domain:mgautreau.substack.com
Silicon Age Hinduism - A defence of Hinduism and an elaboration of what Bronze Age Pervert gets right
Recently, Bronze Age Pervert caused a stir by defending the single most fleshed out faith on the planet and the only living ancestral aryan faith, Hinduism. BAP or Bronze Age Pervert is an uber popular right-wing dissident on Twitter who is anti "desert cult" and is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche
Naturally, I saw a lot of butthurt takes since no sane religious person will ever debate religions in a logical manner as religious experiences and religions in particular work on you believing something to be totally true. What I found interesting was the idea that modern hinduism is totally detached from the vedic faith, which in itself is a motte and bailey fallacy, the person stating this believes that modern day hindusim is a different religion, therefore we can simply have a new revival and this helps you avoid giving any props to Indians given the current political climate. Another thing to note is that most of India, 80 percent or more, is Shudra (4th varna) or below; the first two varnas make up close to 10 percent of the population and only a small number in them live up to the ideals of old, religiously and genetically.
Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well. This is not what my argument is. Hinduism itself is a broad umbrella term for all sects that vary greatly but are driven by the ideals and beliefs in the Vedas and offshoots of such branches. Unlike an Abrahamic religion, your canon is not your holy book but your guru.
The aryans from the steppe were not white, the Vedas were not written by whites as whites or euros came into existence around the time the aryans came and mixed here. Aryans, therefore, are the ancestors to my people and you, the reader. Modern Hinduism has way too much voodoo, it does deviate from vedic ideals but the texts and the practices from said texts still live on. The human capital here kept getting worse and poorer, which meant that things like Gaudiya Vaishnavism seemed more appealing as the strict purity spiralling there can elect Krishna as Jesus, and then religious offerings and a grain-based impoverished diet could be seen as virtuous. Modern-day India is not some place I can ever defend despite being a resident; the vast majority of the people are beyond fixing and always have been. Hinduism is the faith I was lucky to be born with and I may tolerate some anti-H1B takes since mass migration is always bad, but I just cannot fathom the bad faith takes posted by online dissident Christians. Shiva worship was tpresent in the Indus Valley, so were castes, whilst aryans had varnas, which is something that ancient euros also had.
BAP get Hinduism better than most pagan dissidents and every single non hindu, plus a lot of Hindus. The aryan text, Bhagavat Gita for instance, is the most modern Hindu text that goes against the Vedas and yet I have heard podcasts where Euro nationalists who decry Christ for being brown talk about the Gita being an example of aryan virtue, failing to realise that Lord Krishna was dark. So was Lord Ram who by all accounts was the physical manifestation of Dharmik values.
Their skin colors may have been different, darker or fairer, it is irrelevant to their divine status. The central argument is that these people, upon falling out with their Abrahamic faith, look to the past and cannot deny the appeal of the most fleshed-out aryan faith. Saying anything good about Hindusim without asterisks means saying good things about Indians who unfortunately, do not have the best stock today, so claiming that all good things in HInduism were pre-Puranas (a lot of puranas are fan fiction btw, not all though) or that the current population has negligible traces of the past ones is a way to avoid falling into that box. Since conservatism is in many cases a retvrn to values, you have a hard time going against Christianity, which, if you can manage it, always leads to ancestor worship.
Modern-day Hinduism is not totally Voodoo, despite all the mountains of trash, outdated superstitious beliefs, the shaktipithas and the chosen few temples are alive. Modern India bends towards the pajeet stereotype more and more, even for those of higher birth, it still is the only surviving aryan religion. India was poor and backwards during medieval times; a lot of seasoned euro intellectual giants had a lot of admiration for our texts and scholars. Goethe was inspired heavily by Kalidasa.
I was 19 when I came across Curwen Ares Rolinson, who was a far-right youth leader on trial for hate crimes. He experienced a divine intervention and dedicated his life to the study of aryan faiths and started writing for his blog Arya Akasham, much of it makes little sense to me, but he persuaded me to look into theology. As a token of his appreciation, he parted away with a large amount of his life savings to help India during COVID, a loving gesture that I will forever appreciate. I came across him via survivethejive, who, of all the white pagans I know, is the most respectful towards Hinduism, since, despite a sane anti migrant stance, he can see what a living faith like that of his people could look like today and respect it. Anti Indian sentiment is at an all time high for multiple reasons including bad faith behavior from Indians, I am not trying to touch on that topic since I cannot justify sentiments against fellow indian passport holders, but I can never defend things like chain migration and seeing the nation that accepts you as a special economic zone to be exploited. I just want to dispel the myths around Hinduism being a white religion, as it predates whites and many other ethnicities, and the other false belief stapled with it, which is that the link between modern and Vedic Hindus is non-existent, as there are large enough pockets of real beliefs that exist. I see some of those things in my own life, and they are just divine.
I am not here to defend Hinduism against logical arguments. If you ever want to know if it's true, meditate, and you will experience what truth feels like. We are a dying people, but I have faith in Shiva, and I pray for the benefit of all beings.
P.S. will add links in a bit
Corvos
7hr ago
But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.
AFAIK it's usually mandatory for all written code to be reviewed before it's merged into the code base. At my last company every Pull Request (submitted code) had to be reviewed by two people, plus or including the 'owner' of the files in question. Review is usually considered a very onerous duty to be avoided where possible, and in theory reviewers bear as much responsibility for the final output as the original writer. The purpose is partly to inspect the quality of the code and to make sure it's doing what's expected (even senior guys fuck up) and partly to make sure that at least a few people are familiar with each part of the codebase.
This was at a 'move-fast-and-break-things' company. The review standards at somewhere like Intel are of course significantly higher.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7hr ago
In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!
This certainly seems like a salient point (though of course, from my perspective the problem is that you are underestimating humans when you say this). I could not disagree more with your assessment of humans and our ability to reason. And if we can't agree on the baseline abilities of our species, certainly it seems difficult for us to come to an agreement on the capabilities of LLMs.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
7hr ago
I would argue that this is a temporary state of affairs. Current AI coding is at the level of an over-caffeinated intern (who is very knowledgeable, but less than practical). Thus, a great deal of oversight is necessary to make sure they aren't shooting themselves in the foot.
But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.
https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1955747420324946037
Even when agents pass on all human-written test cases, we estimate that their implementations would take 20-30 minutes on average to get to a mergeable state—which represents about a third of the total time needed for an experienced developer to complete the tasks.
In other words, a lot (but not all) of the theoretical time savings are eaten up by the need to understand, edit and improve their code. At present.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
No, I showed that my point was coherent
We can just read the comments. You never told me what your terms meant, because you couldn't. Perhaps you missed my edit back then, even though I recall doing it quickly, so I'll repeat it here just in case:
Let's change the syntax to make it clear. Suppose you had said, "I know my values are just as blurf (or not) as everyone else's." Suppose I inquired as to what you meant by values being blurf or not, or multiple values being equally blurf. It's not really helpful to say that there is nothing objective about blurf. It still simply fails to tell me anything about what blurf actually means.
Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them.
I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant? I think you might be confusing a pleasant conversationalist with a pleasant conversation. Most people don't like conversations where large problems with their stated positions are brought to the fore. That's fair enough. But that's probably what you find displeasing, the clear and obvious feeling in your gut that you know your position has a problem, and that you don't know what to do about it. I sympathize; I've been there. Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works. Moreover, it's unMottely.
DefinitelyAnAlt
8hr ago
I understand. But gotta have.OpSec.
I'm less paranoid on my main. That profile is as hidden as sydney sweeney's assets. I share revealing and intimate information on this alt, so I edit out my comments on a monthly-ish basis.
May start using my main here for innocuous life updates
roystgnr
8hr ago
Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2?
Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time (albeit not as much as it would have if Gaza still had 20% of the population), once it's not repeatedly reset, and sitting next to a Mediterranean beach can't hurt.
I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute, but they were selling Gaza a third of its power while still getting missiles fired at them; that's a lot better than the US would have treated any adversary in the same circumstances.
The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel.
Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.
More recently, Hamas proudly publishes video of digging up water pipes to turn into rockets. There's a weird example of horseshoe theory here, where fellow travelers sound affronted at "Hamas would do X" while Hamas brags "ha ha, look how awesome we are at X!"
This is why a surrender is a prerequisite to building up an economy. You need investment to support subsequent investment, not to be dismantled when there's enough of it to turn into another volley of pot shots.
Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened.
Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours. This is the sort of thing that requires a source.
The childish fantasy
Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.
I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation; that magnitude of error is often a good warning sign that you've been deriving facts from conclusions rather than vice-versa. Discovering that just once should provoke introspection akin to finding "just one termite" in your walls. But the correction doesn't seem to have nudged your perspective at all, and now we see it didn't even elicit politeness, so further corrections this far down-thread probably won't be productive either. I'll stop here.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
I mean, LLMs have solved IMO problems. If that does not count as reasoning, then I do not think 99% of living humans count as being capable of reasoning either.
Asserting AI inferiority based on the remaining 1% begins looking awfully like a caricature of a neonazi (unemployed alcoholic school dropout who holds himself superior to a white-collar immigrant because some guy of his ethnicity wrote a symphony two hundred years ago).
In general, I think this is in fact quite often the shape of the problem - AI critics don't necessarily underestimate AI, but instead vastly overestimate humanity and themselves. Most of the cliché criticisms of AI, including in particular the "parrot" one, apply to humans!
DefinitelyAnAlt
8hr ago
Yeah. Remarkably senior team. No juniors. Youngest person is almost 30. Strong positive bias towards ICs rather than manager types.
Its still early, but digging it so far. Maybe less so if I get marked underperformer ☠️. Hoping I learn my way around to have impact before the first evaluation cycle.
srf0638
8hr ago
Would you race?
I might try to throw down some big days, but I don't like recreational sleep deprivation, so not in a real serious sense. Maybe start with the Grand Depart, maybe not. You?
I've done a fair bit of solo travel both on and off the bike, never really struggled, but it's gonna be harder to schedule now that I have a serious gf. Or slow-play my hand and do it when I retire, there's at least one guy in his 70s on the Rigs of the Tour Divide series every year.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
8hr ago
No, I showed that my point was coherent, it is beyond me why you don't see that. It's not really my problem at this point.
Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?
Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them. You're welcome to read that thread and make of it what you will.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
8hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"...
I was leaning into the joke. MTG nerds are a different breed.
On the topic of conic sections, the poster claimed:
However most histories of Greek mathematics say that conic sections were invented/discovered by Menaechmus, as a tool for doubling the cube, which is of course a useless problem from our modern point of view.
EDIT 3. Parabolic mirrors is not a real application. Of course, this is a nice property of parabola, but conic sections have many other nice properties. The legend of Archimedes burning ships with them is a legend, nothing more
Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math
They very much didn't start out that way.
And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!
That depends on how strict you want to be on the definition of non-Euclidean, spherical geometry, a limited subset, was used in celestial and terrestrial navigation as early as the first century CE, though real usage only boomed in the Age of Sail.
But that was for a very specific purpose, the idea that space itself was non-Euclidean came about much later. That is a lag of about 21 centuries.
While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!
I am happy to acknowledge availability and recall bias here. If there are topics in maths that have remained utterly useless and purely theoretical to this day, I am unlikely to have heard of them.
My overall point is that:
-
Maths is incredibly productive on net.
-
Even if we do have "99.9%" certainty that a particular field is unlikely to have practical applications, the benefits in the unlikely case that it does are usually substantial. If I came across a normal lottery and saw that my ticket had a 0.1% chance of winning billions, then I'd be spending quite a lot of money on lottery tickets.
-
Ergo, it is immensely sensible to subsidize or invest in maths as a whole. The expected value from doing so is positive. Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8hr ago
People, not just you but in general, immediately leap from 'I don't like this opinion' to forming the worst possible interpretation of the post and then downvote.
It wasn't you who posted it, unless you're a corvid as well as a corvos. But the offending bit is:
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
The straightforward interpretation is that either you accept the insulting characterization in the first part, or you're completely out of touch (note the URL). This absolutely deserves a downvote.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Wherefore do you need a corpse to present publicly at all? You presumably have been telling everyone for years that he suffered from a disfiguring illness which lead to his reclusiveness, he sure as hell wouldn't want an open-casket. Unfortunately in his disfiguring illness he turned to a lot of weird woo-woo spirit healing, and there are no medical records for several years because he refused to see a doctor. We're talking about billionaire local feudal lords here, the death certificate comes from the [Family Name] Building at the local hospital, paying off a mortician is the least of the concerns.
Keep in mind that the only cheated party is the government. All members of the family are presumably on-side, the hospital suffers no harm (in fact, under the new will, they're getting a new surgery wing!), the mortician suffers no harm. Even the local government suffers no harm. Only the Federal Government is concerned, and there's not actually much nexus for them to check if someone is alive.
Bonus Question: A 3 year old corpse of a 40 year old man. This is obvious if you think about the corpse of a young woman from the perspective of a necrophiliac.
Tree
8hr ago
I know you’re not a mod, but the law casts a long shadow. Yeah, I agree with you, it is not ‘obvious’, only likely . It was a stylistic flourish, to accentuate the whiplash, scooby doo effect of that comment. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
Corvos
8hr ago
one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years
I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P
Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:
- a 3 year old corpse
- a 40 year old corpse
- a 43 year old corpse
Genuinely not sure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Something I feel has been under-discussed so far:
Estate planning, and assisted suicide as a tax avoidance tool.
Estate tax rates have been a classic political football for decades, with policy shifting radically between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want higher exemptions, so that the tax starts at a bigger estate, and lower rates; Democrats want lower exemptions and higher rates. Republicans cry crocodile tears about family farms forced to sell; Democrats whinge about billionaire feudal dynasties. Each administration has made moves towards eliminating, or raising, the estate tax; often unsuccessfully but always attempted. It's reasonable for any wealthy American to be concerned about major changes in the estate tax system, they come around every decade or so, following party politics.
I've often joked that a particularly wealthy family I know would Weekend at Bernie's their patriarch if he died during a bad (Democrat) period for the estate tax, as one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years and expect a better (Republican) estate tax law to pass. They could drive him around to various places where he could be "seen" in the window of the family Escalade with heavily tinted windows, and just keep it in the family until it was time to "declare" his death publicly and pay the taxes.
But with assisted suicide, new options open up.
It's November 2032. JD Vance has lost in a landslide to AOC, the Republican party having been crippled by a "True MAGA" independent run by Donald Trump Jr who claimed that Vance's administration had betrayed his father's legacy. AOC and her fillibuster-proof Democratic majority plan to increase the estate tax to a punitive 95% on all estates over $50mm. Does a 95 year old multi-billionaire decide to take a one-way vacation to Switzerland to avoid the tax? Do his children pressure him to take the trip? It's Succession supercharged. When death is a taxable event, you choose death at a convenient time for taxes.
But, for that matter, if suicide vacations become routine, then that makes for quite an opportunity for fraud, right? Ok, I don't want to get hit with the AOC taxes when I die, but I'm only 80 I've got years left to live, what to do? Well, Switzerland might be out, but Columbia allows MAID. ((I'll note I'm probably engaging in gross American racist stereotyping here)) I travel to Columbia, pay to obtain a death certificate from a MAID clinic to send back to the USA with the kids, and then I start a new life in Costa Rica, where my kids will send me cash to support my Jimmy Buffet lifestyle.
stuckinbathroom
8hr ago
Fair points, but verification is usually way cheaper than generation.
Not if P = NP
ControlsFreak
8hr ago
Fair enough on the positive claim concerning meta-ethics. If you'd prefer to leave that one in incoherence, you can leave that one in incoherence.
Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?
Corvos
8hr ago
I’m quite happy to take the actual point of the copypasta and accept that the wrapping is for dramatic effect.
Mostly I’m responding to the idea that the prior posts weren’t downvoted for being on the wrong side of the debate but for being rude.
It seems to me there’s a charitable and an uncharitable way to read any of these posts and that the ‘wrong’ side gets less charity by and large. IMO the same copypasta would be downvoted to hell if it was an anti gun message in the same format.
Don’t have any actual action items I’m pushing for here, I just think the phenomenon is obvious and worth noting.
SnapDragon
9hr ago
That's a good question. I'm not sure of the exact reason quaternions were invented - you can indeed stumble on them just by trying to extend the complex numbers in an abstract way - but the Wikipedia article suggests they were already being used for 3D mechanics within a couple of years of invention. (BTW, "number theory" involves integers, primes, that kind of thing, not quaternions. Complex numbers do show up though.)
You could ask the same question about complex numbers too, but they originally arose from the search for an algorithm to solve cubic equations, which is a fairly practical question. That they later turned out to be essential for electronics and quantum mechanics is a case of some new applications of an already useful math concept.
ChickenOverlord
9hr ago
"Are the children wrong?" is not on par with "Listen up, you dumb motherfucker" in terms of rudeness.
Sure, but I was quoting a well-known 4chan copypasta, not actually calling the poster I was replying to that.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
9hr ago
If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure
I do not see Israel as a society that aims to be racially pure, because Jews pretty transparently aren't of one race.
What about things like quaternions, which suddenly became relevant when we needed to interpolate 3D transforms and do rotations without Gimbal lock? The current best process for calibrating cameras is to use dual quats, which also means needing dual number theory. Were those areas originally expected to be useful for engineering? My understanding is no, but I'm not a mathematician.
I think it's still open to debate whether, in the absence of subsidized pure math research, we'd get the same mathematical advancements "never", "much later", "as soon as we need them", or "practically just as soon".
The fact that everybody thinks of (even their own!) pure math as "useless", right up until it turns out to be the foundation for quantum physics or something, is perhaps the best evidence for "never". I got my PhD in Applied Math (unspoken motto: do you want respect, or do you want job offers?), and it feels almost criminal when you hear about a mathematician coming up with an abstract toy only for someone more focused on science and engineering to come along generations later and say, "whoa, that solves my problem; yoink!"
As evidence for "as soon as we need them": the applied mathematicians haven't been just swiping everything; if you don't find something that solves your problem off-the-shelf, you take what you have and you expand it and tweak it and invent more of it until you do, and in the end you're still proving new theorems, just motivated by "this is how I can guarantee when my new algorithm will converge" rather than "theorems are fun!"
As evidence for "much later": the trouble with "do you want job offers" is that some job offers let you publish more than others, and if you're not getting subsidized via something like academic grants or civilian national lab research, it's downhill from there. Math is in part a cooperative team sport, and it doesn't work as well when you want to score in the "free advancement of human knowledge" basket but you're lucky if you get to shoot for "patent" rather than "trade secret" or "national security" instead.
And as evidence for "practically just as soon", I refer back to "theorems are fun!" There are some people who you can shunt off to a job as a patent clerk and it still won't stop them from playing with tensor calculus; if these are the sort who make the critical-path advances then we still get the advances.
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