domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
ArmedTooHeavily
3m ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6m ago
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
1hr ago
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
My belief, based on my recollections of the time, is that "leading experts" and "leading academics" were the originators of the social justice memeplex, and therefore wouldn't make arguments against it even if they could conceive of them. In support of this, the common dismissal at the time of "it's just college students spending too much time on tumblr" highlights that this memeplex's breeding ground was immediately downstream of leading academics. Or perhaps more accurately, academia was the superfund site and Tumblr was the groundwater.
Sorry if the metaphor is too dramatic, I'm feeling bitter.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
This is the result of the much-discussed "march through the institutions". By the time social justice began to come out in the open, the institutions -- even religious ones -- had largely already been taken over by progressives.
What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust.
I don't think we're talking past each other, I just disagree with yours / Davies' core thesis. No, that's not how it works at all. There are scams and frauds in Russia, and there are essentially no high-trust communities there. All that happens is that scammers have to come up with new tricks that other people haven't heard of yet, and so don't know to be on the lookout for.
A community that doesn't lock it's doors is high-trust. If they get burgled, and start locking up it makes them low(er) trust. A burglar learning how to pick locks does not magically make the community high(er)-trust.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
37m ago
To take a common example, the United States imports a lot of the goods used in our defense industry. Particularly computer chips and the parts used in their production.
In theory, defense supply chains aren't supposed to do this. In practice, counterfeit components do sneak in unexpectedly (and there are safeguards to reduce this risk), but I don't think Lockheed (or its subcontractors) are allowed to design in Chinese (or even Taiwanese) bolts and capacitors into an F-35 without a whole lot of paperwork, if at all. There are domestic component manufacturers for those, but often they're not used for vanilla commercial products because they are pricey. There is a reason "mil-spec" components are expensive: maybe part of it is grift, but part of it is supply chain management.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
55m ago
I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.
There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.
I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
07mk
7m ago
I disagree. I think that part of the argument isn't being elided, it's being summarized with the word "optimal." At least, it's being summarized at least as well as in the phrase "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it," and I also think that the that latter phrase is far less elegant and beautiful than the much simpler and pithy "the optimal amount of [bad thing] is not zero" while not really adding any extra meaning or explanation.
FtttG
8m ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
13m ago
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!)
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement.
They ARE the movement bruh.
This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
People have been asking this for at least a century. "The Nazis listened to Wagner and read Goethe and they still plunged the entire planet into total war, how is that possible?"
Philosophy in the Socratic tradition (and if we can speak of a "western tradition" at all, as distinct from other traditions, then we must start with Socrates) never promised wisdom. It promised a love of wisdom; it promised a critique of those who pretend to wisdom. But wisdom itself is for the gods alone. So it is unsurprising when mortals do things that are unwise.
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men.
You have to be something of a weirdo to violate social consensus as publicly and flagrantly as Peterson did.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make.
Because the experts wanted it to happen, they couldn't perceive it as a threat if it wasn't threatening to them in the first place.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
ArmedTooHeavily
just now
They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
Supah_Schmendrick
2m ago
what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
My naive assumption would be that a product is weakly "adversary-proof" for nation N when the production of the item and its inputs are located in territories directly controlled/defended by N's military, or the militaries of countries allied to N, and strongly "adversary-proof if all of the above plus having production located in places either beyond the direct reach of adversarial countries' conventional military and paramilitary capabilities, or meaningfully hardened against such attack.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
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Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze. In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
-
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
-
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men. Yarvin, Peterson, Weinstein, Scott Adams(?). My memory of who was most dominant in this period is somewhat hazy, maybe someone with a better memory can correct me. There were more psychologists among critics than philosophers. You had people like Stefan Molyneux passionately criticizing the proto-movement well before its zenith. His Twitter attests to his neuroticism.
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Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
It’s difficult to come away with clear takeaways. IMO: (1) it is beneficial to increase anonymous discussion, as this laid the groundwork for future criticism, and allowed for arguments to spread which would otherwise be banned. (2) It may be essential to increase the number of passionate and neurotic men, over men with other skills, as the major critics were more often passionate and somewhat crazy. A “passionate” temperament is occasionally inaccurate, and may result in behavior that leads institutions to weed them out — but their utility in sensing and addressing threats compensates for the occasional bout of craziness.
There is a funny review of Jordan Peterson from 2013, possibly the first time anyone commented about his personality online. It was made on the anonymous literature board of 4chan in 2013, long before his rise to fame.
he's craaaaazy. he so crazy. I had a class immediately following one of his lectures like, his was from 1:15-3:15 in Room 101., and my different classes was from 3:25-5:25 in Room 101 too. ok? So... he would totally bug out if someone opened the door early. Like, screaming fits and stuff. my prof (who was just a postdoc and wasn't going to get tenured at u of t) encouraged us all to fuck with his head because in addition to being a rageaholic spaz, peterson would also leave the podium really dirty. also, he lectures in a cape for some reason. he went on this ontario talk show with his daughter talking about how they're both clinically depressed bla bla, I feel bad that she's his dad, that must be hard to deal with
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
55m ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white.
None of that proves "the call is coming from inside the house", unless you're one of the more advanced racists.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Part of adversary proof production for the modern U.S. would almost certainly be near-shoring; Mexico has one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the world and it’s probably easier to convert a pickup truck factory into a humvee factory than to build a new factory.
The other thing that seems often left out of these discussions is diversion of civilian goods(probably through rationing). Civilian boots, food, fuel, mechanical parts- it can all get diverted to the army. This is part of why I think it unlikely the modern U.S. will engage in a full blown war anytime soon- thé cuts to civilian standard of living would be a no go.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1hr ago
One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
FtttG
1hr ago
I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.
gattsuru
7m ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
SSCReader
9m ago
Can you expand on this? I said white people were making the decisions, Coil said the call was not coming from inside the house, I pointed out that the politicians were also primarily white (the house in question). Being white was the house we were talking about as far as I can tell.
SSCReader
10m ago
David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market.
Precisely! That's why Brexit will allow us to control immigration was such a blatant lie. We could always have done so. And that article also notes my view. I think he misrepresents it though. It is not that British workers won't do those jobs it is because they will want more money which will then make those services and products more expensive thus slowing growth. He comes close to it here: In reality, the demand for work is potentially infinite: it’s like trying to fill a bottomless well with buckets of water — the more you throw in, the more you need to keep throwing.
What he is talking about is expansion, more immigrants, means more jobs, means more GDP, means the line goes up. That is the driving factor.
I can tell you from direct experience David Cameron and Boris Johnson have barely a committed ideological bone in their body. They aren't allowing more immigrants in because of some love of global Britain or for other elites. They aren't committed enough to anything to sacrifice for that.
2rafa
15m ago
With enough lobbying they can pass laws that say things like “for each half hour spent in court, x lawyers based in local city who passed the state bar must have y billable hours attached to them”.
Lest that sound farfetched, Hollywood writers just got this kind of deal and the studios are far more equipped to play hardball than state congressmen.
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
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