domain:alexepstein.substack.com
KingOfTheBailey
27m ago
Is everyone on this board handsome?
Rov_Scam
46m ago
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
46m ago
White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.
Well, no, not always. If you identify as French, that does not require you to be hostile to non-French people as an inherent part of your identity (even if some French people might lead you to believe otherwise). Religious identities, while often in opposition for obvious reasons, are not inherently and inevitably hostile to all non-believers. It's only the specific White identity you are trying to craft which essentially defines itself as existentially at war with other identities.
Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something.
Incorrect. I do not accept your premise. "Gas chambers or something" is the answer to an entirely different question, but the theory you are advancing here - that I know Jews are acting against me but I accept it because I feel guilty over the Holocaust - is simply not true. So the answer to your question is obviously yes to you, because you see everything Jews do as being hostile action against white people. This is not obvious to me or other white people who don't share your enmity towards Jews.
Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup.
Every religion and most languages have "special words" for the outgroup, some more derogatory than others. This isn't unique to Jews at all.
So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?
Define "us." It's obviously not wrong for a Jew to tell you you are not one of them because you're not Jewish. If you're a Christian, it obviously wouldn't be wrong to tell a Jew he's not one of you. But it would be wrong to tell a Jew he's not an American, or a German, or an Englishman, assuming he is one of those things. As for whether you can tell him he's not "White," that depends entirely on how you define "White" and we've been over this before. Why would the average Jew of European descent who looks as white as you or me be "not white" because you say so?
My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances.
So a Jew can only be "white" if he stops being Jewish? Both culturally and religiously? When you say "to the same extent that white people" - okay, so the typical Irish-American who only remembers he's Irish on St. Paddy's Day (to party) is white, but an Irish-American who considers his Irish identity to be very important to him is not white? So a Jew who's vaguely aware he's ethnically Jewish but is completely secular and isn't a member of any "Jewish" organizations can be considered white, but a Jew who celebrates Passover cannot?
But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.
This is the presumption you keep making. That Jews not only identify as Jews but specifically hate you and regard you as an enemy. How many Jews, as a fraction of the entire Jewish population, do you believe actually think that way? You say "no more salacious," but that seems unlikely, since while you've never been open (and I don't expect you to be) about what actual plans you and your fellow DRs might have for the Jews if you ever actually got your way, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that those plans are far more negative for Jews than anything I've ever heard Jews in any way intimate that they want to do to me.
KMC
54m ago
Yes, but also because it's damn close to so many things shifting. Maybe it was gold, maybe it was oil, but by god something changed.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1hr ago
Photons have momentum. If you're collecting light that's hitting your craft always at the same angle this momentum has to be transferred somewhere, and your craft is this somewhere as there is nowhere else for it to go.
cjet79
1hr ago
If no one is doing intersolar colonization then I really don't see a need to worry.
KMC
1hr ago
Yes, they are. The ending of Forge is one of the more indelible moments I've read in sci-fi.
100ProofTollBooth
1hr ago
Her entire argument is just babies and tears
Funny - you could say this about both the left and the right regarding abortion today and not be wrong in either direction.
Politics is often silly.
jeroboam
1hr ago
Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.
Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.
You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"
Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "
You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".
System: Emily has unmatched you.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
The 1960s social revolution was driven by sex, making it ipso-facto female-dominated. Not because they were intellectual or political leaders in a revolutionary movement, but because they became entranced by Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll. The 1960s social revolution would have gone nowhere without women.
I would also make a distinction between religious cults and revolutionary movements. The "Dionysian Force" Richard is talking about falls more on the former than the latter. Women are more susceptible to cults, but then they kind of become kingmakers for the cults that blossom into political/social movements.
White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.
Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something. The result is, in your view, White people can't have an identity because they would use it to resist or fight back.
Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup. So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?
My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances. Some Jews indeed take that path. But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.
Pynewacket
2hr ago
sorry, I will try to be better than this potshot, but when the OP reacted like the classical Progressive I couldn't resist the impulse to try to find if he was a troll or just part of the herd.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
The cherry on top is the recent fracas with Bumble, who got in hot water and profusely apologized for the offensive insinuation that some women may desire sex.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
If there’s two prisoners, it’s semi plausible that neither of them defects. If there’s 200 prisoners, it only takes one defector.
And if we assume that even advanced civilizations are mostly planet bound, and that there’s physical reasons limiting the ability to chart exoplanets, then it’s pretty easy to miss an extermination attempt. Maybe finding the homeworld of these aliens is difficult, even if we can tell which star. Can we predict the actual location of known exoplanets well enough to launch a missile which can’t course correct? I’m betting no. Not to mention any individual case could be something other than a civilization, even if it’s phenomenally improbable they all are.
We should adopt an attitude of reflexive paranoia towards possible aliens until they are known to be friendly, and use this as an impetus for dispersion.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2hr ago
it is highly unlikely they’d care about us. We don’t have anything they don’t already have.
We extensively study all sorts of animal and microbial species here on earth, simply out of curiosity, even though these species don't "have anything" for us. Sometimes this research leads to medical advancements, but usually it doesn't. Most academic research is in the same boat. There's no "practical" reason to study obscure religious treatises from late antiquity, or the cultural practices of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, but people do it anyway.
The aliens are undoubtedly weirder than we can possibly imagine
Maybe. But if they are, then that means that we'd be impossibly weird to them! Which would make us rather more interesting.
Of course, it's an open empirical question whether aliens would find any value in studying us or interacting with us. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But thinking that humans couldn't possibly be interesting to a scientifically advanced alien intelligence is just as much of an unfounded bias as thinking that humans are always at the center of the universe.
popocatepetl
2hr ago
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis.
Greg Bear came up with it long before anyway. And Fred Saberhagen as that article points out, though I don't know how explict he was about it.
I was under the impression most people are buzzing about it lately because of its prominent featuring in a popular scifi. The specific term "Dark Forest" was added to the Fermi Paradox Wikipedia page in 2016, specifically referencing Cixin Liu. On the other hand "It's dangerous to communicate" was listed as a possible solution well before that. Perhaps I'm overstating my case.
I do think in the novels it's a parable.
Cook
2hr ago
I also found the voice off-putting, but I presume you would be able to instruct it to adopt a different tone and manner.
ThenElection
2hr ago
young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.
My misspent youth, alas. Note to readers: reading Judith Butler and bell hooks does not, in fact, make women any more likely to date you. (Someone here will doubtlessly point out this is obvious, but when the women around you all suggest that the solution to dating woes is to Be More Feminist and Read Woman Authors, it's easy for a naive kid to get confused.)
I've never read Bear, but Forge and Anvil have been recommended several times. Are they any good?
I loved saberhagen's berserker series. Templar Radiant is brilliant, and The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron is a gem of classic sci-fi shorts.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Propellantless propulsion flies in the face of the conservation of momentum. This is a law which is baked in the current Physics theories, including the standard model and general relativity.
From a theoretical perspective, it follows from the Lagrange function being independent under certain coordinate transformations with Noether's theorem.
The steelman version of this propellantless propulsion would be the claim that of course momentum is conserved, there are just previously undetected particles or fields which carry momentum. Just like a plane can accelerate while staying at the same height without violating the conservation of momentum by transferring some momentum to the air with a propeller, a spacecraft might do the same. Of course, the particles could not be reacting with anything else (like satellites or these fancy detectors we use for dark matter search), otherwise they would have been found long ago. A fundamental part of the universe being discovered by chance through an commercially interesting engineering application seems unlikely -- it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works. (By contrast, my priors for observing complex systems exhibiting unexpected behaviors which will surprise physicists are much more relaxed, high temperature (that is, liquid nitrogen) superconductors were a total surprise, and the early experiments with heavier-than-air flight probably took place before we had any idea how a plane is generating lift.)
The priors for that would at least be slightly higher than "Archangel Uriel personally pushes the spacecraft forward", but still lower than for room temperature superconductors or even room temperature fusion.
The best way to convince the world that the "emdrive" works would be to put one in LEO in a cubesat. Even if you can only generate a very moderate thrust from solar power, the ability to create that thrust continuously will integrate to a tremendous delta v. A year at a thousandths of Earth surface acceleration would work out to 309km/s delta-v. Within three years, your spacecraft would pass Voyager 1 in distance. Humans have some capabilities to track satellites, so we could check easily enough.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis.
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God]Greg Bear[/url] came up with it long before anyway. And Fred Saberhagen as that article points out, though I don't know how explict he was about it.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
3hr ago
This is all dependent on the Venn Diagram that constitutes "White People" being what you say it is, and not what other people (including Jews) say it is.
You want White People to identify as a single group - Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Iberians, Gauls, Germanics, Caucasuses, etc. However, Jews who might occupy or overlap with any of those circles should definitely not be considered part of them. So yes, it's not surprising that when you say "Jews can identify as Jews, and Germans can identify as Germans but also as White, but Jews definitely should not identify as either German or White (because they are the enemy and we hate them)," Jews treat your ideologically-crafted category as a weapon to be used against them, because that's exactly what it is.
"Why, oh why, do the Jews so strongly resist us trying to form an identity movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew?" asks the identify movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
@TracingWoodgrains I admire the courage it takes to put yourself out there. Godspeed brother. That said, you'll always be TracingWoodgrains (or at least Trace) in my heart, because I still admire your respect for the best bit of writing Orson Scott Card ever did. You, sir, are a man of culture.
If we discover advanced alien civilizations existing doesn't that actually lessen the evidence for the Dark Forest theory? Something like massive infrared indicators imply that they are not hiding. Dark Forest theory implies hostile and hidden.
If we can discover multiple advanced alien civilizations at our current tech level, Dark Forest theory is annihilated. Better said that the Fermi Paradox would stop being a paradox.
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis. The books were an exploration, in their own way, of the problems Scott mulled over in Meditations on Moloch, and the Dark Forest was a kind of literary device for the nihilistic endpoint of progress and memetic competition.
"If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything."
and
"You must advance, stop at nothing to advance. Advance, advance without regard for consequences!"
These are at the heart of what the books are getting at.
You'll lose the indentation for numbered lists but you can at least keep the numbers you want by escaping the "." after the number like this: "2\." Ex:
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