domain:ryandv.substack.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1m ago
I think the issue is that it works iff the police obey the order, but that if they don't then it is instadeath for the regime's credibility. The chance that police (or troops) will refuse to fire on their own countrymen engaged in a protest half the population finds sympathetic is high enough that governments don't normally want to risk it.
One of the advantages of a large multinational empire is that you can post troops from province A to keep order in province B, so the troops don't see the locals as their own countrymen. This doesn't work in nation-states, but the same general approach applies - this is why Singapore uses Ghurkas as riot police.
georgioz
4m ago
There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition.
I think this just cheap consensus building, a semantic trap which rests a lot on what the word "allow" means. Not many people would for instance literally believe, that it should not be allowed for people to drink themselves to death or that they are not allowed to cut of their fingers or any number of other gruesome things. But these arguments would be more in line with thinking that alcoholism or self-harm is bad, and that the society should do everything to prevent it using shaming and other tools. Because any other measure to prevent it would be worse and not really applicable.
But many more conservatives and also liberals would against let's say having "gender expression" as a protected characteristic in law or having transition being financed by taxpayers.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
19m ago
we took sports comedies too far (Baseketball)
Isn't this a Parker and Stone movie? They were born in 1969 and 1971 and are Gen X af.
Eh? Is he a transhumanist? I mostly only noticed all the blogging.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
36m ago
The crash would be a big L for rationalists who despite evidence to the contrary believe in future outcomes that require multiple miracles. Yud and Scott would be questioned for spreading ai doomerism over tech that's not even good at what it's supposed to do, let alone be agi.
David Gerard is one guy who I abhore and him providing decent criticism for ai with his website pivot to ai would be a small win for him and tens of his readers.
Openai may have to charge anywhere from 10 to 100 times more per query in order to be profitable. Their api calls netting sub 1 billion means that all llm wrappers are bad, period and are getting funding for valuations they don't deserve. Sam, Dario, Amjad, PG, every single VC knowingly lied and should be seen as responsible parties.
All of them are aware of the financial impossibilities I've listed. My contributions to this place haven't been the best, putting a realistic future scenario is the least I can do. I don't see a way out where this doesn't lead to thousands of jobs going out, I'll write one last post on this in a bit. Many here including me are in tech at various stages, categories, seniority levels and some are employed in startups that use non llm based ai, the good kind I mean. This affects all of us.
cpcallen
37m ago
And set up an online exchange to trade it. Maybe they could call it MTGOX, has a nice ring to it. ;-)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
45m ago
He’s publicly supporting a group of rioters. It seems like at best to be incitement, and given that he asked the LA PD to go and protect rioters, might well be more serious.
You can see it in various long-running webcomics. If you start reading the archives from the very beginning, you can see how the (initially quite terrible) artist has improved just by drawing several new pages every week.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
47m ago
I don’t see these people as tactical geniuses. Up until this point, they’ve basically been able to thus far force Chuck Schumer to use his angry letter writing pen, have Cory Booker sit on the Capitol steps (before he voted in favor of a Trump nominee), and get a New Jersey mayor arrested. Even this isn’t a loss, he gets to look tough and make the governor of California display his impotence. All the while Trump can continue to work on getting his budget passed, arrest migrants in the court house (and now that judges are on notice, they don’t even try to sneak them out the back door). All of this is losing handily, no matter how many times they swear that it’s making Trump look bad.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1hr ago
Overall GDP can grow thanks to a couple of sectors while most others are left stagnating. Without looking too much into the numbers, one can guess finance and tech had this role in western economies in the last decades.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1hr ago
I'm obviously not your immediate interlocutor, and I don't think BLM should be dismissed as something like mere "pressure release" - but still, attacks on legislative bodies seem to be in a fundamentally more severe category to me. It seems foundational to representative democracy that legislative bodies are to serve as a sleeker and more efficient representation of voter preferences as expressed by the act of voting, and any attempt to subvert this by subjecting representatives to pressures other than "how will the voters vote in the next election" is threatening that very foundation. Meanwhile, our political system as I understand it does not make any particular promises about police representing anyone at all. Therefore, trying to use violence on legislators to get them to act in a particular way is worse than trying to use violence on policemen to get them to act in a particular way.
This is not a Russell conjugation; I am very happy to consider the leftish-perpetrator examples of this post to be worse than J6 (which was honestly a relative nothingburger as far as threatening legislators goes).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2hr ago
I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about which of the two protests-turned-riots(?) has more merit - my point is just that they are sufficiently different that blanket accusations of hypocrisy towards anyone who judges them differently make no sense.
It's perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are sacrosanct but largely autonomous devolved subunits of the executive like police are fair game (they represent nobody and have a lot of leeway in how they act), and it's also perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are fair game (they are supposed to be the people's bitch) but police are inappropriate targets (they are wageslaves doing a hard job and owe allegiance to some command superior, not the people).
BahRamYou
2hr ago
I remember back in the boom years of online poker before it got banned in the US, a number of people did things like that. People who weren't good enough to make money playing in a normal way would play just enough to clear the bonuses that sites gave to new players. They called it "bonus grinding" or "bonus whoring." The main caveat, I think, is that it's an incredibly soulless, boring way to make money. It still requires a certain amount of mental effort, and without even the fig leaf of pretending like you're doing something beneficial to society. So most people got bored of doing it, and started to play for real, sometimes losing back the money they earned from the bonus.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2hr ago
I'm genuinely confused as to why you would say that, since in my eyes the factual claims I made shouldn't even be particularly controversial. Could you restate what you think my claim is in your words?
sun_the_second
2hr ago
If the only thing you do with whales is hunt, then understanding hunting them is understanding them in general.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
No wonder Moldbug always claims to be the most right wing person in the room.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
I thought Old Man's War wasn't half bad. It's far up from the disgustingly mediocre level of stuff that populates the Hugos these days.
But I don't think Scalzi is ever going to write anything that transcends being formulaic genre fiction. And him not being that great of a character writer probably is a big part of that, never mind the antics.
That said, I don't recommend holding his stuff in the same level of contempt as Martha Wells or something.
Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:
If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.
Are you saying the BLM riots were more severe and destabilizing than J6?
It's as obvious to me as the opposite seems obvious to you. And not just because the deathcount is an order of magnitude higher.
I see it more as a sort of mob pressure release rather than an actual plan to become intimidating, but don't think that is a big deal.
I just see another irregular verb.
I release pressure. You riot. He is an insurrectionist.
What do you mean my degrees are more aligned to the targets?
You think trashing the desk of a congressman is a strictly less legitimate form of political expression than trashing that of random people or that of policemen. As a Frenchman I find that exceptionally weird. If anything the proper order of a republic would go the other way around.
Listening
3hr ago
Transhumanism is the chief ideology of TESCREAL fascists and extremely right-wing and problematic.
Ioper
3hr ago
Depending on where you are this might not be an option but I usually go to some restaurant or café in the city center with outdoor seating and do some people watching while drinking a beer, eating or having a coffee. If there is a waterfront you can also go there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones (the axis of thingspace), without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":
Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans
This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:
Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.
where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.
(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)
it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly
You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.
No argument there, but the question is as to whether this or directly threatening the voters is worse. I don't think that's that clear cut. In a lot of ways I think the purpose of politicians in democracy is actually to hold the buck and get all that energy directed towards them rather than turned into factionalism.
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