open weights" for LLMs, which carries none of the connotations of "users will contribute bug fixes".
See in my mind, I think the Ackman thing is great. (Note that I hate Ackman's cultural presence in general and find him an utterly despicable person politically and culture war wise)
<1% of the people complaining about this on the internet were aware of the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, RI; fewer still were otherwise aware there was a tennis tournament in Newport last weekend; fewer still regularly follow the minor leagues of professional tennis. Ackman, in faking his way into a wild card spot and getting murdered, affirmed just how good the pros are, even on the minor league circuit, and just how cool it is to be professional tennis player, even on the minor league circuit. Ackman, in buying the status of a minor league tennis pro, affirmed that being a minor league tennis pro is high status.
When tech billionaires get into rock climbing or BJJ, it raises the status of pro rock climbers and BJJ instructors. They're richer, they're cooler, they're more respected.
Now there comes a point at which you've sold too much, where the status becomes worthless when everyone can buy it. A lot of fashion items that were once rare and hard to acquire and required one to travel to certain places, be "in the know" or connected, or were simply expensive, are now no longer the same signal of status.
So, in some ways, gamers should be flattered that Elon wanted to pretend to be them. The important thing is that he ultimately be forced to prove it, like Ackman, out on the court.
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