domain:reddit.com
TIRM
12hr ago
Sniffing little girls and "probably inappropriate" showering with them doesn't count. Literally grabbing grabbing Tara Reade by the pussy doesn't count. He didn't seem to have a mistress despite the hair sniffing and pussy grabbing.
Stellula
13hr ago
Can you give the comment? I don't know what you think relates these things to each other.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13hr ago
I see classical liberalism, or libertarianism, as being very much about better everything. It creates more wealth, allows you to live you to live a hedonistic lifestyle, and also creates the strongest families and communities, because voluntary association is the key to building those things. When you use force to compel people into situations they don't want to be in, that's what produces the low-trust, every-man-for-himself world that these communitarians say they're fighting. Rent control leads to hatred between landlords and tenants. Classrooms become chaotic when you force kids who don't want to be there to attend.* I saw the culmination of this on DSL recently, with someone arguing that once we get artificial wombs we should force women who want abortions to transfer the fetuses into them and bill them and father for the cost, the same way the state goes after men for child support:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13608.msg668940.html#msg668940
Just think about how low-trust and low-class that is. So when you hear things like "the conservative telos tends to be duty," it's all well and good when it's people voluntarily adopting a socially conservative lifestyle. When you force that on people you get this low-class low-trust Jerry Springer paternity lawsuit world. It is not going any place that you want to be.
*I understand there's a reason mandatory schooling exists, but we should acknowledge the downside.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13hr ago
Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete).
The cry of the Intercal programmer. Whether classical geometry corresponds to Intercal and co-ordinate geometry to Python or the other way round is let as an exercise to the interested reader.
(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)
So did I, but then I don't claim to be a mathematician.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
13hr ago
Likewise, plus I think it is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that @FiveHourMarathon's op was missing - the female perspective. I didn't want to say anything in reply to five, because the op was insightful in other ways and I didn't want to put our few women on the spot, but since it's been brought up I think it would be great to talk about, because I also find it fascinating. Also you are at your rhetorical best on two subjects imo @2rafa, class and gender dynamics, I am always keen to hear what you think about them, even when I find what you say upsetting or even degrading.
TeknOShEeP
13hr ago
Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.
The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.
But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13hr ago
Good man. Props to him even if we do disagree.
hanikrummihundursvin
14hr ago
I've spent a few paragraphs voicing exactly what my problems are. Whatever it is you are doing now, including antagonistically mischaracterizing what I write, should be beneath you. I can just as well assert that the only reason you are here is because you agree with Caplan and that your fixation on the word "serious" is the only in you have to play defense, irrelevant though it might be. But that would be a tad low brow and fruitless.
To answer your question about who is serious:
Insofar as people present reasons for why they believe things, they can be held to that standard. I gave examples where Caplan is actively ignoring contradictory information. Be that human differences between population groups or economic data from outside the US. Because Caplan is ignoring information pertinent to his own standard he can not be considered serious.
By the same token a leftist open borders moralizer is serious. They don't need to pretend that their advocacy has any locally positive economic benefits based on statistical extrapolations and human behavior. They just assert that people fleeing a country need refuge and that there is a moral duty to provide shelter. They can volunteer their time and effort to solidify the fact they actually believe this, but the argument is ultimately just moral.
I wrote this for you, but to me, these distinctions are largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. My point was about Caplan. He was presented by you and others as being something he is not. I did not argue that point by asserting that he is not serious so I don't see the relevance about some universally applicable definition of the word.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum...
I mean, posters here aren't shy about analyzing women even though we have women who participate. It seems only fair if you ladies do the same to us, so I say go for it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
I’ve always seen the left as very much about hedonistic urges. The idea being that freedom means freedom to do whatever you want, and that anyone or anything that restricts your ability to live out whatever hedonistic urges a person has.
Anti-natalist ideas fit perfectly well, as having a child introduces obligations, personal, financial, and emotional. A parent is simply not as free to act on hedonistic desires because the child needs things. You can’t just travel on a whim, as you need to arrange for how exactly you accommodate the little child. You can’t spend your last dime on yourself, you need to buy formula.
This is still a telos. It’s just not your telos.
The conservative telos tends to be duty. It’s told in lots of different ways I suppose, but the general idea is that you might have a technical right to do as you please, but it’s not always good to do so unless you deal with all the duties you have. If you don’t keep up your end things fall apart fairly quickly.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
Reading those Scott quotes makes me wonder if the idea of a "set point" has just been tainted by association with low-status people, much like his observation on how Alex Jones latched onto a real environmental effect and turned "they're turning the frogs gay" into a national joke because people think he's lame.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.
This is why checked baggage will always reign supreme. I used to always fly Southwest for that very reason. No need to try to get huge bags in the overhead bin, at best I'm putting up a small tote which has a change of clothes and valuables I don't want to let out of my sight. The rest is in my big checked bag. Alas that they too have joined the legion of airlines trying to turn basic parts of the experience into an upcharge.
No_one
14hr ago
Kaczynski was so very ineffectual as a terrorist. It's a good illustration on how little people achieve when they're lone wolves with no one to consult.
Someone like him could have easily managed to build gigantic bombs causing billions in damages had he, for example, found work in a quarry or at least used purchased components, reliable, tested bombs and so on.
Imagine an IRA style truck bomb blowing up Wall street, shattering windows in half a kilometre, with nobody dead because the cops who opened the truck ended up staring at a mess of traps and large warning signs and decided evacuation is the sensible idea.
Like the Harvey Casino bombing, but on steroids.
Instead he chose to live in poverty, chose to use a maximally inefficient yet repellent strategy and ultimately achieved very little.
No_one
14hr ago
You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.
Also.
and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried
This is I believe backward. Tribal terrorism is common because most people are, by default, tribal, so under the right conditions it can flourish.
But this is harder with intellectual terrorism. Anarchists and bolshevik types weren't a real big deal, terrorism wise outside of Russia and they had much more of a following back then when people were actually pretty poor and suffering.
Their radical egalitarianism also exploited a basic human instinct.
Anti-natalism and efilism are unappealing ideologies that attract people who are not doing well at life, typically because they hardly try. These are not the kinds of people you have to worry about much. The only real danger is some heir or heiress later buying an AGI and prompt-engineering it while it's offline hard enough to get it to help with infectious disease design. That'd be a real issue with possibilities of megadeaths.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.
I took a first-year Computer Science course ten-ish years ago, and at the end the prof said: "If you went back in time 50 years with what you know now, you'd be one of the most knowledgeable Computer Scientists alive."
We were doing simple things like algorithmic complexity, sorting algorithms, linked lists, binary trees, and object-oriented programming (and did conditions, loops, control flow, etc. in the previous class), and...he might not have been exaggerating. A lot of the things we learned were discovered/created in the past 50 years, and they aren't just minor pieces of trivia.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14hr ago
Somewhat of an aside, but I have found Taleb supremely frustrating - he sounded like a typical "empirics bro" making wild in-principle-statements as if hes disproven mathematics, which I rounded down to "dont be too confident in your models". It took a completely different branch of thought for me to learn about the problems of infinite variance for decision theory.
WandererintheWilderness
14hr ago
This is a good summary, but speaking as a transhumanist and progressive my objections to teleology are - obviously - more complicated than "simply thinking it's unfair".
Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.
I fail to see how "If you'd been meant to wear dresses and be referred to using the phonemes /ʃi/, you'd have ovaries" is different from "if God had wished for Man to fly, He'd have given him wings". Only the hopelessly insane would today argue that flying a plane is immoral due to not extending from Homo sapiens's innate qualities. Why should transgender be any different?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14hr ago
I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus.
Interestingly enough Spengler (himself a math teacher) had this as one of his illustrations of the difference between classical and faustian mentality. I have found this to be a great unintentional illustration of the idea.
They have lots of languages in China. Most Chinese people historically didn't speak Mandarin and had no use for Mandarin speech transcribed one phoneme at a time. Characters that mean entire words are quite useful as a common written language in a nation that is so pluralistic that most people lack a common spoken language with people outside of their local region.
This is true even in the modern era. Chairman Mao learned Mandarin as an adult and it shows in his strange accent and phrasing. Like almost everyone, he grew up speaking his local language, not a common national language. But any text written by any Chinese person would be understood by him.
Today Chinese schools demand students speak the common language in class. Outside of school many still speak in local languages which are entirely different than Mandarin. I've seen shanghaiese people switch to shanghaiese to prevent people from other regions and foreigners from understanding them. Rudely right in front of everyone obviously talking about us.
But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century. And even the Koreans had periods in which hangul was banned and all writing was mandatory Chinese only.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14hr ago
Might be true, might not - one thing I am sure of after reading Caro's biography is that absolutely nothing LBJ said about himself could be taken at face value.
Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.
That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.
But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
15hr ago
It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet.
My take is that it allowed mutual intelligibility between various Sinitic languages. You can have a man speaking Mandarin write a text and a man speaking only Cantonese or Wu will be able to read it. It will sound weird, like German translated into English word-for-word (yesterday is a female patient in the clinic come that such fear before tooth doctors had that she during the examination to scream begun has then upstood and out the building run is), but it will be legible. Without it a unified China would've been very unstable.
Now that everyone is taught Mandarin it might be easier to switch to bopomofo, but this would separate the newer generations from China's massive literary legacy.
ABigGuy4U
15hr ago
People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot
Ironically one of the loopier members of the BLM movement, Shaun King, was the only one who actually took a principled stand and said he thought the Babbit killing was a bad shoot and an act of police brutality.
AstralMateus
15hr ago
We should start thinking about raising the birth rates as a practical, logistic and technological problem to solve and not a moral commandment to enforce upon society. And I think Caplan's approach to convincing people to have kids is a step in the right direction.
First, some things have to be be acknowledged. Pro-natalists will not get people to have more kids with moral arguments.
For most, having kids is a risk-reward calculation, and, given freedom of choice, at current levels of expected investment in terms of time, money and effort, less and less people are going to have kids, and TFRs will continue to fall. It just seems like a bad deal to many people – they don't want to give up their free time and life's little pleasures for 5-10-15 years (depending on the number of kids) for dubious benefit. The pro-natalist side may reply that "it may seem like a bad deal now, but your whole perspective on life will change once you have kids!". Well, what if it won't? The life described by you and other people down the thread seems downright miserable to non-parents. Once you have a kid, you're stuck spending most of your time and extra income on them at least for the next 10 years. That is a huge downside risk that you're asking people to take as, essentially, a leap of faith.
Trying to convince young people with spiritual arguments (from Christian pro-natalism to vaguely gesturing towards the fate of the West, human race and the infinite) is laughable. Ain't no one actually, truly believes in those things or cares about them, to the point where it influences their actions, and the minority that does already has kids. Every young Catholic I've met uses contraception, and a few have had abortions. The genie is out of the bottle and it's never coming back. Nor is the "lonely cat lady" scaremongering effective, for that matter.
You have to meet people where they are at, and where they're at is a world of hedonism and infinite alternatives. Unless you have a way take away their freedom, which you don't, you have to sweeten the deal. Alter the risk-reward calculus. Make it drastically cheaper to hire help (perhaps by mass-importing Philippina maids, Singapore style, with no path to citizenship). Offer massive tax credit and subsidize childcare. Somehow convince people that they can relax and not care about extracurriculars and mostly let their kids entertain themselves, which is what Caplan writes about. Create artificial wombs. Whatever. Make having kids somehow take less money and, most importantly, less time and effort. People can spare the money. The hand-wringing about kids being too expensive is mostly cope. But they will not surrender their time, and every attempt to take it from them forcefully will be rejected at the ballot box.
The pro-natalists have to do something other than shake their fists at people and tell them to "suck it up and just do hard things like your ancestors did". No one will "just". No one has ever "just". The left had to learn this painful lesson in the recent years, and it's high time for the pro-natalist right to do the same.
(This rant is mostly aimed at the pro-natalist discourse I see day in and day out in my feed, not your post in particular. If it is not obvious, I sincerely wish them luck, it's not a boo outgroup post)
Back in February, Maine state representative Laurel Libby got censured by the states House of Representatives for posting a tweet featuring state track-and-field champions photos with the same kid that won the recent women's pole vault also placing fifth in men's poll vault two years prior. (Tweet on page 9 of this pdf.)
The censure (passed narrowly along party lines) is based on the notion that Libby is endangering the minor athlete with all this publicity, and that she must apologize. She refused to do so. The rules of the House of Representatives say that "is guilty of a breach of any of the rules and orders of the House … may not be allowed to vote or speak, unless by way of excuse for the breach, until the member has made satisfaction." So until Libby apologizes, she is barred from speaking on the floor, and barred from voting.
Libby sued in federal court for 1st Amendment violation. Meanwhile, she has been seeking emergency relief to restore her voting rights (and thus also the representation rights of her constituents). Both the district court and the First Circuit court of appeals have declined to grant her the emergency relief:
Today, the US Supreme Court granted the emergency relief.
The tweet in question is on an important current political topic made by an elected representative, is inline with her platform (which is likely why she got elected in the first place), and has only publicly available information. The censure bases its rationale on possible harm to the minor athlete, based on indirect evidence that harm could happen (but didn't): tweets by others about this kid, and some study finding that trans kids are four times more likely to be bullied. So it seems to me that this is a clear-cut case of clearly protected political speech by someone whose job it is to speak it.
I am therefore trying to wrap my head around the "legislative immunity" argument that both the district court and first circuit found persuasive. In Maine House of Representatives, some things require a super-majority (2/3 votes), e.g.: overriding the governor's veto. What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?
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