domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
aceventura
4d ago
What right-wingers like Auron underappreciate is how vast the chasm is between their version of the right and IRL conservatism. The majority of Trump voters (let alone the 'independents' who have been deciding our recent elections by flip-flopping between Obama, Trump, and Biden) don't think about immigrants, nationalism, or even gays, in the same way they do.
this is not actually how it works in most of the non-US West
Well, yes, I can admit that as Europe is concerned, they are moving quite fast to the oppressive, and sometimes approaching totalitarian, direction, and there a person who is persecuted for disagreeing with the government - which is not at all limited to Nazis now - could be justly called "dissident". I haven't read anything the person in question posted, is he European?
aceventura
4d ago
After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!
'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.
According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4d ago
This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.
While the tone of your post is a bit aggressive, I do strongly agree with this line of reasoning. I've always been skeptical of hard HBD because I grew up in a rural white town, where there was so much despair and economic struggling.
In my opinion culture is OBVIOUSLY the bigger factor than genes or IQ. And the rise and current downfall of most whites is actually the perfect example. White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.
Lizzardspawn
4d ago
"up to a third of programming is now done by AI" does seem to be a straw in the wind. Yes? No? Just means they're not hiring new junior staff?
It is a bit like saying a third of programming is done by hibernate and spring. Even if true, doesn't mean what you think it means.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4d ago
Yeah my cynical view is that large corporations would've done layoffs either way, as they often do during a downturn or after overhiring (what happened during covid.) In my mind AI is just a convenient excuse. While I do think it improves productivity somewhat, I think the layoffs would've come either way.
gattsuru
4d ago
It's possible, but I'm skeptical -- AI isn't as bad as people say, but I don't think it's quite there yet, and more critically there's a massive space for additional programmer output -- and a lot of this stuff is happening at the same time that Microsoft is demanding vast increases in cheaper workers.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
I worry about the ladder effect. In that, devleopers will be pulling the ladder out behind themselves.
Say you need a low-level coder to help support a more experienced software developer. You might just tell the developer to use AI instead of hire a kid out of college. AI will be better than 80% of kids out of college after all.
But AI can't do what that Software Developer does, and perhaps it never will. Ten years later, you have seasoned developers retiring and who is there to replace them? All the kids with CS degrees had to turn to menial labor and no one got that experience needed to take over the Software Developer's position.
But if you're a future-oriented company who thinks long term, and you say, "I'll hire these CS people so they get trained," you are at a disadvantage against your competitors for years, and there's no guarantee that the guy you hired will stick with you after the job market for seasoned developers tightens.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
A majority of historical wars were genocidal in intent; wanting to exterminate your enemies is in fact an extremely common motivation for warfare
Citation very much needed. Wanting to kill the enemy country's elites and replace them is common, wanting to loot the enemy country's stuff is common, wanting to reduce the enemy people to servitude or slavery is common, even wanting to displace and take territory from the enemy group is common. But even in "barbaric" ancient wars outright eliminating the enemy people root and branch is usually too much work for an unclear reward.
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.
I have seen it argued on multiple occasions right here on the Motte that racial background is the "most dispositive" factor in determining human behavior. That is to say that a person's race will tell you more about how they are likely to behave than whether they are male or female, young or old, married or single, rich or poor, urban or rural, republican or democrat, etc...
By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head. You may claim that the Motte is not representative of the HBD movement or that when users here say things like "most dispositive" or "predictive" they don't actually mean it literally, but it's not a strawman.
TIRM
4d ago
Yes, this is selectively applied only to white people. I can walk by a huge "La Raza" mural and most people don't seem to mind. An equivalent "WHITE RACE" mural would never be tolerated.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
4d ago
My priority is winning, because that’s how you execute power. If EHC needs to be appealed to in order to understand that having power is better than not having power, I question how elite they actually are.
Again, what is EHC actually going to do? If they are so elite, why are they incapable of directing the herd of unwashed sheep?
Traditionally, a shepherd demonstrates his superiority over the sheep by making sure the sheep do what he says. If he’s not capable of leading them, he’s not much of a shepherd.
So, again, assuming your Nietszchean WTP movement is more aligned, even if only a tiny bit, with MAGA than with bio-Leninism, how do you propose to build on that opportunity? How will you lead the sheep?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
If anyone thinks ChatGPT is ready to replace programmers then just like... ask it to build some software for you. Enough to run a sustainable business. It's ready to be an employee, ok then, go employ it. That's free money for you that's just sitting there for the taking.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
So next on my list of "things I should have picked up twenty years ago, and now are vaguely embarrassing to learn" is bicycling. I found myself in possession of a 21 speed Pacific mountain bike, and I've been riding it a few miles as a warmup before climbing workouts on the moon board. The things is...I suck at bicycling. Like, badly. I can ride a bike, but even just keeping my balance while signaling a turn is a conscious effort, and I regularly get concerned I'm going to just fall over, which is deeply stupid. I feel like I should be more fluent in my motion, but I'm just not.
I learned to ride a bike at an appropriate age, but never really did it much after a few 15-20 mile bike trips in scouts in my early teens. My parents never really let me ride my bike anywhere interesting because I would have to cross "busy roads" and I was the kind of quiet submissive kid that listened to them and didn't push boundaries.
So here I am, 33 years old, and I'm bad at riding a bike. But it seems like something I "should" be able to do, and the novelty is making it a pretty fun workout.
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult? What should I be doing to bike as a workout program? What should my goals be? I literally have no idea, so far I just ride a mile up the road and turn around and ride back, then climb.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Also, its probably the only actual racial identitarian movement in US politics that anyone talks about
Black identitarian movements are a thing.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Almost nothing is specific to any one group, especially when we're dealing with groups as broad as "right" and "left", but I do think it's ugly and getting uglier on the right.
I'm saying it's bizarre to single the right out when there was a general raise of "antisemitic" sentiment, and a big part of the current vibe shift was Jewish people responding to the left's reaction to 10/7 .
And it's broader than racism. For instance, I'm closer to Trace's side than I am to Auron's in this exchange, and so I don't want our politics to go down the path Trace is arguing against.
I assure you Trace is no stranger to deploying shame against people he disapproves of. In fact, I don't think you can have a functioning society without shame.
If he (or you) wants to argue that everyone needs to act like trans aspect of trans people should be completely ignored in all contexts not related to sex, he can knock himself out, but I don't see any vitriol in rejecting the concept of transgenderism, and guarding against your movement being eternally trapped in the progressive frame.
But it somehow falls upon America to disentangle a conflict we have little to do with
lol, lmao even.
The US has been playing stupid games in that region for the 10-15 years preceding the war- they wanted that war, and they got it. And Trump is still responsible for it, given that the destabilization efforts continued under his administration; we can blame upper military brass for hiding shit all we want but at the end of the day it's still the responsibility of the guy at the top.
And we can discuss the fact the war had significant economic consequences for the Fourth Reich Germany, too- the US took their cheap natural gas away (it wasn't the Russians that blew it up) and now they get to experience a 1973-style price shock in manufacturing because they were too stupid to figure out how to frack for themselves.
It's unwise to meet NATO spending targets because every non-US nation in that alliance is very well aware that the way they actually pay for it is "the US does something that damages our economy, which causes our GDP to drop by about the same measure that it would if we were paying for our own defense". And paying for their own defense is something that grows the middle class, because the elites are forced to pay their own countrymen for it (this is the idea behind the military-industrial complex), which is why just taking the hit and allowing the US to break client economies is deemed acceptable in said client states.
And [as stated below] if the US is intending to bail out the middle class (which is why Trump II, a reformer, was ultimately elected over the arch-conservative Harris), amping up R&D in the military-industrial complex is the way to do it, because it forces the elites to take a step back from their current objectives of enclosure [no growth ever + environmentalism] and race war and actually start approving development projects for once.
So I think the appropriate question that Europe should be asking is "how much should Europeans allow the Americans to wreck the pan-European economy because they wanted to go to war with Russia for shits and giggles"? If I were Chancellor of the Fourth Reich, my protestations would be as loud as my contributions symbolic, and I'd only start making stuff the Americans might be directly dependent on if they go to war somewhere else... which is probably why their military-industrial policy is currently exactly that.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
I remember the GOP before Trump. Still disadvantaged in academia and the like.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
What's particularly odd to me about his essay is that his descriptions of what "normie conservative church girls" are like doesn't ring true to me. It's true that a lot of country women are into burly, hardworking country men. Obviously! But I'm pretty close to his description of an "extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual", and I've always had an easier time dating "normie conservative church girls" than dating "bohemian art hoes." Who, to be honest, are often more unstable, which the author admits in a comment describes him; like attracts like. The ideal, of course, is "intellectual country girl," and let me tell you, "she is far more precious than jewels."
I'm guessing it was the outright white nationalism, disagreeableness, and evident heterodoxy that made it hard for him, not the fact that he's smart and creative.
It's also really funny when he says this:
People there would get very hostile when I tried to start conversations comparing their region with others where I’d lived, regardless of how polite I was about it.
Considering his ultimate reflections on the Midwest, I'm guessing this conversation was a lot more critical and judgmental than he believes they were, and his interlocutors picked up on it. I take as my evidence for this point the fact that he calls German-Americans "low T" and says that they like smooth brains and not thinking about things, and then has the gall to say, "believe it or not the point of this article isn’t to shit on Midwesterners."
This is a disagreeable man whose default mode is to critique to death everything he sees. Of course agreeable church girls didn't like him!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.
Ah! Well, that's certainly an important piece of information that was elided. You should have simply started there and been honest about your concerns and worries, instead of going for the "500 IQ pwn everyone with facts and logic" play. The dialogue is so much more insightful and constructive when we cut the bullshit and just talk about what's actually bothering us.
I'm not unsympathetic to you, because I'm not without my own anxieties about race. Although I've received 99.9% (non-Ashkenazi) European (and 0.1% SSA/MENA/etc) from multiple ancestry tests, my appearance is rather on the "swarthy" end by white standards, which lead to teachers and other kids at school asking me on multiple occasions if I was mixed with anything. It gave me doubts about what I actually was, or if other white people even saw me as white at all.
Combine that with the fact that I never knew my birth father, and I'll never be able to be truly certain about what I am and where I came from.
But in some sense none of that matters, because I believe that the way that white people are treated by modern wokeness is wrong, and I believe that they have the right to have their own political movement, on their own terms. Even if those terms were so strict that they excluded me. I'd still believe that regardless of whether I was black or Chinese or anything.
Now, my situation is different from someone who is knowingly and visibly mixed (especially someone whose "other half" is both non-white and non-Ashkenazi). But the point is, you're not the only one with anxieties, and honest political dialogue starts with facing those anxieties and putting them at the center of the conversation, because they're essentially the major determining factor of your political orientation.
My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.
The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.
As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
Notice how you didn't dispute my point that Trump, RFK, Hulk Hogan, and prayer breakfasts alienate EHC. You know it does. You're correct that Trump's a good (as in, good at winning elections) politician. If your priority is winning elections by appealing to the unwashed masses, congrats, it worked. Don't turn around and complain that EHC don't want to vote for your party when you did nothing to appeal to them.
And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?
How do you differentiate 'people who talk about witchcraft are witches, so they're tabooed' vs. 'if you taboo any discussion of witchcraft, only maniacal Satanists will talk about it'? See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
More options
Context Copy link