domain:alexepstein.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
32m ago
I discussed it with a judge doing more advanced judgey things (abstract legal analysis of a case judgement as if presenting a paper at a conference) and he thought Sonnet 3.6 was a pretty decent law student, so presumably Opus 4 or indeed o3 would be lots better.
eee
38m ago
I haven't interacted with Darwin in a really long time, like since before the thread was exiled from /r/ssc.
He clearly was not ever arguing in good faith. Like people would be talking about how progressives use X as a Motte and Bailey eh would make bizarre claims of never seeing any real progressives trying to reap the Bailey and then when people ample evidence of progressives exploiting the Bailey he then picks one or two and tries to handwave all of the evidence away by dismissing those. Some standout examples were the time there was some argument about video game journalists and someone quoted someone that reviews video games for Arstechnica and he argued that that is some tiny site no one has heard of and it doesn't count because his byline said he was a "hardware reviewer" instead of a reviewer for games. Or the time he claimed to be really familiar with some controversy and then said that this one guy that had OP-eds in The Guardian and the NYTimes about it was a nobody and "a tutor from South Africa" according to some result on like page 5 of Google results. It was especially egregious because there were multiple tweets from him linked and his bio on twitter had his bonafides in it.
He also would also claim to have personal knowledge (or his spouse does which somehow counts as him knowing too) of literally any subject. The domains were always changing and for it to be true he would have been a true renaissance man with a very storied life instead of someone that spends 12 hours a day arguing on reddit. I'm surprised no one compiled a list of all of the jobs or things he claimed to have experience with, but I wasn't about to spend the time going through his comment history to do it.
Having people with different viewpoints is great, but it isn't enough. If they aren't here to honestly engage in discussion and are just here to troll they are negative value. Darwin demonstrated time and time again that he was not interested in engaging in good faith discussion. The mods bent over backwards and tied themselves in knots to justify his bad behaviour because they desperately wanted more progressive voices. All of the while pretending they would never do that but also writing essays about how it makes sense for the mods to look the other way when a minority voice in a space misbehaves all of the time. It was obnoxious and his behaviour and the defense of it is why I never bothered with the splinter community that kept him.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
39m ago
Well, yeah; this is 100% an autistic Christian thing.
You make yourself an enemy of the God of America when you lie on the form, because He knows the contents of your heart and what is done in secret.
That is why "lying on the form about the contents of your heart" is accepted by American culture as both valid, and an offense that strips you of any right to participate in it so long as they see fit that the question remains on the form.
Interestingly, it doesn't actually make any moral judgment- it still maintains the presupposition that there are good people who are also [disqualifying class]- but then, if the man be good, he would not lie on the forms because [see above].
Thus lying on the form is, while a completely natural thing to do, a sin -> if you were good, you're certainly an enemy of God [and by extension, the country] now -> OK to revoke and eject on those grounds.
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Stephen Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
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