domain:archive.ph
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1m ago
Yes, reality does not conform to our models, and therefore we should look to reality instead of retreating into theory.
Okay, so let's say I get on my bike and I ride for one hour at one mile per hour in a straight line. When I'm done, I will have traveled:
A. One mile
B. Two miles
Which of these answers most closely resembles reality?
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4m ago
And for the love of God, do NOT buy gold miners.
Second this. Gold has done very well over the last few years but gold miners are basically flat. The market doesn't expect gold miners to be able to keep a lid on their production costs in the medium term (which might tell you something about other firms).
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
5m ago
Something like this. I've been binge watching a guy who grew from a construction worker into the owner of a remodelling company on YT, and he's not shy about explaining everything he knows in his videos. Bathrooms? Here's ten videos on sizing them correctly, arranging the appliances, waterproofing the floor, laying tile, using the right fittings, and so on. His value proposition is, basically, "after watching these videos you'll never trust the random brown guys you picked up at the same place you bought the plaster from ever again, so either do everything yourself or just hire my company to remodel your flat".
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
7m ago
Ten million more illegal immigrants since 2019? What's the methodology for that estimate?
The total illegal immigrant population in 2021 (the latest I could find estimates for) was 10.5M, down from 12.2M around 2009.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10m ago
That might work for 40 men in a line. I wouldn’t bet on it if they were maneuvering, in cover, or shooting back. We are getting to the point where targeting software will allow engaging infantry, sure. It’s the hardware that I would expect to limit us.
Acquisition isn’t enough. You need something that can slew the weapon over, fire, confirm the kill, and proceed. Even at the >70°/s traverse rates achieved by shipboard CIWS, that’s not a small task. Every pound you spend on servos and sensors to make it happen is one you have to haul around on your robot. Every cubic foot makes you a slightly bigger target for small arms or close support.
I think the hardware to engage multiple targets in quick succession starts to look less like a robo dog and more like an APC or tank. Which are famous for not coping with infantry in knife range. Or air strikes, for that matter.
As an aside, is there a particular justification for a 9mm chaingun? I don’t think I’ve heard of one before, and I wonder if there’s a mechanical reason. A casual search shows one company, Freedom Ordnance, which seems to really enjoy making belt-fed guns. Plus a WWI prototype. I guess it’s possible! If I were designing a battlefield robot, though, I don’t think I’d go smaller than intermediate caliber.
KMC
17m ago
Does he have a reason to go there other than scoring points in arguments?
Yes, reality does not conform to our models, and therefore we should look to reality instead of retreating into theory. Although I suspect he leads with it out of contrarian impulse.
He also gets into this on the idea of the identity property. The identity property, when it comes to multiplication and division, states that you can perform an action on something and get the same thing back. That in itself doesn't really make sense in the world, does it? If you act on something in any way, it will change, and if it didn't change, you didn't really act on it, did you? For 0, our conception is one of nothingness, emptiness, or lack, but that's not what exists in reality. There is no such thing as emptiness, or lack, or 'zero' in that way. We we do observe in nature and the universe is that 0 does not represent nothingness, it represents equilibrium. It represents inflection points, it represents the middle of the sine wave, the repeat of periodicity, and spin.
So his argument is essentially that our conception of numbers, especially 1 and 0, are inconsistent with observed reality, and therefore we should keep reality and reject our conception. At least, that's how I understood it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19m ago
I don't really understand what you think animals are or why they wouldn't have awareness, will, and volition. It seems pretty clear to me that they do.
We can cage animals indefinitely. We cannot cage humans indefinitely. It's a bit unfair to claim that no state based on slavery has ever survived long-term, because no state has ever survived long-term, but states that came to depend on slavery consistently experience serious, long-term problems with stability caused by trying to keep a large population of hostiles intimately intermixed with their society. To the extent that this has been maintained for any significant length of time, the tradeoffs pretty clearly aren't worth it.
Compassion, which I have for plenty of other animals as well.
Your compassion for other animals results in benign neglect. Why is that not good enough in the case of blacks?
It didn't? I think it did.
Slavery resulted in catastrophic failure in Haiti, and it resulted in a less-catastrophic but still quite thorough failure in America. Slavery demands repugnant levels of tyranny over fellow humans, such that slavers couldn't convince non-slavers to adopt the practice or even to tolerate it long-term. Doing horrible things to blacks to keep them from doing possibly-less-horrible things to each other is not an obvious win, to put it mildly. "domestication" since then has been a complete failure. The black underclass remains a mess. Harsh measures aren't an improvement, and less-harsh measures clearly don't work. The premise is invalidated by the accumulation of actual evidence. We should let the blacks choose whether to follow society's rules among us, or follow their own rules among themselves. Those who wish can be productive citizens, and the rest can do as they please away from the rest of us, black and white alike.
I think that would be incredibly cruel.
Then make your case to the blacks themselves, and let them choose voluntarily if they agree with you. I doubt they're interested, but am happy to be proven wrong.
I just have no idea what you're talking about.
People justified slavery, claiming it was for the slaves' benefit. It wasn't, and that's why slavery brings serious, unsustainable problems wherever it is implemented. People have claimed and continue to claim that some people are fundamentally more people than others, and that the lesser sort can be manipulated and shaped according to their betters' preferences. This view is unsupportable from an evidentiary perspective, and disastrous from a historical perspective.
Consider the Swiss. They do not enslave, and they do not rule. They keep to themselves, defend themselves, and let the rest of the world enjoy their benign neglect. Why should anyone prefer to do other than as the Swiss do?
Publicola
25m ago
In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).
Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?
In general, I think you're missing the massive impact of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath -- the genocide of all white inhabitants of Haiti by Jacques Dessalines created an existential fear in the South (shared by both slaveholders and yeomen farmers who did not participate in slavery) that abolition would result in the bloody death of everyone they knew. This fear was periodically amplified by the German Coast Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the attack on Harper's Ferry. This is why Jefferson wrote his famous letter to John Holmes, calling the Missouri Compromise a "fire bell in the night" and "knell of the Union". The most important quote from that letter gets a lot less attention than it deserves:
The cession of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle[trifle] which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
That was his entire argument against immediate abolition, and in favor of gradual emancipation. This thinking also led to the proposed solution: to spread slavery further and further into the western territories. The reasoning goes: the more evenly distributed the slave population was, the less concentrated the slave population in the Deep South was, the less the risk of a genocide when they are inevitably freed. That at least was the initial reasoning -- the cognitive dissonance between 'slavery must end' and 'we must spread it' led to the rise of racism (i.e., slavery isn't bad because the slaves deserve to be treated this way, whether 'Curse of Ham' or genetic inferiority) as well as an incredibly paranoid totalitarian treatment of slaves in the South (e.g., the ban on teaching slaves to read/write was specifically due to Nat Turner being a literate black who was inspired by reading about the Haitian Revolution).
In other words, the political extremism of the South was motivated less by the greed of the plantation class, and more by the overwhelming fear of a slave revolt. Whether that fear was justified is debatable -- though at least John Brown thought the fears were justified, as his final message asserted that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood" -- but the fact and reality of such fears is I think undeniable.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
29m ago
I am not sure how to give you guidelines for how you can argue that blacks and women are incapable of functioning as fully sentient adults with agency, which seems to be what you're asking for. I mean, your post above would not, IMO, break any rules, much as I disagree with it. But I would suggest that if you want to argue that black people cannot and should not be free citizens and need to be "domesticated" to keep them in line, or that women should be property (not sure if that is your position, but it has been the position of some other posters), well, we've allowed those arguments, but it matters a lot how you say it.
"I don't think women are actually fully capable of expressing agency the same way men are" - probably okay. "Women don't have agency" - not okay.
"I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - probably okay. "Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Now, some of our critics will be quick to say "Aha! It really is just about using MOAR WORDS!" But it isn't. It's about expressing some epistemic humility, or put another way, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong. And at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that.... But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
thejdizzler
30m ago
Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
TitaniumButterfly
32m ago
Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.
What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?
And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,
FOXP2 came to light through the discovery by Jane Flurst, an English geneticist, of an unusual London family whose existence she reported in 1990. The family consists of three generations. Of the 37 members old enough to be tested, 15 have a severe language deficit. Their speech is hard to understand, and they themselves have difficulty comprehending the speech of others. If asked to repeat a phrase like "pattaca pattaca pattaca," they will stumble over each word as if it were entirely new. They have difficulty with a standard test of the ability to form past tenses of verbs ("Every day I wash my clothes, yesterday I ___ my clothes"; four-year-olds will say "washed" as soon as they get the idea). They have problems in writing as well as speaking. The affected members of the family have been given intensive speech training but mostly hold jobs where not much talking is required. "Their speech is difficult to understand, particularly over the telephone, or if the context is not known. In a group of family members it is hard for you to pick up the pieces of the conversation, which is difficult to follow because many of the words are not correctly pronounced," says Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of the Institute of Child Health in London.55
Some of the first linguists to study the affected family members believed [Page 48] their problem was specific to grammar but Vargha-Khadem has shown that it is considerably wider. Affected members have trouble in articulation, and the muscles of their lower face, particularly the upper lip, are relatively immobile.
It could be argued that their defect stemmed from some general malfunction in the brain, which was not specific to language. But the IQ scores of the affected members, though low, fell in a range (59 to 91) that overlapped with that of the unaffected members (84 to 119).56 The core deficit, Vargha-Khadem concluded, is "one that affects the rapid and precise coordination of orofacial [mouth and face] movements, including those required for the sequential articulation of speech sounds."57
The affected members of the KE family, as it is known, have each inherited a single defective gene from their grandmother. They provide the results of an experiment that no one would even contemplate doing in humans, but which nature has performed nonetheless — what happens if you disable a critical speech gene? And the one disabled in the KE family seems to operate at such a sophisticated level that it looks as if it were one of the last genes to be put in place as the faculty of language was perfected.
In 1998 a team of geneticists at Oxford University in England set out to identify the defective gene by analyzing the genome of KE family members. Their method was to look for segments of DNA that the affected members shared and the unaffected lacked. The Oxford team soon narrowed the cause of the problem to a region on chromosome 7, the seventh of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged. Within this region lay more than 70 genes, and it seemed that it would take several years to study each gene and see which one was responsible. But Hurst then turned up a new patient with the same rare set of symptoms. The patient, a boy, had a break in his chromosome 7 that disrupted one of the genes in the section the Oxford team was studying. It was an easy task to identify which of the new patient's genes had been broken. It was a gene known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2 for short.58
The Oxford geneticists, Cecilia Lai, Simon Fisher and Anthony Monaco, then analyzed all 267,000 DNA units in the FOXP2 genes of the KE family members. In all the affected members, and in none of the normal members, just one of these letters was changed from a G to an A (the four different kinds of chemical units in DNA are known for short as A, T, G and C). The [Page 49] switch to an A at this site in the gene meant that in the protein molecule specified by the gene, a unit that should have been an arginine was changed to a histidine (proteins are made up of 20 different kinds of units, known as amino acids, of which arginine, and histidine are two).59
How could a single mutation in a gene cause such a wide range of effects? The FOX family of genes makes agents known as transcription factors, which operate at a high level of the cell's control system. The agents bind to DNA and in doing so control the activity, or transcription, of many other genes. FOXP2 is active during fetal development in specific parts of the brain, and the protein transcription factor it makes probably helps wire up these brain regions correctly for language. Brain scans of affected KE family members seemed normal at first glance but a more sophisticated type of scan has shown they have considerably fewer neurons than usual in Broca's area, one of the two brain regions known to be involved in language, and more neurons than usual in the other region, known as Wernicke's area.60
I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.
throwaway-7742
44m ago
The man, the myth, the schizophrenic computer programmer, Terry Davis.
There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder.
There is not a continuum problem, and "human" is not a fuzzy category largely in the eyes of the beholder. Awareness, sense-of-self, language, volition and Will are obvious and inescapably significant, despite more than a century of extremely popular lies to the contrary. The evidence you are gesturing at simply does not exist, and claims to the contrary have long been established as lies that no one bothers to maintain or defend any more.
Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human?
There are not, nor have there been, any gorillas that can speak sign language. Claims to the contrary appear to be a more elaborate form of Clever Hans, and more generally yet another example of how Psychology and Sociology are grifts that have polluted our society for more than a century.
What about Lucy (A. afarensis)?
We have no observations of Lucy's behavior or capabilities one way or the other. What we can observe is current humans, and the observation shows that while their capabilities may differ, the cluster is still significant and very, very well-separated from all other animals.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that I think is generally localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men.
I observe capacity for moral responsibility in my wife, and in the females of my family generally. They make choices and live with the results. That does not mean there is a difference in how they think versus how I and the males in my family think, but the difference is not a matter of "greater" and "lesser" in the way you seem to be claiming.
If domestication is a thing, it is a thing that all humans require. I can identify ways in which I myself have been "domesticated", how my instincts and desires have been shaped away from raw selfishness and self-gratification toward responsibility and care for others. in this sense, I see no way to argue that domestication is something white men do to white women in particular and blacks generally. In other senses, I cannot see support for an argument that "domestication" exists at all.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
46m ago
As it happens, I just finished a massive biography of Lincoln which covers pretty much every political contest and debate he was ever in blow by blow.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The Southern states that seceded stated this very clearly; they announced their intention to secede literally the night Lincoln was elected, because they believed Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery and would try to curb its spread.
In fact, Lincoln did despise slavery and believed it would eventually have to end, but he was also a Constitutionalist and a Unionist and so accepted slavery as the law of the land, and repeatedly assured the South that he had no intention of infringing on their property rights.
Anti-slavery sentiments were not as black-and-white (hah) as "pro-abolition" or "anti-abolition." The "Ultras" were the "radical leftists" of the day who wanted immediate emancipation and full suffrage for blacks, and Lincoln avoided being associated with them; he thought they were too extreme and he disliked their moralizing. There was a full spectrum of less radical views (gradual ending of slavery, with compensation for slaveowners, with blacks maybe being allowed to settle in other territories, or maybe being sent back to Africa), but very few abolitionists were for full equality.
The South's objections were that the Republicans wanted to forbid expanding slavery to new territories - which, since the political divide then was between slave states and non-slave states, essentially meant the South would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress as the country expanded. The North also very much resented the fugitive slave laws - even Northerners who weren't abolitionists and didn't care much about blacks hated being forced to cooperate with Southern slave-catchers. (Keep in mind also that the South wanted to make abetting escaped slaves a capital crime, and many Southern states essentially criminalized being an abolitionist even before the war.)
Some of the claims that the Civil War "wasn't about slavery" originate in Lincoln's own arguments. During the war, he frequently had to call up more men, and was constantly trying to balance the concerns of the border states in particular, as well as trying to entice the South to cease rebelling. (Towards the end, he took a much more hardline stance towards reconstruction, but earlier in the war the South had many opportunities to concede under very generous terms.) The North believed they were fighting to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union, and being told they were fighting "to free the slaves" didn't go over well with a lot of Northerners, so Lincoln couldn't allow it to be framed that way. (And, again, had the South surrendered earlier, they probably could have kept their slaves.) But the fact was that the war was about slavery, and it was caused by people who (1) wanted to keep their slaves, (2) wanted to expand slavery, (3) wanted to write it into the Constitution that slavery could never be abolished.
(especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL)
Not quite true. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty," which meant basically that new territories should be allowed to vote on whether or not slavery would be allowed there. The problem with this (and the reason why Popular Sovereignty was basically abandoned as a political platform) is that it not only tried to trump the Congressional prerogative to vote on the status of new territories, but it explicitly rolled back previous agreements such as the Missouri Compromise. (The result of this did not turn out well.)
TowardsPanna
55m ago
I'm reminded of that 4chan(?) favorite, the middle aged white man who talked about "they glow in the dark" etc. I can't recall his name. He had a kind of mental illness that supercharged parts of his intelligence. I didn't listen to more than around 10 minutes total of this Terrence Howard character, but he might have something like that going on. A bit of unusual brilliance mixed up with a stream of crazy BS.
TitaniumButterfly
58m ago
I don't really understand what you think animals are or why they wouldn't have awareness, will, and volition. It seems pretty clear to me that they do.
You argue that they are animals, and yet you are unwilling to treat them like animals. Why?
Compassion, which I have for plenty of other animals as well.
Your "guidance" didn't work before and won't work now.
It didn't? I think it did.
My care leads me to wish to leave them alone.
I think that would be incredibly cruel.
Your care demands domination, and has led to this disaster every step of the way.
I just have no idea what you're talking about.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
People really like Sherlock Holmes stories, to the point that they're probably the best candidate for the progenitor of the entire Mystery genre. To those here who enjoy these stories, would you mind putting on your over-analysis caps and explaining what it is about the stories that you enjoy?
Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.
Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?
Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.
So that's the perspective, more or less.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
What are you withholding judgment on? He seems like a pretty garden variety hotep logician, the kind of guy that believes a lot of incredibly dumb shit and says it smugly because it makes him feel like he's actually very smart.
sliders1234
1hr ago
How so? If you mandate B+ average. It doesn’t matter how hard the course is. If one person gets an A another person has to get a B-.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
The weaponization of the dollar has been one of the worse policy decisions in the history of our country. The only reason we've been able to float such insane deficits, and largely skate through innumerable corrupt bailouts or foreign wastes of lives and treasure, is because our debt to GDP ratio doesn't matter. Because the dollar isn't just backed by our own economy, but all the goods in the world that trade in dollars. It's a cushy gig if you can get it, and we've gone and made getting off the USD a national security issue to any country that values its sovereignty.
I see people mock dedollarization. That the process of getting off the USD will be so painful for these countries that they'll never do it. And I can't completely discount that. But it does stink of hubris, and countries may judge (correctly) that the pain of getting off the dollar is less than the pain of staying on it.
Tanista
1hr ago
There is no trap - as in "a problem that's unpredictable and becomes worse if one uses their better judgment". There's a problem that's very soluble to the actions of the selective sex.
I took f3zinker's point to be more that, in many cases, we just tell people to do the sensible thing to avoid certain problems. But in this particular case people try to contrive some explanation (and/or blame society/men/patriarchy) for why people can't just do the thing that makes it seem like they've been trapped rather than just misusing (allegedly - revealed preference and all that) their agency.
Highlandclearances
1hr ago
Most East Asian cities? I think non-majority, non-East Asian ethnicities are typically a very small share of population (1-2%).
I believe that your confidence in believing something should be proportional to how close you are to that something.
For example I (I believe) I should not be more confident about string theory than an actual physicists that deals with the frontier of string theory on a day to day basis. Which means if the most knowledgeable string theorist is 95% sure that string theory is true/viable/useful, then me who gets all my information second hand (through YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, lectures, papers) should not be more than 95% sure about string theory.
Watching the Terrence Howard podcast I realised that I cannot defend against anything he is saying. I'm not saying he is correct. I'm not saying he is incorrect. I've simply deemed myself too far away from where the actual science happens to say anything intelligent on the matter at all.
Everything I know about physics comes from people who (supposedly) know more than most people on physics. I just took their word for it. I've never seen a proton, neutron or electron. I've never looked through a telescope and observed different galaxies. I've never sat down and really tried to understand the math that supports quantum physics. Yet I believe all these things. I just understand that I am trusting these high status people (Physicists) and their findings. But these people that I trust can be wrong. They could have missed something.
In my experience the best way to learn as a layperson is to watch experts (or people who have spent a longer than average time on a subject) debate each other and google/chatgpt/research all the points of disagreement that come up.
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