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culture war roundup

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

The Colorado Supreme Court holds:

A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.

[recent related discussion, slightly older]

The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.

How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:

As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...

Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.

And the other dissent:

Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...

and

Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.

There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.

Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?

The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”

He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”

There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.

Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.

If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.

Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence. The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China. Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.

I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.

I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.

I'm excited for the responses!

Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued

I'd credit [the positivity of leftist hobby spaces] not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave.

...

A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.

@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:

Have we forgotten the whole phenomenon of "you can't be racist/sexist/whatever against [disfavoured group]" and every mainstream outlet defending using doxing and slurs against targets so long as they're in a disfavoured group?

In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.

I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.

If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
What is the woman's responsibility towards low TFR?

Low TFR is the new hot topic. I'll use this post to continue the discussion started by @ffrreerree2 (Only 1 comment, if not an alt, welcome to the Motte.) on his post. Because the last week's thread is about to die off.

Also assumes fuck rate is tied to birth rate

I'll focus on the Iranian video discussed in the previous post. I think it's a good enough approximation of a conservative call to marriage/family building. It does well to highlight the individual failure mode of not having worked towards building a family, obviously "crippling" loneliness, lack of purpose, shitty QOL, yada yada.

That video still bugs me. For one, the right side of the video was entirely redundant. Everyone knows that if you have that wonderful magical trad-wife who other than wearing a hijab at home; gets up in the morning before you without an alarm clock, cooks labor-intensive dishes for not only breakfast but also for your packed lunch, combs your hair for you, and presumably organizes a surprise birthday party for you, then fucks it's it up by spraying foam all over the cake., life is all gravy. Does the modal (regardless of Nationality) man need to be reminded of that dream? Doesn't the very next video by Taiwan hint at the notion that that very dream itself is 'problematic' because women are not only for the kitchen? I'm from the East and its an extremely common discussion trope/meme among young females that there exists no worse reality than being sentenced to the kitchen after marriage, and there are more than enough heuristics (how good-looking the guy is) to figure out if a potential suitor would be the kind to do that. Men around my parts go to extreme lengths to hide any and all desire for such a thing, some even convincing themselves that, that isn't actually a great deal for them all things considered.

Now moving on to the left side. What was particularly wrong about the guy in the video if you look past the "this dude totally sucks" aesthetics? He woke up on time, has an apartment, has a job, has a car, looks the same as his alternate reality married version (despite the pizza coke and takeout), and isn't carrying any obvious grooming defects that a visit to the barbershop can't fix. He also has a pet tortoise. I guess him being rude to the girl selling flowers sealed his fate. Or that he turns his apartment lights off, totally can't fix that by.. turning the lights on.

How does the guy on the left become the guy on the right? The video presents an alternate reality side by side, and it's presupposed that left did something wrong along the way. But he is clearly not happy, I am sure he did not turn down the magical trad wife in the past to further progress his presumble software engineering (casual clothes at the workplace) career. He knows his life kinda sucks. Is the world really suffering from a lack of mediocre-looking software engineering men turning women from marriage? Does not literally 5 minutes on the internet or speaking to a man under the age of 25 reveal to you that it's quite literally the opposite?

So let's imagine an alternative video but this time the female is the protagonist.

On the left we have; Our female protagonist waking up to an alarm. She replies to the 58 notifications on her Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, she eventually musters up the courage to wake up and makes her way to the shower, brushes her teeth and then proceeds to spend 30 minutes putting on makeup because society demanded so, and because it makes her feel better. Having left her house ready to take on The World, but! only after she got her corporation-made coffee, no she doesn't have the time to make coffee at home. Finally, at work, she gets in her pre-email gossip at the breakroom for 25 minutes talking to her female coworker about the latest episode of that totally amazing new Netflix show. Midway through sending the emails the 'cutest guy at the office who is not particularly attractive' asks her how her weekend was, she tells him about how she went to an escape room and was so scared like it was a horror movie! The guy eventually wipes the sweat off his eyebrows during a strategic bathroom break during the conversation and asks her to go with him to this new escape room that he's heard all about next weekend. She declines the offer despite letting him know how that would be so totally amazing and sounds like a really fun plan. The guy contemplates changing jobs and then wonders did he remember to feed his pet turtle. After a hard day of work, she rushes home and reaches for the Beauty by Earth Makeup Remover - with Organic Aloe Vera & Witch Hazel, Use with Eye Makeup Remover Wipes or Cotton Pads, Gentle Non-Greasy Makeup Remover for Dry, Oily and Sensitive Skin Types(also vegan and cruelty free) makeup remover so she can apply it and then reapply another layer of makeup for her upcoming Tinder date, because society said so. She goes on the date talks about her ex, her cat, her totally crazy coworker who is insane enough to go on 10 tinder dates a month as opposed to the usual 5. After an exciting evening out, the couple to be arrives home and engage in unprotected sex because condoms feel like shit, after some pillow talk she says her goodbyes and makes sure to not forget to take the pill because pullout game only gets you so far. She unwinds by watching that totally amazing show on Netflix with the lights off and goes to bed.

Ofcourse the story above other than being terribly written is an exaggeration. The modal young woman isn't this vapid. She maybe goes on 1 date a month, might entertain the guys offer to go for the escape room, and sometimes reads novels instead of watching Netflix, and only uses a 5$ makeup remover instead of a 23$ one. But it's just a difference in magnitude not kind. Both of them do not entertain the idea of procreating with that guy from the office. Both of them are the Pams waiting for their Jim Halperts. They just can't find a good enough guy! And until you do that for them through whatsoever means, no amount of PSA videos is going to help your cause. Start off by thinking towards aiming the video at the right audience maybe. Maybe.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.

A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)

Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.

EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

Trump got hit by two gag orders from two different judges. The precedent in this area of law is severely underdeveloped, both because so few defendants get gagged, and of those who do very few have the resources or energy to mount an appeal. Jacob Sullum writes a great overview of the issue:

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Donald Trump's trial on federal charges related to his attempted reversal of Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, yesterday imposed a gag order that bars the former president from "publicly targeting" witnesses, prosecutors, or court personnel. Trump lawyer John Lauro vigorously opposed the order on First Amendment grounds, saying it would stop his client from "speak[ing] truth to oppression." While that characterization exaggerates the order's impact, constraining the speech of a criminal defendant, especially one who is in the midst of a presidential campaign, does raise largely unsettled constitutional issues.

Chutkan's order was provoked by Trump's habit of vilifying anyone who crosses him, including Special Counsel Jack Smith ("deranged"), the prosecutors he oversees (a "team of thugs"), and Chutkan herself (a "highly partisan" and "biased, Trump Hating Judge"). "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!" Trump wrote on Truth Social after his indictment in this case. The next day, The New York Times notes, "a Texas woman left a voice mail message for Judge Chutkan, saying, 'If Trump doesn't get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly.'"

So to avoid the common pitfalls in discussions like this, set aside Trump for a moment. Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders? If so, what limits should be in place? After working out the questions in theory, how does your position apply to Trump?

I think gag orders can be appropriate in a very limited set of circumstances. For example let's say a newspaper owner is charged with murder in a small town. He should always have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss the allegations against him and mount a defense in public. There are some areas where it starts to get cloudy for me, like for example if he hires an investigator (legal & appropriate) to dig into the history of the main witness against him (legal & appropriate) and he gets his hands on her diary (potentially legal & potentially appropriate). He then spends the lead-up to the murder trial publishing massive coverage the lurid details of all her sex kinks and fantasies, which isn't implicated in the murder charges. To me this starts to look like witness tampering/intimidation, where the defendant is humiliating a witness with the intent to discourage her from giving testimony.

So my answer is here would be yes, judges can impose gag orders but they should be extremely narrow. The operating principle should be to always allow defendants to discuss the direct charges against them, including the ability to discredit witness credibility. There's a blurry line between when someone is discrediting a witness on relevant matters, and when they're just trying to make their life hell to discourage them from testifying. An example of this blurry line is what happened to SBF, where his pretrial release was revoked in part because he leaked Caroline Ellison's diary to the NYT and because he seemed to have been coordinating testimony with FTX's general counsel.

So with that out of the way, how does it apply to Trump? Judge Chutkan's order restricts him from making statements that "target" the prosecutor, court staff, and "reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony". Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending. There are some obvious areas where Trump's commentary is inane and irrelevant, like posting a photo of a judge's law clerk and claiming she's "Schumer's girlfriend", or posting about the prosecutor's family members. Discrediting witnesses is harder to draw a clean line on, because again there's a gradient between discrediting and intimidating. I think Trump should have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss any of his charges and discredit any evidence and witnesses against him. While I disagree with that part of the ruling, I don't know how I would rephrase that clause, and so my reaction is that in these close cases we should default to allowing speech rather than restricting it.

Edit: @guajalote changed my mind on the propriety of Judge Engoron's order prohibiting "personal attacks on my members of my court staff". I agree that criticizing government officials should always be protected, even if the speech is targeting irrelevant or uninvolved individuals. A narrower order prohibiting incitement would've been more appropriate.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.

Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.

Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.

Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:

To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.

Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.

The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”

This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.

While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.

The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:

I keep hearing about fascist infiltration or alt-right infiltration into spaces, including themotte, but no one seems to actually be showing examples...

But now I find myself wondering if this has happened in more progressive spaces that were open to debate.

I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."

A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.

One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.

(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)

In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.

And they take the black pill.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

As many of you know, I am not a Rationalist. My skepticism of Rationalism emerges in a variety of ways, but none are more striking than the feeling of bizarre disconnect when observing the Rationalist tendency to focus on systems, on rules, on formal structures as though they were some durable expression of baseline reality, as though they were dispositive in and of themselves. "well, this is the rule, so this should be the outcome".

This being the Culture War thread, a lot of what we discuss here orbits around questions of Law, procedure, or organizational norms. The problem is that law is not dispositive. It is not the motive power driving our society, or even the steering wheel. In some cases it is the bumper sticker, and in others it is the exhaust. In most ways relevant to our discussions here, it simply does not matter, and if you cannot wrap your head around this, I contend that you fundamentally misunderstand the Culture War itself.

Today's example, via the National Review:

Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex

Virginia Democratic delegate Elizabeth Guzman is seeking to introduce legislation that would hold parents criminally liable for refusing to treat their children as a different sex from the one they were born into. The legislation, which Guzman plans to introduce in Virginia’s upcoming legislative session, would expand the definition of child abuse so that parents could be charged with a felony or misdemeanor for refusing to honor their child’s request to be treated as the opposite sex.

“If the child shares with those mandated reporters, what they are going through, we are talking about not only physical abuse or mental abuse, what the job of that mandated reporter is to inform Child Protective Services (CPS),” Guzman told 7News. “That’s how everybody gets involved. There’s also an investigation in place that is not only from a social worker but there’s also a police investigation before we make the decision that there is going to be a CPS charge.”

The move comes in response to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s latest policy initiatives, which empower parents to exercise control over whether and how children transition gender in school, as well as a speech he gave at a “parents matter” rally back at the beginning of the school year. “They think parents have no right to know what your child is discussing with their teacher or counselor,” Youngkin said.

Sing it with me, all together now: The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered.

When asked by the local reporter whether she isn’t “criminalizing parents” as many Republicans argue, Guzman answered unequivocally.

“No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts,” Guzman answered. “So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.” Guzman was similarly unwavering in her thoughts about whether such an approach violated free speech or religious freedom. “The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are. So that’s what I tell them when they asked me that question, and that’s what I will continue to tell people.”

...I'd love to blame Blue ideology for that last paragraph's worth of mealy-mouthed horseshit, but honestly, I think we all can recognize that Normies shall inevitably Norm. Still, not great. I didn't bother to hunt down her full statement; let's tell ourselves she actually laid out a thoughtful argument about how society requires compromises and hard choices, gestured at trans suicide rates and some impeccably replicated studies showing that confirmed gender identity leads to better outcomes, and then the mean ol' National Review edited all that out to make her sound like a [DATA EXPUNGED] ...less ...persuasive person. Maybe that's even true! Let's not check.

Many Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists have criticized Youngkin’s recently announced education policy changes. Most prominently, the new policies prohibit teachers from using personal pronouns “not on a student’s official records.” They also reverse a previous state policy “allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their preferred gender.”

Last month, students across nearly 100 schools staged walkout protests across the state to criticize Governor Youngkin’s policies and defend transgender rights.

...It bears mentioning that those student walkouts were almost certainly partisan political actions organized by public employees. Red Tribe doesn't get to do student activism in public schools, and it certainly doesn't get to use schoolchildren as political props. This is in fact a perfect example of why the actions they're protesting are needed... but I digress.

This proposed law doesn't matter. It doesn't matter even a little bit, and not just because it hasn't passed yet. It's very clearly a violation of religious freedom so it should be flatly unconstitutional, but of course the Constitution doesn't matter either. None of the surrounding legal, procedural, or policy questions matter. None of it matters. Not even a little bit. These things aren't the engine. They aren't the steering wheel. They're the bumper stickers, and they're the exhaust. They are the effect, not the cause. If this law is struck down, another will replace it. If this law passes, the core issue will not be resolved. The Constitution should prevent this, but it won't, nor would amendments help.

The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of. We can't agree on what constitutes murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, what constitutes crime, what constitutes Justice. These are not the sort of disagreements a society can have, long term. Something has to give, and probably a lot of somethings.

Laws, norms, procedures, all of those are well downstream of Culture, of social reality. You need everyone more or less on the same page before you can even attempt law; trying to keep law together in the face of mutual values incoherence is... well, it's real stupid, and it's never going to work even a little bit. If you can't get people to agree on central definitions of murder and child abuse, how the Sweet Satan do you expect to run a justice system, a legal system, an election system, much less adjudicate free speech?

This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People. If we held the population constant and completely replaced our entire political system, someone very like this woman would be proposing some action roughly analogous to this law, because that is how tribal hatred works. The hatred itself is what matters; the specific grooves and canals it is channeled through, the details of procedure and custom, norms and institutional traditions, codified policies and so on are irrelevant. This concentrated, willfully malignant essence of humanity, cannot be constrained by ink on paper or dusty tradition. It finds a way. You are not going to prevent that by asking it politely to please not.

This event is not surprising, and as some of you are no doubt aware, none of what I've written above is even close to novel. I and others were predicting shit like this as far back as early 2016. If you couldn't, and especially if you are one of the OG Blues or Moderates who scoffed or harrumphed when we predicted it, well, is this sufficient to demonstrate the point?

A brief coda, if you'll allow me. A month or two back, we had an excellent thread about drag, kids, and the slur "groomer". A lot of the blues and moderates argued that "groomer" means someone actually trying to prep a kid for sex with themselves or a specific other person, and so applying it to teachers and other authority figures was an instance of The Worst Argument in The World, and so should be frowned on.

I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.

Perhaps you find that irrational, inexplicable. After all, they're not breaking the law, right?

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

Dispatches from the War on Horny: Has the popular Japanese website Pixiv been colonized by the Western Social-Financial-Complex?

Today (well, yesterday as I write this), Pixiv announced that, in cooperation with Visa and MasterCard's policies (well, okay, they say "Brand Protections of Card Networks," but you probably know what that really means and which card networks they're referring to), they will be forbidding certain content from their Booth, Fanbox, and Request services--of note is "sexual exploitation of a minor." If you aren't already, sit down and get (un)comfortable, this is going to take some explaining.

Now, because of the recent Twitter shenanigans, you may have come across these blog posts by Matthew Skala and Ethan Zuckerman about Pawoo, Pixiv's Mastodon instance, and both its sheer popularity as well as how comfortable its userbase is with lolicon content (and how that makes other Mastodon instances chafe). Well, loli content is once again the source of conflict over at Pixiv, and the East-vs.-West dimension seems like it's also at play here.

The new guidelines seem tailor-made to ban loli and guro (AKA gore) content (which, as a reminder, is fictional art), with the former being, well, just plainly popular for what is likely a whole bunch of cultural reasons I can't get into here. While these guidelines focus on payment-based services that Pixiv provides (Booth is a storefront akin to Gumroad or Storenvy or Etsy, Fanbox is a subscription service akin to Patreon, and I presume Request is Pixiv's equivalent to Skeb, a website for commissioning artists), it's not inconceivable to think that this will sooner or later also apply to the regular art-sharing side of Pixiv, the main site itself.

While I can't really link to them (or at least the Sankaku article collating them), there's already some reactions from Japanese users suggesting that Pixiv will have a Tumblr Porn Ban situation on their hands, as users pre-emptively flee the site before they get kicked off and leave for competitors like Nijie (another art-sharing site) and Fantia (another subscription platform).

One other reaction has been to ask "why not avoid this conflict?", as Pixiv could either just not use Visa/MasterCard (like what competing site DMM did), or, more feasibly, implement workarounds like using points purchased with credit cards (like what DLSite and deviantArt do), or even adopt crypto payments. However, it's also likely that Pixiv is completely fine with this, and here's where things get spicy:

Oddly enough, a few months ago, Pixiv instituted DEI-type policies and sensitivity training, which I presume is quite the rare thing to see from a Japanese company. Now, without going way "beyond the wire" epistemically, it does seem like Pixiv has somehow picked up the Western memes of DEI and incorporated them. This likely made them more open to playing by the rules of Visa and MasterCard, not just on paper, but also spiritually. But, again, I don't want to get too into the weeds of cultural colonialism from the West--it could just be that Pixiv really wants the money that flows through the Visa/MC networks and aren't too willing to rock the boat on this matter. I don't think this is the newest form of imposed American hegemony on the Japanese way of life, like Commodore Perry or the post-WWII occupation and reforms (which arguably built the environment that allowed hentai and lolicon to emerge in the first place), but it kinda does feel like it. (Though see also)

There is certainly no shortage of culture-war red meat when it comes to the modern culture clash between America and Japan WRT general social justice issues, from how Japanese Twitter's trending tab was populated by politics and similar current events until Musk took over, to the aforementioned Mastodon/Pawoo conflict where both sides were of completely different mindsets, and the various controversies over censorship and localization with Crunchyroll's anime distribution and Sony's treatment of Japanese games.

And of course, I don't think I need to re-link articles about Visa vs. PornHub or Patreon restricting adult content or so on. You might already be familiar with how PayPal and the credit card companies basically ban porn and other adult content (citing its high risk of chargebacks), whether outright or through sheer inconvenience (there was a comment I saw recently about how a medium-tier/size payment processor for a porn site had to keep re-routing around damage in the form of network bans, plus also the little things like not being able to use PayPal for some sites and services). Financial deplatforming comes in second or third place to regular social media deplatforming in terms of how often it gets discussed, but it's not very far behind.

Just from the practical/ethical standpoint, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are so huge and dominant that they probably should just be common carriers, especially considering the non-NSFW areas where they have influence (namely speech and such; dissident shitposters and Russians are probably well-aware of this reality). PayPal can freeze your account and hold onto your money for no good reason (and you especially better hope they don't catch wind of you doing sex work or selling NSFW art commissions), and your only option is to enter arbitrage, if you can.

But there's also the poltical dimension of this: these three companies are part of the massive American/global financial hegemon, able to kick off actors and users at-will, whether they be lowly prostitutes or even entire countries. Having one large actor dominate much of the world's wealth is very likely bad on its own, but the pay-to-play ESG corporatism being used to draw the lines of social acceptability is extra-worrying. The anti-porn policies of 1st-world payment processing may be rooted in social conservatism, but they play nicely with the liberal-progressive strong-arming many worry about. For any country more worried about losing access to international money because they crossed some cultural or social red-line of the West, there are only three options: embrace crypto (and subject yourself to the non-stop boom-and-bust cycles it suffers from), voluntarily disconnect from the global finance system (with all the hard work that entails), or admit that we all live in America.

EDIT: Since this kicked off a whole sub-thread in response to Hlynka, I would just like to state for the record that while I don't really care for Lolicon at all, I am fully aware that it will likely not stop there, and even an otherwise vanilla-but-still-NSFW image might eventually not be allowed. Slippery slopes, Murder-Ghandis, "the line must be drawn here," "first they came for..." etc.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

Since my post last week for which I was explicitly not warned at that time, I thought I would address the particulars of the criticism, mainly that,

your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.

First, there is nothing stopping anyone from disagreeing, but I figure I should present and defend my thesis.

Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Plenty of people commit plenty of crimes, and I'm sure Trump is technically guilty of many things, but the same can be said of Obama, Bush, and Clinton, as well as she-Clinton and VP Biden, though not themselves Presidents. The same can be said of many, many people at all levels of the legislative and executive branches. Presidents are not prosecuted, and for good reason, until now, so the difference cannot be the scale of the crime, but must be some other factor. The obvious and clear factor, judging on the last seven years of evidence, is that Trump is unduly and irrationally hated by the powers that be, and that he is specifically marked for destruction in a way most others are shielded.

From Victor Davis Hansen:

#1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

#2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

VDH goes on to list six problems with this prosecution, before 20 examples of crimes that have gone unprosecuted, from the people I've mentioned as well as various spooks and spies.

If we look at the indictment itself, and the person responsible for it, Alvin Bragg, you see more evidence of my thesis.

Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief at his business was charged with murder after wrestling away the weapon and using it to fire at the suspect.

This is the kind of anarcho-tyranny that one would expect when you view the world through a comprehensive lens that allows for understand my claim. That Alvin Bragg doesn't give a shit about the law, he's just there to settle scores and punish those he can find. The law is powerless to help, but boy can they punish when they get around to it. Alvin Bragg, for what's it worth, is another Soros-funded prosecutor. Soros at least gets his money's worth, as every single DA I've ever seen associated with him and his money is using their discretion is release violent criminals and prosecute normal citizens. The man has a type.

Everything about this perfectly fits the model that I've developed over the last seven years for understand what happens to people when confronted with Donald Trump. Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.

Maybe one day events will not fit this model, but today is not that day.

For those of you who don't share this model, or don't share this view, how can you explain the lack of prosecutions of other executive branch employees in the past? How can you explain the two impeachments and long-lingering investigation? How can you explain the one-sided coverage by once-respectable media outlets? How can you explain anything that's happened since 2016? I didn't use to rely on this explanation, but after a certain amount of time, it becomes the simplest explanation, and I have stopped fighting it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.

After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.

One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.

Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.

Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.

Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:

they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.

It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

After OpenAI has admitted AI safety into the mainstream, AI safetyists have naturally accepted the invitation.

The Future of Life Institute has published an open letter calling to pause «Giant AI experiments». (Archive).Their arguments are what one should expect by this point. Their prescriptions are as follows:

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now.

Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.[4] This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.

In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.

Do we control our civilization? Maybe the folks at FHI do, I sure don't. Well, anyway…

Signatories (over 1000 in total) include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, Yoshua Bengio, Connor Leahy, Stuart Russell, Andrew Yang, Emad Mostaque, Max Tegmark, Gary Marcus, Steve Omohundro, Matt Mahoney, Christof Koch, Sam Altman *, LessWrong disciples embedded in DeepMind/Meta, and various NGO/«policy» suits. Bolded are people who are reasonably well positioned and incentivized to, in fact, organize and authorize training «AI systems more powerful than GPT-4» in then next few months, though except Altman they all only barely qualify; actual GPT-5 is believed to already be in training and is, or was, planned to come out in late 2023.

Curiously absent – for now – are Yann LeCun, Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis and John Carmack, and a few more. LeCun, at least, commits to not sign. Here's to hoping he won't find a horse's head in his sheets or something.

I do not have much of a comment at the moment. My perspective is that I despise people overly concerned with «Moloch» and want as many competitive superhuman AIs as possible, so on one hand, slowing down and enabling the state to catch up and subjugate this tech for its purposes is a very bad, yet highly expected and perhaps inevitable, outcome of this race. This attitude is born out of desperation; in principle, their «AI Summer» option, where we increase capabilities over many years, getting the equivalent of 20th century civilizational shift in a decade instead of an explosive singularity, is not bad at all; I just don't believe in it.

On the other: seeing as nobody is closer to GPT-5 than OpenAI themselves (excepting DeepMind with Gato-2 or something better, as Gwern worries), it could be beneficial for our long-term outcomes to equalize the board somewhat, giving China more of a chance too. Geopolitics dictates that this should preclude the possibility of this policy being pursued in earnest, but really China is so colossally outmatched in AI, so well and truly fucked by technological restrictions, and mired in such problems and gratuitous stupidity of its own policymakers, it may not be a factor in either case.

I must go, so that's all from me; hopefully this is enough to pass the «effort» bar required by the mods and prompt some discussion.

In happier news, arguably the most powerful opensource chatbot today is LLaMA-7B with a transfusion of ChatGPT 3.5-Turbo quirks, (not very) creatively called GPT4all. It's far beyond basic Alpaca (already an attempt to extract OpenAI's magic) and absurdly good for what it is, a 4.21 Gb file of lossily compressed 7 billion weights trained… well, the way it's been trained, the AI equivalent of a movie camrip superimposed on the general web dump; the worst part of it is that it genuinely apes ChatGPT's politics and RLHF-d sanctimonious «personality» despite being 25 times smaller and probably 10 times dumber. It runs happily on very modest computers, and – unlike Alpaca – not only responds to instructions but maintains awareness of earlier parts in the dialogue (though it's sometimes overeager to say your part as well). I know that models vastly stronger than that should also be usable on commodity hardware and must be made available to commoners, but we may see regulation making it not so, and very quickly.

Consider the attached image representative of its mindset.

* (EDIT: I believe I found him there with ctrlF when first opened the page, but he's not present in any extant version; guess it was a hallucination. I really need to sleep, these slip-ups are worrying).

/images/16800616737543523.webp

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.

A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.

The long version might require a bit of background to explain.

I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.

As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.

One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.

The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.

Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.

One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.

As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? [archive.ph link]

Quoting Forbes:

…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”

Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.

My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:

  • AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
  • plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
  • vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
  • and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)

In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.

edit: not to toot my own horn, but

Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.

edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

What comes next?

Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?

If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.

I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:

  1. Huge increase in the amount of data available

  2. Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones

  3. Significant increases in education levels

  4. AI

  5. Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list

All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.

For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.

The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.

Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.

What do you all think?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY... assisted suicide and the total state

Replying to /u/freemcflurry 's thread below

.

.

Shanti De Corte A 23 year old French Woman has died via assisted suicide. She was 17 when she survived a suicide attack in Rome… despite suffering no physical injury she developed PTSD and 6 years later was given the fatal injections after a panel of doctors signed off on it.

This is not an isolated incident. I hear stories almost every month of young to middle aged people with decades left to live, often with some physical ailment not even catastrophically disabling (loss of sight in one eye, chronic pain, disability of a limb… things vastly less than paraplegia)… and many that are effectively assisted suicides on mental health grounds alone… I can no longer find the story, but was explicitly assisted suicide for chronic depression.

Now there have been many pieces about the slippery slope of assisted suicide and moral arguments… and of course there are going to some progressives or ardent libertarians who insist this is all a perfectly fine choice for a consenting adult to make… but I don’t really care about all of that…

The overwhelming sentiment I have to all of this is crude but simple:

DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY

The idea someone with less than full locked-in syndrome should get medically assisted suicide is not only insane… its aesthetically revolting.

If you can't summon the will to do it yourself even with full use of your physical faculties (of which suicide only requires one functional finger), then clearly you aren't emotionally competent to assign the task to someone else, and are quite frankly beneath such a grandiose gesture.

I've read multiple books by men who committed sepuku. One was a westerner who was paralyzed from the chest down (and didn't feel a thing)... another was a Japanese writer who, for a myriad of psychological and philosophical reasons, choose to do so in all its pain despite being in fine (actually peak) physical shape, Both of these I found eminently respectable. Whether one agreed with either man, the courage and will involved in either act revealed a beauty of spirit and rendered their logic something that had to be engaged with....

For adults (allegedly physically and mentally competent according to the state that accepts their signature) to choose not just death, but death in the hands of some bureaucrat/matriarch appointed by the state and medical establishment... to seek the return to the womb, and infantilizing comfort of some schoolmarm telling them "everything will be ok", of the disgusting toxic surrender to the surrogate mothering of a "Death Doula"…

This deserves not our pity or concern but our contempt and hatred.

.

Say what you will about school shooters or suicide bombers... of the columbine shooters or 9/11 hijackers...Their rejection of this life and the world had the grandiosity and horror such a choice deserved. In their pain, rage, hate, and nihilism they at least had the dignity to let out a primal scream in their rejection of life.

At the hour and venue of their choosing they made their statements, and expressed everything they felt was a summation of their lives without even a thought to compromise... what statement are these assisted suicides making!?

To decide, out of all places on earth, you want to die in a hospital surrounded by the beeps and stench of piss covered by industrial cleaner? To choose for the hour of your demise the half hour slot the office clerk could find on the schedule? To choose as your last confessor the obese nurse some state bureaucrat selected out of the set who were working that day?

This is contemptable. The final farce of the cradle to grave welfare and biomedical security state.

I imagine these depressive but physically fine adults hoping that maybe this extreme expression, this final most extreme plea for help will extract from the uncaring state the love and affection their teachers promised but never delivered. That they might finally receive the love all the utilitarian and progressive rhetoric promised them... that the institutions they've come to see as father, mother, and lover will react to their pleas with all the affection and benevolence they've been taught to expect from neither parent, priest, or partner...

maybe as the bored RN tells them "Its alright, just a little sleep" they'll delude themselves into thinking that's what they've received... the matriarchy's most intimate soothing coo...

.

These people and institutions deserve our hate not for taking life but for the ritualistic mockery they make doing it... The Aztec heart cutters at least had a style and didn't lie about their knives... and the sun god was vastly more appeased than whatever "Comfort and dignity" is supposed to be assuaged by the syringes, hypocrisies, and economical hospital decoration.

The final sublimation of that most extreme, personal, and human of choices into the banal indifference of the bureaucratic state.

.

If someone is to reject life and all bonds of the living, then let them lead the police on a high speed chase before crashing into a wall… let them go to Vegas and drink themselves to death… let them wander off into the pale white of an ice-flow or chart their boat into the eye of the hurricane... let them blast their brains out on the floor of the state senate, or commit seppuku in the magic kingdom under the unblinking gaze of mickey's plastic mask... let them crash planes and bulldozers into buildings, or their bodies into the surf or concrete after defiant jumps...

And if one lacks the will and resolve to express their death with all the violence and horror a choice to take one’s life deserves… then clearly they also lack the seriousness to surrender their life to another.

Let them prove they truly lived at least a minute before they died. Let out a primal scream before disappearing beyond the vanishing point.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

Inferential Distance Part 3 of ?. On being a not-so-special agent.

It's 2012 or maybe 13 I'm honestly not sure, but the 15 year-old border guard keeps his AK on safe as he inspects our paper-work and negotiates the customary 'service charge'. In reciprocity I keep the revolver concealed in my jacket pocket pointed at the dirt instead of the kid's groin and quietly pray neither of us will get shot today.

This post is an installment of an ongoing series.

I've started writing this post at least a dozen times now and each time I have hit a wall and stopped. There's an idea/feeling I want to convey but I don't have the words it for in part because it is the water I swim in. At the same time the a number of recent posts/threads have left me thinking I really need to just say fuck the wall and kool-aid-man my way through it. I freely concede that the rest may come across as nonsense but I swear there is is point to be had.

Anyway, as we pulled away from the impromptu border checkpoint on the A3 outside Liboi I notice that the young med-students volunteering for [International NGO] and the Mormon Missionary that I'd been charged with chauffeuring are giving me odd looks. As I re-stow the Brazilian-made Smith & Wesson clone in the center console the missionary begins to hammer me with questions "have you had that gun the whole time?" "yes". "Were those real cops?" "Real enough". "What do you mean 'real enough'?" "Just that". "Did you bribe them?" "No, I paid a service charge". "Were you really going to shoot them" "Not if i didn't have to". "Who sets the service charge" "the guys running the checkpoint". "Are you sure it's not a bribe" :Now Faintly exasperated: "Yes, if it were 'a bribe' it would not have been included as a line item in your travel budget because that would be illegal"

10 years later I'm in the back yard talking to my elderly neighbor who lives in the other half of the duplex. She's angry that her purebread indoor cat that she spends a fortune on premium cat-food for has gotten out out of the house yet again and has been running around the back yard, getting dirty, eating table scraps, and having sex with the local stray. She makes some vague insinuation that my kids are somehow to blame. I calmly point out that she had left her kitchen door wide-open and that's probably how the cat got out. "But that was to get some fresh air in the house not to let the cat out" she explains. I nod and pretend to understand, but I don't. Instead I am reminded that missionary on a dusty African highway a decade ago.

Can you see the common thread? If not, perhaps a third example will help clarify...

If you have to dry the dishes

(Such an awful boring chore)

If you have to dry the dishes

('Stead of going to the store)

If you have to dry the dishes

And you drop one on the floor

Maybe they won't let you

Dry the dishes anymore

  • Shel Silverstien

I don't know if you're seeing what I see here, but in my mind all three of these examples, the missionary's questions, the my neighbor complaining while the cat does as she pleases, and the Silverstein poem all seem to trip the same breaker in my hindbrain and gesture towards the same underlying feeling. They are simultaneously nothing alike, and the exact same picture.

If I had to distill it down to a single sentence it would be "the sensation of agency" but that doesn't quite cover it because a major component is also the awareness of the pressence of other agents in the environment and like water for a fish (or air for a human) most people never consider it's presence unless confronted with it's absence.

On a related note, I think one of the more valuable lessons another person ever taught me was "Never give an order that will not be followed". It was part of an NCO leadership course that I attended prior to my second deployment. The course itself is something I've been meaning to write about at somepoint because the material was almost the polar opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum or formal "leadership" course and yet I can say with confidence that it made me a better leader, a better folower, and 15 - 20 odd years later arguably a better parent and boss. The dude who taught the course was a crusty old fuck in his late 50s who'd served from the end of the Vietnam War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then continued to work for the DoD as a civillian employee through the 90s and into the early 2000s which when our paths crossed.

Those of you who've been around for a while may be aware of my claim that despite endless protestations to the contrary the US military is oddly democratic in the sense that that much of the actual power and decision-making is concentrated in "the Demos" IE the enlisted rank and file. Much like my neighbor's cat, Marines are gonna do Marine shit regardless of what you want them to do and it's on you to adapt to them rather than vice versa. The point Mr. Young was trying to impress upon us as future Platoon, Company, and Detachment leaders was essentially the same one that Tywin Lannister/Charles Dance is trying to impress upon his grandson in this scene from Game of Thrones back when it was still good. As rigid as the military hierarchy may be portrayed, it is far more flexible in practice. It is important to remember that those under your command are agents in thier own right. They have thier own objectives, their own opinions, thier own desires, and they are fully capable of making thier own decisions about who what to do, and who to listen to. The key to being obeyed is understanding what orders to give. The best orders are those that your subordinates will understand and want to follow in their own right. Any officer or NCO who finds himself appealing to authority is effectively inviting mutiny. Hence the admonishment to "Never give an order that will not be followed" and the observation that a man who needs to keep reminding people that he is in charge is not truly "in charge".

Which brings us to the flip side of the course and what I have in mind when I describe the course as "the opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum". That being formal training in the esoteric arts of "Malingering" and "Malicious Compliance". As a senior NCO your job is two-fold, to keep the enlisted men on task and to punish the stupidity of officers. Simply put, the ability to recognize and implement such techniques is a core competency for both jobs. The word "No" is one that should be used sparingly precisely because it is powerful. "No" is not a teaching word. However following an order to the letter even especially when doing so will get your superiors in trouble is a teaching moment because it teaches your superiors to think carefully about the orders they give.

I've heard through the grape-vine that the old Navy/USMC NCO curriculum developed during the Vietnam War was superseded by something "more contemporary" not long after I completed the course. I can't imagine that this is a good thing because I feel like this intrinsic conceptualization of "the contested environment" not just between ostensible opponents, but those who are in theory at least on the same side is something that is sorely missing from modern commentary.

As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse. We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality. Would it have been legal for me to shoot that teenage border guard? No of course not. Was anyone at anytime under the impression that this legality or lack there of played any role in my ultimate decision not to shoot him? No of course not.

Yet another one of those core points of inferential difference between woke urban progressives/rationalists and the mainstream right is this distinction between law and social hierarchis as a means vs as an end. The difference between "we follow this man because he is the king" and "this man is the king because we follow him".

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

Unfortunately, I really want to talk about all the Bud Light stuff, and I don't want to make a new throwaway for it. So you will have to deal with this short summary of my jury duty instead of the nice effort post I've been cooking up on dog walks: 1) The pool is almost sarcastically diverse, as though someone had intentionally excluded anyone else resembling my 'peers.' 2) If someone shows up it's because they want to serve on a jury, and they find it strange that someone would intentionally decrease their chances of being selected 3) The entire experience can be a colossal waste of time and energy, 50 otherwise productive people spent all day not working because one illegal immigrant made a sexual innuendo to another illegal's girlfriend/stepdaughter. Why not just deport them?

Onto the Bud Light thing, as discussed earlier here yesterday. The short summary would be that someone (also from San Diego, coincidentally) decided about a year ago that they were a woman, and Bud Light decided to make them a special commemorative can, which apparently they drank in a bathtub as part of a marketing campaign. This has made a lot of people (including me) very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. I'm writing this post now because the company just offered its' first official response and it's perfect gpt fuel-on-the-fire. It's short so I won't give highlights, instead, a summary that suggests it pisses off everyone rather than mollifying anyone. I eagerly invite someone to provide a mirror image of 'their tribes' response but I want to share a few thoughts about mine in a few buckets:

1). For most of my adult life, I drank an incredible amount of Bud Light. Occasionally flirting with the limits of 'functional' alcoholism at ~30 a day, occasionally dipping below my typical 10-12, occasionally taking a month off because I'd been getting fat. This amount of consumption is not unusual in my peer group. Just do some napkin math: (minimally) one beer per half hour of time awake and 'off the clock.' Essentially, Bud Light is not a 6 pack that sits in your fridge for weeks, it's bought in 18 packs by people like me on the way home for the night.

2). We drink Bud Light for exactly the reason you (the proverbial 'you', of course) poke fun at it. It's thin, watery, and doesn't have a lot of alcohol. I can drink 30 a day and never get shithouse drunk the way I will after 3 bourbons on an empty stomach. I can drink more than a tiny sip and enjoy the flavor, unlike a double tangerine ipa. I like to sit around and drink beer, and it's a perfect beer for that.

3). I have my friends that drink Bud Light, and my friends that poke fun at me for drinking Bud Light. I love both, but with the later, we usually don't tool around in the garage while drinking. These days with the later it's usually more like visiting the latest pop-up microbrewery which may or may not have food (or anything drinkable). There's a culture, or if that's a bit grandiose, a vibe around a hot sunny day and a big cold box of weak watery beer.

4). Unlike most potential boycotts, I (and my people) have some purchase with this one ('purchase' for the non-english natives among us here meaning 'agency, power, or leverage'). We get a little say. There is a little verve here. This is not nike, something I already didn't buy, or every insurance company known to man, something I can't really avoid buying, this is weak watery beer!

5). Unlike most Allied marketing, this feels like it was meant to hurt. I'm aware Bud Light has done rainbow pride cans before, and I've probably even bought some without thinking about it. But something feels wrong about buying this beer now that I know they intentionally had a AMAB in a bikini drinking their commemorative can celebrating '365 of womanhood.' Not only can I effectively boycott this, but I can't unfeel the desire to boycott this! This one might have legs.

After the non-apology from the brass, Bud Light may have terminally tarnished their brand. Planting a flag and vitally interested to hear your thoughts

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

Inferential Distance part 2 of ?: Minsky's Marvelous Minutia, or why I'm bearish on GPT

This post is a continuation of / follow up to my post on Inferential distance from a month ago, inspired by the recent discussions of GPT-4 and @ymeskhout's comments on prosecutorial immunity. I also feel like this might end up turning into a series, hense the "part 2" and the question mark.

Two things that came up in that previous conversation were a) the apparent differences between thing-manipulators and symbol-manipulators. That is people's whose job, hobbies, day-to-day life revolve around manipulating objects and those whose lives revolve around manipulating symbols/feelings. And b) the question of what constitutes a "hard" social problem, and how/why thing-manipulators and symbol-manipulators seem to have such wildly diverging opinions on that question.

For a bit of context my degree is in math but entering the field as I did, later in life having already spent 12 years in another career, I tended towards the more applied/practical side of the discipline. This tendency seemed put me at odds with a lot of my instructors and fellow students, especially the "nerdier" sort. That is those who were "nerdy" even by the relative high standards of nerdiness expected from someone pursuing an advanced degree in mathematics. for whatever reason showing an interest in applications was kind of looked down upon. To be fair, I did understand where they were coming from. From a young age we're trained to admire the brilliance of guys like Pythagoras, Leibnitz, Newton, Euler, Keppler, Einstein, Et Al. Afterall, why does anyone even bother to study math if not to follow in those men's footsteps and unlock the grand fundamental truths of the universe? In contrast, while the principals of kinematics, control laws, and signal processing, may be mathematically intensive they also come across as very pedestrian. Pure math guys seem to regard them with a sort of casual disdain, the sort of thing you delegate to unpaid interns and teachers' assistants. Meanwhile truth is you can build yourself a pretty good career working on control laws and signal processing, just not in academia.

This brings us to the question of what constitutes a hard problem. If you spend enough time working in robotics or signal-processing, you'll eventually come across Moravec's Paradox. The paradox is best summed up by this xkcd comic from 2014, specifically the alt-text which reads...

In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

...the "paradox" being that many functions that we consider baseline, and accordingly take for granted, are in fact extremely complex and computationally intensive. Whereas much of what we might label "higher reason" is actually quite simple and requires very little in terms of memory or processing power.

It turns out that it's relatively easy to teach a computer to play chess better than a human or to come up with mathematical proofs that are both novel and correct. And yet, after 60 years, despite the truly massive advances in both hardware and software represented by projects like stable diffusion Minsky's problem remains far from solved. In practice, you can pretty much graph straight line between the simpler a task seems/earlier a it appears in the evolutionary enviroment, to how hard it will be to replicate. Playing chess is easy, Bipedal locomotion is difficult. Bipedal locomotion only seems easy to creatures like you and me because we've been doing it since we were two-years-old, and our ancestors spent millions of years refining the techniques and bio-mechanics that were bequeathed to us as infants.

What does this have to do with anything? My answer is that I feel like a recognition/understanding of Moravec's Paradox is one of the major components of inferential distance between myself and most others both in the rationalist movement, and in academia. It is why I am reflexively skeptical of grand unified social/political theories. and It is also why I remain deeply skeptical of GPT and the oncoming AI apocalypse it allegedly represents.

One claim you'll see guys like Elizer Yudkowsky, Bryan Caplan, and posters here on TheMotte make on a semi-regular basis is that "GPT knows how to play Chess". But if you press them on the topic, or actually look at chess games that GPT has played it becomes readily apparent that GPT makes a lot of stupid and occasionally outright illegal moves (eg moving rooks diagonally, attacking it's own pieces, etc...). What this demonstrates is that GPT does not "know how to play chess" at all. At least not in the same sense that Deep Blue or my 9-year-old can be described as "knowing how to play chess", or AlphaGo can be described as "knowing how to play Go".

Furthermore, once you start digging into their inner workings this lack of "knowing" appears to be a fundamental weakness of the Large Language Model architecture. At the end of the day it's still just a regression calculating the next most plausible word (or in the case of GPT-4 string of words) based on the correlations found in it's training data. Granted GPT-4 is certainly a step up from GPT-3 in terms being able to pass as human. The shift towards correlating longer statements rather than individual words seems to have plastered over a lot of the jarring discontinuities that made GPT-3 generated posts so easy to pick out. In contrast GPT-4 can actually kind of pass for human from the proverbial 50 ft away. Unlike prior GPT iterations, identifying it actually requires a level of careful reading or some sort of interaction.

Eugene Volokh's posts on Large Libel Models probably deserves a discussion of their own but INAL and not really interested in questions of liability. In any case he ends up running into the same issue with GPT that I did. Users here talk about instances of GPT "lying" or "hallucinating" and how to reduce the frequency of such instances, but the conversations inevitably devolve into self-referential nonsense because neither of these terms really describe what is actually happening. In order to "hallucinate" one must first be able to perceive. In order to "lie" one must first understand the difference between true and false. and GPT possesses neither. Simple fact is ask GPT for five examples of prosecutorial misconduct complete with citations and newspaper quotes and it will provide the names of five prosecutors, their alleged crimes, some juicy quotes, and supposed case numbers. However while the names provided might actually be real prosecutors, and the media outlet quoted might be a real outlet, if you actually look up the court records or try to find the quotes you're going to come up short because the example was not something that was pulled out of memory and provided, it was "generated" form the prompt in exactly the manner that a Large Language Model is designed to do.

to be continued...

edit: fixed link

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).

Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".

The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.

At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:

If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

The Sexual Revolution Goes To Hell

There was a conversation a month back about the Sexual Revolution and its (Lady) Discontents, probably highlighted by this later-QC'd @WhiningCoil post:

Most people totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution will never be able to entertain the notion that those mores harmed them. They may look around them, at their peers, and see the damage. But their own decisions will always be above reproach, because SLAY QUEEN!!

[cw: some links NSFW, albeit more in the sense of Comedy Central late-night comedy sense. Also some media spoilers.]

Apropos of nothing, has anyone here watched Helluva Boss? 'Adult' comedy, freely available on YouTube. It stars the Immediate Murder Professionals, a trio of imps who've gained access to the living world and have offered their services to get revenge 'resolve problems' there for damned sinners who can pay. Ostensibly, the show is about the trio's new business as marginally-competent assassins, with the moral and neurotic Moxie, joyful berserker Millie, and wacky boss Blitzø ("the o is silent") going into the world and slaughtering someone. In practice, this ends up more a framing device; many episodes don't involve paid murder, and those that do it's not the actual challenge.

With a few exceptions most individual episodes instead focus more on relationships between the denizens of hell. The three main cast have that awkward mix of professional and casual common to small business (not helped by Blitz's clear desire to make a 'new family') sometimes jumping wholesale into stalking, Millie and Moxie have to juggle a marriage that's a lot more tender and reciprocal than either their parents nor Hell in general tolerates, so on.
That expands with the secondary cast. Blitz's access to the living world depends on a magical grimoire given in exchange for a transactual relationship with the demon prince Stolas, and for the first season neither are quite sure exactly how much emphasis goes on the 'relationship' in 'transactional relationship'. He also runs into a series of current or past lovers sexual partners with their complaints about him. Blitz's adopted adult daughter Loona is desperately looking for someplace to belong after a unpleasant childhood in Hell's pounds orphanages but is unwilling to risk vulnerability. Moxie has... issues with his own Family and knows that he doesn't measure up by the standards of Millie's parents. Stolas' biological daughter Octavia is desperately looking for someplace to belong while her parents go through an unusually messy divorce. Eventually a number of the Seven Deadly Sins get involved, so on.

There's a song spelling it out, diegetically as a drug trip..

As necessary disclaimer: it's gay. Really gay, even by furry-adjacent standards: there's one male/female active relationship among the main cast, and it's constantly going back to the same pegging joke. If you're a fan of the ladies, you're going to be stuck looking at fandom works or the not-on-YouTube sister show Hazbin Hotel, which does have a lesbian couple in focus. I don't know that I could call it good; while there's some decent comedic moments and fluid action scenes, there's sometimes too much emphasis on the cringe in cringe comedy, the musical numbers are hit-or-miss even if you can swing to their sometimes bizarre genre selections, and the characterization could stand to be more consistent. It's never quite Ren And Stimpy gross-out comedy, though some of the gorier fight scenes can get close, but neither is it exactly high-brow. The series as a whole has been trying to make a lot of commentary on economic and social class without serious introspection on its own assumptions, or even how that commentary it does present comes across.

((And I'm sure someone like @HlynkaCG can probably break down better about a Red Tribe take on the spirital ramifications of modern culture framing and worshipping literal demons as parallels for and paragons of modern society. Or of 'heaven' being paperwork and Minnesota Nice.))

Buuuuuuuuut because it's 'adult' and focused on relationships, a lot of it's about sex, and that part is very much written toward the id and superego of those "totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution". The show leads are the bisexual Vivienne Medrano and the gay Brandon Rogers, and the advertising and focus is very much down bad for exactly what you'd expect from that. That's not limited to sex -- one of the better musical numbers revolves around a two-minute long sequence of flipping the bird off to an abusive boss, culminating in a series of giant neon signs, including literal sign language for 'fuck off', the pilot has a particularly unsubtle joke about American healthcare provisioning -- but it's very much spread throughout the ethos. Of the main cast and the secondary cast, only one person (Millie) doesn't have Daddy Issues.

Helluva Boss is 'woke' in the sort of way that its authors would consider 'woke' to be a compliment. To its credit, that's at least sometimes subtle: we do some awkwardly-placed Deaf Culture-rep or a character awkwardly pointing out to his father that bisexual and gay are different things, but there's also a few trans characters (and Blitz-the-o-is-silent is probably meant as a deadnaming metaphor) or more subtle discussions about triggering trauma that you'd have to pay attention to catch. (It helps that the writers are willing to throw some on-the-nose jokes the other direction).

((It's worth spelling out that, where Hazbin Hotel discusses consent and undesired sexual violence with the characters Angel Dust and Valentino, it doesn't really feature among the reoccurring cast for Helluva Boss: the closest matters have been comedic and near-instantly resulted in violent response. Instead, the show portrays sexuality as a tool for the characters, either figuratively with many separate characters squicking out the villainous Striker to discomfort him, or in the more literal sense of skewering attackers through the skull with a motorized and pixelated dildo.))

There's actually a lot of discussion here about how modern (and thus post-sexual-revolution) norms are, in the story's setting, literally damning. "He's had four tongues inside him at once, which, like, good for him!... but he's giving off not-ok vibes" is the most clearly overt situation where the show can't quite disavow people who want to fill every hole they've got, but it can recognize that sex won't fill and often detracts from figurative ones. There's clear contradiction between more 'presentable' sexuality and less such (cw: lots of pixelated dildos, loud, se2 spoilers). STDs exist, in-universe. One of the last straws for that Two Minutes Notice song is the promotion of an entertainer as a sex object that is at best degrading and at worst invites or encourages aggressive stalkers, a topic of prolonged discourse in fandom spaces that's somewhat complicated by the number of people who literally get off from fascimiles of their body or their characters being 'used'. An early-season joke about fandom response to Loona is slightly awkward in contrast to around 15k not-always-on-model images over at e621 that I won't be linking. Though at least the character's explicitly in her twenties.

((The showrunners are probably not considering these conflicts solely as a theoretical exercise. The original voice actor for Stolas was dropped between the pilot and the first season, at the same time certain 'allegations' were going around of Totally Consensual But Also Bad things.))

A lot of the show's answer is to highlight and exaggerate the faults in 'traditional' sexual norms. Whatever sympathy the fandom came up with for Stolas' wife before her reveal -- after all, he was cheating on her! -- faltered when Stella actually appeared, less because she'd wanted Stolas murdered, and more because thing was a loveless arraigned marriage between complete jerks: the extent each of the two hate each other more than they love their child is stated explicitly. While it's the worst of the arranged marriages, it's not the only one we're presented with, and that the others look marginally better only damns them with faint praise (one has the 'bride' tied up, gagged, a shotgun pointed at him). Even where couples are 'traditional' in the 1920s-1980s sense of Love, True Love, there's a lot of outside culture demanding response that doesn't actually fit, such as Millie's parents finding Moxie insufficiently manly or Hell's culture heavily stigmatizing interclass relationships (in this case, between higher-class princes or Sins and lower-class imps). In the setting, even literal cherubs can't really think of love as separate from a bunch of horny teenagers.

But Helluva Boss is struggling to create and draw together a healthy sexuality after the sexual revolution, and as a response to the sexual revolution rather than just those 'traditional' norms. A good number of those criticisms are very likely inspired by personal experiences, and many viewers see and relate to the show in that framework. A bit of that is drawing very heavily from Women's Fanfic Circles of Idealized Relationships, where everybody 'really' just needs sufficient support followed by Just Admitting Their Feelings And Letting People In (something something Found Family), or is disposable and untouchably evil (and there are a lot of disposable assholes). Other parts are more serious. If relationships are increasingly likely to touch between work and play, what extent can a transactional relationship or one with disparity of power be healthy, or can such a thing ever leave those fetters behind?

That's not to say the show has answers. It's not even clear that it's entirely grappled the scope of the questions: like a lot of shows with complicated romantic relationships, there's a fan-favorite solution that's almost impressive for how much it's joked about compared to how little it's presented in any serious sense, even if only to point out where and why it wouldn't work. Some few of the protagonist's flaws are their own, but there's little space or consideration for what would be necessary to grow beyond them, or to produce a next generation that could easily exceed them.

I think it's still relevant to say that they've noticed the skulls.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.

Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.

So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.

What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?

I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.

And none of that turned out to be true.

Am I correct in this assessment?

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

Previously I've written about how Musk can Make Twitter Great Again with Celebs&Sports.

But now let me discuss how Musk can use twitter to subvert the regime without even trying: just allow people to have a clear and unfiltered look at the world.

As an example of this, consider the most recent viral content on twitter - more popular than an NBA game happening simultaneously - #wafflehousefight.

As the mainstream media might describe it, "some drunken revelers at a Waffle House in Austin, TX engaged in an altercation with Waffle House employees." At least that's what they might write if they covered it, but only yahoo and foxnews have bothered to actually cover it. And of course the reason is clear: the story is a group of morbidly obese angry black women assaulting a pretty-ish blonde (and clearly red tribe working class) waffle house employee after demanding the "white girl" make them waffles while they sat in a closed off area. The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's a clear glimpse of what the mainstream media + tech companies normally try to hide: a disproportionate amount of crime is just black people getting angry and doing dumb stuff.

Quite a lot of tech and media tries to cover things like this up. Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar. The mainstream media similarly downplays stories such as black nationalist terrorists shooting up subways, as well as using tactics like not including the attackers photo.

Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.

When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.

Twitter is popular because of celebrities and sports, and the content most people consume there will continue to be 90%+ celebrities and sports. But with stories like #wafflehousefight, Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

The issue of modern divorce was discussed here last week in the context of yet another round of wider discussion about the Sexual Revolution. (It's pretty much becoming tiresome at this point, but anyway.) Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically. It appeared to me that there's mostly a consensus about that here.

Fair enough. However, I've seen online data indicating that a) roughly 40% of all marriages end in divorce b) roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.

So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?